Killer Ratings: A Susan Kaplan Mystery Page 4

  Gradually, the rest of the staff made its weary way out the door, stopping first to commiserate with Peggy, who was probably looking at an all-nighter. Ray, leaving earlier than usual, told her to e-mail him the changes before giving them to Gail. Sandy was supposed to e-mail Rebecca’s promotion memo to everyone after Ray left. She told me he planned to let all messages go to voicemail.

  Ignorant of the bomb waiting to explode, Charles left soon after Ray, giving Peggy an ironic smile.

  “Cheer up,” he said, “Think of all the money you’re making.”

  Zack North, the other writer-producer, exited his office, briefcase in hand, looking preppie in a Ralph Lauren polo shirt, pressed jeans, and loafers. Peggy had left her own office to hand me more rewrites she had printed out and marked-up to plug into my document, and he put down his briefcase and began giving her a shoulder massage. She closed her eyes and rotated her head in pleasure.

  Zack finished his massage. “Better?”

  “Much,” she said. “Thanks.”

  “Anytime.” With a quick goodnight to me, he was off.

  Peggy stared after Zack in yearning. I couldn’t say as I blamed her. Although he wasn’t good-looking in the conventional sense, being on the short side with thinning brown hair and hazel eyes, Zack, in his mid-thirties, had a killer grin. It was boyish and charming and promised fun days at the beach and romantic picnics in the park. I wondered with some envy whether Peggy had ever been a recipient of that grin’s promise. Judging from the soft look in her eyes, I guessed she had.

  However, she wasn’t the only one. After I printed out the script changes, I crossed to the copy machine in the hall, next to the front entrance of the warehouse. The door was propped open to let in some of the cool October night air, and I as fed the pages into the copier, I heard a familiar bubble of soft, throaty laughter.

  I moved to the door. In the graveled parking lot, next to her Cadillac Escalade, stood Rebecca. Bathed in the yellow glow of a nearby street lamp she lifted a cigarette to her lips. I saw a tiny orange flame as the cigarette lighter flicked open. Rebecca bent toward the flame, her eyes meeting those of the person lighting her cigarette. The man was Zack North.

  Rebecca took a deep drag, then theatrically expelled the smoke off to one side. Zack handed her back the lighter, said something to her, and she laughed again. Her slim throat gleamed in the moonlight. Zack cupped a hand to her face and kissed her. Apparently, kissing a woman who had just filled her mouth with tar and nicotine didn’t bother him in the least. The kiss looked like it might last for a while. I quietly removed the prop wedged under the door before closing it behind me.

  I wanted to pound the copy machine in anger, feeling betrayed on Peggy’s behalf. But should I be surprised? Just because Peggy had a thing for Zack, it didn’t mean Zack had to reciprocate. Right? And why not kiss Rebecca, who was an extremely attractive woman. Despite her animosity toward Sandy, Jennifer, and me, she clearly had another side, a sexual side that Zack obviously found appealing.

  But still, I hurt for Peggy and was unable to look her in the eye when I handed her the completed changes. At home I took a long, hot shower, trying to scrub away the memory of Rebecca’s sexy laugh, Zack’s killer grin, and Peggy’s look of unrequited longing.

  Unfortunately, I did not succeed, and the images haunted me as I tossed and turned in my lumpy studio bed throughout that endless night.

  4.

  A week before my twenty-fifth birthday, I had walked in on my law student boyfriend, Peter Williams, in bed with his fellow classmate, Casey Bitterman, in the apartment Peter and I shared, underneath the quilt my grandmother had made for me as a college graduation present. Before the first explanations or recriminations could be uttered, I whipped Grandmom’s quilt off their naked bodies, leaving Casey Bitterman frantically trying to cover her breasts and Peter looking embarrassed—not because I caught him in flagrante delecto, but because I was in full view of his quickly deflating, condom-covered you-know-what. (A tumescent, throbbing flower of manhood, it wasn’t.) Bundling the quilt under my arm, I had stared at both of them for a silent, judgmental heartbeat before throwing them both out of the apartment and forcing the naked Casey to retrieve her clothes in the hallway.

