I had to nip this in the bud quickly. “No, no,” I said. “Mom knows I love her, but if I suggest to her that she give up this retirement thing, she’ll think I see her as an imposition and don’t want her living here. No, it can’t be me.” And they said I couldn’t improvise onstage.
Dad stopped pacing and put his hand to his chin. It was a calculated move—I’d seen him do it thousands of times when he was supposed to be thinking in a sketch—but it conveyed the proper message. He had indeed heard and absorbed what I’d said.
“Yeah, you’re right,” he said finally. “Maybe I’ll call your aunt Irene. Mom will listen to her sister.”
Subtlety clearly was not going to work like a charm in this situation. Dad knew what had to happen and he knew who had to make it happen. But he doesn’t like confrontation and he especially doesn’t want to do anything that might make my mother uncomfortable or irritable. They’ve been married a long time; he’s learned how to avoid difficult situations and Mom has been serene and happy a long time.
I had to be direct, which was exactly what I didn’t want to be. I came by my nonconfrontational traits genetically.
“Dad.” I sighed. “You can’t call Aunt Irene. You need to talk to Mom yourself.”
He had the nerve to look surprised. Or the person he was playing did. Sometimes it’s hard to tell. “Really? You think she’d listen to me?”
“Now you’re laying it on too thick. Of course she’ll listen to you. There’s nothing Mom likes more than being needed. No, there is one thing she likes more. She likes you more. So if you need her and you show her that you value her in the act, I think she’ll be back in no time and you can book yourselves anywhere you like, as long as you don’t start with a cruise ship. You might want to give that a little rest.”
Before he could answer my phone buzzed and I saw Lo Toscadero’s name on the caller ID. I hit the accept button quickly to avoid my father’s arguing against his talking to my mother. Which was just weird.
“So did you solve the murder yet?” Lo asked.
“Nope. Haven’t quite managed to tie up the loose ends. What have you got?” If I knew Lo—and I did—she’d spent as much of the day as she could not tending bar at L’Chaim! and instead surfing the web for background on Dray Mattone’s murder. I hadn’t asked her to do that, but then you never really ask Lo for anything. She just does.
“Not much,” she answered. “The director Heather Alizondo once got a restraining order against the producer Les Mannix, saying he was stalking her.”
My eyes might have bulged just a bit. Dad would have noticed, but he was now sitting at the table with a yellow legal pad, making notes on what he might say to Mom to get her to return to the act.
“Whoa, Les was stalking Heather? To the point that she had to go to the cops? How did Sergeant Bostwick not know this?”
“What makes you think he doesn’t?” Lo responded. “Just because he doesn’t tell you something doesn’t mean he’s never heard of it.”
“No, but Jamie Wallace should. There’s no way that could have gotten away from him.”
“Not necessarily,” Lo said. “The request for a restraining order was dropped, Les and Heather settled privately, and now she’s working for him pretty steadily. So something’s up, but it never actually made the legal record because a judge never saw it.”
“How’d you see it?”
“Tabloids, baby. It’s where the real dirt is kept.”
Did this have any bearing on Dray’s murder? If Heather and Les had some private dispute that didn’t involve the show or Dray specifically, how did that shed any light? And if Lo had really gotten her information from a tabloid, could we even be sure it was true?
“I’m not sure that has anything to do with Dray,” I mused aloud.
“No, but this does—the rumor at the time was that the reason Heather wasn’t interested in this Mannix guy is that she had something going on with Dray Mattone.”
“Man! If this guy spent as much time running around as they’re giving him credit for, he never would have gotten one scene shot.” Now I was pacing. “So that brings Denise into play and it also might have something to do with Heather if she heard about the fake letter about Patty’s fake pregnancy.”
“The pregnancy was fake?” Lo asked.
I filled her in on the day’s developments, which was enough to make me want to crawl into bed and stay there until the following April. “Woooowwww,” Lo said after I was done. “And I thought I had a lot of intel.”
