Deep Dish Page 2

  “Do you realize who else used to be food editor at the Atlanta newspaper?” Birdelle, her mama, had demanded. “Mrs. Henrietta Dull, that’s who. Mrs. S. R. Dull herself. My mama kept Mrs. Dull’s cookbook right beside her King James Bible and her Eugenia Price novels.”

  Two years ago, Gina was doing a cooking demonstration: no-fuss holiday desserts, it was, on Atlanta Alive!, the noontime television talk show on the local NBC affiliate, and Scott Zaleski was the producer.

  She’d been asked back to do three more segments after that, and after the fourth segment, and a lot of flirting and provocative e-mails, Scott had asked her out to dinner.

  He was blond and athletic, well dressed, and wildly ambitious—for both of them.

  Six months after they’d started dating, he’d sold GPTV on her concept for a new kind of southern cooking—flavorful but healthy, with an emphasis on fresh, locally produced foods prepared with an updated twist on regional traditions. It was called Fresh Start with Regina Foxton.

  Their set was the same one she’d used for the Atlanta Alive! shows. But it was starting to grate on her nerves. The cupboard doors, whose rich dark wood looked so expensive on camera, were actually just stained plywood, and they were warped so badly they had to be closed with gaffer’s tape. The countertops were a cheap imitation granite laminate, and the cooktop, donated by a long-ago sponsor, was, as far as Gina was concerned, ready for the scrap heap.

  Their offices weren’t much either. Hers was actually the former janitor’s closet. So much for the glamour of big-time show business. At least she could use the mop sink to wash her face.

  She steamed toward Scott’s office. How could he leave her out of the loop on so many critical changes for the show? If there were issues with the sponsor, and with the budget, shouldn’t she have been the first to know?

  The door was closed. She knocked, waited. “Scott?”

  She opened the door and stuck her head inside. Empty.

  His office was tidy as always, desktop cleared, books and tapes stacked neatly on their shelves. She plopped down in his swivel chair, determined to confront him as soon as he showed up.

  Her irritation melted a little when she caught sight of the screen saver on his computer. It was a color photo of the two of them, standing on the beach last summer at sunset, his arms wrapped around her waist. Scott’s blond hair glowed in the golden light, and her own face seemed to glimmer with happiness.

  How sweet! And surprising. Scott was the least sentimental man she’d ever known. She had no idea the photo had meant so much to him. She reached out to touch the screen and bumped the mouse. Suddenly, the photo disappeared, and a document materialized on the computer screen.

  Squinting at the print, she felt a passing twinge of guilt. The small print ran together in an incomprehensible blur. She fumbled in the pockets of her slacks and brought out the reading glasses, which also made her feel guilty.

  Scott was always pestering her to get fitted for contacts, but she’d tried them once, and hated the sensation of having a foreign object in her eye. Her readers were fine, she’d protested, but he’d banned her from wearing them on camera. No glasses, no aprons, nothing, he’d proclaimed, that might give off even a whiff of Betty Crocker. Regina Foxton was young, hot, and gorgeous. No granny glasses!

  Glasses perched on the end of her nose, she started to read.

  The document was Scott’s résumé. Laid out in neat rows of black and white, it made him out a young television phenom. Bachelor’s degree in comparative lit, cum laude, University of Virginia. Master’s in film and television, Florida State University. Internships at CBS and ESPN. Before the Atlanta Alive! job, he’d produced a Sunday-morning political debate show for a public television station in Jackson, Mississippi, and before that, he’d been a production assistant at CNN.

  She read on. E. Scott Zaleski was thirty-two years old, unmarried, with professional affiliations that included board memberships for the Association of Georgia Broadcasters and the High Museum’s Young Associates as well as the Nature Conservancy.

  He was currently employed as producer and creator of the Georgia Emmy-winning Fresh Start with Regina Foxton show.

  Creator? Gina said it aloud. Of her show? Fresh Start?

  The office door swung open, and Scott rushed inside. He was dressed in a dark pin-striped suit, wearing the silk Armani tie Gina had bought him at Barney’s in New York. He stopped in his tracks when he saw Gina sitting at his desk.

