Deep Dish (7 page)

T
ate was demonstrating his grandmother’s method for seasoning a cast-iron skillet.

“BoBo, pull the camera in as close as you can get on that,” Valerie instructed. “Tate, turn your wrist and look into the camera.”

“I’m not double-jointed, Val,” Tate griped.

Just then, a medium-size bundle of white-and-brown fur burst onto the set, propped his front paws on the kitchen counter, and snatched the basket of hush puppies that had just come out of the deep fryer.

“Son of a bitch,” BoBo hollered as the dog streaked past, spilling the boiling hot fritters all over the floor.

“Moonpie!” Tate yelled, dropping the skillet.

“Cut!” Val screamed. “Cut, damn it.”

Beside her at the editing table, she could swear she heard Zeke, the silent assistant, snigger.

“Tate, get that damned dog out of here,” Val ordered.

Having managed to corner the English setter beneath the set’s rustic kitchen table, Tate was holding out a bit of fried shellcracker, trying to lure the dog out.

“I didn’t let him in,” Tate said. “Last time I checked, he was locked up safe and sound in the trailer.”

“Well, somebody let him in,” the producer said waspishly. “And he’s just destroyed the swap-out for the hush puppies.”

“Get the girls to fix some more,” Tate said, just as waspishly. “It’s only cornmeal and buttermilk, for Pete’s sake.”

“Connie?” Val’s head swiveled in the direction of her prep cook. “How long will that take?”

The heavyset black woman wiped her face with the edge of her white apron. “It’ll take a while. We don’t have any more cornmeal. I’ll have to send somebody out to get some more.”

“For Christ’s sake!” Val snapped.

“Here, Moonpie,” Tate called softly, attempting to wedge his body under the table. “Come get the nice fish. You love fish. It goes great with hush puppies.”

The dog chewed happily on the basket that had contained the fritters and edged backward, away from his master.

“Do dogs like fried fish?” Zeke asked.

“I don’t know,” Adelman said. “Tate, does that dog of yours like fried fish?”

Tate groaned as he stood up. “Only if I fix it.”

Without warning, the dog chose that moment to dash out from under the table, where BoBo, who’d been backing away from the set and the dog, promptly tripped over him, sending his heavy camera clattering to the concrete floor. Moonpie yelped his outrage.

“Christ.” Val jumped up from the editing table.

BoBo cradled the camera in his arms like an ailing infant.

Tate’s face was ashen. “Is it broken?”

BoBo pointed to the smattering of glass on the floor from the smashed lens. “Kinda.”

The producer sat down again and banged her head on the editing table. “This just is not my day. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

“Can we…get another one?” Tate asked, looking from BoBo to the producer.

“BoBo?” Val gave him a pleading look.

The cameraman stared down at the floor. “It’s after six. The rental house we sometimes get equipment from is closed. There’s another place, in Nashville. I guess I could give them a call. But even if they’re open, and they have one, and they overnighted it to us, we still wouldn’t get it till tomorrow at the earliest.”

“Call ’em,” she said, her lips pressed together in a grim white line. “But in the meantime, get that fucking dog the fuck out of here!”

As if on cue, Moonpie, who was now cowering at Tate’s feet, looked up and whined.

“Come on, boy,” Tate said softly, grasping him by the collar. “Time to go home.”

Instead of trotting along obediently beside his master, as he would have done any other time, the setter decided to do what setters do. He sat, planting his haunches firmly on the concrete floor.

“Moonpie,” Tate said, his teeth clenched. “Heel!”

The dog sat.

“Dammit, Moonpie,” Tate whispered. Finally, he bent down and gathered the sixty-pound dog into his arms and staggered toward the studio’s rear door. He opened it, stepped outside into the dying sunlight, and ran directly into Regina Foxton.

Her face was pink with embarrassment. “Oh!” she said, taking a step backward. “You caught the dog. Good. I was afraid—”

She stopped, seeing the look on Tate’s face.

“You did this?” he asked. “You let him out of the trailer? Why would you do something like that?”

