Bird, Bath, and Beyond Read online

  “Are any of the people who were meeting with Dray here now?” I asked, looking around the sound stage and watching technicians stand around because apparently the work was pretty much done. There are always stragglers on a film set. Friends of the producer’s children. Starstruck financiers. Aspiring actresses looking for … ways to further their careers. People who believed in their hearts that this was a glamorous, exciting business and not complete drudgery. Television series shoot incredibly long hours every day for weeks on end. Yes, the money (especially for the producers and actors) is really good. But anyone who thinks it’s nothing but fun and thrills is in line for a tremendous disappointment.

  “No,” Mandy answered without even turning around to look. “None of them has been around since the day he died. In fact, I didn’t even see one that day. I thought it was weird that he was actually doing his job without the security blanket he’d seemed to have with him every day before that. Then it made sense.”

  Sense? That would be a refreshing change of pace. “What made sense?”

  Mandy finally gave in to Barney’s need for rest and faced me, resting her hand on her hip and fixing me with a significant gaze. I surmised she hadn’t made it to the leading roles in TV shows yet because she tended to play everything a little too big.

  “The fact that Dray got killed in his trailer. I figure he set up a meet there for after the scene was done, and something went wrong. That’s when he got shot.”

  That was a lot of guessing. “Sure,” I said, “but it could have been anything. A jealous husband. A crazy fan who thought Dray should be in love with her. An accountant who knew too much about Dray’s tax return. Could have been anybody.”

  “Except I saw a woman go into the trailer and then a minute later I heard the shot,” Mandy answered.

  Okay, maybe she wasn’t overplaying that part so much.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Mandy insisted she’d told everything about the day Dray Mattone had been shot to Detective Baker during questioning, that he’d written it all down and walked away without saying anything. I began to wonder if Bostwick and Baker were the police equivalent of Penn and Teller, and Baker was simply the silent partner in the act, but maybe the one who knew more than he was saying. Because he wasn’t saying anything. See what I did there?

  I was going to go look for Bostwick to ask, but it was barely a minute later that Heather Alizondo informed me that Barney should be made ready for his close-ups. Naturally the bird was asleep but I managed to rouse him pretty easily and being the trouper that he is, Barney managed to act exactly like himself in the cage under lights for about an hour and a half before Heather deemed herself satisfied with the amount of footage they had and dismissed Barney for the rest of the day, saying they might not need him again this week.

  That led me to wonder what the status of Dead City might be at this point, but Heather, a director for hire, had not been privy to the high-level meetings about the show’s future. I looked for Les Mannix on the way out of the studio but didn’t see him. I figured I’d hear from the production company as soon as there was some news. The parrot who played Babs probably wasn’t first on the call list to disseminate the news. The bird’s agent was only a step or two beneath him on that list.

  There were no cops on the set at the moment (which was refreshing), but I didn’t make it all the way to my car free and clear. I wasn’t exactly thinking about what was next on my agenda, which was taking Barney back to Patty’s house and making sure he stayed there this time. Dray’s murder, despite my ignorance of most of the facts, was occupying my mind.

  I knew he’d been a famous television actor and therefore grossly overpaid, but even with the police around for the past three days and the usual sniping and gossiping of a theatrical company, I hadn’t heard one word that had addressed the central question when someone walks up to a man and shoots him in the head on purpose.

  Why?

  Dray Mattone had been killed and people were trying very hard to find out who had done that. The repercussions of the act would no doubt be felt all the way back to Los Angeles, California. There was a widow who would be expecting to see Dray’s estate. But what everybody on the set was doing, as they should, was working to complete the episode that they had been filming when the killing occurred. They couldn’t afford to lose the whole week’s work.

  From what I’d seen of Bostwick and Baker, the Bobbsey Twins of the NYPD, they were working angles, figuring out forensics, and occasionally setting up reenactments that went disturbingly wrong very quickly. The process was all about how and who. Nobody was focusing on why, and that seemed odd.

