Behind the Seams

by Betty Hechtman

  The real A-list benefit was taking place right next to the tent where we’d been in the first place. There was no problem getting past security since Adele and I had two cops with us.

  We might have looked a little worse for wear, and the shiny Mylar blankets we were wrapped in might have given a slight impression that we were aliens. I could only imagine what my hair looked like from seeing Adele’s before she put her big hat back on.

  There was some kind of toast going on, but it stopped when we came in. Along with our escorts, we walked up to the table where D. J. was sitting. For a split second, he looked shocked to see us, then he recovered. He got up and ran toward us.

  “There you are,” he said in an angry tone. He told everyone, but mostly the cops, that we’d wanted to see the aerial tramway and he’d gone with us, but we’d rushed off and left him. He’d finally found his way back to the tram and thought we’d gone down before him. Luckily for him, he had a compass on his watch and a windbreaker in his fanny pack. He walked back to his seat. “Here’s you stuff,” he said, pushing my tote bag on me. I immediately took the doll out and checked its underpants. No surprise, the media card was gone.

  CHAPTER 36

  “PINK, IF ONLY I’D HAD THOSE HOOKS,” ADELE SAID. We had finally made it to our room. Both of us had had a hot shower and we were dressed in hotel robes. We’d splurged and ordered room service.

  “You didn’t really think Barbara was going to invite us to stay at the banquet and let you give her a crochet lesson?” I said. Once the doll had come out, everything got crazy. Becca saw it first and left her chair to rush up to us. What were we doing with Robyn’s doll? she had demanded. Derek joined his wife and I didn’t have a chance to answer before D. J. did it for me. I, he explained, was friends with the woman who everybody thought was responsible for Robyn’s death and I was trying to help her beat the wrap.

  “She came here because she thinks you people killed your own daughter and son,” he said to the celebrity pair. Becca started to cry, Derek looked angry, and everyone else seemed confused.

  Barbara Olive Overton stepped in and strongly suggested we leave.

  Needless to say, nobody wanted to hear our side of the aerial tramway story. Who would believe that the nicely dressed author would try to kill two women wearing shiny blankets. Even the cops who’d come in with us gave us dirty looks. We’d made the top celebrity couple cry.

  What could we do but take our silver blanket capes and go. Talk about personas non grata.

  At least, now we were warm, dry and working on dessert. “Pink, you might as well just give up,” Adele said as she picked off one of the strawberries on her cheesecake. “You might be sure that D. J. killed Robyn and her brother, but where’s the proof? Where’s even the motive?”

  “On that media card,” I said with a sigh. “And he probably has cut it up in little pieces and scattered them in the desert by now.”

  “Now that we’ve been saved,” Adele said, “are you still going to invite me over?” She reminded me that just as she’d offered, she had added the crochet trim to my Chanel-style jacket. She had me there. To my surprise, the embellishment she’d added was actually tasteful, and instead of stuffing it in the back of the closet with clothes I never wore, I’d put it in the front.

  As soon as I said yes, she tried to pin me down to a date. I said I’d have to check my calendar. “Pink, if you knew anything about your BlackBerry, you’d realize you could keep your calendar on there.”

  I had already vowed that if we got off the mountain, I was going to learn how to do everything possible on the BlackBerry. I turned on the TV instead.

  It must have been a slow night in Palm Springs; our rescue made the news, though they used only stock footage and never showed us. They interviewed a ranger who repeated what Adele had said about people getting lost up there about once a month and getting in trouble because they didn’t understand how much colder it was up there. I shuddered when he talked about the bones picked clean they’d found in the past.

  I had just started on my cherry cobbler a la mode when there was a knock at the door.

  “Mason,” I said in surprise when I opened it. His face went from tense and worried to a grin in a split second, and he hugged me tight. Adele called out a greeting from inside.

  “I started driving as soon as I got in touch with search and rescue,” he said. He’d kept calling me and had gotten voice mail. “I remembered the tickets included a room. I was hoping you were here.” He hugged me again, saying how relieved he was to find us.

