by Maisie Dean
Susan raised her eyebrows and smirked. “Are you still enjoying it all?”
“Yes,” I said, almost automatically. Susan helped get me the job; I didn’t want to complain about it, but I also didn’t want to keep the truth from her. I paused for a moment. “Most days I like it,” I continued. “To be honest, I never thought I would get so personally invested. It can be so intense, with everything constantly on my mind until a case is wrapped up.”
Susan leaned back in her seat and looked at me carefully. “Kacey, if I know you at all, and I’d like to think I do by now, I know that you give it everything you’ve got when you really care about something. That can make things more complicated and tiring, but it’s a truly great quality to have,” she said.
“I know you’re right, but it can just feel completely overwhelming at times,” I replied. “There’s never a time where I can leave my work at work with this job. I wonder if I should be giving up on acting so soon. Maybe my true calling is still out there somewhere. Maybe I should be an accountant or a sign language interpreter.”
“I didn’t know you knew sign language,” Susan said with a wry smile.
“I don’t,” I sighed. “I just meant–”
“Oh, I know, honey. The truth is I don’t know the answers either. But if I’ve learned one thing in all my years of helping people move from one job to the next, it’s that people hunt around and bounce from position to position because they don’t feel personally invested in their work. It sounds to me like you’ve found that thing other people are always searching for,” Susan said. “Some people might say you’re one of the lucky ones.”
I let out a big sigh and lifted my hair off the sweaty nape of my neck. “I’m being ridiculous, aren’t I?” I asked.
Susan shrugged and looked up at the clear blue sky. “Maybe,” she replied. “But you’re sure cute doing it!”
CHAPTER 21
On Monday morning, for better or worse, I was back at my desk. My “lights, camera, action!” week was behind me, and it was time to get a handle on what I’d missed while working with Nate. Harrison had placed a thick stack of reports that needed organizing next to my computer, but so far, the tower of folders sat untouched, keeping me company while I sipped a green smoothie and tried to control my brain to focus on the task at hand. I was not succeeding. As soon as I heard the quiet vibrations of my phone inside my purse, I eagerly reached down to pull out the distraction. The screen lit up with another news alert about Nate. Harrison and Owen were absorbed in their own work, so I decided to open up the post. As soon as I did, a clip started playing at full volume.
“Busted,” Harrison said, meeting my startled gaze across the room.
“Oops, sorry. I just wanted to check. It’s something about Nate,” I replied.
“In that case, we should all see it,” Harrison suggested. He stood up from his desk and headed towards Owen and me.
“I’ll bring it up on my large monitor,” Owen offered.
Harrison and I stood behind Owen’s chair as he searched for the clip.
“That one. With the towel,” I said, pointing to the first link.
The video was short, only twenty-three seconds long. In it, Nate had been captured walking down the sidewalk after leaving the gym. He had hung his towel over his head to prevent a clear view of his face, but I recognized the sound of his voice repeating “no comment” over and over. A group of paparazzi and a swarm of onlookers held out their phones and followed him down the street harassing him with names and accusations. Similar clips had been surfacing all weekend. There wasn’t anything groundbreaking to the footage. The only aspect that caught my eye was a group of Japanese girls pointing and laughing at Nate. The group of school-age girls had emerged from a juice shop at the same time Nate walked by the front door, and between fits of giggles they called him something that sounded like “robot cowboy.”
“Robot cowboy?” I repeated out loud.
Harrison, disinterested and cranky over the messy and unexpected end to Nate’s case, walked back to his desk.
Owen shrugged. “I think that’s what they were saying,” he said.
“Has Nate ever had a role like that before?”
“I can’t remember him as a robot or a cowboy,” Owen replied. “And I read his entire IMDb page.
“That’s odd,” I said.
“Nate might resemble a Japanese animated character we don’t know about?”
“Yeah, possibly.”
I sat back down in front of my own computer and stared right through it. Something about those couple seconds with the Japanese girls stirred something in my mind, but I was probably just grasping at straws. The contract for Nate’s case was over, and even though the leak of the old high school footage was supremely poor timing, it wasn’t connected to our investigation.
