Bird, Bath, and Beyond

by E. J. Copperman

  “What about Dray?” I asked. “Did he have a big life insurance policy or something?”

  Mannix looked at me as if I were prescient. “That’s amazing,” he said. “You’d think a guy with that kind of money coming in at that age wouldn’t be worried about life insurance. But in the midst of the negotiations his agent calls me up and says the studio has to pay for a sixteen-million-dollar policy in Dray’s name and that has to be part of the deal. We ended up doing it because it was probably the least expensive part of his contract, but that’s not something you usually get asked to do.”

  That tickled something in the back of my brain, but I didn’t know what. “Who was the beneficiary?” I asked.

  “His wife. Actors, the things they ask for in contracts.” He rolled his eyes. “When we get to cable, we’ll have to scale back and make it cheaper to deliver.”

  “Do you really think you’ll be able to do that?” I asked.

  Mannix dropped the mask he’d put on and looked weary. “I honestly have no idea,” he said. Then he straightened himself, took a breath, and added, “But don’t you dare tell anybody I said that.”

  “Of course. Just one thing: I’m looking for Harve Lembeck. Have you seen him?”

  Les Mannix stood silent for a moment. “Who’s Harve Lembeck?” he asked.

  “The first assistant director.” You’d think the showrunner would know that, but it actually wasn’t all that unusual that he wouldn’t because Les would be so involved with studio and network meetings that he was rarely on the set.

  “No idea,” he said. Then as if he’d been cued, Mannix turned and walked away before I could ask him who on this empty sound stage might be able to help me.

  Given these circumstances, I decided (as I’ll admit I had once before) that the only thing left to do was find Dad and drive home. I walked over to a stagehand—one of the few who was not carrying a heavy part of the set, but had a small lamp in his hand—and asked if he’d seen anyone matching the description I gave of my father. He had not.

  I texted Dad asking where he was and waited a moment, then headed toward the door to get to the parking lot. Maybe Dad had given up on trying to wring information from the stagehands, who wouldn’t have had any, and was back at the car waiting for me. In any event, he didn’t answer.

  I texted to Sam confirming that I’d be around this evening and he at least responded, saying to disregard the CLOSED sign at Cool Beans and just walk in whenever I wanted to, which is what I always do anyway. Sam doesn’t lock up until he goes home.

  Hitting the door on the way out and being somewhat blinded by the bright sunshine, I fumbled in my purse for my sunglasses and put them on. But as I headed into the parking lot I started feeling uneasy about Dad’s not answering. Dad always responds, so this could only mean his phone had died; he’s not great about charging it.

  To test my theory, I pulled out my own phone and called his number. It rang for a while and went to voice mail. Sure enough. The battery must have been dead.

  Once I got to the car and didn’t find Dad and Barney there, I was a little bit concerned. It wasn’t like my father to just take off on his own. Well, yes it was, but he’d always let me know he was doing so. He’s impulsive but thoughtful. Best guess: He thinks he’s onto something and is ignoring the phone because he’s talking to someone from the show about what happened to Dray.

  I considered calling my mother to see if Dad had gotten in touch with her, but that presented two problems: First, I didn’t want to upset Mom by telling her I’d lost her husband, and second, Dad probably wouldn’t have told her his exact location on the lot anyway.

  It gave me a few minutes to think over everything I’d seen and heard since the day I’d accompanied Barney to the Dead City set. And while the whole thing was too large to contemplate all at once, there were nagging loose ends that bothered me. I found myself asking questions and coming up with only speculative answers.

  Standing next to my car in the sunshine, I wasn’t thinking about the parking lot or the sound stage or Bagels and his apparently missed opportunity. I wasn’t thinking about where Dad might be—okay, not too much anyway—and I wasn’t thinking about why I was suddenly interested in seeing Sam to the point that I’d ask if I could drop by.

  Instead, I concentrated on the part of the Dray Mattone murder that I would know and the police wouldn’t: the showbiz aspects. Sure, they had the advantage when it came to bullet trajectories, DNA samples (if they had any), and the physical evidence, not to mention years of experience solving crimes. But I knew how a film set worked and what the motive of everyone in that situation might be.

  Dray Mattone was the only person on the Dead City set who had expressed any dissatisfaction with being there, and that was only to a privileged few. He’d been charming as all get out to me when he didn’t need to be, and according to all the witnesses I’d talked to, he’d been nothing but professional in his work. But apparently his addiction problems had been plaguing him to the point of despair and his marriage to Denise Barnaby had been long-distance, often ignored, and no source of comfort for Dray. What Denise thought when she wasn’t seeking the spotlight was anybody’s guess.

  So Dray had been desperately unhappy according to more than one person in the company. He’d been having short one-off meetings with mysterious figures on the set, who according to Heather Alizondo had all been carrying guns. Of course, Heather was packing heat too, not to mention her shaky history with Les Mannix, and still everybody kept telling me that all the firepower around the set was no big deal. I appeared to be unusually sensitive on the subject.

