Breaking Hollywood (11 page)

The world wasn’t going to hear their secrets from her.

Was it about to hear them from Marilyn McLean?

Sarah watched Davie now, so dignified, solemn. In the days since the phone call from Ed, she’d toyed with telling him, but hadn’t. He had enough on his plate. A new talk show. A top
reality show. A divorce. A recent scandal. A dead rock star. Some lunatic chucking blood at him after his show.

Was there a connection between Marilyn and Davie’s attack? Davie reckoned it was a teenage male who’d approached him, but that wouldn’t be hard for anyone, even a stranger in
town, to arrange. The streets of Sunset were awash with young guys who’d come here with stars in their eyes and ended up with cardboard boxes and aspirations that no longer went any higher
than renting themselves out for a few hours to earn enough money to eat. Everything was for sale here, no questions asked. Throw a bucket of blood at a celebrity? A hundred dollars and name the
location.

Thankfully, his people had bought up the video coverage from the fans who’d been there that night, so it hadn’t made it to YouTube. Davie’s security guys had analysed every
tape, but not one of them caught the face of the idiot behind the stunt. All they knew so far was that it was pig’s blood and some crazy had decided to make some kind of fucked-up statement
by splattering Davie with it. Bizarre. Crazy. But it confirmed that Davie had entirely enough to deal with for now.

If Marilyn McLean was about to come out of the woodwork, then Sarah had to be the one there waiting for her.

She’d protected Mirren, Davie and Zander before.

Nothing would stop her doing it again.

‘Forever Young’ – Rod Stewart

Davie

The assembled cast in Davie’s dressing room wore the faces of the seriously irked.

Al Wolfe, uber-agent extraordinaire. Small but wiry, impeccably tailored in suits he had made by a third-generation Savile Row tailor, a man with a ruthless streak that was legendary for both
its cruelty and success. Davie and Al had been together for two decades, and through the ups, downs and irritations, they stuck together because they made money for each other. That was what
mattered – and if they both dressed it up as loyalty and friendship, that was fine too.

Mike Feechan, head of security for the studio. An ex-cop who’d made a name for himself when he’d brought down a trafficking ring that was shipping Eastern European girls into the
city and pimping them out for top dollar.

Mellie, his director-producer, who wore her standard look of someone who had better places to be and more urgent things to be doing. With an hour until airtime, both of those were accurate
sentiments.

And in the corner, purely in an observational capacity, Sarah sat focused on her iPad. Davie had no idea what she was doing. She seemed to spend every waking hour doing research and writing her
book. In the last week, she’d been particularly distracted, and if he was honest, he wished she’d let it go and chill out for a few days.

Which, yes, was like the workaholic pot calling the workaholic kettle black.

He reclined back in one of the six dark leather Eames chairs that sat round the onyx coffee table. To call it a dressing room was like saying the Getty was just a house. It was 1,400 square feet
of designer living-workspace, designed to accommodate his every whim, need and indulgence. From the white gloss kitchen to the mirrored bar, to the California-king bedroom in case he got cranky and
needed a nap, this was the kind of room that befitted the guy who had entered a pissing contest with the other late-night talk-show hosts and was clearly winning.

Oh, and he was pissing in a jet-black marble urinal, imported from Tokyo at the cost of an average-size SUV.

Davie’s attention was brought back from the Clippers game running on silent on the eighty-inch TV by Al’s grating irritation.

‘So you have nothing? Not a fucking thing?’ Al asked, for the second or third time, his tone escalating through several stages of annoyance.

Mike Feechan shook his head. ‘The wacko had a hood up, and some kind of covering over his face. But we’ve put four extra security guys on the door, stationed two out at the house,
and we have another two ready to be posted on close protection . . .’

‘I’m not doing that. Forget it,’ Davie said casually. He’d deliberately never employed any kind of bodyguard for his day-to-day existence, mostly because he didn’t
want anyone to have intimate details of his life. Secrets led to knowledge; knowledge led to blackmail; blackmail led to a hole in your bank balance or your private life being splattered across the
National Enquirer.
His marriage to Jenny had been on the rocks for a long time, and he was only human. There had been several affairs, multiple one-night stands and a particularly heated
sexual relationship with Vala Diaz, a Mexican goddess and actress who worked on the same show as the kids.

