Hollywood Stuff

HOLLYWOOD
STUFF

ALSO BY SHARON FIFFER

Buried Stuff

Killer Stuff

Dead Guy’s Stuff

The Wrong Stuff

SHARON FIFFER

  
ST. MARTIN’S MINOTAUR
  
  
NEW YORK

HOLLYWOOD STUFF
. Copyright © 2006 by Sharon Fiffer. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.minotaurbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fiffer, Sharon Sloan, 1951–
         Hollywood stuff / Sharon Fiffer.
               p. cm.
         ISBN-13: 978-0-312-34306-4
         ISBN-10: 0-312-34306-X
         1. Wheel, Jane (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women detectives—Illinois—Chicago—Fiction. 3. Antique dealers—Fiction. 4. Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)—Fiction. 5. Screenwriters—Fiction. I. Title.

   PS3606.I37H65 2006
   813’.54—dc22

2005057852

First Edition: June 2006

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

F
OR
S
TEVE
…
WHO PICKED ME OUT OF THE CHORUS
AND MADE ME A STAR

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to the usual suspects who read, listen, and laugh at my jokes: Cas Rooney, Steve Fiffer, Kate Fiffer, Nora Fiffer, Rob Fiffer. Thanks to my friends who share their expertise: Judy Groothuis, Dr. Dennis Groothuis, and Dr. Arnold Robin for medical stuff; Emory Schmidt, who knows a lot about cigars and being a big brother; Chuck and Lynn Shotwell, photographers extraordinaire. Thanks to my West Coast friends who drove me around, fed me, sheltered me, and spilled their stories: Fred Rubin, Alan Rosen, Thom Bishop, Alice Sebold, Glen Gold, Jane Franklin, Marley Sims, Ingrid Willis, Sheldon and all the folks at The Mystery Bookstore in Westwood, and tonight’s special guest star, Bob Lowry. Thank you, Gail Hoch-man and Kelley Ragland—you both make business a pleasure.

HOLLYWOOD
STUFF

Nothing good ever comes from a conversation that starts with “babe.”

—
FROM
Hollywood Diary
BY
B
ELINDA
S
T
. G
ERMAINE

Jane Wheel knew better than to speak on the record. One month ago, when asked if she would be interviewed for a newsmagazine program by the journalist who had written last summer’s story of Johnny Sullivan’s murder as a syndicated feature, coloring it as cautionary tale of small-town grift and aging Americans in rural isolation, which, truth be told, Jane had thought a bit over the top at the time, she could have and should have said no.

And if her mother, Nellie, hadn’t agreed with Jane’s first impulse, telling her that she would look like a fool, going on television bragging and yammering about other people’s business, Jane might have remained firm in her refusal. But something about Nellie’s advice to say no turned Jane’s no into a yes.

That’s how she ended up in a small television studio, miked for sound and pancaked for glamour, all of her instincts for self-preservation, her obsessive desire for privacy, her almost paranoid fears of self-revelation conspiring to stop Jane from talking. She choked on a glass of water, causing her to cough unattractively for the first five minutes of the pre-interview. She then felt her muted cell phone vibrate in her pocket. She excused herself, explained that her husband was out of town, she had to answer it in case it was her son calling…and left the room. There, she explained in an angry whisper to the actual caller, Tim Lowry, her media-curious best friend, that the interview had barely started, she could hardly tell him how it was going. She returned to the set with her lipstick freshened—Tim did know his stuff when it came to cosmetic reminders—and, when the camera rolled on her return, answered each question posed about the murder, about the experience in Kankakee at Fuzzy Neilson’s farm, as directly and as cautiously as she could. Jane paused for a drink of water, remembering to allow her lips to stay moistened—Tim’s voice in her ear again—and relaxed, just a bit. It was going well. She hadn’t cursed, stammered, stuttered, or blurted out anything negative about anyone personally. Then Marisa Brown, the journalist who had written the original story that had been picked up by newspapers in almost every city in the country, leaned forward, girlfriend to girlfriend, and asked Jane Wheel, on camera, the million-dollar question.

“One day you were haunting garage sales, the next you were solving murders. Do you ever feel that your life has become a movie?”

