Obsession

by Susan Lewis

  ‘Isn’t it? But I’ve more or less decided that it must be him who tells me what he knows. I want to hear it from his own lips, that way I might stand a chance of getting to know what’s behind it. If I tell him Phillip’s my father, then for some reason I feel as though he’ll have me at a disadvantage. And if he doesn’t know, and finds out from me, I sure as hell don’t want him to be the one to tell Annalise.’

  Corrie could hear the smile in Paula’s voice as she said, ‘Do I take it from this that you’re no longer lusting after him yourself?’

  ‘Do me a favour!’ Corrie cried. ‘The man’s obviously some kind of pervert.’ She shuddered. ‘If you’d seen him with Octavia last night. I have to tell you Paula, I’ve seen and heard some pretty sickening things these past two weeks, but she, more than anyone or anything else, has left the worst taste in my mouth. There’s something about her that makes the most sordid whore you can imagine seem pure by comparison.’

  To Corrie’s surprise Paula was silent. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘I’m thinking about Ted Braithwaite,’ Paula answered steadily. ‘Has it occurred to you that he must have known who Annalise was when he put you in touch with her?’

  ‘Yes,’ Corrie answered, ‘I’ve thought about that. But I’m pretty sure his motives were genuine.’

  ‘Are you going to talk to him about it?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Not yet, anyway.’

  ‘And what about Annalise? Are you going to tell her who you are?’

  ‘No. That’s for Phillip to do. Which brings me on to the telephone call I received just before I rang you.’

  ‘Holy shit! What is going on?’ Paula cried, when Corrie told her. ‘It all sounds like one hell of a mess, Corrie, and I have to tell you that it frightens me a bit. At least, Luke does. I’m convinced he knows.’

  ‘You could be right. But as I said, I’m not going to be the one to confirm it.’

  ‘Doesn’t it make you want to get out of there?’ Paula said hopefully.

  ‘You’re dead right it does,’ Corrie answered. ‘And I would, believe me, if it weren’t for Annalise. I’m more afraid for her than I am for anyone else.’ Again she shuddered. ‘I just don’t understand how her own mother could have behaved the way she did right in front of her. And Phillip’s not going to do anything about it, that much is obvious. She doesn’t have anyone else, except me, and if I walked out now I’d never stop worrying about her.’

  ‘Well, I can understand that. But for my part, I’m worried about you. Why should Octavia have wanted you to know that she knew about you and Luke?’

  ‘To be truthful I don’t think it’s any more than that she got a kick out of it. She wanted me to know that she has more power over him than either me or Annalise. Well, she’s welcome to it, if that’s the case. But I don’t think she has. I think Luke is calling all the shots, and she’s just so wrapped up in herself, and her nauseating fantasies, she can’t even see what he is doing to her husband.’

  ‘There goes that word again,’ Paula said.

  ‘What, fantasy?’ Corrie sighed. ‘It’s one that’s starting to make me feel sick just to hear it. What ever happened to good old romantic dreams? Of meeting Mr Right and going off into the sunset together? These days my definition of fantasy is something that depraves the mind, makes you behave … Well, like Octavia. Anyway, I don’t think she’s the problem, I think Luke is, and I’m fascinated to know what he’s going to say about last night.’

  But when Corrie finally arrived at the office Luke didn’t even mention it. Corrie played along with his silence, keeping to her decision to say nothing until he did. But maybe her father would throw some light onto things when she saw him the following night. But any hope she had of that was dashed the next morning, when Phillip’s secretary called to tell Corrie that he couldn’t make it.

  Cristos Bennati, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans and his thin, pale cotton shirt billowing in the warm California breeze, was strolling around his pool terrace listening to the lead actors discussing their roles.

  As he paced he said very little himself, wanting, for the moment, only to glean how they saw their parts in this arcane story of Past Lives Present. It was going to be one difficult movie to shoot, with so many changes of period, special effects and stunts, not to mention the size of the cast, but what concerned him most was that the lead artists should have a clear and human concept of each character they were to play. That wasn’t going to be easy for Paige Spencer, who had never taken on a part so complex, nor so demanding before, but Cristos was certain that with the right help she would deliver. David Easton, on the other hand, who was unquestionably where the money was, Cristos knew he could rely on totally. Easton had a whole string of successes behind him, was as versatile an actor as Cristos had ever come across, and was one of the hardest workers, too.

