by M. Z. Kelly
HOLLYWOOD INTRIGUE
MZ Kelly
Note from the author
This book, like all the Hollywood Alphabet Series novels, contains an interesting Hollywood fact or quote from a famous movie star. As you read, look for the fact or quote, and then look for details about how to win valuable prizes at the end of this book. Contests may be related to information in this book or Hollywood in general. All contests are updated regularly, it’s easy to enter, and the prizes are great.
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Also in the Hollywood Alphabet Series:
Hollywood Assassin
Hollywood Blood
Hollywood Crazy
Hollywood Dirty
Hollywood Enemy
Hollywood Forbidden
Hollywood Games
Hollywood Homicide
Hollywood Jury (Coming Soon)
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY ONE
TWENTY TWO
TWENTY THREE
TWENTY FOUR
TWENTY FIVE
TWENTY SIX
TWENTY SEVEN
TWENTY EIGHT
TWENTY NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY ONE
THIRTY TWO
THIRTY THREE
THIRTY FOUR
THIRTY FIVE
THIRTY SIX
THIRTY SEVEN
THIRTY EIGHT
THIRTY NINE
FORTY
FORTY ONE
FORTY TWO
FORTY THREE
FORTY FOUR
FORTY FIVE
FORTY SIX
FORTY SEVEN
FORTY EIGHT
FORTY NINE
FIFTY
FIFTY ONE
FIFTY TWO
FIFTY THREE
FIFTY FOUR
FIFTY FIVE
FIFTY SIX
FIFTY SEVEN
FIFTY EIGHT
FIFTY NINE
SIXTY
SIXTY ONE
SIXTY TWO
SIXTY THREE
SIXTY FOUR
SIXTY FIVE
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ONE
“But I can’t sing,” I protested.
“Course you can,” Mo said, pushing her orange wig hair out of her eyes. My deluxe-sized African-American friend put her hands on her wide hips and stared at me in that intimidating way she had. Her normally low-pitched, yawning voice rose as she tried to get her point across. “Didn’t you ever learn to sing when you was in school by practicing classic tunes like Super Freak?”
“Super what? No and I…”
Mo turned to our gorgeous British friend, Natalie, interrupting me. “I forgot. Kate went to school right here in Hollywood. She didn’t learn nuthin’.”
Natalie pushed me toward the stage. I felt half-naked in my tight dress that showed a lot more leg than material. “All ya gotta do is act like a Spice Girl, sing the words, Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want, and do a couple of pelvic thrusts. We’ll do the rest.”
I glared at her. “I don’t do pelvic thrusts.”
Mo regarded me, levelling one eye on me in that way she had, and shook her head. “That’s a whole other problem. We’ll deal with that issue later.”
I should probably explain how I came to be dressed as Posh Spice and about to perform at a New Year’s Eve party with my friends. My name is Kate Sexton. I’m a detective with LAPD’s Robbery Homicide Division, or RHD. My canine partner, Bernie, and I had recently been assigned to Section One, a homicide unit located out of Hollywood Station that handles some of the department’s most difficult and high profile cases.
Bernie, who’s about a hundred pounds of muscle and testosterone, was home tonight, probably still suffering from tinnitus, after having to listen to a couple of our rehearsals. My big dog had quickly become an integral part of RHD, thanks to helping bring down the bad guys in a couple of big cases. When Bernie isn’t chasing crooks he has his own sense of style—as in doggy style. He’d sired a love puppy named Bubba not too long ago, who was being raised by my mother.
Bernie and I live at the Barkley Bungalows in Hollywood, right next door to Natalie and Mo. My friends own a private investigation business called Sistah Snoop. They try to insert themselves into my cases every chance they get, not to mention my personal life that’s lately been a bigger disaster than a Malibu mudslide.
I’m what my friends call a relationship Chernobyl, having had more meltdowns with the opposite sex than a Russian nuclear power plant. Mo recently embarrassed me by telling my sister, “Kate’s got a lot of friends, but she’s making the minimum wage and there ain’t no sign of benefits on the horizon.”
Tonight, my friends and I planned to perform as a Spice Girls tribute act. A few days ago I’d had my brain surgically removed and agreed to be Posh Spice at tonight’s fundraiser for a local children’s hospital. Natalie and Mo were Baby and Sporty Spice, respectively. We were at Ravenswood Manor, a dilapidated Tudor estate located in the hills of Hollywood. It was just after midnight, everyone at the party was drunk, and, to make matters worse, it had been raining most of the evening.
My anxiety over the horrifying spectacle we were about to make of ourselves was also brought on by an “older” spice that was on the rack tonight. My eighty-something former landlord, Nana, who had recently hooked up with the owner of the estate and was now calling herself the Countess of Ravenswood, ran onstage with the rest of us in the persona of Scary Spice.
“Give me that microphone,” Scary screeched as we all lined up in front of the crowd. She smiled, exposing a row of oversized dentures, something she called Leo’s. “This is my party.”
