Deadly Dues

by Linda Kupecek

  Lunch with Mitzi, my long-time agent. I knew there was something on my exciting agenda today. Along with my half-shift at McDonald’s, which I had also neglected to attend. To my shame, I hadn’t called either of them. I was definitely falling apart if I couldn’t meet basic responsibilities like a shift at an earnest, albeit inelegant, fast-food outlet or conduct a business/social lunch with my agent. On the other hand, I reminded myself, I had a very good excuse.

  “Oh, Mitzi,” I groaned. “I’m so sorry. I had a hell of a night.”

  “Well, so did I,” she said, aggrieved. “I had a migraine that kept me up, but I managed to make lunch.”

  I guess I am such a wonderful actor that she didn’t wonder why I had left a sobbing message on her phone. She always unplugs her phone when suffering with a migraine.

  “Somebody was murdered at my condo,” I said.

  “Great excuse. Hope it was Stan Pope.”

  I hissed in a breath and held it. Was Mitzi psychic or what? She might have had the locales mixed up, but she had identified one dead body with a bull’s eye.

  I wondered how I was going to steer my way through this hellish conversation.

  “I’m not joking. And it wasn’t Stan.”

  She took a moment to consider this. Mitzi is extremely short, fiftyish and plus-sized, and has a wardrobe that constantly amazes me, not only in its spectrum, but also in its courage, ranging from wildly coloured caftans to severe black business suits to hot-pink sweatpants. She doesn’t take life lying down. She gets on her feet and smacks it in the face with her wardrobe. Her red curls look as if she went crazy with neon pastels in a drunken moment, but they are actually the result of visits to a hair salon I can’t afford any more. She seems totally comfortable with her size, and she never seems to lack a man in her life (often one of her clients, which is the source of some discussion among the rest of us). She is emotional and dramatic, and turns into a tiger in defence of her actors. She is lethal in negotiations. But even she couldn’t protect me from Stan and Sherilyn.

  Back in the days of Doggie Doggie Bow Wow, both Mitzi and I had money. We lunched every week. We went shoe shopping. She has several pairs of Manolo Blahniks, which, amazingly, hold her considerable weight. I had a pair of Manolos too, but I got them at a consignment store for twelve dollars. (The proprietor had never seen Sex and the City, and I was the lucky lady who found the Manolos before anybody else. They weren’t even my size, but I bought them anyway on general principle.) I sold them on eBay because I needed the money and cried all the way to the post office when I mailed them to the lucky buyer in Nebraska.

  “Are you all right?” she said.

  “I guess. Some guy broke in and tried to choke me. And then somebody came in and killed him. And then I threw up. And then the police came. The detective is quite cute and seems to think I did it.” Something else hit me. “And I don’t know where Horatio is.”

  Mitzi absorbed this aria silently. Finally, she emitted the response that was typically Mitzi. She is, ultimately, very practical.

  “How cute is this detective? Did he have a wedding ring? Do you think you could seduce him and get him to lean on Stan for your royalties? Does he seem interested in you?”

  “More sexy than cute. No. Unlikely, but I could give it a try. Not at all.”

  • • •

  By the time we signed off, we had shared opinions on last week’s shoe sale at What a Heel, commiserated over the latest news on how lousy chocolate is for you, and promised to reschedule lunch for next week. If I were still alive, although I didn’t share that thought with Mitzi. I had a weak moment where I considered spilling the beans to her and asking her to be my bodyguard, then thought better of it. I would definitely feel safe with Mitzi. I still remembered the time she decked a mugger with a Jimmy Choo.

  I crawled out of bed, staggered downstairs and into the kitchen, did the minimal throw-the-grounds-add-the-water at the coffeemaker, and sank into a 1960s chrome and vinyl chair (three dollars, Salvation Army, terrific deal, even though I had to drive home with it rattling in my trunk) to contemplate the day.

  Where was Horatio? Usually, by now he would be flinging himself at me, slurping all over me, and demanding breakfast, lunch and his favourite doggie bites served on his special platter. Instead, I was drinking coffee in a relatively civilized environment, without a selfish, egotistical, unpredictable, hairy, smelly roommate slobbering on my feet.

