Hollywood Hills (Medium Mysteries Book 3)

by Eve Paludan

  “We are. It’s a fast-growing industry, and I’m happy to have an audience who is always hungry for more of my movies. Well, more of our movies. I have a great cast, and I set us up for profit sharing. I make the same money as my cast and crew. We’re equal partners in our production company.”

  “What an amazing concept.”

  “It is and it does work. For me. For us.”

  “What kind of movies do you produce?” I asked.

  “Shorts. Sexy horror movies, so far. It’s a mash-up of romance and horror, but no full-frontal shots, nothing like that. It’s really about the plots and the hopefully engaging characters. Ed Wood is one of my heroes, if you know who he was.”

  I nodded.

  “And Jamie Lee Curtis. Our current leading lady can scream just like her.”

  “Very cool!” I replied. “I do remember Ed Wood’s movies. And, of course, Johnny Depp playing him in the biopic was just over-the-top amazing. And Jamie Lee Curtis, scream queen. It’s good that you found someone who can scream like her.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Sounds like fun stuff you do for a living,” I said. “Fake blood and stunts and all that movie magic?”

  “For sure. Monday morning, we start shooting a new movie on location. It’s nearby, right here in the Hollywood Hills, so I’m not sweating any travel arrangements. I rented the location for a week. The screenwriter and actors are all people I know. We’ve made movies together for a couple of years and we all love what we do. I kill them in one movie and bring them back in the next one.”

  I laughed and nodded for her to continue.

  “It’s great fun for the fans, too, to recognize the ensemble cast in movie after movie. As director, I rotate the leading man and leading lady parts from one movie to the next to give everyone a turn to play the leads.”

  “An ensemble cast with rotating lead parts. Brilliant.”

  She grinned. “I think so, too. Remember the old Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney movies where friends would get together to ‘put on a show’?”

  “Yes. A movie within a movie.”

  “It’s a bit like that. We often have as much drama behind the scenes as on camera, but we all love-hate each other at different times.”

  “What’s with the hate?” I asked.

  “Oh, we have relationships with each other until we break up and then we couple up with someone else. We scramble the relationship dynamics of our group as much as we do the parts that play out on the YouTube screen. And then, when we run out of partners, we start over again.”

  I laughed. “Your business actually survives that?”

  “So far, it has. No one has died of heartbreak yet. And we’re all very dedicated to our art. ‘The play’s the thing,’ as Shakespeare once said. People do go off and cry when they’re hurt or mad. Me, too, I guess. But we always come back together for the next film. I guess we are moviemaking addicts. A little geeky and a lot neurotic.”

  “What troopers you are,” I said. “What’s the new shooting location like?”

  Her eyes lit up with excitement. “This one is amazing. It’s a house that was also one of the locations for a Bogart film, back in the day. It’s a swanky multi-level mansion that hangs off the side of a cliff. Fire pit in the living room. Balconies. Pool view of the Hollywood Hills. Open kitchen. I wish I could buy it, but they won’t sell and, of course, I wouldn’t have that kind of money anyway. The whole cast is going to stay there—overnighting it for the entire filming week—just to be immersed in the setting and get going early every morning without having to wait for latecomers.”

  “Sounds intriguing,” I said. “To live on set.”

  “It’s one of the best things about our company, to have no separation of real life from movie life during filming. I can’t wait to explore all of the house’s nooks and crannies for filming. And feel the vibes of the people who have been in the place.”

  “Since Bogart filmed there, I’ll bet that house is just imbued with history and maybe a little energy here and there.” I was intrigued.

  “It’s been a popular location for many movies for years and years. As they say, if only the walls could talk.”

  “If only,” I said, half-smiling at the irony. “You love what you do, I can tell.”

  She talked with her graceful hands, too, waving them about. “Yes. I’m passionate about my work, which has become my life. Except for my potential problem with coke—that I hope I am nipping in the bud this weekend—everything is falling into place for me.” She clapped her hands in a movie director-ish way. “Anyway, enough about me. So, what do you do, Pauline?”

