Deadly Dues

by Linda Kupecek

  Sylvia slid her feet off the desk and sat up straight.

  “Lorraine. I thought you were off today.”

  “I called to check on how things were going. When Dimitri told me you were fielding calls, I changed my mind about taking the day off.”

  “Hi, Lorraine,” I said brightly. “Bent and I dropped in to see Stan about that dialect workshop.”

  Lorraine looked me for a moment, assessing this ridiculous statement.

  “So ask him,” she said, nodding toward his closed office door.

  “He’s not in,” said Sylvia, gathering up her papers to make way for Lorraine.

  “How do you know?” said Lorraine, taking off her jacket and setting her briefcase by her desk. Sylvia slithered toward the back office door, managing to look jaded, semi-drunk and relieved all at once. A charming combination, which was not lost on Lorraine. The look she sent Sylvia didn’t bode well for their next conversation.

  “His door was closed when I got here. The damn phone’s been ringing all morning,” was Sylvia’s parting shot before she disappeared into the back office. I could hear Dimitri shuffling and moving very fast to get out of her way.

  “So where is he?” I asked lamely, knowing that his remains were just ten feet away.

  The phone rang. Lorraine punched off the answer mode.

  “HAMS office. Lorraine speaking.”

  She listened patiently for a few moments.

  “I’ll get back to you in half an hour on that. We’re busy here today. I know your production schedule. Don’t worry. We’ll fix it as soon as possible.”

  She made some rapid notes, then remembered our presence and looked up at us impatiently. We were lurking, and doing a lousy job of it.

  “You can check his office if you want, not that he’s in there.” She nodded towards the door. “I don’t have time to deal with that workshop right now.”

  “Gee, Bent,” I said, with jolly cheerfulness worthy of an award, “let’s go into Stan’s office and see if he’s napping on the job.”

  Bent perked up.

  “Good idea.” Neither of us were looking forward to opening the door and seeing what we had already seen, only eighteen hours more ripe.

  The phone rang again, and Lorraine started another businesslike conversation on contracts and deadlines.

  Bent and I moved reluctantly to Stan’s door. I knocked officiously.

  “Hey, Stan,” I called. Bent frowned at me, and I knew why. Normally, I would have emitted some sweet version of “Hey Stan, you rotten royalty-robbing rabble-ripping rat.” Perhaps I was overplaying the courtesy. We waited a moment, and then another. Nothing.

  Bent reached across me and tried the knob. The door creaked open. Stan made ten times what any of us made in a year, but he never got around to fixing the creak in that door. Maybe he sensed he would meet a nasty end and wanted to make sure that he left something creepy behind.

  Bent and I each took a breath and stepped into Stan’s office. I already had my scream planned, not the one I had used in a stage production of Sleuth, but instead the one I had used decades ago in a low-budget horror flick.

  We looked at the desk.

  I gasped, and stifled that scream. Bent grabbed my arm so hard it felt like a nutcracker had grabbed me.

  The room was empty. There was no body, no Stan, no blood, no letter opener. Only a desk and chair. A very clean desk and chair.

  The Travelling Pinky Ring

  “Stan?” I croaked tentatively. Bent should have been wildly impressed by my ability to recover from the shock of not finding a body (for a refreshing change) and mouth the appropriate words. Instead, his eyes were darting from ceiling to floor, as if he thought that if he looked hard enough, Stan’s body would be hanging artistically from the ceiling.

  I jabbed him with my elbow and backed out of Stan’s office.

  “Golly, Lorraine,” I said, as she hung up the phone and started going through folders on her desk. “I guess you were right. Stan’s not in.” I congratulated myself on my cool demeanour.

  She put her chin on her hand and smiled at me, not unkindly, her other hand still on the files.

  “Lu,” she said, “when will you learn that every time you say ‘golly’ any idiot within a mile knows you are up to something? I don’t know exactly what you’re up to, but when a woman of your age and experience starts saying words like ‘gee’ and ‘golly.’ I generally lose faith in her sincerity.”

  I felt like a jackrabbit in her musket sights during one of the historical re-enactments. Lorraine was the real deal, and, as I had just been reminded, it was difficult to lie to her.

