by Rick Copp
“Move out of the way, buddy. People have to piss,” the bartender said as he barreled through the aggravated crowd.
“I can’t,” I said in as low a voice as possible. “Something happened in there and I don’t want to cause a panic.”
“What?”
He leaned in closer, as did the dozen other cowboys lined up to take a leak. I felt discretion was vital at this point, so I whispered in his ear. “A man’s been murdered. And his body’s in your bathroom.”
“Holy shit! Murdered?”
An audible buzz spread faster than melted butter on a dinner roll. There was a powerful surge forward. All I saw in front of me were dozens of cowboy hats in various styles and colors crowding me in, all anxious for a glimpse at the corpse.
The bartender tried shoving me aside to get a better look. He was the type who slowed his vehicle down and bottled up traffic whenever he spotted a car wreck on the highway. He was bigger than me, and managed to reach over my head with his left hand and swing the door open. The guys in the front were able to get a quick look at the pale, stiff, bleeding body of Vito Wilde.
“Jesus!” one of the cowboys said as he covered his mouth and bolted out a side door.
I kept the crowd at bay as best I could, knowing it was important to keep the crime scene clean. Not only was I married to a cop, I had also played a murder victim/corpse in a teaser for CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. It took seven takes to get the scene where William Peterson examined me right, because I found him so sexy, I kept giggling every time he touched me.
The sirens that pierced the air brought some welcome relief. Flock of Seagulls man finally backed off and went to greet the cops, undoubtedly to claim credit for keeping things calm until they got there.
Since we were in the valley, I didn’t recognize any of the officers who pushed their way through. Charlie’s division was downtown Los Angeles. One of the cops, a tiny young Hispanic woman with a kind face and a compact, curvy body escorted me outside away from the fracas.
“Bartender says you’re the one who found the body.”
I nodded.
“Did you know the victim?”
I nodded again.
“Want to tell me?”
“His name’s Vito Wilde. He’s a therapist. He was treating a friend of mine who died recently.”
“This friend of yours, was he murdered too?”
“Police don’t seem to think so. But I do. Vito had information that was going to help me prove it.”
She gave me a quizzical look, not sure how to digest this. She paused, and then continued, “So you think Mr. Wilde knew who killed your friend, and that person is the one who murdered Mr. Wilde?”
“Yes.”
“So don’t keep me in suspense. Who do you think it is?”
“His name is Spiro Spiridakis. And I’ve got his number for you in my car.” I didn’t care that Spiro had an airtight alibi the night I was attacked in my home. He was going down.
I heard a voice behind me. “Why is it wherever you go, there’s trouble?”
I turned to find Charlie standing behind me. He had thrown on some jeans and a t-shirt and rushed over the hill to make sure I was all right.
Charlie grabbed me in a hug and whispered in my ear, “Someday I hope you stop scaring me like this.” Then he let go, and flashed his badge to the cop guarding the back door to the bar and disappeared inside. I was left with the small Hispanic lady cop, who was still trying to piece together my elaborate story.
It was starting to get cold outside, and most of the bar patrons had already been herded behind plastic yellow police tape hastily draped across the front and back of the bar. A crowd was gathering, and my lady cop friend ditched me to keep the area secure. I stood there alone, this horribly violent murder scene behind me.
It dawned on me that if curiosity seekers were already on the scene, then it was only a matter of time before . . .
Flash!
The flashbulb from a camera blinded me. Omigod! The press was here, and what a story they had this time. The former child star recently arrested for breaking and entering was now mixed up in a murder. All of the reporters on the scene had watched TV when they were kids. They all knew exactly who I was.
I made a mad dash for Charlie’s car.
When Charlie came out of the bar about an hour later, the local news teams lunged for him, salivating for any tidbits of information they could feed to their post prime time audience. Charlie was out of his jurisdiction and didn’t want to step on any toes, so he directed them to another officer who was more than happy to dish a lot of nothing to the quote-hungry reporters.