  I smiled. “I’m a psychic. Well, a medium, really.” I conveniently left out the part where my medium powers were more than half-gone because of my drinking.

  “A psychic? A medium? No way!” She raised her perfect eyebrows, blinking away sweat from her long, blonde eyelashes.

  “Give me your hand again and see if I’m the real thing,” I said, hoping I had enough medium juice left in me to actually read her.

  She stretched it out gingerly, and I felt her doubt rise as I clasped her shapely hand in mine.

  “Think of your childhood.” I tried to focus. When she closed her eyes and sighed, I let her multi-entity private history pour into my head for a good twenty seconds as I breathed deeply and slowly in the hot sauna. There was a lot of shocking stuff. A lot.

  I looked at her lovely Scandinavian-type face and said, “You were raised, for your early years, in a nudist camp, east of a desert town surrounded by four mountain ranges. You and your mom lived in a non-religious hippie commune at the east end of a long dirt road flanked by saguaro cacti. You don’t know who your father is, and your mom is one of the original flower children of the sixties. You never even went to public school until you were twelve.”

  She gasped and pulled her hand away. “No one knows any of that. No one. But I guess you could have dug it up somewhere. Somehow.”

  “Dug up? No. I’m a real psychic and medium. Believe what you want, though. I encounter skeptics, but I respect their right to doubt because there are a lot of fakers in my business.”

  “Yes, there are. I’ve given my money to more than a few of them, and they, indeed, turned out to be fakes.”

  “Hence, your skepticism of my claim.”

  She looked scared for a moment. “If that’s true, that you’re the real deal, then tell me something that no one else could possibly know,” she challenged and shut her eyes to concentrate. Her lush lips quivered as she waited for my proof.

  Again, I firmly clasped her slender, smooth hand with its perfect French-manicured nails and said, “When you were eleven years old, you killed a man who…hurt you.” I paused. “And your mom helped you get rid of the body.”

  Chapter Three

  She pulled her hand out of mine as if burned. “Oh, my God, Pauline. Do you know you are the only one who knows this?”

  “It’s not the kind of thing you would put out there on blast. I’m so sorry you were…hurt so badly…that you had to do what you did to defend yourself. And at such a young age, too.” I shook my head, shocked.

  “You saw it in my mind?” she asked and swallowed hard.

  “I saw it, yes. It was clearly self-defense. Brilliant use of a harmonica as a defense weapon.”

  “It’s what I had in my pocket when he attacked me.”

  After a moment or two, I said, “I’m not judging you, Amanda. I’m so sorry all that happened to you. Are you doing okay now?”

  She wiggled her head in a yes-no motion and said, “I have my days, even though that’s old baggage. I guess anything else I tell you now would pale in comparison.”

  “Not so. I’m a good listener. And I am a medium. But I don’t pry. I mean, if you don’t want to talk about things.”

  “Hey, it will feel good to talk about it. You saw I’m innocent by reason of self-defense. And I was a child when it happened.”

  “The perp was pure evil.” I s
huddered because I realized that one of the entities in her was the spirit of that perp. “Do any therapists know your big secret?”

  “No,” she shook her head, “no one knows what happened that day. Except my mom. We don’t talk about it. Ever. Not since that day.”

  I nodded. My heart hurt for her, and I waited for her to talk about it or not talk about it.

  “There’s really something about you that makes me want to tell you all of my deep, dark secrets,” she said.

  I replied, “A lot of people say that about me. They trust me.”

  She weighed me with her eyes. “I trust you, too. I guess we’ll be here all weekend. So, here goes. A little backstory, right?”

  I nodded politely as Amanda spoke.

  “I was conceived in mild scandal, possibly in a free-love event at a nudist camp at the east end of Speedway Boulevard in Tucson, Arizona. When I was born, my mother named me after a famous Spanish horror film director named Amando de Ossorio. I know he isn’t my dad. I mean, I don’t know who my dad is, but she was crazy for his Spanish films so she named me after him.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said politely.

  She paused. “No one knows this stuff except my mom.”

