Heart of Glass (14 page)

“Okay, let’s start like this, as an overall summary:

‘Use script to paper the walls of Versailles. It’s magnificent.’ Or is that overkill?” “Is there such a thing as overkill here in Tinsel-town?” Caine asked.

“Right. ‘Norman Shnorman deserves to be amongst the pantheon of top film industry writers for life.’” “I could weep,” Caine deadpanned.

“In this case, weeping is good,” Anna mused. “Just type at the same time.” She dictated a few more paragraphs, described the plot as “original, thoughtful, funny, and highly moving all at once,” and the characters as “fresh, clever, highly castable, and relatable by young and old alike.” “My mother couldn’t write a recommendation that good,” Caine noted when he was finished. “Want me to read it back to you?” “Just print it.” Anna felt a little sick to her stomach.

Caine pressed the print button; Anna heard a printer hum behind her in the receptionist’s office.

She hurried to the receptionist’s desk with the script, tore off Sam’s original coverage and ran it through the paper shredder, stapled the new coverage to the script as soon as it was fully printed, and then brought it back to the filing cabinet and stuffed it—as best she could figure out—back where she’d originally found it.

No one would be the wiser, she decided. And Sam was off the hook.

“Anna?”

She turned. Caine was standing a few feet behind her. “Yes?” “Really no ethical qualms about doing this?” “Honestly? A ton,” she admitted. Frankly, she was surprised—and touched—that Caine even thought to ask her.

By way of response, he wrapped his arms around her. Anna flushed and leaned her forehead against his chest. She could feel her heartbeat speed up under her simple black Calvin Klein T-shirt.

“I just don’t feel comfortable lying,” she murmured. “And this feels like lying.” “I love that about you, Anna. I really do. But you’re going to find out that there are worse things than lying.” She wasn’t sure she liked the sound of that, and edged back far enough to see his face.

“Really? Like what?”

“Like . . . some lies can be told for a good cause. Like, saying a bride is beautiful when she’s not. Like that. So . . .” He kissed her softly. “We done here, Madame Criminal Mastermind?” “Maybe,” she teased, and kissed him back. There was something really strange about kissing Caine in Jackson Sharpe’s production company office. But maybe it could be . . . good strange.

She kissed him again.

The next thing she knew, they were on the couch, one of his hands tangled in her hair, the other holding her T-shirt. He slipped one strap of her camisole off a shoulder and kissed the soft skin of her neck. The other strap fell. Her pulse raced between her collarbones. When he went to tug the camisole over her head, Anna pulled away.

“The guard could come up,” she explained, breathless from what they’d started.

“Not to worry. I re-locked the door.” Caine pulled her close again.

How did she feel? What did she want? She put a hand on his chest.

“I’m not ready for this,” Anna admitted. “Here?” Caine asked.

“Anywhere.”

“To be continued, then,” Caine said easily, and hoisted her from the couch. “There’s a great new jazz club on Hillside Avenue in Los Feliz. Wanna check it out?” “Definitely.” Huh. He had sure given up on seducing her easily enough. What did that mean? She had no idea.

Five minutes later they were signing themselves out at the guard desk in the lobby. The uniformed guard wasn’t sleeping this time. In fact, he gave them both a knowing nod, followed by a lascivious wink at Caine. Anna felt embarrassed. Had he thought they’d made use of the mythical casting couch in Jackson’s office?

Caine was right. She had too many scruples. For Hollywood,
and
for fooling around in a Hollywood producer’s office.

Room 928

“R
oom 928?” Jack asked the clerk behind the carved wooden counter, who wore a black suit and a name tag identifying himself as Ji Min. “I specifically requested 928.” “Let me check, sir.” As Jack dealt with the clerk, Dee surveyed the hotel lobby. In all the time she’d been in Los Angeles, she’d never been inside the Hotel Roosevelt on Hollywood Boulevard, though she’d driven past it countless times. The lobby itself had an enormous four-story ceiling, marble fixtures, and sleek black furniture. When she looked up, she saw a marvelous crystal chandelier old enough to be the original. Maybe it
was
the original—on the ride over, Jack had told her that the hotel was eighty-five years old. He’d also told her that it was supposedly haunted.

Was she up for an adventure? Always.

Dee had chosen her clothes with a sex-with-ghosts kind of theme. Her Stella McCartney baby doll dress was constructed from translucent ivory silk. At certain angles, when the light hit her just so, she almost appeared to glow.