Charlie ducked away from the madness and slid into the driver’s seat. I was slumped down, frazzled from the whole experience. I knew I would once again be featured across the front pages of the tabloids. This was why Ellery Queen never acted in breakfast cereal commercials as a child. It would have been a real hindrance to his stellar career as a detective.
“Anything?” I asked Charlie.
“Nope, not yet. Forensics is still scouring the area, but I don’t expect them to find much. Whoever killed Vito did it quick and clean.”
“You mean Spiro.”
“It wasn’t him, Jarrod.”
“What are you talking about? We have a motive for both murders now,” I said. “Spiro made a pass at Willard, and was terrified he was going to tell Mother. It would have done irreparable harm to Spiro’s cash flow. And he knew Willard told his therapist everything, and that eventually Vito might speak out. He had to get rid of him too.”
“I had a squad car stop by Tamara’s house. Spiro answered the door. If he had been at Rawhide, there would have been no way for him to get back over the hill to Bel Air that fast.”
“Then it was Eli. Spiro hired him to attack me in order to scare me off and then hired him again to get rid of Vito.”
Charlie shook his head. “Sent a squad car over there too. He was in the middle of giving a ‘massage’ to a prominent studio executive.”
“He was home? So then who . . . ?”
Charlie put his arm around me. “We’ll get to the bottom of it. I promise. We’ll figure it out.”
With more and more questions mounting, I was beginning to believe my boyfriend was dead wrong, and Willard Ray Hornsby’s death would fade away with time, just another bizarre mystery chronicled in a new edition of Hollywood Babylon.
Chapter Twenty
When Charlie and I arrived home and got ready for bed, reports of Vito Wilde’s murder at the Rawhide bar were all over the late night news. It was a fast breaking story, and the frenzied media didn’t overlook Vito’s connection to Willard Ray Hornsby. They also didn’t miss my connection to the whole mess, and wasted no time in putting up the photo of me taken outside the bar for the whole city to enjoy.
Charlie was in the bathroom brushing his teeth, so I was left alone in bed, clutching a sleepy Snickers as I stared at my surprised face on television. My first reaction was alarm at my haggard, worn appearance. I wanted the station to run a scroll underneath explaining to viewers that I had just discovered a dead body and then had to spend twenty minutes guarding it until the police arrived. But alas, they didn’t offer that courtesy.
My second visceral reaction came when the field reporter at the scene suggested my possible involvement in the crime, since I seemed to be popping up everywhere a corpse was found. The news team speculated on how I might be connected to this recent spate of murders. The weatherman joked that I was around more dead bodies than the old lady on Murder She Wrote. You just have to love local news in L.A. I wanted to tell the jerk to stick to his storm fronts and save the commentary for someone with half a brain.
At that moment, the perky blonde news anchor introduced a new interview subject, who happened to be in the studio, respected Los Angeles coroner Susie Chan.
Susie was decked out in a powder blue power suit, fitted with smart earrings and had an impeccable camera-ready coif.
/> Once I found my voice, I cried out, “Charlie, get in here!”
He came stumbling out of the bathroom in his underwear, toothbrush in his mouth, and paste foam staining the sides of his mouth. He almost choked on the toothbrush at the sight of Susie. He was used to seeing her on television; it was just strange to see her commenting on this particular story. Even Snickers poked her head up, intrigued. There was a recognizable voice coming from the big box in the room.
The first question out of the bubblehead news anchor’s mouth was about me. She wanted to know if Susie had any opinion as to why I always seemed to be at the scene of these crimes.
“First of all, let’s make a distinction,” she said in her very best professional, power hungry voice. “Willard Ray Hornsby’s death was not a murder. If you read my autopsy report, which the L.A. Times printed last week, you’ll see I ruled that death as an unfortunate accident. Vito Wilde’s death is most certainly a homicide. There does seem to be a connection, however. Mr. Hornsby was a patient of Mr. Wilde’s. As for Mr. Jarvis’s propensity to show up on the scene every time someone expires, that’s for the police to look into.”
