Jaine Austen 1 - This Pen for Hire (8 page)

I could just picture her. Some elfin Audrey Hepburn type with long legs and a swanlike neck.

Suddenly, I couldn’t decide whether to be glad Cameron wasn’t gay, or miserable that I obviously wasn’t his type. Face it. Men who like delicate ballet dancers rarely wind up with women who’re just inches away from queen-sized panty hose.

“So how come you guys broke up?”

Cameron looked pained.

“She wanted to get married. Unfortunately, not to me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me too.”

Then he forced himself to smile.

“So, how about you? You ever been married? Engaged? Or otherwise encumbered?”

“Married. Once.”

“And?”

“Not exactly a match made in heaven.”

He nodded sympathetically, waiting for me to spill my guts. But I didn’t want to bore him with the excruciating details of life with The Blob. (I’m saving that stuff for you.)

And then, before I knew what was happening, he was leaning toward me. For a blissful minute, I thought he was going to kiss me. But all he did was reach into his glove compartment.

“Want a Tic Tac?”

“No, thanks,” I said. Then, much too perkily, “Oh, my! Look at the time. I’d better get going.”

I reached into the backseat to get my looseleaf binder, my Queen Size fanny jutting out toward Cameron’s dashboard. Good Lord. How humiliating. As I struggled to gather some papers that had scattered to the floor, I pictured the headlines:
Giant Ass Attacks Jeep Cherokee, Driver Mistakes It for Inflated Airbag.

Oh, well. It didn’t matter. He was obviously still in love with his ex-girlfriend.

T
he Creative Talent Agency is in a glitzy high-rise on Sunset Boulevard. The kind of building with wall-to-wall windows and spectacular views. So spectacular that on a clear day, when the fog lifts, you can see the smog.

As I made my way up in the elevator for my meeting with Andy Bruckner, I went over all the movie ideas I’d dreamed up. Which totalled Zero. Nada. Zip. Here was my big chance to become a megabucks screenwriter, and I was blowing it. But somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to pitch ideas to a slimebag like Andy.

Instead of dreaming up a high-concept story for Julia or Meg or Cameron, I’d spent the morning working on a mailer for one of my regular clients, Toiletmaster Plumbers (“In a Rush to Flush? Call Toiletmaster!”).

I stepped off the elevator onto carpeting so thick, I could barely see my Reeboks. I drifted over to an icy blond receptionist at a brand-new antique desk, reading a paperback copy of Sartre’s
No Exit.
I could see she was on page three. I got the feeling that she’d been on page three for a long time—that page two was a distant memory, and page four an impossible dream. She looked up from her book, and gave me the once-over.

“Delivery?” she asked, looking for a package.

“No,” I huffed. “I’m Jaine Austen. I’ve got an appointment to see Andy Bruckner.”

“Yeah, right. And I actually understand this crap I’m reading.” Okay, she didn’t really say that, but she was thinking it. What she really said was, “Oh?”

She picked up her phone and dialed.

“Hi, Kevin. There’s a Ms. Austen here who says she’s here to see Andy.” She listened to the voice on the other end, then hung up, conceding defeat. “His assistant will be right with you,” she said with a grudging smile. “Have a seat.”

She gestured to several leather sofas scattered around the room.

I sat down in one of them, across from two lanky guys sporting scruffy jeans and a colorful assortment of nervous tics. Obviously screenwriters. One of them had a script rolled up in his lap and was going over a page of notes; the other tapped his foot in a compulsive staccato on the thick carpeting.

“Can I get you some coffee?” the receptionist asked.

I was just about to say yes, when I saw that she wasn’t talking to me. She was talking to the screenwriters.

“No, thanks, hon,” the foot-tapper said.

He turned to his partner with a worried look on his face.

“You think maybe we need some comic relief in the decapitation scene?”

I swear, he said that. I’m not making it up. No wonder so many of today’s movies look like something unclogged by Toiletmasters.

After a while, a svelte redhead in a suit that cost more than my car came out from an impressive set of double doors and breezed over to the screenwriters. She air-kissed them gingerly, careful not to make body contact, then led them back through the double doors into the inner sanctum.

