“Please,” the inspector answered, with a formal nod. “We will follow you.”
Dutifully, Juliette led Di Marco and two police officers through the confusing maze of the set to where she had last seen Golonski. A wild hope rose in her that Carson would be arrested, though for what she could not imagine—while the producer was undoubtedly capable of tipping Angie into a quarry, Juliette could not see why she would. Angie’s death only gave Carson another problem to deal with. Where had she been that night? No doubt Michael could vouch for her, she thought bitterly.
Golonski, Joseph, and the cinematographer were bent toward a trio of monitors; as Juliette approached, Carson appeared from nowhere, fully dressed and motioning furiously for Juliette to stop where she was, that it was a live set.
“Cut, cut,” Golonski yelled, as the sound of footsteps reached him through his headset. He looked over toward Juliette, his face murderous. “What the hell? Do you mind? We’re in the middle of a fucking scene here.”
Stepping to one side, she let Carson and Golonski see Di Marco and the two officers behind her, and she took a moment of pure satisfaction in the look of fear on the producer’s face. Maybe she had killed Angie after all. But no.
“Mr. Andrews,” Di Marco said, motioning the two carabinieri toward the screenwriter. “You are wanted for questioning in connection with the murder of Lloyd Watson. Please come with me.”
Chapter Eleven
JULIETTE FINALLY TOOK REFUGE in the library. From its large picture window, she could watch the chaos that lapped at the villa, small waves of humanity and equipment and noise. It was difficult not to feel under siege, even more difficult not to admit, at least to herself, that she had been the one who allowed the attacking army in through the gates.
In the uproar that had followed Joseph’s being led to the police car, Golonski, at Carson’s urging, tried to continue filming. But when Mercy heard what had happened, she fainted. Michael, who was standing right beside her, had completely missed her as she went down. Her head hit the ancient bricks with an audible crack. Out of nowhere, Gabe appeared, scooping her up and carrying her off, while Carson began shouting into her cell phone and Golonski threw his hands up and stomped off. Michael stood, still in the middle of the set, turning slowly around as if in a daze, as if he didn’t know where he was. But when his gaze swept toward Juliette, she slipped away and, skirting the edge of the restless and wondering crew, made her way to the villa and up a back staircase to the library.
Randomly noticing a bowl of apples and a bottle of wine on the long refrectory table that stood in the back of the room, she figured she could wait out most of the craziness until darkness fell. Then she could creep away unseen, possibly jumping in her car and just driving away. Maybe Devlin was right. Maybe she should just go home. Except she couldn’t go home. Not now. She couldn’t leave Gabe in the middle of a mess she had made.
“This was supposed to be my vacation,” she said plaintively to the wasp that was trapped in the corner of the window, bumping against the glass as if certain this time it would give way. “My vacation,” she repeated, throwing herself onto the couch. She wished she had thought to grab her purse during the proceedings, or at least her BlackBerry. She would very much have liked to talk to Devlin right now, even if it meant admitting that she did feel overwhelmed. She needed his inevitable murmur and derisive laugh. To Devlin, it seemed, all the vagaries of the human heart, all the absurdities of human behavior, were perfectly predictable and rather banal. Life was like the hotel business, he had told her time and again. The trick was imaginative anticipation; if you’re never surprised, you’re always prepared. Devlin, with his own steely-eyed refusal to dwell on things he had done, was never surprised.
“Have you seen Mercy?”
At the sound of O’Connor’s voice, all she felt was a gray fug of exhaustion. She did not open her eyes. She heard him enter the room, make his way across the dry and creaking wood of the floor, felt him settle at the far end of the sofa. Still she did not move.
“Other women have attempted to eradicate my existence in a similar way,” he said. “They were equally unsuccessful. I have an unfortunate aversion to disappearing. As you well know, my Juliette.” He drew out her name, lingering over the t’s and she could see his famous big-screen grin on the backside of her eyelids just as clearly as if they had been open. And when they were, there it was, exactly as she had imagined it. Exactly as she had seen it time and time again in the restless dark of a movie theater. Juliette sat up.
