Body Copy - Michael Craven [57]
Tremaine and Marvin were looking down at Tyler Wilkes. Tremaine, for the first time, fully believed something coming out of the mouth of this guy.
Tyler continued. “I quit following him after that. I’m not exactly sure why, but I quit. But I never told anyone.
What’s weirder, Roger Gale going to a sex show or me following him to a sex show?”
With Marvin Kearns in back, Tremaine drove Tyler Wilkes back to Think Big Advertising. The three rode the majority of the way in silence. Tremaine asked Tyler exactly where the karate place was and Tyler told him, but, mostly, the three men sat in silence. It was just the wind coming through the windows and the noise from the street.
As Tremaine pulled into Think Big, he said, “Paul Spinelli never wants to hear about any of this. It didn’t happen.
Understand?”
Tyler Wilkes, calm now, said, “What do Paul Spinelli and Roger Gale have to do with each other?”
Nothing. Tremaine knew that. He looked at Tyler. He didn’t answer his question, he just looked at him. Right at him.
Tyler held up his hands and said, “I don’t know and I don’t care and I’ll never even think about it much less talk about it.”
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Tremaine nodded. Tyler got out of the car and slowly walked toward the entrance to his ad agency.
Tremaine and Marvin watched him and Marvin said,
“Did you get the information you needed?”
“Yeah, that guy had nothing to do with Roger Gale’s murder. He’s no longer a suspect.”
Marvin got in front, then Tremaine threw the Cutlass in drive, and headed back to the trailer park.
“Your performance was nothing short of stellar, by the way,” Tremaine said.
“Thank you.”
“And, just so you know, when Spinelli goes to redeem his gift certificate, he’ll be treated well and told that Herman, who has long since sold his stake in the place, had to go back to New York to take care of his mother.”
“An admirable thing to do.”
“I thought so.”
Tremaine reached in the glove for a smoke. Marvin said,
“I think I’ll join you in one.”
“Every now and then they aren’t so bad.”
They dropped down to the PCH, smokes in their mouths, both enjoying the familiar, nostalgic feeling that they were headed back to Malibu.
“Oh, and Tyler Wilkes?” Tremaine said. “You have nothing to worry about. He’ll never say a word to Paul Spinelli.”
“I know,” Marvin said, and he blew out a plume of smoke that, in an instant, got sucked out the open front window of the Cutlass.
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C H A P T E R 2 6
Tremaine was on his way down to the karate place. It was gray out, a rarity in L.A., a nice change. He was on Olympic, taking it all the way downtown, through Westwood, Beverly Hills, Hollywood, and Hancock Park. He was seeing myriad sections of the city and never going left or right. Just straight, due east, away from the beach.
He thought about what he knew. Was it more or was it less? Was the whole reason Roger Gale had pulled the Wendy Leahy ruse just to keep his wife from knowing about a stupid sex show? Tremaine knew, from the in-ception of his research on the guy, that Roger Gale had no problem going out of his way to mold the way people thought—about him, his company, his ideas. His work stint in a plant in Detroit proved that. But paying a woman Michael Craven
to pretend she was having an affair with him? Would he go that far just to hide the fact that he liked to go watch people have sex? At the end of the day, that’s not that big of a deal.
Real-life porn, that’s it. And it couldn’t have been that hard to sneak downtown every so often. The guy, according to everyone he’d talked to, was always on the move. No one would notice. So why get Wendy Leahy involved? Why go to those lengths?
And why was his wife so convinced he was having an affair in the first place? Where was the intellectual, adult relationship Evelyn Gale had referred to? We go to plays and talk about books and ideas . . . Hiring a P.I. to follow around