Dim Sum Dead

by Jerrilyn Farmer

  Birds sang brightly as the late-afternoon sun moved through the branches above, casting slowly shifting shadows over the paperwork and us and onto the old patio tiles beneath our feet. A leaf, curled and golden, fell onto the blueprint Wesley was studying, and he smoothed it away.

  “So you won’t do anything dangerous, right?” he asked me.

  “No, of course not. I’m not stupid. And anyway, if it turns out that Quita’s fall was an accident, there is no danger, right?”

  “Right.” Wes looked at me with concern. “But you don’t think it was an accident.”

  “You know, I wish I did.”

  Wes leaned over and patted the top of my head.

  “I’d feel better,” I said, “if I could be sure.”

  “Of course you would.” He was never enthusiastic about my little investigations, but I had faced a few problems in the past and gotten through them all right.

  “This is going to be useful.” I touched the edge of Dickey McBride’s antique rosewood mah-jongg case. It was back with us since the Santa Monica police had found too many smudged fingerprints on it and none they could identify. They hadn’t seemed surprised. In all, their manner had not encouraged our expectation, either, that they might continue pursuing this crime with anything mimicking vigilance.

  “So how are you going to get in touch with Catherine Hill?” Wes asked. “I’m assuming she’s not in the phone book.”

  I had this plan. It seemed to me that I would have more success talking to Catherine Hill, privately, than the police ever would if they tried to question her officially. And that was assuming the cops were interested in Catherine Hill. Which they weren’t.

  But first, I had to figure out how to reach her. I knew she had a big house in Bel Air, but short of going out to Westwood and buying a Map to the Stars’ Homes from one of those boys on a street corner, I was stumped as how to talk to her.

  “Remember Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon?” Wes asked, starting to erase another line on his plan.

  “The game? Of course.”

  Several years ago, a bunch of college boys with too much time on their hands and a bottle of Southern Comfort came up with the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. The game is a rather inspired, if loony joke based on the John Guare play and movie Six Degrees of Separation, which suggests that we are all connected by six or fewer stages of acquaintance.

  In other words, if I were in line at my neighborhood Mayfair market and I ran into my hairstylist friend, Germaine, and I invited her to see an Orson Welles film retrospective, we’d hardly be through checkout before she mentioned that she does Loni Anderson’s hair, and that Loni was in Munchie Strikes Back in 1994 with Dom DeLuise, and did I know that Dom was in The History of the World: Part I with Orson Welles in 1981, so did I think she should call and invite Loni to come with?

  In that case, I believe it was only four degrees of separation between me and the illustrious Orson Welles, but you get the general idea. Those wacky and inventive college boys must have noticed how nicely Kevin Bacon could substitute for “Separation” in the meter of the phrase. It seems it was all they needed to hypothesize that Kevin might also be the center of the universe, at least when it comes to connecting actors. What makes their Kevin Bacon joke actually work as a game is the fact that Bacon has been in a significant number of ensemble films, from Diner to Apollo 13. And if you use Bacon as an end point, you can link him in six degrees or less to almost any other performer.

  And the whole thing caught on like gangbusters. For those who don’t have the entire filmography of the Western World memorized, the Internet comes to the rescue. It now has several websites that help you make the proper links. For instance, by consulting the Oracle of Bacon website, which is run by the University of Virginia of all exalted places, you’d learn that Julia Louis-Dreyfus of TV’s Seinfeld takes all six steps to make a chain. She was in Christmas Vacation with Randy Quaid, who was in Major League II with Tom Berenger, who was in Shattered with Greta Scacchi, who was in Presumed Innocent with Harrison Ford, who was in Raiders of the Lost Ark with Karen Allen, who was in Animal House with Kevin Bacon.

  A very amusing game, you might be saying to yourself. But what in heaven’s name does all this have to do with us? Well. As it turns out…we know Kevin Bacon. And if we were lucky, we could just use the Oracle of Bacon to quickly discover how closely we could get a link between Kevin Bacon and Catherine Hill. Then all I’d have to do is trace backwards.

  “Should I try it?” Wes asked, tapping his keyboard.

