TWELVE

I wanted to escape to my office, find a phone, and call Adam and Beverly. It seemed as if—if I could only hear their voices—I would know, somehow. But I had to follow Terry over to the soundstage, trying not to clutch my bag suspiciously close to me. They were shooting another ’20s scene today, an utterly ridiculous one I’d written where Henry and Victor go to a producer’s office to try to convince him to put one of Henry’s songs in his revue. Even though I’d only drafted it yesterday, the lines all sounded foreign to me as I watched Henry and Vic say them. “In five years, everyone will know the name Henry Hilbert. You can either be the man who discovered a genius, or the fool who let him walk away.” Had I really written that?

When the director finally yelled “Cut!” Vic made a beeline for us, leaving Henry looking confused and a little hurt, alone on set. “Did it work? Did you find anything?” Vic asked us.

“Kind of,” said Terry. “Let’s go to your trailer.”

Vic lit a cigarette as soon as we’d cleared the soundstage. Once we’d gathered Jack and June in his trailer and all five of us assumed our usual seats, Terry spoke. “We got about half of it before they got wise and kicked us out,” she said. Then she tossed the rubber-banded bit of sheet music over to Victor. She must have been carrying it this whole time, but I’d been so preoccupied with my own concerns I hadn’t noticed. “Recognize that?” she asked.

Vic let his cigarette dangle from his mouth as he rolled the rubber band off the pages and studied them. “I thought this went missing,” he said. “Fiona had this in her office?”

“What is it?” asked Jack.

“A song I wrote a few years ago,” he replied. “I forgot about it, to be honest. I wanted it to be a love ballad, but it wanted to be an amorphous blob of displeasing sound. It won.”

“Why was it in Fiona’s office?” June asked.

“How should I know?” Vic shot back. “The last I saw it, it was in a box in my house with all my other old music. Henry accidentally took it when he moved out, and then the movers lost it.”

“Fiona must have taken it so you’d never ruin a party by attempting to play it,” said Jack.

“Please, I can ruin a party with my very presence,” replied Vic.

“Maybe it’s not just sheet music,” June suggested. “Maybe she was using it as a code. The letters of the notes spell out a message.”

“You’ve been in too many of Devlin’s spy movies,” said Vic. “It’s old sheet music, that’s all.”

“You could at least check.”

“It opens with eight nine-note chords,” said Vic, already rolling the music back up and rubber-banding it again. “That’s going to garble the message.”

“Your love ballad opens with eight nine-note chords?” I asked. “I don’t know a lot about music, but I think that’s your first problem.”

“Like I said, it wasn’t very good.”

“There was more of it,” said Terry. “Almost an entire box.”

“Are you accusing me of something, Terry?” he asked, putting out the cigarette and leaning forward.

“No one’s accusing you of anything,” said Jack with a little laugh. “Calm down. It’s weird, is all.”

“Because her article couldn’t be about me. What would it say? Vic Durand is a homosexual? The Dispatch would never let her print it. Besides, Don said it was something she was researching, right? I’d love to know what her research process would be for that one.”

“Yeah, to prove that, someone would have to talk to you for one minute,” said Jack.

“I’m telling you, it’s a code,” said June again.

“You have to admit, it’s strange,” Terry said.

“Of course I’ll admit that,” said Vic. “Maybe I can figure out where her head was at if I see what all she had. Where did you two take it?”

“Annie’s apartment,” said Terry.

“I’ll come over tonight.”

“Not tonight,” I said quickly. I needed time to go through the things on my own first and dispose of every reference to me and the Cooks.

“Why? Do you have a date or something?” asked June.

“Yes,” I said, grateful for the lie. It wasn’t until I noticed all four of them staring at me with disgust that I remembered that members of the Ambassador’s Club hated each other’s significant others with a fury. “It’s a friend of my ex’s,” I added. “I’m only doing it for revenge.”

Everyone seemed to take that as a valid reason for going on a date, and we moved on. “Well, we can’t tomorrow; it’s Canteen night,” said Terry. “Thursday?”

“Thursday,” I agreed.

I ditched the group for my office as quickly as I could. I didn’t remember the phone number on the generic “We’ve moved!” letter the Cooks had sent me, but I remembered the street name, and “Cooks on Roxbury Drive” was enough for the operator to put me through. The line rang and rang. No answer.

