“Don’t worry, Hol,” I said. “We’ll tell you when it’s on so you can watch it.”
“At nine?”
“Right.”
“So we’ll be able to watch the final episode at the wrap party,” Wesley explained to her once again. Some of us have a talent for time, but Holly clearly had that timeless quality.
“And that’s why we needed to rent giant-screen TVs,” she said. “So the crew can watch the show as it airs here in L.A. Got it.”
The three of us were seated in the empty Kitchen Arena on Food Freak’s soundstage. The set for the program was a giant in-the-round theater. Audience seating was designed in a full circle around the stage, extending upward in tiered levels. On this Wednesday morning, the three of us sat huddled together in the semidark in the front row. Wes and Holly would be directing our catering staff to load in the party tables and chairs immediately after the live broadcast was finished.
“How much time will we have for setup? We’ve got to roll in ten tables and eighty chairs, and load in the bar and three buffet tables.” Wes was checking his yellow notepad.
“And we need time to decorate.” Holly was using a stylus on her little electronic notebook Palm device.
“You can’t take more than an hour,” I suggested. “Less if possible. We can ask the cast and crew to hang around outside. Maybe get a bar set up out there?”
“Good idea,” Holly said, tapping the screen on her PalmPilot. “The waiters can pass hors d’oeuvres outside, too, so no one has to starve.” She looked around the stage below us and made a broad gesture. “Do you think we need to dress up the stage here?”
“No,” I said. “But the stage crew will be cleaning up the kitchen sets while you are doing your thing with the tables and buffet. After the final cook-off, these kitchens are a mess.”
“Good point,” Wes said. “But with the set as our backdrop and the professional lighting already in place, decorating for the party will be simple. The table linens. The flowers. The centerpieces. The gift bags. It’s done.”
As centerpieces, Wes had found neon-colored DVD racks and had filled them with dozens of the latest movies on DVD as well as the hottest new video games. As gifts, Artie had approved those video-game consoles that double as DVD players. Boxes of them were wrapped by our crew and would be in place at every seat. We’d also ordered special Food Freak T-shirts and baseball caps for all the show’s staff as well as our own party crew. Wes was wearing his. The T-shirt had the slogan IF YOU CAN’T STAND THE HEAT on the front, and on the back, GET OUT OF THE KITCHEN ARENA!
“Is the mobile kitchen up and running?” I asked. Wes was supervising construction of a temporary kitchen and grill that were being built outside on the street next to soundstage 9. An orange-and-white-striped tent was going up at the moment, which would allow our eight chefs a place to work on last-minute dishes. The fresh-baked items and desserts, as well as all the prep work, like marinating and chopping and making sauces and salads, happened at my kitchen, only five minutes away.
“We seem to be on schedule,” Wes said. “No worries. So, how are things going with the show? We’ve hardly seen you all week.”
“I know,” I said, pulling my sweater tighter. I had learned to keep an old sweater at the office for those times when I had to come onto the freezing set. “It’s been frantic around here, but no one is losing it. I think we would have had a much easier week if we hadn’t lost so many key people.”
“And if you weren’t under so much pressure, what with shooting a live show, with no margin for any slipups,” Holly added. “Except that it’s not really going to be ‘live,’ is it? So I don’t know why everyone is in such a fuss.”
Wes and I let that one go.
“I better go. I’ve got to get back,” I said.
“See you later,” Holly said, head still bent over her electronic planner.
I left the two of them to finish up the party schedule, feeling that awkward feeling like when you graduate from sixth grade. All of a sudden you realize you don’t belong to that old school. I wasn’t the party planner today. I was responsible for writing a game show.
I opened the heavy stage door to the outside and walked into another brilliantly sunny day. Yet today I wasn’t warmed. I couldn’t shake the feeling I was stepping away from my comfortable old life and walking into some new disaster.
