“I didn’t even know that ring was in there,” she said, hesi-tating. “I’m not sure…” she began fingering each key. “I hadn’t meant to—”
“How much?” Jane repeated, trying to seem casual.
“Thirty dollars?” the girl said, hoping that the ridiculous price would send Jane away so she could hide these keys.
“Twenty?” asked Jane, hoping the girl wouldn’t notice the hope and fear in her voice.
“Well, maybe I could do twenty-five.”
Jane had the money out before the girl could change her mind and dropped the keys into her bag, knowing that her back would be killing her tomorrow. Big heavy purchases could usually be paid for and left at the dealers’ tables, but this ring of keys would disappear if Jane didn’t keep possession. Jane walked away, automatically putting her hand in her pocket to make sure the tiny gate key she had borrowed from Wren Bixby’s office was still there. What would she do with all these keys? She could already hear Tim’s questions, see Charley’s quizzical look.
“I’ll unlock doors,” Jane said softly to herself.
“Hey, hi! Sorry, are you on the phone?” Louise Dietz, wearing a wide-brimmed sun hat and carrying a straw shopping bag, waved a plate in front of her. “Bluebird china,” she said, unable to hide how much she wanted the plate from the dealer, who Jane could see out of one eye had already decided he wouldn’t have to lower the price on that piece.
Jane shook her head—no, she hadn’t yet stuck the phone wire into her ear that would make her look like even more of a bag lady.
“Should have known you’d be here,” said Louise, peeling off a twenty from a roll Jane thought was too carelessly replaced in her shirt pocket. “Bix loved the collecting angle. We’re all into this….” Louise waved her free hand to encompass the market. She tucked the carefully wrapped plate into her bag and began walking next to Jane.
“Except for Jeb. He says he comes to these places to study characters. Claims not to want to own anything that wasn’t his first.” Louise took Jane’s elbow and steered her away from the next table. “Down at the end, there’s some great jewelry. You’ll love it.”
Jane’s nightmare. Shopping with someone. Someone talking to her. Expecting her to answer, to pay attention. And now Louise was steering her away from a table that might hold exactly what Jane wanted. Needed. Damn it—here she was at a flea market across the damn country and she still could run into someone who could throw her off. How far did you have to go to shop in lustful peace?
“I told Bix you wouldn’t sign away your rights. I could tell when I heard your story,” said Louise.
Great. Not only someone who could push her off course literally, but someone who could actually put her off balance figuratively.
“I mean, here you are, from the Midwest, suspicious as hell of anyone out here anyway. You know we’re all glitter and bluff,” said Louise, looking closely at an ornate rhinestone sunflower brooch. Not Jane’s style, but whenever Jane saw someone look at something that closely, she started thinking maybe she did want it after all.
“And,” Louise continued,” you have a family and a life and when I saw that tape of you at Jeb’s, I told everyone it would be a coup just to get you out here, but you’d never sign.”
“Tape? At Jeb’s?” Sure, it was just a few minutes of her babbling away about her life, not exactly the Paris Hilton video, but she still felt violated. What were they doing? The entire B Room crowd having a pajama party and making fun of her, planning on making her wacky life fodder for their dirty business?
“Yeah.We always have meetings there. Best screening room. Best cook.” Louise paid for her pin. Jane noticed she didn’t even attempt bargaining. These were the people who drove prices up all over.
Louise shrugged. “It’s Joseff—Hollywood with the 1938 trademark and they only had three dollars on it. I don’t know how they missed it. It’s worth a lot more. Wouldn’t have been right to bargain on that one, would it?” she asked Jane.
Okay, so perhaps Jane had underestimated Louise.
“I’m not sure I understand. Does the B Room get together to vote on everyone’s individual projects?” asked Jane.
“It’s not a vote. We’re just close as writers and as friends and we got used to running things by each other. Then after Heck died…Can you sit for a minute?” Louise motioned to a couple of benches. “Sorry, but I get too distracted looking at the stuff.”