  I missed him.

  I picked up the phone and punched in Mrs. Lauterman’s number, remembering that Horatio loved to hang out at her place, where he could watch the Food Network all day while she fed him instant oatmeal and garlic chicken noodle soup, her main menu items.

  There was no answer. I remembered that she had a Scrabble date at this time every day in Mr. Hockney’s condo, where she and her friends Ralph and Rita argued happily over obscure words and arcane spellings. And, of course, she would have called me if she had seen Horatio.

  I went to the patio doors and heaved them open, making a mental note that when the Bow Wow Dog Food money finally came through, I should hire somebody to fix those doors, which always stuck, and sometimes opened and sometimes didn’t, and (although I would never breathe a word of this to my insurance broker, Harvey Elman) didn’t always lock.

  “Horatio—wherefore art you?’” I howled, but at half lung-power, given the events of the past day.

  Who could expect me to be in tiptop shape? Thank God, I didn’t have an audition. Most actors know that it is a law of the universe that after a month of oblivion, without a single call, audition or acknowledgment of their existence, on the very day that they are the most sick (usually with typhoid) their agent will call with an audition request— almost always to take place within two hours.

  So, gamely, the famous actors haul themselves into the shower or bath, scrub and try to imbue themselves with a semblance of health or will to live, and stagger to the audition, always creating the illusion of competence. People who work as accountants or cashiers can take a sick day without any significant career setback or loss of reputation. The life of the freelancer requires a constant presence. No lolling about on the deathbed when the film crew is waiting.

  Actors have an unrecognized grace in that they meet the demands of their work without complaint. They show up on time, know their lines and hit their mark. It never occurs to them to say, “Sorry, I can’t make it today, not feeling so hot.” Not when a film crew is standing by, or a theatre-load of people are waiting. For some, it is simply the money that might be lost if the contract isn’t fulfilled. For others, like myself, it is the sense of responsibility, the feeling that I am, however fleetingly, part of a team that has undertaken a commitment to create something, whether it is trivial (a commercial) or significant (a docudrama about the starving in the North, or the deprived in the South, or the homeless in the West, or the disadvantaged in the East).

  I was jolted out of this high-minded philosophical meditation on the grace of actors by the phone. I grabbed it and squeaked, maniacally, “Horatio?”

  There was a long pause at the other end of the line. A pause which allowed me to seriously question my sanity, if I was now hoping for phone calls from canines. Maybe I was just trapped in some weird novel or low-budget film and was one of those doomed characters headed towards madness. Just as I was beginning to imagine my wardrobe, if this film ever were financed, the voice at the other end of the phone cut through to my addled brain.

  “Have you seen Stan?”

  What could this mean? Of course I had seen Stan, about fifteen hours ago, with a letter opener in his back. And Gretchen had been right: that desk would never get clean. And who was this person at the other end of the phone?

  “Lulu?” The impatient, petulant tone identified the caller. It was Sherilyn. Stan had left his Tupperware wife and twin Dobermans for Sherilyn five years ago. And suddenly she had become a producer, with no credits, no background, and as far as I could tell, no talent or brains.
She had never called me before, so how was I supposed to recognize her voice? She must have dug through her casting files to get my number, or maybe she and Stan had posted my photo and contact info on their kitchen wall, where they had thrown darts at it. Now I was being really paranoid. I doubted I was on their radar enough to warrant that much attention.

  Some people said Sherilyn came from a good family who couldn’t figure out what went wrong, like the poor folks in The Bad Seed. Others said she was a sociopath. And still others simply thought she was Lucifer with blonde hair and pink lipstick.

  I barely knew her. We saw each other at parties and talked about nothing in order to avoid talking about anything too charged with tension. At the Arts Club reception, we had exchanged meaningful words about the garlic shrimp (which I was trying to stuff in my handbag to take home to Horatio, and she had caught me in the act, so I had to explain) and the music, but I had never actually spoken with her for more than five minutes at a time. Why on earth would she be asking me about Stan?

