Dead Ex, page 11
“Doty. Yes, here it is.” And there it was, across a gigantic parking lot, a pink “Hollywood Park” sign in script letters, with a white Vegasy “Casino”
that only the legally blind could miss.
“I’m going to put you on hold now and call Rupert and then call Jen and then get right back to you. It’s all gonna be fine.”
“Sophie, you’re an angel.” I was pathetically grateful for the reassurance, even from a nineteen-year-old who’d apparently been told to just get the crazy woman through seedy Inglewood at all costs.
Jen was in the parking lot, waving her arms like I was an incoming plane. She introduced me to a slovenly man who was sitting in a car with a cigarette clinging to his bottom lip. “Hackburg was kind enough to cancel his evening to help us out,” she said as Hackburg flicked his car’s headlights on and off. “Hackburg, don’t screw this up. Sophie,” she said to her phone, “get Rupert out here.” She turned to me. “Okay. You’re a little casual for the shot so I’ll lend you my pashmina. This will be fun.
Just don’t cry or anything. Got lipstick?” She fussed with me, covering my hooded sweatshirt with a pink cashmere-like shawl. “There. A nice cowl effect. Here’s Rupert.”
I turned to Rupert, who looked like you’d expect a man to look who’d been interrupted during a poker game. He glanced at me with no recognition whatsoever.
Jen said, “We’ll make this fast. Hackburg, throw some light on their
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faces. Rupert, just do what you did yesterday. Kiss her. Couple times, and we’re outta here.”
“Kiss who?” Rupert said.
“Her. Wollie.”
Rupert looked at me blankly. Then his eyes widened and he started laughing. “Jesus. What happened to you?”
“Rupert, shut up,” Jen said. “Hackburg? Ready?”
“Gotta use your car lights,” Hackburg said, emerging from his car.
“Hers too, maybe.”
“Fine,” Jen said. “Get that casino sign in the background.”
“Hackburg,” Rupert said. “What are you doing? Working on your
merit badge in photography?”
“Rupert,” Jen said. “Damn it, just start kissing, would you?”
Hackburg repositioned our cars, shining headlights into our faces for illumination. I closed my eyes and saw a condolence card: orange flames engulfing a hapless woman, with the caption Sorry your life went to hell in a handbasket. At which point Rupert started kissing me.
• • •
My mother considered poker an educational necessity, and so, like many random lessons from childhood, I had its rules firmly embedded in my head. This took up space that could have been put to better use, because I don’t really play poker. Gambling, at even a penny a point, gives me heart palpitations.
Rupert led me through the casino, past the food courts, to the poker area. Beyond a quick glance at a badly done mural behind the deli sec-tor, I kept my eyes focused on the tired blue-and-gold carpet so as not to see people reacting to my hair. “Come on,” Rupert said, noticing. “Suck it up. It’s not that bad. I’ll get you a drink, you’ll put in ten minutes, and take off. Just long enough to give a report on SoapDirt. ”
He had a point. Easier to actually have a date than to pretend to have had one. I risked looking around and decided that if you’re going to de-but a questionable fashion statement, Hollywood Park Casino is the place to do it. The lights were too bright, but there was such a wide range of what was acceptable appearance-wise, I didn’t merit prolonged stares.
I did get noticed. Tables held nine players each, mostly men, and there
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were dozens of tables, with half the players finding time to check out the room. Some ate from TV trays behind them, stretching to stab forkfuls of Korean barbecue or eggs and hash browns, ketchup flying onto their shirts as they turned back to monitor the action. The game, I figured out, was mostly No-Limit Hold ’Em, which my mother had described as
hours of boredom marked by moments of sheer terror.
We reached Rupert’s table but held back, watching the hand. It was at the river and down to three guys, two of whom I knew. Clay “prop guy” Jakes and Max “stage manager” Freund stared at guy in a Hawaiian shirt with a comb-over, on the button, as he in turn stared at the board, a pair of sevens, a four, a king, and an ace. The Hawaiian shirt bet, Clay bumped it up, Max and Hawaiian shirt called, and Hawaiian shirt
showed a pair of kings. Max tossed his cards to the dealer in disgust. Clay smiled slowly, turned over his hand, and said, “I got the boat. Sevens full of aces.” The dealer, expressionless, pushed the chips toward him. Rupert patted him on the shoulder.
