Undercover In High Heels

the gardener’s boxers really belonged to her. “Maybe I could make it up to him by helping him with his new assignment. He said something about those letters that Mia’s been getting. Threatening fan mail.”

“Oh, I totally read about that in People last week. She’s, like, got a stalker or something. Ohmigod-lightbulb moment!” Dana popped up off the futon, jostling the soy nuts onto the floor as she started hopping up and down. “We could find the stalker for Ramirez! He’d totally forgive you then.”

“Dana, Ramirez is a cop. What makes you think we could find a stalker any easier than he could?”

“Uh, hello?” Dana rolled her eyes. “Ramirez doesn’t even watch Magnolia Lane. We know Mia way better than he does. I mean, come on, you watch Access Hollywood daily.”

She had a point there. I’ll admit it: I was a celebrity gossip junkie. I religiously watched every single Barbara Walters interview, I never left the house on the night of the Emmys, Oscars, or SAG Awards, and I bought copies of Star and People on the sly every week. I was even known-on very rare occasions-to use words like Bennifer, Brangelina, and TomKat. I know. It’s a disease.

Still, I wasn’t convinced our knowledge of Mia’s latest boy-toy fling could really outweigh a badge and a gun.

“How much could we possibly do without even being on the set of the show?” I reasoned.

Dana waved me off, switching from the hops to a little footwork-in-place thing. “So, we get on the set. How hard can that be? Look, I’ll call my agent in the morning and see if he can get me on as an extra or something. And maybe you could see if they need a costume designer or a wardrobe assistant? I’m sure you’ve got some connections, right?”

I bit my lip. “Well, my college roommate did do wardrobe for that cop drama on FX.”

“Perfect! I bet she totally knows someone. Ohmigod, this is going to be so fun. We’ll, like, totally be undercover again!”

Dana was referring, of course, to last year, when, against my better judgment, I’d let her dress me as a hooker in order to suss out a murder. Unfortunately, that evening had ended in a dead body. Not an experience I was eager to repeat.

“I don’t know…” I trailed off, picturing Ramirez’s face that afternoon. I had a feeling that if I showed up within ten feet of his assignment he’d likely pop a blood vessel. The words as far away from me as possible echoed in my head.

Dana started jogging in place, bobbing her knees up and down like little pistons. “Come on, Maddie! We could so do this. You’ve got a good track record, girl!”

I hesitated to mention that both times I’d ferreted out a killer in the past it was more by accident than sheer brilliance.

On the other hand, this whole “reassignment” thing was all my fault. And sitting on my futon watching Magnolia Lane reruns wasn’t doing anything to improve my rapidly crumbling love life. If I were going to make it up to Ramirez, I had to do something. “All right, I’ll call my college roomie.”

Dana let out a high-pitched squeal and clapped her hands.

“I said I’d call. No guarantees, ” I hedged, grabbing my address book. I wasn’t sure if I’d put her number under L for Lana, P for Paulson, or R for roommate.

“I think we should start by talking to her costars, ” Dana said, ticking items off on her fingers. “See if anyone has seen a suspicious character around. Second, maybe we should question Mia herself. Maybe the stalker is someone from her past, and he’s coming back to seek revenge. Oooh-or maybe she had a secret love child who’s coming back to haunt her now.”

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. Suspicious characters? Revenge? Secret love child? What was this, Montel?

Fortunately, before I could change my mind, I found Lana’s number (under C for college) and dialed. She picked up on the first ring.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Lana. It’s Maddie, ” I said, with a backward glance at Dana. She was still ticking off possible stalker suspects. I think I heard her mumble something about a political plot to rig the Emmys. I scrunched my eyes shut, hoping I wouldn’t live to regret this.

“Say, I was wondering if you know anyone at Sunset Studios?”

Chapter 4

“This is where we keep Kylie’s clothes, ” Dusty said, gesturing toward a long wardrobe rack of designer suits and blouses.

Dusty was a fresh-faced twenty-two-year-old, just out of design school, with short purple hair and pierced studs in her nose, eyebrow, and lip. Last season when the head wardrobe consultant for Magnolia Lane quit over a SAG Award snub, Dusty landed the job because her best friend’s ex-boyfriend’s mother played canasta with the producer’s aunt. Hollywood was the original who-you-know town. Thanks to the call to my college roomie, four short days later and I now knew Dusty.

“Kylie plays Tina Rey on the show, ” Dusty continued. “Blake, Ricky, and Deveroux have their stuff over there.” She gestured to the far end of the room, where menswear hung on two rows of clothing racks. “And Mia’s are here.” She ended by pointing to a row of clothes stuck on dry-cleaning hangers and swathed in plastic. “Mia has her own wardrobe person, so you’ll mostly just be making sure the others have the right outfits for their scenes and doing a little damage control. You know how to hand-sew, right?”

I nodded.

“Great!” Dusty said, tucking a purple lock behind her ear. “Any questions?”

Only about a million. The second Dana and I had walked onto the Sunset Studios lot that morning it had been like entering some alternate reality, and I was still trying to get my bearings.

We’d parked my Jeep off-site in the designated parking garage behind the lot, then hoofed it-along with the other cast and crew not quite somebody enough to have their own on-set parking places-to the studio’s gated rear entrance. We’d stood in line with women toting wardrobe bags, and a seemingly endless supply of guys with tool belts and little walkie-talkie headsets while the two-hundred-year-old security guard (give or take a year) in Coke- bottle glasses checked our names against his list. Wonder of wonders, when I got to the front of the line mine was actually there. The guard even gave me a “Good day, Miss Springer” before passing me through the gates onto the sacred grounds of the Sunset Studios.

The best way I could describe the studio lot was to compare it to a life-size dollhouse-every corner dressed within an inch of its life but none of it real. Just beyond the rear entrance lay the Sunset Studios “city, ” which was basically a maze of city streets with hollow buildings made to look like New York, Boston, San Francisco, and, of course, a generic middle-American suburb.

Beyond the “city” were rows of squat warehouses with the names of hit shows painted on the outside. All buzzing with activity. I spied a group of extras and guys in headsets milling around outside stage 3F, where the sign said they shot that new cop drama. Outside stage 4B was a catering truck handing out breakfast burritos, and the guy who’d played Screech digging into a box of morning Krispy Kremes.

I would have loved to do a slow celebrity-gawking tour around the rest of the lot, but since I’d hit the snooze about a dozen times that morning (If God wanted people to be awake at 6:00 a.m., he wouldn’t have invented late-night TV.), we were already running ten minutes behind, so instead we’d hightailed it to stage 6G.

The assistant director (or AD) quickly ushered Dana to a holding room with the other extras. She’d given me a conspiratorial wink as she headed off, which I’d tried not to roll my eyes at. (Okay, fine. I hadn’t tried very hard.) And only thirteen minutes late (but who was counting?), I’d made my way into the wardrobe department, where Dusty was currently filling me in on suburbanite fashion, Hollywood style.

“So, basically the outfits will be hung up here for you ahead of time.” She pointed to a rack along the wall