In the five days that had passed, the police had kept a tight lid on the information they were gathering on the previous Wednesday night’s death at 12226 Lemon Grove Drive, in Studio City. At the Freak offices, no one spoke about it. It was still assumed that Tim Stock had died in that fire. But I got a few updates from Honnett along the way. By Tuesday, the identity of the dead man had been confirmed. As I’d suspected, the victim turned out to be Quentin Shore. But Quentin hadn’t been killed by the fire. The coroner determined the cause of death as blunt-trauma injury to the head. The fire damage had occurred after death. Honnett reminded me not to discuss this information with anyone on the staff, so as the days wore on, I felt even more detached from the people I worked with at Food Freak.
As I walked down the block, I made a quick decision to talk to Chef Howie. His star trailer was parked up ahead, its chrome accents gleaming in the sunlight.
“Hey, Madeline. Come in,” Chef Howie said, answering his own door. “Good to see you.”
“Thanks.” I stepped into the RV and noticed that Chef Howie was barefoot. It was much too early for him to change into the clothes he wore on camera. He had on a tight black T-shirt that said, “Greengrocer from Hell,” and a pair of running shorts. The show wasn’t due to shoot for another few hours, so he had plenty of time to get into his Chef Howie gear, the famous silver lamé chef’s jacket, tight black jeans, and cowboy boots. I looked around the trailer and noticed we were alone. “Where’s Fate?”
“She’s over at the office building meeting with Artie, I think,” he said. “Sit down a minute. I’ve been working on my lines.” Howie had been seated on the white leather love seat, and a mass of script pages and note cards littered the white marble coffee table that was attached to the floor. “I’m really not sure about doing the show live,” he mumbled.
“Really?” I hadn’t realized that Chef Howie was nervous. “It should be fine. Almost the same format you always do, right?”
“But there’s no chance to stop and start again,” he said, laughing. “I’m out there all alone. It’s pretty intense, when you think about it.”
“You’ll be great,” I said.
“Here’s hoping,” he said, and he drained a long-neck beer. As I observed more closely, Howie didn’t seem all that great. His face was worn out, haggard, beat. At the moment, his not-quite-shaved beard gave him a look that was closer to hobo than rock ‘n’ roll.
“You okay?” I asked. “I just wanted to see if there was anything you needed. I know this has been an unusual week.” Talk about your understatements.
“Tim’s dead,” Chef Howie said, scratching at his long sideburns. “I still can’t believe it. That guy was a prince. He was a hell-raiser when he was out drinking, but he was a real good guy. Did you know him?”
I shook my head no.
“That’s too bad,” Howie said. “He was a great guy, Madeline. I don’t get why God makes one guy dead and not another.” He shook his handsome head and after a moment of reflection looked up, noticing me again. “Hey, sorry if I’m getting too heavy. I have this spiritual side to me. Fate doesn’t always think I do, but I do.”
“The death of a friend can be devastating,” I said, trying to be helpful.
“You can say that again,” he said. “I’m all torn up. Tim Stock was my buddy. That guy looked out for me so the scripts made me look good. The world is gonna miss that guy. I’m gonna miss him.” He opened another bottle of beer and took a long swig.
I sat there wondering what I should say. It was awkward listening to this eulogy for a guy I knew wasn’t actually dead. And Howie was so broken up abo
ut Tim he was drinking pretty hard. He was knocking back beers with a recklessness I was sure Fate would have stopped had she been there. It was maddening. Some folks enjoy secrets, but I find withholding the truth almost too hard to bear. I figured this did not make me a great cop candidate.
I stood up and cleared my throat. “Well, I had better get—”
“Stay a minute, Madeline. It’s good to have someone to grieve with, you know?”
I sat back down slowly.
“Say,” he said, looking nervous, “have you heard from any of the others?”
“Who?”
“From Greta or from Quentin?”
“Greta is suffering from exhaustion.”
“Oh, really? I hadn’t heard. So is she, like, in a hospital?”
Greta had checked into a rehab clinic to fight an addiction to painkillers. Now, it had never been established that she actually had such an addiction. Apparently no one who knew her had suspected such a thing. No intervention had been performed by anyone on the Food Freak staff. However, after Artie fired her, she dropped out of sight. Next thing we heard, she was out in Palm Desert fighting a painkiller problem.
