Hollywood Holiday Page 4

  “Me?” I squeaked out. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Me? I was just…coming in to show you some notes for my article on Twelve.” Ohmigod, I was so going to hell for all the lies I’d told today.

  “Great. Let’s see them,” he said, holding out his hand.

  I hesitated. You know, considering that the stack of papers in my hands was actually last week’s notes on floral prints versus polka dots.

  “Oh, uh, you know, actually…I think maybe it would be better if I typed up the full story first. You know, get the emotional impact of my powerful prose and all that.”

  If Felix frowned any harder, there wouldn’t be a single plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills who’d be able to iron out his forehead. “So, you don’t want to show me the notes?”

  “No. I mean, not now. I did. When I came in here. But, yeah, I’ve had some time to think about it. You know, while you were with Allie in the…,” I trailed off, feeling my cheeks go red at the very thought.

  “While I was where?” Felix pressed, raising an eyebrow at me.

  “Uh, you know, with Allie, in the men’s room…,” I mumbled.

  I swear I saw the corner of his mouth quirk upward. “Allie was showing me a broken valve on the faucet in the ladies’ room.”

  Oh, thank God. The image of Allie and Felix in the restroom doing…worse things…might have been burned into my brain permanently. “Right. Of course. Plumbing issues.”

  Felix leaned in, his mouth quirking in earnest now. “What did you think we were doing?”

  “Who me?” I asked, blinking in a totally-not-convincing attempt at innocence. “Nothing. I mean, what do people do in restrooms? Like, you know, besides peeing and…okay, hey, you know what? I’ve gotta go. Late. Stories to write. Things to type. This has been a good chat, though.”

  Felix shook his head at me. “I want that story by tomorrow,” he said, gesturing to the stack of bullshit papers in my hand. “Five o’clock or I’m having Allie write a fluff piece about the band’s canceled tour.”

  “You got it,” I promised as I backed out of the door.

  I slunk back to my cube and let out a sigh of relief so big it ruffled my short hair. No sooner had I sat down than Allie appeared at my elbow.

  “What took you so long? What were you doing in there?” she asked, popping a piece of gum into her mouth. Watermelon-flavored, if my nose did not deceive me.

  “I was being interrogated,” I ground out through my teeth. “I thought you were going to keep him distracted.”

  She shrugged. “I did my best. Plumbing can only hold a man for so long.”

  “Plumbing?! That was the best you could do? What happened to the slutty ‘trade secrets’ you used on Cheap Suit earlier?”

  She looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “Ohmigod, Tina, I can’t talk to my boss like that.”

  I closed my eyes and imagined squeezing my hands around her slim, adorable little throat.

  “So, did you get it or what?” she asked, breaking into my pleasant daydream.

  I opened my eyes and glanced guiltily over my shoulder. “Yes.” I slipped the ring of keys from my pocket and handed it to her. “And you better leave me out of your romantic schemes from now on.”

  Allie blinked at me, doing an even less convincing attempt at an innocent face than I’d just given Felix. “Whatever do you mean ‘romantic’?”

  Then she spun on her heels and trotted back to her own cube.

  I got home to find a note in soft, looping handwriting on the kitchen counter saying that Aunt Sue had gone to the Hometown Buffet with Mary Lou and Dotty. She promised there was a casserole for me in the fridge. I opened the refrigerator door. Sitting on the middle shelf was a ceramic dish filled with canned tuna, some soupy mixture, and one fuzzy pink bedroom slipper. I pulled the dish out, set it in the sink—making a mental note to buy Aunt Sue a new pair of slippers—and grabbed a couple of leftover slices of pizza.

  I munched while I changed into my date-night outfit for the evening: a red tank with a panda on it, a pair of black, form-fitting leggings, and some saucy high heels. By the time my laptop pinged with my incoming call, I was ready to rock Cal’s cyberworld.

  “Hey, babe,” he said as his face filled my computer.

  He looked so good, it was all I could do to not make out with my monitor. “Hey, yourself, handsome.”

  “I like the panda. Cute.” He leaned forward as if trying to see down my shirt.

