I Only Read Murder, page 1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Chapter One: A Postcard from the Past
Chapter Two: The Bus to Happy Rock
Chapter Three: Into the Murder Store
Chapter Four: Parrot P.I.!
Chapter Five: The Golden Age of the Rotary Phone
Chapter Six: Pastor Fran Rides Again!
Chapter Seven: Burt the (alleged) Spy
Chapter Eight: The Eighth Deadly Sin
Chapter Nine: Enter Annette
Chapter Ten: The So-Called “Wrap,” So-Called “Party”
Chapter Eleven: The Tiger Roars
Chapter Twelve: A Downward Spiral
Chapter Thirteen: Strongman Melvin
Chapter Fourteen: Broken Glass and Near Misses
Chapter Fifteen: A Whistle in the Dark
Chapter Sixteen: The Maid Dies
Chapter Seventeen: Condemned to Love
Chapter Eighteen: “She’s (finally) dead!”
Chapter Nineteen: A Mysterious Note
Chapter Twenty: The Book of Secrets
Chapter Twenty-One: Into Burt’s Lair
Chapter Twenty-Two: Sexy Nurse (comes with stethoscope)
Chapter Twenty-Three: Under the Yum Yum Tree
Chapter Twenty-Four: A Killer Is Caught!
Chapter Twenty-Five: Marijuana Gangs & Miniskirts
Chapter Twenty-Six: Cozies to the Rescue!
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Team Miranda, On the Move!
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Ghost Lights
Chapter Twenty-Nine: J’accuse!
Chapter Thirty: Opening Night Jitters
TMZ Breaking News!
Authors’ Acknowledgments
I Only Read Murder
About the Authors
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter One
A Postcard from the Past
An actor dies. The audience reacts.
Not with applause, but confusion. Fear and bewilderment take hold. Death is stalking the stage, hovering in the footlights. The rest of the cast look to each other, not knowing what to do, trapped in their uncertainty. They are waiting for their cue. But the cue never comes.
An actor dies onstage. Two hundred witnesses and no one saw a thing.
SIX WEEKS EARLIER . . .
Name the worst day in history. The Fall of Rome? The eruption of Mount Vesuvius? The ill-advised launch of New Coke? For Miranda Abbott, actress extraordinaire, star of stage and screen, the worst day began with her agent, Marty Sharpe. Of course it did. She always knew Hell would be an agent’s office.
Miranda had swept in with a fling of her scarf—green satin to set off her red hair and celebrated cheekbones—and a breathy “Hello, darling. It is I.”
Marty looked up from his needlepoint and sighed. Not her. Not this. Not now.
He was working on one of his Movie Stars of the Golden Age portraits—Marilyn Monroe or maybe John Wayne, it was hard to say; most of them ended up resembling some sort of amphibious creature. A frog or a salamander.
Round-bellied with necktie permanently loosened, Marty had represented Miranda since before she was famous—and long after she no longer was. He seemed decidedly unthrilled at seeing his longtime client waltz in unannounced, as was her habit.
“What have I told you about making appointments, Miranda?”
“I don’t make appointments, darling, I keep them.”
She had a way of speaking in aphorisms that sounded profound but rarely made sense—except, perhaps, in the emotional realm. Miranda was all about emotional intelligence. Trivialities such as making appointments or paying bills or filing her income tax on time didn’t enter into it. Nothing she did was ever about the money. Which is probably why she had lost all of hers, several times.
Moments later, her long-suffering assistant Andrew Nguyen appeared, trim and tailored, looking frazzled even if impeccably dressed.
“Sorry. I was putting money in the meter. They still have meters down here, can you believe it?”
They had driven in Andrew’s Prius, Miranda’s BMW having been recently repossessed, or, as she described it, “taken into the shop.”
Andrew’s parents had fled Vietnam in an overcrowded leaky boat, had struggled and scrimped and saved so that he could pursue the American dream. Which, in his case, meant managing the affairs of the mercurial Miranda Abbott. On LinkedIn, under “current position,” he’d been tempted to enter “babysitter to the stars.”