“He was howling,” she said, taking another step backward. “Scratching at the door to your trailer. He was frantic. I was just going to let him go to the bathroom. But he got away from me. He ran, and I couldn’t catch him. And then somebody opened the door from inside the studio and let him in. And it was locked. So I couldn’t go after him—”

“You just shut down my show,” Tate said, interrupting her. “Big coincidence, huh? The guys from the network are down, taking a look at both our shows. Yours goes just fine. Wonderful. Then they step over to watch
Vittles,
and all of a sudden, my dog gets let into the studio, and all hell breaks loose.”

“I didn’t intentionally let him in,” Gina protested. “I told you, it was an accident.”

Tate was crossing the asphalt parking lot in the direction of his trailer at a rapid clip, with Regina trailing behind.

“Oh,” he said, abruptly turning around to face her. “Oh, it was an accident,” he said, his voice mocking. “That makes it all right that my cameraman tripped over him and dropped and smashed a camera
that can’t be replaced. All with Barry Adelman and his sidekick sitting there watching.”

“Hey!” she said sharply. She ran up beside him and tugged at his arm. “What are you implying? That I deliberately let the dog out to sabotage your show? To make you look bad and me look good?”

He didn’t turn and he didn’t look at her, he just kept stalking toward his trailer. “That’s what happened, isn’t it?”

She stopped and planted her aching feet on the still-hot asphalt. “Just a minute, mister,” she hollered. “You wait just one dadgummed minute.”

B
oBo looked up from the cell phone he’d been hunched over for the past thirty minutes, furiously speed-dialing every professional contact in the phone’s memory.

“Uh, Val?”

She looked up from the laptop, hands pressed together as if in prayer.

He shook his head sadly. “Sorry. No go for today. Nothing’s available. Not here, or Nashville, not even in New York, until Monday evening at the earliest. You want me to go ahead and have them ship a replacement camera?”

Valerie fumbled desperately on the tabletop for her leather cigarette case. She was down to a pack a day now—and that was with a nicotine patch firmly affixed to each of her upper arms. She shook out one of her ultra-slim menthols, lit up, and inhaled so deeply she seemed to suck all the oxygen from the set.

Exhaling slowly, she nodded through the cloud of smoke wreathed around her head.

Sitting two chairs away, Zeke fanned the air furiously with both hands, making extravagant choking noises. “Really!” he said, pushing his chair away from the table.

Val’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully, and she drew deeply from the cigarette again. “Fuck,” she said, exhaling at the same time.

BoBo held the phone up, questioning. “So—should I go ahead and tell ’em to ship it? It’s the last one they’ve got.”

She reached for her Day Runner, slid out her personal Visa card, and handed it over to her cameraman. “There goes my budget.”

She stood up and rubbed the small of her back.

“Okay, everybody,” she called loudly. The cameramen, the lighting tech, the sound man, the prep cooks, and the food stylist all stopped and looked expectantly in her direction.

“We’re shut down till Monday night. I need everybody back here at four o’clock, no later. Everybody got that?”

The crew gave a collective groan and immediately started to clear the set of food and equipment.

“And, Connie,” Val said, her voice rising.

“I know, I know,” Connie said, stacking a tray with the mixing bowls and pans Tate had been using. “Cornmeal. Lots of cornmeal. I’ll put it at the top of my shopping list.”

“What about the fish?” Val asked. “Can it keep till Monday?”

Connie rolled her dark eyes in answer. “Sure. If you want to stink up the whole studio cooking nasty three-day-old fish, be my guest. But don’t ask me to cook that mess.”

Zeke sniggered.

Val shot him a look. She put her hands on her hips now, mirroring her prep chef’s defensive stance.

“Well, what do you suggest? Do we have any more fillets in the freezer?”

“Nuh-uh,” Connie said. “Tate fried up everything he caught. Guess you’ll just have to send him back out to that pond to catch another mess of fish.”

Val frowned. She knew her star’s weekend plans, and was well aware that he wasn’t planning another fishing trip.

“We can’t use another kind of fish as a stand-in?”

Connie frowned and crossed her arms over her chest. “Tate’ll be able to tell. And you know how he is about that kind of shit. I’m not gonna be the one to hand him a plate of trout or bass fillets when the recipe clearly says we’re cooking shellcracker.”

