Body Copy - Michael Craven [18]
“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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“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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“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