The Boy Who Never Grew Up

by David Handler

“You’re leaving yourself wide open to a slander suit, kiddo,” warned Usher. “Stop right now. Or be prepared to face the consequences.”

  “He’s right, Hoagy,” Lamp agreed. “Don’t do this.”

  I tugged at my ear. “Thank you for the warning—both of you. I appreciate your concern. Now, if I may continue …?”

  “Go ahead,” ordered Schlom, anxiously moistening his liver lips. “I wanna hear more.”

  Usher shook his head. “Norbert, I’d advise you to—”

  “I’d advise you to shut the fuck up!” roared Schlom.

  Usher reddened. “Let’s go, Miss Brim. We needn’t listen to any more of this.”

  Pennyroyal stayed right where she was, her face still a blank. She had not said one word. Georgie dozed in her lap.

  “If we’re going to discuss your career in detail, Penny,” I went on, “we have to go back farther than five years. All the way back to high school.” I glanced over at Cassandra, who was scribbling madly in a notepad. “Getting all of this, Cassandra?”

  “Gaaawd!”

  “Back to that summer before your senior year, when you were first recruited at the Galleria Mall by your soon-to-be partner in crime, Toy Schlom, known then as Toy Barbie.”

  Schlom whirled on his wife. “You’re mixed up in this?!”

  “No, Norb!” she cried, with such terror I wondered just what manner of body blows he administered to her in the privacy of their own tear-down home. “I’m not! I swear!”

  “She’s not, Norb,” I assured him. “She just happens to know Pennyroyal from their old playground days.”

  “That’s all, Norb,” Toy insisted, clutching at his hand with hers. “I knew nothing. Nothing.”

  “Until last night, that is,” I pointed out. “When you and I were talking in Norb’s study, Toy. Sure, you backed up Penny’s PG-rated version of her past. What are old friends for, right? But something strange happened to you when I bounced that rape story of hers off of you. Something went click. That’s when you knew, wasn’t it?”

  Toy lowered her eyes. “Yes,” she said quietly.

  “Knew what?” demanded Mr. Shelley.

  “That Pennyroyal was choreographing this whole thing,” I replied. “Pitting the two sides against each other. Raising the stakes higher and higher. All of it carefully calculated. All of it to her own advantage. You’re shrewd, Penny. Much shrewder than anyone has ever given you credit for. Except for Bunny. She never thought you were the girl you made yourself out to be, and she was right. You’re also a hell of an actress. Your whole life is one Oscar-caliber performance.” I glanced back at Toy. “Penny’s been pulling all of the strings. That’s what went click in your eyes last night, Toy. But I didn’t catch on. Not until later in the evening. It was something the lieutenant said.”

  “Me?” Lamp spoke up, puzzled. “What did I say?”

  “Las Vegas,” I replied. “You said Las Vegas.”

  He scratched his head. “So?”

  “So that triggered something in my mind. A slip that you made, Penny.”

  “What slip?” asked Schlom.

  Penny still hadn’t said one word. She just gazed at me steadily.

  “A small one, really. But you’ve been so careful all along, so very, very careful, that it stuck out all the more. You were telling me about when you and Matthew got married.”

  “I remember that,” said Cassandra. “I was there.”

  “You’ll recall she said the two of them ran off to Vegas like a couple of kids—kids who had never been to the place before.”

  “Yeah?” said Cassandra, doubtfully.

  “Matthew told it differently. He said Pennyroyal showed him all the sights. He said that she knew the town well.”

  “She did,” whispered Matthew, wide-eyed, as if we were all seated around a campfire telling scary stories.

  “Of course she did, Matthew,” I said. “Because she’d put in many long hours there under the name of Carla Pettibone, working girl. It was all bullshit, wasn’t it, Penny? About how you didn’t know what you were getting into when you posed nude for Shambazza. About how when you found out you pulled out. A nice, sweet story. And total bullshit. I sort of knew it. And you sort of knew I knew it. So you came to me in my bungalow with a new, improved version. About that one, horrifying little rape party with Toy and Norb. Another nice story. And more bullshit. Because the truth is you willingly became part of Shambazza’s stable from the day Toy first recruited you. He was your pimp for three years. You made good money, certainly more than most high school girls with part-time jobs. You got to wear nice clothes, eat in fancy restaurants. There were trips to Vegas, excursions on big yachts, parties. It was plenty glamorous—you could even convince yourself you were getting into show biz, just like you told me. All you had to do in exchange was—well, we all know what you had to do in exchange. But you did it. You performed. And you’re a good, hard-working little performer. They all told you you’d be a star someday. Only, they didn’t come through for you, did they? Not any of them. Toy, she hooked herself a big one. All you got was pregnant. That part of your story was really touching, by the way. All about your true-blue soccer player. What was his name? Craig? Touching. And more bullshit. You got pregnant on the job. You got yourself an abortion, and you got out. Amazing, really, how none of it left a mark on you. You’re as sweet and clean as the day you were born. On the outside anyway. You left no footprints in the sand either. This is a town with no memory. And you were smart enough to stay out of the porn movies and the magazines. Of course, there was the matter of those photographs Shambazza took of you, and wouldn’t give back. Those became a real problem later on. But I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I?”

