“This city,” said Annette.
I knew what she meant. Culturally, it was a vibrant, diverse town. It also had a high unemployment rate and a very high rate of crime. When we walked around at night, we put extra robbery money in our pockets, so as not to anger gunmen who were looking for more than a meager amount of cash. Violent shit happened here, randomly. People would say that Skylar’s murder was bad luck. A case of wrong place, wrong time.
“You all right?” said Annette. When I didn’t answer, she said, “Vic?”
“What about work?” I was scheduled for the writers’ room; Ellen was supposed to cover set.
“Bruce and Ellen cancelled today’s shoot. We’ll be up again tomorrow. I’ve gotta go in.”
“Me, too. I’ll see you at the offices, honey. Thanks for the call.”
I phoned Eagle first. It was the easiest call I’d make, and I was putting off the hard ones. I knew that Eagle, true to his Northern European temperament, would be the strongest and most stoic of Skylar’s friends. And indeed, all he said was, “It is a tragedy.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“I think I’ll sleep.”
Van Cummings was the tougher one to deal with. He was an emotional guy, the Jackson Browne of camera operators, unashamed to wear his heart on his sleeve. Van had been crying when he picked up my call.
“Why him?” he said. I pictured him right now, running a hand through his gray-blond hair, smoking a cigarette. “He was a sweet kid.”
“I know it.”
“Meet me somewhere, Victor.”
“I can’t. I have to go in to the writers’ room today.”
“Okay,” said Van. “I’ll be at the Low Bar, if you want to stop by after you get off.”
He’d be on his favorite stool for the rest of the day, at the little bar near city hall. Drinking vodka and juice, going outside occasionally to smoke a little weed, then back in for more drink. He’d end up in his hotel bed with one of the crew members, the cute new camera assistant maybe, by late afternoon. That was how Van would deal with this. I had yet to figure out how I would reconcile Skylar’s death.
The last call I made, the one I dreaded, was to Laura Flanagan. I was relieved when she didn’t pick up. The call went to voice mail but I didn’t leave one. Instead I texted her: “Be strong. If you need me, I’m here for you. I mean it, Vic.”
I got dressed and took my rental car, a red Ford Focus, to work.
The production and writers’ offices occupied a run-down building, built in the 1960s, off the Martin Luther King highway, which was, as it is in all American cities, on the blighted side of town. The space was unglamorous and spartan—cubicles for the production staff, offices for department heads and management. I had an office, which I rarely used, with a bare-top desk and an old couch that I was meant to sleep on but never once did. My window gave to a view of an empty lot where men sat on crates and drank beer in the afternoons, after their free breakfast. We were located near a homeless shelter and morning bread line.
The mood was dour when I arrived. In the production office, people were quietly talking amongst themselves or on their desk phones. My assistant, Lynn, a local woman with a law degree who was hoping to become a writer, got up from her desk and hugged me as I crossed into the wing of the writers and producers.
“I’m so sorry, Vic.”
“It’s rough. Is Ellen around?”
“She’s in her office.”
I knocked on Ellen Stern’s open door and entered. Unlike my office, Ellen’s was heavily decorated. Its walls were crowded with framed commendations and one-sheets of shows she’d produced, and her bookshelves were filled. She worked here for most of her day, while I rarely came in, so this was her abode. My home was the set.
She was typing on her laptop with one hand and eating an apple with the other. She looked at me over the rims of her reading glasses.
“I’m sorry about Skylar. It’s awful.”
“Yeah.”
“We’re going to have a meeting with everyone on set tomorrow, before crew call. Go over some general things about street awareness. Suggest they not walk alone at night, what neighborhoods to avoid, that sort of thing. Maybe if Skylar had been more cognizant…”
“You think that’s what happened? That he was careless?”
“What do you think happened?”
“No idea, Ellen.”
She placed her half-eaten apple on her desk and removed her glasses. “He was young. The young tend to think that nothing bad is ever going to happen to them. But this is a dangerous city. We’re here because of the tax credits the state offers. The network mandated that we shoot here, and it’s saving the production millions. We didn’t have a choice. But while we’re here I’m going to try and make sure that our people are safe.”
She didn’t know anything about Skylar’s other life. Ellen sometimes criticized me for being too friendly with the crew and for not entirely committing to the side of the brass, but I was unconvinced that there had to be such a strict division between labor and management.
“That’s a good idea,” I said. “The safety meeting, I mean. Have you notified Skylar’s family?”
“The police did. His parents are coming in from Galveston today. They’re going to take his body home for burial, after the autopsy. We’ll do a service of our own here, for the crew. Maybe in the park. We’ll dedicate a tree to him, something like that.”
“That would be nice.”
“Are you going to be here all day?”
“In the writers’ room,” I said.
“I’ve spoken to the Homicide detectives. I told them everything I knew. Skylar was dating Laura in wardrobe, right?”
“Yes.”
“I also told them you were one of his closest friends here. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all.”
“They’d like to speak with you later on today. Much later, I imagine. They’ve got a lot of work to do, interviews and the like. I think they’re going to get into Skylar’s room at the hotel as well.”
