Chapter 74

“What are you doing here?” I asked after I spun around.

“I would think that would be obvious,” she said as she sat beside me on the blanket. I shifted away from her.

“Decide you can squeeze a couple more percentage points out of me?” I asked.

Liz tilted her head in a question.

“I was waiting for the elevator and I heard Stephanie and Jill fighting,” I said. “I know I was just a publicity ploy for you because your popularity had dipped a little.”

“Now hold on!” Liz said.

“And you apparently think I’m a pain in the ass that was getting to be more trouble than I’m worth,” I said.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” Liz said.

I stared out at the water.

“It’s hard to conceive of a way that statement could be misconstrued,” I said.

“I didn’t say it like that,” Liz protested. “I said the media events that you planned were getting to be a pain in the ass. I did not say that you were.”

“Oh, that’s all better then,” I said derisively.

“It worked,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “Did you hear about good old Lillian?”

“Yeah,” Liz said, handing a phone across. “You left that at the hotel.”

I didn’t take the phone and Liz put it on the blanket beside me. It immediately rang. I looked at it and then at her.

“You’re the one that had the bright idea to have all my public relations calls go through you,” she said, smiling at me. I reached down and sent the call to voicemail. I had hoped to piss Liz off. Instead, she laughed.

“That’s been happening a lot lately,” she said. “Skye answered it for the first 10 minutes or so and then said ‘fuck it.’ Jill lasted about three. The guys just told me to go to hell.”

“Apparently Stephanie believes that anybody with half a brain can make you look good,” I quoted.

“Stephanie is no longer employed by LLE,” Liz said.

“What?” I asked.

“You said it best,” Liz told me. “I can’t have a manager that is willing to sacrifice my interests for her own. She...”

Liz looked away and shook her head.

“She set me up, Travis,” she admitted. “She knew I don’t like to do the media circus thing. Yes, it’s my fucking ego ... just like you told me. I took her side because she was telling me what I wanted to hear. She kept telling me that you weren’t treating me like a superstar should be treated. She said you were acting like I was some idiot headlining for the first time instead of someone that had headlined world tours for 12 years. I was already pissed that you had me doing shit that I’d told the label 10 years ago I would never do again.

“The main reason I wanted you to work with me is because you don’t look at things the same way I do. You’re not trapped inside of a box of your own making. You’re willing to try anything that gets results. Then the first time you do anything differently than I’m used to, I get stupid on you. You were tired and surly; I was tired and surly and, she just kept stirring the pot. I’m sorry that you heard that bullshit. I...”

“I noticed you didn’t refute it,” I cut in. “I know you were in the room. I heard them talking to you.”

“I was stunned,” Liz said. “Jill was sitting with me on the bed. I ... I couldn’t believe you just walked away. Then to hear Stephanie rambling on ... I trusted her. I gave her one of the best jobs in the business and she shit on me. She shit on you! I can’t have that. I’m glad Jill was there. She tackled me from behind when I lunged at her. I was going to see if she could fly. I am not sure I’ve ever been that angry at someone in front of me before. She is pretty lucky I wasn’t alone in the room with her. Or maybe I’m the lucky one. I’m not sure I would have stopped before I killed her. I told her to pack up her shit and go home. She was terminated for cause. I don’t know what cause but I’ll come up with one.”

“She falsified her resume,” I said.

Liz turned and looked at me with her head tilted.

“What?” she asked.

“Her resume,” I said. “She doesn’t have a degree from Alabama. I’m not even sure she’s ever seen Alabama unless you’ve played a show there. She’s from Pennsylvania and she went to college for 18 months. Then she worked in a ... gentlemen’s club. She said she was a waitress and maybe she was. I don’t know. I just know she collected a paycheck from there for almost four years.”

“Why the fuck didn’t you tell me this?” Liz asked.

“It is not my job to audit your employees,” I said. “Ryan could have caught this. Ryan should have caught this.”

“Fuck,” Liz muttered. “I knew Stephanie so I told him not to bother with anything but a criminal background check. She was doing merchandise sales and her background didn’t matter much to me. Well, at least I have that. I’m sure I have a resume from her somewhere and that will be enough. Not that it matters.”

“It’ll save you from a wrongful termination suit,” I said, wondering why I cared.

“Do you remember what I told you in Cabo?” she asked me.

“You’ll have to be more specific,” I replied.

“About what I’m willing to give up to be with you,” Liz said. “I meant it. If I have to retire and move in across the street from you in order to see you every day, that’s what I’m going to do.”

“At least until the restraining order is approved,” I said.

“Take it from me, those take time and they’re pretty worthless,” Liz answered. “You can’t really believe what she said.”

“It all fit pretty neatly,” I said. “One of the reasons I like my job is because it’s like a big jigsaw puzzle. I’ve always liked those.”

“I remember,” Liz said, smiling at a distant memory.