Jane nodded. She was beginning to feel like she was getting a fair trade for missing some of the stuff. Louise talked as if Jane knew a lot of what she was saying already and Jane, remembering Detective Oh’s admonition that silence brought more answers than questions, smiled encouragingly but didn’t say anything as they got comfortable on the bench, their bags between them.
“Did Jeb tell you about Heck?” Louise continued when Jane shook her head. “Henry Rule. We called him Heck because he wouldn’t swear. I mean, he wouldn’t say…well, you know…if he had a mouthful. That was out loud. But he wrote the foulest stuff. I mean, he would parody some of the scripts we wrote for S and L, you know, write the X-rated version, and it would be so bad. No one believed that sweet little Heck had it in him. We had to make him stop when Skye started coming to meetings.
She was grown up and everything, but still, it didn’t seem right since we had been writing for her when she was just a kid.
“ Any way, when S and L ended, we all started different projects. Heck was writing movie scripts, but none of them got made. He had invested all his money, hadn’t bought a thing, still lived in a little cottage in Los Feliz, so he wasn’t anxious to sign up for another series. He liked working alone. We all got together a couple times a month, but after six months or so, Heck started canceling on us. We should have gone over there, you know, checked on him more. We had always said we’d take care of each other.”
“What happened to him?” Jane asked.
“About six months ago, he called Bix and told her he was frightened. Thought somebody was out to get him. She went over there and said his place was really scary. Piled-up newspapers, garbage, wrappers from food, a giant ball of twist ties. Stacks of unopened mail. He told Bix he was afraid there was anthrax in it. Bix tried to contact his family, but she could only find one cousin. He lived out here, but didn’t want to get involved. Heck told Bix to make Jeb come and see him alone. Two days later, after Jeb told us Heck thought someone was trying to kill him, I got a call. There was an added second story on Heck’s little house. And the person before him had built an observation platform, up another story. It was a goofy little structure, but safe enough, I guess. Heck had climbed up on the roof of the observation tower and fallen off. Not really that high, two-and-a-half, three stories, but he landed facedown on the brick patio and broke his neck. Police called me because inside his house, taped up by the phone, was a list of phone numbers to call if anything happened to him. Jeb was first and Bix was second. They weren’t around and I was lucky number three. The cousin and I had to go identify the body.” Louise stopped talking for a moment. When she started again, her voice was lower and she spoke each word deliberately.
“The cousin said he hadn’t seen him in twenty years and had no idea what he looked like, so he would be no good at identifying the body. They made me go in. Later, after signing some papers, I left with the cousin, who asked me how he looked. I asked him what did he care since he was too busy to see him when he was alive, and this creep says, ‘I saw him last Wednesday. We had dinner once a week.’The weasel just couldn’t make himself go in there.”
“Were the police satisfied that Heck’s death was an accident?” asked Jane.
“Sure. He was paranoid, his place was a death trap. He had almost stopped eating entirely because he thought his food was being poisoned. The cousin told me he changed his carry-out place every day so ‘they’ couldn’t find a pattern.”
“Anybody figure out why he was on the roof? I mean, if he was scared to come out of the house and all?”
asked Jane, digging out a power bar from one of her vest pockets and breaking it in half. She gave half to Louise, wishing she had something more substantial to offer.
“A detective said they figured he thought someone was in the house trying to get him. He had climbed on stacks of newspapers to get out the attic window. They said there was no sign of foul play, but…” Louise studied the wrapper and read the carb count out loud. Then she shrugged and bit into it anyway. “If you ask me, the whole house reeked of foul play. Jeb is the main executor of the estate. Heck left everything to us. Every bit of garbage in that place belongs to the B Room.”
“Did you find anything of value there? Wa s there any reason to believe someone had broken in looking for something and frightened him out on the roof?”
