He pretended to know who she was, or, more accurately, who she had been, nodding as she recited her more noteworthy roles. Between them, they had a long list of mutual friends—acquaintances actually, since friendship in the film business rarely survived the duration of a shoot. The alcoholic wrap party embrace. We must get together.
As she sat drinking coffee with him, she experienced a confusion of motives. Was she adding him to the short list, or was she interested in a job working for him? Over the years, she had developed the habit of auditioning for anyone who was in the position of hiring her. It was an unconscious instinct, even with people as low down on the food chain as Charlie Berns appeared to be.
Unlike Sammy Dee or Didier Onyekachukwu, however, Charlie Berns didn’t move the needle on her chemistry test. Though he was not unattractive, there was something detached, almost asexual, about him, which seemed to indicate that he had other things on his mind than women.
Still, he had won an actual Academy Award. Years ago. She vaguely remembered seeing him on TV in an ill-fitting tux, mumbling his acceptance speech. The movie, Dizzy and Will, was a ponderous period piece starring Jeremy Ikon and Jacqueline Fortier that had snuck in when the two leading candidates canceled each other out.
“Where’s your Oscar?” she asked him.
“I got $375 for it on eBay.”
Unbelievable. If she had one, she’d have put it in the middle of the living room with a spotlight on it.
“So what’s your next project?”
He smiled dimly and shook his head. “I’m retired.”
“Oh, come on. Really?” Unconsciously, she switched into coquette mode.
“Let me put it this way—as far as the people who finance movies are concerned, I’m retired.”
“Even if the right script came along?”
He looked around him, as if to say, “Here?” How was the right script going to make its way into Paradise Gardens?
“You never know,” she said with a smile.
That phrase had been her mantra for all the years she was in the business. Everything she did, every attempt to land some improbable role, was motivated by her telling herself that you never know.
Unfortunately, now she did know. Or at least she should have. She had known when she sold the house in Silver Lake and moved to Palm Springs, when she had applied for her real estate license, and when she walked into Charlie Berns’s condo with a retouched headshot.
And yet here she was, batting her eyelashes like a starlet, violating another of the fundamental principles for surviving in Hollywood: don’t shit where you eat. The man was a neighbor, someone she would likely see again, and you didn’t want to have to run into anyone if the project you had worked on together was a train wreck.
“You never know,” he repeated.
She found herself liking the man. He had an impish, ironic smile that flickered at odd moments. He had walked the same highway she had, dealt with the same bullshit, and was suffering from the same sort of dim nostalgia that flared up into an occasional rebirth of interest.
Charlie Berns accepted her headshot and promised to keep her in mind for his next picture, whenever or whatever that might be. Why not? At that very moment, someone could be busily writing a brilliant script about a damaged woman in her sixties, her early sixties. You never knew.
The first date she had with Sammy Dee was at the Olive Garden. The two-hour dinner revealed very little about him, except that he had good table manners and liked his wine. He skillfully evaded her questions about his past, as well as about his present and future.
“What do you do when you’re not investing?” she’d asked.
“Play golf.”
“Is that all?”
“I go see movies.”
“You don’t travel?”
“Not if I can help it.”
On their second date, he took her to a high-end French restaurant in town, where he ordered off the top of the wine list. He dropped a couple hundred on the dinner. That went into the credit column. She drank too much and got cuddly in the car on the way home. There was no telling what would have happened if they hadn’t run into Didier in the hallway as they were heading for her condo. He was standing there, a bottle of cognac in his hand, like a parent waiting up for kids who had broken curfew.
She wasn’t ready to go to bed with either of them. Not yet. It wasn’t that she was an old-fashioned girl in this respect. But she was a smart girl. She knew that one way to keep a man interested was to keep him horny. And she needed them interested while she did her due diligence.
Didier Onyekachukwu’s courting consisted, for the time being, of showing up with margaritas at the pool, or knocking on her door at odd hours with a bottle. His past was a great deal more exotic than Sammy Dee’s. He grew up in a bush village in Africa, with no electricity or running water, where people sacrificed goats. He was educated by French priests, had studied and lived in Paris. The timing of all this was left vague. She had no idea how old he was.
He had been married years ago in Côte d’Ivoire to three different wives. At the same time. Polygamy was the African way of dealing with the demographic problem of too many women, he explained. He had at least a dozen children whose names he wasn’t entirely sure of. There were three Kodjo’s (the Duala name for children born on Monday), a couple of Kumlas (girls born on Thursday), a Thomas, a Victoire, and maybe a Marie Genevieve. Occasionally someone sent him a photo of a grandchild.
He told her that he had been involved in politics, first in the liberation movement against the French, and then in the young republic’s government, and had risen to some sort of powerful position before things got nasty and he fled to France. “I am fortunate I am not dead,” he said with perfect equanimity. “Terrible things have happened to my country.” He didn’t elaborate.
Marcy Googled Côte d’Ivoire and learned that the country used to be called the Ivory Coast. Its capital was Yamoussoukro, the life expectancy was forty-one years, the per capita annual income was $1,062, and its history was marked by a series of bloody coups and ruling family infighting that was too complicated to keep track of.
