Deadly Dues Read online

  Geoff stood and plastered himself against the wall in order to avoid contact with Gretchen as she slid into the booth. I crumpled down beside her, and Geoff cautiously sat beside me.

  I looked at him.

  “I’m not taking any chances,” he said. “She’s a demon with a grudge.”

  Groan. As if I cared. Geoff and Gretchen had bonded briefly—and like cement—for maybe five seconds a decade ago, and somehow the unbonding had had all the dignity of a disconnect session with Crazy Glue and had scarred them for life. More accurately, Gretchen was emotionally scarred and hoped to make Geoff physically scarred. I didn’t know the details. Geoff had a reputation for working his way through the female cast of any play or film. Gretchen kept her personal life private, but every now and again we would get a hint of a wild affair, which she never discussed. Luckily, neither of them had demanded that we fall into camps of allegiance, and so we, the innocent bystanders, simply tried to ignore the ongoing hostilities. I suppose it was a testimony to our charms that both Geoff and Gretchen endured each other’s presence in order to hang out with us.

  We sat for a moment in silence. Wally, the wily waiter we have had since day one, soared by and intoned, “Draft, Rainier’s, Scotch, Chardonnay, and a Sidecar,” then flew away. We barely registered his ministrations.

  “What a mess,” said Pete.

  “No kidding,” said Gretchen. “That desk will never get clean.”

  “Gretchen,” said Pete evenly. “I was speaking … sort of more generally?”

  He was always the solid one in our group. No matter what happened, Pete, with his gentle sincerity and strength, kept us grounded. Tonight his rugged face looked tired, older than his fifty-odd years, and his brown eyes were sad. Normally, his stocky build radiated male hormones and goodwill. Now he looked as if everything were sagging. His tweed jacket had elbow patches and a hanging button. The brown T-shirt underneath had spots of white dust, probably flour—from his passion for baking.

  Pete was kind. He didn’t look at Gretchen with disdain. He accepted her as she was.

  “Oh, yeah,” breathed Gretchen. “I sort of meant that.”

  The rest of us rolled our eyes. But we still loved her. Gretchen used to have an IQ. She once was able to discuss literature and fashion. But ever since Stan had come along and began alternating sexual harassment with career interference, she seemed to lose an IQ point a week from stress. We were sympathetic. She hadn’t had a major audition in over a year, unless you count the local car dealership commercial and the third blonde from the left in a low-budget feature. She passed her waking hours looking in the mirror, wondering what went wrong, cursing Stan and phoning the rest of us in turn, crying and whispering pitifully into the phone. Her sleeping hours she also spent looking in the mirror, wondering what went wrong, cursing Stan, phoning our answering machines and leaving pathetic little tearful messages. Gretchen was bright enough to know that as a slim, beautiful blonde, she had a defined shelf life. The awards she had won should have opened doors to leading roles. Instead, she was biting her nails, trimming them as if they were ornamental hedges, eating entire tubs of frozen yogurt in one sitting (without gaining a pound) and reading comic books and romance novels. We had debated how we could get her out of this state before her IQ dropped to sub-zero. She had an excellent motive to kill Stan, but Gretchen was usually too busy whispering and looking beautiful to take violent action, the event with the statuette being the one exception.

  “I did,” she added. “I did too know that.” Her left hand automatically went to her mouth. Pete and I reached over, clamped our hands over hers and lowered it to the table. I grabbed the obligatory bowl of stale nuts and shoved it across the table to her.

  “Gretchen,” Pete said. “Eat.”

  She sighed and started nibbling on the nuts, picking them up one by one with her pointed little fingers and her erratically pointed bitten-down nails.

  “What I was about to say,” said Pete heavily. “Is that we have to figure out what to do.”

  “Shouldn’t we make an womymous call to the pweese?” said Gretchen, through a mouthful of peanuts.

  We looked at her blankly.

  “Why?” said Bent, his eyes wide. Bent took everything very seriously. He was five foot four of wild compressed energy. When he was upset, he could vibrate as violently as his old van’s engine.

  “That’s what they do in TV movies,” said Gretchen defensively, swallowing.

