Getting Up With Fleas (Trace 7) Page 8

  “Birnbaum called him a triple-threat man before,” I said mildly.

  “Yeah. He lies, he cheats, and he steals.”

  “Does he hate McCue too?” I asked.

  “He ought to.”

  “Why?”

  “Because everyone ought to,” he said.

  “Tami Fluff seemed to like McCue enough,” I said.

  Harden’s eyes squinted and he looked real angry. “You know why they call them starlets?” he asked me.

  “No. Why?”

  “Because piglets was already taken. Of course she acts like she likes McCue. She wants to stay on the picture.”

  “She’s starring in it, isn’t she? Could McCue get her fired?”

  “Of course he could. And that’s another thing about Birnbaum. He has no sense about who’s right for a part. The part I wrote calls for the female lead to speak lines like a real human being. He had no right to sign up that twat for the part.”

  “You ought to think about giving up Hollywood,” I said. “You don’t sound happy.”

  “Where else can I make a quarter of a million dollars for two weeks’ work?” he asked. “Barf really said he liked my script?”

  “That’s what he said,” I answered.

  “I’m going over and tell him he’s a liar.” He stood up and said to me, “It’s going to be a miracle if we get through this weekend without a murder.”

  “Pray for miracles,” I said.

  He walked over to the table where Birnbaum and Sheila were talking to Dahlia Codwell. The actress had slowed down and was still working on her second pitcher of martinis. She didn’t look too bad. There are some people who drink like that. One half-drink and they get to a certain level of tipsy and then they stay there, no matter how much more they drink, until they pass out. Hollywood did create some ferocious drinkers, I thought. Codwell and McCue were both world-class.

  Harden sat down and I turned away to see Jack Scott motioning me politely over to the empty chair at their table. I grabbed my drink and walked over and Scott got up and shook my hand.

  “I’m Jack Scott.”

  “Devlin Tracy.”

  “And this is my wife, Pamela. And this is Roddy Quine, who’s going to direct Corridors of Death.”

  Pamela Scott looked at me shyly, then looked away. She had the unhappy kind of look on her face that God gives to certain people who were created only to suffer. Quine nodded but did not offer a handshake.

  “I just wanted to tell you that I’m glad your company was able to send you up here,” Scott told me.

  “Protecting the investment,” I said.

  “Exactly. And he needs some protecting, that’s obvious.”

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  “You’ve watched Tony tonight. His drinking is getting worse and worse.”

  “He seems to handle it,” I said.

  Scott shook his head. “When he used to drink normally, he did crazy dangerous things. Now he’s drinking worse and I’m afraid of what he might do to himself.” He gave me a smile. Up close, he was as wrinkled as the hands of a bathed baby. “Well, fella, I’m just as glad you’re here to keep an eye on him. He’s not really well, you know. Last night we had dinner with him in New York and he got real drunk. Then he wouldn’t go home. Biff and I were real worried about him. Keep an eye on him. Please.”

  “I’ll try my best.”

  “Is this your regular work? Are you a policeman?” Scott asked.

  “I work for a private-detective agency,” I said. “We do a lot of work for the insurance company.”

  “No special background in things like this?” he said.

  I shrugged. “I know something about drinking.”

  “Well, try to keep an eye on him. It’s no secret that without Tony we don’t have a picture.”

  “I didn’t think anybody in Hollywood was indispensable,” I said.

  “Some actors get hot, and Tony’s one of them. Mystery movies generally don’t make it with the public, so we’re hoping Tony’s appeal can get this one over the top. Gee, I hope so. We’re going to have a wonderful movie.” He smiled at me again. It was the kind of smile that came from a guy who had trained himself to smile at the end of every six sentences.

  It occurred to me that I had not yet seen Roddy Quine, the director, say one word to anyone the entire evening.

  So I asked him, “How do you like the script, Mr. Quine?”

  He took a deep breath before answering. Maybe no one had ever spoken to him before. He opened his mouth and showed me teeth that would have made Secretariat proud.

