Looks to Die For (23 page)

“Getting home how?” Reese asked.

“How would I know? He got out and called someone, obviously. Didn’t want to get caught in a stolen car.”

“He’s a thoughtful kidnapper,” Reese said slowly. “He left the keys under the mat in the front seat.”

I took a sip of the flat Diet Coke Detective Shields had handed me an hour ago. It was the only nice thing he’d done, other than throwing his jacket around me when I got in the backseat of the squad car. I’d asked them to take me home, but instead they’d brought me to this interrogation room in police headquarters. The gist was that if I cooperated, they wouldn’t bring indecency charges.

“I was threatened. I was kidnapped. I was knifed,” I explained indignantly. “That’s what’s indecent.” By L.A. standards, my outfit wasn’t shocking, anyway. A bra? Please. At least I was wearing one. Something you could rarely say for the starlets who strolled around Melrose Place on Saturday afternoons. You could see more nipples on the streets of West L.A. than on the baby-supply shelf at Walgreens.

Now Reese sighed and stretched his legs straight out in front of him. The move would have been better with a pair of cowboy boots, since all he could show off were slightly scuffed oxfords.

“Mrs. Fields, let’s run through this one more time,” he said. He glanced down at the yellow pad where he’d been taking notes. “You drove in your Lexus to visit a man named Johnny DeVito, but you used a GPS so you don’t know how you got there. You went with Nora Wilson, the former roommate of Tasha Barlow, but she’s not with you anymore. You don’t know where she is. You don’t know where Johnny DeVito is. All you know is you didn’t like the neighborhood you visited. Badly designed houses.”

“Number seventeen Hillman,” I said. “I told you the address. An architectural abomination.”

Reese made a little check mark on his paper, then continued. “You get to the house, which may or may not belong to this DeVito fellow. Who, by the way, you want us to find because you think that it was him, not your husband, who killed Tasha Barlow.”

“Correct,” I said, nodding.

Reese looked at me for a long moment and shook his head. But he went on, this time not bothering to consult his notes. “So the woman you’re with goes inside and doesn’t come out. You go back to your car and a man gets in beside you. He handcuffs you to the steering wheel and makes you drive to a deserted street. Then he gets you to take off all your clothes by threatening you with a knife, but he doesn’t touch you.”

“Exactly,” I said.

“Oh, for God’s sakes,” said Shields, coming into the room then. “Are we still playing this game? Hasn’t she given up yet?”

“Given up what?” I asked.

“Lying,” said Shields. He leaned his elbows on the table and put his doughy face close to mine. His breath smelled of garlic pizza and half-moon sweat stains darkened the underarms of his pale blue shirt. If Reese and Shields were playing good cop–bad cop, I was getting confused, since they kept switching roles. Better just to think of them as ordinary men doing their job.

I looked over to Reese, who shrugged. “It does sound strange, Mrs. Fields. Rather suspicious. Almost like you made the whole thing up.”

“Right,” said Shields. “Because she did make it up. She drove herself to the movie set, stripped to her underwear, and concocted the whole crazy story.”

“If I made it up, how do you explain this?” I asked, pointing to my bloodied arm, which was now neatly bandaged. I’d had to sign half a dozen forms before the nurse at the police station would give me an alcohol wipe and gauze pad, and another half a dozen for a Band-Aid to put on my leg, where Johnny’s knife had nicked me.

Shields gave a short laugh. “Superficial wounds,” he said. “You could do them to yourself. Draw a little blood for sympathy but not cause any damage.”

“And why would I do that?” I asked.

“Damned if I know,” said Shields. “Maybe you’re a psychopath. Or an exhibitionist. Or you just want some attention for yourself. But I can tell you this. I’m going to figure it out. And when I do, I have the feeling your husband won’t be the only one behind bars.”

I sat back and folded my arms. They weren’t going to intimidate me. “I’m the victim here, not the perpetrator,” I said.

Shields raised his eyebrows.

“You gave it a good try for an amateur,” he said. “A lot of details, which is risky, and you haven’t changed your story. But you want to know what gave you away? Without being rude, let me just say it. The bra and panties.”

I looked at him in surprise. “What about them?”

“They match.”

I blinked and sat up a little straighter. “You think I’m lying because my underwear matches?”

