by Laura Levine
“Well,” Kandi said, draining the last of her Tequila Sunrise, “I guess it’s time to get packing.”
We tossed most of her Muffy ’n Me scripts in the trash.
“No need to save them for posterity,” she sighed.
Then we wrapped her personal belongings in our chair towels and carried them out to her car, hobo style. There wasn’t much to carry. When we were through loading her trunk, I took what would surely be my last look around the Miracle lot.
“Good-bye, hookers!” I said, saluting the gang on Santa Monica Boulevard. “Good-bye rubber sandwiches at the commissary. Good-bye, Haunted House. Good-bye, roller coaster—”
And as I turned to salute the roller coaster, I saw someone standing at the ride’s control box. A man with silvery hair that glinted in the moonlight.
“Hey. Isn’t that Wells?”
“Yeah,” Kandi said. “I think it is.”
“Wait a minute. I’ll be right back.”
I hurried over to the roller coaster. Sure enough, it was Wells. He was bent over the control box, trying to pry it open with a crowbar.
“Wells! What’s going on?”
He looked up and smiled calmly, as if he always went around prying roller coaster controls open with a crowbar.
“Jaine, my dear. What a lovely surprise.”
“What are you doing?”
“Taking a roller coaster ride.”
His eyes sparkled with a slightly maniacal glint.
“Look, Wells,” I said. “This is really awkward, and I don’t know how to put it, but I was wondering…”
“Yes?”
“Did you…uh…happen to kill Quinn?”
Good heavens. I really had to work on my detective patter.
“As a matter of fact, my dear, I did.”
He grunted with the effort of maneuvering the crowbar. The control box was big, and the metal door was heavy.
“After all,” he said, “Quinn was responsible for Jessica’s death. I couldn’t let him get away with murder, could I?”
His brow glistened with sweat as he worked the crowbar back and forth. Somehow he’d tapped into a hidden reserve of strength. It was like one of those stories where a ninety-eight-pound mother lifts a truck to save her baby.
“It was really quite easy. I hid the vial of poison up my sleeve. No one ever suspected. Dumont the Great performing his finest feat of magic.”
He gave one final heave to the crowbar, and the metal door sprang open.
“Aha!” He grinned like a kid breaking into his piggy bank.
“And the klieg light,” I said. “Are you the one who tried to drop it on me?”
He blinked in surprise.
“Of course not, my dear. I’d never dream of hurting you. I have no idea who was responsible for that dastardly deed.”
And I believed him.
“And now,” he said, “if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to say adieu. Not au revoir, but adieu. I trust you know the difference.”
He trusted wrong. I had no idea what the heck he was trying to say. I don’t exactly run around with a French–English dictionary in my purse. But if I did, I would have known that au revoir means till next we meet, and adieu means Farewell Forever, Ta-ta Tootsie, The End, Fini, Don’t Bother to Write. Or words to that effect.
He pulled a lever and the ancient motor groaned to life.
“What are you doing?” I called out as he headed for the roller coaster.
“I’m going to kill myself, of course.”
“What?”
“I can’t let Stan go to jail for a murder he didn’t commit. I’ve got a suicide note right here,” he said, patting his shirt pocket. “A short but succinct document wherein I confess my sins.”
He looked up to the top of the roller coaster, which suddenly seemed awfully high to me.
“And in case my note gets…uh…messy, I left a copy on my bureau. Right next to my blood pressure medication. Make sure the police see it, will you, my dear?”
And with that he leaped into one of the carts.
Oh, God. He was going to jump. I’d once read a story in the paper about a teenager who’d tried to jump to his death from a ride at Disneyland. And now Wells was about to do the same thing.
The roller coaster began its slow ascent up the first steep hill.
And then I did something incredibly stupid. Something I surely wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t just polished off a Tequila Sunrise. The roller coaster had begun moving, but the last cart was still on level ground. Call me crazy, but I climbed on board. I just couldn’t let the poor old guy kill himself.
