Trading Up (59 page)

Oh God, he thought. His mother was right . . .

He didn’t know where to turn, what to do, who to call. He walked to the window and opened it; a blast of cold air hit him like a slap. Across the street were two men dressed as if for combat, in camouflage pants and heavy jackets with bulging pockets; in a second he saw that they had large black cameras slung over their shoulders like machine guns. So the jackals were gathering already: The story must be circulating all over New York by now, everyone would be reading it and laughing at him; his mother would find out and his ex-wife and someday, if he ever had children, they would unearth the story from some vast electronic wasteland . . .

And as he stood staring down at the street in horror, a taxi pulled up and another photographer got out. He turned away. He went into the kitchen and stared at the coffeemaker.

What was he supposed to do now? he wondered.

And then, a small, hopeful voice whispered that maybe it wasn’t true—that maybe it was
all
a lie. The media got things wrong all the time; everyone knew that they made things up. Or maybe they’d just made a mistake, and Janey’s name didn’t belong there at all. If it
was
true, he thought, there would have to be some evidence of it, and hurrying into the living room, he looked at the small French writing desk and remembered the drawer stuffed with her papers . . .

He yanked it open. Plato’s
Republic
was still on top. Did that mean she hadn’t touched her papers since that evening with Craig Edgers—or that she’d simply decided to keep the book there for safekeeping? He took it out and tossed it onto the chair, then he pulled the drawer off its runners and dumped the contents onto the floor. Dropping to his knees, he began riffling through the mess. If it was true and she
was
guilty, would she be stupid enough to keep the evidence? But guilty people usually did, out of some misguided idea of being clever enough to outsmart the truth. And then his eye spied the official-looking letter he’d seen in the drawer 18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:24 PM Page 316

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that evening when Craig was there. Picking it up, he looked at the return address, and with a sinking heart saw that it read “Parador Pictures.” He withdrew the letter. The date at the top was October 15, 2000. With his face set in a rigid mask, he began reading:

Dear Ms. Wilcox,

As of June 15, 2000, we have been attempting to speak with you regarding
the matter of Comstock Dibble. This is our fourth attempt . . .

So it
was
true then—every word of it, and she’d known about it all along, even before they were married. She had deliberately deceived him from the very beginning, and looking again at the amount she owed, he was stunned. Why hadn’t she come to him for help, or at least paid off the amount without telling him? He knew she was cheap, but it astounded him that she was so miserly that she would risk ruining her own life . . . and his.

And now she had.

But
maybe,
he thought wildly . . . maybe she didn’t
have
the money. What if she sent money home to a . . . sick grandmother . . . or was paying for some niece’s or nephew’s private-school education. Maybe she was
broke,
and she was too embarrassed to tell
him
about it . . .

In a blind frenzy, he began pawing through the papers, looking for a bank statement. Pouncing on a computerized printout, he held the sheet away from him and looked at the balance.

She had $400,000 socked away in a savings account.

She had the money! he thought, shaking his fists in the air. She had had the money
all along
. . .

But suddenly his anger was spent, and he was overcome by despair. He put his head in his hands, and then, as he could not remember doing in years, he sobbed.

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s i xt e e n

“scre w pl ay s!” the headline on the
New York Post
declared gleefully.

Mimi Paxton shifted uncomfortably on the tissue paper, feeling it crinkle beneath her naked bottom.

From the hard, molded plastic chair where the previous patient had thoughtfully left it behind, the
Post
seemed to be calling to her, begging to be picked up and read. So far, she had managed to resist . . . but if only the doctor would come, she thought impatiently. If there was one rule in New York it was this: No matter how rich you were, you
still
had to wait for the doctor . . .

