Set Sail for Murder (2 page)

Polly turned on the water taps to her tub and dumped a half jar of green tea and peppermint bath beads into the torrent. As the bubbles churned and frothed, the scent of a candy store filled the room. Polly removed her clothes, draped them over the leather chaise longue, and then dipped a toe into the water. Slowly adjusting to the preset temperature-controlled whirlpool, she submerged her entire body, leaned back, and let out a long moan of satisfaction. “Thank you, Jesus, and the Jersey Boys!”

With the Jacuzzi whirring and its magic jets pulsating, Polly picked up the phone beside the tub and pushed the intercom button. “I’m ready,” she said, then closed her eyes and rested her head against the soft built-in cushion behind her.

In a moment, Placenta made a halfhearted knock on the door before entering Polly’s inner sanctum. “Timmy’s here too, Miss Water Sprite, so you’d better drag those suds up to your throat,” she said as she headed for the wine cooler and withdrew a bottle of champagne.

In tandem with Tim, who set three glasses on the marble sideboard, Placenta popped the cork and began to pour
the bubbly. When each had their own glass, Polly raised hers and began to make up a song using the most positive lyrics she could think of. The melody was discordant, and the meter made no sense. Still, she rambled, “We’re in the money … Put on a happy face … Look for the silver lining … Dance all your troubles away….”

Tim bobbed his head and snapped his fingers to the beat of Polly’s ad-libbed tune.

Placenta harrumphed. “Someone’s been sniffing the May-belline.”

“Spring is busting out all over …” Polly continued. “I am sixteen going on seventeen … Before the parade passes by … Put on your Sunday clothes … Don’t worry, be happy … And don’t bring around a cloud to rain on my parade!”

Placenta tossed Polly’s rubber ducky into the suds and said, “Okay, already. We get it. The world’s chaos is only half bad. We’re luckier than anybody else. I’ll be Pollyanna and Tim can play Doris Day.”

“Um, I’m more the Hugh Jackman type. He’s always smiling,” Tim said.

“And with damn good reason,” Polly said as she backhanded a splash of bubbles at her son. “But seriously, folks, we’re at a crossroads. We have a choice to make. We can accept the lousy cards we’re dealt, or reshuffle the deck and cheat. Fate, that is. I refuse to go along with the pessimists.” Polly knocked back her glass of champers and waited for a refill. “I believe in Polly Pepper! Always have, despite my mother telling me I’d end up a failure like her. Ha! I only wish she could still talk so I’d know what she was thinking whenever I park her wheelchair over my star on the Walk of Fame.”

“Leaving Grandma there for hours at a time isn’t such a nice thing to do,” Tim said.

Polly pooh-poohed Tim’s concern. “She’ll never admit that she gets a thrill out of seeing tourists point to my star
and talk about how much they love me. Not to mention the semifresh air she takes in.”

Tim and Placenta both agreed that it didn’t help to fear their financial future. “We can take in boarders for extra money,” Tim suggested.

“I don’t cook and clean for strangers,” Placenta said.

“For strangers?” Polly mocked.

Placenta jabbed, “You could start Lush Hour a teensy bit later and end it a weensy bit earlier. Call it ‘champagne saving time.’”

“Pfff!” Polly blew away a strand of hair off of her damp forehead. “You wouldn’t deprive an asthmatic of his inhaler!”

Other than the muted whooshing noise of the Jacuzzi jets, the room settled into a torpid unease as unexpressed thoughts about their potentially dire situation hung in the air and mixed with the steam rising from Polly’s bathwater. A financial crisis was new territory for the threesome, none of whom ever considered that a day might come when they’d have to add the word
austerity
to their vocabulary.

As Placenta reached for the champagne bottle and refilled all three flutes, the telephone rang. Polly splashed like a baby in a plastic pool as she listlessly said, “If it’s J.J. I’ve definitely reconsidered the offer from Depends. And I’ll take any voiceover work—including that commercial for the Tourette’s Syndrome convention he tried to suck me into last week.”

Tim looked at the caller ID. “Just your luck. It’s Laura Crawford.”

“What the heck could
she
want?” Polly said, making a bigger splash in the tub.

