Voices in the Wardrobe

by Marlys Millhiser

  But fees for contests that never paid the winners offered nothing and were well known in the industry’s fringes. They just weren’t dealt with, discussed. It was like special interests bribing congressmen and all the other injustices in this world that are too huge to get a handle on. You hope someone else will address the issue.

  This young man’s name was Brodie Caulfield. He was dangerous.

  “As a pitch it needs work but I found the story idea intriguing and by the number of young faces gone suddenly pale out in the room behind you, I may not be alone,” Charlie told him and the room.

  Each judge offered a spoken comment and then wrote on a numbered card with the sacrifice’s name on it. Charlie had cringed when Dr. Howard called this “giving notes.”

  Charlie wrote, I’d like to see a treatment on this and winked when she handed it to him.

  Brodie was pretty much the bright spot of her afternoon, a long afternoon with a three-hour session. And only a twenty-minute break, during which Brodie slipped her an envelope and turned away to speak to nervous aspirants about the interesting mentality of the Hollywood fringe society. Charlie was earning her honorarium. Never again.

  “They” bombed the Celebrity Pit, was her every other thought. How could all these people go on as if it hadn’t happened?

  And if she heard the words “segue,” “back story,” or “wrap” one more time she would throw up her late breakfast right there in front of the whole room. But she heard them and she didn’t. Hollywood agents really are tough.

  Her cellular had recharged overnight while she’d had a good night’s sleep, and she’d returned calls from Libby, Luella, and Caroline VanZant, all of whom had been trying to contact her. Her room answering machine had refused to overdose on any more messages. Luella Ridgeway informed her there was no destruction at the office or the bank building in which C & M was housed. Some electricity and communications were out, but people still worked on laptops and by cellular. She could not leave now and come back to Maggie.

  Charlie wondered if Mitch’s new film would be jerked because distributors, theater companies, and customers might worry about a backlash from Muslim extremists.

  “Nancy Drew meets J. Lo in outer space. And the universe will never be the same!”

  Ohgod.

  Hang in there. You can do this.

  “Roman gladiator travels forward in time and runs amok in sorority house. He …”

  Time to pop a Pepto.

  “Hallucinating stripper …”

  Okay, let’s look at it this way. There seems to be no swelling of emotional backlash in this room filled with such desperate hope. Maybe dear Brodie defused it with his own little bomb. We feel safer than we did last night in the hallway, don’t we?

  Libby’s message had been, as it often was, mind blowing. “Mom, do not believe what you read. I am not pregnant. You are not going to be a grandma. Oh, that reminds me, Grandma wants you to call her. Mrs. Beesom OD’d on something but is fine and back from the emergency room. Jacob and I are taking care of her so I can’t come to Maggie. Who the hell is Kenneth Cooper? You know how I hate to have my friends see your picture in the paper with some guy. You are my mother, don’t forget. Oh, Kate came to clean up after Tuxedo and had a good talk with him. Gotta go, bye.”

  Kate Gonzales, bless her every breath, cleaned their little house, and had more sense than half of Long Beach and all of Congdon and Morse Representation, Inc. Jacob Forney was the only male other than Tuxedo who occupied the four small homes connected by an inner courtyard and surrounding high stucco walls, gated from street in front and alley behind.

  Caroline VanZant reported in, that Maggie Stutzman had finished another day with no medications, alcohol, fat, sugar, or tears. She had, however, removed the lid from the toilet tank and used it to smash the screen of the television inside the wardrobe. It would, of course, be charged to her account.

  Charlie wondered if it was possible to overdose on Pepto Bismol. But hey, at least she wasn’t a grandmother—where the hell did that come from? Libby didn’t read newspapers or watch news on TV so how did she know about Kenny Cowper? Probably from Jacob Forney or Doug Esterhazie or his father, Ed, of Esterhazie Concrete fame, who was about to marry his third on Sunday. Charlie popped another little pink Pepto and wondered if she’d live to see Sunday.

  “Hi, Jerry Parks with the Union-Tribune. We met at the Sea Spa at the Marina del Sol the other day? Please don’t run away this time. I’m investigating the murder there and understand—you sure don’t look old enough to be a grandmother.” He’d caught her slipping out of the ladies’ room in the lobby which was in a separate building from her room and the conference rooms.