  “The magic of movies,” he said.

  He looked pleased with himself, as if that were an answer to my question.

  Scott looked anxiously around the room. “Where is Tony, by the way?”

  “He was going to the men’s room,” I said.

  “That was a long time ago,” Scott said.

  “Maybe he fell in,” Quine said, and started guffawing, showing all his teeth, looking, sounding, and acting like the imbecile end product of too much British inbreeding. “Hee, hee, hee.” He actually giggled.

  I saw Tami Fluff step into the doorway of the dining room. She looked around, right past me, but when her eyes reached the table next to mine, she seemed to change her mind and walked away from the open doors.

  A moment later, Dahlia Codwell walked out of the room.

  I stood up. “I’m going to see where Tony is,” I said.

  “Attaboy,” Scott said. “Always on the job. Keep our movie alive, Mr. Tracy.”

  11

  McCue was not in the men’s room. I looked inside the two unlocked stalls to make sure he had not fallen asleep inside them.

  As I came out of the men’s room, which was down a little hallway across from the main dining room, I saw Dahlia Codwell leave the ladies’ room farther down the hall and turn the corner toward the dining room.

  Before I reached the other corridor, I heard a voice and stopped to listen.

  “Hello. May I call you mother?”

  “You may call me Miss Codwell, you tart.”

  “What’s the matter?” the first voice answered. It was soft and buttery and belonged to Tami Fluff.

  “The matter, you little tramp, is that while I may be working in the same film you are infesting, I have no inclination to be your friend or confidante. I saw you making up to that drunken bastard McCue earlier tonight. Tell me you weren’t trying to fatten your role at the expense of mine.”

  “I wasn’t,” Tami answered.

  “I doubt that.”

  “It’s true. I was telling Tony how happy I was to be working on a film with two people, like you two, whom I respect and admire so much.”

  “Save the valedictories for your death scene,” Dahlia snapped back. “You still die in this movie, don’t you? Or have you slept your way into immortality?”

  “I don’t know what I’ve done, Miss Codwell, to offend you, but whatever—”

  “You offend me by being alive. Your vacant face offends me. Your ridiculous name offends me. Your nonexistent nose offends me. Everything about you offends me. All I want from you is that you remember that you are a piece of meat who has somehow fucked her way into my motion picture. But meat is plentiful, and in the next film be sure that you will be replaced by another side of beef.”

  “It’s very sad, Miss Codwell,” Tami said evenly. I could smell the perfume the women wore. It was a ripe, overpowering smell. Tami said, “All I had hoped for on this film was that I could learn something about my craft from working with such skilled professionals as you two. I will learn, Miss Codwell, whether you want me to or not. As for my being a piece of meat, I’m sorry you feel that way, but it isn’t true. I was chosen for this part because I can act. And because I’m young enough to play it.”

  “Why, you bitch! Are you implying that I’m too old to have played your part?”

  “The decision wasn’t mine, Miss Codwell,” Tami said. “You could convin
ce me, I’m sure. You should have convinced the people who make those decisions.”

  “It’s not possible when you’ve got yourself opened like the hold of a ship to anyone who comes along.”

  “Good evening, Miss Codwell,” Tami said.

  I plopped down into a chair as Tami turned the corner into the hallway leading to the rest rooms. There was a triumphant smile on her face, a happy gleam in her eyes. Then she saw me and her face soured.

  “It’s not my day,” she said. “First you, then her. Do you always hang around eavesdropping?”

  “I wasn’t eavesdropping. I just didn’t want to barge in. And for what it’s worth, I think she was cheap-shotting you,” I said.

  “Thank you for that anyway, Tracy.” She started to brush by me toward the ladies’ room, then stopped and smiled again. It was a wonderful smile. “I really singed her ass, didn’t I?” she said.

  “Third-degree burns over ninety percent of her body,” I said.

  “Good. I wasn’t lying anyway. I’ll put up with her crap. And I’m going to watch her and pick her brains and learn everything I can about this business. Do you have a cigarette?”

