Soap Opera Slaughters Read online

  Thank you.

  The puzzle in my mind now had another piece that fit. There was no record of Niven signing in at the front desk Saturday, so he must have entered through a fire door. Someone in the building may have left one open for him deliberately, or it may have been ajar by pure chance, but it seemed the only way Niven could have gotten in.

  And whoever pushed him must have left the same way.

  Along one wall of the production office there were several TV sets arranged in two banks, one above the other. Some were tuned to the on-air programs being broadcast by WBS and its three rival networks. Others were studio monitors that showed familiar “Riverday” sets, some of the same ones that the taping breakdown on the bulletin board specified for use that day. On one screen I saw the Jennett family’s living room, on another the hospital room where various characters had, from time to time, recuperated under the affectionate eye of Dr. Matt Jennett. Another monitor was of the supper club owned by Martha and her husband, Leo Jennett (Florence McKinley and Donald Bannister, respectively).

  As I watched, technicians wandered in and out of scenes, checking props, adjusting furniture, dusting bureau and desk tops. A chubby young woman in jeans fussed with the hospital bed, arranged props on the adjacent nightstand—water tray, a box of tissues, a medicine bottle and dosage cup about the size and shape of a shot glass. A flurry of movement in the Jennett living room caught my eye. I focused on that monitor.

  The efficient Ms. Lipscomb appeared on the screen, still holding her clipboard. She was saying something to a tall, white-haired man in his sixties with a dour hangdog expression drawing down the corners of his mouth as if he were smelling a rotten egg. He wore no tie, but had on a gray flannel suit he must have been roasting in. Clearly the original of the man in drag caricatured on the bulletin board, I assumed (correctly as it turned out) that he was Joseph T. Ames, the producer.

  A group of familiar people drifted on the set and sat down on the armchairs and lounges. I recognized platinum-haired VeldaLee Royce, who played the eldest Jennett daughter, Bella. On the show, Bella was nine months pregnant, but VeldaLee must have delivered over the weekend; her tummy was flat and her waist wasp-thin. Ira Powell—the actor who plays her brother, Matt—flopped onto the right end of a sofa and put his head in his hands. He didn’t look well.

  The other end of the sofa was occupied by Donald Bannister, the veteran thespian who portrayed Leo “Father” Jennett.

  Lara, twice as beautiful as recent memory served, looking rounder than she was in truth (for the TV camera adds ten pounds to a performer’s apparent weight), started to sit between the two men on the sofa. Pausing, she made a and moved over to perch on the arm of the couch next to her make-believe daddy, Donald Bannister, and as far away as possible from Ira “Matt” Powell.

  Ames began to harangue the assembled cast members. Gesticulating with wildly flailing arms, he occasionally flung a remark to Micki Lipscomb, who scribbled on her notepad with head ducking up and down like a novelty-store plastic bird whose beak eternally dips into brackish water.

  I wanted to hear what was being said in the Jennett living room, but there was no audio. I reached for the volume control, but the set was one of the upper ones and the sound knob was just beyond my grasp.

  “Leave it alone,” a sardonic voice said behind me. “He’s not worth listening to.”

  I turned and saw a woman signing the taping schedule on the bulletin board. I had to look carefully to make sure it was Joanne Carpenter. On the show, as Eloise Savage, she was always impeccably coiffed, expensively and excellently groomed, but the real Joanne Carpenter was casual to the point of disarray. Her copper hair hung lank and languid on either side of unrouged cheeks. No lipstick, no shadow above eyes that gaped myopically from behind thick rimless glasses. She wore patched and tattered faded jeans and a rumpled orange T-shirt bearing the legend, “The more I know men, the more I love my dog.”

  Smiling uncertainly, she extended her hand and shook mine. “Don’t tell me, let me guess, you’re the new head writer?”

  “No, sorry.” I introduced myself by name and profession.

  “Really? I’ve never met a detective. Where’s your gun?” She seemed disappointed when I said I wasn’t carrying one. “Are you here because of what happened to Ed Niven?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d like to help any way I can. Ed and I used to be good friends. If I can do anything, please feel free to ask” She said it with great earnestness, but I had to remind myself that she, like Florence, made a living out of pretense.

