Murderfunding, p.11
#MurderFunding, page 11
Duh. “No biggie,” Becca lied. “We’ll move. Change our names. At least we’ll know it’s coming.”
Stef’s eyes flashed toward Becca’s face. They held suspicion, confusion. Stef didn’t believe a word out of Becca’s mouth, which meant if there was evidence, Becca had to find it first.
Suddenly, her quest to exonerate her mom and protect her family had become a race.
Becca had expected the streets around Stu-Stu-Studio to be quiet when they arrived that morning, but the raucous shouts of diehard protesters met them as soon as she and Stef rounded the corner. There were significantly fewer of them today—two dozen max, cordoned off behind police barriers at the far end of the block and supervised by four cops who looked bored, at best, by their assignment—but what the Fed-Xers lacked in numbers they made up for in enthusiasm, chanting and jeering as Becca approached the main door. One protester even attempted to spit at her, and despite the fact that he was too far away to hit his target, the look of abject hatred on his face as he hocked that loogie made Becca pause with her hand on the door. That guy wanted to kill her. She could see it in his eyes.
Before she could recover from the shock, the door to Stu-Stu-Studio was pushed open from the inside by a young guy with a clipboard and a thick, curly mop of black hair.
“Name?” he asked unceremoniously, perusing his clipboard.
Becca pushed aside her encounter with the irate Fed-Exer. She had a job to do. “Becca Martinello,” she said, watching to see if he gave any hint that the name meant something to him. He didn’t.
“And Stef Ybarra.”
“Check and check.” He pointed them down the hall that led to the soundstage. “Take the stairs at the end to the second-floor dressing rooms. Vic wants everyone in costume by nine thirty. And remember, no cell phones downstairs. Leave them in your room.”
“No cell phones,” Becca repeated, wondering how Victor Merchant would feel about this dude referring to him as Vic. “Got it.”
A door at the end of the hallway opened to a set of concrete stairs. Unlike the soundstage, which had been power-blasted to a sheen, the stairwell was dusty, the scent of mold and damp heavy in the air, as if it hadn’t been used in years. The large windows had been papered over and the masking tape that seamed the yellowing butcher’s wrap together was brittle and peeling with age. But what it lacked in ambiance, the upper floors of Stu-Stu-Studio apparently made up for in structural integrity. The Fed-Xers must have been just outside that end of the building, yet from inside, Becca couldn’t hear their protest at all.
The stairs continued to a third story above, and Becca immediately spotted the casting guy from yesterday, hanging out on the upper landing. Which probably meant that Victor Merchant was inside.
That must be his office.
“This way,” Stef said, tugging at her arm as they reached the second floor. Becca had unconsciously moved toward the next flight.
“Right,” Becca said, forcing a smile. She didn’t want Stef to know what she was planning: how to get an audience with Victor Merchant.
The hallway didn’t look particularly Hollywoodesque, more like a generic office building with hard fluorescent overheads running its length, and four doors on the left, facing the street. As she passed the first room, Becca saw that it had been furnished with portable makeup vanities—high square wooden tables and an attached mirror rimmed with large lightbulbs.
Three cast members were already prepping themselves inside. Even out of their Wonder Twins costumes, Becca recognized Kylie and Kayden, with their almost-identical builds and height and matching pixie cuts—shaggier on him, sleeker on her—of their dark blond hair. The third station was occupied by an African American girl about Becca’s age, applying moisturizer to her face. Her sleek hair was pinned into two donut-shaped buns on each side of her head, and though Becca was pretty sure she didn’t recognize this girl’s face, there was something familiar about her that Becca couldn’t quite put her finger on.
“Let’s try the next one,” Stef said, nodding down the hall. “We’ll need two diva stands.”
“Diva stands?” Becca asked. “Is that what they’re called?”
As she spoke, the girl with the buns craned her head toward them. Her eyes widened in recognition, then narrowed.
“Look who’s back,” she said. “I put money on you not making it past the Fed-Xers downstairs.”