Finally, I hung up. It was the middle of the day—they were probably both at work. Just for kicks, I asked the operator to connect me to MGM, where a sweet-voiced girl who sounded no older than eighteen told me I should write a letter if I wanted to reach my favorite MGM stars for a photo or an autograph. I thanked her and hung up.

With the help of a few pills, I managed to focus on work for a little bit, writing some awful scene for the whole group where Henry tells them he’s moving to Hollywood to be a movie star. (“But you’re the greatest composer the world has ever heard!” says Victor. “Now it’s time for me to be heard and seen,” replies Henry. I couldn’t wait to forget I wrote that one.)

Finally, around seven o’clock, I’d finished a scene that was horrible, but no worse than the rest of the script, so I called it a night. I had a page boy send the scene to Terry for approval so she could make any edits and get it copied and ready to shoot for tomorrow. Then I started the long walk home.

I’d just reached my stoop when it occurred to me I should find a pay phone and try for Beverly and Adam again. But I wasn’t going to have a chance. Victor Durand was sitting on my front steps, smoking.

“I knew you didn’t have a date,” he greeted me.

“I do have a date. I came home to change first,” I said, stepping past him to open the gate. We rounded the corner and I unlocked my apartment door. “What are you doing here?”

“What, I can’t drop in on an old stranger?” He didn’t wait for an invitation to follow me in, peering around the nearly bare living room as if there might be someone waiting inside to attack us. “Honestly? I’ve been thinking about that music you said you found all day. It was gnawing at me, and I hate being gnawed at. It wasn’t a sensation I wanted to experience every minute until Thursday. So I figured I’d wait until you got home and see if I could have a look at it sooner. I was going to call first, but apparently you don’t have a phone.”

“I’ve found if I don’t have a phone, I can’t call anyone it would be a mistake to speak to without a nickel and a sobering walk,” I said. “Plus, it forces men who want to talk to me to come to my apartment, and then I can develop an interesting reputation.”

Vic raised an eyebrow. “Huh. Men, you say? Is it these boxes here?”

“This one,” I said, pushing the box of sheet music toward him. At least I was reasonably sure that one contained nothing but music, and unless there was a song in there titled “Annie Loves Adam, and Bev Loves Annie, and Annie Loves Bev, and Bev Loves Adam,” I would be in the clear.

He took the box to the couch and began to rifle through it. Seeing no way out of this other than to try to go through the rest of the stuff ahead of Vic and hide anything I didn’t want him to see, I sat down on the floor and started to rifle through the rest of the papers as quickly as I could, scanning each one only for my name or the Cooks and not paying any attention to anything else. “What about your date?” Vic murmured sarcastically.

“I’ll leave him hanging,” I said. “It was a revenge date anyway, remember?”

“Sure. Should we have a drink, then?”

Anything to calm my nerves would be welcome. I hoisted myself from the floor and tried to keep an eye on him as I went to the kitchen. We’d killed the wine the night before, so I went with the vodka, pouring us each a glass.

“You got a record, I see,” he said as I handed him his, nodding toward the album I’d taken.

“That was in her office, too,” I said. “She must have liked the soloist on it.”

“Oh, the soloist is flawless,” he said. “But the Philadelphia Orchestra’s too romantic on the strings for Henry’s music. I wanted to record it with the New York Phil, but Henry won. Put it on, you’ll see. It makes the whole piece sound dated even though it’s only four years old. Makes me feel halfway in the grave.”

I found Side 1 among the five records in the book and blew the dust off both it and the record player, which hadn’t been touched for months. Static played from the album and then the opening chords, the ones I remembered nearly shaking the floor beneath me when I’d heard it at the Canteen.

Vic had finished rifling through the sheet music. “Anything interesting in there?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “Some of Henry’s songs, some of my songs. I can’t fathom why she had it, unless it was part of some prank we never got to see pan out.” To my relief, he settled back on the couch, listening to the record instead of investigating the rest of the boxes. Perhaps I could take it easy for now, go through the rest of it once he left.

“You have this piece of music to thank for your current employment, you know. This changed everything for Henry. People were starting to wonder if he wasn’t a relic of the Jazz Age. This made him relevant again.” The strings came in, lush and full, and he shook his head. “See what I mean? Too sweeping. We’re not in Moscow.”

“Sounds fine to me,” I said.

“Insightful commentary. You should be a music critic. Annie Laurence says, ‘I’m impressed they managed to play all those notes.’ Let’s change the subject. Are you sleeping with Jack?”

I almost spit out my vodka. “No. What? No.”

