“That’s why you called, isn’t it?” Joey asked. “Because you think someone might be trying to hurt Arlena.”
“Yes,” Penelope said reluctantly, shaking her head. “But, I don’t know what to think, Joey.”
“Hold on a second,” Joey said. Penelope heard him put his hand over the phone to muffle his voice as he spoke to someone else in the room. She tried to make out what he was saying but only caught a few words: tonight, case, later and Arlena. The connection opened back up and she heard him clearly again. “Sorry about that.”
“It’s okay. I know you’re busy working,” Penelope said.
“Actually, I’m at home.”
“Oh, sorry…” Penelope said, wondering who he was talking to.
“I’m thinking I should look into this latest incident. I also have some new information on Holly Anderson.”
“Tonight isn’t great. Arlena and Sam are at our house. I spoke with Sam to be sure they were home safe and to make sure Arlena was feeling better. He said she took a Valium and went to bed, that was over an hour ago.”
“Are you still at work?” Joey said.
“I’m finishing up a few things. Most everyone is already gone for the weekend,” Penelope said. “I should go home.”
“Tell you what. Why don’t you stop by my apartment? I’m in Bradenton. It’s on your way.”
Bradenton was in between South Point and their house in Glendale. New Jersey was full of quaint little towns, all with their own village greens, shopping areas and residential neighborhoods.
“Sure,” Penelope said. “But I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”
“No, it’s nothing,” he responded quickly.
Penelope paused for a moment. She was tired but didn’t want to go home just yet. Maybe talking to Joey would settle her mind so she could get some rest. She also felt a spark of excitement peeking through her exhaustion at seeing him again. “Text me your address. I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”
“See you then. Drive safe,” Joey said and hung up.
Penelope exhaled as she pulled the phone away from her ear, the little wiggle of excitement still churning at the base of her stomach. She flipped down the visor to look at herself in the little mirror on the back of it. “Ugh!” she said when she saw her smudged mascara and the circles under her eyes that looked like faint bruises. She looked pale, paler than she normally looked in the middle of New Jersey winter. She glanced down at her clothes and sighed. She had pulled off her apron after talking to her crew in the tent and hadn’t noticed a big stain of red sauce at the bottom of her sweater. Her jeans also looked dingy after twelve hours of walking around on set and working with food. “I need help,” she said out loud in the cab.
She grabbed her messenger bag out from under the seat of the truck and tucked her phone inside one of the front pockets. Penelope kept the cab of the truck locked at all times since it was essentially her office and she always kept her bag stashed under there. Only she and Francis had keys and she trusted him completely. She looked through her bag and saw that she had nothing with her, no cosmetic help at all. Just an old tube of lipstick, a tampon and some loose change.
Penelope flipped off the cab light, opened the door and jumped down from the truck, her bag looped over her shoulder. She locked the door behind her and headed towards the trailers on the far end of the lot.
Arlena’s trailer was right next to Kelley’s, the two biggest on the set. As Penelope approached she saw Freddie, one of the interns, coming out from between the trailers. “Hey, Freddie, is Kelley still in there?”
“I think so,” Freddie said, nodding at her door. He was coiling up the cables that ran power to Arlena’s home on the set. “At least she was ten minutes ago.” He wore an oversized puffy coat over a black t-shirt, a large neon-green skull stretched over his bird-like torso, and baggy jeans that looked like they were about to slip off his narrow hips every time he bent over to pick up the cable slack. Skull tattoos snaked over his hands, and his dyed black hair stuck out in every direction. He turned his back to her and kicked the wound up cable underneath the trailer.
“Thanks,” Penelope said to his back. He waved at her and disappeared into the darkness again.
Penelope rapped firmly on Kelley’s door. It opened a crack and she peered out hesitantly, but when she saw it was Penelope she swung the door open wide. “Hey, Pen. Come on in,” she said through her painted black lips. “I thought everyone was gone.” She scrunched the ends of her short black bob.