  “Sure,” I said, and realized that nobody but McCue and I had been smoking in the dining room. Ahhh, sweet Hollywood.

  “Is she that good an actress?” I asked.

  “Good?” Tami said, inhaling deep on the cigarette. “She stinks. She couldn’t act her way into a high-school Thanksgiving show. The only thing she ever did was get a star to fall in love with her and marry him and wait for him to die. She never could act. She just looked like she could. The only acting she ever did was pretending she liked giving blowjobs, from what I’ve heard. And she accuses me of sleeping my way onto this picture.”

  “If she’s so lousy, what do you want to learn from her?” I asked.

  “How to steal the camera. You watch her, any scene she’s in, and it looks like she’s the only person in it. That’s a trick, and I’m going to figure out how she does it, the old bitch.”

  “Good for you, Tami,” I said.

  “I’m going to be around this business for a long time,” she said.

  “I have a hunch you’re right.”

  “If you ever do get rich and produce a movie, look me up. I might be interested.”

  “I don’t know if I could afford you,” I said.

  “You never know,” she said. “Try me.” She stubbed out the cigarette and wiggled into the ladies’ room.

  12

  I grabbed my canvas bag from the corner near the front door and decided to go upstairs to find my room. Clyde Snapp had told me that I was next door to Tony McCue. Maybe he was up there.

  At the bottom of the steps, a room chart was posted on the wall. I saw that the Scotts, Roddy Quine, and Dahlia Codwell had the first floor of rooms. On the second were Birnbaum and Sheila in a suite, Ramona, and Tami Fluff. I was on the top floor with McCue and Arden Harden, the screenwriter.

  As I walked up the steps, I realized I wasn’t really much of a detective. I had been at the hotel for four hours or so and I hadn’t seen anything except the dining room and the men’s room in the hall. There could have been a battalion of Libyan murderers hanging around upstairs and I never would have known. Well, what the hell, I thought. I didn’t ever want to be a detective and I wasn’t going to be one and I was only going through the motions just to keep Chico quiet until I found something I was better at, if such a thing existed.

  There was no elevator and a sweeping staircase, fifteen feet wide, led from the lobby up to the first floor of rooms. There were only a couple of dozen rooms in the hotel.

  One flight up, the staircase opened to two hallways. On the left side of the stairs there were four rooms. There were probably an equal number on the right side, over the dining room, but I couldn’t tell because the hallway had been sealed off with a temporary plasterboard wall that was posted with a sign that read, DO NOT ENTER. AREA UNDER CONSTRUCTION.

  It was the same on the next floor of rooms. I heard a loud thump down the hallway to the left and then I heard a grunt. I was curious, so I put down my bag and walked down the hallway. The last door on the left was open and I looked inside to see Biff Birnbaum, stripped to a pair of gym shorts, wrestling with a heavy barbell. He yanked it up over his head, locked his arms, then saw me and dropped the weights down onto a pair of couch pillows.

  He grinned his perfect grin. “I try to lift every night,” he said. “It’s good for working off the tension.”

  “Tension? Here? I hadn’t noticed any,” I said, but Birnbaum seemed disinclined to talk, so I left him lugging the weights.

  On the next floor up, the top floor, McCue had the two-room suite directly above Birnbaum’s. Mine was a single room next to his. Number-42. I put down my bag and walked over to the entrance to McCue’s suite and listened. The heavy sound of snoring vibrated the wood of the door. Either Tony McCue was sleeping it off or he had bought a chain saw and was practicing on the legs of the bed.

  I closed my door and noticed that there was no keyhole for a lock. The doors locked from the inside with dead bolts. When you were in, you could keep the world out. But when you went out, anybody could go traipsing about your room. It’d never work in Manhattan, I thought, but what the hell. Maybe the people were different up here in the fresh air.

  I dumped all my stuff into one of the drawers and stuck the canvas bag in a closet. I knew I had a bottle of vodka, so I started rooting around in my clothes, looking for it. I found the pint bottle and a couple of packs of cigarettes and I reminded myself to buy more tomorrow because I didn’t think there was going to be a cigarette machine in this hotel.

