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  “But, Greta, those old-time producers didn’t go to jail.”

  “Because they hadn’t actually broken any laws,” she said, smoothing her navy blue pants. “But afterward, the government fixed that. Now, the entire staff of every game show must comply with federal regulations and sign form 509. That form, Madeline,” she said, her voice as calm as ever, “promises that we’ll keep the secrets secret or they can throw us in…well…in prison.”

  Man. Jeez.

  I followed Greta’s eyes back to the door. I was sure I had pulled the self-locking door closed when I’d left the office earlier, wasn’t I? I know I was rushing, but…

  Greta looked at me with a wan smile. “It’s all my fault. I should have had you sign that form, too—the 509. My fault. An oversight. So now it all lands back in my lap, and I’ll be lucky if all they do is fire me.”

  I blinked. How could this be? I had been having such fun playing in the world of game shows. I had found the greatest temp job on the planet. I was making a delicious amount of money and doing hardly any work. I simply looked up and fiddled with a few recipes a day. I sat in meetings and talked about food, for crying out loud. And it was good karma, too, since I was helping out a friend in need. How could it be that I was now suddenly on the verge of sending my generous buddy Greta to prison? How had I managed to do so much damage by simply forgetting to slam shut my freaking door?

  “This is bad,” I said, looking around at the disaster area that had once been a tidy office. And another, even grimmer thought struck me. What if this vandalism turned out to have a cause that was even worse than Greta imagined? Why had someone trashed this particular office? Was it just a potential game-show cheat, catching an unauthorized early peek at an upcoming script, bad as that would be? Or was the targeting of Tim Stock’s office perhaps connected in some way to the disappearance of Food Freak’s head writer? There were too many possibilities for me to keep everything straight.

  Greta, even under stress, never showed a feather ruffled. “There’s a show-business term you may not be familiar with,” she said, still her calm, soft-spoken self.

  I may not have had any previous show-biz experience, but just living in this town, you learn to pick up a lot of these quaint show-biz terms. “We are screwed.”

  Greta nodded.

  “Do we have to sneak out of the country?” I asked. Well, I can’t stay serious for too long or it hurts.

  Greta almost smiled and then got down to business. “Okay. We can fix this.”

  “Great.” I stared at the pile of tumbled scripts.

  “Okay,” she repeated, firmer. “Let’s not touch anything. For as long as we can keep this quiet, I’d like everyone on the staff here to stay out of it. I need to talk with Artie and he’ll tell us what we can do. You okay with that?”

  “Well, sure,” I said. I imagined myself under bright lights, a federal prosecutor peppering me with questions. I saw myself looking rather strained, but never cracking.

  “I have to make a phone call.” Greta pulled her cell phone out of her purse and began dialing. She looked up at me and stopped. “You don’t look so good, Madeline. You should go sit down.”

  “I’m fine. And I can’t sit anywhere.” The pile of papers and the green Pendaflex files with their nasty metal edges were strewn in such a way that they covered my desk chair. I was not terribly keen to try the Herculon sofa in the corner.

  “You should leave, honey. Go sit down in my office. Wait there. Let’s try to keep this contained until we know more about what really happened.” We were both staring at the enormous mess, some pages ripped while other papers were crumpled and folded. “Damn, it looks like someone didn’t care what he destroyed,” she said, her voice tight. “Damn.”

  “I’ll stay with you,” I offered, one last time.

  “No. I’m fine. I have to call Artie.”

  I opened the door and swiftly shut it behind me, glad to be away from the claustrophobic office with its worn-out furniture and its walls of bookshelves, with its yanked-open file drawers and an entire year’s worth of paperwork barfed all over the tatty carpeting.

  I walked quickly down the hall to Greta’s office and pulled open the door. Susan Anderson was standing there with the two contestant coordinators for the show. They looked up as I came barging in.

  “Oh. Hi,” I said.

  “Hi,” Susan said. Her own office connected to Greta’s and as long as the PAs were working, these offices could remain unlocked.

