by Susan Kandel
I went a little deeper into the history.
Sunday, October 30.
Here’s what Jilly and the guys were looking at yesterday:
Alfred Hitchcock Scholars Meet Here! The MacGuffin Web Page!
BBC Audio Interview—Hitchcock
Strangers on a Train Plot Synopsis
North by Northwest: Trailer
Horror Asylum/ Psychoanalysis, Norman Bates/Horror Movie News
Lavender Blond: Kim Novak
A Tribute to Kim Novak
Suspicion: Hitchcock’s Original Ending
Hitchcock: Truffaut
Vertigo Movie Tour of San Francisco
I was starting to get a bad feeling. In the stomach area. Like when you’ve been kicked.
I closed Safari, then Word. Then I stared, open-mouthed, at the desktop.
There was one little picture of a file folder up there. All alone in the corner.
Underneath the little picture were the words VERTIGO A GO GO.
I clicked on it. A two-page document opened. I read it once. Then I read it again. Then I laughed out loud.
And then I got really, really angry.
Chapter 43
Imagine waking up one morning and finding your tidy existence shaken to the core, your ordinary life stranger than fiction, your humdrum existence suddenly as thrilling and terrifying and glittering as one of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic suspense films!
Meet Cece Caruso, an accidentally sexy, forty-something everywoman. Cece spends her days holed up in her funky bohemian bungalow in West Hollywood with no one to talk to except her dog and cat, living vicariously through her work researching the greats of mystery and suspense.
Suddenly, her overactive imagination starts to run wild—or does it?
Caught in a classic wrong-man scenario, Cece is the innocent plunged into a maelstrom of misunderstanding, forced to race against the clock to prove her innocence, with no one on her side and nowhere to hide.
Welcome to Cece’s world!
We call it “Vertigo A Go Go!”
Cece thinks she’s going crazy, but that’s because she hasn’t read the script!
Suspense, glamour, intrigue, black humor: it’s all there, just like in your favorite Hitchcock movies: North by Northwest, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and of course, Vertigo!
You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll be astonished as our unwitting heroine attempts to solve a murder and save her own skin at the same time.
What will Cece do next?
“Vertigo A Go Go” is the must-see debut episode of Deja-Vu!, brought to you by the people behind last season’s runaway hit, the Emmy Award-nominated Rich and Strange!
Deja-Vu! is a ground-breaking new reality television series which places an unsuspecting person into a fictional universe that he or she may or may not recognize. Think Candid Camera but more outrageous; Punk’d but smarter. Deja-Vu! is tailor-made for nostalgia buffs while speaking to today’s millennial generation, which refuses to recognize the old lines of demarcation between entertainment and so-called real life.
“It’s all real, baby,” laughs creator and executive producer Jilly Rosendahl.
Upcoming episodes of Deja-Vu! include, “Twilight-Zoned;” “The Godmother;” and “Octowussy.” The season finale, “Fear and Bloating in Las Vegas,” will be shot on location at the Four Diamond Award-Winning Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino.
I finally understood the famous “vertigo effect,” invented by a second-unit cameraman for Alfred Hitchcock.
The camera pulls back and zooms in at the same moment. The truth is on a collision course with a lie. The past crashes into the present. And everything is up for grabs.
It happened to Scottie when he realized that Madeleine and Judy were the same person. Now it was happening to me. I thought I was in one story, but I was in another one entirely.
My nightmare was Jilly’s cosmic joke.
I sat there for a moment, my mind reeling.
They were so unspeakably clever.
The hot pink cell phone. What a perfect MacGuffin. They knew me well enough to know I wouldn’t be able to resist. I’d show up at the hiking trail, and they’d be ready.
One blonde on the top of the mountain. Another blonde at the bottom. And a driver’s license that just happened to blow my way.
There was no danger.
No bad guys.
No dead body.
Not even an Anita Colby. That was just a name they invented.
And the police. Those two young bumblers. The pretty detectives with their perfect smiles. They were never really after me. They were fakes, all of them.
I shook my head in disbelief as the past few days unspooled before my eyes.
The kid in the park and his obnoxious mother.
The cop that showed up afterwards, with the friendly advice.
Roy, the freak at the E-Z Nights.
Actors.
I grabbed the yellow folder stuffed with black-and-white photographs.
They were commercial headshots.
I studied the picture of the man on the top, with the Fu Manchu mustache. Of course. It was ridiculous, blustering Sy. He deserved some kind of award. They all did. They’d been amazing.
I yanked open the drawer and pulled out the other folders and spilled them all over the floor.
They were all here.
Dorothy with the silvery hair. Living in a trailer, her life a shambles. She looked good in a sexy halter dress and full makeup. I flipped over the picture. She could do foreign accents and tap dance.
And Jonathan Tucci. His real name was Kyle Black. He didn’t look like an unsuccessful used car salesman. He didn’t even look Italian. He looked like every handsome waiter in West Hollywood, serving chicken breasts and Caesar salads, hold the anchovies, while waiting for his big break.
