Remains to Be Scene
Read Remains to Be Scene Online
Authors: R. T. Jordan
For Robin Blakely
(With love and gratitude)
I sort of pinch myself with wonder every time I get to publicly thank my amazing editor at Kensington, Mr. John Scognamiglio. Thanks for another book, John! Also, my agent Joelle Delbourgo gets a standing ovation for welcoming me into her illustrious fold. A special note of gratitude to Dorris Halsey, who gave my novel its fun title, and to my fellow Kensington author Laura Levine—who writes the wildly hilarious Jaine Austen mystery series—thank you for telling me that you liked this book and for writing such an awesome and bubbly blurb for the jacket! Kevin Howell, I could never thank you enough. Julia Oliver, the same goes for you, too.
To Muriel Pollia, Ph.D.: There is no separation between us. You promised. To William Relling, Jr.: You were wrong. You
did
make a difference. Mr. Billy Barnes—you’re an awesome and talented man.
“Murder is always a mistake—one should never do anything one cannot talk about after dinner.”
Oscar Wilde
“One must never set up a murder. They must happen unexpectedly, as in life.”
Alfred Hitchcock
“T
here’s no business like show business, eh? What a load!” said veteran actress Trixie Wilder as she opened the door and stepped inside her dressing room trailer on the movie location of Sterling Studios’ new musical,
Detention Rules!
“Damn starlets,” she added, as her hand automatically met the switch plate on the wall just inside the entry. But in that nanosecond between flipping on the light switch and the flooding of illumination via overhead fluorescent tubes, the sound of something moving in the deep black maw of the trailer made her heart skip a beat. Her concern was instantly quelled by the sight of her tabby, Patches, racing unusually fast to greet her. Trixie took a deep breath of relief and closed the door behind her.
“There’s a pretty bay-be! Yes, indeed!” Trixie squealed as she lovingly scooped the cat into her arms and rocked her like a newborn. They affectionately nuzzled noses. “Mommy’s finally home from a big ol’ bad day at Black Rock. Yes, she is! Yes, she is!”
Preoccupied with cuddling Patches and listening to the animal’s contented purr, Trixie moved into the room toward the sofa—and abruptly tripped. She dropped the cat, but was able to break her own fall by tumbling forward onto the soft upholstered cushion of the sofa.
“What the hell?” she cried, irritated and confused. When she righted herself and was assured that she hadn’t twisted an ankle or injured a wrist, she looked back and discovered a red brick on the floor in the center of the room. “What the hell’s that thing doing…?” She looked around, then returned her attention to her pet and profusely apologized for scaring the critter.
Trixie Wilder was nobody of any serious consequence in Hollywood. At her advanced age she wasn’t anyone about whom editors at
People
magazine ever thought to devote even an inch of column space. If one of the gossip queens at
The National Peeper
referenced her in a story, it was always a piece profiling someone else. Trixie had long ago accepted the fact that she would never become a headline news subject.
She was a recognizable face from her steady appearances in bit parts for half a century, but she wasn’t even of the caliber of celebrity who would show up on the old “Hollywood Squares” television game show with the likes of Rose Marie. Indeed, aside from a couple of minor recurring roles on sitcoms, she was seldom more than a day player in feature films. But she’d worked with practically every legend from the golden age of motion pictures…if only to deliver a wiseacre line to Roz Russell or Jimmy Stewart.
“Ahh,” she sighed, sitting down at her vanity. She took off her shoes and rubbed her sore feet. “Honey, I think I’m finally too old for this grueling work,” she said to the cat. She began to remove her makeup. “If I don’t retire soon that little no-talent upstart Dana Pointer—or someone like her—is bound to be the death of me. I can see malice in her eyes whenever I deliver my lines.”
Trixie squeezed a dollop of Vaseline Intensive Care lotion into the palm of her hand and slathered her face. “Can I help it if I’m a better actor? Sheesh!” She gave another heavy sigh.
