Lethally Blond (2 page)

“Is the shooting schedule as brutal as you hear?”

“Fourteen-hour days, sometimes. But this is what I wanted, and I’ve got no complaints. The show kicks off in a couple of weeks, and then we play the ratings game.”

“It sounds like a super idea for a show—I’m sure it will be a hit.”

“Kind of your type of show, huh?”

“You’re the second person who said that today.”

“Well, look, the reason I called . . . I mean, I wanted to say hi, but—is there any chance you could meet me for a drink? There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

“Sure,” I said. His tone didn’t suggest a man who’d been pining for me for months and had decided to make one last stab at winning my heart, but I was still curious. “When were you thinking?”

“I know this is short notice, but I was wondering if you could do it now. It’s really pretty urgent. You’re the one person I can turn to on this.”

“What is it? Are you in some kind of trouble?”

“No, no. But a friend of mine may be. I need your advice.”

“Can you give me a hint?” I asked, though I figured that if a guy he knew was in trouble, it had to involve drugs or money or both.

“It— Look, would you mind talking about it in person? I hate the idea of starting to get into it on the phone and then having to cover the same ground again when we meet.”

“Well, I
could
do it now, actually,” I admitted. “I was planning to stay in and work tonight, but it can wait.”

“That’s terrific,” he said. He suggested we meet in an hour and asked me to recommend a place near me. I threw out the name of a bar on Second Avenue between 9th and 10th. It would take me less than five minutes to walk there.

After signing off, I walked distractedly into the bathroom and splashed cool water on my face and in my armpits. I couldn’t believe what had just happened. Maybe it was my destiny that Chris Wickersham would pop into my life every nine months or so. I wondered if there was any chance that he was using a so-called problem with a friend as an excuse to make contact with me. It had been hard to tell on the phone. And I wasn’t at all sure how I’d feel when I saw him. I had never once stopped finding him staggeringly attractive. Perhaps now that I was no longer guilt stricken—and my love life was currently in the Dumpster with a capital D—I would feel the urge to go for it this time.

Covering my bets, I wore a pair of tight jeans and a flowy turquoise baby doll top with a V deep enough for me to flash some cleavage. I smoothed my blondish brown hair and applied just enough eye shadow, mascara, blush, and lip gloss to keep from looking as if I’d tried as hard as I had.

He wasn’t in the bar when I arrived. I found a free table by the front window and ordered a Corona. Taking a sip of the icy cold beer from the bottle, I watched people stroll along the pavement in the September dusk. A couple of guys stared through the glass at me, and one even shot me a flirty smile. I realized suddenly how nice it was to be sitting in a slutty top, waiting for a hunk—even if it wasn’t really a date. Along with my heart, Beau Regan had bruised my ego. This was the closest I’d felt in ages to being a bitch on wheels.

“Hey, Bailey, hi.”

It was Chris’s voice behind me. He must have entered the bar without my seeing him.

As I shifted in my chair, I caught two women gazing behind me, their mouths agape. As soon as I spun around, I could see why. Chris Wickersham had somehow managed to become even more gorgeous in the months since I’d last seen him. There were the dazzling green eyes and the intriguing cleft in his chin. But he’d gained a few pounds, filling out his face in the nicest of ways. His sandy brown hair was a little longer and tinged with blond highlights. The biceps were the same, though. They cockily stretched the sleeves of a gray T-shirt he wore over tan cargo shorts. Had I been the stupidest girl in America to reject him?

I stood up to greet Chris, and at the same moment he leaned forward to kiss me on the cheek. Because of the awkward angle of our bodies, the edge of his full, lovely mouth touched mine, and I felt the same rush I’d experienced the very first time he’d kissed me in Miami. Take it down, way down, Bailey, I told myself. I had no idea what Chris’s intentions were—or mine, for that matter—and I didn’t want to get ahead of myself.

“Hey there,” was all I could muster.

“God, it’s great to see those blue eyes again, Bailey. You look amazing.”

“Well, I’m not the one with half the bar staring at me.”

“I’ll start describing what we do in the morgue with a Stryker saw and let’s see how they like that,” he said, grinning. He created a dead-on whiny saw noise that made me laugh out loud.

He ordered a beer for himself, and we talked for a few minutes about the series. It was being shot entirely in New York City, with all the interior morgue shots done on a soundstage at Chelsea Piers. He interrupted himself at one point to ask how my work was going, and I told him about losing my old arrangement at
Gloss
magazine and miraculously finding the gig at
Buzz
.

“Gosh, is it dangerous for me to be talking to you now that you work for a celebrity rag?” he asked, his eyes playful.

