by Al Roker
I followed him into his living room, where he’d built a pretty good fire in the hearth.
“Get comfortable,” he said, indicating the couch facing the warmth. Judging by the bottle of Rémy Martin XO and the snifter beside a stuffed chair, I’d interrupted him from a little flame dreaming.
By the time it took me to sink into the couch’s soft leather with a sigh, he’d found a snifter for me and was moistening it with the cognac. “You’re a little late for dinner,” he said, handing me the snifter. “I eat early. Helps with the acid reflux. God, old age is fun.”
“You by yourself here, Stew?”
“Nobody else.” He made a little grunting noise as he dropped onto the chair. “Dani’s having dinner with her mom.”
“Roger’s not here?” I wanted to make absolutely sure.
“That jackass was here earlier. I guess I was a little premature in thinkin’ the romance was over. But he left hours ago.” He cocked his head and frowned. “Why do you ask?”
“Somebody broke into the villa this afternoon and left a dead rat in the oven.”
“A rat?”
“Set to broil.”
“Fucking unbelievable. You think it was Roger?”
I shrugged. “You say he was here at the Sands. You saw how much he likes me. And frankly, I don’t know anybody else crazy enough to bust into somebody’s house with a dead rat. I don’t even know where you’d find a rat.”
“That part’s easy. They’re runnin’ wild out here. But Jesus, Billy. If Roger is that twisted, I sure as hell don’t want him anywhere near Dani.”
“That’s the main reason I’m here,” I said.
And I told him everything I knew about the murder of Tiffany Arden, Roger’s former girlfriend.
He leapt from the chair and stood towering over me. “Goddamn it, Billy. You sure took your own sweet time to clue me in about this.”
“I’m sorry, Stew. But the fact is, no charges have ever been brought against Roger. And the only thing I know for sure is that his alibi was bogus.”
“Well, excuse me if I’m behaving like an overprotective father,” Stew said, “but if your silence had given Charbonnet the chance to harm Dani, I’d have gone after him with a gun and then come looking for you.”
“Well, as long as I’m here,” I said, getting up, facing him. “Take your best shot.”
He glared at me, teeth clenched so tightly his jaw muscles knotted. Then he shook his head and walked away. “Let yourself out, Billy. I’ve got things to take care of.”
He climbed the stairs quickly, putting as much distance between us as he could.
That was me, making friends wherever I went.
At the villa, Fitz was carrying two guitar cases toward the open front door. “April’s looking for you,” he said without pausing. “I think she’s in the game room with Des.”
She was.
“Where’d you run off to, Billy?” April asked. She was draped across a sofa with several typewritten pages on her lap. Des was sitting at a felt-lined poker table, patiently constructing a house of cards.
“Took a walk along the beach,” I said.
“Vida’s trying to reach you. Said you weren’t answering your phone.”
“I left it in the coach house. She say what she wanted?”
She smiled. “Not a midnight booty call, I’m afraid.”
“Then who cares.”
“Des is going to be filming stunts at the La Brea Tar Pits tomorrow at ten …”
“Can you bloody believe it?” Des said. “Ten o’clock. In the morning.”
“… and Vida would like you there, too,” April continued. “Something to do with a segment on Wake Up, America!”
The Tar Pits! Where Pleistocene critters once paused to drink the water resting on top of asphalt oozing up from the earth and remained trapped in the sticky goo until thousands of years later, when finally freed by archaeologists in fossil form.
“I guess I should call her,” I said.
“You won’t be waking her,” April said. “It sounded like she was in a club.”
“Good for her,” I said.
Fitz joined us with the news that he’d fit everything into the Hummer and was ready to roll. April and I walked them to the pea-green monstrosity.
“Billy, me lad, you’ll be stayin’ in the guesthouse?” Des asked.
“I’ll see how it goes,” I said.
“Well, enjoy.” He opened the passenger door, grabbed hold of the roof, and swung himself in. “But watch yer back, mate.”
“Later, Billy,” Fitz said, and hopped up and into the Hummer.
The engine turned over. The iron gate swung open. And they were gone.
