DARK THRILLERS-A Box Set of Suspense Novels (36 page)

Just the future, that's all. The whole goddamn future. Ending up on some street corner hawking carnations didn't appeal to Robyn, and as far as she could see, that was the alternative.

13

"The thing about performance, even if it's only an illusion, is that it is a celebration of the fact that we do contain within ourselves infinite possibilities."

Daniel Day Lewis, Rolling Stone

"I don't have a part in this scene," Landry said as Robyn entered his dressing room after knocking. He looked confused and disappointed.

"You'll do your part tomorrow—the scene we were supposed to shoot today."

"Well, I don't know why Cam gave me this and told us all we had less than an hour to study it if I'm not in the scene."

"He didn't take time to remember who was in it and who wasn't. He's . . . a little flustered, what with the last-minute change and all." Robyn took a folding chair and dragged it over to the upholstered wing chair Jackie sat in, the script in his lap. "Look, we need to talk."

Jackie set aside the script, letting the pages fold closed. "You want something to drink?" he asked, beginning to rise from the chair. Robyn took his wrist and he sat down again.

"No, I don't want anything. I have to tell you something important."

"What is it?"

When he was puzzled his eyebrows drew together. He really was gorgeous. Redford as a young man had nothing on Jackie Landry. Robyn felt a sexual spin rush over her. Maybe she should . . . ask him out. She blinked away the thought for later. Stop this, she admonished herself. He looks nothing like Karl. He acts nothing like Karl. You won't like him in bed, you know you won't. And he's too young for you, at least too young for a serious relationship to develop. Get a grip, kiddo.

"I'm the one got you hired for the part," she said.

"You? Well, gee . . ." He smiled, his white teeth lighting up his face. Then the smile faded when she didn't return it. "Cam probably didn't want me. What's wrong? I'm fucking up, that's it, isn't it?" He hung his head, a little boy about to receive his punishment.

"Jackie, listen to me. What you've done in pictures is good work, you know that. People envy you and you're offered some of the best parts, you make big money. But until now you haven't been given a chance to really act. The closest you got to it was in that remake where you played the cheap hood—and even that was more romance than drama."

"I would have been better than Gere in Breathless. That's the cheap hood I should have gotten to play."

Robyn reached out and took his chin, lifting his broad, handsome face. "You would have been perfect in Breathless. But even in that you couldn't do what you can do in the picture we're filming now. Do you understand me? This is your shot, Jackie. You keep dancing around with Cam and missing the inflections and getting off mark and tightening up on camera, you're going to blow the one chance you've got to show the world what you're made of."

He jerked away his face from her hand and looked at the door as if he wanted to get up and run out of it. "I'm trying. Cam's pushing. He won't stop pushing me. If he'd slack . . ."

"Cam's not going to slack up. He's going to get harder, he's going to get so hard you'll think you have a hundred-pound anvil on the back of your neck. I think you can take it, Jackie. I'm the one who begged for your chance. I'm the one Cam's going to turn on if you don't come through on this. Not to mention what's going to happen to me if this picture takes a dive or it gets canned. I've never been involved in a film that got shelved, but things happen. Bad things. Don't let that happen to me, Jackie."

"I'm not deliberately letting anyone down."

He still wouldn't look at her. Her tone had been scolding. Now she rolled her head around on her shoulders to loosen up the muscles tensed and bunched there like gnarled tree roots. "Jackie?"

"What?" Sullen. She had to change it all around. Actors were all kids. More truth than lie. With a kid you reinforced with sincere flattery. Nine of out ten times it worked. She had nothing to lose because she was sincere in what she was going to say to him. It was always easier to be genuine.

"You're the only actor on this picture who has the least chance of being a star when the audiences flock to see it. Did you know that? If you go tell this to Olivia or any of the others, I'll deny I said it, I'll call you a goddamn liar to your face, but I'll tell you the truth in private. You can be bigger than Tom Cruise. You can be more sensitive and brilliant than Val Kilmer, more dynamic than Travolta was in Pulp Fiction, more sexually dangerous and attractive than Pacino in his early films, more moving and believable than DeNiro. You can reach the top with this one film. Only you."

