Lethally Blond (4 page)

I didn’t say anything, just tossed the words over in my mind. I didn’t know Tom’s life well enough to have any sense what he might have been talking about.

“Speaking of work, was there anyone besides Chris that Tom palled around with?” I asked.

She did that pouty thing again with her mouth while she reflected. “He was kind of friendly with these two grips named Danny and Deke, especially Deke. Since he had a fair amount of downtime, he’d play cards with them. Once, back in July, he and Deke even went to Atlantic City for a weekend. I told him it wasn’t smartest thing in the world to be hanging with those dudes, but Tom has a hard time turning people down.”

“And he got along with the other actors—Locket and people like that?” Clearly, she didn’t know he was making Locket’s toes curl up like Froot Loops, but I wondered if she’d had a hint of any flirtation.

“Yes, Tom is just one of those easygoing guys that everybody relates to. I . . .” She hesitated. “Why don’t I bring you to Chris now. I’ve a reporter coming from
Time Out
in a little while, and I need to get myself in gear.”

“What’s your best guess about where he is?”

“Off licking his wounds. As soon as you find anything out, let me know, will you?—so I can ring his neck.”

She rose abruptly then, making it clear that I could either follow her or sit by my lonesome and watch the ratty squirrels chase one another. I trailed behind her to the fourth truck, which behind the cab had a big silver trailer with several doors on the side, all in a row. She rapped efficiently on one, and Chris opened it almost immediately.

“So there you are,” he said warmly. “Thanks, Harper.”

She headed off with a backward wave and a brusque order into her walkie-talkie.

Chris took my elbow and pulled me gently into the truck. We were in a small room strewn with clothes, magazines, Styrofoam coffee cups, and cardboard food caddies.

“Welcome to my humble abode in the honey wagon.”

“Is this room just yours?” I asked, glancing around.

“Yeah, though when you’re a star like Locket, you get a whole damn Winnebago.”

I pulled my gaze away from the interior and turned to him, smiling. “It must be thrilling, though—isn’t it?” I said.

“Yeah, I keep thinking that maybe I won’t have to pour another Scotch on the rocks for another asshole for the rest of my life. So how was your talk with Harper? A bit of a bulldozer, isn’t she?”

“Seems so. Does Tom find that appealing?”

“Once she set her sights on him, I don’t think he knew how to get out of her path.”

“By the way, I talked to his pal John, and he isn’t worried at all. He says Tom has a love for the open road. Do we have a whole head of steam up over nothing?”

“I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “One minute I’m worried, and the next minute I’m pissed, thinking that he just took off.”

“That’s exactly what Harper said.” I wished I could share Harper’s revelation, which gave Tom an even greater motivation to take off, but I’d given my word—and it would probably only upset Chris more.

I took a minute and a half to fill him in on my morning—the rest of my brief convo with John Curry, my discovery about Tom’s friendship with Professor Carr. Chris said that they’d moved up the time for his next scene—it involved the discovery of a scantily clothed dead woman in her twenties (natch) in the park—and he would be pulled away at any moment.

“I might as well split now,” I said. “I’ll call you later if I learn anything.”

As I descended the steps of the trailer, Chris, following behind me, squeezed my elbow.

“Check it out,” he whispered. “There’s the infamous Locket. She’s talking to the first AD.”

She was just inside the park in the area where I’d seen the crew setting up, an itty-bitty thing no more than five feet two, platinum hair in a bedheady kind of do, and gleaming, porcelainlike skin. Even from where I stood, I could see how big her lips were. They looked as though they’d burst if they came even near a pair of pincers.

Everyone behind her seemed frozen in place, waiting while she hashed something out with the AD. There were two guys with handheld cameras and two other guys with their hands on the lenses, as if to steady them. Also cooling their heels were two patrol cops who I assumed must be actors
and
—I suddenly realized—either a dummy or a person under a white sheet on the ground.

“Locket looks vaguely familiar,” I whispered. “Did she once have longer hair?”

“Yeah. Apparently she fought like hell to keep it, but they told her that someone with her job as an investigator would never run around with Cher hair.”

As Chris and I stood watching, a tall man in his forties strode toward Locket and the AD. He had tightly cropped gray blond hair, receding from a high, tanned forehead, a mustache, and a short beard, all very Nordic-looking. He was dressed in a black Armani-style jacket.

“That’s Alex,” Chris whispered. “Producer—and cuckolded boyfriend.”

“He looks—how shall I say—stern?”

“Oh yeah. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him in horned headgear one day. A real Viking warrior.”

