The Actor's Guide To Murder

by Rick Copp

  I called for Snickers, but she still didn’t come. There was suddenly a gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  When one senses impending danger, there’s always some kind of sign, some sort of internal alarm that goes off. I chose to ignore it, and pressed on.

  I opened a kitchen drawer and fumbled around in the dark for a flashlight. Once I found it, I turned it on, but nothing happened. I had forgotten to buy new batteries. Damn. Typical. I only remembered such things when I needed them. I stood there in pitch-blackness, trying to figure out what to do next. That’s when I heard the scratching. It was faint at first, but persistent.

  I followed the sound downstairs to the bedrooms, grabbing the handrail as I descended the steps. Since our house was inverted and propped up against a hill, it became darker the further you went down. And far more ominous.

  I felt my way into the master bedroom where the scratching was growing louder and more desperate now. It was coming from inside the closet. I gripped the handle of the door, and pulled it, but someone had locked it.

  Inside, I heard a frantic whimpering. It was Snickers. Who would lock her in there? Charlie had been out all day and the housekeeper only cleaned on Mondays. It took only a few seconds before I finally began to comprehend what was happening. The gnawing in my stomach went wild, jumping into my throat as I sensed a presence directly behind me, and felt an intruder’s hot steady breath on the back of my neck.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I stood there, frozen in place, panic rising. I pretended for a moment not to notice the figure behind me, trying to buy a few precious seconds before the intruder either shot me or stabbed me in the back. I kept trying to pull open the closet door, my mind racing. The minute I turned around to face him, my fate was up for grabs.

  I let go of the door handle, sucked in a sharp intake of breath, and decided I couldn’t stall any longer if I wanted a fighting chance to survive. I whipped around like a blindfolded kid playing Marco Polo.

  No one was there.

  My eyes adjusted to the darkness and scanned the room for signs of movement. But it was still. The only sound I heard was Snickers’ scratching and whimpering from inside the closet.

  Loud ringing from the phone interrupted the quiet. My heart skipped a beat. My nerves were shattered. Had I imagined the presence behind me, the breath on my neck? Had this ordeal done such a number on my nerves that I was now susceptible to violent home invasion fantasies?

  The phone kept ringing. I walked over to the nightstand next to our bed and scooped it up.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me. I’m in Echo Park. Some guy’s holed up in his apartment with a stockpile of weapons and his landlord as a hostage. Seems a receptionist at his office hasn’t responded to his love letters, so he’s decided to get her attention this way.”

  I was so relieved to hear Charlie’s voice. “When are you coming home?”

  “We’ve been here four hours already. SWAT team is on standby. Guy’s getting antsy. I’m hoping something happens soon, but it may be a while.”

  “Just come home as soon as you can, okay?”

  “Is everything all right? You sound kind of weird.”

  “I think someone’s been here. I found Snickers locked in the closet and the lights aren’t working.”

  Charlie’s cell phone kept cutting out. I couldn’t hear what he was saying and he couldn’t hear me. “Snickers was . . . where?”

  “Forget it. I’m going over to Laurette’s. I don’t feel safe . . .”

  A hand clamped tightly over my mouth, cutting off my words, and I felt the pointed tip of a knife press firmly in my back. I dropped the phone and could only hear Charlie’s faint voice cutting in and out. “Jarrod . . . are you . . . can you hear . . . Jarrod . . . ?”

  And then, an insidious, hard voice that sent shivers down my whole body hissed in my ear, “Leave it alone.”

  He pressed the knife harder, breaking the skin, and I felt blood trickle down the back of my spine. He kept his hand in place, yanking my head back, almost snapping my neck as he spoke again, “You hear me? I said leave it alone.”

  Those were the same words Spiro warned me with after Willard’s funeral. Was this Spiro? They were also the same words Eli scribbled on that note he left on my windshield? Could this be Eli?

  My head was spinning, the pain in my back throbbing and relentless. The intruder’s strong hand pressed firmly over my nose and mouth cut off my oxygen. I couldn’t breathe. I had to act fast.

