by Rick Copp
“I just can’t understand how this happened.”
“Willard had a lot of problems, Jarrod. So he drank. Quite a bit, I’m afraid.”
“What kind of problems do you think he had?”
She hadn’t expected this. She was hoping the Cliff Notes explanation of her son’s death would satisfy me and send me on my way. She was wrong.
“He was unhappy. He couldn’t get work as an actor, and I know that bothered him. Relationships never seemed to work out. He couldn’t catch a break. I used to see such hopelessness in his eyes. Sometimes I think he was looking for a way out . . . some way to stop the pain . . .”
“He got a part the day before he died,” I said. “A good one. We were both up for it and he got it. I hadn’t seen him that happy in a long time.”
Tamara fixed her gaze upon me. She was either embarrassed to be so out of touch with her son or she was hiding something. Her eyes pleaded with me to stop this assault and retreat. No such luck.
“Did you know it was his birthday last week?”
“Yes. The police told me some friends were throwing him a party and he didn’t show up,” she said, her voice quivering for maximum effect. “That’s when someone found him.”
“I did. I was the one who found him.”
She kept staring at me, trying to figure out what I wanted from her. She fumbled for words, anything to say. “You may not know this, Jarrod, but he was also very depressed about getting older.”
I shrugged. “Didn’t seem to bother him last week. But you know him a lot better than I do. You’re his mother.”
She nodded, her face tight, and she locked me with her gaze once again. She knew my comment was bubbling over with sarcasm and it pissed her off. She decided not to respond and started to turn away when I piped in again.
“I’m just confused, Mrs. Schulberg. All these things you’re saying about Willard, his hopeless state of mind, how he drank too much, I never saw any of that.”
Tamara looked at Spiro, who shifted uncomfortably, his eyes darting back and forth. He offered her no help. She stared at me, her face frozen in a mask of calm. Underneath I was sure was another story.
“Perhaps you didn’t know him as well as you thought,” she said.
“How well did you really know him?”
“He was my son. I loved him. But I won’t lie to you. We weren’t as close as I wanted to be. I begged him to come visit me more often.”
I felt it coming. I knew I should have kept my mouth shut, but I just couldn’t resist.
“Unless you only have one extra place at the Thanksgiving table, and Judd Nelson’s already agreed to come.”
She bristled, surprised I even knew about that. But she wasn’t going to give me any further ammunition I could use against her later.
“That was completely inappropriate,” she said.
“I think your son’s death is completely inappropriate.”
Spiro finally stepped in. He moved in front of Tamara, his body physically shielding her from any more of my comments. The first thing I noticed was his open shirt and bronzed chest, the thick, black hair matted against it from the rain. The jerk didn’t even have the decency to wear a tie to the funeral.
His cold, dark eyes bore into me. “Leave it alone.”
He tried intimidating me by moving up close, hovering over me. And it worked. I didn’t want to mess with him. But I’m also an actor, and it wasn’t hard to make it look like I was unimpressed by his bulk.
Why I was antagonizing these two was beyond me. Perhaps I was overcome by grief and anger, and they were the easiest targets, given how they had both treated Willard when he was alive. Or perhaps there was something else at work. Something driving me forward to sort out the devastating events of the last few days that wasn’t yet clear to me.
I arched my back and glared at them with a hard, unflinching stare overflowing with contempt. “I want you to know that I don’t buy any of the bullshit you two are dishing out.”
I figured that was it. Spiro was going to beat me to a pulp. My eyes flickered down to see his hand rising up in a fist, ready to strike. But then, I heard a comforting, familiar voice.
“Ready to go, Jarrod?”
It was Charlie. Like a guardian angel, he was right there behind me. And his presence deflated Spiro’s immediate plans to mark up my face.
Tamara was quite flustered at this point, and was back to playing with her hair. This had all been too much for her. “Please, Jarrod, just let Willard rest in peace.”
“That’s what I want too, Mrs. Schulberg. But right now, something tells me he can’t.”