“Only if you hurl your cell phone at someone or try to bring a half kilo of cocaine through customs at JFK.” I took a swig of beer, thinking of a zillion other questions I had about the series, but before I could ask one, Chris switched gears entirely.

“Like I said on the phone,” he said, lowering his voice slightly, “I wanted to talk to you about this friend of mine. I really appreciate your meeting me.”

Omigod, I suddenly thought, the “friend” is a girl. He’s got chick trouble, and he wants my advice, like I’m some sort of big sister. I felt a flush of embarrassment begin to creep up my chest.

“Okay, tell me about it,” I said awkwardly.

“It’s about this actor I know—named Tom Fain. We met doing an off off Broadway show a year or two ago, and he ended up in
Morgue,
too. He’s got just a small part, but he’s generally in every episode.”

“Is he in some kind of trouble?” I asked, feeling oddly relieved that it was a guy friend after all. I waited for a tale of woe that would probably include at least one long weekend in Vegas.

“I guess you’d call it that,” Chris said. “He’s missing.”

“Missing?”
I exclaimed.

“Yeah, he disappeared off the face of the earth a week and a half ago.”

“Have you talked to the police—though they’re usually not much help with young guys.”

“The first person I called was this guy Tom had mentioned—Mr. Barish—who handles his money. He said he’d get hold of the cops. This detective called me a day later. He looked around Tom’s apartment and said he’d make a couple of inquiries, but there was nothing more he could really do. He told me a lot of guys just take off. But I don’t think that’s what happened. This was Tom’s first regular TV gig. He’s a couple of years older than me, and he’s been praying for this break even longer than I have. I just don’t believe he would have walked away from it.”

“Is there a girlfriend in the picture?” I asked. “Could he have had a blowup and gone off to lick his wounds?”

“There’s a kind of girlfriend, a chick named Harper Aikins he’s been seeing for about a month and a half. She’s a former actress who does PR for the show. But it’s not some major love affair, and she’s just as clueless as I am about where he is.”

“Parents?”

“Both dead. You ready for another?” he asked, cocking his chin toward my beer.

I’d noticed that he’d chugged down his own beer quickly, feeling churned up, perhaps, from talking about Tom. I was only halfway through mine.

“I’m set for now. So tell me the circumstances. When did you last see Tom? When did
anyone
last see him?”

“I talked to him the Thursday before he disappeared. We were on set together. He plays—or I should say
played,
because they’ve canned him now for being a no-show—this guy who mans the phones at the morgue, the one who’s always handing someone a message or announcing that so-and-so is on line four. I’m not sure what he did the next day because they didn’t need him on set, but apparently on Saturday morning he picked up his car from a lot downtown and took off. Harper was out of town that weekend, but she talked to Chris Friday night and he didn’t mention anything about a trip.
Originally
he’d been planning to head out to the Hamptons to see this buddy of his, but the guy told me the plans got bagged late in the week. When Chris didn’t show for work on Monday, I kept trying to reach his cell phone and finally went to his apartment. As far as I know, no one’s heard from him since that weekend.”

“Was he depressed—or in any kind of trouble that you know of?”

“Not that I know of. He’s a helluva nice guy. He actually suggested I audition for the show.”

“Aren’t the producers worried about what happened to him?”

“Apparently not. One of the ADs—assistant directors—told me that Tom was apparently miffed about how small his part was. He’d also been having a little trouble on set. The rumor is he just bolted.”

Chris drew his fist to his face and blew a stream of air into it. I waited, thinking he was going to say something else, but he only stared at me expectantly.

“How can I help?” I asked. I had no idea what I could possibly do, but I assumed that was the question Chris had been waiting for.

“I want you to tell me how I can find him. You solve mysteries, right? I just want some direction.”

I sighed. “When I’m writing a story—or when I’m working on a case like the one I needed your help on last winter—I find that the best approach is to just methodically turn over every stone, one by one. It’s not very sexy sounding, yet it’s usually the best way. But I don’t know anything about Tom’s life, so I wouldn’t know which stones to start with.”

“I can help with that. I can tell you everything I know about him. Plus, I have a key to his apartment. He was nice enough to let me bunk there for a few weeks this summer before I got my own place, and I thought if you looked through it with me, we might find something—a lead.”

“Uh, sure,” I said. It would be more than providing a “little direction,” but I was intrigued, and I liked the idea of being with Chris. “That would certainly be a start. When?”

“How about right now?”

“
Now?
Well, why not, I guess. Even though you’ve got a key to the place, is there anyone who could make trouble for you if they caught you in there?”

“No. Like I said, the parents are dead, he’s got no siblings, and the super is used to me being around.”

