Looks to Die For by Janice Kaplan Page A

her credit card through the machine, and blew me a kiss. I watched her walk out of the store. And right there in Gelsons on Sunset Boulevard, standing in the twelve-items-or-less checkout, it suddenly hit me. The time had come for Lacy Fields to get off her duff and on the case.
    The minute I got home, I stashed away the packages and finally put in the call I should have made ages ago to my longtime best friend, Molly Archer of Molly Archer Casting. We’d been Tri Delta sorority sisters back at Ohio State, meeting for the first time during Rush Week, when we stood in the middle of campus singing “Honky Tonk Women.” Molly was from a fancy suburb of Cleveland, while I’d grown up in a rural town outside Dayton, my determined mom an assistant manager at a Wal-Mart thirty miles away. Molly and I pledged the sorority and connected immediately — both of us were smart, curious about the world, and ready for new adventures. Our friendship grew tighter in the four years, and a week after graduation, we drove out to Los Angeles together to look for jobs. Now Molly’s name appeared in the end credits of a couple of dozen network television shows, and she was more hanky-swank than honky-tonk.
    Her male assistant answered the phone and reported that Molly was on a conference call.
    “Can she return?” he asked officiously.
    “Return what?” I asked him, always amused by the L.A. colloquialism. “Return the sweater I bought her last Christmas? Return to the days of our youth?”
    “She’ll return,” he said, hanging up quickly.
    Five minutes later, the phone rang, and Molly said, “Lacy, dear, thank goodness you called. I’ve left a million messages, but I won’t complain that you’ve been avoiding me. I understand. If it were me, I’d be a werewolf howling at the moon.”
    “No hair growing on my hands just yet,” I said, smiling. That was Molly — never skipping around the subject or playing coy. She hadn’t built the biggest casting agency in L.A. by being reserved.
    “I should have rushed over when you didn’t answer my calls, but I was stuck in Copenhagen casting Moon Over Denmark . I’m about to sign Spike Lee as the native father. He’s perfect, right?”
    “Not exactly your standard Scandinavian.”
    “You know me. Always cast against type.” She chuckled. “Anyway, this is so awful about Dan. What have you been doing?”
    “Wallowing,” I admitted. “But now I want to take some action.”
    “Good! What can I do?” Molly asked animatedly. She’d been the sorority social chairwoman for a reason.
    “To be blunt, I’d like to know something about the girl who died. The victim. Name of Tasha Barlow, née Theresa Bartowski.”
    “Changed her name?” asked Molly with a tinge of scorn. “Don’t these kids know that ethnic is in? Much better to be Geraldo Rivera than Jerry Rivers, I always say.”
    I laughed. “Whatever she called herself, she wanted to be an actress. I thought you might have run across her. Since the scouts stopped hanging out at Hollywood and Vine, the only place to be discovered is your doorstep.”
    “Oh my God, how idiotic of me!” Molly boomed. “I didn’t even think of that. Hold on.”
    She yelled out, “Ben!” and then told the imperious assistant she needed him to check something. I heard an exchange of voices, the clattering of a keyboard, and then Molly came back.
    “Apparently, we have nothing on Tasha in the computer database, where we keep everybody active,” Molly said, going into business mode. “But Ben found her résumé and picture in a file folder. She’d sent it in herself. No agent. And…hmm.” I heard Molly flipping pages and then a brief silence while she read. “I see why we didn’t put her in the system. No creds — just a couple of ams in Idaho.”
    I did an instantaneous translation. No credentials, just amateur shows.
    “For a reference, she gave a high school acting teacher. And — wow, this is strange.” Molly stopped and I