The Actor's Guide To Murder

by Rick Copp

  “What are you talking about? I told you, it was self-defense.”

  I shook my head. “No. The police are right. Spiro may have been planning to murder you, but you had plans of your own. I want to know why.”

  “I thought you were on my side,” she said, her eyes welling up with tears.

  “I’m not on anybody’s side. Except Willard’s.”

  “What is this sick obsession you have with my son? Why won’t you let it go?”

  “Because I loved him!”

  She stared at me in disbelief. Her eyes betrayed a wariness. She wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the details of what I had to say, but I wasn’t going to hold anything back anymore.

  “That kiss at the rodeo, the one the tabloids splashed on the front pages all those years ago. That wasn’t just a captured moment of two confused closet cases exploring some strange, suppressed feelings. That was a picture of two boys in love. He meant everything to me.”

  “Stop it. No more. He’s gone. What’s done is done.”

  I wasn’t going to allow her to sweep any of this under the carpet anymore.

  “We were only sixteen at the time,” I said. “We were both scared about the repercussions, how our families would react. How the whole country would react.”

  “Why don’t you just write a play about it? Romeo and Julian. It’ll be a big hit with the gays. Just don’t share it with me.”

  Tamara was squirming. Deep down she knew what Willard meant to me, and it made her extremely uncomfortable. I had downplayed my past feelings for Willard because I was afraid of hurting Charlie, the new man in my life, the most important man now. But I couldn’t protect Charlie anymore. It had to all come out.

  “You knew all along,” I said. “Willard told you he loved me. That he was going to keep seeing me. Screw what Hollywood might think. He told you that, didn’t he?”

  “He was a boy. He couldn’t have possibly known what was good for him at that age.”

  “That’s why you forbade him to see me anymore, that’s why you did everything in your power to destroy what we had.”

  “I had to. We were in debt. The settlement from my first divorce couldn’t cover expenses. I needed him to keep working.”

  “So if the world knew Willard was a faggot, your gravy train would’ve derailed.”

  She shifted in her seat and refused to make eye contact with me. “Something like that, yes. But I never forced Willard into the business. He chose that for himself.”

  “He did it to please you. He figured if he were a big star, maybe you’d finally accept him. Why do you think he worked so hard to make it? He just wanted you to love him.”

  “I did love him.”

  “Did you ever tell him that? That’s all he ever wanted to hear.”

  “I’m sure I did. Many times.”

  Tamara’s eyes flickered, her mind searching for just one instance where she could remember when those words passed her lips. And from what I could see, she was drawing a blank.

  “I loved him too, Tamara. I loved him with every fiber of my being. I would’ve given up my career for him.”

  The irony was, I was giving up my career for him now. He just wasn’t alive to appreciate it.

  “Stop it,” Tamara said. “I don’t want to hear anymore.”

  “Even after all these years, even now that he’s dead, you still can’t accept the fact that he was gay.”

  “He wasn’t gay. He was confused. He would’ve straightened out eventually. But you went and put all kinds of sordid ideas into his head.”

  “He was who he was. Whether you like it or not. I had nothing to do with it.”

  “He didn’t have many friends when he was a boy. He liked you and trusted you because you were both child actors, and you were both going through the same things. I thought you would be good for him. And then he got . . .”

  She blamed me for corrupting her son. Turning him gay. She even blamed me for his contracting HIV. Her backward thinking was misguided and wrong, but I felt sorry for her. I felt sorry for myself too. I had never completely got over Willard. And reliving the past with his mother, dredging up these deep-rooted memories, was difficult and painful for both of us.

  And now I understood why Charlie had been so reticent about me diving head first into this pool of secrets and lies. He was afraid of losing me to the past.

