Hollywood Stuff (3 page)

“They’re telling me now to turn it off, so I’ll just call you when I—”

“You listen to me, young lady. Charley and Nick need you at home and you don’t need to be flying off on some wild goose chase to Hollywood. Your dad told me what you said, that somebody’s doing a movie or something, and I’m telling you, it’s a scam. I saw this on a TV show. They’ll ask you to invest some money, and pretty soon you’ll have a condominium you can’t pay for in the middle of a swamp.”

Jane looked at Tim. He took the phone and immediately began his static imitation.”…
chchchchchch
…all electronic devices…
chchchchchc
…turned off now…
chchchchc.
” Tim turned Jane’s phone off.

“As I was saying, you deserve a peaceful paid-for vacation in a warm and sunny place where the flea markets are ripe for picking,” said Tim. “I’m going to iPod, but I brought you a little present to keep you busy.”

Jane read the title of the slim hardcover book.
Hollywood Diary: A Life Coach’s Guide to Making It in L.A.,
by Belinda St. Germaine.

“Hey, this is the author of
Overstuffed,
that decluttering book I was reading, remember? What ever happened to that, I wonder, I didn’t get to finish…?”

Tim gave Jane the universal symbol that he wasn’t interested in what she was saying by pointing to his headphones.

Jane sipped her Grey Goose, wiggled her well-polished toes encased in first-class slippers, and opened the book. Tim had said she deserved a vacation, and maybe she did. She had tried to call Detective Oh, her partner, Bruce—she really had to learn to call him Bruce—but had to leave another message on his machine. She told him she was taking a vacation, so she should just begin vacating right now. But if Tim really wanted her to relax, why was he giving her a guide to making deals in L.A.? Ah well, who said you couldn’t have a vacation and be successful? Charley came home from his digs relaxed and tan and thrilled over whatever discovery the crew had made. Maybe she could have it all this trip. Sun, fun, and Pasadena flea. No Nellie, no dead bodies, no foot-in-mouth interviews. Jane smelled her first-class steak au poivre heating up and smiled. Maybe a movie deal wasn’t such a bad idea. Maybe this was the beginning of a whole new adventure for Jane Wheel, PPI—picker
and
private investigator. She wriggled down into her roomy seat, overwhelmed with a sense of well-being, and finished her Grey Goose, known for its property of conferring a false sense of well-being on lightweight drinkers such as Jane. Maybe after L.A., her card, when she got around to having it printed, would have to be changed from “Jane Wheel, PPI—picker, private investigator,” to “Jane Wheel VIPPI,
very important
picker, private investigator.”

First Hollywood Commandment? Don’t take that teenager dressed in torn jeans loitering in the hall for granted. He or she is the future head of the studio. And those distressed blue jeans? They cost more than your car.

—
FROM
Hollywood Diary
BY
B
ELINDA
S
T
. G
ERMAINE

Tim had made all the arrangements with Bix Pix Flix. That was why, Jane told herself, she allowed herself to drink on the plane. Tim was in charge. When they landed, he guided Jane through LAX smoothly, and at the baggage area pointed at a short round man in a dark suit.

“Danny DeVito?” Jane asked. She had been trying to spot celebrities since she got off the plane.

“Read his little sign, honey.”

“wheel,” Jane said, looking over her shoulder. “Coincidence?”

Tim sighed and guided her to their driver, who had already retrieved their luggage.

Seated in back of the limousine, Jane shook her head at Tim’s offer of a drink.

“Probably like a hotel minibar. Let’s not spend all our money in the limo,” Jane said, stroking the leather seat and pressing her face against the window.

“Palm trees, Timmy,” Jane whispered.

“Last time I’m going to say this. We are not paying for this limo. Bix sent it. Sit back and enjoy.”

Wren Bixby had made all the arrangements with Tim. Since they were arriving in the evening and traffic would be insane, she had suggested they have a nice evening at the hotel. She had booked them into the W in Westwood, an area she thought they might enjoy. “UCLA, bookstores, all that rot,” was how she described the neighborhood. Tim and Jane’s meeting would take place the next morning at Bix Pix Flix on the studio lot.

“Only if you’re not all jet-lagged and loopy,” Wren had said. “I know some people need at least a morning to recover from travel.”

“Are you loopy?” Tim asked Jane, who had plopped onto her king-sized bed and was making a snow angel on the white duvet. He unlocked her suitcase and began hanging up Jane’s clothes.