  A few weeks later, I defended my thesis and, accompanied by my mom, took the next plane west without waiting to hear whether I had passed my orals. (I had.) Long hours, hard work, and low pay at my series of temp jobs helped push the memory of Peter and Casey Bitterman to the back of my mind. At least until I caught Zack North kissing Rebecca in the parking lot of Babbitt & Brooks’s warehouse, knowing an unwitting Peggy was crushing on him inside her office.

  As the images of Peter and Casey collided with those of Zack and Rebecca, stealing my sleep and peace of mind, I finally threw back the covers at six a.m. I needed to distract myself with work. If I still had work with which to distract myself. Realizing that it was Rebecca’s first day as co-producer, I decided to alleviate my own guilt for wanting to hurt her by fulfilling one of the conditions of my new job description given to me by her: cleaning up the mess she had left behind in her office the night before.

  Once I arrived at the office, I straightened her desk and washed out her coffee mug, letting my memories slide down the bathroom sink along with the used coffee grounds. I found a stray check made out to a Michael Keller among the pile of production reports, revised script pages, and pink telephone message slips, and clipped it to her desk calendar to remind her to send it out. Several bottles of vodka, empty and full, were stashed in the credenza behind her desk. I debated tossing the empties into the glass recycling bin for the rest of the staff to see. But I decided my job was more important than one brief, smug moment of humiliating Rebecca. I slid the panel shut, leaving the bottles untouched.

  I also found my script. It sat on Rebecca’s desk, with a narrow, white buck slip paper-clipped to the title page. The buck slip had the blue-scripted Babbitt & Brooks logo on top and Raymond Goldfarb, printed in small, red letters on the bottom. In his looping, careless scrawl, Ray had asked Rebecca to read the script and give him her thoughts.

  I remembered the look of vulnerability in her eyes when she learned my script had already been given to Charles. From the little I knew of Rebecca, I doubted support for one’s assistant was high on her list of virtues. I picked up the script, ready to lock it in my desk drawer, and let Rebecca think she had lost it.

  Looking down, I noticed her center desk drawer, and remembered Rebecca’s guilty glance at it when I had suggested she had received a prior death threat. Just a quick peek, I promised myself, and then I’d leave. I slid the drawer open gently, almost reverently.

  Inside: another death threat. I was right, although I didn’t feel like gloating. I didn’t want to read it, but couldn’t not read it, like rubbernecking an accident on the freeway. I looked at the note out of the corner of my eye, as if that would somehow make it less threatening.

  The same white-bond stationery. The same pasted-on newspaper headlines. One letter was creepy enough but two were downright chilling. Even though the threats weren’t directed at me, I felt a coldness in the pit of my stomach, suddenly convinced the sender was in the room with me.

  I quickly looked up and saw Sherman O’Dell staring at me from Rebecca’s doorway. I took a step backward, my breath drawn in so suddenly, it clogged in my throat, and I was unable to scream.

  “Hey, Susan, you okay?”

  I found my voice. “Sherman, you scared me.”

  “Sorry.” He smiled apologetically, shifting the plunger he held from his right hand to left. Sherman was the production’s nightwatchman/janitor. “I was just surprised to see you here. You’re an early bird today.”

  “New job description,” I said. I laughed shakily, still not recovered from my double scare. “Rebecca’s maid.”

  Sherman nodded in understanding, his long, black dreadlocks bobbing at his shoulders. “It’s just that you looked like you’d seen a ghost. And Lord knows no
one’s mistakin’ me for a dead white guy.”

  I smiled in spite of myself and picked up the second death threat, walking it over to him. Sherman read it, his angular face creased in concentration. He was only in his late twenties, but his ebony skin typically folded into dozens of lines around his mouth and eyes when he smiled. He wasn’t smiling now.

  “It’s the second one,” I said after he finished and handed the letter back to me. He rubbed a bony hand against his white T-shirt. The late, great reggae singer Bob Marley graced its front. “Rebecca thinks I’m sending them to her.”

  Sherman snorted in disbelief, which made me glad.

  “Do you have any idea who could’ve sent it?” I asked.