  “Hey!” he said. He glanced at his watch. “Shouldn’t you be taping?”

  “I don’t know,” Gina said, crossing her arms over her chest. “I was just going to ask you the same question. We started taping two hours ago. Where were you?”

  Scott set his briefcase down beside the battered wooden kitchen chair facing the desk and sat down with deliberate caution. “I was in a business meeting. But Jess is perfectly capable of directing a segment on her own.”

  Gina looked him up and down, from his impeccably cut and groomed hair to his polished hand-stitched English oxfords. “You look very nice.”

  “Thank you,” Scott said, fingering the tie. “So do you. Look, Gina, let’s cut the drawing-room comedy, please. What’s going on? Why are you skulking around in my office?”

  She lifted an eyebrow. “I wouldn’t call waiting for you in your office skulking. The door wasn’t locked. Why, do you have something to hide?”

  He sighed. “You’ve been reading my memos.”

  “Nuh-uh,” Gina said. “Just the résumé. Although that in itself was quite a revelation. I never realized you were the creator of Fresh Start.”

  He waved his hand in dismissal. “That’s just résumé-building. Nobody takes that stuff seriously.”

  “I do,” she said. “And I didn’t realize I should have been building my own instead of concentrating on my piddly little job here.”

  He stood up and closed the office door, then sat back down.

  “I was going to talk to you. Today. After I got back from my meeting. I’m sorry you had to find out about it this way.”

  “Find out what?” She felt like screaming. But she’d never been much of a screamer. “What’s going on with the show, Scott?”

  “God,” Scott said. He crossed and recrossed his legs, then leaned forward and took Gina’s hands in his.

  “I’ve been in a meeting with the Tastee-Town people all morning. It’s not good news, Geen. Wiley wants to pull the plug on the show.”

  Tastee-Town Foods was the sponsor of Fresh Start with Regina Foxton. What had started as a mom-and-pop grocery store in Hahira, Georgia, in the early 1960s had evolved into a multistate publicly traded supermarket chain with outlets all over the Southeast. Wiley Bickerstaff III was the grandson of the founder of Tastee-Town. And the current CEO.

  Gina was stunned. “But…Wiley loves me. He loves the show. He had me cater his fiftieth birthday party last spring. He’s been selling the cookbook in all the stores in Georgia. I was the guest speaker at his Rotary Club meeting last month. He invited me to lunch at the Piedmont Driving Club two weeks ago. He never said a word.”

  She rolled her chair around to within inches of Scott’s. “Wiley Bickerstaff loves me! This must be a misunderstanding.”

  “Yeah,” Scott said bitterly. “He’s nuts for you. He just doesn’t love the show anymore. Talk about passive-aggressive behavior. Wiley always wants to be everybody’s buddy. He left it up to me to be the bearer of bad news.”

  Gina stood up abruptly. “Scott, when were you going to tell me? After you’d already fired every single functional member of the crew and hired on a bunch of teenagers? Or were you going to tell me after you had me substituting Spam for pork tenderloin?”

  “Hey!” Scott said sharply. “I was trying to protect you. I still thought until this morning that there might be some way to salvage the show. That’s why I slashed the personnel and grocery budget. To try to show Wiley we could still produce a viable product for a reasonable amount of mo
ney.”

  “And?” Gina said.

  Scott’s shoulders slumped. “No go. Tastee-Town’s new marketing director is under the mistaken impression that their advertising dollars could be better spent elsewhere. They’re putting all their money on NASCAR racing.”

  “So that’s it? We’ll be off the air?”

  Scott sat back in his own chair. “Looks like it. I’m really sorry, Geen. I’ve been putting out feelers, hoping we’d line up a new sponsor, but right now, I’m not optimistic.”

  “I guess not,” she said. “Since you’re obviously hunting for a new job.”

  “That’s not fair,” he said, looking hurt. “And before you go off half-cocked, accusing me of abandoning you, you should know that since Wiley started making noises about dumping the show, I’ve pitched you all over the country. Sent Fresh Start tapes every place I could think of. I didn’t tell you anything because I didn’t want to distract you from making the best show possible.”

