The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set Page 6

This was not a small achievement.

  When I was little and Gramma Gladys came to visit, she was the brainiest, most glamorous person I knew. She wore pearls and the best clothes she could afford or sew for herself. She looked like a lady, cussed like a sailor, and her love was usually misinterpreted as hostility. But she and I understood each other.

  It was clear to me even as young as I was that she’d fought harder for what she had than anybody gave her credit for. And she realized the problems I would face, a little honey-haired cutie who got away with everything. I didn’t know it was because pretty people always get away with more.

  Pretty pretty pretty. I actually grew to hate that word. It was intended as praise, but I understood it as a fetter.

  Pretty pretty pretty.

  Gramma Gladys sought to elbow that shit out of the way by never agreeing with anyone that I was pretty.

  “The kid’s got brains, that’s what counts!” I once heard her yell to my father. “Christ almighty, buy her a chemistry set!”

  I never received a chemistry set and I never made it into honors math, but I got A’s in history and psychology, as well as the leads in the school plays.

  It became my habit to drop in on that parking lot whenever I was troubled. Miraculously, Gramma Gladys was always there, and I always had a little money for the meter in case I saw an enforcement officer coming. There was no explaining it—Gramma Gladys had never even been to California. Her bones rested in the churchyard back in Wisconsin.

  So this afternoon, after buying new clothes, I turned into that parking lot to commune for just a sec with my beloved spiritual advisor.

  I breathed in the gas fumes and looked across the boulevard to the swell mansions of Beverly Hills and said, “Gramma, I took the bird in the hand.”

  A stiff breeze blew my hair into my eyes.

  “I have a kid to take care of,” I went on, “and I’ve got to do it alone. What are the odds I’d get that Oatberger job anyway?”

  I felt Gramma Gladys say, Go home!

  _____

  I stopped at Plummer Park and found Petey and Daniel there. I took a bag of apples out of the trunk and strolled toward the monkey bars where Daniel was demonstrating how to hang sideways from a pole, which Petey found awesome. I had to laugh, watching Daniel try to give a tutorial in the physics of gymnastics to a four-year-old.

  “I’ll show you again. You gotta use your muscles.” Daniel seized the pole, braced his elbow into his stomach, and swung his legs to horizontal and held them there rigidly, his body perfectly parallel with the ground, a startling and ridiculous thing to see.

  “Wow!” said Petey.

  I thanked the universe for Daniel.

  He saw me first and murmured to Petey, who raced over to me. “Mommy!” He wrapped himself around my legs, and my heart swelled as it always did when I was reunited with my boy, no matter how brief the separation. His little hands, lined with the clean dirt of the park, clutched my slacks. You could blindfold me and let a thousand little kids wrap themselves around my legs, and I’d know which one was Petey. Put them all in wool coats and mittens, and I’d still know.

  He pulled away. “Watch me, Mommy!”

  “Wait, honey, I’ve got apples!” The juicy Braeburn was ripped out of my hand and half demolished before Daniel and I took bites from ours.

  We sat at a picnic table eating our apples, watching Petey try and try to duplicate Daniel’s trick. His brown hair swung and caught the light like umber silk. Little-boy hair, cut in the cutest of bowl cuts. When Petey’s cheeks were red with exertion, he looked like a small circus man.

  “He’s not strong enough yet,” Daniel commented.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have shown him that, then.”

  Daniel had grown up in some Carolina or other, and his voice still retained a touch of that soft southern hominy. “Rita, my gosh. It’s something for him to work toward. A goal, you know?”

  “But he’s only four years old!”

  “Old enough to have goals.”

  “Daniel, you’re right. What a dunce I am.”

  He sighed. “Don’t call yourself that.”

  “You know, I’m sitting here thinking how much more actually masculine you are than Jeff is.”

  He laughed, his proud square jaw jutting skyward, his hair fluttering in the afternoon breeze. I could tell by his posture he was relaxed and pleasantly tired. He snapped off a big bite of apple. The air in the park smelled green from all the different species of trees breathing in and out, plus all the shrubs and grass. I watched a small red beetle encounter a crack in a plank in the picnic table and try to decide what to do.