His head came up slowly. He had recognized the honesty in her voice. It had touched him where he needed it most, she saw that in his eyes. He opened like a night-blooming flower, the understanding in his eyes widening slowly, circling his brain, settling into a comfortable place in his soul. Had no one ever told him this before? Didn't he know it? How could someone with such potential not know it?

There lay Jackie Landry's true innocence and his real strength. He had not bought into the Hollywood dream fully. He had not fallen for self-delusion. He had not inflated his worth until it was so large it engulfed a minor talent and rode it into the ground.

"You mean it," he said.

She nodded, biting her lip. She waited until the dawning of his understanding became full day. "You have to do this for me," she said, almost in a whisper as if this were a secret between them. "You have to do this for yourself."

She waited again while he stared at her, stared at her lips as if she might say more.

"I can't keep trying," he said, stating the truth he knew finally. "I can't try, I have to be what it is Cam wants. That's what you mean."

"Yes." Her heart leaped, rejoicing.

"I should have no fear, not of Cam, not of Olivia, not of myself."

"Yes, yes!"

"I have to be Perry Johns and no one else but Perry Johns. I have to be him more than I'm me. I have to let his suffering in.”

"See? I knew you'd understand!"

He stood with her and they embraced, happy children, children who have forgiven one another past grievances and are willing to love again.

He said against her ear, "Thank you, Robyn. Even if you've lied to me, thank you. Don't worry any more, you don't have to worry about me."

She closed her eyes, basking in his maleness, secure in the circle of his strong young arms. She whispered back to him, unable to stop herself, "Meet me at the Universe tonight. Dance with me then. Just one dance."

"All right," he said, releasing her and smiling down into her face.

He was radiant, an angel, and at that moment, God, how she loved him; every inch of him, every hair, every last masculine beautiful bit of him.

14

"Just like those other black holes from outer space, Hollywood is postmodern to this extent: it has no center, only a spreading dead zone of exhaustion, inertia, and brilliant decay."

Arthur Kroker, Panic Hollywood

Robyn melted in Jackie's arms during a slow dance in Heaven. The band sang old blues tunes made famous in the forties by Robert Johnson. The singer doing the cover version was black, male, and exceptionally talented, although not a rival for the throne of bluesman Johnson.

"I'll be good tomorrow," Jackie said next to her ear.

He was talking about the shooting of his scene the next day in the hills outside Hollywood. He had his arms around her waist, holding her tightly. She had her hands looped around his neck and hoped he'd do some dirty dancing before the singer finished his rendition of "When You Got a Good Friend."

"You'll be perfect," she said, meaning it. If he wasn't, Cam was going to give her real hell again.

She and Cam went back seven years, to the time when she first got into the business producing. They had done their first deal together, pitching a sweetheart western to Paramount. It hadn't gone over and was finally turned down by every studio they tried, but from then on Cam trusted her and knew her strengths. She could collect money men like other women collected diamond earrings. She was good at convincing them to risk it all.

But Cam would not spare her hell. If hell is what she deserved, he'd dish it out happily and serve up a side order of heavy suffering for good measure. That's what made him a genius. He might like you, but he wouldn't mind putting the screws to you to get his films right. All that mattered was the picture.

This time that's all that mattered to Robyn, too. That and good sex.

Jackie's body was lean and firm. Not a muscle-builder type, but still strong enough to make her heart skip beats. She had worn the blue dress, the one with the scooped neckline and mid-thigh skirt. Underneath, she wore sky blue stockings with blue and red splashed stiletto heels. Nothing else. Underwear wasn't necessary with the kinds of clothes Robyn chose to have designed for herself. The dresses all came with built-in bra bodices for the most elegant and natural uplift her breasts ever received. She might be small—all right, petite—but she made what she had go a long way. Anyway, it always surprised her how many men liked little women.

"Will you take me home?" she murmured, going crazy thinking about sex with Jackie.