I sat back and waited. And waited. And waited. People arrived for their appointments, were kept cooling their heels the requisite amount of time, and then were finally ushered through the double doors. I had a mental image of a row of agents, sitting at their desks, playing computer solitaire, counting the minutes till they’d kept their clients waiting long enough.

Most of the clients in the waiting room were writers. I could tell by the scripts in their hands and the paranoia in their eyes. At one point a gorgeous woman with legs that wouldn’t quit showed up, and was ushered in right away. She had to have been either an actress or a mistress. One guy showed up in an impressive three-piece suit. I could have sworn he was Ted Turner. But he turned out to be the Xerox repairman.

People came, and people went, and I just sat there. After about forty minutes, I was about to get up and say something to the receptionist when the double doors swung open, and a shorter version of Andy, a curly-haired guy with rolled-up sleeves and Larry King suspenders, came bustling to my side.

“You Jaine Austen?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Kevin Delaney, Andy’s assistant.”

“Nice to meet you.”

I held out my hand for a handshake. He stared at it as if it were a cockroach on a bed of basmati rice.

“Sorry,” he said curtly, “but your meeting with Andy’s been cancelled.”

“What?” I said, anger bubbling up from my stomach.

“Andy told me to tell you he knows all about you. He called
The New York Times
. He said he doesn’t do business with liars.”

“Then I guess he doesn’t work much in this town.”

“Yeah, right. Biting Hollywood humor. Very funny.”

He started back toward the double door.

“Hey! Wait a minute!” I shouted, causing the receptionist to look up, alarmed, from page three of her book.

Mr. Suspenders stopped in his tracks and turned to me.

“Yes?”

“Just when did Andy make this phone call to
The Times?”

“Yesterday, I think.”

“He made me drive all the way over in rush-hour traffic and kept me waiting forty minutes for a meeting he knew he wasn’t going to keep?”

“Sure looks that way, doesn’t it?” he sneered.

He started to walk away, and I grabbed him by the suspenders.

“Look, you putz,” I said, shouting loud enough for all the people in the reception area to hear me, “you tell Mr. Bruckner that I know all about him, too. All about his affair with Stacy Lawrence. And tell him that my next pitch meeting is going to be with the police.”

By now, everyone was staring at me. Half of them, I’m sure, were wondering how they could work this scene into their next screenplay.

As I stomped over to the elevator, I could hear the receptionist calling security.

It took a while for an elevator to show up. I could feel the eyes of the receptionist boring into my back as I waited.

When the elevator doors finally opened, two slack-jawed security guards came bounding out. “Some crazy woman is making a scene at the reception desk,” I said, as they hurried past me. Then I slipped into the elevator and pressed the “Close Door” button before they discovered that the crazy woman was me.

I headed down to the garage and picked up my car from the valet-parking area. A bored cashier held out her hand.

“That’ll be eight dollars, please.”

Eight dollars? For a crummy parking spot?

I ground my teeth as I forked over the money. The cashier smiled and offered me a complimentary chocolate mint. In a wild act of defiance, fueled by my fury at Andy Bruckner, I took two.

I was halfway home, sucking on my four-dollar mint, when I looked up and saw Palmetto, the restaurant where Devon MacRae worked parking cars. On an impulse, I swung into the parking lot. It was only five o’clock, and the lot was empty. Three valet parkers were standing at the ticket booth in their red jackets, shooting the breeze. One of them was Devon.

The sign at the ticket booth said, “Valet Parking $4.” I’d be damned if I was going to shell out another four bucks. So I swerved into a spot and parked my car myself. Then I got out and headed over to where Devon was standing with the two other valets, both handsome young Mexican guys.

One of them started to punch me a parking ticket.

“No!” I stopped him. “I’m not going to the restaurant; I’m here to talk to Mr. MacRae.”

Devon stared at me blankly, no sign of recognition in his eyes.

“We met the other day at Stacy’s funeral,” I prompted.

“Oh, right,” he said, clearly embarrassed that I’d seen him hauled away by The Vale of Peace security guards.

