The Last Cheerleader

by Meg O'Brien

  “I’m sure you’re right. And as I said, I’m happy that you’re with someone who’s doing well for you.”

  “So if my book is made into a billion-dollar movie, you won’t be sorry for missing out?” he asked with a grin.

  “Sorry as all get out!” I laughed. “But I’ll be here with bells on at your celebration party.” Raising an eyebrow, I added, “You will invite me, won’t you?”

  “Mary Beth, you will be first on my list. I’ll never forget what you’ve done for me. In fact—I’ve been wondering. Would you like to go to dinner sometime?”

  At my obvious surprise, he grinned. “It could be like old times. Old, old times. Before business got in the way. And then there was Tony…I mean, you and he seemed to have something going.”

  “Not really,” I said. “Tony and I were friends. You’ve heard what happened?”

  “It was on the evening news yesterday. About Arnold, too. What a shock.”

  “I didn’t get a chance to catch the news. Was there anything about Craig?”

  “Craig Dinsmore? No.” His eyes widened. “Has something happened to him?”

  “I found him dead in his motel room today. Well, yesterday, now. In the afternoon.”

  “My God, Mary Beth! It sounds like Who’s Killing the Great Chefs of—except in this case it’s your, well, you know…authors.” He frowned. “Do I need to hire a bodyguard?”

  “I doubt it,” I said dryly. “Since you’re no longer with me, I’d say you’re safe. You might want to hear what the sheriff thinks, though.”

  He was silent and seemed to be pondering the possible threat to his own life. The truth was, until he said it, I hadn’t really looked at it that way yet—that someone was killing off my authors. After all, Arnold had been murdered as well, and he was just my ex.

  Then I remembered that I’d negotiated a deal for Arnold years ago, for one of his toy-creations books. That qualified me as his agent, as well.

  But the idea was preposterous. Who would be out to get my authors? Or me? No, there was something else going on. I was sure of it.

  Lindy, who had been dozing in her chair, the tea and bourbon growing cold on the table beside her, stirred. Sitting up like a shot, she gazed wildly around her. “What? Where—where am I?”

  The faux-mink throw slipped to the floor, and I went over to her and put it back in her lap. “Here, cover up. We’re at the house of a friend of mine, remember? Patrick Llewellen. He used to be one of my authors, and we’re waiting for the sheriff to come and tell us it’s safe to go back to my house.”

  Lindy looked toward the sliding glass door we’d come through. “What if—what if whoever chased us down the beach is out there right now? What if he’s just waiting for us to come out?”

  “I saw a reflection of flashing red lights going by in front,” I said. “I’m sure the sheriff’s deputies are already there, and they’ll check out the beach, too. In fact, I’ll ask one of the officers to escort us back to my house.”

  When she didn’t seem at all mollified, I said, “Would you like me to warm your tea? There’s bourbon in it. It’ll take off the edge.”

  “I noticed,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Thank you, Mary Beth. I don’t know what I’ve had done without you tonight.”

  Again, her words seemed fraught with another meaning, but I let it pass for the moment.

  I left her with Patrick and went to the kitchen, while he sat on an ottoman in front of her, talking in low, soothing tones. I’d almost forgotten that about Patrick—how comforting he could be in a pinch. It was one of the things I’d lost when we split. That, and the sex—which, come to think of it, hadn’t been nearly as bad as I’d tried to remember it.

  The deputies came finally and spoke to us in Patrick’s living room. First, they wanted to know who he was and how we’d come to end up here. I explained, and they moved on to the search of my house.

  “We didn’t find the intruder,” one of the deputies said. “Your front door was wide-open, though. Did you leave it that way?”

  I shook my head. “He went from the bedroom into the living room, and we ran out on the deck through the bedroom door, then along the beach. When we first got here we saw someone following us, though, about three houses away.”

  “And you say he shot at you?”

  “Yes, in the bedroom. I ran in there when I heard my friend scream.”

  The cop who was asking questions looked at the other one. “Fits what we found at the scene,” he said. Turning to me, he added, “You were lucky.”

