Hollywood Stuff (21 page)

“Maybe Patrick went to Pasadena to confront the B Room and tell them what was going on,” she continued. “He knew Lou was in Ojai. Remember? We heard him in the outer office looking for Lou when we were there meeting with Bix. So he leaves Bix Pix Flix, plants the little explosive device for Lou to find as a threat. It would scare him, but not kill him. Then he hears that Bix found it and was injured. He goes to the hospital that night to make sure she’s all right and plants the mobile in her closet when Skye is out of the room—”

“Patrick planted the mobile?” asked Tim. “Why do you think that?”

“I’m not positive, just thinking out loud. He probably has a stack of those postcards and he could have gotten an old
Southpaw and Lefty
script easily enough through Lou. If he was afraid of getting caught as the one who injured Bix and wanted to frame someone from the B Room, the script pages would hint at that,” said Jane.

“Yeah, hint, but the postcard shouts Patrick Dryer,” said Tim, putting two more muffins in to thaw.

“That’s the thing about reading this book of his. He’s an egomaniac. I mean, he can’t not stick that postcard on there. He has to let them all know about the book. It’s as if he has to sign his work,” said Jane.

“Maybe for all the years it went unsigned?” suggested Tim, his head back in the freezer.

“Jeez, they live where oranges grow, for Christ’s sake, and all they have here is this?” asked Tim, holding up a frozen can. He found a white ceramic pitcher in the cupboard and reflex-ively turned it over to look for a mark.

“For all the years it went unsigned,” repeated Jane. She looked at the book cover on the advance copy. “Ever hear of Pendant Press?”

“Sounds familiar,” said Tim. “Wait a sec.” He went over to the table by the stairs and took his BlackBerry out of his brief-case. “I’ll Google—”

“Wasn’t it the publisher on
Seinfeld
?” asked Jane. “Where Elaine worked? That can’t be a real place, can it?”

“Nope,” said Tim,” doesn’t look like it.”

“But Detective Oh got this from a bookstore,” said Jane.

“So what?” asked Tim. “Lots of people self-publish. My friend Elliot wrote a book on vintage telephones and self-published. He got it distributed to bookstores and it’s sold in antique malls and at shows.”

“Try Patrick Dryer,” Jane said.

“Hits are about his first book, some reviews, library holdings, it’s out of print but available, used, online. Doesn’t seem to have a Web page or anything except old mentions of the novel.”

Jane got up and stretched. Looking out the window toward the main house, she could see it was another perfect day. The sun was bright, the breeze was warm and dry, the water in the pool blue and pristine. When was she ever going to have an opportunity like this again? The convenience of stepping outside her door and enjoying her private paradise? She turned to look at Tim, pleased to see that he had buttery muffin crumbs on his shirt. Any little thing to break up that
GQ
image gave her pleasure.

“You look rather cat-full-of-canary,” said Tim. “Solve the case?”

Jane shook her head.

“What’s next, then?”

“A swim,” said Jane, surprising Tim, surprising herself.

*  *  *

Jane did not particularly love the water, but she found the draw of that pool overwhelming. It was so empty and beautiful and, she had a feeling, chronically unused. It went against her nature, finding something perfectly good and beautiful going to waste. It was not exactly the same as finding a handful of colorful tie-aprons with prints of ducks and geese on them, gingham checks, dancing vegetables, all folded in a drawer at a house sale, clean and forgotten. But it was related. If Jane didn’t buy those aprons, they would go unworn. If Jane didn’t take a swim, that pool would be wasted for another day. She helped herself to a black tank suit in the pool house, pleased that it fit, even more pleased that there was no full-length mirror. She had not put on a bathing suit in at least three years and she had no desire to do a then-and-now comparison. In fact, if she had thought about this impulse more than a minute, she wouldn’t have jumped into the water at all. Jane wasn’t a great swimmer, but she could manage a serviceable crawl, and cutting through the water now was the perfect antidote to last night’s minimal sleep. She would be invigorated for the whole day if she could resist lying down on a poolside chaise and closing her eyes when she got out.

“You didn’t rest for half an hour after eating,” said Tim from the doorway of the guesthouse.

Jane waved at him. Spoken like a satellite Nellie, who would surely see the dark side of swimming in a perfect pool on a beautiful sunny day.

