Famous Mistakes Read online

  “He’s well,” I said. “But, yes, busy. I know he’s looking forward to your show, though.”

  “Here, here. Have a seat. We can order you some sodas while Joe and I finish eating and then we can do the interview.”

  “That’s a really nice offer,” I said, “but I’m afraid we have some bad news.”

  “Bad news?” Brady asked. “What are you talking about?”

  “We went up to your room before we found you here. . . .” Ned faltered. I could tell he wasn’t sure how exactly to break it to him.

  “The room was destroyed,” I said, bailing Ned out.

  “What?” said Brady, confused.

  “It looked like someone had gone through all your stuff. Your clothes were everywhere. The art was off the wall.”

  Brady looked back and forth between us. I could see him processing what we had just told him.

  “That’s outrageous. How would anyone even know where you’re staying?” Joe asked.

  Brady sighed. “Probably has something to do with my tweet this morning. Thought I was giving this hotel some good publicity.”

  Brady pulled out his phone to show us a photo of him opening his hotel room door to reveal the fancy room. He captioned it, “Just checked into the amazing Towering Heights Resort for my show tonight!” His hotel room number was clearly visible over his shoulder.

  “Brady!” Joe admonished. “You’ll have to change rooms; we have to call the police.”

  Brady shook his head. “No, not yet. I want to see it.” He turned to me. “This is very important. Did you see if there was a little black leather notebook with an elastic band around it in there?”

  I thought back to the room, trying to remember if I had seen the notebook, but it didn’t come to mind.

  “I don’t know . . . I’m sorry. I saw your laptop. They didn’t take that.”

  Brady stood up, almost knocking his chair down in the process. He threw his napkin on the table.

  “I don’t care about the laptop. I only care about the notebook.”

  He raced toward the door. Not knowing what else to do, Ned, Joe Archer, and I all followed behind him. Brady passed a waitress.

  “Your bill, Mr. Owens?” she asked.

  Brady stopped, pulled out his wallet, and handed her two twenty-dollar bills. “Just charge the meal to room 823. These are for you. Thanks for everything,” he said, not giving her a chance to respond.

  Brady picked up the pace, so that he was moving at closer to a jog than a walk. As we made our way through the lobby, slaloming through the overstuffed chairs and dodging rolling suitcases, I could feel the eyes of all the guests on us. I couldn’t blame them. From the outside, we probably looked ridiculous. Two grown men, Ned, and me sprinting through the elevator lobby, Ned and I still lugging our boxes of recording equipment.

  We got to the elevator and Brady was finally forced to stop. He hit the button over and over again, just like Ned had a few minutes earlier.

  “What’s so important about the notebook?” I asked.

  Brady paced back and forth. He was so distracted he hadn’t heard me.

  “What’s so important about the notebook?” I repeated. Brady turned and looked at me. I saw the same flash of anger I had seen right before he’d cut into the heckler. I physically took a step back, wanting to put a little more space between us. I realized that Brady was the type of person whose emotions could turn on a dime.

  “Oh, nothing,” he snapped. “Just all the material I’ve spent the past year writing.” He looked at us, waiting a beat for dramatic effect. Even in a moment of crisis, he maintained his performer instinct. “So, you know, just my entire life!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  A Girl on a Mission

  BRADY HIT THE ELEVATOR BUTTON again. The number display showed that it was stopped on the fourth floor.

  “Forget it,” Brady said, exasperated. “I’m taking the stairs.”

  “You’re on the eighth floor,” Joe Archer protested.

  “Nothing wrong with a little exercise,” said Brady, already heading toward the stairs. Like ducklings following their mother, we trailed after him.

  We raced down a hallway, past a shelf of brochures and a bulletin board of posters advertising local activities. Something caught my attention out of the corner of my eye, but we were moving too fast for me to make it out. I slowed down to get a better look. When I was a less experienced detective, I wouldn’t have bothered. I would have thought keeping up with Brady was the most important thing I could do, but over the years I had learned that trusting your gut can sometimes be the key to solving a case. Those “flashes” when something seems out of place can be your brain realizing something, but not processing it fast enough for it to make sense to you.

