Lethally Blond (16 page)

There was a palpable tension in the room, as if everyone were on pins and needles awaiting news of some kind. “Last looks,” someone called. The makeup artist I’d seen earlier stepped quickly from the shadow, brushed something onto Locket’s lips, and scurried off.

“Rolling,” the same person called next. Then, “And action.”

Cara tapped a finger to her lips, indicating I should be quiet, and then, concentrating on someone’s words into her earpiece, wandered off.

Locket spoke first. “But death occurred before midnight, Jared. The autopsy’s going to show that.”

Chris shook his head. “But consider how hot the room was,” he said. “That changes everything.” He seemed so at ease, so comfortable, with all these people around him. I forgot about Tom and Deke and everything else and allowed myself to be mesmerized by the exchange of lines between the two stars.

Then, without warning, I felt the oddest sensation across the rise of my foot. I glanced down and peered into the shadows. A huge black snake, endlessly long, was slithering over my foot. My breath seemed to freeze in my chest. I fought a scream, I did everything possible
not
to scream, but I couldn’t help it. I let out a wail like a banshee and leapt backward.

CHAPTER 13

T
he snake shot forward, hugging the wall, and then I couldn’t see it anymore. I became aware that the low-level hum in the room had ceased in a split second and that the two actors had stopped speaking their lines. I looked up and around. Cara was rushing toward me, and everyone else was just staring at me or craning their necks, trying to pinpoint where the scream had emanated from.

“What the hell’s going on?” the director yelled.

I didn’t say anything, feeling paralyzed and also hoping that maybe it was just a rhetorical question and that in a few seconds the director would call out, “Rolling” again, or
something
. Then I could simply whisper into Cara’s ear about what had happened and slink off, letting her deal with it all.

But the director shouted again—“I
said
, ‘What the hell is going on?’”—and that surely meant I was supposed to volunteer an answer. The shock and repulsion I’d felt at the sight of the snake were snatched away and replaced by a feeling of total and complete humiliation. I hadn’t felt this embarrassed since fourth grade, when my underpants had slipped to the ground while I was jumping around in my best pink party dress. The feeling got even worse when I finally made eye contact with Chris and saw that he looked completely chagrined—and that the blood had drained from his face, leaving it as colorless as a latex glove.

“I—I’m so sorry,” I sputtered. “But there was a huge black snake on the floor next to me. It—it slithered off toward the back there.”

At the sound of the word
snake,
people all over the set let out cries of alarm and began sweeping the floor anxiously with their eyes.

“A snake?” the director snapped, slipping off his chair. “There aren’t any
snakes
in here.” He began walking in my direction, followed, to my dismay, by Alex.

“Well, there was one today,” I declared. “I think you should try to find it. It might be dangerous.”

“I am absolutely petrified of snakes,” Locket announced loudly. “We have to find it—or I can’t work.”

The director reached the spot where I stood. “What kind of snake?” he demanded. “You mean like a garter snake?” Alex, I noticed, was standing silently behind him, his top lip curled. He had a look on his face that suggested he wouldn’t mind seeing a python crush every bone in my body and then swallow me whole.

“No, not like that,” I said, trying to sound as calm and sane as possible. “It was at least four feet long, black—with some white markings.”

“You’re
sure
? And you say it went toward the rear of the set?” He swung his shaven head in that direction, then looked back and posed the question I’d been dreading: “Who
are
you, anyway?”

Oh God, I thought. I didn’t want to get Chris in any kind of trouble. “My name is Bailey Weg—”

“
That’s
what she saw,” a man’s voice exclaimed, interrupting. Simultaneously, the director, Alex, and I all turned. Squatting behind me, arms resting on his beefy thighs, was my good buddy Deke. He jabbed his finger at a partially coiled length of black cable on the ground to my left. “That’s her snake right there.”

“Oh, for chrissake,” the director said. He sighed in annoyance and strode back toward his chair.

“That
isn’t
what I saw,” I called after him, feeling totally sandbagged. “I definitely saw a real snake—with white markings.”

“You need to leave,” Alex snarled, his voice low but frighteningly firm, like someone squeezing your arm really hard with his thumb. “Right now.”