Chastity took a great picture. She wasn’t a tough-as-nails madam; she’d gone to frigging Julliard. The New York Times had singled out her performance as Lady Macbeth in an off-Broadway revival ten years back. But acting gigs were obviously few and far between for women of a certain age. She must’ve jumped at the chance to make a fool of me.
They’d led me on a wild goose chase, all of them.
And I hadn’t caught on.
I hadn’t seen any of it.
Those beautifully orchestrated Hitchcockian locations.
The amusement park, straight out of Strangers on a Train.
The deserted highway, courtesy of North by Northwest.
The chase in the Thai temple, as close as they were going to get to the Marrakech street scene in The Man Who Knew Too Much.
It was beyond embarrassing.
I’d made a complete spectacle of myself with those gardeners in Bel Air.
And with Connor. What an idiot I was about the break-in at my house, which obviously had never happened. There had been no cops that night. No cruiser. No lights. Connor must’ve seen where I kept the spare key, and let himself right in.
And the Andalusia. I groaned inwardly. That was not my finest hour. Did they have me on film in those hideous rubber gloves? Rifling through the desk? Hiding in the closet? No wonder the place looked like a film set. The art director had even remembered to stick a cigarette in a plate of eggs, just like Jessie Royce Landis does in To Catch a Thief. How could I have missed that? I hoped they’d shot those eggs from above for maximum visual impact.
The cameras.
They were everywhere.
At the strip club.
In the waiting room at Thai Orchid Massage.
In Sy’s office.
Oh, God.
It couldn’t be.
I dashed over to the door, threw it open, and ran down the hallway, out the sliding glass doors and over to the wooden fence between Jilly’s house and mine.
It was too high.
I needed a chair.
I shooed away the cats, grabbed one of the superexpensive chaises, dragged it over to the fence, climbed up on top of it,
and reached out for the big, brown, furry creature with the horrible, rat-like snout.
He wasn’t playing dead.
He was stuffed.
They’d suckered me with an opossumcam.
All of a sudden there was a light shining in my eyes. Shit. They’d come home early. What was I supposed to do?
Confront them. Make them pay.
But it wasn’t Jilly and her guys.
Not even close.
It was my ex-fiancé, Detective Peter Gambino of the L.A.P.D.
“Long time no see,” he said, turning off his flashlight.
Chapter 44
Gambino gave me his hand and helped me down. We stood facing each other for what felt like a very long time. Seeing him made me feel calm. Centered. All right, less hysterical.
And then, out of nowhere, Jilly’s backyard was suddenly filled with the jazzy strains of “Spanish Flea” by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. Somebody in the neighborhood must’ve been watching a rerun of The Dating Game.
Or maybe the sound was coming from inside my own head.
“Hi,” I said, smiling.
Even when I was a kid, I’d known The Dating Game was rigged. The third bachelor was always the charm.
“Nice opossum,” he said.
“Nature’s own Dustbuster. Would you mind?” I handed the wireless varmint to Gambino, who dusted him off a little and put him back on the fence. “It’s a long story.”
He nodded, lips pursed. “It always is.”
“How are you?” I asked.
“Fine. You?”
“A lot better, now that you’re here.”
It was dark, but I saw something flicker in his eyes.
“So,” he said.
“So. Are you going to arrest me?”
“Depends on the story,” he said. “I’m still waiting.”
“Let’s go to my place.” I took his arm. “The new neighbor is kind of unfriendly.”
“BYEBYE,” he said. “Definitely hostile.”
“You know her?”
“I’m a cop,” he said. “I keep track of these things.”
I glanced over at the house. At least I’d remembered to turn off the lights. “She’s going to be back any second.”
He bent down and picked up the can of Solarcaine Aloe Extra spray. “Then you’d better put the key back.”
“How did you—?”
“Cherchez la blonde.”
My hand flew up to my hair. “Do you mean me?”
He reached out to stroke my cheek. “Who else, Cece?”
My story was a bit rambling. Maybe it was the bottle and a half of Merlot we drank. Also, Gambino kept interrupting me.
Like when I told him about the message they’d left on the hot pink cell phone, where I’d threatened to kill Anita.
I couldn’t understand how they’d done it until he told me about the outgoing message on his partner, Tico’s, answering machine. It was Marilyn Monroe, breathily informing all callers that Tico was giving her a backrub and couldn’t be disturbed.
Voice changer software.
It allows users to mimic other people’s voices. All you needed was a recording of the person you wanted to imitate. Looked like B is for Ben was not the only person who’d listened to my KPCC interview.
Then there was the name of the erstwhile murder victim, Anita Colby. Gambino pulled me off of the couch and out to my office, where we Googled it, and a whole lot of other things.
Turned out Anita Colby was a real person—a tall, blond ex-model, known as the Face, who was hired by Selznick in the forties to teach his contract players about beauty, poise, and fashion. She became a great friend of Hitch’s, and the inspiration for Grace Kelly’s character in Rear Window. That was another clue I’d missed.
