Lethally Blond (3 page)

“Yeah, she’s part of that theater company he’s involved with—the Chaps Theatre.”

“Well, if she was a whack job, we’d better check her out,” I said, sitting next to him on the couch and pulling a few of the cards out of their envelopes. Some of the ones from Blythe were greeting cards—silly ones with kitty cats and monkeys as well as sexy ones loaded with innuendo—all signed “Blythe” or “B.” Others were just note cards with simple messages in a bold, dramatic script: “I’m missing you,” for instance, and “Let me cook you something
delicious
tonight.” According to the postmarks, a card had arrived every couple of days through the summer up until about six weeks ago, which meant about a month before Tom had disappeared. The last card had a picture of a pug on the front and was blank inside except for “Why don’t you call anymore? B.”

“July thirty-first,” I said, pointing to the postmark. “Do you think she gave up the fight then?”

“Yeah, that sounds about right. I remember him saying something about finally having her out of his hair.”

I took out my notebook and jotted down the return address on East 5th Street.

“By the way, where’s his mail from the past two weeks?” I asked.

“Huh?” Chris asked distractedly. He was staring at something still in the box. “Oh, the post office has it because it was starting to pile up. Of course, they won’t release it to anyone but Tom.”

“What are you looking at?” I asked quietly, aware suddenly that something was up.

“This,” he said, picking up a blue envelope. It was made of really heavy stock, the kind of stationery you buy at Cartier. He flicked up the flap and withdrew the note card inside.

There was just one sentence written in blue black fountain pen: “When you fuck me, it takes a week for my toes to uncurl.” And then the name, “Locket.”

“Obviously a woman who doesn’t beat around the bush,” I said.

“It’s Locket Ford,” Chris said soberly. “The star of
Morgue
.”

“Oh,
really
. Locket? Is that some kind of nickname?”

“No. And it’s not a stage name, either. She came from Appalachia or some other dirt-poor place, and apparently her mother gave her that name because she wanted her to grow up to be special. She was on soaps for twelve years, and this show is her big break into prime time.”

“Could it be bad politically for her to be involved with Tom?” I wasn’t sure how it worked on sets, but surely it wasn’t the coolest thing for the star of the show to be bonking the actor whose part involved handing the morgue staff their paperwork.

“
Bad?
Well, her live-in boyfriend—Alex Ottoson—is the producer of the show, and he’s the one who got her the part.
I’d
say that’s pretty bad, wouldn’t you?”

“Wow. Maybe this guy caught wind of it and that’s why Tom split. He may be hiding out.”

We took another few minutes to glance through the correspondence. At the very bottom were letters from Tom’s mother in shaky handwriting, probably shortly before her death, but we didn’t look through those. When we finally put the box back in the hamper, I felt ashamed for having been such a snoop—yet I was glad we had found the stash. The note from Locket could be significant. But now it was time to go.

The minute we stepped out onto the street, I felt a rush of pure relief. Mercer Street was crowded with people headed off to bars and parties and Starbucks, and we were jostled several times as we stood there decompressing from our foray into Tom’s apartment.

“Why don’t I walk you back to your place,” Chris said.

I sensed by his tone that there was nothing loaded in his comment. There wouldn’t be any expectation on his part to come up and wrestle with me on my couch for old times’ sake. I suspected he was mentally fatigued from our search—just as I was—yet I felt a twinge of disappointment.

On the way over to 9th and Broadway, I told him my game plan for the next day. I would start making calls stat, but there were phone numbers I needed first—Tom’s Hamptons friend, the cop, Harper, Blythe. He tugged the cop’s business card out of his wallet and also scrawled down the name of Tom’s friend, John Curry, as well as the number at the bank where he worked. He didn’t think he could locate a number for Blythe but thought I might find it through 411. As for Harper, he’d arrange for me to talk to her.

“Do you think Locket has any idea where Tom is?” I asked.

“I haven’t a clue,” Chris said, “and there’s no way for me to come right out and ask her. I want to find Tom, but I also don’t want to shoot myself in the foot.”

When we reached my building, Chris gave me a hug the way he had earlier in the evening, though this time the gesture felt more abrupt and awkward. He seemed distracted suddenly, as if thoughts were racing behind those beautiful green eyes. He might have once had the hots for me, but his blood seemed to be running lukewarm tonight. I wondered if a second search of the apartment had left him even more agitated about Tom than he had been before. Or maybe he was discombobulated by the fact that Tom had secretly bedded the star of the show.