  “Hello?” I said.

  “You heard me, you bitch,” she snapped. “Where is Stan?”

  “How should I know?” I snapped back, conveniently neglecting to mention that I had some knowledge of his whereabouts.

  “He told me he was meeting you last night. And he never came home.”

  My anxiety at the revelation that she knew Stan had called me last night for a meeting was overcome by revulsion at the thought that she could think that I could be involved with Stan. I might be a disenfranchised, unemployed, nearly bankrupt, aging, former dog-food shill, but I still had standards.

  Food For Thought

  Moments after Sherilyn had hung up on me, I was in the kitchen, rummaging in the fridge for anything that wasn’t Bow Wow Dog Food. It was after one in the afternoon, and time for some sort of lunch, to replace the sumptuous meal I had missed at La Mer. With a wonderful early Marian McPartland album playing in the background, I shoved around pickle jars, outdated probiotic yogurt containers, wilted celery, soft green peppers, and five large slabs of cheddar cheese bought on sale. I devoted a moment to praying that I wouldn’t eventually end up dining on doggie chow if I didn’t get those royalties that Stan had mislaid.

  I found a brown rice casserole that I had made earlier in the week, and sat elegantly on the kitchen floor, my back against the fridge, eating the clumps of aging rice and veggies delicately with a sterling silver fork (fifty cents, Saint Michael’s rummage sale, and I’m still looking for the rest of the set). It was cold, but still edible, which might have been overstating its virtues at this point in its career as a meal.

  Forced at last to contemplate the day, which unfortunately also required some cursory thought on the events of the night before, I was not heartened. I, along with my pals, had found the definitely dead body of a man who had done evil things to each of us. We had fled the scene in a totally amateurish way, no matter how many detectives Pete and I had played. My heart began to pound at the thought of the police breaking down my door in the next few days, waving guns and threatening me, the famous Lu of Doggie Doggie Bow Wow, with prison and worse. What if they still used rubber pipes to interrogate people? What if they used cattle prods or worse? What if they took away my lipstick? I suddenly realized that I was chewing my so-called lunch at the speed of a buzz saw, and forced myself to slow down. Acid reflux is no picnic, and I didn’t want to invite a visitation.

  Then there was Mister Size Twenty, who had died on top of me. Who was this guy? What on earth did he think Stan had passed on to me, before he had passed on? Had he followed me home from the bar and waited until Geoff left? Did Mr. Size Twenty have a best friend, a wife, a mother? Would they miss him? What was he like when he wasn’t trying to kill people? A tear rolled down my cheek and fell onto a piece of red pepper that I had just speared. The casserole needed salt anyway, and I popped it into my mouth and chewed solemnly. I was becoming overly maudlin if I was wasting a prime fifteen minutes of my life weeping over the brute who had tried to kill me last night.

  The police, in the form of Ryga, would be crazy to think I was a suspect, but common sense can disappear momentarily in all professions. How on earth was I—although not svelte, still a relatively petite person—supposed to have clunked him on the head from my prone position? I suppose they didn’t believe I was prone. If only Horatio were around to speak up for me.

  And where was Horatio? Every now and again, despite city bylaws governing the roaming of dogs without a leash, he would get frisky and go out, looking for action. Although I had never done that myself, I understood that he was a boy dog, and boys just have to have fun. As long as he was careful. But, darn, I needed him now. I needed a hug, no matter how smelly the participant.

  I wondered how much it would cost to print flyers. I missed Horatio. How does one look for a dog? Should I call the Boy Scouts? The Marines? The Army? The animal shelter? What if Horatio were imprisoned in a cell at the animal shelter, having to fend off the attentions of brazen poodles and chihuahuas? Oh, poor Horatio. I made a note to call the animal shelter.

  I chewed down the last of the casserole, hoping it wouldn’t kill me, but also noting that it appeared to be second or third on the list of potential killers, considering last night’s events.

