Lullaby Town Read online

  "I never thought about living anyplace else."

  "Not you. Her."

  "I don't know."

  "Did she have any friends?"

  He pressed his lips together and made a shrug. "Yeah. I guess so." Thinking harder. Then, "I dunno. I was sort of into my own thing." Embarrassed that he didn't have an answer.

  I looked at Pat Kyle.

  Pat said, "Where was she born, Peter?"

  "Someplace in Arizona or New Mexico. Phoenix, maybe." He frowned. "We never talked about stuff like that."

  "Okay."

  "Why don't you ask me something I know?"

  "Okay. What do you know?"

  He thought for a while. "About Karen?"

  "Yeah."

  "I don't know."

  I said, "How did you meet? Did she belong to any clubs or organizations? Did she have brothers or sisters or aunts or uncles or cousins or grandparents?" I figured if I listed enough stuff I would get lucky somewhere.

  He said, "I've got an older sister. She's married to a fat guy lives in Cleveland." Everything was I.

  "Great. But that's about you. What about Karen?"

  "Oh." Oh. Then, "I think she was an only child. I think her people were dead."

  "But you don't know."

  "They were dead." We walked along a little more, thinking about it. He said, "Maybe she was from Colorado."

  We went through a pair of twenty-six-foot doors and into a battleship-gray soundstage that was being rebuilt to resemble the interior of a Mayan ziggurat. The doors were open to let in the air and the light. Above and around us dozens of men and women in shorts and T-shirts clung like spiders to scaffolding as they attached vacu-formed plastic panels to a wooden frame. The panels had been cast to look like great stone blocks. There were the sounds of hammers and saws and screwguns and the smell of plastic cement and paint, and somewhere a woman laughed. It was warming as the day wore on, and some of the men had their shirts off.

  A heavy man with a Vandyke beard and a roll of architectural plans noticed Peter and started toward us. Peter frowned and said, "Nick, T.J., gimme some space here, huh?"

  Nick gestured toward the beard and T.J. went over and intercepted him. Blocking backs.

  We turned left past a couple of guys building something that looked like a sacrificial altar and squeezed between two backdrop flats and over a tangle of electrical cables into a little clearing that had been set up as a sort of office with a desk and a phone and a coffee machine. There was another Webcor candy machine next to the desk. Peter slammed it with his elbow and a PayDay candy bar dropped out. Dani said, "Peter has a candy machine like this on all of his sets. It's part of his contract." She said it like a press release.

  Peter said, "Go find Langston, willya, Dani? Tell'm we're hiding back here and ready to rock."

  Dani squeezed back between the flats and disappeared into the darkness. Nick hung back behind the flats, still not liking me.

  Peter said, "Man, I can't take a shit, the pogues aren't after me about something. That's why we gotta hide." He tore the wrapper off the candy, stuffed most of the bar into his mouth, and dropped the wrapper onto the floor. I wondered how often he brushed.

  I said, "Tell me how you met."

  "I was at USC when I met her. I was casting a film and put up flyers for actors and Karen called for a reading. It was a ripoff of those biker flicks in the sixties. Eighteen minutes, synced sound, black and white. You wanna see it?"

  "Is Karen in it?"

  "No. I didn't give her the part."

  "Then I don't need to see it."

  "I made an audition tape for her. I couldn't find it, but I got the outtake tape. It was a long time ago, so it's Beta format, but I brought it into the office. We can probably dig out a machine if you wanna see. I did a pretty good job with her." More of the I's. I met. I married. I lived. Maybe Karen Shipley wasn't real. Maybe, like Pinocchio, she was a wooden puppet he had brought to life.

  "What's an audition tape?"

  Pat said, "It's a way for an actor to introduce herself to casting agents. The actor tells you about herself and maybe reads a scene. Peter would've shot a lot more tape than Karen would need, then edited it down to three or four minutes. The outtake tape will be the takes they didn't use in the final product."

  Peter nodded and said something, but his mouth was full of candy again, and I didn't understand what he said.

  I said, "I'll want to look at it. Do you have a still picture?"

