Richfield & Rivers Mystery Series 2 - Stellium in Scorpio (2 page)

"So
are we ready?" Nan addressed me using the collective pronoun. I assured
her
we
were. Nan asked Granger if he remembered the story well enough to
"do the character arc," describing the dramatic change a character
has undergone by the end of the movie.

"I've
been thinking about the story," Granger said, crossing his arms, shifting
his weight, and staring up at the ceiling. "I think this girl...Bobby
Sue-"

"Bobby
Jo," I corrected with a smile.

"I
think this girl needs a greater handicap in life than the psychological abuse
she carries with her from her childhood."

"What
do you mean?" I asked pleasantly.

"I
think she should have something like-" He broke off, musing.

"Like?"

"I
don't know.. .like.. .one leg." He pursed his lips pensively.

I
burst out laughing. "Why not put her in an iron lung for the entire
movie?"

"I
think it makes her need for love that much greater," Granger said,
ignoring me the way one would an unruly child.

"Interesting,"
Nan said in a manner that would have me believe she really thought he'd come up
with a provocative idea.

"I
hope you're kidding!" I blurted out. "At one point, the woman becomes
a bareback rider!"

"That
ties in. People expect circus people to be odd." Nan nodded her head
pensively.

"She's
not in the circus. She's on the
circuit!
rodeo circuit! Look, a girl
with a wooden leg..." I tried to sound calm.

"No
leg," he corrected me. "She's too poor to afford a wooden leg, so we
have a sort of.. .Tiny Tim empathy working for us."

I
bent over at the waist and did a ninety-degree pirouette on one heel, trying to
release tension and avoid thrashing Granger, who as far as I was concerned had
just gone nuclear.

"A
girl with
no
leg? How does that work in the scene where she
runs
a
mile after being raped to escape being killed by her torturers?" I felt my
voice rising.

"You
can talk around that," Nan said confidently, letting me know that she too
was experiencing a meltdown.

This
was why everything on television looked the same. Projects were autopsied
before they were even declared dead.
Why do I feel compelled to develop and
write stories for morons? Why do I ever believe anything I write will ever
reach the viewing audience in any form I would want to claim as my own? Why the
hell am I even here with these people?
I began to sweat from the sheer heat
of holding in my emotions.

"Look,
I have nothing against doing a movie about a girl with one leg but it's not
this
movie, and we can't rewrite this movie here in the lobby in ten
minutes!" I checked my watch. "Make that five minutes. We've had four
months to make this decision.

"The
best creative decisions don't always come on schedule-Granger smiled
indulgently.

"This
isn't the best creative decision," I said firmly. "The girl is
raped-"

"That's
something that's always bothered me," Nan said in a Prozac drawl. "I
think we should avoid the use of the word
rape
in this pitch. I would
say she was aggressively attacked."

I
was losing control of the situation. In minutes I would be standing before
Marshall Tevachney, Vice President of Movies and Mini Series for one of the
major television networks in the United States, trying to tell a story I was
making up as I went along.

"Aggressively
attacked is with hammers. Raped is with penises!" I shouted into the
lobby, which was filling up with other writers and producers who had
appointments. It's odd how one can be forgiven the public utterance of almost
any word, save the anatomical name for the male member.

Granger
and Nan stared at me in utter shock as the receptionist, her eyebrow arched all
the way into her hairline, said, "Mr. Tevachney will see you now."

The receptionist
punched the button to a set of doors that let us into the CBS inner sanctum as
Nan and Granger eyed me warily. It was apparent they perceived me to be
dangerous.

"Nuts,"
I said to no one as our feet sank into the plush hallway carpet and the lobby
doors closed behind us.

∗ ∗ ∗ ∗

An
hour later I was back home, where I nuked a cup of old coffee in the microwave,
shrugged off my jacket, kicked off my shoes, and sagged into a chair. Elmo
strolled over and rested his heavy basset jowls on my leg by way of condolence.

"The
whole town's nuts," I told him as the doorbell rang.

