Murder Plays House

by Ayelet Waldman

  “Bye,” I replied, and watched them go through the door as I sat down on the couch to wait. I caught a glimpse of a sound stage, decorated with a large, round bed covered in a wrinkled, red velvet spread. There was a naked man kneeling in the middle of the bed, his back to me. Suddenly I had a pretty good idea what a fluffer was. When Toni and her friend had come out to Hollywood from Nebraska, or Alabama, or Anaheim, or whichever small town or city that regularly launched its naïve young women across the country to be chewed up and swallowed by the Hollywood machine, had they imagined that fantasies of stardom would result in jobs keeping male porn stars prepped and ready? Somehow, I doubted it. Like every other wanna-be starlet, like Alicia for that matter, those two girls had probably spent their years in high school playing Emily in Our Town or tap dancing through Bye Bye Birdie, dewy-skinned and starry-eyed Kim McAfees. They’d honed their Oscar acceptance speeches on the bus to LA, and spent their last two hundred dollars on the perfect set of head shots, designed to make them look like leading ladies, ingénues, comic geniuses. And perhaps it wasn’t yet all over for them. Perhaps they weren’t permanently doomed to be nothing more than fluffers. Perhaps one or the other of them would become the serious actress she had surely imagined herself to be. But I doubted it. If these girls saw their dreams of stardom realized, it would most likely be in the seedy and depressing part of the industry that already employed them.

  When the Talking Pictures light blinked and went out, I heaved myself to my feet, using my hands to lift my belly. It was getting harder and harder to get myself out of a chair. Pretty soon I was going to need a hoist and a forklift.

  I opened the door and looked inside. The studio was larger than I expected, and painted entirely black. Half was taken up with a darkened set that looked much like the one across the hall at Man-Eater Productions—not much more than a bed. Clearly another porn set. At the far end of the long room, lit with two heavy banks of lights, was a set with two easy chairs. A thin woman with a frozen helmet of orange hair, false eyelashes so long they were obvious even where I was standing a good thirty feet away, and a mouth painted in a shade that almost, but not quite, matched her hair, perched on the edge of her seat. Somewhere under the makeup and taut, surgically altered cheeks and eyes was the ghost of Mary Jane, the girl from the Bronx who’d fallen in love with a robot from Naples.

  A young man, no older than twenty, huddled in the other chair. His hair was artfully mussed, and his lime-green polyester shirt was buttoned high on his skinny neck.

  “You gotta make sure you put the graphic up, dude,” the young man was saying as I walked into the room. “They gotta see the graphic.”

  “They’ll see it,” a voice muttered from behind the huge camera hunkered down in front of the set.

  “Of course they’ll see it,” Candy said. Her voice was roughened and harsh, as if she’d spent a lifetime smoking unfiltered cigarettes.

  “All I’m saying is they gotta see that graphic. Plug the movie. That’s why I’m here.”

  Candy rose to her feet. She unsnapped a small microphone from the ruffles of her low-cut blouse, and said to the young man, “Thank you so much for your time. It was a terrific interview. Just terrific, don’t you think?”

  She stomped off toward me before he could answer her, and I swore I heard her mutter something that sounded suspiciously like, “Goddamn film school brats.” Then she noticed me. “Can I help you?” she snapped.

  “I’m so sorry if I’m intruding,” I said.

  She put her hands on her hips. “Can I help you?” she repeated. “This is a closed set.”

  “I’m Juliet Applebaum. I called a little while ago? I think I talked to your producer. I’m looking for a tape of one of your shows.”

  She called over her shoulder. “Spencer! Did you speak to someone about a tape?”

  The man behind the camera raised his head. I immediately recognized the thick Cockney accent that had answered my call when I’d telephoned after leaving Spike at the café. “Yeah. She’s looking for that comedy group. The one we had on a few years ago, remember?”

  Candy turned back to me and gave me the once-over with a suspicious eye. “Are you in the industry?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not.”

  She shook her head and began to walk away from me. “My husband’s a screenwriter,” I said hurriedly. She turned back around, one eyebrow raised. “I’m an investigator,” I continued, and then began to explain about Alicia Felix. Candy held up her hand.