  He swallowed the wad of chocolate and peanuts and shook his head.

  Pat Kyle opened her briefcase and handed me a black-and-white 8 X 10 head shot of a pretty young woman with dark hair and eyes that would be either green or hazel. "I phoned a friend at SAG and he came up with this." The woman in the photograph was made up as a waitress with a fluffy apron and cap and a bright the-lemon-pie-is-very-nice-today! smile. She didn't look convincing. KAREN SHIPLEY was spelled out in block letters along a white border at the bottom of the picture.

  I said, "Pretty. Your friend at SAG say if Karen had an agent?"

  Pat opened her briefcase again and took out an envelope large enough for the 8 X 10. "A guy named Oscar Curtiss, with two esses. He's got an office over here, just off Las Palmas. His address is in the envelope."

  Peter came around next to me and looked at the 8 X 10. "Jesus, I remember this." He gestured at Karen's face. "Nothing unique about the quality. See the nose, it's a little too ordinary. See the mouth, maybe it needs to be fuller." Peter the director. "She had these made before we met. I said Christ, what do you want to look like a dopey waitress for? She said she thought it was cute. I said what a fucking waste." He stared at the picture a little more, then looked at Pat Kyle. "Can you get me one of these?"

  Pat said, "Sure."

  Peter looked back at the picture, and maybe there was something soft in his face, something less antic and less onstage. "She got pregnant right away and then there was the kid and I just wasn't into the family scene. I was scrambling from job to job, trying to get a toehold, and she's talking about Huggies. I busted out of film school. It was crazy. So I said, look, this isn't my thing, I don't wanna be married anymore, and she didn't fight it. I don't think I've seen her or the boy since the day we signed the papers. A little while after that Chainsaw came along and things happened fast." He spread the big hands, looking for a way to say it. "I got larger."

  I said, "Did Karen work, or was she just a wannabe?"

  Pat said, "Quite a bit of extra work and a couple of walk-ons. The sort of thing you get when all they need is a pretty face in the background."

  "Where do they send the residuals?"

  "She's got four hundred sixty-eight dollars and seventy-two cents waiting for her for some work she did on Adam 12. Neither SAG nor the Extras Guild knows where to send it."

  Peter brightened and went back to the candy machine. He slammed it with his elbow and pulled out an Almond Joy. Another wrapper on the floor. "I remember that gig. I went to the set with her and tried to talk the producer into giving me an episode to direct. The guy gives me the bum's rush. That TV prick. A lousy episodic producer and he's telling me I can't hack an Adam 12, he's saying that what they do is 'highly stylized.' Man, I ain't thought about that prick in years." It was as if relating something of his to something of hers, he could remember it.

  Dani came back between the flats with a fat guy in an argyle sweater. Peter said, "That's Langston. He's my cameraman. I gotta talk to him about a shot move we're designing through the pyramid set. Is there anything else you wanna know about me?"

  "Karen. We were talking about Karen."

  He looked annoyed. 'That's what I meant. Look, I gotta go. If you want anything, it's yours. Use my name. This town, it's like saying open sesame."

  "Ali Baba."

  He smiled. "Yeah. Just like Ali Baba."

  He walked over to Langston.

  Pat said, "Well?"

  I shook my head. "He knows about him, but he doesn't know a
bout her. How long were they married?"

  "Fourteen months."

  I shook my head some more. You do that a lot in this business.

  Pat and I went past the electrical cables and between the flats and toward the big doors. We were most of the way there when Peter Alan Nelsen yelled, "Hey, Cole."

  I turned around. Peter was up on one of the framing catwalks, grinning at me. Dani was with him and the fat guy Langston, and a couple of other people who probably had to do with the construction rather than the design. He said, "I'm glad you're on this for me. I like your style." He tossed down a Mars bar. Maybe there was another candy machine up on the ceiling. "Me and you," he said, "I think we're two of a kind. You're my kind of guy."

  I thought about ripping off the candy wrapper and dropping it on the ground, but decided that that would be small. I bit through the paper instead.

  Peter smiled wider and said, "Man, you are wild."