“You did,” I said. “I appreciate it. I owe you a drink.”
“I’m a bartender, honey.” Lo laughed quietly.
“A soft drink. Maybe a milkshake.”
“Hardly seems worth it.”
“I’m going to bed, Lo. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” I glanced over and saw Dad had a list of noes that stretched down the left side of his page and yeses that had maybe four items on it. Fatigue was being compounded by … more fatigue.
“No, wait. I have one more thing. Apparently Dray Mattone was very seriously anti-gun and refused to be photographed with one in his hand.”
“So Harve’s story about Dray wanting to practice was a lie,” I said.
“I’m guessing. This is based on an interview Dray gave three years ago. Maybe his stance changed, but I didn’t see anything that indicated it had.” Lo, once loosed on a topic, is like any of my dogs with a new chew toy. There will be no relenting.
“Keep at it, Lo,” I said for no reason. I knew she would.
As soon as we ended the call, Dad looked up from his pad, which had not changed much since I’d checked last. “Lorraine’s helping you figure out Dray Mattone’s murder?” he said.
“Whether I want her to or not.”
He shook his head, put down his pencil—never a pen, or heaven forbid, a computer keyboard for my father—and rubbed his eyes. “I can’t figure out how to convince your mother to work with me again.”
“By being yourself,” I said. “Show her you love and need her and she’ll respond like she always does.”
Dad’s eyes took on a determination I’d seen before when someone told us we couldn’t hold a booking or an audience wasn’t responding the way he’d anticipated. I’d been waiting for this; it was the perfect indication that he was not going to take Mom’s retirement lying down.
He stood up and marched to the door of their bedroom. My mother, who wouldn’t consider closing her eyes before reading for an hour, was certainly still awake. With Dad this worked up and Mom relaxed, it was the perfect time to resolve their issue and get my life—their lives, sorry—back to normal. He opened the door and walked in as I heard my mother softly saying, “Jay!” She wasn’t expecting Dad this early.
I figured this would take a while but would play out successfully, so I read a few new emails, noted that one from Consuelo indicated we still hadn’t heard from Giant Productions about Bagels, which was officially troubling, and sent a text to Sam that read, Haven’t had a good cup of coffee in a while. I waited for a response.
Instead, I got my father walking out of the bedroom much sooner than I would have expected with a look on his face that could only be described as bewildered.
“She said no,” he told me, shaking his head in wonder.
“You want to help me solve a murder tomorrow?” I asked.
Dad’s faced immediately perked up. “Sure.”
Sam texted me back: Tomorrow?
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Getting Dad onto the studio lot was not difficult. For one thing, Gus the guard had seen me enough in the past week to just wave me in. Having Barney’s cage (complete with Barney) in the back seat helped. Gus eyed Dad, asked for his driver’s license, which Dad had at the ready, and nodded after making a copy. He raised the gate and we were in.
“Your plan,” my father said, “is not entirely clear to me.”
Dad was still pretty shaken by my mother’s refusal to rejoin him in the family business
. I hadn’t had a chance to question Mom on her reasoning because Dad had been present this morning and Mom had come out of the bedroom too late to go on the morning walk with the dogs. That would have to wait until later.
The fact that my plan was not entirely clear to me either wasn’t helping. I’d wanted to get Dad involved to soften the blow of the night before, and now I had to more or less manufacture a role for him to play. I knew what I wanted to do: track down Harve Lembeck and ferret out what he knew about Patty’s wild story of being hired to play a crazed fan that morphed into Suspect No. 1 in Dray’s murder. What Dad was going to do here, especially since the sets had been closed for a day now, was less definite.
“It’s simple,” I lied. “You’re pretending to be Barney’s trainer because Patty can’t come to the set. If anyone asks you, that’s your character. You’ve been training parrots for twenty years, okay?”
“Okay, I get my character,” Dad answered as I pulled the car into a parking spot. “But what am I really doing? How am I helping you solve the murder?”