Chris explained that he had to get back to his trailer, and we hugged good-bye. Before leaving, I joined a group of rubberneckers near the park entrance and took a closer look at Locket. She was talking intently to both the AD and Alex now, looking slightly peeved but obviously trying to keep her cool. “If you think it’s really, really necessary,” she said at one point, the only thing I could make out. Since this was her big break into prime time, she seemed to be doing her best to be cooperative, but it was probably hard to keep her raging diva side at bay. How was a guy who found Harper appealing also drawn to Locket? They seemed so wildly different. Did Tom just have a hard time saying no to
any
woman? And what had Locket seen in Tom? She had Alex, after all—so why run the risk of blowing that arrangement?

As I hoofed it back west in the heat, I checked my voice mail. There was a call from Gina saying she’d talked to Detective O’Donnell and he’d be willing to speak to me. I found a stoop on a nearby building, plopped down, and phoned him. There was a tiny suggestion of an Irish accent in his voice, the subtle kind someone gets when he’s raised here but his parents were born over there.

“I wish I could devote some more time to this one, but the particulars don’t warrant it,” he admitted after I’d introduced myself and explained the reason for my interest.

“Because he’s a twentysomething male and there’s no reason to suspect foul play?” I asked.

“That’s part of the reason,” he said. “But there’s something else. It turns out he withdrew seven thousand dollars in cash the day before he picked up his car. That sounds like a man with a plan.”

CHAPTER 4

W
ith that one statement, everything came into focus, and I felt a wave of both relief and irritation. Tom was probably perfectly fine, speeding his car along a highway at least ten states away, his blond hair whipped by the wind that blasted through the sunroof. Yet he hadn’t cared a damn that there were people worrying about him. Or perhaps he’d convinced himself that no one cared all that much.

“So you’re thinking he took off somewhere, then?” I said. “Any ideas?”

“Not a clue. He made one call from his cell phone about an hour after he picked up his car. Right near Newburgh Junction. We picked that up on the cell site record. It was to the second assistant director on the show. I checked with the guy, and the two never actually connected. Fain just left a message saying he’d call back later.”

“Maybe to tell him he was quitting the show?”

“Could be. But Fain hadn’t worked on Friday and so he didn’t get the Monday call sheet. This guy said he assumed Fain was calling to check whether he had a scene to shoot on Monday. That part doesn’t make sense. Why call for his schedule if he was bailing? But as you say, maybe he was calling to quit.”

“I wonder what’s in Newburgh Junction.”

“He might have just been passing through.”

“And that was the last call?”

“Yeah, I don’t like that part, either. Maybe he lost his phone. The trouble is, there’s nothing I can do. Gina said you’re a friend of a friend?”

“Uh-huh—Chris Wickersham, the actor you spoke to. I’m a reporter, and he asked me to help follow any leads. But so far I haven’t turned up anything.”

“Well, look, would you call me if you hear anything? The money seems to point to him just splitting, but I don’t have a good feeling about this one.”

“Will do, and I’d appreciate being kept abreast of anything
you
hear. Can I ask why you’ve done as much as you have? Missing twentysomething guys usually
don’t
warrant it—unless there’s some evidence of foul play.”

“The executor of the parents’ will—a guy named Robert Barish—made a call to someone he knows higher up, pulled a few strings. They told me to follow up. But since the money seems to point to a split, there’s really not much more I can do.”

After hanging up, I flagged down a cab, my thoughts jostling around in complete confusion: Tom was okay—he’d withdrawn a large amount of cash so he could just take off and leave everything behind him. Tom
wasn’t
okay—even if he’d decided to split, why wouldn’t he have used his cell phone for nearly two weeks? Tom was okay—he wasn’t playing the role he wanted on the show, plus the producer had chewed him out, so he’d obviously decided not to hang around. Tom
wasn’t
okay—he’d been acting since college, so why burn bridges even if he hadn’t been thrilled with his part?

Rather than go directly home, I took the cab to Tom’s car lot on Houston—between Essex and Ludlow. There were two Guatemalan attendants on duty. They spoke broken English, but with the help of my rudimentary Spanish, I figured out that one of them had been on duty when Tom had driven off on Saturday. He said that Tom had left very early, at around eight o’clock. He had not mentioned where he was going or when he was coming back.

Five minutes after I returned home, my next-door neighbor, Landon, was knocking on my door. He was wearing a pair of khaki pants and a cerulean blue Ralph Lauren polo shirt. With his compact body, light brown eyes, and close-cropped silver hair, he’s one of the best-looking seventy-year-old men I know.

“I heard you come in, darling. You’re not at
Buzz Kill
today?” That was what Landon had taken to calling the magazine after the editor in chief had been murdered in July.