  “What’s up, Nancy?” Ned asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I said scanning the board. “I saw something that I think might be important.” I spotted a poster for an exhibit of paintings from the Dutch Golden Age that would be opening at the Arts Complex soon. That wasn’t what I had noticed, but I snapped a photo on my phone for Bess. She’s my other best friend and George-the-tech-genius’s cousin. She’s not really into technology but is a huge fan of the Dutch masters. Especially Rembrandt. I knew one of her dreams was to go to the Netherlands to visit the Rijksmuseum, which has the largest collection of Dutch Golden Age paintings in the world. I couldn’t wait to tell her that some of these paintings would be coming right to River Heights. She would be beyond excited.

  I went back to searching the board. Suddenly I saw it. It was a poster for Brady’s show, but across his picture the word BOYCOTT was scrawled. Underneath that were the letters RHVRA, almost like a signature.

  “There,” I said, pointing at the poster. Ned came over to get a look.

  “What does ‘RHVRA’ mean?” he asked.

  “RH probably stands for River Heights, but I don’t know about the rest of it,” I said. “But if someone is mad enough to organize a boycott and vandalize a poster, they might be mad enough to trash Brady’s room.”

  “This is definitely a clue,” Ned said.

  I agreed. I heard a door shut and realized that Brady and Joe had reached the stairs while we had been lingering at the bulletin board.

  “We should catch up,” I said, pulling the poster off the board. “We’ll show this to Brady and Joe. They might know what ‘RHVRA’ stands for.”

  Ned and I rushed to the doorway we had seen Joe and Brady go through and started climbing the stairs to Brady’s floor. We could hear footsteps echoing down as the two men climbed above us. We were winded and sweaty by the time we reached Brady’s room. My arms felt like jelly from lugging the box of recording equipment all over the hotel.

  Brady and Joe were already in the room and the door was slightly ajar when we got there. I slowly pushed it open. Brady was sitting on the bed, his shoulders slumped, his head down. Joe was standing above him, his hand on his friend’s shoulder, trying to comfort him.

  Ned and I exchanged a look. This was not good.

  “The notebook is gone?” I asked, stepping farther into the room.

  “I wish,” Brady said. I looked at him, confused. Why would he wish it was gone? Before I could ask, he continued, “If it were gone, I could get it back.” He lifted up his hands, showing us shredded-up pieces of notebook paper, scraps of writing visible. “The monsters destroyed it.”

  “I am so sorry,” I said.

  “I spent a year working on that material. I’m supposed to perform it for the first time on the Comedy Channel in a month. It was going to be my big break.”

  “Do you remember any of it?” asked Ned.

  Brady snapped his head toward Ned, sparks of anger flying behind his eyes. “Sure, I remember the gist of it, but people think comedy is so easy. You just go up there, you tell a few jokes, and the people laugh.”

  “I don’t think it’s easy,” Ned tried to interject, but Brady was off on a tirade. I was starting to realize that this was a
pattern with him.

  “But it’s a lot more complicated than that. Comedy is about precision. You need exactly the right words in exactly the right order. Every pause in my routine, every ‘and’ instead of ‘but,’ it’s all labored over. Because here’s a secret: audiences—they don’t want to see you succeed. They want to see you fail. Your job is to win them over, and winning them over requires perfection. So now, thanks to whoever did this, I’m going to bomb on national television and my career is going to be over.”

  Brady took a deep breath, running his hands through his hair. I decided to take advantage of this brief pause and jump in. Who knew when my next opportunity would be, at the rate Brady spoke?

  “I found something that might tell us who did it,” I said.

  “We all know who did it!” Brady shouted.

  “We do?” I asked.

