Stars (The Butterfly Trilogy) (20 page)

     No sirree, Danny thought as he started up Quinn's Toyota and watched the Pacific Coast Highway traffic for a break. No one crossed Danny Mackay and got away with it. And the revenge was never simple and clean; Danny liked to be creative, make it count.

     As he whipped the Toyota onto the highway, zipping around a Porsche and cutting off a Maserati, feeling powerful and invincible—a man couldn't die twice—Danny thought of how there had been a time when the secret list had been long, containing the names of rich men as well as poor. But now the list was very short, because it had only one name on it: Philippa Roberts. And he planned to be very imaginative with her indeed.

H
EY! LOOK AT THIS!
"

     Larry Wolfe came out of his bedroom and stood in the living room of the bungalow, holding up a bathrobe. "Look what they give us!" he called out.

     Andrea Bachman, Wolfe's assistant, unpacking in her own room on the other side of the living room, glimpsed Larry through the half-open door. She had already seen the robes hanging in her bathroom—thick midnight blue terry with silver piping and silver stars embroidered over the breast pocket. "I don't think the hotel is giving them to us, Larry," she said. "We use them while we're here. We don't keep them."

     "Sure we do. There's no sign saying otherwise."

     She didn't argue. Andrea wanted to say, "Larry Wolfe, you're so stupid you make regular stupid look smart." Instead she just said, "Whatever," and went on with her own unpacking. Her days of worshiping every little word Larry uttered were over. Now he was starting to annoy her.

     But he was right in one respect: the bathrobes were unexpected. Most hotels provided plain white ones, but Star's had class. As evidenced by the toiletries. in the bathroom. Andrea had expected the usual little packets and bottles of some particular brand—most often Sassoon or Fabergé—but here she had been pleasantly surprised to find, on the pink marble Pullman, Nina Ricci designer soaps; Jovan Night Blooming Jasmine body mousse; Caswell-Massey almond oil bubble bath. Clearly, people came to Star's to be pampered.

     Her bedroom had come as a delightful surprise as well. Forget the usual hotel-white sheets; Andrea's were a bright raspberry color, the spread was a Laura Ashley calico with matching shams instead of ordinary pillows. There was even a vase of fresh purple hyacinths—in December!

     When she went into the living room, she found Larry already dressed for dinner and inspecting himself in the big gilt-framed mirror over the fireplace. It was still a new experience for Andrea not to feel the old sexual pang every time she looked at him. No longer did her heart stop when she saw him; she could now regard him with objective eyes. Larry Wolfe, forty-four years old, dark haired and chisel jawed, was handsome in a cookie-cutter way, right out of the master of ceremonies mold. Put him in a tux and stick a microphone in his hand, and there you have him. He was sharp and fine; most women breathed heavily when they saw him. What they didn't know was the shallow person those good looks hid. Further, not only did Larry Wolfe not have a deep end, he was a bore. Andrea had once overheard him talking to a friend about an affair he was having with a well-known actress. "She hates the word
fuck
," Larry had said. "When I say to her, 'Let's fuck,' she gets mad. She wants to call it making love, and she won't let me touch her unless I do. So one night I said, 'Let's make love,' and while we were in bed making love, when she wasn't looking, I fucked her."

     Larry Wolfe.

     "When did you say Yamato was meeting us?" he asked, talking to Andrea through the mirror.

     "In four days," she said, reaching for her coat. Mr. Yamato was a wealthy Tokyo businessman who was eager to finance Larry's next picture—the Marion Star story. It would be Larry's first foray into producing. After receiving
his Oscar last April, Larry had discovered that he was no longer satisfied with being just a screenwriter; now he wanted to produce. There was bigger prestige in being producer, more money, more power, more women.