“There seems to be a moratorium on celebrity misdoings this week.”

“Oh dear, is that going to pose a problem for you? If they stop misbehaving, you’ll be out of a job. Maybe you should call Winona Ryder and casually mention that a new shipment of Marc Jacobs pieces has just arrived at Saks.”

“Brilliant,” I said, laughing. “What about you? How was your date the other night? Did you like the guy?”

“I did until he opened his mouth over dinner. Speaking of which, I stopped by to inquire if you wanted to come face-to-face tonight with the most delectable lamb chops you’ve ever seen in your life. I invited a client to dinner, but he’s just canceled.”

“I’d play second fiddle to score one of your lamb chops any day. I’ve actually got an interesting story to share, but I’ll fill you in over dinner.”

After throwing together a sandwich, I found a map of New York State online and looked for Newburgh Junction. It was, just as O’Donnell had said, about an hour north of New York City. But even more interesting, it was close to the New York State Thruway. I let my eyes run up the map. About two hours farther north was the town of Saratoga, home of Skidmore College. Bingo. What if
that’s
where Tom had been headed? To hang with his old professor. To ask his advice on what the hell to do with his life.

I tried Professor Carr’s office phone but once again ended up with voice mail. Next I tried the college switchboard, asking for the theater department and not Carr. A motherly-sounding woman answered.

“Is Professor Carr there?” I asked.

“No, dear, he left about twenty minutes ago. Would you like his voice mail?”

“I left a message earlier. Do you know if he picked up his messages?”

“I believe so. I’m sure he’ll be in touch.”

I’d indicated in both my voice mail and e-mail messages that people were concerned about Tom and asked for a reply right away. Carr hadn’t obliged. Could that mean that Tom was there and Carr was protecting him? It seemed that the only way I would be able to learn if Tom Fain was now in residence in Saratoga was to get my little butt in my Jeep and head up there. I calculated the driving time—about three, three and a half hours each way. It meant investing a whole day and would also mean that I’d be a lot more invested than “making a few calls” for Chris’s sake. But I didn’t have a ton on my plate reportingwise this week, and besides, I felt a growing compulsion to find Tom, even if he had no regard for his friends. I called the garage and ordered my Jeep for nine the next day.

For the rest of the afternoon, I camped out on my terrace, reading through clippings for a freelance article I needed to start sooner or later. Often my thoughts flew back to Tom.

At seven that night, I tapped on Landon’s door. When I’d first moved into my apartment, not long after my wedding, I’d exchanged only neighborly pleasantries with Landon, but after my marriage had crashed and burned and my ex had fled his law firm job and the city, Landon had invited me in for a drink, and our friendship took off.

“Your cheeks are pink,” he said as he ushered me into his apartment. Landon did not believe in gas grills, and from the open terrace door wafted the intoxicating aroma of burning charcoal briquettes.

“I caught a little sunshine late in the day. Here, some Pellegrino. I hear it’s an excellent year.”

The dinner was to die for: the aforementioned delectable lamb chops, haricots verts, roasted new potatoes sopping in olive oil and mint. Over dinner I shared the whole saga about Tom, beginning with Chris’s phone call and ending with my decision to head to Saratoga tomorrow.

“Now that you’ve heard all the details, give me an objective opinion,” I demanded. “Do you think something’s terribly wrong?”

“Well, he may have just taken off, but there’s something about it that doesn’t feel right. You know what intrigues me even more? All this interest on
your
part.”

“I’ve been wondering about the same thing, actually. Believe it or not, I’ve developed a soft spot for Tom. From everything I’ve heard, he seems like a really nice guy—and I feel bad that he’s sort of alone in the world.”

“What’s up with you and Chris? Are sparks starting to fly again?”

“He’s as hot as I remember him being, but I think he came to see me just as a friend.”

“What about
you
?” he asked, his eyes twinkling in the amber light from the citronella candle.

“Well, things never got airborne the last time, so I suspect it’s probably not meant to be. Plus, for all I know he’s got a girlfriend now. But there’s a part of me that thinks it would at least be a distraction from stewing about Beau Regan.”

“Oh dear. Can’t kick him out of your head?”

“It’s getting better. Like today I’ve only thought about him forty or fifty times so far. He’s due back soon, and it’s torturing me. I keep wondering if he’ll call as soon as he’s home, and then realize that if he was interested in pursuing things romantically, he would have stayed in touch while he was away.”

“You have the kind of problem that calls for more claret,” he said, reaching for the bottle of Bordeaux.

“Nah, I’d better not,” I said. “I need to get an early start tomorrow.”