  I felt a chill, remembering the displaced air as the bullets whizzed by my ear.

  “We’ve checked the road and the beach,” he continued, “and we couldn’t find anyone. At least, anyone who shouldn’t be here. We’ll walk you back to your house, though, and look inside once more before we go.”

  “Thanks,” I said, turning to Lindy. “Ready?”

  She stood and came close to me, as if afraid to get too far away. I turned to Patrick and handed him the throw cover. Half smiling, I said, “Well, good night, then…not that it hasn’t been lovely.”

  “I’ll call you,” he said, walking us to the door with an arm around my shoulders.

  It took me a moment. “Oh, you mean dinner. Sure. Call me. It’ll be fun.”

  The deputies left my house and I got Lindy settled in bed just in time to see the sky lighten up over the ocean. I checked to be sure the front door and windows were locked, then took a shower. After that I made some dark Sumatran coffee and took a cup out onto the deck, along with an old newspaper. My Adirondack chair was dripping with sweat, as usual, from a light mist, and I put the newspaper on it to keep my jeans dry. Over my clean tee, I’d pulled on a sweatshirt with a hood because the air was chilly. It was June, though, and by the time ten o’clock arrived the sun would be high and warm.

  Living at the beach was something I’d always dreamed of. I didn’t kid myself, though. With Tony gone, and with Craig’s new contract a question mark, I might not be able to afford a house in Malibu and an office in a Century City high-rise. Oh, I’d do okay, because I’d made investments and saved, getting out of the worst stocks before they crashed. And there would still be commissions from Tony’s royalties. Maybe more than ever, now that he’d been murdered.

  Funny how dead writers and artists sell better after they’ve passed on. It’s as if the readers want to get into their heads, to figure out who they were and why they died. In the case of fiction writers, though, that’s a misconception. Fiction usually contains bits and pieces of the writer, the writer’s mother and father, the writer’s neighbor, some guy the writer met while walking his dog, and umpteen characters he or she may have seen on television and in the movies. It would be difficult for an author to write about him or herself every time, as it’s said that there are only thirty-six plots that exist in the entire world. The trick is to tell them differently and more originally each time. For that, you need a lot of people in your head.

  Sometimes I wonder how they do it. Especially the ones who write about serial killers. How do they keep all that horror in their minds for the length of a manuscript, and not become affected by it?

  As for Tony and my commissions on his royalties, I figured that those, along with my other authors commissions, would hold me for a while. Real estate around L.A., however, especially here at the beach, was out of sight. The mortgage payments on this house and the office in Century City would quickly eat up whatever monies the near future would bring in.

  Well, that was the life of an agent, as well as just about everyone else in the entertainment and literary business in L.A. Up, down. Up, down. It was like riding a pogo stick.

  That, or wearing a little pendant with cocaine in it. I know several who do that, and inevitably, they end up cheating their clients and keeping their money. They cash authors’ royalty checks from overseas without telling their clients that they’ve come, and with this they pay for their drugs and their high-flying lives. Until s
omeone catches them out and sues. Then they lose all their clients, several of whom have come to me with stories of having been betrayed that way. It takes a while for them to trust anyone after that, but some of the best authors around have come from that kind of situation and have stuck with me now for years.

  There must be someone in that group, I thought. Someone with a potential best-seller sitting on his or her desk right now. I’d have to go over my list of authors and their books in progress, see what I could turn up, and what project might be worth putting my own personal energy into. It might not be so bad, working with an author again to pull a book into shape…page by inept page.

  Oh, God. Save me.

  I sighed and drank the fast-cooling coffee, turning my thoughts to Lindy and the night before. Had the intruder been Roger? The main reason I’d taken Lindy in was because I knew something about Roger that she didn’t, and I’d felt sorry for her. But now what did I do with her?

  Lindy answered that question herself, standing at the door with a coffee cup in her hand. “I’ll be leaving soon,” she said. “I just wanted to talk to you first.”

