Loni, you will remember, is the hottie who stole me from my previous tabloid girlfriend, Ella Swift. Ella is a much bigger star than Loni, and snagging me was quite a coup for Loni. It boosted her profile enormously.
Both tabloid romances were dreamed up by my agent, Bruce Kravitz of PanCosmos Talent Associates back in Beverly Hills. Desperation Reef is a near-complete PCTA package—Bruce represents most of the talent and the writer who drafted the first script—a script I’ve never seen from a writer I’ve never met—as well as the other writer who rewrote the script and created the first ending, and the other other writer who wrote the second ending, the one that everyone hates but which will probably be used anyway.
Bruce also represents Ella Swift, and he put us together as tabloid lovers to generate headlines for us during a period when neither of us had anything in the theaters to remind viewers that we existed. For reasons best known to herself, Ella wanted to conceal the fact that she is a lesbian and in the middle of a passionate relationship with her hairdresser.
I have no idea why Ella wants to stay in the closet because to me the thought of her with other women makes her even more exotic and interesting; but I had no one else in my life right then and played along. So we were seen at premieres, parties, charity events, and the odd Lakers game, and I slept at her Malibu house two or three nights a week—in a guest bedroom, while she shared the master suite with the hairdresser.
Then Ella went off to South Africa to make Kimberley, about the diamond trade, and Loni, who is at the stage of her career when any publicity at all is good for her, agreed to become the other woman who broke Ella’s heart.
The triangle produced a massive number of Bruce-generated headlines, in which Ella wept to her friends, or broke down on the set of Kimberley, or flew to the States to beg me to come back to her. Some weeks the tabloids dutifully reported that Loni and I were fighting on the set, or had broken up; some weeks we were about to announce our engagement. Sometimes she’d catch me talking on the phone to Ella and be furious, and sometimes I secretly flew off to Africa to be with Ella.
I was always happy to see myself in the headlines, even if the stories weren’t even remotely true.
If you’re in the news, it means people care. I like it when people care. Seeing my name on the front page of the tabloids warms my heart.
But there are a few disadvantages to becoming such a tabloid celebrity, including the camera-carrying drone aircraft that paparazzi send buzzing over our living and work spaces. These are illegal, at least in the States, but you can’t arrest a drone; and if you can find and arrest the operator, all you have is a man with a controller, and you can’t prove that he’s done anything with his controller that’s against the law.
To me, the drones are cheating. As far as I’m concerned, the tabloids are supposed to report the stories our publicists give them, not start their own air force and find out stuff on their own.
Still, Loni had known what to do when the report came of a drone camera-bombing the hotel. She’d gone from her room to my cabana, as if for a rendezvous, and made certain that the Tale, or the Weekly Damage, or whoever, had their next story. Loni’s Secret Night Visits to Sean, or something.
“Is the drone still up?” I ask.
Loni looks at her handheld and checks the report filed by our nighttime security staff. “Apparently not,” she says. “The coast is clear.”
I walk up to her and help myself to a sip of her orange juice.
“You can stay if you like,” I say.
She offers a little apologetic smile. “I’ll go back to my room, if that’s okay. I need a few more hours on social media tonight.”
The aspiring star must network, or so it seems. “Have fun,” I tell her, and finish her orange juice as she heads for the door.
Exit, texting. Apparently I’m sleeping alone tonight.
Next morning I’m underwater, in scuba gear, doing about a zillion reaction shots. With the camera close on my face, I mime surprise, anger, determination, desperation, and duress. I swim across the frame left to right. I swim right to left. I go up and down. I crouch behind coral heads while imaginary bad guys swim overhead. I handle underwater salvage apparatus with apparent competence.
The director, an Englishman named Hadley, sits in a kind of tent on a converted barge and gives me instructions through underwater speakers. He’s not even getting his feet wet; all he’s doing is watching video monitors and sipping a macchiato made by his personal barista.
“Too small,” he says. “Make it bigger.”
“Too big,” he says. “Make it smaller.”
