Red Cap

Chapter 15: Off the Call Sheet

June let go of Doyle's wrist without any warning at all.

Doyle had been pulling with his whole weight, so when the hold came loose he went sideways and one shoe slid out from under him on the tile. For half a second it looked like the floor would take him, down in front of his own reflection. He got a hand on the chair and stayed up.

He was breathing through his nose. When he straightened, his eyes had gone red at the rims.

He spat on the tile, taking his time with it, and pointed at June.

"You're going to regret this."

Then he was out, and the door slammed behind him hard enough to be heard down the corridor.

June stood where he was and let it roll down the corridor and come back off the wall. He noticed that first — the sound of it, going and coming. Then he noticed his hand.

Doyle's sweat was on it, greasy, gone cold.

He got the pack of wipes off the vanity and used one, slowly — palm, back, the spaces in between — and dropped it in the trash.

In the mirror, the room hadn't changed at all. The chair Doyle had dragged into the middle of the floor and left there. The iced coffee still sweating onto the counter. The bulb over the next station, buzzing the way it had been buzzing since call. This was still the best job he'd ever been handed.

He had nothing behind him. No family in the business, no money of his own, not one thing with his name on it that anybody in this building would have recognized. He'd come this far on his own feet and he'd stayed this far by being careful, and careful had been easy, because the whole business ran on it. You kept the temperature low. You stayed pleasant to men you couldn't stand, for years, and you didn't hand anybody a reason to say your name in a room you weren't standing in.

This morning the temper had gotten there first.

Doyle ate lunch with the people who put movies together, and told them who was difficult, who was cheap, who could give you a week in August. June wouldn't be at those lunches. His name would come up once, maybe twice, in a room he'd never stand in. He'd never hear a word of it. He'd just stop getting called.

Calloway was in the building today. But he was in it for one video — three weeks, maybe less, and then the trucks would go out and the set would come down — and after that this was Doyle's business again, and Calloway had a career of his own to get back to.

"Not like this is on me," June said, to the glass, and got a hand into his hair and held on to it.

"Can that asshole just go away," he said. "Is that a thing that can happen."

On the counter the phone still lay where he'd left it, face up. The timer was still running.

Out in the corridor, Doyle got the door shut behind him with his shoulder and said the rest of what he had to say to a hallway he assumed was empty, and turned around, and stopped.

Calloway was standing a few feet down the corridor with his hands in his pockets, watching him.

Doyle's stomach dropped like a step he'd missed.

He got the smile up — it was a good one, he'd been wearing it into rooms for twenty years — and said, "Mr. Calloway."

"That was loud," Calloway said.

His face held still. No tone in it, no fold, no way to tell how long he'd been standing out there or how much of it had come through the door. He could have heard all of it. He could have heard none of it. The man handed you exactly what he wanted you to have and not one thing more, and Doyle had watched him do it to rooms full of people who knew it and took it anyway.

Past him the corridor ran the way it had all morning: the grip cart, the light stands, tape on the floor nobody had pulled up yet.

Doyle gave the door one more second of thought — how thick it was, how far a voice carried through it — and settled on the line he'd have used nine times out of ten. Own the small thing fast and loud, and the big thing never gets said.

"Me and Halliday have some personal business," he said. "I brought that to work with me. Didn't manage it, and it cost you time, and that's on me. I'm sorry."

"Sorry," Calloway said, turning the word over.

Then he said the next part quietly, and there was something almost pleasant in it, which was worse than being shouted at.

"Not a lot of people have the nerve to cost me a week. You did. And then you went after the person I'm working with. On my shoot." He let that sit. "That's a talent."

Doyle didn't answer. Keeping his mouth shut took work; he could feel himself doing the rest of it too, the not-looking, and he knew how that read.

He'd heard the stories about Calloway's first year, the way you heard everything in this business — a sentence at a time, from people who'd heard it the same way. He'd come in with his fists up. Some outlet had gone after him back then, and the outlet didn't publish anymore. Doyle had never asked for the rest of it. Nobody wrote about Calloway now, and nobody had tried in years.

He'd run the numbers before he ever started any of this, and the numbers had been good. The single was out next month. The video had to be in the can before that, and there was no director in town with the days free and the credits to step in on three weeks' notice. Calloway wasn't going to blow up his own release over one actor's bad morning. It still looked like the schedule.

"Here's what I can do," Doyle said. "I finish the shoot. No feelings in it, no shortcuts. I shoot your takes, and I shoot them again if you want them again. And you take my fee down by half." He shrugged, which cost him something. "Call it an apology."

"Don't need it," Calloway said. "You're done."

"Done," Doyle said, and waited for the rest of it. Calloway let him wait.

He knew better than to ask what came next; he'd been doing this since he was twenty-five. It came out of him anyway, before he could stop it. "So what happens to the video?"

Calloway looked at him.

Nobody moved, because nobody needed to, and Doyle stood inside his own question while the man left him standing there, and the man was in no hurry.

"Right," Doyle said. "Right. None of my business."

He had gotten as far as turning his shoulders when Calloway spoke again.

"Before that. Apologize to June Halliday."

The smile came off Doyle's face without his permission. For a second he thought he'd misheard, and then he looked at the man's eyes and understood that he hadn't.

He could apologize to Calloway. Anyone could; half the business said sorry to him on the way to the coffee machine. But Halliday had three credits and none of them a part anybody would name, and one face, and the face was the entire portfolio. Doyle hired people like that. You put them in the frame, you lit them, you got what you needed before the light turned. That was the point of them.

And what Calloway was asking for wasn't a favor to a colleague. It was how you made a man kneel at a party.

"I know him," Doyle said, and got the smile mostly back on. "He's not carrying this around, believe me. It's not worth turning into a thing. Why don't we leave it."

"You called every take bad all week. Not just his — mine." Calloway's voice hadn't moved at all. "You don't feel a thing about that?"

Doyle said nothing.

"While I'm still being nice. Go apologize to June Halliday."

Doyle's forehead had gone wet, and the man had not raised his voice once.

He looked at him once, which was as much of it as he could take, and turned around and went back down the corridor toward the makeup room.

Three steps in he stopped and put his face back together. He was not going to walk through that door breathing like this.

Then he went on.