  When I was fourteen, I guest starred on an episode of Simon and Simon where I played a math whiz who was coerced by his evil uncle into participating in a series of bank frauds. When the Simon brothers uncovered the plot, my uncle held a gun to my head in order to secure his escape, but I was able to wrest free using a self-defense maneuver the stunt coordinator taught me. I had forgotten all about it until now.

  Pulling myself forward, I jabbed my elbow back, slamming it full force into the intruder’s stomach. A whoosh of air escaped his mouth as he doubled over and let go. I felt a razor sharp pain in my lower lip. He was wearing some kind of ring and as I wrenched myself free of the assailant, it got caught and tore away flesh. I tasted blood.

  Rushing as far as I could away from him, and, more importantly, the tip of his knife, I whirled around to get my first good look at him. He was wearing a black ski mask, a zipped up black vest with no shirt on underneath and blue jeans. His eyes, wild with rage, penetrated me like a wounded tiger in the jungle. He stopped to catch his breath, his knife thrust out to keep me at bay.

  I didn’t wait for him to recover. I raced upstairs, heading straight for the front door. Snickers barked wildly, but I knew she was safe. The intruder wanted me, not my dog. As I scrambled up to the top floor landing, I could see out the kitchen window. The married couple next door in matching purple and white sweat suits was out for an evening stroll in the hills, and just passing by my house. As I opened my mouth to yell for them, the intruder slammed into me. We crashed to the floor with a sickening thud.

  I was on my back. He wrapped his arms around my legs like a steel bar. I kicked and struggled, desperate to wriggle free from his grasp, but he was strong and pumped up on adrenaline. I saw the handle of the knife sticking out of his back pocket and stretched my arm to reach it. My fingers were only an inch from it. I tried lifting my head, extending my body just enough to get my fingers around it. The attacker was able to crawl up my legs, push me down on my back and straddle my waist.

  There was relief in his eyes. He was in control again. But when he reached for the knife in his back pocket, the relief gave way to concern. The knife wasn’t there. It was clutched in my hand, and in a frantic act to save myself, I plunged it forward, prepared to drive it straight into his chest. I had never killed anyone before, but I was so full of fear and self-preservation, I was prepared to take a life tonight.

  But it wasn’t meant to be.

  His left hand caught my arm just as it propelled forward, and with all his might, he slammed it down, smashing it against the floor. A pain ripped through my arm as my fingers instinctively splayed open, and the knife clattered across the kitchen floor.

  I was still on my back, trapped between his powerful knees that held me there, and looked up at him one last time. He didn’t speak. He didn’t have to. His eyes said it all. They were narrowed and angry, full of bile and contempt. He raised his fist and I finally saw what had cut deep into my lip. It was a gold ring with a small green emerald in its center. I wasn’t sure if it was a class ring, an engagement ring, or some fraternity ring. I just saw it jetting forward, decorating a fist that was about to slam into my face.

  My only thought, as an actor, was “Oh God! Not the face!” I turned away but the blow caught me on the right cheek. The pain was excruciating. I glanced up to see him raising his fist to strike again.

  Suddenly sirens blared up the street, rising in volume as they got closer and closer to the house. Charlie. He must have calle
d a patrol unit to check out the house after we got cut off. The noise distracted the intruder long enough for me to slam my hands against his chest and push him off me. I slid out from underneath him, crawled to me knees and grabbed the flashlight I had left on the kitchen counter when I first got home.

  The intruder was searching the floor for his knife when I brought the flashlight down, cracking it hard against the back of his head. He dropped to the floor with a thump. A patrol car screeched to a stop just outside the front door.

  I stumbled through the dark, and managed to get the door open. There I found myself face to face with a pair of young, handsome officers in their mid-twenties, with buzz cuts and hardened jaws. L.A. cops always look like kick ass marines.

  “He’s in the kitchen,” I said, spitting out blood.

  One grabbed his gun from his belt, flipped on his flashlight, and stealthily made his way into the kitchen. The other pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and handed it to me. I dabbed the blood that was streaming from my lip and mouth.

