“You could say that.”
“Was she a Harvard girl?”
“Yes, originally from Manhattan.”
“Which part?”
“Fifth Avenue.”
Lily smiled wryly. “Girls like that are trained from a very young age to break the hearts of sweet men like you.”
“You should have told me earlier. It was an expensive lesson,” I said. “It drained my emotional bank account.”
“At least your financial bank account is still intact. It could be worse.”
“I’m a reporter. My emotional bank account will always be more plentiful than my financial one, and if it’s not, then I have a problem.”
Lily smiled. “Don’t take it personally, love. You’re a tremendous catch, but even the biggest bass isn’t a prize for a girl who has a taste for caviar. And who knows? Perhaps someday you may discover your loss was a win in disguise.”
Lily’s eyes traveled to a spindly plant. She stood up and picked a dead leaf out of its pot. She placed the leaf on a side table.
“You must be exhausted,” Lily said, before returning to her chair.
“I am, actually,” I said. My adrenaline level was still so high it could have been 10:00 a.m. but I just now remembered my deadline, and I couldn’t count on Rubenstein to extend it another minute. “And I have a story to write.”
Lily walked me to the front door. When she opened it, the purr of the Mercedes greeted us. Kurt held the rear passenger door open. I wondered how long he had been standing there.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” Lily said, excitedly. “Wait here.” She disappeared and then returned with a large wrapped box. “This is for you.”
“I couldn’t possibly,” I began.
“You could possibly,” she said. “My only request is that you open it when you get home because I get embarrassed when people open gifts in front of me.”
The look on Lily’s face said there was no arguing, so I accepted it.
“Thank you for everything. What an evening,” I said.
“You’re welcome. Good luck with your story. My father was a luminary in this town, and I would like him to be remembered as such.”
By the time I got home it was past midnight, and I had to crank out my article by seven to get it to editorial. My one-bedroom apartment had always seemed humble, but now, after where I had just been, I realized it was downright pathetic. It was smaller than Lily’s living room, and the dirt was embedded so deep that not even a few coats of paint could do the trick. Appliances were decades old, the furniture was mine from boyhood, and the ceiling was covered with asbestos rather than ivy.
I was an adult, but my apartment was a college kid’s. Bel-Air was too grand for a man like me.
I wrote my article on Joel as quickly as possible and emailed it to the office along with a scanned copy of the photo Lily had given me. I was about to slip into a catnap before work when I remembered the package.
I unwrapped it to find a box from one of Los Angeles’s most expensive boutiques. Inside were two perfectly creased shirts and trousers folded in tissue paper. There was no note.
Phil Rubenstein looked as if he had crawled his way out of the pages of a hard-boiled detective novel. He was what you’d call a guy’s guy. There was a beefiness about him, and he had a ubiquitous five-o’clock shadow at any time of day. Although I never had the privilege of going to lunch with him, everyone who did came back with bloodred drinker’s eyes and speech that sloshed around in their mouths. For Rubenstein the two-martini lunch was a restrained one.
It was Phil Rubenstein who had hired me as a reporter at the Times a few years earlier. To say I was at the lowest point of my life back then didn’t do the situation justice. I had been unceremoniously fired from the Wall Street Journal for an act of plagiarism I didn’t intend to commit. That came after my girlfriend of two years had left me—equally as unceremoniously, with barely a phone call. I was broke, jobless and alone in Manhattan.
My job search went poorly. I was told time and time again I was unemployable—not only in the field of journalism, but in any field. After months of futilely applying for jobs, big and small, a college buddy’s father called his chum Rubenstein on my behalf. There were favors owed somewhere or another, and Rubenstein had taken a liking to me, so I ended up at the Los Angeles Times.
Because of that, I always held a soft spot in my heart for Rubenstein. In fact, whether by exaggeration or not, I considered the man my savior. Never mind the fact that immediately after hiring me he seemed to forget I existed. The newspaper business in Los Angeles was like the film business—it was about who you knew, and that column was blank for me. The well-connected guys got invited to the premieres, club openings and parties, and got all of the scoops that went with them while I had got the smallest local stories.
“Cleary, get in here,” Rubenstein shouted across the pit.
Phil Rubenstein never called me into his office, and the other reporters made eye contact in the way grade school students do when they sense one of their peers may be in trouble.
I temporarily abandoned the story I had been researching on the heated council race in District 10 and made my way across the sea of accusatory eyes before arriving at Rubenstein’s corner office.
The office was the low-rent generic kind that newspapers with shrinking budgets and insolvent balance sheets tended to have, but Rubenstein had personalized it. Photos of Rubenstein with various studio heads and actors dressed up a stock credenza. Framed movie posters with handwritten notes covered the white walls. He had a plastic statue that looked like a fake Oscar award that said #1 Boss. Rubenstein was a newspaper editor, but judging by his office he seemed to think he ran Twentieth Century Fox. This was not by accident.
“How you feeling this morning, Cleary?”
The truth: I had a headache that threatened to become a full-blown hangover if you blew on it wrong, and I could still taste the stale Grey Goose and lime juice on my tongue.
But it was an extraordinary night that had caused this crappy state to begin with, and the headache made me feel as if the night before was somehow still alive.
“I feel good,” I said, opting not to go into detail, satisfied with the fact that my story on Joel Goldman had run on the first page of the Calendar section. There was only one front page of Calendar and it was a daily jostle to get there. The death of one of the most famous titans of the entertainment business was certainly significant in its own right, and I had frosted the story with quotes from David Duplaine, George Bloom and Carole Partridge—three of the industry’s hottest commodities.
Rubenstein gazed out his office window. “Your story was good, Cleary. And the quotes were all nice touches. Overkill, but nice. The only time I’ve seen all those names in one place was at the Oscars.”
“Glad you liked it.”
“That thing with the Journal aside, you’re a very good writer. One of our most talented.”
“Thanks,” I said, wincing at the mention of the Wall Street Journal as one might cringe at a chance encounter with an ex-lover on the sidewalk. I felt a bead of sweat race down the back of my neck.
“I need something from you,” Rubenstein demanded. “I hear there’s going to be a major shake-up at Duplaine’s studio. I need you to call Lily Goldman and get the story. I want it to break here, at the Times, instead of one of those shitty internet sites or, God forbid, the Reporter.”