  “Thanks, Ms. Carpenter, I would like to talk with you.” I gestured toward the monitor. “But don’t you have to go to that meeting?”

  She smiled. “Now how can I be there if no one told me about it?” A vigorous toss of her head. “I believe I’m going to pass up a chance to hear the usual Joe Ames ‘ratings are slipping’ sermon and go straight up to Makeup. Want to come with me?”

  “I’d better not. I’m not authorized.”

  “Oh, hell,” she scoffed, “I’ll be responsible.”

  I shook my head, pointing to the notice from the WBS security chief. She stood close to the board, read it, then turned and shrugged. “Sorry, I didn’t know. I was off yesterday.”

  Florence entered the office. “Never mind, Joanna, dear, I’ll be responsible for him.” Brushing past her, she came over and took my arm.

  “Darling,” Florence purred, “aren’t you on in the fourth scene?”

  “Yes,” Joanne replied curtly. “So what?”

  “Don’t you think you’d better toddle on up to Makeup? Umberto hasn’t a moment to lose...

  Lara didn’t exaggerate. The look they exchanged was one of pure hatred.

  “YOU HETS HAVE SLAUGHTERED romance,” Umberto sniped. His manicured fingers wove deftly through copper strands like an alchemist transmuting base ore into gold. I watched, fascinated, as he changed Joanne Carpenter into the elegantly dangerous Eloise Savage, the woman on “Riverday” who was romantically obsessed with Dr. Matt Jennett.

  After signing in, Florence took me to her dressing room (a wasted trip yielding nothing significant), then upstairs past the greenroom to the makeup/hairdressing area presided over by Umberto, a prominent East Side coiffeur with his own salon on Madison Avenue. Florence told me to wait while she went back down to get Ames’ permission for me to enter the taping area.

  I asked Umberto a few questions, and the conversation led to the topic of “Riverday’s” probable future.

  “No style,” he declared, affixing a roller in Joanne’s auburn tresses. “Utterly disgusting.”

  She took her nose out of the script she was studying, looked up, and said in a hurt tone, “Thanks a whole heap.”

  “Lawdy, Miss Scarlett, I didn’t mean you, honey!” His sinewy hands patted and pinched her cheeks affectionately. “Milady queen, you have reams of style, elegance, class, chic, oomph, pizzazz, not to mention chutzpah, moxie, éclat, panache, Zeitgeist, four-wheel drive, eight-cylinder brains and a chassis so snazzy that if you were only a Scorpio, I’d renounce the church and make an honest woman of you stat!

  Joanne groaned. “Would you believe, Gene, that’s the best offer I’ve had all year?”

  “Well, bitch,” he huffed, “if that’s the attitude you’re going to take, return my engagement ring!” Pretending offense, Umberto put one more roller in her hair and blotted his hands on a paper towel. “All right, you heartless vixen, go roast your head.”

  “I’m done?”

  “To a turn. Shall I autograph your bald spot?”

  “Pardon me, you must have me confused with Ms. McKinley.” Joanne rose from the chair with her head full of pink and blue rollers. “But what were you claiming has no style?”

  “Life.” He handed the actress her glasses. “If you’d paid attention to the grownups instead of trying to memorize that drivel, you would have heard me expound on life sans style as created by a medium controlled by hets with no romance
in their souls. Their paucity of finer feelings is the manure for the dramatic weeds you now clutch to your sweetly underexplored bosom.”

  She stared at him coldly. “Ed wrote this script”

  “I’m not attempting to rive away his laurels,” he hastened to assure her. “Ma petite ange, Mr. Niven richly deserved the awards he won for silk-pursing sows’ ears. He wrote marvelous dialogue, created situations that positively veered on the human. Not his fault the system dictated what he had to put in. Shall I proceed alphabetically? Abortion, adultery, baby worship, cheating, divorce...stop me before R, the network forbids romance.”

  “Signor Ciacionne,” she argued, “romance is what daytime drama’s all about.”

