by Laura Levine
A quick check of my change purse yielded three quarters. Just one quarter more, that’s all I needed. Frantically I rummaged around in the bottom of my bag and—miracle of miracles—along with a linty Life Saver and a petrified Tootsie Roll, I dug up a loose quarter.
Yahoo! Any second now, I’d be biting into my Snickers!
As I put the quarters in the slot, I could practically taste its chewy caramel melting in my mouth. But when I pressed the button for my candy, nothing happened. The Snickers stayed right where it was, snug in its little compartment.
Damn. I pressed the button again.
Still nothing. So I gave the machine a bang. But that Snickers wasn’t budging.
By now, I was pretty darn mad. That cursed machine had eaten my four quarters.
Crazed with hunger, I banged even harder.
Still nothing.
A crowd had gathered around me, looking on with interest. Some of them were even giggling. I didn’t see what was so funny about a defective vending machine.
“Darn machine is broken,” I said, giving it a rather vicious kick.
At which point, Justin came hurrying to my side.
“Jaine, that isn’t a working vending machine. It’s one of the art installations.”
Oh, hell. I was so darn embarrassed, I felt like burying myself in the dirt at Planet of the Grapes.
“I bet you’re starving,” Justin said, guiding me away from the tittering crowd. “The hors d’oeuvres aren’t nearly as good as they were the last time I was here. What do you say we go down the street and grab a burger?”
“I don’t think so. I’ve got a busy day tomorrow. I’d better go home and call it a night.”
No, your eyes are not deceiving you. As hungry as I was, I really did say that. Looking around at the artsy young crowd, I realized that Justin and I came from two different worlds. I didn’t belong with these hip twenty-somethings. All I wanted was to go home and settle down in bed with Pro and a pint of Chunky Monkey.
“Of course,” Justin said. “Let’s go.”
He put his arm around my waist to lead me out of the gallery. And the minute he touched me, I felt a tingle in my lady parts. Darn it all. Why did I have to be so attracted to this guy?
Outside, with his arm still around my waist, we walked down the street toward his motorcycle.
“So what did you think of the exhibit?” he asked.
“It was . . . um . . . very interesting.”
“You lie. You hated it.”
“Well, I liked the jelly bean Mona Lisa.”
“Frankly,” Justin said, “I thought most of it was pretty silly. It wasn’t nearly as good as the exhibit I saw the last time I was here. And Tacoma can be a bit much.”
Gee, maybe we did have something in common. Maybe our worlds were closer together than I’d thought.
“I feel bad about those hors d’oeuvres,” he said. “I promised you a meal, and all you got was a fake vending machine. Are you sure you don’t have time for a quick burger?”
He smiled down at me now, dimple flashing.
That’s all it took.
“Okay,” I said, practically melting in a puddle at his feet.
“With extra fries?” he asked, running his finger along my cheek.
“With extra fries,” I nodded.
And then, right there in the middle of Main Street, he took my face in his hands and kissed me.
Now that was my idea of Fun-topia!
You’ve Got Mail
To: Jausten
From: Shoptillyoudrop
Subject: Wish Me Luck!
Wish me luck, sweetheart! The gals will be here soon for the book club, and I’m just hoping I can lead a discussion about a book I haven’t actually read.
On a more positive note, the patio looks quite lovely—the perfect setting for our little gathering.
My whipped cream and fruit parfait looks positively elegant in my beautiful crystal parfait bowl. And I’ve got that yummy wine chilling for the spritzers. So at least the refreshments will be a success.
I warned Daddy not to barge in like he often does to “entertain” the ladies with his corny jokes, but thank heavens he’s busy playing with some new gadget he bought online.
I’ll write later to let you know how it went—
XOXO,
Mom
To: Jausten
From: DaddyO
Great news, Lambchop! My spy drone arrived this morning! Heading out to the driveway to give it a trial run. Before long, I’ll be launching it into the stratosphere.
Isn’t technology great?
Love ’n hugs from,
Daddy
To: Jausten
From: Shoptillyoudrop
Subject: Utter Disaster
Book club was an utter disaster. All because of Daddy.
It was going wonderfully well at first. It turns out I wasn’t the only one who hadn’t read the book. In fact, hardly any of the ladies managed to finish it. Most of them just Googled it or saw the movie. We all agreed that Audrey Hepburn looked fabulous in her period costumes and were soon happily sipping wine spritzers and chatting about our favorite Audrey Hepburn movies.
As I said, it was all going like a dream, one of our best book clubs ever, when I brought out the pièce de résistance, my whipped cream fruit parfait.
The gals oohed and aahed as I set the parfait bowl down on the table. Some of them even got out their cell phones to take pictures.
Then, just as I was about to scoop out the servings, we heard a loud buzzing noise in the sky, and suddenly what looked like a big metal bird came crashing down—right into the parfait.
Fruit and whipped cream went flying everywhere. Poor Edna Lindstrom wound up with blueberry stains all over her new silk blouse.
The metal bird turned out to be the gadget Daddy was playing with, something called a drone that he bought to spy on Lydia Pinkus!
