by Nora Roberts
Then he locked himself inside and wondered where to begin.
It seemed most practical to start in the bedroom, to see if he had any clothes worth salvaging or if he’d walk around naked until he could get more. He managed to pick through, find enough for one mixed load and dumped it all together in the washing machine.
He ordered a pizza, got out another beer and, sipping it, studied the living room. He wondered if it wouldn’t be better all around to just hire a crew to come in with shovels and haul the entire mess away.
“Start from scratch, Brady,” he muttered. “It could be liberating.”
He was still scoping it out when someone knocked on his door. Since it was too soon for the pizza, he considered ignoring it. But decided even another nosy neighbor was better than stewing in his own helpless disgust.
“Hey, Noah, don’t you ever return phone calls? I’ve been . . . whoa, some party. Why wasn’t I invited?”
Resigned, Noah closed the door behind his oldest friend. Mike Elmo had been part of his life since grade school. “It was a surprise party.”
“I bet.” Mike hooked his thumbs in the pockets of the Dockers he’d bought because the commercials had convinced him women couldn’t resist a guy wearing them and blinked out of eyes red rimmed from the contacts he couldn’t quite adjust to. “Man, this sucks.”
“Want a beer?”
“You bet. You get ripped off?”
“Just ripped.” Noah took the path he’d already kicked clear into the kitchen. “Caryn’s a little irritated that I dumped her.”
“Wow, she do this? Seriously twisted.” He shook his head, his chestnut-brown eyes soft and sad. “I told you.”
Noah snorted and offered the beer. “You told me she was your lifetime fantasy woman and tried to pump me for every sexual detail.”
“So my fantasy woman’s twisted. What’re you going to do?”
“Drink this beer, eat some pizza and start cleaning it up.”
“What kind of pizza?”
“Pepperoni and mushroom.”
“Then I can give you a hand.” Mike plopped his chunky butt on a torn cushion. “So do you think Caryn’d have sex with me now that you’ve split?”
“Jesus, Mike.” Noah enjoyed his first laugh in hours. “Sure, I’ll even put in a good word for you.”
“Cool. Rebound sex is very intense.” He stretched out his short legs, crossed his ankles. “Oh yeah, I get a lot of rebound sex. Guys like you shake a woman off, they’re prime for me.”
“I sure do appreciate your support and sympathy during this difficult time.”
“You can count on me.” He offered Noah his surprisingly sweet, puppy-dog smile out of his half-homely face. “Hey, it’s only stuff, and not really good stuff anyway. You go back to Ikea, or hit Pier 1 or something, and dump it all back in. Take you a few hours.”
Because he’d been thinking the same thing about the bulk of his furniture, Noah scowled. “She broke my basketball trophy.”
Mike straightened, and a look of utter horror whitened his face. “Not the MVP—not from the championship game of eighty-six?”
“Yeah.” And since that had gotten the kind of rise out of his friend that soothed the soul, he narrowed his eyes. “She broke it by shoving it into my computer monitor.”
“That sick, evil bitch broke your computer? Christ, God.” He was up now, stumbling through the wreckage to Noah’s office.
Computers were Mike’s first love. Women could come and go—and for him it was usually the latter—but a good motherboard was always there for you. He actually yelped when he saw the damage, then leaped toward the once-sleek trophy.
“Jesus, she killed it dead. She mutilated it. Butchered it. What kind of a mind does this?” He turned back to Noah, his eyes wide and bright and blinking as his contacts haloed his vision. “She should be hunted down like a dog.”
“I called the cops.”
“No, for this you need a vigilante like Dark Man, you need ruthlessness like the Terminator.”
“I’ll give them a call next. Think you can salvage anything off the hard drive? She trashed every stinking one of my disks.”