  “What happened with your BlackBerry now?” he said.

  “Dead and nothing to charge it with.” I invited him in.

  “I’m getting you a bunch of cords. You can keep them everywhere,” he said as I shut the door.

  I shared my dessert with him as I told him the whole story down to how D. J. had turned the tables on us and made it look like we’d lost him, along with how he’d made the media card disappear. “I’m sure whatever is on it implicates D. J., not that it matters anymore.”

  “Maybe not, Pink,” Adele said from across the room. She stood up and did a little cocky strut. “Who’s the detective now? Maybe I’ll change my name to Adele Poirot.”

  CHAPTER 37

  ADELE AND I SAT DOWN IN THE FIRST ROW WITH Dinah. It felt like déjà vu, at least sort of. It had been barely a month ago when we’d sat in almost the same seats when all of this began. This time CeeCee was in the audience, along with Nell. Rhoda, Elise, Eduardo and Sheila were in the row behind. The booing started and Barbara Olive Overton came out and greeted the audience.

  In the week since the golf tournament, I’d had to pull every string and get help from Mason, Detective Heather and even my talent-agent son, Peter, to make this happen. Adele had talked me into wearing the black Chanel-style suit jacket she’d embellished. I had to admit it: The red trim she’d crocheted on the sleeves and down the front had added some pizzazz, and it looked much better paired with the black jeans I was wearing than the skirt it came with. Over the top as usual, Adele was taking way too much pride in my wearing it, and along with pointing out her work to everyone, was acting like a wardrobe mistress. More than once, she’d adjusted the jacket so it hung just right, even pushing the tissue I’d stuck in the pocket out of sight.

  “Our guest today is D. J. Florian, author of Back from Hell,” Barbara began. She sounded fine, but I wondered if she was nervous, knowing what was going to happen. “For those of you who don’t know his story, D. J. started to write a blog as his life was falling apart. He chronicled what it was like to hit the bottom and the hard road back up. Now it’s been turned into a book he calls a blogoir.” She smiled at the audience and explained the word was coined by combining blog with memoir. “A reviewer for the Los Angeles Post called it ‘a book filled with grit, dark humor and hope.’ There’s talk of a movie deal and more books. He’s currently working on a self-help program that will help everyone, whether their problem is drugs, potato chips, smoking or nail biting,” she said, holding up her own hands, “which I personally would like to hear about.”

  Adele nudged me and made a harrumph sound. I knew she was itching to pull out a hook, but for once, Adele behaved.

  A video piece began to play on a large screen behind Barbara and D. J. The first scene showed D. J. walking down Cahuenga Boulevard and talking to the camera. He pointed out the Hollywood Hills dotted with houses and the TV- and movie-production-related businesses he was passing and explained his frustration at working as a clerk in an electronic store instead of being part of the entertainment business. He’d always expected better things for himself. So to escape his disappointment, he’d gotten into drugs. Just recreational, at first, with the guys he worked with. Then he had moved over to heroin and everything changed.

  The background scene changed to night. “And then I began to lose pieces of my life,” he said. “My friends, my apartment and my job all got lost as the sole focus in my life became getting tha
t next fix.” The scene faded into a dark downtown street. The stores were closed and mostly covered by pull-down metal doors. The only light came from a small store with a tiny bar-covered window. “I started living on the street. Thanks to a kind guy at a convenience store who let me use his laptop, I was able to keep on with my blog.”