  “Of course. Everybody cut footloose,” I said.

  Wesley was already on it. He’d entered Catherine’s name into the screen, and a few seconds later he smiled.

  “It’s a good one. Catherine Hill was in Rhapsody in 1954 with Vittorio Gassman and Vittorio Gassman was in Sleepers in 1996 with Kevin Bacon.”

  “So,” I said, pulling out my cell phone, “all I have to do is ask Kevin to call Gassman and explain I need to talk to Catherine Hill.”

  “Right,” Wes said. “However, if Vittorio Gassman is still alive and if he lives anywhere we can reach him, we have to wonder if the phone number he may have for Catherine Hill is still current after almost fifty years.”

  “True.” I began to rethink. I would hate to bother a celebrity client just to run into an eventual dead end anyway. “Besides, I need some up-to-the-minute scoopage on Ms. Hill. This won’t do.”

  “Wow,” Wes said, looking back at his computer screen.

  “What?”

  “Did you know Kevin Bacon is only two links away from Bob Barker?” He looked up from his screen. “Sorry, Mad. I got carried away.”

  I knew he was dying to tell me. “Go on.”

  “Bob Barker was in Happy Gilmore in 1996 with Andrew Johnston who…”

  A male voice with a Spanish accent interrupted us. “Mr. Wesley?”

  It was one of the men who were working on the house. Wesley put down the laptop and went over to talk to him. After a few seconds, Wes turned to me. “We’ve got visitors. I’ll go see who it is.”

  Who had come to call? Maybe Honnett, I thought, and felt my pulse pick up with a jolt. Maybe he’d tracked me down and was coming with some big, important news. It was unlikely, but still…

  Maybe Arlo, I thought, jolting in another direction. Ah, what about that? It had been a couple of days since I’d walked out on him at the restaurant. It was strange he hadn’t called. But maybe he’d decided to stop by and see me in person. That was stressful.

  By the time Wesley came back outside, I’d had a little too much time left on my own. In those few minutes, I’d managed to run through several disturbing possibilities about who might be coming to call. I was, by that time, staring at the open French doors with more intensity than I normally would have. And, still, I had not expected to see the group he ushered forth—the regulars from the Sweet and Sour Club.

  Buster Dubin, dressed in baggy gray shorts and an oversize Hawaiian shirt, looked an awful lot like his regular fun-loving self, just perhaps a shade more subdued. Trey and Verushka were with him. They lumbered over the shaggy grass, calling out “hellos” and eventually settling, at Wesley’s urging in the chairs around the patio table.

  I’d brought over a pitcher of lemonade and supplies from my house and started pouring glasses of fresh-squeezed lemonade all around. I can’t help it. Really.

  “You know about what happened to Quita, right?” Buster asked after thanking me for the drink.

  “It’s horrible,” Verushka said. “It’s hard to believe, isn’t it? She’s dead.”

  “I will miss her,” Trey said solemnly. The wind gently ruffled his pale blond hair.

  “We all will,” Buster said. “She was a lousy mah-jongg player, but she was a sweet girl.”

  “Say,” I said, “do any of you remember how she did that night? Did she win or lose a lot?”

  No one spoke for a minute. “She stayed pretty even,” Trey said. “Didn’t she?” He turned to Verush
ka.

  “I think she was down, but then she had a megalucky hand at the end,” she confirmed.

  “Really,” Buster said, “for Quita that was a winning night.”

  Verushka sent Buster a questioning look, but didn’t say anything.

  “Do you guys have any reason to think Quita’s death might not have been an accident?” I asked.

  Wesley looked at me. Dead buffalo times made him edgy as a cat. In fact, he looked like he would rather be cleaning out cesspools.

  “Why?” Verushka asked quickly. “Is that what the police think?”

  I shrugged. “She just seemed so disturbed,” I said. “Didn’t any of you notice?”

  “She seemed pretty wasted to me,” Verushka said, looking over at Buster. “Quita was Buster’s girlfriend, and we loved her, of course—but she was hard to really get to know.”

  “How did you meet her?” I asked Buster.

  “Trey brought her over to the Sweet and Sour Club,” Buster answered.