“Can we talk? In private?”

“Sure.”

We walked over to my Corolla. I was trying to decide what profession to assume (lawyer? reporter? police detective?) when Devon made up my mind for me.

“Wait a minute. Now I remember you. You were standing next to me at the gravesite, weren’t you?”

“Right.”

“You must be the newspaper reporter.”

“How did you know?”

“Zane told me.”

“Zane?”

“The girl with the purple hair.”

“Oh, right. Zane.”

“She said you worked for
The New York Times.
”

“Mmm,” I said, technically not lying.

I halfway expected him to take out a flyer for a play he was starring in. But thankfully, he didn’t.

“I hope you won’t write about that crazy scene at the cemetery. I don’t know what came over me.” He shook his head, tears welling in his eyes. “I was just so crazy about Stacy. I guess I went a little nuts.”

“Do you really think Andy Bruckner killed her?”

“Who knows?” he shrugged. “I think he’s capable of it. Or at least, he’s capable of hiring someone to do it.”

Aha. So my hit-man theory wasn’t so far off base, after all.

“But that’s not what I meant when I said if it hadn’t been for Andy, Stacy would still be alive today.”

“What did you mean?”

“Just that if she hadn’t broken up with me, we’d be living together by now, in a place of our own, and she never would have agreed to go out with that lunatic they arrested.”

“I’m not so sure that the guy they arrested really killed Stacy. I’ve interviewed him, and he seems pretty harmless.”

“Stacy needed someone to take care of her.”

Yeah, right. Like Hells Angels need training wheels.

“Stacy was careless. She didn’t watch out for herself. Like that time with the peanut oil.”

“Peanut oil?”

“Stacy was allergic to peanuts. Actually, she was allergic to lots of stuff. Peanuts. Strawberries. Pollen. Perfume. But the worst was peanuts. Just one peanut could make her violently ill. Every time she ate out, she had to ask the waiter if the food was cooked in peanut oil. I can’t tell you how many times she’d forget to ask.

“Then one night, after she dumped me, she went out with Andy to a Thai restaurant. She forgot to ask about the peanut oil. The next thing you know, she was in the emergency room.”

He ran his fingers through his mop of dark hair. “If she’d been with me, that never would’ve happened. I would’ve remembered. They pumped her stomach and kept her in the hospital overnight. Do you think Andy stayed with her? No way. The bum left her there, all by herself, and went running back to his wife. Stacy called me the next day and asked me to come and get her. She asked
me.
Not Andy. Doesn’t that mean that I was the one she really loved?”

He looked at me pleadingly, desperate for the answer he wanted to hear.

“Sure,” I obliged. “I bet she really did love you.”

His eyes shone with gratitude.

“I know this is painful for you, Devon, but aside from Andy, can you think of anybody else who might have killed Stacy?”

“Heck, no. Everybody loved her.”

Right. Another keen observer in the Love-Is-Blind Department.

“Anyhow,” he said, somewhat uncomfortably, “you’re not going to write about what happened yesterday, are you? I’m up for a part in a soap, and I can’t afford any bad press right now.”

“No, I can honestly say I won’t be writing about you in the newspaper.”

He grinned an endearing lopsided grin, exposing a mouth full of fabulous caps. With his jet-black hair, luminous brown eyes, and slightly crooked smile, he was an undeniable doll. I doubted he’d be sitting on the shelf for very much longer.

“I guess that’s about it,” I said. “Thanks for talking with me.”

We shook hands, and I got into my car.

“Wow,” he said, eyeing the dents in my Corolla, “they sure don’t pay much at
The New York Times,
do they?”

I smiled weakly and put my car in gear. As I headed toward the exit, I saw that the lot had started to fill up. The cocktail hour crowd. It was just five-thirty, and already there were three black BMWs parked there.

I turned and saw Devon, waving good-bye.

He seemed like a nice guy. But in the words of that wise old philosopher, Bullwinkle J. Moose, things aren’t always what they seem in Frostbite Falls.

It was very possible that Devon MacRae took a black BMW from the Palmetto parking lot, drove over to Stacy’s apartment and bludgeoned her to death, then drove back just in time to grin his endearing lopsided grin and pocket a ten-dollar tip.

