by Ava Barry
Alexa held up a hand to silence him, then turned back and waited for me to answer.
I briefly wondered if Alexa knew that I was planning on breaking into Theo’s house. “Did Petra say something to you?”
“We haven’t spoken since she quit,” she said. “Hailey, I have a lot of respect for your work ethic and I’m sure that there are reasons for why you do things the way that you do. It comes as no joy to me, therefore, to tell you that you’re fired.”
Her words didn’t register with me right away.
“I have two more weeks to find information on Theo,” I said. “I’m going over there on Friday.”
She shook her head emphatically. “You’re not,” she said. “Leland called me yesterday to inform me that your contract was severed due to a breach in terms. He sent a courier with the nullified document.”
My heart was pounding so hard that I thought Alexa must be able to hear it. I swallowed hard to try to dispel my panic, hoping that my fear wasn’t evident. “That’s still under dispute,” I said.
Brian stood. “There’s no room for dispute on this one,” he said. “We’ve spoken about it. It’s final.”
“Leland told me why the contract was void,” she went on. “Apparently you signed a different contract with Heather Engel-Feeny. Something to the effect that you would allow her to pick through your evidence as she wished?”
“That’s not exactly true,” I argued, but she held up a hand to silence me.
“You don’t have to tell me, Max,” she said. “I know exactly what your contract with Heather says, because her lawyer called, too. She’s suing the magazine because you’ve failed to live up to your end of the contract.”
I felt all the blood drain out of my face. Alexa shook her head and looked so disappointed that I tried to summon words sufficient to express an apology. None came.
“You haven’t been coming to the office very much in the last few weeks,” Alexa said. “It doesn’t seem like you want to be here, anyway. Perhaps this news isn’t as bad as it seems.”
“Alexa, I have a new lead,” I pleaded, but the words were pale and insignificant.
“Please clean out your desk,” she said. “I don’t want to see you in here after today.”
* * *
I could feel everyone staring at me as I went back to my desk. There was a pregnant stillness in the office as I gathered up everything that I could carry, and I willed myself not to look up and make eye contact with anyone. Brian lingered behind me as I packed my things, and I willed myself not to turn around and punch him in the face. I finally glanced up and saw my colleagues gathered, in groups of two or three, whispering to each other as they waited for confirmation of the obvious truth.
“What?” I snapped, throwing a hand in the air. “Can I help you with something?”
The crowd moved back a little bit but didn’t completely disperse. Brian gave me a sideways grin. I was filled with anger and humiliation as I stalked toward the door and left the office, then got in my car and headed home.
As soon as I got there, I went into the greenhouse. I had burned through every last opportunity and connection; there were almost no leads left to follow. But there was one last thing that I hadn’t investigated: Lola DeWitt.
The only information I had on Lola so far was that she had been in one of Theo’s movies, The Man Who Death Forgot. The movie was about a wealthy railroad heir who was presumed dead after a violent train accident. He wakes up in a hospital several weeks after the accident, disfigured and unrecognizable to his family. Rather than trying to reclaim the life he’d led before the accident, he sets out to build a new life for himself, despite his new physical deformities.
I went onto IMDb and checked out the cast list for The Man Who Death Forgot, reading through the biography of every actor and cast member. Most of them had died or moved to Montana, but there was one woman (listed as Dancer #6) who was still alive, and when I did a little bit more digging, I found that she was living in a trailer park near Palm Springs. According to her scant IMDb page, she hadn’t acted in anything since ’82, but I decided to drive out and see if she remembered anything from her experience filming a movie with Lola. At the very least, she might be able to give me new information about Eleanor. I gathered up my things and got in my car, then headed east, toward Palm Springs.
The desert was strange, and I remembered reading old interviews with actresses who had come out in the ’30s and found it to be so exotic. Back in those days, trains heading west had stopped in Arizona and New Mexico, and the only vendors for miles were Native Americans selling turquoise and silver jewelry. I recalled what I had read in Theo’s journals, about the desert being the one last place that the studios didn’t own.
Heading out there now, I could begin to understand why. The trailer park was on a little dirt road on the outside of Palm Springs, away from all the resorts and spas with their luxurious swimming pools. After driving down a nondescript road, I parked in a dirt parking lot, then walked up to a trailer painted with sunflowers and enormous ladybugs. A splintered wooden sign designated the trailer as the reception.
The trailer park manager turned out to be a tan, broad-faced woman in stained denim coveralls. When I told her what I wanted, she stuck a toothpick in her mouth and chewed on it.
“You’re looking for Tammy Brewer?” she said. “You her kid or something?”
“No, I’m a writer. I live in Los Angeles.”
Her face broke out in a big grin. “A writer, huh? I always knew that Hollywood would come knocking. You write for the flicks?”
“Not at all, ma’am. I’m on the bottom of the feeding chain, more or less.”
“You know, we can rent this park out,” she said. “People come down from the movies all the time. Brad Pitt and Angie came down one weekend.”
“To your trailer park?”
“No, they stayed at one of the resorts in Palm Springs,” she said, waving a derisive hand in the direction of town. “You need a filming location? The nicest trailer we got is probably number eight.”