“Nope,” said Jane. “Not loopy. Wary. I would describe myself as wary.” Jane stood and waved her arms around the spacious two-bedroom suite that Tim had assured Bix would be perfect for them. “What could I possibly have that would make it worth their while to spend this money? I’ve found a few dead bodies, and asked people the right questions. I have not, as far as I can recall, participated in any car chases, time-traveled, or averted any natural disasters with my cunning superpowers. Why am I in Hollywood?”

The phone rang and Tim promised to answer Jane’s question as soon as he took care of the caller. To his surprise, it was not the part-time clerk at his Kankakee flower shop, nor was it a forwarded message from T & T Sales, his estate sale business. He shrugged and handed the phone to Jane. Her raised eyebrows were answered by Tim’s shoulder shrug, so she gave her wariest hello into the receiver.

“Long time, no happiness.”

“Jeb?”

“I told Bix to put you up in a nice room. Is it a nice room? Do you and the husband like it?”

“No, not the husband,” Jane said, shaking her head at Tim. “It’s a lovely room.”

“And you’ve already got some guy in there who’s not the husband?” asked Jeb, his voice still maddeningly low and mea-sured. “My little girl is all grown up.”

“Tim is my business partner who is also out here for the meeting. I am not your little girl and I grew up a long time ago.”

Jane remembered now all the reasons she was crazy about Jeb and all the reasons she was driven crazy by Jeb. He was a womanizer, a shamelessly condescending chauvinist. He played the bad boy…and he was so good at it.

“Sorry, Janie. You can’t blame me. You walked away from me twenty years ago and I’ve never recovered. It always brings out the pompous ass in me. When can I see you?”

“Twenty-five,” said Jane.

“If it was twenty-five years ago, that would make the birth date on my résumé grossly incorrect. In Hollywood, we round down, darling.”

Jane looked up at Tim, who also rounded his age down five years. He was now doing an elaborate pantomime of twenty questions about her mysterious caller. Jane turned to face the wall so she wouldn’t have to try to read Tim’s lips and respond rationally to Jeb Gleason at the same time.

“I have something tonight I can’t cancel, but I thought after your meeting with Bix tomorrow, we might meet. We will meet. It’s inevitable. In fact, maybe you and your little friend or partner or whoever would want to stay at my place for the weekend. Bix told me you guys were staying on a few days.”

“Well, that might be…” Jane really didn’t know if she was going to say
possible
or
impossible.
Now she would never know.

“Look, I’ve got to run. Emergency out by the pool. I’ll phone you later or you call my cell. ‘Bye, babe.”

And it was over. The conversation she had imagined off and on for twenty-five or twenty years, depending on whose ré-sumé one was reading, was over. Jeb Gleason had been the love of her life in college until one night when she knocked on the door of his apartment and was greeted by Linda Fabien wrapped in a very skimpy bath towel.

“Jeb’s still in the shower. Want to come in and wait?” Linda had asked.

Jane remembered that Linda had been vigorously chewing gum. It was, in fact, the gum-chewing that kept her sane as she walked back across campus to her own place. Who ran around naked and dripping wet and popped gum into her mouth? What kind of insane idiot had Jeb hooked up with while she was out of town giving an undergraduate paper at a college history conference? She had taken a filthy all-night bus ride back by herself in order to surprise him by getting home six hours early. Surprise!

Jane called him the next morning and told him she never wanted to see him again and hung up while he was still asking why. Only later did she realize that even though she knew Linda Fabien, Linda Fabien did not know Jane. Linda was an art history major/local folksinger whose face was on a music festival poster that had been plastered on every possible vertical surface on or near the campus. Jane had not given the towel-clad Linda her name. She had politely said that she would not wait, that she would call another time. She’d still been wearing the navy blue suit she had worn when giving her paper, an outfit that Jeb would never recognize as belonging to her. Linda Fabien probably told Jeb that a census taker or a Jehovah’s Witness had stopped by.

Despite the fact that every campus, even an enormous land-grant state university, was a really small world, Jane never saw Jeb again. A theater major, he ducked out of the program and skipped the degree when he was cast in a West Coast repertory company. Jane’s heart had healed, albeit a little crookedly, giving her a slightly more cynical view of happily ever after. During Jane’s senior year, a handsome TA named Charley had walked into her discussion section, and Jane found herself in the right class at the right time. Charley proposed on the night of Jane’s college graduation. Jeb phoned Jane on her wedding night and it had been the last time they had spoken. Until today.

Cynda, Wren’s assistant, not Danny DeVito, picked them up after breakfast and drove them to the studio. She gave them a mile-by-mile description of their trip, explaining that to live in L.A. was to learn to drive by your watch—avoiding rush hours, which were becoming all hours.

