And now what? Astor was still missing, Deborah was still not speaking to me, and Jackie was still dead. The world was not at all the happy place it had seemed to be so recently, and for just a moment there no longer seemed any point to pretending. All the purpose, all the anger and resolve and need to Do Something drained out of me, and I collapsed onto the edge of the couch in Robert’s living area. It had all looked so bright and beautiful this morning, and now the world had snapped back into its true form, gray and pointless and mean-spirited, and even though that was certainly a better fit for Dismal Dexter, I didn’t like it. I wanted things back the way they were. Like a little boy trapped in a dark and dreary adventure, I wanted to go home.
But I was not a little boy, and even worse, I was home. This was it, this dismal, painful, senseless trudging through sludge. This was where I lived; back in ugly old reality again. And there was nothing I could do about it, nothing at all, except to find Astor and drag her back home and start up the same old shadow show.
Home: back to dirty socks on the floor and screeching at all hours and Rita’s endless, pointless, disjointed monologues. Rita: the one person still talking to me, and I didn’t really want to talk to her and couldn’t understand what she said. And thinking of Rita, I remembered that my phone had bleated at me while I was being grilled by Anderson. It had to be her; nobody else was left.
And so with a heavy sigh and a sense of returning to painful duty, I dragged out my phone and looked at the screen. Yup: Rita. She’d left a message, naturally-why pass up an opportunity to blather? I went to voice mail and listened.
“Dexter,” she said. “I know you must be looking for her. For Astor? Because it’s been a long time now and you didn’t- And anyway, I thought of something, and I was going to- I know you said she might come home, and I thought, that’s right, she might, but maybe not-and so anyway, I’ll just be gone for twenty minutes. Oh. And I’ll call you when I get back, in case.” I heard her take a breath, as if she was going to go on, but instead she disconnected.
I glanced at the time. The call had come in fifty-eight minutes ago. I had been to college, so I knew that fifty-eight minutes was more than twenty minutes, but she hadn’t called back.
I called her number, but it rang and rang until it went to voice mail. I disconnected. I couldn’t believe Rita had left the house, and it was even harder to believe she’d gone somewhere without her phone. But apparently she had, and I would just have to wait until she got back.
In the meantime, Astor was not in any danger; she was with Robert, and she was quite probably someplace nearby, learning makeup tips. She would not want to be found, which would make things harder, but Robert would be much easier to locate. If he wasn’t hovering nearby at the edge of the excitement, somebody would know where he was-Victor, the director, would be a great place to start.
I found Victor in his trailer, just two doors away. I could tell he was in there because as I started to walk past, Martha, the assistant director, came rushing out of the trailer as if she was pursued by killer bees. Before I could even frame a question to her, she sprinted past me, muttering, “Shit shit shit shit shit,” and then vanished around the end of Trailer Row.
I went up the steps and knocked. There was no answer, but I could hear a voice inside, raised in passionate agony, so I pushed open the door and stepped inside.
Victor sat at the table, white-knuckled hand pressing his phone against his face. A large glass of water stood in front of him. He was listening to someone on the other end, shaking his head and whining, “No. No. No, impossible, fuck, no,” and as I stood there watching he picked up the glass and drained the water.
And then he reached behind him for a large blue bottle, which I recognized as a popular brand of vodka, refilled the glass, and took another healthy drink. I didn’t think he had filled the vodka bottle with water. He looked up at me without seeing me, and suddenly exploded in rage at whomever he was talking to on the phone.
“Well, goddamn it, what would you do? We got half a pilot in the can and a dead star, and the network is all over my fucking ass to fucking do something, and I can’t do shit without her and I can’t fucking raise the fucking dead!” He listened briefly-very briefly-and then snarled into the phone, “Well, then, call me back when you do know something.” He slapped the phone to disconnect and then slammed it onto the table.
“Rewrite,” he muttered angrily. “Fucking rewrite around a dead woman … Asshole …” Victor reached for his glass of “water” again, and then appeared to notice me for the first time. “What,” he said, and he did not sound like he was going to invite me to join him for a drink.
“I’m looking for Robert.” He just stared at me. “Robert Chase?” I said helpfully.
Victor screwed his face up and turned bright red, like he was going to give me a dose of the kind of bile he had unleashed on the phone, and I was in no mood for it. So it probably wasn’t the nicest thing I could have done, but I was past caring. “He has my little girl,” I said. “She’s eleven years old.”
All the color drained out of Victor’s face. It was an amazing thing to watch; one moment he was puffed up like a big red balloon, and the next he was a greenish-white thing with cheekbones poking through sagging flesh. “Oh, Jesus fuck, I’m dead,” he whispered, and he reached for his glass with two hands, lifting it numbly to his face and draining it.
When the glass was empty, Victor put it back down on the table. His hands were shaking and the glass rattled briefly before settling to a stop in front of him. He stared at the glass and then, finally, looked up at me with eyes that were nearly as dead as Jackie’s. “They said it was just gossip,” he said, and there was a slight slur to his words. “I never … I mean, you know. Richard Gere and the hamster. Tom Cruise is gay. All that shit. Just backstabbing bullshit Hollywood gossip.” He lifted the glass, saw it was empty, and put it back down again. “I swear, I never thought … I didn’t really think …”
Victor closed his eyes and slumped forward until his face was almost touching the tabletop. “Fuck,” he said. “Why me? Why is it always me …?” He began to shake his head, slowly and rhythmically. “I’m dead. It’s all turned to shit on me and I am soooo … fucking … dead.…” And he stopped shaking his head, and stopped breathing, and just sat there slumped into a pale green heap.
I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but his face had actually turned even greener, and he sat there for a long moment, motionless. Then he jerked upright, snapped his eyes open, and took a deep breath.
“You got to understand, Chase wasn’t my idea,” he said. “I wanted somebody younger, but the network needs a star. They got a list; it tells everybody’s TVQ-”
“Their what?” I said.
He gave me an impatient, irritated look. “TVQ. How popular they are. How many viewers they can get to watch something.” He held up a hand, then let it flop back down helplessly. “Robert’s is very high.”
“Right,” I said. “He’s popular.”
Victor nodded. “He’s popular. A star. And people always make up awful shit about stars. It’s … Everybody says stuff like that, you know, about anybody who makes it. It’s a mean, bitchy business, but if I thought it was really true about Chase and little girls-”
He stopped and looked down at the table again. “Fuck,” he said. “I woulda cast him anyway. He’s got a really high TVQ.” He stared at his hands for a moment, and then lurched sideways and grabbed the big blue vodka bottle and began to pour his glass full again.