Hollywood Stuff (20 page)

Tim’s reverie was interrupted when Bobbette, standing on top of a small kitchen step stool, made a horrified retching sound and held up two old Waterford tumblers she had fished off the top pantry shelf where she was stashing the extra dessert plates. Tim went over to help her step down from her perch and see what had made his new employee so distraught. He gagged. So maybe she wasn’t the perfect housekeeper. She held out to him two glasses, each filled with sticky black-brown goo. Helping her down, he took the glasses from her and set them on the pantry counter. So? She missed a few things. No matter. He knew his way around a broom and a mop. He would still hire her away from Jeb Gleason. For sport. Besides, he loved chocolate cake.

The D Room
by Patrick Dryer was what some might classify as a quick read. Lots of dialogue. Sentence fragments. Par for the course, Jane figured, in a popular mystery with a dash of Hollywood thrown in for good measure. The book, in Jane’s opinion, was lacking a few important ingredients. First and foremost, Patrick Dryer had neglected to inject any humor into his characters or their situation. Didn’t he realize that readers would have a difficult time buying the outlandish murders? The convoluted story? Jane, back in the day of her advertising career, recalled how her creative group composed a campaign for a product. Their work was most successful when they accepted their real task—not explaining their product, not even selling their product, but instead creating a story about their product. Jane knew that most young professionals couldn’t tell one premium beer from another, so she and her group gave their beer a history, a personality, a sense of humor. Jane’s direction to her team? Tell a story that speaks to the intelligence of the consumer, and in the course of spinning the tale, make them smile in recognition.

Patrick Dryer’s rule in writing
The D Room
? Create—or report on—a group of narcissistic, unlikable people and pound away at them. Dryer himself had said in his introductory note that these were real people. Perhaps that was the problem with the fiction here. Jane had taken a few writing classes in college and she remembered a particularly affected young man who had written a story about religious awakening which included eight pages of dialogue between two roommates after a night of smoking marijuana and drinking tequila. When the instructor kindly suggested that the eight pages of dialogue seemed somewhat excessive and didn’t always ring true, the writer, filled with passion, hoisted a state-of-the-art circa early seventies tape recorder the size of a small suitcase onto his desk.

“It’s all true. I turned this on when we talked because it was getting so intense. You all just don’t get it because it’s so real,” the student said, his finger hovering over the play button, threatening to prove his point to the horror of the other students, who by this time realized they had another hour of class and they might be subjected to a poor-quality tape of the late-night stoned-out philosophy of two twenty-year-olds.

“Just because it’s true doesn’t make it real,” said the teacher. “Fiction has to be more real than life. Whatever happens, whatever anyone says has to be true to the story.”

If Patrick Dryer had only taken a class taught by this woman. Or any class, Jane thought, since she figured these were pretty standard rules for writers to live by. Patrick, though, had an ax to grind and grind away he did. Ben, the Bizarro World Jeb Gleason, leader of the group of writers, was described in painful detail, down to the kinglike robes he preferred to lounge in when at home. And Ben’s home, down to the last detail in the blue bedroom in the guesthouse, was identical to the one where Jane, from after midnight until now, had done a lot of reading and little sleeping.

Tim’s door was still closed when Jane went down to make coffee. She had heard him tiptoe in a few hours after she immersed herself in
The D Room,
but hadn’t called out since she knew that any excuse for her to escape from the deadly writing would make it that much harder to finish the book by morning. Jane was sure that somewhere in
The D Room
would be the key to the story playing out before her. She meant to finish it now over coffee and impress Bruce Oh by announcing Patrick Dryer’s murderer by lunchtime.

When just enough coffee had dripped through to make a cup, Tim arrived, posing in the doorway of the kitchen. Sleepy, disheveled, but still maddeningly put together, a magazine model in a pair of plaid flannels and a rust-colored waffle-weave shirt, he ignored Jane standing in front of the coffeemaker, a blue Bennington pottery mug in her hand, took a cup from the shelf, and helped himself.

“Coffee?” Jane asked.

“Yeah, got some,” he said. “How’s the book? Weird to read a story by a dead man?”

Tim’s question provided the wake-up jolt that she missed when he stole the first cup of coffee. She had been reading it as if it were the tale
of
a dead man, not written
by
a dead man. A murdered man. Patrick had become so present, whining about his life and hard times, that she had lost all perspective. The fact that she was operating on bits and pieces of stolen sleep might have also contributed to her single-mindedness. Although she was aware while reading the book she might find out who had a reason to kill Patrick Dryer, Jane hadn’t been thinking about the fact that Patrick wrote this to destroy others. He didn’t know anyone was going to kill him first.
The D Room
was not a diary, it was a novel.

“One that he planned to be alive to promote,” Tim reminded her when she told him what she was thinking. “Remember the postcard on the mobile?”

“Remember Bix told us that his first novel had some promise, was critically well received?” Jane asked. “He lost something along the way to this one. This reads like a child tattling on the other kids who won’t let him in the game.”

Even if Patrick’s book didn’t tell the exact story, since he may not have anticipated his own early exit from the cast of characters, it seemed to reveal more details about the members of the B Room, which in turn might lead to the real-life murderer of Dryer. And as Jane read further, she began to think that whoever had killed Patrick might also have had a reason to kill another character who, in Patrick’s book, was named Sam Sagella. Sam Sagella was Lou Piccolo, down to his curly dark hair and love of Padrón cigars.

Lou Piccolo freely told Jane that he accepted the work of an anonymous writer and was willing to give him credit and money if he would reveal himself. Patrick Dryer, in the novel, made it clear that the character of Sam accepted the work of another under different circumstances.

