Everybody Takes The Money (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries) (14 page)

A show like
Girls Becoming Stars
could burst onto the scene, be incredibly popular for two years, and then flame out, and that would be considered an unqualified success. The producers made some money with almost no investment and then were on to their next project.
 

“Leaving the stars of the show high and dry and wondering what just happened.”

“Exactly,” Anne said. “Gotta feed the beast. And you get so used to the money and the perks and then it all vanishes.”

“And you end up dead in North Hollywood.”

“Can you imagine?” Anne said.

Studio City was named after its origins in the early days of the movie business, when the undeveloped area was used as studio lots. Westerns were filmed there. I myself never particularly enjoyed Westerns. Good vs. Evil? Cattle vs. Sheep? Everything the main characters were fighting over was eventually going to give way to whoever owned the railroads, so all those poor bastards did was distract everybody from the real issues, which was who owned the land.

My unique perspective on the opening of the West may have been colored by the fact that one of my great-great-grandfathers was a railroad tycoon who married a silver heiress and bought up cheap what these poor ranchers and farmers had been killing themselves to own and work on.

It was tough to imagine movie cowboys riding around modern day Studio City. Despite the name, the place had zero glamour, although it was one of the wealthier areas of the San Fernando Valley. Ventura Boulevard looked much the same here as it did in Tarzana: lots of tall palm trees, garish billboards, and oversized store signage competing for drivers’ attention. There were some pedestrians, but the cliché about Los Angeles being designed for drivers was triply true in the San Fernando Valley. The Valley really came into its own post-World War II and the layout was absolutely designed for autos: wide lanes, large radiuses on sidewalk corners to make turning easier, and every ten feet another driveway.
 

The buildings on the block near Schlegel’s office held dentists’ offices, doctors’ offices, TV producers’ offices, realtors’ offices. Every single one of them had flat, featureless architecture and looked like every other building for miles, designed to be torn down and replaced with something else in a decade or two. Schlegel’s building was at least a decade past its expiration date, but the office itself was in fine shape.

Except for the piles of paper everywhere. That was kind of horrifying.
 

“Don’t step on that!” the guy on the phone yelled at me. He was pointing at the pile that was leaning against the wall for support. My foot had almost made contact with it, because the paper had blended in with the white wall behind it.
 

I raised a hand in apology. And carefully scanned the room for further minefields.

“Micah Schlegel?” Anne said.
 

The guy on the phone waved us back from him, still focused on his call.
I’ll get to you, stop pushing me.
 

Schlegel was a young guy, maybe the same age I was, twenty-seven or twenty-eight. His brown hair was wild and curly, sticking out in all directions, and he wore glasses with wire rims. I had a stereotype of TV producer as a more the older, cigar-chomping type, but in today’s TV environment, that guy wouldn’t have enough energy to keep up with the pace. Schlegel wore a t-shirt and jeans and he kept talking into the phone a million miles a minute.
 

Also in the office were two other desks, against the far wall. One had another guy with headphones on, typing as fast as he could, and the other had a young woman, answering an actual landline phone and scribbling things on a piece of paper. That summed up Los Angeles: everyone was on the phone all the time. All three voices echoed around the small room, hardly dampened by the carpeting or the baffles created by the towers of paper. But none of them seemed at all disconcerted by the noise made by the others.
 

I would be a bad fit for this office.

“Shit!” Schlegel yelled. “Mariah! Scott Thomason over at Fox wants a meet. Set it up.”

The woman at the desk, who I assumed was Mariah, lifted her middle finger and waved it at him. But she scribbled something down.

Schlegel pointed at me. “You Anne da Silva?”

Anne took a step forward. “I’m Anne.” She stuck her hand out. “Hi.”
 

“Either of you want coffee? I want coffee. Jesus. Today’s crazy. Need to get out of here. Come on, let’s go.”
 