“And,” she said, “never be without your
Thomas Guide.
” Cynda held up a thick book she had wedged into the door pocket on the driver’s side. “This is the bible. Better, actually. Gets you where you need to go without any threat of damnation.” Cynda smiled a perfect straight white smile and turned into the legendary gates of the studio.

“Here we are.”

She parked the car and pointed to a row of bungalows.

“These used to belong to all the big stars on the lot, you know, when they were under contract to the studio. Can you just imagine what went on in them?” asked Cynda, who had been doing a running commentary as studio tour guide.

Jane didn’t recognize most of the young stars’ names or the TV shows Cynda mentioned. She tried to absorb as much information as she could—difficult, since she was still overwhelmed by real live palm trees outside the car window. Jane recognized these feelings of excitement. Hadn’t she forgotten her own inhibitions sitting in a local television studio? Now here she was, weak-kneed at the thought of passing by Clint Eastwood’s parking space.

Earlier, over coffee in the lobby, Jane had once again reminded Tim that she was not going to get involved in any movie deal.

“Right,” Tim had agreed, smiling at a handsome waiter who seemed genuinely thrilled to be serving them coffee.

“Everyone’s too happy here,” said Jane. “I don’t like it.”

“Who would?” agreed Tim, nodding at the waiter, who offered a silver bowl filled with raw natural sugar cubes.

The receptionist, Jenna, introduced herself, offered green tea, free-trade coffee, and English chocolate biscuits, then excused herself to find Bix, who had taken a call on the back porch of what was really a tiny charming house.

“Tim? Look at these,” Jane said.

Two glass shelves had been hung across the window. Each held mismatched Depression glass salt and pepper shakers. Three of them, missing their tops, were being used to root delicate cuttings of ivy. One of the green salts Jane recognized as green U.S. Swirl and there was a pink Miss America, but the others were less familiar.

“These are all firsts, I think,” Tim said, his face an inch away from the glass door of the bookcase.

“Yes, they are,” Wren Bixby said, coming in with her hands extended in welcome.

“My partner Lou’s weakness. I don’t think he reads them. Just buys them and locks them up.”

Jane thought,
Typical book guy,
but gathered her wary self together, concealed her delight at finding out that Bix collected mismatched shakers, put on her I-am-not-making-a-deal face, and shook hands.

Wren Bixby did not conform to Jane’s mental picture of a producer, but then again, Jane’s mental picture was snapped sometime in the sixties, watching the late-late show on television with her mother. Typical producer? Maybe William Powell in
The Great Ziegfeld
? Nellie didn’t have many soft spots, but give her a bowl of potato chips, a Pepsi on ice, and Victor Mature in a toga or Van Johnson in an army uniform and she went off-duty until “The End” floated on to the screen. Nellie interpreted old movies primarily as cautionary tales—if you fall in love with someone, he’ll leave; if someone goes up in an airplane, he won’t come back; and if you sign your name to a piece of paper, you’ll lose your shirt. Shaking Wren Bixby’s hand, Jane heard her mother’s voice tell her this was all a scam.
Look at that girl, for Christ’s sake, she hasn’t even brushed her hair. Hold on to your wallet.

Jane did not think the young executive was going to pick her pocket. She had, however, imagined that Wren, or Bix, as she insisted Jane and Tim call her, would be wearing a business suit and, perhaps, trendy glasses, lipstick, and have an expensive-looking haircut. Jane, in her past life, had been an advertising executive responsible for a talented creative team at a major agency and had done her share of supervising commercial productions. She wasn’t exactly a mogul, either, but when she had to meet clients, she pulled together the businesswoman’s fitted suit, high heels, and made-up look. Jane might have felt like a phony dressed like a grown-up, but she pulled it off when necessary.

Bix didn’t bother with the homage to grown-up. At first Jane figured Bix for thirtysomething. Then a shadow fell across her face and Jane started thinking older—maybe she and Bix were about the same age. Nope. A quick toss of her head and Bix was back to Gen X or whatever letter of the alphabet stood for
not as old as Jane Wheel.
Bix wore a lavender embroidered silk tunic over torn blue jeans, red and purple strappy sandals, and what looked to Jane like small light fixtures hanging from her ears. Her long hair, braided into twenty or so skinny plaits, was swept up into a ponytail with bangs hanging down to her freckled nose. Tim had immediately impressed her by naming the designer of her chandelier earrings and complimenting her on her fabulous shoes. Jane thought she saw him heave a slight sigh when he looked back at Jane’s feet, sensibly covered up in her most comfortable leather clogs.