  “Thanks. How was your day?”

  “Exhausting. But productive.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “With?”

  He grinned. “Super-secret stuff.”

  “You’re killing me. It’s a Clinton, right? Bill? Hilary?”

  But he just shook his head. “Listen, about this detail—”

  I groaned, cutting him off. “Please don’t tell me it’s been extended again?”

  Cal paused. “Sorry, babe. I’m going to be here a little bit longer.”

  “Define ‘little bit.’”

  “Probably until the fourth.”

  “Of January?!” I shouted. “You’re not going to be here for Christmas?”

  Cal ran a hand through his hair, making it stand up on end. “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do.”

  “But you promised,” I said. I was imitating Allie’s super-whine to perfection.

  “I promised I’d do my best.”

  “Well, your best sucks.” I crossed my arms over my chest, obliterating any view he might have had. “You know, in the last month we’ve only seen each other three times. Three!” I said, holding up the digits to emphasize my point.

  Cal’s jaw set hard. “Look, I don’t like this any better than you do. But I can’t help it.”

  “Puh-lease! Just tell Obama to hire more Secret Service.”

  “I’m not guarding Obama,” he said, his voice tight. I could tell he was getting upset, but I was too far into my own upset-ness now to stop.

  “Of course you can’t tell me. Because they’re so important. More important than spending Christmas with your—”

  I paused, almost applying the unspoken title of girlfriend. One I was suddenly wondering if I’d ever use.

  “—girl,” I finished instead.

  Cal sighed again. “I don’t want to fight. I can’t make it. I’m sorry. We’ll have to celebrate the holidays another time.”

  “Right,” I scoffed. “And when will that be, huh?”

  He paused. “I don’t know.”

  I gave him an “I told you so” look.

  “I have to go,” he said, looking over his shoulder at the door.

  “Fine. You know what? Me too. I have big, important stuff to do, too, and you know what?” I said, my voice rising.

  “What?”

  “I’m not telling you what it is.”

  And with that, I logged off.

  It only took two seconds of staring at the now blank screen before I regretted the whole conversation. Ugh! I flopped back on my bed. I knew it wasn’t Cal’s fault. He was working. He was good at his job and loved it. I should be happy for him that someone as important as Not-The-President thought Cal was the only person worthy of protecting his holiday festivities. And I was. I was just feeling selfish and grumpy.

  And a little bit frustrated that even Allie and Felix were getting laid, and I was spending Christmas alone.

  The first thing I did in the morning was call Cam. If I was going to interrogate Skip the Gold-digging Long-lost Son, I needed an “in” to get past the gatekeepers in reception at ABC Records. And if anyone had, one, it would be her.

  Cam answered four rings in with a sleepy, “What time is it?”

  “Seven,” I said, confirming on my Hello Kitty watch.

  “Uhn,” came her grunted reply. “Too early. Go away.”

  “Late night?”

  “Very. I spent six hours crouched in the bushes outside a premiere after-party waiting to get a pic of Brad Pitt.”

  “Did you get
it?”

  “Need you ask?”

  I grinned. Cam always got her man.

  “Hey, do you have an in at ABC Records?” I asked.

  I heard rustling as Cam sat up in bed. “Um, maybe,” she yawned. “There was this kid who interned with me a couple of years ago. I heard he shoots music videos now.”

  “Any chance you could call in a favor with him?”

  “I can try.” She paused. “On one condition.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t ever call me this early again.”

  Luckily, Cam’s former intern came through, and two hours later I was sitting in Skip Warner’s private office. Unluckily, Former Intern didn’t have that much clout at ABC yet, and the receptionist informed me I had exactly five minutes with the producer between his other scheduled appointments. And then security would politely escort me out.

  Which didn’t leave me a lot of time for beating around the bush.

  “I understand you are Dusty Miller’s long-lost son?” I jumped right in.

  Skip had short-cropped brown hair; a tall, thin build; and wore a pair of wire-rimmed glasses that he might have thought made him look older. In reality, they just made him look sort of like Harry Potter.

  “Yes, I recently learned that Dusty was my father,” he slowly admitted, as if not sure he could trust the direction I was going with this question. Smart cookie.