  “I mean,” I explained, “by the prevalent standard, Jeff’s deemed a real man because he likes to screw chicks, and you’re deemed a pervert because you like to do it with men. Yet the amount of manly leadership you provide for Petey compared with how half-assed Jeff is with him—uff. The amount of daddy-ship. Petey loves you, you know.”

  Daniel was silent, and I realized he’d gotten misty. He swallowed and said, “And I love him. You know, I doubt I’ll ever father a child. And yet there’s something in me that I feel opening up, somehow, when I’m with Petey. I admit, half the time he’s a little asshole, but the other half—he’s so sweet and original. He sees possibilities when we’re climbing a tree that I don’t see.” Petey called out, “Daniel, show me again how to do it!”

  “In a minute, boyo. Meanwhile, do the overhead ladder twice back and forth without stopping. Can you?”

  Petey ran to do it.

  Daniel turned his spark-blue eyes on me and said, “Well?”

  I met his gaze. “I took an acting job. It’s an unusual role, and I can’t talk about it with anybody—yet, anyway, and I know you’re going to sit there and guess and try to tease it out of me, but—”

  “No. I won’t.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I can see it’s a big deal.”

  “Thank you.”

  We gnawed our apples. The beetle stood back from the crevasse in the plank, thinking. It put a feeler out to the crack, then turned sideways and moved along until the crack stopped, then it turned and kept going the way it wanted to. “Did you guys get lunch?” I asked.

  “Yeah, we went to my place for sandwiches.”

  “Another thank you.”

  Petey ran over to a couple of kids who sharingly gave him a sand shovel and allowed him to help them dig a hole “to Colorado.”

  “Colorado?” murmured Daniel.

  “Anyplace,” I remarked, “is the other side of the world from Los Angeles.”

  Daniel sighed mightily.

  “‘Smatter?” I asked.

  “Oh, the usual.”

  “Anything on the horizon?”

  “I wish I didn’t need a guy, you know?”

  “Do I ever.” The sum total of guys I’d dated since leaving Jeff was two, and only one of them had I felt OK about sleeping with. Then he turned out to be still stuck on his ex-wife. He actually asked me to help him write a letter to her in Milan where she’d gone to study design.

  Daniel said, “I really should stop dating Hollywood guys. Definitely no more directors or actors. They’re all black holes of need.”

  “Yeah, I guess they are, except you. So the profile of your dream guy has changed slightly?”

  “I want a guy who’s neither impressed that I’m on a TV show!, nor looks down on me because I’m only a TV actor!”

  I laughed.

  “I want a guy who’s smart,” Daniel went on, “you know, with a serious job or career. A guy who’s so damn busy he doesn’t have time to be neurotic.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I want never again to go out for coffee with another thirty-year-old child whose every thought comes out of his mouth, when, that is, he’s not absorbed in looking at his own reflection in the Starbucks window.” He looked down at himself. “And here I am in muddy pants, playing in the park. But—”

  “I know what yo
u mean.”

  “Course, there’re plenty of old guys who hit on me, but I don’t want Santa Claus either. Oh, listen to me whine. I have no right to feel sorry for myself. Although I do, really: my cleaner quit again.”

  “The same one?”

  “Yeah, Connie. She went back to Colombia again.”

  “Oh.”

  “She was really good. Now there’s grime everywhere.”

  “Why don’t you try cleaning your own apartment? You might just—”

  “Rita! You need professionals for these things.”

  Regular work on television is the holy career grail of everybody in Hollywood. I know I’ve said that starring in a Serge Oatberger film is the ultimate, and it is. The difference is this: being chosen by Oatberger is like winning the lottery, which is wondrous and giddy and if you’re smart with the money you’ll never have to do anything you don’t really want to do. But finding yourself in the cast of a hit TV series is like getting in on the ground floor of a new business. If you handle yourself well, you’ll be offered lots more opportunities. A multiseason hit show is to die for—or kill for, depending on the show and how you feel about your costars.

  “You’re just yearning,” I told him. “Hasn’t there ever been a Mr. Right in your life?”

