Bartholomew 02 - How to Marry a Ghost (6 page)

I faced up to the fact that I felt threatened. There was a new breed of ghost for hire and for the first time I felt just a little bit past it. To begin with I could rationalize Bettina’s success by telling myself that the jobs she landed were the fluff stuff, writing the memoirs—
Memoirs? Ha! More like the teenage diaries
—of MTV chart toppers or someone hailed as the next Paris Hilton.

There was a role for her as ghost for the youth market. But then she snatched a job I coveted from right under my nose, that of ghosting the autobiography of a respected BBC newscaster with an addiction to painkillers.That certainly wasn’t a good fit for the youth chronicler niche and I felt the unfamiliar stirrings of ri-valry, so much so that the first thing that came out of my mouth when I went to Genevieve’s office for a meeting to discuss future work was:

“What’s Bettina working on at the moment?”

Genevieve is a treasure. She is always brisk and efficient but she is also mumsy. There’s no other word for it. She mothers me in a way my own mother never has. There I’ll be in her tiny Covent Garden office, 5' 8" tall with my long Madonna (not the singer!) face and my willowy frame inevitably encased in the most minimalist clothes I can find, fretting about what my next job will be. And there she’ll be, 5' 2", fussing around me in pastel-colored suits. And even though she is tiny, with dainty feet and hands, she is also
enormous,
like a pretty little hippo in sugary camouflage. But she is so comfortable with her bulk that she almost makes me want to gain thirty pounds.

And she is the only person, apart from Tommy, who under-

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stands that I’m neurotic and antisocial and that I prefer to live vicariously through other people, which is why ghostwriting is so perfect for me. But ever since Bettina had been on her books, I’d had the sense that she wasn’t quite as
there
for me as she had once been.

“What’s Bettina doing?” she echoed, lifting a little bottle of Evian to her rosebud lips and taking a tiny sip. “Nothing, dear.

She’s just finished the newscaster book and she’s currently in New York for an interview. She’s been there awhile actually, two or three weeks. Went there for a holiday and then this job came up.”

“Genevieve, I want you to put me up for it too,” I said.

She blinked in surprise and immediately protested. “You don’t even know what it is. And it’s not right for you, Lee. Anyway, as I just said, it’s in New York.”

“What’s that got to do with it?” I was feeling very tetchy. “I know New York. I’m going there next week anyway because my mother lives there now and she’s getting—” I let it dangle because I couldn’t say she was getting married and I still hadn’t quite got to grips with the partnership affirmation thing. “I could stay with her.” I made eye contact with Genevieve and held it until she looked away. “So who is it?”

She shrugged. “Shotgun Marriott. Not your thing at all.”

“Why should it be Bettina’s thing and not mine?” I leaned forward to stare in outrage at Genevieve across her desk. “Well?” I said when she didn’t reply.

“Oh all right,” she said finally, “it might be something for you but Bettina does have a history with this guy.”

“She knows him?”

“Not exactly. When I first took her on as a client she told me the one person whose book she wanted to ghost was Shotgun Marriott’s. She said she’d tried to nail him—her words—once

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before a few years ago but he wasn’t interested in doing a book.

She said she was alerted to the idea of doing his story when she was ghosting the tell-all book by Patsy White, Smokey White’s wife, remember?”

I nodded. Smokey White, another rock legend, had made the mistake of dumping his wife who had promptly dished the considerable dirt on their marriage to Bettina.

“Well, Patsy had been on the road with Shotgun and his wife and she hinted to Bettina that there was a story to tell about the Marriott marriage.”

“So what happened?”

“Nothing as far as I know. Bettina said she did some digging around at the time but since neither Shotgun nor his ex-wife would talk to her, she didn’t get very far. So it’s understandable that when a rumor started to spread about a month ago that Shotgun wanted to do a book, she was determined to be first in line to ghost it. She said she was going to America on vacation but I shouldn’t be surprised if she went there just to be strategi-cally positioned geographically when he was ready to start interviewing.”