I wasn’t going to argue. Nothing I said was going to convince them, and nothing would make me happier than to just get out of there. As for the snake, I didn’t care if they all ended up with fang puncture wounds in their asses—except for Chris, of course. At the moment I didn’t dare look him in the eye. I lowered my head and walked quickly down the hall, with Cara nipping at my heels. I suspected she was trying to make it appear as if she were taking action like a good PA but didn’t know me from Adam. Once we were back near the dressing rooms, though, she gave me a piece of her mind in a loud, rapid whisper.

“I leave you alone for two seconds and you disrupt the whole set. I could get fired.”

“And what would
you
have done if some huge snake had slithered over
your
foot? Grin and bear it?”

“
If
you even saw a snake. What would a snake like that be doing in here, anyway?”

“You tell me. Is there any chance it’s being used in an upcoming scene?”

“In
CSI
they’d think nothing of having one crawl out of a corpse during an autopsy. But we’re a much more realistic show.”

“Look,” I said, realizing that there was no convincing her, either, “I’m sorry for creating any problems for you. Will you please tell Chris I’m really sorry, too? I’ll give him a call later.”

Luckily, a cab was dropping off a passenger right outside the building, and I hailed it. As I leaned back against the leather seat, I realized I could barely think straight.

“You gonna give me the address?” the driver grumbled as he was pulling out onto the West Side Highway. What I felt like doing was telling him to drop me in a bar in the Village where I could pound down a margarita, but I had to show at
Buzz
and finish my story on Tom.

As the cab shot uptown, I replayed the scene in the studio again and again in my head. Was there any possibility my imagination had gotten the better of me? Maybe what I’d seen
had
been the cable, yanked at that precise moment by one of the crew members so that it slid across my foot—and in the dim light just
looked
reptilian. Deke might have even been the yanker himself, eager to scare the bejesus out of me. Originally, I’d noticed him standing far off to the right, but then I’d become spellbound by Chris’s performance and had momentarily lost track of Deke’s whereabouts.

No, I was almost positive—what I’d seen was a live, butt-ugly snake. There’d been those whitish markings on its back—which the cable didn’t have—and I’d observed its head, too, with the snoutlike shape that could trigger primordial fear in just about everyone.

But what was a snake doing on a soundstage? Was it possible that it belonged to Deke and he’d set it loose when he saw me arrive on the set? He looked like the type of guy who would enjoy having a pet that slithered. Or perhaps the snake belonged in the building for a reason unbeknownst to me. Chris would clearly learn more as the day went on and would clue me in later. Thinking of Chris, though, made my stomach knot. Shouldn’t he have come to my rescue back then? It would have been such a relief if he’d acknowledged me as his friend and assured the director that I wasn’t prone to hallucinations. But everything had happened so fast, I couldn’t totally blame him for hanging back, unsure of what to do.

When I arrived at
Buzz
, the place was
literally
buzzing, as if someone had dropped a thousand cicadas on the floor. Monday was always at least a nine on the nutty scale, but it could reach a ten when something really big was happening—for instance, when a star couple split or an A-lister ended up caught with his pants down. This seemed like one of those days.

“What’s going on?” I asked Jessie as I parked myself in my workstation. “It seems like all hell is breaking loose.” Just as I spoke, I caught a glimpse of Nash in his glass-walled office shaking his head hard as he spoke to Valerie and one of the other deputy editors.

“Apparently Nash is changing the cover story, so people are scrambling,” Jessie said. “What’s up with
you
? Your face looks kind of pinched, like you slipped a disk as you were walking into the building.”

I described my nightmare at Chelsea Piers. Leo, who started off half listening, rolled his chair closer as the tale got juicier.

“A
snake
?” Jessie said after I’d reached the climax of the story. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

“They say if you dream about snakes, it means you’re really horny,” Leo said. “Or wait—that you’re
afraid
of sex. I forget which.”

“I didn’t
dream
I saw a snake, Leo,” I said, aggravated. “I really did see one.” He shrugged and returned to his computer. Jessie, on the other hand, pumped me for more details.

“And what about Chris?” she asked. “Was he there through this whole thing?”

“Oh yeah. And from the look on his face, you would have thought I was flashing my boobs for a
Girls Gone Wild
video. He looked positively mortified.”

“Did you talk to him afterwards?”

“No, because he was shooting. I’ll catch up with him later—I’m sure everything will all be okay.” But a part of me remained worried.