  I put my hand out for her to take, but she moved away from me and folded her arms. She spoke evenly, her voice void of emotion. “Listen and listen good, Jarrod. I admit Willard and I drifted apart over the years, but after I married Spiro, I tried reconnecting with him. He didn’t want anything to do with me, so I had to let him go. And ever since he died, I’ve spent every waking moment regretting it, not having some kind of relationship with him while I had the chance. I loved my son. I would never hurt him intentionally. And Spiro didn’t kill him. I know that for a fact because he was with me the night Willard died. And whether you choose to believe that or not, it’s the truth. So go find this Theodore Phelan or whoever it is you think might be involved, because chances are the real answers are there, not with me.”

  “You still haven’t told me why you killed Spiro.”

  She took a deep breath, made sure no one was around, and then turned her head slightly towards me without looking at me.

  “Fortunately,” she said, “I don’t have to.”

  Chapter Thirty

  By the time Charlie charged into the Palms Springs Police Department (after hitching a ride with a fellow detective who owned a weekend cabin near Joshua Tree), the officers were finished questioning me. Angie Dickinson spent two hours pumping me for information, and I told her everything I knew. Almost everything. I feigned ignorance when she asked if I knew who it was Spiro confided his plans to in the steam room at Crunch gym. I’m not sure why I was protecting Eli. But he did have enough of a conscience to tell me where Spiro was planning to knock off Tamara, and I did feel strongly that he could be of further help in the future.

  My immediate plan was to return to L.A. and talk to him one more time. I still believed he was holding something back from me and I was determined to find out what. And I didn’t want the Palm Springs police locking him up in a desert jail cell for collusion before I had the chance.

  Charlie was a formidable presence in the precinct, hovering over the small town officers, barking questions about their procedure, and waving his badge around. The ploy worked. They wanted his ass out of there. And they knew he wasn’t going to leave without me, so Angie Dickinson finally told me that I was free to go.

  After retrieving the Beamer at Two Bunch, Charlie and I stopped at a convenience store on the edge of town to load up on soda and chips for the long drive home. He knew junk food would calm me down and bring me back to a better place.

  Still, I was wired enough to try calling Isis three more times on Charlie’s cell phone. There was still no answer. I recounted what Tamara had said about her psychic reading, and I was single-minded in my resolve to find out exactly what Isis saw. I wasn’t going to let this wait until the sun came up.

  By the time we could make out the lights of downtown Los Angeles in the distance, it was going on three o’clock in the morning.

  “Don’t go home. Head for Isis’s apartment.”

  Charlie raised an eyebrow. “At this hour?”

  “She’ll be up.” I had no idea if that was true, but it sounded confident enough to Charlie, who shot past our exit and took the 10 freeway west towards West Hollywood.

  When I rang Isis’s apartment, I was still jacked up on caffeine from the sodas and a sugar high from a Mounds bar Charlie had been kind enough to share with me. Charlie stood behind me, a little self-conscious to be calling on someone so late.

  A raspy, annoyed voice came over the speaker next to the locked front door that led into the lobby. “Who is it?”

  “It’s me, Isis. Jarrod. I really need to talk to you.”

  Charlie leaned over my shoulder and spok
e into the speaker. “If it’s too late, we can come back tomorrow.”

  “It’s not too late,” Isis said. “I’m just reading a few tarot cards and watching TV.”

  I tossed a self-satisfied smile to Charlie as a buzzer rang, and we pushed the door open.

  Isis was in a pink robe and big oversized fur slippers when we entered her apartment. Her hair was a tangled mess. She may not have been sleeping but she certainly wasn’t expecting company. On the television was a Psychic Friends Network infomercial. Isis was obviously checking out the competition.

  “Can I get you boys something to drink? I went to Price Club today so I’m all stocked up on the super size bottles.”

  Charlie declined. I was so high I figured another shot of caffeine wouldn’t make any difference, so I asked for a Wild Cherry Pepsi. Isis had giant bottles of every kind of soda on the market stacked in her pantry. It didn’t matter that she lived alone and could not possibly drink all of it before the expiration date. A good deal was a good deal.

  After we sat down, Isis smiled.

  “Is this about Tamara Schulberg?”