Jane forgot that there was tape rolling. Her throat suddenly cleared. She opened her brown eyes a bit wider, barely licked her lips, and leaned forward in her chair.

“That’s exactly how I feel. Every time I find a body, I think somebody’s going to jump out and yell,
Candid Camera,
or what was that new one? Oh yeah…
Jane Wheel. You’ve been punk’d.”

After that, Jane couldn’t stop talking. She described her parents, Don and Nellie, their tavern, the EZ Way Inn, the gambling scandal that had involved practically their whole town. She babbled on about her neighbor’s murder and mentioned that she had been a suspect in that one because of an innocent kiss.

“Hey, it didn’t mean anything,” Jane said. “I mean, we’d been drinking, for heaven’s sake.”

Jane found that she liked playing to an audience. Marisa was smiling and nodding. Marisa’s sister, Laura, who had taken the photographs for the print piece, was standing in the wings, doubled over in silent laughter at Jane’s stories. Even the cameraman, all serious business when Jane was choking earlier, was now laughing and miming one-handed applause.

Only after the lights were off and Laura and Marisa were high-fiving each other on the piece did Jane wake up.

“I got a little chatty,” Jane said.

“You were marvelous,” said Marisa.

“Perfect,” said Laura.

“Could you maybe edit out…?” Jane paused. Where to begin? The loose remark about her mother, Nellie, being, at best, a difficult woman? The knock on Kankakee as the tavern capital of the world? Blurting out that Charley was an academic and everybody knew that academics were underpaid?

The Brown sisters did edit some of the interview. The carefully measured and thoughtful performance that Jane gave at the beginning of the piece disappeared. Instead, when the interview was televised nationally that week on a newsmagazine that Jane had never even heard of before, Jane Wheel appeared to be a cross between the crocodile hunter and the entire Ozzy Osbourne family.

Watching with Nick, she gave silent thanks that Charley was out of the country and hoped that Don and Nellie were still having problems remembering the numbers of television channels since they got digital cable. Besides, who had ever heard of this program?

Everyone. Jane heard from her former schoolteachers, Kankakee shopkeepers, her Evanston neighbors. Her personal worst was when she yanked the phone cord out of the jack and she looked over to Nick for some sympathy. He was staring straight ahead, almost comatose.

“I’m not going to school tomorrow,” he said softly.

“What? I didn’t say anything bad about you, honey,” said Jane. “You’re the one—”

“Ace,” said Nick.

“What?”

“I’m the
ace
midfielder on my soccer team?” said Nick, not quite as softly. “Why would you say something like that? Why would you say anything about me?”

“
Ace
means that you’re good,” said Jane, feeling herself grow weaker and weaker.

“Do you know what this means? For the rest of my life, I will be called
Ace,
” said Nick. “And I’m not even that good, Mom. I’m finished. I’m quitting.”

“You can’t quit soccer, Nick. Nobody watches this, nobody—”

“I’m not quitting soccer. I’m quitting school,” said Nick, leaving the room. “I’m quitting this family.”

Jane heard a kind of angelic choir, some kind of chanting, and thought maybe, if she was lucky, she had dropped dead. Of course, the way she had sworn and been bleeped on national television, she should have known immediately that the first thing she heard after death was not going to be an angelic choir. No, it was just her cell phone that Nick had switched to the
Seraphim
ring tone.

“It wasn’t that bad,” growled the voice at the other end.

Uh-oh. If Nellie was calling to comfort her, it was even worse than she thought.

Jane would have to quit the family, too.

Tim, of course, had taped the interview and edited it in such a way that when he walked into Jane’s house that night and dropped it into the VCR, it played over and over in a continuous loop. Tim then reminded Jane that if she tried to turn off the television manually, without the remote, she would never be able to get the television, with cable, back on. When she asked him what that had to do with anything, Tim smiled, dropped the remote into his vintage leather briefcase, and walked swiftly and decisively out the door.

