Mexico Is Forever

by Benjamin M. Schutz

“It was called Kennel Queen. Do I have to say more? There are a few sure-fire no-nos, even here. You can’t use children and you cannot cross species lines. Nobody here would produce something like that. Rumor had it that it was made in Mexico. The star was a girl working here when it broke. That was the end of her career.”

  “Why?”

  “Nobody trusted her. She ran around denying that she’d made the tape. Said she had no idea how it got done. Christ, there were pictures of her on the box. I saw one of the flyers for it. She was the draw. That’s how they stung so many people. If I told you I had nude photos of my mother and nude photos of Michelle Pfeiffer, what do you think would sell better? She was on the rise, had her own fan club. Then she went and did something stupid like that. Nobody could take the chance that she was part of the sting in any way. She got shut out fast.”

  “What’s her name? I have to talk to her.”

  “Good luck. She’s dead.”

  “Dead! What do you mean, dead?”

  “Suicide. Put a gun to her head, boom, made a wall pizza.”

  “Why?”

  “Once you get into the business, you’re an outlaw. Straights don’t want to have anything to do with you. If you’re an outlaw and the rest of the outlaws turn on you and shun you, where do you go? What’s left?”

  “What was her name anyway?”

  “She performed as Peaches Melba, but her obituary said she was Martha Tupperman.”

  “How about friends? Who would she have confided in? Who saw her last before she died?”

  “Maybe her boyfriend, but he dumped her after he found out about the tape. I think he’s the one who found her body. You might try one of the other girls, Keli Cummings. She was pretty close to Peaches until the end.”

  “What’s her number?”

  Jack read it to me.

  “Thanks.”

  “What’s this all about, Leo?”

  “I don’t know yet, but maybe her death wasn’t suicide. Maybe it was murder. Maybe the D.A. didn’t come into possession of that tape, maybe they made it.”

  Jack was silent, then he said somberly, “Prove it if you can, Leo. If you’re right, it doesn’t matter who pulled the trigger. I’d call it murder. I’m sure they figured what’s one slut more or less in the world. I’ll check my machine regularly, Leo. If I can help, just holler.”

  “Thanks, Jack.”

  I hung up the phone and turned to face Darla.

  “I don’t like what I heard just now. You said that ‘d’ word a lot,” she said.

  “‘D’ word?”

  “Yeah. ‘D’ like dead. Somebody else is dead? Who?”

  “Another performer. Name of Peaches Melba. You know her?”

  “Yeah, nice but dumb as a box of rocks. What happened?”

  I ran through Jack’s information with her. When I finished she was shaking her head and her lips were bloodless. She spoke more to herself than me.

  “That’s what they had worked out for me. It could have been me too. I just knew it was wrong. There was no way I was going to go to Mexico with them. She’d have gone though. Bought whatever story they told her. She wasn’t real bright. Gone right with them.” She shuddered. “Jesus, it gives me the creeps, just thinking about it. Like reading your own obituary.”

  Darla looked at me. “Do you think she committed suicide?”

  “I don’t know if it matters. I can see someone feeling that alone, that desperate, deciding to kill themselves. Mostly I’m impressed with what a cold scheme it is. Set up the sting, use her to make the tape. Then discard her like the piece of trash you think she is. Who would she have gone to? The cops? She knew it was their sting, they wouldn’t help her. Go to her friends in the business? They were afraid of her. She was tainted. Her family? Try to explain that she didn’t do this. No. I can see her watching all the doors slam in her face and deciding that’s enough, she wants out. I want to prove who it was that shoved her into that corner and closed all the doors.

  “Maybe she was murdered. Maybe she could prove something and had to be silenced, but I don’t think so. They sure didn’t give you a lot of leads when they contacted you, and you were more suspicious than she was. I doubt that she had much in the way of evidence.

  “We have to find a way to tie Melrose to this girl. That puts the D.A.’s office in the position not only of using the tape in the sting, but of making it for the sting.