“But she hasn’t actually got the job yet?”

“Well, I haven’t heard anything,” Genevieve conceded.

Well, that was it! I’d been dithering at the thought of attend-ing my mother’s ceremony, telling myself I shouldn’t go out of some kind of deep-rooted loyalty to my father, but the next day I called my mother and told her I was on my way.

But now, as I wandered about the mausoleum a couple of days after my mother’s ceremony, dwelling on the drama of not one but
two
bodies being found with a connection to Shotgun Marriott and fretting about the fact that I still hadn’t had a summons for an interview with him, I began to give up hope. Bettina had got there ahead of me and yet again she had landed the job.

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I wished it could be me all alone in the pool house instead of Rufus. I needed a place where I could hole up and be on my own for a while. I’d had enough socializing and excitement over the last few days to last me a lifetime and if I didn’t get some space and private time to recharge my batteries, pretty soon I’d begin to freak out.

I was right about the dust sheets in the mausoleum. The day after the beachfront ceremony, all the furniture on the ground floor had been covered up except for the breakfast room beside the kitchen. I set up my laptop there and settled down to wait. I went for long walks from one end of the sweeping curve of the bay to the other, cursing the fact that I had not brought a swimsuit. I had no car in which to explore the area and while Rufus was an angel, coming back from work in the evening bearing steaming aluminum cartons of delicious take-out food to share with me, during the day I felt somewhat cut off from reality.

He brought tantalizing bits of gossip about the recent deaths.

“There’s no freakin’ word on who she is,” he said, plunging his hand into a pile of barbecued ribs with such relish that he evoked a painful vision of Tommy who had a habit of getting more food on his face than in his mouth. “Shotgun Marriott’s place is off limits to the world. There are police lines wherever you look.”

“Is he there?” I asked.

“They say he is but no one’s seen him. The press are camped out on Cranberry Hole Road but no one’s given them anything yet.”

The next day I went for an early morning walk along the beach to the far end of the bay where I caught a glimpse of something yellow in the woods. The mist was still coming in off the water and I thought maybe I had imagined something but looking closer, I saw it was a police line.This had to be the edge of Shotgun’s property. I hung about for a few minutes feeling edgy and

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then I saw them searching the area, dogs straining at their leashes.

One man looked up and saw me and said something to another and they started coming toward me. I turned and ran. It was pure instinct and after a few seconds I slowed to a jog, imagining it must look very suspicious.Were they coming after me?

But when I looked around, the beach was empty. I arrived back at the Stucco House, as Rufus told me they called it—I thought

“mausoleum” a much more appropriate name—and found a note on the kitchen table from Lucia. “Jenny called.” Who was Jenny?

Oh,
Genny,
as Genevieve liked to be called.

“So,” she said triumphantly when I called her back, “it’s a go.

You got the job.”

“I did? But I haven’t even had an interview.” Now that it had happened I was amazed. “He didn’t want Bettina?”

“Apparently not.You know, I’m not talking directly with him.

With someone like him, you deal with their ‘people.’ But now I come to think of it, they didn’t mention Bettina. It’s odd. I’ve been calling them every day for some kind of reaction about either you or Bettina and the last time I spoke to them, I mentioned that you were out in East Hampton. I said you’d need two or three hours’ warning if you had to go into the city to meet with him. Anyway, it turns out he’s out there too. They called back pretty quickly and said he wanted you. And he wants to see you right away. Have they buried his son yet? It’s all over the papers in London this morning. Dreadful!”

“He’s being cremated this morning,” I said, repeating what Rufus had heard on the grapevine.

“
This morning?
Good God, and he wants to see you the same day!”

“For an interview?”

“They were talking as if you were already hired,” said

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Genevieve. “Call his office in the city and they’ll tell you where to go.”

“What time?” I reached for a pen. My hand was shaking slightly. Going to meet a subject for the first time the day he had cremated his son. It was almost unthinkable.