I
opened the door to find Mary Beth Engle standing there with a Tupperware
container and a big smile on her pert, thirty-something face. Mary Beth and I
had been paired on a blind date only two nights before by a well-meaning friend
wanting to end my extended mourning over Callie Rivers.

"Thought
you might enjoy lunch," Mary Beth said in a way that made me think she
envisioned herself as lunch, and whatever was in the Tupperware as merely bait.
I was horrible at situations like this, and I avoided them like the proverbial
plague. I had considered our blind date a disaster. First, I didn't know I was
on a blind date-you might say I was blind to that fact. I just thought I was
meeting friends for a drink. They surprised me with Mary Beth, who they said
they'd brought along to cheer me up and to make me forget Callie, a woman
seemingly uninterested in seeing me anytime soon. Mary Beth's round, cherubic
face was cute, but not sexy. She tried very hard to please, laughing at all my
jokes, staring into my eyes, and never offering up a thought of her own, and
now, here she was serving herself up with lunch. In short, Mary Beth should
have been straight, because there were a hundred guys who wanted nothing more
than exactly what Mary Beth had to offer: vapid attentiveness and a potluck
meal. Unfortunately, Mary Beth just wasn't doing it for me. She set the
container on my kitchen countertop in a proprietary way and gave the kitchen a
once-over as if sizing up something she thought she might soon own.

"I
have a special floor wax that will get those scuff marks right off this
floor," she said and spun on her toes to face me, taking two steps forward
and sliding her arms around my waist.

"I
had such a super time with you the other night. You are so funny." She
giggled to accent the word
funny.
"I would love to spend more time
with you."

Elmo
moaned and flopped to the ground, one ear landing squarely over both of his
eyes, as if he couldn't bear the idea of my infidelity to Callie. His moaning
gave me an excuse to pull away.

"Sorry,
when he makes that sound, it means his collar's too tight," I lied and
leaned over to fake-adjust Elmo's collar. When I stood up, she was standing in
front of me with her shirt unbuttoned, revealing bare breasts. I had to give
her points for speed. She took my hands in hers, yanked them forward, and
placed them on her breasts.

"What
I'm saying"- she drawled the words-"is that I'd like to see more of
you. A lot more of you," and she reached for the zipper on my jeans,
deftly unzipping them and sliding her hand inside. I knew if I didn't move
quickly I was a dead woman. I could easily do this because it was easy, not
because I had any feelings for Mary Beth. It might even have been an exciting
diversion because it was unexpected and uncharted, but I was old enough to know
that if I took a moment of my life to fuck Mary Beth, Mary Beth would fuck
every moment of my life thereafter: calling, visiting, crying, and showing up
with Tupper-suppers! I pulled back suddenly, aching a bit from the effort it
took, just as the phone rang.

"Sony,"
I said and grabbed the phone.

"Teague?"
It was Callie calling from Tulsa, and she sounded upbeat.

"Hello,"
I breathed, feeling my heart leap to higher ground somewhere in my upper chest,
where the beating just stopped, as if it had been put on pause. While I
struggled to breathe, I was aware that love could actually kill me.

"What
are you up to, darling?" she asked as I zipped my pants backup.

"I
just got back from a network pitch, and if you'll permit me a negative
word," I said, mocking Callie's dislike of my swearing, "it was a
fucking disaster!"

"Why
don't you meet me in Las Vegas and tell me all about it?" Her voice had a
silvery ring to it that had an instant sensual effect on me.

"When,
two weeks from Thursday?" I asked sarcastically.

"You
need a break. My client is one of the original owners of the Desert Star
Casino. He's given me a two-week stay, and there's no one I'd rather stay with.
How about tonight?"

"Tonight?"
I breathed, my whole body coming alive. Mary Beth took this unguarded moment to
wrap her arms around me from behind and nibble my ear. I yanked my shoulder up
to my neck so quickly I nearly dislocated it, and I groaned in pain.

"Are
you with someone?" Callie asked suddenly.

