The Starlet

by Mary McNamara

  Mercy thought about this for a moment, spilled out another small pile of coke, tidied it into a line, and snorted it. “I don’t know exactly,” she said. “He isn’t cheap, that’s for sure, and he’s been asking for a weekly stipend, which is weird. But he really did seem shook up about my mother’s death and he’s not a bad guy to talk to, you know? He listens pretty well and he’s got some great stories. And his program may be silly, with all those little phrases, but at least he understands that sometimes you can’t just go cold turkey, that sometimes cutting down is better. It’s not so daunting that way. Gabe says it’s a daily reprieve,” she added, looking wistful, “that an addict is always in recovery, never recovered. I get that, I do, and he’s probably right. I mean, I know he’s right. But who wants to hear that? It’s just depressing. And not all of us have that kind of time, you know. Not all of us can just devote ourselves wholeheartedly to our sobriety.”

  She uttered these last words with Gabe’s precise cadence and intonation; she even got the accent right. It wasn’t a mean impersonation, just dead-on, and Juliette found herself laughing so hard, it bordered on hysteria, the real reason for which she refused to contemplate.

  “Mercy,” she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, “you have to promise me that if you survive this movie, you will take a year off, just take a year off and go somewhere quiet and get yourself clean. Because it would absolutely break my heart if you died.”

  “Well, that’s one heart that would break,” Mercy said, sending a jet of smoke angling out of the corner of her mouth. Then she smiled sweetly. “You know, Juliette, I may do just that.” She looked at herself in the mirror, tugging at the skin around her eyes and mouth as if she were not pleased with what she saw. “If I survive this movie.”

  There was a knock on the door. Mercy held a finger to her lips. The knock was repeated.

  “What,” she said with overdone exasperation. “I’m trying to sleep in here.”

  “Pages,” said a voice, “new pages.”

  “Slide them under the door.”

  Several sheets of paper obligingly presented themselves under the door; they were a yellow with a green tinge, like a tennis ball. Juliette handed them to Mercy, who glanced at them and rolled her eyes. “Oh, look,” she said, “we’ve gone neon. It is never a good sign when you go neon.

  “Life is so much better when the writer is in jail,” Mercy continued, leaning back into her chair. “He cannot leave this shit alone. Golonski should have never let him on the set. He hates me, he hates Michael, he hated Lloyd. Joseph Andrews is the reason God invented email.” She sighed again, took a swig of vodka. “You’d better go,” she said dismissively, her attention already fully occupied by the script. “These are for tonight and it looks like they’ve messed with the staging. You should come to the shoot, though,” she added, with a surprisingly bright smile. “It’s the big climax and all . . . should be pretty dramatic. Bring Dev,” she added with a knowing lift of her eyebrow. “That should send Michael into the appropriate mood of despair.”

  Then she turned her attention back to the pages with a finality that left Juliette no alternative but to leave. As she closed the door, she could see Mercy cutting herself another line. Her head still turned, Juliette bumped smack into Usher as he hurried toward Mercy’s trailer, his bag over his shoulder.

  “Oh, Juliette,” he said. “Michael is looking for you.”

  She nodded.

  “You really need to work on your timing,” she said with some amusement and no small amount of contempt.

  Michael was not in his trailer. The assistant there said she thought he had gone to craft services to eat. The craft services tent, which now stretched out beside the patio of the villa’s kitchen, was empty save for the fragrance of coffee and chocolate cake—it was the production designer’s birthday—and a table full of set designers and women from the wardrobe department. One of them said she thought Michael was in the makeup trailer; when Juliette headed to the door, the table rippled with repressed laughter. She wavered for a moment—she suddenly felt embarrassed and ungainly, as if she were being sent on a wild goose chase. But just then a grip walked by. “Michael O’Connor is looking for you,” he said. “He’s up in his room, I think. At least that is where he said he was headed.”

