Chapter 133

Phil stepped out of the terminal and immediately shivered. The difference in temperature from takeoff to landing had been more than 30 degrees. It had been 66 degrees at 4:30 a.m. when he’d been driven to LAX.

It was barely above freezing and there was a dusting of snow on the ground. He had seen the bands of snow heading southward during his inbound trek. But he didn’t care.

The first thing he saw when he pulled his suitcase through the door had been Hailey. She wore a dark green winter parka that hung almost to her knees. She had a fur-lined hood up over her head and sunglasses against the glare of the sun off the snow.

The bulky parka couldn’t hide her shape and the other males waiting for arrivals seemed to notice every curve of her body. But Phil’s attention was focused on two other things.

The first was the wide smile that came to her face the moment he stepped out of the gate. She immediately began moving toward him, paying little attention to people that were also looking for someone coming through the door.

The second thing Phil noticed was the dark leather jacket she carried folded over her forearm. He let go of the wheeled suitcase in time to catch Hailey as she vaulted toward him.

He didn’t get to say a single word before she pulled him in for a kiss. She grinned broadly when he put her feet back on the pavement.

“I’ve missed you!” she told him.

“I’ve missed you!” Phil replied. He reached for the jacket but Hailey skipped away from him with a giggle.

“You’ve been teasing me about the 70- and 80-degree days out there,” she taunted. “So I just brought this to tease you with it.”

“You have a lot of other things to tease me with,” Phil pointed out.

“Good point,” Hailey answered, laughing again. She tossed his jacket at him and he pulled it on. He was thankful that she’d had the foresight to put his gloves in the pockets.

“It’s miserable here,” Phil noted as they headed toward short-term parking.

“Excuse me?” Hailey replied, giving him a sideways glance behind her sunglasses.

“The weather, that’s all,” Phil said hastily. “I can’t tell you how much I’ve missed being with you for the last couple of months.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” Hailey cut in. “I know. But you’re here for a few days now and you’ll be back for good in two weeks. We’re doing OK.”

“I know,” Phil said. Hailey had brought the sedan so he put his suitcase in the trunk and got in the passenger seat. Hailey immediately leaned over and kissed him again. He just watched her as she navigated through traffic. It was heavy coming out of the airport. Even though the city wasn’t as big as Calder City, it was still a lot bigger than Heilman and the weather had made the roads slippery.

“What’s the agenda?” he asked.

Hailey glanced away from the road and smiled at him.

“I think we see if the hotel will let us check in early,” she said. “I swear, I couldn’t sleep last night just thinking about getting you into a bed.”

Phil looked at his phone. It had automatically reset to Eastern Time and he was slightly amazed at the concept. He shook it off and considered if the hotel would let them check in before 2 p.m. Hailey had unzipped her coat in the warm car and he saw the swell of her breasts beneath her sweater. He figured it was worth a shot.

He reached over to take her hand as soon as traffic died down. The GPS on her phone called out the turns and they rode in silence into town. There were hotels near the airport but it was more convenient for everyone else to head downtown.

“I have another surprise for you,” Phil said as they neared the Executive Suites.

“You’re never leaving me again?” Hailey asked hopefully.

“That surprise will have to wait until next month,” he said sorrowfully. “I brought a finished cut of the movie for you guys to watch.”

“That’s sweet,” Hailey said. She was happy to have tangible proof of why her boyfriend had been gone for so long.

“Truth is, I value your opinion a lot more than random people off the street,” Phil said. “I just want you to promise me to be honest. If it sucks, I need to know. The critics are going to get their copies right after the focus groups and I want to be ready to be savaged if it’s terrible.”

“Have you watched it?” Hailey asked as she made a left turn into temporary parking. The parking lot was below ground and was filled with upscale models. Phil was pretty certain that a six-year-old car would be distinctly out of place there.

He wondered why he even cared about such things. He took Hailey’s hand again as soon as they were out of the car. He looked around at the hotel lobby. There was a bar off of it and it looked like a restaurant, too. The woman at the counter looked surly when she saw two young people entering.

“Hi,” Phil said politely. “I’m Philip Warner. We have several reservations for Lambswool Studios in Los Angeles.”

The woman gave Phil a hard look before turning to her computer scene.

“One suite tonight and another tomorrow night,” she said.

“That’s correct,” Phil said after confirming it with a glance at Hailey. He slid his black card across the desk along with his photo ID. He had been forced to get a California driver’s license in order to use the studio vehicles when he needed. The woman looked at it and then at Phil again. “We’ve had a long flight. I wondered if the room was ready for us.”

“Check in isn’t until three,” the woman said tartly. She gave Hailey a scathing look, certain she was a hooker or something.

“Yes, I’ve been reading since I was four and the sign is right in front of you,” Phil said, irked at the way she’d looked at Hailey. “I simply asked if it might be ready early. If it isn’t, a simple ‘no’ will suffice. I will be damned if I put up with attitude from an eight-dollar-an-hour hotel clerk. Now is the room ready or is it not?”

“Is there a problem?” a voice sounded from Phil’s left.

“No problem,” the clerk said instantly.

“Yes,” Phil said at the same time. “I realize that we didn’t arrive in a chauffeured Rolls Royce and that we aren’t wearing clothing that costs thousands of dollars. But you can rest assured that my money is just as green as anyone else’s. If this establishment cannot or will not find someone with manners to staff the desk, perhaps you should not be in the hospitality business.”