Her mouth dropped open at the insinuation. Spiro took her by the arm, and guided her to the limo. He ushered her inside, climbed in behind her and slammed the door shut. The car roared away.
I stood there with Charlie. I had no idea what possessed me to confront a dead man’s mother like that on the day of her own son’s funeral. I certainly wasn’t proud of it. But as I watched the limo disappear in the cloudy haze, the wind kicked up again and the rain beat down once more, and I became convinced that it was Willard Ray Hornsby’s restless spirit urging me forward to find out what really happened on the night of his thirtieth birthday party.
Chapter Five
I suppose if Charlie had some 8 x 10 photos made up of his handsome face and started driving around town to auditions, I might feel a little threatened. It’s never a good idea to compete with your boyfriend. So I understood why Charlie was upset that I wanted to painstakingly examine the facts surrounding Willard Ray Hornsby’s untimely death.
Acting was my business. Crime was his.
And since his fellow LAPD detectives had already ruled that Willard’s drowning was an accident, there was no point in either of us poking our noses into the matter any further. If only it were that easy for me to let something go.
I still had too many questions. And it certainly didn’t help that I was an obsessed conspiracy theorist, or as Charlie sometimes referred to me, “conspiracy nut.” All depends on your point of view, I suppose. I was also replaying my psychic reading from Isis over and over in my mind. She didn’t say a close friend was going to drown accidentally. She said a close friend was going to be murdered. And she was spot on most of the time with her predictions. But given the skeptics, Charlie included, it wouldn’t have helped to bring up that little tidbit as proof it was a homicide.
I’ve always been fascinated by the possibility of foul play. And when you have a bunch of actors for friends who live to create their own drama, it can become an obsessive pursuit. There was that cruise to Catalina we took one Thanksgiving weekend to recreate the mysterious drowning of Natalie Wood. Charlie had assumed we were just going to kick back, stuff ourselves with turkey, and play the Silver Screen Edition of Trivial Pursuit, but that was before I cast him in the role of Christopher Walken and myself as Robert Wagner. Laurette gave a memorable turn as the doomed Natalie.
So it came as no surprise that I was like our beloved Snickers with a new rawhide bone. I just couldn’t let it go.
As we climbed into bed the night after the funeral, I couldn’t help myself. “Willard’s house isn’t cordoned off with yellow police tape or anything, is it?”
Charlie stopped after taking his shirt off and stared at me. “No. It’s not a crime scene. Why?”
“Just curious.”
“I don’t want you going over there.”
“I’ve got a busy day tomorrow. I couldn’t go even if I wanted to,” I said as I fluffed my pillows and slipped underneath the massive goose down comforter.
Our bedroom was a serene periwinkle blue with soft lighting and a big comfortable bed you could get lost in. It was my favorite room in the house, not just for the obvious reasons, but because I felt safe in here, like I was cocooned away from the pressures of real life.
Our house was inverted, so the bedrooms were downstairs from the upper floor, which had the kitchen, living room, den and dining room. Bu
ilt against a hillside, the structure looked out onto a stone courtyard and a cluster of giant bamboo trees and a small trickling waterfall that added to the peacefulness of the property. One felt far away from the bustling expanse of Los Angeles, yet downtown Hollywood was only a short five-minute drive down a hill.
Our home was an escape from the rest of the world, but on this night, the one person I needed to escape from was on the other side of the bed. And he wasn’t going to cut me any slack.
“I don’t believe you,” he said. “I think you want to find some evidence that suggests Willard’s death wasn’t an accident, and that his mother had something to do with it because you don’t like her.”
He was absolutely right, though I loathed admitting it. So I didn’t. Feigning indignation was far more satisfying. “How can you say that? What’s happened between us? When did you stop trusting me?” As thick as I was laying it on, I knew it was useless. Charlie knew me too well.
He sighed. “I want you to promise you’re not going to go over to that house tomorrow and stir up any trouble.”
