Pie A La Murder (3 page)

“It was meant sincerely. What can I do for you, Della?”

“Project pies.”

“Pardon me?” Phil said.

“Tomorrow night’s live show is about pies. Millions of people don’t realize that baking a pie is really easy, it tastes better and—depending on what’s it in—is cheaper than buying one. I’d like to encourage a series of bake sales all around the country to raise money for good causes.”

“Explain.”

“Imagine teams of four, in hundreds of cities and towns, all baking pies—and cakes and cookies and brownies—to sell for whatever charity or cause they care about. Then on a date we pick we’ll announce the name of the team that’s raised the most money. We’ll show their photos on TV. Is this something I’m allowed to promote on the air?”

“ ‘Promote’—that’s my favorite word.” I heard excitement in his voice. “It’s a great idea! We can do
well
by doing
good
.”

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

“Let’s think big,” Phil said. “You promote—‘champion’ is a nicer word—bake sales around the country, and what we do at the BLC is offer a nice prize for the group that proves it raised the most money. Wait a minute, I’m about to be brilliant! The prize will be a three-day trip to Hollywood for the winning team. They’ll appear on your show, and we’ll get them a VIP tour of Universal Studios, and send them to Disneyland.”

“That sounds expensive,” I said. “Do you think Mickey will go for it?”

Our boss, Mickey Jordan, billionaire owner of, among other businesses, the Better Living Channel, could be inconsistent in his generosity. He’d never balked at improvements in equipment, but sometimes he pinched pennies until they screamed.

“I think I can sell him on the basis that it’ll get us free national news coverage. Mickey loves ‘free.’ Hey—we could make a documentary about the sales, focusing on a few groups in major TV markets as they organize, bake the stuff, sell it, and count the money. There’s bound to be at least a couple of fights and kitchen disasters. Maybe some backstabbing and sabotage. Reality TV. I love it!”

All day Thursday I baked pies for the live show that night. I would be making an apple, a lemon meringue, and a chocolate cream on the air, but there wouldn’t be enough time in the hour to have all three ready so that viewers and the people in the studio audience could see the ready-toserve finished product. I also planned to pass out slices for the studio audience to taste. To provide for that, I had to bake two of each at home.

Tuffy watched me take the last pie out of the oven and stood up. He always knew when I finished cooking or baking.

“You can’t come with me tonight, Tuff,” I said. “Sorry.”

He seemed to understand, and settled back down on his cushy L.L.Bean dog bed next to the refrigerator. Nights, he slept in my bedroom, but he seldom left my side during the day, so I made sure he was comfortable while I worked long hours in the kitchen.

On Mondays and Tuesdays, when I pretaped four half-hour shows, Tuffy came to the studio with me. He was a fixture on the set, which had been built as an exact replica of my basically low-tech yellow and white home kitchen, right down to a duplicate L.L.Bean dog bed. The camera operators photographed Tuffy watching me curiously, ready to taste anything I might drop. Those shots resulted in Tuffy getting his own electronic fan mail. One of Phil Logan’s assistants answered the e-mails and signed them with paw prints.

Just as I finished washing the mixing bowls and the measuring cups and spoons, my gray and gold calico cat, Emma, strolled into the kitchen and went right to her food bowl. I glanced up at the wall clock and saw that it was three o’clock, her preferred time to dine.

“You must have a watch in your stomach,” I said to Emma. She didn’t look up at the sound of my voice, just crunched happily.

While the pies cooled, I let Tuffy out into the fenced backyard, took a bath, put a few hot rollers in my hair to fluff it out, and did my best to “glam up,” as Liddy called it.

Apparently I didn’t do it well enough, because when she came to my house to help transport the pies, she looked at me critically and then went back outside to her car for her professional makeup kit.

“Always carry it,” Liddy said. “When you do extra work you don’t get the top rank makeup artists, so I learned to do my own.” She steered me toward the bathroom and handed me a towel from the rack. “Sit down, put this around your neck, and don’t move your mouth.”

I did as instructed. While she was using her skills on my cheeks, brows, lashes, and lips, I was doing a mental runthrough of that evening’s show. Cooking live on TV had begun as a publicity gimmick a year ago, when I suddenly went from being a cooking school teacher on the verge of bankruptcy to a TV cooking show host. Phil Logan’s initial plan was to have me do live shows once a week only for the first two months. His theory was that the novelty of it would get the public’s attention and help to establish me, an unknown. After the first two months, all the shows would be pretaped. But so many people began writing in asking for the free tickets that Phil persuaded our boss to keep the Thursday night live show on the schedule. Recently, Phil had found money in his budget to buy twenty extra seats, expanding the size of the studio audience from thirty people to fifty.

“Have you heard from Jolly Ole Nick?” Liddy asked as she applied eye shadow.

“No. But I didn’t expect to.”

“You sure he’s coming tonight?”

“That’s what he said he wanted to do. He would have let me know if he’d changed his plan.”

“When we get to the studio, have one of your people tape off three reserved seats.”

“Liddy, I don’t have ‘people,’ but I was going to have seats saved for Nicholas and Celeste. Why three? Oh, Lord.” I felt a flash of dread and turned my back to the mirror in order to stare at Liddy. “You don’t think his ex-wife came here with Celeste, do you?”

