Kitabı oku: «Sidney Sheldon’s The Silent Widow», sayfa 7

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
LANA

Lana Grey tossed back her Titian hair and gave Anton Wilders her signature smolder as she delivered the last line.

‘Because I said so, Rocco.’

Lana leaned forward, her ample bosom threatening to spill over the top of her Victoria Beckham dress at any moment and into Anton’s lap. ‘Because. I. Said. So.’

‘Scene,’ a bored voice called from behind her as the stage lights went back up. Lana didn’t care about the bored voice, or the ennui on the faces of the USC interns hanging around the set, hoping against hope that the great director would remember them.

He won’t, Lana thought triumphantly. He’ll remember me. I nailed that audition. Anton Wilders is going to relaunch my career with a bang.

What a struggle it had been, to get Wilders to see her! Lana’s agent, Jane, had had a terrible time getting past his people, the Rottweilers that surrounded him, as they surrounded all the big-name directors.

‘Lana Grey’s too old to play Celeste,’ Wilders’ right-hand man, Charlie Myers, told Jane bluntly. ‘The casting note clearly says twenty-two to thirty-two. Lana’s, what, forty-five?’

‘She looks twenty-five,’ Jane had insisted. She was a good agent, Jane. Just the right amount of push. ‘She was born to play this role. Let me speak to Anton.’

‘No.’

‘I won’t stop calling.’

‘Please do, Janey. She’s too old!’

Screw you, Charlie, Lana thought now, smiling at Wilders as he walked onstage and enveloped her in a lingering, distinctly lecherous hug. He wants me. I’m going to get this part.

‘Lana. Darling. Bravo!’

She could feel Anton’s warm breath on her neck, and his left hand snake down onto her pert ass. All the twenty-something USC girls hated her right now. Bad luck, ladies.

‘You were incredible.’

‘Thank you, Anton.’

I was incredible. I knew I was. I’ve still got it.

Easing herself out of his embrace, Lana fluttered her eyes coquettishly. ‘I knew I was right for this part. As soon as I read the script, I said to Jane, “This is me. It’s me.”’

‘It is you,’ Anton agreed. ‘And I wish I could cast you, darling, I really do,’ he went on, still smiling and staring longingly at Lana’s tits. ‘I know you’d rock it. But I’m in a bind. The studio want Harry Reeves as Luke. I only heard this morning.’

Harry Reeves. The nineteen-year-old Disney star, without a decent film credit to his name? Harry Reeves?

‘I didn’t know that.’ Lana felt her jaw locking as hope and happiness left her body. ‘Is that definite?’

‘Looks like it.’ Wilders’ hand was back on her backside. ‘You’re so gorgeous, baby, but with the best will in the world, I can’t cast you as Harry Reeves’ girlfriend.’

Out of the corner of her eye, Lana saw two of the USC girls sniggering.

Leaning in closer, Wilders whispered in Lana’s ear, ‘I’ll cast you to suck my dick, if you’re interested. I’m staying at the Standard.’

Lana kissed him politely on the cheek and reached for her coat. ‘You’re sweet, Anton,’ she smiled. She wasn’t going to give those bitches the satisfaction of seeing her humiliated. ‘Some other time.’

‘You can name your price!’ the director called after her cruelly as her borrowed Louboutins clack-clacked across the floor. Lana heard open laughter now, and a bored ‘Next!’ from the stagehand.

A familiar feeling of rage flooded through her veins.

Screw you. Screw all of you. I hope you all die in a fire.

Outside on Cahuenga Boulevard, Detective Lou Goodman sat in an unmarked car a few yards from the theater. He watched Lana Grey emerge onto the street, take a few steps and then double over, gripping her knees and panting as if she’d run a marathon, or been punched in the stomach. It was a crowded sidewalk but, Hollywood being Hollywood, nobody stopped to help, or even to look.

Goodman glanced at Lana’s file, open on the seat beside him. Nikki Roberts handwrote her patient notes, in the sort of beautiful cursive you never saw these days. Each new client’s file began with a summary, followed by dated and detailed session notes. Like so much else about Dr Roberts, Goodman was impressed.

‘Grey, Lana: forty-five years old, divorced,’ Lana’s opening paragraph read. ‘Actress. Initially presented with acute anxiety and panic attacks. Fear of aging, loss of career – self-worth issues.’ In the margin, Nikki had written ‘Financial worries??’ which she’d later underscored in red. ‘Divorced 2005. Subsequent abusive relationship, ended 2011. Lost both parents, 2012/13. Run for the Hills ended 2009, no steady work since.’ And then the final three words of the summary, stark and unexplained: ‘Sexually compulsive. Angry.’

