Deadly Dues

by Linda Kupecek

  “Right!”

  He cut me off with an anguish that was a nice balance between the theatrical and the truly panicked.

  For a moment there was an uneasy silence, punctuated by our careful breathing.

  “Don’t you think—” I said, trying to phrase this in an appropriate and non-incriminating way, “—that by now, people would have gone into the office—”

  “And then would have discovered the you-know-who on the you-know-what with the you-know-what in his you-know-whatever,” continued Geoff.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Don’t you think?”

  Silence.

  “Makes sense,” said Geoff.

  I couldn’t stand it any more. I shouted into the phone, even though this is an unkind thing to do, particularly to somebody who is hung–over. “So! Have you heard anything from anybody?”

  “No!” Geoff shouted back. My ear hurt, but at least I finally had an answer to my supposedly simple question.

  I grabbed the remote and clicked on the television to the news channel, hoping to find something on Stan. I muted it and grazed the local headline news. Decayed fish in the drinking water. Toxic fumes in the daycare centres. Reminded me of Stan. But no specific news on Stan.

  “Geoff,” I said. “Shouldn’t there be something on the news by now?”

  “Why don’t you call the office?” he said.

  “Why don’t you call the office?” I said.

  “Because I’m scared of Lorraine,” he said.

  “She has ethics,” I reminded him.

  Lorraine was the only executive assistant at the HAMS office who had lasted more than a week. Most couldn’t take more than two days of Stan’s leers, lewd jokes and threats. But Lorraine had been there for over three years. She was in her early fifties and had left a career in the oil industry, and then a job in a stockbroker’s office, for the more relaxing state of fending off calls from five hundred actors every day, while dealing with irate casting directors, aggrieved producers and, worse, dear old Stan.

  Although she looked like a benevolent mother of the bride, with a kind, pie-like face and soft brown eyes, Lorraine was full of surprises. Her hair changed colour every month or so, varying from blonde to light auburn to rich brown, and once, to everybody’s amazement, a cherry red that was so incongruous with her matronly outfits and ergonomic shoes that one gasped at the vision. I have never understood why anybody still mobile would want to wear things that looked like large, carved loaves of leather bread on one’s feet, but then, my years of wearing stilettos hadn’t caught up to me yet. Maybe in twenty years I would be walking in large loaves of bread without embarrassment. Of course, then my life would be over.

  In her spare time, Lorraine did historical re-enactments with a group of history buffs, cooking over campfires in traditional pioneer dress and learning to shoot authentic early firearms. Maybe this was why Stan was afraid of her.

  She frequently booked long weekends to attend fencing tournaments, and again I fantasized about her turning up at the office with an épée and scaring the hell out of Stan.

  Whoops. Hope that wasn’t what she did, with maybe a little more exuberance than necessary. I liked Lorraine, and really hoped she wasn’t homicidal despite all those ethics.

  We all knew that Lorraine was more qualified to run the HAMS office than Stan, despite his cutthroat ways. Lorraine had a quiet integrity that registered with people. It didn’t hurt that she was one tough cookie. No wonder Geoff was afraid of her. Anybody with a slight aberration from sainthood would be well advised to tremble in her presence.

  Strangely, she and Mitzi were friends, and met regularly for dinner. Mitzi, of the cash-register soul and the designer shoes, and Lorraine, of the high morals and the low, low shoes. Go figure. I often wondered what they talked about at dinner, besides me. Being an actor, of course, I often assumed, mistakenly, that people loved to talk about me.

  Actors cried on Lorraine’s shoulder all the time. She endured all this mess and saltiness with kind pats and tough love, and drycleaning bills that she submitted to HAMS.

  Lorraine was well aware of the hardships that Stan had imposed on Gretchen, Bent, Geoff, Pete and me, but when she had tried to intervene, she was given a choice. She chose her job, and I didn’t blame her. She was a tough cookie, but she was also single, divorced and committed to all those expensive fencing tournaments and historic re-enactments.