  “Come, sit down,” I said, patting the seat of the chair next to me. “Here, it’s wet. Let me put some of this newspaper on it.”

  I spread out a few dry pages, and Lindy plunked down on the chair with a tired sigh. Leaning her head back, she closed her eyes. “I feel so helpless. I don’t know why I came here, Mary Beth. I just didn’t know where else to go, and I felt like I was losing it. For good, I mean. I guess I’ve really been losing it for years.”

  “Do you want to tell me why Roger threw you out?” I asked.

  She looked at me briefly, then glanced away. “It’s not a pretty story.”

  “Something you did that angered him?” I asked. “Another man?”

  “Oh, God, no. I’ve got enough to handle at home without another man in my life.”

  She appeared to be thinking over whether to tell me about it. Finally she said, “I found out something about Roger. Something really bad.” She gave a bitter laugh. “Some marriage, huh? The homecoming queen and king, the perfect match. Most likely to succeed.”

  I didn’t respond, but wondered how much I should say. I thought I knew what Lindy had found out about Roger. Not the details, of course, but in general. If I turned out to be wrong, though, I’d only be opening a hornet’s nest.

  Roger Van Court was someone I had loved from afar in high school. He was the rich kid in class—not that I was impressed by that, or the fact that he was captain of the football team. If anything, I saw those aspects of Roger as a cliché. His good looks were something else, though. He had the cutest dimple in his left cheek, and when he smiled it seemed like the sun came out. Who wouldn’t want him, at the age of sixteen when flaws are never seen or even believed in?

  I was horribly shy, however, and I always had my nose in a book. As for Roger, even before Lindy there was usually some gorgeous girl with him. When Lindy started going steady with him, I felt envious, of course. But I also lived vicariously through her. She would tell me all about their dates, and how wonderful he was, and how well he treated her. I could only hope that someday I’d have someone like that.

  Be careful what you ask for, they say. Seven years ago, Roger had turned up at my storefront office in Hollywood. It was late at night and raining hard. I was finishing up some work but the office was closed, the blinds down. That didn’t stop Roger. He knocked insistently on the door until I couldn’t ignore the knock any longer. I peeked out cautiously through the blinds, as it wasn’t the greatest of neighborhoods there. When I saw it was Roger, I was so surprised, I opened the door without thinking. He stepped in, shaking the rain off his coat and stamping his feet on my rug. After a few of the usual greetings—”It’s been so long…! But you still look good…” and “Thanks, so do you”—he told me he wanted to talk about Lindy, that things weren’t going well. The fact that he’d come to me about this was a shock, as I hadn’t heard from either him or Lindy since high-school graduation.

  It didn’t take me long to figure out that Roger had been drinking. No sooner was he inside than he spotted the small bar I’d made out of an old, distressed buffet against one wall. I always kept a few bottles of wine and champagne there to celebrate with authors I’d gotten a good deal for.

  Well, they say a drunk can smell liquor a state away. There was a bottle of Cabernet on the bar, which I’d opened a couple of days before when Mary Nance’s latest cookbook was picked up for a high five figures. Roger spotted the wine immediately and uncorked it, pouring himself a large water-glass full. He held the bottle up and looked at me. “Would you like some?”

  That was Roger, all right. The boy I’d had the hots for in high school, until eventually—through Lindy’s increasingly eye-opening stories about him—I’d come to see how arrogant he could be. Offering me my own wine, no less.

  I shook my head and reached into my bottom drawer where I kept a half dozen or so bottles of mineral water handy. I put a bottle on my desk and opened it, but didn’t drink right away. Roger gulped the wine down as if he were dying of thirst, and then poured another glass. When that was gone, he opened another bottle without asking, bringing it and the tumbler over to the chair across from my desk.

  As he drank, he talked on and on. I said nothing, just sat and listened, trying to figure out how I was going to get him to leave. I was getting nervous, wondering what on earth he was really doing here. Something—an odd shift of energy in the room now—didn’t feel right. I thought about calling someone, a friend, and saying I’d be “late for our date, because Roger Van Court, an old acquaintance from San Francisco, had dropped in unexpectedly.” That would let Roger know that someone else was aware he was here—in case anything happened.