I was flabbergasted. After all our bonding at Off-Vine, Susie was selling me out on the eleven o’clock news.
I turned to Charlie. “Did you hear that? She’s all but saying I’m the killer!”
Charlie didn’t want to fan the flames, so he talked in his calm, even voice. “She didn’t say that.”
“She implied it! And did you notice how she’s pretending we don’t know each other by calling me Mr. Jarvis? She’s distancing herself. And what about her famous bathtub murder theory? She’s not even talking about that!”
The news anchor glanced at the teleprompter for her next question. Hopefully with time and experience, she’d get better at pretending the questions came off the top of her head.
“So aside from Mr. Jarvis and their doctor/patient relationship, did these two men have anything else in common?”
“Yes. Both were openly gay men.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” I was now shouting at the television. “You never got over your husband coming out of the closet, did you, Susie!” I crawled to the edge of the bed on my knees, still shouting. “I always knew you were homophobic!”
Charlie gently took me by the arm and pulled me back beside him. His best course of action at this point was to keep me calm. But I was wild with rage.
“I never trusted her! I knew she’d eventually show her true colors !”
Susie leaned forward, drawing the news anchor closer to her, as if she were about to share a secret just between the two of them. Of course, they were miked so the whole city could hear her intimate revelation. “And they were both HIV positive.”
This bit of news stopped me dead. Susie continued on with her theories regarding the similarities between these two men, but I didn’t hear another word. I was stunned. Willard had never shared that news with me. The first question that popped into my head was why this didn’t show up in Susie’s autopsy report. I grabbed Charlie’s cell phone off the nightstand before he could stop me and pressed the speed dial button for Susie.
And then, right on television, there was a ringing. Susie stopped talking and froze, like a child caught sneaking candy. The news anchor stared at her numbly. She wasn’t used to anything unexpected happening. That would require her to think on the spot, and most news anchors are not adequately trained in doing that. Susie reached down underneath the news desk and pulled her phone out of her purse. She held it up.
“I’m sorry. It might be an emergency.” She flipped the phone up. “Susie Chan.”
“Susie, it’s me, Jarrod. Why the hell didn’t you tell me that Willard was HIV positive?”
The news anchor touched her earpiece. The producer in the booth was probably screaming at her to regain control of the situation. But the anchor just sat there shaking. This was a first and she didn’t know what to do.
Susie looked into the camera right at me. “I thought you knew.”
The news anchor, ashen-faced, stuttered, “Thought I knew what?”
Susie pointed to the phone, but I don’t think the news anchor understood yet that she wasn’t talking to her.
Charlie had his hands over his face. He knew Susie would be livid over this. He was going to get it from both sides.
“Of course I didn’t know! Why wasn’t it in the autopsy report?”
Susie covered her mouth so the viewing audience wouldn’t hear. But they heard every word. “That was just a preliminary report. Not all the blood tests were back. Look, if you don’t mind, I can’t talk about this right now.”
“Fine. So what did you think of the restaurant the other night? Did you like your pecan-breaded chicken?”
Susie’s face burned a crimson red. I loved tripping her up like this. It was a euphoric victory.
Someone in the booth was now feeding the still shell-shocked news anchor words to say because she finally turned to the camera, and chirped, “Sports and weather are up next. We’ll be right back.”
The station mercifully cut to a commercial.
“You’re a bastard, Jarrod!” Susie was screaming now. She knew she was off the air.
“Yeah, well, what’s with you acting like I’m a complete stranger on TV? You afraid I’m going to smear your pristine reputation if it gets out I’m shacking up with your ex-husband?”