  “Again, you don’t have to tell me,” I said, trying to let her off the hook if that was what she wanted.

  “No, Pauline. I do have to tell you. I want you to know who I am.”

  “Why?”

  “Because—for some unknown reason—I feel like we are important to each other in some grand scheme of something that is supposed to happen.”

  “Oh, are you psychic, too?” I was intrigued.

  “Only a little. I have premonitions and things like that. Déjà vu. I wish it were more. And I wish I understood it more.”

  “I feel that way, too, that I wish I was more psychic,” I admitted, “but just out of curiosity, do you feel this trust with anyone else?”

  “No. Just you. No one else knows this big secret. Except my mother.”

  “Is she still alive?”

  “Yeah. She is. She’s a real estate broker in Tucson. Or she was. I don’t know what she does now.”

  “You don’t talk anymore?”

  “Not often enough. Our past is problematic, to say the least.”

  I nodded patiently.

  “So, Mom’s hippie name was Breezy and she changed it to Bree when she had to get work. She disconnected herself from the commune long ago, when I insisted on going to public school, as you mentioned, at age twelve.” Amanda paused again. “I wanted to play ball, in a uniform, on a team.”

  I smiled. “Did you play ball?”

  “Yes. I was so good at it. I loved it.”

  “Do you still?”

  “Yes. I play softball for fun on a women’s city league. I’m the shortstop. But I digress.”

  “The commune? What happened to it?” I asked.

  “It’s no longer a hedonist free-for-all getaway for University of Arizona students with a penchant for carefree sex and for filching buds from its expansive pot gardens. The nudist camp and pot fields gave way, in time, to tile-roofed condos, timeshare casitas, and pretentious dude ranches whose Olympic pools were rated higher than their trail rides by the vacationing petite bourgeoisie.”

  I laughed. “You have a way with words.”

  “I’m not just a filmmaker. I’m a writer, and if you never heard it before, you should know that writers are full of themselves. The more words you write, the better chance you have to change the world. You should write. It would open up your mind to amazing possibilities.”

  I laughed again. “Maybe I should. Someday.” I visualized her childhood home. “The four mountain ranges I saw in your head. That’s what surrounds Tucson?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “It can be,” she said cautiously. “But beauty isn’t enough. When ugly things happen, you want to bury them and leave.”

  I got a psychic flash of young Amanda and her mom burying a man’s body in a hog pen. I accidentally bit my lip and raised my hand to my mouth to see if it was bleeding. It was. I pressed against it for a few moments until it stopped bleeding. I suddenly said, “Mandy?”

  “Wow, you even know my nickname. From when I was a little hippie brat.”

  I nodded.

  She continued, “After we packed up and left, we moved to West Tucson, out to this little trailer park on South La Cholla Boulevard where we had a big yellow dog that wandered up one day and became our bodyguard. Mom had no boyfriends because of what had happened to me. She was too scared to trust anyone in her life again until I was an adult.”

  “Gosh, you have been through a lot. Your mom, too.”

  When she paused, I squeezed Amanda’s hand gently to comfort her.

  She squeezed back and let go. “No pity. I’m all grown up now. No one can hurt me again. Not like that.”

  I gave her an understanding nod.

  She continued, “So, I started going to school on a big yellow bus. I blasted through all of my classes and graduated high school at sixteen. Then I went to college in Europe on an arts scholarship. Afterward, with my shiny new film degree, I found a lot of work and finally, I made some movies in Europe. Spaghetti Westerns. It was a blast. I love horses. I grew up with them in Tucson.”

  I listened, trying to absorb all of her facets.

  “Do you ride, Pauline?” she asked.

  “No. The few times I’ve been around horses was to try to do some medium work with animals.”

  “Was that fun?”

  “Neigh. Neigh.”

  Amanda laughed at my corny joke.

  “Sorry, it’s not fun for me. I love animals, but I don’t know how to even understand horse talk. I am a people medium. Sadly, I’m eternally crippled by being monolingual. For example, if a Portuguese-speaking ghost shows up, I’m hosed. I don’t speak dog or cat, either.”