“Let’s not,” she said quietly. “I’m not in the mood.”
“And how could you be, with our friend Joseph Andrews somehow implicated in the death of Lloyd Watson, with Mercy swooning before my eyes as I stood there, incapable of movement?”
His smile was calculated to be infectious, those angled eyebrows high over pools of blue alight with that knowing mischief that had seduced millions for so many years. She closed her eyes again and leaned back against the corner of the sofa.
“Why are you here, Mr. O’Connor? Have you come to confess? To tell me that you promised Joseph you’d star in his movie if only he’d kill Lloyd Watson for you?”
“Interesting theory. Now, why would I do that?”
“Who knows? Boredom? Professional jealousy? Insane rage over ceding your leading-man mantle to a younger man?”
“You’re being unkind, my Juliette, which is something you rarely are.” He reached out for her ankle. “Why? Are you angry with me? Have I done something to offend you?”
She pulled her leg away, tucked both of them under her.
“Nothing I didn’t expect you to do,” she said flatly. “Though I can’t say I’m impressed by your taste. What does it mean, that men not only cheat on me but with women I can’t stand?”
“Cheating,” he said carefully in a low voice. “That’s a word with all sorts of implications, isn’t it?” He paused. She looked at the ceiling and began counting the angels painted there, comely young women all, with pink lips and round breasts beneath their celestial robes.
“Juliette,” he said. “Look at me. No,” he said, catching hold of her arm and yanking her toward him. “Look at me.”
Late afternoon pulsed through the window, and even in that syrupy gold, Michael’s face was pale and lined. The skin, stripped of the makeup, seemed thin and papery, the bones of his skull and jaw too prominent. Even so, his eyes were bright blue, so blue that, she realized with a shock, he must be wearing tinted contacts, something she was certain he had never done before. She saw now the very clear imprint of his illness; even if it was in remission, the cancer had done damage. Despite the prominence of his bones, he seemed somehow blurry, as if his face were being worn away, used up like a photograph too often handled or a painting left for years in sunlight. Sorrow jolted her, not personal, not the feeling of a lover or even a friend, but a more universal loss, like one might have for a work of art destroyed or defaced.
As if he could read her thoughts, he abruptly let go of her arm and turned his face away. “I’m playing lover to a girl young enough to be my daughter because I need to prove I can still do it. Which maybe I can’t. I’m old and I’m tired and maybe I’m done, but this,” he said, motioning toward the set outside the window, “is all I know how to do. There’s nothing else. There’s never been anything else. I need the work. And for the first time in a long time, I don’t know if I can do the work.”
Watching him now, Juliette could see that these words were an effort and the effort seemed sincere. But even that made her angry—everything that was going on, and this was what he was worried about? That he wasn’t the greatest actor in the world? It seemed absurd.
“So getting a quickie from Carson, that somehow makes everything all right? Shores up the old confidence level?”
“I suppose,” he said simply. “For a few minutes. Under certain circumstances. It keeps the demons at bay. For a few minutes.” He shrugged. His tone was far too matter-of-fact to be mist
aken for an apology. “As I said, I don’t expect you to understand. But it had nothing to do with you, nothing to do with . . . us. Which is a very separate thing. Or might be, under different circumstances.” He sighed and looked around, at the walls lined to the ceiling with books and bits of Etruscan pottery, at the portraits of Madonnas and dark bearded men. “I should have never come here,” he said regretfully. “I should have told Carson we needed to find another location. You need to keep work and . . . life separate. We all do things out of fear, repeat patterns for the comfort of familiarity. I have new fears and very old . . . patterns.”
With mild shock, Juliette saw that he expected some sort of sympathy from her; with an even greater shock, she realized that sympathy was in fact one of the things she felt.
