TWENTY

I spent a sleepless night in a holding cell, alone except for the thumping and screaming and music and voices and chills and pains and thoughts flying through my head too fast for me to grasp and hold on to any one. After what felt like an eternity, I was shouted at to wake up—hilarious, since I hadn’t even come close to falling asleep—and handed something sloshy and gray in a bowl that I believe was supposed to be oatmeal. Given the aggressive nature of my awakening, I expected something to happen after that, but nothing did. Hours passed. I was served a sandwich that I barely touched because nausea was flooding over me in waves so intense I couldn’t see straight. When the guard came to retrieve my tray, I asked him if I wasn’t supposed to have a phone call?

“You’ll get a phone call after you’re charged,” he snapped, as if he were annoyed I hadn’t read the jail handbook yet.

“And when will that be?” I replied.

“We have up to three days after your arrest to charge you” was the answer.

They were going to milk every one of those three days, I predicted. Every hour I was in here—not allowed a phone call, not allowed to share my side of the story with anyone—was an hour both the studio and the police could work on convincing everyone who might be inclined to believe me that I was a murderer. No doubt Kiblowski and Cooper were knocking on the doors of the rest of the Ambassador’s Club right now, fake sympathy in their eyes. We thought you deserved to hear the news directly from us…

I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes, preparing myself to be there for a while.

Sure enough, nothing happened that day. Something did happen the next, but it wasn’t related to my arrest: I started vomiting. It was a painful sort of vomit, too, the kind that seems less like a sickness and more like a cramp that sends your stomach contents upward like a geyser. The guard first accused me of faking it, which I would have laughed at if I hadn’t been worried that laughing would start more half-digested porridge to erupt out of me. Once it became clear that I could barely even keep a sip or two of water down and therefore probably was not faking, a doctor was called, although he didn’t arrive for several unbearable hours.

When the doctor did finally show up, an old man with graying hair and frigid hands, he wasn’t exactly helpful. “Any chance you could be pregnant?” he asked.

“A small chance, maybe,” I answered.

“Well, there’s your answer, then,” he said.

The fact that, even if I was pregnant, I was still unable to keep food or water down didn’t seem to bother him. I asked for something to treat the nausea, and he said it should die down by the second trimester, an answer I didn’t find helpful. Without even leaving me so much as a pack of ginger snaps, he was gone.

I didn’t really believe that I was pregnant—Jack and I had used protection, and this felt more like the ceaseless vomiting that came with stomach flu or food poisoning than the waves of illness brought on by a strong smell or a moving train car I’d witnessed in actual pregnant women. But I had nothing to do but ruminate on the what if. Neither of us were exactly cut out for parenthood, but I did think (in a perfect world, one where I was not a murder suspect) Jack would try. He probably wouldn’t be proposing to me, but he wouldn’t run out on me either. He’d support me. He might even warm to fatherhood, eventually. I could see him giving the kid little bit parts on the radio, holding her up so she could reach the mic and grinning when the kid nailed it. It was one pleasant thought as the entire room spun around me.

Fortunately—or maybe unfortunately—by the end of the day, whatever bug I’d eaten had worked itself out of my system, and I was able to drink some ginger soda and eat a few crackers without incident. My pregnancy was apparently over. As the nausea lifted, I felt better than I had in days. I was exhausted, but my mind was clear, and the noises and thumping and ghosts even settled down too.

I had no idea what day it was, but I’d been in here two nights, which meant I’d be charged tomorrow or released that night.

Only I wasn’t charged tomorrow. When I asked the guard about it—it had been seventy-two hours, hadn’t it?—he told me that it was now Saturday, and weekends didn’t count. I couldn’t tell if he was lying to me or not. I’d been so preoccupied with vomiting, with the noises in the walls, that it hadn’t sunk in yet that maybe I was in for more trouble than a ruined reputation and an expensive legal battle. As I lay there another entire day, a dark thought occurred to me: Maybe I’d never be charged. Maybe they’d let me die in here. If the police’s case against me wasn’t airtight—which I knew for a fact it wasn’t, since I hadn’t killed Fiona—maybe it would be easier to let me die in police custody. They could plant a suicide note on me too. I’m sorry I murdered Fiona Farris; I can’t live with the guilt anymore. The thought of Jack reading that in the paper, thinking that of me when I was no longer around to set the record straight while a prescription pad that proved my innocence was left to rot behind the toilet in an apartment scrubbed clean and rented out to the next Pacific Pictures writer—it was nearly unbearable.

Not this, I told the universe, told myself. Annie Laurence, you’ll die someday in some stupid, senseless way—too many drugs or too much to drink or in some pointless frenzy of emotion, but not this, not this. Please. Not this.