  “I’m feeling anxious,” I said, truthfully. “Too many bills. Not enough money.” Then, not so truthfully, “I had geared myself up for pitching the workshop to Stan.”

  She nodded. “Well, good luck. You know what your chances are.”

  Bent and I said our goodbyes and escaped into the hall.

  We were silent in the elevator, as it lurched in hair-raising instalments toward the ground floor. On the second floor, the doors shuddered open to admit a person of indeterminate sex in a brown (or was it grey?) overcoat, redolent of sardines, cat food and a brewery, an occurrence which further inhibited any conversation we might have been foolish enough to initiate.

  Once on the street, Bent turned to me, “Where is he?”

  “Get a grip,” I hissed into his face. “Lorraine is probably watching us from the window. Be cool.”

  “Why would she bother? And could you stop shouting? It’s not very subtle.”

  “I was hissing. That is much more subtle than shouting.”

  I then stalked away, but in the opposite direction to the car.

  We both knew we were at each other’s throats because of shock. After a few more moments of stress, including an unfortunate argument around a fire hydrant, witnessed by two teenage boys with skateboards, attitude and more earrings than I thought possible for a human body to carry, we headed for my car.

  I felt my face flush and wondered if it was from hormones or high blood pressure. Hormones, what hormones? I couldn’t remember having any hormones since that lean and lanky stunt guy on the Land Rover commercial I had shot over a year ago. Then I had hormones galore. So maybe it was high blood pressure, and I was about to keel over. I tried to assess the likelihood of my passing out, which was an excellent diversion from addressing what we had just not seen in Stan’s office.

  Bent crawled into the passenger seat and looked at me suspiciously as I collapsed behind the wheel.

  “You look sort of funny,” he said. “Sort of pink.”

  I looked over my shoulder into the traffic, before easing into the street. A Toyota honked at me in annoyance, and I realized I had nearly clipped it. So much for my peripheral vision in moments of stress.

  “I am not pink,” I said firmly. “I am white with shock.”

  “Hmm, if that’s your version of white, I sure don’t want to see what you would call rosy plum,” he said, cracking his knuckles. It was hard to tell, but his skin wasn’t quite its normal shade of black either.

  I pulled around the corner into an empty parking spot, out of range of the HAMS windows, and turned off the motor.

  Bent and I looked at each other for a good minute and then screamed as quietly as we could without getting arrested. After that, we both started talking at once, which didn’t help.

  “Where was he—?”

  “What happened—?

  “Did Lorraine—?”

  “Did Sylvia—?”

  Then we lapsed into silence.

  I took a deep breath, trying to be sensible.

  “There is no way Sylvia would have cleaned up that mess. She’s like Pigpen,” I said.

  “Unless she did it while she was loaded,” said Bent.

  “And came back later when she was sober? Why not get rid of him right after the deed?”

  “Maybe,” said Bent, eyes narrowed, staring out the window at the dumpste
r lurking appealingly at the end of the alley half a block away. “Maybe Lorraine and Sylvia killed him together, then Lorraine cleaned up the mess while Sylvia dragged his body away. Lorraine loves to clean. And Sylvia loves to get outdoors for a smoke.”

  “Lorraine would never do that.”

  We didn’t bother to say, but Sylvia would.

  We both stared out the window, deep in thought.

  “But where would they put the body?”

  A banged-up old Firebird that must have been a great car twenty years ago before it was caked in rust and graffiti roared out of the alley, two scrawny kids in the front seat. It skidded slightly to avoid the dumpster, but still managed to give it a good bang, ricocheted off and disappeared down the street after a hairpin turn. The dumpster gave a little shudder and shifted position slightly.

  “Friendly neighbourhood drug dealers,” I said. “Where are the cops when you need them?”

  Bent was still staring out the windshield. He was really thinking hard, because his eyes were sort of glazed.

  “Bent?” Oh no, what if he’s having a stroke? It’s always the little pent-up balls of fire that collapse in front of you. Did I remember my cell phone? Did I remember to charge it?

  “Bent!”