P
rozac and I were snuggled in bed, going over the facts of the case. Okay, I was going over the facts of the case. Prozac was licking her privates. Some mammals have all the luck.

I’d decided to tackle this whole thing methodically, by jotting down detailed notes on a legal pad. Here’s what I jotted:

—Stacy Lawrence, aerobics instructor and seductress extraordinaire, dumps her boyfriend for a big-time Hollywood agent, and gets her skull bashed in with a ThighMaster.

—Suspects? Scads.

—Don’t forget to buy Q-Tips. And Oreos.

Okay, so my mind wandered a little. Clearly, this jotting shtick wasn’t working. I tossed my legal pad aside and decided to let my mind wander on its own. I started going over my list of suspects, beginning with my own personal fave—Andy Bruckner.

I remembered what Devon said about Stacy’s allergies. About how she almost died at that restaurant with Andy because neither one of them remembered to ask the waiter if the food was cooked in peanut oil. But what if Andy
had
remembered, and kept his mouth shut?

“How’s this for a scenario?” I asked Prozac. “Maybe Stacy was beginning to be a problem, threatening to spill the beans to Andy’s wife about their affair. So Andy takes her to a Thai restaurant, with plenty of peanut-based dishes on the menu, and conveniently forgets to ask the waiter about peanut oil. Sure enough, she orders a dish cooked in peanut oil and has a violent reaction. Only, unfortunately for Andy, she doesn’t die. So he has to take more drastic measures. Like bonking her brains out with a ThighMaster.”

I looked over at Prozac for approval. But she just went on licking herself, unimpressed with my powers of deduction.

Then I remembered my hissy fit with Andy’s assistant at the Creative Talent Agency. Maybe I shouldn’t have threatened to go to the police. If Andy Bruckner had killed Stacy to keep her from blabbing to his wife, what would stop him from killing me?

Suddenly I felt scared. What an idiot I’d been. Why didn’t I just pin a bull’s-eye to my chest and hand Andy a gun?

I reached out to Prozac, who, sensing I could use a comforting body to curl up with, promptly leapt off the bed and fled to the living room.

I finally managed to calm myself down with a few deep-breathing exercises, and a large glass of chardonnay. After all, I told myself, several people in the waiting room at CTA heard me threaten to go to the police. If I were to turn up dead, Andy would be the first person the cops would question. Surely Andy wouldn’t take that kind of chance. He might be a killer, but he wasn’t stupid.

And besides, it was possible that Andy wasn’t the killer. It could easily have been Devon. I’d seen his temper in action at the cemetery. He said he’d been crazy about Stacy. Maybe crazy enough to kill her, in one of those if-I-can’t-have-her-no-one-else-can fits of passion.

And what about Jasmine Manning? And Yetta Kolchev? Either one of them could have killed Stacy in a jealous rage. And Lord knows how many other women out there had boyfriends or husbands seduced by Stacy. Any one of whom could have flipped out and taken revenge with a ThighMaster.

My brain was overloaded with possibilities, all of them sounding pretty damn plausible. I had plenty of theories. What I didn’t have was evidence. Not a shred of the stuff.

I thought about my conversation with Devon MacRae in the parking lot. I had a feeling that he’d said something important, something I should have been focusing on. I sensed that he’d given me an important clue, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what it was.

Trust me. This detective business is a lot harder than it looks on TV.

I flopped back on my bed, feeling a bit overwhelmed. I was lying there, wondering about the nature of good and evil, and whether or not I had any ice cream in my freezer, when the phone rang.

It was Howard.

“Guess what,” he said. “I’m out on bail.”

“That’s wonderful.”

“My mom had to mortgage our house to put up the bond money.”

Oh, jeez.

“My attorney says he’s pretty sure he can get me off. He’s a really nice guy. And very enthusiastic. I’m his first case out of law school.”

Double jeez.

“Anyhow, I called to thank you. Detective Rea told my attorney how you came to see him and put in a good word for me. I really appreciate that.”

