“Now, this is just a crime,” his voice said, silky and low, as his hand glided along her back and he smiled down at her, like he knew something she didn’t.
“If you mean the Pink Martini version of ‘Little Drummer Boy,’ I agree.”
Massarsky frowned in confusion. When he laughed, she wasn’t sure if he’d noticed the song playing over his sound system or if he simply discarded any human dialogue that diverged from the script in his head, as if original thoughts did not compute for him.
“I mean a beautiful girl like you without a drink in her hand,” he replied. “I don’t have a pink martini, but I’m sure I can get the bartender to make you one.” He guided her into the corridor with that hand on her lower back, steering her. “Or anything else you’d like.”
Cassie smiled. She had no choice. It was why she’d come, after all. Just like the rest of them. She’d been in L.A. for four years, been to hundreds of auditions, scored a few commercials and sitcom walk-ons, and finally starred in an indie film about lesbian parenting that got her nominated for best actress at Outfest. Massarsky wouldn’t have seen it, but it made her feel like a real actress and it nudged her up a few notches on casting sheets.
Still…Girl.
The word did not surprise her. Twenty-six years old, but to men like Massarsky, she’d always be a girl.
“Don’t you want to put your purse down? I’ve got someone checking coats and things.”
Cassie smiled, slinging the straps of her purse a little higher on her shoulder. “It’s part of the ensemble. The designer who loaned it to me made me promise to keep it with me, show it off.”
Massarsky chuckled. “Don’t you love this town?”
“More than anything.”
She let him guide her to the vast living room, where furniture had been rearranged to make room for the bar. The windows were open to let fresh air circulate. Snowflake decorations were everywhere, but it was seventy degrees even up here in the hills. Christmas in Hollywood.
“I’ll have—” she began.
“Can I suggest something?” Massarsky interrupted, and he didn’t wait for her reply, looking to the bartender. “Pomegranate martini.” He glanced at her. “You’ll love it.”
Cassie didn’t tell him she’d had one before and had not, in fact, loved it. She took the offered glass and sipped from it and smiled, and when he put that guiding hand on her back again and steered her away from the bar and deeper into the house, she went along.
The walls were decorated with decades’ worth of photos of Massarsky with actors and politicians, the famous and the powerful. Always just him and those celebrities. In some of the framed photos, it was clear there had been others in the picture, people whose hands or arms or shoulders remained but who had been cropped out because their presence did not contribute to his legend. This was the kind of man Cassie had come to celebrate Christmas with.
“I didn’t catch your name.”
“Cassandra Ochoa.”
“Oooh. Exotic,” he said. “I like it.”
She wondered if men like James Massarsky could tell a real smile from a fake one, and realized they probably didn’t care. As with a woman’s orgasm, the pretense of a smile was enough to reassure him.
“You’re an actress?”
“Isn’t everyone?”
“But are you a real cinephile? A real movie lover?”
“Of course.”
“Old movies are my passion. I collect mementos from my favorites, oddities and props and rare photographs.”
Cassie smiled shyly. “Honestly? That’s half the reason I came. My agent and her husband were coming and invited me. Normally I like a quieter Christmas with family, but that’s hard these days. Kind of grim in this town. I’d read an article in Variety about your collection and it just fascinated me. Is it true you have the tooth De Niro had knocked out filming Raging Bull?”
Massarsky grinned like a schoolboy. “I know, weird and gross.”
“No, it’s cool,” she said, and touched his elbow the way she knew a thousand other actresses must have.
Balding, sweaty upper lip, pot belly, hairs growing inside his ears, Massarsky either didn’t see how repulsive he’d be to most young women or he didn’t care. When Cassie had arrived, she had assumed the latter, but now that she’d been in his presence for a few minutes, she had changed her mind. He had an air of confidence, a swagger more appropriate for a leading man than an obese producer careening ungracefully toward his sixtieth birthday.
And yet…something about his excitement, the sparkle in his eyes when he thought about his collection, made him seem human, like in that moment Cassie could imagine the little boy he’d once been. If nothing else, his love of movies was sincere.
He looked at his watch—only men his age still wore watches—and gave her a conspiratorial look. Late as it was, people had continued to arrive, and the boisterous laughter and chatter of his guests nearly drowned out the Christmas music pumping from the speakers.
“I keep the room locked up during parties,” he confessed, with a boyish shrug. “A lot of one-of-a-kind items in there. But if you’d like a tour…”
Cassie felt a little thrill travel up her spine. “I’d love it.” Even her smile was genuine, and tonight, in the Hollywood hills, that was nothing short of a miracle.
“At some of these Christmas parties, I’ve taken little groups in with me, but then people get pissed that they didn’t get a tour. Half of them couldn’t give a damn about the collection, but they feel slighted or they’re trying to curry favor.”
Massarsky paused, eyes narrowing with suspicion. “What’s your favorite old movie?”
“You mean aside from It’s a Wonderful Life?”
“You’re saying that because it’s Christmas.”
“I’m not. That movie makes me cry every time I watch it,” Cassie said. She wasn’t lying. Maybe he saw that in her eyes. “But if you mean something else, I guess I’d say The Children’s Hour or the Gable version of Mutiny on the Bounty.”