  He was watching Easton now, using a hand to shield his eyes from the dazzling sun as Easton patiently went over what he saw as Paige’s character in her eighteenth century incarnation. Paige and the others were listening as intently as Cristos to Easton’s views, and though they were different from Cristos’s own, Cristos was more than ready to accept that Easton might have come up with an angle he’d not seen himself.

  A few minutes later Cristos was grinning. Sure enough, Easton had yet again pulled a rabbit from the hat. Easton was looking at him, grinning too and knowing that he had just impressed the hell out of his director.

  ‘You look like you’re gonna piss your pants with excitement, Bennati,’ Easton remarked, leaning back on his lounger and picking up the mineral water beside him.

  ‘If I didn’t think you’d do something to upstage me, I would,’ Cristos laughed. ‘Where the hell d’you get that idea from?’

  Easton shrugged, the shrug that had helped make him famous the world over. ‘Just came to me in the night, you know how it is. So what do you say, Paige, honey? Wanna try it my way?’

  Paige glanced at Cristos, who nodded his encouragement, then he crouched down on one of the steps to watch them run through the lines. There were other actors in the scene, and one by one Cristos nodded to them to come in too.

  When it was over Cristos roared with laughter and applauded. ‘Paige,’ he declared, ‘you could out-English Queen Elizabeth herself. The accent is terrific, babe, just terrific.’

  Paige was beaming. Cristos and Easton exchanged glances, and Easton gave an almost imperceptible nod of his head. At the outset Easton hadn’t been exactly overwhelmed by Cristos’s choice of leading lady, now, not for the first time, he was letting Cristos know that he had changed his mind.

  Cristos was pleased with his choice too. He liked Paige. She was easy to get along with, gratifyingly intelligent for a woman who coyly professed not to be, and, every bit as important as far as Cristos was concerned, never made the slightest attempt to seduce him – though both Cristos and Easton knew she was dying to. She’d have been wasting her time with Easton, for he was so happily married it was disgusting, but Paige had already made it more than plain that she wasn’t attracted to short men. Easton had yelled with laughter at that, a response that Cristos was more than a tad relieved at, since it wasn’t the most diplomatic thing Paige had ever said, and the whole world knew how sensitive Easton was concerning his lack of height.

  ‘OK,’ Cristos said, rubbing his hands together, as they finished, ‘I reckon we’ve about cracked it for today guys. David, Paige, d’you get the books on English social history Jeannie sent? Good, then let’s meet again Friday and talk about it some.’

  ‘I think make-up are dragging this l’il ol’ girl off to the wig-makers,’ Easton said, mimicking Paige’s drawl and mincing a path towards Cristos. ‘Kissy, kissy,’ he said, pouting his lips at Cristos.

  ‘Get out of here,’ Cristos laughed.

  He saw how nervous Paige’s laugh was and sensing that she was afraid they were making fun of her, he winked.

  ‘W
hat about you, honey?’ he asked. ‘You free on Friday?’

  She pulled a face. ‘Sorry, costume fittings.’

  ‘OK, that’s it then. All of you be ready to roll a fortnight Monday, you’ll have your schedules by then, but if you wanna discuss anything beforehand someone in the production office will know where to get hold of me.’

  ‘Got any idea yet when the shooting’ll start in Britain?’ Easton asked. ‘The lady wife wants to bring the kids along too.’

  ‘Sure. We’ll be there mid-November through December. Home for Christmas – if we keep to schedule. D’you find yourself a new assistant yet, or d’you want Jeannie to check out renting a house for you?’

  ‘Got myself someone,’ Easton answered. ‘She’s already on the pay roll.’

  ‘Good. What about you, Paige? Your assistant working out?’

  ‘Just fine,’ she answered. ‘But maybe we could have a talk about make-up.’

  ‘Sure.’