  “What is all this grandmother stuff?”

  Kenny was just coming out of the gents next door. “Charlie, there’s a private bar, not far if you want to sneak away. Monroe’s there already. Said I’d bring you.”

  “We’ll have to kidnap him. He’s press.”

  “Give me your cell?” Kenny asked Jerry Parks pleasantly. “Don’t want to miss the action, do you? Where’s your photographer?”

  “Who are you? What’s my cell and photographer got to do with—”

  “Guess he doesn’t want to go with us, Charlie. I’m her bodyguard. Let’s step into the men’s and I’ll block you into a stall so she can make a getaway. Real reporters don’t pass up chances to get on the inside of a story.”

  Jerry Parks went for his cell and Kenny grabbed it out of his hand before he could punch 911 or his photographer’s number and handed it to Charlie. “You wanna hide this weapon somewhere in the ladies?”

  “But that’s against the law—you can’t—”

  By the time Charlie returned to the lobby after dropping the cellular weapon in the sanitary napkin bin’s disposal slot, Jerry Parks had agreed that he’d rather go to the private party. But he squirmed when Kenny shoved him into a bright red car at the lobby door and they sped off to the Bahia close by.

  “Photographer was in the parking lot,” Kenny explained.

  Brodie Caulfield, driving, winked at her in the rear view mirror. “Lots of budding screenwriters were too. Word’s out you drive a metallic blue Dodge Ram, Ms. Greene, and there’s only one of those in the parking lot.”

  “And it hasn’t moved since you got here,” the reporter from the local paper said. “But you have.”

  Kenny added, “Yeah, for somebody who doesn’t want to get hassled, you sure know how to stand out.”

  The patio bar at the Bahia was deserted but for their little grouping. Keegan had needed a break from the aspirants too. “I enjoy adulation, but there is something else in the conference air back there. It’s a little scary.”

  “Desperation.” Charlie ordered a margarita with salt and dug into the nachos somebody had ordered placed in the center of each of the two tables, shoved together.

  Chorizo, pintos, corn kernels, melted cheese, chopped green chiles, black olives, raw tomatoes, green onion, leaf lettuce sliced into strips on corn chips with a lime, and pineapple and roasted-chile salsa. A welcome and delicious dinner, sadists would consider an appetizer. Charlie would need it. “How do I get my truck back? I have to go to Maggie at the Sea Spa. I want to try to kidnap her and bring her back to my room at the Islandia.”

  Fourteen

  “So who all is escaping, Jason North and the other shark? Sarah?”

  “She’s already here.” And Dr. Grant Howard was already looped. “In the ladies. The rest of the faculty, Jason and Morrie, are at the Islandia cocktail party where they should be and mingling with the attendees as we all should be. I was abducted by Mr. Monroe and Sarah. Why do you not wish to socialize with the students you came to teach? Who are paying good money for it too.” His voice deep and resonant, his diction dramatic, his thinning hair a comb-over dyed an innovative shade of dirty rust, his florid complexion deepening to rose when he felt thwarted.

  “Not everybody feeds on desperation like you do, Doctor,” Brod
ie said. “You an MD, PhD, Masters in English lit or psychology? What? Veterinary medicine?”

  “You know, I always wondered that too, Grant.” Sarah Newman returned to her chair and martini-up. It was that kind of day.

  Grant Howard ignored the change of subject. “Have you no pity? Those desperate aspiring young talents are the future of Hollywood. We all have a responsibility here to encourage their endeavors in a very voracious and difficult field. I, for one, am proud of the Institute and all it stands for.”

  “I kind of liked the hallucinating stripper, myself,” Kenny said, ignoring the subject too. “But then I’m not faculty.”

  “Who are you exactly?” Jerry, the ferret, asked Kenny. “You seem to hang out with the big shots around here.”

  “He’s an investigative reporter like you,” Charlie said and ordered another margarita, “and my client, Kenneth Cooper.”

