Following Polly Read online

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said when I walked into her office.

  “I’m not quite sure I understand,” I told her.

  “You’re all wrong. I’m casting a waitress. In television talk, that means good legs. Dancer legs. When was the last time you went to the gym?”

  “Umm…”

  “If you have to think about it, you’re wrong for the part. You’re thin enough, but you carry yourself like a big fatty and the hair needs work. Uncombed is never in. The clothes don’t work, either—you look like an office assistant, not a waitress.”

  “That’s why I’m here,” I managed to say while Mona paused.

  “We’re not casting an office assistant. Jed! Jed!” she bellowed. “We have a situation.”

  An earnest twenty-something-year-old appeared out of nowhere.

  “Oh, Mona. This is Alice. She’s here to interview for Katie’s job.”

  “Oh.” Mona looked at me as if in a whole new light. “Hire her,” she said to Jed.

  I wasn’t sure whether to take Jed’s offer. The interview was so unpleasant.

  “Life is unpleasant,” Barnes had said to me when I asked Mother her opinion later that day.

  “Just go until you find an alternative, Alice. It will give you the structure you need until you have a vision for yourself.”

  I explain all this to Charlie. Then I describe my first days at Mona Hawkins. My role was ordering lunch. Every morning, I was required to review the three-ring binder filled with laminated menus from restaurants that delivered to our office. I was required to call each of these restaurants—there were more than twenty—and ask about the daily specials. I then had to type an unabridged account of the specials and place an asterisk next to any dish that included goat cheese or fennel, as Mona was partial to those ingredients. Mona would spend a good part of the morning considering the menu, both to herself and out loud. At 11:45 or so, Mona would call me into her office, command me to shut the door, and announce her order, which routinely consisted of two appetizers and two entrees.

  I can tell that Charlie is poised to ask me if Mona is fat. I tell him that she looks like a cadaver.

  Again, I intercept his predictable question about an eating disorder.

  “Not really.” I explain how lore at the office had it that until five years ago Mona had maintained a weight of 298 pounds.

  Mona’s most trusted assistant, Jed Rausch, used to imitate Mona’s proclamation:

  “I find eating very sensual.” Then Rausch would dribble some bread product out of his mouth and say, “Delicious, delicious, delicious.”

  Five years ago, Mona announced to the office that she was taking a little leave to have some gallbladder surgery and would be out of the office for five weeks. She was back at work in a month: fifty pounds thinner.

  “I had a big gallbladder,” she told suspicious employees.

  Energized by her weight loss and restricted by her egg-sized stomach, Mona limited her meals to small series of bites of food. It was more pleasurable for her to have one bite of eight foods, she would lecture to no one in particular, than eight bites of one.

  “I still love food,” she proclaimed. She had come clean about the nature of her operation after losing one hundred pounds.

  “I just want to taste it all.”

  Mona has maintained her current weight of 119 pounds through this tasting method.

  On my first day of work Mona had given me a lecture about the lunch order and her philosophy behind it:

  “I rather enjoy looking at all of the food I don’t eat. Instead of food controlling Mona, Mona controls—No… no… Mona conquers food.”

  “I hope that woman has an account with some local food shelter or Meals on Wheels,” Charlie says after I have told him all this.

  I think of my recent days on the street and how much I would have appreciated just a few of Mona’s leftovers.

  “No. Part of Mona’s regime was that she didn’t want anyone to have the food.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. One time I tried to take some of the food to a soup kitchen on my way home and Mona caught me and threatened me.”

  “I can’t believe directors and producers hired her.” Charlie’s incredulous.

  “Me neither. There was this rumor that she was involved in the gay porn industry for years and years. And then suddenly, one day she set up shop in legit film, made some lucky choices, and became a premier casting director.”

  “Why would anyone work for this monster?” Charlie asks me.