  Mounting the stairs, Juliette was struck by how quiet the villa was, though outside she could see the courtyard roiling with preparations. The sun was setting, and as she made the sharp turn from the stairway to the corridor, it slipped behind the hills. What orange glow had remained suddenly vanished, as if snuffed out. Her eyes adjusted to the sudden dimness and Juliette saw a figure in white emerge in front of one of the doors. For a moment her blood froze and she thought wildly about the stories her father had told her of a woman in a long white dress who walked the hallways at night. But then her vision grew clearer and she could see that it was only Carson, sidling quickly toward the opposite staircase. She seemed to be buttoning her white blouse.

  When Carson vanished down the stairs, Juliette forced herself to walk toward the door from which the producer had emerged. She stood there, debating whether to knock or not, when it opened and there stood Michael O’Connor.

  “Wow,” she said. “So did you plan it this way or did I just miss my cue? Because French farce has never been my forte.”

  “Really?” O’Connor said. “You seem to be following the basic narrative structure quite well. How was Siena?”

  “You know what?” Juliette said. “There is only so much I am willing to do, and I’m not willing to do this.” She turned and began walking back the way she had come.

  “Wait, Juliettte, wait.” And in two steps, there he was, towering over her.

  “What, Michael?” Juliette said. “What? Do you want to know what happened in Siena? Do you really? Because it’s none of your damn business.”

  “It doesn’t matter what happened in Siena. And you’re right, it is none of my damn business.” He sighed and passed a hand over his face. “And for the record, Carson was just here with new pages. More new pages. Because we can’t go three minutes on this shoot without fucking new pages. But that isn’t what I wanted to say.”

  He took a deep breath and in the silence of the empty corridor Juliette was afraid he would be able to hear her heart pound.

  “Look, I just want you to know that when I signed on to this project, when I realized you were in Tuscany, I thought for a minute that if I could start again, that if we could start again, then we might actually have a chance, not a big one, of course, me still being me, but a shot—”

  “Just stop,” Juliette said, horrified not by what he was saying, but by how badly he was saying it. It sounded rehearsed. And though liar and cheat he might well be, Michael O’Connor never ever sounded rehearsed. “Jesus. If that’s the best you can do, spare me, and I mean that literally. What happened, happened. As you pointed out, we’re all adults. So don’t stand there trying to conjure regret, or whatever it is you’re doing. Jesus.”

  “You see?” he said, his voice suddenly torn between laughter and anger. “You see how fucked I am? Can’t even make a simple expository speech that I actually mean sincerely. Struggling to make a simple movie, to keep up with that fucking child who’s strung out on dope and booze half the time and still doing better work than I am.” He took a step back, raised his hands in a helpless gesture. “While you sit there and watch and feel bad. Again. Feel sorry for me. Again. It’s absurd and I can’t seem to do anything about it.”

  “Poor you,” Juliette said. For reasons she could not explain, she felt the urge to laugh, not in derision but in relief. She realized she meant what she had said—it didn’t matter. What had or had not happened with Carson didn’t matter. She wasn’t sure why, but she did know, with great certainty, that she didn’t want to see regret in O’Connor’s face, or pain or anger. What was the point of that? What was the point of Michael O’Connor if he was going to behave like everyone else she knew? Afte
r all these weeks of watching him brood and frown and struggle to do what always looked so easy when it was done, she’d trade all the apologies in the world just to see a little fuck-’em-all mischief back in his eyes. “I guess you’ll just have to learn to live in the mortal world with the rest of us.” She patted his cheek. “We’ll do our best to make your stay a pleasant one.” Then she turned and walked away.

  “Wait,” he called again after a moment of stunned silence. “So you never answered my note.” She paused and looked at him quizzically. She had forgotten his note. “What next?” he asked quietly.

  She shrugged and offered him a small smile. “I’m going to take a nap. You should probably do the same. I understand you have a very big scene tonight, and when I last saw your costar she was midway to stoned out of her mind.”

  As Juliette moved across the courtyard, she could feel the dimensions of Michael’s window burned onto her back. She knew he was watching her but she refused to even glance behind her; let him stew. It would be good for him; get him in the mood for his scene. In Casa Padua, she found Devlin asleep on the couch, the Little Book angled open on his chest as if he had been waiting for her. Passing him silently, she went into her bedroom, closed the door, closed the window, lay down on the bed, put a pillow over her head, and did her best not to think of Michael or Mercy or Devlin or anything at all.