  “The Last of the Manly Hardy Boys? Dead Time in Disneyland? And you wrote for the Miami Herald.” Jerry Parks had a boyish look about him, sideburns and mustache notwithstanding. “I thought you were a much older guy.”

  “And you thought I was too young to be a grandma. Where did that come from?”

  Keegan Monroe pulled a folded newspaper clipping from his shirt pocket and handed it to her. “Was hoping, as busy as you are, you might possibly miss this.” He was an odd man. Prison seemed to have given him more confidence than success had. “Star Universe.”

  The Star Universe, a tabloid actually not published in Florida, tended to concoct stories about Hollywood stars and their peccadillos and families. Rarely did they bother with mere agents. The picture was of Libby Greene dancing with (to Charlie) a total stranger at some outdoor venue and under lights. He had “predator” written all over him. Libby Greene, daughter of Mitch Hilsten’s agent-girlfriend, seen partying at producer Clint Melneck’s estate with his youngest son, Gary, is rumored to be pregnant with Melneck’s first grandchild. It was this sort of unfortunate wording that had gotten Charlie in trouble before—she was an agent but not Mitch’s. Congdon and Morse would be flooded with filmscripts for Mitch and they would get tossed unopened. Libby Greene, however, was her daughter.

  Charlie took her margarita and cell out to the rescued sea lion garden next to the patio bar but concealed by palms and spiky things. Paths circled a series of connecting pools where the sea lions could glide over huge rocks and slumber still in the deepest part of the pool but not hide from the hotel guests wanting to stroll by and watch their every move. Today, Charlie could really identify with the sea lions.

  She stopped to lean on the stone wall of an arched footbridge between pools, the fronds of some exotic swordlike thing clacking in the breeze, when Libby and not her cell’s voice mail answered Charlie’s sweaty panic attack. She nearly choked on a slug of salty margarita and relief.

  When she returned to the table she was much settled down, even had some more nachos.

  Kenny’s grin was both satyrical and satirical though it showed little of his teeth and less mirth. “You should be listening to this, Charlie. Dr. Howard knows a few things about the Sea Spa at the Marina del Sol.”

  Jerry Parks, busy with PDA and stylus, apparently happy to have been abducted now, was so intent on the tiny screen, he had to keep blinking his eyes back into focus.

  “Poor Judith. She deserved better.” He teared up and shook his head. “She and Caroline VanZant were thrick as thieves, before the divorce. I, pershonally, do not condone divorce.”

  “You, personally, have a wife who’ll put up with anything, even you.” Sarah Newman was losing a few inhibitions herself. “My sister never did have enough starch.”

  “No amount of starch could straighten the spine of a female that rotund.” Even with the slurs, his trained voice and perfect modulation would have made that last pronouncement a momentous statement. But if written, the period would have been drowned in an even deeper, yet still modulated belch.

  “Married to you, she’d have to find something to enjoy.” Sarah had an old-fashioned pageboy without the bangs and a good start on the wrinkles.

  “Tell Charlie about the relationship between the VanZants and Judith Judd,” Kenny said in a calming voice and signaled to the hovering waiter for another round.

  Charlie waved a hand over the salt-encrusted rim of her goblet-glass and shook her head to be left out of this largess, and noticed the admiration in Jerry Parks’ eyes as he stilled the stylus to consider Kenneth Cooper. She wanted to tell him that Kenny Cowper had not become rich because of his books. He was a trust funder. They were everywhere in the arts that paid only the top one or two percent and then often grossly. But trust funders had the money to appear, to a struggling novice, extremely successful in whatever field they chose. Talented trust funders, fortunately, could even afford to be book editors and live in Manhattan. Charlie knew more than a few who made grotesque jewelry instead and lived a lavish lifestyle that announced their jewelry was art, not grotesque. You can’t argue with insured incomes.

  “Caroline and Dr. Judy were thick as thieves before which divorce? They both were,” Charlie said. “Divorced.”

  “Warren VanZant divorced Judith to marry Carolyn Hammett. Didn’t you know that?”

  How would I know that? I assume Detective Solomon knows that. “Dashiell Hammett. Wow. Well that opens a whole new docket. What happened to Mr. Hammett senior?”