  I saw his mouth move and realized that he was actually looking at something. I squinted in the direction of his stare. From the slight opening at the top of the dumpster, something pale and limp was hanging down. It had five fingers, it was attached to an arm in a cashmere sweater, and a loud gold ring was on the evil pinky. A gold ring that was very familiar, as was the cashmere sweater. The hand swayed back and forth.

  Bent and I watched it, open-mouthed. Any passerby would have taken us for two cartoon characters. Not so. We were two idiot actors caught in a nightmare.

  • • •

  We stared at the horrible image at the end of the alley, our mouths open invitations for a cloud of moths or bats to invade.

  Then we turned to look at each other.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” I revved the engine. The Sunfire did its usual sputter and died.

  Bent grabbed my arm in the now too familiar nutcracker grasp.

  “No, we should go and look.”

  “Are you crazy?” I kept turning the key but the engine just mewled like a baby and played dead.

  “We can’t just leave him there! Alone!” It occurred to me that this hadn’t bothered any of us last night, leaving poor Stan alone in his office.

  “And what are we going to do?” I shouted back.

  A loud knock on the driver’s window sent me into a spasm, and the Sunfire started, no doubt from the adrenalin running from my hand through the key and into its innards.

  A uniformed policeman leaned down into the window. I rolled it down and smiled at him, calling all dimples into action.

  “Everything all right, folks?” He was young, blond and very serious. His vehicle was parked on a side street, a stone’s throw away, but mercifully not within view of the dumpster.

  Damn, I would get the only law enforcement officer in the world (aside from Ryga) who hadn’t seen the Bow Wow commercials.

  “Just fine, sir,” I dimpled. “Wolfgang and I were having a little disagreement, but it was all in fun, wasn’t it, honey?”

  Bent’s eyes crossed in horror. For an acting coach, he was lousy at improv.

  The police officer leaned closer into the car. I grabbed Bent by the shoulders and purred, “Right, honey?”

  Then I planted a large and forceful kiss in the area of his mouth. Bent’s eyes went somewhere in the direction of Mars, and from the corner of my eye I saw the police officer pull back. His eyes started to move in the direction of the dumpster. Just then, his car radio bleeted. He nodded at us, and strode across the street to his vehicle.

  “Stop that!” Bent shoved me away, wiping his mouth. “That was revolting. I don’t believe in public displays of emotion.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said, pulling the Sunfire into traffic and driving slowly the half block toward the alley. “It was wonderful for me, too. Now, without being obvious, which I know will be a big chore, try to get a better look at the dumpster.”

  I puttered along as slowly as I could, noting in my rearview mirror that the police car had taken off in the opposite direction with its siren starting up. Thank goodness real criminals were attracting attention away from true innocents like Bent and me.

  “It’s still there,” said Bent, craning his neck in a totally unsubtle way. “And some bottle picker is going to steal that ring pronto.”

  “Should we report it?”

  “No!”

  “What then?”

  “Nothing. We do nothing. Nothing nothing nothing.”

  “You should be a pop-song writer. You have the lyrics down pat.”

  He sent me an insulted look, but at least he was quiet for the next ten minutes. Maybe he took my career suggestion seriously and was plotting his next move as a lyricist.

  • • •

  I dropped Bent off at his house. He had been quiet all the way home. Usually he talks non-stop, like a dentist’s drill, but instead, we drove along Aleventra Drive in silence. The leaves rustled down onto the windshield from the poplars lining the drive. I turned on the windshield wipers occasionally to clear the mist of the dreary day. The muted screech-screech of my old blades were the only sound. Even when I dropped Bent off, he was subdued and distant. This was maddening. I wanted to vent and scream and relive and examine and, furthermore, store it all away for future roles (if I had any), and he was totally non-cooperative. People deal with stress in different ways, and I now realized that Bent didn’t want to confront what we had just seen, while I wanted to send twenty-five e-mails to all and sundry asking for advice. Except, of course, that I couldn’t.

  Later, I sat on the floor in front of my fridge, reduced to eating a barely defrosted plastic container of what I thought might have been lentil stew in its first incarnation.