  “Oh.” Now she felt like a heel. First for spying on him, and second, for coming this close to accusing him of disloyalty, when all he’d been doing was looking out for her best interests.

  “Scotty,” she whispered, coming over and sitting down on his lap, wrapping her arms around his neck. “I’m so sorry. I had no idea. I had no right—”

  He buried his head in her hair, kissed her forehead. “It’s all right, baby,” he murmured. “We’ll think of something. You’re the best in the business. Wiley Bickerstaff is a moron. Tastee-Town’s gonna live to regret getting rid of us. It’s you and me against the world, babe.”

  She fought back sudden tears. God. She’d been so mad at him for keeping secrets from her, she hadn’t thought about losing the show. Her job! She’d worked since she was fourteen years old. Made straight As in school, never failed at anything in her life. And now, staring thirty in the face, she was out of work. Fired, essentially. And if she was out of a job, so was Scott.

  She felt a chill of fear run up her spine.

  The previous spring, after years of renting and scrimping and saving, right after Tastee-Town signed on for another year’s worth of shows, she’d bought the two-bedroom town house in Buckhead, the first home she’d ever owned. What hadn’t gone into the down payment, she’d spent on furnishing it. Her five-year-old Honda Accord was paid for, but the transmission had been making weird sounds for the past month.

  Now what?

  “I’m almost thirty,” she said aloud. “Now what?”

  “Now you get back to the set and finish the show,” Scott said, kneading her shoulder muscles.

  “Okay. But no more secrets.”

  “Deal,” he said.

  Gina managed a small smile. “That’s my girl,” he said, kissing the tip of her nose. Gently, he dislodged her from his lap and stood up. “We’ve got ten shows left under contract. Let’s make ’em the best damned shows you’ve ever done. And in the meantime, I’ve still got some irons in the fire. I’ll figure it out.”

  She pulled a tissue from the box on his bookshelf and blew her nose. “Okay,” she said, her voice unsteady. “I’ll do my best. I just have one question.”

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “What’s the E stand for?”

  “Huh?”

  “E. Scott Zaleski. You know, your résumé. I never knew Scott wasn’t your first name.”

  He rolled his eyes.

  “No more secrets, remember?”

  “Eugene,” he said. “Now you know the worst.”

  Chapter 3

  Somehow, she managed to get through the rest of the day. After the lunch break, Scott was back in his usual seat, guiding the new crew patiently through the process of filming a fairly technically complicated cooking show.

  They filmed through the dinner hour, and once the last segment was in the can, Scott congratulated everybody on a good day’s work, and sent them home.

  “I’ll call you later,” he whispered to Gina as he was packing up his laptop for the day.

  She smiled. Officially, their romance was a secret. But she was fairly certain Jess and the others knew that she and Scott were an item.

  After Scott and the crew had gone, she walked around the kitchen, letting her fingertips trail across the scarred countertop. Spotting a grease spatter on the stainless steel cooktop, she buffed it out with the edge of a paper towel. It might be a crummy kitchen, but it was, for four more days, her crummy kitchen.

  Feeling weirdly melancholy, she decided to hit the break room for a Diet Coke before she headed home for the night.

  “Oh!” she said, spotting a tall man with his back toward her. He turned. It was Andrew Payne, her lighting engineer. He was tacking a note to the bulletin board.

  “For Sale,” it said, listing a Fender guitar and amps, a Seadoo Set Ski, and lastly a 2006 Harley-Davidson Fat Boy. “Awesome condition. Sacrifice at $18,000.” All his toys.

  “Oh, Andrew,” she said softly, squeezing his arm. “You’re selling the Fat Boy?”

  “Got to,” he said, his jaw clenched. “Heather’s pregnant.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Gina said. “I only found out about the show today.”

  He shrugged. “Heather hated that bike.”

  “But you loved it. It was your baby.”

  “Got a real baby on the way now. And no job.”

  He turned away and headed for the door.

  “Andrew,” she called.

  He turned around, his face unexpectedly sullen. “Yeah, I know. You’re sorry. Scott’s sorry. Everybody’s sorry. And me and Eddie and Jackson are the sorriest of all. Cuz we’re out of work. You have a nice life now, Gina. Okay?”