Polly Pepper was famous for being able to find something to like about almost everyone. Laura Crawford was the exception. Laura was Polly’s least favorite cast member from
The Polly Pepper Playhouse,
her long-ago-canceled musical/comedy/variety television series. Polly and Laura
could go years without seeing or speaking to one another, and when they did communicate, it was always Laura who instigated the overture. Without exception, every conversation came with an agenda. After transparent faux pleasantries Laura got to the root of the reason for her calling. It was always a variation on one theme: how they could all make money using Polly’s name and international prestige to take advantage of autograph hounds or collectors of celebrity memorabilia.

“Don’t fall for any of her schemes,” Tim said as he answered the phone and ignored his mother adamantly waving away any interest in speaking with Laura. “Auntie Laura!” he exclaimed. “Oh, status quo. Mending another broken heart. Polly? Couldn’t be better. She’s taking a boob-ly. But I know she’d love to chat.” He smiled evilly at Polly’s icy stare and pushed the cordless phone into his mother’s hand.

Polly moved her lips and closed her eyes as she silently counted to ten. She then morphed into her Polly Pepper persona. “Sweetums!” she cooed. “You’re picking up my thought vibrations. I was just thinking about you. Um, a couple of weeks ago.”

For the next full minute Polly lied about her busy schedule. She feigned boredom with having to schlep through airport security, and the increasing lack of amenities in the first-class cabins of the dozens of different airlines she claimed she had to take en route to untold numbers of personal appearances and special guest starring roles on sitcoms. “Mainly abroad, dear. I’ll send a Tweet when
Muhammad and Me
airs on Al Jazeera’s new comedy night,” Polly said.

In Hollywood, like bringing a bottle of imported wine to a dinner party in Paris, it’s boorish to ask an out-of-work actor to talk about their latest projects. No one ever tells the truth. “My agent wants to put me up for the new Spielberg film,” was code for “I’m a humongous failure!”
And when one said, “I’m trying to write my memoirs,” everybody knew they were washed up in the biz.

Laura was smart enough to know that Polly was in the same boat as every other one-time major female star of her age range. When Polly became silent for a long while, and listened intently to Laura, Tim and Placenta knew something had caught Polly’s interest. “A cruise? As a matter of fact, I do have some time off coming up.”

Tim nudged Placenta and they both nodded their full support to Polly for a high-seas adventure.

“Alaska?” Polly winced. “Isn’t that the place where that Gidget who ran for veep puts lipstick on her pit bull? I remember donating to Actors and Others for Animals to have her tongue removed … or was it to have her daughter spayed?” She listened for another moment. “I hear she’s a humanitarian at heart. Where did I read about her support group for unwed teenage girls of right-wing politicians with sexy but irresponsible sperm donors?”

Trying to get off the line, Polly finally said, “Yes. A-ha. I’ll tell J.J. to call you first thing in the
A.M.
No, stop being afraid of him. He’s really a kitty cat, albeit a saber-toothed one. Yes, ciao to you, too, dear.
Arrivederci.
Bye-bye. Gotta go now.”

Polly hung up the telephone, picked up her champagne flute, and took a long swallow. “Refill, please,” she said, looking at Tim. “We have something to celebrate. And I won’t say I told you so about landing in clover—or the Atlantic Ocean!”

Over the next few days, a volley of calls between Polly and her reptilian agent, J.J. Norton, ensued. They hammered out the details of the cruise that Laura Crawford had instigated, and finally signed contracts that provided for two extra guests to accompany Polly, albeit with less-than-stellar accommodations for her companions.

True to her nature and desperate for a job, Laura had somehow convinced the talent booking agent for Astral Cruise Lines—who ran the popular Kool Krooz XXX-itement ships—that she could get the legendary Polly Pepper to host a weeklong series of lectures with the original cast of her famous TV show. Although Polly was a piece of cake to convince to go along for the ride, the other two members of her comedy troupe, Arnie Levin and Tommy Milkwood, weren’t as eager to join in the promised fun. Especially since it meant sharing a stage again with the scene-stealing Laura Crawford. For the two male costars, twelve seasons on television with Laura was as painful as watching the fluke of Charlie Sheen having his own hit prime-time show. Almost.

As hysterically funny as both gifted men could be, like most comics, they also had their dark sides. Arnie could be as cruel as he was amusing—as the restraining orders from five former wives, and Donny Osmond, attested. While audiences adored him, for twelve seasons
The Polly Pepper Playhouse
staff had scuttled out of Arnie’s path in the hallways at the studio. The writers had to endure his weekly visits to their offices where he held hair-tearing tantrums whenever he perceived that Polly or Laura or Tommy or a guest star were getting a higher percentage of funny lines in a sketch. He was a brat with a temper that would make famously grumpy Jerry Lewis look like the Werther’s Original candy grandfather.