“You leave Tate to me,” Val said. “Just do me a favor. Call all your seafood dealers and see what they can come up with that looks like shellcracker. We can use the earlier footage of Tate dipping it in the breading, and nobody will see a thing. Just call me at home tonight, and let me know what you found.”

Connie pursed her lips, picked up the tray, and stomped off the set, muttering as she went. “I’m not callin’ Atlantic Seafood and askin’ them if they got what I know they ain’t got….”

Val turned and gave Barry Adelman and his assistant a weak smile.

“Food divas,” she said, adding an expressive shrug. “I’m sure you deal with this kind of thing all the time in New York.”

Adelman nodded without saying anything, his pen busy jotting something on a yellow Post-it note, which he promptly pressed to the sleeve of his assistant’s shirt.

In fact, now that she was standing right in front of him, she could see that Zeke’s shirt seemed to be generously papered with a small forest of yellow stickies.

“I’m really sorry about today,” Val said, trying not to stare at Zeke. “I hope you won’t think your trip was wasted. This was just one of those days. And about the dog…what can I say?”

She flicked a long ash onto the floor. “It was inexcusable. I’m going to have a talk with Tate. I myself am a
huge
animal lover. But, well, Moonpie—let’s just say he’s uncontrollable. I told Tate—”

Barry Adelman leaned over and plucked a Post-it note from a spot directly under Zeke’s Adam’s apple, and handed it to her.

She read it aloud. “Dog = awesome.”

Adelman nodded. “That dog is a natural.”

He paused and looked around to see if anyone else was listening. Everyone else, of course, was rushing around trying to make their escape for the weekend.

Lowering his voice, Adelman went on. “I’m not really in a position to tell you this. I mean, it’d be very premature…”

Val batted her eyelashes and moved closer to the executive. “Anything you tell me would be totally confidential, Barry.”

“Zeke!” he said, snapping his fingers.

His assistant sprang to his feet.

Adelman scanned Zeke’s chest, finally picking a slip of paper from the assistant’s right shoulder. He smiled coyly and handed it to Valerie.

“Sponsorship tie-in?” she read.

“Exactly,” Adelman said.

Valerie wondered what she should gather from this cryptic exchange. Should she hazard a guess? But if she guessed wrong, would Adelman think her some kind of mental defective?

“Ahh,” she said finally.

“Dog food,” Zeke said, in a conspiratorial whisper.

“Riiight,” Val said, grinning. “Of course. It’s funny you should mention that. Because I happen to know that the ChowHound folks are looking to launch a whole new ad campaign in the fall. They’re crazy to have Tate endorse their premium dog-food line. There’s even talk of using Moonpie in some of the ads.”

This, of course, was a blatant lie. There was no such talk that Val knew of. ChowHound’s corporate offices were located in Atlanta, it was true. Like everybody else in town, she’d stopped and stared at the eight-story headquarters building in Midtown that was shaped like a giant red fire hydrant. But she’d never even met anybody from ChowHound. Still, that could all change. It would change, she vowed to herself.

“Pet-care products,” Zeke added knowledgeably, plucking a Post-it from directly above his left nipple. He read aloud from it. “Thirty-eight billion dollars last year.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Val said, almost purring. “And that’s only one of the sponsorship opportunities we see for Tate and Moonpie. Once they’re in a national venue. That’s why I was hoping we could have dinner this evening. I know Tate is dying to have some one-on-one time with you.”

“Hmmm,” Adelman said. He looked at his watch, and then at Zeke.

“Can’t,” Zeke said, handing his boss a yellow Post-it clinging near his left wrist. “Flight’s at eight.”

“Next time,” Adelman said.

Zeke packed up his bulging leather messenger bag and Adelman’s laptop case.

“But what about the show?” Val sputtered. “You really didn’t get to see what Tate can do.”

“We saw,” Adelman said. “I’ll be in touch. In the meantime, send me that footage of the dog stealing the food, would you?”

“Sure,” Val said. As she watched the men walk off, she flung her cigarette to the floor and stubbed it out.