It was a good question. “Ah, that’s the interesting part.” Sure it was. “Remember I told you about that mysterious woman who got up at the memorial service and accused Les Mannix of killing Dray? Nobody I’ve talked to can tell me her name or what it was she was doing here.” All that was true.
“So? Aren’t we assuming that was Patty?” Dad wasn’t trying to be difficult; he was trying to understand. And since he knew me well, he was probably coming to the realization that I was ad-libbing, which left him somewhat in the lurch.
“Probably, although I didn’t think to ask her. So, two things. I want to see if you can at least get a clear description of her and what people saw her do or heard her say. Second, Dray had apparently been meeting on the set, briefly each time, with various people who would show up and then never be seen again. Nobody knows what that was all about, but I’ve heard it said there was some connection to his drug problem. I want you to find out—”
Dad got out of the car and held up a hand to stop me. He didn’t speak loudly despite the fact that nobody in the area seemed terribly interested in what we were doing or saying. “You’re saying this guy had a habit, went through rehab, was trying to get back to sober life, and was having these brief meetings with people nobody else knew that didn’t last long? And the people never came back again?”
That was pretty much the size of it, and I told Dad so. He had a serious look on his face and drew me closer to speak even less loudly. “Dray was attending meetings and he was looking for a sponsor,” he told me.
His comment threw me for a moment; it seemed to come out of nowhere. “How do you know that?” I asked.
My father fixed me with a look. “I’ve known more than a couple of people over the years who went through it,” he said. “He was trying to get it together. If you could find one of those people, they could tell you his state of mind at the time. But they wouldn’t. It’s not the way these things are usually done, but with the schedule a TV star keeps, it’s not that crazy that they’d all come to the set to talk to him. It’s like an audition process. Just seems like he was being picky.”
I blinked a couple of times. “Dad, is there something you haven’t told me?” In an instant my whole concept of reality was being threatened.
Dad let out a quick breath like a rueful laugh. “No,” he said. “Believe me, you would have figured that out by now if it was true. I’ve just known some people. And you see it enough times, you know what it looks like. I’m willing to bet that’s what Dray Mattone was trying to do.”
“So the parade of people could be a dead end,” I said, my mental state returning to what I laughably consider normal. “Even if we knew who they were, none of them would tell us anything. But Heather said they were all carrying guns.”
Dad shrugged. “Not illegal,” he said.
“People keep telling me that. How come nobody knew who they were?”
“There’s a reason Anonymous is in the title,” Dad said.
“So I guess we ignore that. I’m going to look for Harve. Why don’t you take Barney here to use for cover and see if you can find out anything about the mysterious curly-haired woman?”
“Who am I gonna ask?” Dad wanted to know. “The show wrapped yesterday. I’ll be lucky to find a janitor sweeping up.”
I shrugged. “Maybe he knows something.”
Dad stood still a moment, then picked up Barney’s cage and walked away, muttering about how it had been his understanding that I’d had a plan.
I took the moment without a bird to watch to get back into the car and drive over to Giant Productions. Except that Giant’s trailer was no longer parked where it had been the other times I’d been there. I called Consuelo, who reported no word on Bagels’s big break from the production company.
“I’m guessing the real name of the unit was Fly by Night Productions,” I said, and Consuelo did not argue. It was going to be a joy to report this back to Miriam.
It took only a few minutes to drive back to the Dead City sound stages and offices, but there were already changes to the area by the time I got there. The name of the show was no longer on the signs at each door. Those are easily changed out—they’re simply printed on cover stock and slid in and out of frames—but the decision to remove them told me more than I wanted to know.
The show had been canceled. Everybody I’d met on the set was now out of work, and that meant Bostwick and Baker were not going to be able to easily interrogate anyone but Patty. Cops work hard, but they tend to come up with a theory of a crime and then try to find the facts that support it. And it was fairly clear who the presumed suspect was in this case.
That was a problem, but my first priority right now was finding my father and a parrot.
