“Okay,” I mumbled. “Thanks for the interview, I guess.”
I stepped out, and I swear my feet barely hit the sidewalk before the door shut and her limo peeled off again.
I looked around, trying to get my bearings. I’d been so focused on what Deb was saying I hadn’t paid any attention to where we were. Hoping we hadn’t traveled to Baby Gap via South Central, I quickly made my way to the nearest intersection and glanced up at the street signs. El Gato and 5th. Wherever that was.
I pulled out my cell and dialed Gary. He picked up on the first ring.
“I’ve been waiting outside the john for, like, half an hour. Where the hell are you?”
That’s what I’d like to know. “I need you to come pick me up.”
“Oh great! You mean you ditched me? That’s how you do me, huh?”
I rolled my eyes. “I did not ditch you! Deb was leaving. I had to follow her.”
“You got to meet Deb!” he whined. “Oh man, what was she like? Was she as hot in person as she was on TV?”
“Just come get me,” I told him. Then rattled off the cross streets.
“Where the hell is that?” Gary asked.
“I was hoping you’d know.”
* * *
Twenty minutes later I finally spotted my little green Bug with Gary at the wheel. Barely. All I could see was the top of his head over the steering wheel.
He pulled to a stop at the curb, and I quickly switched places with him, scooting him into the passenger seat.
“Thanks,” I said, moving the seat back. He had it so far forward I thought I’d fly through the windshield.
“Yeah, well, you can repay me by slipping Deb my number next time you see her.”
“Sorry to burst your bubble, but I doubt there’s going to be a next time.” I quickly filled him in on my interview with the Mom star and her alibi. Then I reluctantly relayed how she’d pointed the finger at Alec.
“But honestly,” I said, “I really think she’s barking up the wrong tree. Alec doesn’t seem strapped for cash.”
“Well, we can find out for sure,” Gary said. “Let’s take a look at the company’s financial records.”
“Yeah, like he’s just gonna hand them to me.”
“Well, where does he keep them?”
I shrugged. “They’re probably housed at the production offices at the studio. But,” I added, “trust me, there is no way we can get on that lot. The only people they let in the gates are movie stars.”
Gary nodded. Then he pulled down the passenger side visor and flipped open the little mirror, scrutinizing his reflection. “Huh.”
I almost hated to ask… “’Huh,’ what?”
“Think I could pass for George Clooney?”
Chapter Fifteen
The plan was simple: get past the gate by posing as movie stars, then sneak into Real Life Productions’ offices and get a look at their financials.
Unfortunately, as simple as the plan was, the execution ran into a couple of snags as we pulled up to Sunset Studios. Namely, Gary looked nothing like George Clooney. Or Brad Pitt. Or Johnny Depp.
“Okay, fine!” Gary said after I’d shot down his list of People’s Sexiest Men Alive. “Who do you think I could pass for?”
I pursed my lips together and took a good, hard look at him. He was short, hairy, and had a face that would give even a mother pause. I was tempted to say he looked like a muppet but that just seemed cruel.
I looked up at the studio lot. The seven-foot-high walls were covered with posters of their top shows and upcoming movies. An action pic starring Stallone, a romantic comedy with Reese Witherspoon and a remake of the remake of the Little Rascals starring Elle Fanning and that kid from Modern Family.
“Rico Rodriguez,” I said, eyeing the poster.
“Who?” Gary asked, his eyebrows hunching together.
“Him.” I pointed across the street.
Gary looked up, checked out the Little Rascals poster. Looked at me. Then shook his head.
“A kid? Are you fucking nuts?”
“What? You think you can pass as Stallone?” I asked, gesturing to the other poster.
“I got a mustache. Kids don’t usually have those,” he said, pointing out the facial hair in question.
“Hmm. Yeah. We’re gonna have to do something about that.”
“Oh, no. No way! We are not doing anything.”
“You gotta shave it.”
“I can’t shave! My mustache is my signature. It’s my thing! The ladies love the ‘stash.”