Adelman turned, and Val visibly brightened.

“Just what kind of dog is he?” he called. She could see Zeke’s pen poised above the pad of Post-its.

Val had to think fast. “He’s a setter,” she said. “A Landrover setter. Very rare breed. Tate has the only one in the state.”

T
ate whirled around to face Regina, and Moonpie squirmed in his arms.

This woman was truly starting to get on his nerves. At least, he thought smugly, he knew now that she was no threat to his own career ambitions. He had never seen anybody who looked less like a potential network television star. The carefully arranged hairstyle he’d seen created just that morning was now a distant memory. Perspiration plastered her light-brown hair to her forehead. There were dark mascara smudges under both eyes, and a trace of what he guessed was either flour or powdered sugar on her forehead. Also not to mention that she was barefoot and that the neckline of her sleeveless top showed a much more tantalizing view of her cleavage than she surely intended.

“Mister?” he repeated, his voice mocking. “Did you just call me ‘mister’? Where the hell are you from, Reggie?”

“Odum, Georgia,” she snapped. “Not that it’s any of your business. And don’t call me Reggie.”

“Why not? You don’t look anything like a Regina.”

She frowned. “Nonetheless, that’s the name my mama and daddy gave me. My friends call me Gina. You, however, may call me Regina, if you have to call me anything at all.”

“Okay, RE-gina,” he said, purposely emphasizing the first syllable. “Excuse me, but now that you’ve ruined my show and made me look like an idiot to Barry Adelman and his associate, I’ve got to put my dog back in the trailer. And then I’ve got someplace I need to be.”

He turned and resumed his trek to the trailer, but now she was hot on his heels again.

“I’m sorry about your camera. Truly, I am. But I did
not
sabotage your show,” she said, out of breath from trying to keep up with him. “I would never do something like that.”

“Because you’re such a Girl Scout,” he said sarcastically.

That stopped her for a moment.

“I don’t like your tone,” she called. “And another thing. Stay away from my set when I’m taping from now on.”

He turned around again, tightening his grip on Moonpie as a precaution, because the dumb animal seemed determined to rejoin his new friend. Regina Foxton stood in the parking lot with her hands on her hips, glaring daggers in his direction.

“You mean your piddly little regional show? Why shouldn’t I watch? Do I make you nervous?”

“No!” she lied. “I just don’t want you stealing any of my recipes,” she said finally.

“As if.”

That really seemed to fire her rockets. She ran right up to him, her jaw clenched in outrage, and Moonpie, the traitor, wriggled in his arms and wagged an enthusiastic greeting.

“So it’s a coincidence that you saw me shooting my seafood episode this morning, and then, this afternoon—magically—you happen to also tape a seafood show with Barry Adelman sitting right there in the studio.”

She was definitely right up in his face. So close, in fact, that Moonpie stretched out his head and gave her a big sloppy slurp in the face.

He expected her to scream, or jump backward, but the dog’s affection seemed to have a softening affect on her. She laughed and scratched his chin, setting off another spasm of heavy breathing and tail wagging—by Moonpie.

“Hey, buddy,” she crooned, letting the dog continue his disgusting display of affection. “I like you too. It’s not your fault your owner is a big ol’ butthead.”

“Nice language from a Girl Scout,” Tate said.

She continued to ignore him, and to lavish attention on Moonpie.

“What’s his name?’ she asked.

“Moonpie,” Tate said coldly.

“What kind of dog is he? A Brittany spaniel?”

“He’s an English setter,” Tate said. “Actually, if you want to get technical, he’s a Llewellen setter. Are you done now?”

She flicked him a look. “With you, yes.”

“It’s a hunting and fishing show,” he said, desperately needing to have the last word.

“What?”

“Vittles
,” Tate said. “My show.”

“Oh, yes,” she said dismissively. “So I heard. Kill it and grill it. I get it.”

“I cook seafood all the time,” Tate insisted. “Today’s show was scripted weeks ago. We taped the fishing portion earlier in the week. So, obviously, there was no way I copied your idea.”

“If you say so,” she said. She gave Moonpie a farewell pat on the head, turned, and walked away, head held high.