  “The same people who have been attacking me online for one dumb joke I made. Now they’re moving their harassment to real life. They think that if they throw me off my game by trashing my room, by destroying my notebook, I’ll bomb tonight.”

  “But if they’re boycotting you, why do they care how well you do?”

  “It’s a lot easier to convince people to boycott a bad show,” Brady explained. “If I did amazing tonight and everyone who’s in the audience goes online and tells all their friends and followers that Brady Owens’s show was awesome, then people who live in Amherst, Massachusetts, the next stop on my tour, are going to have to really be convinced that what I said was so terrible that they shouldn’t go. But if they hear that I was horrible and not funny at all, then it’s really easy for them to say, ‘Yeah, he is a terrible person. I’m not going to support him.’ ”

  “That feels like you’re oversimplifying,” I said.

  “Oh, you want nuance?” Brady asked. “These little jerks found my home address and they faked 911 calls coming from there. The police literally surrounded my house.”

  Vandalizing the poster seemed a lot more harmless than destroying his room or spoofing his number to call the police.

  “I found this poster downstairs,” I said, and showed it to the others. Brady and Joe leaned in for a closer look.

  “Oh, dear,” Joe sighed. “Yep. They probably are involved.”

  “What is RHVRA?” Brady asked.

  “River Heights Victims’ Rights Advocates,” Joe said. “They have been calling and e-mailing my office constantly, imploring me to cancel your show because you don’t respect crime victims. There’s even a group of them sitting in the waiting area of my office as we speak, demanding to speak to me.”

  “Wow. Well, thanks for not canceling,” Brady said.

  “Look, I don’t necessarily agree with your decision to put that heckler on the spot like that, but I would never cancel your show over it,” Joe said. “I don’t cancel a show just because I, or a community, disagree with it. Freedom of expression—the First Amendment—is a fundamental American principle, and I believe that it is especially important for the arts. Bottom line, it’s going to take more than some angry protesters sitting in my office to get me to cancel a show. To my mind, that just means that it’s even more important to let the show go on.”

  I thought about what Joe was saying. Brady had—jokingly or not—encouraged violence against someone. That was going beyond just voicing a different opinion. I wasn’t sure Brady or Joe was completely in the right on this.

  “Why didn’t you apologize?” I asked. “If not for the joke, then for telling the crowd to mug the woman who shouted at you?”

  Brady sighed and ran his hand through his hair. “I didn’t realize it was going to turn into this whole thing. In the moment, it didn’t feel like a big deal. I have to shut down hecklers in my show all the time. It’s just a fact of being a comic. It wasn’t until the next morning that I realized it had spun out of control.”

  “Okay . . . ,” I said, not seeing why this meant he couldn’t apologize.

  “By the time I saw how badly people had reacted, it had turned into a mob. My Twitter was filled with people calling me the most vile names. Ironically, given how this all started, plenty of them were calling for violence against me. And I’m not going to reward that behavior. They don’t get to do these horrible things and win.”

  “We’ll get you more security,” Joe said.

  “No,” said Brady sharply. “I don’t want that.”

  “I’m afraid it wasn’t a suggestion. If you want this show to go on, we’re going to need to bring in some extra security to make sure the event is safe for all our guests. We don’t know what these people have planned next.”

  “No. If they see that I’m easily intimidated, they’ll just grow bolder and bolder each stop on my tour.”

  “Well, no offense to the people of Amherst and wherever you go after that, but my priority is the safety of the people of River Heights. You are one of the first shows at our venue, and I can’t have anything go wrong or we could risk the complex’s entire future.”

  Brady puffed up his shoulders and moved right into Joe’s space. Joe was a good six inches taller than the comedian, but Brady still managed to seem threatening.

  “This is so typical of you, Joe. You always prioritize your own needs over everybody else’s. . . .”

  “Oh, really?” Joe asked, leaning down so he was just inches from Brady’s face.