  “Right,” Trey said, sipping his lemonade. “She played MJ.”

  Buster looked over at me. “I wonder if I could talk to you? I called your office, and Holly said you were with Wes. We took a chance we’d find you here.”

  “We’re like his escort service,” Verushka said, clowning. “We’re all attached at the hip, and my hip is, like, my biggest part.” She laughed loudly.

  “Can I have a moment with you, Madeline?” Buster asked.

  We took the flagstone path through the rose garden and entered the French doors into the large empty living room. From another room we could hear the sound of a radio tuned to a Spanish language station. The plasterers had finished in this room and it smelled like damp cement. We settled ourselves on the long wooden step that leads up from the sunken living room into the entry hall.

  “What can I do for you, Buster?” I’d selected a spot on the dusty hardwood about eighteen inches away from him, farther than I would normally have chosen to be seated from a friend. He was the same man with whom I’d goofed around two nights before. And yet it was different now. The shocking death of Quita McBride at Buster’s house had rubbed off on him, raising uncomfortable questions. I was glad the crew was noisily at work in the room next door.

  “I need a favor,” Buster said.

  I looked at him carefully.

  “Your fortune-teller was right,” he said, smiling. “Mrs. Chen is hot. I got that gig I wanted. The music video.”

  “Warp?” I remembered the rock group Quita had mentioned at the party.

  “Right. Yes. The shoot is in Europe.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks. Yeah. Copenhagen and then France. It could be a blast. Trey never talks about his chicks, but I want him to come with and bring his girl. And I may take a babe along. Have you ever been to Denmark, Madeline?”

  It wasn’t taking Buster long to jump back into his fun, fun life. I chuckled at the bad taste of it all. Sometimes gallows humor is all that’s left.

  A workman stepped lightly past us on the step, carrying a bucket of white goo. We waited until he passed.

  “Look, Mad, I heard that you are friends with a homicide detective.”

  Remember that cynical side of me that I had been trying to give a proper burial? Imagine it rising from the psyche graveyard. “Who told you that?”

  “Well, word gets out. Whitley Heights is like St. Mary Knee.”

  “St. Mary Mead,” I corrected. Holly, I thought to myself. She told everything to everyone.

  “I have to leave the country, Mad. For this gig. It’s only two weeks, and I’m coming back to edit here in Burbank. So I need this cop with a hair up his butt to agree to let me leave.”

  “If you are under suspicion, Buster, nothing I say would help. If anything, it could hurt.”

  “Let’s play truth or dare, Maddie.” Buster gave me a sly grin.

  “I know that game,” I said, amused. “All it can do is lead to trouble, right? Why would anyone play that?”

  “I’m not trying to flee from justice. I’m directing a big shoot in Europe. Well, let’s say I dare you to talk to your cop friend for me.”

  “Okay,” I said, “and if I accept your dare, what do I get?”

  “You get the truth. Ask me any question you want to.”

  I looked at Buster Dubin, his jet-black hair and his permanent five-o’clock shadow and his dancing eyes.

  He said, “You know you want to ask me something.”

  My heart began pounding in an odd way. I became aware of the sound. I had to know. “Okay. I’ll talk to Honnett.”

  “Excellent.” Buster smiled up at me and edged a little closer on the step. “So now it’s your turn. What do you want to know? And remember, I am a fairly eligible bachelor, I always win at MJ, and I have made a fortune on the stock market.”

  So Buster expected me to ask him advice? I was afraid he was in for a shock. I wanted the truth about something a lot more important to me than his sex life, or how many tech shares he was holding.

  “Truth,” I said, looking him in the eyes. “What really happened after I left your house?”

  “After you left?” He stared at me.

  “This is your game,” I said.

  “Quita and I had a fight.”

  Oh, man.

  Buster told me more. “Quita was a good kid, really. But, you know, she could be demanding as hell, and lately she was getting all weird. You know, she had never seemed happy. It was like she always had some other thing on her mind. And over the past week, Quita had been getting more and more spooky. I told her she didn’t have to leave right away. She could take as long as she needed to move her things.”

  “So you broke up with her that night?”