Checkmate. The “p” word. Charlie was a pro when it came to mining feelings of guilt. Actors rarely felt guilt over anything, but I did. And when the man I shared my life with made me promise, I was hard-pressed to break it without a consuming sense of dread, and he knew it. What he didn’t know was that in my mind, I wasn’t going over to Willard’s house to “stir up trouble,” I was going over there simply for my own sense of closure. To walk through his house before saying goodbye to him for the last time. And if for some bizarre, unexpected reason, a clue turned up that led to some answers, then so be it. It may have been a questionable technicality, but I was desperate.
Luckily at that moment, Snickers scuttled into the room, leapt up on the bed, and snuggled in the crook of my arm. It allowed me to avert my eyes from Charlie when I said, “I promise.”
Charlie seemed satisfied. He gave me a soft kiss on the mouth, then rolled over and went to sleep. I tried ignoring the pangs that stabbed me in the stomach. Those incessant guilt pangs that kept reminding me of how I had just lied to my boyfriend. But for me, I had to know the truth. The circumstances just didn’t add up in my mind. And in my naiveté, I actually believed that nothing could go wrong and Charlie would never have to find out anything.
I picked up Laurette at her office in Glendale and we drove over the 405 freeway towards Brentwood the following morning. I didn’t want to go back to Willard’s house alone, and I knew Laurette’s curious nature would get the best of her, and that she would want to go with me.
The promise of lunch at the Cheesecake Factory once we were finished sealed the deal. That was one promise I had no problem keeping. Our Dr. Atkins’s diets were apparently history, though neither of us was willing to say it out loud just yet.
“Maybe if I got you more auditions, you wouldn’t get so obsessed about stuff like this,” Laurette said as we exited the freeway, and turned onto Sunset, heading towards Brentwood. Laurette was big on blaming herself for everything, and she was very concerned that this whole Willard business was going to drive a wedge between Charlie and me.
“First of all, I’m not obsessed. I just feel I owe it to Willard.”
Laurette gave me that look that said, “We both know you’re obsessed, but in the interest of being a supportive friend, I’ll just nod encouragingly.”
Willard had always wanted to live in Brentwood. It was where Marilyn Monroe lived. He had adored Marilyn. He wasn’t even born in 1962 when she died of a pill overdose, or perhaps by the hand of one of the Kennedys (we’ve already established I’m a conspiracy theorist), but there was something about her tragic life that spoke to him. In fact, Willard’s house was only a few blocks away from the house where Marilyn died. He always had this need to be close to her. His bookshelves were lined with biographies of her life, and his most prized possession was a signed poster from Some Like It Hot. I remembered the day he took all the residual money he made from a recurring role on Who’s the Boss? playing one of Alyssa Milano’s boyfriends and outbid everybody for it at a celebrity auction. And now in a cruel twist of fate, Willard, like his heroine, had died at home alone in Brentwood, with the strange circumstances still a mystery.
I parked the car at the curb outside Willard’s home. The immaculate tree-lined street was quiet, except for a lone elderly gardener a few houses down trimming a hedge with his clippers.
Laurette climbed out of the passenger’s side, and joined me as we headed up the walk to the front door. She was starting to have second thoughts.
“This isn’t breaking and entering or anything like that, is it?”
“Of course not,” I lied. “Willard was a friend.”
Laurette’s eyes flickered back and forth, checking to make sure no one was watching us. The gardener down the block was immersed in his work, and never even looked up as I marched up to the door and jiggled the knob. It was locked.
“Let’s try around back.”
Before Laurette could protest, I stepped down off the small porch, and pried open a chipped, weathered wooden side gate. I slipped through, and Laurette, not wanting to be left behind alone, followed close on my heels.
We found ourselves in the backyard. Except for a few chirping birds and a skittish squirrel that ambled up a tree as we approached, the area was still, almost like a painting. The morning breeze stirred up a few leaves as we both stared at the small lap pool.
“Is that where you found him?” Laurette asked, her voice tense.