  When a person is wealthy and famous, is it simply assumed that everybody wants him dead?

  From what Mandy had told me not long ago, there had been a drug problem in Dray’s past and possibly in his present. Was that a reason someone might shoot him? I couldn’t imagine that he’d gotten too far behind in his payments. A star actor on a hit series that means a lot to the network can make as much as a million dollars for each episode. Between seasons there would be films that paid equally extravagantly. Dray couldn’t possibly have spent so much or used so much that he couldn’t afford the habit. Had there been something else?

  The two big motives for violence, I’d been told, were money and sex (or jealousy about sex). Had Dray been cheating on his wife? Might she have found out? Was I just guessing that based on the idea that it was a woman who walked into the trailer? Was Mandy trustworthy? Could jealousy be a motive to perhaps stop into his trailer one day and empty a prop revolver into his head? Would Dray’s wife, Denise Barnaby, have done it herself? It seemed from what the entire company was saying that she was in L.A. Maybe she’d hired someone to do the deed.

  I didn’t know enough about Dray as a man to guess what things he might have done that could have incited this kind of violence, but maybe it wasn’t his fault at all. There is a lot of envy in show business. There’s a lot of money in show business. That’s not ever a good combination.

  This musing was getting me absolutely nowhere, but it was short-lived. I stopped and put down Barney’s cage so I could get out my car keys and get him settled in the back seat. But behind me I heard a voice say, “Excuse me?”

  I turned. Next to the car, directly in line with Barney’s cage, was Harve Lembeck, the assistant director who had asked, what seemed like four years ago, whether Barney wanted a cracker. “Hi, Harve,” I said. Snappy repartee seemed not only unnecessary but impossible.

  “What did the bird say about Dray?” he said. Apparently niceties like a greeting or an acknowledgment of the other person were not in Harve’s conversational arsenal.

  “What?” So he caught me off guard. It’s not the kind of question I got on a regular basis. Until recently.

  “The bird. They say he knows who killed Dray.” Harve shifted his weight from one foot to the other like he was torn between running off at top speed and starting to dance the samba. “Is that true?”

  Instinctively I reached over and moved Barney’s cage away from the crazy man. “I’m not sure what Barney knows,” I told Harve, “but there’s no possible way he could tell anybody because he just repeats what someone has taught him to say.” It was getting really old having to explain this over and over, and I was fairly sure this would not be the last time.

  “Okay.” Harve seemed to settle on his left foot and stood there looking at me a moment. Then he pivoted and began to walk away. That wasn’t really helping.

  “Hey!” I yelled after him and Harve turned to face me. “What was that all about?”

  He took two steps back, assumedly so we wouldn’t have to shout such confidential communications to each other in a parking lot. “I didn’t want the bird saying anything that would get me in trouble,” he said. “I need this job.” He pointed his head in the direction of the sound stage in case I’d forgotten where he worked.

  “What would get you in trouble with the company?” I asked.

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sp; Harve looked at his shoes, a move that I’m sure had gotten him out of situations when he was five, but wasn’t flying today. “Nothing,” he said.

  “Oh, please. You practically just confessed to Dray’s murder.” I realized as the words left my mouth that this was probably an unwise thing to say to the man’s face.

  But he looked absolutely shocked by the very suggestion. “What?” he squeaked.

  “Well, I’m not saying you shot him, but you’re sure making a case you did.”

  “I didn’t shoot nobody.” Well, that did it; I was convinced.

  “You didn’t shoot anybody,” I corrected without thinking.

  “Exactly.”

  It wasn’t my job to figure out who shot Dray Mattone, and even this exchange wasn’t convincing me it was Harve anyway. But somehow it seemed the faster this murder was solved, the sooner Barney would be back in Patty’s hands and working again, which meant I would be getting 15 percent of his salary. So I figured anything I could find out and pass along to Sergeant Bostwick would be helpful not only to the NYPD but to me personally. It’s how an agent gets through the day.