In order to put the wandering thoughts to rest, I texted the expert on all things Nate Pavel—Rosie. I quickly asked her if she’d ever seen Nate in a role that had anything to do with being a robot cowboy, or even one or the other. She responded with a single question mark. If Rosie didn’t know anything about it, most likely there was nothing to know. I replaced my phone back into my purse and pushed the whole thing beneath my desk and out of sight. It was time to get back to the real work at hand. But as soon as I had separated a handful of the stacked files into piles by date, the front door opened. The rattling bell announced Tippy’s arrival, and once again I let my attention drift away from my files.
Tippy was dressed in a tailored coral pantsuit. A heavy string of pearls was settled neatly across her collarbones, and she sported a bracelet and dainty ring to match. She eyed up the three long faces in the room and crossed her arms.
“Who died?” she asked. Before Harrison, Owen, or I could find the will to reply, Tippy held up her manicured hand. “Never mind. I don’t want to know. Is the coffee fresh?”
CHAPTER 22
The coffee, much to Tippy’s displeasure, was far from fresh. While the four of us—Harrison, Owen, Tippy, and myself—waited on the new pot to brew, we gave Tippy a thorough summary of Nate’s case. I was surprised to find that Tippy kept on top of the popular, entertainment-oriented, news.
“I thought that may have been your client. I saw a blurry clip of someone throwing a drink of some kind onto a shirtless jogger near Venice Beach,” Tippy interjected. “The commentator mentioned racial slurs and some nonsense about monster chasers.”
At the same time, Owen and I corrected her. “Phantom Hunters,” we said.
Tippy batted her hand in the air. Her lipstick lips turned up at the edges in a vaguely amused expression. It made me uneasy.
“The trouble is, dears, lacking my many years of life experience, it can be an easy trap to not be able to see the forest for the trees,” Tippy said.
Harrison scratched his head while Owen poured out four mugs of hot coffee.
“What are you getting at, Tippy?” Harrison asked. He’d crossed his arms and the right side of his jaw flexed. I always knew when Harrison was annoyed with his grandmother. Tippy considered herself captain of the ship as frequently or infrequently as she pleased.
“It’s so clear to me,” she said, placing a hand on her trim waist. Tippy’s face stretched outwards with a rare grin.
“Clear?” I repeated. There was a heat bubbling to the surface of my skin. I was the one who’d been working directly with Nate for a week, and not one thing about it felt clear.
Owen stirred a teaspoon of brown sugar into his mug for an absurdly long time.
“Will you just come out with it?” Harrison asked, unable to hold back the frustration in his tone.
“All I’m saying is that the real question that needs to be addressed here isn’t why someone would release the footage, the question you should be asking is why now? At this exact moment?” Tippy asked. “Obviously whoever did it is trying to ruin Nate’s career, but that knowledge alone won’t lead you anywhere.”
“But Grandma, the man who
had the footage is dead now,” Owen said.
“Owen, darling, dead people don’t leak sensitive information to the press,” Tippy replied with a wink.
“Nate couldn’t think of anyone who might have proper motive to go after him,” I told her. “There must be more to it, but with no leads, it felt like a dead end.”
Tippy shrugged and arched one delicate eyebrow. “I don’t know the answers, but I do know the importance of asking the right questions in this business,” she said. “Personally, if it were me holding that footage, I would have waited until the pilot was picked up and the network had already sunk some real money into the promotions. Anyone in the Hollywood system would know to do the same,” Tippy continued.
For all her powerful disdain of Hollywood and the film industry, her knowledge over the inner workings took me by surprise. Did Tippy have a history with the Hollywood scene that no one told me about?
Owen was following his Grandmother’s words closely. “And if Nate cost the studio cold hard cash, they’d almost certainly never touch him again,” Owen said.
“Exactly, Owen,” Tippy said warmly.