“I think you misunderstand,” I said patiently. “I don’t work for movies. I don’t know any celebrities. For the last three years, I’ve worked for a dying magazine in a dingy part of Hollywood.”
At the word “Hollywood,” she perked up again.
“What’s Hollywood like?”
“It’s not as glamorous as people think,” I said, and cleared my throat politely. “Can you direct me toward Tammy’s trailer, please?”
Tammy’s trailer sat at the edge of the park. The scrub and desert were on the other side of a barbed-wire fence, and in the distance, a low range of mountains squatted against the horizon. I remembered a story I’d read in Theo’s journal, about a luxurious weekend spent in Idyllwild, retreating to a beautiful wooden cabin in order to get some peace of mind. I wondered what he would have made of the trailer park.
I knocked on Tammy’s door and waited for a minute. There were the sounds of shuffling inside, and then someone called, “Just a minute!”
A moment later, the door blew open. A shirtless man stood before me, blinking into the sunshine. His skin was the deep, rich brown of desert citizens who spend most of their time outdoors. He wore a pair of old boxer shorts, and, strangely enough, a bolo tie.
“Howdy,” he said.
“Is Tammy here?”
The man stood aside and motioned for me to enter the trailer. I stepped into a cloud of cigarette smoke, and saw a woman slouched over at a little kitchenette table. She had a cigarette clamped between her teeth, and she looked up when she heard me come in.
“I think Chet’s dead,” she said, without preamble.
“Who’s Chet?”
“The goddamned lizard,” she said, moving aside to show me a terrarium. “He hasn’t moved for three days.”
“I told you to take him out of the aquarium,” the man said, coming over to join us. “Maybe he’s lonely.”
“It’s not an aquarium,
Harv, it’s a terrarium.”
They both peered in through the glass.
“What do you think?” Harv asked, turning to me.
“Uh,” I said. “I’m probably not the best person to ask. I think that type of lizard looks dead on a good day.”
“Well, golly,” Tammy said. “Maybe we should add another lamp. These lizards like heat.”
“Told you not to go catching things in the desert,” Harv said.
“I didn’t catch it, you silly man,” Tammy said, grabbing a handful of his stomach. “Chelsea gave it to me when she moved to New Mexico.”
I realized they’d both forgotten about me, and I cleared my throat. “You’re Tammy Walsh, aren’t you?” I asked.
“Well, I was,” Tammy said. “Before I married that bastard from Pennsylvania.”
“You used to be a dancer,” I said.
They both broke into wild laughter, and Harv patted Tammy on the back.
“Say,” Tammy said. “You want to play a game of bullshit with us? Isn’t much fun with only two players.”
“She’s right,” Harv joined in. “You deal out all the cards, and then of course you know what the other person’s got.”
“Harv’s a lawyer,” Tammy piped up, unnecessarily.
“Look, I don’t want to bother you,” I said, “but I was hoping you could tell me something about The Man Who Death Forgot.”
They were both quiet, for once, and Tammy tapped a cigarette on her hand. She had suddenly turned serious.
“What are you doing here, kid?” she asked.
“I’m a writer. I’m working on a story.”
“You work for MGM?” she said, giving me a wary look.
“No, I’m a journalist.”
“I didn’t see a penny of those royalties,” she said. “They screwed us over.”
“Oh?”
“Sure, they paid us fifty bucks for a day of dancing, and that’s all we got,” she said. “It’s not even legal, the way they treat their actors.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “My gran was an actress.”
A light came on in her eyes. “What was her name?”
“Nadine Shaw.”
“Don’t know her. Sorry, kid.”
“Do you remember working on that movie? Do you remember Eleanor Hayes?”
Tammy stuck another cigarette in her mouth and lit it. “ ’Course I remember her,” she said. “Not very well—we weren’t supposed to talk to her—but sometimes she’d come and hang out with us. The studio heads didn’t want the chaff mixing with the big stars, you know.”
“Was she nice?”
“Weird kid,” Tammy said. “Down-to-earth and all that, didn’t have a big head about her. But she was a tin-stamped weirdo.”
Harv giggled.
“She had some problems on that film,” I said. “Some personal problems. Do you know what happened?”
“Say,” Harv said, poking my shoulder. “You ever meet Bob Mitchum?”
“Hush, Harv!” Tammy said. “I’m trying to remember. There was something that happened. God, it’s been a while.”
“I like the boxing pictures,” Harv said. “And the old Westerns.”
“There was a dancer,” Tammy said slowly. “One of the girls we danced with. She was with us partway through the film, and then they kicked her off. Real nice girl, but kind of strange. Had a real thing for Eleanor.”
“Thing?”
“Yeah, the girl was obsessed. She even broke into Eleanor’s dressing room, tried on some of her dresses. Eleanor was real upset, threatened to walk off the film if they didn’t do something about it.”
A chill ran down my spine. “Can you remember her name?”
“It was one of those cute names, like Dolly or Sally. Lucy, maybe.”
“Was it Lola DeWitt?”
Tammy’s gaze went distant. “Yeah, that was it,” she said. “Lola. Crazy little thing, that girl.”
“How do you mean, crazy?”