  “Tell me if it’s true, Penny,” Matthew pleaded, his face torn with pain. “Is it? Tell me! I have to know!”

  She sat there holding Georgie. Finally, she shivered and broke her silence. “I did it for the contacts,” she began, her voice flat and detached. Mechanical, almost. “There’s nothing so unusual about that. Lots of young actresses willingly do it—and they don’t even get paid for it. At least I got paid. I wasn’t that stupid. But I was wrong. I thought it’d do my career some good. It didn’t. They just led me on and wiped the floor with me. So I quit. Carla Pettibone went bye-bye. My high school grades got me into SC. I’d heard that a lot of alumni networking went on there. I took some theater arts classes, and I became a cheerleader. Posed for school calendars, posters. Got my face on TV during games. I thought it might lead to some modeling assignments or TV spots. It seemed like it was worth a shot.”

  “And it was,” I said. “Because it was your turn to get lucky. Even luckier than Toy did. You happened to bear an amazing resemblance to one Mona Schaffer, a girl Matthew Wax had a crush on when he was a kid. Because of that he made you Debbie Dale. You walked in the door and the part was yours. You’re not stupid. You knew that the press has a way of finding out things about a star’s past. And let’s face it—Carla Pettibone, prostitute, and Debbie Dale, America’s sweetie pie, didn’t exactly fit together. So you went to Shelley Selden with a carefully sanitized version of the facts. You admitted you’d had an abortion when you were in high school, since they might be able to trace that. And you told him all about that mean man Shambazza who took those nude photographs of you. You had to tell him. You couldn’t take a chance on them surfacing. Shelley, being a careful man, approached Shambazza and bought the negatives from him, satisfied that he was nipping any potential problem in the bud. Only Shambazza wasn’t satisfied, was he?”

  “I was still one of his girls,” Pennyroyal confirmed bitterly. “That’s what he told me. I was his property and always would be. He threatened me. Said he’d slash my face with a razor if I didn’t pay up.”

  “You and Toy both, I imagine,” I suggested.

  Toy closed her eyes and nodded faintly. “He was free-basing. Horribly strung out. More of a nuisance than a menace, really. Norbert paid him so he’d stop pestering us. An
d he probably would have continued to pay him if someone hadn’t …” She trailed off, her violet eyes on Pennyroyal. There was horror in them.

  “The police dismissed it as a drug killing,” I said. “Only it wasn’t. It was you, Penny. You’d worked too hard to get this far. That man wasn’t going to threaten what lay ahead of you. No one was.”

  “It wasn’t like that at all!” Pennyroyal objected heatedly. This was the first rise I’d gotten out of her. “I was afraid of what he might do to me! You didn’t know him—he was mean!”

  I nodded. “So you went up to his studio and shot him dead—the no-more-fears formula. With that you became a star. And you became Mrs. Matthew Wax.” Matthew’s head was bowed. He looked very pale. “He was a shy, sweet, naive guy. And putty in your hands. You succeeded where so many women before you had failed. You swept the great Matthew Wax off of his feet. Now you had it all. Stardom. A husband who was rich and famous. And, soon, a baby with which to secure your lifelong financial claim. But that still wasn’t enough, was it? Not for you. So, after two years of living with the man, two years of pretending to be in love with him, you calmly announced that you wanted out. You felt stifled. You needed your independence. And with that you set out to turn your divorce into the richest, gaudiest breakup in show business history. You hired the most inflammatory high-stakes lawyer in town, Abel Zorch, who also happened to be tight with Norbert Schlom. Zorch assured you he could get you half of Bedford Falls as part of your settlement if you fought hard enough. You knew that Norb was in the process of putting together the sale to Murakami. You also knew he desperately wanted Bedford Falls as part of it. None of this was a secret. So you three cooked up a nice, cozy deal between friends—you would give Norb your half interest in Bedford Falls in exchange for the one thing you really wanted, the one thing every performer in the business wants. Clout. A major chunk of Panorama City Communications stock. Your own production company. Your own financing. Whatever you wanted. You’d be a player. And to hell with Bedford Falls. Norb, he’d figure out how to wrest the other half away from the family. That would be a walk in the park for him. You and he shook hands on it. Then you set out to turn up the heat. You wanted publicity, the more outrageous the better. You wanted to put the House of Wax on page one.”