  “It’s a pretty good starter job for people who want to go into casting or get into other parts of show business. One of Mona’s assistants was a script supervisor in Hollywood. Another went off to cast some stuff of her own. Some leave show business altogether because they realize it’s not for them.”

  “That’s you, right.”

  “I guess.”

  “When this all blows over are you going to go back to show business?”

  I don’t tell Charlie that I never thought of myself as in show business. I worked for Mona, hoping what Mother had hoped: that it would lead me to realize my true calling.

  “Let me take this one step at a time,” I tell Charlie, and he senses that I don’t want to talk about Mona anymore.

  Charlie’s busy at the computer writing notes on his father’s situation. He looks particularly defeated this evening.

  “It makes no sense,” he confides to me. I resist reaching out to him and instead let him continue speaking. “It’s impossible to picture my father doing any of that stuff. He’s still mourning my mother. I can’t even picture the man on a date with another woman. They were married for thirty-seven years.”

  I have so many things I want to tell Charlie. Not just about his father but about mourning a spouse—what it can do.

  “It sounds like your parents had a great marriage,” I say, thinking of my parents. “My mother and father had one, too. Whenever I tell people this, they tell me that I’m romanticizing their relationship because I lost my father at such a young age. But I look at our old photo albums and family movies and I know they were meant to be.”

  “I didn’t realize that. I’m sorry. Was he sick?”

  “No, he and my older brother were killed in a plane crash when I was eight.”

  Charlie doesn’t speak right away.

  “That must have been a very lonely time,” he says finally.

  I nod.

  “It was. Sometimes it’s still that way.”

  “A pain you never get over.” His voice is flat.

  “But you do learn to live with it,” I reassure him.

  “So how come you seem so normal?” he asks sincerely. “I mean except for the obsessive following.”

  I tell Charlie about my childhood friends.

  “I kind of went from one house to another. My friends liked it because it was a prolonged slumber party and the parents didn’t mind because I tried to be a perfect guest.”

  “And what does being the perfect guest entail?” Charlie is smirking.

  “I stayed out of everyone’s way and when appropriate I would tell a funny story.”

  “I can believe that,” Charlie says. “You are, in fact, hilarious.”

  “Oh, you should have met me in high school. I was in my humor prime. I wrote parodies for our school literary magazine. In fact, that’s how I ended up at Harvard.”

  “You attached a parody to your application?”

  “Oh, no. I hadn’t even considered going to Harvard. I had always thought that I needed a smaller, more nurturing school. But one night, I wrote a parody of my friend Daphne Feller’s personal essay, entitled ‘Semper Amabo Harvard.’ I wrote it in Latin and it had fourteen footnotes. Daphne dared me to send it in. She even did all the typing.”

  “You actually wrote something in Latin?” Charlie is clearly impressed.

  “Well, once I had the idea, I had to execute it.”

  “What happe
ned to Daphne?”

  “She went to Stanford. She’s a doctor. Her parents just celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary.”

  “Did your mother ever remarry?”

  Speaking of pains I can live with.

  “Yes.” I tell Charlie about Barnes, the god of all things foolish. He is somewhat cheered.

  I like this moment we’re sharing. Charlie puts his arm out as if to give me a comforting hug, but catches himself.

  “I’m going to do some work on the Internet.”

  That’s my cue to watch television.

  “It has got to be someone from the film,” Charlie tells me this morning.

  “What?”

  I’m not awake yet, and Charlie’s lack of coffeemaker is not acceptable. He’s fresh faced from his post-run shower, wearing what I call his uniform: jeans and a blue rugby shirt. The neatness of the navy is nicely contrasted by his intense expression and his floppy hair. He’s eager to tell me his theory and drags me to Eat Here Now. I’m wearing one of his thick flannel shirts and Felisha’s riding pants and boots.

  “The killer has got to be somebody from the movie you were working on.”

  I have known this to be a possibility, but how could Charlie be so certain?

