The Detective & the Pipe Girl Read Online Free PDF

point?”
    Total smart-ass. I respected it.
    “Sorry. Do you know where it is?”
    “Didn’t security tell you? When you enter through security, they tell you where to go.”
    Man. Another snafu. Yeah, that’s right, I used the word “snafu.” I said, “I’m an actor. I don’t listen to others. Like the security guy. Didn’t hear a word he said. When people talk to me I smile and nod, but I’m really just thinking about myself.”
    “Well, you kind of look like an actor, but you’re not an actor, because actors don’t talk like that. Actors actually do that, but they don’t say they do that. And by the way, if what you just said is true, how are you going to hear what I’m telling you?”
    “What?” I said. “I drifted off.”
    She gave me a sly look, called security, and asked where the Friendship audition was. Then she told me. “Walk across the lot to stage seven, then go through a door marked A.”
    “I think I can follow that.”
    “Like I said. You’re not an actor.”
    I smiled. “Thank you. I appreciate it.”
    And I did. And I thought that, despite her remarks, she bought my story. I walked out the door.
    Across the lot, I walked through the door marked A—I’d found the audition. Flanking one of the big stages, the waiting area was a stark, bleak, gray-walled room. Actresses and actors sat, some reading their scripts, some just blankly staring into the stark bleakness. Suzanne was not one of them.
    The room housed a door that opened periodically to reveal the actual audition room. I’d catch intermittent glimpses of smug-looking black-turtleneck types determining the careers of people. But no Suzanne in there either. Must have missed her. I sat down in the waiting area; no one seemed to mind.
    A weary, bearded casting director wandered in and out of the two rooms. Calling people in, sending people out. Man, this was depressing. No wonder actors and actresses were such freaks.
    The thing is, though, this was a pretty big audition. For a real movie. That’s the reality. Even some of the biggest Hollywood pictures were cast in environments like this. For starring roles. Hard to believe if you’ve never seen it. If you took a tourist here and said: Do they cast big movies here or torture people? You’d get a 70–30 split—in favor of the torture.
    I caught the bearded casting director’s eye. He looked at me. He seemed to know I didn’t belong there. “Can I help you?”
    “Wait. This is the audition for Friendship ?”
    He nodded. He looked exhausted.
    “Sorry, wrong room. This place is confusing.”
    I walked back out to the lot and hung around. I stood between a Toyota Prius and a pickup. I felt obvious, but the reality is no one even gave me a second look. I watched people mill about the lot, casting people, Hollywood types, actors, actresses, randoms. Nobody walked by in costume like you see when people are on Hollywood lots in the movies. No aliens. No Roman gladiators. No bald strong man sporting a curly mustache and a wrestling singlet. I leaned on the pickup, watched the door to the Friendship audition. A young actor who I’d seen in the waiting room emerged. He would be filed under the “quirky” type. The pudgy-white-guy-with-a-charmingly-unkempt-Afro-friend who says outrageous yet somehow honest and real things. I watched him get in his car, an old red Jeep Wrangler. He cranked it up and headed toward the entrance I had bypassed. I took off. Ran back over to the back wall, climbed it, jumped over to the jacaranda, then dropped to earth on the other side. I got in the Cobalt, fired her up, took off, and yanked her around to the street where the gated entrance was.
    The Jeep had already exited the lot and I just caught it going left at Sunset, two blocks up from where I was. I stomped on it, got up to the Sunset intersection fast, then ripped it left, in front of, way too close to, some oncoming cars. Had to, otherwise I would have been waiting forever. The guy’s red