  Then there was the mysterious curly-haired brunette who had accosted Les Mannix at Dray’s memorial service. People had seen her around for a few days, but nobody knew who she might be. She was seen going into Dray’s trailer but not around the time of the shooting, when apparently nobody was paying attention to Dray’s trailer.

  And I was sure I’d recognized her voice from somewhere, but when?

  The thing that finally did it for me was a comment both Heather and Dad had made when we were discussing the parade of armed figures who had met with Dray on the set recently. Independently, each of them had compared the one-a-day meetings in the corner of the sound stage as being similar to an audition process for a role in a film or TV show. And that was when I realized where I had heard the curly-haired woman’s voice before.

  It had come from Barney.

  There wasn’t time to think about that because I was shaken—almost literally—from my reverie. From where I was standing I could see the corner of what had been Dray Mattone’s trailer. I could only assume it hadn’t been hauled away for some serious renovation by the company that had rented it to Dead City because it was still considered a crime scene, although there was no yellow tape around it that I could see.

  What was especially alarming at this moment was that someone was walking toward the trailer’s side entrance, not exactly slowly but in a somewhat jerky, awkward fashion. I almost yelled out because heading toward the trailer was my father, carrying Barney’s cage in his left hand. That was unusual. Dad is right handed.

  I stopped because he was being followed closely—very closely—by a woman. That proximity was significant. I could tell even from this distance that the woman was guiding Dad toward the trailer and holding him with her left hand on his left hip. I couldn’t see Dad’s face, but it didn’t look like a happy scene and I wanted to cry out.

  The woman was the curly-haired brunette from the memorial service. She was almost holding Dad in a hug from behind because her right hand was completely obscured in his right side.

  I’m no expert, but I was willing to bet she was holding a gun.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  I’m not an idiot. The first thing I did was to call Bostwick.

  “You see the gun?” he asked as soon as I ran breathlessly through my plea.

  “I can’t say I saw it exactly, but the way they were walking and the f
act that my father is headed into Dray Mattone’s trailer with a mysterious woman—yeah, there was a gun,” I said.

  “You don’t have any proof yet, but I’m alerting the studio security and I’ll send a car there right now. Whatever you do, don’t follow him inside.” Bostwick hung up.

  He was right, of course. I hadn’t actually confirmed the presence of a gun in my father’s ribs. I didn’t know the woman was forcing him inside. The best thing to do was to wait for the studio cops and then the NYPD cruiser to show up. It wasn’t going to help Dad at all for me to come bursting into the trailer and upsetting the curly-haired woman.

  I ran for the trailer. He’s my dad.

  Luckily the trailers here were not surrounded, as many in the Los Angeles industry are, with gravel to make it seem more “homey.” So my feet didn’t make a ton of noise when I arrived at the steps to the trailer entrance. In the distance, maybe half a mile away, I could see the studio security car, flashers not operating, sirens not sounding, on its way to me. It didn’t seem to be in that much of a hurry. But I was.

  I was careful to step lightly on the three stairs up to the trailer door, which I was hoping desperately was not locked. If the curly-haired woman had decided to keep Dad and Barney inside and been careful, I’d only be alerting her to the presence of someone outside without actually achieving anything toward the goal, which was getting Dad out safe. And Barney.

  The key—no pun intended—here was stealth, which is something I’m not great at. When I was eight I tripped over a slipper backstage at one of the Catskills hotels, which led to me knocking over a tray of water glasses, which led to my making my entrance onstage soaking wet and bleeding from the left foot. And that wasn’t even my worst performance that month.

  Now I reached for the doorknob and silently attempted to turn it. It moved, which was an excellent sign but not the whole ball game. Once I’d turned it (so slowly the motion could have been adapted into a PBS miniseries), I pushed very gently at the door to open it.

  It did not move.

  My heart stopped beating for a moment. I closed my eyes and stifled the scream I wanted to let loose. I couldn’t get into the trailer, and making a loud sound outside the trailer would only … Wait, that was it.

  If I created enough commotion out here, the curly-haired woman would have to open the door if she wanted to see what was going on. Sure there were windows in the trailer, but I could duck down low enough to avoid being seen through them. All I had to do was decide on the right kind of ruckus to make. The studio car was still at least three hundred yards away.

  The trick was not being obvious in my motives. An electronically generated police siren, for example, was something I could easily download on my phone, but it would sound fake and would alert the woman inside that someone was trying to get her to slip up or at the very least was aware of her presence and her bad intentions.

  I fell back on my strength, which is pretending to be something I’m not. I hollered at the top of my lungs like a woman who had just broken her leg in three places. It was possible the memory of that entrance over the broken glasses was fueling my performance. I’m a Method faker.

  As soon as I let out my piteous scream I dropped to the ground just next to the stairs and waited only a few seconds. Then I yelled again just to let my quarry know she was not dealing with one isolated incident that would go away, but with someone who could draw attention to this area of the lot for an extended period of time if she didn’t act quickly.

  Sure enough, the door to the trailer opened. It opened out, and I realized that I could have simply pulled on the door and avoided this whole badly written scenario. But there was no time to ruminate now on my own stupidity because a head was sticking itself out through the doorway to investigate.