He smiled. “The Gable version.” With a snobbish roll of his eyes, he nudged her back. “Come on. Later on, I’ll show you the reel I have from the original version of Bounty.”
“The Australian thing with Errol Flynn?”
Massarsky beamed. “You really do know your old movies. Most people know nothing about In the Wake of the Bounty, but I’m not talking about that. The first version was Australian, but—”
“The silent version?”
Massarsky stared at her. “Wow. That’s…I don’t know that I’ve met more than one or two other people who know that movie exists.”
“It doesn’t. I mean it did,” Cassie clarified, “but it’s lost. Like thousands of others.”
“Correction,” Massarsky said, “it was lost.”
Cassie let her mouth drop open in a little O of wonderment.
“This way,” he said.
She hoisted the straps of her purse higher on her shoulder and let him steer her into a darkened side corridor, around a corner, past a pair of French doors that opened into a sunroom, and then up three steps into another corridor. She sipped her pomegranate martini and only grimaced a bit when she swallowed.
Massarsky tapped a code into a keypad beside the door and Cassie heard the lock click. He opened the door and stepped inside. Motion-sensor lights flickered on.
“You wanted to see De Niro’s tooth,” he said.
She grinned. “That’s so nasty, keeping his tooth.”
“It’s Hollywood history, honey.”
Cassie took his arm and smiled up at him. “Show me.”
The lights were low and warm, with individual illumination in most of the cases and small lamps above rare posters and artwork on the walls. The poster for Revenge of the Jedi—the original name for the third Star Wars film—hun
g on the wall, and she pretended that she hadn’t seen it before. It was very rare. In the condition it was in, she figured it must be worth at least five thousand dollars, but compared to the truly unique props and other items in his collection, the poster was unremarkable.
Massarsky showed her De Niro’s tooth. It had yellowed, but it looked like there might still be a bit of blood on it. When he brought her over to a small case holding the prop gun that had killed Brandon Lee on the set of The Crow, Cassie got a chill. There were other unsettling souvenirs as well. The glove that Harold Lloyd had worn to hide his missing fingers in the 1920s, after he’d picked up a bomb he’d thought a prop while shooting publicity photos for Haunted Spooks. The dress Virginia Rappe had died in. A portion of the Fokker D-VII that stunt pilot Dick Grace crashed filming 1927’s Wings.
“Dick Grace. That was a crazy one. The guy broke his neck and crushed four vertebrae, and he was back to work like a month later,” Massarsky said, beaming. “They don’t make men like that anymore.”
“At least he lived,” Cassie replied. “Some of these are pretty grim.”
“That’s half the fun for a collector. The macabre stuff always goes for top dollar. That and the erotic. I had one guy try to sell me a half stick of butter he claimed was from the filming of Last Tango in Paris. I’ve been known to have a kink or two, but that seemed pretty disgusting to me, not to mention impossible to prove.”
Cassie wrinkled her nose. “We all have a kink or two. I’m glad you didn’t buy that.”
Massarsky hadn’t missed that fact that she’d agreed with him about people and their kinks. He slid his arm around her and they proceeded through his little Hollywood museum more intimately after that. When they paused in front of a baseball bat from Walter Hill’s The Warriors and the actual sword from John Boorman’s Excalibur, he put a hand on her ass and she did not remove it.
“You have another sword. What’s that one?”
“Oh, you spotted that?” He turned to look toward the far corner of the room. “You told me you didn’t like the gruesome ones.”
“I said some of them were pretty grim. I didn’t say I wasn’t…intrigued.”
A shiver went through her, something dark and delicious. He must have seen it in her eyes, because he inhaled deeply and his smile widened.
“Okay. It’s a great story. Maybe not the best story I’ve got, but fucking tragic,” he said as he guided her, hand at the small of her back, toward that far corner. “You ever heard of They Died with Their Boots On?”
“Of course. Errol Flynn and Oliva de Havilland. God, she was beautiful.”
“She was.”
“So the sword is from that?” Cassie asked as they stopped in front of the glass case. The light shone up through the case, gleaming on the blade within. She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear and turned toward Massarsky, shifting her purse straps on her shoulder again. “So what’s this tragic tale that goes along with it?”
He glanced at his watch, a look of pleasure crossing his face.
“Am I boring you?” she asked, putting just the right touch of petulance into her voice.
“No, no. It’s almost midnight. I’ve got another story for you. The best one. But okay, first…The movie’s this bullshit version of General Custer’s life, right? Great movie, but they played it like a biopic and it’s not that at all. Anyway…do you remember the big cavalry charge?”
“Vaguely, I guess. I saw it years ago.”
Massarsky’s smile dimmed a bit. “Doesn’t matter. Point is, during the charge there were accidents. Horses went over. Three riders were killed, including an extra named Jack Budlong, who was riding right next to Errol Flynn when he fell. The guy’s going down and in that split second, he tosses his sword to have his hands free, try to break his fall.”
“Don’t tell me.”
“The damn sword landed handle first, stuck in the mud, and the poor bastard impaled himself on it. Killed almost instantly.”
