Murder Plays House (13 page)

“Harassment? Alicia was harassing Julia?” Al said.

He winced. “No, that’s the wrong word. Forgive me. Julia just asked me to try to calm Alicia down.”

“And did you?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yes, I think I did. Look, Alicia was never going to be happy about the whole Bingie McPurge thing. But even she came to recognize that there was nothing she could do about it.”

“She gave up her idea of suing Julia?”

He smiled with a certain self-satisfaction. “She seemed, after our conversation, to understand that it would be a bad idea.”

“I take it you and Julia are still close. It sounds like she relies on you.”

He nodded. “Of course. We’re all friends at the Left Coast Players. In fact,” he said modestly, “I’ll probably be joining Julia in New York soon. I just have to set things up here. You know, find someone who is willing to take over the troupe.”

“Oh really? Is Julia helping you get an audition at
New York Live?”

He shook his head. “She’s a doll, and I’m sure she’ll put a word in, but this has been in the works for quite some time.”

Sure. Sure it had. There was something in Spike’s eyes that let me know that he recognized my doubt full well, and, in fact, possessed plenty of his own. Still, I wasn’t likely to convince this man to say anything negative about the woman upon whom his future might or might not lie. I was going to have to do the legwork on my own.

“Do you happen to have a video tape of the Left Coast Players? One with Alicia on it?” Al asked.

Spike wrinkled his brow. “I don’t, but a few of the players did an appearance on
Talking Pictures
a few years ago. You might try them. They might keep tapes of old shows.”

“Talking Pictures?”
I said.

“It’s a public access TV show out of the Valley. Hosted by Candy Gerard. You probably remember her, she used to have a series on CBS back in the mid-seventies,
Mary Jane and Rodolpho in Space?”

I nodded my head. I vaguely remembered the series from my childhood. It had something to do with a love affair
between a girl from the Bronx and an Italian space robot.

“Anyway, Alicia and some of the other players went on the show.”

“Was Julia Brennan there?”

“God no. Public Access? Julia was never that desperate. Neither was I, for that matter. Alicia did the show with a couple of the guys. You should call Candy. She might have a tape.”

I jotted the name of the show in my notebook, and then asked Spike, “Did Alicia’s death come as a surprise to you?”

He wrinkled his brow. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, were you shocked? Or weren’t you?”

He closed his eyes for a moment. “Frankly, I wasn’t surprised. Don’t get me wrong, it never occurred to me that someone would kill her. But Alicia didn’t seem like someone who would live to a ripe old age.”

“How so?”

He sighed. “Did you ever meet her?”

I flashed on the image of Alicia’s brutalized body lying in her bathtub. “No,” I said. My voice came out a hollow croak, and I cleared my throat. Al glanced at me, and I smiled reassuringly.

He shook his head. “Well, let’s just say that a character with an eating disorder wasn’t too great a stretch for Alicia Felix. In all the years I knew the woman, I don’t think I ever saw her eat more than a single leaf of lettuce. She was so thin. I mean, they’re all thin, all the baby actresses, but she seemed thinner than most. Sometimes she looked positively cadaverous.”

I couldn’t help but remember, as clearly as if I was holding before me a coroner’s photograph, Alicia’s sharp ribs, concave belly, and the hollow cup of her pelvis. “She was anorexic,” I said.

He nodded. “Of course. I mean, she never said anything, but she had to be.”

Here finally was someone who was willing to say what everybody else surely knew. It struck me, without knowing him too well, that Spike was that kind of guy. For all his Hollywood shtick, he seemed like someone who called things like he saw them. Even his self-aggrandizing puffery had just a trace of self-mockery to it. It was as if he was wordlessly letting me know that he was fully aware how ridiculous it was for a man of his age still to be engaged in the miserable rat race that was the quest for stardom. I liked him, orange skin, bloated belly, and all.

“If you told me that Alicia had starved to death, I probably wouldn’t have keeled over in shock,” Spike said. He took a large gulp of coffee, and looked about to launch into another homily to the speedy brew.

I spoke before he could. “But were you surprised that she was murdered?”

He licked away the pale brown mustache the coffee had left on his upper lip. “That’s something else. I mean, who expects anybody to be murdered?”

Al interrupted. “Did she have any enemies?”