Vic shrugged. “He’s the famous, charming, single man and you’re the new-in-town single woman. It felt like a not-irrelevant question. I’d warn you not to, though. The only thing Jack Kott knows how to do is self-destruct. You can either steer clear or be hit by the shrapnel. Unless there’s some reason you’re not sleeping with him.” He tapped his glass. “Are you a lesbian?”

“I’m not answering that,” I said with a scoff.

“I only ask because you carry around that enormous purse.”

I forced my lips into a smile. “I’m not married. Let’s leave it at that.”

“Why? You know all about us, and we don’t know anything about you, other than the fact that you live like a convict on the run.” He paused. “Are you a convict on the run?”

“I wish,” I said. “I had my heart broken, that’s all. Lay on the floor practically comatose for a while and then decided to ditch town. Not that interesting of a story.”

“Don’t I know it,” said Vic. “It was actually the morning we recorded this that Henry told me he needed to live ‘respectably’ now.”

“No wonder you don’t like this recording,” I said.

“And I didn’t even bring it up until I had mentioned the strings twice, so you know I’m not kidding about them. Wasn’t that nice of Henry? People are only going to listen to this forever, long after you’re dead, which you might as well be because you just lost out to a movie contract and a dumb blond. Now go play! But you know they say it’s good for a pianist to be unhappy. Misery loves accompaniment.”

“You had that one ready,” I said.

“Do me a favor and act like it’s new when I repeat it in front of the club,” he replied.

“You know, our situations are similar,” I said. Strange, it had never occurred to me before. The thought was oddly comforting, that perhaps it wasn’t something wrong with me that had left me alone and floundering. “I was left because of a contract, because the relationship wasn’t proper, because of… Well…” I gestured out the window, at the yellow Los Angeles sky that was quickly turning dark blue. “Because of this town, because of the studios, because of who people we’ll never meet expect us to be. Because people who already make more money than us need to make even more money. Because out here, everyone’s a product.”

“Just wait until the day you’re playing yourself in a biopic about your ex-boyfriend that never once mentions the fifteen years you spent devoting your youth to him,” was the response.

I could see it happening, too: the film about Bev and Adam’s rise to fame in New York, moving to Hollywood. I could see myself relegated to the supporting cast, the grateful playwright tossing flowers from the front row opening night, an extra cast to sit next to me as my fake husband. The thought made me sick. “I don’t know how you do it,” I said.

“You don’t exactly have a choice,” said Vic. “You can’t go public without ruining your own career, and even if you decide you don’t care about that, the studios will smear you. They’ll say you’re hysterical or lying, or if that fails—”

I never got to find out what the studios would do, because at that exact moment, a brick soared in through the window we were sitting under.

The window shattered above us, sending shards of glass raining down. I dove onto the floor, covering my head, purely on instinct. I thought at first we must have been bombed, that this was how the whole of Hollywood would meet its end. After a few seconds of relative silence, the only noise the record still turning unawares, I dared to sit up a bit and saw that was not the case—the world was still here. Something fell from my hair. I reached up to brush it away and only realized upon slicing my palm the thing that had fallen was glass, which I was now covered in. Vic was prone on the couch, hands underneath him. The window was totally smashed, the few shards that somehow remained upright still noisily cracking, threatening to topple any moment.

“You all right?” Vic asked.

“I think so,” I said. “Get away from the window; the rest of the glass is going to fall.”

“I’m scared to move,” he replied. “I can’t cut my hands. I’m playing the Hollywood Bowl in two weeks.”

“Forget the Hollywood Bowl,” I said. Reality was starting to set in, and my whole body began to tremble. “We could have died.”

“Yeah, and even if we had, the union would still require my corpse to show up at the Hollywood Bowl in two weeks,” Vic snapped, slowly inching his way up. “Brush the glass off me. No one cares if you cut your hands.”

“God willing, I’ll cut my whole arm off, and then I won’t have to write any more of that movie,” I muttered, helping him ease his glass-covered jacket off and using the sleeve to brush some of the shards sticking to the pomade in his hair.

“What the hell was that?” he asked.

Our eyes fell to the brick on the floor, gray and worn and eerily still for all the chaos it had just caused.

He shot to his feet. The movement forced the last remaining shards of glass to tumble in, and we both flinched at the sound. “Someone threw that at us? I thought it was Japan!”

“Thank God it wasn’t,” I said, but he wasn’t listening, heading instead for my door. “What are you doing? Don’t go out there! They could still be there!”

