Love Sold Separately

by Ellen Meister

  Adam shrugged. “I’ll get to the bottom of it. I promise.”

  “You’d better,” Sherry said. “Because if it happens again, someone’s getting fired.”

  Sherry dismissed them. As they filed out of her office and walked toward the elevator, Dana turned to Adam.

  “I didn’t mean to get you in trouble,” she said.

  “It’s not your fault,” Megan interjected.

  “Don’t sweat it,” Adam said. “If Sherry didn’t chew me out at least once a day, I’d call the paramedics.”

  “Do you have any idea how it could have happened?” Dana asked.

  They reached the elevator bank, and Adam pushed the down button. “I’ll figure it out.”

  Dana watched the lights as the elevator car made its way up to them. “Do you think it could have been intentional?”

  He looked at her. “Intentional?”

  “I know it sounds crazy, but I feel like... I don’t know.”

  “You think someone has it out for you?” he asked.

  Dana hesitated. She liked to think she was good at reading people, and Sherry seemed genuinely furious at the screwup. So it was hard to believe she was the culprit...even if deep down she’d enjoy sabotaging Dana and replacing her with Emily.

  Maybe Emily herself had done it. Or perhaps she put her friend Jessalyn up to it. But no. Even as Dana reminded herself that people rarely telegraphed their guilt, she couldn’t picture them capable of such duplicity.

  When Dana and Megan reached her dressing room, Ollie was standing outside the door, waiting for them.

  “Is everything fine, Dana?” he asked. “Any trouble with Miss Sherry?” His eyes were filled with concern.

  “I thought you were going home.”

  “I just wanted to make certain that everything is okay. You were having troubles before, I think.”

  Dana shook her head. The kid’s loyalty was pathological. She had practically bitten his head off, and he stuck around to make sure she was all right. She put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m fine,” she said. “Nothing to worry about.”

  “I leave now?” he said.

  “Yes, Ollie, you can go home.” She dismissed him with a kind smile and went into her dressing room with Megan.

  After shutting the door, Dana slipped out of her on-air wardrobe. “I have time for a drink,” she said.

  “It’s Tuesday,” Megan said, as if it were she, and not Dana, who had a rehearsal schedule.

  “You have someplace to be?” Dana asked as she hung up her dress. She knew that Megan still worked as a waitress to supplement her income, but that was only weekends and Thursday nights.

  Megan picked up an unused eye shadow palette and examined it. “Do you?”

  “I’m good,” she said. “Why don’t we go to that place on Ninth?”

  Megan considered it for a moment as she studied the shades of browns and nudes in the palette. “I think I’ll get going.”

  “You sure?” Dana asked.

  Megan waved away the question. “I haven’t had a second to myself for a week. If I don’t get home and do some laundry, I’ll be running errands tomorrow in a sports bra and Chanel No. 5.”

  “I’m glad you rushed over here,” Dana said. “I probably would have fucked up that conversation with Sherry.”

  “You did seem ready to punch someone in the throat. Just promise me you’ll call if you ever get that urge again.”

  Dana promised and noticed Megan was still holding the eye shadow set. “You want that?” she asked. “The makeup girl gave it to me. She gets a ton of freebies and insisted I take it.”

  “I don’t need it,” Megan said. “Thanks, anyway.” She opened the undercounter drawer to put it away. “Hey, what’s this?”

  Dana looked up to see Megan peering into the drawer she knew was empty. “What’s what?” she asked.

  “This gold bracelet.”

  “Bracelet?” It was the same drawer that had flown open when she slammed it in anger, so Dana knew it was empty before they went up to see Sherry. Still in her underwear, she crossed the room to see. And there, in the middle of the barren drawer, was a gold bracelet in the shape of an alligator, its two emerald eyes staring up at her.

  23

  “And you have no idea how it got here?” Detective Marks said as he peered into the drawer.

  Dana had called him in a panic right after Megan found the bracelet. If someone was trying to set her up for Kitty’s murder, she needed to be as careful as possible. Dana guessed she had caught him off duty, because he wasn’t wearing his suit. He was in jeans and a white Athletic Club T-shirt. Since his hair was wet, she figured he had been at the gym working out. Also, he looked pumped, his veined biceps straining against his sleeves. If she knew him better, she’d lay her cool fingers on the smooth mound, admiring its firmness.

  Stop this, she told herself. You’re seeing Lorenzo. And even if you weren’t, this guy would be a mistake.

  “The only thing I know is that the drawer was empty before I went up to see Sherry a short while ago,” she said.

  “Who has access to this room?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “I didn’t lock it, so anyone, really.”

  The detective opened the door and poked his head out into the hallway, looking up. “No security cameras,” he said.

  “I asked a few people if they saw anyone come in here,” she said, “but everyone was busy.”

  “Did you notice anything before you left your dressing room? Anyone hanging around?”

  “No,” she said, though she knew her usual powers of perception might have been skewed, due to her fury and the Dexedrine. “I was in here with Megan, having a little bit of a meltdown about something that happened on air today. I was in such a state I slammed the drawer shut, and it bounced open. That’s how I know it was empty at that point.” Dana shrugged, and the strap of her tank top slipped off her shoulder. She quickly fixed it in place, but not before noticing that his eyes darted there and then away.

