Chapter 10

THE NEXT AFTERNOON Damon summoned me to a creative meeting at his apartment. We were scheduled to play the tape of the new scene I’d written for Link Ramsey, and to discuss the story line change I wanted to make in order to pair Link’s character with Cybelle’s. Earlier that morning, he had talked the doctors into releasing him, hired two male nurses to tend to his physical needs and arranged for his apartment to be equipped with the paraphernalia necessary for his recovery.

That much he told me when he called; it was my guess that the coffin filled with his native earth would be replaced temporarily by a hospital bed.

Damon lived on Central Park West, in a majestic old edifice just nine blocks north of the more eccentric building where I lived. Too close for my taste. Even if I strolled, it was only a few minutes away.

The butler showed me into the antique-filled living room. As fine as the individual pieces of furniture were, what took and held a visitor’s eye were the six framed drawings from Picasso’s autobiographical Vollard Suite. Several memorialized the erotic relationship of Picasso and Marie-Therese Walter, his model and mistress, the woman he called his amour fou—his mad love. The most striking drawing hung over the fireplace, where no one in the room could miss it. Titled “Rape IV,” it was an example of Picasso using his genius to celebrate male violence.

Damon still wore a neck brace, and his right leg and right arm were immobilized in hard casts. Using a cane for balance, he was standing up near his gigantic television set. He turned when I came into the room, saw me looking at the drawing over the fireplace, and winked. I was relieved to see that the demon and I were not going to be alone. Tommy Zenos was there; he seemed even more nervous than he usually was around Damon. There were traces of powdered sugar on the front of his jacket. He was just putting a videotape into the VCR, and his eyes told me he was as relieved to see me as I was to see him. We exchanged quick greetings.

Then I asked Damon how he was feeling.

“Better than my enemies would prefer.” He gestured for Tommy to push “Play” on the VCR.

It was the tape of the new scene I wrote for Link.

We watched it in silence. Three pillars of the temple waiting for lightning to strike. If possible, the scene was even more powerful on the screen than it had been when I watched it being taped live in the studio. Tommy was as moved as I had been. When it was over, there was the hush a dramatic writer dreams about, the stillness that means an audience has been totally caught up in what they’ve seen.

Damon was the first to emerge from the spell.

“Your boy broke a lot of props,” he said. “I should take the cost out of your pay.”

Tommy was usually too timid around Damon to say anything that wasn’t an echo of the daytime chief’s pronouncements. Not today. He didn’t even look at Damon before he spoke to me. “You were right and I was wrong,” he conceded. “I didn’t think it would work—turning Cody into Kira’s love interest.”

Damon was not going to be ignored. “Just because Cody raped Kira doesn’t make him unredeemable. Most women want to be raped by the right man.”

That was just too disgusting to ignore. “Damon, you are a cockroach,” I said.

Tommy gasped. “Morgan didn’t mean that—”

“Yes, I did.”

“Shut up, Tommy,” Damon said.

Damon wasn’t offended that I called him a cockroach. In my experience, it was impossible to offend him. I steered us back to the business at hand, as though I hadn’t heard what Damon had said, and as though I hadn’t said what I’d just said. “The people out there—” I gestured toward his terrace, at the America beyond the railing that encircled his balcony. “Most of the people in our audience don’t take rape lightly.”

“Then you have a big problem, Morgan.”

And when I solve it, you’ll say “we” did a great job. “If I had known the audience would go crazy for Link Ramsey,” I said, “I wouldn’t have made him Kira’s rapist.” I paused. I didn’t look at Tommy, but I was giving him a chance to tell Damon the truth; it was Tommy who insisted I make Cody her rapist.

But Tommy did not speak up, and that was his big mistake of the day.

Damon turned on our producer. “You fat scum, Tommy, letting Morgan take the blame. You’re a snot-nosed, overweight nothing, an empty suit with a producer title that you couldn’t earn, but that you have—for the moment—only because your father is one of the few creative geniuses in Daytime. You’re living proof that talent skips a generation.”

Tommy was pale as death and shaking. I knew that he was petrified of authority figures, starting with his tyrant father. He was too wounded now to defend himself.

It made me sick to my stomach to witness Damon’s cruelty to people who were too afraid to fight back, or to tell him to take his job and shove it wherever it would hurt the most. But I had learned a long time ago that I couldn’t stop Damon when he was in one of his demon-moods.

I wanted to help Tommy regain a shred of his dignity, so I said, “We should be grateful, Damon. Tommy’s the one who found Link Ramsey in that off-Broadway play and signed him up. Now that we realize the audience isn’t responding to a Kira and Nicky romance, we’ve got the solution right in our own cast.”

Damon indicated the tape. “How do you plan to use this scene?”

“We can’t undo the fact that Cody raped Kira,” I said, “but we can brainwash the audience into forgetting. I want Joe to partly reshoot the rape like this: We edit our new Cody scene so it’s at the beginning of the sequence. Then we see Kira in the doorway. I’d like a new shot of Kira, reacting in shock to what Cody’s done to his office. I talked to Cybelle’s doctor this morning—we can shoot her from the waist up. The idea is that Cody’s assault on Kira is not the act of a rapist at all, but instead it’s a primitive, mindless loss of control, in reaction to his grief over the death of his brother.”

Damon looked skeptical.

Tommy, sick with humiliation, was staring at Damon’s balcony as though he wanted to leap over it.

“We’ll reshoot Kira’s face during the assault,” I said. “We can use a body double for full length when they’re on the floor. Our reshot scene won’t look as violent. It will look more as though Cody surprised Kira by grabbing her, but that she realized something awful must have happened and she responded to his need—”

“A sympathy fuck,” Damon said.

“I wouldn’t phrase it that way. Then we take our new scene and play it over and over and over again as a flashback. Kira will think about it, and we’ll play that flashback. Then Cody will think about it and we’ll run that flashback. Cody will confess it to a priest, and we’ll play that flashback. Our new flashback. We’ll brainwash the audience into thinking that what they saw was not as terrible as they thought it was at first.”

“ ‘The big lie’ . . .” Damon smiled with perverse satisfaction. He seemed to be comparing me favorably to Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s architect of propaganda, whose theory was that if you told people the same lie often enough, it would become their truth. “Okay, do it,” he said finally.

Damon continued to ignore Tommy Zenos. “But if this doesn’t work, if Cody and Kira don’t become our Super Couple . . .” His voice became as soft as a viper’s hiss. “Then I’ll just have to punish you. Won’t I, Morgan?”

I managed to get out of his apartment before I succumbed to temptation and pushed Damon over his own balcony.

LATE THAT NIGHT I had been asleep for less than an hour when the phone rang. It was Joe Niles.

“Morgan—Damon’s been murdered. Somebody pushed him over his balcony.”