The three of us walked over to a nearby Starbucks. Anne bought a small coffee, Schlegel ordered a gigantic milkshake-type drink with whipped cream sliding off of it in cascading waves, and I kept my moral superiority by having nothing. Stevie kept me on a tight budget, which makes moral superiority easy.
 

Schlegel was being slammed with interview requests since the news about Courtney’s murder had broken. “I can’t believe it,” he kept saying. “I just talked to her, you know, yesterday. And I don’t have time for this, you know? I’m trying to get all this stuff done and she’s dead.”

A pair of guys at the table next to ours swiveled around when they heard Schlegel say that. I lifted my eyebrows at them and they turned back around.
 

“You’re working a lot?” Anne said.
 

“Eighty hours a week,” he said.
 

“What’s the show?”

“This is for the reunion show,” he said. “You work eighty hours a week developing projects, calling people, putting shit together. When the show’s actually in production you work a hundred hours a week.”
 

“You’ve had shows on the air. Doesn’t that count for something?” I asked.

“No one has it made in this town,” he said. “No one! And everyone always thinks, ‘Oh, all I gotta do is get my one break and I’ll have it made!’ But that’s bullshit. You always have to hustle for your next job. Always.”
 

Gary had taught me much the same lesson. He had a matched set of those statues everyone in town wanted, owned the sobriquet “Legendary,” had millions of dollars in the bank, and still took starring roles in big-budget horror flicks just to keep working. He had to keep his name out there, because in less than a year executives would say, “Sir Gareth who?” And if he didn’t take the money, someone else would.

“So what’s your story?” Schlegel asked me. “You an actress?”

I shook my head. “Personal assistant.” I pointed at Anne.

“Huh.” That answer gave him nothing he could use for his own advancement or to promise me some. He lost interest in me and I worked on a sculpture using a couple of plastic straws snagged from the condiments counter.
 

“So let me tell you this flat out,” Schlegel said. “I’m not going to talk much about Courtney. I know that’s why you called, but I’m not talking about her.”

“Grieving?” I said.

“The police?” Anne said.

“PR.” Schlegel shook his head. “The publicity from this is gold. Right now I need this.”

Anne pushed her phone closer to him. “Let’s talk about the reunion show. Are all of the girls going to be on it?”

He made a dismissive noise. “Man, Courtney wasn’t even going to be on it until a week ago.”

Anne and I looked at one another. So much for him not talking about Courtney. She leaned forward. “What changed?”
 

Schlegel shook his head. “We have to put this together kind of fast, you know? Some of the girls don’t live in Los Angeles anymore, and some have moved on to other things, if you know what I mean.”
 

The smug expression on his face when he said that made me want to put one of my straw sculptures up his nose.

“But mostly we want the girls who are doing interesting things now. You know. Who have a story.”

I cut Anne off before she could ask her next question. “You keep saying ‘a story.’ I have the feeling you’re using the word differently than the rest of us do.”

“You know. This one’s working as a model, this one’s got, you know, kids, this one’s still going to auditions and really focused on the dream, you know? Everybody’s got a story. We’re not going to have time to repeat stories, so we have to pick the interesting ones.”

“Why wasn’t Courtney going to be on the show?”

Schlegel shrugged. “Well. You know, she’s nice and all. But I asked her to maybe come up with a different angle on things, you know?”

“Oklahoma wasn’t a good story?” I said.

Schlegel pointed at me. “Exactly!”

“What changed?”
 

“She told me she had a great angle. Nobody else had this.”

“And you’re not going to tell us what it was.”

He shook his head. “You know how much this is worth in terms of ratings now?”

“Even though it might be why she was murdered?” I said.

“Wow. You think?” he said.

I wanted to give Anne the signal that meant
You create a distraction and I’ll strangle him
, but at the last moment I remembered only Stevie would understand what that gesture meant. And she never created the distraction, no matter how much the person deserved strangling.

“Who else is going to be on the reunion show?” Anne asked.

Schlegel rattled off the names of several other girls who they were looking to include on the reunion show.
 

“Will Roger Sabo be working on it?” Anne asked.
 