I watched him as he hurried the short distance to the corner and then sprinted across Broadway. He may have been just catching the light, but it seemed almost as if he were in a hurry. I turned and entered my apartment. The doorman Bob was on duty tonight, and he gave me a pleasant, almost approving nod, as if he were happy to see that I was heading in alone again tonight. Bob never made me feel skanky, but I also sensed he kept tabs on the traffic coming in and out of 14B.

I popped open a beer as soon as I got in and carried it out to my terrace along with a bag of tortilla chips and a bowl of leftover, slightly tuckered-out salsa. I guess you’d have to call my apartment the spoils of my two-year starter marriage, and I never stop feeling . . . well,
spoiled
by it. Though it’s just a moderately sized one-bedroom with an itsy-bitsy kitchen, it has two drop-dead features: the large brick terrace and what I behold from it. There’s no glimpse of landmarks, but nonetheless it’s a gorgeous, quintessentially Manhattan view. It looks to the west, toward a skyline of nondescript redbrick and limestone apartment buildings topped by nineteen wooden-shingled water towers. At night, when the sky is inky black and there are lights dabbled in different apartment buildings, it seems almost fake, like the backdrop of a Broadway musical.

I took a long swallow of cold beer and then leaned back in my chair, encouraging my mind to idle for moment. Though it was warm out and the red geraniums in my clay pots were still blazing with color, I could feel a touch of fall in the air. Just like cold spots in lake water, there were cool ribbons threaded through the breeze that hinted at the not-so-balmy October and November days ahead.

I should have been happy about the imminent arrival of fall. First and foremost I would be an author, with the arrival of
Bad Men and Wicked Women
late in the season. In addition, I’d just bought a pair of black suede boots that were so snug and gorgeous, my calves had nearly orgasmed when I’d tried them on. And last but hardly least, it had been a bitch of a summer, something worth distancing myself from.

Yet all of a sudden I felt overwhelmed by melancholy. Maybe it was because I’d had such high hopes for the summer, and it was tough to consider how pathetically they’d unraveled. My initial plan had been to write a few gripping articles, spend as many weekends as possible in the sun, take Rome by storm, and have a fling that would leave
my
friggin’ toes curled. I know you aren’t supposed to bank on anything in life, I know that “shit happens,” but
nothing
had worked out as planned. What I’d anticipated as a Gorgonzola soufflé kind of summer had ended up resembling a grilled-cheese sandwich made with one of those individually wrapped singlets that taste like socks you’ve worn too many days in a row.

For starters, there was the humiliation of being bounced from the gig I’d had for several years at
Gloss
magazine. When the editor, Cat Jones, had confessed that her newsstand sales were plummeting and she was morphing the magazine from a sexy, edgy read for married women into
Take-a-Chill-Pill Monthly
, I’d tried to be sympathetic to her plight. But that didn’t make it any easier to know my crime pieces were going to be replaced by stories along the lines of “The Secret Power of Bath Salts” and “How to Cure Mild Depression by Organizing Your Shoes.” Fortunately, I’d found my way to
Buzz
.

The worst thing about the summer was what had happened with Beau Regan, documentary filmmaker and documented heartbreaker. At first I’d thought he was the fun, sexy summer fling I’d been longing for, but I’d ended up falling hard—hard as in onto a car hood from a tenth-story window. I’d come right out and told him that I couldn’t see him if he was sleeping with anyone else. I’d thought for a moment that he was going to give up the one chick he’d been seeing casually on the side. But then an assignment had come through out of the blue and he’d taken off for Turkey, saying that he felt he couldn’t make a decision until he returned—in mid-September. There’d been one lousy postcard with the breathtaking message “Hope your summer’s going well. I’ve been thinking about you.”

My co-worker Jessie had suggested I read a book about the failed patterns of love and see if I could learn how to stop falling for the wrong guy. But I didn’t think Beau had been the wrong guy. It had just been the wrong moment.

Something else was making me blue: Tom Fain. The fact that he’d lost two adored parents so young gnawed at me. And where the hell
was
he? Had he just hightailed it out of town on an adventure? Or was he staying below the radar as the result of a mess he’d made? And if so, what kind of mess? Money? Drugs? Or the kind you make for yourself when you fuck the producer’s live-in girlfriend? And there was one other question to consider: Had something
terrible
happened to him?