“She’s the Antichrist, Noah.” He shook his head sadly. “I’ll see what I can do, but don’t hold out any hope. There’s the pizza,” he said when he heard the knock. “Let me fuel up, then I’ll do what I can do. And you know what? I don’t even want rebound sex with her now.”
fifteen
It took Noah a week to get his house in order. The sorting, cleaning, dumping was purely a pain in the ass, but the demands of it kept him from feeling helpless.
A new computer was a priority, and with Mike egging him on, he bought a system that sent his friend into raptures of delight and envy.
He wouldn’t have bought all the damn software games if Mike hadn’t kept pushing them on him. And he sure as hell wouldn’t have sat up half the night playing video pinball if he hadn’t bought it in the first place.
But he told himself that was beside the point. He’d needed the distraction.
He outfitted his living room with cargo furniture, ordering straight out of an in-store catalog by pointing at a page and telling the salesman: “Give me that.”
This delighted the salesman and saved Noah a headache.
Within two weeks, he could walk through his house without cursing and made serious inroads on reorganizing his office and regenerating lost data.
He had his car back, a new mattress, and a half-baked promise through Smith’s admin for a meeting when the lawyer returned to California the following month.
And he managed to track down Lucas Manning.
Manning wasn’t quite as cheerfully forthcoming as Lydia Loring had been, but he agreed to talk about Julie. Noah met him at Manning’s Century City suite of offices. It always surprised and slightly disillusioned Noah that actors had big, plush executive offices.
They might as well be CEOs, he thought as he was cleared through several levels of security.
Manning greeted Noah with a professional smile and assessed him with eyes of storm gray. The years had turned his once burnished-gold-coin hair into the brilliance of polished pewter and filed down his face to the sharp points and angles of a scholar. According to the polls, women continued to find him one of the most appealing leading men in the business.
“I appreciate your taking the time to talk to me.”
“I might not have.” Manning gestured to a chair. “But Lydia campaigned for you.”
“She’s quite a woman.”
“Yes, she is. So was Julie, Mr. Brady, and even after all this time it’s not easy for me to talk about what happened to her.”
No need for small talk, Noah thought, and following Manning’s lead, he took out his recorder and pad. “You worked together.”
“One of the happiest experiences of my life. She was a brilliant natural talent, an admirable woman and a good friend.”
“There are those who believed, and still believe, that you and Julie MacBride were more than friends.”
“We could have been.” Manning eased back, laid his hands on the ornately carved arms of his chair. “If she hadn’t been in love with her husband, we would have been. We were attracted to each other. Part of that was the intimacy of the roles we played, and part was simply a connection.”
“Sam Tanner believed you acted on that connection.”
“Sam Tanner didn’t value what he had.” Manning’s trained voice hardened at the edges and made Noah wonder if the delivery was emotion or simply skill. “He made her unhappy. He was jealous, possessive, abusive. In my opinion, his addiction to drugs and alcohol didn’t spark this abuse, it simply uncovered it.”
There was a bitterness still toward Tanner, Noah thought, every bit as ripe as Tanner’s was toward him. “Did she confide in you?”
“To an extent.” He lifted the fingers of one hand off the arm of the chair, then dropped them again, like a pianist hitting keys. “She wasn’t a whiner.
I admit, I pressed her to talk to me, and we’d grown close during the filming, remained friends afterward. I knew she was troubled. At first she made excuses for him, then she stopped. Ultimately, she told me, in confidence, that she’d filed for divorce to snap him out of it, to force him to get help.”
“Did you and Tanner ever discuss it?”
Manning’s lips twisted into a smile. Wry and experienced. “He had a reputation for having a violent temper, for causing scenes. My career had just taken off, and I intended to be in it for the long haul. I avoided him. I’m not of the school that believes any press is good press, and I didn’t want to see headlines splashed around gloating that Tanner and Manning had brawled over MacBride.”
“Instead they gloated that Manning and MacBride were an item.”
“There was nothing I could do about that. One of the reasons I agreed to this interview was to set the record straight about my relationship with Julie.”
“Then I have to ask, Why haven’t you set the record straight before now? You’ve refused to discuss her in interviews since her death.”
