At that, they exited the tunnel and entered the agency proper. It was truly a sight to behold, the virtual tour he’d taken did not do it justice. Wide open spaces, full-sized billboards touting ads that Gale/Parker had created. An enormous cutout poster of the smart-ass hound dog that they’d created for Alpo. Punching bags hanging everywhere, things that must be desks but sure didn’t look like desks . . . And there was the basketball court, right in the middle of it all.
But what struck Tremaine most were the people. Young people everywhere. Some of them were walking, some trotting, some zooming this way and that on roller skates and skateboards, humming across the smooth concrete.
Tremaine stood there and just observed them. Dyed hair, nose rings, tattoos. It was like being at a punk rock show—without the anger.
And the clothes, they definitely ran the gamut. You still had your older people in all black, but you had many more younger people in jeans and ironic
Happy Days
T-shirts.
Hell, some people barely wore anything at all. Like that beautiful girl over there by the water fountain. What’s that she’s got on, a napkin? And, man, did most of them seem young.
“So you can dress like this and drive one of those Beemers out there?” Tremaine said.
“Scary, isn’t it?”
“Maybe I should go into advertising,” he said. “Except, I’m like twice everybody’s age.”
“Maybe even three times,” Nina added with a sly grin.
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Michael Craven
“Let me show you around a little, then we’ll go meet Laurie.”
Nina led Tremaine around the agency, explaining how each account had its own section. A dog food account got its own chunk of floor space, a running shoe account, a car account. Tremaine looked at the billboards that were up inside the hangar and recognized almost all of them.
Television monitors were all over the place, too. On each of them, a series of commercials ran over and over in a loop.
Commercials created by Gale/Parker.
Nina led Tremaine to the middle of the agency, where there was a room with two big glass walls and two big orange metal walls that didn’t look inhabited. Inside it sat what looked to Tremaine to be awards. Little gold statues and plates.
“This was Roger’s office. Nobody felt right about taking it over, so they use it to house all the awards the agency wins. I guess it’s kind of a tribute because Roger had won so many himself.”
“What do you mean, awards?” Tremaine asked.
Nina laughed. The laugh of someone who just realized that there’s no possible way the other person in a conversation could know anything about the subject at hand.
Nina said, “The advertising industry is very self-congratulatory. They hold awards shows every year to honor things like the best TV commercials or the best magazine ads.”
“Do people from outside the industry have an interest in these awards?”
“Not really. It’s basically just advertising people congratulating each other.”
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B O D Y C O P Y
“Keeping score.”
“Exactly.”
Nina and Tremaine moved on and now entered another unusual room within the open space created by four wood walls, each a different height. The wood walls had windows cut into them. There wasn’t a ceiling on top of the walls, but rather an open view to the top of the hangar.
An attractive woman with blonde corkscrew hair stood up from behind her desk. She looked to be about forty.
“There you two are,” she said.
She walked around her desk and approached them. Her skin-tight, dark blue jeans rubbed together on her way over.
Sticking out her hand, she said, “I’m Laurie Donnelly.”
Tremaine, shaking her hand, replied, “I’m . . .”
“Donald Tremaine. You were quite a surfer,” Laurie said.
“You’ve done some research,” Nina said.
“Yeah, when I heard he was coming in, I looked him up.”
Laurie looked at Donald. “Still have your looks, I see.
Still have the blonde hair. Not as long though. Looks a little like Redford’s in
Butch Cassidy
.”
Tremaine smiled, embarrassed.
“You’ll have to excuse Laurie,” Nina said. “Like I said, she’s an incorrigible flirt.”
“I’m not sure I know what that word means,” Laurie said. “Nina’s an intellectual. I just tell it like I smell it.”
“With that, I’ll leave you two alone,” Nina said.
“You sure he’ll be all right?” Laurie said.
“He’s a private eye; he’s been in dangerous situations before.”
“Not this dangerous,” Tremaine said.
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Michael Craven
“Oh, he’s got a sense of humor, too,” Laurie said.
“I wasn’t kidding.”
Nina said good-bye to Tremaine and Laurie and left.
Laurie Donnelly was the kind of person Tremaine needed. She had a position of stature at the agency and was happy to use it to help him out.