  “I need to go over everything with you in as much detail as possible. First, I want you to call Keli Cummings, see if she’ll talk to you and me. Tell her we think that her friend was murdered and we need her help.”

  I pushed the number over to Darla, who dialed it and listened to it ring. I sat next to her to listen in.

  “Hello,” a sleep-thickened voice mumbled.

  “Hey, Keli, it’s Fantasia. What do you say?”

  “No shit. Really. Where ya been? We all figured some old lady put you up in a sugar shack. You didn’t find God, did you?”

  “Not quite. Listen, I’m in some trouble. Bad trouble, and I need your help.”

  “Sure, what can I do?”

  “You were friends with Peaches, right?”

  “Yeah, what a bummer.”

  “I’ve got a friend here, he’s helping me. He wants to ask you some things about her. Tell him whatever you know. Okay? Trust me, he’s okay. If you’re worried, talk to Jack Meehof. He’s friends with this guy.”

  “Okay. I trust you. Put him on.” Darla handed me the phone and leaned over to listen in.

  “Hello, my name is Leo Haggerty. I understand that Peaches talked to you about the tape she was supposedly in, the one in the sting operation. Is that right?”

  “Yeah. She never did that tape. Peaches would never do shit like that. No way.”

  “What did she do when she found out about it? Who did she talk to?”

  “She was really pissed off when she saw one of the flyers for it. I remember she talked to some guy in vice. They told her it was part of a bust out in the valley. She said she never did it and she wanted to sue whoever it was that said she did. The cops told her if she could find the people who made it and she could prove that she didn’t do it, she could sue them or press charges. But if she couldn’t, she better keep quiet because she could be busted too, for doing the deed. They said the D.A. only wanted the guys who made it and who bought it. They weren’t interested in her unless she made a big deal about it.”

  “When she died, did you have any doubts about it being suicide?”

  “No. Not really. She was really depressed. She couldn’t work anywhere. Her boyfriend dumped her. Nobody would talk to her. Well, that’s not true. Mostly nobody. Even if people weren’t sure, nobody wanted to take any chances that she was a stoolie. So she was all alone. Her family had disowned her when they found out about what she did for a living. She was in a corner. She just kept saying she didn’t do it, but no one believed her. She couldn’t prove it and no one would help her. She was doing a lot of drugs and booze when I saw her last. Staggering around crying ‘What am I gonna do? I got nowhere to go to.’ That’s all she kept saying, over and over. I didn’t know what to say to her. I couldn’t see a way out either. Next day she got an eviction notice. They were gonna throw her out of her apartment by Friday. She did it that night. She was all curled up on the floor in a corner of the apartment, with nothing but a blanket and the gun.”

  “Before all this happened, did she get any strange offers of work? Anything with location shots?”

  “It’s funny you mention that. I think that was the happiest I ever saw her. She’d just gotten contacted by this guy, said they were gonna shoot a big-budget film down in Mexico. Monterrey, I think. Some legend from the seventies, Henry something, was gonna shoot his first film in like fifteen years. She was flipped out. But it never came off. That was like the end for her. Nothing but bad luck after that. Three months later she was dead.”

  “What do you mean, never came off?” I thought my voice would c
rack. All my hunches carefully piled on top of each other demanded that Peaches had gone to Mexico. If she didn’t then nothing made any sense at all. I felt like I’d just reached the bottom of the tunnel, scraped away the last dirt, and read the words THIS SIDE UP.

  “I mean, there was no film. She went down to Mexico but like nothing happened. They stayed a day or so. Shot some setups and that was it. The producer said his backers got cold feet and there wasn’t any money. The end.”

  “This producer, did you ever meet him?”

  “No. Peaches said it was all hush-hush. She thought the backers were some Hollywood people who got off on the sex but didn’t want to get too close to it. Like I said, she was real excited. Big budget, big director, some other old-timers were gonna come back for it. She was gonna be part of history. The film of the year. No question.”

  Melrose learned fast. He’d got his story right this time.