“I set the record straight.” Manning angled his head slightly, lowered his chin. It was an aggressive stance with those storm-cloud eyes just narrowed. “In court,” he continued. “Under oath. But the media, the masses were never really satisfied. For some the idea of scandal, of illicit sex, was as much of a fascination as murder. I refused to play into it, to demean Julie that way.”
Maybe, Noah mused. Or maybe the mystery of it gave your rocketing career one more boost. “And now?”
“Now you’re going to write the book. Rumors around this town are that it’ll be the definitive work on the Julie MacBride murder.” He smiled thinly. “I’m sure you know that.”
“There are a lot of rumors around this town,” Noah said equably. “I let my agent worry about that end of it. I just do the work.”
“Lydia said you were sharp. You’re going to write the book,” he repeated. “I’m part of the story. So I’ll answer the questions I’ve refused to answer for the last twenty years. Julie and I were never lovers. Tanner and I never fought over her. The fact is, I’d have been delighted if both of those misconceptions had been true. The morning I heard what had happened to her remains the worst day of my life.”
“How did you hear?”
“David Melbourne called me. Julie’s family wanted to block as much media as possible, and he knew the minute the press got wind of it, they’d start hammering me for comments, interviews, statements. Of course he was right,” Manning murmured. “It was early. The call woke me. My private number. Julie had my private number.”
He closed his eyes and pain flickered over his face. “He said, ‘Lucas, I have terrible, terrible news.’ I remember exactly how his voice broke, the grief in it. ‘Julie’s dead. Oh God, God, Julie’s dead. Sam killed her.’ ”
He opened his eyes again, emotion rushing into them. “I didn’t believe it. Wouldn’t. It was like a bad dream, or worse, worse, some scene I’d be forced to play over and over again. I’d just seen her the day before. She’d been beautiful and alive, excited about a script she’d just read. Then David told me she was dead.”
“Were you in love with her, Mr. Manning?”
“Completely.”
Manning gave him two full hours. Noah had miles of tape, reams of notes. He believed part of Manning’s interview had been calculated, rehearsed. Timing, phrasing, pause and impact. But in it there was truth.
And with truth there was progress.
He decided to celebrate by meeting Mike at an off-the-strip bar called Rumors for a couple of drinks.
“She’s giving me the eye.” Mike rolled his own watering eyes to the left and muttered into his pilsner.
“Which eye?”
“The eye, you know. The blonde in the short skirt.”
Noah considered his order of nachos. The energy from a good day’s work bubbled under the surface of his skin and conversely helped him relax. “There are one hundred and thirty-three blondes in short skirts in here. They all have eyes.”
“The one two tables over to the left. Don’t look.”
Though he hadn’t intended to, Noah shrugged. “Okay. I’m going up to San Francisco again in a couple of days.”
“Why?”
“Work. The book. Remember?”
“Oh yeah, yeah. I’m telling you, she’s definitely eyeing me. She just did the hair flip. Hair flipping’s the second stage.”
“Go make a move, then.”
“I’m biding my time, scoping it out. What’s it like inside San Quentin, anyway?” Mike tried a little eyebrow wiggle on the blonde to get her reaction.
“Depressing. You walk through a door, it locks behind you. Your hair stands on end when you hear that click.”
“So does he still look like a movie star? You never said.”
“No, he looks like a man who’s spent twenty years in prison. Are you going to eat any of these?”
“After I talk to the blonde. I don’t want nacho breath. Okay, that was five full seconds of eye contact. I’m going in.”
“My money’s on you, pal.” Then Noah muttered as Mike swaggered away, “She’ll eat him alive.”
He amused himself watching the action. The dance floor was packed, bodies crammed against bodies in a shower of flashing colored lights and all bumping and twisting to the music.
It made him think of the night he’d taken Olivia dancing. And how he’d stopped hearing the music or anything but the beat of his own blood once his mouth tasted hers.