“Whoever did this, they not only want to disrupt Nate’s career, they want to bring him down in the industry for good,” I said. The notion of timing and the mysterious perpetrator had been swirling around in my mind for days. As much as I hated to admit it, even to myself, Tippy was right. She’d set out the pieces of the puzzle in the right positions; we would just have to rotate each one of them until they fit together. The largest question mark of all was the motive.
“That doesn’t change the fact that Nate, the victim in all of this, has no idea who might hate him enough to do something so cruel,” I continued. “It’s not his co-star, Thomas, it’s not even his ex-girlfriend who is unexpectedly pregnant with his child. And unless the blackmailing drama teacher left a copy of the footage to similarly blackmailing offspring…” I trailed off.
Owen wrinkled his brows and held his mug in front of his face so that we could barely see his mouth move. “Maybe it isn’t personal,” he said quietly. Owen, ever the pragmatist, sipped his coffee.
Tippy nodded. “You could be right, Owen. In this case, you’re looking for someone who personally benefits somehow from this timing,” Tippy continued. She prattled on about the wisdom of her years, and her time at the agency, while I zoned out. I stared at the coffee maker beside Owen’s elbow. It was about a foot tall and slightly less wide. The right side housed the section that ground the beans as well as a small, worn button pad. The carafe sat beneath the spout to the left. A few of the white labels on the buttons had nearly been worn away from use. One of the buttons was meant to show a coffee pot that was half full, but, if I angled my head to the right, the remaining white lines made it look like a robot. All of a sudden, the pieces slid together in my mind.
I set my coffee down so abruptly it spilled onto the counter. Shocked, Tippy paused her monologue and the three of them peered back at me expectantly. “I’ve got it! I know who has been sabotaging Nate’s career!”
CHAPTER 23
I never expected to step back into the glitzy office building of Zimmerman Talent, but later that afternoon I found myself standing beside Lucky at the security desk. As the investigators on the case, we weren’t required to be present while the police brought in the culprit, but Harrison thought it would be a good opportunity to provide me with some more undercover experience. Lucky and I wore matching black pants and dark blue button-down shirts. We also sported simple black baseball caps. The only visible difference in our disguises was the thin black tie Lucky wore, and my strawberry blonde wig and glasses.
Across the polished floors of the wide-open lobby, the model-esque women stared and salivated over the new stud of a security guard, Lucky. The blonde flipped her smooth, straight hair over her thin shoulder and shot Lucky a coy look.
“You’re rather popular. Maybe you should apply as an actor,” I suggested to Lucky.
He grinned at me and back across the room to no one particular receptionist.
“Kacey, don’t be ridiculous,” he fired back. “The agency would be lost without me and you know it.” Lucky gave the reception desk a playful wave.
“Do I need to remind you that we’re undercover here?” I asked. “Being undercover means not getting noticed. It’s hiding in plain sight,” I said.
Lucky nodded. “Usually, but in this case, we haven’t got anything to lose. We’re spectators, pure and simple. Besides,” he said, “I’m not one for blending in.”
I rolled my eyes. Under my breath, I said, “You can say that again.”
A muffled “ding” sounded, and Lucky cleared his throat and straightened his back. “Here we go,” he said.
The elevator doors slid open and out poured half a dozen police. Surrounded by the navy-shirted officers and being escorted off the premises was Bob Bukowski, Nate’s accountant.
Bob was handcuffed. His off-white dress shirt was askew, with one corner untucked from his pants. His eyes lacked energy and his mouth was turned down at the edges. He’d taken a good long ride on the coattails of Nate’s success, and who knew how many others he’d stolen from, but today was the day for all that to come to an end.
My body surged with energy and pride as I watched the scene unfold. Nate had been right to be suspicious and paranoid about the success of his career, and I had been the one to solve it!
The officers had led Bob halfway across the lobby when one of the front doors was pushed open and someone new entered the room.
To my surprise, it was Trudy.
“Uh-oh, that’s the ex, isn’t it?” Lucky asked with a gleam in his eye. “Drama.”