  “She say anything at all about what happened down there?”

  “Yeah, she called me one time while she was down there. I was at her place looking after her plants. She asked me to do that and take care of her cat. No way the cat. I hate those things. So I said I’d do it if she put it in the kennel. Anyway she called me late one night. She’d just gotten in and things weren’t right. She was a little scared and wanted to talk, ask me what I thought.”

  “What scared her?”

  “Well, nobody was acting like they had all this money to spend. She said the producer went batshit on her at the airport. You know, to fly into Mexico you need a tourist card, a return ticket, a passport. Well, he’d bought her ticket under the wrong name.”

  “You’re kidding me? He thought her name was Peaches Melba.”

  “No, that’s her stage name. Her street name was Aimee Dalton.”

  “Street name?”

  “Yeah, you need a buffer between your work and the rest of your life. You can’t be introduced to straights as Peaches Melba. But you don’t use your real name either. It keeps those two parts of your life separate. Gives you a way to live in between them.

  “Anyway, that’s how he bought her the ticket. But that’s not the name on her passport. It’s Martha Tupperman. So he had to race back to the counter and get her another ticket right away ’cause the plane was boarding. She said he was pissed about that the whole way down.

  “Then they go out to this house to stay—”

  “Where were they? Did she say?” I interjected.

  “Yeah, Monterrey. Anyway she says the place is a dump. No way they’re gonna get good exteriors for this fabulous film. She said she’d seen more romantic settings on the docks in Long Beach. There was nobody else around too. Just her, the producer, and his tech. Everybody else was Mexican. You know, ‘no spicka de Englese’ type. Anyway, she was starting to get scared. She wanted somebody to know where she was, so she waited until everyone was asleep, got out of her room, and called me. She gave me the number. I told her I’d call her the next day and if she wasn’t okay, I’d call the cops.

  “She felt better and that was that. Next day she called, said they’d shot some setups, real nothings with some Mexican guy. No sex. Nothing. She didn’t even get her full day rate. The producer pulled the plug. Said there wasn’t any money. She said that’s it, she’s coming home. She flew back that night.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to have that phone number written down somewhere?”

  “Gimme a break, do I sound like Ma Bell?”

  “Hey, I had to ask. You remember the dates that she was gone?”

  “Christ, man. It was six months ago. Something like that I don’t remember.”

  “How about the kennel where the cat went?”

  “That I remember. I went down with Peaches the morning she left. I hated that animal. We took her to the Pet-A-Way Motel.”

  “You remember where?”

  “The one over in West Hollywood.”

  “She didn’t call collect, did she?” One last grasp.

  “I don’t remember, I don’t think so. Man, I try to keep my head clear of shit like that. Life’s too short.”

  “Thanks. You’ve been a real help. If we have to, can we call you again?”

  “Yeah, I guess so. Let me talk to Fantasia.” I gave her the phone, walked over to the desk, got out the pad and pen, and made some notes.

  “Yeah, Kel? I don’t know if it helps. I don’t know what he’s going to do with it. When I find out, I’ll let you know. Anyway thanks. Hey, all this works out I could be back in no time. Listen, until you hear from me, this call didn’t happen, okay? Thanks. Love ya.”

  Darla hung the phone up, came over to me, and looked at my notes and doodles.

  “This what you did to me?” she said, pointing at the pad. I put the pen down and looked up at her. “That’s right. I used the most dangerous tool in the world, the telephone. You know what to ask and who to ask and Aladdin’s Lamp doesn’t have as much magic.”

  “So,” she said, sitting on the desk. “You learn anything useful from all of that?”

  “Yeah, some things. Let me ask you a few questions, first. On a shoot, how do you get paid, check or cash?”

  “Check these days. Used to be cash, then the IRS got on everybody’s ass.”

  “Is that a rule for everything?”

  “Not really. Anything done commercially, that’s the way it is. Suppose you do a private tape for a collector, that’s still cash. I suppose this Mexican deal could have been cash. If it’s all a fake then it probably was cash.”

