Fun House (John Ceepak Mystery) Read online

  Ceepak reracks the radio mic.

  “Take Kipper,” he says when we pass King Putt miniature golf.

  I flick on my turn signal.

  Even though the Fun House is up on Halibut Street, the production offices are in trailers and Winnebagos lining Kipper and John Dory streets. The streets in this part of the island are all named after fish; farther south, you get trees. After that, the Sea Haven Street Naming Commission just sort of gave up and started going with the alphabet and numbers. There’s even a “Street Street” way down near the southern tip. I think the Commission was meeting over at the Frosty Mug during happy hour when they made that particular decision.

  A young Class I SHPD officer in a glo-stick green fluorescent vest waves at us. He’s a summer cop, like I used to be back when I first met Ceepak. The department already has four “seasonal hires” working traffic control in the blocks surrounding 102 Halibut Street, the rundown rental where the TV kids are spending the summer.

  The house on Halibut is one of the butt-uglier ones on the island: a one-story house that looks like a three-story bungalow because it’s propped up on top of a two-car garage and has a triangle-roofed bedroom up where the attic used to be. To get to the main floor, you have to hike up a set of rickety wooden steps lined with PVC railings.

  First stop is the main party deck, with its hot tub, picnic table, and gas grill (that’s where the guy named Vinnie taught the girls how to toast cream-filled cannoli pastries on a stick—like sober people do with marshmallows).

  A sliding glass patio door leads you into the living room/ kitchen/pigsty. The sides of the house are covered with tobacco-brown shingles, but the garage doors below are painted green, white, and red so they look like two aluminum Italian flags.

  Paulie, Mike, and Vinnie, the three guys left in the house (Tony DePalma got the boot in Episode One; Salvatore “Salami” Amelio lost the Skee-Ball competition), are always calling themselves Guidos. Soozy K, Jenny, and Nicole, the three remaining girls, call themselves Guidettes.

  Meanwhile, Italian-Americans everywhere call them “faccia di culos,” which means “faces of a buttocks,” or, you know, jerks.

  “Parking could prove problematic,” says Ceepak as we crawl up the street crowded with trucks, campers, step vans, a diesel-guzzling generator—all sorts of major vehicles corralled behind bright orange parking cones. There’s even a pop-up pavilion serving chips and salsa and Oreos and pretzel sticks and M&Ms to any crew members who waddle by. The crew guys all have radios jangling off their belts and multi-colored tape rolls bouncing against their thighs.

  “Maybe we should swing up Shore Drive, park there,” I suggest.

  “That’ll work.”

  As we inch along, seashells crunching beneath our tires, I see more crew members, all of them dressed in cargo shorts and sloppy tees. They’re rolling carts loaded down with video gear, lighting equipment, electrical cables. They’re pushing lights on rolling tripods, carrying stanchions rigged with flags of black cloth, hauling props. They shove dollies, trolleys, and laundry carts with wheels gone wobbly. These are the grips and gaffers and best boys and electricians and all those technicians listed at the end of a movie when they roll the credits. Not that I stick around to watch them—except in movies that give you funny bloopers, too.

  With the help of a summer cop who keeps calling us “Sirs,” we find the last available parking slot on Beach Lane and walk past a gaggle of “looky-loos”—tourists straining to see one of the reality show stars or have their picture taken in front of the Fun House. I imagine half the guys posing for cell phone pix will tug up their shirts and try to wiggle their nipples.

  “Hey, Danny! Ceepak!”

  It’s Layla. She comes bounding down a set of steel steps attached to a gleaming white mobile home.

  “Great to have you guys on board,” she says, beaming that smile that got me hooked on a New York City girl in the first place. Layla has changed into a tight gym top that doesn’t quite cover her belly button. Cargo shorts hug her hips. All kinds of radios spank her fanny.

  Sometimes, a dirty mind is a terrible thing to waste.

  “We’re rolling live up at the house. There’s coffee at craft services. You need to hit the head?”

  This is how Layla Shapiro talks. Scattershot. She’s what they call a multi-tasker. While she’s telling us about the toilets, she’s texting on her BlackBerry and futzing with the volume dial on the walkie-talkie clipped to her hip.