"No!
A friend stopped by to have lunch, that's all," I said, and Mary Beth
retreated sullenly.

"There's
a seven o'clock flight..." Callie's voice trailed off.

It
was true that a plane flight would put me in Vegas in about forty-five minutes,
but today had been harrowing enough without adding to it an opportunity for
high-altitude free fall.

"Okay,
so drive," she said, reading my thoughts, "but be very careful. See
you in the hotel lounge at nine." She hung up on me in her standard form
of goodbye.

I
pretended she was still on the line for Mary Beth's sake. "All right then,
I'll leave now. No, sure, I can be there." I checked my watch. "No
problem." I hung up and shrugged happily at Mary Beth. "Sorry, I've
got to leave town suddenly."

"Oh."
Mary Beth looked hurt as I put my hand on her shoulder and walked her to the
door. "Can I call you when you get back?" she asked.

"Actually,"
I said, "I'm...getting married." I had no idea where that remark came
from, but it just popped out and, having heard it out loud, I figured it was as
good as any lie I could have conjured.

"Were
you getting married forty-eight hours ago when you and I went out?" Mary
Beth asked tersely, exhibiting the first signs of real life I'd seen in her.

"No,
I wasn't. It just came up."

Mary
Beth paused, tapped her little foot three times on the hardwood floor, huffed
loudly, and left. Elmo rose up on his back legs, leaving his front legs
plastered to the floor, stretched, and passed gas, blowing Mary Beth down the
road.

"You
really like Callie, don't you? Me too."

∗ ∗ ∗ ∗

Every
nerve ending in my body was tingling with excitement. I would see Callie
tonight. "You care if I go to Vegas, Elmo? I'll call Wanda and she'll come
and play with you... and give you rice with your dinner... and some chips...
and a huge Milk-Bone before bedtime-Elmo's expression never changed as he
lifted his muscular behind off the floor and ambled out of the room. He was a
Hollywood dog. He knew a snow job when he saw one.

I
jumped up, pulled a small suitcase and suit bag out of my closet, and began
flinging clothes into them without regard for what matched. I was so happily
nervous that I couldn't think straight, and I couldn't locate the simplest of
items like the number for Wanda, Elmo's dog-sitter. I rummaged through drawers
trying desperately to find it. That was one thing I hated about Vegas: there
were no dogs allowed in any of the hotels. No one could tell me that a dog
would pee on their fancy hotel carpet any more frequently than the drunks who
inhabited the rooms.

I
looked over at Elmo, his large brown eyes rolled up in his head as if he were
preparing to be beamed up by aliens. Dropping to my knees, I lifted his head up
and looked into his big, soft face.

"You
know what?" I said, "Screw those Vegas hotels. I'm taking you with
me." His ears elevated off his head a full inch, and he became alert.

"You'd
like to see Callie too, wouldn't you?" He stood up and shook his huge fur
suit in that way he had of getting physically ready for something important.

"But
here's the deal: we have to smuggle you in, and you have to be quiet in the
room, and sometimes, I might have to leave you for a couple of hours in the car
with the windows cracked, but it's pretty cool now, so I think you'll be fine.
Still want to go?" He wagged his entire body. "Great!" I said.
"Let's get you packed. And remember, once we're with Callie, NFL-No
Farting or Licking."

Elmo
let out a long, loud belch and I laughed. "You always have to have the
last word," I said.

I
tossed the suitcases and a thermos of coffee into the Jeep, loaded up Elmo, and
we were on our way by four o'clock in the afternoon.

Once
through the maze of traffic on I-5, heading east on the 14, I felt the cool,
high desert wind wash away the tension in my chest and shoulders and I relaxed
enough to suck in a deep breath of fresh air. The drop-down seat in the back
allowed Elmo to lie down on his tummy and place his head and shoulders on the
console between the front seats so he was hound-happy himself, until I punched
the CD button on the dash and the first mournful notes from k.d. lang enveloped
us. Elmo whipped his head left and glared at me.