She lifted one of her buttocks, trying to tuck the gown underneath, and in the process her eye fell on the
Post
again. Two weeks had passed since the story first broke with that chilling and now infamous headline: “MODEL?/WRITER?/

WHORE?” Some people said that it rivaled the
Post
’s most famous headline:

“Headless Body Found in Topless Bar.” But this story had what reporters called

“legs”—it was about money, sex, power, and movies, and in the middle of it, like a character right out of central casting, was a beautiful lingerie model. The papers were still running something about the scandal every day like an ongoing soap opera, and apparently the public couldn’t get enough, as if no one had anything better to worry about. But that was another rule of New York: One man’s misery was another man’s triumph (even if it only meant getting a taxi on a rainy day at rush hour); and another man’s shame could provide entertainment for millions.

Usually the cover included a photograph of Janey—there seemed to be a never-ending supply, and one day they’d done a whole inside page of photographs of her from her early modeling days, which was, Mimi thought, probably even more 18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:24 PM Page 318

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embarrassing for her—but today, the cover showed a rather goofy-looking young black man sporting trendy glasses. She squinted at the name, thinking,
that was it
—

Scooter Mendelsohn.

She didn’t need to read the
Post
to know what that story was about, she thought, transferring her weight from one buttock to the other. George had merrily told her all about it, claiming it was “one of the great moments in business.” Well, Mimi thought, it was certainly one of
his
great moments in business. The real hero was that little Scooter Mendelsohn from Brooklyn, and George had already promoted him to a junior executive at Parador Pictures, which was quite a coup for Scooter, considering that he was only twenty-one. But George had big plans for him; he said that Scooter exemplified exactly the sort of morality that had been missing from Parador before . . .

It wasn’t, George explained, the fact that Comstock had paid women to write screenplays that never existed that had brought him down, but the way he’d gone about trying to cover it up. Oddly enough, George said, if Comstock had paid the women more—if he’d given them $100,000 or $200,000 or even
$300,000
—

he probably would have gotten away with it. Anywhere from $100,000 to $300,000 was the standard industry amount for a screenplay; and it wasn’t out of the ordinary for a movie company to pay a writer and then get burned when the writer simply didn’t deliver. But when Comstock decided to sell part of his company and the accountants began preparing the books, they were struck by the unusual number ($30,000 instead of $300,000), and they panicked. The legal department began sending out letters—and naturally, none of the women complied—and why should they? George asked. After all, they thought they were being paid for
sex
. . .

And then, George explained, puffing himself up like a blowfish, Janey had come to him with her letter, and this was what had put the idea in his head to buy Comstock’s company
himself
—after all, the very best deals were struck when the buyer had secret information that the seller didn’t want to get out. However, George reassured Mimi, this was one part of the story that would never become public—George certainly didn’t want people thinking that he would take advantage of a poor little twit like Janey Wilcox, who actually seemed to have some public sympathy on her side. And so, the only people who knew that Janey had come to him for help were Janey and himself, of course, and now Mimi . . .

And the fact that the “screwplays” had become public knowledge didn’t have anything to do with George at all. The burden of that proof rested entirely on Comstock Dibble himself; if he had admitted to his transgression instead of thinking he could outwit George Paxton, the whole thing never would have come out in the press.

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According to Scooter Mendelsohn, who had told all this to George, who had told Mimi (and, by now, various other personages as well), two days before the big buyout meeting, Comstock Dibble called Scooter, who was then a sort of assistant’s assistant, into his office.

Apparently, Comstock Dibble was in such a sweat that he basically had an entire box of Kleenex tissues stuck to his head. Comstock was always a terror in the office, but in the past two weeks, he’d been especially fearful, and had even made his tough-guy publicist cry—and he was a fifty-five-year-old man who everyone suspected had once been in the syndicate! Scooter knew this, because he’d gone into the men’s room to take a leak, and he’d heard the guy crying from inside one of the stalls, and he knew it was him because he looked under the stall and saw the wing-tipped shoes the guy always wore. So it was with a great deal of trepidation that Scooter entered Comstock’s office.

“What’s your name again?” Comstock demanded.