I rolled my eyes. “You can grow a new ‘thing’, Casanova. Come on, how else are we going to get in there?”
Gary looked from the poster, back to me, back to the poster again. “Jesus, the things a guy does to stay employed.”
I did a mental “yes” and pointed my Bug toward the nearest Rite Aid drugstore to grab a pack of disposable razors. While there we added a ball cap and a tootsie pop, and by the time we were done with him, Gary looked at least fifteen years younger. If you looked close it would be obvious that he was a little person, not a child, but I was hoping the security guard’s thick bifocals kept him from looking at anything too closely.
I shoved my new ten-year-old in the car and pulled up to the studios gate.
Predictably, the old guy in the guardhouse came out, clipboard in hand. “Name please?” he asked.
“Rico Rodriguez,” I answered.
The guard looked in the car.
Gary did a little wave, careful to keep his face shadowed by the cap.
“ID please?” he asked.
I bit my lip. “Um, what kind of ID?’
“Driver’s license?”
“He’s a kid. He doesn’t drive yet,” I said, giving the guard a sacchariny sweet smile.
His gaze shifted from my “kid” to me. “And you are?”
“Allie Quick. His nanny.”
“Do you have ID?”
“Right here, sir,” I said, pulling my own driver’s license from my purse.
The guard gave it a once over, comparing the picture to me. While I’ll admit I was having a decidedly much worse hair day than the girl in the photo, he finally nodded and handed it back to me.
“Okay, thank you, Miss Quick. I’ll buzz you through.”
Seriously, I was way too good at this.
Five minutes later we’d stashed my Bug in the lot, grabbed a golf cart—the studio’s preferred method of travel—and hightailed it to the fairy-tale looking village of production offices on the left side of the lot. I parked two cottages down from RLP’s place, staking out the territory. I knew from my previous visit here that the window to the left of the door looked in on Barker’s office. Predictably, it was empty. The one on the right, however, had a figure pacing in front of it. Since it was Alec’s office, it was safe to assume it was Alec.
Also safe to assume his receptionist was sitting in the main room, as he had been when I was there.
“We need a distraction,” I mused out loud, getting out of the golf cart. “Something to get both Alec and his receptionist away from the office long enough for us to slip in, nose around, then slip out.”
“I got it,” Gary said.
And before I could ask what “it” was, Gary grabbed a large rock from the garden of the cottage next door.
“What are you doing with that?” I asked.
“I saw this in a movie once. Totally worked.”
He shoved the rock onto the gas pedal and put the cart in gear, jumping clear. The engine revved, the cart’s wheels spun and it took off like a shot down the cobbled pathway…
Straight into the last cottage in the row. I watched in horror as it crashed into the porch, taking out the bottom two steps as the railing crashed to the ground.
Immediately doors all down the row popped open, producers and assistants coming out to see what the commotion was.
I grabbed Gary and ducked behind a tree. “What the hell was that?” I whispered.
“You sai
d you needed a distraction.”
“Yeah, I said distraction, not destruction!”
“Well, it worked didn’t’ it?” he asked, pointing to the door of the RLP bungalow where Alec’s assistant exited, Alec a close step behind him.
“Come on. We don’t have much time,” I whispered back, grabbing him by the arm.
We quickly slipped through the office doors then opened the one on our left and ducked inside, shutting it with a click behind us.
The room was laid out the same as Alec’s—a large desk in the center, bookcases along one wall holding dozens of DVDs and a couple of file cabinets stacked near the windows. Careful to keep away from said windows, I crossed to the first file cabinet. Of course, as soon as I jiggled the handle I could tell it was locked.
“You see a key anywhere?” I asked.
Gary moved to the desk and opened the top drawer. “Whoa. This guy was a slob.”
I peered over his shoulder. Candy wrappers mixed with paper clips, mixed with business cards, loose change and fast food ketchup packets.