  “Hi,” said Nellie Lauren and Stella Tibbs—Nell and Stell, as they were called. They were almost always together and, frankly, I wasn’t sure which one was which. I’d been introduced to them only once and only briefly, because the writing department seldom hangs out with the contestant department as a matter of security. I couldn’t remember if Nellie was the tall attractive black woman in her sixties or perhaps the bouncy fifty-year-old with the bright-red pixie-style hairdo.

  “Sorry to barge in,” I said. “Greta asked me to wait for her here.”

  I imagined what Greta was going through, back in Tim Stock’s office, her position on Food Freak suddenly threatened by a nasty act of vandalism. My head was pounding, but at a distance. I could almost feel it. I should have stayed there. I should have insisted on helping. I shouldn’t have left her alone with that mess. I should have—

  “…she is, Madeline?” Susan was saying.

  I looked up to see all three women staring at me. “Excuse me?” I had definitely missed something.

  “Greta,” Stell—or perhaps it was Nell—asked, perplexed by my confusion.

  “Know where she is?” Nell or Stell repeated.

  “Um…” Well, that was a bright response. If this was my clever answer to a simple staff inquiry, how the hell was I going to hold my own against the feds?

  “Maybe she’s gone to lunch,” the tall, African-American Stell or Nell replied. She sounded agitated. As a matter of fact, so had the red-haired Nell or Stell.

  “Stell and Nell need to talk to her immediately,” Susan told me. “We’ve called her cell phone, but it just goes through to her voice mail. Either she’s left the phone off or she’s on another call.”

  “Right,” I said, still trailing the conversation by at least three seconds.

  “Hey,” one of the contestant coordinators said, looking at me closely. “You look white as a ghost. Doesn’t she, Stell?”

  Aha! It was the red-haired woman who was talking. Red hair was Nellie. I felt enormous relief. I think I began to chuckle.

  Stella said, “You do look pale. You having trouble, too?”

  “…trouble, too?” I echoed.

  Susan filled me in. “Stell and Nell have to be onstage in ten minutes. Their contestants are giving them trouble. It’s always something.”

  “It is,” Stell confirmed. “I’ve seen it all and I still see something new every day.”

  “What kind of trouble?” I asked.

  “What kind don’t we have?” Nellie asked, running her hand through her short red hair. “Do you have any idea how hard it is doing this last-minute extra show? It’s one hour and we need to find the best contestants, and we don’t have the best. They’ve been used up! It’s killing the contestant department.”

  “I hadn’t thought about that before,” I said truthfully.

  “It’s impossible,” Stella said, raising one pencil-thin ebony eyebrow. “We simply don’t have time to find the quality people we need. We use up to six contestants on every show. Now you go and multiply that times ten shows. Go on.”

  “Sixty!” Nellie picked up the complaint. “Sixty good-looking, outgoing, happy, talented, engaging, sparkling, smart, competitive people. That’s who we have used up all season, Madeline. And now they say they need six more? Just where are we supposed to get six fresh A-plus contestants on such short notice?”

  “And they have to cook,” Stella added, her eyebrow still arched. “Don’t forget they’ve got to cook, darlin’. They’ve got t
o cook good!”

  “And answer culinary questions. It’s impossible,” Nell said, shaking her head. “We need plenty of lead time to place our ads in the Sunday newspaper. We usually do a cattle call and round up some possibles. We have to screen ‘em all, of course, and hold callbacks. But all that takes time. We can’t pull them out of our—”

  “We’ve used up all our good ones,” Stell continued. “This here season was supposed to be finished.”

  “So,” I said, realizing they were waiting for my reaction, “you are having trouble finding good contestants.” I hoped that was right. My mind had been racing around and around Greta’s current problem. Thank goodness Nell and Stell weren’t discussing something really complicated, like the weather.

  “Girl, we gave up on ‘good’ last week. We’re settling for live ones just about now.”

  “That’s rough,” I said, beginning to warm to this new problem. I had no idea it was a chore to find game-show contestants. It seemed like everyone I knew wanted to be on Freak. Of course, most of my friends loved to cook, but still. Who wouldn’t want a chance to win half a million dollars just by cooking a nice meal? “Say, I could call some of my friends,” I offered. “I know lots of excellent cooks.”