Max sat back, looked skyward, and shook his head. Then he saw me.
“My God,” he said. “And I thought I was having a rough night.”
“Not her doing, Max,” Rupert said. “This was the work of Dr. Tricia Frankenstein.” Rupert introduced me to Clay, who obviously did not remember me from Tricia’s party, and helped me into a chair, as though bad hair constituted a physical handicap. The other men at the table glanced at me, then away. I watched them play another hand, then headed to the ladies’ room to call Fredreeq.
“You’ve done what?” she yelled, hearing about my experience.
“Not me,” I whispered into the phone. “Them. Yes, I was duped, I’m an idiot. Listen, you know hair; I need you to tell me if it’s fixable, because I don’t trust Gloria. Also, how do I handle this vis-à-vis Simon?
Can I come over? There’s stuff I need to tell you about Joey and I’m not that far, I’m at Hollywood Park with Rupert and—”
“Rupert? My Rupert? You’re hanging with Rupert Ling? Where, the casino? Don’t you move. I’ll be there in half an hour. Forty minutes tops.”
I spent ten minutes in the bathroom, staring in the mirror, and when I could stand my own company no longer, returned to the poker table.
The faces hadn’t changed, but Rupert was in the game now and he and Clay seemed to be in excellent moods. Max did not; his good-natured charm was fading along with his stack of poker chips. Focusing on cards
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kept my mind off my hair, but Clay folded and said something to Max that got my attention. There was a steady stream of ambient noise, and I had to strain to hear. “Cops impounded the guns today,” he said.
Rupert looked up. “What guns?”
“From the show. The ones we rent, from ISS. Jen called me at home last night to come in, open up the lockbox.”
“I didn’t hear anything about it,” Max said, watching as the dealer dealt the turn.
Clay wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Jen told me to keep it to myself, till she works out how to spin it.”
“And you’re doing a heroic job of it,” Rupert said. “Very discreet.”
“Well, I just realized we got no guns for the Monday hostage scene.
We’ll have to go with replicas, which don’t look right, or Max, you gotta hire a specialist, because ISS won’t rent to me anymore. I lost my EFP
over a reckless driving conviction.”
“Bet,” Max said, pushing forward a short stack of yellow chips. “No money for a specialist this month,” he said to Clay. “Jen will say to use water pistols. The eighteen to twenty-four demographic won’t know the difference.”
Rupert laughed. “What’s that sound? Why, it’s David, rolling over in his grave. Why not borrow some guns from Tricia? She married a Texan—
I’m sure he brought firearms into the marriage. Or wishes he did.”
I was about to ask what an ISS and an EFP were when I caught sight of Fredreeq in the doorway. She wore a floor-length blue velvet dress and stood staring, fairly quivering. Only Rupert Ling’s presence, I suspected, prevented her from screaming. She moved in silently, one hand outstretched. She touched my hair. I was aware of the men looking at us as their conversation faded into silence.
“Oh, please, no,” Fredreeq whispered.
“Fredreeq,” I whispered back. “This isn’t helping. Tell me what I can do.”
She gulped. Closed her eyes, opened them, and uttered one word:
“Lawsuit.”
• • •
Fredreeq bore me off to the bathroom to render a diagnosis, as the poker area with its backdrop of TV screens was too distracting. She studied me
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from all angles, felt my hair strand by strand, and even sniffed it. “Okay, it’s bad,” she said. “Here’s the plan. No one comes near you with an appliance. No blow-dryer, no curling iron. With daily deep conditioning, maybe wrapped in plastic and covered in a wig, in six months you’ll be good to go.”
“Six months?” I gasped. “What do I do about Simon, take a sabbatical from sex?”