In the roadmap of his personal life, there were many potholes – none of which he wanted anyone else to know about. Now, things were far more settled. He and Sarah were making it work, and
for the first time, he was being faithful. But scrutiny and intrusion still made him uncomfortable, so he’d pass on having two human mountains walking three feet behind him at all times.

Anyway, this whole situation wasn’t particularly fazing him. Come on, it was just some freak trying to pull a stunt that would get him a bit of notoriety and a YouTube following. Sure, it
was strange that the weirdo didn’t appear to have put the images online yet, but no doubt that would be his next move. In the meantime, the studio had released one photograph, with Davie
looking like he was roaring with rage at his attacker. All the entertainment shows and tabloids had covered it. The result? The kind of publicity that would have cost him a sum with at least five
zeros. Hi ho, silver lining. Twenty minutes of discomfort had equalled maximum exposure for the show. And with a bit of luck, the freak would now move on to his next target.

Mellie unfurled her legs from under her and stood, her spiked heels and black leather trousers giving her a look that sat somewhere between Robocop and an occupation that demanded the use of a
safe word. ‘Look, gents, much as this is fun, we have a show to put out in less than an hour.’

Heading for the door, clipboard in hand, she didn’t wait for a reply before adding, ‘If I could just ask we keep our main man in one piece, that would be lovely. He’s not much,
but he’s all we’ve got.’

Davie winked as she passed him and took the break as his cue to get up too.

‘Al, I’m gonna leave this to you. Just have to go meet tonight’s guests.’ He didn’t wait for a reply, trusting Al to have his back. There was no way Al Wolfe was
going to let anything happen to the guy who made him a couple of million a year.

Heading down the corridor, he pretended to be fixated on checking his phone as he walked. Much easier than having to greet everyone who passed by, trying to catch his eye, looking for the
validation of an acknowledgement from the boss. The only exception was when he passed Lauren Finney’s dressing room, where he knocked on the door, popped his head in and said hi. Lauren was
surrounded by make-up artists working on her hair and face, but she still grinned and blew him a kiss.

Outside the door of dressing room 2, he paused, something niggling.

It took Davie a few moments to recognize the sensation. Anxiety? No. Fear? Nope. It was . . . nerves. He was actually nervous. Not a full-scale, shaking, want-to-throw-up kind of deal, just a
mild tremor of apprehension.

He knocked, making the ‘South City’ sign on the door tremble. A chorus of invitations beckoned him in.

Of course, his eyes went to Mirren first, making the tingling sensation creep a little further up the intensity scale. In blue jeans and a white skinny polo-neck sweater, her hair tied back in a
messy ponytail, she looked a decade younger than her forty-one years.

Forty-one. That made him forty-two. Nearly thirty years they’d known each other.

Clichéd, maybe, but who would have thought this was where they’d end up?

Their childhood homes were a few thousand miles, and light years, away from here. Smack in the middle of a rough council estate in the East End of Glasgow, they’d grown up in the same
pebble-dashed terrace of five houses.

Davie lived on one end of the terrace with his mum, Ena, a grafter who worked three jobs to support them. Zander lived on the other end, with his dad, Jono, and his mum, Maggie. Jono Leith was
the local hard man, a heavy-drinking, vicious bastard who attacked first, asked questions later.

Davie’s teeth clenched at the memory of the man and the knowledge of the effect he would have on their lives. But that was later, many years after he first saw Mirren, age twelve, sitting
outside her house in the middle of the terrace, smoking a cigarette, trying to block out the noise of her mother having sex inside.

Every night, from the bedroom window of his house two doors away, he’d see her there, until he finally plucked up the courage to speak to her.

They soon became inseparable. Zander. Mirren. Davie. The three of them against the world. They had no money, no prospects, nowhere to go and nowhere to be, but it didn’t matter. Zander,
his best mate, was the one who got the girls, while Davie was the one they all wanted as a cute, funny friend. Except Mirren.

