I stood ringside while Blake and Grant walked through the match they would have the next day. It looked pretty similar to the one I’d seen. They went through it at a walking speed, without using any moves; nobody went off the ropes, nobody got picked up. They just walked to spots and gripped each other where they’d need to in the real match.
I noted that Blake did most of the talking. A couple of times, he adjusted Grant’s hand placement or his stance.
I didn’t think Grant liked being corrected, but I noticed something important; every time Blake corrected him, he did what was asked without a word. His feet shifted, he moved his hands, he changed his stance.
Grant might be the guy who was going to win the match, but Blake was definitely running it.
When they’d finished the slow speed walk-through, they did it again, half speed. Blake and Grant both bounced off the ropes a couple of times. Then they sped it up again, with Blake calling out moves, telling Grant when to duck or to roll.
They still avoided any big hitting stuff; nobody went up on the ropes and when either of them picked the other up or put on some kind of hold, I could see it wasn’t done with any kind of intent.
I was reasonably sure I could cross Blake off the list. This guy seemed to be exactly what he presented himself as: a pro wrestler who just loved to work and wanted to make Grant better. I wrote a note to myself to check out Blake’s history online later.
All told their walkthrough took over an hour. As they were wrapping it up I felt someone sidle up behind me.
I peeked over my shoulder and saw Daphne. “Ms. Stein.”
“Mr. Dixon. I’m not used to being spoken to that way on the road.”
“I’d prefer not to piss you off. But I’ve got a job to do.”
“Understood. In fact, I found it a bit refreshing. The talent all walk around on eggshells around me. And it seems like you’re serious about your work.”
“I am,” I replied. “It’s maybe the only thing I’m serious about.” Besides the squat rack and Geneva Lawton, I thought. But there was no call to go telling Daphne that.
“Good. Grant’s got some real talent,” she said. “If he can work hard enough to harness it, he could be something in this business.”
That was the second time someone had commented negatively on Grant’s work ethic. That was an emerging pattern. I was a detective. Nothing like that was going to slip by me.
“What’s he got to work on?”
“Everything,” Daphne said flatly. “In the ring, on the mic, in the weight room. Everything,” she repeated.
“I see.” A pause. “How long’s he been with the company?”
“This is his second time on the road with us as a full-timer. He’d been pulled in on short contracts a couple of times; auditions, essentially.”
“So why’d you take him on if you don’t think he works hard enough?”
“I didn’t. Gogarty did.”
“Ah.” Daphne didn’t have hiring or firing power. I made a note.
“Look, I still think the guy has a lot of potential. But if he doesn’t learn to love the work by thirty, he’s never going to.”
I held back my own thoughts on what an employee owed an employer. From where I stood ‘loving the work’ usually meant ‘putting it above everything you actually loved in some misplaced show of loyalty.’ But there was no need to get into that with someone whose good side I needed to be on.
“So, look. Ms. Stein. I hate to have to ask these questions, but…is there anyone with the company who might wish Grant harm?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. And if they did, all they’d have to do is asked to be booked with him and run a shoot.”
“What a what?”
“A shoot is when you hurt somebody in the ring. On purpose.”
I looked up from my notebook. “That happens?”
She laughed. “You take a dozen or more hyper competitive people, all used to being the alpha? Throw them together on the road, with the pressures of schedules and performance and audience reaction, and everybody’s competing for a limited amount of heat? Of course they’ll try to hurt each other.”
“I’m sorry. Heat?”
“Audience reaction. Buzz. Heat is how you move up. Generate enough of it and bigger companies take notice…”
“So your wrestlers look at DWF as just a step-ladder?”
“Works both ways,” she said. She gestured with her chin at Blake, who was going over some kind of hand-positioning with Grant. “Blake there is on his way down. Making it last as long as he can.”
“His way down?”
“He’s been in this game a long time. Longer than me. Hell, I only fell into it because I never quite made it from stunt-work to acting, and even then I barely really wrestled. Being a chaperone and an announcer always fit me better anyway.”
I nodded, tapping my pen against the notebook. What she was saying just now didn’t seem all that useful, but you do enough investigating, you learn to give people the space to talk. Don’t interrupt them and you never know what they might say.
“Anyway, Brian—that’s Blake’s real name—he’s had his sniff of the bigtime. On big TV packages once or twice, been on the house shows before a pay-per-view, that kind of thing. Never quite broke through.”
“That kind of thing could grate on a man,” I muttered.
“Not Blake. He lives and breathes this business. So if the only work he can get is to job for a guy like Grant, he’ll take it. And he’ll still try to do it all the right way.”
“Job?”
She laughed. “Do you know even one sentence of information about wrestling?”
“I know a lot about the collegiate game.”
She turned to look at me, and reached out to poke my chest with one finger. I didn’t have the vest on and my bike jacket was hanging open. Vanity demanded that I not let the side down, so I tensed up and her finger bounced off.
“That how you know Grant?”
“We were teammates.”
“Ah, old college buddies. That why he wanted to hire you, huh? Do his old roommate a favor?”
“We were teammates,” I said, in the same flat tone of voice I’d said it the first time. Daphne got the hint and laughed slightly.
“Well, if you’re eliminating suspects, you can cross Brian off your list. He’d hurt himself in the ring to save whoever he was working with before he’d hurt them to make himself look good. It’s just not in him.”
I understood what she meant, and I was sure she believed it. I’d like to believe it, too. But everything she was saying only made me want to take a second and third look at Blake Irons.
“One more question,” I said, as it looked like Blake and Grant were about finished, as they were slipping out of the ring and grabbing towels and water bottles.
She looked at me, cocking a sculpted eyebrow.
“I’d like to be able to talk to all the other wrestlers…at least the folks Grant has worked with, or might. Or those whose careers he has an effect on.”
“That’d be all of them, then.”
“Well, the more of them I can talk to, the better.”
“It’s not someone in the company making those threats.”
“I’d like to agree with you,” I said, “but it’s my job to eliminate everyone who could be doing it in order to find the person who is. And I’d be a pretty piss poor detective if I didn’t approach this methodically.”
“I suppose I can understand that. I’ll put out the word that talent should expect questions. What about the crew?”
I’m not real sure that your security chief could figure out how to use a computer, I thought, but didn’t say. And I couldn’t see how the roadies were a threat to anyone unless it was a bartender signaling last call.
“Let’s start with the talent, and I’ll keep an eye on the crew.”
“Good luck with that.”
“I’ll take all the luck I can get.”