If they got into his suite, they’d access his room safe. The contents of the safe would tell a story. They’d know.
“I’ll be here,” I said.
Ellen placed her glasses back on her face, and her eyes went to her laptop’s screen. “They’re waiting for you in the room. Bruce and the rest.”
“Right.”
Our conversation had been free of emotion. In this racket we were used to death. Because we worked together so closely, sometimes up to eighty hours a week, death showed itself to us with surprising frequency, and we became enamored of it. One of Ellen’s partners on another show had died of a massive heart attack on set. A junkie actor on Crucial Investigations, a show I worked on for NBC, hung himself in his trailer the day he’d wrapped. We watched fellow crew members deteriorate, and continue to work, as they were dying of cancer. A dolly grip I knew, an alcoholic who had once pissed his pants while sleeping on my hotel-room couch, drank a quart of Listerine one night and did a Bill Holden, fell out of the shower while blackout drunk and hit his head on the edge of the bathtub. There were more casualties, too many to count. Skylar was the latest, a guy we’d remember and talk about less and less as the shoot progressed and we moved on to other jobs.
In my office, I took my notebook and pen out of my book bag, then headed for the room.
The writers’ room was deliberately drab, with zero decor: two walls with mounted writing boards and windows with blinds kept drawn, so we wouldn’t be distracted by the outside world. A long table, holding yellow legal pads and cups of pencils and pens, took up the bulk of the space. In the center of the table was an array of snacks, mostly of the healthy variety per Bruce’s instructions, and bottled water. A coffee urn, constantly refreshed, had been set up at a nearby station, along with a cooler holding soft drinks, juices, and Gatorade.
Bruce Kaplan sat at the head of the table. At the other end of the table was Diego Rodrigu
ez, our young script supervisor, who took the meeting’s notes on his word processor, the only laptop allowed in the room, a rule that prevented us from surfing while at work. Diego, quiet and contemplative, was a sponge, and very smart. He would soon get a script assignment, and someday it was likely that, per his ambition, he would have his own show. Also at the table were our two staff writers, Randall Arrington and Fay Harmon. Randall, his hand in a bag of potato chips, did not look up as I entered. Fay’s eyes met mine, and she gave me a kind nod. I nodded back and had a seat near Diego.
First order of business, as always, was lunch. A menu from a local restaurant went around the table, and we made our choices on one of the pads, placing our orders beside our names. While we did this, Bruce, rumpled and clearly unmoored, made a brief speech about Skylar’s death and how deeply it resonated to management, as well as how we had to soldier on and proceed with our work. The others listened respectfully even as they chose between the Cobb salad and grilled shrimp over Caesar. They knew little of Skylar Branson except to recognize him by sight.
“Why would man fear that which is so inevitable?” said Randall, unprompted, speaking on death, quoting, no doubt, from Shakespeare or some other decomposed writer I had not read. Randall liked to do that. He knew it annoyed me, and he thought it made him seem intelligent.
“Let’s get started on one-fourteen,” said Bruce.
Scenes were discussed by character, then handwritten on the board by Diego, using a Sharpie. Often they were quickly erased. If they were deemed worthy of making it into the episode, the beats were transposed onto index cards. Lead characters (Tanner, Hart) got their own color card, as did supporting characters (Tanner’s Team), and others who reoccurred in each ep. Criminals, too, if they had a multi-episode arc or we gave them POV. Then we put the scenes in order: day one, night one, day two, night two. Once thumbtacked up on the bulletin boards, the different-colored cards would tell us, graphically, whether or not our cast of characters was fully represented. The process, called “beating out” an episode, usually took a couple of days, depending upon the level of nonsense and useless discourse allowed in the room.
“I need to give something a little extra to Andre Robbins in this episode,” said Bruce, speaking of a young actor in our cast. His agent had complained about Andre’s paucity of lines and the stagnant nature of his arc. Robbins played Cobb McCord, a handsome, “impetuous” junior member of the squad.
“Trouble at home?” I said. “He is newly married.”
“Maybe he can’t get it up,” said Randall, and I saw Fay give an almost imperceptible roll of her eyes.
“We played that already,” I said. “With Detective Richards, earlier in the season. We solved his problem with a pill.”
“Okay,” said Randall. “How about this? He wakes up one day and…I’m just spitballing here, I haven’t figured out the details yet…all a the sudden, he thinks he’s gay. Doesn’t know if he’s a cocksman or a cocksucker. We could play it out for the rest of the season.”
“They did that storyline with Bayliss on Homicide,” said Diego.
“And it didn’t work for them, either,” I said.
“Randy,” said Bruce, with great tolerance, “I don’t think that’s what the actor had in mind when he asked us to expand his role.”