  “Aw, that’s sweet,” Stell said, twinkling her brown eyes at me. “But you work here now, pumpkin. Your friends are not eligible to be on this show anymore, now that you work here as a writer.”

  “It’s in the rules,” Nell said. “Those rules we all sign.”

  “The 509,” I said, nodding in agreement, hoping no one suddenly wondered if I’d ever been obliged to sign them.

  “Right,” Nell said.

  I realized, just then, the price my friends were now forced to pay so that I could work on a game show. I should have thought this through earlier. Heck, Wesley and Holly, my two closest friends, were excellent cooks. They could have come on this game show and won half a million. It seemed, suddenly, like such a better deal than having me work here for a tiny fraction of that jackpot. D’oh!

  The door to Greta’s office swung open and we all turned to look. I expected it to be Greta, ready to call a staff meeting, ready to announce what had happened in there, in that office down the hall.

  Instead, in popped the star of Food Freak himself—Chef Howie Finkelberg. He and I had met only once before, but since the special episode was being taped this week, he would be in the studio a lot more.

  “Hi, girls,” he said. “Anyone know where Greta is?”

  “No. We’re all looking for her,” Susan said and then, the gracious hostess, she said, “Chef Howie, have you met Madeline Bean yet? She’s been writing for the show this past week.”

  “Hello, Madeline.” The star of Food Freak turned to me and gave me his full attention. He was the sort for whom tight Levi’s had been invented. He was dressed for the taping, wearing a custom-made chef’s coat, cut to show off his muscles, over the aforementioned jeans. It was his trademark to leave the collar unbuttoned. Preteen girls pinned up “Chef Howie” posters on their bedroom walls and dreamed of crème brûlée and Chef Howie. “So good to meet you,” he said, his contact-lens-enhanced green eyes meeting mine. Clearly he did not remember that we had been introduced the previous Monday. I chose not to remind him.

  “My God,” he said, never breaking our intimate eye contact, “you are gorgeous. That hair! You should be on camera! Do you act?”

  “No,” I stuttered, shocked. “Never.” Can you believe this guy? How corny was that? What sort of green, new-in-town, stars-in-her-eyes, aspiring-actress type did he take me for?

  “You’re laughing,” he said, amused. “I mean it, Madeline. You’re a highly regarded chef in your own right, yes? You are a hot young Hollywood caterer. You are simply perfect.” Howie spoke in a low growl. He did not stop looking at me.

  “He’s right,” Susan said, a hint of excitement in her voice.

  Nell and Stell kind of gasped, taken in by the power of Chef Howie’s voice.

  Here I was, my native skepticism on hyperalert, but how flattering, really, that Howie knew about my culinary business. Of course I was an event planner, not merely a caterer, but he still seemed to know me by my reputation.

  I realized they were all staring at me, smiling at me, seeing me in perhaps a whole new light. I felt myself begin to flush and I brushed my long curly hair off of my hot neck.

  Just my luck, I would get discovered and be on the brink of my big break just as I was on the verge of being thrown in prison for breaking federal game-show statute 509 or some such number. And, of course, much as I resisted everyone else’s infernal dream about a career in front of the camera, I suppose it would be preferable to fifty years in the slammer.

  Howie was waiting for my answer.

  “What sort of thing did you have in mind?” I asked, annoyed to realize my voice did not sound anywhere near as skeptical as I had surely intended it to.

  “Listen to Chef Howie,” he said, referring to himself in the third person. If that wasn’t a clear signal to stop listening, I’d never heard one. And yet, I continued to listen. I have no excuse. I just wanted to hear what he thought I might be able to do. Just in case this game-show writing gig was about to be flushed down the tubes due to my exceeding stupidity regarding closing doors.

  “I think you should sing, Madeline,” he said, with a completely straight face. “You could become the singing chef. It would be a sensation.”

  Yes. Right. I’m afraid with ideas like that one, I had better see what I could do to salvage the writing gig after all.

  Chapter 5

  Stella, Nellie, Susan, and Chef Howie waited for my response.

  “That’s not why I’m here working on Food Freak,” I said modestly. “I may be the one person in Hollywood who has no Hollywood dream.”

