The Fatal Funnel Cake Page 12

  Phyllis just shook her head wearily and waved off Carolyn’s suggestion.

  “Oh, it’s much too early in the investigation to speculate about that, Mike,” Gloria said.

  Peggy asked, “Could they possibly call each other by their first names more often? Nobody talks like that in real life.”

  “It’s TV news,” Sam said. “It just sort of has a noddin’ acquaintance with real life.”

  Gloria continued, “I’m sure it’ll be a while before the medical examiner’s office announces an official cause of death. But in the meantime”—her face got even more solemn—“my very good friend, my protégée, if you will, is gone, struck down in the prime of her life by a cruel fate.”

  Carolyn said, “If what Bailey told us is true, Gloria’s probably dancing a jig on the inside right now.”

  Phyllis thought about that. From what Bailey had said, Gloria Kimball did indeed hold a bitter grudge against Joye over what had happened several years earlier. No one could tell that from the way she was acting now, though.

  “Thank you for that live report from the state fair, Gloria,” the anchorman said. “You’ll let us know if there are any other breaking developments?”

  “Of course, Mike.”

  “Thanks again, Gloria.” The split screen went away, leaving the anchorman on camera by himself. He went on, “I’m Mike Wallichevsky for The 44 News, and we’ll be right back with a story you won’t want to miss about a gorilla that can predict what the stock market is going to do.” He smiled. “You may want to get some bananas together to invest.”

  “That’s about enough of that,” Peggy said as she turned the TV off. “I think I’m gonna go start supper.”

  “I’ll come and help you,” Carolyn said as she got to her feet. “How about you, Phyllis?”

  After a couple of seconds, Phyllis said, “What?”

  “I asked if you wanted to help us fix supper.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry, I was a little distracted. No, I don’t really feel up to it, Carolyn, if that’s all right.”

  “That’s fine,” Carolyn assured her. “After everything that’s happened this week, I’m sure you could use a little rest and relaxation.”

  “Yes,” Phyllis said, “I think I’ll go up and check my e-mail and try to get my mind off of everything.”

  • • •

  About half an hour later, Sam knocked quietly on the partially open door of Phyllis’s room. She was sitting in an armchair by the window, her computer open in her lap. She looked up, saw Sam standing there, and smiled.

  “Come on in,” she said.

  Sam sat on the foot of the bed and said, “I had a feelin’ you were doing more than just checkin’ e-mail up here. You’ve been researchin’, haven’t you?”

  “That’s right. My Google-fu is powerful, as you always like to say.”

  “Yeah, but somehow it doesn’t sound quite so goofy when I say it.”

  “So you’d like to think, anyway,” Phyllis said, still smiling.

  “I believe I’ll change the subject by askin’ you what you found out.”

  Phyllis nodded. “I was looking into the background of Joye Jameson’s show—”

  “That goes without sayin’.”

  “And I was amazed,” Phyllis said, “at how much, well, gossip you can find out about celebrities online.”

  “Celebrity gossip on the Internet.” Sam shook his head. “Who’d’a thunk it?”

  “That’s about enough joking around from you, Mr. Fletcher. Do you want to hear this or not?”

  Sam held up his hands in mock surrender. “All right, I’ll behave,” he promised.

  “Good. Anyway, I went all the way back to the days of Gloria’s Kitchen. It’s true that Joye was Gloria Kimball’s assistant. I remembered that, but I didn’t know that Joye worked on the show for five years in that position before Gloria had a problem on the air one day.”

  “What sort of problem?” Sam asked.

  “Well, the consensus of opinion seems to be that she was drunk, although some people believe she was using drugs. In fact, after the incident Gloria herself claimed she had a poor reaction to some prescription medication. But regardless of the cause, she made something of a spectacle of herself. There are clips from that episode on YouTube.”

  Phyllis tapped the computer’s touch pad a couple of times and turned it so that Sam could see the screen. The video played, and as it opened, Gloria Kimball, looking only slightly younger than she did now, was walking unsteadily across a set much like the one at the state fair.

