Murder With Sarcastic Intent (5 page)

“Maybe I’m not an American porn actress,” Mary said. “You know, maybe I was European.” She snapped her fingers. “Wait, I’ve got it—I
was
an Italian porn star, but now I’m in America, looking to produce a porno film here. You know, breaking into the industry. And I’m looking for fresh talent to star in my new film.” Mary clapped her hands together. “It’s perfect.”

“I don’t know, sounds a bit thin,” Alice said.

“No, it’s dead-on. But I think I might need someone else,” Mary said. “If I’m an actress turned producer, I need a director. I think it would be more believable if I had a director with me.” Mary glanced at Alice.

“You wouldn’t work,” Mary said.

“Why the hell not?” Alice said.

“Jesus Christ, you look like an overgrown Girl Scout,” Mary said. “Maybe if I told them you were in charge of baking muffins for the porn stars between takes.”

“Don’t give me that,” Alice said. “I’ve got Hollywood harlot written all over me.”

“No, I need someone totally sleazy,” Mary said. “Someone that doesn’t have to act too hard to come across as being completely without morals. Someone totally inappropriate. With absolutely no shame.”

Mary lifted her eyes for a moment. Then she glanced over at Alice. They locked onto each for the briefest of moments, then both spoke at once.

“Kurt.”

Ten

Mary and Alice sat at the back of the Calabasas City Fair’s main stage. Calabasas was northwest of Los Angeles proper, near Topanga Canyon, and it had taken them quite awhile to get through traffic.

Now, Mary sat and looked around. There were forty steel folding chairs, approximately thirty-five of which were empty. The faint smell of livestock hung in the air, along with the sickly sweet smell of fair food, tinged with deep-fried everything.

Kurt Cooper, Mary’s uncle and Alice’s brother, was on the stage. He was younger than Alice, but looked about ten years her senior. He wore jeans, tennis shoes, a T-shirt, and a shabby sportcoat—probably the only one he owned, Mary surmised. She’d never seen him wear a different one on stage.

“I don’t want to say last night’s audience was old,” he told the audience, “but when the ladies got all turned on by my act, instead of panties they threw their Depends on stage.”

One of the audience members—Mary guessed he was one of the ride operators on break—started snoring.

“How much does he make for something like this?” Mary said to Alice.

“Whatever it is, they’re paying him too much.”

Mary heard someone scream. Probably trapped on the Ferris wheel. The entire audience of five people turned toward the commotion, but Kurt Cooper was not about to lose his audience.

“But don’t get me wrong,” Kurt said. “There are some pretty hot females here. Unfortunately, they’re all down in the livestock barn. You don’t even have to buy them dinner and drinks. Just give ‘em a blue ribbon, and they’re yours for the night.”

“Oh dear,” Mary said.

“Check out the guy with the cotton candy,” Alice said. Mary spotted the audience member, clearly stoned, poking the pink cotton candy as if it was some kind of science experiment.

“Isn’t that—” Mary started to say.

“Jason.”

Jason Cooper, Kurt’s son and Mary’s cousin, was in his early twenties, and Mary noticed that whenever she bumped into him, he was usually encased in a marijuana cloud.

“Jason,” Alice whispered at him.

Mary looked at her. “Yeah, whisper … wouldn’t want to throw off Kurt’s act.”

Mary’s cousin stood and walked over to them, a tall, gangly young man with curly hair and stooped shoulders. He sat in the chair next to her. The scent of pot followed him.

“Hey,” he said. Mary looked at him. He wasn’t actually a bad-looking guy, she thought. Kurt’s brother, Brent, who’d been murdered the year before, had always been a ladies’ man. Jason had luckily taken after him, not his father.

“How’s the cotton candy?” Mary said.

“It’s so pretty,” Jason said.

Alice reached out, tore half of it off the stick, and shoved it into her mouth.

Jason looked at her, aghast. His lip started to tremble.

“It’s okay, Jason. I’ll buy you another one. Maybe even win you a stuffed polar bear,” Mary said. She glared at Alice who continued to chomp on the candy, a flame of pink shooting out the side of her mouth.

“I thought you already ate,” Mary said.

“Mmff mfff frghh,” Alice said.

There was the sound of a microphone dropping, and Mary looked back at the stage. Kurt was gone.

“Come on, let’s get in line to see the star of the show,” she said.

Mary led the way to the side of the stage, where Kurt was talking to a man in jeans, cowboy boots, and a Western shirt, carrying a clipboard.

“Look, if the set was too short, I can go up and do another fucking hour if you need me to,” Kurt said. “But the deal was a hundred bucks.”

The man shook his head. “A hundred if we sold out. There were maybe six people out there. And just as many laughs, frankly. Forty bucks is all I can do.”

“Forty bucks? I spent that on gas to get out here!” Kurt said. “Eighty.”

“Fifty.”

“Sixty.”

“Fifty-five.”

“Deal.”

Kurt held out his hand, and the man counted out the cash.

“Who says big-time Hollywood deals aren’t being done anymore?” Mary said.

Kurt and the man looked at her.

“Can I get a receipt?” the man said to Kurt.

“I don’t know, can you?” Kurt said.

Jason giggled.

Kurt turned to Alice. “Let’s get out of here.” He spotted a small blob of cotton candy on the side of her mouth. “Is that cotton candy or herpes?”

Eleven

“Boy, if I had a penny for every time someone wanted me to do a porn film,” Kurt said. He winked as a waitress put a glass of water in front of him.

They had stopped on the way back to Santa Monica at a Thai restaurant Mary liked. The place wasn’t much to look at from the outside, but the food was good.