“Okay, then, let’s do it.”

He waved for the check, paid, and three minutes later we were out on the street. He said Tom lived on Mercer, so we headed there on foot. While we walked, Chris provided more details about Tom. He’d grown up in Manhattan, gone to private school, and then majored in theater at Skidmore College. Whereas Chris had used modeling as a potential springboard for acting and had eventually headed for L.A., Tom had plugged away mostly in the off off Broadway world, performing in many small “black box” theaters, once totally nude.

I was curious, I told Chris, about the guy Tom had said he was going to see in the Hamptons. Was there a chance Tom
had
headed out there and the guy was denying it? Perhaps he and Tom had ended up in an altercation, or at the very least this dude was covering up something. Chris didn’t think so, based on his conversation with the guy. He was an old high school friend of Tom’s.

His apartment was in an older, kind of grand-looking building that had obviously been renovated into living spaces. There was no doorman, but the lobby was nicely decorated with an original limestone fireplace mantel. Not exactly what I was expecting for an actor who until recently had done ten-dollar-a-ticket theaters and let his schlong dangle in front of an audience. Reading my mind, Chris explained that Tom had purchased his place with money from the sale of his parents’ apartment on the Upper East Side.

We took the elevator to four, and I followed Chris down a long hallway, the walls painted tobacco color and hung with brass sconces. From the pocket of his shorts, he pulled out a set of keys and thumbed through several until he found the one to Chris’s place. He turned the lower Medeco lock and, when that was unlocked, a top one. I was right behind him as he pushed open the door, and no sooner had he stepped into the vestibule than I felt his body tense.

I soon knew why: In a room at the very end of the hall, probably the bedroom, a light was glowing. Someone seemed to be home.

CHAPTER 2

I
s it Tom?” I whispered.

“I—I don’t know,” Chris said, his voice as low as mine. “I don’t think I left a light on.”

I waited for him to make a move of some kind, and when he failed to,
I
did.

“Tom?” I called out. “Are you here? . . .
Tom?
”

There was no answer.

Chris patted the wall with his right hand and found a switch, flooding the vestibule with light. Side by side, we started down a long hall on the right toward the room where the light was burning. Once more I called Tom’s name, and once more it was met with silence.

We reached the room, a bedroom, and stepped quietly through the doorway, Chris just ahead of me now. The room was empty. The lamp throwing off the light was on a wooden, antique-looking table by the window. I glanced instinctively toward the bed. There was a hunter green duvet across it, slightly askew and rumpled, as if the bed had been hastily made.

I jerked my head back toward Chris. “Has somebody . . . ?”

“No, it was that way when I came in before,” Chris said, guessing my question.

“What about the light?” I asked. “Are you sure you didn’t leave it on?”

“I thought I’d switched it off, but I guess I must have forgotten to. According to Tom, I’m the only person with a key besides him. He wanted me to keep the spare in case he lost his.”

“Of course,
Tom
could have come back and turned the light on,” I said.

“I know,” he acknowledged. “But it doesn’t make any sense. Why come back but not tell anyone—and not show for work?”

“I wonder if he’s in some kind of trouble and feels the need to lay low for a while. Let’s check the closet.”

Chris slid open the closet door, which bounced on the tracks, making my heart skip. I waited silently as he made a mental inventory of the contents.

“It looks about the same as it did,” he declared. “I’m just not familiar enough with his stuff to tell what’s not here. The only thing I’m sure about is that there’s still no sign of his duffel bag. He has an old leather one—the kind you use for short trips. I figured it meant that when he left that Saturday, he was planning on at least an overnight.”

“His parents didn’t leave him a condo in Florida along with the apartment, did they? I mean—”

“Not that I’m aware of. I know that they used to have some kind of weekend place in the country, but Tom sold it earlier in the summer. He said it wasn’t the kind of place you’d go to if you were single.”

“Let’s look around the rest of the place,” I said.

Chris led the way back down the hall toward the living room. I noticed this time that the walls were lined with nicely framed architectural prints. The living room was even more of a surprise. It was spacious, with windows on two sides and an expensive- looking couch and two armchairs flanking a brick fireplace. There were several antiquey pieces in there as well. The one incongruous touch was the large empty pizza box strewn haphazardly on the coffee table with a pile of dried crusts in the center of it.

“Was . . . ?”

“Yeah, that was here when I checked this past weekend,” Chris said. “So far, nothing looks different.”

“I thought you said you were here over a whole week ago.”

“I came back—just to double-check.”

“This is quite the place for a struggling actor,” I observed. “Were his parents well-off?”

