Jaine Austen 2 - Last Writes (9 page)

“Sure,” I said, eager to escape. “I’ll see if I can find her.”

“See if you can find some food, too,” he shouted after me. “An M&M would be nice.”

I hurried backstage, where I found Wells and Zach hanging out at the coffee machine. Wells was telling Zach about the time he played Mercutio to Laurence Olivier’s Romeo. Zach was pretending to give a damn.

“Hi,” I said. “Sorry to interrupt, but have either of you seen Vanessa?”

“No,” Zach grunted, clearly upset at having been reminded of his lost love.

“I believe she and Quinn are still in their dressing rooms,” Wells said.

Zach clenched his fists into angry balls. No doubt he was thinking what I was thinking: that Vanessa and Quinn were probably together in the same dressing room, boinking their brains out.

Out on stage, the warm-up guy was scraping the bottom of the comedy barrel and doing knock-knock jokes.

“Knock knock. Who’s there? Aardvark. Aardvark who? Aardvark a million miles for one of your smiles!”

The audience groaned.

“Oh, God,” I said. “They’re in such a bad mood. If this keeps up, I’ll be lucky if they don’t lynch me.”

“Don’t worry, my dear,” Wells said. “I’ll entertain them.”

And before I could stop him, he went bounding out onto the stage.

I watched in the wings as he walked up to the warm-up guy and whispered something in his ear.

“And now, ladies and gentlemen,” the comic said, “as a special treat, allow me to present Mr. Wells Dumont doing Hamlet’s soliloquy from the blockbuster hit,
Hamlet!
”

The audience gave a tepid round of applause as Wells tried his best to look like a twenty-something Danish prince.

“To be or not to be…” he began.

What on earth did he think he was doing? These people came to see a comedy. Not a guy contemplating suicide. Even knock-knock jokes were better than Hamlet’s bitching and moaning.

As Wells rambled on, the natives grew more and more restless. People were openly yawning; I saw a guy in the third row nodding off. Clearly, I could kiss my show biz career good-bye. Woody Allen sitting on Neil Simon’s lap couldn’t get laughs from this crowd.

It was all too painful to watch, so I made my way out a side door into the cool night air. I sat down on the steps of the soundstage, looking up at what would have been the stars if the smog hadn’t been so thick. I could barely make out the Miracle roller coaster in the distance.

But one thing I could see was Dale, a few feet away, talking on his cell phone. At first I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but then suddenly he started shouting.

“If you won’t do something about it, I will!” He punched the air with his fist to emphasize his point. “That’s right, Bernie. I’ll handle it myself.”

With that, he snapped his phone shut and stormed past me back into the soundstage. No hello. No hint of recognition. As if he hadn’t even seen me.

And what was that phone call all about? Just what was Dale Burton going to handle?

Whatever it was, I didn’t much care. I had troubles enough of my own. Not only was my career about to go up in flames, but there was a distinct possibility that my father was losing his marbles. What was all that nonsense about finding love oil in Mom’s car? Of course, it was possible that he wasn’t nuts and that Mom was actually having an affair with some sleazeball from the shopping channel, but that thought was just too horrible to contemplate.

So there I sat, whiling away the minutes, feeling my fanny go numb and thinking about joining a nunnery to get away from it all, when Kandi came rushing up.

“Where the hell have you been?” I asked.

“Emergency shrink session.”

“Didn’t you just have one of those yesterday?”

“Hey, I’m having a rough time.”

“Join the party,” I said.

“How come you’re out here? Why aren’t you inside?”

“The taping hasn’t started yet. Stan and Audrey are stuck on the Hollywood Freeway.”

“I was, too,” she said. “It’s a nightmare out there.”

“It couldn’t have been worse than what’s going on in there,” I said, pointing to the stage.

“Why? What happened?”

“The warm-up guy ran out of jokes forty minutes ago, and when last I looked, Wells was entertaining the troops with Hamlet’s soliloquy.”

“You poor thing.” Kandi shook her head pityingly. “We’d better get in there before Stan and Audrey show up.”

With Herculean strength, she managed to haul me up and drag me back inside. By now, Wells was back at the coffee machine, telling poor trapped Zach about the time he played Iago to Paul Robeson’s Othello.

“Jaine, my dear,” he said, catching sight of me, “I tried to warm them up for you. Although I must admit, they weren’t the most responsive audience I’ve ever played to.”