  Bent leaned over the table and hissed at her, his glasses almost steaming over. He seemed more intense than usual, if that were possible. He began to splutter, which was a sign that he was revved up to high gear.

  “This is not a goddammed TV movie,” he spat. “This is life. And we are not morons. We are not going to make any anonymous calls. So that the cops can wonder just who found the body.”

  “Right,” said Gretchen, looking mournfully at the nuts.

  Wally slid our drinks in front of us and soared away. Geoff took a good chug of his Scotch, and the rest of us took a private moment with our respective drinks. I love the smooth, oaky taste of Chardonnay. Gretchen was hooked on sweet-and-sour girlie drinks. Bent drank only draft, as a political statement of his leftist leanings. And Pete drank Rainier because a voice-over for a Rainer commercial had equalled the down payment on his car.

  “We shouldn’t have left,” I said. “We should have stayed there and called the police. We should call the police now.”

  A long pause. I could tell this was not one of my more popular suggestions. I tried another approach.

  “Did anybody check to see if Stan had written our visit in his appointment book?” I asked.

  Geoff took another long swallow of his Scotch and said, “He probably didn’t. He called us this evening.”

  “Right,” I said. “So if we are lucky—”

  I was interrupted by two people who popped up at our table like puppets in a Punch and Judy show. They were both short, so we hadn’t seen them coming. They were civilians, not actors.

  He was hefty, in his fifties, very pleasant-looking in a sports jacket, with an incongruous earring in his left ear. This is what happens when people read old InStyle magazines. She was the same age, plump and innocuous, dressed in a bright polyester blouse and smart little navy Walmart slacks.

  “It is!” she almost shouted. “It must be!”

  He leaned towards me, excited.

  “Didn’t you used to be—Lulu Malone?”

  I looked at them and turned my face into a smile that made my dimple hurt.

  “I still am Lulu Malone,” I said.

  “Lulu Malone—I can’t believe it,” she said to him, ecstatic.

  “Lulu Malone,” he repeated.

  Then they turned to each other and sang, “Doggie doggie bow wow!” just the way I used to do it in the commercials, only not as adorably, although they did hit every note.

  My dimple felt as if a root canal were in progress, but I kept smiling.

  “So what ever happened to you, Lu?” he said, leaning over confidentially.

  She turned to him. “She’s not nearly as attractive in person.” She lowered her voice a tiny bit, but not enough. “And she’s quite a bit older.”

  Pete suddenly rose from his seat, staring at the entrance, his eyes wide and mouth slack.

  “My God, there’s Kevin! I haven’t worked with him since Dances With Wolves!”

  Geoff lurched up, looking in the same direction, with an adoring look plastered on his gorgeous face.

  “Wow, I’d love to catch up with him. Darn, he just went out the door. I bet he’s on his way down the street to the Rochester.”

  I had turned to look at Pete and Geoff in surprise. I didn’t know Pete had been on Dances With Wolves. I turned back to Mr. and Mrs. Nightmare. Poof. They were gone. When I looked back at the doorway, I could just see his sports jacket and her bright blouse disappearing into the street.

  “Thanks, guys,” I said with what I hoped was an a
ppreciative laugh. “Brilliant work.” I smiled brightly. “Now—where were we?”

  To my annoyance, a tear slid down my cheek, circled around in my dimple and dropped into my Chardonnay.

  Gretchen reached over to squeeze my hand. Too bad she over-reached with her ragged little nails and clawed Geoff’s hand. He flinched against the wall of the booth, knocking over my Chardonnay in the process.

  In a second, Wally was wiping the table.

  “It was her fault,” said Geoff defensively, looking at Gretchen.

  Wally rolled his eyes and disappeared. We had a lot of credit with Wally. Like many actors, we pinched our pennies and tipped the minimum in slow times. But Wally had learned that if he hung in there long enough, we tipped well (to the point of bankruptcy) when we felt flush. Not that any of us had felt that way recently. Over the years, Wally had learned all our secrets as he leaned his stringy, balletic body across the table to deliver our drinks. He knew our fortunes from his tips. He kept tabs on our respective love lives from our presence or non-presence. He knew when any of us were depressed and sometimes slipped us an extra drink as a consolation prize for not getting the role. We were grateful. But we were also aware that Wally could retire on our collective tips. (Gretchen exempted, as always.)