Draping a kerchief over her head of short gray hair, which was matted from being trapped under a wig for fourteen hours, Trixie tied the ends of the scarf under her chin. She looked at herself in the mirror and groaned at the sight of her Grandma Moses face. “Maybe in my next lifetime…” she said wistfully. “Okay, kiddo. Let’s blow this joint. I’ve TiVO’d ‘Project Runway.’ Let’s get home and see what Heidi Klum’s up to.”
As Trixie reached for her purse, she sensed a subtle transfer of weight at the other end of the aluminum trailer. She stood perfectly still and held her breath. She scanned the room for a weapon with which to defend herself against a possible attacker. The only item readily at hand was a half-full carafe of coffee left over from breakfast. She automatically grabbed hold of it by the handle.
“I’m calling security,” Trixie called out for the benefit of anyone who might be in the trailer. With her free hand she reached into her purse and retrieved her cell phone. She’d seen enough slasher films to know that it was a cardinal rule
never
to venture down into darkness alone to investigate peculiar sounds. “Hell, I don’t even know the number for security,” she whispered, as she opened the lid to her phone and moved backward toward the front door. She decided to dial nine–one–one, but to save the last digit until she was certain that there was an actual emergency. She looked down at the keypad and squinted at the tiny numbers. She found the #9 and could hear a soft tone as she pushed the button. She pushed the #1 and momentarily took her eyes off the LED display when she was distracted by the sense that someone was walking out from the shadowy end of the trailer. Just as she looked up, a reflexive jolt of adrenalin shot through her body and she gasped.
“Jeez Louise!” Trixie said, panting and holding her cell close to her rapidly heaving chest. “What the hell are
you
doing in here? You should know better than to scare an old woman.” Trixie was at once startled and relieved to discover who had been hiding in the bathroom. But her ease quickly turned to anger. “If you’re trying to give me a heart attack, you practically succeeded!” she said. Then a thought dawned on her. “Oh, I get it. This is about our earlier discussion. You can save your breath. Take it up with the director, ’cause I’m not leaving this show under any circum…”
In an instant, Trixie was pushed to the floor. The glass carafe flew out of her hand and splashed coffee all over her clothes and the carpet. Her cell phone dropped from her other hand. And her head hit the brick on the floor. Patches hissed and leaped onto the sofa.
Then the trailer became deadly silent. The lights were turned off, the door to the trailer opened and was locked from the inside, then closed.
And the world continued to revolve—despite the sudden and unexpected departure from the planet of an old Hollywood actress—one whom no one would miss. One who would finally have her name in a featured news headline.
“I
want a job like Marg Helgenberger’s,” Polly Pepperpouted as she sat reading
The National Peeper
at the poolside patio breakfast table on the sprawling grounds of her Bel Air mansion. While sipping a Bloody Mary through a crystal straw engraved with her initials, she read and agreed with the lead article. The opinion of the writer—that Marg had a very cool career on “CSI”—made her envious. Polly sniffed. “I can do Marg’s job in my sleep! Don’t we solve those damn murder cases before anyone, including that sexy Gil Grissom?”
Polly recounted a recent scenario from her favorite television series. “Hell, as soon as the bride-to-be slept with the male stripper from her bachelorette party it was obvious that the jealous financé asphyxiated the stud. It didn’t take a forensic expert to figure out that all those Ziploc bags filled with the bits and pieces of the corpse could be traced back to said fiancé!” She then turned the page and began reading about a mass grave of family pets exhumed on Reba McEntire’s estate.
Wrapped in a pink silk monogrammed robe, with her dyed red hair and most of her famous face shrouded behind a curtain of paisley scarf, Polly looked up from her paper and absently peered over the rims of her designer sunglasses. She blinked with annoyance and then stared at her handsome but disheveled son, Tim. He was seated opposite her, wearing shorts and a nearly diaphanous T-shirt that was threadbare after years of use. Polly supposed it was his adult version of a security blanket.