  “Pick a number and stand in line,” he said. “The woman is one large ball of misery. And she needs to share the pain.” I wondered what she did to Sherman to make him come to that observation, true as it was. But I didn’t have the nerve to ask. He began to move into the bullpen, seemingly as unconcerned about the threats as Charles was. But I was concerned—and scared—and, needing his reassuring presence, I said, hoping to stop him, “Rebecca’s being promoted to co-producer. Starting today.”

  Sherman paused. Like Patrick, he wore the keys to the warehouse attached to his belt loop. But, unlike Patrick, who only carried those to the production offices and sets, Sherman had the whole schmear: a thick bundle of keys to every door in the building. They clanked heavily together at his sudden stop. His chocolaty eyes looked thoughtful.

  “Is that what you folks in the biz call ‘failing upwards’?”

  I smiled at the term. “I hadn’t thought of it like that. Next time someone asks me why television is so bad, I can tell them it’s because all the incompetent people are failing upwards.”

  “Yeah. You think if I start missing notes on my sax, club managers will start hiring my band for more gigs?”

  As Jennifer said, everyone wanted to be something else. Sherman played tenor sax in a struggling rhythm and blues band.

  I shook my head. “If the news of Rebecca’s promotion had already gone out, I’d think someone was sending her the threats out of spite. But obviously someone hates her without even knowing she’s being promoted.”

  Sherman said, “You know there are no such things as secrets in this town. Maybe word of her promotion already leaked. Who knows about it here?”

  “Sandy, Jennifer, and me. And of course Ray. And Patrick. But I don’t know when she got the first letter. It could have been before Ray even decided to promote her.” Something was bothering me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. “Anyway, it wasn’t Sandy.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because it just wasn’t.” I sounded irritable. I looked up at him to see he was smiling at me, teasing. “You’re jerking my chain, aren’t you?”

  “Maybe.” He continued to smile at me. Fondly. Like big brother to little sister. It made me squirm. I already had a brother, thank you very much, and I wasn’t looking for another one.

  “You don’t seem to be taking this very seriously,” I told him.

  “Far as I’m concerned Rebecca, deserves everything she gets. If this makes her lose a night’s sleep, more power to the sender.” He saluted me with the plunger before sauntering down the writers’ corridor, turning the corner, and disappearing from view.

  I watched him go, once again wondering what had happened between him and Rebecca that made him dislike her so much. I realized I was still holding the letter and turned around toward Rebecca’s office to put it back on her desk.

  But just as I was about to enter, the front door opened, and Rebecca appeared. Since this was Promotion Day, I expected to see a smug smile, triumphant eyes, maybe even a huge frosted cake with “Congratulations to Me” inked on top in cherry frosting. But her lips looked dry and cracked, dark Jackie O glasses covered her eyes, and instead of a cake she clutched a cigarette. She stumbled into her office and slammed the door behind her so hard the plywood walls vibrated. I decided not to return the letter. In her mood, she would call the police, and have me in cuffs and thrown in county jail before I could scream, “I’m innocent!” I put the note in a folder in my desk, instead, deciding to replace it later, when she wasn’t in the office.

  I was aware of its presence all morning, feeling as if it was burning a hole in my desk. I showed it to Jennifer as soon as she walked in.

  “I was right,” I said. “She had received another threat. I found it in her desk.”

  “If I were you, I’d throw it out,” said Jennifer. “Burn it even.”

  “You don’t think I should give it back to her?”

  Jennifer shrugged. “How badly do you need this job?”

  Before I could answer, Peggy, Zack, and Charles entered the bullpen. I put the note back in my desk, reluctant to show it to them behind Rebecca’s back. As they entered Ray’s office, I suddenly remembered I had forgotten to take my Dress Blue script from Rebecca’s desk. What did she plan to do about it? Was she reading it even as I gnashed my teeth? The cockeyed optimist in me hoped she would overcome her prejudices and read the script on its own merits. But the resident pessimist in me laughed in scorn.

  I surfaced from my fog of worry to realize that the writing staff seemed to have taken Rebecca’s promotion surprisingly well.

