Reel Murder (16 page)

“Wow, Lola; that’s fantastic. Is it new?” Lark stepped back from the counter and nearly tripped over Pugsley, who’d taken up a strategic spot in the middle of the kitchen floor, practicing his “Oliver Twist” routine. His roly-poly body quivering with excitement, Pugsley fixed Lark with an unwavering doggie stare. His eyes were the size of Ping-Pong balls, and his tongue was lolling out of his mouth in a trademark pug grin
. Feed me!
his body language screamed.

With Pugsley, begging for food has reached the level of performance art. It’s street theater, all the way.

All he has to do is flash that bug-eyed pug stare and we cave, showering him with all sorts of delicious treats. Today was no different. Lark reached down and popped a veggie sausage link into his mouth. It was like putting a quarter into a vending machine. It disappeared instantly.

“It’s not my dress,” Lola said, sniffing slightly. “It’s from Wardrobe but I’m not even sure it suits me. They want me to wear it in the party scene; you know, scene twenty-three?”

“Scene twenty-three? So filming has started up again?” I asked around a mouthful of Belgian waffles.

“Fingers crossed,” Mom said. “Nothing is definite but the AD called late last night and said things might get rolling again this morning.”

“But how did you get the dress?” Lark asked.

“Oh, Rhonda was a sweetie and let me take the dress home a couple of days ago so I could try it on with heels and jewelry. I have to bring it back this morning and give her the verdict.”

“Why didn’t you just try it on for Rhonda while you were on the set yesterday? Wouldn’t that have been easier?” I took my first sip of french vanilla coffee
. Perfecto
. My neurotransmitters revved into high gear, and my synapses connected. It takes caffeine for me to have a functioning brain.

“I just hate trying things on in Wardrobe you know? No privacy. I feel like I’m in the dressing room at Loehmann’s! All those mirrors, the unflattering lights, people gawking at each other.” She blew out an unhappy sigh and held the dress up to her chest, biting her lower lip.

I wondered if Mom felt intimidated by all the size zeros and double zeros in the Wardrobe trailer. Drop-dead gorgeous twenty-year-olds with fake tans and perfect Barbie doll bodies, all squealing happily as they wriggled into barely-there designer clothes.

True confession time: I wouldn’t like to get undressed in front of them, either.

“Well, I think it’s lovely and I bet it looks terrific on you.” Lark was tactful, as always.

“I don’t know; I think it was intended for someone, you know, older.” Lola paused. “It might be a little too mother-of-the-bride, you know? Something about the pastel color and those flowing lines. I don’t want to look like Queen Elizabeth inspecting the Palace Guard.”

Lark and I locked eyes over Mom, who was decked out in a denim miniskirt, pink crop top, and chandelier earrings. “Mom,” I said firmly, “no one would ever mistake you for a matronly type. Or for the queen, or even the mother-of-the-bride. Trust me on this one,” I added as Lark smothered a giggle. “I like the dress; tell Rhonda you’ll wear it.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

She never suspected that I had my fingers crossed behind my back.

“Oh, Maggie, I’m so glad you’re here early,” Maisie said an hour later. “We need to talk.” Mom and I had just arrived on the
Death Watch
set and checked the call sheet. Apparently the cameras were rolling again, because Mom was scheduled for hair and makeup followed by the party scene filming at 11:00 a.m. sharp.

She had only a few lines in that scene, but I knew that Mom would manage to steal the show. Whenever Mom’s in a group shot, she figures out a way to stand out from the other actors. She’s the one laughing a little too gaily, flipping her blond hair over her shoulder with abandon, or winking flirtatiously across the table. It’s become a running gag with the cast and crew. They call it “The Lola Walsh Effect.” Just keep the camera trained on Lola, because that’s where the viewers are going to be looking, anyway.

“Toodles, sweetie.” She grabbed a coffee and gave me a hurried wave before dashing across the grass toward the makeup tent. The Grecian-style dress was tucked into a garment bag under her arm, and I wondered what the final decision would be.

Maisie pulled me to the side, away from the cast members who were making a stampede for the craft services table. The big shiny catering trucks had just rolled in and the workers were unloading hot breakfasts in white Styrofoam containers along with gallons of coffee and boxed doughnuts.