He laughed. “Enemies? Honey, this is LA. Everyone has enemies. Hell, your dry cleaner has enemies.”

I leaned back in my chair and put a hand to the small of my back where it had suddenly begun to ache. I wondered if other interrogators had to deal with these same indignities—backache, swollen ankles, stretch marks. I shifted in my seat and asked my follow-up question. “Do you know who some of her enemies might be? Would Julia Brennan be one of Alicia’s enemies?”

He rolled his eyes at me as if he’d never heard anything
so stupid. “Hardly. Now, if you were investigating
Julia’s
murder, that would be a different story. Then it might have made sense to wonder about Alicia’s feelings toward her. But I promise you, Julia Brennan didn’t consider Alicia an enemy. In fact, I doubt she thought much about her at all.”

“And was there anyone else?”

Spike narrowed his eyes, and it was brought home to me, once again, that this was a man far more insightful and intelligent than he allowed himself to seem. “You want to know if I know anyone who would like to see Alicia dead?”

“Yes.”

He leaned back in his chair, tented his fingers over his belly, and said, “Alicia was not a particularly nice woman. Don’t get me wrong. She could be very charming and friendly, when it suited her purpose. And she did have friends; Moira Sarsfield, for one. But Alicia was ambitious. She was more ambitious than she was talented, I think, but then that’s true of most of us. She wanted success, she wanted adoration, she wanted the kind of things stardom brings you. Again, we all want that to a certain degree, but Alicia’s desire was more . . . what? Palpable, I guess, than, say, mine. So did she make enemies? Sure. I’m sure she did. But I couldn’t tell you who, and it’s something of a mystery to me why someone would want to kill her.”

“Why? If she was so ambitious, doesn’t it stand to reason that she might have trampled on the wrong person?”

He leaned forward again, grabbing his cup of coffee and shaking his head at what he clearly considered my dense lack of understanding. “Alicia never attained any success to speak of. She couldn’t have inspired any real envy. That can’t be the reason for her murder. You’ll have to find the motive somewhere else, my dear.”

There was more than a kernel of truth to the man’s word. Alicia may have done more than her share of professional trampling, but it surely hadn’t resulted in much.

I couldn’t resist asking one final question. “Spike’s not your real name, is it?”

He pushed his coffee cup away and waggled a finger at me. “Trade secret, my girl.”

“No, really.”

He winked. “Oh, what the hell. Larry Finkelman, at your service.” He extended his hand to me, and I shook it.

“Thanks for your help, Larry.”

“Don’t mention it,” he said. “And call me Spike.”

C
ANDY
Gerard’s talk show was filmed in a long, grey building in a strip mall out in Studio City. There was an Arab grocery store flying a large American flag and advertising Jordanian olives and Israeli newspapers on one side of the studio, and a Vietnamese nail salon on the other. I imagined for a minute soaking my feet in hot paraffin, having my nails painted vermillion, rather than looking for tapes of Alicia Felix. The indulgence of a pedicure was far more attractive, but I doubted that Harvey Brodsky would hire Al and me based on the loveliness of my toes. I had to figure out who killed Alicia Felix, and while I wasn’t sure I was going to get any closer to the solution to the crime by watching her appearances on public access TV, it wasn’t like I was exactly inundated with better ideas.

I dragged open the heavy metal door of the unmarked studio and walked in. Maybe it was the hypersensitivity of my pregnant nose, but the place stank to high heaven. It
smelled like old socks and onions, with a whiff of cheap perfume. It smelled like a tenement just after the hookers and the smack-addicts had been rousted out, and just before the place was demolished. And it didn’t look any better. The walls were cement blocks, and exposed pipes trailing filthy streamers of shredded duct-tape sagged from the ceiling. Two young women in short skirts and high heels were lounging on a faded purple couch pushed up against the wall. One of the girls leaned against a broken armrest, her long legs draped across the other’s lap. The second girl was holding a tiny mirror and studiously popping the pimples on her forehead.

“Is this where they shoot
Talking Pictures?”
I asked.

The long-legged girl, who had dyed black hair and severely cut bangs, pointed in the direction of a closed door marked “Do Not Enter When Light Is On.” There was a large red signal light above the door. She snapped her gum loudly, and the other girl, who had finished ravaging her forehead and was now carefully painting her collagen-enhanced lips a noxious shade of plum that contrasted strangely with her platinum-blond hair, giggled.