“Okay, here you go.” Dee saw the clerk hand over an envelope with a key card. “Room 928 it is. Enjoy. If there’s anything we can do to make your time more enjoyable here, let us know.” “I will,” Jack assured him.

“What’s so special about room 928?” Dee asked Jack smiled and wriggled his eyebrows mysteriously.

“You don’t know the story?”

On their way up in an elevator as modern as the hotel was classic, Jack told Dee about the legend of room 928. Supposedly, the actor Montgomery Clift had lived in that room back in the 1950s, back when he was filming
From Here to Eternity
with Natalie Wood. Soon after the hotel was renovated, people who stayed in 928 began reporting a peculiar presence. One woman swore she had been reading in bed, felt a tap on her shoulder, turned over to say good night to her husband, and realized that it couldn’t have been her husband, because he was snoring with his head under the quilt.

Another time, a psychic awoke at five in the morning to see a shadowy apparition that resembled the silhouette of Clift sitting in a chair near the door. But the chair hadn’t been anywhere near the door when he went to sleep. The psychic reported that the ghost stood and glided into the bathroom. There it disappeared.

These stories didn’t make Dee nervous. Actually, they thrilled her. There’d been a time in her life when she’d loved the paranormal and the occult. This visit to the Roosevelt was bringing all that back.

Room 928 was the last one on the right at the end of the hall. Jack opened it with his key card. Then, with no warning, Dee felt herself being swept up in his arms and carried over the threshold of the doorway. She giggled.

Five minutes later, they were “adventuring” all over room 928, kissing on the white-draped bed with the round French-style green bolster pillows, the matching white love seat, and even the window ledge that looked out over Hollywood Boulevard and the hills beyond. Finally, Dee lay cradled in Jack’s arms.

“I have news for you,” she teased. “Really big news.” “What’s that?” “I’m pregnant. It’s either yours on Montgomery Clift’s.” Instead of laughing, which is what Dee had expected, Jack got very thoughtful. “Interesting,” he admitted. “Minus the Montgomery Clift part, I mean.” “Come on, I was joking,” Dee told him, as she nuzzled against his neck.

“Yeah, I got that. But think about it. My sister Margie—you know about her, she has brain damage—is never going to have children. That leaves me. My parents have always talked about how cool it would be to have grandchildren. The more the merrier, actually.” Whoa. Dee remembered how early in the school year, she’d tried to fake a pregnancy. She was so ashamed of that now. But at that time she’d been halfway to the Ojai Institute but hadn’t even known it. Now, she realized she’d had a biochemical imbalance back then. Between her meds and excellent therapy, she was a completely different person now.

Jack, however, had no such imbalance. Which meant that he was serious. Which was really, really weird.

“That idea doesn’t totally freak you out?” Dee asked. Jack swung his head back and forth like a bobble-head toy. “Once upon a time, yeah. But now . . . I could see being a father sometime. Not just with anyone, though. With you.” “You mean like . . . a decade down the road or something. Right?” “Maybe,” Jack agreed, nuzzling her neck. “Or maybe we’ll be on our third or fourth kid by then.” “I validate your feelings,” she said seriously, just as she’d been taught at Ojai. “But . . . I’m so not ready for anything like that.” “I didn’t mean tomorrow, Dee. I meant . . . sometime.” “Oh.” Dee tried to smile, but it didn’t feel right on her face. Were they seriously talking about
babies
? She hadn’t even officially finished high school yet!

“You ever thought about where you wanted to live?” he asked.

“You mean like now or what?”

“What.” Jack pressed his lips to her forehead. “Umm, my parents’ house in Beverly Hills? After they retire and go to their place on Oahu?”

“Yeah. But you’ve been back east, though. Ben told me you visited him at Princeton. What’d you think of New Jersey?” Ben had mentioned she’d been to Princeton? She wondered what else he’d told Jack. Surely not that they’d slept together. After all, it was only one time. Ben wouldn’t tell Jack. Or would he? She had a feeling now that it would upset Jack. A lot.

“Princeton was nice.”

There. That seemed neutral enough.

