She left after promising Dee tickets to her boyfriend’s next movie premiere. Dee might feel conflicted about Hollywood, but even she couldn’t resist a shot at attending one of the town’s glamorous events.
Dee bought a chai tea and an almond biscotti and returned to her table, fending off another laptop-wielding interloper. She alternated crunching on the biscotti with typing notes on her phone from her meetup with Pria. In general, the conversation confirmed what Dee suspected about Baker’s financial straits, but Pria had provided details ratcheting up how dire they were. Underwater on a mortgage, excessive credit card debt, being kicked out of the apartment he shared with Pria—Michael Adam Baker was spiraling from successful career to homelessness.
There were a few hours between her appointments with Pria and her friend Mindy Baruch, so Dee used the time to hang out with her father, which meant joining him in a protest against the FAA’s noxious new flight pattern. They caught up between waving posters at drivers on the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura Boulevard, encouraging them to honk their support for the cause. Dee noticed women hovering around Sam and felt torn between wanting him to find happiness again and resenting any woman who thought she could fill her mother’s shoes. Sam responded to the flirting with charm, but zero interest in romance, rendering the issue moot . . . at least for the moment.
After the protest, Dee went back to her father’s house, where she made quick work of the turkey sandwich he’d saved for her. She left him practicing various takes on the voice of a trash bag for an upcoming commercial audition and headed to New Century Studio.
She was happy to see Manny was the guard at the gate. Rotund and jovial, Manny was a studio fixture. “Weird to be giving you a visitor drive-on,” he said, handing Dee the pass. “We miss you.”
“I bet you say that to all the unemployed writers,” Dee said, placing the pass on her dashboard.
“Only the ones I like.”
“Aww,” Dee said. She had a feeling Michael Adam Baker didn’t fall into this category.
Manny leaned out of the guardhouse. “A couple of execs are on a retreat,” he said in a conspiratorial tone. “I booked you into one of their spaces by the soundstage instead of the visitors’ lot.”
“Bless you, Manny. You’re enough to make me reconsider quitting Duh!”
Manny let out an exclamation of mock alarm and waved his arms back and forth. “God help us, no! I would never wanna be responsible for that.” He dropped his arms and went back to speaking in a stage whisper. “Although from what I hear about how lousy the new episodes are, they could use you.”
Dee blew the guard a kiss and drove onto the lot. She maneuvered around an obstacle course of golf carts zooming back and forth, costume racks being wheeled across the narrow lot streets, and tour groups taking selfies in front of the soundstages where their favorite shows were filmed, either in the present or the past. After narrowly missing a couple of actors dressed as aliens who suddenly decided to play catch with one of their second heads, she pulled into her designated parking spot, which sat right in front of the Duh! soundstage.
She showed her pass to the set guard, who was new to her, then wended her way through the hallways behind the show’s sets to the empty dressing room where Mindy asked to meet. Mindy was already there.
“Dee!” She threw open her arms for a hug.
“Min.” The two friends shared a warm embrace.
Dee glanced over Mindy’s shoulder and, to her surprise, the dressing-room mirror reflected the image of someone else in the room—a man, within the ballpark of her own age, clad in the typical writers’ room attire of T-shirt and jeans. He’d given up the fight against baldness and gone with a shaved head. Like most staff writers, he’d also given up the struggle against the ten or twenty pounds that came with a lifestyle short on exercise, but long on free food.
Dee released Mindy. The unexpected visitor stood up and extended a hand. “Hi, R.J. Morrin. We haven’t met, but I know your work.”
“I know yours too,” Dee said, shaking his hand. She’d never been on staff with R.J., but she knew friends who had and they spoke well of him.
“I hope you’re okay with R.J. being here,” Mindy said, apologetic. “He replaced Michael after he was let go.”
“Wait, what?” Dee wrinkled her brow, confused. “From where? Here? Michael worked on Duh!?”