  “This was on the show’s regular soundstage in Hollywood,” Phyllis said.

  Gloria tripped, apparently over nothing, and had to catch herself on a kitchen counter. “My nex’ guess is . . . is movie star Frank . . . Frank Stanton. Gorgeous boy, jus’ gorgeous. Here he is now. C’mon out, Frankie.”

  A good-looking young man about twenty years old came onto the set, smiling but looking a little worried and wary at the same time. He had good reason to feel that way, because Gloria greeted him by throwing her arms around him and kissing him on the mouth. The actor tried to disengage himself from her embrace gracefully, but Gloria hung on. Joye Jameson was visible in the background of the shot, looking shocked.

  “That kid’s half her age,” Sam said.

  “Yes, evidently Gloria was a cougar before the term even became popular,” Phyllis said. She turned the computer around to face her again and stopped the video. “It goes on like that for another minute or two before the director finally cuts away.”

  “Who was the director?” Sam asked.

  Phyllis frowned and said, “You know, I don’t know. There are no credits on this clip. You think it was Charlie Farrar?”

  “I don’t have any idea,” Sam said with a shrug. “It just occurred to me; that’s all.”

  “It might be interesting to find out. Hang on a minute while I look.”

  Sam sat on the bed while Phyllis navigated to another site. After a few moments, she said, “According to this, Charlie Farrar worked as an assistant director and director on Gloria’s Kitchen, but it doesn’t list individual episodes that he directed. Still, it’s certainly possible he was there that day.”

  “Didn’t mean to distract you,” Sam said. “Go on with what you were tellin’ me about how Gloria fell from grace and Joye took over.”

  “Well, after that incident, Gloria was off the show for a while, although it was still called Gloria’s Kitchen at that point. She supposedly had medical issues, which everyone took to mean she was in rehab.”

  “Yep. You can see why.”

  “Joye filled in for her, and after several weeks of that, the name of the show changed without explanation to The Joye of Cooking, and Joye was the star from then on. There was some minor speculation that Joye had sabotaged Gloria somehow, maybe by slipping her some sort of drug without her knowing, and of course there was a little talk about how Joye must have been sleeping with the producer, too, in order to take over the show so quickly and completely.”

  “That producer bein’ Reed Hayes?”

  “Yes. He wasn’t the original producer on Gloria’s Kitchen, but he’d been with the show for several years at the time, and he’s still running it.”

  Sam rubbed his chin and said, “So back then Hayes was sleepin’ with Gloria Kimball’s assistant, and now he’s Bailey Broderick’s boyfriend.”

  “It was rumored he was sleeping with Joye. There’s no proof of that, as far as I’ve been able to discover so far. Of course, I just started looking into it.” Phyllis paused. “And I appreciate you not asking me why I’m doing this.”

  “Shoot, I understand,” Sam said. “You’re curious. I am, too. I’ve got to say, though, in the time that I was around ’em, I didn’t get any sort of ex-lovers vibe from Hayes and Joye. For what it’s worth.”


  “For what it’s worth, neither did I,” Phyllis said. “Maybe a little animosity, but I figure that was strictly business. Which leads right into my next point . . . Joye was rumored to be demanding a large increase in her salary in this new contract that’s coming up. Large enough that it’s possible the syndicate would have canceled the show rather than giving in. Evidently the battle over that behind the scenes has been pretty bitter. Joye was even threatening to leave and start her own network if she didn’t get what she wanted.”

  Sam frowned and asked, “Was she a big enough star to do something like that? No offense, but I’d barely heard of the lady until recently.”

  “She was a big enough star with her target audience that she probably could have found the backing she needed. Whether or not she would have been successful . . . well, who knows? You can’t predict TV.”

  “Or much of anything else about life,” Sam said.

  Phyllis smiled. “That’s true. But that keeps it interesting, don’t you think?”

  “Well . . . there’s a good reason for that old Chinese curse. You know, the one that goes, ‘May you live in interesting times.’”

  “And we certainly do,” Phyllis said.