  As I sat on my glistening white tile floor (installed in the Bow Wow Days), I sighed and wondered if I had a stray bottle of wine lurking in a cupboard. Sometimes I hid them, just in case Geoff or Bent came over and started scrounging in the refrigerator. They would drink anything, even Kummel liqueur. The upside of this was that I could unload any foul bottle of liquor or wine on them. I usually had a decent Chardonnay on hand, but the events of the day—and my bank balance—had precluded any useful errands, like grocery shopping.

  Geoff occupied a strange area in my life. He was a friend. He was a mooch. (He had at least three ex-wives, and he had cheated on every one of them. He was a louse. A gorgeous louse. Young women with two-digit IQs often found him irresistible, especially when he was the lead in a TV movie and they had one line. I, however, had a three-digit IQ, and a very impressive resumé, and so managed not to be overwhelmed by his roguish charm. Oh, but that charm, I mused. It was powerful. I wondered whether it ever got him into trouble (other than problems with irate boyfriends and homicidal husbands, at which point, Geoff usually managed to find a role in a low-budget film in the Bahamas or the Philippines that kept him away until things cooled down.) I was smart enough to know that if I ever succumbed to his best efforts, I would regret it forever. Fun with a big price tag, from heartbreak to humiliation.

  Nevertheless, sometimes one can put those judgments aside and be willing to be friends with a lovable rat. My terms were that he never came on to me (or more realistically, that he limited his efforts to frivolous flirtation), that he never dated a minor and that he always paid back any money he borrowed from me. Strangely, we remained friends on these terms. I sometimes wondered what Geoff did in his lonely hours. There were only so many models an aging hunk could pick up. But he seemed to manage.

  My friendship with Bent was based on his loyalty and my gratitude, no matter how weird his behaviour was at inappropriate moments. I really wish he hadn’t bared his teeth at that Doberman in the back of the pickup truck last year,
just as we were walking by. Luckily, I only had to take the Prozac for two months and then I was back to normal.

  Gretchen was a friend and an enigma.

  Pete was my tried and true, old-time, go-to friend for everything. He was reliable and comforting, except for unfortunate moments when he talked about pedicures in the Cayman Islands enjoyed by the people who had ruined my career.

  I pulled open the door of the refrigerator and found an old bottle of Mogen David, dating from the days when I could afford a cleaning lady, which meant it would probably kill me if I drank it. I unscrewed the top, sniffed, recoiled, grabbed a Waterford Crystal glass (three fifty at Value Village) from the counter, sloshed in some of the odious mutant sugar and grape, scrunched up my eyes and downed about two ounces. This no doubt marked the beginning of the end for my little liver. I had drunk more in the past two days than I had in the past month. I love Chardonnay, but not to the point of saturation. And now I was drinking desperation booze. Lulu Malone of Bow Wow Dog Food one year, Loozie Boozie of Mogen David the next, I thought, as I raised the glass, held my nose and swallowed another mouthful.

  I sat on the floor for a long time, wondering if I were dead, an instant diabetic or just in a coma. My mind drifted around the highlights of the past twenty-four hours, and I handily managed to avoid dwelling on the most repugnant parts. Mostly, I thought that I just wanted to go to sleep and wake up and find that I was still the star of Doggie Doggie Bow Wow, and that I had money and maybe a nice stuntman in love with me. And that I could afford brand new Manolo Blahniks in my size.

  The doorbell rang. I thought about it for a while. Did I want to answer it? Not after last night. I was never going to answer my door again. Ever. That sweater was a write-off. To say nothing of the rug and the loveseat. And my stomach still hurt.

  The doorbell rang again. It made me want to cry. I thought that maybe if I just sat very still, holding the bottle of Mogen David to myself as if it were a protective talisman, whoever it was would go away.

  I waited. Whoever it was had given up. Good.

  I settled back against the cupboard. I needed something to overcome the taste in my mouth. I had twenty-seven different kinds of exotic tea turning into aromatic dust in my cupboards. Yes, that’s it. Tea. Soothing. Pure. The sort of thing that heroines in mysteries drink. Nobody who drinks tea ever gets bumped off. Look at Miss Marple. I rest my case.