“I hope they are!”

“You’re gonna fight an intruder? Without using your hands? What are you gonna do, kick him in the shins?”

“I’m not gonna fight him. I’m gonna give him a firm handshake and some tips to improve his aim.”

I let him go, too afraid to follow, trembling as the clarinet wailed in the background and a heartbroken Vic from several years ago picked up the melody. After a moment, the present-day Vic returned, shaking his head. “Whoever it was, they’re gone now. Not a soul out there except for that mangy black cat.” He offered me a hand. “Come on. I’ll drive you to my place. We can snort something and call the police.”

“Maybe in the other order,” I suggested, taking his hand. It wasn’t until I grasped it, so steady, that I realized how dreadfully I was shaking.

He led me into the courtyard and out onto the street, where I stopped to gaze into the gaping hole that used to be my front window, now wide open for anyone to waltz right in. “What if someone robs me?” I asked.

“Robs you of what?” Vic immediately replied. He had a fair point. “I only live a minute or two away. The police will be here before that happens.”

Vic lived only about a mile west from me geographically, but with its detached, elegant homes instead of squat cement apartment buildings, the neighborhood felt like a different world. His house was modern looking, two stories and all white, with a large patio on the second level—and the whole front lawn was swarming with cops.

He was out of the car practically before it had come to a stop, arms waving madly at the half a dozen or so police standing around. “What’s going on? What’s the meaning of this?”

Then we saw the gaping hole in his window too. Only his had smoke pouring out of it.

A next-door neighbor, apparently the one to hear the crash and phone the police, managed to coax us inside her place as Vic muttered obscenities at the cops, who wouldn’t let him inside his house. I asked the neighbor if I could use the telephone, and I rang Terry.

“Call Jack and June too,” Vic shouted when he heard who I was speaking to. “This is an emergency. I need every reassurance.”

There was no answer at Jack or June’s place, but Terry, who had still been at the studio, pulled up in record time. I could have kissed her I was so grateful for her presence, as Vic’s muttering was turning into a full-blown tantrum. “My fucking piano!” he shouted at her as she walked in.

“Did something happen to your piano?”

“I don’t know! They won’t let me in there to see!” Terry went to give him a hug, which he swatted away. “Don’t hug me. It’s not so dire I need affection.”

“It didn’t look like that much smoke. Are you sure you didn’t leave the oven on?”

“I’ve never used my oven, I’m keeping it pristine for my suicide,” replied Vic. “You can hug the redhead instead. She got got too.”

Terry looked at me, an eyebrow raised. “There was a fire at your place, too?”

“No, but someone threw bricks through both our windows,” I told her.

“I bet it was Arthur Rubinstein,” muttered Vic.

“You’re in fine form tonight. Why would Arthur Rubinstein throw a brick through your window?” asked Terry patiently.

“Jealousy,” Vic answered. “And I insulted his wife on Jack’s show last week.”

“Well, we can’t narrow it down to just people you’ve insulted in public. There would be more people wanting to kill you than Fiona,” said Terry. Her eyes suddenly flickered over to me. “Do you think this was related to…?”

“Two of us attacked? In one night? It sure seems like we’re someone’s target,” I said. “Maybe someone who wants us to stop investigating.”

“That’s impossible,” said Terry. “No one knows we’re investigating anything besides the five of us. I haven’t told anyone. Have you?”

“Don suspects,” I said. “And Vic told Henry, when you were trying to get into the Dispatch offices.”

“I didn’t tell Henry anything,” he retorted. “Not like he listens to me if I had. What a dreadful night. Did you get through to Jack and June?”

“I rang them both. Neither answered,” I said. “Should we try to go find them? Make sure they’re all right?”

“I’m sure they’re fine,” said Terry at the same time the police officer in the door said, “I can’t let you leave.”

All three of us rounded on him. “What do you mean, I can’t leave?” said Vic. “I’m a prisoner?”

“The detectives have some questions for you,” he explained.

“He’s the victim,” I snapped, “and our friends might be in trouble.”

“We’re sending a black-and-white for your friends right now,” said a familiar voice. Detective Kiblowski appeared behind the officer, smiling like we were all old friends. “We figured we needed to talk to them too, after we saw the note.”

“What note?” said all three of us at the same time.

Kiblowski held it in the air for us to read. “Found it tied around a brick inside, probably what broke the window.”

In large block print letters, the note read: I’LL KILL YOU ALL IF I HAVE TO.