The Actor's Guide To Murder Page 3

  Some people take years to realize they’re gay. I knew when I was ten, right about the time John Stamos joined General Hospital.

  I stopped short of asking him out. I was so taken with him, I had never seriously considered the possibility he would say no. Now it was all I could think about. But if I let him leave without asking, I’d have to call him again and risk stalking charges.

  Luckily the stars were on my side.

  “So I’m off duty after this,” he said. “You know a place where I can get some breakfast?”

  I shrugged. “There’s a diner in the mini-mall around the corner. I was thinking about grabbing a bite there myself.”

  And that was that. We’d been together ever since.

  Charlie had never seen an episode of Go to Your Room! until after we started dating. He never dreamed he would be sharing his life with an actor, let alone a former child star. The only reason he ever came to Los Angeles in the first place was to follow his new wife, who had gotten a job at the LA Coroner’s office.

  The wife dumped him two months after Charlie uprooted his life to move with her, and he came out of the closet three weeks later. It turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to him. I thank her every day, because I believe it was the Universe’s way of forcing Charlie to confront his issues, and getting us closer together so we could finally meet. It was destiny.

  And besides, Isis had told me six months earlier the man of my dreams was going to come into my life as an authority figure. I figured a cop was close enough. He had arrived to protect and serve. Charlie wasn’t a big believer in psychic phenomena but he tolerated my relationship with Isis.

  The thought of Isis snapped me back to reality. Her prediction was still gnawing at me. I had never seen her so intense, so disturbed. Usually I prefaced every reading by telling her to withhold any truly horrific premonitions. I just didn’t want to know if my chain-smoking Aunt Sadie was going to succumb to throat cancer. But I had forgotten to lay the ground rules this time. I was too concerned with questions about my career. And for that, I was now obsessing over which person in my life was about to expire.

  Isis wasn’t perfect. She never batted a thousand, but she always came pretty damn close. Now the question was, who could she be talking about? My parents in Vero Beach, Florida? My sister in Bar Harbor, Maine? Mr. Reilly, my sexy high school creative writing teacher on whom I had a terrible crush? The name of every person I had ever come in contact with in my whole life was rushing through my head.

  I heard the garage door creak open again. I exhaled a deep breath. Charlie was home. Snickers jumped to her feet and scurried over to the door to greet him. She ran in circles, unable to contain her excitement. I felt like joining her.

  The door to the garage swung open and Charlie sauntered in. Both Snickers and I hurled ourselves at him. He was completely taken by surprise.

  “Whoa! What’s all this?”

  “You’re alive! We’re just so happy you’re alive!”

  “Me too,” he said, eyeing me suspiciously, the way Ricky Ricardo used to look at Lucy. “What have you been up to?”

  “Didn’t you get my message?”

  “No.” He still had that suspicious look. It was time to fess up.

  “I went to see Isis today . . .”

  “Oh no . . .” Charlie threw his hands up. He didn’t want to hear it, but I was already on a roll.

  “She said someone close to me was going to be murdered.”

  This stopped him briefly as he opened the fridge to grab a bottle of Miller Lite. He didn’t want to give any credence to Isis’s psychic gifts, but couldn’t help himself.

  “So you thought it was me?”

  “Well, look at the line of work you’re in. It’s certainly plausible that you could die unexpectedly, get shot by a perp or something. I mean you don’t have to be a fan of NYPD Blue to know all the possible storylines.”

  “I’m fine.” He brushed his soft lips against my cheek. That always shut me up, and he knew it. “So what are we doing about dinner?”

  “Um, actually, there was two parts to the message you didn’t get. It’s Willard Hornsby’s birthday, so I offered to throw him a party . . . tomorrow night . . .” I started talking faster when I saw the irritation on his face. “Only fifteen people or so. And I can call Susan at LA Spice and have her cater. You like Susan’s food. It’s just that I feel we owe Willard. He gave us a breadmaker last Christmas and all we got him was All About Eve on DVD.”