Her face may have been hidden behind a mask of clown makeup yesterday, but Becca knew the voice instantly. Fake Molly.
Kylie leaned forward to see through the doorway. “You owe me twenty bucks, Fiona.”
Becca felt Stef’s hand on her arm. “I think I hear Lars.” Like yesterday, she was keen to avoid a confrontation.
Becca? Not so much. Though intellectually she knew that picking a fight with a cast member wasn’t a good idea, her basic programming didn’t allow Becca to let shit go. “You mean you hoped we wouldn’t,” she said, shoulders square. “The only way you and the Wonder Twins here are going to get cast is if the rest of us bail.”
“It’s too bad this isn’t actually Alcatraz two-point-oh,” Fiona replied. “Or I’d show you exactly how much I belong here.”
“As predator or prey?” Becca asked.
“Do I need to remind you who I’m connected to?”
Becca laughed. “Your aunt’s boyfriend’s cousin’s dry cleaner’s florist’s neighbor? That’s a total fucking joke.”
Fiona’s nostrils flared. “Look who’s talking about being a joke. Did you manage to come in costume today?”
“Come on.” Stef tugged Becca firmly, backing her into the hall. “We don’t have time for this.”
“See you downstairs, Fake Molly.” Becca waved sweetly as she retreated, hoping that nickname would stick.
“It took you exactly one day to pick up an enemy,” Stef said under her breath as they poked their heads into the next room, where Sumo Sutra was lacing Mistress Distress into her corset.
“More like one hour,” Becca said, correcting her.
“Is that normal for you? Or did Fiona’s Molly Mauler story get under your skin?”
“Not even close.” Becca wasn’t sure that was entirely true, but she certainly wasn’t going to let Stef think her theory had any sway.
“Darlings!” cried a familiar voice as they arrived at the last door on the floor between the ladies’ room and an emergency exit. Lars was doing a handstand against the wall, his legs fanning from vertical to horizontal and back again. “You made it.”
Aside from the four diva stations and the garment rack, there wasn’t much to their dressing room. The windows were papered over like the ones in the stairwell, allowing in a glow of natural light. The room had probably been an office at one point in time. There were phone jacks and networking outlets on each wall, meant to accommodate at least three different desks, and wedged into the corners on the dirty tile floors were remnants of the room’s past: paper clips, misshapen staples, a pushpin from a corkboard.
Coop poked his head out from behind one of the diva stands. “You’d better hurry. They want us downstairs in thirty minutes.”
“We saved these spots for you.” Lars pointed to the two empty makeup stands with his foot. “Had to fight off the dominatrix and that judge dude. But I might have enjoyed that.”
“Thanks, guys.” Becca dumped her bag on the floor beside one of the diva stands. Then she grinned at Stef. “See? I don’t piss off everyone I meet.”
Stef rolled her eyes. “Just seventy-five percent of us.”
Lars kicked his feet off the wall and curled down into a standing position. “I brought you some makeup. If you’re going to be Dolly, you need to be Dolly.” He pulled a plastic bag from beneath his makeup stand and handed it to Stef. “Just some extras I had at home.”
“Eye glitter,” Stef said, riffling through. “Body glitter, lip glitter, lipstick, lip gloss, lip stain, and liquid liner in three different shades.”
Becca arched an eyebrow. “That’s just your extras?”
Lars grinned. “Jealous?”
Stef poured the contents out on her table. “I don’t think I know how to use any of this.”
Lars sucked in a quick breath and looked as if he was about to cry. “I’ll help you. Let me help you? Please, please, pretty please?”
Stef’s eyes grew wide in genuine terror. “I don’t think—”
But Lars wasn’t taking no for an answer. He steered Stef toward the nearest diva station and plopped her down in her director’s chair. “Just relax and let it happen. Time to Dolly-fy!”
“HEY,” GRISELDA SAID, THE moment Dee answered her FaceTime call. “Nyles there?”
Dee shook her head. “He’s meeting with his attorney about his parents’ estate.”
“Don’t you mean his solicitor?” Griselda said with a fake British accent. Then she cracked up.
