Murder by Numbers (2 page)

Then she frowned. On the other hand, that bit of graffiti meant a very expensive clock was ticking as the production crew went to work trying to remove the shiny pink mess. Something this simple could throw off the whole shooting schedule. And if it messed with the shooting schedule, it also goofed up the town's major public work again. It wasn't even solely the boardwalk at risk. The new mayor, Ray Massini, hadn't just planned an extension to the wooden decking fronting the harbor. The mayor's plans, at least according to the
Oregon Daily
, called for upscale shops and a trendy snack bar to replace several disreputable sheds and marine businesses now facing the water. The first step to completing all that, however, was getting sturdy pilings to support the boardwalk driven into the silty beachfront. There was a reason that references to pile drivers cropped up in any comparison of humongous noise levels. That sort of banging couldn't go on while the movie cameras were running on the docks. So the graffiti was actually holding up two kinds of work.

Neither the director nor the mayor is going to be happy today. On the other hand
, a suspicious little voice in the back of her head cheerfully pointed out,
it leads to another day of extra work for some lowlife like Deke Jannsky.

Hmmm…Would he be stupid enough to risk everybody's paychecks in the hopes of fattening his own?
She looked down again at her little bag of meds. If she was this easily distracted
before
she started taking the drugs, it didn't bode well for her day's work at the computer.

Liza's attention went back to the dock as she heard angry voices in the air. Had Deke somehow been identified as the rude sign painter?

No, he'd been busted for a lesser crime. Liza could hear him profanely denying that he'd taken food from the craft table—stuff meant for the film crew and lead actors, not the lowly extras. However, he was still holding the evidence—a huge chocolate-covered donut—in his hand. This was apparently the last straw for the aggravated film people. One of the wranglers told him to turn in his papers and leave the set.

Deke smugly played his ace in the hole, pointing to the distinctive hat he wore. He must have been annoying the filmmakers for a while, because one of the PAs produced a hand-aged replica of the cap and gave it to one of the other extras.

Deke's profanity and sound level rose considerably. “You think you can get away with pulling this kind of crap?” He demanded in one of his more printable tirades. “I'm gonna mess you up—I'm gonna mess this
whole freaking film
up—but good!”

“We don't need any amateurs doing that,” Liza muttered to herself as she crossed to her car. The film shoot hadn't been the smoothest she'd ever seen in her years in the film-publicity business. “Not when we've got a bunch of highly paid professionals already on the job.”

Liza decided to wait till she was in the relative privacy of her car before dosing herself with the cold nostrums.
At least the box on the nasal spray doesn't say anything about not operating heavy machinery
, she thought as she pulled out onto Main Street and hurried home.
Maybe I won't get as flattened by it as I usually do by cold meds.

She braked at the end of the gravel driveway leading up to the old family homestead on Hackleberry Avenue, got out, and went to open the kitchen door. Rusty greeted her with a few loud barks and some vigorous tail wagging. Translated from his mixed-breed Irish setter dialect, this meant, “See how alert and careful I am, guarding the house?

Any treats for this good dog?”

Like the mutt had to ask.

Liza gave him a dog biscuit and popped another throat lozenge for herself. Rusty's gung-ho attitude made her glance guiltily at the computer set up in a corner of the living room. Her cushion—the backlog of unpublished columns over at the
Oregon Daily
—was getting pretty darn flat.

She frowned at the puzzle already up on the screen. It had come out even simpler than her usual standard for low-difficulty puzzles:

I could wrap another “Introductory Sudoku” column around it
, Liza thought, unwilling to abandon her creation. The problem was finding more time to develop sudoku. She might have to cheat, maybe use a computer program to devise a few run-of-the-mill puzzles.
It's not cheating—exactly
, Liza told herself.
I'm working with the programmers on that Solv-a-doku project.

Most sudoku creation and solution programs used the computer's mechanical strength—the uncomplaining ability to undertake repetitive tasks that would drive humans up a wall—and harnessed it for a brute-force approach to filling the eighty-one spaces of a sudoku puzzle. The rules were simple—fill each of the nine rows and columns with the numbers one through nine, no omissions or repetitions. The grid was also broken into nine boxes of nine spaces each, which also had to be filled with the magic digits between one and nine.