When they were sixteen, he discovered that for some inexplicable, fan-fucking-tastic reason, she’d fallen in love with him.

That would have been enough for him. Life complete. Davie and Mirren. They could have got a house on the estate and had kids, and he’d have been happy just to have her, just to breathe the
same air every day and sleep beside her at night.

But it didn’t play out that way.

Jono Leith, Zander’s dad, had fucked up their lives, changing everything, destroying what they all had. They were forced to find new lives, here in LA, and while success had come to all
three of them, their relationships were collateral damage.

For twenty years, Mirren, Zander and Davie had no contact with each other, their ties too much of a reminder of what it had cost them to get there. They lived in the same city, moved in the same
circles, but always managed to avoid being in the same company, mutually understanding that their relationships belonged in another place and time. It was only when Sarah started digging into their
past last year that the three of them had been forced to re-establish contact, brutally aware that what happened back then, before they left Scotland, could destroy everything they had now.

They’d stopped that happening. Only just. But now they were back in touch, they hadn’t quite figured out the new rules. They were friends, but they had a history that could never be
told. They were a family that had been ripped apart and were slowly rebuilding the bricks in their wall, laying foundations, testing for weaknesses, finding strengths, taking it slow, easing into
each other again.

He wasn’t the same person as that little curly-haired guy with a cheeky grin, and Mirren was no longer the angry, neglected teenager desperate to escape her life.

They were no longer in love.

There was no ‘Davie and Mirren’.

And he wasn’t sure where that left them.

‘Hi,’ she smiled, rising to greet him. As she hugged him tightly, every trace of the apprehension he’d felt earlier dissipated. Behind her, an obscenely good-looking guy rose
to his feet and held out his hand. ‘Hey, Davie. Thanks so much for having us on the show.’

‘Yeah, right,’ he said, grinning at Logan Gore. ‘I think the thanks should be going in the opposite direction. Really appreciate you doing this. I mean, clearly you need to get
your band some more publicity,’ he joked. ‘I saw those sales figures today.’

Logan’s smile was tempered with some humility. ‘Yeah, well, you know . . . we try.’

From the right side of Davie’s vision he saw a flying object approach and ducked out of the way just in time.

South City’s lead singer, Jonell, put his hands up in surrender. ‘Hey, man, sorry. Just sending my boy some C,’ he said, gesturing to the can of OJ that Logan had somehow
caught.

‘No worries. I’m just a bit jumpy about things flying in my direction,’ Davie said, only half kidding.

‘Shit, sorry. Heard about that whole blood thing. Scary vibe, man.’ Jonell was the son of a Motown backing singer, and could flip from the sweetness of Smokey to the depths of
Marvin.

Logan was on harmonies, male-model good-looking and the all-American jock. Ringo, on drums, was delighting his parents, who saw his success as a fitting tribute to the fact that he was conceived
to the soundtrack of
Sergeant Pepper.
They’d felt the names John, Paul and George were just too mainstream.

Lincoln on guitar and D’Arby on keyboard were two school mates who looked great and had the moves and the voices to complete the line-up.

America’s teen generation had adored South City since they’d exploded onto the charts four years before, thanks to a talent show not unlike the one Davie produced. They’d long
passed the talk-show circuit now that they regularly put 50,000 jean-covered teenage buttocks on seats in arenas, but over dinner at Mirren’s a few weeks before, Davie had cheekily asked
Logan to come on the show and was stunned and delighted when he agreed.

‘You look great,’ he told Mirren, realizing his arm was still sitting around her shoulders. How did that feel? Odd. But strangely comfortable. In his life, he’d loved three
people. Perhaps four. His mum and Mirren were definites. He’d thought he was in love with Jenny Rico when they first got married, but looking back, there was every possibility that was lust,
with a bit of ‘Can’t believe I landed her’ thrown in. And now Sarah. There was definitely love there. He just wasn’t sure yet how deep it went or how far it would take
them.

A shout from South City’s stylist summoned Logan, leaving Mirren and Davie alone.

‘So how’re things going?’ Mirren asked. ‘Is all OK?’