  Ned and I exchanged looks. This was quickly escalating into a personal fight that seemed to have roots way back in their history.

  “What if I found the culprit?” I asked. Joe and Brady slowly pivoted to look at me, but they didn’t say anything. “Listen, I think this is the work of one person. It sounds like RHVRA is a group of concerned citizens that want to talk to you, Joe. They’ve been waiting in your office and calling you. I don’t think it was them. This crime has no note attached to it. This doesn’t feel like a group making a statement but a single person acting out. I can investigate and see what’s going on here.”

  Joe looked between Brady and me. “If whoever trashed Brady’s hotel room is found and arrested, and I am assured that there are no other plans, then we could do the show without extra security. But what makes you think you can?”

  “Don’t you read Carson’s holiday letters?” Brady asked Joe incredulously. I blushed a little. I love that my dad is proud of me, but it always makes me self-conscious that he includes updates on the cases I’ve solved in the letter he sends every year to our friends and family. “Nancy here is a detective,” Brady continues. “She’s solved loads of cases all around River Heights and even in other cities. Carson writes all about them.”

  “Oh . . . uh,” Joe stammered.

  “I’ve never solved a case in San Francisco, though,” I said to Joe, who gave me a small embarrassed smile.

  “I swear I read your father’s letters. I just didn’t put it together that you were the detective. I thought you were a lot older based on all your exploits.” He looked at me for a second, thinking through his options. “You’re sure you’re up to the case?”

  “I’m sure,” I said. “Preventing sabotage is kind of my specialty.”

  “There is a lot of sabotage in River Heights,” Ned said.

  “All right, Nancy. You’re on the case. Doors open for the show at seven p.m., so you need to have the culprit and I need to feel confident that you have discovered any other plans by six. Otherwise, I will call in the extra security.”

  Brady turned to me and looked me right in the eyes. “I’m counting on you, Nancy. The rest of my tour depends on you.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Put a Button on It

  “FOR THE RECORD, I’M NOT doing this for your tour,” I told Brady. “I do think you need to take some ownership of your actions. Even if you meant it as a joke, I don’t think you should have called for violence against a heckler, and I think you should apologize. I’m taking this case because I don’t want one of the first performances at the Arts Complex to be a disaster. It’s too import
ant to River Heights.”

  Brady looked like he wanted to argue, so I held up my hand to stop him. It was now almost one thirty, and Joe was giving me until six. We didn’t have time to argue.

  “First things first: we need to search this room,” I said.

  “What are we looking for?” Ned asked.

  “Anything that looks out of place,” I answered. “Whoever destroyed it must have exerted a lot of energy to do this level of damage. It’s possible they dropped something or otherwise left something behind that will help us identify them.”

  “Okay. Where do we start?” asked Joe.

  I surveyed the room. It was a good question. For a moment I felt overwhelmed by how much damage had been done. It could take a long time to go through everything, and I didn’t have a lot of time before Joe would call in the extra security. It was also easy to imagine missing an important clue in the mess. But sometimes moving forward with one plan is better than waiting for the perfect plan.

  I opened the door to the bathroom. It looked like that room had been left alone.

  “Brady, is this how you left the bathroom?” I asked.

  Brady peered in. “Yup, looks like they left that room alone.”

  “Okay, then we will too. Let’s divide this room into quadrants,” I said, “and each of us will be responsible for searching that quadrant. If there’s anything that seems like it might be a clue, hold it up and Brady can tell us if it’s his or not.”

  “You’re lucky this is the first stop on my tour,” Brady said.

  “Why is that?”

  “You won’t be digging through my dirty laundry.”

  We all laughed.

  “Okay,” I said. “Brady, how about you take from the west wall through the left pillow, and then down the bottom of the bed. Joe, if you could take the east wall through the right pillow, Ned and I will split the space in front of the bed. Sound good?”

  Everyone nodded and got to work.

  I got down on my hands and knees and started in the upper left corner of my quadrant.