For a creator, this meant presenting a partially filled grid (usually with twenty-odd clues) that had one single solution. For solvers, it meant taking this sudoku and filling it in. No adding, subtracting, logarithms, or other math was required. The whole thing worked on strict logic.

In the computer world, this logic rested on an enormous number of yes/no questions, answered at tremendous speed. “Will these numbers fit together?” “Will this number work in here?” If not, another candidate would be shoved into place until the grid was created or completed.

Humans would find such an approach time-wasting and crazy-making. But then, humans could see relationships within the puzzle that would require complicated programming for a computer. The guys at Solv-a-doku were attempting that programming, based on Liza's hierarchy of twelve proven sudoku-solving techniques. Well, eleven, to be honest. Number twelve involved taking a peek at the printed solution in the back of the book or magazine.

Some of the more esoteric techniques turned out to be programming problems, which didn't necessarily surprise Liza. But she did find it strange that the technique most humans picked up first in solving sudoku seemed to be a computer programming challenge.

She reached out a hand to the computer, only to jerk it back as the phone began ringing. Liza looked at the clock. Five minutes before Michelle Markson was supposed to call. That probably meant it
was
Michelle, who had risen to become the warrior queen of Hollywood publicists thanks to the vast arsenal of head games she deployed against actors, directors, studio execs, and, yes, her own partner. Maybe
especially
against her own partner—Michelle liked to remind Liza who was the boss.

Liza picked up the phone to hear Ysabel Fuentes's voice on the other end. Ysabel was probably the highest-paid receptionist in Hollywood, someone who knew where all the lost files were at Markson Associates—and where most of the bodies were buried in the film business. About once a month, Ysabel and Michelle locked horns and Ysabel would quit. Part of Liza's job was to get the irreplaceable Latina back on the payroll every time she gave notice.

“Hi, Liza,” Ysabel said. “I'll hook you up now.”

A moment later, Michelle's brusque voice came on. “So you're having problems up in the boondocks.”

Liza could just imagine Michelle's expression—the queen of the pixies dealing with an incursion by some blundering humans.

“You said it. Things have gone downhill quickly for
Counterfeit
since Terence Hamblyn's car accident.” Liza paused. “Is he doing all right at Cedars of Lebanon?”

Terence had been Derrick Robbins's handpicked choice to direct the picture, and he'd nurtured Jenny's talent every bit as carefully as Derrick had hoped. But just when he was almost ready to wrap the filming, he'd gotten into a serious car accident on a fogbound roadway and had ended up being airlifted to L.A. It was hard to direct a feature film in a full body cast.

“He's all right.” Michelle's voice was disparaging—she found Hamblyn too much of a nice guy. She preferred, not surprisingly, a go-for-the-jugular approach to filmmaking. “Jenny is having problems with the new director?”

“Frankly, I was surprised when they brought in Lloyd Olbrich,” Liza admitted. “He is a name in the business. I thought the people at Mirage Productions would try to rush through the job with a bunch of schlockmeisters—”

She stopped talking when she heard an embarrassed cough, though it was a toss-up over who should be more embarrassed. Liza recognized that cough. She'd heard it from her estranged husband often enough.

“I guess they didn't tell you this was a conference call,” Michael Langley said. He had a certain rep for being a schlockmeister himself, doctoring scripts for films destined to go direct to video. “I got in touch with Michelle after the people from Mirage Productions sounded me out on doing some script revisions.”

“Revisions? Why? What's the matter with Mal Whelan's script?” Liza was really confused now. Malcolm Whelan had done a remarkable job of mixing comedy and suspenseful plot twists in
Counterfeit
. Jenny was playing a young woman whose father dies—or was he her father? The entire life she knew turns out to be a fiction created by a master con artist—who now has a pack of unsavory associates turning up expecting a cut from their latest job. Jenny's character needed a crash course in scamology just to survive.

“Well, right now, Malcolm is threatening to take the Alan Smithee option if the studio goes ahead with the changes they're talking about,” Michael said.

Alan Smithee is the pseudonym members of the Writers Guild use to take their names off scripts when their work is completely trashed.

“Can they do this?” Liza demanded.

“Of course they can.” Michelle's voice was flat. “Mirage Productions bought out Derrick's company lock, stock, and barrel. They need a successful film, because they haven't had one since Oliver Chissel took over.”

