Singer 02 - Long Time No See (11 page)

Obviously Zee Friedman possessed that gift I’d always longed for, flair, the intuitive sense of when less is less and when less is more. Her outfit, plain black cotton pants cut off mid-shin and an ordinary white T-shirt, was stylishly minimalist. I, on the other hand, was in navy slacks, my perpetual blue sweater with butterfly scarf, and gold button earrings. Hopefully she’d think my retro look was intentional.

I’d spent the two previous days doing research and making calls. At last, through a friend of a friend of a neighbor of Jill Badinowski, I came up with another StarBaby client who had taken down Zee’s phone number. “Sorry to bother you on Memorial Day weekend,” I told her.

“No problem,” Zee assured me. She had the voice of a more imposing woman, the contralto the Statue of Liberty would have if she could speak. She pulled her feet up on the cushion of the love seat so her heels touched her backside. She hugged her knees. Her toenails were the pale blue of bleached denim. “Are you a detective?” she asked hopefully.

“Let’s just say I’ve been hired to see what I could find out about Courtney.” Zee gave me an enthusiastic nod. Her dark hair bounced cheerfully, as if eager to know more. “Do you have any idea how many other people she employed?”

“At least one other guy, but I can’t say for sure if there were any more. I worked for her freelance, on weekends.” Between us was her coffee table, an old wood toy chest with peeling decals of the Little Misses Muffet and Bo-Peep.

“Only on weekends?” I asked.

“Well, that’s when both parents are home. You want the two of them interacting with the baby, since the video’s at least partly to prove to the kid how great his parents were, no matter what he remembers. Anyway, I work full-time, so Saturday and Sunday were it for me.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a production assistant for Crabapple Films.”

I nodded respectfully, as if to say, Oh, but of course, Crabapple, though I’d never heard of it and prayed they didn’t make movies about adolescent girls being chainsawed. “What do you do there?”

“The stuff nobody else wants to do,” Zee replied, smiling happily. She seemed inordinately content, one of those people miraculously missing the resentful gene. Not only was her voice big, her smile was also: overwide, the grin you’d see in a nursery school drawing. “Like I get permits from the mayor’s office, copy and file stuff, run back and forth to the set. That’s how I got onto Courtney. One of the guys on the set was filming for her and he moved to L.A. He passed the job on to me.”

“Do you want to be a cinematographer?” I was tempted to drop the fact that my son was a movie critic, but decided it sounded undetective-ish. Also, just in case her cheeriness was a sham and she’d pumped two bullets into Courtney, the less she knew about me the better.

Zee shook her head definitively. “Actually, I enjoy the managerial stuff a lot more—knowing where the money’s going, making sure a seventy-foot crane is at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn Tuesday at six
A.M
.” She had managed to get her legs into a knot so complex all but one pale blue toenail was hidden. Her arms, meanwhile, were stretched out along the back of the love seat, as if about to embrace two invisible friends. “As far as Courtney goes—eeesh, sorry ... As far as Courtney went, I was surprised she stuck with me. I’m just another Columbia film major whose parents got her a digital camera for graduation.”

“Did Courtney ever talk about her background with you?”

“No. After you called I started thinking. I realized how much I don’t know about her. Except like obvious things. Married, two kids. She’d been an investment banker. I mean, we talked a little. Like how much we’d loved college and hated high school. But who loved high school? Maybe one dumb jock and an Epsilon semimoron Most Popular. Anyone who still has a clear memory knows how awful it was.”

“Why did Courtney hate it?”

“I think ... The usual. You’re either skinny or fat or puny or a giant and you don’t have a boyfriend. And you like to read. Courtney was sawed off and scrawny, although she said she filled out by college. But most of the time she was all business with me.”

“Was she good at her business?”

“She definitely didn’t have a cinematic eye—which was why she decided I was a good videographer. She seemed nice, I guess.”

“What do you mean, ‘I guess’?”

Zee pursed her glossed lips and gave it several seconds of thoughts. “It’s terrible to sound New Age-y,” she said slowly, “especially when you have tendencies. But some people emit niceness rays. You know?”

“Did Courtney emit not-niceness rays?”