After all they’d been through, Dee truly appreciated how Griselda managed to keep things light. “So did you find anything?”
In answer, an alert popped up on her iMessage.
“That is the obituary of one Ruth Martinello,” Griselda said. “In the Mining Journal of Marquette, Michigan.”
Dee tried to stay calm as she opened the file. There was no photo, just a short entry stating that Ruth Martinello, forty-three, of Marquette, Michigan, died after she lost control of her car on the highway and crashed into a tree. But it was the date that caught her eye. “November thirteenth?”
“Yep.”
Just three days after Molly Mauler’s death on Alcatraz 2.0. But there were probably hundreds of deaths around that time, even in Michigan. “That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s her.”
“Keep reading.”
Dee’s eyes raced down the column. Ruth Martinello didn’t have much going on, apparently. Other than her death, the obituary merely noted that she was a stay-at-home mom and was survived by her wife, Rita, and children, Rebecca and Rafael. “What am I looking for?”
“Rebecca Martinello,” Griselda explained, “who goes by Becca, is a senior in high school.”
Just like I’m supposed to be. It was hard not to be bitter when she thought that Molly had tried to murder a girl who was the same age as her daughter.
“And Becca has an Instagram feed,” Griselda continued.
Another ding on her iMessage delivered a web link that opened to the Instagram page of Becca Martinello.
It was mostly photos of other people—soccer games of a boy, younger than they were, who might have been the brother mentioned in the obituary. Two friends popped up frequently, tagged as Jackie Orachevsky and Mateo Jimenez, and there were pictures of other cities—New York, San Francisco, Seattle—that looked too professional, as if they’d been downloaded from a travel website. Finally, there was an untagged photo of a girl.
She was white, her skin pale with a stripe of freckles across her nose and cheeks. Her hair was light brown, cut shoulder length, which she wore parted down the middle and tucked behind each ear, and her eyes were bluish gray, pale like her skin, and with a tug of sadness at the corners.
“You’ve seen her before,” Griselda said.
“I have?”
“Yep.”
Dee furiously tried to remember. The hair, the freckles, the pissy look on her face. Yeah, they were kind of familiar. Where had she seen them? It must have been recently. But she sure as hell hadn’t been in Marquette, Michigan, and unless Becca had been in Los Angeles…“Oh shit.”
“You remember?”
Dee quickly pulled up an Internet browser and began to type. “That video you sent yesterday. The one from the TV auditions.”
“Exactly,” Griselda said. She smiled as a clacking from the other end signaled that Griselda was hard at work. “Don’t bother looking for it. The user took it down, but not before I downloaded it.”
Another message popped up with a link, and Dee muted her player as the video rolled, keeping her thumb poised over the trackpad as the camera panned down the street at all the costumed auditioners.
“One minute and thirty-three seconds,” Griselda said.
Dee scrolled ahead. Near the end of the video, the camera zoomed in on a girl not in costume. She immediately paused the playback. “Holy shit.”
“Yep,” Griselda said. “Ruth Martinello’s daughter auditioned for Who Wants to Be a Painiac?”
“I knew something was dirty about that show.” Dee clenched her jaw as she compared the Instagram selfie to the face on the video.
“If she really is Molly’s daughter,” Griselda said slowly, “that means the show has got to be connected to The Postman. Somehow.”
“We should tell the FBI.” It was the smart thing to do, putting this information in the hands of the authorities and letting them deal with it. But so far, the FBI had seemed less than interested in Dee’s input, and she seriously doubted this would be any different.
Griselda nodded. “On it.”
Dee leaned back against the wall of pillows that separated her from the headboard. The morning she and Nyles and Griselda had been airlifted off Alcatraz 2.0, she’d truly believed that the nightmare was over, and that Kimmi and her family would never again inflict pain and suffering upon her and those she cared about. That had been six weeks ago. Six weeks, and the horror was back, lurking around her in the darkness, waiting to pounce.
