Hollywood Stuff (12 page)

“I guess I have more than three questions,” said Jane. “One more, at least. Do—”

“Anything. Look, I love Bix. Somebody’s trying to hurt her because of this stupid thing I did…I’m an idiot. Jeb Gleason’s right about me: I’m an idiot hack. But I didn’t kill anybody. And Bix didn’t do anything to deserve this.”

“I think the nurses are letting Skye escape,” said Tim. “She’s headed back this way.”

“Do you collect Depression glass?” asked Jane.

Skye walked in, still laughing her famous Celie laugh, assuring the LPN who accompanied her that it was no problem to sign autographs, she loved talking about the old days.

Lou smiled for the first time since Jane had met him. “Yeah, I do. Real men can collect Depression glass, you know,” he said. “My mom was a huge collector and I caught the bug.” Lou looked over at Tim, who had shot a look when he made the “real men” reference. “Hey, no offense, I mean…shit…you see why Bix didn’t want me at the first meeting? I have to grow on people.”

Tim shook his head. “I’m gay, I’m not thin-skinned. Besides, if you collect Depression glass, well, hell…”

“What?” asked Lou, anxious again.

“It’s only a matter of time,” said Tim.

Out here, East Coast-style flattery will get you in the door, it can get you past one gatekeeper receptionist, it might even get you an invitation to a B-list party, but in order to actually make a Hollywood omelette, you have to crack open the rotten
egg
of ass-kissing, California style. And you’ll be surprised how quickly you can learn it.

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

Jane excused herself after Skye returned. She wanted to find a glass of water and a moment to collect her thoughts. If Lou Piccolo collected Depression glass, he would have been just as likely as Bix to walk down that aisle in the prop warehouse and open the rigged box. And if Lou was as abrasive as he claimed to be, if he had borrowed a few story ideas—freely given or not—he was the half of Bix Pix more likely to have made a few enemies.

Jane walked down the hospital corridor, stopping to study a framed poster. So much of the art in public spaces was institutional—ordinary and forgettable—but this was different. It was a photograph of a hand holding a yellow No. 2 pencil over what looked like a three-dimensional scribble rising from a blank page.

Jane leaned toward the print, trying to see what the material was or how the photographic trick, if that’s what it was, had been accomplished.

“Some kind of wire?” a polite male voice queried from behind her. “Tungsten filament, perhaps?”

“Tungsten filament certainly,” said a voice behind the voice. “That’s a Shotwell. My client, Dr. Bouchard, wants nothing but eighteenth-century French furniture in his house and nothing but Charles Shotwell photographs on his walls. Strange mix, but I’ve seen—”

“So it wasn’t a
royal we,
” said Jane, turning around to face former Evanston police detective Bruce Oh and his wife, Claire.

Bruce Oh raised an eyebrow slightly, which for him was a thoroughly out-of-character display of expression. Jane did not know, however, whether he was surprised to see her or had no idea what she meant by the reference to the
royal we.

“When we spoke on the phone,” said Jane,” you said
when we return from California,
but I didn’t know you were in California, so I thought you were just—”

“I apologize, Mrs. Wheel,” said Oh. “I dislike being unclear.” Bruce Oh turned to his wife, who was standing beside him. “You phoned Mrs. Wheel to tell her we were visiting your relative in California?” Claire, rubbing a piece of dust off the photograph, nodded impatiently. He turned back to Jane. “I thought you had received the message that we, too, were in Los Angeles. My wife’s aunt is ill and we came here to visit. So the
royal we
you speak of was, in fact, a…” Oh hesitated, searching for the correct word. “A
plebeian we,
after all.”

Jane hated that falling-down-the-rabbit-hole feeling she experienced whenever she realized she had forgotten something. Worse was the feeling of not realizing…not remembering the forgetting. When had Claire Oh called her? Charley was supposed to be the absentminded professor in the family. Jane, easily distracted by a piece of pottery or a souvenir tablecloth, was still the one who was supposed to process the information she was told.