  We heard the first officer call out from the kitchen. “There’s no one here.”

  “He must have gone back downstairs,” I said as I coughed and sputtered, trying to catch my breath.

  We searched the whole house together. In the few moments it took for me to let the officers in, my assailant must have escaped to the garden off the bottom level of the house and retreated out the broken backyard fence where he probably came from in the first place. He also found his knife, so there was nothing left behind for the police to examine. Once again, I was left to explain some rather bizarre, questionable circumstances. A smashed window leading into the laundry room at least gave the officers some evidence to support a break-in.

  I wasn’t going to sit by and let the mysterious attacker’s trail get cold.

  I snatched up the phone and dialed Willard’s mother Tamara. It took four rings, but she finally picked up. I could tell her scratchy, annoyed voice wanted to know who the hell was calling her at this late hour as she answered. “Yes. Who is it?”

  “Tamara, it’s Jarrod Jarvis.”

  There was a pause. “What is it, Jarrod? Is something wrong?”

  “I want to know if Spiro is there with you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he there at this very moment?”

  “Yes. We’re having a quiet night at home. We’re . . . um . . . watching TV.” She didn’t relish in telling me what they were really doing.

  “I’d like you to put him on the line.”

  Tamara hesitated, not sure what I was up to, but she decided to indulge me. So she told me to hang on while she got Spiro. After a few moments, Spiro’s gruff voice came on the line.

  “What?”

  “Been there all night, Spiro?”

  “Yeah. What of it?”

  “Someone just attacked me in my home, and I wanted to make sure it wasn’t you.”

  “Sorry. Can’t help you. But if it makes you feel any better, I sure as hell wish it had been me.”

  He slammed down the phone in my ear. What a lovely guy. I thought about the various possibilities. The intruder could have been someone Spiro hired. There was still Eli the tattooed hustler. Perhaps what I witnessed in the movie theatre at the Beverly Center was Spiro paying Eli to frighten me into giving up this crusade.

  I found the key to the bedroom closet door and freed Snickers, who was more traumatized by the evening’s events than I was. She followed me from room to room, sticking as close to my heels as possible without tripping me up while I checked one more time to make sure the intruder was truly gone from the premises.

  A two-bit hustler shoving my head under water was cause for concern, but a knife-wielding madman invading my home was far more troubling. If Spiro was behind this, and the attack was designed to scare me off, then his plan was working. A part of me wanted to drop the whole matter right now, and just move on with my life.

  The cops were kind enough to go outside, find the fuse box, and restore electricity. They offered to stay with me until Charlie arrived home, but I thanked them and sent them on their way. I didn’t honestly believe the goon would come back. He had already made his point.

  When I turned on the television and curled up on the couch with Snickers, waiting to hear the garage door squeal open signaling Charlie’s arrival home, I happened to stumble across an old rerun of Highway to Heaven starring the late, beloved Michael Landon. It happened to be an episode where Michael and his bearded sidekick, Victor French, were helping a runaway deal with his drug-addicted mother and abusive stepfather in Madison, Wisconsin. A fifteen-year-old Willard Ray Hornsby played the boy. We both worked a lot in those days. Willard was so good in the episode, probably because it mirrored his real life.

  I am and always have been a true-blooded Californian. And as a true-blooded Californian, it’s required that I believe in any new age pursuits, psychic phenomena and universal signs. I was close to giving up this unending, frustrating search. It had been an exhausting quest, each turn in the road leading to another dead end. And more questions just kept piling up, making the puzzle that much harder to solve. But as I contemplated dropping the whole matter once again, the first face I saw was Willard Ray Hornsby himself. Playing a troubled boy in a long forgotten TV show. It was a sign. A sign I should continue. And I would. I would continue to push and prod and perhaps put myself in further danger. Willard’s youthful face on my television set was sending me a message. And I wasn’t about to let him down.

  Chapter Sixteen

  When the officers left, they must have radioed Charlie, because within ten minutes he was home, and holding me in his arms. He came close to losing me tonight and it had shaken him up pretty bad.