Penelope stepped inside, pulling the door closed behind her against the frigid air. “Almost, I need a favor. I’m stopping by a friend’s place on the way home and I look, well, I look like this.” She swept her hands in a dramatic arc from her hair down to her shoes. “Can you make me look presentable? Or at least not like I got dragged behind a bus on the way to his house?”
Kelley laughed out loud, a rare occurrence for the normally reserved girl. “I think I can help.” Kelley spun Penelope around and sat her down in the makeup chair facing a mirror lined with large bulbs.
“Fantastic. I thought I looked bad before but the lighting in here lets you know exactly how bad you really look.”
Kelley giggled. “You don’t look that bad. You’re tired. We all are.” She released Penelope’s hair from its pony tail. Penelope’s hair was wavy and thick and she always thought it was too unruly to let it be loose while she was working. A lot of chefs cut their hair short for that reason, but Penelope always thought her hair was one of her best features and didn’t want to chop it off. So she tied it back, sometimes for so long letting it down at the end of the day was a huge relief.
“How’s Arlena?” Kelley asked as she worked her fingers through Penelope’s hair, massaging her scalp with something that smelled like lavender.
“I think she’s better. At least she’s home in her own bed resting comfortably. Sam’s with her.”
“That’s a relief. I’ve never seen anything like what I saw her go through today. It was terrible,” Kelley said. She moved around to face Penelope on her left side and tilted her face up to the lights, studying her for a moment. Making some kind of determination, she turned towards her makeup tray on the counter at the base of the mirror. She picked up a small palate of foundation and lightly touched a spot with her pinkie under each of Penelope’s eyes.
“Look up,” she directed as she smoothed the makeup on. Her fingers felt cool and soothing. “Arlena and Sam seem like they have good chemistry. That scene they shot today was something else.”
“They sure do,” Penelope said.
Kelley applied a light coating of foundation to Penelope’s face and then brushed it with a faint bronzer. She dusted her eyelids with a pale gold sparkly eye shadow and swiped her lashes with black mascara.
“Are you wearing this?” Kelley said, looking down at Penelope’s stained sweater and stretched out jeans.
“Not if I can help it,” Penelope said.
“Oh thank goodness,” Kelley said with true relief. “I have a few things here from wardrobe. Let’s find something less…”
“Food stained?” Penelope asked.
“Yes, food stained.” Kelley agreed, nodding. She pointed to a rolling clothes rack in the corner where various pieces of clothes were hanging. “These are cute.” She grabbed a pair of tight black riding pants and a short cropped red jacket and held them up against her tall frame for Penelope to see.
“They’re nice. But I think it would look like I was trying too hard. I need casual. I’m only going to an apartment to talk.”
“A man’s apartment?” Kelley teased.
Penelope glanced away. “But it’s a casual man’s apartment. Not the North Jersey Horse Riding Club for cocktails and caviar.”
“I can work with that. Let’s see…how about these? They’re stretc
hy.” She held up a pair of dark blue jeans.
“Those are perfect.”
“What are you, a size six?” Kelley eyed her from the waist down.
“I was before Italian feast night.”
Kelley rolled her eyes and handed her the jeans. Penelope stripped off her dirty jeans and slid on the new pair, feeling them shrink against her legs. She hoped she’d be able to zip them up. She always felt puffier when she was working long hours. It was hard to stick to a good eating and workout routine, much less get enough sleep, when your work days were fifteen hours long.
She buttoned the jeans and glanced in the mirror, happy to see her stomach was still flat and tight above the low riding waistline. She pulled off her stained sweater and stood in her bra, looking eagerly through the wardrobe rack.
“How about this one?” Kelley held up a thin knit sweater, fuzzy and black with a dramatic low neckline. “Trying too hard still?” She waved the sweater on the hanger.