Honestly, I’m so mad I could spit!
XOXO,
Mom
PS. Thanks to that stupid drone, my parfait bowl now has a giant crack right down the middle.
To: Jausten
From: DaddyO
Subject: Not My Fault!
I suppose Mom wrote you about the little incident on the patio. Unfortunately I lost control of the drone, and it wound up nose-diving into her whipped cream and fresh fruit parfait.
But it’s not really my fault.
I blame it all on the faulty directions that came with the drone. Believe you me, I’m going to write an angry letter to their customer relations department.
First of all, it wasn’t nearly as easy to operate as it looked online. I was standing out on our driveway for at least forty-five minutes before I was finally able to launch it. I tried to aim it out in the street, but the darn thing insisted on going its own way—up over the roof of our house to the back patio, where out of nowhere it stopped working and made its unfortunate descent into your mom’s parfait.
Now it’s clogged with whipped cream and berries, totally out of commission.
When Mom found out I’d bought the drone to spy on Lydia, she blew a gasket and made me promise to throw the drone straight in the trash.
Which I did. (It was broken, anyway.)
Now I’m off to Bed Bath & Beyond to buy her a new parfait bowl.
Love ’n hugs from,
Daddy
To: Jausten
From: DaddyO
Subject: You’ll Never Guess
You’ll never guess what just happened, Lambchop!
I was at Bed Bath & Beyond to get Mom that new parfait bowl and was browsing around, looking at an amazing combination-slicer-dicer-blender, when I happened to glance up and saw The Battle-Axe huddled in a corner near the upright vacuum cleaners, talking on her cell phone.
With lightning speed, I put on my aviator sunglasses, pulled down the brim of my baseball cap, and scurried over to a nearby aisle—just in time to hear her saying:
“Hideaw
ay Motel? Thanks for returning my call. I’d like to reserve a room for next Friday. Room number twelve, the quiet room at the end of the motel. You have my credit card on file, my name is . . .”
Waaah, waaah, waaah! Mommy, I wanna cookie!
A little kid wailing in his stroller cut off the rest of the conversation, but I had all the info I needed. The Battle-Axe has made plans to meet The Flounder for an X-rated lovers’ tryst. Little does she know, she’s about to have an unexpected visitor.
Soon her secret love won’t be a secret anymore!
Love ’n snuggles from,
Your crusading
Daddy
PS. I was so darn excited about Lydia’s tryst, I forgot to buy the parfait bowl.
To: Jausten
From: Shoptillyoudrop
Subject: Impossible!
Daddy went to Bed Bath & Beyond to buy me a new parfait bowl and came back with a stupid slicer-dicer-blender instead.
The man is impossible!
XOXO,
Mom
Chapter 24
Fun-topia was all very well and good, but it wasn’t getting me any closer to finding Bebe’s killer.
(In case you’re wondering, there was no dipsy doodle that night. After scarfing down burgers on Main Street, Justin and I returned to my duplex, where he took me in his arms and zapped me with a flurry of good-night kisses. But true to his promise to take things slowly, he tore himself away before things escalated to the mattress zone, leaving me dazed and panting at my front door.)
The next morning, I woke up determined to shelve all thoughts of Justin and focus on the murder.
I got momentarily distracted, however, when I opened my emails and saw that bombshell of a message from Daddy. Had he really heard Lydia Pinkus reserving a room for two at The Hideaway Motel? Could it be? Was Lydia Pinkus, TV’s bastion of propriety, actually having an affair?
I reeled at the thought of “The Battle-Axe” tearing off her support hose in a moment of passion. But I couldn’t go down that rabbit hole. Not with a pesky murder to solve.
I needed to talk with Lacey Hunt and find out if Bebe had been blackmailing her. Consulting the contact list Justin had given me, I put in a call to her.
If I was hoping to speak with the movie star in person, I was in for a disappointment. A brisk young woman named Petra answered the phone and informed me, in no uncertain terms, that Lacey had said all she was going to say about Bebe’s murder to the police and that I did not have a snowball’s chance in hell of chatting with her.
“Besides,” she added, “Lacey’s not even home today. She’s at the studio, shooting her new movie.”
Needless to say, she did not tell me which studio or what movie.
I hung up, dispirited, but still determined to track down the sticky-fingered star. I checked a few show biz industry websites for any mention of Lacey’s new movie but came up empty-handed.
Then inspiration struck.
Weren’t celebs always posting pictures of themselves on Instagram, doing fun things in fab locations, eager to keep their presence alive on social media?
Sure enough, there on her Instagram page was a picture of Lacey in a stylist’s chair, her hair in rollers, looking prettier than any woman has a right to look without makeup.
“Here I am,” she’d written, “at Spectacular Studios, prepping for my new movie, Love Is in the Air.”
You know, of course, there’s no actual Spectacular Studios. It’s a name I made up to protect the innocent (namely, moi) from a lawsuit. The last thing I needed was a pack of Spectacular lawyers coming after me, pressing charges for stealing that moose head.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. More about the moose head later.