“Are you two on the show?”

This reduced both of them to heaps of intense laughter. The black-haired girl actually had to press one long-finger-nailed hand to her inflated chest to quell her hysterics.

“We work over there,” she said, finally, pointing to the far end of the hall. A large poster decorated with a silhouette of a naked woman and the words “Man-Eater Productions” marked a set of double doors. Another red signal light glowed over the top of the doors.

“Are you actresses?”

The blond smiled. “Actresses? Sure, that’s what we are. Right, Toni?”

“You’d better believe it,” her friend said, emphatically. “I’m acting every minute of every working day.”

“We’re fluffers,” the blond said, and winked.

Before I had a chance to inquire just what a fluffer might be, or even to decide if I really wanted to know, the light over the Man-Eater door went out, and a heavyset man wearing a beret and a Sundance Film Festival T-shirt stuck his head out. “Girls, time to get busy,” he said.

The two leapt to their feet, dragging their tiny skirts down over their rear ends, and tottered through the door on their impossibly high heels.

“Bye!” the blond called over her shoulder.

“Bye,” I replied, and watched them go through the door as I sat down on the couch to wait. I caught a glimpse of a sound stage, decorated with a large, round bed covered in a wrinkled, red velvet spread. There was a naked man kneeling in the middle of the bed, his back to me. Suddenly I had a pretty good idea what a fluffer was. When Toni and her friend had come out to Hollywood from Nebraska, or Alabama, or Anaheim, or whichever small town or city that regularly launched its naïve young women across the country to be chewed up and swallowed by the Hollywood machine, had they imagined that fantasies of stardom would result in jobs keeping male porn stars prepped and ready? Somehow, I doubted it. Like every other wanna-be starlet, like Alicia for that matter, those two girls had probably spent their years in high school playing Emily in
Our Town
or tap dancing through
Bye Bye Birdie
, dewy-skinned and starry-eyed Kim McAfees. They’d honed their Oscar acceptance speeches on the bus to LA, and spent their last two hundred dollars on the perfect set of head shots, designed to make them look like leading ladies, ingénues, comic geniuses. And perhaps it wasn’t yet all over for them. Perhaps
they weren’t permanently doomed to be nothing more than fluffers. Perhaps one or the other of them would become the serious actress she had surely imagined herself to be. But I doubted it. If these girls saw their dreams of stardom realized, it would most likely be in the seedy and depressing part of the industry that already employed them.

When the
Talking Pictures
light blinked and went out, I heaved myself to my feet, using my hands to lift my belly. It was getting harder and harder to get myself out of a chair. Pretty soon I was going to need a hoist and a forklift.

I opened the door and looked inside. The studio was larger than I expected, and painted entirely black. Half was taken up with a darkened set that looked much like the one across the hall at Man-Eater Productions—not much more than a bed. Clearly another porn set. At the far end of the long room, lit with two heavy banks of lights, was a set with two easy chairs. A thin woman with a frozen helmet of orange hair, false eyelashes so long they were obvious even where I was standing a good thirty feet away, and a mouth painted in a shade that almost, but not quite, matched her hair, perched on the edge of her seat. Somewhere under the makeup and taut, surgically altered cheeks and eyes was the ghost of Mary Jane, the girl from the Bronx who’d fallen in love with a robot from Naples.

A young man, no older than twenty, huddled in the other chair. His hair was artfully mussed, and his lime-green polyester shirt was buttoned high on his skinny neck.

“You gotta make sure you put the graphic up, dude,” the young man was saying as I walked into the room. “They gotta see the graphic.”

“They’ll see it,” a voice muttered from behind the huge camera hunkered down in front of the set.

“Of course they’ll see it,” Candy said. Her voice was
roughened and harsh, as if she’d spent a lifetime smoking unfiltered cigarettes.

“All I’m saying is they gotta see that graphic. Plug the movie. That’s why I’m here.”

Candy rose to her feet. She unsnapped a small microphone from the ruffles of her low-cut blouse, and said to the young man, “Thank you so much for your time. It was a terrific interview. Just terrific, don’t you think?”