Wells was up front in the first cart, reciting what I could only assume was Shakespeare:
I have liv’d long enough. My way of life
Is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have.
“Don’t jump, Wells!” I shouted.
But he didn’t hear me over the din of the grinding cables.
Somehow I’d have to manage to get into Wells’s cart. Forcing myself not to look down, I climbed out from my cart and into the one in front of me. Which wasn’t easy with that damn wrap skirt of mine flapping in the breeze. I repeated this utterly terrifying process until I was at last in the cart behind him.
“Don’t do it, Wells!”
He turned around and saw me for the first time.
“Get off!” he shouted angrily. “Get off!”
“You mustn’t kill yourself, Wells. With a good attorney and a sympathetic jury, you could be free in a few years.”
He laughed bitterly.
“Free? Free to do what? Free to come home to an empty house night after night? Free to play small parts in pathetic sitcoms? Free to spend the rest of my life watching my body fall apart? No, my dear. It’s time for me to go. I’ve been planning this for a long time. No clichéd death with sleeping pills for me. I’m going to go out fighting, like my beloved Macbeth.”
“No!” I shouted, as I climbed into his cart and held down the safety bar. “I can’t let you jump.”
His eyes widened in surprise.
“Jump?” he said. “Who said anything about jumping? I cut one of the cables.”
“What?”
“As soon as we reach the top of the hill, we’re going to crash to our deaths.”
Oh, damn! NOW he tells me!
By now we were just a few feet away from the crest. I scrambled desperately to get out of the cart and grab hold of the wooden siding. But I couldn’t reach it.
“You’ll have to stand on the edge of the cart,” Wells said. “Don’t worry. I’ll hold you.”
And he did. In a final act of chivalry, he kept my legs braced while I reached out for the elusive wooden siding. Finally I was able to grab hold of it. Then he let go of my legs, and I managed to get a toehold to safety.
Wells Dumont may have killed Quinn Kirkland, but that night he saved my life.
“Adieu, my dear,” he said blowing me a kiss. “Don’t be sad. This is the way I want it.”
Then he sat back down in the cart, his spine straight, his eyes bright with anticipation, as if riding a horse to battle.
The roller coaster reached the crest.
“Lay on, Macduff!” he shouted, brandishing an invisible sword. “And damn’d be him that first cries ‘Hold, enough!’”
And then, before my eyes, Wells Dumont plummeted to his death.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
A word to the wise: Never hang from the side of a roller coaster in a denim wrap skirt.
By now a crowd had gathered down below, all of them looking straight up into the all-cotton crotch of my control-top pantyhose. Gad, how mortifying.
Kandi had called 911, and before long a rather attractive Marlboro Mannish fireman was climbing a ladder, telling me to stay calm.
Easy for him to say. He wasn’t clingin
g for dear life to a pile of termite-infested popsicle sticks.
Finally, he made it to the top of the ladder and managed to extricate me from my precarious perch. Step by step he guided me down the ladder, all the while treated to the aforementioned view of my crotch.
At last I was on terra firma, just in time to see the cops swarming around Wells’s body.
“I’m sorry I didn’t believe you, Jaine.” I turned to see Detective Incorvia, looking rather sheepish. “We found a suicide note in his pocket. He confessed to everything.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I had a hard time believing it myself. Wells was such a nice guy.”
“I hope you realize he had nothing to do with cutting the wire on the klieg light.”
“I know,” I said.
“Stan did that. I just got off the phone with him. I told him about Wells, and he recanted his confession. Except for the part about the klieg light. He swears, though, that he never meant to hit you. All he wanted was to get Muffy ’n Me cancelled. He thought if he could get Audrey to retire to Palm Springs, he could save their marriage.”
“But I don’t understand why he confessed to Quinn’s murder.”