“I hope not. The third seat is for me. I’m going to sit next to them and try to get acquainted with the girl. See if I can do a little positive PR on your behalf.”

I squeezed her hand. “You really are worried about Celeste ruining my relationship with Nicholas, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” she said softly, “I am. Now turn around again and tilt your head back so I can make you gorgeous.”

When I could move my mouth again, I said, “I’m going to start exercising.”

“Except for walking, you hate exercise.”

“I like that climbing wall at the Santa Monica Pier.”

Liddy nodded in approval. “Climbing’s good for all parts of the body.” She was silent for a moment. “When you think about it, it’s also a kind of metaphor for life.”

I wasn’t thinking about metaphors. My mind was on Nicholas. With the sudden arrival of his eighteen-year-old daughter, was our relationship really heading for the choppy waters Liddy had predicted?

Because we planned to drive to the studio in my Jeep Compass, Liddy had parked her ivory Range Rover on the street. It was a beautiful day, this second of November. Sunny and just slightly crisp. Swimming weather—or it would be if I’d had a pool. I hoped the weather was a good omen for meeting Celeste tonight.

It took Liddy and me three trips back and forth from kitchen to vehicle, but we finally loaded the pies into the special boxed shelves I’d had installed behind the rear seats. They’d been made specifically for the purpose of transporting finished dishes to the TV studio, as well as the groceries and portable equipment I needed for teaching classes on Saturdays at my little cooking school in the back of a Santa Monica appliance store.

To avoid getting stuck in rush-hour traffic on the 101 Freeway, as usual I took Beverly Glen Canyon through one of the several man-made clefts in the mountain range that separated the west side of Los Angeles from the San Fernando Valley. From either side it was called “going over the hill.”

Once across the canyon and onto Ventura Boulevard I turned east. It was only another few minutes before we reached North Hollywood, and the corner of Chandler and Lankershim boulevards where the Better Living Channel’s West Coast broadcast facilities were located.

As always, the first thing I saw was the billboard on the corner, just outside the high security fence that surrounded the airplane hangar–shaped structure that was my second home two days and one night a week. The huge sign featured caricatures of the BLC’s four West Coast hosts. I liked the artist’s rendering of me because he’d given me a smaller waist, bigger eyes, and hollow cheeks.

At the security gate I touched my finger to the “Call” button. Through the microphone I heard the jovial voice of Angie Johnson, one of the guardians of the entrance.

“Hi, Della. Whatcha makin’ tonight?”

“Pies. How late are you working?”

“ ’Til nine.”

“I’ll put a plate in the on-set fridge with your name on it.”

“Yummy! Who’s that in the car with you?”

“It’s Mrs. Marshall.”

“Okay, I’ll log her in.” Angie pushed the release on her side of the security camera. I watched the tall iron gate swing open.

“Angie, I’m expecting two special guests tonight. You know Mr. D’Martino?”

I heard her bawdy chuckle. “Oh, yeah. That man is
electric
. When you get tired of him, put in a good word for me.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” I joked. “He’s coming tonight, and he’s bringing his daughter. I don’t know exactly when they’ll get here, but will you be sure to let them in, even if they’re late?”

“Count on it.”

“I will. Thanks.” I waved at the camera’s lens, drove onto the grounds and around to the rear of the building to my parking space near the big, sliding double doors into the studio. Members of the audience would enter through another door adjacent to the front of the building and the visitors’ parking lot. I hoped two of those people would be Nicholas and Celeste.

I made myself stop thinking about them and parked the Jeep. As soon as Liddy and I opened the rear door to begin unloading, George, one of the studio’s uniformed security guards, came up to us at a trot.

“Let me get that stuff for you.” He inhaled the aroma coming from the pies. “Smells good enough to eat.”

“Hands off until after the show,” I said, laughing.

Liddy and I carried one pie box each, while George, hefting the four biggest ones, followed us into the studio.

The Better Living Channel building was divided into two sections and housed four permanent sets. The workshop set for
That’s Not Junk
, where the host demonstrated how to rescue and repurpose everything from broken can openers to butt-sprung sofas, shared space with the design studio for the channel’s newest offering:
Decorating for Dimes
.

My kitchen was on the far side in the back half, next to
The Car Guy
’s automobile repair shop. Car—as we called the man who’d changed his name legally to “Car Guy”—had the spot next to the big sliding doors because he needed to drive his demonstration vehicles in and out.

Six PM. An hour to broadcast. I checked that my cell phone was on. Still no word from Nicholas.

One gaffer up on a tall ladder tested the lights above the preparation counter and stove top that faced the audience, while another technician adjusted the lights over the oven and the long display counter against the kitchen’s back wall. Because Tuffy didn’t appear in the live shows—too many people around for his safety—his dog bed had been moved to the storage room behind the set.

My favorite camera operators, Jada Powell and Ernie Ramirez, were checking their equipment and getting shot instructions from our TV director up in the glass production booth above our heads. Tonight, Jada’s cloud of soft, curly hair—“Diana Ross hair,” Ernie called it—was tamed into cornrows and accented with tiny red and white beads. Ernie was wearing his usual Los Angeles Dodgers baseball cap and blue satin team jacket. It hadn’t been a great year for the Dodgers, but win or lose, Ernie was loyal.