  “I speak several languages, but it’s good to know what you are and what you aren’t. Sometimes, boundaries are simply walls, not roads.”

  “Amen to that. So,” I said, “when you went to Spain, you found Amando de Ossorio.”

  Her mouth dropped open. “Yes, Miss Know-It-All!”

  I smiled. “Was he your dad?”

  “No. He’d never even met my mom. She was just a crazy fan.”

  “I’m sorry. You must have wished for a dad, a male role model.”

  “It’s okay. Amando was my superhero. If I could have picked a father out of the air—and I sort of did, well, after my mom told me who I was named after—it would have been him. He was a fantastic human being. I only met him once, at a film festival. He was such a sweetheart. He gave me insider tips I’ve used to finance and create wonderful films.”

  “Holy cow, Amanda. How amazing.”

  “I know. I’ve led a twisted, but charmed life.”

  “I’ll say.”

  Amanda nodded. “So, fast forward a few years when my mom had breast cancer. I went back to Tucson to take care of her and she recovered, to her oncologist’s surprise. I stayed in Tucson for a while, at her house, writing screenplay after screenplay like a fountain of them was in me and leaking out of every orifice.”

  I grinned.

  “What a great opportunity, to just create endlessly.”

  “Yes. And I had so much joy that Mom was beating breast cancer so I was writing like crazy. During her treatments and illness and finally, her recovery, I had this freedom at her house to stay or go. Or write or work at a regular job. Whatever I wanted, she wanted that for me, too. My beautiful hippie mom. No one has ever been my champion like her.”

  “I’m so glad she survived.”

  “Me, too. You won’t tell anyone about what she did for me back then?”

  “Never.” I meant it. I even crossed my heart.

  She nodded. “I know you won’t tell. I have a good feeling about you, Pauline.”

  “Thanks. And after your mom was healed from cancer, you came out to
Los Angeles to act and ended up making movies, first as an actress and then you broke off to produce and direct your own flicks?”

  “You got it. My life story in a nutshell.”

  I gave her a curious gaze. “Wait a minute. What about friends? Lovers?”

  “The friends? I’ll tell you later.” She wagged a finger at me. “The lovers? Real ladies don’t kiss and tell. Not that I am that much of a lady.”

  “You’re one brave human being,” I said.

  “Not brave. I’m just really stubborn when I know what I want.”

  “I could use a little more of that.”

  We smiled at each other, and when you’re naked with a stranger, that is no small thing. I decided I liked Amanda very much.

  When the sauna timer went off to tell us to move to the next part of our de-toxing—a cleansing treatment—someone came to make sure we actually vacated the little room for the next two clients. And to ensure that we didn’t stay in there for too long.

  I didn’t see Amanda again for two hours as the herbal wraps were private and there was no talking. The sounds of singing whales played on a DVD as the bodyworker aimed to squish all the booze and tobacco out of my system and fill my mind with the songs of cetaceans who sounded…happy, if repetitious.

  As I relaxed in skilled hands, I thought about Amanda. I wanted to know more about her. I was so intrigued. And I sensed this connection with her, like some energy of hers was reaching out to tangle with my own chakras. How were we intertwined? I had to figure this out.

  We had herbal wraps to further suck out the poisons we’d shoved into our bodies, then our private showers in which we scrubbed ourselves raw with pink salt. Finally, after our glorious private Swedish massages, we reconnected in the pool area as if magnetized to each other. As if we’d missed each other. It was the darnedest thing. I couldn’t remember a time when I had felt so relaxed and serene. And so compelled to continue making a new friend.

  Now, we were sitting in our bathing suits—her in a white-and-gold, polka-dot bikini and a thin gold belly chain, and me in a new blue Catalina tank suit from Walmart. We sat on the edge of a sparkling swimming pool with our feet dangling in the cool water. I was mesmerized by the rippling patterns of light on the aqua floor of the pool. The sun was warm on my back, but not yet hot. It was the perfect day in the Hollywood Hills.