“Nope, don’t recall her. We never used her at our agency.”
“I thought she had a terrific crush on me and one night when Marina went to a screening at the Writers Guild for some Italian tearjerker I didn’t want to see, I ran into Inez at a joint on the Strip. Gil confessed in his letter that he’d hired her to lure me to that motel.”
“And you allowed yourself to be lured, Bud.”
“Inez was awfully cute.” He shook his head, then sat up straighter. A smile touched his plump face. “Now here’s what I intend to do.”
“About what?”
“Marina and me. Haven’t you been paying attention, buddy?” He frowned at me. “I’m going to tell Marina that Gil faked this whole thing. She’s certain to—”
“You actually know where Marina Bowen is?” I asked. “She dropped out of movies a good fifteen years ago. And after doing thirteen episodes of that dreadful sitcom about a widow who inherited a circus, she disappeared from Hollywood.”
“Well, no,” he admitted, “I don’t yet know where she’s living now. I only got Gil’s stuff today. But once I check with SAG and some of her old friends, I know I’ll be able to track her down. Once I find her, I’ll convince her that I was sabotaged by that louse over yonder.” He pointed at the fog-enshrouded funeral home across the street where the neon sign was flashing a blurry Eternal Rest into the night.
Almost three weeks passed before I encountered Bud Hebberd again. Now and then I still do a consulting job for the advertising agency where I worked for over thirty years. They were co-producing a TV reality show tentatively titled Elective Surgery. It was felt that Dr. Vernon Noodleman, bestselling author of Surgery Can Be Fun, would make an ideal host. Noodleman felt otherwise, but since I’d worked with him back in the 1980s when he appeared in a series of TV spots for our Butch Masculine Deodorant account, it was thought that I might be able to persuade him where others had failed.
So I flew to Tucson two days after Gil Jacobs’s wake and spent a week and a half cajoling Dr. Noodleman. I’d just about got him to agree to host Elective Surgery when the Creative Director at the agency faxed me at my hotel to inform me that the show was being retitled So You Want a New Face and they were actively pursuing a noted Chicago plastic surgeon for the hosting position.
Preoccupied as I was with pitching Dr. Noodleman, I pretty much forgot about Bud and his attempts to find his long-lost love.
On a smoggy Tuesday afternoon, over a week after I got back to L.A., as I was leaving the Sunset Strip office of my latest urologist, I noticed Bud, wearing a faded Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts that didn’t much flatter his flabby legs, standing at the corner up ahead.
“How’ve you been?” I inquired, catching up with him.
“Wretched, miserable,” he answered without looking at me, “frustrated, forlorn, downcast, depressed, morose—”
“Okay, enough,” I cut in. “So what did Marina say when you found her?”
“I haven’t found her.” He pointed across the street at Moonbaum’s Delicatessen. “Let me treat you to a plate of blueberry blintzes and I’ll explain.”
“I’m on a low-carb diet,” I told him. “But I’ve got time for a decaf.”
The signal changed and the roar of Jaguars, Mercedes, hybrids, SUVs, and a few lesser vehicles ceased. We crossed Sunset.
“Not a trace,” said Bud. “Once a major actress, a noted Hollywoodite... vanished.”
Inside the chill, highly air-conditioned deli, we found a booth and settled in. “I hear,” I said, “that Groucho Marx used to eat here all the time.”
“Sure, and George Washington slept in this very booth.”
“Has it occurred to you that Marina Bowen might be deceased?”
“Am I a nitwit? Of course it occurred to me,” he said. “I’ve gone on the ‘Net’ and checked obits, hospital records, prison records, mental institutions. I’ve combed Yahoo, Google, Hoohaw, and sundry other search engines for mentions of Marina Bowen — also for Jane Borowitz, her real name. I found forty-three sites devoted to her old movies, ninety-two giving bio info, thirteen, if you can believe it, devoted to that abysmal Running Away With the Circus TV disaster. Two separate outfits are selling DVDs with ‘all thirteen hilarious, gut-busting episodes.’ Proving that there’s no accounting for taste.”
“So I’ve heard.”
A waitress with the looks of a supermodel appeared beside our booth. “Any luck, Mr. Hebberd?”
“Still haven’t found her, Mindy. I’ll have the blueberry blintzes with sour cream and applesauce. Plus a Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray.”
“And your distinguished friend?”
“Decaf.”
“Would you like a side order of kosher dills?”
“Not at all.”
Smiling abundantly, she departed.
Bud rested both elbows on the table. “There’s not one bio site that takes her beyond 1990,” he said forlornly. “There are speculations that she’s living in New England with an ailing relative, that she entered a nunnery as a protest against the Gulf War, that she married me and we’re living in an artists’ colony in Taos, New Mexico.”
“How about the Guild?”
“No address for Marina since 1990. And the agency that represented her — well, there’s only one guy still there from back then and he has no idea where she is. The handful of her surviving friends haven’t heard from her since she vanished from Los Angeles.”
My coffee came and I stirred one packet of Splenda into it. “Were I you, Bud,” I advised, “I’d take this as a sign from the Almighty. You’re not meant to find her. Or to put it in nonmystical terms, if Marina is still in this world somewhere, she simply doesn’t want to be found. By you or anybody else. Knowing when to quit is important.”
“I’ll find her.” His blintzes arrived.
“How?”
Setting aside his blueberry-stained fork, Bud held up his left hand and commenced ticking off fingers. “One, I have just hired a topnotch, crackerjack investigative agency,” he told me. “These lads are top seeded in the P.I. field. Three of them are former FBI agents, two are rumored to be ex-CIA, and the guy who’s in charge of finding Marina for me has been fired from the LAPD for excessive zeal.”
“An outfit on the Strip?”
“Yeah, I was just up—”
“Going to be expensive.”
“It is, sure. No problem.”
After sipping my coffee, I asked, “And what’s two on your list?”
He retrieved his fork. “This’ll appeal to the adman in you. Advertising. I’m going to be placing ads — full-page and half-page — in all the trades — Hollywood Reporter, Daily Variety, and such.”
“Also expensive.”
“No problem,” he repeated. “Each ad has a big headline — Whatever Happened to Marina Bowen? Then a few lines of concise copy saying that anyone knowing her whereabouts should contact Hubris Productions. That she’s wanted for an important role in a new film budgeted at sixty million bucks.”
“Might work,” I conceded. “But I’m not clear on how you’re going to pay for the private eyes and the trade paper ads.”
“You forget, buddy, that I have Gil Jacobs’s complete files,” he reminded me in a lowered voice. “And some of his photos and documents, especially the most recent ones, are still quite useful.”
I said, “Wait now, Bud. You aren’t planning to take over his blackmail business?”
“For a while, sure,” he said. “It’s only fair. Gil was responsible for my losing Marina in the first place. Why shouldn’t he help me pay for finding her again?”