  “What happened on air?” he asked, now fixed on her face. His expression was inscrutable, but she thought she saw a bit of pink rising up his cheeks. Was this gritty detective blushing?

  “I’m sure it’s not relevant,” she said.

  “Tell me, anyway.”

  Dana sat on the sofa, hoping he would take the chair opposite her so they could be eye-to-eye, but Marks stood by the drawer as if guarding it.

  She launched into the story of what had happened with the Barlow and Ricci color charts, and he showed more interest in the details than she expected. He pressed for information on who was responsible for the charts, and who had access to them on and off set.

  “Of course, it might have been an honest mistake,” she said. “A random screwup.”

  “But you don’t really believe that.”

  Dana stood, as it was too hard to have a conversation with her head craned back. “Honestly, I think someone might be trying to sabotage me,” she said, and hoped he didn’t think she was being paranoid.

  “And why would that be?”

  “It’s a pretty plum gig,” she said. “A lot of people would like a shot at it.”

  He folded his arms, thinking, and the pressure on his biceps made them enormous. She swallowed.

  “Tell me about your amateur sleuthing?” he asked.

  “Sleuthing?”

  “Have you been poking around,” he clarified, “asking questions about Kitty Todd?”

  Dana bit her lip. “Not really.”

  He gave her a look that said he didn’t buy it.

  She let out a breath. “You didn’t leave me any choice,” she said. “You’re hounding Lorenzo like a dog and I know he’s innocent.”

  “You need to have faith in the process.”

  “I’d have a lot more faith if yo
u believed what I told you.”

  “Tell me who you spoke to about the investigation,” he said.

  Dana squinted at him. “You think what happened on the air today is connected to the murder?” she asked.

  “That’s what I’d like to find out.”

  Dana considered that, trying to understand if it really made sense. She hadn’t thought the bracelet and the color charts screwup were related, but now she wasn’t so sure. If the murderer knew she was probing, and worried she was getting close to the truth, it might make sense for him—or her—to try to get Dana fired.

  “I’m struggling to understand why someone who wants to get me in trouble would leave the bracelet in my dressing room for me to find. Doesn’t it make more sense that they were leaving me a clue to the murderer’s identity?”

  “That’s one possibility,” he said.

  “What’s another?” she asked.

  “I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “Don’t do that. I’m deep in this shit. I deserve to know.”

  Marks sighed and glanced at the door, as if he were waiting for someone. He looked back at her and his expression softened into something like sympathy, as if he really did regret that she was so embroiled in the mess.

  Finally he said, “Okay. It could be a false lead.”

  “Like...someone trying to steer me in the wrong direction?”

  He nodded. “Or...”

  “Or what?”

  There was a knock on the door and a calm male voice said, “Police.”

  Marks opened the door and greeted two uniformed officers by name. It was obvious to Dana that he had asked them to come. One of the cops took a few photographs of the bracelet in the drawer, and the other snapped on a pair of blue plastic gloves before picking it up by its tail and dropping it into a baggie.

  “Thank you for your help, Ms. Barry,” Marks said, and moved toward the door.

  She wanted to stall so they could finish their conversation. “What about the alligator?” she asked. “What will you do with it?”

  “What would you like me to do—release it to the wild?”

  The other officers snickered.

  “I just want to make sure it doesn’t wind up in the sewers,” she quipped back. It was ancient urban legend every New Yorker knew—the myth of abandoned baby alligators growing to enormous lengths and sloshing around the dank dark corridors of Manhattan’s underbelly.

  Marks shook his head. “Then it might find its way down to Wall Street,” he said, “and we can’t have that.”

  “Why not?”

  He shrugged. “Might get eaten alive.”

  24

  As the E train rattled downtown toward the Sweat City theater, Dana thought about rehearsals. She loved the show and was grateful for the opportunity to play the role of the horrible Mrs. Woodbridge, despite that she would never get career credit for it. She still grappled with that. Because even though she recognized that releasing herself from the shackles of judgment had enabled her to fully immerse in a role as she had never done before, it was hard to erase all traces of ego. Dana knew who she was, knew that beneath the dedicated artist beat the heart of a ham. She couldn’t get away from it. She was an actor, after all, and that meant she came alive in the limelight. So it was hard to reconcile that she would be giving the performance of her career and no one would know it was her. She wouldn’t be able to call family and friends and tell them to come see the show. She wouldn’t even get to grasp Megan’s arm with two hands after the play and ask, in needy desperation, if she liked—really liked—her performance.

  Art for art’s sake, she told herself over and over.

  When the train stopped at Fourteenth Street, a crowd pushed in and Dana got jostled deeper into the subway car. She tried to escape the proximity of strangers by disappearing inside her head, replaying the conversation with Marks to figure out where it had been leading. But there were too many distractions. In particular, two young women nearby—high school girls, she surmised—were having an animated conversation about a teacher they thought had been egregiously unjust. The taller girl, with a backpack slung carelessly over one shoulder, complained that the teacher refused to accept a paper handed in late, and yet wouldn’t let her do an extra credit assignment to make up for it. She was indignant, and the other girl agreed again and again that “Martins is, like, a total dick.”

