A look of angry displeasure crossed Angie’s face. “Mercy is resting,” she said, pointedly, not looking over at Juliette. “Tell her we’ll call her. When it’s convenient.”
Before Juliette could speak, or turn around and leave in disgust, she heard her name called from within the trailer. Angie’s mouth pressed itself small and pale, and with a sound of impatience she withdrew.
“Juliette?” In a moment Mercy appeared at the door, all but leaped down the steps, and threw herself into Juliette’s arms. “I’m so glad you’re here. Why didn’t you call first? I had no idea you were coming.”
“I came,” Juliette said, disentangling herself from the young woman who smelled of fresh cigarette smoke and old tequila, gently pushing Mercy back so she could look at her, “because Michael said you were . . . sick yesterday.”
Mercy rolled her eyes. Her hair, crowned with extensions, was a mass of flyaway ringlets. She, too, was in makeup, much of which was now smeared on Juliette’s neck and blouse, but there were blue circles under her eyes and she looked as if she had lost ten pounds since Juliette had last seen her. Mercy wore only a small cotton shift. Beside her, Anthony dropped his eyes and melted away.
“Oh, that,” she said, tugging Juliette up and into the trailer and shutting the door firmly behind her. “I don’t know why everyone is making such a big deal about it, I’m fine.”
“He said you overdosed, Mercy,” Juliette said. “People tend to make a big deal about things like that. Frankly, I don’t know why you’re even working today. I don’t know how you’re even working today.”
Mercy threw herself down on a red velvet sofa. Angie was nowhere to be seen, and the inside of her trailer looked like a Moroccan prince’s tent two minutes after the harem departed. Dresses of lace and angelic linen were strewn on velvet sofas and silken chairs that waited provocatively beneath filmy curtains and hangings of jewel-toned beads and golden rope. “Jesus,” Juliette said, whisking aside a bit of purple tulle, “do you charge by the hour?”
“I know, isn’t it great?” Mercy said. “I’m playing a modern woman who may or may not be the reincarnation of a painter’s virginal muse, so I thought I should get in touch with my inner call girl. And it wasn’t an overdose, I don’t know why everyone keeps saying that.” On a table beside her right shoulder, an army of bottles were amassed, some prescription, some brown plastic with the label of a famous L.A. health store on them. Absentmindedly reaching for one, Mercy shook loose an alarmingly large yellow capsule and swallowed it with a swig of green tea. The action did not cause even the smallest pause in her monologue. “I just had a little trouble waking up, that’s all. I took a few Ambien last night”—she poured herself three more gelitan caplets, green this time, and swallowed them—“and okay, probably not the best idea to do shots with the best boy, but it’s not like Ambien are real drugs, and it always pays to make friends with the crew. Especially when the director despises you. So I was asleep—okay, majorly, deeply asleep—but next thing I know, some guy is pumping me full of adrenaline.” She finished her green tea and reached for a can of Red Bull. “Today everyone’s looking at me like they’re afraid I’m going to kick it like Lloyd, but you want to know what I think? I think that bastard Bill Becker told them to do it so I could finish the seven hundred scenes I have to do today, because shooting me up with adrenaline costs less than paying for the permits so we could go into tomorrow. Do you want a Diet Coke or what?”
Juliette surveyed the young woman dispassionately. In the days she had spent with Mercy, she had never seen her this agitated, never heard her talk so manically.
“What are you on right now, Mercy?” she said, glancing at the table. “What is all that crap and what did you just swallow, while I was standing right here looking at you?”
“Nothing,” said Angie, appearing from the depths of what Juliette assumed was a bedroom. “Oil of evening primrose,” she added, picking up one of the bottles. “For premenstrual bloating. Some flaxseed oil and Omega-3. Mercy has to take care of her body and we follow a strict, doctor-approved herbal regimen. Not that it’s any of your business . . .”
“It is very much my business when the star of this movie calls me because he’s afraid your daughter is going to kill herself.” Juliette had not planned to take this tone, but Angie always did bring out the worst in her. “You would be amazed at the many, many other things I would rather be doing right now.”