  Her assistant, Sylvia, was extremely tall and thin, but any resemblance to a runway star ended there. Sylvia had cavernous cheeks and lines around her eyes and mouth that qualified her to be a standin for a pirate on a ghost ship. Her blonde hair was clipped into a buzz cut. Maybe the fact that she was a recovering crack addict who carried a switchblade inside her patent leather boots had something to do with her ability to cope with our Mr. Pope. The first time she flashed the knife at Stan, he backed into a potted plant and ruined his leather jacket and pants (bought, no doubt, with my Bow Wow royalties). Elsie Lamonde, an elderly actress who now does mostly extra work, was in the office at the time and hit high C with her scream of terror. By the time Lorraine had called the nurse from the optometrist’s office down the hall, and they had revived Elsie, Stan was locked in his office. Many a glass was raised to Sylvia at Murphy’s that night.

  Lorraine had admonished Sylvia severely, we were told, but, ha ha, we guessed it was an admonishment carried out over double Scotches.

  Sylvia was supposed to be temporary, but the office had been understaffed since Katrina had taken maternity leave. Katrina, as the office manager, targeted for national promotion, had kept Stan in line. Now Lorraine had taken on that challenge. Katrina was in babyland and Lorraine and Sylvia were left to answer the phones, while two assistants typed at their keyboards in the back office.

  • • •

  “What if Sylvia is there?” moaned Geoff. “She wants to have her way with me. I’d probably wake up in the morning looking just like Stan did last night.”

  “Shhhhhhh!” I hissed at him. “I’ll call the office. Obviously you would just blow our cover.”

  There was a pause.

  “Lu,” he said. “Have you been watching Starsky and Hutch reruns again?”

  “In case you have forgotten,” I said huffily, “you are not the only person in the world with a private eye series to their credit.”

  My Darling, Detective experience stayed with me, probably more than any of my other roles. I had loved doing it and had delivered the arch dialogue with style. Geoff was totally out of line. I knew my film noir clichés.

  Moments later, I had signed off with Geoff and called the HAMS office.

  “Yeah,” snarled Sylvia. I opted for Cheery Member Mode.

  “Hi, Sylvia,” I chirped, as much as I could in my morning state. “It’s Lulu Malone.”

  “You,” she said. Her tone was a fine balance between indifference and disgust. This is what happens when you are an operatic diva for Bow Wow Dog Food one day and a has-been the next.

  “Stan there?” I asked, with an innocent tone reminiscent of the most phony scenes in black and white movies of the forties, of which I had watched far too many, with too many bottles of Chardonnay, over the years.

  There was a slight pause. Was Sylvia reviewing my delivery, or was she hesitating because she was in shock over the bloody scene in Stan’s office?

  “He’s not in yet,” she said dismissively.

  Not in yet. I was about to say various colourful things to her, along the lines of, “Not in yet? Have you looked in his office? He is in! In Technicolor and 3D!” I wisely refrained.

  “Oh,” I said demurely—Ha! Me? Demure?—mind racing. “Could you get him to call me when he gets in?” Gawd, I was brilliant. Was this a great alibi—not that I needed one—or what?

  “Sure,” she said. I could have sworn I heard the sound of a nail file, or maybe a stiletto, in the background.

  I hung up the phone and pondered this. Could Sylvia have staggered into the office (and staggeri
ng was her choice of walk before noon) and not checked Stan’s office? Was she sitting there, at the receptionist’s desk, unaware of Stan’s head face down on his desk, in a pool of … Stop that, Lu, you are getting entirely too detailed in your memory.

  Where was Lorraine? Should I call back and ask to speak with Lorraine? Scratch that thought, dodo. Well, what should I do?

  The suspense was killing me. I couldn’t believe that nobody had noticed Stan’s body by now. I didn’t know much about death, but I had heard on good authority (and had the added backup of the time I played a bimbo pal to a private detective in that TV movie that I don’t want to talk about) that bodies smell after a certain time. Surely Sylvia, insensitive as she was, could not have failed to notice the aroma emanating from Stan’s office.

  For a brief, demented moment, I contemplated calling her back and saying something subtle like, “How’s the air?” Luckily, I realized immediately how stupid this was, and instead, sat by my phone, wondering what was going on.