“Is everything okay?” I wondered if the Guitar Heroes had objected to my script changes and was bracing myself for some possible fallout. Mom had warned me that scriptwriters are notoriously temperamental and that “the boys” wouldn’t appreciate my tampering with their dialogue in the courtroom scene. I reminded myself that Hank, as the director, had the final say-so in the matter, and after all, he was paying for my expertise.

“Are you kidding? Everything’s more than okay,” she said, breaking into a wide smile. “Maggie, I’ve gotta tell you, you did a fantastic job on those revisions; you really nailed it. Hank was so pleased.” Maisie was wearing her long red hair in two braids today. If I wore my hair that way, I’d look like Pippi Longstocking, but Maisie, in her black denim jeans and Boho top from Miu Miu looked very hip, very L.A.

“Really?” I felt a little frisson of relief go through me. “I’m glad he liked it. I didn’t want to step on any toes”—I lowered my voice—“but there were a few things that needed to be smoothed out.”

Maisie’s headset made a squawking noise and she yanked it off and looped it around her neck. “Just between us, Hank isn’t thrilled with the scriptwriters. Sometimes I can’t believe Beavis and Butthead have actually won five Emmys between them. It just shows there’s no justice in this world. They’re no Einsteins; believe me. Just look at them!”

She gave a little snort and nodded toward the scriptwriters, who were playing basketball outside the production office. Someone had duct-taped a cardboard box to the outside of the trailer to make an improvised hoop and they’d managed to dredge up a battered basketball. They glanced over, gave me a blank stare, and then went back to the game.

“Are they annoyed with me?”

She grinned. “Maybe a little. But don’t worry about it. Hank’s the one paying your salary and he’s thrilled with you. That’s all that matters.”

She was right. The director called the shots. Everything else was smoke and mirrors. “So what’s on for today?”

Maisie consulted her clipboard as her headset squawked again. “We’re shooting some exteriors and the party scene. If you want, you can just go over some dialogue with Sandra and talk to her about her character, or you can keep working on the script on your own. I know Hank’s paying you by the day, so you don’t have to report to anyone. Just do whatever it takes to get the job done; that’s all he cares about.”

“That’s good to know.” This was turning into a very sweet gig, as Nick would say. Maybe with
Death Watch
on my resume, I could pick up some more movie work, assuming of course that
Death Watch
did reasonably well at the box office. If it tanked in a really spectacular way (think
Water-world
), then it would be best left off my resume and never mentioned again.

The headset squawked again. This time she glanced at her watch and blew out a little sigh. I had the feeling Maisie was always running late, that she was one of those chronically overscheduled people whose life was spinning out of control.
One Xanax away from a nervous breakdown
, I thought idly. “All the actors are at your disposal and you can go wherever you want on the set,” she said in a rush. “You can watch the filming, hang out with the actors, do whatever you want.”

I raised my eyebrows. “It sounds great. I guess I’d like to start by spending some time with Sandra, if I could.”

“Sure, no problem. Help yourself to some coffee and doughnuts and I’ll send her right over. She said she really learned a lot from talking with you the other day. She likes you.”

One of the Guitar Heroes glanced over again and gave me the evil eye. I stared right back and he gave me a death glare and broke eye contact. If he thought he was going to intimidate me with his frat boy antics, he had “another think coming,” as Vera Mae would say. I’ve gone one-on-one with murderers, rapists, and convicted felons in my forensic work. It’s going to take more than a couple of twenty-something surfer-dudes in baseball caps to give me the heebie-jeebies.

I smiled at Maisie. “It’s always good to have friends. You never know when you might need them.”

Sandra showed up a few minutes later, talking animatedly to one of the grips. He was wearing black denim jeans and a T-shirt from Copper Canyon, a resort area south of the California border. “I’m telling you, you’ve gotta go back to Mexico,” she was saying. “How long were you there? If you were working the whole time, you probably didn’t get a chance to really look around.”

He hoisted a length of cable from one shoulder to the other before nodding. “We only shot in Chihuahua for one night, and they put us up in some tourist rattrap. It had fake stucco walls and a plastic fountain, can you believe it?”