  “Any credits?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your husband. Do I know his work?”

  Maybe. “He wrote the Flesh Eater series. The most recent one is called The Cannibal’s Vacation. He’s working on Beach Blanket Bloodbath now.”

  Her whole demeanor suddenly changed. “How fabulous!” she cooed. “I’m a huge fan. Huge. Come on over to my office. We must talk!”

  Her office was down the hall from Man-Eater Productions and consisted of a room about the size of a storage closet. One wall was entirely taken up with shelves full of plastic videotape boxes marked with dates and names in thick black marker. Candy perched on the edge of a card table and motioned for me to take the single seat, a rickety metal folding chair that I was sure would not be able to carry my weight. I sat down carefully, wincing at the creak of the seat under my behind.

  “So, your husband writes those wonderful films,” she said. “They’re so unusual. So exceptional for the genre. I really consider them to be almost like art films, don’t you?”

  I blinked. I wasn’t quite sure what the technical definition of art cinema was, but I had a feeling it couldn’t encompass both Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Peter’s homage to the undead.

  “I’d love to have him on the show!” Candy said. “Give him the exposure he so clearly deserves.”

  I smiled politely, imaging what my husband would say if I told him he had to drive out to the Valley to appear on public access television with a washed-up 70s sitcom queen. “I’d be happy to pass that along to him.”

  “Just have his agent give me a call.” She reached across the table and riffled through a pile of papers. She pulled a crumpled business card out of the stack and handed it to me. “We’re, uh, in between bookers right now, so he should just talk to Spencer, or to me.”

  “Great,” I said, pocketing the card. “So, I’m really hoping to get a copy of the Left Coast Players’ appearance on your show.”

  Candy smiled and waved at the wall of videocassettes. “We’ve got a complete archive, as you can see. They were on, what, two, three years ago?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  Within no more than two minutes, Candy had pulled out a videocassette in a plastic box marked L.C. Players. “Here it is,” she announced. She tried to blow the thick layer of dust off the case, and when that didn’t work she rubbed it against her skintight black leather pants. The case left a grey smear of dust along her thigh.

  “Thanks so much,” I said. “Do you think I can get a copy?”

  She smiled. “Do you think your husband will do the show?”

  I paused, and she blinked her long eyelashes benignly.

  “I’m sure he will,” I said.

  She smiled again. “Excellent. Come with me.”

  She led me out the door of her office and to the Man-Eater studio. The light over the door was off, and she pushed the door open, motioning me to follow her.

  “Fred!” she called out as we walked into the studio. The man in the beret was sitting in a director’s chair, talking to two other burly men. They were the only fully dressed people in the room. A few women wrapped in bathrobes were standing around a long table full of picked-over boxes of donuts and half-empty bottles of diet soda. I looked over at the bed, and froze. Toni was there, hunched over a naked man, probably the same guy I saw from the back. This time it was her back I saw, and the realization of what she was doing crept over me slowly. I felt the heat of my blush burning my cheeks, and
I was all the more self-conscious because I was the only person who seemed at all shocked by what was going on. I turned my back on the scene, and gulped nervously.

  “Can you dub this for me, hon?” Candy said to the beret-wearing man. She handed him the video.

  “Sure, Candy,” he said.

  She turned to me. “Juliet? You don’t mind if he does it on a high speed, do you? He can do higher resolution, but it’ll take longer.”

  “That’s fine,” I said, looking down at my shoes. For some reason I just wasn’t capable of looking anyone in the face. Not with Toni and the unidentified man over on the bed.

  Candy seemed to notice my embarrassment for the first time, and she laughed. “Never been on an adult film set?”

  I shook my head.

  Candy nodded in the direction of Toni’s busily bobbing head. “The fluffer’s got to keep the guys in working order.”

  “Right,” I said, trying unsuccessfully to appear nonchalant. “Of course.”

  “You know, there’s some cutting-edge work going on in the adult-film arena. A lot of studio directors are finding inspiration in adult film directors’ creative risk taking. Aren’t they Fred?”