  “Look, Harve, you know something about what happened when Dray was shot. I’m guessing from the way you looked a minute ago that you probably didn’t tell the police. But you’re in the clear as soon as they find out what happened. So here’s what we’ll do: You tell me what you know and I’ll tell the cops without mentioning your name at all.” His face had blanched just in the split second I’d mentioned the police. “That way the murder gets solved, you don’t have to worry about losing your job, and you don’t get in any further trouble. How’s that?”

  It was a complex set of principles for a guy like Harve, who was still trying to puzzle out why I might have thought he had been asking Barney if he’d wanted a cracker. So it took a few seconds for him to process everything I’d said.

  “I don’t like it,” he answered. “How do I know you won’t tell the cops where you heard this when they ask you?”

  “I’m a lawyer, Harve.” That was actually true; I have a license to practice law in New York State. “Anything you tell me is subject to attorney-client privilege, which means I don’t have to tell them anything. Give me a dollar.”

  Harve looked suspicious, but he reached into his jacket for a wallet and produced a fairly greasy picture of George Washington with the proper artwork attached. “Now I’m your lawyer for this matter,” I told him. “I’ll go to jail myself before I’ll tell the cops where I heard whatever it is you’re going to say. So spill it.”

  There was the usual interval during which Harve translated my words from English into whatever form of communication went on in his brain. “Okay, here’s the thing,” he said. “I wasn’t there when Dray got shot, okay? I’d never been inside his trailer in my life. I just usually stood outside the door and knocked, trying to get him to come out in time to shoot the scene.”

  “Was Dray difficult that way? Did he get temperamental and stay in his trailer when it was time to film?” You hear of testy actors throwing tantrums, but sexist society that this is, they usually seem to be women. The men are deemed “tortured artists.”

  Harve shook his head. “Nah, he was a good enough guy and a pro. But he liked it for someone to come knock on the door and remind him, if he fell asleep or something, and I was the one who got the job. You know, I don’t like to tell tales out of school, but sometimes he wasn’t alone in there.”

  “He had women in the trailer?” I asked.

  Harve did a head tilt. “Not a lot. Once in a while. They’d go in there in costume and come out wearing street clothes, and I don’t think they were just using the place to change, if you know what I mean. There are still some costumes in there.”

  “So what happened that day?” I could hear Barney flapping in his cage. It was probably getting hot under the cover, so it was time to cut to the chase.

  “It was getting close to the time to shoot, so I went out to knock on the door like usual. But I stopped when I got to the door because I heard voices inside.”

  That probably wasn’t terribly unusual, I thought, and Harve must have been anticipating that point because he didn’t let me talk. “I heard voices in there before, of course, but this time they’re yelling at each other and I don’t want to get involved, you know? But I know Dray’s gonna want to know it’s time to come out and act, so I wait for the moment when there’s a break in the yelling. Except there is no break in the yelling. Then there’s a shot.”

  Barney squawked but did not speak.

  “You heard the shot?” I said. “Did you see who came out of the trailer after that?”

  “No! I didn’t want nobody to know I was there. I didn’t knock or anything; I just ran. Right back into the building so nobody would see me, especially the guy with the gun. I don’t want no trouble.” Harve, whose face overall resembled a callus, looked like he might cry.

  “So why were you concerned about what Barney might have seen?” I asked him. “If you were outside the whole time and you didn’t see the person who shot Dray, there’s no way you could get into any trouble with the police or the killer.”

  “I lied before,” he said. “When I said I never went into Dray’s trailer in my life. I did go in that one time. Before the cops came. Because I was afraid they’d find something inside that was mine.” Harve looked away and squinted despite the sun’s being behind him.

  “What?” I asked.

  “The gun. The one that shot him. I’d given it to Dray because he said he wanted to get comfortable with it, you know, for his character. He’s a medical examiner, so usually he’s in the lab. But he knew there was a scene coming up in a couple of weeks where he’d have to handle a gun and he didn’t want to look stupid with it.”