The door wasn’t locked yet, so I opened it and went inside and saw workmen taking apart the set on which I’d seen Dray Mattone work with Barney the one day I was here with a full crew, the last scene Dray would ever shoot. Standing on the floor, watching them disassemble the fake morgue, was Les Mannix in jeans and a white dress shirt, obligatory baseball cap on his head. At least Les wasn’t operating under the delusion that he was a millennial; the cap was not on backward.
I walked over to him and saw the pensive, almost sorrowful look in his eyes. “I’m sorry to see it, Les,” I said. And I meant that. People working on a theater or film production like to say they become families; that’s a stretch, but they do spend many long hours together in pursuit of a common goal. They get pretty friendly and it’s always sad to see that experience come to an end, especially when it’s unexpected.
“We’ll be back,” he insisted. “I’ve got calls in and people are interested. Something will happen inside a week, you’ll see.” But he’d given that speech too many times now and it wasn’t even clear whether he believed it anymore.
“All this because someone walked into Dray’s trailer and shot him.” Hey, I wasn’t that close to the Dead City company. I could use the mood to my advantage. “Why would anybody want to do that?”
There was—and I want to be clear about this—no tear falling from Les Mannix’s eye. He was not happy about what was going on, but he wasn’t about to break down and let himself be seen as a failure. No, Les was determined to be the strong leader, even if there was no one left to lead.
“There were any number of reasons I can think of,” he said with a clipped tone. “The man was coming out of rehab and for all I know had relapsed. He was three thousand miles away from his wife, and who knows how many women were taking her place. He didn’t like being on a TV series anymore and told me so to my face, even while he was signing a contract for three more seasons at an amount of money that would set up sixteen families for generations to come. He was always good to work with on the set, I’ll grant him that, but away from it, Dray Mattone was a hot mess and he hurt a lot of people. I can think of twenty off the top of my head who are not sad that he’s dead.”
Wow. Y
ou don’t often get that big an emotional download all at once. I wondered how much of it was real.
“Were you one of them?” I asked, I thought gently.
Apparently Mannix disagreed with my assessment; he turned and stared, eyes slightly bulging. “I beg your pardon?” he asked. Well, he was polite, anyway.
“I was just wondering. I mean, the way you talked Dray wasn’t the nicest guy anybody ever met. How mad were you at him?” I was still trying for a sort of innocent tone, but there wasn’t any way to mask the intent of the question.
“I did not shoot Dray Mattone, if that’s what you’re asking,” he said. “I didn’t hate him. I wouldn’t even say I disliked him. Business is business. We had our negotiations and his agent took me for all he could. That’s her job.”
As an agent, I was simultaneously offended and flattered. For my clients, the job is really to find work rather than negotiate cushy terms. If I get a cat’s litter box being cleaned out at least once a day written into a contract, I’m on a good run.
“I didn’t really mean to ask that way,” I said, signifying that I had meant to ask that way, but more subtly so Mannix wouldn’t have gotten annoyed. Maybe the guy had shot somebody; those are not the circumstances under which it’s best to irritate them. “I don’t think you had a motive. The contracts were signed and you would have known the impact Dray’s death would have on the show. You didn’t want to see this happen.” I gestured toward the carpenters taking down the set.
“That’s right.” Mannix nodded. The baseball cap bobbed a bit and I wondered if he was losing his hair. “I had no reason to want Dray dead. If I’d wanted him gone I wouldn’t have renewed the contract.”
“Still, I assume the show is insured, right? Wouldn’t you be protected if one of your key cast members was no longer able to perform on the set?”
“Up to a point.” This was business talk. Mannix reverted to his thoughtful-but-tough persona as if he were being interviewed for an article in Variety. “We were insured for any costs incurred if Dray had died while filming something we couldn’t complete. Dray finished his work on this episode. But now we’re facing cancellation by the network, and while they’re saying it’s because Dray got killed, it’s really because they saw our numbers slipping, the show was getting more expensive as cast members got bigger contracts, and they saw a way to cut their losses and run.”
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