Bruce had brought Randall, his former college roommate, into the writers’ room and given him a staff position. Randall had once been an advertising copywriter and he convinced Bruce that he could do it. But he wasn’t a screenwriter, or any kind of writer at all, and had no desire to learn the craft. Consequently, Bruce had to rewrite most of his work. In Randall’s mind, he was here to collect a paycheck, eat free food, and hit on the females in the office. He had a beach ball for a belly and wore thick-lens oval-rim glasses that made him look like a Japanese villain in a ’40s war flick. Women found him repulsive, and so did men, but that message didn’t reach him or stop his inappropriate behavior. Guys like him never seemed to get it; I often wondered if there were mirrors in his house. At any rate, Randall was Bruce’s cross to bear.
“We’ve already established that McCord is a hothead,” said Fay, a veteran scribe whose reserved and dignified personality had actually hindered her advancement in the industry. She was the best pure writer among us.
“That’s right,” said Bruce, leaning forward to hear her, as she was very soft-spoken.
“Playing on that,” she said, “we could have him assault a suspect during an arrest. Maybe the suspect is already handcuffed or something, and McCord punches him in the face.”
“Why does he have to punch him in the face?” said Randall, whose comments were nearly always off point. “He could sucker punch him in the gut or somethin instead.”
“Go on, Fay,” said Bruce, tiredly.
“I’m thinking, his actions could imperil the case against the suspect. McCord’s brought up on brutality charges, and it also puts him in the doghouse with Tanner and Hart.”
“Which he has to work himself out of,” said Bruce, warming to it.
“Sets McCord up for some kind of redemption,” I said. “You could sell that to the execs, Bruce.” The cable suits loved that concept: redemption.
“I like it,” said Bruce.
“It’s something we could play into next season,” I said.
“If there is a next season,” said Bruce, rather mournfully. Our first two episodes had already run, and the numbers were not stellar, despite a lead-in from a popular show. “But I do like it.”
We discussed the beats for the McCord arc and got them up on the board, then on cards. It was my episode, and I began to see the scenes, how I would write them, the dialogue, everything. That’s how it worked for me. The movie had begun to play in my head.
Lunch came, and then the inevitable post-lunch ennui. We drank more coffee and tried to get back up. A second wind lifted us, and we got more scenes on the board, and more cards on the bulletin board. Late in the day, my assistant knocked on the door and popped her head inside the room.
“Excuse me, Victor,” said Lynn. “The police are here to see you.”
I got up out of my chair.
Two Homicide dicks, one black and middle-aged, one white and getting there, were waiting for me in my office, both of them seated expansively on my couch. They were in suits and ties, wearing Glocks set in clip-on holsters and badges on neck chains, like they’d just stepped out of the props truck via the wardrobe trailer. The only thing that wouldn’t have worked for our show was their grooming; our hair department head, Jana Kendros, would have given them better cuts and some product.
They stood as I entered. The office was crowded for three, and I imagined that was the way they wanted me: uncomfortable.
“Dennis Mahoney,” said the white one, late thirties, a little overweight but not soft, with strawberry blond hair that screamed Gaelic, a nose brilliantly veined from drink, and cheeks cratered with the laughing reminder of an acned adolescence. He wore a Men’s Wearhouse–grade suit with pleated slacks and a rep tie darkened with an oval of grease.
“Detective Gittens,” said the black one. “Joe.” His suit was a little more twenty-first century than his partner’s. He wore a thick mustache, had a face dotted with raised moles, and deep brown, tired eyes. He was on the green side of fifty and wore no wedding ring.
Gittens was the sensible one, Mahoney the meat-eater.
All of this I noticed before I spoke to them. An eye for detail is helpful in my profession.
“Victor Ohanion,” I said, and shook their hands.
“Ohanion,” said Mahoney, brightly. “You must be Irish. Me, too.”
“I’m Armenian,” I said.
Mahoney’s smile faded. I might as well have said I was an A-rab or, worse, a Muslim. I was raised Orthodox Christian but hadn’t seen the inside of a church since I was an altar boy. I’d been wandering the wilderness for more than twenty years.
“Have a seat,” I said, gesturing to the couch. They did, a
nd I took the chair behind my desk.
Gittens wasted no time.
GITTENS
We understand that you were friends with Skylar Branson.
OHANION
That’s right.
GITTENS
In the last few days, did Mr. Branson say anything to you that would indicate he was in some sort of trouble?
OHANION
(beat)
No.
GITTENS
Was he acting peculiar in any way?
OHANION
Not that I recall.
MAHONEY
One of your crew members said he saw you two talking last night on set, and that it looked contentious.
OHANION
That would’ve been Lance. He’s a bit of a drama queen. Likes to get into other people’s business. The truth is, Skylar and I were just talking.
MAHONEY
What were you talking about?
OHANION
Designer shoes and handbags. Menstrual cramps. That sort of thing.
MAHONEY
You’re a funny guy, Ohanion.
OHANION
I have moments.
GITTENS
For the record, where were you last night at the time of Mr. Branson’s death?
OHANION
What time was that, exactly?
GITTENS
He was shot around three thirty a.m.
OHANION
I was in bed at my hotel. Sleeping.
GITTENS
You stay at the crew hotel?
OHANION
Correct.
GITTENS
Were you sleeping alone?
OHANION