  Mr. Shelley shook his head at this. “I don’t understand why. What was the point?”

  “Because what she didn’t want,” I replied, “was any kind of peaceful, amicable compromise. Or worst of all, a trial separation. That would blow the whole deal. She needed an outright war, and she made sure she got one.” I turned back to her. She was watching me with those innocent blue eyes of hers. “You took up with Trace Washburn right away, knowing it would set off a major scandal. And knowing that Big Steve would be willing.”

  Trace stirred and went into his heavy breathing thing. “He tries to please,” he acknowledged. “Be a sin for him to leave ’em itchy, wouldn’t it?”

  “You gave Abel Zorch tons of sleazy dirt about your marriage,” I continued, “which he promptly and gleefully leaked to the papers. Meanwhile, you set yourself up as the poor victim, the good little mother who had somehow gotten caught in the middle of this mean, vicious studio war. You made everyone think you were being used by Abel. Not so. You were in the driver’s seat all the way. You landed yourself a big-time book deal and hired the most hard-nosed ghost you could find, Cassandra, knowing that the prospect of a juicy, tell-all memoir would force Matthew into writing one of his own. Dueling memoirs. What more could a gal ask for? Lots of noise. Lots of ill will. Plus the chance to get down on paper the authorized, utterly fabricated story of your life, a lie that Cassandra has unwittingly been cranking out for you, night after night.”

  “I been boned,” cried Cassandra, aghast. “She’s been boning me all along!”

  “Welcome to the big time,” I said, patting her hand. “This is about where I came in. My first night in town you showed up at Spago, complaining to Abel that the press was treating you like a whore. You begged him to cool it. Strictly a performance for the benefit of anyone who happened to be listening, particularly me. You figured I could be of use to you, what with being privy to the family secrets and all, so you pulled me aside and unloaded on me. Told me there was no one you could trust. Told me everyone was trying to use you, hurt you. It was quite some performance, considering that it was you who was doing the using and the hurting. You who stole your own negatives out of this office in the middle of the night. You knew how to sneak onto the lot undetected. Johnny showed you how to.”

  “How did you know where the negatives were?” Mr. Shelley asked her.

  “I overheard you tell Sarge, years ago,” she replied coolly.

  “But how’d you get into the office?” Sarge wondered.

  “I still have keys to everything. Hard as it is to believe, I was actually a member of this family once.”

  Bunny muttered something under her breath.

  “What did you say, you old bitch?” sneered Pennyroyal.

  “I couldn’t repeat it in polite company,” Bunny huffed.

  “You’ve always hated me, haven’t you?” Pennyroyal charged. “Well, guess what? It’s mutual.”

  “I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear that,” Bunny fired back.

  “When you say, miss, that you possess keys to everything,” Shadow interjected, “would that be with the possible exception of Mr. Selden’s desk?”

  Pennyroyal admitted this was so. “I had to use a pry bar to get the drawer open.”

  Shadow nodded, satisfied.

  “Negatives in hand,” I continued, “you slipped out the way you came and dropped them off at the Enquirer in a plain envelope. Then you sat back and watched both sides yell at each other while you sobbed over the cruelty and injustice of it all. The Bedford Falls people figured it for a Zorch gambit. Zorch figured they did it to discredit you. Me, I didn’t think it made sense for either side to have done it. Neither side did—it was strictly you escalating the war. Zorch phoned me, wanting to discuss it. He was upset. This was, after all, just the sort of noisy public spectacle Murakami was pressuring him to avoid.”

  “I screamed bloody murder at him,” Schlom confirmed. “He swore to me he didn’t do it. You wanna know the truth, I wasn’t sure myself whether to believe the guy or not.”

  “Did he know you did it?” I asked Pennyroyal.

