Fun House (9 page)

Yep. They’re showing everything they promised they wouldn’t.

“Welcome to Morgan’s Surf and Turf,”
Chip the deejay continues in a voice-over as we watch Paulie Braciole strut out the front door and into the parking lot.
“Home of the world’s best crab pie and creepiest parking-lot stalkers.”

They cut to Skeletor in his Boonie hat, talking to Paulie. His Harley gleams in the background.

“I’m pulling’ for you, bro,”
says Skeletor, who looks even skinnier on TV.
“Big fan of The Thing. Want The Thing to take the whole thing, know what I mean?”

“Yeah. Thanks.”
Paulie actually sounds humble. I think they looped the line. That means they recorded it later, when he could be coached, matched it with the picture.

They cut from modest Paulie to Skeletor yanking up his T-shirt to flash his bony ribcage.

“Check it out. This is The Thing you wish you had. The Thing you wish you could be.”

Quick reaction shot from Paulie looking disgusted. The light seems different. Like maybe they shot this last
Saturday
—right before we had all those nasty thunderstorms.

The sequence of events? It isn’t the order it actually happened in.

“Where’s Soozy K?”
asks Skeletor, going on tippy-toe. Behind him, in this shot, the sky is clear again.

“I need to get back to work,”
says Paulie, sounding like an honest day laborer unpacking fruit trucks somewhere.

“Work?”
scoffs Skeletor.
“BLEEP, man, all you people do is get drunk, play Skee-Ball, and BLEEP each other. You call that BLEEPING work, bro?”

Paulie shakes his head and laughs good-naturedly. The sky is, once again, partly cloudy.

“Fortunately,”
said Chip the narrator,
“some undercover law enforcement officers had been trailing the psycho known to local authorities only as Skeletor.”

Ceepak and I make our big entrance.

Ceepak flashes his badge.
“We’re with the Sea Haven Police Department.”

And they cut to a grateful Paulie throwing up his hands.
“I am so out of here. Thanks, guys.”
He heads toward the restaurant—before all those dark clouds in his Saturday sky can open up and drench him.

Back to Ceepak, Skeletor, and me. Three different angles. None of them very flattering. Except for the sky. It looks clear again.

“Where is your helmet, sir?”
says Ceepak.

Skeletor kick-starts the bike and, in what they call a jump cut (because they chop out a whole chunk of action, which makes the film look jumpy) immediately tugs down on the Boonie hat’s leather straps.

“I don’t need a BLEEPING helmet.”

“Yes, you do.”

They’ve eighty-sixed all of Ceepak’s polite “sirs” to make him sound more like a hardcase cop.

“You need the full gear,”
says Ceepak. He gestures at Skeletor’s hat.
“Not the fool’s gear.”

Friday, August 13, the day after our chase scene in the parking lot airs on
Fun House
, we’re back at the mobile production office.

Ceepak and I are about to storm up the steps when out waltzes the mayor.

Hugh Sinclair looks extremely happy. He is wearing his standard sunglasses on a red Croakie string and a brand new item: a T-shirt that says “Put Down The Corn Cob!”

See? I told you I’m famous.

“Officers! Awesome work last night!” He gives Ceepak a finger pistol. “Picked up one of yours, too!”

“Pardon?” says Ceepak.

“Your shirt. The one that says ‘Give Me The Fool’s Gear!’”

Geeze-o, man.

“Hey, how come nobody told me last night’s show was going to be all about the SHPD and that awesome chase scene?”

Yeah. In case you missed the episode, Ceepak, Skeletor, the motorcycles, and me got almost as much airtime as the food fight and celebrity guest judges. And, if you care, which I don’t anymore, Nicole Stanziale got the boot at the end of the show. The “Fun House” ten is down to five.

“But hey,” the mayor continues, “I talked to Chief Baines first thing this morning. Guess you guys didn’t know you were about to become movie stars either, huh?”