  Here the scene changed again to a freeway underpass and a motley encampment. D. J. pointed to the upslope under the concrete bridge and said that was where he’d kept his sleeping bag and described in graphic detail about the rain, rodents and outbursts from the other denizens. The picture cut to a downtown street near a sports arena. A blind musician with no shoes was playing a bluesy piece on a guitar. Next to him, a guitar case sat open with some money in it. D. J. stood back from the scene as some well-dressed people passed by and dropped some money in the case. D. J.’s voice faltered. “This was where I hit bottom. It was New Year ’s Eve of 2008 and just a few minutes before the clock was going to strike midnight. Jerome had collected a nice stash from the people coming from a concert. As I was bending over to steal it, I knew I had hit bottom, but I didn’t care. And then it was as if a hand reached out and tapped me on the shoulder. I heard a voice in my head tell me not to give up, that there was hope. From that moment on, my life started to change.”

  Suddenly the picture cut to a close-up of the still photo of Robyn and Ty wearing silver top hats that said “Happy 2009.” They were hugging and both pointing to her watch. It said five minutes to midnight. The view moved back so that the whole picture came into view. There were some people in the background, and one of them came into focus. He was wearing a tuxedo with the tie pulled loose and holding a champagne glass as he tipped his party hat. It was D. J. Florian.

  The picture froze on the back screen and the lights came on in the studio. Barbara looked at D. J. and glanced down at the paper in her hand. “What do you have to say about that?”

  A hush of anticipation went through the audience. D. J. was still looking at the back screen. I imagined he was in shock. He was so sure he’d gotten rid of the media card with this photograph. Adele nudged me and gave me a knowing smile. She was taking all the credit, though it had really been my mistake. I’d grabbed the doll and the media card in her hand at the golf tournament without looking at them. In all the confusion, I’d taken the media card with Adele’s own photos. At the time, Robyn’s card from the doll was still in Adele’s camera.

  The media card had only appeared empty because Adele’s camera couldn’t read the program it was in. When we’d put it into a computer with the proper program, we’d been able to see everything Robyn had left.

  When D. J. turned back toward the audience, he appeared calm. “Somebody faked the picture,” he said. He said it must have been taken the year before. He even walked back to the screen and pointed at the nine in the year and claimed it had been altered from an eight. He started to go off on people who might want to derail his career, but Barbara interrupted.

  From the audience, I could see the beads of perspiration on her nose. The talk show host was used to nonconfrontational interviews. This was a first for her, and she was nervous.

  The photo on the screen changed to a bunch of photos of the party, with D. J. similarly dressed in the background. “Are you going to try to claim that all of these photographs were altered?” Barbara was finding her sea legs at being a push-the-envelope interviewer. “So, instead of wandering the streets of skid row that New Year’s Eve, you were actually at a party in a tuxedo, weren’t you?” She waited for him to answer, but he said nothing.

  Barbara picked up a sheet of paper and explained to the audience who Robyn was and what had happened to her. She said that in addition to the photos, Robyn had left notes for a script she’d planned to add as a voice-over to the photographs. “I’d like to read it in her place,” the talk show host said. D. J. swallowed so loud, I was pretty sure the people in the last row heard it.

  “‘I asked D. J. to speak to my brother, Miles, who has been valiantly fighting an addiction to drugs and winning for the past year. I thought it would encourage Miles to see how D. J. had turned his life around. But Miles seemed uneasy after he met D. J. My brother said addicts had antennas that pointed up a fake, and that was how he felt when he met with D. J. I was sure my brother was wrong. Nothing would have happened if I hadn’t broken up with my boyfriend at that time. I know it might seem childish, but I started cutting him out of all the prints of the photographs I had. If I hadn’t, I probably never would have really looked closely at that New Year’s Eve photograph.

  “‘Ty’s and my first date was that New Year’s Eve. I was living in a building in Studio City owned by a man who loved creative types and offered a low-rent haven for struggling actors, writers and people like me who wanted to work in production. Every year, he gave a party for the tenants. After I saw the picture, I checked back, and though I had never known him, found that D. J. Florian had had an apartment on the floor above me and had been paying his rent on time the whole time he’d claimed he’d been living on the street.’” Barbara paused to let it all sink in before she continued. “‘I did more checking, and there were more and more holes in the story. I didn’t want to tell my brother the details until the show aired, but I gave him one of the photos with D. J. in the background and told him that it looked like he was right.’”