Tammy looked at me, and then her face hardened. She stood up and grabbed the ashtray from the table, then started collecting butts that had collected around the trailer.
“I don’t wanna talk to you,” she said. “I have nothing to say.”
“Wait, what’s wrong?”
“Get out of my trailer. I got things to do.”
I stood up. “I’m sorry if I said something to offend you,” I said. “I’m just writing a story.”
“You work for them?” She turned and glared at me. “You work for the studios?”
“I work for a magazine,” I said, then recanted. “I just got fired. I don’t work for anyone.”
“Yeah? Then why are you down here, asking questions?”
I took a step forward, but Harv stood up and put his hand on my shoulder. “Easy there, champ,” he said. “Gotta respect the lady’s wishes.”
“Please, listen to me,” I said. “I’m a writer, working on a story. That’s it.”
“Why are you looking for Lola?” Tammy said.
“Someone mentioned her name.”
“She was a bad seed.” Tammy lit another cigarette. “Always bragging about climbing up the chain, getting famous, and all that. Some producer told her that she was going to be the next Eleanor Hayes, and I guess she believed them.”
“Did you believe her?”
“I thought she was talking air, at first. But then there were days when Eleanor refused to come to work, I don’t know why. Guess she had a problem with a director, or a producer. They’d call Lola in to stand for her. It went to the girl’s head.”
“Do you think she might have become violent?”
“God, I don’t know, kid,” Tammy said, and she looked tired. “Everyone was pretending to be someone else back then. I don’t think I ever really knew who anyone was, or what anyone was capable of.”
NINETEEN
It was nine days until Halloween, and yards were decorated in grand style. Some of the decorations around my neighborhood had been up for a month already, and as the days crept closer to the holiday itself, more and more went up. For the last three days, I had been toiling around my house, by turns listless and filled with new enthusiasm at my chances of catching Theo. I didn’t shower once, and the only things I ate were cold pad thai and cereal.
I finally forced myself to shower and shave, then have some coffee and get dressed. There was one more thing I had to do before executing my plan.
The decorations around Petra’s apartment building were a little bit more subdued, but one of her neighbors must have had kids, because a trio of poorly executed jack-o’-lanterns sat beside their doormat.
When Petra opened her door, she gave me a droll look.
“A bit early for trick-or-treating, don’t you think?” she said. “Your costume sucks, by the way.”
“I figure if I start now, all the good houses will still have candy.”
“Good thinking.” She leaned against the doorjamb and folded her arms.
“You gonna let me in?”
“I’m busy,” she said. “Polishing my résumé.”
“Alexa told me you quit,” I said. “I hope it’s not because of me.”
“It’s not your fault,” she said. “I realized that I was wasting my time as an intern.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You’ve already said it. It’s unnecessary to say it again, Hailey.”
I spread my hands. “You were my partner,” I said. “I’m not very good at accepting help, but you helped me. I told you that I was going to break into Windhall, and I’m going to go through with it.”
I couldn’t read her expression. “Have you thought about the consequences?”
“I don’t have anything left to lose,” I said. “I’ve already lost my job. Alexa fired me. I don’t know if you’ve heard.”
“I heard.” She picked at her fingernails. “I’m still friends with some people who work there, you know. There have been a few changes to the Lens.�
�
“Brian get fired?”
She gave me a half smile. “Alexa canceled the Time buyout. It’s gone independent again.”
“When was that?”
“Not sure. In the last few days, I guess.”
I thought about Heather’s lawsuit against the magazine, and my heart sank. Alexa’s decision must have been before that, because the lawsuit would push the Lens even further into the red.
“There’s something else you should know,” I said. “You were right about Heather and Linus Warren. They’re up to something. I know the papers are saying they caught the woman who was killing those girls, but I think they might have had something to do with it, anyway. It’s another crazy theory, and you probably don’t want to hear about it.”
“I have a minute before I need to keep working on my résumé.”
“I think Engel was responsible for Eleanor’s death.”
“I see.”
“But I know Theo is hiding something, too. There’s gotta be a reason why Theo came back, after all these years away. I mean, he just showed up, out of the blue. There’s something in that maid’s room, and I’m going to find out what it was.”
“Job or not, you’re taking a huge risk.”
“It’s my last shot.”
I took out my phone, and when I found what I was looking for, I scribbled something down on a piece of paper.
“Here,” I said. “This is my friend’s number. I know it’s a big ask, but if I don’t call you by tomorrow morning, would you let him know that I’ve been arrested? His name is Thierry. Tell him to find me at the Beverly Hills police station.”
“Hailey—”
“Don’t try to talk me out of it. Just, please—call him.”
She looked sad for a moment, then nodded and took the piece of paper. “I know that I’m not going to talk you out of it,” she said. “So I’ll just wish you luck.”
* * *
Friday was a crisp, perfect day. Laurel Canyon smelled like crushed eucalyptus, woodsmoke, and a fine haze of dust. I spent the afternoon packing up my notes on Theo, trying not to get frustrated or emotional about the turn of events. Heather hadn’t asked to have the journals back, but I put them into the original box in which she’d given them to me, along with the all the papers and photographs that had been tucked between the pages.