Nana, or Scary, had undergone a transformation in recent months, thanks to a sexual rejuvenation drug, and had taken to dressing like Britney Spears on LSD. Tonight, Scary wore gold, as in gold hot pants, a gold sports bra that barely hid her surgically enhanced spice rack, and a golden crown. Maybe Scary also thought she was the Queen of Ravenswood.
What followed can only be described as spice induced acid reflux as my friends and I performed our version of the song Tell Me What You Want as it poured down rain on the outdoor stage. All I knew was that when the song mercifully ended and our waterlogged quartet finally dragged ourselves offstage, what the audience really, really didn’t want was any of us, especially Nana.
I turned to my Spice girlfriends and said, “I’m just glad that fiasco is over. I’m soaked to the bone.”
Mo shook her head, water flying off her like Bernie after a Saturday night bath. “I’m afraid what we got here is a night that’s gonna live in infamy.”
“What are you talking about?”
Natalie motioned to the little man in a tuxedo on the balcony of the estate next to our makeshift stage. “The vamp got everything on tape. Word has it we’re all gonna be on the local TV stations tomorrow, showing how some people rang in the New Y
ear.”
Maybe it was the graying widow’s peak or the tuxedo, but Claude, Nana’s new beau who had recently inherited Ravenswood, looked remarkably like a vampire. I saw that he had a video camera set up on the balcony. Dracula bowed and then waved to us.
“Shit, why does this happen to me?” I groaned as my phone rang.
“Don’t be a Debbie Downer,” Scary Spice said, coming over to me. Nana’s oversized dentures, made even more pronounced by her blood-red lipstick, gleamed in the overhead lights set up for the performance. “This is your lucky day. You’re going to be a star.” Her eyes then lowered, taking in my soggy dress. “And everyone’s gonna see what you’re really made of.”
I fished around for the phone in my purse, not giving much thought to what she’d said. “What are you talking about?”
“Nana had our outfits specially made,” Mo said, running a hand seductively over her tight dress. Tight was the operative word, but that wasn’t unusual. Everything Mo wore was tight.
My eyes grew wider as I realized that my friend’s enormous breasts were surfacing for air beneath the now transparent material of her outfit. I then glanced over at Natalie and saw that her perfect assets were also on display for all the word to see.
I braced myself as I looked back at Nana. I now realized that Scary Spicy, true to her name, was modelling a withered birthday suit that looked like it was wrapped in gold plastic wrap. I pitied Claude, wondering if later he’d be forced to unwrap the birthday present.
Mo went on, “Betcha half the world’s gonna see our moneymakers.”
I was horrified, now realizing that when it rained, our outfits had turned into something that should have been in a wet T-shirt contest. My moneymaker, as Mo called it, had, no doubt, been revealed to everyone at the party, not to mention those who would later tune in to the six o’clock news.
I blew out a breath in frustration, held a hand over my “assets,” and answered my phone. It was my partner, Ted Grady.
“We just caught a case, Kate. I’ll meet you at the station within the hour.”
“What’s going on?”
“All I know is that a girl was murdered up in the hills. And it’s bad.”
TWO
“The girl’s body was found in a cave by some boys playing in the area yesterday,” Ted Grady said.
My partner in Section One, LAPD’s new robbery homicide unit, glanced at the brush covered hillsides around Stone Canyon Reservoir as he drove us down the muddy road. The small body of water served as the water supply for several of the local cities. The area was dotted by homes set on the hills that took advantage of the magnificent views.
Ted went on, “The boys apparently made some kind of pact not to tell their parents until one of them said something about the body last night.”
It was hard to believe that we were just a few miles from Hollywood as the crow flies. The January rains had ended the long Southern California drought, leaving the hills covered with a velvety carpet of green grass. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought we were miles from civilization, travelling through a verdant valley of trees and shrubs.
It had rained most of the night. I’d gotten to the station a little before three and by the time we’d arranged for off-road vehicles and supplies, the morning sun had begun breaking through the scattered cloud cover, dappling the canyon in patterns of sunlight and shadow and adding to the beauty of the area.
“Why did the boys keep it a secret?” I asked, brushing damp, frizzy hair that was the bane of my existence out of my eyes.
I’m tall with dark hair and even features, thanks to decent DNA that I’d inherited from my mother, but my hair had a mind of its own. After last night’s Spice Girl performance in the rain, I’d gone home, used some conditioner and a blow-dryer, but it hadn’t been much help taming the mane.
“The kids were doing drugs and told one of the uniforms they were afraid they’d get into trouble,” Ted told me. “You know how kids can be.”
Bernie pushed his big wet nose up from the backseat and through the partially open rear window, inhaling the musty odor of wet earth. I asked Ted, “Do we know anything about the victim?”
Grady, a heavyset African-American detective in his forties, shook his big head. “The responding officers said she looks to be in her teens. Dead maybe a couple of days.” He glanced at me. “They also said something about the body being posed. Not sure exactly what that means.”