  Murphy strolled by and beamed at us. We were good for business, even now.

  “Hey, guys. Next round on the house.”

  We nodded appreciatively. Murphy, who seems like a big side of beef in a slimmed-down world, doesn’t miss much. He reached down and touched my shoulder gently. I looked up at him in gratitude. He moved on to the bar, where an out-of-work director and a bipolar screenwriter were getting into it about a long-gone shoot. Goes to show that even Billie Holiday can’t quell the savage beast in men, sometimes.

  “If we’re lucky,” I continued, “nobody will know we were there.”

  We sat in silence for a moment. Another Chardonnay slid discreetly in front of me. And another round of drinks for all. Was this a great life or what?

  “Aren’t we jolly?” trilled Wally, and away he went.

  “We should get jolly,” said Pete. “How does this look?”

  The great thing about actors is that we can change gears in a nanosecond. Gretchen suddenly leaned her head against the booth and laughed that wonderfully wispy little souffle that had stopped the show in Noises Off. Geoff turned expansive, flung his arm around me and laughed deeply and heartily, using his deepest baritone, the one that entranced all women, from makeup artists to high-profile stars shooting on location. Pete planted a warm smile on his face and plunked his chin onto his hand, doing his “just a happy gardener” look from the Sunny Plants and Pots Nursery commercials he had done a decade ago, which had paid off his mortgage. Bent just bent over his beer and looked like Bent, which, in its own demented way, was a great cover. I asked my dimple for triple time and it obliged.

  “So,” hissed Bent. “What next?”

  “I think we should lay low and see what happens,” smiled Pete serenely. “We just pretend we weren’t there. If anybody makes suspicious noises about any one of us, we all come forward and confess.”

  “Confess!” Geoff, Gretchen, Bent and I shrieked in perfect unison. We could have been the chorus from The Trojan Women.

  “Are you kidding?” said Geoff, his blue eyes almost rolling up into his hairline.

  “I don’t mean confess in the classic sense,” said Pete calmly. “I mean we confess that we were there.”

  “But we didn’t do anything,” Gretchen added.

  “No matter what we do,” I said. “It’s going to look lousy. Any one of us could have done it.”

  “Oh, thanks,” Geoff said grimly.

  “I mean, we all had a motive,” I said.

  “Anybody who knew Stan had a motive,” said Pete.

  “There must have been somebody who liked him,” said Gretchen plaintively, losing another IQ point right in front of us.

  “Maybe Sherilyn liked him,” I said tentatively, mostly for Gretchen’s sake. “They were a good-looking couple.”

  “Yeah, he must have been dynamite in bed,” said Gretchen wisely.

  We all looked at her in barf mode. The thought of getting into bed with Stan Pope was a close second to drawing the night shift in the Paris sewers as far as I was concerned.

  “Well, he got around,” said Pete.

  I sipped my Chardonnay and mulled this over. Sherilyn and Stan were the perfect couple: coarse and vulgar, with dollar signs for eyes and hearts heavy with malice. Sherilyn Carp had bleached bouffant hair and wore pale pink lipstick. She usually sent a chill up my spine, but that was only because she reminded me of the girls who used to beat me up on the volleyball court in junior high. I thought Stan and Sherilyn were a lovely match.

  I couldn’t think of any other woman who would want Stan as a paramour. Poor Gretchen. Bashing him over the head with her Roxy award had cost her a lot. Maybe she now regretted defending herself. And wished she had closed her eyes and done the unthinkable.

  The rest of us had really enjoyed seeing him with that big beautiful bruise that didn’t fade for weeks. He told everybody he had fallen off a golf cart. Yeah. Sure. We had made a point of asking him about it every time we saw him. Very solicitously.

  We fell into an awkward silence. Normally, having known each other for so many years, a silence meant we were in a mellow tone, or sinking into group career depression. Tonight, we each knew it was more of a private contemplation about how much better our lives would be without Stan Pope in the picture. And, if my friends were like me, this also involved a nice load of guilt for being happy about his demise.