  “I’m sorry for your loss. It must be an especially hard blow having just reconnected with him after all this time.”

  Skip nodded, averting his eyes from mine. Though whether it was to hide tears or guilt, I wasn’t sure. “It was. I feel like we were just starting to get to know each other.”

  “And starting to produce his music.”

  Skip’s eyes bounced down to his hands, clasped on the desk in front of him. “The music was secondary. What mattered was connecting with my father.”

  “How did you two connect?”

  “He showed up at my office one day.” He paused. “Out of the blue and unannounced. Kind of like you just did.”

  I ignored the dig, instead forging ahead. Four minutes and thirty seconds. Tick-tock. “That’s not how Tami tells it. She says you sought out Dusty.”

  Skip shook his head. “Tami is half in the bottle most days. I mean, not that I wouldn’t have sought Dusty out. I just had no idea he existed. My mom never told me anything about my father.”

  “So how did Dusty contact you?”

  “He said he saw the notice of my mother’s death in the news. He had promised her not to contact me, but seeing as she was gone, he said he felt like he had to. All he wanted was to have a relationship.”

  It was a likely enough story, but I noticed his magnified eyes still hadn’t met mine.

  “Okay, so Dusty contacts you,” I said, playing along. “And you thought maybe you could make a couple of bucks off Dad’s music?”

  But Skip shook his head again. “No. That was Dusty’s idea.”

  “Wait—Baxter said that Dusty didn’t want to sell out.”

  Skip frowned. “Dusty and the band have had some disagreements about the music, but I promise you that wasn’t true. Dusty came to me. In fact, he said he was talking with Baxter about remixing more songs. He said he hoped that they’d reach an agreement soon.”

  My head was spinning. Either this guy was the best liar on the planet—which was possible considering he was a music executive—or someone else had been feeding me a line of crap.

  The band said that Dusty didn’t want to sell out. Tami said that Skip was a gold-digger. And now Skip was insisting that Dusty was the one pushing for more songs and more profits. Clearly, one of them had to be lying.

  The question was, who?

  I sat at my desk, tapping the end of my pen against my lips and staring at the Informer’s website. Cam’s photos of the fateful fall were getting a dozen likes a minute. That was a dozen likes a minute my nonexistent column wasn’t getting.

  I looked up at the clock. 4:25 p.m. I had less than an hour to figure out who had pushed Dusty if I wanted my story to run instead of Allie’s fluff piece. Unfortunately, I wasn’t any closer to finding that out than I had been this time yesterday.

  I absently scrolled through a memorial photo reel of Dusty that Cam had put together. Most were old pictures of the band. Tons of leather, lots of neon. A couple shots of Twelve’s first album cover. Stills from his junkyard video for “Summertime Girl.” Somehow she’d even unearthed some photos that looked more recent: Dusty with his arm around Tami at some show in Vegas, Dusty with his bandmates, smiling as they held their now platinum “Christmastime Girl” record, a photo of Dusty with Skip at the recent birthday party Tami had told us about.

  I paused on the birthday photo, enlarging it. It was the only photo I’d seen of Skip and Dusty together. While the family resemblance wasn’t striking, I guess they passed as father and son. Same brown hair, same tall, slim build. Skip was smiling, looking up at his dad through his boyish glasses with what I could only peg as admiration. Dusty was laughing at some joke off camera, a glass of champagne raised high in one hand. They looked for all the world like a happy family.

  But something about the photo was niggling at the back of my mind. Something wasn’t right.

  I resized the pic again, back to full screen, making my eyes scan over every inch of the scene. A birthday banner hung in the background, a crowd of people milling beneath it, attesting to the fact that record producers never had a shortage of friends. I spotted Tami in one of her übershort, übertight dresses and one of the other members of Twelve off to one side. Beside them was a table covered in trays of food and decorative fake fall leaves.

  And then it hit me.

  “Max!” I shouted.

  His head popped up over the wall of my cubicle. “Yeah?”

  “Where are the Informer’s archives kept?”

  Max blinked his watery eyes at me. “You mean the old issues?”