But that wasn’t entirely accurate. Not the word babysitter, the word star.
Andrew took a seat next to Miranda, handed her a bottle of Aquafina. She looked at it with mild confusion and then handed it back so he could unscrew the top for her.
“Thank you, Andrew darling, at least there’s one person who cares for me and takes care of me.” With a single sip, she was ready. “I warn you, Marty. It’s Monday morning, and I am in a feisty mood.” She passed the bottle back to Andrew, who just as dutifully screwed the lid on again.
“You’re always in a feisty mood,” said Marty.
“That reality series you promised me? Where is it? Why has nothing materialized?”
“The Real Has-Beens of Beverly Hills?”
She winced. Miranda hated the title. Would talk to the producers about that. Something more dignified, The Queens of the Silver Screen, perhaps, or Real Ingénues of Hollywood. Beverley Hills was so passé.
“Well?” she said.
“I pitched.”
“And?”
“I pitched. They passed.”
Miranda fell back in the leatherette chair, a hurt look on her face. Her assistant, Andrew, knew that look. Behind the facade, there was a pool of sadness.
“I’m not even famous enough to play a has-been?”
“No, no, no,” said Marty. “You’re plenty famous. You’re just not”—he searched for the right word—“crazy enough. You’re too . . . normal.”
Andrew raised an eyebrow.
“Here’s the deal,” said Marty. “Producers of reality TV are looking for flamboyant unstable delusional narcissists.”
“And?” she said.
“Don’t get me wrong. You’re plenty narcissistic.”
“Thank you.”
“But not narcissistic enough.”
Andrew raised the other eyebrow.
“Hang on a sec,” said Marty, shuffling through some papers. “I may have something for you. A commercial.”
Ah, that was more like it! Tiffany diamonds? Saks Fifth Avenue? The Céline Dion Living Legends Line?
“Metamucil,” he said, as he pulled out the script. He slid it across to her.
“Metamucil?” she said. “The fiber supplement?”
“C’mon. There are no small parts, you know that. This isn’t simply a commercial. It’s a tender and touching dramatic scene: three generations of women, a grandmother, her daughter, and granddaughter in summer dresses at a picnic discussing their digestive issues. I circled your lines.”
She flipped through the pages.
“The grandmother? You circled the grandmother’s part?” She was aghast at the sheer effrontery of it. “Surely, you mean the mother. Or, with the right lighting, the daughter.”
“She’s a youthful grandmother,” Marty assured her. “And she has the best lines. Life is too full to feel full. That’s gold, Miranda! Think of the layers of nuance you can add to that. Think of the residuals.”
She was livid. “I am NOT playing a grandmother! I am nowhere near that age.”
“Well,” said Marty, with a shrug, “when it comes to actresses, after forty or forty-five, it all starts to blur.”
Andrew braced himself for what was coming. Five . . . four . . . three . . . He used to start the countdown at ten, but Miranda’s fuse had gotten shorter lately.
“May I remind you,” she said, blood and voice rising, “that I was Pastor Fran on Pastor Fran Investigates, investigating crimes as Pastor Fran, for six years, Marty! I was the lead character on a top-ten network TV show for six years!”
“Five,” said Marty. “The ratings tanked at the end, remember? The DUI and that drunken brawl at the Golden Globes? Tarnished the image of you as a woman of the cloth, as you’ll recall. And anyway, Pastor Fran Investigates, that ended, what, fifteen years ago?”
“I was a star, Marty!”
“And you still are. You’re just in a bit of a slump, that’s all.”
“What kind of slump lasts fifteen years?” Her scarf had slipped down, and she flung it back with renewed purpose. “If you are not going to bring me worthwhile roles—”
At this, Marty rankled. “Don’t be too proud to take the work that comes your way. Metamucil pays the rent.” He would have said “mortgage,” but that hadn’t been true with Miranda in a long, long while.