I was in my Jeep by exactly nine the next morning. As I pulled out of the garage, it struck me that this would be a good chance to swing by Blythe’s apartment. It might be smarter to surprise her with a visit than leave a bunch of messages. The building on 5th Street turned out to be a brick tenement midway down the block. The kind of place that probably held a mix of artsy types and people down on their luck, typical for the neighborhood. Blythe’s name was on the mailbox along with an apparent roommate, T. Hardwick. I rang the bell.

A female voice asked, “Who is it?” sounding both groggy and wary.

“Blythe?” I inquired.

Long pause.

“Who wants to know?”

“My name is Bailey Weggins, and I’m a friend of a friend, and something’s come up that I think she’d want to know about.”

“Blythe isn’t here.”

“Is this her roommate?”

“Yes, and I’m trying to sleep.”

“When do you expect her?”

“I don’t know. Maybe never.”

The hairs on the back of my neck shot to attention, as if they’d heard a loud bang.

“Look, is it possible for me to come up? This is a fairly urgent matter.”

There was another long pause. Finally, she announced that she would come down and I should wait in the foyer.

I was expecting another struggling actress, but the nebbishy, irritated-looking chick who pushed open the door into the vestibule was so lacking in charisma that it was pretty obvious the biggest part she’d ever played was a farm animal in a fifth-grade show. She was dressed in a pair of saggy jeans and an oversize mustard-colored T-shirt. Her blue eyes were nearly obscured by a pair of dark-framed glasses, and her hair, a reddish brown you see only on horses, was pulled back in a low ponytail under a baseball cap.

“What’s so important?” she grumbled.

“You’re T. Hardwick?” I said, smiling pleasantly.

“Terry Hardwick. What’s this about?”

“Like I said, I’m Bailey Weggins and I’m looking for Blythe.”

“You’re the one who left the phone message.”

“That’s right. It’s really important that I talk to Blythe.”

“She owe you money? Good luck getting it.”

“No, I just want to talk to her. Has she moved out?”

“That’s one way to put it,” she said scornfully. “I think the term they usually use is
skipped
out. She took off with a guy, saying they were doing a movie together. Not only does she owe me rent money, but she stole every tube of sunblock I had and this white eyelet bathing suit cover-up that cost me seventy-five bucks.”

It sounded as if I might have just solved the mystery of Tom Fain.

“Was it about a week and a half ago?” I demanded. “With someone named Tom?”

“You a girlfriend of Tom’s?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.

“No, but I’m a friend of a friend, and I’m trying to locate him. He’s missing.”

She scrunched up her mouth. “No, it wasn’t with Tom— though he was here once or twice. This new guy had a foreign-sounding name. I think she met him in Williamsburg. And they took off longer than two weeks ago—around the first of August.”

That was right around the time the cutesy Hallmark card campaign had come to an abrupt end. So she wasn’t with Tom. She had obviously cooled on him once she’d found another dude to go apeshit over.

“Do you know where they went—and if there’s any way I can reach her?”

“I don’t know
where
she is,” she answered with disgust. “She called a few weeks ago for her messages and said she was in the Miami area, but she’s such a liar, it’s hard to know. I can’t believe I ever trusted her. She’d get all teary-eyed and ask if I could pleeeeease give her just one more week on the rent because she’d just done this commercial for Burger King and would be getting a big check. Between the rent and the food and all the clothes of mine she took or wrecked, she owes me a thousand dollars.”

“That’s a shame,” I said, finding it hard to be all that sympathetic. Terry looked like the type of humorless chick one might relish torturing. Maybe Blythe had stolen her sunblock just for fun. “How did you two hook up as roommates, anyway?”

“I put a sign up. My mother said I was stupid sharing my place with an actress, and I should have listened to her. I may not work with people as thrillingly exciting as Blythe, but at least they wouldn’t eat a whole bag of someone’s miniature Snickers and leave all the wrappers in the bag—like you’re not supposed to
notice
there aren’t any candy bars in there anymore.”

“What do you do, anyway?” I asked.

“I work in health insurance. So how you going to find this Tom guy?”

“I’m heading upstate today to follow up on a few leads. Do you think Blythe will call back?”

“Well, she left some of her shit here, so maybe she’ll be back. If she doesn’t, I’m seriously thinking of calling the police.”

I offered her my business card, which she accepted with all the enthusiasm of someone being presented a dead eel, and asked her to have Blythe get in touch if she called again. Yet it didn’t seem likely that Blythe would know Tom’s whereabouts. She’d apparently found someone more receptive to her charms than Tom had been, someone willing to keep her in Snickers for the unforeseeable future. My best lead now was Skidmore, and it was time to haul ass and get up there.