Jaine Austen 2 - Last Writes (10 page)

Maybe the “it” he was talking about was Quinn taking over his role in
Muffy ’n Me
. And maybe the “something” Dale threatened to do was knock off his competition with a dose of rat poison.

I spent the next four hours waiting for Kandi in the lobby of the Hollywood Precinct. Not exactly a ride in the wine country. Although they did have more than their fair share of winos stumbling around.

I sat next to a tall guy in a baby-blue sharkskin suit and enough gold chains around his neck to stock the jewelry department at the Home Shopping Club. This is just a wild stab in the dark, but I think he might have been a pimp.

All I know is, he offered me a job.

“Some of my clients,” he told me with a wink, “they like ’em hefty.”

I assured him I was gainfully employed and had no need of his services.

“You ever change your mind, honey, you just call Leon.” And with that, he handed me his business card.
Leon’s Escort Service. Let us Escort you to Ecstasy
.

I have to admit I was a tad relieved when three of Leon’s employees were released from custody, and Leon finally left. I spent the rest of the time trying not to stare at the flamboyant same-sex couple sitting across from me. Exactly which sex they were, I’m still trying to figure out.

After what seemed like an eternity, Kandi finally emerged from captivity, with a handsome Latino guy by her side. This was her attorney, Ramon Sandoval, Mr. WE SUE 4 U.

“Don’t worry, Kandi,” he assured her. “they’ve got nothing on you.”

“But what if they arrest me?”

“I hope they do.”

“What?”

“We’ll sue them for wrongful imprisonment!”

And before you could say “ambulance chaser,” Ramon was out the door. Kandi and I followed him out to the parking lot. Luckily there were no reporters waiting to ambush us. I insisted that Kandi spend the night with me; I didn’t want her to be alone.

“Thanks, Jaine,” she smiled gratefully. “I really could use the company.”

We drove back to my place, making a pit stop at the supermarket to pick up several emergency pints of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey ice cream. A half hour later we were cuddled in bed, inhaling our Chunky Monkeys, Prozac licking the lids.

When we’d scraped every last molecule from the cartons, Kandi put down her spoon with a sigh.

“It was rat poison, all right. The cops had the donuts tested. And they think I’m the one who did it.”

“But why? Anyone could have slipped into the prop room and doctored those donuts.”

“Yes, but I’m the one who brought them to Quinn.”

“But if you were really the murderer, you wouldn’t have brought him the donuts. If you knew they were poisoned, the last thing you’d do would be to implicate yourself that way. Surely, the cops will figure that out.”

“There’s something else,” she said with a sigh.

“What?”

“Bianca told them what I said the other day.”

“What did you say the other day?” I asked, totally befuddled.

“Remember when Bianca stopped by our office to drop off those scripts? I guess I was saying something about wanting to kill Quinn.”

“Oh, geez. That’s right. You did.”

“You’ve got to help me, Jaine. You’ve got to find the killer. Just like you did last year.”

(It’s true. I solved a murder last year; it’s a long story, one you can read all about in
This Pen for Hire
, now available in paperback at a bookstore near you.)

“Until the real killer is found,” Kandi said, “I’m the one everyone will associate with the crime. I’m the one the cops hauled off for questioning.”

“Of course, I’ll do what I can. But I’m just an amateur.”

“Yeah,” said Kandi, “but you’re an amateur who cares about me.”

That I was.

We woke up the next morning like two drunks on a bender, our faces still sticky from Chunky Monkey ice cream. We turned on the TV, just in time to see news footage of Kandi being hauled off in the squad car.

“Oh, wow,” she moaned. “I look so fat.”

Don’t you just hate it when Size Sixes say they look fat?

“Kandi, get your priorities straight. We’ve got more important things to worry about than how you look on television.”

“Look,” she said. “There’s a shot of you, waving good-bye to me.”

“Yikes! Look at my tush! It’s taking up half the screen.”

What can I say? Sometimes it’s tough to prioritize.

“I’m going on a diet,” Kandi announced.

“Me, too.”

“I’m going to start right after I finish this,” she said, lifting a sticky bun from the box of pastry I’d picked up last night at the market.

“Me, too,” I said, grabbing one.

Prozac passed up a sticky bun for a bowl of fish guts. Which is why you’ll never find a cat editing
Gourmet
magazine.

