Good as Dead(33)

Three months ago

“My mother wants us to come for Thanksgiving,” Kate said as she rubbed oil on her face. She complained about how she was “drying up” since turning fifty, but I barely noticed the tiny lines around her eyes and mouth—to me she was more beautiful than ever.

“That’s fine,” I said from my side of the bed, silently hoping no one would be in jail by then.

I didn’t like to keep secrets from Kate. In our twenty years of marriage, I’d never had any secrets to hide. I’d never been tempted to have an affair. I didn’t gamble, get drunk, or do drugs—not even pot. Every dollar I made went through Kate. She was so good at managing our money that I made her the CFO of my production company. As a board member, she not only knew exactly how much money we had coming in, she also knew where I was, and who I was with, at all times. As the saying goes, she knew where all the bodies were buried. And I used to like it that way. But now it was a problem.

I had friends who were serial liars. They had affairs, and hid money in cash—which they blew at the track, the craps table, the occasional back alley. Big portions of their lives were walled off from their wives, and they were masters at keeping their debauchery secret. “Compartmentalizing,” they called it. What she doesn’t know, they would say, can’t hurt her.

Did the wives know about the gambling and affairs? Some did. Some also didn’t care. I had a co-star who slept with multiple women who weren’t his wife during our film shoot. When I asked him about it—Does your wife know you run around?—he said simply, She likes having a ski house. I took that to mean yes, she knew, but considered a ski-in, ski-out in Aspen fair compensation for her husband’s indiscretions.

“OK, I’ll get the tickets,” Kate said, then closed the bathroom door for privacy. I’d held her hand as she’d had a baby taken out of her abdomen, but she still wouldn’t pee in front of me.

I had convinced myself that I was protecting Kate by not telling her about the accident. A man was dead. My role in it was so much worse than anything she could ever imagine. If I told her what really happened, it would ruin everything we’d built together, destroy everything she’d held dear. My end game was to protect Kate from pain, as she’d already experienced more than enough.

So I had to do something I had never done—keep a secret from my wife. To transfer money to Holly without Kate knowing, I would have to find an asset in our portfolio that my wife wasn’t tracking. Then, quickly and quietly, I would have to liquidate it. Then I would have to act like nothing out of the ordinary was going on—by getting up, going to work, talking about my day just like I always did. Evan advised me to get rid of the SUV, or at least keep it off the road for a while, but Kate would find that odd and ask me about it. And I would have to lie to her face. Lying by omission was one thing, but making up a bullshit excuse why we spent a fortune on a new car just to have it sit in the garage was something else entirely. I rationalized that moving the car was just as risky as driving it—as I said to Evan, Wouldn’t it be better just to keep it on the road, like we had nothing to hide? He said No, it wouldn’t, but I overruled him—that’s how afraid I was of having to lie to my wife.

The first part—figuring out how to do the payoff—turned out to be relatively easy. Evan had an idea where to pull the money from, and I gave him the go-ahead to make the transfer. Twenty-four hours later, it was done.

The other part—keeping this from my wife for eternity—that’s what would keep me up at night. I had nightmares about that video popping up on Twitter, then going viral for the world to see. Clouds got hacked, people cracked. Our lives were on thin ice now.

I was worried about physical evidence, mental mistakes, that damn video—but I was also worried about myself. Pretending everything was fine was going to be the hardest acting job of my life. And I would have to play the part until I died.





CHAPTER 18


Everybody on my staff loved the script.

I didn’t want to read it. Because I had already decided I wasn’t going to hire the squirrely investigative journalist who had spent his summer writing it. I did not want a New York Times reporter anywhere near me, especially one who was wondering where the hell I was on the day of the accident. And who could unearth that one critical piece of this horror show I needed to stay buried.

It had been almost four months, but panic still surged through my body every time I got an unexpected knock on my door. I had played the scene out in my mind a thousand times. There’s a detective here to see you, my assistant would say. And she would let him in. And I would lie. No, Officer, I don’t know anything about an accident. And he would ask me if anyone on my staff could vouch for my whereabouts at 11:55 a.m. on May 17. And then my staff would have to tell them, Yes, come to think of it he was acting strange . . .

Maybe I was being paranoid, but I did not want a reporter who was capable of connecting dots hanging around my office. But I couldn’t pass on a script everyone on my staff loved without a reason. It was just a matter of finding one. After twenty-plus years in the business, I had become an expert in passing on scripts. We did it 99 percent of the time. If practice makes perfect, then I was a master at saying the word “no.”

It was nine o’clock. My first meeting wasn’t until eleven, and the reporter’s script was the only one in the recommend pile. It was a tight 102 pages, but I only intended to read the first ten. Most people read scripts on their iPads or computers now, but I still liked them printed, on three-hole paper, secured by shiny brass brads. I liked the reminder that a movie script was different, special. It was not just a story told by words on a page, it was a blueprint for an immersive experience—one that would be shaped by camera moves, light, editorial trickery, music, and songs. A script on its own was just a suggestion. A producer’s job—my job as the producer of films that I sometimes also starred in—was to interpret it, then find the best people to bring it to life. A script wasn’t like an embryo with every feature predetermined by its DNA. It was a lump of clay requiring an army of artists to shape and color and bake life into it.