  Charlie sat up. “How did you know—?”

  I knocked Charlie’s knee with mine to shut him up. I had a plan and I didn’t want him spoiling it before I had a chance to put it into effect.

  “No. I completely understand that your work as a psychic is confidential and it would be inappropriate for you to share information from another client’s reading.” I patted her thigh with my hand for punctuation.

  “Uh huh.” She eyed me suspiciously. This didn’t sound like me at all, so she remained on her guard, rightly fearing I might be up to no good.

  “You take your work very seriously and I would rather cut out my tongue than risk our friendship by asking you to compromise your obviously strong convictions,” I said.

  She was suppressing a smile now. This was too much, even for me.

  Charlie leaned back on the couch, interlocked his fingers behind his head, and got comfortable. He figured we’d be here for a while.

  “You know how you always have psychic visions in your dreams? Well, I had one last night. I had this dream,” I said.

  Isis’s curious nature got the best of her. “A dream? What kind of dream?”

  I had hooked her. Isis was obsessed with dream interpretation, and I knew she couldn’t resist a challenge. It was also the only thing I could think of at the time.

  “Screw the cherry soda,” I said. “You got any vodka in the pantry? My throat’s a little parched, and this is a pretty elaborate dream.”

  She was up on her feet in an instant, and heading towards the kitchen. Not only was Isis an amazing dream interpreter, but she was also a consummate hostess. And I was hoping that in the time it took for her to mix me a potent cocktail, I would be able to come up with some dream, any dream that would help bridge the conversation to Tamara Schulberg and her psychic reading a few days before.

  Isis didn’t have any orange juice or club soda, so we mixed the vodka with one of her super size bottles of Seven Up. Charlie declined. He had to be up early for a raid on another garage that supposedly housed some more car thieves. He was also tired from driving out to Palm Springs and back to fetch me.

  I watched Isis fill our glasses liberally, and knew my time was running out. I had to think fast. Once we were settled down with our cocktails, the spotlight would be back on me, and Isis was expecting a doozy of a dream. The pressure was on for me to deliver.

  Charlie knew exactly what I was doing, and checked his watch. He was resigned to my schemes, especially at this late hour, but was also interested in what malarkey would come spilling out of my mouth. I was kind of curious too.

  As she stirred the drinks with her fingertips, she yawned. “Sorry, I’m a little tired. I had four Reiki clients in a row tonight. That’s why I didn’t pick up the phone when you called earlier.”

  Reiki is a spiritual form of healing accomplished through the power of touch. The therapist directs energy through her hands into the body’s seven Chakras. Isis was recently annointed as a Reiki master, and was enormously proud of her accomplishments as a healer. She was also easy to flatter. That’s when it came to me. I had my dream.

  “You are such an amazing psychic, Isis. You already know what I dreamed, don’t you?”

  She looked at me with a glassy-eyed stare. She wanted to say yes, that her wise mind had already seen and studied what I was about to say, but unfortunately it hadn’t. She didn’t have a clue, but she knew I considered her my all-knowing guru, so she just stayed quiet.

  “It’s like we have this powerful mental connection,” I said, laying it on thick. “It’s freaky that you just mentioned Reiki because that’s exactly what my dream was about.”

  “Oh. Yes. Okay. What exactly happened in this dream?”

  “I was giving a Reiki treatment to this older woman. I couldn’t quite see who it was. But she was more of an acquaintance than a friend. I was trying to rid her body of all this dark energy inside of her. You know, restore the peaceful glow of her aura. But I couldn’t. It just wouldn’t go away. What do you think the dark energy represents?”

  “I’m not sure,” Isis said, her voice tentative. She was still questioning my motives and didn’t want to be tricked into talking out of school.

  “I kept trying and trying, but the energy was too strong, so full of evil. And that’s when this strange apparition appeared above us. It was a man, about my age, who kind of looked like me, and I had this great affection for him. He was just floating above me, crying this warning that I couldn’t make out.”