Tim clutched a coffee mug with both hands holding tightly, as if it might escape. His body was hunched over Doonesbury in the
Los Angeles Times
.
Without question, Tim was the light in Polly’s life. Bright, talented, articulate, popular, and every inch the sum total of a good gene pool and private physical fitness trainers, Tim was pretty much the perfect son. As for a career—that was spotty; however, nobody in Beverly Hills was a better party planner than Tim. He was meticulous, and his theme soirees made Polly equally famous as a revered hostess. But at ten o’clock in the morning it was still too early for him to make coherent conversation. Until his infusion of caffeine, grunts were the extent of his ability to communicate.
Polly’s eyes darted from Tim to their maid, Placenta, who, in the starched white uniform that she loathed wearing, was well into her daily chores, scooping out purple bougainvillea petals from the Koi pond. To Polly, Placenta was an oddity because she was more interested in the lives of ordinary people than what she called the “superficial set dressing of Hollywood.” Placenta occupied her time and mind with what she considered to be more significant cultural events, such as the bits of fingers that litigious patrons of fast food restaurants slipped into their soups and chilies. She was bored by Polly’s discussions of the mercurial whims of ancient celebrities, most of whom were presumed by the general public to be dead anyway.
This morning, neither Polly’s only offspring nor her servant seemed to pay any attention to what she had to say. It occurred to Polly that practically anyone else of a certain age on the planet, if provided the opportunity of being seated at Polly Pepper’s breakfast table, would have hung on her every word, gesture, and puff of cigarette smoke.
Polly cleared her throat, raised her voice half an octave, and continued her rant. “It says that the ‘CSI’ writers and producers have tons of technical help to keep the audience constantly guessing. Heck, we usually know in the first two or three scenes! We should have our own show. ‘CSI: Hollywood.’”
Without looking up from the comic strip panels, Tim yawned, and in a groggy voice he forced out a sentence almost in monotone. “A whole series about stars who have gone missing from the tube since before the turn of the millennium—like you,” he said, then took another gulp of coffee.
Tim’s sarcasm buffeted Polly like an unexpected bad review. “I’m iconic!” Polly huffed. Her memory flashed on the tough but fulfilling life she’d once known as an international television superstar. For a time, she was the biggest. The highest paid. The most honored. The most beloved. An entire room in Pepper Plantation, her famous home, overflowed with Emmys, People’s Choice, and nearly every other showbiz award—a testimony to her stature in Hollywood. Like Bette or Cher or Barbra, Polly’s first name alone was all the identification anyone needed in order to know about whom one was speaking. Only a Maori Aborigine or a Gen-Xer might be excused from knowing that Polly Pepper was a goddess from the golden age of television’s musical/comedy variety hours.
With a singing voice just slightly less raspy than Rod Stewart’s, and dancing aptitude limited to a soft shoe, Polly had hit the talent jackpot with brilliant comic timing that turned ordinarily lame chicken jokes into labor-inducing convulsions. She parlayed her minimal talent into stardom and her own wedge of cement on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. With her trademark feet-on-the-ground personality, viewers, if asked, would describe Polly as “a real live person.”
Two decades had passed, however, since her hit variety series, “The Polly Pepper Playhouse,” disappeared from the airwaves. Another decade has flown by since the network pulled the plug on her attempted comeback in the critically skewered sitcom aptly titled, “PP!” And more recently her big-budget Broadway-bound musical bio of Typhoid Mary was pronounced D.O.A. in N.Y.C. (Although a dance remix of the show’s best song, “Bacteria,” became a hit at clubs). Her career now was reduced to playing Mame or Dolly each summer in what she euphemistically refers to as her “Mortgage Tours.” After three decades in show business, Polly Pepper’s luster was fading faster than Scott Peterson’s virginity in San Quentin.
