Hollywood Boulevard (24 page)

    "I've been there. I had to ask three people on the street how to find it, down that underground parking below the Kodak Mall—"

    "Right. The clerk remembered the long box because of its odd shape; people don't usually mail flowers USPS. The guy hasn't got much to do — probably bored stiff— and he thought it could be a rifle— maybe a little excitement to his day— but the box didn't have the heft—"

    "Did he see who sent it?" The Detective took a beat. "Gee, I didn't think to ask."

    "Sorry."

    "It was a kid, maybe twelve years old."

    "A
kid
?"

    "Probably someone passed him a couple of bucks to drop it off, waited outside and took the receipt. We won't find the kid, but it would be someone seemed trustworthy, not to set off stranger- danger alarms, maybe even someone the kid knew. So it's likely somebody nearby. Could be Eddie."

    "Is that what you think?" "No."

"I don't know anybody nearby."

"Sure, you do; you're just not putting two and two together."

" Thank you."

    "For what? It's my job." He was quiet again for a couple of seconds. "That doesn't include what went on earlier. . . ."

    "Detective? No explanations required, remember?"

    "Sure."

    If he had more to say, he wasn't going to get the chance because Andre walked into the suite just then, trailed by Carola, looking more worried than ever. I said into the phone (my liar soldiers back on the job), "Oh, Dottie, Andre just walked in. I'll call you back?" I didn't wait for a reply. I hadn't bought my plane ticket. I hadn't prepared anything for Andre— whatever throes of remorse might hit me— having wanted to take the coward's way out. But never mind all that, what was he doing here at this hour? And he hadn't called first. Shave a couple of hours off and I could have been getting out of Billy's car, or Grant's room. At least I'd showered. I was glad Carola was with Andre so we didn't have to be alone, though they both looked pretty dog- drag miserable. "Andre, is something the matter?" (How could he possibly suspect anything; it
just
happened. . . .)

    Andre addressed Carola: "Drink?" She nodded. He pointed to the scotch bottle on the liquor shelf, and she nodded again. "Ardennes?" he asked me.

    "No, I don't think so." Andre was quiet as he got ice for two drinks, pouring a hefty amount of scotch into each glass. His face was set hard as he passed Carola hers. Would he confront me with her here? "Andre?"

    "Ardennes?"

    I felt the pit of my stomach tighten. The way he glanced at me,

quick but loaded. How could he know? Did I have guilt smeared all over my face? Could Alma have told? So soon? Not Sylvia? Someone from the production was here; saw me leaving Grant's room with the Detective? Oh, I'd have to come up with something huge. This was awful. . . . I don't think the best actor in the world could lie their way out of this one. Was I going to have to confess? Jump off the balcony? It wasn't as if Andre would start a big wronged- husband row, though he'd probably rather I'd gone to a different location. I just didn't
want
him to
know.

    "I've stopped production," Andre said. He downed his drink, poured another. "Carola, out of the kitchen. Come sit." He was standing at the table. She'd lagged behind near the door, as if she might make a fast dash for it. "Why is it so dark in here?" He pulled back the glass curtains; L.A.'s afternoon brightness spilled over the sitting room.

    "You shut down your movie?" That's what this was all about? I almost laughed with relief— but of course it wasn't funny.

    Carola sat on the couch, literally on the edge of her seat. I looked from Andre to her and back to Andre. He shrugged. Carola said, her voice barely above a whisper, "Andre— we— fired the actress."

    "No!" Fired Luce Bouclé? Oh, boy. This was the stuff tabloids dined on: "Production Halted: Actress Booted out on Her Fanny!" It was something every actor lived in dread of happening to them. I don't think Andre had ever taken such an extreme measure before. I felt almost as if it were me he'd sacked, but maybe that was the other issue, which for the moment, happily, was fully eclipsed.

    "Carola, not so gloomy. We are well rid of her; we will shoot around her scenes until she is replaced."

    Carola didn't look convinced. They'd probably been shooting around the lead for days. There was the bond company to consider, and how would the producers take the news? The film would begin hemorrhaging money, if it wasn't already. Not to leave out the actress herself: contract broken, her people in a fury.
Variety
and all the other rags would milk the story dry; focus especially, cruelly, on how the actress would try to save face.

    "Andre? What will you do?"

    "It must be contagious. You are gloomy too, Ardennes? I will find a way." He passed a hand along my guilty back, the same back Detective Collins had recently made his own.

    I moved away. "I'll see if there's anything to eat."

    "We are not at a funeral, no need for a spread," Andre said, looking into his second drink.

    Not quite a funeral, but any way you looked at it the situation was bad. I pictured Jonas Campion taking the news. Producers have heart attacks over less. Campion wasn't the type, but someone under him was going to choke on this one. Andre— if Campion could make it stick.

    "You're not concerned?"

    "Concerned, not hysterical," Andre replied nasally.

    "I'll get some cheese and crackers to go with the drinks," I said, heading into the kitchen.

T
he Christmas after Daddy died I sat in a chair for hours. I'd refused to go with my mother to my grandmother's, where aunts, uncles and cousins gathered as they always did for a gigantic meal and piles of gifts underneath an enormous, bright- as- day tree. How was I supposed to celebrate? How could my mother? I had no way to know it would be Grandma's last Christmas, and except for some childhood cats I'd had no experience of death.

