Mumbo Gumbo (8 page)

“We think we know what’s going on, Maddie, but we don’t all the time.”

That was for sure. Since I’d been working on
Food Freak,
I felt I didn’t really know what was going on most of the time.

Greta put her hand on my arm, kindly. “Sometimes it’s just a string of bad things, random and annoying, you know?” she suggested hopefully.

“I really hope you’re right,” I said. But we both had our doubts.

The producer of
Food Freak
walked me out of the little supply room and down the stairs into the now empty hallway outside our offices. Everyone on the staff had been eager to take advantage of their surprise day off. “I won’t let anything harm this show,” Greta said. “I’ve still got a few moves left.”

And so had I. I punched the last number into my cell phone and waited to hear Holly pick up the phone.

“Yo!” Holly’s husky voice came over the phone, breathless from whatever she was doing, whether it
was from step aerobics or chasing her kitten around her apartment, I couldn’t be sure. Ever since she had broken up with her boyfriend several months back, Holly had become a homebody.

“Are you able to meet me here, at the studio? Right now?” I asked. “You’ve got a command performance on the lot, if you want it. Nothing improper involved, just schlepping.”

“No way,” she squealed.

“Way. And while we’re cleaning up my new office, we’re going to be doing a little snooping around. Are you up for that?”

“Sure.”

“I have a feeling that just about nobody has been telling me the truth around here, Holly.”

“Big surprise,” she said. “Hey, Mad, this is, like,
it
, you know? The phone call. My big break. ‘Come down to the lot, Miss Nichols.’ And I’m all, like, ‘I’m ready for my close-up.’ ”

“Right. Cool, isn’t it? Oh, and don’t forget to bring a mop.”

W
hat a dump,” Holly said.

“Especially from that angle.” I looked down at her. Holly was on her hands and knees making neat piles of manila envelopes on the floor.

“From any angle,” she suggested. “But maybe it looks better when it’s straightened up.” Holly reacted to my doubtful expression. “Worse?”

“You wouldn’t think it was possible. I know.”

Holly Nichols sat and looked at me. As a creative soul, she often dressed as if to pay back her parents a hundredfold for sending her to a private girls’ school that required uniforms. Tonight was no exception. I smiled at what Holly had considered the right thing to wear for this occasion, an evening of playing janitor in a frumpy office on a closed television studio lot. Her long, lean legs were covered in snug, white silk capris slashed with lime-green stripes. Not many women could handle the illusion of width such a horizontal pattern projected across the posterior, but Holly Nichols, thin as a wisp, managed to look stunning, if offbeat. Her white crop top exposed a lovely midriff. She had kicked off her lime-green sandals and I noticed she was wearing several toe rings and a fresh
pedicure in matching lime. In this dazzling outfit, more suited, perhaps, for a disco party at some Palm Springs country club than housekeeping, Holly began straightening the books that were flopped all over the floor, their spines splayed, and placing them into neat piles. She sorted them quickly into stacks of cookbooks or trivia books or foreign phrase books. “It sounds like this missing Tim guy is the key to the whole thing.”

“Maybe.”

“Where did he go?”

I had asked myself the same question all week. “Maybe Las Vegas, but they’ve called all the hotels and he isn’t checked in anywhere.”

“Not under his own name,” Holly guessed.

“No one seems to know where he is. And since I have never met the guy, I can’t even guess.”

Holly sat back on her heels and took a break. “The fact that a guy is missing and his office has been trashed…”

“I know. I know.” There were just too many coincidences and secrets.

We looked at each other. Holly’s white-blond hair fell over her forehead in long straight bangs, while the rest had been caught up in the back at a jaunty angle in a sloppy topknot. “So what do you think is really going on with this missing dude?”

“He’s not technically missing. He’s just…well…
not here.
He could be on a two-week cruise to Mexico or holed up drunk as a skunk in some cheap motel in the desert. That’s what all his coworkers think. The one who is most upset is Artie Herman, who is just a sweet old guy.”

“The executive producer?”

“Right. He seems very concerned, but in a fatherlybossly kind of way.”

“I didn’t know you were going to be doing any undercover investigating here,” Holly continued, now on her knees handing me books. “Your trouble is, you don’t seem to be able to leave any puzzles alone. You are a problem solver, Maddie. It’s your gift and your curse.”