  “I’ve got to talk to my editor.” Jerry Parks tried to stick his stylus behind his ear but it snapped back to his handheld on its bungie cord.

  “You’ve got to read my treatment,” Brodie Caulfield told Charlie.

  “I’ve got to get Maggie out of that place.” Charlie dipped her last nacho in the pineapple-chile salsa.

  “I’ll take Elmer Fudd here back to his conference,” Sarah said and winked at Charlie. “Don’t forget Uranus for The Rites of Winter, will you?”

  Jerry Parks called in to his editor on Charlie’s cell while en route to the Spa with Charlie and Kenny in Kenny’s rental. Brodie and Keegan planned to go out to dinner somewhere in Charlie’s pickup, after Sarah took them as well as her brother-in-law back to the Hyatt.

  Libby and her cell had been at Mrs. Beesom’s and Jacob Forney too, when Charlie called from the sea lion garden. They figured that Betty Beesom took all her pills and forgot and took them again. She had this plastic case with pills doled out for morning, noon, dinner time, and bedtime in little pockets. But it got tipped over or something and they all spilled out. She may have mixed them wrong. Anyway, they pumped her stomach in the emergency room and sent her home, telling Libby and Jacob that now her stomach was pumped she wasn’t sick so she wouldn’t be admitted to the hospital.

  “I said if she’s not sick how come she’s taking all those pills and they said to keep from getting sick. All she can have is Jell-O and chicken broth. She’s really pissed. And I wasn’t even at that party with Gary Melneck. First time I even met him. He’s a jerk. I went with Lori and some other cheerleaders. Anyway, you gotta get back here, Mom. Jacob leaves for his convention tomorrow. I’ve got more parties coming up.”

  “Sorry honey, Maggie’s in real trouble too. I can’t leave her now.”

  Charlie informed her daughter that anyone responsible enough to get a job and an apartment after graduation from mere high school could be depended upon to forgo partying and care for an elderly neighbor. That neighbor had come through for Libby on numerous occasions.

  It was the second time in twenty-four hours someone had called Charlie a bitch.

  “So, what story are you really covering? The conference, the Institute, or the murder at the Sea Spa at the Marina del Sol?” Charlie asked the reporter when he’d informed his editor of Warren VanZant’s relationship to both Dr. Judy and Caroline, that he was safe but separated from Ted, his photographer, and on his way back to the scene of the murder.

  “You, actually,” Jerry Parks said. “And now I can honestly report and probably sue for being abducted and having my
property stolen by a subject I was investigating.” He produced a theatrical sneer. “Little guys always get the wrong end of the stick, right? Makes great press.”

  “You weren’t wandering the halls of the Spa because of the murder there when I first saw you?” Charlie asked.

  “Well, yeah, but I had already registered for the conference on my own and seen your photo in the brochure, so when I spied you at the murder scene I got assigned you too.”

  “You want to write screenplays?” Kenny turned from traffic to the backseat long enough to make Charlie nervous.

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  “In your investigations did you come across how Dr. Howard knew Dr. Judy? He seemed pretty upset by her death,” Charlie said.

  “Let’s just say they go way back.”

  “Wonder who is the most likely person at the Spa that night who would want to murder Dr. Judith Judd. Or did someone from outside come in and do it and leave before the alarm was sounded?” Charlie pondered aloud.

  Between the three of them, they came up with a list for each scenario and even a third. The guests and staff of the Spa, Judd’s family and the staff of her production company who knew she would be there, and the owners of the Spa itself. Or a complete stranger looking for someone to kill or looking for somebody else and killed her by mistake.

  “In murder mysteries,” Charlie said, “the list has to be select and identifiable, but in real life the ‘random’ is as real as it is in the universe. That’s why more murders go unsolved than not and why mysteries are so popular.”

  “God, you’re depressing,” Kenny Cowper said. “Okay, Parks, give your list and pick three candidates and I will too. Charlie will probably choose a wandering unidentifiable vagrant or something.”

  “Not so,” Charlie said. “I pick Dashiell Hammett, Ruth Ann Singer—the dead doctor’s assistant, or Warren VanZant. Or the pharmaceutical industry.”