“First, break the news to him over the phone. Phase Two, he sees you dimly lit. Flashlight, candlelight, nothing too bright that evokes Ronald McDonald. Then—”
“Okay, never mind, I’ll figure this out. Come on, let’s get this date over with.”
Back at our table, Rupert pulled up another chair for Fredreeq. Max had just lost a major hand, judging from the reaction he got from Clay, who called him a donkey. “You don’t make enough to play junk cards like that,” Clay said. Max, in response, hailed a yellow-uniformed chip runner to replenish his supply.
“The cops asked me today about David’s medication,” Rupert said
quietly. “His nurse kept a supply of morphine at the house, and now it’s gone. Has Joey mentioned this, Wollie?”
I looked at Fredreeq. “No. Why would she?”
“She’s been David’s majordomo,” Max said, pulling out his wallet for the chip runner. “What did you tell the cops, Rupert?”
“I told them to check Clay’s medicine cabinet.”
Clay smiled. “I wouldn’t turn down morphine. But I haven’t been
at David’s since the first of December, when me and Max put up his Christmas tree for him. Max, what about you? Stockpiling drugs for your knee surgery?”
“Knee surgery?” Fredreeq said. “Do not get it done at Kaiser, whatever you do. My husband’s cousin ended up getting his leg amputa—”
“No. Stop,” Max said. “Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.”
Rupert laughed. “Max is a baby. Don’t let his size fool you. He tries to dignify his cowardice by calling it a medical syndrome.”
“LPT,” Max said. “Low pain threshold. I am not making this up. But I don’t do morphine; I barely function on Vicodin.”
“What do you mean, Joey was David’s majordomo?” I asked.
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The table went quiet as cards were dealt, then picked up. “David gave Joey his power of attorney,” Rupert said, breaking the silence.
Clay tossed down his cards. “She was on the set a lot, I’ll tell you that.
She got David to reinstate food and flowers in the wedding scene after Jen cut the budget for it.”
I thought of Joey spending the Christmas season with David, with access to all of his life and work. Including his morphine, and Joey had a taste for mind-altering substances. Not needles, though. And she wasn’t capable of stealing.
Only, would the cops know that? Or the media? And if they were
told, would they believe it if the information came from Joey’s friends?
Fredreeq was frowning. Maybe she was thinking along the same lines.
Because the answer, of course, was no.
E i g h t e e n
T he bedroom was dark when I returned. I’d already pulled off my sweatshirt and jeans in the living room, so as not to wake Simon, and now I carefully slipped under the covers and arranged a pillow over my head, praying to whatever god was on duty at that hour to save me from any more hair reactions until morning.
Simon woke but didn’t turn on the light. He asked where I’d been and I said only, “Out with Fredreeq.” I was bad at lying, but I was getting better at misleading.
Around midnight, the phone rang. I answered; it was Ali, the doorman, saying a woman named Joey requested my presence in the lobby. I whispered to Simon to keep sleeping, then tiptoed to the living room, threw on clothes, and headed to the elevator.
In the lobby, Joey and Ali were already buddies, eating tortilla chips and guacamole, although Ali stayed on his side of the desk and Joey stayed on hers, with the plastic container between them. I’d have bet that no human power could get Ali to eat on the job, but something about Joey made people let down their hair.
But not dye it orange. When she saw me, she did an audible intake of breath, and even Ali, trained in social discretion, went momentarily wide-eyed.
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“You look like you need a walk,” Joey said, looping her arm through mine.
“Walk?” I said. “I need a wig, not a walk. It’s winter out there.”
“Wear this.” Joey gave me her heavy biker jacket, and then Ali gave Joey his black wool coat, none of which made much sense to me, but I was busy explaining to Joey how Tricia had deprived me of whatever dignity I’d once had.
“You can handle it,” Joey said. “I once shaved my head to play a neo-Nazi. You get used to stares after a while. And look, lots of people have neon hair.”