“On the up side, no one will be able to tell we’ve been here,” I pointed out, digging in and shifting the random contents.
Ten minutes later we’d gone through all of the drawers, and I was starting to get antsy. I wasn’t sure how much longer our wrecked golf cart could keep the receptionist at bay.
I looked under a table, behind a trash can, inside a potted plant. No file cabinet key.
I looked up. As in Alec’s office, the walls were covered in huge posters of shows Barker had worked on. Most were stuck up with thumbtacks, but one in the corner was framed and mounted behind glass. The poster advertising the first season of Stayin’ Alive, the show that had made Barker.
I walked over to it. I lifted one corner and ran my finger along the back side.
Bingo.
I felt the raised metal ridges of a key taped to the back of the poster. I quickly peeled it off, ran to the file cabinet and fit it inside. A perfect match. The cabinet clicked open, and I immediately began pawing through folders for anything that looked like financial records.
“Uh, Allie?” Gary hailed me.
“Yeah?”
“We’re out of time.”
I whipped my head up to find Gary staring out the window. He was right. The receptionist was on his way back to the office.
No bueno.
I pawed faster, sifting through headshots, expense accounts, show treatments. Finally I hit one labeled “accounts payable.” I grabbed it, along with its brother, “accounts receivable,” and shoved them into my purse. I stood up and closed the cabinet.
Just as the door to Barker’s office flew open.
“What the hell are you doing in here?” The receptionist put his hands on his bony hips, his eyes flashing fire behind a pair of wire-rimmed glasses as his gaze pinged from Gary to me.
“Oh, uh, hi. We…um…I was looking for Alec.”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “Alec’s office is over there,” he said, pointing across the bungalow to the other door.
“Right. Well, see, I um…I was looking for Alec. But then I saw no one was here and I went looking for a piece of paper to write him a note.”
His eyes narrowed further. I wasn’t totally sure he was buying it, but I did my best dumb blonde hair flip to sweeten the deal.
“Alec had to step out,” he said. “But I’ll tell him you were here.”
“Great. Wonderful. Thanks!” I said, hoping he wouldn’t tell him exactly where I was here.
I grabbed Gary by the arm and quickly steered him out of the office and down the street before Alec got back.
“Man, that was close,” Gary mumbled as soon as we were outside.
“Way too close.”
I looked around. But of course, our cart was crashed, which meant we had to hoof it on foot back to the front gate. Which meant that by the time we reached my Bug again I was sweating like a Biggest Loser contestant. We pulled out of the Sunset lot and stopped at a 7-11 for slurpies, and I made Gary look the other way while I slipped my bikini bottoms on and my pants off. I’m pretty sure I caught him peeking through his fingers once, but it was still preferable to roasting like a stuck pig in the heat.
We parked under a shady tree a few blocks down from the convenience store and pulled out our boosted files.
Problem was, neither of us were accountants. I squinted down at the printouts. Like most companies, their financial transactions were all calculated online. However, like most executives, Barker must not have completely trusted his hard drive not to eat them, printing out paper copies of every invoice, receipt, and expense filtered through the company. As far as I could tell, RLP was putting out at least three-hundred grand a month in payroll and other expenses.
“What kind of income were they pulling?” I asked Gary, the AR spread open in his lap.
“Hard to tell,” he answered, slurping his drink. “Payment comes in chunks, so it’s not a regular monthly thing. But as best I can figure, it looks like they were doing fine. Pulling in around two-hundred K a month.”
I shook my head. “That’s not so fine when you’re spending three.”
“No way.”
“Way.” I showed him my file.
“So the company is losing cash,” Gary said. “I guess that puts your pretty boy as suspect numero uno again, huh?”
“He’s not mine. And he’s not a pretty boy,” I shot back. Though I had to admit it did paint a little more suspicion into Alec’s corner. But it didn’t exactly scream “smoking gun.” A fact I pointed out to Gary. “You know, if Barker was getting desperate for cash, he might have made some desperate programming decisions.”