  “Really?” Chef Howie asked, teasing.

  “Really. I have no desire to be discovered,” I said, smiling. “And, truth be known, I don’t sing. At all. But that’s awfully nice. Thanks anyway, Howie.”

  “No, no!” Stell and Nell insisted in unison.

  I was startled at their insistence. Me? A singing chef? It was really…

  Stell said, “It’s Chef Howe.”

  “What?”

  Nell continued in a lowered voice, “We all say Chef Howie.”

  “All his fans call him Chef Howie,” Stella explained. “It’s simpler.”

  “Oh,” I said. “You’re not joking.”

  Howie, with a dashing smile, winked at me. Yes indeedy. Chef Howie. Right.

  The door banged open and we all looked up, expecting Greta. But this time, a tall, snaky-thin woman entered. She wore black leather jeans and a zebra print halter top, not actually appropriate for office attire, but then again, not actually appropriate for any kind of attire after, say, 1983. She had the sort of skin that had no doubt spent many a summer slathered in cocoa butter. It had the leathery look for which one pays extra when buying expensive luggage.

  “Chef Howie,” she said, her voice like a cheese grater. “What the hell are you doing here? I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

  “Hey,” Howie said, “chill. I’m waiting for Greta.”

  Susan did her introduction thing. Susan was indispensable. “Fate Finkelberg, meet Madeline Bean, our newest writer.”

  “Fay, nice to meet you,” I said.

  “I’m Fate,” she corrected. “F-A-T-E.”

  I avoided a spontaneous smirk and congratulated my self-control.

  “A new writer?” Fate turned to Susan and her lips curled downward. “You mean Greta replaced Timmy Stock already? Shame on her!” Fate exuded disapproval and dissatisfaction, elevating the concept of negative energy to an art form.

  “Madeline is just helping us out. It’s temporary,” Susan explained.

  I checked out Fate Finkelberg, who was frankly wearing too much jewelry and exposing too much old skin to be taken very seriously. She might have been something twenty-five years back, but by
now it was difficult to tell what. She was trying to pull off that disco look and I shuddered to imagine that she had been stuck in those platform shoes for the better part of three decades. I took in her streaked blond hair, cut in the same shaggy style that Rod Stewart used to wear long ago. I turned to study Howie again. He looked to be young thirties and I did the mental math. Fate must be Chef Howie’s mother.

  As for Howie, with his thick brown hair and his devilish grin, there was nothing I could find wrong with his looks. In People magazine’s “Sexiest People” issue, they said Chef Howie was bringing back Elvis sideburns single-handedly. His hands were rough and scarred, the way tough-guy chef’s hands always are, very sexy. He could have been a rock musician with that lean build and those clear green eyes. Very badboy chic. Some insisted it was Howie’s hip, casual machismo in the kitchen that had ratcheted Freak’s ratings higher and higher. Staring at him now, up close and personal, I couldn’t say I’d argue.

  “Come on,” Fate said, turning back to Howie. “Let’s go to the trailer. We need to talk. One of these girls can tell Greta you want her.”

  Howie seemed very used to following her orders, because without a murmur of dissent or skipping a beat, he told us, “Ladies, I’m outta here. Tell Greta I need her right away. Good to meet you, Maddie.” He gave me a slow TV star smile, and winked. Twice.

  “See you later…Howie.” I know. I am bad.

  Fate Finkelberg turned slowly; her light eyes traveled over my white jeans and blue tank top, stopping for a moment as she checked out my unruly red/blond hair, which, for once, I was wearing down. It’s curly and heavy, and when I’m cooking, I almost always pull it back in a braid or clip it off my neck. As a newly minted game-show writer, however, I was experimenting with the whole long pre-Raphaelite hair look. It was a pain to fuss with, but I’m trying to get into the pain. Fate Finkelberg, queen of the spiky shag cut, was not impressed. At all.

  “You call him Chef Howie, sweetie pie, or you’re out of a job.” Ms. Finkelberg didn’t raise her voice and didn’t blink. She was taking me on, perhaps hoping I’d snap at her bait and get myself fired.