Body Copy - Michael Craven [20]
“Excuse me,” Tremaine said. “Are you Jack Sawyer?”
In a rusty, gravelly voice, the guy said, “That’s me.”
Sawyer stood up, bowlegged, a little bent over. This guy was an old cowboy working with a bunch of kids.
“I’m Donald Tremaine.”
“Yeah, I know who you are,” Sawyer said. “Donnelly told me you were coming. And I remember your old surf video. You were a crazy bastard.”
Michael Craven
Tremaine considered explaining that, no, he wasn’t crazy, but why get into it? This guy seemed like a character, somebody who might tell him something he hadn’t already read in the reports or online.
They shook.
“Have a seat,” Sawyer said.
Tremaine did.
Sawyer said, “So, Nina hired you to figure out who killed Roger?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I can tell you, almost for sure, that nobody in these halls did it. I was one of the first employees hired here, and I know everyone who’s ever worked here. There were people who got sour over getting passed up for a promotion or something. But nobody wanted Roger dead.
Everyone respected him too much. The cops kept asking questions about whether he cheated on his wife because he kept such crazy hours, and there are women everywhere you look here. Have you noticed?”
Tremaine said, “Maybe.”
“Maybe,” Sawyer said. “I like that. But crazy hours, leaving the agency at midnight, grabbing a drink somewhere, things like that, that’s advertising. That doesn’t mean he’s banging some broad in a broom closet. I suppose if he was having an affair with someone who worked here and she got pissed, she might have done it, but I don’t think that happened. If he was having an affair, he wouldn’t have been doing it here.”
“Why is that?”
“Ad agencies are worse than sewing circles. Everyone knows everything about everyone. And if the big guy 62
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was involved with anyone, people would have found out.
You know how you tell if two people at an agency are doing it?”
Tremaine shrugged.
“They don’t talk to each other. The people flirting with each other, they’re just having fun. The people ignoring each other . . .”
“They’re having lots of fun,” Tremaine said.
“Yeah,” Sawyer said. “And it happens all the time in agencies ’cause you’re here all the goddamn time. That’s one of the reasons I got in the business. But Roger? I don’t think he ever had that kind of fun, not here at least. I never heard anything like that. Never.”
“What about outside the office?”
“I don’t know. I don’t really know what he did outside the office. He didn’t socialize with people from the agency much.”
“Who did he socialize with?”
“Fancy people. That was important to his wife.”
“What do you mean? Hollywood types?”
“Not really. Old-money people. People down at L.A.
Country Club. People who look down on Hollywood.”
“That doesn’t sound like Roger Gale’s kind of crowd.”
“I don’t think it was, but why do you say that?”
“Well, I didn’t know him, obviously. But the image I have of him so far is that he was an artist, a guy who cared about creativity, about substance. It doesn’t seem like he’d be concerned with status that much. It seems like his work was his big passion.”
“It was his big passion. That’s why he was here all the time. That’s why he went to some of the lengths he went 63
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to do great work. That’s why he still wrote body copy at fifty-nine years old.”
“Body copy?”
“Yeah. Body copy is . . . let’s say you have a magazine ad. Well, there’s the big headline up top. Then there’s a couple paragraphs below it explaining all the great things about your product. Writers hate writing that shit ’cause nobody reads it. So they make the junior writers do it for them. But not Roger Gale. He still wrote it himself, even as head of the agency. He didn’t care if no one read it; he wanted it to be perfect. That’s passion.”
Tremaine said, “So, back to the country club crowd . . .”
“Yeah,” Sawyer said.