“Let me try it.” Penelope slipped it over her head and down into place. It fit perfectly, snug and tight but not too tight, and the neckline did a nice job of featuring her cleavage, which was almost always covered by a chef coat. She fanned her long blond hair over both of her shoulders, turning from side to side to see every angle. “I like it. Thank you so much, Kelley. I owe you one.”
“No you don’t. You always bring me dinner when I’m too busy to head down to the tent, which no set caterer has ever done for me before.” She motioned for Penelope to sit in the makeup chair again. “Let’s be sure we’ve got everything together.” She eyed Penelope’s face again and turned once again to her makeup tray, grabbing a tube of lip gloss. “One last finishing touch and you’re good to go to your casual man’s apartment.” Kelley tilted Penelope’s face upwards with her cool fingers, then unscrewed the lip gloss and began applying it to her lips.
Penelope glanced at the clock on the wall of the trailer and saw she had fifteen minutes to get to Joey’s. She had her coat and bag, so she could leave directly from Kelley’s trailer. She considered the route she would take, wondering if it would be faster to take the local roads or hop on the Turnpike. A faint, mildly unpleasant smell fluttered past her nostrils and she tilted her head farther back. She thought for a moment that maybe her sweater had been worn by an actress who had gotten sweaty while filming and it hadn’t been washed yet. “Do you smell that?” Penelope asked Kelley, lifting her arm to sniff her armpit. It smelled like a dry cleaner’s store, so it wasn’t her or the sweater.
“I smell something. Yuck, what is that?” Kelley glanced at the wastepaper basket under the counter. “Maybe my assistant threw her lunch out in here.” She picked up the waste basket from underneath the counter but it only contained some used cotton balls and a few tissues smeared with makeup.
“Wait…” Penelope grabbed Kelley’s wrist and pulled the lip gloss applicator down to her nose. “It’s this. The lip gloss smells funny.”
Kelley lifted the tube up to her nose and sniffed. She made a face. “It’s gone off or something. Which is ridiculous…this stuff is forty dollars a tube.”
Penelope smelled the applicator again. “It hasn’t gone off. It smells like clam juice.”
Chapter 13
Penelope arrived at Joey’s apartment slightly after nine thirty, later than she had promised.
He opened the door with a smile. If he thought it was too late for her to visit, he didn’t act like it. “There she is,” he said, motioning for her to enter. “I was getting ready to put out an APB on you. Here, let me take your coat.”
Penelope slid her messenger bag off of her shoulder and onto the floor, propping it up against her leather boot. She slipped off her puffy coat and handed it to him.
“You look nice,” he said. He hung her coat in a small closet in the hallway.
Penelope thanked him, temporarily forgetting the makeover Kelley had given her. She picked her messenger bag back up from the floor and clutched it tightly in both hands. “Sorry I’m late. I have something to show you.” She reached inside her bag, pulled out five tubes of lip gloss and held them out for him to see.
“Gee, thanks. Normally people bring wine.”
The tension left Penelope’s shoulders and she let out a small laugh. “Ha. Good one. No, these are Arlena’s, from her on-set makeup kit. I think they’ve been tampered with. One of these might have caused her allergic reaction today.”
Joey’s face grew serious as he looked down at the tubes in Penelope’s hand. “What are you talking about, Penny?”
“They smell…bad. Fishy. I think someone laced these lip gloss tubes with seafood so they would come in contact with Arlena and trigger an attack. The makeup artist used one of these on Arlena right before it happened.”
“Hang on.” Joey went down the hall into what Penelope guessed was a bathroom, returning a few seconds later with some tissues. “Put them on the counter.” He laid the tissues down and she placed them on top of them. “I’ll take these in tomorrow and we can find out if they’ve been tampered with. You know what it means if they have, right?”
“I know. Not an accident,” Penelope said, resigning herself to the possibility that someone might be trying to harm her friend.