I nodded. It had been almost a week since the night I stumbled across Willard’s limp and lifeless body, but the image was as strong in my mind as if I were seeing it for the first time. I couldn’t shake it, which probably explained my need to push ahead and prove there was more to his death than a simple trip over some patio furniture and a headfirst dive into this tiny pool.
Laurette was starting to panic. She checked her watch, and looked at me with pleading eyes. “It’s already eleven-thirty. You know how crowded the Cheesecake Factory gets at lunchtime. If we don’t head over there soon, we’ll never get a table.”
“I just want to check things out inside.”
I sauntered over to the sliding glass door that led into Willard’s living room and pulled on the handle. It was locked too. Then I noticed a small window leading into a downstairs bathroom that was cracked open. I had been on the Atkins Diet just long enough to convince myself that I could squeeze through it.
I waded through some bushes to get to it, grabbed the sill, and hoisted myself up. I could hear Laurette’s hushed, urgent voice behind me. “What are you doing? Stop it! Don’t do that!” But it was too late. I was already half way inside. There was no going back now.
Photos of Marilyn during various stages of her career adorned the small, spotless bathroom. I paused long enough to look at one candid moment from the set of her last film, The Misfits, that Willard had put in an expensive silver frame and placed lovingly next to a medicine cabinet mirror. There was sadness in her eyes, a sense of hopelessness. So much vulnerability captured in the briefest of moments. I wondered if I was fooling myself. Maybe Willard’s mother Tamara was right. Maybe he had given up on life, and was slowly killing himself with booze. Maybe I was chasing answers that didn’t exist. After all, he worshipped Marilyn, and Marilyn suffered a similar tragic demise. Maybe all of this was exactly what Willard wanted.
Or maybe that’s exactly what someone wanted everybody to think.
I left the bathroom, and crossed into the living room, where I spotted Laurette pacing nervously outside the sliding glass door. I flipped the latch on the inside handle and pulled it open. She plowed inside, and slammed the door shut behind her.
“I’m a wreck. Just do what you came here to do, and let’s get the hell out of here.”
The police had already combed the house from top to bottom and found nothing out of the ordinary. Everything seemed to be exactly the same as the night Charlie and I had last been here
. I assumed Tamara and Spiro had yet to scour the place for anything of value.
I started in the kitchen, checking all the drawers, but found only some spare keys, a few take out menus, assorted corkscrews and kitchenware.
Laurette yanked open the refrigerator and found a wheel of Brie cheese. She sniffed it.
“I wonder if this is still good.”
I smiled. Food always became an overriding obsession when we were nervous. Or sad. Or happy. Or excited. Food was just an overriding obsession, come to think of it.
As Laurette shut the refrigerator door, she stopped to look at the wide array of magnets that decorated the massive Amana fridge. Most of them were miniature posters of Marilyn’s films including The Seven-Year Itch, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and How to Marry A Millionaire. There were a few other movie classics and vintage stars represented, but Marilyn dominated. It was then that my eye caught something: a small slip of paper sticking out of the bottom of the refridgerator. It must have been stuck to the fridge with a magnet, and somehow fallen off. I bent down, used my index finger to slide it out from underneath the grate, and blew the dust off it. It was a check drawn from Willard’s Wells Fargo account, and made out to someone named Terry Duran.
“You know a Terry Duran?” I asked Laurette.
She shook her head. I looked at the amount. Five hundred dollars. I decided to look for more clues upstairs. Laurette had no intention of separating herself from me, so she gamely followed.
Willard’s bedroom was small and cozy, and on his night table I found a couple of books with interesting titles . . . Finding True Love in a Man Eat Man World: The Intelligent Guide to Gay Dating, Romance, and Eternal Love and Living Well: The Gay Man’s Essential Health Guide. Tucked away inside the health guide was a receipt from A Different Light, an independent bookstore specializing in gay and lesbian books, located in the heart of West Hollywood. The books had been purchased on the day he died, probably as a birthday present to himself. Why would Willard bother to buy a couple of self-help titles if he was so hell bent on drinking himself to death? Tamara’s convenient and easy summary of her son’s state of mind felt more off the mark every minute.