Tim, usually sensitive to his mother’s vulnerability, and now realizing that his attempt at levity so early in the day had been unkind, mumbled to his mother, “Honey, you’ll always be a star, and I know that you’ll get another series. The Young Turks who run this town just haven’t caught on to how much the general public loves you, and wants you back in their living rooms,” he said.
“You think I still have some market value?” Polly asked.
“Like Vicoden,” Tim insisted.
Still, Tim’s smart-aleck remark had magnified what Polly had been feeling for too long—that she was a relic, like something once treasured but now stashed away in an attic and forgotten. For the past several years she and her analyst had tried to justify her diminished position in the hierarchy of Hollywood by deciding that a “has been” was better than a “never was,” and that after her many years of hard work and self-sacrifice, she was entitled to an extended hiatus. But her ego was too big to accept anonymity for more than the tick of the second hand on her Cartier wristwatch.
The truth was that she missed those exhausting years when she was forced to be out of bed by 5:00
A.M
. The chauffeured car would take her to the television studio, and by seven she was meeting with her producer and writers and reading the script of the comedy sketch routines for the week’s show. By ten, she would be in the rehearsal hall with her choreographer learning a dance number with Robert Goulet, Betty White, or Benji. The afternoons were reserved for meetings with the network suits, lunch with a
TV Guide
reporter, or working with her personal assistant to respond to the thousands of letters that arrived in bulk each week.
Those letters were indispensable to Polly. Most important, they confirmed the public’s adoration of her, and they were used as a barometer of what her fans liked and disliked about each week’s guests, sketches, and the selection of musical material. Second, the mail was used as a prop on the program. In a novel and always hysterically funny way to open each week’s hour of comedy and music, Polly would call for the house lights to be turned up—the better to emphasize her accessibility. She would then sit in a wingback chair that was placed at the foot of the stage, beside a coffee table on which sat a large fish bowl filled with mail. She then invited a volunteer member of the studio audience to hold the fishbowl while Polly closed her eyes, turned her head, and reached inside. She removed what was presumed to be an arbitrarily selected envelope.
Polly would slip a pair of reading glasses on, open the envelope, clear her throat, and read aloud the message. The questions were always intentionally provocative inquiries about Polly’s personal life or peculiar problems that required her sage but amusing advice.
Of course, this was a scripted and well-rehearsed gimmick. Polly and her staff of writers selected and embellished the lamest missives. It was clear to Polly from the content of the semi-literate mail that she was a darling among gun-hording trailer-dwellers, rather than the class of sophisticated PBS-supporting left-wing liberals to which she aspired.
The staff writers on “The Polly Pepper Playhouse” composed Polly’s supposedly extemporaneous sidesplitting responses. A typical recitation at the top of the show’s one-hour broadcast would find Polly in a serious ladylike demeanor, opening an envelope and reading, “‘Dear Polly, do you sleep in the nude?’” Polly grimaced in a way that made audiences roar with laughter and anticipation of her response. She blushed on cue and feigned embarrassment. Then, with a wink of an eye, looking straight into the camera she asked in a sultry voice, “Am I alone?” The audience nearly busted a collective hernia with Polly’s seemingly spontaneous and naughty wit. The phrase, “Am I alone?” quickly made it into the vernacular of pop culture.
Or, “Dear Polly. You’re such a common and down-to-earth star with lots of ex-husbands (that same wide-eyed look of unease crossing her face) and lots of Emmy Awards, too. What’s the difference between your ex-husbands and your Emmy Awards?’” Without missing a beat Polly replied, “The difference, my darling, sweet, invading-my-privacy fan, is that if my ex-husbands were all in a car that drove off a cliff, I’d feel terrible if my Emmys were in the trunk!