I hate the underwater stuff. We all do. I tried to convince the producers that we could do this all on green screen, but they didn’t believe me.
I’m done by twelve thirty, but the better part of four hours in the water has me exhausted, and the diver’s mask has scored a red circle around my nose and eyes. I’m lucky that everything was filmed at shallow depth, where there’s ample natural light, and I don’t have to go through decompression.
A powerboat takes me back to the hotel, and on the way I decide to stop by Loni Rowe’s room. I’d seen the call sheets that morning and noted that the shooting schedule’s changed and I’ve got a scene with Loni the next day. I want to talk to her about it—I’m thinking of giving her some of my lines actually, because they’re too on the nose, as they say, for my character but would be okay for her.
She’s got a ground-floor suite in one wing of the hotel, with a patio looking out on the beach, and on the patio is some lawn furniture where a bathing suit and some towels are drying in the breeze. The bathing suit is big enough to cover her whole body, like a wet suit, and aids the pale redhead in hiding from the sun. There’s a cardboard sign by the door with Loni’s name, L. ROWE, so that people from the production staff won’t wake someone else by accident.
I notice that the sliding glass door is cracked—a bird probably hit it, I think, a gull or something—and then I knock on the doorframe, open the door, and step into the air-conditioned interior.
Loni lies dead on the tiles. There’s not a lot of doubt about her status, because her head is a bloody mess. Her pink sundress is spattered with a deeper shade of red, deeper even than the red of her hair. A broken coffee cup lies on the floor next to her in a puddle of mocha liquid. There’s a cloying scent in the air that wraps itself around my senses.
I look around wildly to see if there’s anyone else in the room, particularly anyone with a weapon. There isn’t.
My heart pounds in my throat, and my pulse is so loud in my ears that I can no longer hear the breeze, the ocean waves, or my own thoughts. I’m not a complete stranger to dead bodies, but if I’m going to face death, I need more preparation.
I back out of the room and try to remember if I touched anything. As I back onto the porch I get a tissue out of my pocket, and I scrub the door handle. Then I shut the sliding glass door, and suddenly all the glass in the doorframe falls out and crashes to the ground in a huge pile of glittering rainbow shards. The sound is louder than the cry of a guilty conscience.
Again I look around wildly, but no one seems to be paying attention. I scuttle to my cabana, and then I do the obvious thing for someone in my position.
I call my agent.
“So Loni’s been shot?” Bruce says.
“Shot? I guess.” My gut clenches, and I bend over my dinette in a sudden agonizing spasm. “I don’t know how she was killed,” I say. “I only know she’s dead.”
“But you didn’t kill her.”
“No.”
He ticks off the next question on his mental list.
“Do you have an alibi?”
I try to think. Thinking is hard, because my mind keeps whirling, and my guts are in a turmoil, and I keep seeing Loni’s body crumpled on the floor in her pink sundress.
“I was on the underwater set all morning,” I say.
“So you’re fine,” Bruce says. There’s a tone of self-congrat
ulation in his voice, in the logical way he’s handling the crisis. “You’re in the clear.”
“Bruce,” I say, “these aren’t the Beverly Hills police we have down here. These aren’t kid-gloves kind of police. They might just pin this on me because I’m handy.”
“That’s why you only talk with one of our lawyers present,” Bruce says. “I’ll have someone on his way to you in a few minutes, along with a Mexican colleague.”
The gut spasm passes. I straighten. The panic begins to fade.
“Sean,” Bruce says, “do you think this might have been aimed at you? Because of, you know, what happened.”
What happened a couple years ago, when a surprising number of people were trying to screw up my comeback by killing me.
Bruce’s question sends a wave of paranoia jittering along my nerves, but then I consider the timeline of events.
“I don’t see how,” I say.
Because really, all those bad times are behind me, those times when I was traveling with bodyguards and hiding in hotel rooms and complete strangers were trying to stick me with kitchen knives.
I’m a big star now. People love me. Nobody wants me dead now except for maybe a few spoilsports.