     "Okay, let's go," he said, heading toward the door without helping Andrea with her coat. "I need a drink." He opened the door and walked through, letting her trail behind. In fact, Andrea, forty-two and self-proclaimed plain, had followed Larry around like an afterthought for years. But that was going to end. As they got into the little electric cart that she had called for to take them to the Castle, Andrea gave Larry a smile that said he was the best thing since screw-top wine bottles. She had to be careful not to give herself away. Because she was biding her time.

     To get even.

     In the bungalow a few yards away, Carole Page was finishing the preparations for her first encounter with Larry Wolfe. And she was thinking, Some things can't be bought with money. Or with power, or influence. But only with sex. When you got down to it, she decided as she checked her makeup, sex was the ultimate currency. There was nothing it couldn't buy. And what Carole Page, movie star in trouble, was going to buy was a man. Specifically, Larry Wolfe.

     She left her bedroom and went into the living room, where a young man with a wide smile and a tight butt had earlier lit a fire in the fireplace. On the hearth was a polished brass bucket filled with pinecones dipped in wax. When tossed into the fire, they crackled and gave off brightly colored sparks. It was only one of the beautiful touches Carole had found in her bungalow. When she had first arrived, she had noticed the fragrance of orange blossoms in the air. She had puzzled over its source until she had found a ring, filled with oil, on top of one of the light bulbs in her bedroom. It was very romantic. If only Sanford could be here to share it with her.

     But of course he couldn't be, not with the seduction she planned. "I'm going for a rest," she had told her husband when the shooting of her latest film was done. "I'm absolutely exhausted." Carole was not so much exhausted in the body as in spirit. Anyone with eyes could see that
Challenge Girl
, the movie she had just finished starring in, was a bomb.

     But she was going to see to it that her next film was not a bomb; When she had read about Larry Wolfe purchasing Marion Star's long-lost diary with the intention of making a big-budget film out of it, Carole had seen her opportunity. She did some research on the screenwriter and discovered that he was a jerk with an ego a mile wide. But he was a gorgeous jerk, and he apparently already had a lot of Japanese money backing him. She researched him a little further and learned what Larry liked in women: "I need to know that the conquest is mine," he had candidly confessed in a
People
magazine article. "Women who throw themselves at me, and there are a lot of them, don't get anywhere. But put an unreachable woman in my path and I'll go to any lengths to get her. The harder she is to get, the more I pursue her. That's the game, you see? Pursuit and conquest. There's no bigger high."

     So Carole had her strategy. She was going to get Larry by making him think
he
got
her.

     When she had read in Liz Smith's column that Larry and his assistant, Andrea Bachman, were coming to Star's to claim the diary they had bid on and won and to scout the old mansion as a possible location for shooting, Carole had gotten on the phone and secured a reservation for the same dates. Larry was due to arrive today. Now all she had to do was find out where he was, contrive a casual encounter, and then appear uninterested.

     As she reached for her Russian sable coat, she felt her lace bra strain against her breasts. "I'd swear they're getting bigger," Carole had complained to her plastic surgeon. "Liposuction permanently removes fat cells," he had said, "and when fat cells are removed, the body doesn't create new ones, it just finds a new place to store fat. In your case, Carole, you had your thighs suctioned, so your body is sending fat to the only other likely place—your breasts."

     Which, of course, had made the implants a waste.

     Closing her eyes, Carole tried to will her headache away. She had a mild hangover from all the champagne she had drunk during the drive earlier to Palm Springs. "Fear of the tramway," she had said to her limousine companions, Frieda Goldman and Dr. Isaacs. Had they believed her? She doubted it. She winced to think of how she had downed that entire bottle of Dom Pérignon. She should know better; alcohol always loosened her tongue. Carole
was just thankful that she hadn't blurted out anything like, "I'm going to Star's to fuck Larry Wolfe, so he'll put me in his next movie." She had been sober enough to stop short of that.

     As she slipped into her coat, a painful memory suddenly flashed in her mind: a magazine cover with Carole's picture on it and the headline "Is Carole Page's Career Over?"