  Pat Kyle shook her head.

  We walked out through the big doors and into the light. The paper tasted terrible. If Daryl Hannah was watching, I hope she was impressed.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Pat Kyle and I walked back to the Kapstone offices where someone had set up a Sony Betamax VCR along with several yellow legal pads and sharpened pencils for the taking of notes. There was a check for four thousand dollars in an envelope taped to a Beta cassette on top of the VCR, along with a fresh pot of coffee on a side table with a tray of bagels and cream cheese and lox and sliced tomatoes and red onions. Pat said, "Would you like company?"

  "Sure."

  Pat turned on the machine and inserted the cassette and we watched as nineteen-year-old Karen Shipley Nelsen walked into an empty room and stood next to a stool. She wasn't made up like the waitress now. Now she was wearing faded jeans and an airy white top and red boots and she looked tanned and outdoorsy. The brown hair was cut in a sort of fluffy shag and the eyes were hazel. No makeup.

  She looked at someone behind the camera and said, "What do you want me to do?" The sound coming out of the television was hollow and sort of tinny. Even with that her voice was light and girlish. She giggled.

  Peter Nelsen's voice came from where she looked. "Give us the left and the right and the back. Try not to giggle."

  She showed her left profile, and then her back, and then her right. She said it as she did it, and when she moved she sort of squiggled and swayed and bounced, the way fifteen-year-old girls do when they're acting grown-up and people are watching. 'This is my left side, and this is my back, and this is my right." And then she giggled. "Hee hee hee."

  Pat Kyle said, "Oh, God."

  "She's not impressing you with her talents?"

  Pat smiled sympathetically. "I get tapes like this every week. Young women and young men come into my office and read for me, and they want you to like them so badly that you can feel them ache, but they aren't any better than this and they never will be any better than this."

  "Then you suspect she has not pursued acting as a vocation?"

  She made an I-hope-not shrug.

  The shot changed abruptly into a tight close-up. Closer, Karen's eyes showed an absence of line or character. She was talking about herself and trying to look serious. "… think my strengths lie in comedy, but I can also do drama. I think I'd make a really good ingénue."

  Peter's voice cut in sharply. "You sound like an idiot in a malt shop, 'really good ingénue.' If you're an ingénue, just say it. Say 'I'm a perfect ingénue."'

  Karen looked unhappy and said, "Oh, Peter, do I havta?" When she addressed Peter, she looked off camera. When she was acting, she looked directly out of the screen.

  Peter's voice said, "Why am I wasting my fucking time?"

  Karen looked unhappy some more, then made a little smile and stared back into the lens and made herself serious and said it. Then she giggled.

  It went on like that, cutting from bit to bit. Most of the bits were just fragments, five seconds of this, eight seconds of that, and many of them were repetitious. Peter would ask her a question or tell her to do something and she would answer or do it. There was something hopeful and naive to her manner, maybe because she was nineteen. She tried hard even when she looked unhappy.

  My stomach grumbled and I kept looking at the lox and bagels. I had to keep reminding myself that lunch at Lucy's was only moments away.

  At one point, Peter walked into the picture and handed her a couple of script pages. He was wearing an orange Marine Corps T-shirt with a couple of stains on the back. They wouldn't take me because of this hip thing. He was young and skinny and built exactly as he was now, all wide butt and coat-hanger shoulders and intense eyes. His hair stuck out in a tremendous natural that, within the small confines of the TV monitor, seemed to be a full three feet across. Karen cleared her throat and read the speech from Rocky that Talia Shire says to Sylvester Stallone to give him the courage to go on. She didn't read it well. She giggled when she finished and asked Peter if that was okay. He said no.

  The tape lasted twenty-two minutes. Karen Shipley never once mentioned her family or her friends or her hometown. She giggled sixty-three times. I counted. Giggling is not one of my favorite things.

  When the tape ended, Pat Kyle turned off the monitor and we went to lunch. Kapstone Pictures paid.

  One hour and ten minutes later, full of pork burrito and Dos Equis beer, Pat Kyle resumed work and so did I.