Unlike Sammy Dee, Didier Onyekachukwu didn’t mind talking about his past, but much of it was so foreign to Marcy that it didn’t shed a lot of light on who he was now. He was cheerful, forthcoming, and fun to be around. But was he the man to take care of her? Would he take her to Paris and the south of France, to the châteaus of the Loire, and to all the other places she longed to visit? Would he allow her to shred her real estate license and pass on driving up to LA for an audition for some role she didn’t even want?
And was he a better bet than the retired cement company owner with the good manners and the pinkie ring? It was a tough call. What she really wanted was to see their tax returns. And their medical records. Preferably both.
Marcy found JB INVESTIGATIONS: DISCREET, RELIABLE, REASONABLE on Angie’s List. They had seven reviews, six As and one B. The website listed “asset search” among the services provided and offered a free consultation. They did not include the evaluation of potential romantic prospects, but she assumed it went with the territory.
The office was located in a strip mall in Cathedral City, above a Chinese take-out place. Marcy had, naturally, dressed for the interview as if it were for a role. She was playing the damaged wife of a scoundrel in some 1940s film noir, and wore a black dress, heels, and some costume jewelry. The only thing missing was the Barbara Stanwyck hat and veil.
She had expected Robert Mitchum, or at least Elliott Gould doing Robert Mitchum, and was surprised to discover a hefty middle-aged Jewish woman named Evelyn Duboff behind the desk. The woman was dressed in a Loehmann’s pantsuit and a pair of Adidas tennis shoes.
“Sit. Take a load off. You want a cup of coffee?”
“No, thank you,” Marcy said, sitting down.
“So how’d you find me?”
“Angie’s List.”
“You ever wonder who this Angie is?
” Marcy could hear Brooklyn in her voice. “Must be a very rich woman by now.”
Marcy nodded, unconsciously looking around for a cue card. As if she were doing a take of a scene and had gone up on her lines.
Though the air conditioning was on, it wasn’t making a lot of headway against the midday desert heat. The odor of soy oil wafting up from the Chinese place below made her feel queasy.
“So what can I do for you, Miss . . . ?”
“Gray. Marcy Gray.”
Evelyn Duboff looked at her a little closer and smiled. “Wait a second, you were in pictures, right?”
“Still am. Well, sort of . . .”
“I’ve seen you on television. In a movie or two.”
“They show them late at night.”
“Facacta business, the movie business. You make a million, or you starve.”
“I did all right, for a while. Now . . . well, anyway, that’s not why I’m here. Your website says you do asset searches.”
“Bread and butter business these days. Used to be women wanted to know whether their husband was screwing around on them. Now they want to know where he’s stashed the 401K.”
“This isn’t that . . . exactly.” It was at times like this that she wished she had her own private screenwriter writing her dialogue. She sat there for a moment, not sure how to present the problem.
“Darling,” Evelyn Duboff said, “don’t be shy. This is a privileged conversation. We do everything within the law, more or less. And, between you and me, we can stretch that a little bit, too.”
“Well, it’s sensitive.”
“What isn’t? If I could tell you the things people want to know, you’d plotz. So what’s going on? Married?”
Marcy shook her head.
“Ex-husband hid his assets during the divorce, and now he’s taking bimbos to the Caribbean?”
“Actually, it’s two men.”
“Two? Nice, very nice.”
“And I’ve never been married to either of them. But I’m thinking about it.”
Evelyn Duboff digested this for a moment, nodding slowly. “Uh-huh. And you want to see what you’d be marrying into. Am I right?”
“Sort of. I mean, I just want to know a little more about them.”
“Don’t blame you. Far as I’m concerned, anybody gets married at our age deserves complete disclosure. You wouldn’t buy a used car without getting it checked out by a mechanic. Right?”
“Right. So is it . . . legal to do that?”
“Legal enough.”
The woman shifted her bulk in the chair and emitted a sound that was somewhere between a belch and a yawn.
“Banks are forbidden by law to disclose information on depositors except to law enforcement, and even that has to have a court order. But there are ways of getting the information without dealing with the bank.”
“I just kind of want a rough idea of . . . their . . . assets.”
“I’ll give it to you down to the penny. Including real estate, stock positions, annuities, commodity futures, puts and calls, partnerships, precious metals, you name it. Anything else?”
“Well, you know, past marriages, ever been arrested type thing.”
“No problem. Tell you the truth, most of that is public record. You could get it yourself. But I’ll throw it in.”
She wished she had a prop cigarette. This would be the moment that the director would have her lift the veil, and Robert Mitchum would take the gold-plated lighter out of his double-breasted suit and light her cigarette. I’m not sure I can afford your services, mister. He would crease his cheeks a millimeter and say, Don’t worry about it, ma’am.
“This sounds kind of expensive,” Marcy said.
“Depends. Anything I can do without moving my ass out of this chair you can probably afford. Surveillance is the expensive item. Sitting in a car waiting for a man to walk out of his girlfriend’s apartment type thing. That can add up.”
“I don’t have a lot of money.”
“Neither do I. But I’ll tell you what—my usual price is five hundred an hour, but for you, I’ll do it for three-fifty. With any luck, you’re in for a thousand, maybe twelve hundred. Out the door.”