“Why were you looking for Mercy?” she asked abruptly. Already she was forgiving him, finding something in his honesty that made up for his betrayal, and hating herself for it. No, they hadn’t made any promises to each other, but Carson? If it had been anyone but Carson. “Are they actually going to try to keep filming today?”
After a swift searching look, O’Connor answered as if none of the previous conversation had occurred. “No chance. Carson is utterly immersed in damage control and the crew is being reminded of their confidentiality clauses one more time—she may as well have it tattooed on their foreheads. Golonski, meanwhile, is off to Siena to try to spring his screenwriter; we are, apparently, missing a climactic scene. Which is a problem.”
Juliette said nothing.
“And I was looking for Mercy because I was suddenly overcome with an odd sense of concern for her. While I don’t want to try to get back into your good graces by resurrecting our sleuthing past, I do wonder just what the hell is going on. Don’t you? I mean, why do they suddenly think Lloyd was murdered? And why on earth would Joseph have anything to do with it? I have wracked my already overtaxed brain trying to figure out who would want that poor boy dead, and aside from your theory of my jealous rage, I can think of no one. Can you?”
“I don’t have any idea. According to Devlin, it was the insurance company that reopened the investigation, because if it was suicide or an overdose, they don’t have to pay. I think they’re trying to prove that someone faked the whole autoerotic thing in order to make it look like an accidental death. That is apparently covered, which frankly is a little weird. But why they would think it was Joseph is beyond me.”
“Probably because it was his semen on the floor in Lloyd’s room.”
Shocked, Juliette and Michael swiveled their heads in time to see Mercy, followed closely by Gabe, entering the room. “At least that’s what I’m guessing. We were just in the chapel,” she said with a wan smile. “It really is peaceful there, although Gabe showed me the special room where the nobles sat so they wouldn’t have to even breathe the same air as the peasants—pretty horrible when you think about it. We lit a candle for my mother, and one for Lloyd. I guess I should have lit one for Joseph. But I can’t believe he did it alone, which only leaves my mother. Which makes perfect sense, since he does have this weird fixation with me. She probably slept with him, and that’s how she got it. Although I don’t see her actually planting it; that would be just gross. So maybe it was his idea. Except it’s got more written all over it.”
“Got what?” Juliette said, her head spinning as her eyes went from Mercy to Gabe, who was watching the young woman with an air of expectation. “What are you talking about?”
“The semen. Which must have been Joseph’s, or why would they arrest him?”
“They didn’t arrest him,” Michael said sharply. “They took him in for questioning.”
“Whatever. They’ll probably arrest him later. Isn’t tampering with a crime scene a crime? And they must think he tampered. Otherwise how could his semen get in Lloyd’s room?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Michael and Juliette asked almost in unison. “And will you please stop saying ‘semen’?” Juliette added.
Looking from one baffled face to another, Mercy sat down with a sigh.
“I told you I was the one who found Lloyd’s body,” she said. “I told you that. And when I found him, with that rope around his neck like he had been whacking off, I knew it wasn’t right. For one thing, the rope had cut this huge red mark into his neck and Lloyd would never have let that happen. He was way too into how he looked and we were shooting the next day—everyone in costume and makeup would have seen it. And then there was the . . . word Juliette doesn’t want to hear again. On the floor. Totally gross, and I knew it wasn’t Lloyd’s.”
“I am going to regret asking this,” Michael said, “but how on earth did you know that?”
“Because it was like two feet away from the body,” she said impatiently. When Michael continued to look blank, she sighed again. “Lloyd didn’t have that kind of trajectory. He took so many supplements to keep that cut look of his, he didn’t have any trajectory, actually, and not much in the area of quantity, either. What?” she said, surveying the expressions on the faces around her. “Oh, am I the only person in this room who has ever actually had sex? Anyway, I assumed they would test the stuff for DNA and realize something was wrong. But apparently they didn’t; everyone was too fixated on the toxicology report. An actor dies and it’s always about the drugs.” She shook her head sadly before adding rather brightly, “So I phoned in my anonymous tip.”