Since she wasn’t in shape to do more, she decided that ten laps would be more than sufficient to stretch her limbs and clear her head. Something was wrong about Patrick Dryer’s book. Not the self-publishing part. That wasn’t so surprising. It was the novel itself. There was a hitch in the story. What was it? Jane thought if she moved her body, her brain would follow along and give her the information she knew she had, but could not assemble. On her last lap, she felt better than she had in days. She hadn’t realized how good it might feel to actually move. She lifted herself out of the pool and sat on the side where she had thrown an oversized towel. Draping it over her shoulders, she realized she was sitting in front of the table where Lou Piccolo had been sitting last night. She turned and faced the table, clean and empty except for the heavy ashtray, the same one, she supposed, that Lou had been using last night.

Jane tied the towel around her waist and sat down on one of the lounges. She would not close her eyes. She shook out her hair, grateful that Tim had suggested this shaggy style before they arrived in California. How long ago had that been? Her preparation day at the spa? At least a hundred years ago. The amazing thing about being drawn into a mystery was what it did to time and routine. Jane and Tim had only spent a few days in Los Angeles, and she felt as if Evanston and Kankakee were lifetimes away. Looking up at the blue sky, the clouds so perfect that they were surely painted on by the set designer, Jane felt an almost overwhelming sensation. She was being seduced. And it wasn’t just any one thing drawing her in. It was just promise, that old shape-shifter, promise. You want to be a movie star, this place can offer you the dream. You want success as a writer? You’ll be hammering out a script out by the pool in no time.

Patrick Dryer arrived here, his published novel in hand, and was seduced by the promise. He wrote a script and handed it over to someone he thought he could trust. Then, line by line, his ideas, his writings were drained from him. He was murdered in Pasadena, but his writing was killed much earlier. That book was workmanlike at best. How could he have dazzled Lou with all of the so-called brilliant material used by the B Room?

“What the heck are you doing out there?” yelled Tim. “You’re not used to that sun, you’ll fry.”

“What?” Jane asked, sitting straight up.

“You need sunblock, sweetie. I don’t know what’s gotten into you. Wearing a bathing suit, swimming, for God’s sake. You’re from Illinois, have you forgotten? We don’t go for dips in other peoples’ pools. We don’t even—”

“No, what did you say before?”

“I asked what you were doing sitting out here in the sun,” said Tim. “What’s wrong with you? Sunstroke already?”

“You said what the heck…” said Jane.

“Yeah, I meant what the fuck, but I’m trying to clean up my language since you told me that my godfather credentials with Nick would be revoked if I didn’t—”

“Everyone is in Patrick’s novel. In
The D Room,
he has a character to represent everyone in real life, everyone in the real-life B Room…” said Jane.

“Yeah?”

“Heck. Everyone except Heck.”

Jane asked Tim to get her another towel. She looked down at her legs and realized Tim was right. What was she thinking? A pale Illinois lass sitting out by a pool? In a bathing suit? For a moment California had her, but there is nothing like the lack of a suntan, that pasty doughy look of one’s own skin, to remind you of your roots.

“Henry Rule is not a player in Patrick’s book. Why not? He was part of the group when Patrick arrived here. Heck’s illness separated him from the group this year, but Patrick’s been hanging around out here for at least five years. If the novel is true, they’ve been bleeding him for at least five years.”

“Why do you keep saying that? About the novel being true?” asked Tim, throwing the towel on top of her.

Jane shook her head.

“It’s a novel, not a memoir,” said Tim. “I mean, he might have based it all on his life out here, but he didn’t write a Hollywood memoir or anything. You know, like Belinda St. Germaine. She came out here and got burned by people and wrote
Hollywood Diary,
and even though she probably exaggerates the stuff, she doesn’t pass it off as fiction. Maybe Dryer just took the B Room as a subject for fiction, then made stuff up.”

“No,” said Jane, standing up, wrapping one towel around her waist and draping the other one over her shoulders.

Jane walked into the guesthouse, motioning for Tim to follow. She picked up Patrick’s book from where she had left it on the table.

“It’s not made up and I can show you why,” said Jane. She opened to a page in the middle and began reading.

