Skin Deep

'Then you're not paying me enough,' I said.

'All it would take,' Cohen said as if I hadn't spoken, 'is one more bad story, one more headline that the dream boy gets his rocks off by breaking girls' fingers. All we need is the National Enquirer headline reading TOBY PAID TO KICK ME and interviews with four abusees on Geraldo, and the show isn't worth the film it was shot on. We've had four headlines and three blind items already.'

'I'm not interested in taking care of Toby Vane,' I said. 'I think he's the lowest form of life since Mr. Tooth Decay. And, as I said, you're not paying me enough.'

'Let's take your points in reverse order,' Stillman said, cutting off Cohen with an upraised palm. 'Fifteen hundred a day. And you're not taking care of Toby, you're protecting the girls he might hurt.'

'For how long? Assuming that I'll do it at all.'

'Two weeks. At the outside. We'll be signed, sealed, and delivered by then.'

'And after that?'

'Then it's Toby's problem,' Stillman said with the air of one who'd anticipated the question.

'Not entirely.'

'You mean the girls.'

'Well, of course I do.'

'Then it's their problem,' Stillman said. 'I can't worry about them after that. Are they more important than the people starving to death in Africa? I gave fifty thousand dollars to help them last year. They have less control over their destiny than the girls Toby Vane-or anybody, for that matter-beats up.'

'I have to think,' I said. 'By the way, what happened to the girl in Toby's van?'

'Which girl?' Cohen said, sounding like someone whose dentist had just hit a nerve.

'The first one,' I said. 'You know, Northridge.'

Cohen looked at Stillman, and Stillman nodded. 'Her, um, her nose was broken.' He looked embarrassed. Stillman just looked at me.

'How many have there been?'

Cohen shrugged. 'Not that many. Eight or ten. After a while we caught on, started planting pros around.'

'Pros don't bleed,' I said.

'Pros don't talk to the press,' Stillman said. 'Let's get down to the bottom line. I have a screening to go to. Toby Vane is a big star, okay? Toby is a star because he's the boy every woman loves: he's a son to the middle- aged dames, a grandson to the old ones, the boy next door to preteens, and a fantasy lover to girls in their late teens and twenties. His show is worth fifty-four million dollars for exactly as long as that big friendly grin of his doesn't get shit all over it. If it does, High Velocity isn't worth carrots. I'm not going to let that happen. You're not going to let that happen. Dixie here isn't going to let that happen.' He raised a hand, the man with the plan.

'We've all got our jobs cut out for us. You spend days and evenings with him, keeping him out of trouble. Dixie manages the press and keeps anything that's already happened from surfacing in some rag. And I negotiate the syndication deal as fast as I can, and pay both of you.'

'Two weeks with Toby Vane,' I said.

'Say ten days,' Stillman said.

'Say two thousand a day,' I said.

Stillman looked at Cohen. Cohen looked at Stillman. 'Okay,' Stillman said. 'But you'd better keep his ass out of trouble.'

'I'll wrap it in linen all the way up to the back of his neck,' I said. 'But I want to make one thing clear: if he gets out of hand, I'm going to deck him.'

'Don't hit him in the face,' Stillman said.

There was a moment of silence while we all listened to the echo. 'I'll take the first five days on account,' I said.

'Ten thousand dollars.' Stillman pulled a checkbook from one desk drawer and a gold Mont Blanc fountain pen from another. The pen scratched expensively. He blew on the check for a moment and then held it out across the desk. He didn't get up.

I did.

'Dixie will take you to the set,' he said. Now that he'd bought me, he wasn't quite so polite.

Ten thousand dollars richer, I followed Dixie to the door. I paused at the threshold.

'Tell me one thing,' I said. 'Why me?'

Stillman looked back up at me. 'Don't you know, Mr. Grist? Toby likes you.'

3

Panty Hose Oaks

'It's a simple matter of crisis control,' Dixie Cohen said, maneuvering the big Mercedes through suicidal freeway traffic. The air conditioner roared away. 'Problem is, there's no time between crises.'

'Must be hard on the digestion.' We were out of the Cahuenga Pass, heading for the Valley.

'I wouldn't know. Last thing I digested was my backbone. If I still had it, I'd have clobbered Toby long ago.'

I looked over at him, figuring the odds on his decking Toby. His most conspicuous muscle was his Adam's apple. The hands on the leather-covered wheel were long, supple, yellowish, and fine-knuckled, a violinist's hands. It wasn't hard to imagine the sound of his fingers splintering on contact with Toby's jaw. He had a musician's profile, too. He looked like a guest conductor for a minor orchestra specializing in tragic opera.

'He's in his mid-thirties or something,' I said, trying vainly to turn the air conditioner vent away from me. 'It's a little late for corporal punishment. Why should you have clobbered him?' I settled for rolling down my sleeves.

'That's personal,' Dixie said. It was as though he'd tugged a zipper closed between the front seats. He tightened his mouth like someone working up to a spit.

The Ventura Freeway hurtled by, bordered by laurels, oleanders, and other poisonous shrubbery. The Oracle at Delphi had chewed laurel, and look where it got her. I was sighing, preparatory to changing subjects, when Dixie swerved the wheel sharply, dexterously cutting off a brown Japanese something in the lane to the left. We were awarded by an outraged beep.

'Crazy woman,' Dixie said, although he'd been at fault. 'If Toby were with us, he'd be screaming back to her with his head stuck out the window, even if he were driving. Especially if he were driving.'

'Give me fifty words on Toby.' It seemed like a safe subject.

'Which fifty?'

'Well, I already know his favorite color.'

Dixie sucked in his cheeks, looking more than ever like a man on the verge of a satisfying spit. 'Toby's tough,' he said. 'He likes being a star, and he might even hold on to it. He works. Knows his lines, shows up on time, gets the job done. How many words is that?'

'You've got a few left.'

'He's smarter than you think-correction-smarter than I think. I found that out right away. He's got charm down cold. He's very, very good at being the little boy who can't figure out what he's done wrong. No matter what it is. He can look so sweet. And way down in the middle of it all, under the grin and the skin, he's so sick that Freud would have gotten a job as a bricklayer. Getting to know him is like opening a big, bright Christmas package and finding a box full of snakes.'

'So,' I said, 'who was he before he was Toby?'

'Officially,' Dixie said, 'he was born in South Dakota, raised on a farm, and encouraged by a kindly, white- haired old drama teacher who loaned him the money to come to Hollywood. When he got here he took a job in a