“What you need,” I said to Kandi after we’d polished off our breakfast, “is a nice relaxing weekend. Maybe we’ll drive out to the beach, have some margaritas in Malibu, then come home and watch old movies while we stuff ourselves with pizza.”

“What about our diet?”

“We’ll start Monday.”

“Sounds like a plan.” She managed a small smile. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Jaine.”

She took my hand and squeezed it. I squeezed back.

Sad, but true: I experienced more intimacy in that three-second hand squeeze with Kandi than I did in three years of marriage to The Blob.

Kandi tootled off to the shower, and I was busy cleaning up the breakfast things, when the phone rang.

It was Bianca. I felt like slapping her silly for getting Kandi in trouble with the cops.

“What the hell do you want, you sniveling little ratfink?”

Okay, what I really said was: “Hello, Bianca.”

“Audrey asked me to call you. She wants you and Kandi to come to the studio today for an emergency rewrite session, to write Quinn out of the script.”

Good heavens. The body was barely cold. They sure weren’t wasting any time, were they?

“She wants us to come in on a Saturday?”

“And Sunday, too.”

So much for our relaxing weekend.

“Lots of sitcom writers work weekends, Jaine,” she said reprovingly. “It comes with the territory. By the way, do you know where Kandi is? I’ve been trying to reach her all morning.”

“She’s here with me.”

“Oh.” Did I detect a note of disappointment in her voice? Was she expecting Kandi to be in jail? “Then you can tell her about the rewrites.”

She hung up without bothering to say good-bye.

What a bitch. I wouldn’t mind seeing her in jail. If only she was the murderer. And then it occurred to me: Maybe she
was
. What if Bianca, like Audrey and Kandi, had been boffing Quinn? True, it was hard to conceive of anyone wanting to sleep with a creep like Bianca, but there’s no accounting for tastes. Maybe Quinn had a thing for girls with ferrety faces. What if they’d been sleeping together, and when Bianca found out about his affair with Vanessa, she blew a gasket? Was it possible that she was the one who’d sprinkled rat poison on the donut and then pointed the finger of suspicion at Kandi?

Hey, this was Hollywood. Where anything was possible. And everyone seemed to have been sleeping with Quinn Kirkland.

Chapter Twelve

I
nstead of margaritas in Malibu, we went through rewrite hell in Hollywood. Killing off Quinn on paper was a lot tougher than it had been in real life. Whenever we could, we gave his lines to Dale. But it wasn’t easy. I sat by, helpless, as some of my best jokes were cut from the script. I was beginning to understand why comedy writers often wind up in the Home for the Terminally Frustrated.

The rewrite was no picnic for Kandi, either. I could tell her mind was a million miles away. I’d be distracted, too, faced with the prospect—however remote—of spending the rest of my life in an unflattering prison jumpsuit.

Audrey was surprisingly sympathetic.

“I know you’re upset, Kandi,” she said. “But I want you to know that I don’t believe for a minute that you had anything to do with this crime.”

Kandi smiled gratefully.

Now you know Kandi didn’t kill Quinn. And I knew Kandi didn’t kill Quinn. But I couldn’t help wondering: Why was Audrey so sure Kandi didn’t kill Quinn? Was it because she did it herself? I remembered the rage in her voice when she confronted Quinn in his dressing room. Was it possible she’d made a pit stop in the prop room on her way back from her network meeting?

Just something to think about between paragraphs.

Monday morning we gathered on stage for another read-through of
Cinderella Muffy
. Had it been only a week since I first showed up at the studio? It felt like months.

Audrey made a perfunctory speech about how everyone was going to miss Quinn, what a fine actor he was, what a credit to the show, blah blah blah. But it was clear she didn’t mean a word of it. She spoke in a dull monotone, a Stepford Wife dressed in Armani.

As she spoke, everyone sat around the long metal table, eyes lowered, nodding their heads in agreement. Everyone except Stan, who stared straight ahead, guzzling his gin at an alarming rate.

Dale made a pathetic attempt to look subdued, but you didn’t have to be Sigmund Freud to figure out he was overjoyed. Every once in a while, he’d break out in a wide grin, thrilled with all his new lines. For once, his cell phone was nowhere in sight.