  “Hmmm.” Daniel closed his eyes and inhaled as if smelling a fine wine, or a steak hot off the grill. “One time. He was the complete package. I guess I judge every guy I meet by him. Cute, but he didn’t know it. That is such a godsend I can’t tell you. Tough in public, very—and he did have a bit of a public profile. But tender in private. Bright, thoughtful. Not thoughtful in the way of being considerate, though he was that, but he was a man of thoughts, a guy who’d listen and read and come up with his own ideas.”

  “So what happened?”

  Daniel’s eyes clouded. “He wasn’t—ready. He drew back.”

  “Oh.”

  “I still think of him.”

  Petey swung up into the branches of a tree.

  “Not so high!” I shouted. He ignored me.

  “He’ll be OK,” said Daniel. “That’s our safe tree. He knows every move on it. Why don’t you relax? I’m watching him.”

  “But what if he falls out? How are you gonna catch him if you’re—”

  “Rita, I hate to break this to you, but Petey has fallen out of that tree.”

  “Daniel! When?”

  He looked at me with amused guy-smugness. “Lots of times! Rita, Rita, calm down, OK? He got the wind knocked out of him, that’s all. He survived. That’s how you learn to climb trees. You fall out a couple of times, and you learn quick what works and what doesn’t.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Metaphor for life and all that.”

  “Right, right. You must think I’m such a wuss.”

  “You’re no wuss, you’re my best girl. Look at your little pixie face! I’d say you’re feeling upbeat this afternoon.”

  He drew a cigarette from a pack in his shirt pocket and lit up. The smoke drifted in the breeze. I didn’t like it, but all I said was, “You and your lung candy.” Huge numbers of people in show business smoke. We’re all supposed to be so into health and fitness, and we are, but we’re also obsessed with weight control, and the cigarettes help with that, plus we’re stressed out half the time, ditto.

  I said, “I am feeling upbeat.” I mused aloud about growing up pretty, and wanting to do the things smart people did, and Gramma Gladys, and how people used to value me for miming and pretending, and tell me I had instinct. “I don’t even know what instinct is, really.”

  Daniel listened quietly.

  I said, “When I got married, Jeff, who had known me since before I got hips if not breasts, told me I wasn’t smart enough to have any career but acting. He agreed with all of them. Instinct’s all you’ve got, baby.”

  “He said that?”

  “Yeah, and I believed him. And he was right, really. But I haven’t even been successful at that. I’ve been relying on unemployment and child support for way too long now.”

  “Supporting a child takes other than money.” He ashed his cigarette over the dirt.

  “Yeah. Lately Jeff’s been hostile when he comes to pick up Petey.”

  “Hostile how?”

  “Well, belligerent. I suspect he’s back to drinking, but I haven’t smelled it on him. Last weekend he said he’s thinking of challenging my custody because my income’s been so low.”

  “Oh, what a prick.”

  “He is the biggest prick in the world. He’s good at making me lose sleep. But you know what? I think—I hope—things are about to turn around for me.”

  I thought some more. “Seems like there are different kinds of intelligence. Maybe I’m not a genius. But I think I have a—a kind of emotional intelligence.”

  “You’re smarter than you think.” Daniel took a last hit from his cigarette, stubbed it out on the ground, then carried the butt over to a trash can. That’s L.A. for you.

  I wanted to be a success, and most of all I wanted to be a star. If I achieved that, I thought everything else would follow: a nice house, a college fund for Petey. Fame! Goddamn it, I wanted fame. I wanted love and support from audiences worldwide. I loved to hear applause, even the spattering of it around the set of a commercial when I flipped my hair and smiled in astonishment at my clean laundry. I loved to hear a director say, Good work, Rita. I loved the camaraderie of being in a cast. Frankly, I loved to show off.

  Chapter 8 – Society Mom Behind Bars

  One of the things they must teach very thoroughly in deputy school is door-slamming. Either that or it’s a huge part of on-the-job training: “Don’t turn the handle or knob, close the door, then release the handle or knob. This demonstrates weakness. Do pull the door firmly, creating maximum acceleration and, finally, full metal-to-metal contact between bolt and jamb. This demonstrates power and authority.”