  Cristos walked with the others to their cars, accepted Easton’s invitation to dinner at his place that night, then stood in front of the house waiting until they had driven down through the gardens and out the gates. Easton was on his Harley Davidson, and hearing him roar off down Sunset Cristos smiled to himself. Easton was like a big kid with that bike, though Cristos might wish, just as Jane, Easton’s wife, did, that Easton didn’t ride it quite so fast. And Cristos wasn’t just thinking about the movie. He liked Easton and loved Easton’s kids, so he sure as hell wouldn’t want to see anything happen to the man.

  Cristos was still thinking about Easton as he wandered back round to the pool. Easton hadn’t been the most obvious choice for this movie, but Cristos trusted his talent like few others in this town. He was a volatile man, for sure, though Easton preferred to think of himself as a perfectionist. Cristos couldn’t argue with that, but he didn’t relish the thought of too many explosions on the set, when the need to keep to schedule was more pressing on this movie than on any other he’d made. He never failed to calm Easton down, and to be fair Easton wasn’t an actor to throw a scene unless he felt justified. But boy, when he threw one, he sure as hell threw one, and anyone in a twenty yard radius better run for cover. Cristos grinned. How many times had he heard the same thing said of himself? Paige, he knew, was already quaking in her boots at the prospect of becoming a target, either of himself or of Easton, which was probably why she had created a scene with the make-up guy earlier in the week. Nothing more than nerves, and now Cristos was going to smooth her ruffled feathers, just as he had Aidan’s when Aidan had reported the incident to him. Cristos felt it important he let Paige know that Aidan Starr was, in his opinion, the best prosthetics guy in Hollywood. Sure, she would have her own personal make-up artist, but Aidan was the guy whose job it was to rebuild her face, her hands, and even, for one scene, her breasts. That was what had caused the problem. It was Paige’s only topless scene in the movie, and she didn’t want the public thinking she had wizened breasts. Well, there was one easy way of getting over that, which was to make her topless in another scene, when she was playing a young woman. It wasn’t vital to the story that she did that, but Cristos guessed it would make her happy.

  It did, and it was all Cristos could do to stop himself laughing when she thanked him so gushingly. There would be more fireworks to come in the make-up department, he was sure of that, but they’d get through it. Paige was a pussycat at heart, she’d just felt it necessary to show a few claws to begin; she’d soon have them eating out of her hand. What Cristos had to be careful of though, was that he didn’t succumb to Paige himself. He sure was tempted, he couldn’t deny that, especially when she turned on that sultry look of hers and tousled that mane of red hair about her face. The first time she’d done it for the camera, during her test, he’d damned near found himself with an erection. Since then he’d kept himself in better check, but she was still getting to him. If he gave in he knew he’d never hear the end of it from Easton, which was as good a deterrent as any Cristos could think of.

  When Paige had gone, Cristos wandered up over the terrace, through the wide white arches of the villa and into the kitchen, to find Jeannie.

  ‘What’s cooking?’ he said, slapping her bottom as he passed.

  ‘paige Spencer, that’s who’s a-cooking,’ Jeannie grinned. ‘Boy, has that lady got the hots for you.’

  ‘How about telling me something I don’t already know?’ Cristos said. ‘Like, how the location boys are getting on over there in Britain.’

  Chuckling quietly Jeannie picked up her notebook from beside the salad washer, saying, ‘They reckon they’ll be ready by the time you arrive, but they need to know if the script revisions are going to affect anything. I told them I didn’t reckon so – it’s all dialogue stuff, isn’t it?’

  Cristos nodded.

  ‘OK, I’ll get back to them.’ She looked down at her pad and began ticking off her list of messages. ‘Casting have got a whole lot of talent lined up for you over there too. Freda, the line producer, is booking the British crew now, but she needs a list of who you want to take out from the States.’

  ‘We’ll get to work on that tomorrow, down at the lot with Freddy Burnside,’ Cristos answered. ‘What else?’

  ‘Uh-uh,’ Jeannie said, shaking her head. ‘Our darlin’ unit manager has just been diagnosed HIV.’

  ‘And that prevents him from working?’

  ‘’Fraid so. The insurance guys won’t buy it. I got onto Stan Rowlinson this afternoon, he’s taking over tomorrow.’