“I had my own line of action figures!” she shouted. “I had my own glow-in-the-dark doodle poster! I was on lunch boxes and iron-on T-shirts. I had my own Bedazzler, for god’s sake! And now you want to have me advising young girls to eat more fiber so they can shit better?”
“Miranda, calm down.”
In the history of the universe, has telling someone to calm down ever actually made them calm down? Miranda rose from her seat, arms wide in full theatrical mode, hitting every word like a driven nail. “I. Am. Beloved!”
“Was,” said Marty.
“What did you say?”
“Was beloved, were beloved. You’re in a s lump, Miranda, so you’ve got to be strategic in what you do, now that you’ve entered the—” He caught himself just in time.
She glowered down at him. “Say it,” she said.
Andrew tried to intervene. He got up from his chair but was swatted aside with an imperious wave of her hand.
Her eyes remained locked on Marty’s.
“Say it, you rat bastard.”
“Look, Miranda, it’s just a commercial. A bit of work to get you through. That’s all.”
“Say it. I dare you! Now that I’ve entered ‘the suicide years.’ That’s what you were going to say.” Her face was as red as her hair at this point.
Her assistant Andrew pled for decorum. “Please. Maybe we should all take a moment to—”
“No! I will not stand here and be insulted. I made you, Marty! Suicide years? No. These aren’t the suicide years. These are the murder years. These are the don’t-give-a-damn years! These are the ‘stab your agent in the eye with a salad fork’ years!”
A strange look came over Marty. The feigned warmth and feigned friendship, the practiced flattery and the ingratiating mannerisms drained away, replaced by a harder and, it must be said, colder gaze.
“Get out,” he said.
“Fine!” she replied with a final fling of the scarf. “Come along, Andrew.” Then, to Marty, “I warn you. The next time I visit this meager kingdom you call an office, I shall be expecting something more than a grandmother sharing the intimate details of her bowel movements.”
“There won’t be a next time,” said Marty. “You’re done. I’m firing you, as of today.”
“You can’t fire me. You’re my agent. If anything, I should be firing you.”
“By all means,” he said. “If that makes it easier for you. You fired me. But either way, you’re not welcome in this office. You are no longer my client. And I am no longer your agent.”
She stormed down the stairwell with young Andrew trailing behind.
“Maybe we should go back,” he said, all but begging. “And apologize.”
“Never!”
She burst out into the muggy heat on Sunset Boulevard, muttering invective.
The front tire of Andrew’s Prius had been clamped. Miranda stood staring at it as though it were an odd bit of flora.
“I told you!” said Andrew. “I said, we can’t park here. And you said, no one cares.”
“Well,” she said, “take it off so we can go.”
“Take it off? How?”
“I don’t know. You’re the personal assistant. Make some calls.”
“Calls? To who?”
“Whom,” she said. “Make some calls to whom. Can you still drive it?”
“It would tear away the fender.”
“Yes, but can you still drive it? I’ll pay for the fender.”
“With what? I haven’t received any reimbursement for the last three months. I’m basically an unpaid intern at this point.”
Andrew had been hired by Miranda long after her fall from stardom. She had paid well—at first. She’d even covered his kid brother’s college tuition, a gracious gesture that she never dwelled on. “That’s what money is for, darling,” she’d said. But since then, her funds had evaporated and so had Andrew’s patience.
“Have you not been paid?” she said, genuinely puzzled. “Well, you should rectify that, Andrew. You’re in charge of the money.”
“The nonexistent money.”
“I’m between gigs, that’s all. As for this ridiculous clamp that the city has seen fit to attach to your vehicle, if we can’t drive out of here, that’s fine. We’ll take a bus. Here’s one now.”
She stepped out into traffic and raised her hand. The bus rumbled past in a cloud of exhaust.
“You can’t flag down a bus like it’s a taxi,” said Andrew. “There are rules.”
“Rules don’t apply to me,” she said. “I apply to rules.” And with that, she headed off, skirt and heels and green scarf fluttering, down Sunset toward the Hollywood Hills.
