Robert Crais: Lullaby Town

"What's an audition tape?"

Pat said, "It's a way for an actor to introduce herself to casting agents. The actor tells you about herself and maybe reads a scene. Peter would've shot a lot more tape than Karen would need, then edited it down to three or four minutes. The outtake tape will be the takes they didn't use in the final product."

Peter nodded and said something, but his mouth was full of candy again, and I didn't understand what he said.

I said, "I'll want to look at it. Do you have a still picture?"

He swallowed the wad of chocolate and peanuts and shook his head.

Pat Kyle opened her briefcase and handed me a black-and-white 8 X 10 head shot of a pretty young woman with dark hair and eyes that would be either green or hazel. "I phoned a friend at SAG and he came up with this." The woman in the photograph was made up as a waitress with a fluffy apron and cap and a bright the-lemon-pie-is-very-nice-today! smile. She didn't look convincing. KAREN SHIPLEY was spelled out in block letters along a white border at the bottom of the picture.

I said, "Pretty. Your friend at SAG say if Karen had an agent?"

Pat opened her briefcase again and took out an envelope large enough for the 8 X 10. "A guy named Oscar Curtiss, with two esses. He's got an office over here, just off Las Palmas. His address is in the envelope."

Peter came around next to me and looked at the 8 X 10. "Jesus, I remember this." He gestured at Karen's face. "Nothing unique about the quality. See the nose, it's a little too ordinary. See the mouth, maybe it needs to be fuller." Peter the director. "She had these made before we met. I said Christ, what do you want to look like a dopey waitress for? She said she thought it was cute. I said what a fucking waste." He stared at the picture a little more, then looked at Pat Kyle. "Can you get me one of these?"

Pat said, "Sure."

Peter looked back at the picture, and maybe there was something soft in his face, something less antic and less onstage. "She got pregnant right away and then there was the kid and I just wasn't into the family scene. I was scrambling from job to job, trying to get a toehold, and she's talking about Huggies. I busted out of film school. It was crazy. So I said, look, this isn't my thing, I don't wanna be married anymore, and she didn't fight it. I don't think I've seen her or the boy since the day we signed the papers. A little while after that Chainsaw came along and things happened fast." He spread the big hands, looking for a way to say it. "I got larger."

I said, "Did Karen work, or was she just a wannabe?"

Pat said, "Quite a bit of extra work and a couple of walk-ons. The sort of thing you get when all they need is a pretty face in the background."

"Where do they send the residuals?"

"She's got four hundred sixty-eight dollars and seventy-two cents waiting for her for some work she did on Adam 12 . Neither SAG nor the Extras Guild knows where to send it."

Peter brightened and went back to the candy machine. He slammed it with his elbow and pulled out an Almond Joy. Another wrapper on the floor. "I remember that gig. I went to the set with her and tried to talk the producer into giving me an episode to direct. The guy gives me the bum's rush. That TV prick. A lousy episodic producer and he's telling me I can't hack an Adam 12 , he's saying that what they do is 'highly stylized.' Man, I ain't thought about that prick in years." It was as if relating something of his to something of hers, he could remember it.

Dani came back between the flats with a fat guy in an argyle sweater. Peter said, "That's Langston. He's my cameraman. I gotta talk to him about a shot move we're designing through the pyramid set. Is there anything else you wanna know about me?"

"Karen. We were talking about Karen."

He looked annoyed. 'That's what I meant. Look, I gotta go. If you want anything, it's yours. Use my name. This town, it's like saying open sesame."

"Ali Baba."

He smiled. "Yeah. Just like Ali Baba."

He walked over to Langston.

Pat said, "Well?"

I shook my head. "He knows about him, but he doesn't know about her. How long were they married?"

"Fourteen months."

I shook my head some more. You do that a lot in this business.

Pat and I went past the electrical cables and between the flats and toward the big doors. We were most of the way there when Peter Alan Nelsen yelled, "Hey, Cole."

I turned around. Peter was up on one of the framing catwalks, grinning at me. Dani was with him and the fat guy Langston, and a couple of other people who probably had to do with the construction rather than the design. He said, "I'm glad you're on this for me. I like your style." He tossed down a Mars bar. Maybe there was another candy machine up on the ceiling. "Me and you," he said, "I think we're two of a kind. You're my kind of guy."

I thought about ripping off the candy wrapper and dropping it on the ground, but decided that that would be small. I bit through the paper instead.

Peter smiled wider and said, "Man, you are wild."

Pat Kyle shook her head.

We walked out through the big doors and into the light. The paper tasted terrible. If Daryl Hannah was watching, I hope she was impressed.

Pat Kyle and I walked back to the Kapstone offices where someone had set up a Sony Betamax VCR along with several yellow legal pads and sharpened pencils for the taking of notes. There was a check for four thousand dollars in an envelope taped to a Beta cassette on top of the VCR, along with a fresh pot of coffee on a side table with a tray of bagels and cream cheese and lox and sliced tomatoes and red onions. Pat said, "Would you like company?"

"Sure."

Pat turned on the machine and inserted the cassette and we watched as nineteen-year-old Karen Shipley Nelsen walked into an empty room and stood next to a stool. She wasn't made up like the waitress now. Now she was wearing faded jeans and an airy white top and red boots and she looked tanned and outdoorsy. The brown hair was cut in a sort of fluffy shag and the eyes were hazel. No makeup.

She looked at someone behind the camera and said, "What do you want me to do?" The sound coming out of the television was hollow and sort of tinny. Even with that her voice was light and girlish. She giggled.

Peter Nelsen's voice came from where she looked. "Give us the left and the right and the back. Try not to giggle."

She showed her left profile, and then her back, and then her right. She said it as she did it, and when she moved she sort of squiggled and swayed and bounced, the way fifteen-year-old girls do when they're acting grown-up and people are watching. 'This is my left side, and this is my back, and this is my right." And then she giggled. "Hee hee hee."

Pat Kyle said, "Oh, God."

"She's not impressing you with her talents?"

Pat smiled sympathetically. "I get tapes like this every week. Young women and young men come into my office and read for me, and they want you to like them so badly that you can feel them ache, but they aren't any better than this and they never will be any better than this."

"Then you suspect she has not pursued acting as a vocation?"

She made an I-hope-not shrug.

The shot changed abruptly into a tight close-up. Closer, Karen's eyes showed an absence of line or character. She was talking about herself and trying to look serious. "… think my strengths lie in comedy, but I can also do drama. I think I'd make a really good ingénue."

Peter's voice cut in sharply. "You sound like an idiot in a malt shop, 'really good ingénue.' If you're an ingénue, just say it. Say 'I'm a perfect ingénue."'

Karen looked unhappy and said, "Oh, Peter, do I havta?" When she addressed Peter, she looked off camera. When she was acting, she looked directly out of the screen.