“Apparently, he thought Audrey was the killer. He’d bought the rat poison—innocently enough—to kill rats. Then, after Quinn was murdered, he thought Audrey had used the stuff to knock off Quinn. He’d overheard her threatening to get rid of him, and he was afraid she’d lived up to her threat. Which is why he foolishly threw the box of poison into the dumpster with his prints all over it.”
“So he confessed to protect her.”
“The things we do for love, huh?”
“Yeah,” I sighed, reminding myself to pick up some crabmeat for Prozac on my way home. “The things we do for love.”
“Well, it’s been nice working with you, Jaine.”
We shook hands good-bye, and then he walked back to where poor Wells’s body was being loaded in to the coroner’s truck.
“Excuse me, miss.”
It was the Marlboro Man fireman, holding a clipboard. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to need a few facts for my report.”
I couldn’t help noticing his eyes, which were a beautiful hazel with flecks of brown, like chocolate jimmies on pistachio ice cream.
“Your name?”
“Jaine. Jaine Austen.”
“No kidding!” His eyes widened with surprise.
“I know, I know. You love my books.”
“Actually,” he said, “I was just going to call you.”
“You were?”
“Yeah. Your mom gave me your phone number. Didn’t she tell you?”
My eyes shot to his name tag.
“I’m Ernie,” he grinned. “Ernie Lindstrom.”
Epilogue
Thanks to the machinations of his high-powered attorney, Stan wound up serving less than a year in jail. During which time he lost twenty pounds and gave up booze. By the time he got out of jail, Audrey had started divorce proceedings, but Stan didn’t mind. Three months after his release, he married his parole officer.
Audrey went on to produce a string of forgettable sitcoms. Lance’s wasn’t one of them. In fact, after the night of the taping, he never heard from her again.
After Muffy folded, Vanessa played the corpse in a teen slasher movie, and Zach Levy-Taylor got himself a gig on a long-running soap opera. He plays a guy named Brick, a moniker which I think suits his acting talents to a T.
Dale was unemployed for a while, but finally landed himself a gig doing infomercials for the Turbo Steamer. He’s now my father’s favorite TV star.
Kandi is back writing for the cockroach and, incidentally, dating a guy she met in Dr. Mellman’s waiting room.
And Bianca is still picking up Audrey’s dry cleaning.
As for me, I’ve resumed my old life, writing resumes and brochures. Perhaps you’ve read my latest: Only YOU Can Prevent Clogged Toilets! I still teach my memoir-writing class at the Shalom Retirement Home. Mr. Goldman is as insufferable as ever, bragging that he knew all along “whodunit.” And, as galling as it is to admit, he did. He’d always said the murderer was Wells.
I dated Ernie Lindstrom for a while. After a few months he decided he wanted to get married. Unfortunately, not to me, but to a nymphette he met while putting out a fire at a Swedish massage parlor.
Sometimes, at the end of the day, when I’m sitting in my living room sipping a chardonnay and enjoying the view of my neighbor’s azalea bush, I think about what my life would have been like as a high-paid sitcom writer, with a fancy car and a Malibu beach house and a closetful of Joan & David shoes. But then I remember what life was like at Miracle Studios—the monumental egos, the petty jealousies, and those godawful rubber sandwiches. And I realize that there’s no way I’d ever go back to all that Hollywood crap.
Unless, of course, somebody offered me a job.
PS. I almost forgot. Detective Incorvia sold Kung Fu Cop to Dreamworks for $3.5 million.
Please turn the page for an exciting sneak peek of
Laura Levine’s next Jaine Austen mystery
KILLER BLONDE
coming next month in hardover!
Prologue
My name is Jaine, and I’m a bathaholic.
Yes, it’s true. I like nothing better than to tear off my clothes in the middle of the afternoon and leap into a hot bubble bath. So it’s lucky I’m a freelance writer. While other working stiffs are trapped in offices, chained to their computers, I can hop into the tub any time I please.