“Yes,” Mindy said. She tilted her head, also confused. Her mass of brown curls tilted left with her. “After you left the show. I thought that’s why you got in touch with me. He didn’t tell you when he showed up at your motel?”
“Nope. He never mentioned it. I guess there wasn’t any reason to. Still, kind of odd he didn’t bring it up.”
R.J. spoke up. “When Mindy told me you were coming to get some intel on Baker, I had to be in on it. I have a lot to say about him. A lot.”
From the malice in the voice of a writer deemed in general as a stand-up guy, Dee intuited that none of what R.J. had to say about Michael Adam Baker was good.
He confirmed this with his next statement: “I’m not surprised someone offed him. I’m only surprised it took this long.”
CHAPTER 19
Dee took a seat in the chair at the makeup table and swiveled to face Mindy and R.J., who were both sitting on the dressing room’s ratty old sofa.
“I’ll go first,” Mindy said. “I don’t have that much to tell you other than that Michael now was hugely different from the Michael we worked with at On the John, and the pilots I did with him. He was still really superior and arrogant on the pilots. You know, all ‘I’ve got an overall deal and that makes me a writing god.’ When I heard Dan wanted to bring him on here,” she continued, referencing the Duh! showrunner, “I brought this up, but they insisted he’d changed. And they were right. Talk about being humbled. He tried so hard to be nice to everyone, it was uncomfortable. And he’d lost any writer mojo he ever had. He barely pitched anything, and what he did almost never made it into the script. He spent a lot of time out of the room taking calls. He said they were about new deals, but we didn’t believe him, because he’d come back all sweaty and nervous. Dan fired him after only a couple of weeks and brought in R.J.”
“My turn.” R.J. rubbed his hands together, if not with glee, then with a definite dose of satisfaction. “I had history with Baker. We worked on the first season of Besties together. Way more of my jokes got into the script than Baker’s, which made him jealous and insecure. He told Shawn, the showrunner, I was bad-mouthing him, which was a total lie. But Baker was two levels above me, so Shawn took his word over mine and didn’t pick up my option. I didn’t get hired anywhere the next season. My career never completely recovered. I mean, I’m here.”
R.J. did a sweep of the room with his hand. Dee got it. Working on a show like Duh! was a job of last resort for writers whose prior careers had been spent on network and streaming shows. There were solid comedies created for kids. Duh! wasn’t one of them. “Anyway, I play poker, like a lot of writers.”
Dee and Mindy exchanged a knowing look. Poker games were the hanging-out equivalent of trips to the men’s room where guys bonded and women rarely got past the door.
“And I know what Baker’s calls were about,” R.J. continued. “The ones that made him sweat.”
Dee sat up straight, giving him her full attention. She had a feeling he was about to share the kind of scoop she hoped her trip would deliver. “What were they about?”
“Mostly the games were for fun. Small pots. Nobody was ever out more than a few hundred dollars.”
Having grown up in a family that was frugal to the point of being parsimonious, Dee couldn’t imagine tossing off the loss of “a few hundred dollars.” But she kept her judgments to herself. “I know there are high-stakes games too,” she said, then took out her phone. “Do you mind if I make a few notes? This is really valuable information, and I don’t want to forget anything.”
“Go for it,” R.J. said. “The big games are where you can get into trouble. And Michael did. I know from friends that he went from casual to illegal high-stakes games run by guys you don’t want to owe money to. He racked up major debt, which was what the calls were about. He needed money so badly, he began making ‘How to’ videos about writing for television that he tried to sell online. It’s not a terrible idea, but apparently the videos sucked. Even if they were good, they were never going to deliver the kind of money he needed to pay off what he owed.”
Dee, head down, thumbed away on her phone. R.J. sneezed.
“Bless you,” she said, still typing.
“Thanks. Allergies. The ratty old couches and chairs in these dressing rooms are dust condominiums.”
“Could be a cold,” Dee said, still typing. “Writers’ rooms are like preschools. One cold gets passed around to everyone. If you come to work, everyone gets mad at you for spreading germs. But if you stay home, you’re a wuss.”