Along with the Andalusia Apartments. I hadn’t known that Theresa Wright, the star of Shadow of a Doubt, had once lived there.
Nor had I known that the desolate road I’d walked down looking for a gas station was the precise location where the crop duster sequence in North by Northwest was filmed.
Nor that the used car lot Janet Leigh goes to in Psycho was in Bakersfield, on the exact strip where I’d found All-America Auto.
They’d done their homework.
Now it was my turn.
“Revenge is dangerous,” Gambino warned.
“No, it’s a dish best served cold,” I said, my brain whirring.
“Did Hitchcock say that?”
I wasn’t sure so I Googled it.
“It comes from an eighteenth-century French novel, Les Liasons Dangereuses.” I pointed to the screen.
“See, I told you. Dangerous.”
I wheeled around in my chair to face him. “Will you help me?”
“I already have.” He grinned. “You know Jilly’s surveillance cameras?”
“Oh, shit, I forgot all about them! I was supposed to smash them with my shotgun. Now they’re going to know I’m onto them.”
He put his hands on the arms of my chair and leaned down so his face was close to mine. “Your neighbor’s whole system went on the blink for some reason between nine and ten this evening. Nothing salvageable. Nada. It’s a real shame.”
“Thank you,” I said, meaning it.
“For what?”
“For even talking to me. For not hating me.”
I saw that flicker in his eyes again.
This was it.
Nobody could take care of this for me.
It was now or never.
“I’m sorry.” I stood up and threw my arms around his neck and whispered into his shoulder, loud enough so that I couldn’t take it back, “It’s you I want. It was always you.”
He pulled back, holding me at arm’s distance. “Say that again.”
“It was always you,” I said. “I never stopped loving you.”
“I knew that,” he said. “I meant the first part.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Are you asking or telling?”
“Telling,” I said. “That I am so sorry for everything.”
“Then why’d you leave like that?”
I looked down at the floor. I was afraid to look into his eyes. But I had to. “I don’t want to be married. I’m not cut out for it. I realize that now. But I know it’s what you want. And what you deserve. So I left.”
“How was the Caribbean?”
“Overrated. The sunsets looked like cheap postcards.”
He smiled despite himself. “So where does that leave us?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess it’s up to you now.”
“Come with me.”
He led me back into the house to the living room, where he’d dropped his jacket. He reached into the pocket and pulled out something pink and filmy. Then he handed it to me.
It was the cut-up Dior negligee that Rhonda Fleming wore in Spellbound.
A wisp of silk, as delicate as anything I’d ever touched, yet it had survived Hitchcock’s perverse imagination, Dali’s scissors, Selznick’s backseat driving.
And time. It had stood up to the hardest test of all.
“Happy birthday, Cece,” Gambino said.
In all the tumult of the day, I’d forgotten it was my birthday.
But Gambino hadn’t.
Of course he hadn’t.
Just outside my door, half a million people spent the rest of the night celebrating in the most outrageous costumes they could think of.
Inside, two people spent the rest of the night celebrating in next to nothing at all.
Chapter 45
At eight o’clock the next morning, I kissed Gambino good-bye, then paid a visit to my friends next door.
Connor didn’t look especially happy to see me.
“Good morning,” I said cheerily. “How are you?” I inhaled deeply. “Beautiful day, don’t you think?”
“Yeah,” he said, yawning. “Beautiful.”
Poor thing was tired. He and the guys must’ve had a lat
e night, what with getting the video equipment up and running again and devising even more audacious ways to humiliate me. Not to mention hauling home Cher’s bed and making it up for their shameless, sunburned, madwoman of a boss.
I hoped Jilly had enjoyed a deep sleep. It would be the last one she had for a while if I had anything to say about it.
Connor yanked up the waistband of his sweats. “It’s like the crack of dawn. What are you doing here?”
I handed him a stack of mail. “The mailman delivered it to me by accident.”
“Weird,” he said. “But thanks.”
I didn’t budge.
“I’d invite you in,” he said, turning to look over his shoulder, “but I kind of need to shower.”
“Oh, I understand. No problem at all.” I held my ground.
“Okay, well, I’ll be seeing you later, I guess. I mean, I hope.” He looked uncomfortable now. “I stopped by a couple times the last few days and you haven’t been around. I’ve missed you, Cece.”
“You’re such a sweetheart,” I said, staring into his lying eyes. “You haven’t said anything about my hair.”
He turned red. “You look hot.”
At least as hot as an accidentally sexy forty-something everywoman can look. “Aren’t you going to ask me why I did something so drastic?”
He scratched his head. “You needed a change?”
Funny. “I needed to disguise myself. Make sure I wasn’t recognized.”
“What are you talking about?”
“C’mon, Connor. You know.”
“No, I don’t.” He turned to look back over his shoulder again. “Listen, do you want to come in and talk about this or something?”
Hmm. The backyard might be a nice setting for our penultimate conversation, with the waterfall going and everything. But I was anxious to move on. I had a lot to do today.