“Believe me, Howard, it was the least I could do.”

“You’re the only one who came to visit me in jail. Except for my mom, of course.”

How utterly pathetic.

“So I’d like to take you to dinner, to thank you.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I want to. Really. I thought we could have Chinese food. I know this really nice restaurant on Fairfax. The House of Wonton.”

“Sounds great,” I lied.

“Meet you there tomorrow at five? I’ve got an early-bird coupon.”

“Terrific,” I lied again.

I got off the phone, suffused with pity. Poor Howard. The guy goes out on what probably was the first date of his life and winds up getting arrested for murder. I thought back to what he’d told me, about discovering the body. How he walked into Stacy’s dark apartment, confused and concerned, smelling her perfume in the air, and wondering where she was. How he called out to her and, getting no answer, walked down the darkened hallway to her bedroom, only to find her lying there, covered in blood. What a nightmare. And it was all my fault.

I decided to ease my guilt with my good buddies Ben & Jerry.

A half hour later, I was sitting in my kitchen, staring down into an empty carton of Chunky Monkey, when it hit me: the important clue Devon had given me in the parking lot. All evening long it had been buzzing around my brain like an elusive housefly. And now it stood still just long enough for me to figure out what it was.

Devon said Stacy was allergic to lots of things. Peanuts. Pollen. Strawberries.
And perfume!

Howard said he smelled perfume in the apartment the night of the murder. If Stacy was allergic, the perfume couldn’t have been hers. Someone else had to have been in her apartment that night.

And I had a pretty good idea who it was.

I spent the next day putting the finishing touches on my Toiletmasters brochure. A few of my zippier headlines were “Tanks for the Memories” and “Commodes Sure to Bowl You Over.” (Hey, I never said I was Shakespeare.)

At about four o’clock, I headed over to the Century City Shopping Mall. Century City used to be part of the back lot at Twentieth Century Fox movie studios. Where Academy Award–winning movies like
The Grapes of Wrath, Gentleman’s Agreement,
and
All About Eve
were once made, you can now buy a Gap T-shirt. Inspiring, isn’t it?

I was walking past Bloomingdale’s, remembering the good old days when I could actually afford to shop there, when who should I see coming toward me but Elaine Zimmer, loaded down with Laura Ashley shopping bags.

“Elaine,” I called out. “Hi.”

She stared at me blankly.

“Jaine,” I prompted. “Jaine Austen.”

“Oh, right,” she smirked. “How are things at the LAPD? Or
The New York Times?
Or wherever it is you’re working this week.”

I had the grace to blush.

“Daryush was furious when the cops told him you’re not really with
The Times
. Apparently he told his whole family in Russia he was going to be in the paper.”

Ouch.

“So how are things going with your ‘investigation’?”

“Great,” I lied. “And you?” I eyed her shopping bags, bulging with Laura Ashley linens. “On a shopping spree, I see.”

“Yes,” she beamed. “I’m moving into Stacy’s apartment next Saturday.” She was about a thousand times chirpier than the last time I’d seen her. “Well, I’ve got to run. They’re having a white sale at Bloomie’s.”

She waddled off, her shopping bags bouncing at her side. Now that she was about to move into the apartment of her dreams, she was one happy camper.

What a difference a death makes.

As I watched Elaine disappear into Bloomingdale’s, I remembered the bloodstains I’d seen in her laundry basket. Was it possible that Elaine killed Stacy to inherit her apartment? Or maybe it wasn’t about the apartment. Maybe Elaine killed Stacy simply because she hated her. Maybe Elaine was sick of being a short, stumpy woman no one looked at twice, sick of seeing women like Stacy get everything they wanted in life just because they were beautiful. Maybe she got so fed up with the injustice of it all that she went a little bonkers, like one of her patients in the psychiatric ward.

Lost in thought, I made my way along the mall—past kamakaze shoppers, harried moms, and anorexic fashionistas. I arrived at my destination, a tiny shop that sold “all natural” body oils. I browsed through the fragrances, wondering why on earth anyone would want to smell like “Birch Bark” or “Henna Root.”

Finally I found the fragrance I was looking for.