Shields wiped an imaginary crumb off his sleeve and then nodded. “I’ve been married nineteen years, so I know about ladies’ underwear. And that’s one fancy set you were parading. What is this, Valentine’s Day? I see my wife get dressed every morning. She puts on whatever’s clean, and the lacy bits get saved for a special night. So I gotta think that if that’s what you put on this morning, you knew people would see it.”

“I always wear nice underwear,” I said staunchly, feeling a little color rising to my cheeks, “and it’s usually La Perla. Sometimes I buy Cosabella, but their bikinis can be a bit tight. I almost wore a Chantelle bra this morning, but it had too much lace and you could see the pattern right through my shirt.” I looked down at my chest and then back at the detectives, who probably didn’t have an opinion on unsightly bra lines. “My mother always said that a woman in cheap underwear feels cheap all day. So, Detective Shields, tell your wife to get rid of the mismatched Maidenforms, and then buy her some French lingerie. If La Perla’s too expensive, they make a lower-priced line called Malizia. It’s usually not silk” — I lowered my voice as I revealed the secret — “but you can hardly tell the difference. And it’s sexy, so you’ll probably rip it off your wife pretty fast, anyway.”

I stopped talking and the room fell silent. Shields shoved his pudgy hands into his pockets and took a few steps away from me. I saw Reese trying to hold back a smile.

I stood up. “So that’s it. I’ve told you everything I know. Do you think I can leave now?”

Reese looked over at Shields, who gave a barely perceptible nod. Maybe he was afraid I’d start lecturing next on panty protectors.

“Thank you for being so forthcoming, Mrs. Fields,” Reese said, standing up. “We’ll go over this with our superiors and get back to you. But for now, you’re free to go. Do you want to call your husband, or should I drive you home?”

Neither was a good option. All I wanted right now was to keep my misadventure quiet. Pretend it never happened.

“If you’ve found my car, I’ll drive myself home,” I said. And then, flashing what I hoped was a winning smile, I added, “I’ll send you back the clothes I borrowed. And call me anytime if you have questions about lingerie.”

My story stayed under wraps for barely twelve hours. First thing the next morning, my friend Molly Archer called me in a flurry.

“Lacy, if you wanted a showbiz job, you should have told me,” she chided. “I would have helped. I think your escapade was just clever as could be, though I must say I was surprised you’d be doing something like that now.”

“What escapade?” I asked cautiously.

“Going to George Clooney’s trailer in your undies.”

I swallowed. “Where’d you hear about that?”

“Hear about it? I’m looking at it.
The National Enquirer
online edition has the scoop today, and I’ll bet they have it in the print edition next week.”

I slipped over to my desk and typed in the site on my computer. Two clicks and there it was — a picture of me at Clooney’s trailer with almost nothing on, and the headline
DESPERATE HOUSEWIFE
.

“Oh my God,” I said.

“What’s wrong?” Molly asked cheerfully. “You look to die for. Great leg definition. You must be doing yoga. Who took the picture?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “The only person around was the private security guard. He must have had a camera hidden in his pocket or something when he opened the door.”

“Oooh, that’s who’s been selling all the inside pictures to the tabs!” Molly crowed. “Darling, I’ll call you right back. I want to phone George to warn him he has a mole on staff.”

She hung up and I quickly read through the article, which claimed I was an older actress desperate for a part in Clooney’s new movie. Standard tab tactics — start with a picture and fabricate a story. It would have been funny, but a lot of people other than Molly were going to recognize me. Last night, I’d managed to get home and change my clothes without Dan or the kids seeing me — and I still wanted to keep my misadventure to myself for a while.

“What am I supposed to do?” I asked Molly in a panic, when she called back.

“First of all, be flattered,” she said. “Some editor looked at the picture and decided you were an actress. At least they didn’t decide you were a stalker.”

“No place I could have been hiding a gun. But what do you think happens when the papers figure out who I am and link me to Dan?”

“‘Killer Doc’s Wife Goes Crazy With Stress,’” said Molly, quoting a fake headline. She’d obviously been around tabloid stories a few times before. But now she paused, a worried tone creeping into her voice. “But what were you really doing at Clooney’s trailer, anyway? Showing up in your underwear?”

I didn’t answer, and Molly suddenly took a sharp breath.

“Oh gosh, this isn’t funny, right?” she asked, her tone changing abruptly from her previous banter. “Did something awful happen?”