  I couldn’t think of any excuse to go into the HAMS office to see for myself. My dues were paid. Everybody knew the only reason I would go into the office would be to either fling myself on Stan and offer him anything (well, almost anything) in exchange for my royalties, or else to kill him. Whoops. Let’s not go there.

  I called Geoff and left an upbeat no-news-is-good-news message on his machine, and reminded him to pick up his car before it got towed. Then I sat by the phone and stared at the clock. Past noon and nobody had noticed Stan’s body. What to do? I called Bent.

  Too Much Discovery

  As always, Bent answered the phone with a counter-tenor snarl. I had always thought his phone greeting was a combo of desperate loneliness and angry alienation. But I’m not a therapist. I’m just an over-educated actor with a stalled career and an overwhelming ambition not to end up pushing a buggy full of bottles around town, while people point at me and sing Doggie Doggie Bow Wow.

  “Hey, Bent,” I said, trying to sound casual and cheery.

  “Yeah?”

  “I was wondering,” I said, “if maybe you and I should wander down to the office and talk to Stan about whether we can get sponsorship for that dialect workshop we were planning?”

  There was a long pause, through which several locomotives and maybe the chorus line of a Busby Berkeley musical could have passed.

  “Hello?” he said finally.

  “Mmmmm?”

  “Lulu! Have you lost your mind?” he hissed into the phone. “Have you forgotten about last night?”

  “No! I haven’t forgotten!” I hissed back. “But I just called the HAMS office and nobody seems to know anything about anything, so I thought maybe it would be good idea to go in and establish an alibi and also to ensure that somebody notices the you-know-what that must still be in the office and that nobody has had the presence of mind to discover yet!”

  “Good thinking, Lu,” he said, suddenly chastened, to my great satisfaction. “I’ll pick you up in half an—”

  “No!” I said, remembering what it was like to sit in his rusted, unbearably noisy van. “I’ll swing by your place.”

  I washed my hair in record time, inhaled some aromatherapy energy oil, and after hacking all over the bedroom for five minutes, splatted on some makeup, aimed a blow-dryer at my hair, pulled on my navy Ralph Lauren cords (three fifty at Salvation Army), a blue Liz Claiborne T-shirt and matching sweater (three dollars at Value Village), and red Amalfi loafers (one dollar at a church rummage sale) and I was set to go. Too bad I was wasting this bargain-basement but very high-class beauty on Bent, Lorraine and the late Stan.

  As I pulled up in front of Bent’s decrepit rented house, I felt a wave of guilt. The poor guy, so demented, so without any social or sexual skills (as far as I knew), and I couldn’t think of a single woman with whom I could set him up. Poor Bent.

  These thoughts sent me into a meditation on appeal and karma. Who knows who we are meant to connect with? Some of the most gorgeous guys I ever met were total bores, and the drip who pumped gas at the corner service station turned out to be a country and western singer with an awesome voice. I hoped that some day, Bent would meet a woman who would look past the weird behaviour and the spluttering and see into his soul. And recognize the kind man that he is under all the layers of insecurity.

  He was hunched over the curb in front of his house when I arrived. Bent always seemed caught up in principled agony, based on either the sins of the right wing, the stupidity of the left wing, or the lack of support for his political party, which was somewhere to the far left of the Green Party and the Autoworkers combined. I knew as I hit the brake, shifted into park and pulled up the lock button on the passenger side that he was going to regale me with whatever political scandal graced the front page of the paper that morning. He assumed, wrongly, that I was interested. He thought that I shared his moral outrage. Moral outrage is a great thing, and I highly recommend it as a pose in a variety of situations, but it has a short shelf life. You have to dole it out discreetly. Bent did not know when to call it a day with moral outrage. It had become a way of life for him.

  When I finally angled into a parking space by the HAMS office (after numerous directives from Bent regarding my parking skills) we climbed out of my car, much less friendly than we had been when we entered it.