“Yeah, well, what I do is sort of like those,” I said. “When you make the right move at the right time, it all fits together perfectly and a picture starts to take shape. That’s been the problem for me from the outset. I could never get a clear picture in my head. I’d see a mountain landscape and then it would shift to a sailboat on a lake. A minute later it would be kids playing ice hockey. I was always off balance. Every time I’d get my feet under me a little, you’d throw something else at me. I was still wrapping my head around working for you when we decided to try dating at the same time. I wasn’t really comfortable with idea of dating yet and you started to talk about marriage. I tried to shift to that subject and it was kids and moving to Nashville. Then it was you walking away from your career and moving out here.

“All the while I was trying to guess what the label had in store for you, formulating an idea of what you would need on the road and trying to figure out a way to make Dallas work. Liz, I did the only thing I knew to do and I didn’t put the plan together by myself. What you got is the type of campaign we know how to put together. If you’re not happy with this one then you’re never going to be happy with how we work.”

“It’s not that,” Liz said. “I’ve been listening all day to people tell me how impressed they were with my marketing team.”

“To be honest, Jill and Ryan are just as much amateurs as you and Stephanie,” I said.

“I’m not talking about people that know you,” Liz said. “Uh, we had sold over half the tickets by 11 o’clock. Granger went out and got a dozen new servers last week to make sure the site could handle the traffic. I guess a ton of people could log in at a time. They had 500 people working the phone lines.”

“Good,” I said.

“He said it was your idea,” Liz said. “He told me that you pointed out that people were willing to wait for a couple of minutes but not 30 or 40 minutes. He was really impressed with you. RFN had a counter on its website, letting people know how many tickets were available in each section. We watched it and it just kept spinning. I thought ... I thought it was fake. It wasn’t. He said we sold 5,000 tickets in the first five minutes. And it never stopped. The cheaper seats were gone by noon. The expensive ones were out by three. The mid-priced tier went to zero just as we were landing here. RFN didn’t even switch the sales to retailers. They were supposed to take over at four but Granger just kept the people at RFN working the lines until it was done. Nine hours.”

She shook her head.

“Amazing,” she concluded.

“Even more amazing,” I said. “Eight hours and forty-seven minutes. I’m sure Granger didn’t see any reason to cut into his profits by switching when there were only a few hundred tickets left.”

“Probably,” Liz said, laughing lightly. “He wasn’t the only one that called me. I talked to Conny and Ben. They both called. Uh, Watson Dewey called me just a few minutes ago. He asked me to apologize to you for being such a twit when he met you. He was amazed that one person did as much as you did.”

“It wasn’t one person,” I corrected. “The others helped. I just kept their contributions under wraps in case it failed. That’s what I mean, Liz. This is how we do things. And you don’t like how we do things. It’s not going to work.”

“I think it will,” Liz objected. “Jill said something to me after she got me calmed down and I explained to her what was going on. She said we’re never going to be in this situation again. We’re going to have control over things. The prep work won’t be so haphazard ever again.”

I tried to keep my face neutral but I must have flinched at her assessment.

“Not what you did,” Liz said. “The prep work comes months or even years in advance. We’ll start making plans for the next tour a few weeks after I’m done at RFN. We’ll sit down and look at the demographics and compare it to places we’ve never been. We’ll know three or four months before the first date where and when we’re playing. You’ll have the time to set things up.”

“And I’ll probably want to set them up the same way,” I cut in. “I still don’t understand why you’re so pissed at things.”

Liz sighed.

“The media blitz is a tool that is used for newcomers,” she explained. “You use it to introduce them to people that might not have heard them or their music. Once you get status, you stop doing it.”

“Why?” I asked. “And don’t tell me that it’s just the way things are done. You don’t want to do things the way you used to do them. I want you to come up with a valid, supportable reason that you don’t stick with something that seems to work really well. It can’t be the cost. I wasn’t kidding about how much money was spent. The airfare from Miami; a suit and some casual clothes for me and Brian; we shared a hotel room and we rented a car. That’s it. Three or four grand at the most is all this cost. So what is the problem?”

Liz sighed.

“Maybe it is ego,” she said. “That’s what Stephanie used against us. She started as soon as she found out the plan. She managed to convince me that you really had no idea of what you’re doing.”

“She’s probably right,” I said.

“No!” Liz said. “I told you I talked to Ben and Conny. They had already talked to their PR people about what you managed to pull off. They were both warned about even attempting something like this. It should have been impossible. And you did it.”

“You did it,” I said. “There was never a doubt that you could sell out the stadium. But everyone kept hammering on me that you had to do it in a day, that it couldn’t take the entire two weeks or it would be a failure. We had to find a way to get the information to as many people as possible in a short time. So we went mass marketing. It wasn’t just TV and radio. Sarah sent a blast email to every person with a Texas address on your newsletter list.”

“I was sure that Susan, Sarah and Rick were integral parts of this success,” Liz said, patting me on the arm.

“Susan did a lot of the prep calls,” I said. “But she’s been focusing on Amber the past couple of weeks. Rick formulated the questions and answers we practiced. But he’s had to work on the building acquisition.”

I paused and turned my head. How in the hell had I forgotten that Liz had spent more than two million dollars on a downtown office building?