  I was so caught up in my make-believe dream that I never stopped to think that I might talk myself into a corner. But there I was with Isis and Charlie on the edge of their seats, waiting to hear what came next, and I was stumped. This probably explains why I never excelled at improvisational acting.

  So I stopped the story, grabbed the bottle of vodka, and refilled my glass, adding just a splash of Seven Up. I gulped down the cocktail and practically licked off the last remnants of liquor from the half melted ice cubes, hoping and praying that the dramatic pause would give me a few precious seconds to make up the rest of my dream.

  Isis was tired of waiting. “What was this spirit trying to say?”

  “It said that this dark energy took a human form and was hiding his true self from this woman. This energy, this wicked soul was trying to enslave her, but she didn’t see it. It was almost as if he was playing the role of loving husband, but behind the scenes he was another person, this shadowy creature who was preying on her . . . or someone close to her.”

  Now I knew Spiro had made several passes at his own stepson, and I was betting that it must have come up in Tamara’s reading in some form. Fortunately Isis had no idea that I was aware of this juicy tidbit, and I could see from the look on her face that it was killing her not to explain what I was seeing.

  I looked at Isis, my eyes full of innocence. “Do you have any idea what it means?”

  Isis was itching to divulge everything. Every fiber of her being wanted to talk, but her ethics kept getting in the way. She shook her head.

  “Well, don’t feel too bad,” I said. “Not everybody’s good at dream interpretation.”

  Isis’s head snapped to attention. I had called her talents into question. It was too much for her to bear.

  “The apparition represents Willard! He was warning his mother about her husband Spiro!”

  “Go on.”

  She paused, debating with herself, and then shifted her gaze towards me. “Now, you can’t tell anyone I told you this . . .”

  I was next to her on the couch in an instant. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  “Promise?”

  “Of course.”

  “When Tamara came to me, she was very upset. Her marriage to Spiro was crumbling. She felt he was just using her, and let me tell you something: The asshole was using her. But that’s not the awful part . . .”

&n
bsp; “What?” I asked, bursting with anticipation.

  Isis became distracted by a loose thread on her bright pink robe. She began to pick at it. It got longer and longer as she pulled, threatening to unravel the garment entirely.

  “Isis, talk to me. What were you going to say?”

  She let go of the piece of thread and looked up. “You know, most people just want to be friends with me so I’ll tell them they’re going to win the lottery. They don’t really care about me, just my gift. But you, you always loved me for me.”

  It was true. I did love Isis, and I was sure we would still be friends even if she weren’t a dead-on psychic. But tonight, I was obsessed with her gift, and it made me feel like a first class heel because I was forcing her to compromise her principles. She knew it, which was why she was keeping me in such suspense.

  “We have a very special relationship and I would never exploit it,” I said as I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “Now get to the awful part!”

  “Spiro did a horrible thing.”

  “He tried to get Willard into bed,” Charlie said.

  Isis sat back, disappointed. Charlie had been sitting on the couch, quiet as a mouse, and now at this critical point in our conversation, he decided to pipe in and spoil Isis’s big moment. He had sucked the drama out of her revelation. I couldn’t believe it. She spun around to Charlie.

  “How did you know that?” she asked.

  “Jarrod told me.”

  She whipped back around to me. “You already knew?”

  I shot Charlie an angry look for ruining my manipulations, but the jig was up. I nodded somberly.

  “Willard’s therapist told me.”

  Isis snorted, indignant. “How could he violate his client’s trust? Doesn’t he have any professional ethics?” The irony of this statement, in light of her own gossipy nature, was lost on her.

  “The therapist doesn’t have to worry about ethics anymore. He’s dead,” Charlie said.

  “Oh,” Isis said, the anger draining out of her face.

  I thought for a moment that we were done. My plan had been to use my dream to at least get Isis talking about Tamara’s reading; first about Spiro’s despicable behavior involving his stepson, and then perhaps something more that might help tie it all together. But Charlie’s interruption threw all that into jeopardy.