“ We haven’t gone through the house yet. Most of us haven’t been past the entryway. We’re supposed to do it next week, before we sell it.…I don’t know if I can.…Look, all I know about mental illness is what I’ve learned from television and researched for scripts. I’m no expert. Heck was ill, no doubt about it, but he was also believable. Maybe I just want to believe this because he was part of the B Room, but I think something real was eating away at him.”
Jane asked Louise if the rest of the group agreed with her.
“You’re here, aren’t you?”
Jane shook her head.
“At first no one agreed with me, but then Bix got a letter that said she’d be next. She might be able to help herself and save the rest of us, but she’d have to wait for instructions. Said if she called the police, she wouldn’t have a chance.
“She showed us the letter at Jeb’s. It was the same day you were on TV, I think. Jeb had recorded it. Played it for us. Bix said she thought your story would make a good movie.”
“And thought that if I was here, I might be able to figure out who sent the letter?” asked Jane. She hoped she didn’t sound as incredulous as she felt. These people had lived in a fantasy world so long it had addled their brains.
Louise nodded. “And who made Heck jump off the roof.”
“If someone made him jump,” said Jane, and Louise nodded. But Jane was only being careful. She had already decided that there was something fishy about Heck’s death. It was a tragic illustration of one of her core beliefs. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean there isn’t somebody out to get you. And then there was Bix’s note from yesterday that Jane had in her pocket. Someone had threatened that they all would go to hell. Or heck.
Jane was a few minutes late for her rendezvous with Tim. Louise had gone off in search of more costume jewelry and with a promise to find Jane later. Jane tried to fill him in on her conversation as fast as she could, but knew he was only half listening. He grabbed her bag filled with keys and flash cards and volunteered to make the first run to the car. He was carrying two small lamp bases, metal, maybe brass, accented with a deep orange ring, maybe Bakelite. He waved another bag—pointed out their next meeting place—and sprinted off.
She started down the next aisle, pausing at a table with old autograph books. Jane picked up one with a heavy blue cardboard cover, dated 1928, and paged through it, trying to focus on the rhymes and spidery signatures that usually delighted her.
May your cheeks retain their dimple,
May your heart be just as gay,
Until some manly voice shall whisper,
Dearest, will you name the day?
Manly voice? Why hadn’t Jeb just called her and asked her, point-blank, to come out to L.A. and work on this?
Once upon a time,
A chicken found a dime,
She gave it to the rooster
And the rooster said, “It’s mine.”
Isn’t that just like a rooster? Of course Jeb couldn’t ask for her help. He couldn’t even ask her why she walked out on him all those years ago. He had shrugged it off and acted all manly and roostery about it. So this was a perfect plan—let Bix ask Jane and Tim to come out here under the pretense of the movie deal, and while they were here, rope them into whatever was going on with the B Room. When Jane dated Jeb in college, he rarely said anything directly. Do you know how to make grits? he had asked her one night and she had answered, No, how? He told her it wasn’t a riddle, he just liked grits with eggs in the morning and he could handle scrambling the eggs. At the time, his convoluted proposal that she spend the night at his place seemed charming.
“Passive-aggressive bullshit,” she said out loud, recognizing it for what it was.
“Now are you talking on the phone?” asked Louise, who had once again come up behind her.
Jane sighed and handed over three dollars for the autograph book without blinking. Its wisdom was priceless. And if Louise was back to chat, Jane figured this might be her last opportunity for a purchase. When she turned around, she was even more certain that she was done for the day. Rick and Greg were standing with Louise, who apparently had gone to gather them. She pointed to a group of tables and chairs near a refreshment stand.
“Jeb said he’d meet us over there,” she said.
“Cock-a-doodle-do,” Jane muttered under her breath.