They had shared dinner at the Beverly Wilshire, her treat, drinks in the bar there, his treat, and now a half hour rubbing bodies on the dance floor at the Universe. He had suggested Planet Hollywood and she said wait, let me show you the Universe, you'll like it better. And now it was time for the pièce de résistance. Show time!

"My pleasure," he said, maneuvering her from the floor before the bluesman finished his last guitar chord.

Robyn had hired a limo for the night to prove to Jackie how special he was. She'd dismiss it when they reached her place and she'd call it back if Jackie wanted to leave again. If not, if he stayed over, she'd drive him to location in the morning. Let everybody talk. It's what they did so well and she did have a reputation to uphold besides.

It was hardly ten o'clock. Neither wanted to stay up too late, not when the next day was the day Jackie meant to show her, show Cam, what he could do with his part.

Neither of them noticed they were being scrutinized from the shadows at one end of the bar as they gathered Robyn's light jacket and purse.

Both would have been surprised to know Cam sat there in the dark, nursing a draft while watching them all night.

On the other hand, if they had known he was watching, and thought it over a bit, they'd know they should have expected it. It was his biggest film. What Robyn did with Jackie to get him to act was of Cam's gravest concern. And if they'd known, they would have expected he was probably muttering to himself about how he hated the Universe, hated the alternative music, hated wasting his time in a Hollywood hot spot when he could have been down at some little stink-hole bar with real people.

But they did not know and Cam wasn't about to let them find out.

After dismissing the limo Robyn took Jackie's hand to lead him into the three-story, white stucco, two-million-dollar house in the Hollywood Hills earned from the profits on her last production deal. Once inside the elegant, but cold and austere, house that she found too late she didn't like very much, she turned into Jackie's arms and kissed him long and thoroughly. He slid both hands down to cup her ass and she squirmed against him, china doll in the arms of a sun god. It was going to be a good night. He was as hard for her as anyone she'd ever fucked.

The telephone rang and they froze, tongues in mouths, hands full of body parts. The answering machine picked up and after an anonymous male voice asked the caller to leave a message, Robyn pulled away to listen more closely.

Jackie stood next to her in the shadowed foyer, waiting. They could hear the answering machine in another room off the foyer go click and then beep and then there was a two-second silence. Finally a heavy sigh floated toward them, amplified and weary.

Karl's voice suddenly echoed through the empty dark rooms of the spacious home.

"I've been calling all night, Robyn. I'm sorry to leave so many messages. They wouldn't let me talk to you on the set today, said you were busy, weren't taking calls."

Robyn stiffened. Jackie slumped.

"I have to get this," she said to him, moving away without turning on the lights, leaving him alone in the vast foyer.

Karl's voice continued. "The police have been called in now, but they don't have anything, really, it's half a joke to them . . ."

Robyn reached an extension and picked up. "What police?" she asked, sounding angrier and more put-out than she'd meant to sound.

"You're there! Oh, thank god."

"What is it, Karl? I have company."

"I'm sorry."

"What is it? You said you called the police."

"Robyn, you need to help me. Someone's . . . well, someone must be crazy. They broke into my office and threw . . . blood . . . all over everything. The walls, the desks, the . . ."

"Blood?" Blood, she thought? Did he say that?

She heard the front door close, a soft punctuation with a small echo. She said, "Wait a minute, I'll be right back." She dropped the receiver and let it dangle from the wall phone while she hurried to the foyer.

He had gone.

She opened the front door calling, "Jackie?" but he was gone. Not a trace of him on the walk leading to the street. No sign of him on the street either. He'd have a long walk to find somewhere to use a phone to call for a cab. What the hell was wrong with him?

"Well, shit."

She closed and locked the door, really angry now, and stalked back to the phone.

"Thanks a lot."

"What's wrong?"

"My company." She paused, hoping Karl would feel some twinge of jealousy. "Is no longer my company. He left.”

“I'm sorry, Robyn, I said that. But this is important.”

“Yeah, yeah. What about blood? I think you're losing your mind, Karl."