“Pretty awful,” I admitted. “To tell you the truth, I’m scared out of my mind.”

“Come right over,” said Molly. “I haven’t seen you in too long. We need to talk.”

I’d already promised to meet a client at the Pacific Design Center, so I told Molly I’d stop by after that. My client, the wife of a movie producer who’d just had his first hit, met me dressed in a black embroidered miniskirt, four-inch-heeled Christian Louboutin sandals, a white James Perse T-shirt, and a pink fur bolero shrug. The perfect outfit to wear when picking out a light fixture for your mansion on Benedict Canyon. We spent an hour admiring various options, but my usual persuasive powers failed me. She fell in love with a hand-forged three-tier iron and bronze leaping stag chandelier and couldn’t be convinced to consider a simpler Verona style.

“I need iron and bronze to make a statement. I’ve heard Russell Crowe is moving into the neighborhood,” she said, as if that explained the choice. Maybe the stud liked stags. Hey, it was her thirty thousand dollars, not mine. The excess made me slightly nauseated, but I doubted I could convince her to spend less and donate the savings to Children’s Relief Services.

Since I was already in West Hollywood, I didn’t bother with the freeway and just drove up La Cienega, past the Hollywood Bowl, to get over the mountains to Burbank. Molly had her casting office in a cottage on West Olive, a quick drive from NBC, ABC, and Warner Brothers. Molly could cast an actor and have him on the set in an hour. Not the usual system — but network execs trusted her enough that it had happened.

When I walked in, the corridor outside the casting room was packed with a dozen gorgeous male actors in their twenties, all with broad shoulders, blond hair, rippling abs, and tight Levi’s that showed off their buff buns. I grabbed a mini poppy-seed muffin from the overflowing tray of goodies by the front desk, untouched since nobody else here would dream of eating a carb. Total body fat percentage in the room was about 5 percent.

A minute later, Molly herself bustled out and, seeing me, raced over with a hug.

“You’re here. I’m so glad. I’ve missed you.”

She took my hand and pulled me around the corner to her sleek office — all black and chrome furniture and shiny surfaces. She had an original Marcel Breuer Wassily guest chair by her desk, with slanted leather seat straps guaranteed to cut into your thighs and nudge your knees into an uncomfortable angle. The chair belonged in a museum. Preferably behind a red rope where nobody would have to sit on it.

Molly perched on a swirly faux-leopard couch and patted the cushion next to her. I came over and sat down.

“I hope I’m not dragging you away from something important,” I said, twisting my neck so I could look directly at her. Given the sofa’s curvy line, eye-to-eye conversation wasn’t easy.

Molly flipped her curly dark hair back from her round face and gave a little laugh. She was beautiful in a non-Hollywood way, with sparkling eyes and clear skin that she’d gotten from God, not Lancôme. She wore less makeup than any woman I knew, and even though we were exactly the same age, the tiny laugh lines around her eyes somehow made her look younger, not older.

“We’re casting a Fox reality show,” Molly said with a grin. “The spec sheet says we’re looking for a California surfer type. Extra requirement is that he has to bare his butt. And here’s how old I am, darling. I asked two of my young girls to do the auditions and I’m not going back in at all. I figure that either I’d be turned on by those young naked buns, which would probably be illegal, or I wouldn’t be turned on, which would officially qualify me as middle-aged.”

I laughed. “So you’re not even going to peek?”

She winked. “Not unless you want me to.” She went over to the flat-paneled mirror on one wall and flicked a switch — and all of a sudden, we had a window into the audition room.

I looked at Molly in surprise. “One-way mirror?” I asked.

She nodded. “I just had it put in. Isn’t it too much fun? It makes me feel like Molly Archer, Detective.”

I grimaced. “I’ve been trying the whole girl-detective thing myself. It isn’t that much fun, believe me.”

Molly cupped her hand to her mouth, as if pushing the words back in. “I’m so sorry, darling,” she said, closing the switch and coming over to sit next to me again. “I wasn’t thinking. Now tell me what’s going on. And how you ended up almost naked on a movie set.”

“It’s a pretty long story,” I said.

“I want every word,” said Molly firmly.

I settled in — which wasn’t easy on a backless chaise — and outlined the basics, leading neatly to the day in question, which I described in detail from the moment I picked up Nora until I snuck in my own front door. Molly shook her head a few times, and when I finished, she whistled softly.