In
The D Room,
the poor struggling novelist who met Sam Sagella through a distant relative showed him television scripts he had written on speculation, hoping that if it didn’t actually get him work, it would at least get him an agent. Sam agreed to read them, make comments and, if he deemed it worthy, show them to his own agent. Sagella, however, stole the work, and after a few minor changes, passed it off as his own. Because Sagella worked with a partner, he involved her—Margaret Luckenby, whom everyone called Lucky—unwittingly at first, in the stolen scripts. Sagella kept promising the writer that he would reveal him as the genius behind the work when the time was right, paying him, fairly handsomely, to keep quiet for the time being. When the ghostwriter found out that Sagella and Lucky were nominated for a major award for a script he had drafted, he became unhinged and began doing away with Sagella’s group of writer friends one by one, since they all, knowingly or not, had used his work as their own.

The way things worked in the D Room of the novel was that alpha male Ben convened weekly meetings of a group of writers who had worked together on a phenomenally successful show twenty years earlier. While working on that show, they made a pledge to always support each other professionally. In Hollywood, for them, that meant to keep each other working. Since most television writers reached an age where they were considered no longer valuable, there was a fear among writers, no matter how successful they had been in their early days, that there was a younger, and more affordable, crop of writers pouring into L.A. every day. Writers were always replaceable, and with the current emphasis on reality television, they were now expendable. Ben’s group, the D Room, their name born from the same circumstances as the real B Room, included Sam Sag-ella even though he didn’t share their history, because Lucky, in love with him, brought him in.

Although his relationship with Lucky cooled, Sagella made himself invaluable to the D Room because of his endless supply of answers. Treatments, story ideas, scripts—anything anyone needed, Sam could produce. Rewrites, polishes—anything anyone had a problem with, Sam could fix. And the wonder of it all, for Ben and the group, was that Sam wanted nothing more in return than to be included in the D Room meetings. A single share, like everyone else received, of the group money. He claimed he had no ego involved in his work, but he longed for the security and camaraderie that they all enjoyed.

For a time, it was a win-win-win situation. Sam got membership in the group, the group was more prolific and had no fear of writers’ blocks or dry wells, and Ben could keep the D Room fund, which he maintained and from which he took a healthy cut as the grand poobah of the literary pyramid scheme, obscenely healthy.

“So they’re all in there, right?” asked Tim, pouring Jane a cup of coffee when he topped off his own. Jane, back into the book, smiled and thanked him, forgetting completely that she had made the pot in the first place. “What did he name them?”

“The first person narrator/novelist/genius goes unnamed,” said Jane. “So humble of Patrick not to name him Patrick. Would have been so postmodern to actually name the narrator Patrick, but he resists. Resisted. Lou, Bix, and Jeb are the characters Sam, Lucky, and Ben. Louise Dietz is Dolores Kadow, who is actually treated pretty decently. Dolores is a hardworking writer whose biggest flaw seems to be that she trusts what the people around her tell her. She’s got that cynical sidekick wit, but at heart she’s a good soul who believes in the talent of all her writer friends,” said Jane. “Also, Dolores is the only character Patrick bothers to describe at length. He calls her a fashionable dresser with a good eye for vintage jewelry.

“Greg and Rick are Alan and Fred, squabbling partners who really love each other but are blinded by their own worka-holism. Even though they begin getting material handed to them, they work just as hard, transcribing dialogue, changing characters’ names, and arguing over each point as if they were the original writers.”

“Who does he kill? Or how?” asked Tim, rummaging through the freezer. Finding some frozen banana muffins wrapped and marked with a date and Bobbette’s name, he held them up like a prize.

“How did it go with Bobbette last night, by the way?” asked Jane. “I heard you go over there and figured you’d have her packing her bags for the move to Kankakee by sunrise.”

“One story at a time, sweetie,” said Tim, getting busy with unwrapping the muffins and finding a plate for thawing them in the microwave.

“Patrick’s persona favors poisons in the novel. He isn’t very specific. You know, he has a subplot that he lays in with a trowel. Before he saves the day by feeding material to Sam Sagella, who gives it to the group, one of the writers…” Jane leafed back through the pages. “Alan. Is it Alan or Fred who writes some porno films on the side? Kind of a lark for him, but the money comes in handy when they all hit a dry spell. Part of the thing about this that’s interesting, even if the writing is a little clumsy, is that they all desperately need to keep up their peak salaries. When they were all hot, they were making a lot of money and bought big houses and fancy cars and lived high. They hired people to work for them, cooks and assistants, and if they can’t keep up with their neighbors, it’s a fast downhill slide. Patrick maintains that to be successful in Hollywood, you have to look like you’ve remained successful.”

“You think he did?”

“What? Who?” asked Jane.

“You think Greg or Rick wrote porn?” asked Tim, buttering a muffin and handing it to Jane.

“Possibly,” said Jane. “It really doesn’t go anywhere in the book. I mean, the other members of the D Room act like they don’t approve, but they accept the monthly share of the money. He makes the character look like he’s going to be his fall guy, you know, pin the murders on him, because of someone he worked with in the X-industry, as Patrick calls it, looking for revenge. So Alan or Fred—accidentally—is supposed to kill—”

“Wait, if—”

“I know, it’s confusing, but I skimmed some of that part. I admit I didn’t get every thread of the plot. From the story he tells, I’d have to say, right now, that it would be reasonable to believe that Sam killed Patrick. I mean Lou Piccolo killed Patrick,” said Jane. “The feud is between the two of them. And if Lou was first stealing stuff, then weaseling stuff out of Patrick, and Patrick threatened to expose him and shut him off, it might have been reason enough to kill him. Since they all go to the flea market every weekend…” Jane took a bite of her muffin and sipped her coffee, placing the book down on the table.