  “No, milady, precisely not.” He sat her at a dryer. “Sex, certainly. Adolescent passion, macho possessiveness, jealousy and revenge and domination, very yes. But pure love? Companionate affection? Quaint anachronisms they put in mothballs when they stopped filming in black and white.”

  “Behold who lectures me on the definition of love,” she declared sardonically. “Umberto, you, of all people, shouldn’t make sweeping generalizations about hets, as you call them.”

  “And why not?”

  “Because, darling, you are yourself a sweeping generalization.”

  “Because you think I’m too obvious?” He positioned the dryer bowl over her head, paused before flicking the switch. “Milady, ask yourself the derivation of gay as coined a few decades ago. Or better yet, read the introduction to The Gay Science.”

  “Now it’s a science?” she taunted. “How romantic!”

  “A misleading title,” he replied with condescending patience. “I merely mention it to stress the adjectival use in a defiant sense. Sometimes one must overstate to make society aware of its illnesses.”

  The actress yawned. “What’s this got to do with the conversation you were having with Gene?”

  “I was about to tell him I think Mr. Ames ought to take a chance and hire a gay head writer.”

  “That would be taking a chance.”

  “You needn’t scoff. You’d be surprised what it’d do for the ratings.”

  “I suppose we’d pick up every sixth man.” Joanne eyed the hairdresser. “You don’t by any chance have someone particular in mind for the job?”

  “Aahhh, that would be telling.” He cut off the discussion by switching on the dryer, then asked whether I wanted to take a look at the roof.

  “Yes.”

  “You can’t go out there,” he cautioned, “but there are windows to see from.” He beckoned me through a portal at the far end of the room. I entered an L-shaped chamber whose vertical leg pointed back the way we came, enclosing the inner shell of the makeup room in half brackets. The horizontal leg of the “L” we stood in was a windowless nook equipped with table and chairs, a sink, refrigerator, cabinets and one tall unit of shelves stocked with snack food, utensils and various makeup supplies in tins, jars, cans, boxes, bordes, tubes and sticks. On the tabletop next to a tattered piece of Saturday’s newspaper sat a moldy loaf of bread and an empty peanut butter jar with a sharp knife laid across the top, its blade still smeared with the sticky stuff.

  “Pigs,” Umberto sighed. “They never clean up, never make the beds. Look at that! One of them stole a whole big carton of collodion. You know how expensive that is?” Wrinkling his nose with distaste, he motioned me around the corner to the long leg of the “L,” a narrow corridor with a cot along either side, one of them badly rumpled. Umberto inspected it, more and more disgusted. “Would you believe they even ripped off the pillow?” The sleeping nook had windows in its outer wall. They opened on a broad expanse of partly paved, partly tarry roof already tacky in the morning sunlight. A short flight of iron stairs led up to a sheet metal door that would have provided access to the roof except that its hasp was held shut by a shiny combination lock.

  “That looks new,” I said, pointing to the lock.

  “It is. Security it on yesterday.”

  “Why would anyone go out there in the first place?”

  “To sunbathe in the buff,” Umberto made a. “Actors are like little children fleering at authority. Not that they’d set foot out there now, after what happened.”

  Just then, we heard a murmur of many voices growing swiftly louder. A tall thickset man shambled into the alcove and shoved brusquely by us. As he passed, a sickening sour smell assailed my nostrils.

  “Don’t say you’re sorry,” Umberto piped in protest. The actor, paying no attention, flopped onto the unrumpled cot, rolled on his stomach and pulled the pillow over his head.

  I recognized him. Ira Powell. He played Dr. Matt Jennett, the romantic male lead of “Riverday,” the middle one of Florence’s three supposed children on the show. Powell was one of the most popular sex symbols on afternoon television, but at that moment, I doubted whether any of his millions of adoring fans would have relished sharing his bed. I recalled watching Lara, on the monitor, go out of her way to avoid sitting next to him on the sofa. No wonder. Powell stank of sweat, alcohol and puke.

  The cast meeting was done. A few of the actors stood in the greenroom engaged in low conversation. No one seemed very happy.

  I felt weird, maybe even a little depressed to enter a room full of strangers whose faces and alleged histories I knew so well. So familiar did they seem, so much did I admire many of the people they pretended to be, it was hard to accept the fact they had no notion—or interest—in who I was.

