Italian Iced

by Kylie Logan

  Her smile was sly. “Kept that out of the newspapers and all those fan magazines, didn’t she? Tina Moretti, a nothing from nowhere. What’s it they call it, the wrong side of the tracks? That was Tina’s part of town, all right.”

  “And you two went to acting school together?” I could excuse the twist of disbelief in Declan’s voice because I knew exactly how he was feeling. Dulcie did not seem like the type who could read, much less act.

  “You ever seen her website?” Dulcie asked. “It says Miss Meghan Cohan studied at a prestigious acting school.”

  That was exactly what it said.

  Dulcie laughed again. “Jack Kolinsky’s School of Drama. That’s the place. And not even in New York. Girls like me and Tina, we couldn’t afford no acting schools in New York. Kolinsky’s, in Hoboken, that was more our kind of place. The prestigious school . . .” She put on a hoity-toity accent. “In back of a butcher’s shop. Ha! Them tabloids. Wouldn’t they love the real story!”

  I remembered our trip to Dulcie’s trailer and the picture of Meghan on her bedroom wall. “You and Meghan . . . er . . . Tina, you knew each other in acting school, but you didn’t like each other, am I right?”

  “Are you kidding me? We were best friends! All the time we were getting fleeced by Kolinsky and his stupid school and his stupid acting methods, and after we graduated, too. Then . . . well, we figured our next stop was the silver screen.” As if picturing her name in lights, Dulcie threw her head back and spread her arms wide. “We shared an apartment for a while, and I’ll tell you what, nobody coulda been closer than me and Tina.”

  “What was she like?” I couldn’t help but ask it. “Before she was Meghan, back when she was just Tina, what was she like?”

  One corner of Dulcie’s mouth twisted. “Not the prettiest girl, not at first, anyway. Not until she got a lot of work done.”

  I shouldn’t have been surprised, yet somehow, since I’d always known Meghan as the embodiment of ideal feminine beauty, I never imagined her as anything but. “Was that when you were in acting school?” I asked her.

  Dulcie nodded. “Tina, I don’t think she ever thought anything but that she was the hottest thing in the whole, wide world. But then Kolinsky, he had a way of pointing out people’s faults. He’s the one who said something about Tina’s big nose.”

  That explained Spencer’s schnoz!

  “Once she got that worked on, then he’d mention other things bit by bit. You know, her chin or the lines around her eyes. All that sort of stuff. I think he knew, see, the more she got worked on, the prettier she’d be. He knew if she was pretty enough, talent, it didn’t matter. Not that he cared. All he wanted to do was wait until Tina was a star, then say that he was the one who taught her everything she knew.”

  “Only he didn’t, did he?” It struck me as odd. “Otherwise the press would have caught wind of Meghan’s background and her true identity.”

  “Paid him off.” Dulcie spat out the words. “Just like she did—” When she realized she’d said too much, she gulped.

  It didn’t take a genius to fill in the blanks. “She paid you, too. The trailer?”

  Her nod was barely perceptible.

  “Was she still paying you? All these years? Were you still getting money from Meghan?”

  “Like clockwork,” Dulcie admitted. “Though I was thinking lately that maybe I should ask for a little more. You know, like a cost-of-living raise.” Dulcie’s grin was sly. “So you see, I couldn’t have killed Tina. Why would I? If I did, I’d lose the check I got every month.”

  So Meghan was subsidizing Dulcie’s income. Call me crazy, but that told me Dulcie should have loved the woman, or at least felt less angry than a person who stabbed a knife through the heart of Meghan’s picture.

  “You were a better actress.” I played the jealousy angle, dangling the suggestion in front of Dulcie like a fat worm on a fishing line.

  “Damn straight.” She dropped her cigarette butt and stomped it out, but when she made a move toward the door, I signaled to Declan. While he stepped up behind her to stymie her exit, I ruffled my fingers through the bills in my hand.

  Dulcie ignored Declan and looked at the money.

  “So how did Tina turn into the star and you didn’t?” I asked her.