“Why do you need another rewrite of that script, Sam?” I asked, waving away some of his cigar smoke. It never ceased to amaze me that he insisted on smoking even when I told him it made me sick. One more strike against the bastard.

“The producer’s interested, he just wants to see if you’ve really got the stuff, you know?” Sam gave me an oily smile.

“I’ve got the stuff,” I told him. “I can give you three more drafts of this script if I need to, but I’m beginning to wonder why the producer doesn’t want to meet me.” I knew then that Sam was using me, but I wanted to see him squirm his way out of it again.

“That sucks,” said Tim.

“That isn’t even the worst of it,” said Jane. “He goes on for pages, having Sam make up phony reasons that Patrick can’t be brought to meetings. This is real. It’s terrible fiction, but it’s real, true-life dialogue. I was thinking, when I started reading this, about a fiction-writing class I took in college. Just because something’s copied from life doesn’t mean it rings true. It makes for bad fiction.” Jane held up the book. “And this, my friend, is bad fiction. And you know what bad fiction is, right?”

Tim shook his head, moving to make more coffee.

“Bad fiction is real life,” said Jane.

Jane didn’t know whether or not to credit the swimming with clearing her head, but she did now know why the novel was self-published. It was because Patrick couldn’t write anymore. The book was poorly written. He had either lost what talent he had or he was simply written out. If Patrick felt that Lou Piccolo and the B Room had drained him of his best work, it was understandable that he would snap. Jane wondered if all the threats and the harassment that Patrick had rained down on the B Room really constituted threats on their lives or if he was referring to his novel. Was he just threatening them because he knew they would recognize themselves in
The D Room
?

For the first time, Jane had some real sense of Patrick’s desperation. Not only did he feel he was used and used up by the group, he actually still believed in the power of words. He thought he could hurt them with this. Jane looked at the book and began paging through it again. Where was Heck? Had Patrick left him out because Heck had already punished himself? Maybe he thought the dishonesty, the appropriation of his material pushed Heck over the edge, so Patrick would pardon him from an appearance in his tell-all book.

Jane turned to the chapter that introduced the writer who turned to pornographic films. Last night, Jane had skimmed the sections that dealt with this subplot, since she was only trying to find any facts about the D Room/B Room characters that might point directly to whoever killed Patrick. If it was Lou, and Lou died of a heart attack, the crime was solved and, to some, it would seem that punishment had been swift and clean. Instant karma.

It wasn’t a long chapter. The character Ben was hosting a party. Speaking in the very cadence of Jeb Gleason, Jane noted, Ben told a story about a friend of the group, a writer who had fallen on hard times. He had written an X-rated movie under a pen name, turned a quick profit, and had so much fun that he kept at it, found he had a knack for it. He was a prolific writer, but found that the better he was known in the porn circles, the less people wanted to know him in any other circles. Jane had thought last night, even skimming this section, that it was a cut above the rest of the novel. She had also remembered, incorrectly, that the character who wrote the X-rated movie was Alan or Fred. She must have been dozing through it. Now she realized the story of the inadvertent pornographer whom everyone had loved, then shunned, was written with compassion. Maybe, Jane thought, Patrick saw in him a comrade in arms, someone who couldn’t get credit for his legitimate work. Now, reading more carefully, Jane noted that the writer/narrator listened to Ben’s story with so much attention because he knew who he was talking about. The wayward writer was the narrator’s cousin—the relative who had introduced him to Sam Sag-ella and the rest of the D Room writers. The cousin’s name was Hank. How could she have missed that last night?

When a knock at the door roused Jane from her immersion in her second reading of
The D Room,
she looked up, noticed that she had a fresh cup of coffee by her side, but Tim was nowhere in sight. Assuming it was Jeb knocking at the door, feeling refreshed and celebratory since the two thorns in his side, Lou and Patrick, would no longer be around to disturb his own sweet scheme, she sat where she was and reluctantly called out for him to come in. It was, after all, his house.

Detective Oh, holding the giant book that he had borrowed from Jeb last night, nodded a good-morning to Jane.

“Perfect morning for a swim,” he said.

Jane opened her mouth, but knew that no words would form. Instead, her skull was filled with the wretched silent screaming of a fortysomething midwestern woman sitting at a kitchen table in a borrowed bathing suit.