“Look, we’ll write as much protection as we can into the proposal. Scope. Assumptions. All that weasel-ly legal stuff you’re so fond of. And we’ll get the Griz to look it over, make sure we’re bulletproof.” The Griz was our lawyer, Glenda Gilbert.
“There’s no such thing as bulletproof when lawyers are involved,” Bobbi said. She heaved a sigh. “We’d need a high-speed Internet connection.” She’d been after me for months to upgrade our dial-up service. So had our service provider, who wanted money.
“Swell. Like I don’t get enough junk mail as it is, half of it from the bastard son, mistress, widow, or second cousin of a former Nigerian government official who’d absconded with the national treasury, promising me a fat percentage to help transfer it out of the country.”
Bobbi sighed again. “Is that a yes?”
“I suppose.”
“All right, let’s get to work.”
We spent the afternoon working on the proposal. By four o’clock, we had a number upon which we both agreed.
“Okay,” Bobbi said. “Now double that.”
“They’ll never agree to that,” I protested.
“Fine,” she replied. “Then they don’t. In fact, I’m hoping they won’t. And I think we should ask for a third up front. If we’re going to put our lives on hold for the next six weeks, let’s at least make it worth our while.”
“Whatever you say,” I said.
We agreed to sleep on it before faxing it to Quayle’s office, but we faxed a copy to the Griz. Quayle had left half a dozen tapes of the show, so I suggested we relax with a beer and watch one or two. Bobbi got a couple of beers out of the film fridge while I set up the little combination TV/VCR on a corner of my desk. We sat side by side on the sofa, feet up on the magazine-strewn coffee table. I pressed the play button on the remote.
Star Crossed, quite simply, stank. The writing was lame, the internal logic riddled with holes, and the humour, such as there was any, was juvenile at best. The computer-generated special effects were cheesy and the fight scenes weren’t even remotely convincing. How the astonishingly statuesque Richenda Rice, a.k.a. Star, managed to actually stay inside her costume of straps and buckles during the fight scenes reminded me of old-time movie cowboys whose hats somehow always stayed on, despite fist fights, falling from horses, or plunging off cliffs into raging rivers. Soon we were fast-forwarding through the action sequences, returning to normal speed whenever the characters, most of whom looked faintly embarrassed by the whole ordeal, engaged in dialogue. However, the dialogue was so utterly inane and frequently completely pointless, contributing little or nothing to the story, that we ended up fast-forwarding through it as well, without losing the thread of the plot, such as there was one.
After zipping through three episodes, we’d both seen enough. All the storylines seemed to revolve around attempts by various alien bad guys to deflower Virgin. What made it particularly intriguing was that under their human guises the villains were supposed to be scaly, lizard-like creatures whose biology, not to mention physiology, made a successful union highly improbable, not to say uncomfortable. What a warty-skinned, goggle-eyed lizard thing saw in a leggy and buxom human female was also a complete mystery. Invariably, however, Reeny’s character was kidnapped, bound and gagged, and her costume, what little there was of it in the first place, cunningly and strategically disarrayed, as much by her abductors’ misguided attentions as by Star’s inevitable but rather clumsy and inept rescue.
For the most part, despite the atrocious dialogue, the acting was competent, although perhaps I was lacking in objectivity. Had I not known it was Reeny playing the role of Virgin, though, I wouldn’t have recognized her. Even knowing, I found it difficult to see past the makeup, costume, and physical augmentations. Even her voice seemed different. Nevertheless, I thought she was wonderful.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Bobbi said. “Reeny’s a sweetheart, and maybe she’d do better with a decent role, but she’s got the right idea, going into production.”
I rewound the tape while Bobbi sat on the sofa finishing her beer. As I ejected the tape from the TV, D. Wayne Fowler came into my office.
“Here are your prints,” he said, handing me the envelopes from the photo finisher. He had a small, colourful gift bag in his other hand.
“Thanks,” I said. I put the prints on my desk.
Wayne was twenty-six, but looked younger. Equally at home with both traditional and digital photography, he was plump and earnest, sometimes too earnest. He’d been with us for six months, during which time he had developed, if you’ll pardon the expression, a desperate crush on Bobbi.
“Hey, are these from the new season?” he asked, picking up one of the Star Crossed videocassettes.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I doubt it.”
“Do you think it would be okay if I borrowed them?” he asked.
“I don’t see why not.”
“What’s that you’ve got there, D. Wayne?” Bobbi asked. She ran his initial and name together, making it sound like Duane — or Dwayne, as our American cousins prefer — spoken with two syllables — Duh-Wayne. I didn’t know what the “D” actually stood for. For all I knew, his first name really was Duane. Or Dwayne. Which would have made him Duane Wayne Fowler. If so, his parents should have been flogged.
Wayne blushed deeply. “I-I-I saw this w-w-when I w-w-was out picking up the p-p-prints,” he stammered. He never stammered when he spoke to me, but around Bobbi he became almost incoherent. “It’s f-f-for you,” he said, and thrust the gift bag toward Bobbi.
Bobbi accepted the bag, from which she removed a small teddy bear wearing a natty little photographer’s vest and carrying a tiny Nikon camera.
“Why, thank you, D. Wayne,” she said, beaming at him. She stood and kissed him on the cheek. He turned so red in the face I thought his heart would burst.
“Y-y-you’re wel-c-c-come,” he said and fled from the office, clutching the Star Crossed tapes to his bosom.
“There’s a rude name for women who tease men like that,” I said. “Especially men like Wayne.”
“Slap me,” Bobbi replied, abashed. “I just can’t seem to help myself.” She picked up one of the envelopes of prints. “Let’s see if your dead guy is here,” she said.
He wasn’t. There was a nice picture of Kevin Ferguson, though, with his hand on my sister Mary-Alice’s backside and a beatific grin on his face. There was another good one of Mary-Alice punching him in the stomach. He wasn’t smiling in that one.
So who the hell was the dead guy? I searched my memory again for any recollection of him, either at the party or elsewhere, but again came up empty. I was as certain as I could be that I’d never met him, and it spooked me more than a little that a man I didn’t know from Adam had crashed my birthday party and had died there. Despite what I’d told Daniel about letting the police handle it, as I rode the ferry across False Creek toward home I composed a mental list of some more people to talk to who’d been at the party and might have spoken to him. I owed him at least that much, whoever he was.