But Genevieve was moving right along. “Two o’clock and if you find out where Bettina’s got to, let me know. She seems to have vanished off the face of the earth. Her cell phone’s been turned off for days. For once I’m going to have to tell her she hasn’t got the job.”

This should have been music to my ears but when I hung up I was feeling weirdly uneasy.

For good reason.

Rufus swung by the house about an hour later.

“I came by to show you this.” He flashed the
New York Post
in front of me. I caught the headline: gal pal dead in shotgun's woods. woman's body found 24 hours after son dies in wedding dress.

And below it was a blurred but easily recognizable photo of Bettina.

I sat down suddenly. I hadn’t exactly been Bettina’s biggest fan but I was deeply shocked and when I told Rufus about the connection, I could see that he was too.

“She was there for a job interview? The stories in the press make it sound like she was there on a date. Anyway, I’d better draw you a little map of how to get to Shotgun’s place,” he said.

I guessed he was being practical to cover his nervousness. “It’s quite complicated. I mean you could walk along the beach and through the woods but it’s probably more professional to arrive via the front entrance.”

“Assuming I really do have the job,” I said, hesitating a little at

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the very thought of what it might entail, “I’m going to have to find somewhere to live around here.”

“You mean you don’t want to stay in this cozy little nest?”

“I’m not sure I—”

“Just kidding.” He smiled. “When I was a kid I was always outside on the beach. I never noticed what a miserable place it was.

Don’t worry, we’ll find you somewhere.”

Later that day I mentioned the possibility that I might be staying out on Long Island in a phone call to my mother and she whooped in excitement.

“But Lee, that’s utterly perfect. You can oversee the building of my house because God knows I won’t have the time to come chasing out there every five minutes.”

I noticed it had now become
her
house even though the Phillionaire was paying for it—and what exactly was it that would keep her so busy that she couldn’t take a quick helicopter ride to monitor progress herself?

“I’m going to redecorate Phil’s apartment,” she said by way of explanation, “it’s so fuddy-duddy. I’m going to gut it and start from scratch.”

“What does Phil say about that?” I had thought his Fifth Avenue apartment the epitome of good taste and how anyone could say his state-of-the-art kitchen was fuddy-duddy was beyond me.

“Oh, Phil thinks it’s a blissful idea.We’re going to take a suite at the Carlyle. Now let me ask him what you should do about a place to live out there and get back to you.”

As it turned out it was Phil himself who came back to me within the hour.

“It’s a bad business,” he said, referring to Bettina’s death. “You sure you want to get mixed up in the life of this character?”

“I can’t afford not to,” I told him, glad that we weren’t face to face so he couldn’t tell how shaky I was about the possibility of

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being even remotely involved in a murder investigation. “Shotgun Marriott’s story will be red-hot material now and I’ll be right in the thick of it. I have a chance to make my career take off into the stratosphere and I can’t afford not to take it.” I was rather pleased about the
career taking off into the stratosphere
bit. I waited for Phil to be impressed by how ambitious I had become.

“You’re a ghost, not a ghoul.” He said it so quietly I had to strain my ear to the receiver. “It’s the type of assignment that Bettina woman would have relished by the sound of things but you’re too nice, Lee, too”—he paused—“too gentle.”

“I—am—not!” I shouted down the phone, offended that he should think me less able to do the job than Bettina. “I’m very tough. I can handle it, easy. I’ll do a terrific job.”

“I’m sure you will,” he said. “I’m just not so sure you’ll come out of it unscathed. But anyway, it’s your decision and Vanessa tells me you need somewhere to live. Listen up, I’ve got a suggestion. Put Rufus on the line, will you, please?”

Rufus listened for a while and then smiled. “Sure thing, Dad.

I’ll take her over there right away. Come on,” he said when he’d hung up, “I’ll show you where you’re going to live.”

I followed him out of the back of the house, stepping off the veranda and down a trail through the beach grass to the bay.Then we turned left and took the walk along the beach I had come to know so well. But after about seven minutes, Rufus suddenly turned inland again up another sandy trail through the dunes.