“First of all, Michael O’Connor is not the star of this movie,” snapped Angie. “And you shouldn’t believe everything you hear. I would think with your experience you would know that. There is a conspiracy on this set to paint Mercy as some sort of drugged-out troublemaker, and has been from the very beginning. Ben Golonski has been nursing a grudge against Mercy since she wouldn’t star in that horrible movie he did about Jamestown. And while I’ve certainly always been a fan, Mr. O’Connor seems bound and determined to convince everyone that he stepped in at the eleventh hour like some shining knight to save this film. As if we don’t all know where he’s been for the last few months and why, and that if he doesn’t get back in the game with a hit, he’ll be doing lame-o comedies like De Niro.”
“Golonski, too,” said Mercy idly, stroking a small silky terrier that had emerged, yawning, from beneath the sofa. “Becker got him for cheap because no one else will touch him—his last three films have bombed and that book he wrote didn’t help matters.”
Right, Juliette thought, suddenly remembering the details of Golonski’s fall from grace. A few years ago, he had gotten some absurd amount of money for his autobiography—he was all of forty-three—in which he managed to insult virtually every studio head in Hollywood. At the time he was the Industry darling, riding a megahit wave that left him unassailable; even those people he had trashed competed for his pictures. Until, after demanding total creative freedom, his movies began to tank. One after the other. Becker always did know how to leverage a man when he was down.
“So here we all are,” Mercy said, kissing the dog between its ears and lapsing into a babyish singsong, “a bunch of screwups trying to prove we can still make a movie without dropping dead in the process. Isn’t that right, Cupcake?” she cooed, fondling the dog’s ears. “Do you think we can do it without killing each other? Do you? Do you? Did you meet Cupcake, Juliette?” she asked, tearing herself away from kissing the animal long enough to display him proudly for Juliette. “I got him at Resurrection. They encourage pets as therapy, which is about the only constructive thing they do at that place.”
“Mercy!” said Angie. “How can you say that when Steve Usher has been so supportive of you, so protective? He called only last night to see how you were doing.”
“Shut up, Mother,” Mercy said. “Just because you slept with him doesn’t mean I have to embrace him and his ridiculous Little Book.”
“Watch your mouth,” Angie said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“What did you tell Mr. Usher?” Juliette said, to interrupt what was clearly a well-worn mother/daughter exchange. “Or was this before she had to be injected back into consciousness?”
“You have absolutely no right to speak to me or Mercy that way,” Angie said hotly. “Who the hell are you anyway? You work in a hotel. Where, I am pleased to inform you, we will certainly never be staying again. And if I see one word of this alleged overdose appear on any website or in any magazine, I will personally sue you and your boss for defamation.”
“Mother, for godsake,” Mercy drawled in a bored voice. “No one even listens to you when you talk like that. This isn’t a road show of Gypsy.” She raised her eyes from behind the dog’s white fur, looked directly at Juliette for perhaps the first time since she had arrived. A word flashed into Juliette’s mind just before Mercy laughed and shook Cupcake off her lap.
“Juliette,” she said. “I’m fine. You can see I’m fine. Except that—spoiler alert—my mother is a professional bitch and things are a little tense because Bill Be
cker thinks we should be shooting twenty-seven pages a day to make up for the money he lost when Lloyd . . . wound up dead. And I should be in costume, because in about three seconds someone will knock on that door, demanding that I be on set. Again.”
“Thank you for coming,” said Angie, pouncing on the moment and steering Juliette to the door, but not before Juliette could see how slowly Mercy walked as she started for the bedroom, see her hands shake as she reached for an inhaler. “And do tell Michael we appreciate his concern, especially considering his own, well, his own set of health issues. It was such a relief to see that his hair had grown back in,” she added maliciously, opening the trailer door and all but propelling Juliette into the sunshine.
“Well,” Juliette said, adopting a measured tone that she did not feel, “I certainly am glad everything is okay. But Michael said I could hang around a bit and watch the filming,” she added disingenuously, raising her voice so Mercy could hear, “so I think I will. See you on the set.” She flashed a wide smile into Angie’s anger-frozen face.