“Of course, they weren’t responsive. Do you really think people who come to a taping of
Muffy ’n Me
are Shakespeare fans?”

Okay, so I didn’t really say that. What I said was: “Thanks for trying.”

Kandi and I left Wells and Zach at the coffee machine and made our way out to the audience, where, to my horror, I saw the warm-up guy handing his microphone to Mr. Goldman. The nunnery was looking better every minute.

“You think you’re so funny?” the warm-up guy said. “You take over.”

“Okay, sonny. I will!”

Mr. Goldman grabbed the mike and cleared his throat, a phlegmy affair that nauseated everyone. But before he could say anything, Audrey came marching onto the set, Stan huffing behind her. Kandi and I hurried over to join them.

“Let’s get this show on the road,” Audrey said.

“But I’m not finished,” Mr. Goldman protested, refusing to let go of the mike.

Audrey looked over and saw Mr. Goldman in the section reserved for guests of the cast and crew.

“Who invited that idiot?” she whispered, looking around accusingly.

“That would be me,” I admitted. “He’s one of my students from the Shalom Retirement Home.”

I smiled weakly, wondering if they’d let me bring my vibrator to the nunnery.

Mr. Goldman cleared his throat again, sounding a lot like a clogged toilet.

“Knock knock,” he said defiantly. “Who’s there? Fornication. Fornication who? Fornication like this, you should wear a black tie.”

Believe it or not, he got a laugh. Probably the last I’d be hearing all night.

Chapter Ten

I
t turned out I was wrong about the laughs. After the first few apathetic minutes, the audience stopped coughing and started laughing.

Cancel the nunnery. Call the movers. It looked like I’d be moving to Malibu after all.

The first scene featured Wells as Mr. Watkins the nosy neighbor and Quinn as Uncle Biff. Mr. Watkins stops by, convinced that Muffy has turned his cat into an umbrella stand. The script called for Uncle Biff to offer Mr. Watkins a donut. Mr. Watkins refuses, and Uncle Biff eats it himself.

That was what was supposed to happen.

“Won’t you join me in a box of donuts?” Quinn was supposed to say, holding out the box.

Then Wells was supposed to say, “I doubt there’s room in there for both of us.”

Then the audience was supposed to laugh uproariously.

None of which happened.

Because when Quinn went to the kitchen counter for the donuts, he came back empty-handed.

“Sorry,” he said, abandoning the script. “There aren’t any donuts.”

“Props!” Audrey shouted, fuming. “Where the hell are the donuts?”

We all looked around for Marco, the prop guy, but he was nowhere to be seen.

Then Teri, the makeup lady, stepped forward, none too thrilled at the prospect of facing an angry Audrey.

“Marco had to go to the hospital,” she stammered. “His wife was about to give birth. I was supposed to tell you, but I forgot. You see, I ran out of mascara, and I had to run over to the drugstore to get some, and I guess it just slipped my mind.”

The poor woman was so scared, she was practically peeing in her pants.

Audrey smiled wearily.

“That’s okay, honey,” she said. “No problem.”

Teri breathed a sigh of relief and skittered back to the makeup room.

The minute she was gone, Audrey turned to Stan and hissed, “Fire her.”

“Will somebody please go to the prop room and get the damn donuts?” the director shouted from the control booth.

“I’ll go,” Kandi said.

As she hurried off, Mr. Goldman called after her: “Bring one for me, too, sweetie! A person could die of starvation around here.”

Which got another big laugh from the audience. Mr. Goldman grinned proudly. Maybe he was as funny as Seinfeld, after all.

Minutes later, Kandi returned with the donuts.

“Okay,” the director called out. “Let’s take it from the top.”

So once again, Mr. Watkins showed up, convinced that Muffy had turned his cat into an umbrella stand. Once again, Uncle Biff tried unsuccessfully to mollify him with a donut.

Only this time there was a pastry box on the counter. Quinn brought it back to the table.

“Sure you won’t have one?”

He held out the box to Mr. Watkins, but Watkins waved it away.

“You’ll be sorry,” Quinn said, plucking a sugar-coated donut from the box. But as it turned out, Quinn was the sorry one. He took one mouthful and grimaced.

“I think there’s something wrong with this do—”

But before he could utter his last “nut,” he doubled over in pain, his face a nasty shade of blue.