Let’s get back to Lacey. Now that I knew where she was, I had to figure out a way to get onto the studio lot.
No way would the guards at the gate let me in without a pass.
Somehow I’d have to sneak in. But how?
Simple! I’d take the famous Spectacular Studios tram ride, and when no one was looking, I’d hop off the tram and scout around until I found the soundstage for Love Is in the Air.
I patted myself on the back for being so clever.
After a fortifying cinnamon raisin bagel, I bid Prozac farewell and tooled over to Spectacular’s sprawling home in Burbank. And I do mean sprawling. It took me forever just to find the visitors’ parking structure and snag a space for my Corolla, snaking my way up to what seemed like the 312th level.
Elbowing my way past the tourists at Spectacular’s theme park, I arrived at the ticketing area for the studio tour, where I was in for a most unpleasant shock.
Who knew studio tours were so expensive? In a stunning blow to my Mastercard, I forked over an obscene amount of money for a ticket, then got on line to wait for a tram.
On a weekday morning at eleven there wasn’t too much of a crowd, so I only had to wait about ten minutes—ten minutes that seemed like decades, however, due to the tyke in front of me who kept hollering at the top of his lungs, “Where’s Mickey Mouse?” No matter how many times his parents explained that they weren’t at Disneyland, the kid kept wailing for Mickey.
Finally, my eardrums throbbing, we were led onto a two-car, open-air tram. There I caught my first break, grabbing a seat at the very back of the second car, out of sight of the tour guide in the first car.
Which meant I could hop off the tram without him noticing me. Even better, the tram wasn’t full, so I had the whole back row to myself. I hunkered down next to the outside guardrail, so it would be easy peasy to jump over to freedom when the tram stopped to visit an attraction.
Then, just when I thought the tram had finished loading, a last minute passenger came rushing on, a ruddy-cheeked, middle-aged gal in capri pants and flip-flops—her glasses hanging from a chain around her neck, a tabloid newspaper clutched in her hand.
I watched in dismay as she walked down the aisle past several empty seats and plopped herself right next to me in the back row. Can you believe it? The whole row was empty, and she had to sit next to me!
“Oh my!” she exclaimed. “Isn’t this exciting! I heard Bratt Pitt is shooting a movie here! Isn’t he gorgeous?” She pointed to a picture of Brad on the cover of her tabloid, breaking up with Jennifer Aniston for the umpteenth time. “I drove all the way up from Whittier, hoping to see him.”
By this point, the guardrails had been lowered into place, our genial tour guide, Sean, had welcomed us aboard, and we were off and running.
Sean was yakking about the fun to come, his face visible on a monitor at the front of the tram. The little kid from the ticket line was still screaming for Mickey Mouse. And my seatmate, Shirley—by now, we were on a first name basis—was still on a roll about Brad.
“I love my husband, of course,” Shirley was saying, “but I’ve had a mad crush on Brad ever since I first saw him in Thelma and Louise. I even called in sick at work, hoping to catch a glimpse of him today. I’m a dental hygienist, you know. Seventeen years with Dr. William Schroeder, the ‘Crown Prince’ of Whittier. Lord, he’s got great teeth—not Dr. Schroeder, his teeth are a mess. But Brad, just look at that smile!”
She beamed down at the tabloid picture of Brad and shook her head in dismay.
“All those years with Angelina. I knew it would never last. She’s just not right for him. He should have never left Jen.”
By now, she was practically sitting on my lap. How was I ever going to make my escape? I could only hope she’d pry herself away from me to look at an attraction on the other side of the tram.
Just my lousy luck, the first several stops were on my side of the tram, with everyone looking in my direction. What if all the stops were on my side? Why, oh why, had I chosen this stupid seat?
But at last we came to an exhibit on the other side of the tram—a man-made body of water where, Sean informed us, a terrifying sea monster would soon be rearing its ugly head.
And sure enough, seconds later, a scaly
green creature came bubbling up from the water, spewing flames with a deafening roar. I was waiting for Shirley to rush to the other side of the tram to get a better look, but she didn’t move a muscle.
“Who cares about a silly old sea monster?” she said, gazing fondly at the photo of Brad in her lap.
Gaak! I couldn’t let this opportunity slip through my fingers. Who knew when or if I’d get another chance to break away?
Then, glancing down at Shirley’s tabloid, I got an idea.
“Look!” I cried. “It’s Brad Pitt!”
“Where?” Shirley asked, looking around frantically.
“Over there!” I pointed to the other side of the tram. “Scoot on over, and I’m sure you’ll see him.”
And praise be, she was up like a shot, her head hanging out the other side of the tram.
This was it, the moment I’d been waiting for. Wasting no time, I hurled myself over the guardrail and jumped down to freedom. Scrambling to my feet, I started sprinting down a dusty dirt road. I thought I heard Shirley shouting, but it was hard to be sure over the sea monster’s roar and the kid still wailing for Mickey Mouse. After a while, I shored up my courage and glanced backward, fully expecting to see Sean hot on my heels. But the tram had long since headed off to its next destination.