“It’s all good, Sean,” Bruce says. “You’re absolutely in the clear. And we’ll make sure you don’t have any problems.”
“Okay. Okay.” A sense of well-being descends on me. Bruce Kravitz is an absolute wizard at conjuring up that sense of well-being. It’s how he gets things done and how he makes people happy.
“Now,” Bruce says, “you should tell somebody about the body.”
The paranoia returns. “Not the police!” I say.
“No,” Bruce says. “Absolutely not the police, you’re right. Are any of the producers on the premises?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll start calling and I’ll find out. Just sit tight and remember that you’re devastated.”
“Of course I’m devastated!” I say.
“I mean,” Bruce says firmly, “remember that you and Loni were supposed to be an item. It’s your girlfriend that was killed, Sean, your lover. You’ll have to be ready to play that.”
“Right.” In my panic and terror I’d sort of forgotten that everything the public knew about me and Loni was a complete fabrication.
“Can you do that, Sean? Can you play that part?” Bruce sounds like he wants reassurance, so I reassure him.
“Of course I can play that,” I say. “I liked Loni. I found the body. It won’t be hard.”
“Good. Now I’m going to make some calls, and I’ll call you right back.”
Once again Bruce’s voice conjures up that amazing sense of well-being. I thank him and hang up and sit down on a couch, and wait for what happens next.
What happens next is Tom King, the line producer. On a set, the line producer is the person who keeps everything running, who controls the budget and supervises the production—a job that requires the financial acumen of JP Morgan and the relentless tenacity of a TV cop. He’s experienced with big productions like this one, and the horrific, complex troubles they can cause.
He’s knocking on my door just as my phone rings, Bruce telling me he’s on his way. I open the door and let him in.
Tom King is a burly, balding man of fifty. He wears a white cotton shirt and Dockers, and he holds his phone in his hand. There’s an odd little triangular patch of hair on his philtrum, hair his razor had missed that morning.
He has intelligent blue eyes that are looking at me warily through black-rimmed spectacles, as if I might explode if not handled carefully.
“Bruce tells me there’s a problem,” he says.
“The problem is that Loni is dead,” I say, a little sharply. Because this isn’t some little issue in catering or shooting schedules that needs to be smoothed out; there’s an actual dead body lying in one of the rooms, and Tom seems to be regarding it less as a violent crime than as a tactical problem.
His blue eyes flicker. “Can you show me?” he asks.
“Why don’t you go and look for yourself?” Because I have no desire to see Loni dead again.
“I only know what Bruce told me,” he says. He is still regarding me warily, as if he’s suspecting me of hallucinating.
Unhinged speculation whirls through my mind. Maybe he’s used to actors going off the rails and hallucinating dead bodies. Maybe this happens to him all the time.
“Please,” he says.
“I’m not going inside,” I say.
“Okay. You don’t have to go in.”
We walk back to Loni’s patio. Her towels are still fluttering in the breeze. Tom steps onto the patio and shades his eyes with his hand to look inside. I stand a good fifteen feet away, where I won’t be in danger of seeing anyone dead.
“The door glass is shattered,” Tom says.
“I did that. The glass broke when I shut the door.”
He looks at the pile of glass and frowns. “I’m sure the code requires safety glass,” he says. Which is a line-producer sort of thing to say.
He gives me a look over his shoulder, seems about to say something, then decides against it. I know what he’s thinking: You broke the glass when you were fleeing the scene of your crime.
Fuck him, I think.
He opens the door carefully and steps inside, and I hear a sudden intake of breath. I step onto the patio, feeling the cool breath of air-conditioning escaping through the door, and as my eyes adjust to the shade I see Tom bent over Loni’s body. He’s touching her leg. He straightens, still looking down at the corpse.
“She’s cold,” he says. “She’s been here a while.”
Which lets me off the hook, as he well knows. He straightens and looks at me.
“Sean, I’m sorry,” he says.
“What happened?” I ask. “Do you have any idea?”