Zee shook her head. “No. Not at all. But at the beginning I thought, Wow, what a woman! I mean, this bundle of energy. She’d talk about StarBaby and make it sound like I was joining her on some kind of crusade:
Courtney and Zee’s Excellent Adventure
. That StarBaby would really
do
something. People would be able to see themselves as they were, as their parents and siblings were. Maybe an idealized version, because they were being filmed, but at least not filtered through fantasy or an imperfect memory. Courtney was going to franchise it all over the country. And probably the world—though she didn’t say that.”

“Did she have a plan?” I asked.

“I remember she showed me a list of all the zip codes and what the per capita income was for each one plus lots of other demographic boring stuff. She was so optimistic, so
positive
. I could almost see her on the cover of
Time.”
Zee put her feet up on the seat again, wrapped her arms around her legs, then rested her chin on her knees, a feat of elasticity I found impressive. “At first anyway.”

“She changed at some point?”

“Yeah, I guess last summer, probably in July. She’d said something a few months before then that summer might be a little slow for business because parents were around more, kids could do more outdoors and all that. I’d have thought that was a good time for filming, except I had this feeling that if I liked my job, I shouldn’t contradict her. But business didn’t pick up after school began again.” Before I could ask she added: “It didn’t slow down either. Courtney just seemed kind of bummed to me, although that was strictly me and my ESP. For all I know I could have been reading her totally wrong. Because she wasn’t all that readable. She never made small talk. And she had zero curiosity.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like when people meet me and hear ‘Friedman,’ they tend to squinch up their eyes because they’re thinking: Asian and adopted? Half-and-half? Or because of the film-major business, they’re curious about what my favorite movie is. But with Courtney, zilch. She read my resume, checked out the first two minutes of my student film, and told me what the pay was. I was less a human being and more the mechanism that operated the camera. She was Total Business Person.”

“She was cold?”

“Not what most people would call cold. With a truly cold person, you’re always wondering, Shit, what did I do wrong? But she never made me feel inadequate. In fact, I could tell she liked the way I worked. She’d even say Good work! and sound as though she meant it. So I felt she had her code of privacy or sense of boundaries and it wasn’t anything personal.”

“Did she stay so dispirited about the way the business was going?” I asked.

“Not really. By the time mid-September came she ... I honestly don’t know. She did what she had to do—go over what each family was looking for, how much to shoot. But she acted disengaged, like her mind was someplace else. Before that, even when she was going through her bummed phase, she’d always brainstorm ideas on where to film, or think of ways to get the parents to ask for more time, which equaled money, but essentially she said to me, Whatever.”

“I’m trying to get a handle on her,” I explained to Zee. “She doesn’t sound as if she was the world’s warmest person,” I mused.

“Except that’s really not right because with her kids she
was
Mrs. Warmth. Mrs. Mom. I mean, Travis, the little boy, came into the room once. She put her arms out for him and her face got this blissed-out expression. Madonna and child—the Virgin Mary, not the singer. And from the way her house was fixed up, she was really into that Mrs. Homebody role. She had no eye in terms of film, but she did have ... I guess you’d call it Rich Suburban Lady good taste.” An uh-oh expression came over Zee’s big-cheeked face.

“Don’t worry,” I reassured her. “I’m not rich. And if left to my own devices—although fortunately my friends restrain me—I’d probably put up purple plaid wallpaper. But I know what you mean. Nothing offensive.”

“Right. But nothing imaginative. Nothing personal. Everything
done
. I mean, you couldn’t pee there without good taste. Sorry. My mom hates it when I say ‘pee.’ Anyhow, you’d go to the bathroom—the guest bathroom, downstairs. She had a pile of guest towels—the kind you’re afraid to use because they have to be ironed, but then you’ve got to because you’re scared she’ll think you didn’t wash your hands. And then on the sink counter—pink marble—she had this basket with eensy-weensy Tylenol and Motrin tins and a teeny sewing kit. Tampaxes with a pink bow around each one. I swear to God!” She shook her head and added: “Courtney lined the bottom of the waste-basket with a paper doily.”