  “Is there somewhere we can go to discuss the details of our liaison work moving forward?” says Ceepak.

  “Sure,” says Layla, jabbing a thumb over her shoulder. “This is the production office. Marty’s inside. There’s bagels. It’s air-conditioned.”

  My turn to smile. Hey, it’s August, 98 degrees with 98 percent humidity. My shirt is glued to my back. My sunglasses are fogged up because I had the AC blasting in the Crown Vic. There’s only one way to defog them: more AC.

  “We should have the full duty roster for the coming week completed within the hour,” says Ceepak when we’re inside the nice and chilly trailer.

  “Excellent,” says Layla, clicking her BlackBerry. We’ve only dated twice, but the girl has lots of lists. And schedules. If we do have sex on our third date, I’m sure she’s already blocked out exactly when it needs to happen and what gear and refreshments need to be on location. “Can you put a downloadable PDF in your cloud?”

  “Come again?” says Ceepak.

  My man doesn’t know from Internet file-sharing clouds. Hey, he’s thirty-seven. His generation still sends e-mails instead of texting.

  “We’ll have Mrs. Rence fax it over,” I say.

  “Awesome,” says Layla, her thumbs launching into a fresh text message.

  Marty Mandrake is in the truck with us, munching on a bunch of grapes, staring at a bank of monitors. Three of them, the ones directly in front of Mandrake, seem to feature today’s big scene: the beer pong tournament being played on and around the picnic table on the Fun House deck. Twelve smaller monitors built into the wall above the “hot” camera feeds remind me of the screens you’d see behind the security desk in a high-rise office building. High-angle, locked-off shots peering down on every room in the house. Very Big Brotherish.

  On the three main screens, I can see Paulie and Mike Tomasino. They’re tossing ping-pong balls into a triangle of ten red Solo cups set up on opposite ends of the table. The cups are semi-filled with beer. The rules of this extremely popular frat house drinking game are quite simple: you plop your ball into a cup, the other team has to drink it. First team to have the other guys drink all their cups wins.

  “Are these organic?” Mandrake snaps, plunking a grape into his pie hole.

  “Yes, sir,” says Layla. “We had a P.A. pick them up at the Whole Foods up in Red Bank.”

  I’m impressed. Red Bank is about sixty miles north of Sea Haven.

  “Oh!” says Mandrake. “How long was that, Grace?”

  Mandrake is sitting in one of those foldout director’s chairs with “Mr. Mandrake” stenciled across the back. A middle-aged woman with three different stopwatches dangling around her neck is seated beside him. Her chair doesn’t say “Grace.”

  “From when Paulie ricocheted his ball off the porch railing until it bounced off the wall and plopped into the middle cup?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Five seconds.”

  “Mark it. It’s gold. Pure gold.” He presses a button on the side of a handheld radio. “Rutger?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Get me a close-up of that ping-pong ball in Mike’s cup when he goes to drink it.”

  “There’s a bug in the cup.”

  “Beautiful. Shoot it.”

  “You got it, Chief.”

  “Rutger Reinhertz is the best director in reality TV,” Mandrake announces to the world. “Gets the money shots. Doesn’t cost a fortune.”

  Ceepak clears his throat. “Mr. Mandrake?”

  �
�Yeah?” Mandrake keeps his eyes glued on the three TV screens flickering in front of him.

  “We’d like to talk to you about Paul Braciole and the anabolic steroids. If he cooperates with us, the county prosecutor might be interested in discussing a deal wherein no charges are brought against him or Ms. Kemppainen.”

  “Great. Give me a minute. We need to wrap this sequence.”

  “Marty has an ambitious day planned,” Layla whispers. “Including a company move down to Morgan’s Surf and Turf for the etiquette competition later tonight.”

  Ceepak just nods. His wife, Rita, used to waitress at Morgan’s. Me? I’m wondering what the heck goes on in an etiquette contest.

  “Come on, Paulie,” Jenny Mortadella (the skanky one) shouts as she cozies up to The Thing in a very skimpy bikini that shows off the mermaids tattooed all over her boobs. “Beat this bitch. Bounce a ball up his ass.”

  “Um, we’ll, you know, clean that up in edit,” says Layla.