  The sound of just one steel door slamming behind us as Gary and I walked through the jail to meet with Eileen Tenaway brought home the This Is It feeling of incarceration.

  The Century Regional Detention Facility sits just off the Century Freeway in one of those urban Gaza Strips where everything is bleak and mistrustful. The rents must be cheap for the scrap dealers and warehouses, then there’s this building that looks like a concrete shopping mall where they keep the accused and the convicted, and the freeway noise pounds over it like an endless hail of bullets.

  I had never been arrested and never visited anyone in jail, except for bailing out Jeff from the drunk tank in Green Bay once after we were engaged. (Talk about ignoring warning signs.) Television shows cannot convey the feeling of that sound of slamming prison doors. It’s like getting a soft blow to the sternum from a crowbar. Surround-sound movies do a better job, but nothing is the same as feeling the actual vibes when thick steel strikes thick steel. And we weren’t even on a cellblock.

  Technology is great, you know, what with cameras and electric locks (with their eerie zapping clicks) and super-tempered glass, but in the end there’s no substitute for brute solidity. In the days to come I would notice that other attorneys and outside people, who would be joking and laughing on the bright jacaranda-shaded plaza outside, stopped smiling as they passed into this building. Their voices, however, remained bluff in affirmation: I’m not staying here! May the grace of God keep me safe from a place like this.

  Gary had scored a special interview room, private except for a window in the door. He tossed down his leather briefcase. Same as everything else in the jail, the table and chairs were overbuilt and ugly, like Soviet furniture.

  The air smelled of disinfectant, sweat, and fear. Gary rubbed his eyes. It was early, barely seven o’clock, on the Tuesday after we’d met. We’d be permitted an hour to spend with Eileen, then go back to jury selection in court. This too was a special break: the other lawyers had to wait until nine-thirty to see their clients.

  As we waited for the female deputy to retrieve Eileen Te
naway, Gary said, “Now, you’ll have carte blanche with her, except for one ground rule.”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re not to ask her about the night of Gabriella’s death.”

  I dropped my hands.

  “She doesn’t want to discuss it.”

  “But Gary, how’m I supposed to—”

  “Rita, that’s it.” His voice was hard right then, and I realized I sort of liked it. I liked that he felt he could be tough on me.

  When she passed through the door, which was held by a deputy who couldn’t wait to slam it, Eileen squinted like a mole, and Gary said her name in a hearty voice.

  She was not shackled. The deputy watched from the window. “The officer can’t hear us unless we shout,” Gary said. Eileen shook Gary’s hand and turned to me, still squinting. Gary introduced us and I grasped her hand with as much warmth as I could, even though my heart was pounding and my hands clammy. The fluorescent light bounced around greenishly to illuminate every line in our faces, every scratch on the table, every grain of grit on the floor.

  Gary had spoken to her yesterday about me, he’d said, so I asked, “Are you into Gary’s plan, Eileen?”

  Ignoring me, she said to Gary, “I bet you forgot to bring what I asked you for, didn’t you?”

  He flipped open his briefcase. “No, I didn’t forget. Here it is.” He drew out a framed photograph, which I hadn’t noticed when the deputies were searching our stuff and us. “The studio still had the negatives,” he added.

  Jail time is a type of anti-cosmetic, I realized: a jail is an anti-spa. You go there and your looks coarsen, your body slackens. Eileen Tenaway had suffered its effects now for several months, and it showed. Yet she’d started with such a surplus of beauty, at age thirty-four and behind bars she was still caviar to most other women’s ground chuck.

  Eileen Tenaway took the photo from Gary and as she looked at it, I looked at her and thought about her public image. She’d always been more of an East Coast beauty than a West Coast one. You know, she dyed her hair blond, but not too light, and she wore it sleek and symmetrical, often in upswept knots. Her makeup had been more subtle than startling, her wardrobe more Beacon Hill than Beverly Hills, though that’s where the Tenaways lived. She’d had an expensive, understated look that actually drew more attention than if she’d been a Hollywood clone wife.