“You are kidding me,” Juliette said. “So you’re saying Joseph’s DNA matched the . . . what was on the floor of Lloyd’s room? How would they know that? How would they get Joseph’s DNA?”
“From Carson,” Michael said wearily. “Or the insurance company. Joseph has had a heroin problem for years, but he cleans up when he’s on set. He just has to pee in a cup once a week to prove it.”
Now it was his turn to face the various looks of surprise in the room.
“You’d be amazed at how many cups are being peed into on any given movie set,” Michael said. “There are a lot more highly functioning addicts out there than you might think.”
“Until they’re not,” Gabe said. “And they wind up dead, like Lloyd Watson.”
“So you think Joseph wanted to make it seem like Lloyd didn’t OD because if he had, the insurance wouldn’t pay and they’d shut the movie down.”
Mercy nodded. “Yes. It’s expensive to keep me on a stalled project,” she said frankly, “and God only knows what they offered Michael to come on at the last minute.”
“Oh, I did it for scale and the opportunity to work with you, my dear,” he said with a sardonically sweet smile.
Mercy ignored him. “Everyone’s in cost-cutting mode these days, and if it got too expensive Becker might have just sent the whole thing back to development hell,” she explained, sounding suddenly like the Hollywood professional she was. “Joseph needs to get his movie made or else his price will plummet. He thinks he would be the next Richard Curtis if only American directors and producers weren’t so stupid.”
“But I don’t understand why Angie would have been involved in trying to make Lloyd’s death look like something other than an overdose,” Juliette said.
“Or a suicide,” Michael added. “Does someone think Lloyd did it on purpose? Was there a note? A suicide will stall a picture even faster than a drug overdose.”
“If Joseph’s a heroin addict, he may not have been thinking straight,” Gabe said. “He may have panicked.”
“I actually don’t think he’s using anymore,” Michael said.
“But why do you think Angie was involved?” Juliette asked, turning to Mercy.
Mercy shrugged. “I saw her coming out of Lloyd’s room that night, and then those pictures showed up on deadanddying; they had Angie written all over them. At first I thought she was just banging him. She still got off on the whole mother/daughter thing, even though it’s been years since I told her I wouldn’t do that three-way shit anymore.”
Mercy stopped, startled by what she had just sai
d, something she clearly had not meant to share. There was a sudden awful silence. Juliette let out a small gasp and Michael quickly stood up and moved toward the window. Gabe reached out and put his hand on Mercy’s shoulder, but his expression did not change. For a moment, Mercy dropped her eyes and a flush crept up her neck, stained her cheeks, but she quickly looked up and defiantly straightened her back. “Not that it was any big secret, those little two-for-ones. At least not among certain circles. Though you never indulged,” she added, her voice shaking slightly, “did you, Mr. O’Connor?”
Michael was fiddling with the curtain, his eyes firmly on whatever activity was taking place in the rising twilight below. Turning, he regarded his costar kindly.
“My luck with blondes ran out long before you were born, princess,” he said.
Mercy tried to smile, but her mouth only twisted. She dropped her gaze again to her lap, where her hands wrung each other as if she were trying to rub the flesh off them.
“It’s okay, Mercy,” Juliette said, crouching down beside her and taking those hands in her own. “Like you said, that’s all in the past. It’s nobody’s business. You don’t have to talk about it now. You don’t even have to think about it now.”
Gabe made a sound of protest in his throat.
“That’s right,” he said. “Just keep it buried inside, just carry it around for a few more years. Feed it drugs and alcohol until it explodes and takes her with it. Jesus. Mercy,” he said gently, not making a move toward her, “you are allowed. You are allowed to talk about the things that have happened in your life. You are allowed to tell the truth about it and you are even allowed to do it in such a way that doesn’t make any money for anyone.”
“Stop it, Gabe,” Juliette snapped. “Her mother just died. You always think talking about something makes it better, but it doesn’t. Let her grieve however she wants to.”
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