“Yes, fourteen-year-olds, trying to shock their parents.” We walked out onto Wilshire. “Joey, this is life-threateningly frigid. It’s gotta be forty degrees out here. Come up to the penthouse.”
“No. I don’t want Simon to know I was here and grill you later. I thought we’d talk in the lobby, but do you know how many monitors there are in that place?”
“A lot?”
“Ali’s watching at least twelve.” With a glance over her shoulder, she led me south on Thayer, away from Wilshire. We kept our heads down, as if we were making our way through Siberia. “Makes me paranoid.
Hey, have the cops called you yet?”
“No.”
“They will. They interviewed me today. And they’ve interviewed Elliot, and now they’re going to interview you, checking out my alibi.”
“What do you mean, alibi? Why are they using words like that?”
“I’m on their short list for suspects.”
“Why?” This was exactly what I didn’t want to hear. I put my arm around her, for bodily warmth along with emotional support. “What’s your motive supposed to be?”
“I don’t know yet. Possibly they think he asked me to shoot him. Assisted suicide. It crossed your mind too. It’s not a big stretch. Anyhow, I just need to know—do you remember calling me Friday morning?”
Friday. I’d gotten up, gone back to bed with Simon, then gotten up again and phoned Joey to get the number of her mother in Nebraska, who wanted a boxed set of my greeting cards. There was no such thing as a boxed set of my greeting cards, so I’d wanted to explain to Mrs. Raf-
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ferty that there would be a slight delay while I invented one. “I called you around ten, ten-thirty,” I said.
“Yeah. Do you remember if you called my home or my cell?”
“Home, probably.”
“But you didn’t leave a message on the machine?”
I thought back. “No. The machine didn’t pick up. So I called your cell.”
“So when I answered my cell, you didn’t know where I was. I could’ve been at home. On my cell.”
“No, you were in your car.”
Joey turned to me. “How do you know?”
“You said your mom was on her way to Croatia on a cruise with your brother and you couldn’t look up anyone’s cell number because you were in your car.”
Joey kicked a stick off the sidewalk and into the street. “Okay, that’s bad. Did I tell you where the car and I were?”
“The 134 East. You mentioned it because there was a mattress in the middle lane, causing some problems.”
She kicked a rock. “Worse than no alibi. Negative alibi.”
“I take it that if you could prove you were home in Pasadena at the time David died, that would be a good thing?”
Joey rubbed her hands together. “A very good thing. It would also be impossible. The next best thing is if no one can prove I wasn’t home when he died.”
“Me, for instance,” I said. “What time did he die?”
“Between nine and eleven Friday morning. That’s when the cops
asked Elliot to verify his whereabouts.”
“Why would Elliot have a reason to kill David?”
We stopped as a car’s headlights turned onto Thayer from Ashton
Avenue, blinding us. “Elliot had no reason to kill David,” Joey said. “But then, I didn’t either. I have reason to kill Elliot, but that’s another story.”
I stuck my hands in my pockets, which were actually her pockets.
“You and Elliot are on speaking terms?”
“He wanted to give me a heads-up to get my alibi together. He’s
thoughtful that way.” She paused. “I don’t want to run into him. I’m not at the top of my game right now, and he’ll exploit that.”
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“Do you have to run into him?”
“I need some things from the house.”
“I could pick them up for you.”
“Yeah, I’m going to send you to Pasadena now, after giving you hy-pothermia. Anyhow, it’s just Krav Maga gear, my boxing gloves and shin guards. I haven’t worked out in weeks. That’s probably why I’m out of sorts.”
“Oh, yes, that must be it,” I said. “As opposed to being a murder suspect. Listen, Rupert Ling said that there was some morphine missing from David’s house. And that David auctioned things off to raise cash, to pay a professional to kill him.”
“A professional?” Joey stopped and stared at me. Her face was white, her Medusa hair backlit by a streetlight, her body lost in the long wool coat. It was easy to see why she’d had a career in theater. Unexpectedly, she smiled. “That’s great.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t need money. If these detectives go with that as a motive, they’ll have to find another suspect.” She started walking again. I followed.