One week later, Charley called, asking Jane how she felt about Nick joining him for an extension to his trip. He had been asked to join a faculty panel heading to Peru for a three-week symposium. Students would be attending for credit, it would be a safe and sane trip, and, after all, he reasoned to Jane, wouldn’t Nick learn more from that experience than from a middle school unit on magnetism or yet another introduction to the significant battles of the Civil War? Jane, no defender of the curriculum at Nick’s school, where she had seen him read the same short stories in English class two years in a row, still didn’t like to go through the permission request for Nick to miss that much school.

The last time Charley had whisked his son away from his battered desk, the principal had intoned, “Even if it is educational, Mrs. Wheel, surely you understand that Nicholas is missing valuable curriculum material here?”

Jane, feeling like she was the one being called into the principal’s office for some infraction, had bent her head and shuffled her feet, mumbling something about Nick’s straight A’s no matter how much class time he missed, and somehow managed to exit without her voice breaking or any tears escaping.

This time, however, Jane leapt at the opportunity to get Nick out of the country. He would surely forgive her televised babbling if she got him out of school, out of the country, for a three-week period when something, anything, might happen to break the middle school news cycle of her idiocy. Surely, in twenty-one days, some other kid’s parent would do something, anything, that rivaled her loose lips sinking ships, and Nick could return to school, happily under the radar, where any self-respecting fourteen-year-old longed to live.

Jane told herself that it was a good thing Charley had gotten Nick out of town. And it wasn’t just to spare him the razzing of classmates for having a mother who didn’t know when to shut up. Jane knew her son would learn more from his father and the travel experience than he would here, and when father and son returned, they would both be full of the excitement and knowledge of the dig, forgiving and forgetting all about Jane’s televised shout-out.

But now, on this October evening, cool with just enough orange and red leaves crackling underfoot to remind anyone and everyone that this was autumn in the Midwest, with all of its promise of harvest moons and the smell of woodsmoke—which, let’s face it, never made up for the snow and freezing rain and skin-numbing cold that would follow—Jane, walking the neighborhood with Lovely Rita, her big loyal shepherd mix mutt, was filled with…something. Longing? Maybe a little. In that sentimental, falling-leaves sort of way. But this feeling felt bigger, more momentous. Desire? Well, she missed Charley, but they had grown comfortable with the rhythms of his field-work and her treasure hunts, which often separated them. Restlessness? Definitely. Jane needed something to happen. No, she needed
to make
something happen. She no longer wanted to fall into a criminal case by tripping over a body. She didn’t want to live from Thursday to Thursday, checking the local paper’s classifieds for garage sales.

Back home in her kitchen, she unsnapped Rita’s leash and buried her face in her dog’s neck. Rita turned around and looked at Jane, mildly curious, then trotted off in search of food and water.

Jane phoned Tim but got his machine. She dialed her partner in noncrime, Detective Bruce Oh, and heard his wife Claire’s efficient voice message, dictating exactly what the caller was to do and how long he or she had to do it. Jane hung up.

She paced the length of her living room, a large space filled with wooden trunks used as tables, a cast-off crystal chandelier which had never been wired for light, only hung for reflection.

She plumped the pillows covered in flowered barkcloth and stared at the bookcase filled with old hardcover books. Jane Wheel was not a book collector per se, but she was a collector who heard the small voices of objects that called to her.
Take me home.
That’s what she heard from ceramic flowerpots and old autograph books, tins of buttons and battered boxes of office supplies from the thirties. She picked up a tiny matchbox with strong art deco graphics that held “gummed reinforcements” and wondered how many of Nick’s classmates would know what a gummed reinforcement was. The tiny container had been propped up in front of a collection of books Jane had discovered at a house sale. She remembered the thrill of opening the carton in the basement and finding the cache of hardcover mysteries. No Nancy Drews, but hardcovers with glossy dust jackets intact. A Mary Roberts Rinehart. An Agatha Christie. A more recent, but also more raggedy Raymond Chandler.
The Long Goodbye.
Jane took it off the shelf and rubbed away a light film of dust with her hand, and found herself saying the title out loud. Such an exquisitely sad phrase,
the long goodbye.

If Jane hadn’t been holding the book, staring at the off-center column of stacked shabby suitcases filled with vacation photos, travel brochures, and maps, all gathered from rummage sales and thrift stores, all chronicling the lives and travels of strangers, she might have been more wary when she answered the ringing phone.