“Erin?” the woman said, glancing at the clerk.

“I just told him that check-in wasn’t until three,” the clerk protested.

“It wasn’t what she said,” Phil cut in. “It’s how she said it and the looks she’s given us since we passed through the door.”

“I apologize, Mr...” the woman said, waiting for Phil to provide his last name.

“Warner,” Phil offered.

“Mr. Warner,” the woman said. “We just had a convention leave us and I fear the rooms won’t be ready until three.”

“Thank you,” Phil said. “That’s fine. If she had told us that in that manner, we could have avoided this entire situation.”

“You have my apologies,” the woman said. Phil and Hailey headed back outside to the car. It would be another two hours.

“Are you OK?” Hailey asked when they headed out of the lot.

“She pissed me off,” Phil said.

“Yeah, I saw that,” Hailey pointed out. “It’s the same attitude we’d get if we went to the Super 8 near campus.”

“I guess,” Phil said with a sigh. “But would it have killed her to be nice to us?”

“No more than it would have killed you to be nice to her, I guess,” Hailey said.

Phil chuckled.

“I guess I was sort of a dick,” he said. “I’ll apologize when we get back.”

“I know you’re used to having people jump when you tell them to,” Hailey said. “You need to put that away this weekend. These are our friends, not your employees.”

“I’ll try,” Phil agreed. “I haven’t meant to ... be a jerk to them.”

“You haven’t been,” Hailey said. “Not really, anyway. Tiffany said you talked over her on the phone last time she talked to you. I’ve noticed that you are sometimes more interested in talking than listening. It doesn’t happen a lot but it does happen.”

“That happens to everyone,” Phil countered. “You do it, too.”

“I know I do,” Hailey agreed. “But you don’t. You’re the guy everyone goes to when they want someone to listen to them. And you do. You had a debate with Katelyn over politics and I know you don’t believe anything you said. You just wanted her to be able to formulate her replies when someone else made the argument. You let Tiffany ramble about her clothing selections. I know you don’t care what she wears. You just wanted to let her know that she’s important to you. You sat and listened to Molly practice her cello for half an hour because she wasn’t sure if the tempo sounded better fast or slow.”

“I didn’t know either,” Phil interrupted.

“I know you didn’t,” Hailey said with a laugh. “But the point was that you were interested enough to listen while she figured it out. I know that I’ve missed talking to you about stuff I know you find silly.”

“I don’t find anything you say to be silly,” Phil told her.

“Jesus, Phil, I find half of what I say to be silly,” Hailey replied as she squeezed his hand. “But you listen to me as if I were reciting Shakespeare or something.”

“It’s going to take some time to slow down,” Phil decided. “Out there, it’s go, go, go from the time I get up until the time I go to bed. There are meetings, decisions. I have someone pulling at me every minute of every hour. I guess maybe I just need the same thing you guys do. I need someone to let me formulate my arguments. I need someone to show me that I’m important on a personal level. I need someone to listen to me while I figure out things for myself. You guys listened to me as often as I listened to you. I didn’t have anyone out there like that.”

“What about Chris, Skyler and Grace?” Hailey wondered. She wasn’t certain where she was headed but she decided just driving around for a little while wasn’t a bad idea.

“They don’t really understand the nuts and bolts of production,” Phil said.

“We don’t either,” Hailey said.

“But you know you don’t,” Phil said. “That’s the thing about people out there. Everyone is dead positive they know everything. I spend a lot of my time dissuading people of that notion. Sky, Chris and Grace aren’t any different. They think because they understand one aspect, they understand it all. And they’re certain that the portion they work is the most important and the rest of it is just ancillary. I can’t use them as sounding boards because they sound back.”

“That could be awkward,” Hailey said.

“I made a huge mistake in firing so many people at once,” Phil told her. “A lot of knowledge and experience walked out the door that day. The ones I kept are competent but only in certain areas. It’s always been Steinmetz’s policy to keep information compartmentalized. It helped the department heads fudge the books if no one else really understood what they did. It also gave them the impression that they were indispensable. In a way, they were. I made this a lot harder than it needed to be.”

“At the same time, there is no way the studio would have survived if you hadn’t trimmed their salaries off the book,” Hailey noted.

“I could have done it one at a time over the course of a month or two,” Phil said. “Instead, I had to try to figure out their jobs from notes or assistants or by random chance. I put an end to that. Now the top-floor guys all are being cross-trained. Well, except Lewis Steinmetz. Him I’m just house training.”

Hailey laughed. She found a fast-food restaurant and pulled in. She decided that since she couldn’t take Phil to bed, she might as well get the bad news out of the way.

“Please, no!” Phil said. “I’ve gone a whole week without unwrapping my food. I don’t want to break the string.”

“It’s just a place to talk,” Hailey said. “I’m going to have a sundae.”

“It’s freezing out here!” Phil said.

Hailey just shrugged. Frozen yogurt crossed all meteorological boundaries in her mind. Phil just got a cup of hot tea.

“Have you had any luck identifying a successor?” she asked when they sat down at a table.

Phil shook his head sadly.

“I keep hoping Marc Edmonds would take it but he’s happy where he is,” Phil said. “His wife is pregnant again and he doesn’t want to devote the amount of time to the studio that he would need. I’ve been hedging my bets and this one turned up a loser. I have no one. Right now, I’m thinking about just appointing a committee and overseeing them from here.”