Zach, too, was in Happy Camper mode. He sat by Vanessa’s side, fetching her coffee and danish, like one of the Tarleton twins at Tara, glad to be back in her orbit.

As for Vanessa, she sat woodenly throughout the reading, her emotions locked away somewhere deep inside her. She gave no clue as to what she was thinking. It could have been,
I can’t go on living without my beloved Quinn
.

Or,
I need a pedicure
.

Your guess is as good as mine.

Of all the actors, only Wells seemed genuinely saddened by Quinn’s demise.

“Poor Quinn,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “What a talented fellow he was. I still can’t believe he’s gone.”

But I had to remind myself: Wells was an actor. For all I knew, he could have been in the middle of a very convincing performance.

After a suitable period of mostly manufactured grief, the actors started reading the script. Dale delivered his new lines with gusto, really selling the jokes. He wasn’t as funny as Quinn, but he wasn’t bad. Not bad at all. I think everyone was surprised at how many laughs he was getting.

Audrey and Stan exchanged glances, clearly impressed with his performance.

We were almost through with the reading when I noticed a short, pudgy guy walking onto the set. He looked bewildered, like a tourist who’d wandered off from his tram.

“Can I help you?” Audrey asked, not sounding the least bit helpful.

“I’m Detective Incorvia,” the man said. “L.A.P.D.”

“Omigosh,” Kandi whispered, squeezing my elbow. “That’s the cop who questioned me the other night.”

He rummaged around in his pocket and finally came up with a badge.

Audrey stared at it for a second or two. Then, apparently convinced that it didn’t come from a Cracker Jacks box, she smiled stiffly.

“What can I do for you, Detective?”

Was it my imagination, or did she seem a tad nervous?

“I need to ask you and your staff a few questions. Is there somewhere I can conduct my interviews?”

“Oh. Of course. You can use the conference room in the Writers’ Building.”

He took out a beat-up notepad from his pocket and consulted it.

“The first person I’d like to talk to is…”

He squinted down at the paper, trying to decipher his own handwriting.

“…Jaine Austen.”

Everyone was staring at me. Now I knew how Kandi felt the other night. My palms starting gushing sweat. I smiled weakly at Detective Incorvia. He didn’t smile back.

Damn. What if I’d just taken Kandi’s place as the cops’ Number One Suspect?

Chapter Thirteen

D
etective Incorvia was a harmless-looking guy, with soft brown eyes and a fuzzy mustache that badly needed trimming. So why was I so damn nervous? I sat across from him in the conference room, my palms still gushing like Niagara. I told myself I was being crazy. He said he wanted to talk to everybody, not just me. This was strictly routine. But all I could think about was me, in Kandi’s unflattering prison jumpsuit, sharing a cell with a gal named Duke.

Incorvia reached down into a paper bag on the floor beside him and pulled out a stethoscope.

“Ever seen this before?” he asked.

It was the stethoscope Kandi had swiped from the prop room.

“We found it in your friend’s desk,” he said.

“Oh?” I tried to feign innocence.

“It’s been missing from the prop room for the past two months. We believe Ms. Tobolowski stole it.”

“She didn’t steal it. She just borrowed it.”

“Steal. Borrow. Whatever you want to call it. Your friend obviously likes to hang out in the prop room.”

“Look, Detective,” I said with as much authority as I could muster. “Kandi didn’t kill Quinn. She simply couldn’t have done it.”

“Apparently she was having an affair with him.”

“So were half the women in greater Los Angeles.”

“And she was overheard threatening to kill him.”

“That’s not true! She didn’t threaten to kill him. She just said she’d
like to
kill him. It was all very hypothetical, like me saying I’d like to lose twenty pounds by the weekend.”

“I stand corrected,” he said, a smile hovering on his lips.

“And she wasn’t the only one who was angry at Quinn,” I went on.

“Oh?”

I told him about Zach and how he’d attacked Quinn during rehearsal. About Dale’s angry phone call to his agent. And about Audrey’s confrontation with Quinn in his trailer, how she threatened to get rid of him if it was the last thing she did.

He took out a well-chewed pencil and made notes as I talked.

“I’m telling you, lots of people were pissed at Quinn. The man had more enemies than Nixon. Anyone could have slipped into the prop room while Marco was gone and doctored that donut.”