Laurie said, “Who do you want to talk to first?”
“How ’bout you?”
“Let’s do me last. I’ve got a few things to do, stat. But I can get you started and all set up for a full day.”
Tremaine said, “Why don’t I start with the girl who found Roger, Mary O’Shaughnessy?”
Before he had even finished his sentence, Laurie was on her phone.
“Mary, it’s Laurie Donnelly. The gentleman I was telling you about earlier is going to be coming by to talk to you shortly. Be as cooperative as possible and answer all his questions.”
It’s not possible that Laurie heard Mary’s response because the receiver was already back in its cradle. Slammed abruptly down.
Then Laurie looked at Tremaine and said, “She’s ready when you are.”
Laurie set up some other interviews for Tremaine, told him who he was going to talk to, then winked at him and said she’d see him later.
52
C H A P T E R 9
Mary O’Shaughnessy and Tremaine sat in a small conference room that had a small table, some chairs, and no windows. Tremaine looked at Mary, probably twenty-six, attractive, but desperate to be taken seriously. She was sitting so upright that it had to hurt, and she had her hands tightly clasped in front of her, almost like she was praying.
“So you wanted to talk to me first?” Mary said.
She couldn’t contain how impressed she was with herself over that fact. Tremaine nodded at her question.
“I thought it would be good to talk here,” Mary said.
“This is called a solitary room. It’s for people who want to take a break from the action of the agency, and just sit in here and think. You don’t have to be a creative to use Michael Craven
it. Like, I use it sometimes, even though I’m an account executive.”
“A creative?”
“Yeah, that’s what they call the writers and art directors. Creatives.”
Tremaine wondered if they called her group Kind-of-Annoyings. He said, “Account executive. Laurie said you were an assistant account executive.”
He had to point it out. Look at this girl, with the ridiculous posture and the little up-and-comer smirk. He just had to.
“Well, I am, but that won’t last long. I’ve already been promoted once. I started as a receptionist.”
Tremaine moved on. “So, you found Roger Gale that Saturday morning?”
“Yes!” she said.
She was so proud of it. Proud of being the one to find a dead guy.
“He was sitting there at his desk, it was very early in the morning. I was the only one in the office, the first person here. Well, other than Roger, obviously.”
“But he was dead, so that doesn’t count,” Tremaine said.
“Exactly,” she said.
She didn’t take his comment as a joke, she wanted credit for being the first person in. Mary was talking, describing the scene. Tremaine was sort of listening but knew within seconds that he wouldn’t get any information from Mary that wasn’t in the police report.
He asked her a few questions anyway; she was, after all, giving him her time. Even though, as each second passed, he became more cynical about his first interviewee.
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B O D Y C O P Y
“So, you saw Roger’s head crash down on the desk, and you went in his office to find out why that had happened?”
“Yes,” she said. “And I called out his name a few times, and when he didn’t answer, I felt his pulse, like they do in the movies. And when I had my fingers on his neck, some blood from his head, where it had hit his desk, dripped on my hand. It was really weird.”
“Then you called the cops?”
“Yes,” she said. “And I remember my fingers stained the phone with blood.”
Tremaine thought about saying, please, save the imag-ery for your screenplay, but he didn’t.
Instead, he remained relatively polite and said, “Did you know Roger Gale? On a personal level?“
It hurt Mary to respond to this question, Tremaine could tell.
“No,” she said. “I’d only talked to him once in my life.”
“And what did you talk about?“
“Not much. I said hi.”
“And what did he say.”
“He smiled.”
Tremaine said, “Thanks for talking to me, Mary. You’ve been helpful.”
“I have?” she said.
Tremaine smiled.
Tremaine, after leaving Mary, sat down with a young copywriter named Matt Bishop. A creative. They sat in Matt’s
“office” a room with three orange steel walls and an opening 55
Michael Craven
on one side that looked out into the agency. Matt had a goatee and his fingers were bejeweled with several cheap-looking rings. His dark hair and dark goatee set against pale Iowa skin gave him sort of a sinister look. But within seconds of talking to him, Tremaine realized, Matt Bishop was a genuinely nice and helpful guy behind the wannabe-rock-star exterior.