  I, of course, was thrilled to see his angst-ridden face. It was proof that the big lug loved me. I no longer had to convince Charlie there was more to Willard’s death than what the police and forensics people had already determined in their official reports. Too many bizarre occurrences had finally forced him to accept what I had so adamantly believed from the beginning. Someone had wanted Willard dead.

  And now he or she wanted me dead too.

  I didn’t care that Spiro was tucked safely away inside his mansion in Bel Air with his sugar mommy Tamara. I had seen enough in the past week to know he was paying hustlers off, pulling strings from behind the scenes, warning me every step of the way to keep my nose out of it. Spiro was, in my mind, the devil. And if he didn’t carry out the dirty deed of knocking off Willard himself and making it look like an accident, then he had certainly orchestrated it. And it was my mission to prove it.

  Charlie combed the house for any clues left behind by the assailant, but I knew it was a fruitless search. The knife was the only key piece of evidence and the attacker fled with it as I let the cops in the house. But Charlie had to keep busy so his mind wouldn’t wander to the scene he almost came home to find—his lover sprawled out on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood.

  As the victim of the attack, I was doing much better emotionally than Charlie. I had already been pounced on once by a wild-eyed tattooed hustler in Laurel Canyon. I was getting used to violence and mayhem and it just strengthened my resolve, kept me focused and pissed me off enough to doggedly pursue more clues.

  I fired up the laptop and cradled it in my lap as I clicked on the Internet Movie Database, the incredibly detailed Website full of entertainment industry factoids. All you have to do is punch in a name, and a complete list of film and television credits immediately downloads for your convenience.

  I wasn’t one hundred percent sure what I was looking for, but I knew Spiro was a struggling actor before he met Tamara, and won a few bit parts in a string of forgettable projects. I was hoping something might jump out at me. A name. Someone who might provide a little insight. It was a reach, but I had nothing else to go on at this point.

  After typing “Spiro Spiridakis” into the little search box, I waited the few seconds for the computer to pull up a list of
titles. Then, I painstakingly clicked on each and every barely released independent film and quickly cancelled TV show he had appeared in so I could pour over all the names in the cast and crews that Spiro worked with during his brief career.

  For such a short stint in the acting profession, Spiro had certainly racked up a bunch of credits. Granted, most of them were glorified extra parts, but his swarthy good looks and Greek pedigree served him well, even after he gave up his dream of being an actor.

  Having finished his third search of the house, Charlie sauntered into the bedroom where I was propped up against a pillow, clicking and searching, clicking and searching. He kissed me on the forehead.

  “I turned on the house alarm before I came downstairs.”

  I looked up at him and gave him a reassuring grin. “I don’t think he’s coming back tonight.”

  “I know. I just thought it was a good idea.”

  It dawned on me that Charlie, as a cop, was used to always staying alert in situations fraught with danger. He was just worried about me.

  “I’m okay, really. You didn’t have to turn on the alarm.”

  When we moved into the house, we installed a high tech security system to monitor every window and door throughout the entire house. After I accidentally set it off six times and Snickers set it off eight times, triggering a migraine-inducing screaming horn heard for miles that called in three neighborhood patrol cars with armed guards to the scene, we decided as a family that it just wasn’t worth it. It had been dormant for years. Until tonight. Charlie was trying to make me feel safe, and I loved him for it.

  Charlie tossed off his clothes. There was a biting chill in the air, so he hurried into bed and slid under the covers. He snuggled up next to me, wrapping his arm around my waist, trying to pull me closer. As much as I wanted to just snap off the light and fall asleep in his arms, I couldn’t help but notice a name in the cast list of a small independent movie in which Spiro appeared.

  The film was a Quentin Tarantino rip-off in the mid-nineties that never got a theatrical release but was eventually sold to an Encore movie channel. Lots of blood, guts, guns, and self-consciously hip dialogue. According to the plot summary, Spiro played a small time hood (talk about type casting) who gets knocked off in the first five minutes of the story. Playing his buddy, who is tortured by a group of gangsters into revealing the whereabouts of a lost suitcase full of cash, was an actor by the name of Malcolm Randall.