“If Des refuses to use the rat as an excuse, Crockaby Realty is going to squeeze Max like a ripe orange,” April said, as if the idea amused her. “You going to be okay by yourself? I can have a bodyguard here within the hour.”
“There are security guards, and the alarm system works,” I said. “You just have to turn it on.”
She nodded. “Well, Billy, it’s been a very … unusual evening.” She opened the door to the Camry and, just as she was about to get in, added, “If you need to reach Des, he’s at the Bev Wilshire, registered under the name of—”
“Daniel Knight Lewis,” I said.
She smiled, got into the car. It started up and rolled off without a sound. Those sneaky little hybrids. Road ninjas. Definitely not pedestrian-friendly.
I was mentally nattering. Not a good sign. Nerves. Just going on like a … Shut up!
I waited for the gate to automatically close and lock, then went back into the villa and searched for the alarm system’s instruction brochure. I found it stuck behind the main keypad to the right of the front door. Since it explained how to cancel an alarm, this was probably not the smartest place to keep it.
Making sure the front door was secure, I carried the instruction brochure and the half-full bottle of Jameson back to my little undefiled guesthouse, where I looked in every room and closet to make sure no homicidal chef lay lurking. After checking the window locks, I flipped through the brochure, learned how to bypass the motion sensor in the guesthouse, and, using the keypad in my little enclave, did precisely that before arming the rest of the system.
A little red light indicated all was secure. As comforting as that was, I still had a creepy feeling of uncertainty that I hadn’t experienced since those childhood nights just after my father’s death, when, even with my mother in the next room, the house had felt empty and threatening.
I exchanged my grown-up clothes for my jammies and got into bed with the Walter Mosley thriller and the bottle of Jameson, my substitutes for the teddy bear named Mr. Happy who’d helped me chase away the goblins and ghosties of the night all those years ago.
Chapter
FOURTEEN
To say that the next eight days rolled by uneventfully might not be entirely accurate. True, I had no further contact with Roger Charbonnet, either up front and personal or via some ugly little prank. Nor did I hear another word from Stew Gentry, though I did see him windsurfing on one of the rare evenings I was able to fit in a walk along the beach.
Nearly all of my time was taken up with work.
I spent my mornings with Vida Evans and a bearded cameraman named Hamid Tarul, doing segs for Wake Up. Someone, possibly Vida but more likely Carmen Sandoval, had decided to use several of the city’s more famous locations as the sites for my “Reports from L.A.,” creating a forced serendipity with Des’s spots promoting his show.
The serendipity began, as previously mentioned, at the La Brea Tar Pits, more specifically, at the Page Museum and adjoining park. There, Des, playing the new-to-L.A. hipster, goofed on the various outdoor exhibits—imitating the giant sloths, the prehistoric bear—before entering the museum and nearly leaping from his skin when the animatronic baby mammoth began to move and trumpet.
Meanwhile, I, and the morning show’s viewers, were given a mini-t
our of the exhibits by a charming young volunteer guide that somehow managed to include a bit of Des’s clowning while condensing the usual two-hour-plus exploration to nine minutes, including one commercial interruption.
On subsequent days, we visited Chinatown, the Hollywood sign (where Des rode a cherry-picker, pretending to clean the letters), the back lot at Universal Studios, the Bradbury Building (the iconic movie location for hundreds of fictional private eyes, where our comic hero wore a snap-brim hat and trench coat), and, of course, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre (where, against all advice, he lowered his pants and impressed his Jockey shorts–covered skinny butt in cement, a grim exercise that, even though carefully photographed, to no one’s surprise wound up on YouTube rather than on the network).
As for my afternoons, they alternated between working with Harry Paynter on the book, which now had a tentative title, Murder on the Menu, and attending daily three p.m. meetings with the participants of Des’s new show. The latter included the baby-faced head writer Gibby Lewis, whom I’d met on my first night at the villa; producer Max Slaughter, a gent bovine in body and serpentine in thought, with a Vandyke beard that turned his plump face a bit demonic; his omnipresent gofer Trey Halstead; Tessa Ruscha, the show’s director, a formidable woman with a profile not unlike the comic-strip legend Dick Tracy, who, in flip-flops, towered over most of us; and Tessa’s efficient, no-nonsense floor manager, Lolita Snapps, a black woman in her forties with hair dyed the color of dull gold.