Only this time, Dee wasn’t going to be the victim. She wouldn’t be taken unawares. She wouldn’t stumble upon her sister’s dead body. She wouldn’t be blindsided or railroaded through a sham trial. This time, she was going on the offense.
“Gris,” she said, almost dreading the words that were about to come out of her mouth. “We need to be prepared for them not to believe us.”
“Then what do we do?”
There was one more option, one more lead that Dee had been avoiding. She thought of her dad, who was making breakfast in the kitchen. Several months after Kimmi had been convicted of kidnapping a ten-year-old Dee—then known by her real name of Dolores—Dee’s dad had picked her up from school and announced that they were leaving their home in Manhattan Beach, changing their names, and starting new lives. Dee wasn’t allowed to talk to her old friends, to use her old name, or to tell anyone who she had been.
The reason behind the drastic life change had always confused Dee. The trial was over. Kimmi was locked up. Why did they need to move? Her dad would never say, and eventually, Dee had given up trying to figure it out.
Until six weeks ago on Alcatraz 2.0, when Kimmi had made it all very clear. Daddy went to talk to your dad a few months after my trial ended….
That would have been the exact time that Dee’s dad uprooted their lives. Kimmi’s father—The Postman—had offered Dee’s dad money to buy the rights to the story of her kidnapping. Which meant her dad had direct contact with The Postman.
Was that how it had all happened in the first place? Had Dee’s dad been working for The Postman on one of his shows? Had he been one-half of Merchant-Bronson?
Only one way to know.
“There’s one person who might know The Postman’s real identity,” she said slowly.
Griselda stared hard at the camera, then seemed to understand. “Do you think he’ll tell you?”
I doubt it. “I don’t know, but he’s the best shot we have.”
Dee crutched down the narrow hallway of the condo, pausing at the end, where it opened up to the main living space. Javier sat at the dining room table, sorting through a pile of mail that must have been forwarded from their Burbank house, while her dad stood in front of the six-burner stove, humming atonally to himself.
He had three different pans going, and though Dee couldn’t see their contents, she knew exactly what each contained: one large frying pan for the crumbled sausage, a smaller one for sautéing vegetables, and a third, probably still empty, for the omelet. Her dad scurried around the kitchen, giving a few moments of attention to each pan, then returned to a large bowl of eggs that he whisked with reckless abandon.
“Hey, Javier.” Dee smiled as she leaned forward on her crutches.
“Good morning, Miss Guerrera,” he said formally. “How are you feeling?”
“Better,” Dee said. Her usual answer. Then she dropped her voice. “Do you think you could give me a minute with my dad?”
Without hesitating, Javier nodded his head, whisked the unsorted portion of the mail back into a large bag, and disappeared through the front door into the condominium’s exterior hallway.
“Did Javier go out?” her dad called from the kitchen. “I’ll have his omelet ready in a sec.”
Dee sighed as she hobbled to the kitchen. She’d done everything she could to avoid this moment. But it was her only option, and it couldn’t wait.
She forced her lips to move. “Can we talk?”
“Sure.” He didn’t face her, keeping his focus on the onions and peppers sizzling on the stove top. “What’s up?”
There was no simple way to ask, but instead of leading with Tell me who The Postman was, Dee decided to ease into the topic.
“Remember back when we lived in Manhattan Beach?” she started, trying to sound more like a nostalgic teen and less like an FBI interrogator.
“Of course.”
“You worked on a show….”
He snorted. “I worked on a lot of shows, DeeDee.”
“Right, but you worked on a game show where contestants had to guess a popular song in as few notes as possible.” Was it her imagination, or did her dad’s entire body just tense up?
“I worked on a lot of shows,” he repeated, his voice not quite as light and airy as before. “I don’t really remember—”
“Wasn’t it called, like, Lend Me Your Ear or something?”
He shrugged, focusing intently on the sausage pan.
“It was a Merchant-Bronson production,” Dee said, pronouncing the name very carefully. “Wasn’t it?”
He didn’t answer, just continued to move the sizzling meat around in the pan absently, like a person whose mind was far away.