Finally, after two more horrible days, I was herded onto a bus with about a dozen other people, mostly men, all in the same beige jumpsuits. No one bothered to explain where we were going, and I knew by this point that asking questions never produced satisfying answers. Maybe Jack had been right about the absurdity of the universe the night he’d taken off his pants in Musso & Frank’s.

We arrived at a courthouse after a short trip, heading in not through the grand staircase at the front entrance but through a grimy metal door around the back, filing into the same room, where a judge called us one by one to the stand. I heard the charges of the other arrestees read out loud: Disorderly conduct. Aggravated assault. It dawned on me that I was the worst criminal in the room.

Sure enough, when it was my turn and the judge read out loud the charge of homicide, the men in the room gave a series of catcalls and wolf whistles, which were not at all silenced by the pounding of the gavel. Photographers started snapping pictures of me—none of the men had their picture taken. I was the star of today’s proceedings, and I hadn’t even had to lose twenty-three pounds of knee fat for the honor. The judge asked how I pleaded, and I said, “Not guilty.” My bail was set at a couple thousand dollars, and I was returned to my row, cameras documenting my whole journey.

“Who’d you kill, baby?” the man next to me whispered in my ear.

“No one,” I replied. “I’m being framed.”

He grinned maniacally, giving me a wink. “Yeah. Me too.”

I knew whatever I tried to do next to clear my name, Irma and Devlin and the PR machine of Pacific Pictures would paint as the hysterical flailing of a guilty woman, making up nonsense because she was out of other options to save her own hide. They’d probably succeed at it too. But they were wrong if they thought I would let that stop me.

After returning to my holding cell for about an hour or so, I was marched to a room with a telephone. I wanted to call Jack, wanted him to tell me it would all be okay and bail me out and take me to his beautiful house in Santa Monica. I wanted to call Vic, tell him he’d been wrong, Fiona hadn’t done this to herself. I knew neither of them would take my call after what was now four entire days of newspaper stories and police visits and gossip on the lot about what a crazy person I’d turned out to be.

I’d have to call the people who already thought I was crazy, before any of this mess. So I made my one phone call to Adam and Beverly Cook.

Beverly told me she and Adam couldn’t risk being seen in public with me, let alone downtown picking me up from jail, but promised they’d find a way to help me nonetheless. It took all day, but finally—shortly after dinner—I was released into the custody of a grim-faced MGM employee with a severe hairline and hands so thick I wondered if he hadn’t done a little murdering of meddling journalists himself. Without saying a word, he drove me not to the Cook house on Roxbury Drive but to a small bungalow in the Hollywood Hills.

“Where are we?” I asked when we arrived.

“It’s an MGM safe house,” he responded.

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“Sometimes in our industry, it’s necessary to take meetings the press can’t find out about,” he said. “One example off the top of my head would be right now. So MGM has a few houses around town for that purpose. Your friends are inside; you can talk to them in private. I’ll wait out here.”

All this, I mused as I climbed the concrete steps toward the tiny house, for some lights and sound. Safe houses and jails and murder and sham marriages and knee weight loss and police bribes and horse-riding lessons—all for some pictures on a screen that weren’t even real.

I didn’t bother knocking, just pushed open the door to find Adam and Beverly seated on a brown leather couch. Beverly jumped up to hug me when I walked in. Adam didn’t. “Oh my goodness, are you all right?” she squealed, pulling away to look at me and brush away a few strands of the tangled mess that was my hair. “We’ve been worried sick about you.”

“I’m fine,” I said, leaning past her to look at Adam, who was pretending to examine the freckles on his arms. “Hi, Adam.”

“Annie,” he replied, not looking up.

“We know you didn’t do it, obviously,” said Beverly. “They’re printing all these awful lies about you—but we know you didn’t do it.”

“Did you do it?” asked Adam from the couch.

“No,” I said. “I’m being set up. The head of Pacific Pictures and his weasel of a secretary killed her, and now they’ve arranged for me to take the fall.”

“How dramatic,” Adam said.

“How’s the horseback riding going?” I asked him.

“What can we do to help?” Beverly interjected. “We’ll do anything.”

Adam grunted from the couch to indicate his objection to the word anything. He needn’t have bothered. I knew Beverly was exaggerating since picking me up themselves and letting me into their own home were already off the table.

“A shower,” I said. A few times over the last four days, I’d been permitted to stand under a pathetic stream of cold water for a few minutes, but it felt less like bathing and more like a fresh way to torture me. “I could use a shower. And something to eat.”