  She felt stung by his simmering anger. “Andrew, I really am sorry. I could kill Wiley Bickerstaff. You know what they’re doing, right? Pulling our show because they think NASCAR racing is the next best thing to sliced bread. Can you believe it? The women who shop at Tastee-Towns don’t care about NASCAR. They want to know how to fix simple, delicious meals for their families.” She shook her head. “I don’t get it. Not at all.”

  Andrew’s smile was bitter. “That what Scott told you? The guy’s got balls of solid brass, I’ll give him that.”

  “What do you mean?” Gina said, feeling a familiar chill run down her spine. “Tastee-Town has a new marketing guru. He somehow persuaded Wiley that car racing makes more sense than cooking.”

  “Man,” Andrew said. “Zaleski’s really got you snowed, doesn’t he?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gina said, her voice chilly. “I’m sorry the show’s been canceled. Even sorrier that you and the others lost your jobs. I’m out of work too, now, you know. But it’s business. You can’t blame that on Scott.”

  “Business?” Andrew hooted. “Monkey business maybe.”

  “You’d better go,” Gina said, turning her back on him. “Before I forget how much I like you.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said, turning. “I’m outta here.”

  She heard the heels of his cowboy boots clomp across the linoleum floor, and then heard the break-room door swing shut. More footsteps echoed in the empty corridor.

  “Wait,” she called, running after him. He was at the rear entry door when she caught up with him.

  “Now what?” he asked, his voice nasty.

  “What don’t I know?” she asked, afraid to hear it, afraid not to.

  “You really want to know? All of it? The truth?”

  She lifted her chin and met his belligerent stare with her own. “The truth.”

  He hesitated. “Aw, hell, Gina. Jess said we should all just suck it up and keep our mouths shut. But the hell with that. You got a right to know who you’re dealing with.”

  “Just tell me,” Gina said.

  He scratched his chin. “I don’t know anything about the NASCAR thing. That’s a new one on me. Maybe that’s the story Wiley put out to save face. What I do know is that ain’t the reason Wiley Bickerstaff canceled your show.”

>   “And the real reason is?”

  “Crap.” He said it under his breath.

  “Just tell me,” she urged. “I’m a big girl. I can take it.”

  Andrew took a deep breath. “Last week, when you were down in Odum, visiting your folks? Scott was visiting the Bickerstaffs. Only Wiley wasn’t home at the time. In fact, Scott wasn’t visiting at the Bickerstaff house at all. The way I heard it, he and Danitra Bickerstaff were checked in at the Ritz-Carlton in Buckhead.”

  “What are you saying?” Gina whispered.

  “Mr. Bickerstaff got to wondering how come Danitra had book club every Thursday night, but she never had any books around the house,” Andrew said. “Dumb bitch. Book club! Have you ever met Danitra? The only book she’s interested in is Wiley’s checkbook. I heard he hired a private investigator. Had her followed. And last Thursday, the detective followed her to the Ritz, where she checked into a suite. Not five minutes later, Scott Zaleski showed up at the front desk, introduced himself as Mr. Bickerstaff, and asked for the key to the suite. You believe that? The bitch checked in under her own name. And with Wiley’s American Express platinum card!”

  “That’s a lie,” Gina said heatedly. “Scott wouldn’t do that.”

  “You wouldn’t think so,” Andrew agreed. “No matter what else you think about the guy, you can’t say he’s stupid. Still, he did screw the boss’s wife and manage to get all of us fired in the process.”

  “How…how do you happen to know all of this?” Gina asked, her voice breaking. “It’s probably just vicious gossip.”

  “Nope, not gossip,” Andrew said. “I’m sorry, Gina. But if I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’. Jessica went to Paideia School with Meredith Bickerstaff, Wiley’s daughter by the first Mrs. Bickerstaff, and Danitra’s stepdaughter, who happens to be a year older than Danitra. Meredith told Jess the whole story last week, right after it happened. Half of Buckhead’s heard it by now.”

  “Not the half I live in,” Gina said.

  Chapter 4