“I called to tell her we were going to California, but there was no one at home and when the answering machine picked up, I decided to phone back later and speak with her in person,” said Claire.

Should Jane remind Claire that she was standing right here?

“Ah,” said Oh,” and then you were unable to make the second call?”

Claire nodded and, with no further explanation or apology, went back to polishing the glass covering the photograph.

Jane noted that her partner and his wife always did this—spoke to each other directly, no matter how many other people were in the room. Jane liked to think it had something to do with their unique relationship, which she puzzled over every time she watched the two of them interact. Such an odd couple. Claire, tall and imperious, meticulously dressed in designer clothes of the very season they were designed for—unlike Jane’s own clothes, which occasionally carried all the right tags but were purchased just a season or two after their prime—and Bruce Oh, so quiet and still that he became invisible wherever he stood. The only remarkable aspect to his outward appearance was his daily neckwear. Claire found the most fantastic vintage ties and insisted that her husband wear one from the collection daily.

Were Bruce and Claire Oh odder than any other married couple, though? Jane could remember being twentysomething—she could conjure that mad rush of passion that overtook her back then when Charley smiled at her from across the room. Now did people wonder what Charley saw in his pack rat, almost-detective wife? Growing old with someone, after all, was only one letter away from growing odd with someone, and maybe that’s what they were all in the process of doing.

Claire explained to Jane that her great-aunt was at death’s door and that she and Bruce came out to be with the family and say their good-byes.

“She’s a horrid woman, but we’re all grateful to her for her genes. Living to one hundred and six, she gives us all hope, you know, that we’ve got what it takes to become our own antiques.”

“She’s here in the hospital?” asked Jane, somewhat surprised that someone that age wouldn’t prefer to be taken care of at home.

“Her son and his wife are in their eighties now, healthy, but not able to care for her, really, so they needed her to come to the hospice here at the hospital. Aunt Violet refuses to go quietly.”

“You perhaps mean quickly,” said Bruce Oh. “She has been quiet.”

Claire, to relieve her boredom, had been touring the hospital art. Discovering a Shotwell she hadn’t yet seen was a satisfying distraction from the vigil at her aunt’s bedside. She announced that it was time to go back to the hospice wing and check in with the family. Claire insisted that Bruce remain with Jane.

“Jane is so good at finding adventure…I think she should catch you up,” said Claire. “Aunt Violet will wait for you to return.”

Jane proceeded with the catching up.

“A body at the flea market?” said Oh, shaking his head slightly. “At a house sale, in an antique store, in the midst of his own trash…but a flea market…” He paused. “This would be a first for you?”

Jane, as quickly and efficiently as possible, explained the events that had let up to the body in Pasadena. She omitted that she’d had a romantic history with Jeb Gleason, just mentioned him as a college friend. It had no bearing on the case, she reasoned, so why bring it up? She did tell Oh, however, that she had felt slightly guilty about playing dumb and not telling the police detective on the scene at the market that the body belonged to Lou Piccolo.

“But it did not belong to Mr. Piccolo,” said Oh.

“Yes, but I didn’t know that then,” said Jane. “I mean, it turned out to be okay for me to
not
say what I thought I maybe
should
have said, but it might have gotten pretty confusing with the police later if the victim
had
been Piccolo and we had been questioned again after the investigators checked his office records and found out Tim and I just flew in for a meeting with the man.”

Oh nodded. “Confusing,” he said.

“I mean, is it less of a lie if you think you’re lying about something, but it turns out you were telling the truth because you were misinformed?” Jane asked, feeling as if she were performing some kind of corkscrew dance that was driving her to the center of the earth.

“Whoa, baby, does the ER have an ethicist on call?” said Tim, who had come out of Bix’s room to find Jane. He shook hands with Oh, accepting the fact the man was going to show up wherever Jane happened to be discovering a dead body or two.