  “What does Dr. Banacek need with a gun?” I asked. “How do they get to that point?”

  Harve looked at me. “A lot of the people in the show are zombies,” he said. “Even after they’re dead, you have to shoot them sometimes.”

  Under the cage cover I heard Barney mention that it is not possible to kill a zombie.

  “So you gave Dray a gun?” I asked Harve.

  He nodded. “From the prop stock. Maybe a week before this happened. It wasn’t registered to him and he didn’t have a license. I figured if the cops found out I’d given him an illegal gun I could be back in jail.”

  “Back in jail? When were you in jail?”

  “Got out about two years ago. Minor drug offense.”

  “But wait,” I said, “you didn’t have the gun. The gun ended up in Barney’s equipment bag and the police found it with me.”

  “Yeah,” Harve answered, still looking away as if searching for the missing piece of his soul in the distance. Everybody on a set is so dramatic. “I heard someone coming as soon as I got inside. I figured even if they saw me walking out, it was best if I didn’t have the gun on me. So I stashed it in the bag next to the birdcage and figured I’d come get it later. Except there were cops there forever, and by the time I got back, the bag was gone.”

  Yeah, guess why. “I’d already carried it away,” I told him. I opened the door to my car, got in, and started the engine so the air conditioner could start working. I wanted Barney out of the heat. “So how come whoever shot Dray with that gun left it lying around in the trailer for you to drop into Barney’s bag?”

  Harve broke his leading-man-brooding pose and looked at me. Then he shrugged. “No idea,” he said. “I actually got out of the trailer before anybody got there. I don’t even think they saw me coming out of the trailer.”

  “I’m guessing not or the cops would definitely have mentioned it,” I said, making a mental note to tell everything in this conversation to Bostwick if I saw him again. And I was pretty sure I’d see him again. You don’t get rid of a cop that easily.

  I assured Harve that his secret(s) would remain untold, a pledge I had no intention of honoring if there was any need whatsoever to break it. Harve thanke
d me profusely while I once again informed that Barney would make no incriminating statements about him at all and (without any help offered from the kind gentleman) heaved the cage into the back seat of my car. Then I drove off with Barney before Harve could tell me anything else that would make me uncomfortable.

  I drove straight to Patty’s house, mustering a level of determination I usually reserved for difficult negotiations with producers. I was not keeping this bird another night and I didn’t care what Patty said about it. She was Barney’s human owner, she was the person who was going to receive 85 percent of his earnings, and cold or no cold, she was going to be seeing to her parrot that night and every night from now on.

  Parrots can live to be eighty years old. Barney was six. I wasn’t making that kind of commitment to any male, particularly one who had to be kept in a cage. No offense, Barney.

  Steeling myself for the whole trip to Sunnyside, which would take only eleven minutes if not for the Long Island Expressway, I avoided calling Patty to let her know Barney and I were on our way. I didn’t want to give her time to put together a really strong pathetic plea.

  And that’s why it came as something of a surprise—okay, an enormous shock—when I arrived at Patty’s house to see two police cruisers parked in front, lights flashing. There were also two unmarked cars, one of which I recognized as Bostwick’s, parked in the driveway. A crowd of neighbors was standing outside on each stoop, no doubt hoping to be the first to tell the others the real story about what was going on. There’s nothing New Yorkers like better than knowing something first.

  My first horrible thought was that whoever had shot Dray Mattone had done the same to Patty. But the logic, as I double-parked half a block from the house and left Barney in the car, windows open, eluded me: You have a grudge against a big celebrity actor and shoot him. So then you shoot the owner of the parrot who works on his show? There was a bridge to be built there, for sure.

  It got both less stressful and more perplexing just as I got close enough to be held back by one of the uniformed officers. They hadn’t yet gotten yellow police scene tape up to keep back the crowd, but it seemed unnecessary, since I was the only one actually trying to approach the house.