  “He knew he hadn’t,” she replied. “And he didn’t think Shelley Selden was the type. That left me. He gave me a bunch of shit about it. Called me names. Suggested I may have blown the whole Murakami deal. Then he told me he was going to advise Norbert to forget about Bedford Falls for the time being. Too hot to handle. He actually wanted to go back to Murakami and attempt to restructure the deal without it. He figured if they were patient Bedford Falls would eventually go under on its own anyway.” Shelley Selden reddened at this. “He thought Norbert would go along with the idea. Which was well and good for them. But what about me? Where did that leave me?”

  “Out in the cold,” I said. “You and Abel quarreled, and you came to the conclusion that it was time to dump him as your lawyer, like you told the lieutenant and me. Only you had a different reason for dumping him than you gave us, and a rather stronger definition of job termination in mind. You had already killed one man who threatened to stand in your way. Now it was time to kill another. Abel, he would always be a threat to you. He knew too much about the real you. He might try to use it against you in the future. Besides, his murder would be an excellent way of escalating the war even further. Certainly no shortage of people around who would want him dead. All you had to do was plan it right. Did you already have the gun?”

  “I’ve always kept a couple of guns around,” she replied. “Shambazza gave them to me.”

  “You ducked out on Cassandra at some point in the afternoon,” I suggested.

  “Yeah, yeah, shewa,” Cassandra confirmed. “She said she had to pick up a script.”

  “You went to
Zorch’s building in Century City and removed the battery from the remote control in his car. You’ve got a remote-controlled gate just like it at your house. Later that afternoon you called Abel’s office to set something up. He was in court, but he called you back from the courthouse and suggested you meet him at his house at, say, six?” She nodded. “You and Georgie got there early, five-thirty, so you could—”

  “Georgie was with you?” cried Matthew, greatly disturbed. “Georgie was there?”

  “You wanted to be good and ready to ambush him at the gate,” I went on. “There was, however, a small, unforeseen problem—Johnny. Sitting there across the street on his Fat Boy with his broken heart. I expect this threw you somewhat.”

  “I wasn’t sure what to do about him,” she acknowledged. “But I stayed calm. I rang the bell at the gate. Kenji came out and told me how pleasant it was to see me but that Abel wasn’t home. He didn’t invite me in. Apparently, Abel hadn’t told him I was expected, or he would have. I thanked him and then I—”

  “You improvised,” I suggested. “Turned Johnny’s presence there into a bonus. He’d already tried to kill his own mother. He’d even shot out the windows of Zorch’s Rolls just the night before. And if the police happened to ask you, you’d have to admit that, yes, you did see him lurking outside Zorch’s house just moments before the killing. Johnny was perfect for it. He was easy. And just think of the publicity: ‘Badger Hayes, All-American Killer.’ You waved good-bye to Kenji, then you approached Johnny. He panicked and took off like the paranoid little boy he was. This suited you. You didn’t want him around. You drove away. Kenji saw you leave. He saw both of you leave. What he didn’t see was that you turned around and came right back. No one saw you that time. Zorch showed up a few minutes later. He was even nice enough to bring his new boyfriend, Geoffrey with a G. That made Johnny look even better for it. You shot them both, Zorch once in the groin, figuring a sexual twist would place it right at Johnny’s feet. Then you took off. You used the less popular way out, Alto Cedro, in case anyone, such as me, was on the way up. Then you drove around in the hills like you said you did. You’ve already acknowledged you have no alibi for the time of the killings. No one to vouch for you except Georgie, and he’s not very talkative. Johnny looked ideal for it. A neighbor’s housekeeper even IDed him as someone who’d been hanging around outside Zorch’s house for days. It all worked to perfection. Except for one problem: Johnny managed to get himself an alibi. He streaked down the hill to the Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset and Doheny, went inside, and phoned Matthew. He was sitting there with Matthew when it happened. That let him off the hook. A shame, but no great loss for you. You still did what you intended to do—you got rid of Abel Zorch. And no one suspected you. You were America’s Sweetie Pie. How could anyone in their right mind believe you would do something so horrible? The whole thing looked more and more like a war over the future of Bedford Falls. You made sure of that the very next night. You sneaked onto the lot once again, this time dressed to kill in diamonds and black leather, and toting two cans of gasoline, which you splashed about over the false fronts of Homewood. Then you hightailed it over to my bungalow smelling of rosewater, which covered the aroma of gasoline. It took a while before the place caught fire. How did you manage that?”