Body Copy - Michael Craven [12]
No one saw him return. But, as Tremaine learned poring over the statements, Friday night was the one night people didn’t work till the wee hours. It was the one night the employees got out of there, were encouraged to get out of there. Many of them came in on weekends, as Mary O’Shaughnessy had, but Friday night the place was relatively empty. So, if he’d come back late that Friday night, he could have gone unseen. It wouldn’t have been unusual.
Tremaine wondered, did the person who killed him know Friday nights were slow, or did they just get lucky?
The agency did employ a twenty-four-hour security service, but the two guards who worked the night shift weren’t there to determine who could and who could not enter the agency. They were just there to make a statement.
Officially, the agency’s doors locked at midnight, but everyone who needed a key had one and knew the alarm code.
Roger Gale wanted the agency to be accessible anytime anyone might have a creative surge. Gale himself came and went at all hours—always had. The security guards really just stood around outside, ostensibly guarding but rarely questioning, rarely even noticing, the people who came and went.
The guards on duty the night in question claimed not to have seen anything. Claimed that they never saw anyone, Roger Gale or otherwise, come in that Friday night after the last person left around nine. A note in the report indicated that both the security guards were fired shortly 35
Michael Craven
after the murder. They’d become friends while working together and had been caught leaving their posts to get alcohol. So, Tremaine thought, the night of the murder, they could have been three sheets to the wind. Probably were.
Tremaine continued to peruse the information and began to see why the police never got anywhere. There was essentially no evidence. Nothing at the scene, no unusual fingerprints, no indications of someone being in Roger Gale’s office who shouldn’t have been there. And Roger Gale’s past? Looked clean. No business deals gone bad, no affairs. Officers had asked many of the employees and his family members about Gale’s irregular hours, but everyone just said Roger Gale worked hard. No one had any reason to believe he was involved with anyone other than his wife.
There was never an official suspect named.
There was, however, a person of interest listed: a man who held the position of Creative Director at a rival Los Angeles ad agency, a man named Tyler Wilkes. He had been questioned extensively and was, according to many Gale/Parker employees, jealous of Roger Gale—really jealous. Tyler Wilkes had built his agency in El Segundo, a neighborhood close to Playa del Rey, home of Gale/Parker.
He’d also built it to physically resemble Gale/Parker. And, according to the report, he was “constantly” compar-ing the two shops, constantly trying to compete with the legend of the ad man down the road. “Obsessed” was the term one cop used. But the police could never get anything on Wilkes. It was simply their only lead.
Tremaine wondered, do people in the advertising business kill each other? You got that in certain worlds—drugs, politics, possibly. But advertising? Tremaine had always 36
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considered advertising to be something of a prestigious field. Martini lunches, teams of people in black turtlenecks, location shoots. But murders?
You never know, Tremaine thought. He was always surprised at the reasons people found to kill each other.
Reasons that often seemed stupid, silly, insane, impossible.
Yes, shit between people, or in people’s heads, can escalate; it just can. And ad agencies have relationships with enormous companies. That means lots of money. And that’s what a tremendous number of murders are about: money.
So what makes advertising different? If an agency down the street is winning all the business, getting all the respect, wouldn’t it be nice to have the creative force behind that agency gone forever?
Maybe.
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C H A P T E R 7
Tremaine and Nina Aldeen decided to meet at noon at the Rose Café in