  I nodded, jumping up from my seat. “Yeah, the stuff from before we went all digital. From 1989, to be exact.”

  Max shrugged his shoulders. “My guess would be the basement storage somewhere. Why?”

  “Because,” I called over my shoulder as I raced for the elevator, “I know who hired Frosty!”

  At exactly 4:59 p.m. and thirty seconds, I pushed through Felix’s glass door and slammed a manila file folder down on his desk.

  “Your story!”

  Felix looked up from his computer screen and cocked one eyebrow at me. “On Twelve?”

  I nodded. “Yes, and I know who was lying.”

  Felix blinked at me for a second, then leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers in a thoughtful pose. “Okay, lay it on me, Bender. Who was lying?”

  “Dusty.”

  That got his attention.

  “Wait—the victim?”

  I couldn’t help doing a big goofy grin. “Uh-huh. See, the proof is right here,” I said, pulling up the printout I’d made of Cam’s birthday party photo. “This was taken at Skip’s birthday party, last month. November sixteenth, to be exact.”

  Felix leaned forward and looked as directed. “Okay. So?”

  “Soooo,” I said, pulling another sheet of paper from my file. This one was a copy I’d just made on the ancient Xerox machine in the basement. “This article from 1989 says that Dusty was in rehab in the summer. If he’d had an affair with Skip’s mom then, Skip would have been born nine months later. In the spring.”

  Felix’s face slowly transformed, a smile cracking his stoic British countenance. “Not in November.”

  “Bingo.” I pointed a finger at him. “Skip said it was Dusty who contacted him after seeing news that his mother had passed away. I think that part is true. Dusty saw that the woman he’d slept with in rehab had passed away and that she was survived by her successful record producer son. And he saw an opportunity. He contacted Skip, pretending to be his long-lost father in order to get Skip to produce a remix of
‘Summertime Girl.’ Skip went along with it, only too happy to reconnect with his rock-star dad. Then the song became a hit.”

  “I’m not seeing the motive for murder yet,” Felix said with a glance at the clock. “The song is a hit, and everyone’s happy?”

  I shook my head. “Not everyone is happy. The song is too big of a hit.”

  Felix raised an eyebrow. “Is there such a thing?”

  “There is when you have to split the royalty checks. Dusty cowrote the song with Twelve’s lead singer, Baxter. Only when the big checks started coming in, Dusty wanted all of it. Skip was keen to produce more remixed hits, but Dusty didn’t want to share the proceeds with his estranged bandmate anymore. He was trying to find a way to get sole ownership of the rights. He stalled by telling the band that he didn’t want to sell out and telling Skip it was the band holding up the rights.”

  Felix shook his head. “He sounds like quite a guy. I take it you have proof of all of this?”

  “I do,” I said, not even trying to keep the pride out of my voice. “I had Allie call Dusty’s lawyer, posing as an assistant at ABC Records, looking for the latest update on contract negotiations. He confirmed that Dusty was trying to revert all rights to himself on a technicality.”

  Felix nodded. “Clever.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It sounds like Dusty had given just about everyone around him a nice motive to want him out of the picture. The kid he was duping, the band members he was cheating out of money. So who killed him?”

  “None of the above.”

  Felix glanced at the clock again. “You’re killing me, Bender.”

  “I know, but I’ve spent fifty-three seventy-five in Swear Pig donations this month, so I’m gonna milk this moment.”

  “Touché.”

  “Okay, so you want to know who killed him?”

  “Dying to.”

  “Nice pun,” I said. “It was the girlfriend.”

  Felix shook his head. “But she’s the one person without a motive.”

  I pointed at the photo of Skip’s birthday party. “Actually, she has the best motive. Tami’s not as dumb as she looks. She realized they were celebrating Skip’s birthday in November and did the math. She told me that she and Dusty had broken up when he went into rehab, then got back together right afterward. But if Skip was born in November, that meant Dusty must have slept with Skip’s mom in February—six months after he got back together with Tami. Tami said Dusty never wanted to get married, never wanted kids. He’d cheated her out of a family, and now she finds out he cheated on her as well.”