  They had arrived to work with their usual cheery “Good mornings;” there were no fireworks, no angry debates in Ray’s office, no Rebecca looking superior. Something was up.

  I found Sandy in her office and asked what was going on. She placed some folders in a file drawer and shut it with a bang.

  “Ray called me from his car last night. He told me not to send the e-mail.” Her eyes didn’t meet mine.

  “I don’t get it. It seemed like such a sure thing. And half the staff already knew about it. What made him change his mind?”

  Sandy looked annoyed. “I don’t know, Susan. Maybe Cliff Rosen told him to hold off. Cliff wasn’t all that crazy about Ray promoting her to associate producer.”

  Cliff Rosen was the president of Romulus Television and Ray’s boss.

  “Why not?”

  “Because she’s not qualified. She was Ray’s assistant.”

  “I’m an assistant. Does that mean I’m not qualified to become a staff writer?”

  Sandy waved her hand impatiently. “That’s different.”

  I opened my mouth to ask another question but she jerked her thumb toward the wall that separated her office from Ray’s. “This is not a good time to talk about it.”

  But I had a funny feeling she was only using the thin walls as an excuse not to talk about the memo at all. I debated telling her about the other death threat, but she seemed eager to have me leave, so I left without saying another word.

  I told Jennifer what Sandy had related to me. Jennifer listened intently, tapping one pointed nail against her teeth. “Just because Ray changed his mind now, doesn’t mean he won’t change it again later,” she said when I finished.

  “Are you still going to talk to Charles about it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Let’s see how things shake out. If Rebecca still thinks she can lord it over me, I will. But I’d just as soon not stir things up. At least not yet. But I am glad she’s not getting the promotion.”

  I was glad, too. If Rebecca read my script, there was no way she would treat it fairly now that she was denied her own writing assignment. I was right. Charles called me into his office that afternoon. “I just heard from Ray about your script,” he said. “I’m sorry, Susan, he didn’t like it as much as I did.”

  A cannonball of lead dropped into my stomach even though I knew I shouldn’t be surprised. I stood rooted to the cheap green carpeting and nodded dumbly.

  “He didn’t believe in the characters,” Charles said. “I don’t think he likes Dress Blue very much if that’s any help. Maybe because they won the Emmy over us.”

  I worked up the nerve to ask, “Did he read it? Or was that Rebecca’s opinion?�
�

  There was a pause then Charles spoke, sounding very tired and very sad. “Let’s not get into that. I honestly don’t know. I’m sorry.”

  I nodded again. “Thanks anyway,” I managed to choke out before exiting his office and heading for the front door. As I passed the closed door to Rebecca’s office I was tempted to flip her the finger but really, what would be the point? She hadn’t gotten her promotion and so took her anger out on me and my script. I had worried success wouldn’t be that easy to attain and I was right. But it still didn’t make me feel any better.

  Once outside, I paused as I noticed Jennifer turning away from the dumpster on the other end of the parking lot. I stood back from the door, not wanting her to see me, but she trotted up the ramp in the middle of the warehouse and entered the large barnlike double doors without looking in my direction. As soon as she disappeared inside, I headed toward my car.

  I sat in my 2005 Honda Civic, window rolled down, gulping drafts of warm, polluted air that smelled faintly of tar. I popped in a DVD of Abba’s greatest hits and closed my eyes, blocking out the sight of the peeling facade of the warehouse, while practicing my Emmy acceptance speech. With the pulsing beat of “Waterloo” pounding through me, I thanked Rebecca for her lack of belief in me, which had only served to motivate me to keep going despite the odds. Rebecca sat in the audience looking humbled and ashamed, and eighty pounds overweight.

  Feeling much calmer, I opened my eyes and smiled. Success really is the best revenge.

  5.

  When I returned to the bullpen, Charles stood at Jennifer’s desk, talking into the phone. He did not look happy. Jennifer was nowhere in sight.

  “Let me explain it to you this way,” he started to say, but the person on the other end cut him off. “Uh-huh,” he said instead, listening impatiently. And again, “Uh-huh.”

  Charles glanced at me in irritation, and it took me a second to realize he wasn’t annoyed at me but with whomever he was speaking.