  But I discarded that idea as being silly and paranoid. I’d forgotten how important it is to listen to one’s instincts, the little voice that screams, “Run!” when logic argues, “Don’t be silly, there isn’t anything to run from.”

  Roger set the wine bottle beside him on the floor. He sighed, and kept on talking—about living on a trust from his father’s business empire, Courtland Pharmaceuticals; about Lindy having changed; about how happy they used to be, and how awful it was now. After the third glass of wine he began to slide down a bit in the leather chair. It was a small office, all I could afford back then, and the chair wasn’t my taste. I’d picked it up at the Salvation Army store, and it was so old it was shiny and slick. I decided suddenly that if I was ever going to get him out of there, I’d better do it soon before he slid right off and passed out on my floor.

  I remember all this now because I still sometimes try to convince myself that since Roger was so drunk, it made sense for me to think he was harmless.

  “Why are you here?” I asked finally. “Roger, what do you want?”

  He looked at me with that old twinkle in his eye that every girl in school had been prey to. The dimple moved and the teeth flashed. He was tall and had basically the same good looks. I’d noted that his face was a bit puffy, though, and he looked heavier, as if his football muscles had gone slack since high school.

  I blinked as he said, “The truth, Mary Beth, is that I just can’t get you out of my mind.” He leaned forward earnestly. “I’ve been in L.A. for three days, and all I can think of is you. Knowing you were here, not all that far away…” He sighed.

  I was so shocked, I didn’t know how to answer that, so I picked up my bottle of water, took a deep swallow from it and just listened. Not that I had any choice in the matter. Roger was bent on delivering a monologue, his words slurring and that once-charming smile sagging from the alcohol like the skin of a sharpei dog.

  “I always had an eye for you, you know,” he went on, his voice a parody of seduction. “Even when I was dating Lindy. It could have been you, Mary Beth. You could have been my homecoming queen.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  The sarcasm in my tone wasn’t lost on him. The gray eyes
turned cold, and his voice took on a chill.

  “Don’t pretend you wouldn’t have loved that.” His arms were resting on the arm of the chair, and now one of his hands closed into a fist.

  “Oh, hey,” I said, “don’t misunderstand me. It would’ve been the answer to a prayer back then.”

  I should have stopped with that, but couldn’t help adding, “And just think—we could have been married. I could have had Lindy’s life right now, with you out of town, drunk, and flirting with her old best friend. Like I said—wow.”

  If looks could kill, I’d have been dead in an instant.

  “It’s not my fault Lindy turned out the way she did!” he said angrily. “She’s so damn empty-headed. Hell, she thinks she’s still a cheerleader. Not that she looks like one, she’s let herself go so much.”

  He looked at me through eyes that were already glazed. “You, on the other hand, Mary Beth—you’re still a knockout.”

  When I couldn’t hide my surprise, he said, “You always were, you know. Quiet as a mouse, but so pretty the guys were afraid to ask you out. That gorgeous red hair down to your waist, and those sexy green eyes…” He shook his head. “You always had a good mind, too. You were open to things you didn’t understand. You didn’t criticize people just because they had new ideas. Not like Lindy.”

  If he was trying to impress me, he’d sure taken the wrong tack. Lindy and I might not have seen each other in eight years, but in high school we had always stuck together, no matter what. It was an unspoken vow we’d made, probably because I was able to keep her on balance, while she provided my life with the excitement I wasn’t able to generate for myself.

  I wasn’t about to join her husband now in trashing her.

  Not only that, but I was truly stunned about this declaration of interest in me. I’d long ago gotten over Roger Van Court, and to me he seemed now like every other Peter Pan man without a life—no real job, living on a trust fund, never growing up. Like so many actor-, entertainer-and screenwriter-wannabes in L.A. Except that they seldom had trusts, but worked at Johnny Rocket’s hamburger joint as singing waiters.