  “Too much of a coincidence,” he tells me. “The person has been staking you out and has been staking Polly out. The killer has to have wanted you persecuted or Polly dead. It seems unlikely that someone would want to hurt you.”

  A compliment!

  Charlie is still talking. “But the killer may have had a beef with Polly, or likelier yet, her husband. What better way to torture a person than to kill the person he loves?”

  I knew Charlie was a romantic.

  “And the killer must have seen you hanging around Polly. You could’ve been anybody. Just a nice easy fall guy for this killer.”

  I don’t know whether I should delight in Charlie’s assertion that I’m not hateable or bemoan the fact that he thinks I’m a bit of a milquetoast.

  Charlie continues to ponder this.

  “What about Lissa, the scorned actress?” Charlie asks, excited.

  “You clearly have no experience in showbiz,” I tell him. “Actresses are routinely fired for no reason, not hired for no reason, and treated like garbage for no reason.”

  “Yeah. But what if this one was a nut?”

  “They’re all nuts. And her beef would probably be more with Mona than with Humphrey. After all, Mona was the mastermind who decided to use Lissa as a pawn in the negotiations. If Lissa wanted to kill, her target would be Mona.”

  “Maybe she hates you. Maybe she’s framing you,” Charlie tells me.

  “No. Actors know that the casting assistant is a nobody. It would be a waste to frame me.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short. You are not a nobody.”

  “I will take that as praise.”

  “You should,” he says seriously.

  I don’t know why, but I blush.

  Charlie has clearly not thought this through. The killer could have been stalking Polly for days and noticed that Polly had another “fan.” This opens up the list of possibilities as to Polly’s murderer. But I don’t want to overwhelm the guy. He has his own mystery to solve.

  “I’ve made up a list in my head,” I tell him, “of all the people who might want to kill Polly. Only one is from the film.”

  “I’m all ears,” Charlie tells me.

  Maybe I’m wrong, but I think he may be enjoying this just a little bit.

  “Well. I’ll admit that I have never liked Polly Dawson. She’s led a charmed life, but has left a wake of disgruntled friends, colleagues, and maybe lovers. In the last couple of weeks alone, I saw Polly’s actions inspire extreme reactions in people.” I’m tempted to ask Charlie about his college romance with her, but I refrain. “I know of two men who may have been in love with her and two women who hated her.”

  “Okay. Ladies first,” Charlie says.

  “The first one is D.M.” I point out that that is my name for her. “I think she may be one of Polly’s business partners,” I tell him. “She’s older than Polly, fatter than Polly, and far less refined.”

  “You have just described ninety-nine point nine nine percent of the female population. That’s hardly a reason to kill her.”

  I tell him about Polly’s flaunting her trim little figure in front of her friend, who, by all appearances, has to struggle with her weight. I also tell him about our museum trips. Polly always ignored the line to pay for their admission, leaving D.M. to take care of it.

  “I wouldn’t think that poverty was one of Polly’s problems,” Charlie says.

  “Oh, Polly was much meaner than that.”

  I tell him about one interaction I’d witnessed. They were standing in front of Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe. D.M. said she wasn’t sure that the general public would be familiar with Monet. Polly almost spat at her.

  “No problem there, because this is Manet. You should educate yourself.”

  “You couldn’t miss the festering animosity,” I tell him.

  “Polly was horrible,” I continue. “She said something to D.M. like ‘It’s one thing that you’ve never been exposed to any sort of culture, but you’ve known for weeks about the importance of these trips to the museum. The least you could do is a little reading.’ ”

  “Whew,” Charlie says.

  “She told D.M. that she embarrassed her.”

  Charlie looks totally fascinated, so I go on.

  “Polly always ordered a huge meal when they were out together. She would order the Lever House hamburger and french fries. When we went to the Four Seasons, she would get the whole pheasant and whipped potatoes. As they sat there, Polly would play with the food rather than eating it. When the busboy would come to collect her plate, she would clutch her stomach a little too dramatically and say something like, ‘I’m so so so full; I couldn’t eat another thing.’ ” I shake my head disgustedly. “I swear, she put on this performance to torture D.M.