“I think she’s in a hospital, yes,” I said.
“Pills?” Howie asked, looking concerned. “Booze?”
“I don’t know,” I answered truthfully.
“Think she’s really out there getting a lift?” he asked.
“A face-lift?”
He nodded, as if any of those things—pills, booze, face-lifts—were the sort of occupational hazards for which television producers might be sidelined.
“I really don’t know.”
“What about Quentin?” he asked, changing the subject and looking into my eyes. That interested me. If Fate Finkelberg’s visions of her husband cheating on her were true, I doubted Chef Howie was having an affair with Greta. His reaction was just the right unstudied mix of being out of the loop and of low-level interest.
“Oh, I wonder if you could do me a favor,” I asked suddenly. “Do you think you could give me Susan Anderson’s home number? I told her I’d bring over some toys for the boys.”
“Does Susan have children?” Howie asked. “I didn’t know that. I know she has sheep. She knitted me a chef’s hat out of some special wool. It was incredibly sweet of her, not to mention weird as bat poop.”
I laughed at that. “No, she doesn’t have kids. She has three gorgeous dogs. She calls them her ‘boys.’ ”
“That so? Susan is a nice gal, but I had to tell her I couldn’t wear her knitted chef’s hat on the air. It gave me a rash.”
Fate Finkelberg was paranoid. Susan was not the object of Chef Howie’s affections, either. Susan had just found love with Tim Stock. And Howie showed no special interest in Susan. He didn’t recognize “the boys,” and what was more, he was allergic to wool! I felt foolish even considering Fate’s charges.
I supposed Fate had been working herself up over nothing in a fit of control-mania. She couldn’t stand Howie making up his own special sign-off signal. Rather than accept the fact that her husband wanted a little autonomy, she had to manufacture some deeper betrayal—like an affair at work.
“So where’s Quentin?” Howie said, getting back to his initial question.
“Quentin?”
“It’s got me pretty worried,” Howie said.
Now, as a rule, I like honesty. I try to resist lying when asked a direct question. But Honnett had warned me to keep all the information he’d given me quiet. I thought about the art of vagueness and sidestepping.
“I’ll let you in on something, Madeline,” Chef Howie said, holding significant eye contact, “I helped Quentin get his job on this show. I can’t believe he’d run out.”
“Ah. Well, Artie doesn’t tell me everything. I’m so new.”
“That’s right,” he said, as if just remembering that I’d been on the staff only a couple of weeks. His stress was real and it was making him a little forgetful.
“You knew Quentin before Food Freak?” I asked.
“Well,” Howie said, shuffling the papers on the coffee table. “We were acquainted, that’s all. Nothing unusual there. Only, do me a favor? Don’t tell Fate I asked about him, would you? No reason to talk about it, right?”
“Okay,” I agreed. Hm. Howie wasn’t concerned about Fate hearing we’d talked about Greta. He didn’t warn me not to tell Fate we’d been discussing Susan. But Quentin worried him.
Now what was this about? The more I thought it over, the more I figured Jennifer Klein might know something that could be important. She’d worked closely with Quentin and Tim and Greta. And I decided right then to go see if Jennifer might enlighten me.
Chapter 24
I walked across the studio lot quickly. For five days, I’d come to work hoping I’d find Tim Stock back in hiding in the secret bedroom next to his office. For five days, I’d pushed the rose-colored sofa away from the wall of bookcases, and opened the swinging case. For five days, I’d come up empty-handed. No sign that Tim had ever returned.
For five days, Susan had become more and more unsettled. She couldn’t understand why Tim never again contacted her. Even if he still felt threatened somehow, he should have called to let her know he was all right. I didn’t want to suggest that Tim might have a new reason for running, now. It might be that Tim was responsible for the fire at his own garage. Yet, I still couldn’t believe that was true. It made no sense at all that Tim would kill Quentin Shore. Did it?