“Thank you, everybody,” she would declare and quickly stand up as if putting an end to the public humiliation. “Tonight we have a fabulous show for you. Don Adams is here! (Applause.) The Captain and Tenille are here! (Applause.) Jack Klugman is dropping by! (Applause.) Our regulars, Arnie Levin, Tommy Milkwood, the lovely and talented Laura Crawford! (Applause.) And of course the Polly Pepper Prancers! We’ll be right back after these messages from our sponsors and station identification. Don’t you dare go away!”
But the audiences did go away—eventually. Now, Polly’s glory days of hard work, discipline, and #1 Nielsen ratings had morphed into a star’s worst fear—looks of vague recognition and whispers between strangers who ask, “Didn’t she used to be…?”
Slowly slipping back to reality, Polly exhaled loudly as she refocused on her present life and turned the page of
The Peeper
. Her eyes focused on a picture of Lindsay Lohan, which set her off on another rant. “Good God,” Polly winced. “Look at those bazongas! Who did that tramp have to kill to get into all those Disney movies? Remind me to call her up and ask to recommend a hit man. Although it’s probably her mother.”
Polly noisily sucked up the last of her Bloody Mary, then impatiently wiggled the glass high above her head. “Oh, Placenta, darling,” she cooed.
Placenta dumped soggy bougainvillea petals into a trashcan and wiped her hands on her apron. She marched up to the table and snatched the glass out of Polly’s grasp. “Don’t exhaust yourself,” she sniped. “And if you’re thinking of killing off young movie stars for a role, skip Lindsay or that Duff girl. Try being age appropriate for once. Think Faye Dunaway.”
“Does anybody even remember her?” Polly scowled.
“Whatever. But you’re never getting a Nicole Kidman hand-me-down, honey, no matter how hard you cry, or how young you think prosthetic makeup can fool the gullible public into believing you are.”
Tim, finally emerging from his semi-catatonic state, looked up from the newspaper and said, “There’s only one actor on the planet who Polly Pepper wouldn’t mind being poured into an urn and sealed away forever in a vault at Forest Lawn.”
“Polly Pepper would never wish ill upon a fellow thespian,” the star said. “It says so on my official Web site. Or in that otherwise horrid unauthorized biography.”
Setting down his coffee mug, Tim prodded, “I suppose the
initials
Sedra Stone no longer mean anything to you?”
Polly sat perfectly still—as one who isn’t sure whether to laugh or cry is wont to do.
Placenta, dumping a can of V-8 into a tumbler and measuring in a couple of fingers of vodka, some Worcestershire sauce, lime juice, and a celery stalk, looked at Tim as if he were crazy to bring up the taboo subject of Sedra Stone. She braced herself with a surreptitious slug from Polly’s Bloody Mary before moving to the table and tentatively placing the glass before her mistress.
Polly gave Tim a cold stare, then dipped her straw into the drink and took a long pull that drained half the glass. She smacked her lips in satisfaction, and said, “Tim darling. Just because Sedra Stone stole your semi-daddy…”
“And your second pathetic excuse for a husband, too,” Placenta added before quickly walking from the patio through the open French doors leading to the kitchen.
“…doesn’t mean I hold the slightest grudge against her,” Polly continued. “We all do what we have to do to succeed and survive in this crummy town. I certainly wouldn’t trade all the combined Oscars on Hilary Swank and Meryl Streep’s mantles for Sedra’s mucky Karma.”
Sedra Stone was Polly Pepper’s biggest rival in Hollywood. Also a legend from 1980s television, she was the antithesis of Polly Pepper. Her long-running primetime soap opera “Monarchy” gave Sedra fame, fortune, and an identity that, all these years later, was still synonymous with a steely disposition, mastery at manipulation, and an acid tongue that could sizzle through an umbilical cord. On screen she usually played an emasculating CEO who would lie, cheat, embezzle, murder, and have sex with half a dozen board members from competing corporations before lunch. She would then move on to seducing hard-bodied and equally unscrupulous male office assistants who were younger by more than half her years before the Swiss weenies were served at cocktail hour.