Wells raced to his side.

“Good heavens,” he said, horrified, as Quinn crumpled to the floor. “I think he’s dead.”

From the audience, I could hear Mr. Goldman: “That’s funny? A guy dying is supposed to be funny? I don’t get it.”

“Shut up, Abe,” Mrs. Pechter said. “I think the poor man is really dead.”

“Oy vey.”

My sentiments exactly.

Chapter Eleven

E
ver notice how, when your apartment gets burglarized, you could reach menopause waiting for the cops to show up? But have a TV star die on a soundstage, and they’re on the scene faster than calories cling to my hips.

The cops showed up in record time that night. Before I knew it, they’d cordoned off the kitchen set with yellow police tape and were questioning the cast and crew. I assured the cop who questioned me that I’d seen or heard nothing suspicious that evening.

By now, the audience was buzzing. Now
this
was entertainment. This was something they could tell the folks about back home.

I hurried over to make sure my students were okay. I didn’t want one of them keeling over with a heart attack from all the excitement.

“Is he really dead?” Mrs. Rubin asked.

“Given the fact that he hasn’t been breathing for the past twenty minutes, I’d say yes.”

“Such a tragedy,” she tsk-tsked.

“You think it was a heart attack?” Mrs. Pechter asked.

“Of course not,” Mr. Goldman hummphed. “The guy was poisoned. Anybody could see that.”

“I’ll never eat donuts again,” said Mrs. Rubin.

“You shouldn’t be eating them anyway,” said Mrs. Pechter. “Not with your high cholesterol.”

“Her cholesterol isn’t as high as my cholesterol,” Mr. Goldman boasted. “Nobody has high cholesterol like I do.”

And so it went, until the cops decided to let the audience go. Reluctantly, they filed out of their seats, giving their names to the police as they left the building. The last thing I heard Mr. Goldman say as they ushered him out the door was, “I still say they could’ve served refreshments.”

At which point, Kandi came rushing up to me.

“Guess what,” she said. “The cops think the sugar on the donut wasn’t sugar. They think it was poison. Probably rat poison.”

I looked over at poor Quinn, slumped over at the kitchen table. The guy was a rat, but he certainly didn’t deserve to die like one.

“What if they think I did it?” Kandi raked her fingers through her hair distractedly.

“Don’t be silly. Why would they think that?”

“I was the one who brought him the donuts, wasn’t I?”

“Kandi, you’re overreacting. Never in a million years are they going to think you had anything to do with Quinn’s murder.”

“Excuse me, Ms. Tobolowski?”

We turned to see a dark-haired young cop standing at our side.

“Yes,” Kandi said, “I’m Kandi Tobolowski.”

“Would you mind coming down to the precinct with us? We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“I didn’t do it,” Kandi wailed, like a suspect trapped in a Perry Mason episode. “I swear, I didn’t do it!”

“Nobody said you did anything, Ms. Tobolowski,” the cop said. “We just want to ask you a few questions.”

“I want my lawyer.”

“Okay, fine. Call your lawyer.”

Then it dawned on her:

“Oh, gee. I don’t have a lawyer.”

“What about that guy who got you a settlement when you hurt yourself on that defective stairmaster?” I asked.

“Oh, right. Ramon Sandoval. Call him and tell him to meet me down at police headquarters.”

“What’s his phone number?”

“1-800-WE SUE 4 U.”

Uh-oh. Not exactly F. Lee Bailey, was he?

“Tell his answering service it’s urgent.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll take care of it.”

I walked Kandi out to the squad car, where we were horrified to see a bunch of news vans in the parking lot. Suddenly reporters were swooping down on us like flies on a Belgian waffle.

Kandi covered her face and ducked into the car.

“I’ll never work again,” she moaned.

“Don’t worry, honey. Everything’s going to be fine,” I assured her with a confidence I didn’t feel. “As soon as I call Sandoval, I’ll drive over to the police station and wait for you.”

Which is exactly what I did.

It wasn’t till I was pulling up in front of the Hollywood Precinct that I remembered Dale and his angry phone call. I’d told the cop who questioned me that I’d seen nothing suspicious. But now I remembered the look of grim determination on Dale’s face as he spoke to his agent.

“If you won’t do something about it,” he’d said, “I will.”