  “You win this competition, I’ll give you a pwize.” Jenny’s doing drunken baby talk now.

  “Oh, yeah? Like what?” says Paulie.

  “This.” She tugs up her bikini top and flashes “The Thing” her things. She’d probably wiggle them but I don’t think that kind of plastic shimmies.

  Now Ceepak’s closing his eyes, and, if I’m not mistaken, uttering a silent prayer.

  “We’ll, you know, pixellate over those, block them out,” Layla explains.

  The middle monitor shows a horrified reaction shot of Soozy K’s face when Jenny flashes her tattooed nay-nays. The mermaids look like they are harvesting pistachios for the winter.

  “I thought you had an alliance with Mikey?” Paulie says to Jenny. Yep, there are a lot of “ee” names in the house.

  “Not after he fell on his ass playing Skee-Ball because he was so drunk—”

  “I wasn’t drunk, bitch—”

  In my head, I start adding in the bleeps.

  “Yes, you BLEEPING were.”

  “So?” says Mike. “You’re a BLEEPING cow! Flashing your BLEEPING BLEEPIES. What kind of pig does that? A cow, that’s who.”

  “You want to hook up later?” Jenny says to Paulie.

  Paulie shrugs. “Whatever.” He bops a ping-pong ball off the picnic table and into the beer cup Soozy’s holding in her hand.

  “What the BLEEP!” shouts Soozy when beer sloshes up and splatters all over her chest.

  “Maybe you better take off your top too,” jokes Paulie. “Hang it up to dry!”

  Now the guy named Vinnie, another bodybuilder type who spikes his hair up into a waxy Mohawk, comes stomping out of the house.

  “Yo, Paulie? What the BLEEP? I found this BLEEP under your bed.” Vinnie has something in his hand. We can’t tell what it is.

  “Get me a close-up!” Marty Mandrake shouts into his radio.

  Two of the cameras rush in to see what Vinnie found.

  “This is huge!” says Mandrake. “I’m working your drug investigation into my storyline!”

  “What the BLEEP,” says Jenny Mortadella. “That BLEEP will shrivel your BLEEP, you stupid BLEEP.”

  In the close-up on monitor three, we see what Vinnie found in Paulie’s room.

  Another little glass vial with a cartoon label.

  More Skeletor steroids.

  5

  “YOU’RE PUTTING ILLEGAL DRUGS ON NATIONAL TELEVISION?” says Ceepak.

  “Maybe,” says Mandrake. “This is a reality show. We shoot a ton of footage. But we don’t know what we’ll actually air till we get in the edit suite and start hacking away at it.”

  Dialogue seeps out of the live monitors.

  “That’s not my shit,” from Paulie.

  “I found it under your fucking bed,” from Vinnie.

  “That’s how you fucking beat Tone?” from Mike. “Dope?”

  Anthony “Tone” DePalma was the first guy kicked out of the house back in July. He lost to Paulie in the Beach Badminton Beer Blast (they played with racquets and wadded-up aluminum beer cans instead of the more traditional shuttlecock).

  “Your balls are going to fall off,” from Jenny Mortadella.

  Ceepak leans forward and snaps off the audio.

  “Hey!” protests Mandrake, who was gobbling up the garbage faster than a rat in a Mickey D’s dumpster after they clean out the Big Mac bin.

  “You realize,” Ceepak says to Mandrake, “that since the enactment of the Federal Anabolic Steroid Control Act, steroids are placed in the Schedule III class of illegal drugs, along with barbiturates, veterinary tranquilizers, and narcotic painkillers?”

  “No,” says Mandrake, somewhat sarcastically, “I did not know this. Now can I go back to doing my job?”

  “By simply holding the illegal steroids …” Ceepak gestures toward the silent monitor because, I think, all the Fun House kids look pretty much the same to him (muscles, olive skin, too much hair gel).

  I help out. “Vinnie.”

  “… Vinnie is committing a federal offense, punishable by up to one year in prison and/or a minimum fine of one thousand dollars.”

  Mandrake grabs his walkie-talkie. “Rutger? Cut! Hold the roll!”

  The camera crews do as they’re told.