I knew right then that I was going to do what I could to make sure Tom was okay. It was partly because I wanted to help Chris, just as he’d once helped me, but also because of the lost parent connection I had with Tom.

Suddenly a scraping sound startled me out of my thoughts, and I glanced left. A dead leaf, broken off from one of my geraniums, scurried across the stone floor of my terrace, driven by a gust of wind. Fall
was
coming. That meant crinkly brown leaves, suede boots, and wool coats. But I could only wonder what my search for Tom would bring.

CHAPTER 3

I
was at the desk in my home office before nine the next morning. Calling it an office may be slightly generous on my part. It’s really just a large walk-in closet that I converted into a work area with a few bookshelves and a built-in desk where I set my laptop. The whole space is about the size of the crisper drawer in my fridge, but the upside is that there aren’t any distractions. If I had to work in my bedroom, I’d be getting up constantly to defuzz my sweaters or trim the pad peeking out from under the area rug.

Fully caffeinated after two cups of coffee, I was nearly ready to focus my attention on Tom. First, though, I checked some Web sites—CNN, TMZ, Perez Hilton, the Smoking Gun, Gawker, and so on—to make sure nothing was brewing crimewise in the world of celebs. You never knew, for instance, when there’d be newly posted mug shots of someone like Nicole Richie, and I’d have to spring into action. Once I was sure that
Buzz
wasn’t going to need me today, I wrote out a list of calls to make and started in.

The first one was to a cop I knew named Gina who had once worked in Missing Persons. I was hoping she still had buddies in that department and would call the cop Chris had talked to—Kevin O’Donnell was the name on the card—and grease the wheels for me, encouraging him to be forthcoming. I reached only her voice mail, and I asked her to call me.

I had better luck reaching John Curry, Tom’s buddy with the Hamptons house. I called his line at the bank, and he answered himself.

“Curry,” he said in a voice suggesting that though the day had barely begun, he was already bored to tears with it. I introduced myself, explained that I’d been enlisted to help look for Tom, and said that I was hoping I could meet with him as soon as possible.

“
Meet
with me?” he exclaimed with borderline irritation. “How’s that supposed to help?”

“You were one of the last people to talk to Tom,” I said, trying to submerge my own annoyance.

“Look, I’ve already talked to that friend of his and the cop. Besides, this week is a real bear for me. I’m up to my ass in about twenty different things here.”

“Could you at least give me a few minutes on the phone?” I asked. “I’m sure you’re as concerned about Tom as we are.” I was hoping the last comment and the loaded way I’d delivered it would goad him into agreeing.

He sighed loudly, as if he were blowing out candles on a cake. “It’s just that . . . Look, I’ve got five minutes now. Go ahead and ask what you want. And just so you know—I don’t happen to be all that worried about Tom. He’s been known to pick up and leave before.”

“For what reason?”

“Tom’s always been a little bit restless, even before his parents died. He’s got a love for the open road.”

“Did he say anything to you that suggested the open road was beckoning him right at this moment?”

There was a long pause.

“What?” I urged.

“Nothing really. You just put it in a slightly different way than the cop did. I mean, he asked if I knew where Tom might have gone. But I hadn’t thought about it in a more general sense—about whether Tom was especially restless these days. I just don’t know. Tom and I weren’t in touch very much the last couple of years—I’ve been in Singapore, doing a stint for the bank there. We reconnected a few months ago, but I haven’t seen a huge amount of him.”

“Why didn’t you two end up getting together on that weekend?”

He exhaled loudly again. “Totally my fault. I wanted him to come out and see our new house. But I hadn’t let the wife know, and when I told her at the last minute, she got all pissy because she’d already invited her mental case sister and brother-in-law. I asked Tom if he’d mind taking a rain check.”

“Go back to what you said about his parents’ deaths. Was Tom pretty affected by that?”

“I was away when they both died, so I have no idea what it was like at the time. He didn’t go all emo when he told me about it, but I could sense it was tough for him.”

“You guys met in high school?”

“Yep. I was a year ahead of him, but we played baseball together. Then just by chance he ended up at Skidmore, too. He was in the theater department, which was a whole different world—but I saw a fair amount of him up there.”

“What do you know about his love life?”

“He had this one chick he was seeing earlier this summer, but he wasn’t that interested and she finally took the hint. Lately he’s been seeing someone who works on the show—not an actress, but someone behind the scenes. I guess he likes her well enough, but the problem is, Tom isn’t ready to settle down—despite how much these babes like to pressure him.”