  Las Palmas above Santa Monica Boulevard is a community of flat, faceless costume-rental shops and film-editing outfits and little single-story houses with signs that said things like flotation therapy. Women in flowered tops pushed baby carriages and men who looked like they wanted day work stood outside little markets and kids on skateboards practiced jumping curbs.

  I stopped in a 7-Eleven on Fountain just past La Brea, bought two dollars' worth of quarters, and ran outside to beat two fat guys to the pay phone on the side of the building. One of the fat guys was in a hurry and the other wasn't. The one who was in the hurry made a face like he had bowel trouble and said Ah, shit, when I got to the phone first. The one who wasn't leaned against the grill of a white window-repair truck and sipped at a Miller High Life. Did Mike Hammer use a 7-Eleven as an office?

  I fed in a quarter and called a woman I know who works for the phone company and asked her if they had a listed or unlisted number for either Karen Shipley or Karen Nelsen anywhere within the state of California. She said she would have to get back to me, but it probably wouldn't be before tomorrow. I asked if she needed my number. She laughed and told me she's had my number for years. It's something I've been told before.

  When I hung up, the fat guy in the hurry started forward. When I fed in another quarter, he raised his hands, rolled his eyes, and went back to the truck. Guess it wasn't a good day. His friend had a little more of the Miller and belched. When he belched, he covered his mouth with two fingers and said excuse me. Polite.

  I called another woman I know who works the credit-verification department at Bank of America and asked if she would run a credit check on both Karen Shipley and Karen Nelsen, those names being either primary account names or maiden names listed to another unknown name. She said she would if I took her to a Lakers game. I told her to think of something else because I was going to take her to a Lakers game anyway. She made a little swooning sound, told me she'd get back to me tomorrow, and hung up. Some charmer, huh?

  The fat guy was leaning past his truck like Carl Lewis set to come out of the starter's blocks, glaring at me. I showed him another quarter and fed it into the phone. His face went white, he slapped the fender of the truck, and then stormed the long way around the truck and into the 7-Eleven. His friend sipped a little more Miller and shook his head. "He's asking for a thrombo."

  I said, "Get him into yoga. That'll help him relax."

  The friend shook his head, looking sort of sleepy and tired, and made a little shrug like they'd been through it a thousand times. "You can't talk to him."

  I di
aled the North Hollywood P.D. and got a gruff male voice that said, "Detectives."

  "Elvis Cole for Lou Poitras."

  "Wait one."

  The phone got put down on something hard. There were voices in the background and the heavy laughter of men, and then the voice came back. "I'm putting you on hold. He's gonna take it in his office."

  I got put on hold, then Lou Poitras came on. The laughter and the male sounds were still there, but now they were muted and farther away. Poitras said, "I got my ass chewed good for trying to fix your last ticket. Don't ask me again."

  "Lou. One might think that our entire relationship is me asking favors of you."

  "So what do you want?"

  "A small favor."

  "Shit."

  The fat guy in the hurry came out of the 7-Eleven with a Miller High Life of his own. He leaned against the truck next to his fat friend and looked tired. They drank. If you can't beat'm, join'm.

  I said, "I need to know if you have anything on a woman named Karen Shipley or Karen Nelsen. And I need you to go back ten years on the search."

  Lou Poitras said, "Anything else?"

  I said that should do it.

  "You at the office?"

  I told him where I was.

  You could see him shake his head. "Some big-time private op, working in a parking lot."

  "Beats sucking off the taxpayers."

  He said he'd get back to me tomorrow and hung up.

  Everybody was going to get back to me tomorrow. Maybe there was something going on today that I didn't know about. Maybe that's why the fat guy was in such a hurry. Maybe he knew who to call to find out where the action was, and upon making the call, he and his buddy were going to whatever it was that I didn't know about. Maybe I could go with them.

  I hung up the phone, looked at the fat guy in the hurry, and said, "It's all yours."

  He sipped more Miller and didn't move, giving me who cares? His friend looked at him, then me, and shrugged. Go figure. Some guys are never happy.

  CHAPTER FIVE