“Put it away, pal,” he muttered, and, scowling, picked up his beer. “You blew that one.”
He sipped his beer and watched the show. He’d always enjoyed an occasional night in a club, getting blasted with music and voices, being pressed in with people and movement. Now he was sitting alone, while his oldest friend worked the blonde, and wishing he’d stayed home.
He pushed aside the nachos without interest, lifted his beer again and spotted Caryn crossing the floor toward his table.
“Of all the gin joints in all the towns,” he mumbled and took a longer, deeper drink.
“I thought you were playing hermit.” She’d decked herself out in a leather dress of electric blue that coated her like a tattoo and screamed to an abrupt halt just past her crotch. Her hair was in a thousand wild fuck-me curls, and her mouth was painted a hot, wet red.
It occurred to him that it was just that look that had made him think with his glands when he’d first seen her. He said nothing, lifted his glass again and did his best to stare through her.
“You set the cops on me.” She leaned down, planting her palms on the table and her impressive breasts directly at eye level. “You got some nerve, Noah, getting your father to call out his gestapo friends to give me grief.”
He flicked his gaze up to hers, then over her shoulder where one of her friends was pulling desperately at her arm and muttering her name.
His lips curved in a viciously cold smile, and he pitched his voice just over the roar of music. “Why don’t you do us all a favor and get her out of here?”
“I’m talking to you.” Caryn jabbed a nail, painted the same wild blue as her dress, into his chest. “You pay attention to me when I’m talking to you, you bastard.”
The control snapped in, even as he imagined squeezing his hands around her neck until her eyes popped. “Back off.”
She jabbed him again, hard enough this time to break skin. Then let out a squeal of shock when he grabbed her wrist.
“Keep out of my way. You think you can trash my house, destroy my things and I’ll do nothing? You keep the hell out of my way.”
“Or what?” She tossed her hair back, and to his disgust he saw it wasn’t fear in her eyes, but excitement, edged with a glint of lust. “Going to call Daddy again?” She raised her voice now, to just under a scream. Even in the din, it cut and had heads turning. “I never touched your precious things. I wouldn’t lower myself to go back
in that house after the way you treated me, and you can’t prove any different. If I’d been there I’d have burned it down—and I’d have made sure you were inside when I did.”
“You’re sick.” He shoved her hand aside. “And you’re pitiful.” He was pushing his chair back when she slapped him. The ring on her finger nicked the corner of his mouth, and he tasted blood. His eyes went dark and flat as he got to his feet. “You keep crossing that line, Caryn, and you’re going to get run over.”
“We got a problem here?”
Noah merely glanced at security. The man’s shoulders were wide as a canyon and his big, sharp smile didn’t hold any humor. Before he could speak, Caryn had launched herself against the boulder of his chest, blinking until her eyes filled.
“He wouldn’t leave me alone. He grabbed me.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
“That’s a damn lie.” This from Mike, who’d hopped to Noah’s side. “She started on him. She’s a lunatic, wrecked his house last week.”
“I don’t know what they’re talking about.” Tears slid gracefully down her cheeks as she tipped her face back to the bouncer’s. “He hurt me.”
“I saw what happened.” A brunette with amused eyes and a slight Southern drawl strolled up. “I was sitting right over there.” She gestured behind her, kept her voice low. “This guy was having a beer at this table, minding his own business. She came up to him, got in his face, started poking at him and yelling abuse. Then she slugged him.”
The outrage had Caryn shrieking. She took a swipe at the brunette, missing by a mile as the bouncer nipped her around the waist. Her exit, kicking and screaming, caused quite a stir.
“Thanks.” Noah dabbed the back of his hand on his lip.
The brunette’s smile was slow and friendly. “Anytime.”
“I’m going to get you a fresh beer. Sit, relax.” Mike fussed around him like a mother. “Man, that woman is over the edge and then some. I’ll get the beer and some ice.”
“Your friend’s very sweet.” She offered Noah a hand. “I’m Dory.”