  It was Dad’s, and I was glad to see it, even if the gun behind his head was now clearly in sight. I felt like calling Bostwick back to tell him I’d been right.

  Instead I tried to make eye contact with my father, but he didn’t react at all when I stuck my face out of the shadows and looked at him. Then he looked down at his feet, which seemed really weird.

  That is, it seemed weird until Dad said, “What’s this?” and reached down as if he were picking something up off the stairs. That sudden move, which he could justify easily should his captor object, allowed him to get the gun away from his head and pointing into the open air just for a moment.

  In that time I launched myself up the stairs and toward the curly-haired woman, who was indeed the person standing behind Dad in the trailer doorway. My father ducked out of the way and I ran past him and, uncontested, into Dray Mattone’s trailer. I caught a flash of the gunmetal as I flew into what ended up being one of the leather armchairs in Dray’s living room area.

  “Hold it!” yelled the woman with the gun. That made no sense. I was the one on the easy chair and she was the one holding the weapon. I turned to look at her and was disappointed to have been right in my assumptions.

  “Patty,” I said, “I really wish it wasn’t you.”

  My father, who to his credit had tried to run for cover, stopped as Patty Basilico aimed her pistol at him and gestured him back into the trailer. He followed the visual command and stood next to me. Knowing Dad, I realized he was probably figuring that if Patty shot at me he could jump in the path of the bullet. My father is both dear and melodramatic.

  Of course we were being held at gunpoint, so maybe melodramatic was a bit of a stretch under the circumstances.

  Patty reached up and took off the long curly-haired wig. She placed it carefully on the table as if it might break, holding the gun on Dad and me and looking as calm and normal as if she were dropping off another plate of chocolate chip cookies at my office.

  “Well, it is me,” she said. She pulled a chair away from the table and sat down, leveling the gun the whole time. Not a second of wasted movement, not an opportunity for either of us to rush Patty or the door before being shot. This was not the first time she had held people at gunpoint.

  “It is okay for me to be upset about her having a gun?” I asked Dad. I’ll admit it; I felt a little vindicated.

  “I can’t say as I’m crazy about it either,” he said, and closed ranks just a little bit more on my right side.

  Barney, in his cage on a side table nearer to me than to Patty, made sure we knew it was not possible to kill a zombie. It offered little comfort.

  “How’d you get involved in this?” I asked my father. “You were supposed to be…”

  “Looking for the curly-haired brunette from the memorial service for Mattone,” Dad said. He gestured toward Patty. “I found her. I take it she’s your client?”

  I shrugged. “Pretty sure I’ll be resigning the case,” I said. Then I looked at Patty. “Why’d you come back to the lot? There’s so much I don’t understand.”

  “You’ll have to get used to it,” she said. She seemed to be consulting her phone while keeping the gun trained on us. Her eyes darted back and forth from one plane to the other. “I don’t plan on explaining my evil plan to you, Mr. Bond.”

  “Oh, come on,” I tried. “That’s not fair. If you’re going to shoot us, at least let us know why.” Dad tightened at the word shoot. He probably thought it was a bad idea to remind Patty of that, although I didn’t think she was bound to forget the gun in her hand anytime soon.

  “Sorry. But don’t worry. I’m not going to shoot you. I have another plan for you two that’ll look less obvious.” Patty sounded like she was planning the agenda for next month’s meeting of the PTA. She still had that homey, cheerful tone to her voice. It was really weird.

  This was about keeping this nutty scene going until Bostwick showed up, mostly because I had absolutely no confidence in the studio cops, who had probably been told by the NYPD not to take any action unless they saw an immediate danger. All they’d see was a trailer that was still. Probably they wouldn’t even knock on the door until the real cops showed up, and would be happy not to
do so.

  The best thing studio security does is keep people away from a closed set, and they’d clearly done a bang-up job here. So it was up to me to keep the scene going, but I had a master improviser with me.

  “She’s not going to tell us,” I said to Dad, “but I think I know what happened anyway.”

  “Really!” My father sounded like I’d offered him the recipe to an especially sinful chocolate cake that I’d just gotten from the pages of Good Housekeeping. “You figured it out?”

  “I’m not sure, but I have a theory.” I took a look at Patty, who appeared less interested in my theory than in whatever was occupying her attention on her smartphone. Probably she’d googled how to tie people up in a luxurious trailer without any actual rope on hand. The key was to engage her. “You were hired to kill Dray Mattone, weren’t you, Patty?”

  She didn’t look up, nor did she answer. Dad would have to carry the load in this performance. “Hired?” he asked. “She wasn’t mad at him all on her own?”

  “Put down the gun!” Barney shouted. Maybe he was reenacting the crime.

  “No, I don’t think so,” I answered Dad. “See, Dray was depressed. I don’t know if he was clinically depressed or not, but he was under the care of a psychiatrist, who certainly wouldn’t tell us anything even if we asked, and was on some antidepressant medication. But he’d decided it made him gain weight and had stopped taking it.”

  Where were those cops, already?

  “So how does that lead to your client here being paid to shoot him? The psychiatrist was mad because Dray went off his meds?” Dad, as my mother has often observed, is incapable of not going for the joke.