“Such as?”
“Such as revealing Deb’s affair after all. I mean, he needed a big season opener, right? What if it came to light that America’s homemaker had been cheating all along?”
“What about her books? Her career?”
I shrugged. “Maybe Barker wasn’t worried about longevity of the show anymore. Maybe he was worried about a big bang and a big payoff, now. Or,” I said, wheels turning in earnest, “what if he planned on cutting some of the big salaries in his other shows? We know Lowel was on the chopping block, but what if he was getting chopped sooner rather than later? Or maybe Barker was getting rid of the other big name judges too? I’d say this spells more motive all around.”
“Swell,” Gary said, closing the file and using the folder to fan himself. “What do you say you take me back to my air-conditioned car now? It’s five o’clock. I need a beer and a shower, and not necessarily in that order.”
* * *
I dropped Gary off at his car. Then, as much as a shower and a beer sounded tempting, I pointed my car toward the Informer’s offices. I was doing a bang-up job of avoiding fallout from my Disaster Night, even if I did say so myself, but the fact remained that I had a column to turn in.
So I reluctantly parked in the Informer lot, threw my pants back on and, holding my head up high, rode the elevator up to the offices. The second the door slid open, my eyes shot to Felix’s office.
He was sitting at his desk, Bluetooth in one ear. As if feeling my eyes on him, he looked up, locked eyes with me for a brief second. Then spun in his chair so his back was facing me.
He didn’t want to see me any more than I did him.
An odd sensation washed over me. Ninety percent relief, ten percent disappointment. One hundred percent uncomfortable in a way I was way too tired to examine at the moment.
I quickly walked to my cube, turned my back to him, and transferred the notes and raw footage of Don from my laptop to PC, then typed up an article on my interview with Deb, Don’s alibi, and the fact that a “reliable source” had informed me RL Productions might not have been the cash cow everyone thought.
I sat back and reread my copy. It wasn’t my best work, I knew. It was scattered. Unfocused. Without any clear conclusions about anything. Tons of suspects, tons of scandalous fodder for the
tabloid, but no clear murderer. No hard facts. No impressive investigative journalism to make the L.A. Times break down my door with employment offer in hand.
I sighed, hit send and shut down my monitor. I glanced at my desk clock: 5:45. If I left now I might be get out of here before Felix read my crap copy. I quickly grabbed my purse and stood up to make for the elevator.
Only I froze as I turned toward the silver doors.
Because someone was getting off. Blond hair, long legs, short skirt, killer high heels. She crossed the office with a confidence few women ever grew into, making me simultaneously hate and want to be her.
I watched as she strutted straight toward Felix’s office. She gave a quick knock on the door but didn’t wait for a response before entering. Felix looked up, and I watched his face break into a huge, genuine smile. I swallowed, forcing down some lump of emotion I was not in the mood to identity as I watched him jump up from his chair, cross the room, and envelop the woman in a full-body hug.
The way he greeted her, she could have just been a good friend. Maybe a family member. An old schoolmate from years past.
But I knew she wasn’t just any of those things.
She was Maddie Springer. And Felix was in love with her.
Chapter Sixteen
Remember that woman Felix was gaga over back when I first met him? The one who ran off and married someone else, leaving Felix so dejected that he rebounded with yours truly?
Maddie Springer.
I stood lamely in my cube, purse in hand, watching through the glass as Maddie laughed, smiled, said something so incredibly funny that Felix burst out laughing too.
I looked at the elevator doors. I could easily slip out now. Felix was totally preoccupied. He wouldn’t even notice.
But instead, I sat back down at my chair.
Felix had placed my cube right near his office, ostensibly because with me being the new girl, he wanted easy access to lend a helping hand as I learned the ropes. It was also within perfect earshot of his office.
I turned my computer screen on, pulled up my email program and pretended to read as I focused on the noises coming from Felix’s office behind me.
Hollywood Confessions Page 17