I drew in a breath and slowly exhaled. As members of the department’s recently formed Section One homicide unit, Ted and I knew we would be dealing with some of the department’s most difficult cases. Even so, the thought of working the murder of a young girl uncovered some images of past cases that I tried to keep buried in the darkest recesses of my mind.
Homicide was one of the department’s most difficult assignments, but Section One cases, and especially one that involved the murder of a child, raised the stakes to a whole other level. I pushed away imaginary visuals of the dead girl and her distraught parents as we moved deeper into the canyon.
My phone chirped as a murky cloud descended on the area and our four-wheel drive SUV bounced through a couple feet of water. I recognized the girl’s voice as I answered.
“Hi Kate, it’s Lexi. I thought I’d see what you’re doing today.”
I’d met Lexi Mills while doing a fundraiser for Kids ‘n Cribs, a charity for homeless children in Hollywood. She had been homeless for a while before living in a shelter until her elderly grandparents had finally agreed to take custody of her. Lexi’s mother had been murdered at the hands of an abusive boyfriend who was now doing life in prison.
“I’m ah…actually…I’m just working,” I said, trying to keep the edge out of my voice. “How are things with you, sweetheart? You’re up early.”
“I’m helping with a few chores before going to school. I have a basketball game tonight at the community center. I was wondering…” She paused, maybe gaining the courage to tell me what was on her mind. “I thought maybe you could stop by if you have a chance.”
I asked her what time the game was scheduled for and told her that I’d try and make it.
Her enthusiastic response pushed away the terrible images I’d recalled a few moments earlier. “That would be so cool if you can come. Maybe we could get something to eat afterward.”
“I’m looking forward to it.”
I’d almost ended the call when I heard Lexi say, “Primrose.”
I chuckled and said, “Violets,” before telling her that I’d see her tonight.
Lexi loved flowers, and we’d developed a habit of saying the name of a flower every time we parted. It was maybe, in some small way, a substitute for expressing the affection that we’d begun to feel for one another in a short period of time. She’d told me that she went to the cemetery where her mother was buried and put fresh flowers on her headstone every week, without fail.
My smile lingered as I put my phone away, something that my hefty partner noticed.
“That girl you’ve been working with, I take it.” Ted said, glancing at me and smiling.
I nodded. “Lexi Mills. Great kid, finally off the streets.”
We hit a pothole and my head hit the car’s ceiling. “Damn.”
“Sorry. We should be there in a minute.” Ted found my eyes again. “I’m thinking maybe your charity work is starting to bring out your maternal instincts. You ever thought about having kids someday?”
I laughed. “I’d have to find a guy first.”
Ted knew that I was on the rebound from a divorce, followed by several failed relationships. When Natalie and Mo weren’t referring to my breakups as a nuclear meltdown, they said I was a relationship Titanic; full of holes and taking on water. While I had to admit there was some truth to what they’d said, I’d recently decided to put any dating on hold for a while, knowing that I wasn’t ready for a relationship again after some of the losses I’d suffered in my life.
Up ahead we no
w saw there was a clearing with a couple of parked police units. The sky opened up again, rain coming down in sheets as we pulled off the dirt road and stopped. A uniformed cop, who had been guarding the trailhead that I assumed led to where our victim had been found, came over to our car.
Ted lowered the window as the rain pelted down and the cop said, “We’ve got two of our guys up ahead.” He pointed up the hill. “The body’s about a hundred feet up the trail at the back of a cave. Other than initially checking out the scene, we stayed out of the area to preserve any evidence.”
We thanked him and then removed our foul weather gear and equipment bags from the trunk. The sky continued to pour water, only darkening my mood, as we suited up. Despite attempts to keep the past images of murder victims at bay, a scene resurfaced.
I remembered a case I’d worked involving a teenage girl who had been murdered and dumped in an alleyway. I was a rookie cop at the time and the death notification had been traumatic, both for me and her parents, who had become hysterical and inconsolable. I hadn’t been able to sleep for a week afterward, unable to shake the traumatic images.
“Looks like the cavalry is coming,” Ted said, motioning to the convoy of police vehicles coming up the dirt road behind us. I knew it would be a matter of minutes before the department’s SID, or Scientific Investigation Division, and the coroner’s office technicians would be trampling over the area. Despite all the best efforts and training, my past experiences had taught me that anytime you have dozens of people at a crime scene things get lost, missed, and sometimes key evidence is simply ignored. I was determined not to let that happen.
I cut my eyes up the hill. “Let’s get up there and see what we can make of things.”
As Ted and I headed up the trail with Bernie, the skies seemed to grow even darker. Maybe it was my imagination but, as the path turned and we saw the cave up ahead of us, there was something about the place that seemed different from the surrounding area.
Beneath us, the water from the reservoir shone in dappled patterns of raindrops, illuminated by the partial sunlight. But the area around the cave was dark and forbidding, as though the cavern held the entrance to another world; a place both grim and ominous.