He let out another sigh. “Look, my boss has walked by twice and given me the evil death stare. I gotta get movin’.”

“Just one more question, I promise. Can you think of anyone else who might have a lead on Tom? Someone he might turn to if he was in any kind of trouble?”

“There was a guy from Skidmore he was pretty close to—a professor named Alan Carr. Tom mentioned him lately, in fact. He had this big old house where a lot of the theater kids would hang. But like I said, I doubt Tom is in any kind of trouble.”

“Okay, thanks. If you think of anything else—”

“Yeah, sure,” he said, and hung up before I could give him my number.

I pulled up the White Pages online and found a B. Hammell at the return address on Blythe’s cards. I left a message saying to call Bailey Weggins, that it was important. I
didn’t
say it was about Tom.

Next I went on the Skidmore College Web site and found both an office phone number and e-mail address for Professor Carr. I left him a message on his voice mail and also shot him an e-mail. Thinking that the semester might not have even started yet, I tried directory assistance for Saratoga. There was an Alan Carr on Broadway. His answering machine picked up and a laid-back voice announced, “Hey, you’ve reached Alan Carr. Leave a message if you want, but I don’t check this machine regularly, so if it’s urgent, try my cell.” But he didn’t leave a cell number. I left a message on the machine just in case he
did
check it today.

No sooner had I ended the call than my phone rang. It was Gina. The clanging in the background suggested she was in a diner or coffee shop. Talking loudly to be heard over the din, I explained that I needed info from a detective in Missing Persons. She said she knew O’Donnell and that she would speak to him on my behalf. “He’s good people,” she shouted. “I’ll tell him to call you, okay?”

Moments later, my phone rang again. It was Chris—with an update on his end.

“Good news,” he said. “Harper’s on set with us. If you can get here quick, I can introduce you.”

“Are you shooting at Chelsea Piers?”

“No, we’re on location—in Tompkins Square Park.”

I slipped on a pair of black leggings, a khaki-colored tunic, and black flats and headed toward my destination on foot. The park—an actual
square
oasis of green between 10th and 7th streets and Avenues A and B—is in a gentrified area of the East Village known as Alphabet City. In the 1980s, it had apparently been filled with homeless people and heroin dealers, but it had been refurbished recently and now held a dog run, handball courts, and a table designed with chessboards. Beneath the old elm trees you could find not only old women speaking Yiddish and men wheeling shopping carts filled with used soda cans but also hip young families with pound-rescued mutts and kids dressed in black instead of pink and powder blue.

Chris had told me to make my way to a long row of trucks and trailers on the eastern side of the park, to look for people with earpieces and then ask for Harper. The directions had sounded kind of vague, but as it turned out there was no way to miss the trucks. There were about eight of them in different sizes parked along Avenue A. Just inside the park was a large cluster of guys in jeans and T-shirts bustling about, setting up lights and other equipment. On the sidewalk outside the park were what appeared to be other crew members, drinking coffee out of cardboard cups. I informed one of them that I had an appointment with Harper Aikins. Speaking into a walkie-talkie, he delivered the message to someone and then told me she’d be right with me.

It was a good ten minutes before she walked up behind me and introduced herself. She wasn’t at all what I’d expected. My imagination had conjured up an L.A. type—tiny, thin as a breadstick, with long, sleek hair—but Harper was about five nine or ten, with broad shoulders and wide-ish hips. Her dark blond, slightly wavy hair was cropped very short and brushed back hard from her face, drawing attention to coppery-colored eyes that were so round they looked like two pennies in her face. She was wearing a boatneck pink top with three-quarter sleeves, a tan skirt, and, despite the warm weather, a pair of cowboy boots. Though she lacked an L.A. aura, she exuded confidence. She was the kind of chick who you knew immediately had 1600 on her SATs and had probably gone to Princeton or Yale.

“Hi,” she said, shaking my hand firmly, though it was one of those drawn-out hi’s that never really sound happy to see you. “Shall I take you to Chris? He’s in the honey wagon.”

“Actually, Chris thought it would be helpful for us to talk. He told you, right, that I’m trying to help him look for Tom?”

“Yes, he told me. Though I’m not going to be much help. Tom didn’t give me the slightest clue where he was going that day.”