“Ohmigod, it sounds awful!” Sandra’s squeal could have peeled paint off the walls.

“It was. It looked just like the Mexican Village set at Universal studios.”

Sandra gave him a knowing look. “Trojan Productions, right? That’s the trouble with these little indie outfits. They put you up in crappy places and they work you like a dog. Anything to save a buck, you know.”

She suddenly spotted me and her features morphed into a grin. Instant personality change. It was like someone had pushed a button or she’d just swallowed a handful of mood stabilizers. “Although I really like the Seabreeze; that was a cool party last night, wasn’t it?” She was talking a little too loudly, smiling at him like her life depended on it.

I had the feeling the Little Miss Sunshine act was all for my benefit, and I tucked the information away in my memory bank. Like all performers, she has a strong desire to be liked. Why else would she go into a profession where the chance of success was so small, and the odds of rejection so great?

“That it was,” the grip said, edging away. “Catch you at lunch, hon.”

“So what are we doing today, Maggie?” Sandra asked, widening her blue eyes, giving me a broad smile. She was dressed casually but revealingly in tiny denim shorts and a low-cut halter top. I wondered if she was going overboard on the amount of skin she was showing and then decided she was entitled. After all, she’d lost all that weight through strenuous dieting and exercise and she was eager to show off her new bod. Who could blame her? She looked terrific.

“I thought we’d work on the script some more and go over some of your dialogue. If that’s okay with you.”

“Cool!” She perched on the top of a picnic table and let her long, tanned legs hang over the edge. She was wearing four-inch espadrilles that made her legs look incredibly long and lean. It was hard to remember that this Gisele Bündchen look-alike used to be the “formerly fat actress.”

“You’re a fan of Mexico? The Copper Canyon area?”

She narrowed her eyes, just for a microsecond, and then quickly recovered. “Oh, you mean the conversation I was just having with Howie? We both love to travel. He got stuck in some tourist hellhole down there shooting a movie and I was just telling him about some attractions in the area.”

“Sounds like you know the area really well.” I opened up my copy of the script and pretended to be absorbed in it. I could feel a slight change in Sandra’s body language, an almost imperceptible tightening of her core muscles, as she folded her arms and crossed her legs. A protective gesture, a defensive mode? Certainly a classically “closed” position.

“You must have spent a lot of time there.” I smiled at her. She looked at me and her face stalled. I sensed a little wave of tension rolling off her but I acted like I was clueless. Something was definitely up; my radar was pinging. She still hadn’t said a word. “I’d like to go there sometime,” I continued. “I’ve never been south of Tijuana.” I made sure my voice was deliberately casual, smoothing out my tone. This is a trick I learned early on, dealing with anxious clients at my psychology practice.

There’s a saying in psychoanalytical circles: “If there are two people in a room and one is anxious, the other one better not be.” Good advice for beginning therapists. If I kept my tone easy and conversational, they’d unconsciously mimic me and their own voices would slide down a notch or two.

Except with Sandra it didn’t seem to be working; her whole body was vibrating with tension.

“Well, I’m no expert,” she said a little too quickly. Her eyes landed hard on me and she sounded like she was still on high alert. “But I can jot down the names of a couple of hotels for you. I can think of a few nice places down there that don’t cost an arm and a leg.”

“In Copper Canyon?” I made a note on a piece of scrap paper and I swear I saw Sandra flinch.

“Not just Copper Canyon, the whole area,” she hedged. She blinked, licked her lips, and swallowed hard. Sandra was really feeling the heat and I had no idea why. The tiny muscles around her mouth tensed, and her eyes clouded with some negative emotion. Fear? Shame? I wasn’t sure.

It was a fleeting look, totally unconscious, but I caught it anyway. It’s called a microexpression, a flash of emotion that reveals what an individual is really feeling. Microexpressions can appear on their own, or sometimes they show up right in the middle of a fake expression, but they’re only there for a flash. It usually takes a trained eye—or someone with really good instincts—to pick up on them. “There’s Monte Alban,” she said quickly. “I would definitely recommend it.”

“White Mountain?” I asked, calling on my limited Spanish.