  But—damn!—I thought, as I swirled my Chardonnay around from behind one dimple to another, maybe I can get my hands on the royalty payments that Stan confiscated. Maybe—I started to smile over this—I might be able to give up my highly desirable job at McDonald’s. Wow. I was sure going to miss Geraldo and Thug and Robyn and the rest of the pubescent gang …

  I caught Pete looking at me reproachfully. “It’s not what you think,” I said, defensively.

  “Sure,” he said. Ever since Sally had left him, Pete had lost his aura of sweetness. A sombre sadness hung over him, from his drooping moustache to his scuffed boots. Of all of us, maybe Pete had the best reason to hate Stan. He had adored Sally, had talked about her non-stop during on-set meal breaks, had rhapsodized about her needlework, had rushed home when a shoot wrapped to see how she was doing. He and Sally had been together over twenty years, a long time in entertainment business years, and he had never dreamed it might end. But it had, thanks to Stan and his bad seeds of gossip.

  I had fantasized repeatedly about force-feeding Stan Bow Wow Dog Food until he coughed up my royalties. I wonder what the others dreamed about, and whether any one of them had pictured a letter opener in his back. Stop that, Lu. Stop that right now. It is not nice to wonder if your dearest friends are murderers.

  But such a good cause, the other part of me piped up. There will be massive celebration in the entire film and television community. The world is a better place. Whoever did it should get a medal.

  Yow Yow Yow, I silently shrieked to myself. Stop that. Don’t even think that. Next thing you know, you’ll be blurting it out after the next glass of wine, and then you’ll be in the doggie doo-doo. This is a very good point, I said to myself. You do not want to look like a suspect. Even to yourself.

  My reverie was interrupted by Bent thumping his glass down on the table. We all jolted to attention. I noted, with some satisfaction, that Geoff, Gretchen and Pete all looked as guilty as I felt. Bent didn’t look guilty. He looked bent of out of shape. Which is how he got his name. I liked Bent, in the way you like the ornery little mongrel in the litter, the one who snaps at all the other puppies and then, when you aren’t looking, gets a lonely little look in its eye. And then chases its tail and bites you on the ankle. That’s Bent.

  He and I had met ten years ago when he was the assistant stage
manager on the worst Medea of all time. Unfortunately, I was playing Medea in this wreck of a production. No matter how bad I was, when the rest of the cast refused to meet my eye, when the reviews begged for my assassination at the earliest possible moment, when even Tallulah, my goldfish at the time, turned her tail on me and became very interested in the sludge at the bottom of the goldfish bowl when I came home, Bent was kind. When the rest of the world seemed to believe that I should be shot on sight because I was a Bad Actor, Bent would greet me with a smile. He would get me coffee. He would compliment me on little moments in my universally scorned performance. I knew I was a lousy Medea, but I still had to climb onstage every night and try to find a way to fix it and be a Better Actor. I was too young for the role, and my dimples didn’t help, but I tried.

  Bent gave me the strength to walk out of the wings and onto the stage night after night. I have never forgotten it. It was kindness to an artist in defeat. The sort of kindness that keeps the blackest of demons away in the dark hours of the sleepless nights when one relives every mean-spirited comment, every slash of wit, every suppressed laugh when one enters a room.

  Being an actor is great—when you are in a hit show or film, when you are acclaimed, when you are lucky enough to get a great review, when people recognize you and fall all over you. It is not great when you become the laugh of the month, for all the wrong reasons, and only your best friends still call. And when they do, they bumble around, not knowing what to say. (Note to friends of actors: the best thing to say in these situations is, “You are talented and you can get past this, and don’t read any more reviews, by the way.”)

  Bent was never a best friend, but he got me through Medea. A year later, when Bow Wow happened, and the great dramatic actress who was spat on in the streets became the highly paid dog-food shill who was drooled on in the streets (unfortunately, mostly by dogs), I remembered, and recommended Bent to the production house as a dialogue coach. It wasn’t just out of gratitude. Bent had great ability as a teacher. His caustic personality totally undermined him in any direct creative situation. But in a teaching situation, he was able to distance himself. He was perceptive and thoughtful. He connected with his students, which was so weird, considering that he was unconnected in real life. He got results. And he managed to demonstrate the same amazing kindness he had shown to me.