  “Give me ten, fifteen minutes, and I’ll have this dubbed,” Fred said, ignoring her question. He tossed the tape to one of the other men.

  “Thanks, hon,” Candy said. “Juliet, would you prefer to wait in my office?”

  “God, yes,” I said. They all burst out laughing, and she led me back out the door.

  Thirteen

  “YOU know what I love about you the most?” I asked Peter as we were driving to Spago.

  “My rock-hard buns and washboard stomach?”

  “Those, too. But I was really thinking of how supportive you are. How eager you are to help me succeed in this wild new path my career has taken.”

  He glanced over at me and narrowed his eyes.

  “Juliet?”

  “What, darling?” I smiled innocently.

  “What did you get me into, now?”

  “Nothing. I’m just talking about this dinner.”

  He turned back to the road, just in time to avoid hitting a bright yellow Humvee that had shot out of a blind driveway directly into our path. He swore under his breath.

  “Wow! Great job avoiding that monster truck! You are such a terrific driver, sweetie.”

  “Okay, that’s it!” he shouted, and screeched the car over, right in the middle of Little Santa Monica Boulevard.

  “Peter! What are you doing?”

  “What? What? You tell me what. What is going on?”

  I leaned over and patted his arm. “Nothing. Really. Let’s just get to the restaurant.”

  He pulled back out into traffic. Within a few moments he was handing the car over to the valet parker with his usual elaborate instructions. The young valet parker just nodded, clearly not understanding a word my husband was saying. Peter has never made peace with that fact that vintage orange BMW 2002s with wood trim, velour seats, delayed wash wipe, and the rarest of Alpina Butterfly throttle injection systems just aren’t the valued commodity in the rest of the world that they are around the Applebaum/Wyeth household. The valet took off with a squeal of wheels, and Peter swore again. I wrapped my arm around his waist and leaned my head against his upper arm, the closest to his shoulder that I could reach while we were standing up. He hugged me back, and we walked into the restaurant.

  As we were heading over to the table where Hoynes and his guest were already waiting for us, I said, “Oh, Peter. I forgot to tell you. You’re booked onto this talk show. Talking Pictures? You’re shooting next week. Wednesday.”

  He turned to me, his mouth open, but we’d arrived at the table.

  “Hi!” I said brightly. “I’m Juliet Applebaum. And you know my husband, Peter Wyeth, of course.”

  It was a thing of beauty—by the time the hand shaking was completed, my husband’s stunned expression had been replaced by one of resignation.

  Alicia Felix’s boyfriend, Charlie Hoynes, was a fat man. Not obese, necessarily, but bloated somehow, with an immense abdomen that appeared to begin right under his neck, and continued down, to the tops of his thighs. His thinning hair was cut short, almost buzzed, and a single gold hoop dangled from one bulbous earlobe. His nose was squashed flat, and redder than the rest of his face. It looked like it had been palpated, squeezed, and pressed deep into the flesh between his cheeks. His grip was firm, and somehow sticky, and it was all I could do to resist wiping my palm on my leg when he finally released my hand.

  It was impossible to imagine him in any kind of intimate situation with his date, a rail-thin blond with oversized breasts, improbably named Dakota Swain. How could her delicate frame survive contact with his bulk? Dakota had sharp, mouse-like features, and narrow lips outlined heavily in bright red lipstick. She looked incredibly familiar to me, and for the first few minutes of dinner I was distracted by trying to place her. This always happens to me in Los Angeles. During our first few years in the city, I would constantly greet people, sure I’d met them before. I even asked, on more than one occasion, if the possessor of that familiar face was someone who had gone to college with me. I was invariably shut down with a glare, and the comment that the person had just had a guest spot on Seinfeld.

  But I did know Dakota. I was sure of it. Finally, I just asked her. “Dakota, do we know each other? I swear I know you.”

  She smiled. “I’m an actress. You’ve probably seen my work.”

  I smiled back, doubtfully. “What have you been in?”

  “Oh God, what haven’t I been in! Sitcoms, commercials. You name it.”