  From downstairs, Carolyn called, “Supper’s ready!”

  “There’s more,” Phyllis said, “but we’ll talk about it later.”

  Chapter 17

  During supper, neither Phyllis nor Sam mentioned anything about what they had been discussing upstairs, but it was never far from Phyllis’s mind, and judging by the thoughtful expression on Sam’s face, he was mulling it over, too.

  The mood at the dining room table was subdued. Phyllis tried to liven it up slightly by saying, “Sam, tell us again about the recipe you’re going to use in the contest tomorrow.”

  He grinned. “Well, as you might expect, growin’ up in Texas when I did, I never knew much about sushi, even though it was invented right here in the Lone Star State.”

  “What?” Carolyn asked. “I never heard of such a thing! Sushi wasn’t invented in Texas.”

  “Sure it was,” Sam insisted. “We’ve had it around here for as far back as I can remember.”

  Phyllis tried not to roll her eyes. She had a pretty good idea what he was about to say.

  “We call it bait,” Sam said with a smile.

  Carolyn stared at him for a couple of seconds, then sighed exasperatedly in an eloquent expression of her opinion regarding his sense of humor. Phyllis could tell that Eve and Peggy were trying not to laugh, though.

  “Anyway,” Sam went on, “what I’m gonna fix for the contest isn’t really sushi, but that’s what I’m callin’ it. It’s Texas-style Spam sushi, a little like a California roll but even more like Hawaii’s Spam musubi recipe. It has sushi rice that’s easy to make in a rice steamer, and it’s put together in a form. You can buy musubi forms, but I made mine by cuttin’ out the bottom of a Spam can. You put down a strip of seaweed on a plate or cuttin’ board, place the form in the middle of the seaweed, add some sticky rice, then a slice of Spam that was fried in bacon grease, and has a mixture of cream cheese and green onions spread on it. To that you add slices of avocado and jalapeño peppers. More rice is added to the top of that, but you have to flatten it all as you go along. The last step is to push it out of the form and wrap the seaweed around the whole thing. If the seaweed overlaps, dab a little water on it to make it stick together, and that’s pretty much it.”

  When Sam was finished, Peggy said, “You know, I’m not much of a sushi eater myself, but that actually sounds pretty good. I’d give it a try.”

  “We’ve all had it,” Phyllis said. “Sam prepared it for us at home last week.”

  “It is pretty good,” Carolyn added with a tone of grudging admiration in her voice.

  “I’ll fix some more for all of us,” Sam promised. “After I’ve won the blue ribbon for it tomorrow.”

  Eve asked, “Aren’t you worried about being greedy? I mean, three blue ribbons in one household is a bit much, isn’t it?”

  Sam grinned and said, “Nah, we can’t help it if we’re all culinary geniuses.”

  Carolyn said, “I just hope you don’t run into any competitors as crazed as that funnel cake fellow . . . what was his name?”

  “Ramón Silva,” Phyllis said.

  “That’s right. I hope there isn’t anyone like him in the Spam contest.”

  Sam shrugged. “I won’t let it bother me. Haters gonna hate; that’s how I look at it. Doesn’t make any difference in how I roll.”

  “I suppose,” Carolyn said.

  The conversation put another thought into Phyllis’s head. She turned it over in her brain as the meal continued and tried not to let the others see how distracted she was.

  She was glad when supper was over. After everything was cleaned up, Carolyn, Eve, and Peggy went into the living room to watch a movie on DVD. Phyllis begged off, saying that she was tired, and Sam mentioned that he was going upstairs to read.

  “No offense, ladies, but that movie y’all are about to watch looks a little weepy, and if I want to sit around and cry, I can watch clips from the Cowboys’ last few games.”

  Phyllis was glad that Peggy didn’t make any suggestive comments about Sam going upstairs at the same time. With all the thoughts of murder crowding into her brain, romance was just about the last thing on her mind.