  The HAMS office was on a street with a melangé of bistros, cafés, ethnic restaurants, delis and disintegrating office buildings. During the day, there was an exhilarating mix of panhandlers, fashionistas, foodies and construction workers walking the streets as the upgrading of the blocks continued. At night, the streets were almost deserted, except for the restaurant clientele and the occasional police car. And, last night, terrified actors fleeing the scene of a crime.

  The Horton Block, where our union offices resided, seemed to sink into the ground a little deeper every time we visited. The parking garage was ancient. It was always a toss-up—park underground and fight off the drug dealers who lurked when the parking attendant was absent, or park on the street and dodge the kids on skateboards and the panhandlers. I was so close to being a panhandler that usually Geoff or Pete had to restrain me from handing my wallet to whoever was collapsed at the door. At least there were a few medical offices in the building, but they kept erratic hours, and one of them was suspect. You have to wonder when the sign says “Dr. Howie’s High Times Natural Clinic. No reasonable offers refused.”

  Today I preferred the street to the parking garage.

  We were silent as the groaning elevator crawled upward. I wondered who had taken this elevator, standing exactly where we were now, to Stan’s office, and ended his life?

  Given the lax security in the building, perhaps some wandering terrorist or psycho had walked into Stan’s office and done the deed. I felt a little cheerier. I didn’t want to think that somebody I knew was a killer. I looked at Bent, who was hissing quietly at the elevator buttons. Could he? I wondered. Could he have done it? He had the rage. But he was also a guy who took in stray kittens and helped little old ladies across the street. He had stopped doing the latter when one of them mugged him after they struggled across the intersection. She got his cell phone and his video store card.

  The elevator door creaked open and we stepped into the hallway. I forced myself and my Amalfi loafers toward the office. Bent, for once, was a much better actor than I was. He looked energetic and purposeful as he stomped down the hall ahead of me. We pushed open the door and found Sylvia knocking back the last of a mickey of vodka.

  She tossed the empty bottle in an open drawer, which she kicked shut while looking at us with a nice mix of boredom and contempt. I didn’t take it personally. Sylvia had her hands full, keeping Stan appropriately terrified of her. Oh my God, I thought. Was Sylvia the killer?

  “Is Stan here?” I said. I deserved an Oscar for the delivery. Perfectly casual, disinterested, sounding just like an innocent person who had not seen him with a letter opener in his back last night. I sensed t
hat even Bent glowed approval at me for the mini-performance.

  Sylvia leaned over the desk and glowered at us, emanating alcohol fumes that would have knocked over anybody but actors.

  “That pig? He’s dead meat.”

  I winced. Stan was a low-life, immoral, evil creature, but like most people I had a Pollyanna sort of attitude, tempered by pure superstition, about speaking so vilely of the dear departed.

  “He wasn’t that bad.”

  “Wasn’t? He was, he is, he will be! Lorraine’s off today. And he left me with a pile of contracts that he never bothered to vet. How am I supposed to know what to do with them? I’m dealing with producers and casting directors—”

  The phone rang on cue. Sylvia picked it up, ran a hand through her buzz cut, and did her snarl.

  Then she was amazingly polite—for Sylvia. “I understand. I’m sorry. As soon as Stan or Lorraine look at the contracts, I’ll get right back to you.” Maybe there was hope for her after all.

  She reached over and punched in the keys for the answer mode on the phone. Dimitri, the shy geek hired to help pick up the slack during Katrina’s absence, peeked out from the back room.

  “Don’t answer the phone,” she hissed. “When Stan comes in, I’ll kill him.”

  Dimitri pursed his lips all the way up to his eyebrows and nipped back into his office.

  I worked out all the tenses and realized that I had just made a major booboo. Thank God Sylvia was so pissed that she wouldn’t remember, if and when the police grilled her on this.

  “So where is Stan?” said Bent.

  He was doing a miraculous job of sitting casually on the desk, one scrawny leg hanging over the side. Furthermore, to his credit, he didn’t look frightened. If Bent leaned over too far, he could easily fall into one of the caverns beneath her cheekbones.

  “I don’t give a damn,” said Sylvia.

  “I beg your pardon.” Lorraine was standing in the doorway behind us, briefcase in hand, sensible shoes on her sensible feet, her round face quiet and stern.