  “That’s what he wanted.”

  “I know . . . but a breadmaker! I went to Macy’s and saw how much it cost. A lot more than that DVD.”

  “Prices don’t matter. It’s the thought that . . .”

  “Bullshit. Everybody notices. Especially in Hollywood.”

  “It’s just that I was looking forward to just kicking back . . .”

  “I know.”

  “Watching a movie . . .”

  “I know.”

  “Ordering Indian food . . .”

  “I know.”

  Charlie knew it was a done deal, and I was just letting him vent until he finished his beer. Once he got it all off his chest and wandered away to take a shower, I was off and running with party preparations.

  I had no auditions the following day, so I was able to throw myself into the role of party host. Susan and her crack catering team showed up at six o’clock and took over the house. Susan loved working at my place. It had a fabulous open kitchen and lots of charm.

  Mr. Bone, an architect, built the house in 1928. He died shortly thereafter, but I was convinced his spirit still roamed the hallways since Snickers had a tendency to bark at nothing, just air. I always assumed she was saying hello to Mr. Bone. The alternative was that my dog had troubling psychological problems. And a ghost haunting my house was a much more colorful story than a schizophrenic Pekinese.

  After an exhaustive title search, I couldn’t find one single famous person who ever lived in the house. Not one, not even a cheesy seventies sitcom star like Joyce DeWitt. Nobody! Charlie would tell people that I was the first famous person to live in it. That was sweet of him, but I still wanted to brag that I slept in the same bedroom as Humphrey Bogart or Charlie Chaplin or, hell, Erik Estrada!

  I spent the previous night and the following morning calling up everybody on my short list to make sure they could make it. Remarkably, almost everybody could. I’m sure the fact that LA Spice was catering helped clear a lot of calendars.

  I called Willard last to confirm his arrival at eight. He seemed genuinely excited that I was going to all this trouble just for him, but the fact was I loved throwing parties, ever since Isis told me I was a good host and I had the perfect home for entertaining. Charlie loved hearing that one.

  Susan and her catering staff buzzed around spreading linens and heating up hors d’oeuvres. Laurette was the first guest to arrive. She and I liked to sample all the food without the pressure of other guests racing ahead of us to load up on all the best morsels.

  Around seven, more people arrived. I had invited Willard’s mother Tamara and her husband Spiro, but they were dining with a studio bigwig at Morton’s. Birthday or not, Tamara had her Hollywood social life to think about.

  We all crowded in the living room to greet the birthday boy. He called and said he was running a little late, so we waited . . . and waited . . . and waited.

  By ten, guests started to make excuses and leave. I had now left five messages on Willard’s answering machine.

  And my stomach was churning with dread.

  All I could think about was Isis and her prediction. Charlie tried assuring me that Willard was fine, but even he knew his words were hollow. Something must have happened to him. We had spoken by phone at seven-fifteen. He was going to take a quick bath and head over.

  Charlie and I jumped into the BMW and sped down the curving, shadowy streets of the Hollywood Hills that spilled onto Sunset Boulevard with its massive billboards and bright lights. We zipp
ed through the plush greenery of Beverly Hills before swerving off a side street into Brentwood towards Willard’s house.

  Charlie, behind the wheel, kept eyeing me.

  My body kept shaking so he turned on the heat. But I wasn’t cold. It was nerves.

  As we pulled up to the small stucco house on the corner, I was surprised to see all the lights on. Willard was home.

  We got out of the car, and walked up the path to the front door. It was open. A Macy Gray CD wafted out from the kitchen. We saw an open bottle of wine and two half empty glasses sitting on the coffee table as we poked our heads inside. Charlie told me to go back and wait by the car, but of course, I stayed right on his heels.

  “Willard?” I called out as my eyes darted about the room.

  Charlie checked the den. There was no sign of him. On his way back, Charlie slipped on some water that had spilled on the floor. He caught his balance, and then headed towards the back bedrooms.