  I had an absurd urge to clue in some of my favorites on the problems they didn’t realize they soon were going to have to deal with. If only, for instance, Leo Jennett, father of the brood, knew that his new club manager was affiliated with the mob and wanted to use the family’s supper club as a dope drop. Or if the eldest daughter Bella realized what was really in the letter that Eloise Savage etc. etc.

  Lara waved to me. She was across the room talking with a short, stubby man I recalled from the days when Hilary handled PR for Trim-Tram Toys. In those days, Abel Harrison was an ineffectual executive floater, but now that he owned an ad agency and the casting office for “Riverday,” he looked dramatically different. His once-straggly mustache had sprouted into a generous bush Oscar Homolka might have admired, and Harrison’s dark glasses, bright clothes and hairpiece completed his transformation into something rich and strange.

  His first question was inevitable. “What brings you here, Gene? Hilary send you?”

  “No, I don’t work for her any longer.”

  “What a shame! The two of you?”

  “Are no longer affiliated,” I said curtly. I glanced at Lara, but she didn’t seem troubled by the incompleted remark. She, too, was changed. Umberto’s handiwork, panchro base and the flush of rouge had effaced the woman I spent the sweet silent hours with. Now she was Roberta Jennett.

  “Where’s Florence?” I asked.

  “On the set with Joe Ames. I don’t think she’s gotten your OK yet,” Lara said. “I have a feeling she’s preoccupied at the moment making thinly veiled threats.”

  To whom? What do you mean?”

  “Florence came in toward the end of the meeting,” Lara explained, “but in plenty of time to catch the general gloom-and-doom mood. If Ames doesn’t get a new head writer immediately, the show’s in real trouble with the network.”

  “You know what this is all about?” Harrison said, pulling worriedly at his lip. “The sweeps are coming up, and the new rating figures are going to shift around a lot of advertising dollars. ‘Riverday’ has to get a facelift to convince WBS it can hold onto or improve its audience share.”

  Lara shrugged. “Ames has already axed a few of the older characters. Look what he was making Ed do with Ira’s role! You think more heads have to roll?”

  “I think so,” the adman nodded gravely. “He needs a big gesture. ‘A renewed commitment to youth’ is the dreaded-phrase they’re using up at Corporate.”

  “How big a gesture?” Lara asked.

  �
��Florence McKinley.”

  LIKE ALICE STRANDED ON the unwonderful side of an intransigent looking-glass, I was stuck in the limbo of a deserted greenroom until Florence got around to securing my clearance from the producer.

  Lara couldn’t stay long. She was in the second scene and didn’t have time to answer any of my questions. On her way out with Harrison she promised to do what she could to speed up the process of getting me on the set.

  Time passed. A voice on an intercom called for all the extras to report downstairs. That cleared the room. I wandered back to Makeup. Umberto was gone, but Joanne Carpenter still sat beneath the dryer studying her lines. As I entered, she glanced at her watch, closed her script and shut off the machine.

  She gave me a wide-eyed smile that told me she’d exchanged her glasses for contact lenses. “Gene,” she asked, “do you know how far they are in the taping?”

  “They just announced the third scene.”

  “Good. Then there’s still plenty of time before they’re going to need me.” She stood up and began to remove the thin rose-hued makeup gown she’d donned to protect the orange T-shirt she was wearing. “Want to go for a walk with me?”

  “Where to? I’m still not allowed in the studio.”

  I have to run out to Tenth Avenue to get a prescription refilled.”

  “Are you sure you’ve got enough time?”

  “Hell, yes.” She folded the gown and placed it across a chair. “They have to move the cameras and position them for the supper club, there’s a whole bunch of extras to block and rehearse, they’ll have a line runthrough, there’ll be unexpected crises to solve and then a final dress rehearsal. It could take a good hour before they tape.”

  “All right, I’ll be glad to come along, if you don’t mind my asking questions.”

  “That’s what I had in mind,” she said, carefully patting her hair to make sure it was totally dry. Her head was still full of rollers. “Come on, Gene, I have to stop for a moment in Wardrobe.”