As maddening as the whole thing was, Juliette had no intention of leaving. Because the word that had run through her mind when Mercy had raised those golden eyes to hers was “beseeching.”
Chapter Five
MAKING HER WAY BACK to the Campo, Juliette wondered if any movie ever got made without one form of insanity or another occurring off-camera. Location work was particularly fraught. Away from family, familiarity, and what little media-enforced moral order there was in Hollywood, the cast and crew lived in their own little biosphere for weeks, sometimes months, simmering in a creative rue of lust and jealousy, artistry and boredom. Long hours under hot lights in a strange place, and boundaries melted away, revealing the more basic instincts of human nature. Love affairs bloomed like orchids in a hothouse and rivalries easily exploded. Over it all dripped money, like a poisonous glaze, highlighting the food chain—who had the biggest trailer, who went into makeup last, who had a private chef on set—and intensifying the pressure to get it right and get it done as quickly as possible. Minutes were worth millions. On a film set, everything and everyone was rented by the hour; no matter how complicated the contracts might be, it had the same basic economics of a back-alley tryst, which could explain why it so often turned into just that.
What happens on location, stays on location, or so the Indusry mantra went. Except, of course, when it didn’t, as Juliette knew only too well. She had lost her husband to location. Six weeks into the filming of his first successful script, Josh, the man to whom she had been married for ten years, the man whose writing career she had supported emotionally and financially, had left her for the kohl-eyed leading lady, with her Oxford accent and Pre-Raphaelite hair. Juliette’s heart broke so fast and hard it was weeks before she could breathe normally, months before she could sleep or smile or feel anything except the raw and bloody pulse of pain and disbelief. A year later, Josh was dead, murdered for reasons Juliette still didn’t understand.
“Don’t go loving him again just because he’s dead,” Devlin had said more than once at the time. “Dead or alive, he’s still a right bastard.”
Thinking of Devlin, Juliette smiled. He had been right, of course, about both things. Josh’s death had wiped away the protective layer of anger she had slowly acquired after he left. How could you be angry at a man murdered in his thirties? Even if he had cheated on you. In the weeks after his death, Juliette couldn’t help but dwell on the possibilities—if he hadn’t died, perhaps Josh would have realized the stupidy of his choice, of his actions, come back to her on his knees. Perhaps she could have found a way to forgive him and they could have resumed their lives as if nothing had happened . . .
“Right bastard,” Devlin would say in passing if he caught her with a certain look on her face, and even in the midst of catastrophe it made her laugh.
“Right bastard,” Juliette repeated to herself now, though she had a suspicion she was not speaking only about Josh.
Guided by a growing cavalry of golf carts, rivers of black wire, and the sound of shouting, she considered the forces at work in Siena. Though she did not buy for one minute the idea that O’Connor had come onto this film to be close to her, neither did she believe he had had to beg, as Angie had suggested. Even with a couple of nonstarters and a few months’ absence, he was a multiple Oscar winner and still one of the most bankable stars around. Although Juliette knew his battle with cancer was not exactly a secret among the inner circle of Hollywood, where nothing was a secret, it had not leaked into the entertainment press or even the tabloids. But she certainly did not put it past him to position himself as a savior, just as Angie suggested. Although she had seen him, during his illness, accept humility with a grace that astonished her, she had also seen the opposite—an arrogant assurance of his place as one of the universe’s masters that allowed him to pass judgment on just about everyone. Certainly he seemed more annoyed by how Mercy’s drug problems might affect him than concerned with her actual well-being.
Ben Golonski she did not know personally; she had seen him hold court at the Pinnacle, had watched his familiar but still amazing trajectory from unknown to the top of the power list and back again. When his book came out, she and Devlin had shared a laugh over it, marveling that no matter how many stars had crashed and burned around them, the people currently dwelling in the heights of Hollywood never seemed to think the ground could give way under them. Until it did.
Juliette wondered why on earth Golonski would agree to keep filming after Lloyd’s death, when Mercy was so clearly in danger of going off the rails. As she began sidling through the crew members ringing the set, she got her answer.