  I noticed that the glass door leading to the yard was open a crack. The breeze from outside ruffled a stack of magazines on an end table. I heard Charlie calling for Willard as he checked all the rooms in the back of the house. I stepped outside onto the patio, looked around, and then froze in my tracks.

  “Charlie! Charlie, come quick!”

  I raced over to the edge of Willard’s small lap pool. There, floating face down, was a lifeless body. I jumped into the water, still yelling for Charlie, and turned the body over. Willard Ray Hornsby’s face stared up at me, his eyes empty, his mouth agape, the life inside of him completely drained out. It was just as Isis had predicted.

  Chapter Four

  Whoever said it never rains in Southern California wasn’t at Willard Ray Hornsby’s funeral at Forest Lawn Cemetery that bitter Monday morning three days after his untimely death.

  Charlie and I stood huddled underneath my bent, rusty-handled umbrella (who ever thinks to buy a new one in Los Angeles?), straining to hear the minister’s eulogy through the whipping, violent winds and torrential downpour. As our group stood, just a small cluster in the vast lawn of endless headstones, the minister tried as best he could to project through the inclement weather, but it was a hopeless cause.

  After a while, I focused on watching the small, intimate crowd of mourners gathered to pay their respects. I knew most of the faces, including Laurette, of course, and a few actors from Willard’s scene study class.

  And then there was Willard’s mother Tamara, whose main concern at the moment was the state of her hair. She kept clutching it, fearful it was all going to come tumbling down from the top of her head. She was close enough to the minister to actually hear what he was saying, but it didn’t interest her much. She was so preoccupied with her damn hair.

  After Tamara packed up her young son and headed west in the eighties to make her mark, she never did anything of note except for playing a background babe in a James Bond movie. This led to a few television roles, but it was her marriage to an up-and-coming studio executive that finally got her in the right circles. She played it up for all it was worth—parties, Aspen ski weekends, charity balls with the other wives of the rich and powerful.

  The fact that her new husband had no room in his life for a stepson didn’t matter. She was on her way. Willard was treated like a puppy that had just peed in her favorite Joan & David’s. She even forgot to invite him to Thanksgiving one year. Judd Nelson got his place at the table instead.

  Of course, all good things must come to an end, and Tamara’s husband of eight years dumped her for a pretty young thing who was about to make her mark in a big screen version of The Perils of Penelope Pitstop.

  Tamara didn’t have to play the scorned divorcée for long. She used her contacts to secure an invitation to a political fundraiser hosted by Warren Beatty. Since Annette Bening already had him wrapped up, she set her sights on recently widowed media mogul Stan Schulberg. Stan was eighty-two-years-old but looked seventy-six if he was a day. He was one of those legendary men who bought and sold TV networks as a sport. He had billions, and Tamara seduced him shamelessly. By the time she squeezed a marriage proposal out of him, he was already hospitalized with pneumonia. His terrified children and rightful heirs to his fortune did everything in their power to delay the nuptials, but Tamara wasted no time in dressing up the ICU room with flowers and calling in a rabbi for an emergency service. And there, before two registered nurses serving as witnesses and to monitor the respirator, Tamara and Stan were married.

  She forgot to invite Willard.

  Within two weeks, Stan Schulberg was dead and Tamara’s savvy lawyers secured her a half a billion dollars from the estate faster than you can say Anna Nicole Smith.

  Standing next to Tamara near the coffin was her boy toy, excuse me, husband Spiro Spiridakis. Spiro was a six-foot tall, sculpted Greek God whose primarily role in Tamara’s life was to share her bed and help spend all that money. While Tamara was pushing fifty-five, Spiro wasn’t more than thirty. He looked twenty. But when you don’t work, and can spend your day working out at the gym and getting herbal face treatments, that’s not such an impressive accomplishment. Both Tamara and Spiro looked bored and put out by this whole funeral affair. Tamara kept dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief, but I would bet my entire life savings that the only moisture on her face was a direct result of the rain.