“No one has ever asked you to do porn,” Alice said, after the waitress had taken their order. “But if they did, a penny is about what they’d offer.”

“I watch porn,” Jason said. He looked around, like the cops were going to slap cuffs on him any minute.

“Studying the cinematography?” Mary said.

Jason looked at her with a blank expression.

“Never mind,” Mary said, then turned to Kurt. “So can you help me or what?”

She had briefly explained the situation to Kurt: that she wanted him to pose as a director of pornographic films in order to try to get some information out of the agent whom Nina Martinez had supposedly been seeing.

“What’s it pay?” he asked. “I’ve got a lot of gigs coming up.”

“I guess a double shift at In-N-Out counts as two gigs,” Alice said.

“You sound a little crabby, Alice,” Kurt said. “How many years has it been since you’ve had some in and out?”

Jason snorted water out of his nose.

“Trust me, you don’t want the answer to that question,” Mary said, picturing her aunt with Sanji the yoga instructor.

“Are you seriously going to haggle with your niece over this job?” Alice said to Kurt. “I’m sure your bank account needs as much help as your stand-up material.”

Jason giggled. “Good one, Aunt Alice.”

Kurt looked at his son. “You’re a good boy, Jason. No matter what everyone else says.”

“I’ll be happy to pay you, Uncle Kurt,” Mary said. “How’s twenty bucks an hour sound? That’s more than minimum wage. Plus, I’ll be able to write off your services.”

“Or lack thereof,” Alice said.

“Can I come along?” Jason said.

Kurt sighed. “Don’t you have a job or something?” he said.

Jason shook his head. “No. I’m in a band,” he said. “But we don’t have any gigs for the rest of the year.”

“It’s March,” Alice pointed out.

Jason looked at her. “It is?”

Mary’s patience was wearing thin. “Okay, I’ll hire you too, Jason. You can be a production assistant or something. Maybe it’ll keep you off the streets for a few days,” she said.

“Thanks,” Jason said.

“No problem,” Kurt said.

Mary rolled her eyes.

“This is going to be so cool, I always wanted to be a private detective,” Jason said.

“You’re not a PI, trust me,” Alice said, then gestured at Mary. “Neither is she.”

“So what do I have to do, exactly?” Kurt said.

Mary laid out the situation. “I need you to pose as a director of adult films. Jason here can be your star. I’m a former star turned producer. We’re going to meet with an agent tomorrow, and I need to get some information from him. Specifically, an actress he supposedly represents. I need to find out if he knows where she might be. She’s missing.”

“I’m going to put a big sausage in my pants,” Jason said. He had a big smile, as if he’d just nailed a big idea.

“What else is new?” Kurt said.

Mary checked her watch.

“Let’s meet at my house tomorrow at nine a.m.,” Mary said. “Sharp.”

“What should I wear?” Kurt said. “A beret?”

“You need to come across as a sexist egomaniac,” Mary said, “only concerned with making money off of questionable material.”

Alice looked at Kurt.

“So just go as yourself,” she said.

Twelve

Mary looked through the steam rising from her coffee cup toward the Pacific. Her condo in Santa Monica had a nice view. It wasn’t one she appreciated very often, despite frequent self-reminders to do just that, but this morning, checking the clock and waiting for Uncle Kurt and Jason to arrive, she had a minute.

She wondered about Jake, about how he was doing, and whether this break in their relationship would turn out to be a good thing.

There was no getting around it: Mary had not taken his betrayal well. When he had slept with Lieutenant Davies well over a year ago, Mary’d been hurt and pissed. His excuse had been that he was drunk and wasn’t sure about the status of their relationship.

Mary knew he was such an overgrown Boy Scout that he probably wasn’t lying. Which gave her a twinge of guilt over how hard she’d repeatedly raked him over the coals.

But it was just a small twinge.

Now, her mind turned back to the case at hand. Nina Ramirez.

She had done her research and located the talent firm located in the building at the corner of Ocean and Wilshire. It was called Global Talent Management, and they had an agent named Trey Williams. She called and explained she was a producer embarking on a new film project and wanted to talk with him about some of his talent. Williams agreed to the meeting.

Now, she took her coffee over to her computer, booted up the machine, and logged into her email.

Voila.

A message from her “technical assistant,” as she liked to think of him. Okay, he was her hacker. But it was harder to claim a hacker as part of your employment team than a technical assistant.

Mary skimmed the note until she got to the good stuff, an itemized list of Nina’s social accounts and email addresses with their corresponding passwords. Or, as Mary noted, password. Every account had the same one: cuddlybear12.

To Mary, it didn’t seem like the kind of password a girl involved in pornography (if she was) would use. Then again, maybe some women liked that coquettish behavior before slipping on the trashy lingerie and getting in front of a camera.

Mary logged onto Facebook, entered Nina’s email and password, and studied the home page when it came up.

There was virtually no activity on Nina’s page. A few innocuous status updates, a few messages from friends, and that was it. The most recent update was almost two weeks ago and that was from a girl asking about going to the mall.

Well, that was disappointing, Mary thought.

She closed Facebook and opened Nina’s email account. It was filled with junk mail. Mary had to scroll down almost three weeks’ worth of messages to get to an actual real person.

It was from an email address called [email protected].

GagMan.

Cute, Mary thought. What was he, some kind of Porno Super Hero?

She opened the email. It was simply an address with no message.

Mary jotted down the address on a note pad.

She checked Nina’s Twitter account and another email account, both of which yielded no useful information—other than the fact that Nina had been discovered by nearly every pornographic spam account there was. Mary had never seen so many porn products and penis enlargement emails in her life.