  When she woke up it was dark. The ache in her shoulders and her head told her she had slept for a long time, and for some reason this made her instantly anxious. Pushing open her bedroom door, she was almost blinded by the lights pouring in from outside, bright white retina-burning stage lights, aimed at and bouncing off the bell tower.

  Devlin was sitting where she had left him, awake now and frowning over the book in his hand, flipping from one page to another.

  “Have you looked at this?” he said, his eyes still on the pages.

  “No,” she answered, shivering slightly as sleep retreated and the evening air hit her skin. “What is it?”

  “Lloyd Watson’s Little Book,” he said. “And I think I know why Usher is so hot to get his hands on it. Look at this bibliography.” He motioned her under the lamp where he held the book.

  “God, enough with the bibliography,” Juliette said. “I know, it’s long and weird. Gabe went on and on about it. It’s probably padded, but I don’t see Steve Usher going down in the big bibliography scandal of the century.”

  “Will you shut up and look at this?”

  Juliette joined him on the couch; feeling his warmth, she leaned into him, pulled one of his arms around her, and closed her eyes. Devlin promptly bit her neck.

  “Ow,” she said, sitting up. “Shit, Dev. What did you do that for?”

  “Strange, isn’t it, how context dictates sensation? Now would you please look at what I am showing you, which is very likely the reason I traveled ten thousand miles and into your arms?”

  Juliette yanked the book out of his hands. The bibliography was indeed quite extensive, five pages long, and full of books she had heard of—the Bible, the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, several unauthorized biographies of Usher and other substance-abusing stars, Alice in Wonderland—and many titles she did not recognize.

  “Look at the markings,” Devlin said, pointing to several entries in which some of the various initials of authors had been circled and the corresponding page numbers of the works quoted. In, for example, the entry for The Cocaine Wars, by F. Edward Hinchley, Simon & Schuster, 1987, pp. 263–308, the F had been circled, as had 263 and 8. In Crack Alley, by Monty L. Pickens, HarperCollins, 1994, pp. 258–302, it was the L, the 258, and the 2. Up and down the page the little blue circles went, like the scatterings of some demented code breaker. Juliette tried to turn the letters into words or find a pattern in the numbers, but nothing presented itself.

  “Is it an anagram?” she asked, noting several L’s, two F’s, three E’s, a B, two C’s, and a single A. “Do the numbers add up to something?” She flipped to page 258 in the Little Book, but it was bare of markings, and the book ended on 260—there was no 263. She looked at Devlin, baffled. “What am I missing?”

  “You’ve just been out of Los Angeles for too long. 263, F8; 258, L2; 361, D6 . . .” He looked at her expectantly, but she returned the look, even more confused.

  “I don’t know, Dev. Bingo?”

  “Really, J.,” he admonished. “Before everyone had GPS, what did we always put in the gift baskets for guests who are visiting Los Angeles for the first time? What do we keep copies of in everyone’s office? 253 E5, does that not ring a bell? You have three seconds or I’m afraid you’re fired.”

  Juliette frowned. “That’s the Pinnacle’s location in the Thomas Brothers’ Guide. Oh,” she said, illumination dawning. “Oh, my God, the Thomas Guide. Wait, what?” Illumination flared, then sputtered out. “The Thomas Guide? Does anyone even use that anymore?”

  “What’s the Thomas Guide?” asked Gabriel, who had appeared in the doorway, flushed and out of breath.

  “Were you just running?” Juliette asked, momentarily distracted by her cousin’s appearance. “You never run.”

  “You first. What’s the Thomas Guide?”

  “It’s a big book of maps for Los Angeles, for all of Los Angeles,” she explained. “Pages and pages. You can’t really live without it if you don’t know the city, and there’s a street index in the back. Every address has a page number and a letter number, like E4, that matches up with a sort of longitude/latitude grid. Like any map, really, only you can pretty much find any house or business.”

  “Or street corner or park or parking garage,” Devlin added grimly.

  “Right,” Juliette said, glancing at him, her eyes narrowing as she tried to figure out what exactly he meant. “And Devlin thinks, and it certainly looks like, there are a bunch of locations marked off in this copy of Usher’s book.”