  “Look, it’s not like I was breaking her heart, okay? I’m pretty sure she was seeing someone else. I get a bad rap for going through a lot of very beautiful women, but I’m not really so difficult to please. A lot of times the chick leaves me.”

  Yeah, I thought. Right.

  “Now look at you, there,” he said, smiling. “You don’t believe me. And that is terribly sweet. It is. But I guess I just wasn’t famous enough or pretty enough to keep Quita’s attention. I am just a humble guy who directs TV ads. I wasn’t what she wanted as a steady follow-up to Mr. Movie Star Man.”

  “Maybe she was really in love with Dickey McBride, then,” I said.

  “She was fond of the old dude. She was impressed as hell to be Mrs. Big Name Star. You know that type. The fame game. She was into it. No, what you’re saying makes sense. I think she liked Dickey okay.”

  I thought it over while a radio in the other room played a slow, sad Spanish song. “Did she ever tell you how he died?’

  “She said he had a heart attack one night,” Buster said. “She was there, if you know what I mean.”

  “That’s the rumor I had heard, too.” I nibbled my thumb. “So tell me this, Buster. When you were breaking up with Quita, what time was it?”

  “Just after you all left the house. It must have been about one o’clock. Quita said she couldn’t stay with me,” he said.

  I looked over at him in his bright green-and-aqua Hawaiian shirt and nodded. “Tell me the rest of it. After you and Quita argued that night, what then?”

  “She left. She took off. It was like one-thirty or two.”

  “But you didn’t go straight to sleep, right?” I asked.

  “Not right away. I worked on the storyboards for the new video, then I played my N64 for a while. That was it. I swear. I never saw Quita again.”

  “So,” Buster said, making a lame joke, “I guess your cop friend won’t let me leave the country now, anyway,” Buster said. “You have to tell him all this, don’t you?”

  I nodded. “See? I told you this was a ridiculous game.”

  He laughed. “If Quita slipped out there, it wasn’t my fault. I figured all this will sound a lot better coming from you. Sorry to get you mixed up in the middle.”

>   He had a conscience at least. He wanted to get out from under his little lie.

  But I had a lot more questions to ask a lot more people. And when I got the answers, it might just clear up what happened to Quita that night.

  “I’ll take your message to my cop friend,” I said. “He’ll come back and terrorize you, though.”

  “That’s cool. And maybe when it’s all over, I can take you to Copenhagen.”

  Chapter 18

  The staccato on/off hissing of automatic sprinklers sounded like some hopped-up percussionist was laying down a light rhythm track for the dazzlingly bright day in the community of Bel Air. You’ll find this uppest-of-upscale L.A. neighborhoods is home to an older generation of money, that which is most often found in the pocketbooks of old movie stars, businessmen, and former Republican presidents. Bel Air folk have special needs. They crave a private driveway upon which to park the Rolls, lots of leafy trees under which to shade the latest face-lift, and thousands of square feet in which to display their highly insured collections.

  This concentration of ultraplush homes creates a booming industry of day workers. Mansion upon mansion require a never-ending supply of workers to wash, polish, mow, trim, add chlorine, buff, fertilize, launder, wax, vacuum, sweep, blow-dry, press, cook, deliver, replant, clean, paint, fold, and dust.

  As it turned out, getting Catherine Hill’s address was not a big trick. I called a caterer friend whose company does weddings for the old movie crowd and he had it on an invitation Rolodex. He was rather a dear about it. The inside information I had really been hoping for was a little harder to acquire. But that turned up, too, in the end.

  Alba, the lovely woman from El Salvador who comes to my house three days a week is a godsend in more ways than her obvious skill with the Dustbuster. I remembered her cousin Maria worked for a family in Bel Air on Bellagio Road. So that’s where we started and Alba got on the phone.

  Her cousin Maria works with Rosa from Guatemala, and it turned out that Rosa’s sister-in-law Lillian was the nanny for Catherine Hill’s grandchildren. Imagine that. Lillian had the phone number for Sonia who worked days for Miss Catherine Hill. In L.A., we can play the Six Degrees game both upstairs and downstairs.