  Seeing little point in expressing his personal feelings about the insurance jerks, Cristos picked up an apple and biting into it, said, ‘Go on.’

  ‘Still with the insurance boys, they wanna discuss stunts – again! And Con Rosenburg wants a meet about the special effects for the dancing scenes. He’s got some problem with it, he says, and needs Richard to be there too, to discuss lights. And the costume designer. I’ve arranged it for Friday morning, unless you tell me otherwise. Oh yeah, and don’t forget you’ve got a meeting at the Black Tower tomorrow with god.’

  Cristos laughed. This was Jeannie’s way of referring to Bud Winters, the exec. producer, who, like all the other men of power at Universal, had their offices in the giant tower just off Lankershim Boulevard. ‘OK, is that it?’ he said, already heading out towards the annexe where the two screenwriters had been at work all day.

  ‘Just about,’ Jeannie answered. ‘Except Luke Fitzpatrick called to say he’d heard you were flying in to London next week and did you want to get together?’

  ‘Don’t bother to call him back,’ Cristos said, ‘And if he calls again, tell him I died.’

  He could feel Jeannie’s frown as he swung himself over the wall into the garden, but didn’t look back. If she knew what had been behind Fitzpatrick’s last visit she’d soon quit hassling him over the way he had treated the bastard. Perhaps he should tell her, after all, he had very few secrets from Jeannie and her husband, Richard. And he had nothing to hide. It was just that he didn’t much like discussing Angelique Warne. The whole thing was still, after all these months, too painful.

  Cristos had loved Angelique more than any other woman he’d known. And she had loved him – or so he’d thought. He wasn’t so sure now. But at the beginning it had been good … No, for the whole two years it had been good. It had only turned bad at the end, and then so quickly that Cristos could scarcely understand, even now, what had happened.

  He’d known Angelique took drugs, hell, they both did from time to time. Nothing heavy, just something to help relax them when they felt they needed it. As far as he knew she only ever took them when she was with him, but he’d learned, the night she died, that that wasn’t the case. It was also the night he’d found out about the other man.

  He could only thank God now, that Hank Robarts, the Los Angeles Police Department’s Chief of Detectives, was with him when Angelique had called from a hotel in Beverly Hills. Hank had been at the villa, advising him on the cor
rect procedure for certain scenes in the movie, and had offered to drive him to the hotel. Once there, Hank had sheepishly asked if he could have an introduction to Angelique, so Cristos had taken him up to the room.

  What had happened then was still pretty much a blur in Cristos’s mind, though he guessed he’d never forget the things she’d said in the minutes before she’d thrown herself to her death. It had all been because of an interview the Los Angeles Times had run that day, in which Cristos had confirmed that Angelique was not to star in his new movie, and that no, they did not have any plans to marry either. It was true, they hadn’t, though Cristos had known for months that he was the only reluctant party. Had it been up to Angelique they’d have been married long before, but Cristos just didn’t want to be married. He didn’t want to be another statistic on the Hollywood divorce annals, and that was the only way marriages headed in this town. They were happy as they were, he’d repeatedly told her, and saw no reason to change things. He knew now that the drugs had been responsible for inciting her paranoia, but that she should have taken matters to such an extreme … That she could have planned to hurt him as much as she had …

  She had started by accusing him of publicly humiliating her in using the LA Times to throw her over. Cristos, stunned by her misconstruction of what he’d said, had responded by losing his temper too. As they fought Cristos totally forgot about Hank Robarts, who, he later discovered, only stayed because unlike Cristos, he had noticed the drug induced glaze in Angelique’s eyes the minute they’d walked in the door. Like any good cop, he could sense when things were going to turn real nasty. And they had, pretty quick.

  It was only thanks to Hank that none of it had come out after. That the public would never know that Angelique Warne had been pregnant when she died. Cristos himself would never know now whose the baby was, since during their showdown she had told him about the senator. The man she had been sleeping with to make Cristos jealous. The pitiful part of it was that until that moment Cristos had never even suspected there was another man. But there was, the senator himself confirmed it later, in the privacy of Hank Robarts’ office.