I knocked on Jennifer’s office door and heard her call out, “Enter.”
“Hi,” I said. “Got a minute?”
“Sure. Sit down.”
Jennifer looked up from her computer monitor and smiled at me as I walked into her office. Jennifer’s office was smaller than Tim’s, and it had none of the charming two-story library atmosphere, either. It was a plain room with a desk and a few chairs. It did, however, possess a large floor-to-ceiling mirror about three feet wide, located on one wall. I had peeled off my sweater on the walk across the lot, as the heat of the day had quickly made it unnecessary. Now, I smoothed my shirt and straightened my jeans.
“You look like a real writer,” Jennifer said, still smiling.
“You mean a little sloppy?”
“I prefer to call it ‘casual,’ ” Jennifer answered. She was a comfortable-looking woman, always dressed in denim. Her dark hair fell over her forehead in deep bangs. A dimpled chin gave her face a heart shape.
As I turned away from the mirror, something odd caught my eye. There seemed to be a line in the wall along the edge of the mirror. For a moment I stood there, startled. Behind that wall, I knew, was the hidden bedroom. And I was willing to bet that behind the wall mirror, there was a second hidden door into that room. Funny, Holly and I hadn’t noticed it when we were in the bedroom, but we hadn’t spent a lot of time investigating after we found the trapdoor that led us downstairs and outside.
“Madeline?” Jennifer said. I got the feeling she had asked me something and I’d missed it entirely. I turned around quickly.
“Sorry, what?”
“I said, watch your behind today. Fate Finkelberg is charging around the office as if she wants to shoot someone.”
“Thanks for the warning. Tell me, Jennifer, you’ve known her longer than I have. What is wrong with her?”
“Now there’s a question that could inspire a serious discussion,” Jennifer said, chuckling. “Unfortunately, we don’t have the time to even scratch the surface.”
“Can you give me a hint? Act it out? How many syllables?”
“She’s one of those people who isn’t particularly desirable to a town like this. I mean, her greatest talent is her ambition,” Jennifer said, folding her hands on her desk. I pulled up a chair. “And so she’s found someone who can be her meal ticket. Chef Howie has got the right looks and personality for television. He’s still a young enough guy and he’s getting hotter and hotter since Food Freak has become so popular.”
“He’s not terribly…” How should I phrase it? “…bright, though, is he?” I asked.
“To get into Hollywood, no report cards are examined.” Jennifer smiled at me. “That’s why they need us writers.”
“I see.”
“But Chef Howie is smart enough. He may not be a genius, but he knows that Fate has made all this possible for him. She does the massive amount of work with the agents and the lawyers and the producers and the network. All Howie has to do is show up. It seems to be a relationship that works. Why?”
“Fate came to see me last week. She wanted to be friends.”
“Uh-oh.” Jennifer leaned forward, hoping I’d tell her more.
“She was worried about what extracurricular adventures Howie might be getting into. It turns out it was all nonsense. The women she was worried about couldn’t possibly have been involved with him.”
“I’ll say,” Jennifer said, smiling to herself.
“How’s that?” It seemed an odd comment, considering I hadn’t even mentioned who the suspects might have been. I looked at Jennifer more closely. She looked more padded and practical than the type of woman I would have imagined Howie might tumble for, but one could never tell. “Do you know who Howie is involved with?”
“We’ll have to talk about all of this later,” Jennifer said, sighing. “Right now I’m swamped. I’ve had to take on a lot of the work Tim and Quentin used to do. Not to mention Greta. Would you mind helping me out? Can we go over some of the script material?”
“Of course.” There was no time to think around here. I had to help get the show on the air.
Jennifer handed me a copy of the latest version of the show script and we settled into the task of reading the pages aloud. She and I found a few typos and one question that might have two possible answers. Instead of doing a lot of last-minute research, she decided to substitute another question instead. Then we had to read through all the material to make sure the new question didn’t sound too similar to anything else in the script.
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