  “We’re cutting,” squawks out of the radios attached to Layla, Grace, and Mandrake. Even though they’re not spinning digital tape, the cameras are still feeding images to the monitors. The Fun House boys stop yelling at each other. The girls adjust their boobs inside their bikini tops. It’s kind of funny watching the cast when they think they’re not being filmed. It’s real reality. It’s also boring.

  “What if that ampule is empty?” asks Layla.

  “Come again?” This from Ceepak.

  “What if Vinnie is in possession of nothing more than an empty glass bottle with a Skeletor sticker glued to its front?”

  “Then, technically,” says Ceepak, “he is not in violation of the State and Federal Steroid Control Acts.”

  “Exactly,” says Mandrake. “You see why I rely on Miss Shapiro here? She’s not only got a hot bod, her brain ain’t half bad, either.”

  Layla blushes. Tugs down on that Lycra tank top. It still doesn’t cover her belly button.

  “Our intention with this subplot—” she says before Ceepak cuts her off.

  “Subplot?”

  “Sorry. TV talk. Sure, the show’s unscripted, but, well, we’re always looking for plot points. Conflict. Something to give each episode an arc and narrative drive.”

  “Ms. Shapiro,” says Ceepak, “the criminal distributor of these illegal drugs is a person of great interest to the Sea Haven Police Department.”

  “So let’s use the show to help you catch him!”

  “Ma’am, with all due respect, this is a matter for law enforcement professionals.”

  “So you don’t welcome the help of a concerned citizenry?” says Mandrake. “You need to be the Lone Ranger? Hunt the bad guy down all by yourself?”

  “I did not mean to imply—”

  Layla holds up a hand. “Hear me out, Officer Ceepak. Please?”

  Ceepak crosses his arms across his chest to signify that he’ll listen. For a minute, anyway.

  “We won’t run any of this footage from the steroid storyline, not even this confrontation between Paulie and Vinnie, until after you guys apprehend Skeletor.”

  “We have your word on that?”

  “Sure,” says Layla. “That’s the beauty of reality TV. We create our own timeline and continuity. We can cut out of the beer pong bit before the big Paulie–Vinnie blowup and recycle it back into the show later—after you have Skeletor behind bars and Paulie has redeemed himself on the steroid front. Maybe he goes up to Newark, talks to inner-city kids.…”

  “Audiences love redemption scenes,” says Mandrake. “Even the Schnauzer on Hot Dog, the one who bit the Poodle on its pom-pom, even the Schnauzer had a redemption scene. Licked a sick Beagle’s ear.”

  Ceepak sighs.

&n
bsp; “Here’s what we do,” says Layla. “We lean on Paulie. Have him make contact with his drug dealer.”

  “You’re assuming the illegal steroids are his?”

  “Hey, that stunt he pulled on the Skee-Ball machine? Come on. That’s classic roid rage. Surely you guys figured that one out already.”

  Ceepak has to nod because, to tell the truth, which he always does, we had.

  “Okay. We tell Paulie that the only way out of this jam is for him to set up a meet with his dealer. When he does, I alert you and Danny. Give you the where and when. You take Skeletor off the street. Paulie repents. We fade to black and roll credits.”

  Ceepak squints. “Would your cameras be filming this hypothetical drug deal?”

  “Second unit only. We document the transaction so you can use it in court. Like those stings in airport hotel rooms the FBI is always running.”

  “But you won’t use the footage on your program?”

  “Not until Skeletor is safely behind bars, right, Marty?”

  “Hmm?” Mandrake was distracted, picking through the grape bowl again.

  “We don’t run anything on the steroid storyline without clearance from SHPD.”

  “Definitely,” he says. “Of course not. No way.”

  “You guys will save a ton of time if we play it this way,” Layla tells Ceepak. “I’m guessing Skeletor is off the street before we’re on the air next Thursday night.”

  “It is highly doubtful that Skeletor, himself, will take the meet with Mr. Braciole.”

  “Well, if he sends a flunky,” I say, trying to lend Layla a hand, “at least we’ll land the next fish up the line. We cut that fish a deal, he leads us up the food chain to an even bigger fish. Sooner or later, we’re reeling in Skeletor.”

  Ceepak turns to Layla. “Encourage Mr. Braciole to contact his supplier.”

  She smiles. “Come on. Let’s do it together!”