    I was the only one I knew at school who wasn't freaked by the idea of my parents
doing
it. I mean, they didn't paw each other in front of me or act like sloppy teenagers, but they were organic, natural, so I wasn't grossed out by the idea of sex between "old" people. That Christmas my mother was alone for the first time since I'd known her. She must have been dead inside, but it wasn't her way to draw attention to herself. He'd been sick with leukemia, caught too late. After about a year of wasting away the disease suddenly accelerated, and the shock of seeing him gnawed alive from the inside was numbing. I was away at boarding school for most of the ordeal, so I only got to see him that way at Thanksgiving. He was gone the day after I returned to school and I had to turn right around and go back home.

    I'd been sent out of the city for the last three years of high school because my mother didn't like the tone of things for city kids those days. I don't think she thought I'd join a gang or anything moronic like that, but to me it felt like I was being hauled off to a Connecticut prison. It was actually all right at the all- girl revue, as we called it; I made more mischief there than I probably would have back in New York. I think Dad didn't like me being sent off either. I was only a two- hour train ride away and I came home any weekend I wanted. Still, I was the only one of my friends to be shipped out.

    Woulda, coulda, shoulda had no place in our little household. We were forward- thinkers who treated trouble as a nuisance to be weathered. The line we used when something really bad came along was
At least it's not the Ardennes
. Even when he realized he needed help, way past the subtle, then stronger signs of something wrong, my father said the six months they maybe could have salvaged for him with earlier rounds of chemo was not something to cry over. If he had one regret, it was his first wife. He wished he'd seen more clearly before they married that she was a depressive. Her mental states hurt him and eventually their kids and, of course, her too. He didn't understand depression. Who does? he asked. He regretted too that he probably hadn't cared enough, possessed sufficient compassion to stick by her. She became a cloud over the household. She got custody when they split up because at the time two things were true that aren't any longer: Depression was a matter of bucking up, and children belonged with their mother, almost no matter what.

    We had a conversation about all this one time because I told Dad my stepbrother was wacko and had threatened me. "He hates me, Daddy," I said. "Does he have to come here?" I was six, and my stepbrother, Alec, was about to graduate from high school.

    "Alec doesn't hate you. He's mixed up," Dad said. "Can you try to be nice to him anyhow?"

    "He's mentally ill!" I said. That was what we all said about anybody we didn't like in the first grade. That it might be true was meaningless because I didn't know what the words meant in the first place, but hearing that must have hurt Daddy. Alec was a troubled teen, but he straightened out in the army. He didn't see action like his father, but time stationed in Germany gave him a different perspective, I guess, because he took the GI Bill and became a legal advocate for soldiers. He behaved gently at Dad's funeral. He'd started to look like my father, which was very weird for me at the time. I guess Dad knew his son turned out okay. I don't know.

    I didn't mind my half- sister, Arlene, so much. She was older than Alec, so she'd basically always been an adult. I just assumed she'd started out that way and I had trouble with the idea that she was my sister. She always acted surprised when she and Alec came to see Dad— which by the time I was six was nearly never— that there was this little kid running around and that I was
her
half- sister. She painted my finger- and toenails pink once, wedged cotton wads between the toes and told me I had to blow on my hands and feet until the polish dried and to quit squirming. That's pretty much my whole childhood memory of her.

    Anyhow, I sat in a chair in my room for hours on end, not turning on a light as Christmas day waned into Christmas night, taking only bathroom breaks and trips down to the kitchen for milk and cookies. I wasn't thinking so much about my father being dead. I was thinking about myself and the promise I'd made him to go college. My mother had gotten me hooked on books early and I figured I could give myself as good a liberal arts education as any school could, and one that would mean something to me, so why should I waste time at a university? Dad wasn't against acting or the arts; he just knew what a tough life it could be. My parents didn't baby- talk me, and they didn't hide trouble when it came, like the insecure times when my father wanted to quit one job for another, or when he struck out on his own with insufficient financial backing. Our family didn't believe finances ruled. There was always enough to live on and sometimes— more often than not— plenty of money for the three of us to live well. If he could take chances, why couldn't I?

    So his dying sort of set me free. When my mother came home that night, laden with the gifts I hadn't been there to open, I let her know I'd be saving her a bundle because I wasn't going to school after I graduated. I would have dropped out anyway, I told her, so I was not blaming breaking my promise on Daddy's dying. She looked tired as I made my case, seated in her armchair on the other side of the round lamp table from Dad's armchair, in a corner of the living room with windows that overlooked the Hudson River. The armchairs were raised up on a little triangular platform— like a small stage— with a couple of Persian rugs instead of the wall- to- wall carpeting in the rest of the living room. I think the stage had been there when they'd bought the place, so I was used to it, but none of my friends' apartments had a stage. I stood where I always did, in the middle distance between the king's and queen's armchairs, just at the edge of the platform. It was where I'd stood for years, giving little declarative performances. My parents were my first audience, more so than the typical only child's attention seeking— which I effectively was, growing up. I hadn't sought their approval so much as I secretly watched to see how well I performed vis- à- vis their response. I even think they were complicit, or at least he was, calling me his little thespian when I came to them about a science project or a hated homework assignment, and maybe I hammed it up a little extra to please him. My mother would caution against showing off. Her sense of decorum was her own— not something lifted from a code of etiquette. Julia Thrush's carriage was impeccable right to the end, and, luckily, I inherited that from her, and her long legs. Her modulated voice was clear into her seventies, and she had a melodic laugh. When it came around to teenaged rebellion my problem was more about there being nothing to rebel against than anything they did that I found offensive. I'd slouch on purpose to annoy her; answer Dad in irritated monosyllables, but that didn't last long.