“I’m just saying that if the dead man
had
been Lou Piccolo, I realize I took a chance when I parsed words over whether I knew the victim,” Jane said, adding under her breath, feeling that whirling dervish thing all over again,” even though it turned out that I didn’t know him after all.”

“Sometimes silence is the greater truth,” said Oh.

“Dumb luck,” Jane agreed.

Jane was ready for Oh’s next question, since she had been asking it herself after her conversation with Lou Piccolo. She answered Oh the same way she had answered herself.

“I don’t know why Jeb looked at the dead man and said that Lou Piccolo was back from Ojai. He had to have recognized the victim and known that there was a connection to Lou. Since no one knows who the phantom writer was…” Jane stopped and looked up at Oh, who had the good grace to look pleasantly expectant and puzzled at the same time rather than confused and irritated that Jane Wheel was carrying on an investigative meditation with herself. “I’ll explain all of this, but the most important thing is that Jeb recognized the body as someone Lou had a connection to and, I guess, might have wanted dead.

“But why that cool acceptance of the fact?” she continued. “I mean, if Jeb really believed that Lou could murder someone, why did the B Room disappear en masse instead of telling the police who the victim was and who they might want to start looking for?”

“Mrs. Wheel, you of all people should know what can happen if you claim knowledge of a victim,” said Oh. “There are those in law enforcement who are so happy to have information handed to them, it doesn’t matter that the information should have them up and running in a different direction. They will keep the person with something to say talking and retelling what he or she knows until the good citizen begins feeling very much like an ill-used citizen.”

“Now that everyone is filled in on everything,” said Tim, “can you come back in and help referee between Lou and Skye? They’re in some kind of pissing match over who cares more about Bix and her well-being and who is going to take better care of—”

“Moot,” said Jane. “Listen.”

The conversation among the B Room members grew louder as they approached from the elevator. They were arguing over which route they should have taken from some restaurant in Pasadena, where, apparently, they had stopped for brunch even though they had all just encountered a man murdered by someone who at least one of them had believed to be their associate. Rick was insisting that they should have anticipated the traffic jam they encountered. He added that the stops at everyone’s houses and offices had been totally unnecessary. Greg agreed

with his partner, but insisted that the stop they made at their office had been a necessary one. He managed to sound both belligerent and apologetic at the same time. Louise was doing a blah-blah-blah-I can’t-hear-you counterpoint.

Jane, Tim, and Oh stood facing them as the group rounded the corner at the nurses’ station and Jeb held up his hand like a crossing guard to stop the bickering.

“Bix has been in good hands, so stop the noise,” said Jeb, reaching both hands out to Jane. “You came here right after the flea market? What a friend you’re being to Bix. She’s going to up the option money, I can feel it.”

Jane dodged his hands and began to introduce Jeb to Bruce Oh. She started to call Oh her partner, but hesitated, remembering that Oh had kept himself out of the newspaper stories that had been written about their last case at Fuzzy Neilson’s farm in Kankakee and had asked her not to mention him when she had appeared on the television newsmagazine that had started this whole Hollywood mess. Why not allow him to remain a silent partner?

In the beat in which all of this ran through Jane’s mind, Oh picked up the signal.

“I am a colleague of Mrs. Wheel’s husband, Charley,” he said, stretching out his hand toward Jeb Gleason. “Adjunct professor only,” he added, which Jane realized was absolutely true. Bruce Oh did teach classes at Northwestern University, where Charley was a faculty member. Using the truth to perpetuate a lie was incredibly convenient.

“The coincidence of us both having loved ones in the hospital so many miles from our homes is fascinating,” said Bruce Oh, bobbing and weaving around Jane, putting himself between her and the B Room. It allowed him to look over all of the individuals and memorize their faces at the same time as he set a screen for Jane as she gathered herself behind the cover he was providing. She marveled at how he used his foreign appearance to such wide-eyed innocent advantage when he wanted to remain anonymous.