Now that he’s actually in the room, he doesn’t want to look at the body. I don’t want to look at it, either. We look at each other instead. And then I look past his shoulder, and I see the bullet hole in the wall behind him.
“Look,” I say, pointing.
Tom steps to the wall and looks at the bullet hole. My mind is starting to recover from its shock, and I’m able to process a few of the facts.
“The bullet went through the glass door,” I say, “and it hit Loni, and then it kept on going into the next room.”
He looks at the hole, and he nods, and then at the same instant the same horrifying thought occurs to the both of us. He spins around, his blue eyes wide.
“Who’s in the next room?” he asks.
We sprint clean around the building. I’m out of breath by the time I come to the room on the other side from Loni’s, with its neat cardboard sign, E. COUSTEAU.
“Emeline,” I pant. She’s one of the set dressers, a French-Canadian from Montreal. I jump onto her patio, and the sliding glass door is open, so I just walk in.
“Emeline!” I call. No answer. There’s a faint, sweet smell in the air.
At least there’s no body on the floor. But I find the bullet hole easily enough, and looking from the hole to the door, it’s clear that the bullet punched through the wall and flew out through the open door.
“What’s back there?” I ask, waving an arm.
“Swimming pool, and tennis courts beyond,” Tom says. “And if a bullet hit anyone out there, we’d know about it by now.”
“Emeline!” I call again, and I check the bedroom, but she’s not in. I return to find Tom standing pensively in the front room, staring down at one of Ossley’s printed bongs sitting on the table, next to a bag of bud, which explains the cannabis scent in the air. Thoughtfully, Tom confiscates both.
“I don’t think we want the police finding this,” he says.
“Check.”
He looks at me. “If you’ve got anything in your place, you’d better make it disappear.”
“I’m clean,” I say. “I never travel with anything that could get me
busted.”
That’s what the crew is for, for heaven’s sake.
“I’m going to have to call people,” Tom says. “You should go back to your cabana. And expect the police.”
“Bruce says he has a lawyer on the way.”
“Police will probably get here first.” He frowns at me. “Do you have any idea who’d want to kill Loni?”
“No. No one at all.”
“You and she were, you know, seeing each other,” he says. “She didn’t mention anyone?”
By now the shock is over and I’m getting pissed off. “She did not tell me she was being stalked by a killer, no,” I say. “Oddly, that did not come up.”
He’s a little surprised by my vehemence.
“Okay,” he says. “I believe you. But maybe you should go to your room now.”
Which I do. But not before a sense begins to come over me that I’ve been through all this before.
The fact is that people around me keep getting killed. I don’t have ill intentions to anyone; it just seems to work out that they die. When I look into my past, I see a lot of blood there.
I’ve only killed one person myself. Well, two. But nobody knows about one of them. And I had no animosity in either case.
I don’t get up in the morning thinking, “Well, who will I kill today?” I don’t intend harm to anybody. I never have.
I’d hoped all that was behind me. But now Loni’s been murdered by an unknown party for unknown reasons, and it’s all beginning to seem horribly familiar.
By the time the police interview me, late at night, reliving my old memories has me emotionally exhausted and discouraged and depressed, and I don’t have to act at all in order to seem like Loni’s stunned, grieving boyfriend. It’s only the knowledge that if I misstep, I might be blamed for everything that keeps me from lurching in the direction of the nearest tequila bottle and drowning in it.
The police interview goes better than I expected. Turns out that the production rates the best—very quickly the local cops are supplanted by the PFM, the Policía Federal Ministerial, who are the top investigators in the country. I’m interviewed by a very polite man in a neat gray civilian suit with excellent English skills. His name is Sandovál. He offers his condolences on my loss and records the interview on a very new recorder with a transcription function, that displays a written version of the interview on a nine-inch screen. The problem is that it keeps transcribing the English words as whatever Spanish words seem phonetically close, and the result is complete gibberish. He doesn’t know how to turn on the English function, if there is one, but he assures me that the audio recording will be all right.
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