Tommy, too, had a flair for dragging negative vibrations onto the set. Often, when his
Ego-meter
detected that audiences were responding more favorably to the others, he sabotaged a sketch in order to draw attention to himself. A master of mean-spirited practical jokes, he knew that snails were the only things that terrified Laura Crawford more than her recurring nightmare—the one in which she was reduced to working as a sales associate behind the Clinique cosmetics counter at Macy’s. Armed with this
fear factor knowledge, Tommy once maliciously sent Laura a Christmas gift of stuffed escargot from an epicurean mailorder catalog. Her nightmares escalated and she became addicted to sleeping pills.

The two comics were in agreement that they’d rather have appendectomies performed by Homer Simpson, without anesthesia, than have to work with Laura Crawford again. However, the reality of their own economic downturns made them reluctantly agree to the cruise. They rationalized that the horror was only for a week. Surely they could put up with a putz like Laura for that amount of time. Plus they’d get a free cruise and have an opportunity to mug for live audiences again—not to mention the payday.

When Polly heard that Arnie and Tommy were ready to set sail, she decided that a celebration was in order. She telephoned her beau, Beverly Hills police detective Randy Archer, and suggested dinner at Spago—and a much-needed sleepover at his condo.

P
olly, Tim, and Placenta stepped from their hired limousine onto the curb at the embarkation gate at Pier 35, at San Francisco’s Embarcadero. Although tired after the flight from LAX, and awed by the sight of the enormous ship berthed before them, they grimaced at a motley group in the check-in queue. “Tank tops?” Polly said, looking at several young men.

“This is what they call a Kool Krooz,” Placenta mocked. “Neanderthals. Jerry Springer guests. Southern state governors hiding out with their mistresses. Just pray to God that we aren’t assigned to the same dining table as the bald guy with shorts, missing front tooth, and hairy watermelon showing below his sleeveless T-shirt!”

Polly turned to Tim. “When your second father and I made the crossing aboard the
QEII,
I wore furs—before I knew better. For the men, suits and ties were de rigueur!”

Placenta pointed to a large banner and read, “WELCOME ABOARD THE S.S.
INTACTI!
NO SHOES. NO SHIRTS. NO SHIT!”

“Kool Krooz, eh?” Polly echoed ruefully.

“Intacti?”
Tim said. “Um, does anybody else realize that’s an anagram for
Titanic?”

The trio looked at each other with wary expressions, as the limo driver deposited their luggage with a cruise ship attendant and waited for Tim to hand him a tip.

“Kool Krooz, indeed!” Polly said again, but this time with more enthusiasm. She projected that the following seven days were going to be filled with many memorable experiences suitable for embellishing out of all proportion at dinner parties and in the autobiography she constantly threatened to write. “Much relaxation, and most of all a payday from my lectures and selling millions of units of
The Polly Pepper Playhouse
DVDs.”

“Look around,” Placenta retorted. “This group watches
Whipped Out
and
Biker Bitches’ Conjugal Jail Visits.”

As the trio moved toward the check-in line, a solid woman in a flowing muumuu and sombrero abruptly barged into the space between Polly and Tim. “Hold it, Polly,” the woman barked. “Don’t move!” She looked at her companion. “Shoot her fast, Larry!” The woman wrapped a thick arm around Polly’s neck and yelled at her friend, “Make it snappy! And don’t mess it up. This has to move fast on eBay.”

Polly smiled for the camera, but instead of saying “cheese,” she muttered, “Laura’s gonna pay for this.”

While the flash was still a spot before Polly’s eyes, Muumuu Woman grabbed the digital camera out of her companion’s hands and looked at the image he’d taken. “Yep! That’s her, all right. No mistaking that famous chipmunk overbite. An easy five bucks. Ten if she signs the print later,” she said as if the star was invisible. She made no attempt to share the picture with Polly. “Hey, we’ll get the whole collector’s edition: Laura Crawford, and the other two clowns who used to be on that old show.” The woman waddled away with her friend, still talking amongst themselves.

“Bon voyage to you, too,” Polly called out. She looked at Placenta. “Chipmunk? Bet she thinks I’m Leslie Caron.”