  Dana noticed a man seated by the door who was peering furtively toward the girls. She followed the line of his vision and saw that he was looking at what appeared to be a pink leather wallet peeking out from the vocal girl’s backpack. The man stood and edged closer to the teens, and Dana had a pretty good idea of what was going on. She tapped the girl on the shoulder.

  “Excuse me, I think your wallet is sticking out,” she said.

  “Ugh. Again?” The girl swung the backpack around and moved her wallet to a zippered section deep in the interior. “If I lost my wallet again my mother would kill me.” She thanked Dana over her shoulder and went back to her important conversation with her friend.

  Dana wanted to tell the girl she had to look out for herself. She couldn’t expect her teachers to cut her a special shortcut to success. And she couldn’t rely on strangers like Dana to warn her when she was in trouble. There are thieves everywhere, Dana wanted to say. Not just professional pickpockets, but regular people pushed to desperation.

  Dana had almost been that person, just a year ago. Her checking account had been in overdraft due to an unexpected visit to the doctor for strep throat, and she was on a spending freeze until her next check came in. She was hungry, and couldn’t even duck into a deli to fill up a small salad bar tray. She would have to make do with whatever unappetizing scraps she could find in her pantry and fridge.

  And then it happened. She was walking down Forty-Seventh Street when an elderly man in front of her reached into the pocket of his cashmere overcoat to pull something out, and a folded hundred-dollar bill floated to the ground behind him. Dana knelt to pick it up and paused as she considered slipping it into her pocket. She even glanced around, and knew that no one had seen her. It would be so easy. She thought about filling up a big salad tray, topping it with one of those pickled hot peppers she liked so much. Maybe throw in a handful of pine nuts for good measure.

  She tried to justify it by telling herself the man wore an expensive coat and almost certainly had a cushy bank account. The hundred dollars probably meant nothing to him. And anyway, he should have been more careful with his cash. She would be teaching him a lesson.

  But of course, it was wrong, and she knew it. The pressure in her throat told her so. She croaked out, “Sir!” and when he turned and saw her holding the folded up bill, the terrible tightness released. She had done the right thing.

  Dana thought back to the gold alligator bracelet, and wondered if it was possible someone had stolen it simply for the money. If that were true, then the theft of the bracelet had nothing to do with the murder. And maybe that was where Marks was headed with his theory.

  Of course, that left the question of why the bracelet wound up in her dressing room. Was it possible the thief’s conscience got the better of him, just as Dana’s had on Forty-Seventh Street? And was it a him? Better to think in non-gender-specific pronouns, she reasoned. So maybe the sticky-fingered perpetrator’s conscience got the better of them. Maybe they were worried that if they tried to sell it they would come under suspicion for the murder. In either case, the thief might have assumed that slipping it into the drawer of Kitty’s old dressing room was the most inconspicuous way to return it. They might have figured it would take a while to be noticed, and by then it would be assumed it had somehow been overlooked when the room was cleaned out.

  But of course, it still meant that the bracelet was stolen by someone who had access to Kitty’s office between the time Dana viewed th
e murder and the police arrived. She tried to remember who she saw running down the hallway toward Kitty’s office on that day. Dana had been in such a state it was hard to remember. She knew Honeycutt was there, and possibly his secretary. She was pretty sure Brenda the receptionist had been in the crowd, and possibly Adam Weintraub and Sherry Zidel. There were people she didn’t know, faces she couldn’t recall.

  Dana was still searching her memory when she reached the theater. She felt a pang of guilt for being late, and for not quite being off-book. She had the first half of the script down cold, but she still had a lot of work to do on act two. She promised herself she would go straight home after rehearsal and work on her lines. No booty call with Lorenzo.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said to Tyrel when she arrived backstage. She put her suede jacket on a hook.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Nathan is working on some blocking with Raj and Sylvia. Tough day at the office, dear?”

  “You could say that.”

  “I’ve been watching, you know. Don’t think it was easy for me to resist that big pink handbag.”

  “I beg your pardon,” she said. “It’s blush.”

  “Of course. And I forgot to tell you—I think I know one of those models who was on the other day.”

  “Which one?” she asked. “Natasha, Chloe or Amy?”

  “No, someone else. Emily, I think. She was on the show after yours. White denim jacket.”

  “Emily Lauren,” Dana said. “You know her?”

  “We took an acting class together a couple of years ago. Only her last name wasn’t Lauren.”

  Dana laughed. “I figured that was a stage name. What was she back then?”

  He squinted, thinking. “Can’t remember. It wasn’t something terrible, though. Not something you’d need to change.”

  “If you think of it, let me know. I’d love to look her up.”

  The rehearsal was rougher than most, because they were doing the second act and Dana was frustrated with herself for still needing her script. She had some good moments, though. No, some great moments, where she found a previously hidden truth inside her character. But she couldn’t forgive herself for being a slacker, and silently vowed she would be caught up by the next rehearsal.