“Well, it would still help to talk.”

She lifted her shoulders in a “whatever” shrug. “But let’s get one thing straight,” she said. “I know what you do for a living, and I need your guarantee that this is all strictly off the record. Our producer, Alex Ottoson, doesn’t like outsiders. And Locket’s been burned by
Buzz
.”

“How so?” It was hard to imagine a soap actress like Locket even being on the radar at
Buzz
. The magazine, particularly the gossip section called “Juice Bar,” focused on the hot young celebs everybody was, well, buzzing about. The sort-of-famous like Locket, as well as the used-to-be-famous and the never-gonna-be-famous-no-matter-how-they-try types made it into the pages only when they overdosed, had a boob break free from a dress on the red carpet, or went through a butt-ugly divorce, the kind that generated language like “Defendant repeatedly demanded that plaintiff engage in three-way sex with prostitute named Glamour.”

“They make fun of her mouth. They once wrote that her lips had so much collagen, they should have a stamp on them that said ‘Not to be used as a flotation device.’”

“You’ve got my word I won’t feed any gossip to the magazine. I’m only here because of my friendship with Chris—to help find Tom.”

She set her mouth in something between a pout and a grimace and glanced around. “Why don’t we go over there,” she said brusquely, indicating an empty bench just inside the park. As we sat down, she called someone on her walkie-talkie and told the person in a clipped, no-nonsense tone to let Chris know I was here and would stop by his trailer in about ten minutes.

“This must be pretty upsetting for you,” I said as soon as she finished.

“I don’t know
what
to feel,” she said. A tear welled in each eye, but she hurriedly dabbed them away. “One minute I’m freaked that something has happened to Tom, and then the next minute I’m furious because I think maybe he just took off. I’ve only been dating Tom about two months, so I don’t really know him
that
well. Maybe he
did
just blow town.”

“Chris says he can’t believe Tom would bag a job on a network show after working so hard to get here.”

“Chris doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does. Tom had
very
mixed feelings about being here.”

“You’re kidding?” I said, taken aback. “Why?”

“You can’t say anything to Chris because I don’t think he knows, but originally Tom was up for
Chris’s
part. Tom’s a nice guy—too nice, if you ask me—and as soon as he heard he was being considered for one of the main roles, he told the casting director about Chris for a smaller role. The next thing you know, everything ended up flipped. Tom never resented Chris—like I said, he’s not that kind of guy—but he resented the outcome.”

Her revelation threw a new light on the situation. So maybe Tom
had
just bagged it.

“And that’s not all,” she said. “Alex is
very
powerful—he created about twenty percent of what you see on TV—and he’s exerting a lot of control over this show. A couple of days before Tom took off, Alex lit into him after a scene. Said he was ‘working too hard.’ That’s something that actors with a lot of stage experience are sometimes guilty of—they tend to overact in front of the camera, when what you want to do for TV is keep it really small and natural. But from the cuts of the show I’ve seen, it wasn’t true in Tom’s case. It was almost as if Alex were just busting his chops for nothing.”

So this must be the trouble on the set that Chris had mentioned. “Was Tom pretty upset?”

“It was hard to know because I was in L.A. most of that week and wasn’t due back till Sunday. I talked to him on my cell whenever I could grab five minutes, and he did seem fairly bummed—though not I’m-going-to drop-off-the-planet bummed.”

“When was the last time you actually talked to him?”

“I called him on Friday night. He’d had weekend plans with this guy he knew at school, but the guy ended up bailing on him. We agreed to get together for dinner Sunday night after I landed. Then I never heard from him. At first I thought maybe he’d just forgotten about the dinner. It wasn’t until he didn’t show at work on Monday that I realized something might be the matter.”

“He didn’t say anything about what he was going to do instead that weekend?”

“No, he just said he’d be fine. There was one weird thing—just a little thing that at the time didn’t seem odd, but I’ve wondered about it since.”

“Yes?” I prodded.

“He said he had work to do.”

“Work?”

“Right. When he said that his buddy had blown him off, I’d suggested half-jokingly that he fly out to L.A. There were some loose ends I had to tie up for work, but I had a nice room at the Mondrian and he could have chilled at the pool. He said no, he’d be okay. And then he said, ‘I’ve got some work to do.’ It’s just an expression, and I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but afterwards, after he just fell off the face of the earth, I wondered what he’d meant by it. We weren’t shooting that weekend.”