“There’s a bathroom upstairs,” said Beverly. “One of my dresses is up there too—we thought you’d want something to change into. And we’ll see what we can find in the kitchen.”

The hot water felt so incredible cascading down my body, achy from the paper-thin cot and four days of inactivity, that I stood there for ages, only remembering that I needed to use shampoo and soap when it started to run cold. The dress Beverly had brought me was an old one of hers, red with white polka dots and a frilly detail around the bottom hem. It didn’t fit me right—too big in the bust and too small in the waist—and the ill fit combined with my red hair gave the appearance of Little Orphan Annie Laurence. Still, it was hard not to be grateful. When I finally emerged downstairs, Beverly had made me a makeshift meal of a peanut butter sandwich, some applesauce, and a few shortbread cookies, which were stale but I ate anyway.

As they watched me eat, they made awful small talk about the pictures they’d worked on so far, either not noticing or not caring that I said nothing as I chewed on my sandwich. After I’d finished eating, Adam poured us all martinis, which I had to stop myself from downing in one sip.

Beverly was in the middle of describing her dance lessons when I interrupted. “Which one of you spoke to the police about me?” I asked.

There was a shared look between them. “We both did,” said Beverly. “Together and separately.”

“Because that’s a large part of their story,” I said. “They’re saying I killed Fiona because she found out about an affair we had, that I followed you out here because I’m in love with Adam. If you really want to do something to help me, that’s one thing: tell the police that isn’t true.”

They were quiet for a moment too long. “Sorry, Annie,” said Adam finally. “But I mean…isn’t it sort of true? You did move out here for us.”

“Because you left me with nothing,” I blurted out. None of us had expected me to agree with him, and we all took a second to blink at one another in shock. “You took my furniture, and you took my future. My play closed and I was too depressed to write another. I didn’t have other friends. You two had been my only real friends. I couldn’t tell my family what was going on, not all of it. I built a life with the two of you, and you took it away with no warning. Yes, I followed you out here, but not to win you back—not entirely. Without the two of you, I had nothing else. That’s what I was following. That’s why I came.”

Neither of them knew how to respond to that. Adam folded his hands together and stared at them. Beverly’s gaze wandered aimlessly around the living room. Finally, she cleared her throat. “You know, we’re sorry if we hurt you—”

“You don’t have to,” I interrupted. “Let’s all just move on.”

Relief washed over their faces. “What’s your plan now?” asked Beverly.

I exhaled. “Fiona was murdered because she found out a secret about Henry Hilbert,” I said finally. “In my apartment, I have proof Devlin’s secretary was at the Canteen when Fiona died. At Henry Hilbert’s house in Calabasas is proof that Fiona was going to write an article about him. So I suppose I need to take my proof to Henry Hilbert and convince him to come clean on his own. Henry’s evidence proves Devlin had motive, my evidence proves Irma had opportunity, and both of them found the means in the pages of our play.”

“It’s so grim,” said Beverly with a shudder.

“But if Devlin and Irma are working with the police, how are you going to convince them?” asked Adam.

“If the police are in the pocket of the studio, it’ll need to be undeniable,” I said. “A public scandal. Something that makes arresting Devlin and Irma worth more than whatever sum of money they’ve been paid. If it’s not that, they’ll just poison my coffee, same as they did to her.”

“I can drive you,” said Adam immediately. “I don’t want you getting in a car with anyone I don’t trust.”

This sudden flare of protectiveness made me soft. There was no future in which we were all back together again, but maybe there was one where we were something resembling friends. “Thank you,” I said.

He glanced at his watch. “You’d better hurry, though. Hilbert’s on at the Hollywood Bowl in an hour.”

We stopped at my apartment, where, to my relief, the prescription pad was still hiding in its spot behind the toilet. The cops had clearly searched the place, but since there wasn’t all that much to search, they’d mostly made a mess, probably out of a desire to appear intimidating. Was it really necessary to throw the ten dresses I owned onto the floor of my bedroom to conduct a thorough search of my enormous closet? I doubted it.

I thought about changing, but I didn’t have time. Beverly’s ill-fitting red dress would have to suit. I returned to the car, where Adam was waiting.

“Was it still there?” he asked.

“Thankfully, yes,” I told him.

“Good,” he said, starting the engine. We took off, Adam driving surprisingly fast, and ten minutes later we reached Highland Avenue. Traffic slowed as we joined the line of cars en route to the concert, snaking their way up a hill toward the parking lot. I glanced over and noticed Adam looked like he was on the verge of throwing up.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“We need to talk” was his response, but he didn’t elaborate further.

“All right,” I said finally. “What about?”