  “Well, her looks, for one thing, thanks to all that cosmetic surgery. I couldn’t afford it, but then, I wasn’t sleeping with every rich guy I happened to meet.”

  “You were working hard, working at your art.”

  “You bet I was. Paid my dues, too, in every crappy neighborhood drama group, and every crappy summer stock theater, and in a couple productions so off-Broadway you’d need a map to even find the Great White Way from there.”

  “Did Tina?” Declan wanted to know.

  She nodded begrudgingly. “She took a couple small parts here, a couple small parts there. But Tina, she always said she shouldn’t have had to bother with walk-ons. She said she was destined for bigger things. Oh, she was destined, all right, wasn’t she? Destined to get smashed over the head and left in some freezer. Tina the Snowman!” Dulcie thought this was pretty funny. That would explain why she laughed.

  “But you were still friends all the time you two were working to get noticed? You were still roommates?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah. I mean, in the great scheme of things, sure, she had more rich boyfriends than me, but I ended up getting more roles.” A slow smile brightened Dulcie’s face. “That really ate at her. Me, getting the calls from the casting directors.” As quickly as it came, her smile faded. “That’s what finally got to her. That’s why she did it. Okay, so I wasn’t going to be the next Marilyn Monroe, but I did a couple commercials, and I got a couple nibbles. I had a part on Law & Order, you know. I mean, I didn’t have any lines ’cause I played the dead hooker they found in an alley behind a bar, but it was a break. It was a big break. And it bugged the heck out of Tina!”

  “But you have a picture of her on your bedroom wall with a knife stabbed through her heart, and I can’t say for sure because I was just her chef, after all, and I didn’t have any reason to go through Meghan’s private rooms, but my guess is she sure didn’t have a picture of you anywhere in her house, not with or without a knife through your heart.”

  Dulcie chewed her lower lip. “If it wasn’t for me, Tina never woulda got that part in None Are Waiting.”

  “The picture that made her a star?” Declan’s curiosity was only natural.

  Dulcie nodded. “Bet when she gave interviews, she never mentioned how it really happened. Bet when she was on TV, she never told the story, not the real story. Bet she smiled and simpered and batted those eyelashes of hers and pulled back her shoulders to show off her bought-and-paid-for breasts and she never once told the truth about how she landed that role.”

  “But you know the truth?” I could feel it in my bones and in the aura of resentment and anger around Dulcie. “What really happened, Dulcie? Do you remember?”

  She barked out a laugh. “July 22, 2001. You bet I remember. Like it was yesterday. That was the day Tina showed up for the screen test for None Are Waiting. She knocked the socks off the casting director, the producer, the director, her costars. They said she was made to play Sheila and they offered her the role on the spot. And yeah, that film, that made her career. She knew it was gonna, too, that’s why she changed her name.”

  “That is the story Meghan tells, but it’s not the truth?”

  “By that time, she was married. To that What’s-His-Name, that Italian with the big ego and the big mouth. They was living in an apartment over in Brooklyn, and to read about their marriage now, you’d think it was all a bed of roses. But it wasn’t. They weren’t married that long and Tina already had a kid and she was miserable. She came over one day to moan and complain about her husband, and her bawling baby, and how her career was going nowhere fast. And me .
. .” Even now, Dulcie couldn’t believe the whims of fate. She shook her head. “I stepped out of my apartment long enough to go answer the door when the Chinese we ordered showed up. My phone rang, and when I got back inside, Tina, she tells me it was a wrong number. Only it wasn’t. I didn’t find out until years later. It was no wrong number. It was the casting director inviting me to try out for the part of Sheila in None Are Waiting.”

  I sucked in a breath. “She didn’t tell you? She—”

  “Went in my place. Showed up there on July 22, 2001. You want to know why I have that picture of Tina on my wall with the knife in it?” Dulcie plucked the money out of my hand and whirled to go back inside. “Because Tina, she sweet-talked her way into the screen test that should have been mine, and she became a star because of it. Am I glad she’s dead?” Dulcie’s smile was positively creepy. “You bet I am. But why should I kill the golden goose? Besides, I couldn’t have. I was working here the night Tina was killed.”