  So that must have been what Miles remembered, I thought, feeling a deep sadness that I hadn’t gotten the message in time to save him.

  Barbara had a take-no-prisoners look when she turned to D. J. “Is any of it true?” she said.

  “I created a hero. People come up to me and say they have hope from reading my blog. They think if I did it, they can. What’s wrong with that?”

  “What’s wrong with that is that it isn’t true. You didn’t do anything,” Barbara said.

  “I almost did. I had the idea of writing a nogel. That’s a novel in blog form. But when I started posting the blog, people believed it was real. So, I let them keep on believing, and then it got a life of it’s own. I based it on a guy I worked with. I just made it more dramatic, with a better ending. In my version, he comes back from his personal hell and starts a new life. The real guy did drugs, got caught and went to jail.”

  D. J. began to sweat and move toward the edge of his seat.

  As Barbara brought up Robyn’s death, he took off. But he didn’t get far. Detective Heather was waiting off-camera, and I saw her lead him away.

  When the show ended, we went backstage. The door was open to the green room, and I saw D. J. and a contingent of cops. “You’ve got nothing on me,” D. J. said. “I had nothing to do with any deaths.” He glared at them as he made a move toward the door, and I realized Heather was going to let him go.

  And I was powerless to stop him. Until the lucky sneeze.

  From behind me, Adele achooed with such force, she fell into me. “Pink, a tissue,” she wailed and I imagined something embarrassing had happened. When I reached in my jacket pocket and pulled out the tissue, something else came with it. It must have been left from the last time I’d worn the jacket.

  The strip of paper had a telephone number written on it, and I remembered I’d marked it down the first time I’d met D. J. in the café right after Mason and I did the improv at the production office. While Adele mopped up with the tissue, I unfolded the strip. My mouth fell open and I rushed into the green room and grabbed Detective Heather.

  She had a now-what look on her face, and I explained that I’d needed a piece of paper to write D. J.’s phone number on. “He pulled this from his pocket,” I said.

  She looked at the paper with a dismissive shrug, but her demeanor changed when she saw what it was. It was actually two strips of paper, both receipts. One was from a general merchandise store and listed Nature’s Sweetie and a shipping box as the items sold. The other receipt was from the post office and showed a package sent and gave the zip code, which I bet was the production office’s.

  She
signaled one of the uniforms, who grabbed D. J. before he slipped out. She pointed to the receipts in my hand with an expectant expression. “What do you have to say about these?”

  D. J. shrugged it off. “Nothing. There’s nothing that ties those receipts to me.” I started to slump as he pulled free of the uniform, but when I lifted my thumb and looked at the store receipt again, I yelled, “Wait.”

  It only took a few minutes to confirm the string of numbers my thumb had been hiding, and Detective Heather eyed D. J. with a look of triumph. “How about you used your credit card?”

  D. J.’s eyes darted around and he appeared panicky. Then he glared at me.

  “If you had just stayed out of it, everything would have been fine.”

  “For who?” I said, standing in front of him. “For Robyn and Miles, who are both dead? For Nell, who never would have gotten out of the shadow of suspicion?” I glared back at him.

  “I saw the photograph on Robyn’s desk,” he said. “When I realized I was in it, I knew it could ruin everything. I thought Robyn might not have noticed, but then I overheard her telling someone she had a plan to ambush somebody in the middle of their TV appearance. I knew she meant me, and I couldn’t let her do that. Finally, I had gotten my shot at the big time. So what if it wasn’t true. It was a great story and it inspired people. I could have helped so many more people with the self-help plan I was developing. I had to stop her. I had met with her a few times and knew about her obsession with the sweetener. All it took was a razor blade, some cyanide power and a glue gun to fix the packets. Then to make it look like she wasn’t really the intended victim, I added some of the tainted packet to the box in the bookstore café and brought in the other box to the police station.