“Apparently not as much at the end as they once were. His father played the market, and he was pretty good at it. But Tom told me that he made some bad investments a few years before he died and lost a lot of what he’d saved. His parents weren’t destitute. They had their apartment in New York and some savings—and they had put a decent chunk of change in trust for Tom—but they didn’t have the
big
bucks anymore. Tom said he thinks the stress contributed to his father’s heart attack. His mother died of some kind of cancer about two years later—a year ago this summer.”

We moved on to other areas in the apartment—the bathroom (toothbrush missing), the small eat-in kitchen (nothing in the fridge except a few bottles of beer and a quart of milk, which stank to high heaven when I beaked the top part to take a whiff), and then a room off the kitchen that must have once been a maid’s room and now held a single bed, a desk, and several bookshelves mounted on the wall. Chris explained that this was the room he had crashed in before he’d rented his own place.

“What is it?” I asked. Chris had suddenly pursed his lips, perturbed.

“That copy of
Backstage,
” he said, pointing to the newspaper on the far left side of the desk. “I know it sounds crazy, but I could swear it was in the middle of the desk when I was here before. But I’m probably wrong. Just like I’m wrong about the light. Because why would those be the only things that have changed?”

“Well, if he came back to pick up just a few things like clothes, he might not have disturbed much.” I glanced instinctively behind me. If Tom—or someone else—had dropped by once, they could drop by again and catch us snooping around. I really didn’t love being here.

I slid open the single drawer of his desk and glanced inside. There were pens, pencils, envelopes, odds and ends. I slid the drawer shut. On top of the desk were a few pieces of mail, which I thumbed through. Nothing more than bills and nothing dated later than right after Labor Day. There was one bill from a parking lot on Houston, and I jotted down the name and address.

“What kind of car does he have?” I asked.

“A black Audi.”

“And what about a calendar? I don’t see anything here.”

“He uses a Sidekick—and I assume he took it with him.”

“Computer?”

“There’s a laptop over there in the corner,” he said, pointing. “I tried a few passwords to see if I could get into his e-mail but nothing worked.”

At the very back of the desk was a pile of papers, which I grabbed next. On top was another copy of
Back Stage
and underneath four or five head shots with the name
Tom Fain
printed on each of them.

“So this is what he looks like,” I said, staring down at the shot.

If the picture was true to life, Tom was as great looking as Chris, but in a totally different way. He was brown-eyed and very blond, his hair long enough to be worn tucked behind his ears. His skin was incredibly smooth, almost embryonic looking, but his features were strong enough to prevent that from being a negative. If he’d passed me on the street while I was standing next to a girlfriend, I probably would have muttered something short and simple, like “Oh. My. God.”

It wasn’t simply his stunning looks. In the photo, he had that air of easy sophistication and casual disregard that New York private school kids always seem to possess, resulting perhaps from the strange convergence of growing up with all your needs provided for but also learning to rough it in the city, like riding the subway solo at fourteen.

“Yeah, that’s a recent shot,” Chris said.

“Did they make him cut his hair for the show?”

“No, they wanted it long. They thought that’s what you’d see on a New York guy who worked the front desk at a morgue.”

“Do you think it’s okay if I keep one?” I asked. “Just for—”

“It’s fine. He probably has a huge box of them somewhere.”

I felt staples on the back of the photo and flipped it over. Attached to the back was a résumé. It listed not only stints on a few shows like
Law & Order
, but also lots of plays.

“That’s where we met,” Chris said, jabbing with his forefinger at the name of one of the plays. “Like I said, Tom did a lot more theater than me, but I did this one play with him at Stage Right Productions.”

“
Julius Caesar
?”

“Yup. But mostly he worked at this small theater in the Village. Here it is,” he said, pointing. “The Chaps Theatre. They put on over a dozen plays a year—some classics, some written by new playwrights. He was a member of the company.”

I tucked one photo in my purse and let my eyes peruse the bookshelves. There were books on playwriting and acting and a few old college textbooks. On the top shelf was a big plastic tub.

“What’s in there?” I asked Chris.

“Photos. I looked inside when I was here last but didn’t go through them.”

Assuming I’d want to investigate, Chris lifted down the plastic box and set it on the desk. There were some loose pictures, stacked sideways, others in wide envelopes with dates. Most seemed to be family photos, which Tom had probably taken possession of when his mother died. I leafed through them quickly. Many featured Tom with his parents in various locations around the world. There were Tom, at about twelve, and, I assumed, his attractive blond mother on the long green mall in front of the Eiffel Tower. On the back, in a woman’s handwriting, was the date 1990 and, unnecessarily, “Paris.” Another shot showed Tom and his father standing on a white-and-blue glacier, with “Alaska, 1991” on the back. And there was one shot of all three of them in long-sleeved shirts and jeans, a stacked stone wall behind them. On the back: “Andes, 1994.”