Andrew watched her leave.
“I can’t do this anymore,” he said.
But he couldn’t leave her on her own, either. He hailed a taxi and picked up Miranda as she strode through the heat haze of an LA morning.
“To the Hollywood Hills,” she informed the driver as she slid in.
“I already gave him the address,” said Andrew. He leaned up to make sure there was no misunderstanding. “It’s in the lower hills, just above Santa Monica.”
“The Hills are the Hills,” said Miranda. “Anything above Santa Monica is still in the Hills. And I am above Santa Monica!”
“Barely,” said Andrew under his breath.
He had decided that after he got her home, he would hand in his resignation. He’d had enough. His parents had watched Pastor Fran Investigates faithfully, religiously, every Friday, had learned their English from that show, had been proud beyond words when he got the job ferrying the Star Herself around. “Is she like her character?” his dad would always ask, and Andrew would always lie. “Yes, Papa. Exactly like the character.”
But he was done lying. Was done running interference. Was done, done, done. He had always been loyal to her. But even loyalty cannot survive penury and magical thinking.
The De-Lux Arms looked like a motel, though it was in fact apartments. Green stucco, sun-faded to pastel, with outdoor stairwells wrapping around a cement pool, cracked and usually dry. A few palm trees out front swayed in the heat, listless and limp.
Above the De-Lux rose the grandiose homes of the Hollywood Hills, cantilevered in ascending steps above the lowly less-famous below.
Miranda Abbott had once lived in those hills, in those homes.
As she and Andrew walked the stairs to her second-floor apartment, a ruddy-faced man in coveralls approached with a warm smile, beaming at her. “Hi there! Ms. Abbott?”
“It is I.”
Always happy to meet a fan.
He had a clipboard. “Can you sign here?”
She took his pen with a flourish. “Certainly. And who should I make it out to?”
“The furniture company, I guess.”
She looked through the document. “You’re taking my dining room set? That is genuine Moroccan rattan! Do you have any idea how much that costs?”
“About $781.50, I would imagine,” he said, tapping a finger on the overdue amount.
“I should never have bought that on layaway.”
“I tried to warn you,” said Andrew. “When expenses incurred are greater than income received . . .”
But she wasn’t listening. “Fine,” she said, scrawling her name across the bottom. “But I better not see that on eBay.”
She didn’t know exactly what eBay was, but she’d heard that certain celebrities were selling their autographs on it. She assumed it was some sort of memorabilia store.
As the ruddy man whistled down to his crew to come up and begin hauling away the dining room furniture, Miranda sighed and, tempting the gods of literary irony, said, “I don’t know how this day could possibly get any worse.”
When she went to let the repo men in, she found an eviction notice taped to the door.
“They spelled my name wrong,” she complained, pulling the notice down and stepping aside as the movers bullied past. “Two b’s and two t’s. How hard is that to remember?”
A Murphy bed, opened and unmade, a wall of photographs, once framed but now thumbtacked to the faded paneling, a messy stack of gossip magazines, the latest edition of Variety, unread. A closet stuffed with Pastor Fran memorabilia.
Miranda Abbott’s last stand . . .
Andrew picked up her mail from where it had fallen and then been trod upon by work boots. His final duty as her personal assistant.
He took a steadying breath. It was time.
“Miranda,” he said. “There’s something I need to tell you. Something I need to say.” But the goodbye got caught in his throat.
She waved in the general direction of the icebox.
“At least they didn’t take the fridge. Small mercies. Andrew, darling, there’s a fresh jug of lemonade in there. I made it just for you. I know how much you like it.”
A simple recipe: lemon juice and two pounds of sugar. Andrew had made the mistake of complimenting it once, and now she prepared it for him every time she knew he was coming over. It broke his heart, bringing it out onto the balcony, with the wisteria and the view of the Hills beyond. Lemonade and foot-trodden mail. Bills mainly, and a postcard. There was a time when she would have received hundreds of letters a day.