  Then I got to the part I didn’t want to think about. Who had beaned Mr. Size Twenty with the garden gnome? Could Geoff have come back? Unlikely. Geoff was basically a coward. He would have run to a phone and called the police (or maybe his pals at the Daily Sun) before taking any action on the scene. And even if he had, he would be taking centre stage, gloating and glowing to reporters, enjoying the glory of being a hero. If a friend had done it, surely he would have hung around for a few moments to see if I was all right. And if a stranger had done the deed, why didn’t he bash my head in while he was at it? One-stop shopping for anybody with a murderous bent. Who else? Mrs. Lauterman? I couldn’t imagine her getting her walker into my condo and out again so quickly. Although she was pretty energetic. That green hair had really perked her up. I discounted my other neighbours, who were infinitely boring and would have nothing to do with murders or rescues on general principle. Not when Survivor or American Idol were on television.

  This was even more depressing. I devoted a few self-righteous minutes to cursing North American culture in general and agreeing with the H. L. Mencken quote about nobody ever going broke underestimating the taste of the American public. Having done that, I suddenly remembered that the Bow Wow Dog Food commercials, however adorable, might not necessarily have been a watershed event in North American culture, and I beat a quick critical retreat and decided that there was room for everything in North American culture, as long as it satisfied and enriched society. I thought that sounded pretty good, and grabbed a pen to jot it down, in case I could use it in a future grant application. I was somewhat long in the tooth for grant applications, but in my profession, you never knew when the perfect project might be ripe for a few thousand dollars from a benevolent foundation.

  I took a break from my ruminations on potential grant-worthy projects to wonder just when my phone would start ringing with the news of the demise of Stan. I would have thought that great celebratory cackles would be emanating from everybody who knew him. And yet, nothing.

  I called the number for the animal shelter and left a message, trying to sound sane and measured. I might have babbled a bit, but surely whoever checked the messages would understand.

  Then I punched in Gretchen. Everybody called Gretchen. They loved to hear her whisper. It was almost as good as telephone sex. Except she only whispered about her stalled career. Plus, she was almost always at home, floating around in the spookiest house of all time.

  After ten long rings, she answered. Her tiny little whisper was like a desperate vibration into the phone line.

  “Hello?”

  It was so unfair. Most men would probably have either fainted or leapt into their cars to rescue her (from something) after hearing that v
oice.

  “It’s Lu. Have you heard anything?”

  “About what?”

  I stared at the ceiling. She was still losing IQ points by the day.

  “About you-know-who,” I said, very carefully.

  There was a pause through which maybe Peter Fonda and twenty bikers could have driven.

  “Oh,” she said faintly. “Him.”

  “Gretchen, are you awake?” I shouted. “I am trying to carry on a conversation here. Remember last night?”

  “Last night.” Another long pause. “I thought we weren’t going to talk about that. It’s so upsetting.”

  She didn’t sound upset. She sounded slightly inconvenienced.

  I walked around the room rapidly, hoping it would calm me. Instead, it just made me more anxious to speed over to Gretchen’s and shake her until she woke up.

  “Hold that thought,” I said slowly. “I’ll call Geoff and get back to you.”

  I hung up, being careful to be gentle so as not to disturb Gretchen’s delicate state of whisper, and punched in Geoff’s number. After ten rings—what was wrong with these people? They obviously were living half a life if they hadn’t been nearly murdered by giant thugs with black masks—his groggy voice moaned into the phone. Hungover, of course.

  “Geoff, it’s me. Lu.”

  “Don’t hit me again,” he whimpered. “And don’t sic your neighbour on me.”

  I breathed deeply for a few moments, trying to remember what Gus, my yoga instructor, had taught me so many years ago, before he was arrested for procurement. (I never got over that; it turned me against yoga for at least a decade.)

  “Geoff,” I said. “Have you heard anything?”

  Pause.

  “About what?”

  Was I the only person in this crowd with a brain to throw around? I was ready to consider giving up booze if this was what it did to a person.

  I tried to speak nicely, but it was difficult when the steam was sizzling from between my extremely expensive crowns.

  “Remember last night?” I said delicately. “Remember when we were all together and we found a certain person with a certain something in their—”