  Chapter 14

  “It’s all very interesting, but it’s not exactly helpful. And it’s not really surprising, is it?”

  The next morning across the breakfast table at a greasy spoon that served better-than-average coffee and worse-than-average pancakes, Declan looked up from his bacon and eggs.

  “You mean about Meghan? About her taking advantage of Dulcie?” he asked.

  “‘Taking advantage’ is putting it mildly, don’t you think? What she did to Dulcie was downright . . .” The thought sat uneasily with me, and I shook my shoulders. “What a rotten thing to do!” I swirled my spoon through the fresh cup of coffee our waitress had just brought over. Yes, it was my third of the morning. Like I said, it was really good coffee. “I always knew Meghan had an ego a mile wide, but lying to cheat Dulcie out of the role of a lifetime? That’s as low as low can get. No wonder Dulcie hated Meghan.”

  “Too bad about her alibi, huh? She’d be the perfect suspect.”

  Too bad, indeed.

  The night before, after Dulcie went back to work behind the bar, Declan and I found her supervisor and talked to him. Dulcie had, indeed, been on duty the night Meghan was killed. All night, in fact, because a pipe had burst in the kitchen and Dulcie had worked until the next morning helping with the cleanup. Just for the record (not that I’m paranoid or anything) I’d also asked about the night Meghan’s will was read and I was attacked. Yep, Dulcie had been at the casino that night, too.

  “Maybe she paid a hit man,” I said, and took it back almost immediately. “I know, she hardly looks like she could afford one.”

  “Unless she’s been banking the money Meghan sent her every month.”

  “To pay for Meghan’s murder.” Okay, it wasn’t funny. I mean, murder never is. But there was a certain irony in the situation that made me smile.

  At least until I thought about what it all meant.

  “We’re nowhere,” I grumbled.

  “We’re somewhere,” Declan countered. “We’ve eliminated a suspect.”

  “Great.” I pushed aside the dish where my half-eaten pancakes sat looking as flat and mushy as I felt. “We need a breakthrough, a super-duper clue, a—”

  My phone rang.

  “Maybe that’s it,” Declan suggested.

  As much as I doubted it, I answered.

  “We gotta talk.” The voice on the other end of the phone bumped to the staccato rhythm of excitement. Or maybe it was nervousness. “Now.”

  “But, Spencer, I’m in—”

  “I’m at the restaurant. You’re not here. We gotta talk. Where are you, Laurel?”

  “Where am I?” I signaled to our waitress for our check. “I’m on my way, that’s where I am.”

  * * *

  • • •

  TWO AND A half hours later, I pushed through the front door of the Terminal and had a quick look around.

  No Spencer.

  My shoulders sagged, and the adrenaline that had fueled the world’s quickest pack-up-and-get-back-home trip ever didn’t just drain out of me, it washed away completely and left me feeling limp.

  Not unlike my breakfast pancakes.

  “You’re not supposed to be back here yet.” When Dolly zipped by I couldn’t tell if she was relieved to see me or if she was disappointed I’d shown up again so soon after I claimed I was taking time off. She bobbled the tray she was carrying, righted it, recovered. “I thought you were out of town resting.”

  I leaned over to have another look into the overflow seating area outside the office and the kitchen. No Spencer. “Has anyone been here looking for me?”

  “You mean the kid?” Dolly, of course, knew exactly who the kid was, but I gave her credit for playing it cool. There were people around, and some of them were reporters.

  She tipped her head toward the office. “Waiting for you,” she said. “And eating us out of house and home.”

  As soon as I opened the office door, Spencer looked up from the pizza he was halfway through finishing. He glanced over my shoulder. “You alone?”

  “If you’re talking about Declan, he’s parking the car.”

  “Good.” Spencer took a glug of Coke. “I don’t want anybody to know this. Anybody but you.”