Charlie was on top of things enough to grab the phone out of my hand at that point. He glared at me as he spoke frantically into the phone. “Hi, Susie, it’s me.” He settled back to endure her unexpurgated rant. He felt he had to after I torpedoed her live interview on the news.
I, on the other hand, was feeling pretty damn good. Susie was a grandstander and attention hog, and she deserved a little humility.
But I did sometimes feel sorry for Charlie, having to put up with me like this. However, I felt sorrier for Willard. I seemed to be the only one interested in putting all the pieces together. And this latest startling bit of information was one hell of a big piece. It was just a hunch, but deep down in my soul I knew this was the clue that would lead me to the mother lode of answers.
Chapter Twenty-One
During the heyday of Go To Your Room! I had a stalker. I was fourteen years old at the time, and completely unprepared for the obsessive advances of a persistent inmate at Angola State Prison who was convinced that we were soul mates meant to be together for all eternity.
He wrote an average of fifteen letters a week to me, each one becoming more aggressive and frustrated the longer I failed to respond. It came as no surprise that the inmate was mentally deficient, and had been in and out of institutions most of his life. I found out his first crime was at the age of eleven when he slaughtered his parents in their sleep for refusing to allow him to stay up and watch The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour.
So when he escaped from his cell during a riot and disappeared just as we launched our second wildly successful season, there were a few tense weeks on the set while the escaped con was still at large. He was recaptured just two miles from my house after he got into a scuffle with a crossing guard who didn’t know which street I lived on. The inmate was convinced there was a vast conspiracy at work and the crossing guard was an emissary from the evil forces bent on keeping us apart. The crossing guard managed to beat him off with her hand-held stop sign until a squad car arrived on the scene and arrested him.
That was my extreme story of someone who wouldn’t take no for an answer during my days of fame, but it stayed with me, and ever since then I have been extra careful whenever I leave the house. I tend to be hyper aware of everybody around me, and I’m always prepared to react if I get any strange, uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. It’s been years since I’ve gotten a fan letter, so the chances of acquiring another obsessive fan are remote. But I’ve never forgotten the trauma of those terrifying few weeks, so an alarm system has been permanently installed inside of me to detect any
one who might choose to invade my personal space. Most people, having not gone through such an ordeal, don’t notice their surroundings or those who fill it. Tamara Schulberg-Spiridakis was one of those people.
I followed her all morning, and not once did she get an inkling that someone was on her tail. Granted, she did have a brush with fame after snaring her loaded geriatric media mogul, but since the marriage only lasted a couple of weeks, her fame was fleeting. She simply disappeared from the society pages and trade papers after settling her lawsuit against his estate.
So she wasn’t trained like I was to watch for anyone who might be trailing her. She had her nails done at Skin Sense, a tiny beauty salon on Third Street near the Beverly Center, then had her hair rinsed and styled at Umberto, one of the trendier salons in Beverly Hills. I also went to Umberto for sheer camp value. I may not see Gwyneth Paltrow under a dryer, but I did spot Monica Lewinsky getting highlights once.
I lingered outside until Tamara was finished, then pretended to be just passing by. I knew if I showed up on her doorstep in Bel Air, Spiro would be on hand to shoo me away. I couldn’t call and ask her to meet me because that would give her time to prepare. She would be ready for any questions I decided to lob her way. No, a surprise run in on a busy street in Beverly Hills was my best option, and the time to strike was now.
“Tamara!”
She looked up at me, startled. She had to be asking herself why I always seemed to be popping up in the most unexpected places.
“Jarrod, what are you doing here?”
“Meeting a friend for lunch at the Mandarin.”
That was plausible. The Mandarin, a popular Chinese eatery, was within walking distance, and since I was standing outside the parking structure next to Umberto, it made sense.
“We seem to be running into each other all over the place,” she said.
“Fate. We’re meant to be together.”
She let out a nervous laugh, not sure what I meant. She checked to make sure her new hairdo was still in place. It struck me as a nervous gesture.