“I think it would be best for everyone if we all pretended that story we told the police was true. You’re a friend of Bev’s I met in college once Bev and I were engaged. You and I had a brief affair, we all sorted it out, and now we’re not in each other’s lives much.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to go spilling our secrets to the press,” I said. “If my case goes to trial, I’ll stick to that story.”

“Not just in the trial,” he replied. “Between us. All of us. I think we should all forget anything more than that happened. Never mention it again, even when we’re alone.”

I looked at him, confused. He kept his eyes firmly on the road in front of him, his hands glued to the steering wheel. “Even when we’re alone? Why?”

“Because—it’s—” He sighed, exasperated. “With the police involved and the studio involved—”

“Are you worried they could be spying on you?”

“No, I’m not worried about that—Annie, I know you kissed her!” he exclaimed finally. “I know you came to the house the other day when I wasn’t there and you kissed her!”

My jaw dropped, and I leaned back in my seat, stunned. “First of all, she kissed me—”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me!”

“You got her alone and you—”

“I didn’t know you weren’t going to be there. It’s not like I planned—”

“It’s too much, on top of everything else. You’ve lost the privilege of talking frankly to us. You’ve lost your entitlement to our past,” he said. “From now on, you’re a friend of Bev’s from college who I met once Bev and I—”

“Pull over,” I said. “I’ll walk from here.”

He sighed again. “Don’t be dramatic—”

“What do you care if I am? I’m only a friend of Bev’s from college, who you met once you and Bev were engaged,” I replied.

“It’s all uphill from here. You don’t want to walk it—”

“I don’t mind a walk.”

“You already look awful. Your hair isn’t done; your dress doesn’t fit. If you walk in this heat, it’ll only be worse.”

That was the final straw for me, the fact that he didn’t want to spare me a walk not because he still liked me but because he was thinking of my appearance. I opened the door right there in the middle of Highland Avenue.

“If Devlin Murray murders me tonight,” I told him as I got out of the car, “know that I died wishing I’d never met either one of you.”

I slammed the door.

Despite Adam’s concerns over my unset hair and my secondhand outfit, the guard at the stage door seemed completely unperturbed by my appearance. I explained I was a reporter, there to interview Mr. Durand for Variety. I didn’t even get to the part of the fib where I’d forgotten my press badge before I was kindly given directions to the dressing rooms.

The stark white bowels of the Hollywood Bowl were poorly lit and eerily empty, silent except for the cacophony of thousands of concertgoers picnicking above us. Their muffled voices and piercing laughter gave me the feeling of walking through a crypt, hearing the faraway sounds of the living. I walked past a few closed doors until I reached the one labeled “Dressing Room B.”

I stopped dead in my tracks. They were inside, all of them. I could hear their voices through the door: June screeching some one-liner, Victor responding, Jack laughing, Terry shushing. I hadn’t expected them all to be there. The Ambassador’s Club had been permanently dead only a few days earlier. How had so much changed?

I knocked on the door. After a few seconds, June answered, giving me a scoff, a very cold once-over, and an icy sneer. “I’ll give you this,” she began. “It takes guts to show your face here, that’s for sure.”

“Please tell me you don’t believe it,” I said. “I didn’t kill her.”

“Then now you know how it feels,” she replied, “to be accused of something you didn’t do.”

“June, I’m so sorry,” I said. “For everything.”

“You’ve been arrested for my best friend’s murder,” she replied. “An apology isn’t what I’m looking for.”

“I’m being set up,” I insisted. “I can prove it, but I need to talk to Vic.”

June was about to slam the door in my face, but Vic spoke up from inside the room. “Let her in,” he said.

Reluctantly, June stepped aside, holding the door open for me. The dressing room was much larger than the trailer in which the club usually gathered. It reminded me of the spacious room Beverly and Adam had shared backstage at Altogether Too Many Murders. A mirror stretched the length of one wall, a coffee table in the middle had been set up with meats and cheeses, and nearly every available surface was covered in bouquets of flowers. Vic was sitting at the makeup table in front of the long mirror, Jack leaning next to him, Terry perched on a couch in front of the finger foods. All three were glaring at me with looks that could kill.

I figured I ought to cut right to the chase. “I didn’t kill her,” I said, reaching into my bag to take out the prescription pad. “It was Devlin—Devlin and Irma. I found this at the Canteen kitchen, shoved under the island.”

I could read it on Terry’s face before I even produced the pad: it was plausible to her, and part of her was kicking herself for not thinking of it sooner. Whether Devlin was behind this particular murder, who could say, but there was no denying he could be behind some murder somewhere, that he had the resources and the influence to think he could get away with it.