  On the phone, I had sensed the nervous tension in his voice, but seeing Spencer really brought his jitters home. He lifted a piece of pizza to his mouth, decided he didn’t want it, dropped it on the plate. He squirmed in the chair in front of the desk, crossed his legs, uncrossed them.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked him.

  Again, he looked toward the door.

  “Nobody’s going to disturb us,” I assured him. “Nobody’s going to eavesdrop.”

  When he lowered his chin, raised his eyebrows, and looked at me as if to challenge me with Really? he looked so much like his mother (in spite of his big nose), I caught my breath.

  “I might be a kid, but even I’m not that dumb.” There was a tabloid newspaper on Sophie’s desk, and he handed it to me.

  Reading the headline, my heart thumped. “The will? They have the story about the will? Somebody knows about—”

  “The monkeys, yeah.” Spencer plucked the tabloid out of my hands and tossed it on the floor. “So I get to go back to school and have every kid there know that all the money that should have been mine is going to monkeys in some place I can’t even pronounce.”

  “They’re apes, actually.” I slipped into the guest chair. “And the money probably doesn’t matter, anyway. You won’t be broke. You’ll never be broke. Your dad has plenty of money.”

  “Yeah, well, a mother who liked animals more than she liked me still makes me look like a loser.” He pouted the way only a seventeen-year-old can.

  “And it makes me wonder . . .” I retrieved the newspaper and glanced over it again. “How did the story become public so quickly?”

  The question wasn’t worth a two-shoulder shrug, so Spencer used just one. “Nobody said we couldn’t talk about it.”

  “Did you talk to anyone about it?”

  “Who am I going to talk to in this dumpy town?” Spencer dismissed my question altogether. “Besides, that’s not what I need to talk to you about.” He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. He sat back, wriggled, cleared his throat.

  “You should know, it doesn’t mean anything,” he said.

  I could be excused for not catching on fast enough. “It . . . what’s the it that doesn’t mean anything?”

  “What I’m going to tell you.” He threw his left hand in the air and let it slap back down on his lap next to his hand with the cast on it. “I wouldn’t even be telling you at all except that we should share information, seeing as how we’re both investigating.”

  “Like I told you, I’m not investigating,” I told him. “And you shouldn’t be, either.”

  “Yeah, well, I have been.” He picked up a s
lice of pizza, then slapped it back down on the plate. “If I was smart, I’d just keep my mouth shut. But . . .”

  “But . . . ?”

  “My mom . . .” When his voice broke, Spencer cleared his throat. “My mom didn’t always pay a whole lot of attention to me. Not that I blame her,” he added quickly in case I got the idea that he cared. “She was busy. And important. She had a lot of stuff to do.”

  “And a lot of people who depended on her, what with her production company and the movies she directed, and the charities she worked so hard to raise money for.”

  “Yeah, like I said, she was busy. So, I mean, it’s not like in the movies where some kid doesn’t know what to do and some adult takes an interest and says something stupid and kind like Believe in yourself or Follow your heart. Because in real life, adults, they don’t say stuff like that.”

  “Some of them do,” I assured him. “Not always to kids like you, and not always to kids like the kid I was. But there are good adults out there.”

  “Are you one of them?”

  His question caused a tight ball of emotion to form in my throat. “I try to be,” I assured him. “It doesn’t always work.”

  One corner of his mouth pulled tight. “I know what you mean. But you . . . when that stupid story about me being a junkie showed up in the tabloids, my mom said you were the one behind it, but I know that wasn’t true.”

  “You’re right. It wasn’t. But how do you—”

  “I did it.” He sat up and pulled back his shoulders. “I’m the one who tipped off that reporter.”

  It took a moment to process what he was saying. “You’re the one who broke the news about your drug addiction?”

  There was no way in the world I could be any dumber than I was.

  At least that’s what the look Spencer gave me said.

  He shook his head. “Don’t you get it? It wasn’t true. I made the whole thing up.”

  “Because . . . ?”

  “Because I wanted to see what my mom would do about it. And what she did . . .” His shoulders sagged. “Sorry she fired you. I was just trying to get her to notice me.”