“No, sir,” says Ceepak, that popping jawbone joint about to shoot sideways out of his skull. “We did not.”

The mayor scampers down the short set of steel steps. Gives Ceepak a hearty handshake.

“We’re booked up for the season!”

“What?” I say, because Ceepak is too busy trying to shake free from the mayor’s smarmy grip.

“Every hotel, motel, guest house, and B&B on the island is completely sold out. Reservations came pouring in over the Internet last night and early this morning. Morgan’s? You can’t eat dinner there until sometime in early December. Everybody wants to try their crab pie and see that lobster tank the drunk girl tried to smash with her hammer. So, you guys catch that psycho stalker yet?”

“He is a not a stalker, sir,” says Ceepak. “He is a drug dealer.”

The mayor crinkles his nose. “Nah. I like the stalker angle better. But hey, talk to Marty.” He thumb-gestures over his shoulder. “Maybe he’ll go with your idea. Well, I gotta run. TMZ wants to do a satellite interview!”

He bops into his BMW. Ceepak and I storm up the staircase, shove open the trailer door.

We see Marty Mandrake, Rutger the director, Grace the stopwatch lady, and Layla. The TV team is huddled around a table loaded down with trays of doughnuts—the kind they probably have to fly in from a gourmet bakery in Brooklyn.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are now the top-rated show on television!” says Mandrake proudly.

“Excuse me,” says Ceepak as we impolitely barge in.

The production team looks up. Some are in mid-doughnut chomp.

“All
right
!” says Rutger the director. “My two stars! Give me the full gear, baby, not the fool’s gear!”

Marty Mandrake swaggers over. His face is puckered up in what he probably thinks is an expression of earnest sincerity. To me, it looks like he has gas.

“Gentlemen, glad you could join us. We need to talk about working you two into next week’s scenario.”

“You lied to us,” says Ceepak.

Mandrake looks shocked. Insulted. “Lied?”

“Yeah,” I butt in. “You told us you wouldn’t use any of the footage from the drug bust until
after
we arrested Skeletor.”

“We
had
to use it, Danny,” says Layla.

“Had to?” says Ceepak before I can.

“To protect the kids,” says Mandrake. “We can’t have these kinds of crazies stalking our stars.”

“Mr. Mandrake, the man known as Skeletor is a dealer of illegal drugs. He was not stalking—”

“Did you see the way he tugged up his T-shirt, did that whole Thing thing? He’s clearly obsessed with Paulie.”

“I don’t see how that changes anything.”

“Of course not. You’re not in show business. Don’t know what kind of crazies we have to deal with on a daily basis. So, I’m sorry if we hurt your feelings, if you think we ‘lied.’”

“I don’t think it; I
know
it.”

“Fine. Good for you. Now we have to deal with what comes next. Layla?”

She shoves a folder across the table.

“Paulie Braciole received a very upsetting text message,” she says. “A death threat.”

“Oh, really?” I say, because I’m guessing they cut together some kind of fake text message the same way they messed with reality in their edit of the parking lot footage. “When’d he get this threat?”

“Wednesday,” says Mandrake. “While we were in the editing room. It’s what made us scrap our original cut and go with a lot more of the action with Skeletor and the motorcycles.”

Yeah. Including the scene where the biker bopped me on the head.

“We needed to let this creep know we’ve got the goods on him,” says Mandrake.

“Might we see this threatening message?” says Ceepak, sounding like he doesn’t believe it’s any more real than Paulie’s humble-pie act under the stormy summer skies.

“Of course,” says Ms. Shapiro, flipping open the folder.

Ceepak and I move to the table. Read what’s printed on the paper.

“U ratted me out? U R The Dead Thing.”

And, as it turns out, that death threat is the one thing from this reality TV show that’s really real.

11

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, I
GET A CALL FROM
C
EEPAK
.

“It’s Paul Braciole,” he says, sounding grim.

“What’s up?”

“He has been murdered.”