Zee Friedman’s breezy manner was actually not that distant from my own children’s more sardonic Long Island style: Both were true to the Generation X credo that when one is profoundly cool, life can hold no surprises, and thus, there is never any reason to act excited. “You couldn’t go into that house without feeling awe,” Zee went on, sounding noticeably unawed. “It was the apotheosis of its kind. Did you get that? ‘Apotheosis’? That’s four years at Columbia. Anyhow, her house is to upper-middle-class suburban houses what the Parthenon is to Doric architecture.”

I nodded, recollecting the miniature decorated lampshades over each candelabra bulb in the chandelier in the front hall, the impeccable arrangement of photograph, lamp, and leather-bound books on a small antique table in the living room. How Courtney must have loved what she created. Then I said: “I saw the StarBaby video you made of Luke Badinowski.” Zee simultaneously grinned and pressed her fingertips against her temples, as if Luke or his parents had been a headache. “Your work looked professional to me.”

She shook her head. “Thanks, but it’s just competent. I’ve got an editor friend with super-rich parents. She’s got a monsterly expensive piece of computer editing equipment, an Avid. Trust me: If you used one, your videos would totally look Kar-Wai Wong.”

“What kind of equipment did Courtney Logan have?”

Zee ran her fingers through her hair, pulling it back from her face and shoulders, then twisting it into a bun. “Not that much. Lights for indoor shots. No big, expensive deal. I forget what they’re called—the things those guys who make wedding videos use. Maybe eight, nine hundred bucks’ worth of lights.”

I thought about the fifteen thousand bucks Fancy Phil had claimed came out of the Logans’ joint money market account plus the ten thousand Courtney had ultimately kept from the Smith Barney brokerage account. Fancy Phil had said that sum, twenty-five thousand dollars, was spent for “camera crap” and promoting the company. “What about cameras?”

“I used my own,” Zee replied. She let her hair fall back to her shoulders.

“Any other equipment?”

“No. The other guy she had filming kept the StarBaby equipment in his house. He went to Wesleyan.”

“Did you ever meet him?”

“No. Typical Courtney. She said practically zero about him. I got the impression she didn’t want us to get to talking, which probably meant she was paying one of us more than the other. Anyway, she expected I’d use my own equipment. I did rent a mike because the one on my camera makes everybody sound like King Kong.”

“Did she spend a bundle on ads or publicity?” I asked.

“That I don’t know. If she did, I couldn’t see any serious results. The whole time I worked for her, the level of business seemed about the same.”

“Did she ever talk shop with you?”

Zee leaned her head against the back of the love seat and gazed up at the carved molding at the top of her wall. The decoration could have been a series of grapes or rosettes, but obscured by a century’s worth of paint, it was just evenly spaced bumps. “One time. She said businesses fail for two reasons. Lack of capital and one other thing. Patience or a plan or something.” She looked apologetic. “I’m interested in production, but what she was going on about was more like a business school rant. I timed out.”

“What made her chatty about business all of a sudden?”

“It must have been when I asked her if she had any more work, around July, when she started to act bummed. I’d been hoping she’d give me more to do. But she sort of intimated that she wanted to spread whatever work there was around, not to have to rely on one person.”

“Did that make sense to you?”

“If you believe the clichés about film people—that we’re undependable and narcissistic—it did, even though the truth is making movies is a highly organized operation. If people aren’t reliable they don’t work again. But to me her talk about patience and stuff sounded defensive. I couldn’t see that she was on any road to franchising.”

“How often did you work for her?”

“Two or three weekends a month.”

“What did you think of StarBaby?” I asked. “As someone interested in the producing end of making movies.”

“I guess it’s not a bad idea for wealthy communities, where people have a lot of disposable income and not that much time. Probably there are, like, rich dot-com couples with babies who buy video-cams but then are too busy to read the instruction book. Except unless Courtney could get the price down, StarBaby wasn’t going to become the McDonald’s of kiddie video. I mean, she’d been talking about wanting to trademark everything with the word ‘star’ in it: StarChild, StarKid, StarGirl, StarBoy. And before the summer, she’d been looking into all sorts of other stuff. She’d gotten two pediatricians to let their exams be photographed, which had to have been a brilliant con job on her part because of doctors’ malpracticephobia. And she was thinking about renting or buying some cuddly dog—a beagle or a collie—the kids could snuggle up to if the family didn’t have its own dog. But she said there was a liability problem, like if lovable dog decided StarBaby was lunch.”