  There was no refrigerator or ice tray or anything like that in the bathroom, so I poured the vodka, warm and neat, and lay on the bed smoking.

  Then I noticed a little door in the wall, over the dresser. I got up and tried to open it, but it was screwed shut and there was paint over the screw head. I guessed it was an old-fashioned dumbwaiter that used to connect from the basement to the guest rooms. It was the old way of getting hot water from the basement up to the rooms before hot-water systems were installed. It was probably used too for packing garbage down to the basement and maybe even for hoisting food up to the rooms. And it was also probably a great way for mice to get all over the building without having to climb the stairs.

  I lay back down, smoked awhile, and then lifted the bedside telephone. I was surprised to get an immediate dial tone and then I remembered it wasn’t likely that this place would have a switchboard operator. Probably direct lines had been pumped into the rooms while the movie shooting was going on.

  As I dialed, I could hear McCue snoring next door. Some people were annoyed by snorers and couldn’t sleep when they heard the noise. I’m not one of them. My father brought me up believing that the best defense is a good offense, and I may just be the most offensive snorer in the world, especially when I’m drinking. Wait until I went to sleep. I’d knock McCue right out of bed.

  Chico answered on the first ring.

  “Hi. Devlin Tracy, boy bodyguard here.”

  “Good,” she said. “I was just in the kitchen fixing dinner. Why are you calling so early? What is it, about ten o’clock there?”

  “About that,” I said. “The subject has gone to sleep. If you listen carefully, you can hear him snoring next door. So I’ve decided to turn in too. It’s part of the new me.”

  “The old you was good enough, you know,” she said. “So come on, fill me in on all the Hollywood gossip. Who else is there? Did anyone have their clothes ripped off yet and get thrown in the pool? Come on, dammit, talk.”

  “There’s no pool. It’s freezing here and even a starlet would think twice about jumping into the lake here. It’s got ice on it, I think.”

  “So you promised me the dirt on McCue. Let’s have it. What’s he really like?”

  “He’s a man like all of us. He just wants to be loved and understood.”

  “And
because he isn’t, he drinks, right?”

  “How’d you know that?” I asked.

  “I hear it a lot,” Chico said. “You don’t have any dirt for me?”

  “Okay,” I said. “McCue’s a wild man. He drinks worse than I do. He’s a pill-popper too. He travels with his own shrink, who’s the best-looking woman here, even if she does dress like a Forty-second Street hooker.”

  “Stay away from her,” Chico said. “Shrinks screw like minks.”

  “Mink,” I said. “Mink is plural.”

  “Mink doesn’t rhyme, though. This isn’t much of a report. Who else is there?”

  “Well, there’s Jack Scott, America’s favorite sixty-year-old Boy Next Door, and his wife. He looks like a prune and she looks like she could use prunes. Are you taking notes?” I asked.

  “I don’t have to. I remember everything. What else?”

  “We’ve got Dahlia Codwell. She hates McCue because he calls her Granny Puckett. She wanted to play his wife in this picture but he said she was too old, and now she’s playing the wife’s mother. She’s pissed. She thinks the actress who got the job is a tart.”

  “Is she?”

  “I don’t know. She’s pretty smart. She called me a prick already.”

  “Very fast learner. Who is she?”

  “Tami Fluff. I don’t know who she is,” I said. “I never go to movies.”

  “I know. I always have to go alone. Tami Fluff. She’s the new hot thing. Stay away from her. What’s she like?”

  “At first, you think she’s got all the brains of a cotton ball, but I think there’s something going on between the ears.”

  “Why’d she call you a prick?”

  “Because McCue told her I was a producer and she came on to me and then she found out I wasn’t.”

  “Lying will always get you into trouble,” Chico said.

  “It gets you into panties too, sometimes,” I said. “Anyway, she and Codwell hate each other, I guess. And Tami—”