Cassie put a hand to her mouth in a flutter of scandal and horror. “Oh my God. That’s awful.”
“I know. Great, right?”
“And that’s not the best story you’ve got in this room?”
“Nope. I’ve got a handful of things in here connected to accidents and famous deaths, but only one actual, real-life murder weapon.”
Her mouth went dry. She wetted her lips with her tongue and watched him notice. Her face flushed and she let out a small, nervous laugh. “Show me.”
Massarsky reached out and touched her face, moved the same lock of hair she’d shifted before. He pressed himself against her. If he’d been a younger man, she was sure she’d have felt an erection, but there was nothing. Not yet. He bent to kiss her and she let it happen, let his lips brush hers for just a second before she bit him. Just a playful nip.
He drew back, eyes wide as he prodded his lip, then glanced at his fingers. No blood. Not this time. Cassie let him see the danger in her smile and Massarsky nodded in approval.
“I did say we all have our kinks,” she reminded him.
He grinned, then glanced at his watch. “We’ll get to your kinks. But I promised you this story. I’ll keep it short. The clock’s ticking.”
“What does time have to do with it?” she asked.
Massarsky turned toward another case, two down from the sword that had killed the unlucky horseman. This case was smaller, and empty.
“There’s nothing in it,” Cassie said.
“That’s not strictly true.”
She moved closer and realized he was right. At the back of the case was a small wooden object, some sort of display stand—though there was nothing on display. Flat on the bottom of the case was a photo still from It’s a Wonderful Life, a shot of a very scruffy, wild-eyed Jimmy Stewart.
“Were you robbed?” she asked, turning toward him. “I mean, I told you it was my favorite, but what am I missing?”
Massarsky’s eyes clouded. “I’ve been robbed, yeah. A few years back. But it wasn’t this case. Inside this case is the greatest thing that’s ever come into my collection.”
“You said a murder weapon. I see a photograph.”
He stroked her neck, ran his hand along her back and over her ass. “You’ll never believe me.” His voice deepened. “Not at first.”
Cassie sighed impatiently and glanced toward the door. He saw that, too. For a man with his reputation, James Massarsky seemed to notice a great deal, even if his attentions were mainly focused on his precious collection and wanting to fuck her.
“This is your favorite movie,” Massarsky began. “So I know you remember this scene.”
“Of course. This is in the alternate reality, where George Bailey was never born. He and Clarence go into the bar, but it’s like a nightmare version of what it used to be. Even the bartender’s horrible. The angel orders a Flaming Rum Punch. I remember that because I tried it once.”
Massarsky looked impatient now, glancing at his watch again. “So here’s the story. The girl who played Violet, Gloria Grahame…rumor had it she was sleeping with a guy named Tommy Duggan at the time, and got him a job as an extra on the film. He’s in the background in a few scenes, just barely there. No lines, nothing, but if you had a picture of Duggan and you freeze-framed your way through the picture the way I have, you’d find him. They mostly cut him out.”
“Cut him out? An extra? Why would they bother?”
Massarsky grinned. A shark’s grin. For the first time, she was nervous.
“This scene…they shot it on Christmas Eve. Trying to get it in the can before they broke off for the holidays. They were shooting late. Understand that Duggan had a reputation as a tough guy. Maybe he did some work for organized crime or maybe people just didn’t like him. Either way, in the midst of that crowd scene, when they’re all jammed around George Bailey and Clarence the An
gel, the camera drifted past Duggan and then he was out of the frame. It was midnight when that happened. Exactly.”
Cassie felt her throat tighten. Her heart had begun to race. It seemed colder in the room than it had before.
“What happened at midnight?”
“Someone stabbed Duggan in the back, nicked his spine and punctured a kidney and twisted it. Thing is, in a room full of people, everyone was focused on the main actors, so nobody saw who did the deed. There were four or five people close enough to Duggan to have stabbed him and the police had suspects, but they could never prove a thing. Duggan fell on his face with the knife sticking out of his back. A dozen people were staring at him, saw the blood starting to pool. The guy playing Nick the bartender started swearing—Henry Travers, who played Clarence, remembered that. They were staring at that knife…and it just vanished.”
Cassie shuddered and stared into the case. She wanted to touch the glass, reached out to do so, but then hesitated. Massarsky kept these things sparkling clean and she didn’t want to mark it up.
“That’s not possible,” she said, though she knew her voice sounded hollow.
“I didn’t think so either, but I’ve shown this case to people on Christmas Eve at least half a dozen times. They all see it. They think it’s some kind of trick, some fucking smoke and mirrors David Blaine bullshit, but it’s real.”
Cassie frowned. “Go on.”
“We’ve got maybe a minute before midnight. When the clock strikes twelve on Christmas Eve, you’re going to see that knife appear, right there in the case. For sixty seconds, exactly. One minute. And then it’s gone for another year.”
Entranced, she stared into the case. “Where did it come from?”
“I’ve heard a dozen stories, most of them about magic and deals with the devil, but it’s all just mythmaking as far as I’m concerned. Maybe one of those stories is true, but I’ll never know which one. And it doesn’t matter. The best part of the story is the murder of Tommy Duggan.”
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