“They clearly traveled a lot,” I remarked.

“Yeah, Tom said his father loved seeing the world. That was one of the toughest parts about losing the money. His parents were going to have enough to live on, but not the extra to really travel well—and that had been something his parents had planned to do after he retired.”

Without warning, I felt a swell of sadness. The family Fain looked happy, and you could sense the love they felt for one another—in one photo, Tom’s mother hugged him in a gesture of pure adoration. How painful it must have been for Tom to lose both parents. My father had died when I was twelve, and I knew something about the ragged hole that the early death of a parent leaves in your heart.

I dropped the snapshots back in the box, and Chris returned it to the shelf. In unspoken agreement, we wandered back through the kitchen and out into the hallway.

“If you had to make a guess,” I said, “do you think Tom has been back here?”

Chris let his eyes wander around the hall, as if the answer lay on the walls. “I don’t know,” he said finally, his brow furrowed. “I probably left the light on. And the magazine—it was probably there before, but I hadn’t noticed. But why does it matter, anyway? Tom is still missing. He’s AWOL at work.”

“I know, but if he came back here, it means that he’s basically okay. He just doesn’t want anyone to find him. And that means we should probably just let sleeping dogs lie.”

He shook his head. “Then if I had to guess, I’d say no. Tom’s the kind of guy who tends to leave a trail. Like the pizza box.”

“Okay, then, let’s proceed from there. Tom went someplace a week and a half ago, and we need to figure out where.”

“So what do we do?”

“For starters, I want to talk to the guy Tom was supposed to see in the Hamptons. I know you said he doesn’t seem culpable in any way, but Tom might have said something relevant to him. I want to talk to his girlfriend, too. Is there anyone else at the show who might know something?”

“The show? That seems like a dead end to me. There’s Harper, of course, and he was kind of friendly with some of the crew, but I’m pretty sure there was no one else he palled around with.”

Simultaneously we both shifted our bodies, ready to leave. I was thrilled to be getting out of there. But just before we reached the doorway, I stopped dead in my tracks.

“Hold on for a second,” I said. “Let’s just check the clothes hamper. It’s a tip a cop once gave me. If Tom did come back, he might have dumped clothes there.”

It was an old wicker basket in the bedroom with one of the hinges missing from the lid. I flicked it open and we saw a pile of smushy-looking clothes reaching three-quarters of the way to the top. Chris reached his hand in, and as he rifled through the clothes, the smell of sweat wafted upward, but it was an old, stale smell like the kind that greets you in a locker room after the season is over.

“Nah,” Chris said. “These are mostly running clothes that . . .”

“What?”
I asked. I could tell by the expression on his face that his hand had touched something unexpected.

“There’s a hard thing at the bottom.” He tossed several T-shirts and pairs of running shorts onto the floor and then slowly lifted out a plastic storage container, this one the size of a shoebox. We could see through the transparent sides that there were envelopes inside. I felt a weird tingle go through my body.

We glanced at each other, both of us nearly bug-eyed.

“We better take a look,” I announced. “Since he’s hiding it, it could mean something.”

As we carried the box across the hall to the living room, I felt dread gaining on me. Could the contents be tied to Tom’s disappearance? Was I about to find records of cocaine deals carried out throughout Manhattan?

With the box on his lap, Chris lifted the lid and flicked through the envelopes.

“It’s mostly from chicks,” he said. “Jeez, we’ve found his love letter stash.”

“Okay, we better put it back,” I told him.

“Hold on,” he said, lifting out one parcel of at least thirty cards bound by a fat rubber band. He tugged an envelope from the pack and drew a card from the envelope. “That’s what I thought,” he said, glancing at the few words scribbled at the bottom. “These are all from this actress he was seeing before Harper—Blythe. Blythe Hammell or Hamlin, I think. She used to call a ton when I was staying here, and it drove him nuts. After a while, he just started letting all her calls go to voice mail or his answering machine.”

“So he just wasn’t, as they say, into her?”

“He was
initially,
I think. Tom’s a pretty private guy overall, so I don’t know everything that went on between them, but I take it they had a fairly fun romp in the beginning. But she started getting real possessive after that. He tried to break it off, and she just kept hounding him. She sounded like a bit of a whack job to me. Of course, half the actresses you meet are—and besides, Tom has this way of seeing everybody’s good side.”

“Is that how they came into contact—through an acting job?”