  Charlie patted her talon-like hand with his broad, damp one. “And now Dakota is going to be in the latest Hoynes Production, The Vampire Evenings. We’re shooting the pilot and eight episodes over the next few months.”

  That’s when I figured out why I felt like I knew Dakota Swain. I hadn’t caught any one of her various TV or movie appearances, at least not that I could remember. She looked familiar because she looked like Alicia Felix. Like Alicia, Dakota was a skinny blond with fake breasts, approaching forty, and desperately trying to look a dozen years younger. Hoynes clearly had a type.

  I smiled noncommittally, and then complimented Dakota on the black spandex midriff-baring top she was wearing. There were two tears in the fabric, carefully placed just barely to avoid exposing her nipples. “Booty Rags?” I asked.

  She nodded. “I bought it at Fred Segal. They have the best selection in the city.”

  I nodded, wondering if she really thought that information would be useful to a woman at the end of her pregnancy.

  Through the appetizers, Hoynes grilled Peter on his career, what films he’d written, what projects he’d been up for but hadn’t got, what he’d turned down. At one point, his chin glistening with melted butter, and his mouth full of Clams Casino, the producer pointed a finger at my long-suffering husband and bellowed, “So what’s your quote, kid? What are you getting now? Two, three hundred K a picture? More? Less?”

  Peter smiled sickly and pinched me under the table. I hadn’t been paying much attention to what Hoynes was saying; I found myself unable to keep my eyes off Dakota. She was carefully slicing and dicing every item on her plate. She had reduced her smoked salmon to tiny pink shreds, and her blini to a pile of mashed dough. So far I hadn’t seen her raise her fork to her lips even once. I dragged my eyes away from her plate and interrupted Hoynes’s flow of words.

  “So, Charlie, what can you tell me about Alicia Felix?” Awkward, I know, but that’s what we were there for, and the guy had been torturing my husband long enough.

  He banged his hand down on the table. “Call me Tracker!” he announced in a voice uncomfortably close to a bellow. Diners at neighboring tables looked over at us, and one fastidious-looking man in a black suit jacket and muted grey tie winced.

  “Tracker?” Peter said. “Since when are you known as Tracker?”

  “Since l
ast year. I had it legally changed.”

  Peter and I exchanged a look. “Er, Tracker,” I said. “What can you tell me about Alicia?”

  “What do you want to know?” he asked. At that moment a busboy swooped down on our table and cleared our plates. Dakota pushed her plate away with one hand, and putting the other over her chest, filled her cheeks to indicate how full she was. Of air, I assume, since she hadn’t actually consumed a single morsel of her first course.

  “Were you two . . . er . . .” I looked over at his date.

  He laughed again. “An item? We were; we were indeed. Dakota here knows all about Alicia. I don’t keep secrets from my girls, do I, babe? It’s all out in the open with the Tracker-Man. You see what you get, and you get what you see!” He reached his fork over to the butter dish, speared a ball of butter, and popped it into his mouth. He smiled at my astonished expression and said, “Atkins diet, babe.”

  I discreetly refrained from mentioning the breadcrumbs that had been baked onto his appetizer. Dakota looked nauseated at the sight of him eating butter, or maybe by the very idea of butter itself. Or perhaps it was simply old Tracker who made her ill. I was willing to bet that was it. I thought I was detecting a resurgence of my own morning sickness.

  “So how long were you seeing Alicia?” I asked.

  He wrinkled his brow. “Let’s see. Six, nine months maybe? Dakota, you’d know. I met you both at the vampire auditions. When was that?”

  “Closer to nine months ago.”

  I felt decidedly awkward asking him these questions in front of her. How desperate was Alicia, how desperate was Dakota, that the two of them had forced themselves to be intimate with this grotesque man? Because desperation could be the only reason for their choices. Nothing else made sense. As little as I wanted to, I needed to know more. I decided to take Tracker at his word that he was a man who brooked no secrets. “Were you and Alicia serious?”

  “Serious? I don’t know. I liked her, sure. Just like I like Dakota here.” He reached one hefty arm around his girlfriend and squished her close, placing a kiss on her cheek with a loud smack. She furtively wiped the grease left from his lips with a napkin.