“Thanks for bringing them to me. I’ll check into them first thing in the morning. Let’s talk in here.” Joey nodded towards the living room. His apartment had an open floor plan anchored by a sleek kitchen with a large island topped with white marble and lined with black swiveling stools. His apartment had a masculine feel, with lots of dark leather and green-tinted glass tables. Joey’s walls were lined with framed prints from the Museum of Modern Art.
“Sure, thanks.” Penelope wandered into the room, glancing at each of the prints that hung in shiny black frames. “You’re an art fan?”
The rear wall of the apartment had a set of double doors leading onto a balcony that stretched the length of the apartment with a view of the Hudson River and the faint lights of the New York City skyline beyond it.
“I can’t draw a straight line, but I like to look at things by people who can. I go to shows at the Met from time to time, a gallery show once in a while. Would you like a glass of wine?”
Penelope had been floating slightly outside of herself ever since she discovered the tainted lip gloss, turning the information over and over in her head and thinking about how she would present it to Joey. She didn’t remember the drive over to his apartment. But she refocused then, coming back to the present. She was standing in Joey’s living room and he was offering her wine.
“Sure…if you’re having some,” she said.
Joey turned and headed towards the kitchen. He was wearing a tight grey t-shirt and nice fitting dark jeans with soft leather shoes. Penelope realized she hadn’t seen him in anything but a suit until now. Well, a suit and an ill-fitting parochial school uniform back in grade school. She glanced around the living room while she waited for him and noticed a bookcase angled next to an overstuffed leather easy chair in the far corner. He had grouped his books by author, and she could see his favorites were Stephen King and Raymond Chandler.
Penelope drifted back towards the kitchen and hoped he didn’t think she was too nosy, sizing up his things in the living room. Joey pulled the cork from a bottle of cabernet and poured them each a glass. It almost felt like she was on a date, except for the fact she was here to discuss Holly Anderson’s murder.
“What did you want to ask me?” Penelope said, swirling her glass.
Joey came around the island and motioned for them to return to the living room. They sat down next to each other on the couch.
“We’ve been going through Holly’s computer and phone records. She did reach out to Richard Tangelo, Arlena’s photographer, to inquire about headshots, but when she asked to make an appointment, he told her how much the consultation alone wou
ld cost and she thanked him and said she’d call back, which never happened.” Joey took a sip of wine and placed his glass on the table. He picked up a folder lying in the center of the glass. “Tangelo has been working out of his LA office this week, which we were able to confirm with his staff.” Joey leafed through a thick stack of documents and reports, finally pulling one from the pile that looked like a phone bill.
Penelope nodded. “It makes sense she would try and get the same headshot photographer if she was trying to follow in Arlena’s footsteps. But that doesn’t mean anything. Lots of girls want to be like the famous people they admire. And there are tons of photographers in the city.”
“That’s true. Right now we’re looking for connections between Arlena and Holly, tracking Holly’s movements.” He scanned the list of numbers and pointed to a note he had scrawled next to one of them. “Who is Peter Gessner?” he asked. “Holly called his office multiple times in the two weeks before she was killed.”
“That’s Arlena’s agent,” Penelope said, pulling the paper closer to her so they were both holding it by opposite sides of the sheet between them. She slid closer to Joey on the couch, feeling a tingle of static where their legs almost touched. She ignored it and looked through the list.
“She didn’t make many calls,” Penelope said.
“But she sent over a hundred texts a day,” Joey sighed. “Unfortunately those are more difficult to trace. The content anyway. We can see the numbers she was texting. Lots of friends at her school, her parents, the usual.”
“That’s a ton of numbers to sort through,” Penelope said, shaking her head.
“I know,” he said, releasing his side of the report. “Still…see if anything jumps out at you.”
She continued to look through the numbers.
“Her computer searches were very focused on Arlena, Max and Randall Madison and any projects they were working on. She researched Arlena’s family like she was doing a term paper on them,” Joey said, leafing through the folder again.
Murder on a Silver Platter (A Red Carpet Catering Mystery Book 1) Page 9