Scooter had only worked there for six months, but he was too frightened to be insulted. “Scooter,” he said.

“Can you make a cover page for a screenplay?” Comstock barked.

“Sure . . . ,” Scooter said, wondering what he was getting at.

“Good. I want you to take these names with these titles,” Comstock said, handing him a list with a bunch of women’s names on it, “and then I want you to take these screenplays,” he said, pointing to a pile on his desk, “and I want you to rip off the real covers and put the new covers on them. Got it?” Scooter naturally hadn’t, but he was too afraid to say so.

“And I want the new covers to be different colors, too!” Comstock barked at him as Scooter grabbed the pile of screenplays and quickly left the office.

Back at his desk, Scooter had done exactly what Comstock wanted, and at first he didn’t think that much about it, especially as everyone in the office had now come to the conclusion that Comstock Dibble was officially insane. But then he got to the last name, Janey Wilcox, followed by the title
A Model’s Story
. He was about to put this new cover page on the screenplay
Chinatown,
when he began putting two and two together. He knew that name, he thought. Wasn’t Janey Wilcox that Victoria’s Secret model? She certainly was no writer—that was for sure. It was a mockery of the movie business, putting the name of a screenplay she obviously hadn’t written on the cover of such a great movie. That was the thing that
really
got him, he said. If he’d been putting the fake title on
Showgirls,
for instance, he might not have even cared . . .

Scooter left the doctored screenplays on Comstock’s assistant’s desk at the end of the day and went home.
Chinatown
was in his head, so he rented it and then ate a bunch of frozen mini pizzas. And then he started thinking again. His whole life 18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:24 PM Page 320

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had been shaped by movies—movies were
everything
to him. Movies were sacred; they were what made people’s lives worth living. All he’d ever wanted to do, ever since he was a little boy and his mother had taken him to see
Wall Street,
was to be in the movie business. And now he was, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow, he’d done something wrong . . . that Comstock had asked him to do something . . .
illegal
.

He’d seen enough movies to know that he had to make some kind of decision.

In movies, when people didn’t do
the right thing,
something bad always happened to them. He might get fired . . . or worse, he might
never work in the movie business
again
. And so, he decided, he had to tell someone . . . but
who
?

Sitting there watching
Chinatown,
he suddenly remembered that Parador Pictures was being sold; it was supposed to be a secret, but everyone in the office knew about it because they were all afraid for their jobs. He couldn’t remember the name of the man who was buying it, but he did remember the name of the company—

Smagma. He remembered it because it sounded so ominous, like something out of a James Bond movie . . .

He couldn’t sleep all night, and the next morning he got up early and, at about 7:30 a.m., called information. There
was
a Smagma Enterprises in New York City, and he took down the number. He didn’t think there would be anyone in the office that early, but he decided to call anyway, for practice.

And then, to his surprise, the phone was actually answered by a very nice lady who said, “Smagma Enterprises.”

“I . . . I’d like to speak to the head of Smagma,” he said nervously.

“That would be Mr. George Paxton,” the lady said. “Who’s calling, please?”

“You don’t know me,” Scooter began, “but I work for Parador Pictures . . .”

“Hold on, please,” the lady said pleasantly, as if it weren’t the least bit surprising that
he,
Scooter Mendelsohn, would be calling George Paxton . . .

And then the great man, George Paxton himself, had gotten on the phone.

And Scooter had told him the whole story . . .

The big moment arrived the very next morning, when George Paxton and six very serious-looking men in suits showed up at the Parador offices and went into the conference room with Comstock Dibble and his men.

At around four in the afternoon, Comstock’s assistant appeared at Scooter’s desk carrying a pile of screenplays—the fake ones and the real ones that the company had commissioned in the past couple of years—and plopped them down. “You did it,” she hissed. “You take them in. I’m too scared.” And so Scooter picked up the pile of screenplays and knocked on the door of the conference room.