  Sam went on down the hall to the room he was using, waited a few minutes, and then walked back quietly. Phyllis had left her door open. As he slipped in, he said, “Sneakin’ into a gal’s room makes me feel like a teenager again.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t remember that far back,” Phyllis said.

  Sam sat on the end of the bed as he had before. “All right, what was the rest of it you were gonna tell me?”

  “It’s about Hank Squires.”

  Sam frowned in thought for a moment, then shook his head and said, “Uh . . . who’s Hank Squires?”

  “You know. Hank the cameraman, from The Joye of Cooking.”

  “That big fella who works the main camera? The one who’s startin’ to go bald on top?”

  “That’s him,” Phyllis said. “He used to be married to Joye Jameson.”

  Sam stared. A few more seconds ticked by before he said, “That doesn’t hardly seem right. He’s built sort of like the Incredible Hulk, and she was just a little bitty thing.”

  “You see couples like that sometimes,” Phyllis said with a shrug. “I was surprised when I found out about it, too, to be honest. But they were definitely married. I read about it on several websites. They got a divorce several years ago, and it’s the timing of that divorce that’s the interesting part.”

  “I know you’re gonna tell me.”

  “The divorce became final three weeks before the incident on Gloria’s Kitchen that led to Joye taking over the show.”

  Sam thought about it, then shook his head again. “I don’t get the connection.”

  “If the marriage had lasted a little longer, Hank would have wound up married to a rich, famous TV star.”

  “Son of a gun,” Sam said. “You’re right. She was just a nobody when they split up, but that was about to change.”

  “Yes. And remember, Joye was rumored to be having an affair with Reed Hayes at the time.”

  “What was listed as the grounds for the divorce? Got any idea?”

  “I was able to look that up on a state of California public records database. The grounds were irreconcilable differences, which, of course, can mean almost anything. The divorce appears to have been quite amicable despite that, though. They split the marital property down the middle, and no spousal support was awarded for either party.”

  Sam grunted. “No alimony, huh? That would’ve been a heck of a note, if Joye got rich and famous but Hank had to keep on payin’ her part of what he earned as a camera
man on her show. That’d sure chap a fella’s behind.”

  “Yes, but that’s not what happened,” Phyllis reminded him. “So we can’t consider it a motive for murder. And the two of them must have stayed friends; otherwise, Hank wouldn’t have continued to work on the show.”

  “Yeah, that makes sense,” Sam agreed. “Although if there really was an affair and he knew about it, he might’ve kept his feelin’s bottled up inside all these years, lettin’ ’em stew and fester. Throw in the fact that Joye was rich as sin and he was still a workin’ stiff . . . well, it might have been enough to push him over the edge sooner or later.”

  “I suppose you’re right about that. And there’s one more thing that has me curious. Yesterday I saw Hank and Bailey acting rather suspiciously, as if they might have been sneaking off to meet each other.”

  Sam’s bushy eyebrows rose in surprise. “You mean you think the two of ’em might be carryin’ on together? Bailey’s supposed to be datin’ Reed Hayes.”

  “Hence the sneaking around if she actually is involved with Hank Squires.”

  Sam shook his head and said, “That’s pretty hard to figure, too. Those two don’t strike me as the sort to get mixed up with each other.”

  “Remember how unlikely you thought it was that Hank and Joye Jameson were married.”

  “Yeah, there’s that, all right,” Sam agreed. “I guess you never can predict who somebody’s gonna wind up fallin’ for, can you?”

  “Not with any degree of accuracy.” Phyllis gave him the details of what she had observed in the Creative Arts Building the day before, then said, “Of course, there could be a perfectly legitimate explanation for what they were doing. Like I mentioned, the restrooms are down that hall. Maybe I just imagined that Hank and Bailey were acting furtively.”

  “I’ve never known you to imagine anything like that. You’re usually pretty doggone sharp about what you see.”

  “It’s one more thing to consider, anyway,” Phyllis said. “And so is that business with Ramón Silva.”

  “Now you’ve lost me again,” Sam said. “You’re talkin’ about the fella who was mad because you won the blue ribbon for your funnel cakes?”