There was color in Trudy’s cheeks, and she kept an arm slung across her abdomen as she walked towards Bob and the officers. As she approached the group, glaring in Bob’s direction the whole time, the lead officer glanced over to me. The police, as well as the building’s management team, knew Lucky and I were positioned as security guards to observe. We had been told only to get involved if the police thought it was necessary. I gave the lead officer a subtle nod to convey that I knew Trudy and that she wouldn’t be a risk. At least, I hoped not.
“Miss, I’ll ask you to please keep your distance,” a burly policeman said to Trudy.
“Don’t worry about that, I certainly will. I wish I had kept a lot more distance from you, you thief, and I’m sure Nate does too,” Trudy said, addressing Bob personally. “I’m here to thank you, Mr. Bukowski, for everything you’ve done for Nate.” Trudy’s tone dripped with sarcasm and frustration. “Now that they’ve found the extended footage on your computer, it will be released, and the public story will change when it comes out that it’s all been a scheme from the start. You thought that you could help yourself to Nate’s lucrative overseas commercial payments by saying they never ran, but the truth was bound to come out eventually. The ad he did for those Western-themed robots was massive in Japan! The public perception is going to change once the full picture is explained. The world is going to know that Nate is the victim of an embezzling accountant. Your face might even make it onto the front pages today, imagine that. Most people have to work their butts off for that kind of attention,” Trudy continued. “The difference is, you’ll have disappeared tomorrow.”
I felt a light nudge against my ribs.
“She’s getting all the glory,” Lucky said quietly. “Isn’t this your favorite part of it all?”
I chuckled under my breath. “Usually, yes.” I did love a good opportunity to show off my investigative skills and sharp thinking, but Trudy was doing well. “There’s no camera here, and besides, I’m not an actress. I’m perfectly happy behind the scenes and out of the spotlight with you,” I said.
Lucky straightened his posture and lifted his chin. “Speak for yourself, Chance,” he said, giving another wave towards his fans at reception.
I gave my fellow security guard a good, strong elbow to the side.
Bob lo
oked at the floor and fussed against his restraints. He spoke quietly and it was too hard to hear clearly from where I stood, but it sounded like he mumbled something about “gambling debts” and that “prison will be safer anyway.” Two of the officers grabbed hold of his shoulders and marched him past Trudy and out the front door. Flashes popped outside, bouncing around all the glass windows.
“How did they…” I began and trailed off, wondering how the paparazzi had already heard of the arrest.
Lucky gave me a wink. “I may have tipped them off. After what Nate has endured the past few days it only seemed fair that Bob would get a taste,” he said.
“The arrest only just happened, is that allowed?” I asked, pleased with Lucky’s foresight.
“No, not exactly,” Lucky said and held up his index finger. “Don’t tell Harrison.”
Another ding sounded and the elevator doors slid open to expose Iris Zimmerman herself. The talent agent was petite and glamorous, wearing a pure white pantsuit. Around the waist, the sheer jacket split into flowy columns that nearly reached her black stilettos. Her blonde hair was cropped in a masculine, and very becoming, fashion.
Through the non-prescription glasses that were part of my disguise, I watched Iris’s small, angelic figure drift across the floor towards Trudy who had been collecting herself after Bob’s removal from the building.
“Trudy, I’m so sorry for all this,” Iris said. “I should never have been so quick to turf Nate out. I should have believed him that there was more to this.”
Trudy nodded and smiled. From where I stood it looked as though she wiped away a few tears. Iris moved forward and wrapped Trudy in a hug.
“Will you forgive me, please?” Iris continued.
“Of course,” Trudy replied. “It’s been difficult. You did what you thought you had to, that’s all.”
Iris rubbed Trudy’s arms on either side of her. “We’re going to get through this. Nate is lucky to still have you for support,” she said.
Trudy suddenly looked sheepish. “He’s going to have me for more than that,” she replied. Trudy reached into the top of her shirt a couple inches and withdrew a chain. On the chain was an engagement ring large enough to see from several yards away.