It was Tessa who, with Max’s approval, had brought in the “cutting-edge lighting consultant” identified by the uni-name Pfrank. With his chalk-white skin, long, stringy jet-black hair, a beard stubble that resembled smudged ash, fingernails as long as a mandarin’s, though not as clean, and teeth the color of lemon pulp, Pfrank presented quite a picture.
He seemed devoted to an unwavering wardrobe consisting of a Black Sabbath Heaven and Hell tour T-shirt covering his emaciated chest and black jeans wrapped around his pipe-cleaner legs. There were sparkling stones embedded in his earlobes, rings on his fingers, bands of metal and leather around his wrists, and Nikes the size of country mailboxes on his feet. A heavy chrome key chain drooped from a belt loop, eventually disappearing into his right pants pocket.
He also had heavily mascaraed eyes and topped the whole image off by speaking with a faux-British accent. In short, he was a low-rent modern-day Captain Jack Sparrow. All smarm and no charm.
“I felt it imperative that the at Night designation in the show’s title be treated as literally as … well, Black Sabbath treated their album Live Evil,” Pfrank informed me on the afternoon before the big telecast.
We were watching a complement of workmen put the finishing touches to six-plus months of extensive gutting and restructuring that had transformed what once had been the Margo Channing Playhouse, a midsize live Equity theater venue on Fountain Avenue in Hollywood, into the new Harold Di Voss Theater, named for Commander Di Voss’s late father, Gretchen’s granddaddy, who’d moved Worldwide from a fledgling network into what was at the time considered one of the big four of television broadcasting—NBC, CBS, ABC, and WBC.
Put together by a set designer named Giselle Cateline, the interior of the Di Voss Theater consisted of a high-tech, state-of-the-art television broadcast studio that seated one hundred guests. That was an audience approximately the same size as Craig Ferguson’s on CBS.
The building now had everything a TV studio needed. Except width.
“That is why,” Pfrank continued, “it was necessary we envelop the video mise-en-scène in a cloak of delicious darkness. And use what I call the ‘night minions,’ stagehands garbed head to toe in black.”
Des had already told me about the minions and the mise-en-scène, only not in those particular words. But I wasn’t sure what they had to do with the width of the theater. So I asked Pfrank.
“Didn’t you read my interview in the L.A. Times? It explained everything.”
“Missed it,” I said.
Pfrank sighed. “Well, first you have to understand that there were budgetary parameters that necessitated the use of the existing theater shell. So Giselle realized that while there was the limitation of width, we could play a little with depth. Did you meet Giselle?”
“Afraid not.”
“Oh, too bad. She’s in Quebec now, working on a feature starring the Academy Award–winning Ms. Sandra Bullock, no less. Giselle is—well, the bitch is brilliant, and I don’t use that word very often.”
“I should hope not,” I said. “Feminists would have your guts for garters.”
He flashed a Joker grin, then continued his natter.
“Giselle has created a fucking fabulous design that uses the stage depth to create three separate areas—a cozy conversation-space stage front, near the audience, a flexible performance space just past that, and a permanent-space stage left behind that for the musicians.
“And you know what makes it all work?”
“The director?”
He gave me a chalky, tolerant smile. “I’m talking about the set. The things that allow Giselle’s design to transform an awkward, some might say impossible, space into television magic are wheels and … my darkness.”
“Anyone ever tell you you’re a very dramatic guy?” I asked.
“Are you calling me a diva?”
“Al Pacino is dramatic,” I said. “You’re a diva.”
He mulled that over and evidently was satisfied to be mentioned in the same breath with Pacino. “Shall I continue?” he asked.
“Please.”
