Red Cap

Chapter 17: Clean Hands

"You did what."

"Took him off the picture."

Deirdre Vance had a pen in her hand. She put it down. She'd been on the phone since eight that morning, and this was the first call of the day that made the room feel small.

"Doyle's out," Calloway said. "I told him myself, an hour ago. Scheduling, creative differences, whatever you want to put on it. He's not going to fight it."

"We said you'd stay out of it. We said it twice, and the second time we wrote it down."

"We did."

"You don't have the facts. You have one account from one person who won't put a name to it, and you've taken the director off a shoot three weeks in—"

"Doyle isn't clean," he said. "Leave him on it and he does it again. Then it's on us for having kept him."

She went back over that one, because it wasn't an answer to the question she'd asked. It was an answer to a different one — the one she'd been carrying around all week and hadn't put to him yet. Which told her he'd already found out.

Her shoulders came down a notch, and she didn't care for the fact that they did.

"Fine. Say he takes it to the trades. 'Label artist has director pulled off his own video.' That one writes itself."

"He won't."

"You're sure."

"He knows what he did. He'd rather it went away than went into print."

There'd be a version of this that went upstairs, and she'd be the one writing it, and none of what had actually happened would be in it. Fine. That was the job. She wanted to tell him he was being hot-headed — she had the sentence right there — except that he wasn't, and that was the problem. He'd thought it all the way down to the end.

"Then you've got somebody," she said. "You didn't pull a director on a Thursday because you were angry. Tell me you've got somebody."

One second.

"Somebody'll turn up."

She'd been mid-inhale and it didn't finish. She gave him one beat, in case a name was coming, and no name came. She got as far as "Calloway" — and then there was a voice on his end, away from the phone, and then his, aimed at whoever it was: "Two days."

* * *

The room wasn't big enough for anything to be said out of earshot, so June took the far end of it, by the wardrobe rack, and got his phone out and kept his face in it.

Zoe's last message was still sitting where it had been since before Doyle opened the door. He read it through a second time and didn't answer it.

He'd had the shape of the call inside a minute. The other end was doing most of the talking, at the pitch of somebody who'd been handed a decision instead of asked for one, and it didn't take much to place it. Calloway's agent.

June scrolled without reading. None of it was his fault. He couldn't have stood up in that room and made a single person agree with that, and it ran back through him anyway — the director, the crew, the date, the money behind the date. He'd been in the room for the part of it that started everything. That was enough.

"Halliday."

He looked up.

"Go home," Calloway said, phone still at his ear. "Take two days. You'll get a call with a time."

There were about four things June could have said to that, and none of them belonged anywhere near a phone Calloway was still on, so he nodded. Calloway had already gone back to it.

Outside, the stage had the look of a thing that had stopped without anybody announcing it. The camera sat under its cover. Half the crew stood around monitors with nothing on them, and the first AD and the DP were in a low conversation nobody else had decided to watch. June got his things, and nobody asked him where he was going.

* * *

Bernie called back two blocks out.

"I was in a room," he said, by way of hello. "Three hours. I came out and read your texts standing up."

"You read them."

"I read them." A pause with a fair amount in it. "He came to you. On the shoot, in the room. He came to you."

"Yeah."

Bernie let out a breath that had been in there a while. "You're all right."

"I'm all right."

"And he's gone."

"He's gone."

"Okay." Then, because he was who he was: "You know what this is."

"I know what it is."

"You don't get to send a text." Bernie was already moving. "So: dinner. That's the obvious one. Except one dinner is a courtesy. A dinner is what you give a person you've already thanked. It's not this."

"Okay."

"And we can't send him anything either, because a gift from us this week is a message, and the message is that we want something, and he'll read it off the outside of the box in about a second." Another pause. "So it's dinner or nothing."

"Then nothing."

"Nothing isn't one of the options. Because then it sits there. You've got the rest of this shoot to get through and both of you know it's sitting there."

June didn't have anything to put against that, so he didn't.

"Give me a day," Bernie said. "I'll think of something."

"Sure."

"Yeah." He heard it. "I'll call you."

June said okay. Neither of them had anything to put in the space after that, so the call ended.

* * *

He'd assumed a week. A director pulled off a shoot three weeks in, a replacement, a schedule that lived two weeks out on a call sheet — a week, minimum, and he'd have taken ten days and kept his mouth shut about it.

The thread lit up on the third day, a little after four.

[Thursday, 2 p.m., same stage. New director: Gabe Whitlock. Times go out tonight.]

Then it did what threads do. Somebody had worked second unit for him once. Somebody else posted the part that was checkable — in a career going back more than a decade, not a single music video — and then somebody said the other thing, and two more people said it after them, none of them with anything underneath it: Gabe Whitlock was a Calloway fan.

June read it twice and went looking, because the question he actually had wasn't in the thread. A man with a feature career doesn't take a music video because the song is good. There's a number. June wanted to know what the number was, and whatever he guessed, he suspected it wasn't close.

The page was a list. Features, all of them, years and running times and a line about each, and down at the bottom the other things — a short, something for a museum — and nothing anywhere in the part of a page where the videos go.

Two o'clock tomorrow. A man who'd never shot one. And, according to nobody in particular, a fan.

June set the phone down on the table, face-up, with the notice still open and the page one swipe behind it, and the thread with Bernie behind that, still on the same two dead ends it had been on since the call. Then he went to find something to eat.