Liza knew Chissel's name from the
Oregon Daily
—but not from the entertainment section. “I thought he was more of a businessman than a movie guy.”

Michelle snorted. “He started out more like a con man, if the stories are true. Then he got into all sorts of shady trading. Lately he'd been buying companies and stripping the assets and pulling greenmail scams—scooping up pieces of companies on the cheap and extorting much higher prices from people to buy him out.”

She snorted again, this time louder. “But he was the one who got taken in this last deal, winding up as president and CEO of Mirage Productions. Damned appropriate name, Mirage, when it comes to the company's assets. He didn't help himself by trying to go the blockbuster route.”

Liza knew that story—paying forty million dollars to produce a film in the hopes of making two hundred million on the other end. The resultant film had flopped, big-time. Mirage had tried that recipe again, making two sequels and a remake next—all to disappointing box office results. Derrick had been working on the other end of the scale, trying to assemble about ten million in funding for
Counterfeit
—but given the quality of the production, the script, Jenny's performance, and the built-in publicity, the film had a real chance of making ten times that.

“Given his background, I was surprised to see Ollie the Chiseler so hot to trot over
Counterfeit
. But he needs a quick, cheap success.”

“If it's that important to him, why isn't he out here?”

“Don't invoke the name of the devil unless you want to have dinner with him—long spoon included,” Michelle said. “The farther away Ollie stays, the better the film will be.”

“Okay, then why is he screwing with the film via long distance? Doesn't he trust his director?” Liza wanted to know.

“He doesn't trust anybody. Furthermore, he's got the critical taste of a commodities trader. He probably thinks he's opening the flick up to a wider audience,” Michael said.

“A nice way to say going for the lowest common denominator,” Liza growled. “Or just plain dumbing a good movie down.” She sighed. “Where exactly is this assortment of geniuses thinking of going?”

“The people from Mirage who talked to me thought Malcolm and Terence were keeping the film too light,” Michael said. “They want it darker, more dangerous for the heroine.”

“How? By adding a stalker in a hockey mask?”

“That's probably not too far off from their intentions.” Michael took a deep breath. “There's a reason they came to me.”

“You were involved in the news stories about rescuing Jenny,” Liza said. “Duh—publicist, remember?”

“More than that kind of publicity,” Michael told her. “The new plot points in the script—they want to mirror some of the stuff that happened to Jenny after Derrick's murder.”

Now it was Liza's turn to suck in a deep breath. “Jenny took a long time getting over that.”

“And the new director—Olbrich,” Michelle put in. “Like you said, he's got a reputation for wringing more out of a script, getting memorable performances. But he does it by messing with his actors' heads. I've heard rumors about one promising young guy who wound up in a rubber room after Olbrich got done with him.”

“What can we do?” Liza asked.

“Nothing much. When Chissel and Mirage moved in to buy Derrick's production company—and save his deal—they got the whole ball of wax. Jenny doesn't have much leverage.”

Liza nodded. “All she can do is pull out. And if she does that, Jenny gets the rep of being ‘difficult' before she even gets a film on the screen.” She paused. “You don't have anything on Chissel that you can use to leverage him into doing what we want?”

“With a nickname like Ollie the Chiseler, he's used to bad publicity,” Michelle said. “And Olbrich is busy building himself a demon director reputation. I don't think we'll get much traction there.”

She sounded as if she were grinding glass between her teeth as she went on. “All I can say right now is that Jenny will have to suck it up until or unless we get something going for her.”

“And since I'm the one on-site, I'll have to give her the heads-up,” Liza said.

“We're not going to take this lying down,” Michelle said. “I don't want to get a reputation for being soft.”

“Don't worry. That's not a problem,” Michael said. “It won't cross the mind of anyone who knows you.”

It was a bit of a surprise to hear her ex-husband lining up on Michelle's side. Part of the problem in their marriage had been Michelle's not-so-subtle suggestions that Liza should dump him and trade up.

“I'm putting Buck Foreman on this,” her partner went on. Well, if Michelle wanted her pet Hollywood detective on the case, she was definitely looking for some sort of results.

“All right,” Liza sighed. “No use putting things off. I'll get over to the set and give Jenny a heads-up.”