  “She would sit over her steamed greens looking longingly at Polly’s uneaten burger. Polly would pretend to be oblivious to all of this, but she had a habit of stabbing a forkful of the most presentable portion of food and then waving it in her friend’s face and then placing it back on her plate.”

  Charlie looks doubtful. “That’s no reason to kill someone,” he says.

  “You didn’t see it,” I tell him. “They had this kind of emotionally abusive thing. Polly put down everything that this woman did. Polly was nasty and this woman just took it. Maybe she snapped.”

  Charlie may not be sold on this theory, but he types into his computer: Suspect Number One. Name: D.M. Blondish female. Motive: Weird woman friendship or business relationship.

  “Next?” Charlie says.

  We’re still on the female suspects. I think for a moment.

  “Jenna McNair,” I say.

  “Who’s that?”

  “You’ll like her for the murder,” I say in detective show lingo. “She’s from the movie. She’s going to be a very big star.”

  “Go on.”

  “Jenna McNair. She’s the one who got the part that Lissa tried out for.”

  “Why would she kill Polly?”

  “I got the vibe that the two hated each other.” I start to tell Charlie about how I went to the mayor’s mansion for a cocktail party and about the icy connection between the two of them. “When Polly left, I saw Jenna mouth the words ‘What a bitch.’ ”

  Charlie seems less interested in Jenna McNair than in my crashing a private party at Gracie Mansion.

  “No one arrested you for trespassing?”

  “Ummmm. No.”

  “You were at a city party with city officials and security and guest lists and cameras, and you didn’t get caught?”

  “They had guns, too,” I say enthusiastically, “and bats and walkie-talkies and bomb-sniffing dogs.”

  Charlie looks at me and takes a deep breath. “You
are good,” he says in awe.

  I feel tingly. But we have to get back to Jenna.

  “I don’t know why, but those two women didn’t like each other.”

  Charlie, still awestruck by my mayoral coup, continues typing into his computer. Suspect Number Two. Jenna McNair. Motive: The two don’t like each other.

  “Is this really a strong motive?” he asks. “You said yourself that Polly Dawson must have a long list of women who don’t like her.”

  Charlie’s right. I think of Jean and me, for example. I have despised Polly for years and Jean’s hatred of her is almost pathological.

  “I know,” I tell him, “but the timing with Jenna would be right. For example, my best friend, Jean, and I have always hated Polly. It’s been a constant. It would seem weird that out of the blue, for no reason, either of us would kill her. Polly wasn’t a new character in my life.”

  Charlie interrupts me. “Yes, but the theory is that you always hated her and then your getting fired triggered a murderous event. That makes your motive stronger than Jenna McNair’s.”

  “So I got fired,” I say matter-of-factly, “from a position I didn’t even enjoy. And why would I kill Polly? She’s not in casting. Under your theory, if I were to kill anybody, it would be Mona Hawkins. Jenna just met Polly. Who knows? Polly may have realized that her husband was working with a woman who was more beautiful than she was and made her life miserable.”

  “This one seems thin to me, but we’ll keep it.” Charlie is poised for Suspect Number Three.

  “We’re on to the gentlemen,” I say. “I guess the number-one suspect has to be Polly’s cute young lover.”

  “I like it,” Charlie says. “More.”

  “Polly was sleeping with a guy. He must have been twenty-three, twenty-four years old. She used to go to his apartment almost every day and the two would spend hours up there.”

  “How did you know about him?”

  “I was lucky. I was vigilant about following her to this one building over and over again. Most would have given up.” I say this as if my behavior were normal. “One day, they must have discovered they were hungry because they actually left the premises and ventured into Chinatown for a meal. In fact, that was the day I saw you having lunch with Kovitz.”