I bonked her on the topknot with the pamphlet on “Peas!” I was about to shelve. As we talked, I took each book she handed me and shelved it according to the simple organizational system Tim’s office library employed. All the cookbooks for any particular single subject were filed alphabetically by subject. I stuck the “Peas!” pamphlet and a thin volume offering
101 Simple Carrot Recipes
onto the low “Vegetables” shelf, and the book espousing the
He-Man’s All-Steak Diet
up on the “Meats” shelf.

“I’m not really getting too involved here,” I said. Denial is my friend. “I’m out of here in a week. I just want to be helpful. You know me.” After only a week in a foreign land, surrounded by aliens, I had already lost my bearings. How had I come to accept all the nonsense? Perhaps it was the pace at which everyone worked, and the intensity. It kept one dizzy enough to begin to doubt that up was up and down was down. “I’m so glad you are here,” I said, taking another book from Holly, this one about Asian cuisine. The “Foreign Food” section was against the far wall, and as I walked across the room in my stocking feet, I continued explaining the bizarre set of circumstances. “The truth is, Holly, the mess here probably has nothing to do with Tim Stock. I think it might be my fault that this room was broken into.”

“That’s dog poop! None of this is your fault, Mad,”
Holly said, sorting through the books she had collected from the debris. She held up another cookbook featuring international cuisine—this time Greek—and flung it, Frisbee style, across the room at me.

“Holly!” I caught it, and imagined the simultaneous flinches of every blessed librarian across the country as I snatched the book out of the air as gracefully as I could.

“Good catch,” my assistant commented, with a grin.

Despite her unorthodox library skills, Holly was making sense. I couldn’t believe how much more grounded I felt talking with someone who came from my own world. “Anyway,” I continued, “the big secret here is how paranoid game-show people behave when it comes to their clues and answers. They have this bunker mentality and seem to worry all the time that their game material might leak out.”

I had come back to stand next to Holly and her stack of books, the better to reduce the likelihood of any of them going airborne.

“And that’s why someone broke in here?” Holly asked. “To cheat on the game? Who would do such a thing?”

“The contestants on
Food Freak
can win half a mill,” I said.

Holly countered slowly, “But aren’t you even the teensiest bit suspicious that something else has gone wrong here, something bigger than a cheating contestant, and you and I might just be the dumb idiots brought in to cover up someone’s dirty work?”

“It would make me feel a lot better if I could talk to this Tim Stock. I wonder if I put my mind to it, if I could track him down.”

“Oh, dear…” Holly held up the little yellow sticky note she’d pulled off a mass of pens and notebooks in the corner behind the desk where someone had overturned all the desk drawers. The one that said “Heidi and Monica might have to die.”

I gave my assistant a stern look, which, thanks to several long years of practice, she quite easily ignored. “Oh my God, Maddie. Oh my God. Who are Heidi and Monica? Do they kill the contestants around here?”

“I don’t know who they are. That note could mean anything,” I said. “Don’t go overboard, okay? Tim Stock is a writer. This could be the premise of a new script idea. Everyone here is extremely dramatic.”

“Really?”

“I think that’s most likely a story idea, a little Post-it creativity.”

“Right,” Holly said, “I get it.”

“Wait.” I said. She was just about to discard the Post-it note. “Let’s keep this…just in case.”

“Just in case, huh?” Holly said, warming back up. “What do you really think? Is anyone around here acting weird?”

“Everyone acts weird here,” I said, sighing.

“List all the suspects,” Holly requested, getting comfortable.

“There’s this writer—Quentin Shore—and he’s the most aggravating, frustrated, silly person you’ve ever seen. But he’s not evil. He’s more like afraid of his own shadow. I used one classic four-letter word, and he just ran away.”

“Mad,” Holly said, looking up from straightening a loose-leaf folder of notes and clipped recipes labeled “How to Gumbo,” “you have already cussed at your new job?”

“I’m ashamed. They made me do it.”

“Man! I would have loved to hear that! You swore at some writer?”

I nodded sheepishly.

“Just once?”

“Okay. Twice.”

Holly hooted.

“But, honestly, he had it coming, Hol.”

“Don’t tell me. I know it. They
all
have it coming.”

“And Quentin is not the only Froot Loop out of the box. You would not believe Chef Howie.”

Holly looked upset, “Aw, schnitzel. Don’t tell me Howie Finkelberg’s a jerk. He’s so hot.”

“He’s okay, Holly. But he’s got this very strange wife. She’s completely nuts.”