I needed to tackle my work, but first and foremost I was going on a snake hunt. I Googled big black snakes and found several Web sites devoted to the delightful creatures. It didn’t take long to find a species that matched what I’d seen:
Lampropeltis getulus,
better known as the common king snake. It was found in most parts of the southern United States (which, of course, didn’t explain what the hell it was doing at Chelsea Piers) and grew anywhere from just over two feet long to almost seven. It was black or dark brown with white or yellowish markings—that often took the form of crossbands or stripes. The good news for the actors prancing around the set was that it was nonvenomous. The king snake’s claim to fame: It liked to feed on other snakes, even poisonous ones. Yummy.

After grabbing coffee, I checked in with the art department to review the final layout for the item on Tom. They were using his head shot as the photo along with an inset of a shot that the network must have provided, because he was sitting at his morgue desk, holding out a slip of paper. The entire piece was just a few paragraphs long, short by even
Buzz
standards. Sad, I told myself, to think that a change in hairstyle by Jessica Simpson garnered more ink than Tom’s death. But then maybe Tom would have never wanted to possess any real estate in a magazine like
Buzz
.

Back at my desk, I reviewed the text I’d submitted Friday. What I needed was an update on the investigator, and this gave me the excuse to hound Sheriff Schmidt again. I got right through to him this time and explained that I was now calling as a journalist.

“Why didn’t you tell me that from the beginning?” he demanded, sounding Miffed with a capital M.

“I’m sorry about that,” I said, not wanting to burn any bridges. “But I didn’t know that I was going to be writing the story then. I’d been searching for Tom as a favor to a friend, not in any journalistic capacity.”

“Well, I don’t have much to tell you. We’ve confirmed that the body is that of Tom Fain, and that death was the result of repeated blows by a sharp object. We are questioning people in the Andes area and, with the assistance of the New York office of the state police, people in New York City as well. At this time, we do not have a suspect.”

Something about the tone of his voice made me assume that there hadn’t been much progress on the case, though that was a point he would neither confirm nor deny.

“Do you think that Tom could have been killed by someone who worked on the show with him?” I asked, knowing he wasn’t going to share but curious as to how he’d respond.

“I’m not at liberty to discuss any of our theories at this point.”

I couldn’t help feeling guilty as I considered the info I was sitting on—Locket’s visit to Tom and her revelation about the unnamed visitor. But I had given my word to Locket that I would let her break the news to the cops. If she didn’t do it tomorrow, as promised, then I would have to take matters into my own hands.

There was a piece of information I
could
share with Schmidt, though, and I decided this was the moment. I told him that in the course of doing my research for my article (
slight
distortion), I had discovered that Tom had loaned a crew member several thousand dollars and then had run into difficulty getting it repaid. I’d been reluctant to throw Deke under the bus until I learned more about the situation, but it was clear to me now that the dude was a real creep.

Schmidt didn’t comment for a few seconds, though I could discern him breathing.

“We’re aware of this matter, yes,” he said at last.

I wondered how he’d stumbled onto it. “Oh, Mr. Barish must have told you,” I said. He didn’t say anything back, making me suspect my guess had been right.

“You don’t have anything else you want to share with me, do you?” he asked.

“No, I don’t,” I said, convinced that my voice had jumped an octave as I’d spoken. He was gonna be mad if come Wednesday I was the one breaking the news about Locket’s little sojourn to the Catskills.

“Well, I want to hear from you if you learn anything of significance.”

“Of course,” I told him.

My item in
Buzz
also gave me an excuse to call Harper again. She could play hard to get with me on a personal level, but as the PR rep for
Morgue
, she would have to respond to the message I was about to leave on her cell.

“Harper, it’s Bailey Weggins. We’re going to bed at
Buzz
with a short item on Tom’s death, and I’m calling to get an official response from the producers and cast of
Morgue
.” On the one hand she might not have much interest in crafting the perfect “We are deeply saddened” message for
Buzz
, but as a publicist she wouldn’t want an item going to press without her knowing what it said and how it might impact on her—and without her having had a chance to mold it to her liking.

For the next half hour I fiddled with my little piece, incorporating what I’d learned from the sheriff’s department and leaving room for whatever Harper coughed up. I called Tom a promising young actor, and my heart ached as I reread those words on my computer screen.

After I routed the piece to Valerie, with a few TKs indicating I was still waiting for more pieces of info, I refilled my coffee cup in the kitchenette. On my stroll back I considered what my next move should be. I’d reported on Tom’s death, but I still had to figure out who had brutally murdered him. Deke and Alex were definite contenders, and so, too, was Harper, but right now I didn’t have a reason to suspect one more than another.