He smoothed the wispy blond bangs from her face. “I like the shore. Belmar, Asbury Park. It’s not all the fake shit you find out here. Back there, people build things and get their fingernails dirty. People with real jobs, fixing cars, building houses, driving buses, working for the phone company. Like that.” Okay, this was entirely too bizarre. Dee stretched her toes into the high-thread-count white Egyptian cotton sheets. She slept on similar ones every night, and, not to sound terrible, she expected that state of affairs to last forever. She wondered what kind of thread-count sheets one might find at the MegaMart in Belmar, New Jersey? Could thread count veer into negative numbers?

“But . . . you go to Princeton! You’re at Fox for the summer. You want to make a lot of money! You told me so!” Dee found herself really upset.

“Yeah,” he admitted. “But there’s so much—the bullshit out here is just so thick. Maybe I can play the game for a while. But after that, I’m thinking about returning to the real world.” “In New Jersey,” Dee clarified, just to be sure. “Like after you make money to help your sister?” “I figure she can live with me. Or you know, when the time comes . . . us.” Holy shit. He
was
serious. Dee did some deep, meditative breathing. This didn’t make any sense. She was the one who always seemed to be pulling him closer. He was the cool college guy who wasn’t interested in commitment. Back in her bipolar days, she might have thought that she was in a science-fiction movie and aliens had eaten Jack’s brain.

“Jack?” “Yeah?”

“I’d rather screw the ghost of Montgomery Clift than live in Belmar, New Jersey.” Silence. She felt Jack’s arms tense.

“Oh man!” He laughed a little louder than was necessary. “You think I was serious?” “Yeah,” she admitted, though she felt uncomfortable doing it. “Kinda.” She still wasn’t sure, frankly.

“Didn’t know I could act, did ya?” Jack wrapped his arms around her; soon they were kissing again.

From Dee’s point of view, kissing Jack was vastly superior to talking at the moment. So she made sure his lips were well occupied.

Soon, she’d put the weird conversation about weddings and babies and living in New Jersey out of her mind. They ordered room service and sneaked into the hotel pool to skinny-dip after hours. They raided the minibar and finally fell asleep around three in the morning. The ghost of Montgomery Clift did not make an appearance. But all through the evening, no matter where they were, Dee felt like another kind of apparition was following her around, casting a peculiar shadow. It was the niggling suspicion she had that Jack hadn’t been bullshitting at all. And that was a worse nightmare for her than any encounter with a spirit from the great beyond.

“So, I need your help.”

“Maybe I should get those words on tape,” Anna quipped.

Cammie bit her lip and clenched the wheel. Asking Anna for anything was not her idea of a good time. On the other hand, they
were
getting along better. Nominally.

“Actually, I’m serious.”

It was the next morning, and they were on their way to the beach in Carpinteria to Virginia Vanderleer’s second home (she had four) for a fashion show organizing committee brunch. There wasn’t a good reason for the brunch—everything that could be organized had been organized, and the show would take place the following Wednesday evening—but Mrs. Vanderleer had insisted that this brunch would build what she called “committee solidarity.”

Cammie wore a black Cheeta B. shutter-pleat camisole with a tiny plaid schoolgirl-looking miniskirt, and black Miu Miu sling-back sandals. Anna had on a White and White mint green beaded cardigan that looked vintage, and black silk Harari slacks. They looked, Cammie thought, as different from each other as they actually were.

“It’s Champagne,” she explained, as she shifted into the left lane to blow past a teal blue Ford Taurus that was barely going sixty. “I want to help her. And yes, this is Cammie Sheppard talking. So your next question is, ‘What’s in it for you, Cammie?’” “Actually I’m still back on you having what sounds like it might actually be a selfless desire,” Anna declared, as she fished her sunglasses out of her cherry red Kate Spade hobo bag.

Cammie zipped in and out of traffic; the Lambor-ghini hugged the road like three-ply cashmere. It was definitely worth the quarter-mil her father had paid for it. “Okay, first of all, you don’t know me. And second of all, I refer you to first of all. So let’s not pretend we’re close friends.” “Whew,” Anna teased. “I feel much better now. You being nice could be a sign of the apocalypse.” Cammie bit back a bitchy retort. “Here’s the thing. We both know Champagne wants to be a model. And we both know she doesn’t have a clue about how to reach that goal. I know she’s on the short side. But she’s got the look.”

“Agreed. And?”

“And she needs a manager. Someone to help her, show her the ropes, someone who believes in her, who can maybe even make it happen.”