“Really?”

“Her name is Fate. Fate Finkelberg.”

We just looked at each other. “Maybe,” Holly suggested, “that name alone pushed her over the edge.”

“And I have to admit…” I lowered my voice. “Even my old pal Greta has me worried at times.” Although the office door was closed, we were both aware that Greta was working late in her own office down the hall.

“Take my advice,” Holly said. “Trust no one.”

“Amen.”

Around us, patches of floor were now clear. We’d been at work for almost three hours, and the place was looking much better. Reams of disheveled papers had been picked up and placed in two industrial-size trash barrels. We had spent the first hour reading through most of the papers as we chucked stuff. The bulk of it was pages and pages of past scripts, which had come undone, the metal brads now scattered here
and there. Many sheets were folded. Pages from different past shows were mismatched and mixed up together. Greta had told me earlier that these extra copies of old, used scripts were not important to the show anymore. One set of back-up copies was kept by Susan Anderson, another set by Greta. Holly and I had neatly stacked the hundreds of stray pages in the trash bin. Often, we’d find a page with handwritten notes scribbled on it. I became accustomed to deciphering Tim Stock’s scrawl. On one page that featured a recipe, he’d written: “Tell H to make the garlic sexy.” On another, he’d written: “H can flirt with the eggplant.” Each show featured tidbits of information right before the first commercial. Often, Tim would write in corrections in his flowing peacock-blue fountain-pen ink, like, “Fix this! Should be 1, not 8 teaspoons!”

“Do you think anyone would mind if I took these?” Holly asked, her blue eyes lighting on the old mix-and-match script pages.

“Well…” I looked at the trash can, neatly stacked to the top with a season’s worth of jumbled show scripts. “Why not?” Greta said they were all worthless. They were scripts for shows that had already aired.

“Bonus!” Holly whispered, cheering to herself.

“But what will you do with them?”

“Sell them on eBay.” Holly had decided to support herself through our tough financial times by becoming an Internet entrepreneur, putting all sorts of odd items up for auction on-line. In this way, she off-loaded a thirty-seven-inch mirrored disco ball, a vintage Bakelite mah-jongg-tile bracelet, and two acrylic paintings she had created back in art school during an experimental
asparagus-stalks-as-paintbrushes period, and made over $300 in her first week as an eBay auctioneer.

“Be back in a jiffy,” she said. Holly put the last of the hardcover books into a pile on her left and sprang up from the floor. I’ve never felt short at five foot five, but when Holly stood, I had to look upward about five inches to make eye contact. And that was when she was barefoot.

“Where are you off to?” I asked.

“I’ll just take this junk out to my car.” She backed up, pulling the gray plastic trash barrel on its heavy-duty wheels, and carefully maneuvered it to the door between the tall piles of cookbooks.

“Okay. Come back soon,” I called. “Greta said she’d stop in and help us if she could.”

“Gotcha.” Holly pulled open the office door and was quickly through it and down the darkened hallway.

“You want me to go with you?” I called after her.

“Hell, no. I’m illegally parked in an executive’s parking space right near the door downstairs,” she called back. Her voice faded so that I almost didn’t catch her last line. “Who’s gonna bother me on a security-patrolled lot?”

Who indeed? Perhaps that was the most worrisome issue in today’s office break-in. Who had been able to penetrate studio security to get into this office during the middle of a busy workday? Of course, anyone who was already authorized to be on the lot could have done it. Anyone on the
Food Freak
staff or crew. And anyone who had been given a day pass, like the contestants who had been waiting to be taped before they were sent home.

I turned to dust off the top of Tim’s desk. There was
one last paper, a Xerox copy, to be dealt with. I picked it up and wondered where it should go. The trash? A file drawer? Tim had made a copy of a small packet of one of those old-fashioned berry-flavored drink mixes that kids used to like. Perhaps an errant piece of
Food Freak
reference material? I pulled open the now organized center desk drawer and placed it there. I’d figure it out later.

It was nice to see the desk so spotless, all the debris and papers finally cleared off. I had a feather duster and gave the old oak surface a quick brushing. But why, I wondered, would any contestant risk being caught in the head writer’s office? It would mean immediate disqualification from the game. And how would they know the office wasn’t occupied? It made no—

And that was the very last thought I had before the shocking flash and the vivid pain and the room tumbled inward suddenly and melted into black velvet.