Schlegel made a face. “That asshole. Jesus, I hope not. You guys know him?”

“He brags about his time on your show quite a bit,” I said.

“He was useless. Well, there was one thing he was really good at.”

“Scoring drugs?”

“Okay,
two
things he was really good at.”

Anne and I exchanged a glance before I smiled. “What was the second thing?”
 

“Did you ever watch the show?” he asked me. When I didn’t respond, he looked at Anne. “You did, right? ‘Kay. So one of the problems the girls had was how they were going to support themselves while doing the auditions, making the rounds, what have you.”

I looked at Anne. “Didn’t the show pay them a salary?”
 

Anne shook her head. “These shows set them up with a ‘normal life.’” She made quote marks in the air. “The girls hold down jobs, they go to auditions....”
 

“And somehow in between everything else they become stars.”
 

Schlegel nodded. “Right. That’s the show. Shows have stories, too. Well, Sabo finds us a place that does a sponsorship on the show and hires some of the girls for, like, answering the phones.”

I watched Anne nod, like that made any sense. She kept paying attention, so perhaps what he’d said sounded like English to her. I interrupted him. “What’s a sponsorship? They bought commercials?”

Anne shook her head at me. “No. In order to finance these shows, there are product placement ads. What sodas the girls drink. What cars they drive. In return, the show features that brand heavily, with the logo front and center on the screen.”

Schlegel nodded. “The one Sabo brought us was Hitchcock Christian Financial Counseling.”

That was the first fascinating thing Schlegel had said all day. Because Hitchcock had definitely acted like he had no damn idea who Roger Sabo was when I mentioned the little sleaze’s name.

Anne said, “Roger Sabo, the drug dealer, brought you a Christian organization?”

Schlegel sucked a wad of whipped cream off his straw and stared at me to see if I was watching. “It was a minor deal, but it worked pretty good. You know, it was good enough for him to score a producer title. Well,
assistant
producer. And it showed a couple of the girls as being wholesome Christians, which, given the rest of the things they were doing—”

“Which girls went to work at this Christian office?” I asked.

“The down home girls, the ones from Oklahoma and Texas.”
 

“Courtney Cleary and who?” I asked.
 

“And Randi Narvaez. The one from Dallas.”
 

The one from Dallas.
Every girl was a type, who fit into a slot. A slot defined by her story. TV liked its types and its easy stories.

“Is Randi going to be on the reunion show?” I asked.
 

Schlegel nodded. “She is now.”
 

“Now?”

“You know. Since Courtney... Randi and Courtney worked together. We have to have her now.”

“But you weren’t going to have her before.”

He shook his head. “Randi’s story was okay. Nothing special. She’s doing under-fives. Mostly no dialogue, which is, you know...” He tilted his head to the side.
 

Could this Randi woman have guessed she was not going to be on the reunion special? Would that be a big enough incentive to kill Courtney?

This town was making me suspicious of everyone’s motives at all times.

Anne started scribbling on a notepad. “What did the girls have to do at this office?”

“They would sometimes answer the phones. Shit, did you ever watch this show? Even with our amazing, miracle-working editors, it was clear they were useless.”

“These jobs...were bogus?” Anne asked.

“You gonna put that in there?” he said.

She pushed her glasses up her nose and leaned toward him, co-conspirators in the behind-the-scenes details. “I just want to get a feel for how this worked behind the scenes.”

Schlegel nodded. “They didn’t do any typing. They didn’t take messages. They called home on the phones. We had to cover their long-distance charges, for Christ’s sake. I don’t think a single one of them did anything if the cameras weren’t rolling.”

“Where can I sign up for that sort of work?” I asked.

Anne kicked me under the table. “Why would the employers go along with this?”

Schlegel laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”

She shrugged. “I should ask anyhow.”
 

“Well, you can’t put this in. Or you can’t put that I said it. But they went along with it because it was great publicity. Their companies got named over and over again on a show everyone was watching. Who wouldn’t want some of that, you know?”