Jane dropped the blue autograph book into her bag and spotted a table that looked like it had more of the small volumes. She said she’d be right over to the snack area and zigzagged across the aisle. She picked up a zippered brown leatherette journal with a fifteen-dollar price tag on it. Without even looking through it, she replaced it on the table and saw some battered cardboard-covered books in a small case on top of a trunk a few feet back. Stepping over to the shelves, she pulled out the stack of autograph books and found herself staring at a face. At first she thought it was someone looking at the same books from the other side; then she noticed that the eyes were not studying book titles. In fact, these eyes were not searching for any flea market treasures, since these eyes belonged to the face of a man no longer browsing, bargaining, or buying. This was the face of a dead man.
Jane opened her mouth, hoping she would be able to scream, when she felt a hand on her shoulder. Just behind her, the B Room had gathered with their leader, Jeb Gleason. Jeb was so close behind her that Jane heard his statement as a low whisper in her ear.
“Look, gang, Lou Piccolo’s back from Ojai.”
Jane, realizing, if only for one lucid second, that this must be the “Pix” of Bix Pix Flix, Lou Piccolo, studied the face, her open mouth still poised for a scream. Lou Piccolo had brown straight hair, a bit shaggy, and what had been, she felt sure, a handsome tanned face, with perhaps just a touch of cosmetic work. Although features and faces might grow rigid without life, Lou’s eyes were stretched a bit more than even death called for. In that second of reflection, Jane was ashamed to admit that she was judging a dead man, but she couldn’t stop herself from thinking, How vain.
In the next second, the scream escaped and Jane yelled loud and louder. Even though Jane was familiar with the bodies that cropped up around her when bargain-hunting, she still felt woozy enough to turn and take Jeb’s arm for a moment. But there was no arm. No Jeb. Across the garage she could see the B Room scurrying away, cutting against the crowd coming in answer to Jane’s call for help, with Jeb following behind them, his arms outstretched, hurrying them along. Back, Jane guessed, to the henhouse.
8
Its not that everyone’s dishonest. Really. Its more like they’ve lived their own version of the truth so long that they now believe it is the truth. I mean, I’m guessing that most Hollywood showbiz types would pass a lie detector test. Until somebody invents a bona fide, fool-proof bullshit detector, the people in the “entertainment industry” are safe.
—FROM Hollywood Diary BY BELINDA ST. GERMAINE
Jane was given a chair and a bottle of water and a cold towel and, from a kind anonymous soul, a vending machine package of cookies. In turn, she gave a police detective her name and address and described how she had pulled out the stack of autograph books and discovered the dead man. A few feet to her left, Jane could
see the proprietor of this particular table, wringing her hands, answering another set of questions from another police officer, and, most probably, wondering if Jane was still interested in those autograph books and if she was going to be allowed to sell them.
Because a policeman reporting to the superior officer who was taking Jane’s statement announced he had found his wallet and ID, but not spoken Lou Piccolo’s name out loud, the police officer did not ask Jane if she had any connection to the dead man. He merely asked her if she had ever seen him before.
“No,” she answered honestly.
If the officer had asked her if she knew Lou Piccolo, she would have to explain who she was and how she happened to be in L.A. and how she was connected to the dead man in front of her. However, as long as the name was not spoken, she rationalized that she had no obligation to bring up any confusing and problematic connection to the man who, it now became sickeningly clear, had been stabbed to death with a classic daggerlike letter opener, flea market price tag still attached. Police had been dispatched throughout the flea market with elaborate descriptions of the weapon to see if any vendor recognized the dagger as one he or she had sold, and, if so, did they remember the purchaser well enough to give a description?
Jane was rather pleased to note that she was now being ignored. Had this been Kankakee, Illinois, where she was quite well recognized as someone with a penchant for uncovering bodies rolled up in Oriental rugs or walking into crime scenes littered with garage sale detritus, or had it been Evanston, Illinois, where she was known to walk into more than one murder plot, she might have garnered unwanted attention. Here in sunny Pasadena, she was just another hapless tourist at the flea market, who instead of cool bargains found the stuff of which nightmares are made.
Hollywood Stuff Page 8