Terry knew all that. The rest of the group was not so charitable. June came over to snatch the prescription pad from my hand and flip through it. “She could have dropped this anytime,” she replied with a huff before letting it fall to the floor. I quickly bent down to pick it up. “It could have been under there for months.”

“She had it when I first met with Devlin, a few days before Fiona died,” I tried to argue. “Then, a few days later, she offered me sleeping pills and didn’t have it. She had to call it in.”

“That doesn’t mean she’s the one who dropped it,” June argued back. “You could have stolen it from her. Planted the evidence.”

“Sherman Oaks,” said Terry suddenly. “The police told the Dispatch receptionist Fiona’s things were supposed to go to a house in Sherman Oaks. Irma lives in Sherman Oaks.”

“A lot of people live in Sherman Oaks,” replied June.

“You have to trust me,” I pleaded.

“Why would we do that?” Jack asked, his eyes piercing mine. “You’ve been lying to us from the beginning. Ever since you pretended to spill a glass of water on Fiona to get close to us.”

So that had made it to the papers. “I only wanted to be your friend,” I said. “And I was, I think. Wasn’t I?”

“No,” said June, almost laughing. “It’s when you came along that everything went south. You had us all convinced our friendship was poison, when it was you all along.”

I understood now. They were all back to wisecracking in a dressing room, not because they’d forgiven each other but because they’d bonded over not forgiving me. “Fine, you don’t have to like me. But please.” I looked at Vic. “She died over it.”

He stared at me for a moment, then dropped his gaze. He reached over and grabbed a cigarette, lighting it with shaking hands.

“Died over what?” said Jack.

“The prescription pad proves they had opportunity,” I said, still looking only at Vic. “If you and Henry come clean, that proves they had motive.”

“Oh no,” said Terry, turning to Vic. “What did you do?”

“Nothing!” scoffed Vic.

“Then what did Henry do?”

“Wait,” said Jack. “Devlin killed Fiona over something Henry did?”

“No,” said Victor, looking at me. “No, you’re wrong. It wasn’t that. It was a suicide or it was—it wasn’t that.” He lowered his voice, as if that would keep the other people in the room from hearing him. “Devlin and Irma didn’t know.”

“Henry told them,” I said. “In the interview—Jack said Irma interviewed him, all about his past. They surely did the same for Henry. He told them, and then he gave them all the evidence, and he lied to you and said movers lost it.”

“Henry wouldn’t have done that. He wouldn’t have told them,” Victor responded, but he didn’t sound certain of that. “It was our joke. À quatre mains. Our secret.”

“Like Henry hadn’t thrown you under the bus before,” said Jack.

“You don’t even know what the hell we’re talking about,” snapped Victor.

“Then enlighten us,” June said.

“Nothing. We’re talking about nothing,” Victor declared. “I have to debut a concerto in front of seventeen thousand people in fifteen minutes. This is not the time for this. Annie’s guilty. They arrested her. She’s a stalker who followed some MGM actor out here, and when she couldn’t weasel her way into his life, she weaseled her way into ours.”

“I’m not a stalker!” I shouted. “We were in love! I’m done hiding it or denying it—we were in love! His name is Adam, and his wife’s name is Beverly, and we were—all three of us—we were all together, I loved both of them, and they both loved me. And I know that might not make sense, or it might make me look worse in your eyes, but I don’t care anymore. That’s the truth. The three of us were together for seven years. Seven years! We had just bought new furniture. We were planning for the future. And they got MGM contracts and dumped me because the chance to be a Hollywood star was worth more than me. I did follow them out here, in a way, but can you blame me for that? They took everything I had, and I only wanted it back. Is that worse than what you did, for the man you love?”

Everyone only stared at me, and I found myself wishing one of them would crack a joke about me, anything to make the moment less mortifying. I felt as if I’d sliced open a vein and were bleeding out on the floor.

“What did you do?” Terry finally asked Victor again.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. The initial terror was melting away, and with it came relief. If Irma and Devlin managed to lock me up for good—or worse—the truth was out there now. “Nothing matters. Only that they want me to pretend it never happened, and I don’t want to do that. Their names are Adam and Beverly Cook, and I was in love with them, and they were in love with me, and it was real. It was. I don’t want their lies to be the final say on my life. But don’t worry about it. I’ll leave now. Break a leg, or whatever it is you say to pianists. Break a finger.”

“Well, you don’t say that,” cried Victor, but I was already halfway out the door.

“Annie, wait—” called Terry. I halted, turning back as Terry addressed the rest of the group. “Is this the justice we want for our friend? If Annie’s right and we do nothing, Irma and Devlin walk free.”

“I don’t walk anywhere,” said a voice behind me.