  “What sort of locations?” Gabe asked.

  “How would I know?” Juliette asked. “I don’t have the damn thing memorized.”

  “But I can guess,” Devlin said. “Considering that each of the circles occurs in an entry in which a specific drug is part of the title. Page 263 is mid-Wilshire and I’m pretty sure, for example, that this one, G9, is a high-class strip club. You can’t see it from the street, you have to know it’s there. I have had to give directions, on occasion, to our guests,” he added, answering Juliette’s raised eyebrows.

  “A strip club?” she said. “Why would Usher be including the coordinates for a strip club?”

  “Because, my dear idiot, that is where, presumably, a person might buy some heroin,” Devlin said, exasperated, pointing to the title in that entry, “as in A History of Heroin, by G. Gordon Libby. G. Gordon Libby, Jesus, did no one at his publisher even check any of this?”

  “It’s self-published,” Gabe said. “So that would be a no.”

  “So you’re saying that Steve Usher, recovery guru to the stars, is running some sort of a drug ring?” Juliette asked in disbelief. “How is that possible? Why would he do that?”

  “Anything is possible,” Gabe said. “And for the money, of course.”

  “I don’t think he’s running it, exactly,” Devlin said. “But he’s obviously got a hand in, a bit too far in, it would seem.” Juliette fixed him with her fierce what-do-you-know look, and he sighed. “Last week, I got a call from a . . . well, let’s just say a former business associate. He very much wanted to know the whereabouts of Mr. Usher. This particular individual is not the sort of man you want looking for you. But I suspect he had been hired to have an interest. There have always been rumors that Usher was not as fastidious as one might hope for a recovery guru.”

  “What does that mean, exactly?” said Juliette.

  “Oh, come on, J.,” he said impatiently. “Everybody knows Resurrection isn’t exactly a tight ship; why do you think it makes so much money? What other rehab center has tea dances and Oscar parties? What did you think that meant?”

  F
lushing, Juliette had to admit she hadn’t really thought about it all that much. Devlin gave her a look of surprise and mild disapproval.

  “Well, it was common knowledge that the staff was prepared to look the other way—not for the actual patients, but for their friends and family. Someone checks in with their entire entourage, chances are not everyone is seeking sobriety. But now it looks like it wasn’t just a matter of allowing the stuff in. Now it looks very much like he was involved in selling it.”

  “And Lloyd figured it out,” Juliette said. “That’s what Mercy meant when she said Lloyd knew they were a bunch of phonies. So did Usher kill Lloyd?”

  “I don’t see how, since he was actually in Malibu at the time,” Devlin said.

  Gabe had grown silent and still. “We’ve got to go,” he said urgently. “Now.” He tugged Juliette off the couch.

  “Why? What’s happened?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s why I came over in the first place. They’re shooting a scene in the tower and I heard them arguing about Mercy using a stunt double. Apparently she was insisting on doing whatever had to be done herself. But I just saw them set up this huge sling around the top of the tower, like those nets you put under trapeze artists. And that made me very nervous. Because last time I saw her she was high as a kite, and if it turns out Steve Usher is some sort of drug kingpin, who knows what might happen?”

  Outside, the wind had picked up and was surprisingly cold. Cerreta’s square, solid bell tower was bathed in a light that turned its warm golden stone silver and made it seem impossibly tall and forbidding, looming against the night sky like a place of judgment. Juliette could see the net hammocks strung just below the battlements and three large inflatable slides like rides at a child’s picnic. She could just make out a group of figures on the top of the tower; a camera on a zip line hovered outside the battlements, presumably on remote; another on a crane was manned by the cinematographer.

  Carson, Joseph, the production designer, and a group of other people Juliette recognized only vaguely huddled around the monitors. Stepping closer, she could see on the screen what was happening on the roof of the tower. There was Michael in a cape and high boots, Mercy in her full white habit, Golonski speaking to both of them closely, his hands making small chopping motions, while a handful of other crew members milled about, measuring things and adjusting lights. One woman was fixing something around Mercy’s waist, tweaking and pulling until Mercy finally shook her off.