“Thanks for talking to me,” Tremaine started.
“No problem,” he said. “Lots of people would be really glad if the person who murdered Roger was caught.”
Tremaine noticed an ad hanging on the Matt’s wall for Häagen-Dazs ice cream. It showed a woman sitting on her couch crying and eating from four different cartons of ice cream. The headline on the ad read:
The breakup was really
bad. That’s why our ice cream is really good
.
“Is that a real ad?” Tremaine asked.
“No. We pitched it to the client, but they didn’t get it.
Typical.”
“Too morbid for them?”
“Yeah, they said it gave their product a depressing image.”
Tremaine thought, they were right.
“This would have won a ton of awards,” Matt said. “Instead, they took the straight approach. We always run into that with clients. They never want to take risks.”
Tremaine shifted the subject and asked, “So, you worked with Roger Gale?”
“Some, but not enough. But I was working with him on the H&R Block pitch at the time of the murder. So, the time I did spend with him was right around the time of his death.”
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B O D Y C O P Y
“Did you like him? As a boss? As a person?”
“He was the best mind this business has ever had.”
“But did you like him? Was he fair? Was he a straight-shooter?”
“That was his best quality. Even above his talent. He respected anyone who came to work every day ready and willing to come up with new ideas. No matter who it was.
That’s why he liked me. I had an idea for the H&R Block pitch, so I got up the nerve to introduce myself to him one day at lunch. So I told him my idea, and he liked it, and the next thing I know, I’m working directly with him. Every day. Coming up with ideas for the pitch. He never asked me about my credentials, where I had worked before, what I had done while I was at Gale/Parker, anything. I don’t even think he knew I was a copywriter at first. He just liked the idea and said let’s do it.”
“What about if he didn’t like your ideas? How did he act?”
“He told you. There were plenty of suggestions of mine that he didn’t like. Believe me, plenty. He’d just say so.”
“When you worked with him, did you get to know him at all, personally?”
“Not really. It was actually kind of funny. We’d work all day and never really do any small talk. Nothing. I tried to get him to talk about stuff other than work, you know, what he did on the weekends or whatever. He’d just kind of look at me. All he wanted to do was work. He was just totally consumed. It was amazing.”
“Did you ever see him outside the office?”
“No. I couldn’t get him to
talk
about stuff outside of work, much less make plans with me.”
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Michael Craven
“No, I mean, did you ever just run into him randomly?”
“Once. I saw him at a restaurant.”
“Who was he with?”
“His wife. I didn’t say hi. I was too intimidated. It was before the H&R Block thing.”
Tremaine considered this kid, Matt Bishop. Just a young successful guy who has a tremendous amount of respect for Roger Gale. Tremaine wondered, though, if Matt was just going to tell him a series of Roger Gale Was Great stories.
Stuff he could read in an ad magazine or online. But this kid did know the man, a little. He certainly offered more insight than Mary.
Matt was still talking. He said, “You know how committed Roger Gale was?”
Tremaine shook his head no.
“Okay, check this out. Roger found out Gale/Parker was going to be invited to the Ford pitch. This was years ago, when Gale/Parker was just starting to really explode.
Anyway, they weren’t going to be formally invited for a month or so, but Roger knew they were getting the nod.
So, to research the company, to get a feel for it, Roger moves to Detroit and gets a job in one of the Ford plants.
Not on the assembly line, nothing too technical, but still, doing manual labor in a plant. Busting his ass forty hours a week, working for Ford. He kept the job for more than a month, lived in Detroit, hung with those guys, the whole deal.”
Tremaine looked at Matt. Watched him as he told the story of his idol with enthusiasm, even passion.
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B O D Y C O P Y
“Then the pitch rolls around,” Matt said. “And Roger moves back to L.A. so he can work on it. Everybody here goes gangbusters for another month or so to prepare the creative. Then, the actual presentation rolls around. Roger presents the work, then goes on to tell the top brass at Ford how well Gale/Parker knows their business. And how he knows—personally—how hard the guys work to put the cars together. The grand finale was Roger pulling out his pay stubs, showing everybody that he’d taken a job at their company. Showing everybody that Gale/Parker wasn’t full of shit when it came to understanding what goes into making Ford cars.”