I have the phone tucked under my chin so I can pull on my shorts. I glance at the clock. It’s eleven thirty. Saturday is my day off. Guess I slept in. I also guess I won’t be doing that again until Ceepak and I figure out who murdered Paulie Braciole.

“How?” I ask.

“Single gunshot to the brain. Powder burn on the left temple, exit wound on the right—slightly lower, suggesting that the bullet traversed straight through both hemispheres of the brain, making death instantaneous. We’ll know more after Dr. Kurth runs her post-mortem.”

Dr. Rebecca Kurth is the county medical examiner. We’ve been keeping her kind of busy this summer.

I tug on my sneakers.

“Where are you?” I ask, sniffing my uniform polo shirts to find the cleanest one.

“Boardwalk. Pier Four. A booth called the Knock ’Em Down.”

Ceepak can’t see me, but I’m nodding.

The Knock ’Em Down is one of several “games of chance” tucked into a side alley off the main path to the Giant Ferris Wheel at the end of Pier Four. If I remember correctly, the Knock ’Em Down is done up with a Farmer-In-The-Dell look: a mural with a cartoon horse and cow making goofy faces at you; three wooden barrels with a pyramid of six white milk bottles stacked on top.

You pay a buck and hurl a baseball at the bottles, half of which, I swear, are filled with lead. The only guys knocking them down are friends of the booth operator, who probably has a button he pushes to make the stack topple every once in a while so he can keep reeling in suckers like me.

But I digress.

“Was Paulie shot inside the booth?” I ask.

“Highly doubtful,” says Ceepak. “The game operator, a young man named Hugh Williams, discovered Mr. Braciole’s body when he rolled up the security gate at eleven hundred hours.”

In Sea Haven, our boardwalk amusements don’t open till noon, because everybody spends the morning on the beach. Opening at noon also gives the vendors time to fill the bottom of those milk bottles with wet cement.

“Danny?”

I have one arm inside my shirt, but I freeze: I can tell from Ceepak’s voice that whatever he’s going to say next isn’t going to be pretty.

“Yeah?”

“Mr. Williams discovered the body on a side wall of the booth. It was hanging in the middle of the stuffed animals they award as prizes.”

I hop in my Jeep and race up to the boardwalk, a good thirty minutes north of my apartment.

Ceepak and the other first responders have sealed off the crime scene with rolled-out
POLICE LINE, DO NOT CROSS
tape. The taut yellow plastic snaps in the gusts blowing up from the ocean. It looks like we’ve locked down the whole block of games, even though blinking bulbs are still throbbing in signs outside the unmanned booths: Water Gun Fun, Whack A Mole, Duck Pond, Frog Bog, Clown Bop, Balloon Pop, and Bucket Drop.

Most of the brightly colored booths have their fronts open, and I can see all sorts of stuffed animals hanging off hooks. Giant Teddy Bears wearing New York Mets, Yankees, Jets, and Giants uniforms. SpongeBob SquarePants flashing his two-toothed smile. Giant yellow banana people with pudgy cheeks. Long-limbed fleecy things that look like an octopus crossed with a rhesus monkey.

One or two booths are even offering “Official Fun House” prizes. I see a towering display of boxed-up bobblehead dolls. Paulie “The Thing” molded in mid T-shirt tug, his incredibly ripped chest immortalized in tan plastic.

“Danny?”

It’s Ceepak, waving at me from up at the Knock ’Em Down booth. One of our SHPD cruisers is parked thirty feet beyond the booth, its roofbar lights swirling, blocking off the mob of onlookers licking their orange-and-white swirl cones, trying to see what the heck is going on.

Officers Nikki Bonanni and Jen Forbus are working crowd control at the far end. The two Murray brothers have caught the duty at the end where I entered.

“Put down the corn cob,” yells some young wiseass in the crowd.

“Give me the full gear!” shouts another.

I shake my head. Six years ago? Both those guys would’ve been me.

“Detective Botzong is on his way,” says Ceepak when I reach the Knock ’Em Down.