     After three film flops and saying good-bye to forty, Carole found herself staring into has-been limbo. And it scared her. She was also resentful. She was a good actress; everyone said so. But lately she had found herself acting in some pretty sorry vehicles. The number of roles for "older" women rapidly diminished with each passing year. The Screen Actors Guild had recently uncovered some scary statistics: while 71 percent of all feature roles went to men and only 29 percent went to women, the percentage of film and TV roles available to actresses over forty was a miserable 8.8 percent.

     Only one thing could save her now, she knew, and that was a screenplay written by a man named Larry Wolfe, currently the hottest screenwriter in Hollywood. Last April's Oscar win had clinched that. And now he was going to produce his own movie as well as write it, which meant he had casting power. Larry was the reason for the sneaked condom in her purse: to seduce him into signing her. But she only had a few days in which to accomplish it. Sanford expected her back at their home in Beverly Hills for Christmas, back with her fears and wrinkles and desperate memories of better days.

     And Sanford, her sexy, virile husband, making love to his "beautiful movie star." How much longer could she hold on to him?

     As she went to the door, she caught her reflection in the mirror, a tall, striking blonde who looked like she could pass for thirty. But it wasn't fleeting glances that worried her, it was the close-ups. Would she be able to make love with Larry Wolfe, wondering if the little lies could be seen: the pucker where the liposuction tube had gone in; the dimples where she'd had her lower ribs removed; the hairline scar from the tummy tuck? Carole thought of these marks as the signs of age, like counting the rings of a tree; the more cosmetic surgery scars, the older the woman. Soon, she knew, she was going to add tracks behind her ears for the jowl lift, a scalp seam for the forehead lift, and the little craters left after the removal of her back teeth.
All designed to make her look not forty. Would Larry Wolfe see these little lies and be turned off? Or worse, just laugh at her and say she was too old to play a twenty-five-year-old sex goddess? And then what? Were her days with Sanford numbered? Was she going to appear in one more flop, was she going to look too old for a part she was playing, were people going to start shaking their heads in pity—and send Sanford in search of a new beautiful movie star?

     This was her biggest fear: not so much of a fizzled career, but of losing Sanford. Carole had been a big star when they met, and she knew that that was partly what had made him fall in love with her—her fame and stardom. He had told her often enough in their early days together, and he continued to remind her of it. Some men might resent being outshined by a wife's limelight; Sanford basked in it. But would he still want her if she was a has-been? "I want to keep you proud of me, darling Sanford," she whispered to her reflection. "I couldn't bear to have you watch me fade into obscurity, another aging actress who can't find any roles. I know that it would slowly erode our relationship, and ultimately I'd lose you. And if I can't live with you, my love, then I wouldn't want to live."

     When Andrea Bachman saw the Castle, she was instantly reminded of the opening scene in the movie
Rebecca
—a mysterious house standing in moonlight, a woman's voice saying, "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again...secretive and silent Manderley..."

     As the golf cart hummed along the concrete path that led from the bungalows to the main building, their young driver, bundled in a parka, giving them some wholesome facts about the place—"Health club is over there, indoor tennis courts down that way"—Andrea kept her eyes on the house. She thought it looked romantic, medieval, and sinister all at once. Kevin Costner's Robin Hood could scale those towers and turrets and battlements. No need to build a set for the Marion Star story; the real thing was going to make a helluva location.

     Not that the story itself was shabby. The crime that had been committed here nearly sixty years ago, on July 4, 1932, had never been solved. Ramsey's murderer was never found, and neither was the young and beautiful Marion
Star. They say that when she saw her lover's body, sprawled naked in what the newspapers dubbed the Obscene Bathroom, Marion had run out into the night, hysterical, and had somehow gotten lost in the snow. And then, after the spring thaw, when a search party made up of Riverside County sheriffs, forest rangers, and local police had scoured the area for miles around without recovering her remains, it was speculated that wild animals had devoured her.