  Spiro kept checking his watch, sighing, then staring blankly at the minister. He was probably running late for a shiatsu massage at the Burke Williams Spa in West Hollywood.

  Finally, the minister wrapped things up with a rather impersonal tribute to Willard’s life. From what I could make out through the rain, it was a standard issue tribute, nothing particularly related to Willard’s actual life, just a perfunctory “Boy, will we miss him,” and then a final prayer.

  I didn’t blame the minister. He didn’t know Willard. He only had Tamara to rely on, and needless to say, none of his friends were ever consulted. If Tamara had put as much effort into her son’s eulogy as she did into her hair, the poor minister would have at least had a fighting chance to make some minor impact on the gathered mourners.

  Before the minister was able to close his Bible, Tamara and Spiro scurried off towards their parked limousine.

  The rain was subsiding, and the crowd quietly began to disperse. I stared at Willard’s coffin, so full of questions, so confused as to what actually happened.

  After Charlie and the cops combed the premises for any signs of foul play, Willard’s death had been ruled an accident. According to a preliminary coroner’s report, Willard’s alcohol level was off the charts, and apparently in his drunken stupor, he tripped over something on his patio, fell into the pool and drowned.

  Charlie said that when the police broke the news of her son’s death to Tamara, she closed her eyes, shook her head, and said, “It was only a matter of time, I suppose.” Then she launched into a sad story of how her son couldn’t cope with Hollywood’s constant rejection, how he dulled the pain of his battered self-esteem with booze, how his story was one more cautionary tale for those starry-eyed youngsters who wanted to scrape together their last few dollars and migrate to Hollywood to make it as the next Tom Cruise or Julia Roberts.

  It was all so neat and tidy. Tamara had all the answers. But she didn’t know squat. Not a clue where her son’s head was at emotionally. As far as I knew, they hadn’t spoken in a while. And from my own run in with Willard the day before he died, he was in an ecstatic state, completely full of hope and enthusiasm. He had just gotten cast in a juicy guest-starring role on Smallville. For any out of work actor, a crumb like that would keep your spirits up for months.

  More questions gnawed at me about this tragedy. There were a couple of empty tequila bottles found near the body. If he was drinking hard liquor on the night he died, then why was there an open bottle of wine and two glasses on his coffee table? Who else had been there that night?

  And Willard didn’t even like tequila. Whenever we went out for margaritas, he woul
d order the fruit-flavored ones because peach and strawberry usually drowned out the sharp taste of Jose Cuervo. Even more disturbing was the fact that I had just talked to him a few hours earlier. He was alert, happy, and anxious to get to the party. How on earth did he have time to go from that to bitter, drunk, and accident-prone? I hated myself for obsessing about details. Now was the time to grieve. But I couldn’t help myself. The nagging details and unanswered questions were cropping up and consuming me.

  Charlie watched me glare at Tamara and Spiro as a few mourners stopped to offer their condolences. Charlie was getting nervous. He was afraid I was about to do something to embarrass him. And as usual, he was right.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  “Jarrod, don’t . . .”

  “I’m just going to tell Willard’s mother how sorry I am.”

  Charlie sighed. He knew that was a bald-faced lie. He knew I couldn’t stand Tamara or her steroid popping lover boy. And he knew that I wouldn’t be happy until I let them know it.

  I charged down the hill towards the limousine. Tamara and Spiro had managed to shake off the few stragglers who tried offering comfort and were now focused on disappearing into the safety of their car. If they had only moved a little faster.

  “Mrs. Schulberg?”

  She turned to face me. There was a hint of recognition in her eyes, but it took her a moment to process who I was.

  “Jarrod,” she said finally. “I’m so glad you were able to come. I know how much you meant to Willard.”

  “I thought the world of him too. I still can’t believe it.”

  She wanted so desperately to get in that limo with Spiro and speed away, but for appearances’ sake, she had to go through the motions.

  “Yes,” she said, letting out a deep breath. “Such a tragedy.”