“Well, everything is on wheels, soft rubber spherical wheels. The chair and couch used for Des’s interviews can easily be pushed to stage right to allow the cameras access to the performance area. There’s a scrim that will hide the musical group during those times when they’d be a distraction. It will simply be rolled away when it makes sense to put Mr. Fitzpatrick and his orchestra on display. The minions, of course, will be doing the moving, dressed in black, with my darkness design facilitating their complete invisibility.”
“It seems a little tricky,” I said. “Especially the timing.”
“We’re working on that.”
“And about those wheels, what’s to stop the furniture from sliding out from under people? I imagine Des could make a joke of it if he winds up on the floor, but what if it’s a guest like Morgan Freeman or Hillary Clinton hitting the deck?”
“That won’t happen,” Pfrank said smugly. “The wheels are set in a springlike device. When weight is applied, they disappear into the base of the furniture, making it as stable as … Oh, I’m sorry, Chef Blessing. I’m going to have to leave you now. My assistant has arrived with our minions.”
I watched him head toward a group of nearly a dozen men and women who’d filed in through the front doors. It wasn’t hard to pick out Pfrank’s assistant, who, except for platinum spiked hair, could have been his double. The so-called minions were mainly young and burly, the obvious exception being a tall male, at least a decade older than the others. He was wearing unusual octagon-shaped sunglasses in the minimally lighted theater, which suggested either an eye problem, an affectation, or a bizarre fashion statement.
Or maybe he was just warming up for Pfrank’s glorious darkness.
All of the minions, I presumed, belonged to IATSE (the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees). I wondered what the local thought about its members working in the dark, wearing Pfrank’s ninja costumes. Well, it wasn’t my union. Not my problem.
Or so I thought.
Chapter
FIFTEEN
The workmen had just removed the protective plastic covers from the hundred or so audience seats. I tested one and found it surprisingly comfortable. I had about fifteen minutes more to kill before a scheduled luncheon meeting with the head writer, so I decided to give the seat even more of a test.
I leaned back and observed floor manager Lolita Snapps herd the camera operators around the stage area
in preparation for tomorrow night’s show. Pfrank returned with the stagehands in full ninja garb and turned them over to Lolita. Chairs and couch were placed in position on the stage, and Lolita arranged a full-on demonstration of ninjas rolling furniture and fast-moving cameras narrowly avoiding collision.
A lot of choreography to work out with the maiden voyage of this leviathan a little more than twenty-four hours away.
“Not exactly like watching Kobe sink one for the Lakers, is it?” Gibby Lewis said, interrupting my reverie.
“But almost as graceful,” I said.
We moved on, via his white Porsche Boxter (topless, of course), to Nate ’n Al in Beverly Hills, where, after introducing me to assorted celebrities and power brokers, and suggesting I join him in ordering the extra-long hot dog with grilled onions (“That’s assuming you like hot dogs”), Gibby settled back in the booth. His baby face broke into a strange conspiratorial grin, and he asked, “So what are you doin’ here, bubbie?”
“Say again?”
“Why are you here in L.A.? Des says you’re some kind of network spy.”
“He told you that?”
Gibby nodded. “He said he wasn’t sure, so he invited you to stay out at his place as a kind of test, I guess. When you went for it, he figured you were the spy guy.”
“It didn’t occur to him that a guesthouse in Malibu, with a pool and the ocean, might strike me as an improvement over a hotel room?”
“What can I say? The Des man is paranoid, of course. We all are. But sometimes it’s not without reason. So … are you?”
“A spy?” I said. Me, the James Bond of WBC. I kinda liked the idea. “Is there something Des is trying to hide from New York?”
“That he didn’t tell me,” Gibby said. “Just that I should watch what I say around you.”
“But you’re doing the opposite,” I said.
Gibby sighed. “I write comedy. Just like Conan used to write comedy before Lorne took a chance with him. But I make the clubs and the comedy stores. I’m good. You’ll see tomorrow night. I’ll be doing warm-up for the show. If, God forbid, Des doesn’t work out, I figure it couldn’t hurt to be a guy who goes out of his way to cooperate with New York.”