Marcy screwed up her features. She could afford a thousand dollars. She had spent that much money on shoes.
“Look, the more information you give me—past addresses, social security numbers, date of birth, mother’s maiden name—the cheaper this is going to be.”
“All I know is their names and where they live.”
“Can you get me license plate numbers of their cars?”
“I think so.”
“Okay, that’s a start.”
Evelyn swiveled in her chair and turned on her computer. She hit a few keys, brought up a screen, hit a few more keys, and pages came out of her printer.
“This is a contract. It’s the usual mishegoss about no liability on my part and what happens if you don’t pay me. It’s standard. Relax. It’s not going to be worth my while to hire a lawyer if you stiff me for a thousand dollars.”
“I’ll pay you, don’t worry.”
“Of course you will. And you’re going to write me a retainer for three hundred and fifty dollars right now. A bargain. You couldn’t even get your carpet cleaned for that money.”
Marcy gave the contract five seconds of her attention, signed it, and took her checkbook out. She started to write the check, then stopped.
“There’s no way they’re going to find out, right?”
“They’ll never know, darling.”
She wrote ACTING LESSONS on the memo line.
Evelyn Duboff glanced at the check. “You’re going to write it off. Why not? It should be tax deductible anyway. Information on a potential investment.”
The tax deduction hadn’t even occurred to her. She was more concerned with covering her tracks. Three-quarters profile to camera right, her good side, she rose and headed for the door. She got it in one take.
It wasn’t until she was driving home that Marcy realized that she didn’t know if Didier Onyekachukwu even had a car. She had never seen him outside of Paradise Gardens. How did he live in Palm Springs without a car?
Pulling into the parking garage, she drove past Sammy Dee’s space and saw the Lexus, glowing from the car wash. She memorized the license plate. In her condo, she picked up the phone and dialed Didier’s number.
“Good morning,” he answered in his endearing, sing-song voice.
“Bonjour, Didier.” He liked it when she tried her French out on him. “Come unt tally too?”
“Comment vas-tu?” He corrected her.
“Of course. Listen, mon ami, my voiture is malade. I wonder if you can give me a lift to Ralphs. I need to pick up a few groceries.”
“Désolé, ma petite. Je n’ai pas de voiture.”
“Pardon?”
“I do not have a voiture. I take the taxi when necessary.”
“Oh . . . I see. Well, I’ll give a Sammy a call.”
“No, no, no!”
“I’m sure he won’t mind.”
“No, no, no!” he repeated. “I, too, have a need of the groceries. I shall call the taxi, and we shall procure our groceries together. N’est-ce pas?”
“It’s really not necessary.”
“I insist.”
A half hour later Marcy found herself in the back seat of a taxi with Didier Onyekachukwu and a shopping list of items she didn’t need. There was an intimacy to the excursion that she found a bit uncomfortable. Even though she was auditioning life partners, she would have preferred working up to shopping together more gradually. At this stage, it seemed to fall into the too-much-information area.
She avoided cosmetics and stayed away from cleaning supplies. She walked right by the bathroom deodorizer, even though she actually needed a replacement for the jasmine-lavender mélange atomizer she kept on the toilet lid in her powder room.
Instead she bought canned goods, soups and vegetables, coffee and
sugar, and then bought some yogurt and cut fruit when she realized that she had presented this excursion as something more pressing than stocking up on soup for September in the desert.
His shopping cart contained exotic fruits and vegetables—kiwi, papaya, figs, mangos, artichokes, plantains, yams, garlic—as well as sesame oil, noodles, spices, nuts. And, incongruously, a large box of Fruit Loops.
“I like to eat them as I watch the television,” he explained.
As they stood in line waiting to be checked out, she restrained herself from leafing through the latest issue of People, even though she was dying to know who Jennifer Aniston was dating. She had subscribed to the tabloid until she realized that she was going through it unconsciously searching for evidence of the declining careers, or incurable illnesses, of people she didn’t like. Or worse, the obituaries of women she had been in direct competition with. One less rival.
As soon as she got home, she called Evelyn Duboff and gave her Sammy Dee’s license number. She told her that Didier Onyekachukwu didn’t have a car.
“Red flag,” the detective said.
“What do you mean?”
“He could have lost his drivers license. DUI, reckless driving, whatever . . .”
“Wouldn’t that be on his record?”
“Not if he knows how to keep it off. There are people who can get it done for you. And clean up your credit rating at the same time.”
“So . . . when do you think you might have some answers for me?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether either of these guys has gone to the trouble of purposefully clouding the trail. There are people you can get to do that for you, too.”
“So you’ll let me know?”
“You’ll be the second to know, darling.”
Ten minutes later, the doorbell rang. Sammy Dee was standing there in a pair of neatly pressed trousers and a Lacoste T-shirt.
“Something wrong with your car?”
It took her a second to connect the dots.
He answered her unuttered question. “I saw you pull out in a cab.”
Now what? A little improv routine. It was something she did well in acting class. You just went with whatever your scene partner gave you—like hitting a tennis ball back over the net.
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