  I scribbled a note to check Peaches’s bank records. Rosa always said she liked California. Melrose would have been an idiot not to have used cash so I didn’t hold out much hope for that.

  “Tell me, what’s the minimum number of people necessary to make a tape? If Melrose was smart, and I think he was, he’d keep the loose ends to a minimum. He went to Mexico to keep it far enough away that people in the business wouldn’t know anything about it. He used Mexicans with no connection to the business.”

  “Well, there’s the performers, however many the scene calls for, the cameraman, the tech, a gaffer. That’s about it.”

  “Remember what she said, it was Peaches, the producer, and his tech. Let’s assume he brought the tech down with him. Everybody else she said was a Mexican. Not likely Melrose brought them in from L.A. How important is a tech? What’s he do?”

  “Depends on what you need. He’s going to monitor the tape machine while they’re shooting. Afterward he’ll make up the master print. Maybe he’ll oversee the duping. If you want anything in the way of special effects done to the tape, he does it.”

  “Okay, so the tech is indispensable.” I scribbled more notes. “Keli said that they didn’t shoot any sex scenes in Mexico. None at all. They had to splice that in later. So they had to have a body double on hand if you or Peaches wouldn’t do the scene. They had to have actual sex scenes in the tape or there’s no offense.”

  “If? Thanks a lot. I may not draw lines where you would, but there are some things I don’t do and pooches are one of them.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “That’s probably why he took these photos of me. That way he could match my skin tones, shape, tattoos, hair. But why work that hard? Shoot it in low light. You don’t need a body double, just a body.”

  “Maybe not. Look at what happened to Peaches. She was afraid to come forward about the tape because she was vulnerable to criminal charges. Unless she could prove it wasn’t her. A real good body double would have made that very hard to do. Getting a technical expert to look at the tape would have been very expensive.

  “No, it was an inexpensive way to silence her. It worked better than they thought. Her suicide was the best thing that could have happened to them.”

  “Stop it already. You’re depressing the shit out of me. I was just a little voice away from going down there. After that it wouldn’t have mattered what I did. A little suck and fuck with some beaner and the next thing I know, I’ve g
ot no friends, no job, no home. I’m sitting where she was. Curled up in a corner, holding on to a blanket like a kid having a nightmare, trying to wake myself up with a gun.”

  “So, you want to help me catch these bastards? I already sent Melrose on to meet her. How about the rest of them?”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to pretend to be Peaches. We need the dates that she went to Mexico. That was the day she put her cat in the pet motel. I want you to call them, tell them you’ve been looking at some old bills, and want to double check the dates and how long the cat was there.”

  “Sure, no problem.” She dialed long distance and got the number for the kennel. She dialed that and waited for a connection.

  “Not good. They say that the number is no longer in service.”

  “Shit. If they were still in business there’d be a message giving the new number. What else do we know? She called long distance from Mexico. Maybe she used a calling card or reversed the charges. There’d be a record of that.”

  “Can we get it?”

  “Sure. If we call the phone company, we have to know the number we want checked and the address and billing name to identify ourselves. We ought to start with directory assistance for the West Hollywood area and get Peaches’s address and number. Let’s figure that she didn’t live too far from the pet place.”

  I dialed directory assistance and hit the same wall she had. “I’m sorry, the number is unpublished. I cannot release it to you.”

  “Thanks.” I hung up. “All right, let’s go about it another way. We need to tie Melrose to both of you. When were you scheduled to go to Mexico with him?”

  “Let me think. It was three weeks after I got busted. That was July 5th. So figure it was around July 26th.”

  “We need a date. What else did you do that day?”

  “I went to the airport and booked a flight to Seattle. Then I didn’t board. I left my credit card in the bathroom. Then I took a train to Phoenix and paid cash.”

  “Okay. You weren’t using Sarabeth Timmons yet. What was the first thing you did here?”

  “I got a room to stay at. I applied for a social security card.”