“I beg your pardon,” said a light and musical voice, as a small hand bit into her shoulder. “Who the fuck are you?”
The woman who turned Juliette to face her was so beautiful that for a moment Juliette froze, unable to process the various bits of emotion and information that were assailing her. This woman was manhandling her, which was infuriating, and questioning her as if she were a suspect in something, which was unacceptable. But her hair was the precise color of honey and fell about her face in perfect Breck girl waves that set off wide gray eyes and skin so perfect, so milky smooth and soft, that Juliette had the childish urge to reach out and stroke it.
“I ask again,” this vision of loveliness said, “who the fuck are you?”
The repetition gave Juliette just enough time to gather herself, to perfect her posture, set her own not-insignificant jawline and, with great formality, pluck the woman’s hand from her shoulder.
“My name,” she said quietly and carefully, as if speaking to a mentally challenged child, “is Juliette Greyson. And you are . . . ?” She tilted her head to one side and watched with great satisfaction as that ivory skin flushed, those big gray eyes darkened like thunderclouds.
“Security,” she snapped.
“You’re security?” Juliette asked.
“Security,” the woman repeated, at which point Juliette noticed she was wearing a Bluetooth. “There’s some crazy redhead on my set. Come deal.”
“Wait, wait, Carson, hang on one second.” The ever-shifting sea of electricians and production assistants parted and O’Connor emerged, clad in a black raincoat over an artfully rumpled sweater. “Hi, Juliette, sorry, Juliette,” he said, throwing a placating arm around her shoulders. “Carson, this is Juliette Greyson, remember I mentioned I was going to have her come down and talk some sense into Mercy?”
Never had Juliette seen a woman’s face shift so quickly, the irritated line of her mouth instantly curving into a welcoming smile, the hard and dismissive eyes lighting up with pleasure.
“Juliette,” she said, extending the hand that had moments before gripped her with such ferocity, “of course. I should have known, all that gorgeous auburn hair. I’m Carson Cooper, I work with Bill Becker and I’ve heard so much about you. From both Bill and Michael. You’ll have to forgive me,” she said, waving away their i
nitial meeting with a lovely deep-throated laugh. “Things have been a bit tense on the set, as I’m sure you know. And with Michael here, and Mercy, of course, we’ve had a fair number of fans infiltrating the ranks.” She took Juliette’s arm and began steering her through the crowd. “Not to mention all those horrible photographers.”
Juliette shot a glance at O’Connor. Was he really buying this? The thrilling little laugh, the accent that was suddenly vaguely Continental? Michael was smiling slightly but in a way Juliette could not read. Meanwhile, Carson continued to murmur in her ear with sudden girlish intimacy.
“It has been so difficult since Lloyd died, and we thought all was lost until I was able to convince Michael here to step in, our knight in shining armor.” She paused to give O’Connor a blinding smile.
“How did Lloyd die?” Juliette said abruptly. “Was it an overdose, or something else?”
Carson came to a sudden stop a few steps away from where a small number of black canvas chairs were arrayed around a group of monitors; Juliette could see Ben Golonski deep in conversation with a tall gray-haired man whom Juliette recognized as an award-winning cinematographer.
“Something else?” Carson asked, and her tone was a bit less dulcet. “What else could it have been? The toxicology report could not have been more clear—Lloyd had a dangerous mixture of painkillers and sleeping aids in his bloodstream. He had been plagued with insomnia for years,” she added, falling into what was clearly a prepared text. “Just last month he complained about it in an interview in the Los Angeles Times. It appears he was self-medicating and accidentally overdosed. Why?” she added, peering into Juliette’s face. “What did you hear?”
“That it wasn’t quite as clear-cut—”
“How is Mercy?” O’Connor interrupted. “Or how did she seem to you? She’s due on set in two minutes.”
“She seems terrible,” Juliette said bluntly. “She looks like she hasn’t slept in days and she’s obviously strung out on something, though I suppose it could just be some of those Chinese herbs all you people are so fond of. She says she didn’t overdose last night, that she was just deeply asleep and someone shot her full of adrenaline just so she could get through however many scenes she’s supposed to get through today.”
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