Which is what I was doing the day SueEllen Kingsley first called me. I’d just finished writing a slogan for a new client, Tip Top Dry Cleaners (We’ll clean for you. We’ll press for you. We’ll even dye for you.), and I was relaxing in a marvelous haze of strawberry-scented bubbles. The mirrors were fogged over. The radio, if I remember correctly, was playing a soulful Diana Krall love song. And my cat Prozac was perched on top of the toilet tank, licking her privates, visions of fish guts dancing in her head.
It was one of those blissful moments I often experience after I’ve finished a writing assignment, basking in the glow of a job well done (or done, anyway), until it dawns on me that now that the assignment is over, I’m out of work again.
I was still in the bask-in-the-glow stage when the phone rang. I let the machine get it.
“Ms. Austen.” A syrupy, southern-accented voice drifted out from the machine. “SueEllen Kingsley here. I saw your ad in the yellow pages—”
Yippee! A prospective client!
“And I’m calling because I need a ghostwriter to help me write a book.”
At the sound of the word “ghostwriter,” my enthusiasm came to a screeching halt. In my experience, people who are looking for ghostwriters often fall into the “mentally unstable” category. These are people who want to tell the world about how they were abducted to the planet Clorox and forced to have sex with spatulas. Or people who believe that they’re the love child of Wayne Newton and Golda Meir.
SueEllen Kingsley left her number on my machine. For a minute I considered not returning the call. But then I remembered a few pesky facts of life, like my rent and my Visa bill and my impossible-to-kick Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey habit.
Reluctantly, I hauled myself out of the tub and into a worn chenille bathrobe. Then I shuffled over to the phone and dialed.
If I’d known what I was getting into, I would’ve stayed up to my eyeballs in soapsuds.
Chapter One
SueEllen Kingsley answered the phone, her voice as gooey as melted Velveeta. “Ms. Austen,” she oozed, “can you hustle your fanny over to my house in an hour?”
I assured her I was an expert at fanny-hustling, and she gave me the directions to her house. Which turned out to be more like a castle. A vintage Spanish estate nestled in one of Beverly’s niftiest Hills, the house was a showstopper. Its arches and balustrades and red tile roof glistened in the midafternoon sun. The whole thing was so Spanish manor-ish, I al
most expected to see Zorro leap onto one of the many balconies with a rose in his teeth. But there was no sign of Zorro. The only Hispanic in sight was a gardener pruning the bougainvillea.
I drove up a circular driveway and parked my humble Corolla next to a gleaming Bentley. Then I checked my teeth in my rear view mirror for any stray pieces of lettuce left over from the Jumbo Jack I’d picked up on my way over. Satisfied that all was clear on the dental front, I gave myself a quick blast of Binaca and tugged a few unruly curls back into my ponytail.
Finally, plucking a stray french fry from my lap, I got out of the Corolla and looked around. What a palace. The kind of place God would build if He had money.
I was beginning to regret my decision to wear my usual work outfit of jeans and a blazer. A place like this called for something a lot fancier. Like the British crown jewels and a blazer.
Why the heck was a woman with SueEllen’s money calling a writer from the Yellow Pages? I’d checked her out on Google before I left my apartment, and found her name scattered on the society pages of the Los Angeles Times. SueEllen was apparently a partygiver and fund-raiser par excellence. Surely she had access to scads of well-known writers. So why, I asked myself again, had she called anonymous old me? Oh, well. Who cared why she called? Just as long as her check didn’t bounce. And from the looks of the place, I was sure it wouldn’t.
I headed up the front path, and rang the bell.
Now I don’t know if they have a doorbell at Versailles, but if they do, I’ll bet it sounds just like the Kingsleys’. A series of mellifluous bongs resonated from inside the house. Seconds later the door was opened by a timid Hispanic maid holding a bottle of Windex.
“Hi,” I smiled. “I’m Jaine Austen. I have an appointment with Mrs. Kingsley.”
“Si,” she said, eyes lowered, clutching her Windex to her chest. She spoke softly, in a heavily accented voice. “Mrs. Kinglsey’s having her massage. She wants you to wait in the living room.”