Lana straightened up and appeared to take two deep breaths. She was still a strikingly attractive woman, with her trademark mane of red hair, long, coltish legs and a face that Goodman had always thought of as having a rather old-fashioned beauty. Like most teenage boys of his generation, Goodman had followed Run for the Hills slavishly growing up, and had always admired Lana Grey’s brand of retro-glamour. Red lips, lacquered hair, big boobs and a sassy comeback for everything. She’d been so sexy back then. Every man in America wanted her.

Must be tough to get older when you’ve had a youth like that.

Pulling out her phone, Lana gazed down at the screen. Her fingers began moving deftly across it in what Goodman recognized instantly as a Tinder swipe. Really? Lana Grey used a hook-up app? Talk about the mighty fallen. After a few minutes, she put the phone down, apparently settled on a mate, got into her car and drove away.

Lou Goodman followed.

Three hours later, Nikki Roberts listened intently as Lana Grey sat in her office, leaned back on the couch, and poured her heart out.

And what was pouring out of Lana’s heart was rage. Lava-hot, toxic rage, of a kind that was painful to listen to. But that was Nikki’s job. Reactionless, she let it flow.

‘He put his hands on me. His stinking, disgusting hands.’ The words flew out of Lana’s mouth like bullets. ‘Asked me to suck his dick, like I was a prostitute. Offered to pay me, with all these pathetic, twenty-something little bitches standing there laughing. Like it was the funniest thing for him to humiliate me like that. I wanted to stick my hand down their throats and pull their non-existent hearts out. Have you ever felt like that?’

Lana’s eyes flashed up at Nikki like two flares.

‘Like you could kill someone with your bare hands and enjoy it?’

‘We’re not here to talk about my feelings,’ Nikki responded evenly.

Lana laughed bitterly. ‘So you have. Thought so.’ She paused and stared out of the office window. ‘I guess everybody has at some point. Wanted somebody else to suffer. I mean, really suffer.’

Poor Trey really suffered, Nikki thought. Since Haddon broke the news, she hadn’t been able to go more than a few minutes without an image of Trey’s torn and mangled body leaping, unbidden, into her head. Lisa Flannagan had suffered too, of course. But Lisa didn’t haunt Nikki the way Trey did. Despite her feelings of guilt and sadness over her death, despite everything, Nikki still couldn’t bring herself to like Lisa. Even now, the young model’s entitlement and her casual cruelty towards other women left a sour taste in Nikki’s mouth.

She still hadn’t reported the break-in at her house – if you could call it a break-in. Somehow she suspected that Detective Johnson, for one, wouldn’t dignify it with such a title. ‘An unlocked door and a single missing photograph?’ She could hear his sardonic, mocking voice now. ‘That’s not a crime, Ms Roberts. That’s middle-aged memory loss catching up with you.’

With an effort, Nikki wrenched her attention back to Lana. ‘I’m curious,’ she observed. ‘Why would you choose to focus your anger on these young women around Wilders, and not on the director himself? It seems to me he’s by far the worst offender here. Him and the man who abused you afterwards, at his apartment.’

Lana uncrossed and recrossed her legs in an oddly provocative manner.

‘It’s not abuse if you ask for it, Dr Roberts,’ she said bluntly.

‘Isn’t it?’ asked Nikki.

Lana’s eyes narrowed. Who was this woman to judge her? This beautiful doctor who men still lusted after, and who was only now reaching the peak of her career? What the hell could someone like Dr Roberts possibly know about how it felt to be left on the shelf, discarded by the world, dumped in a box marked ‘Too old. Too ugly. Finished. Worthless.’? She didn’t know shit.

‘I don’t see how,’ she responded coolly. ‘I told him what I wanted him to do to me and he did it. That’s the joy of Tinder. No questions. No strings.’

‘So you wanted him to hurt you? To humiliate you?’ Nikki frowned. Minutes ago, Lana had sat there shaking while she described a sexual encounter of such bestial brutality even Nikki had gasped listening to it. After almost two decades as a therapist, it took a lot to shock her. But the things that Lana Grey had been subjected to – willingly, she now claimed – had done it.

‘Don’t you get it? I wanted to own the humiliation!’ Lana shrieked. ‘I wanted to take it back. To control it. Anton Wilders wants to treat me like a whore? “I’ll see you and I’ll raise you, dude!” It’s called feminism,’ she added defiantly, sitting back with an ‘I rest my case’ flourish.

Letting a guy urinate in your mouth is feminism? thought Nikki. Most of her patients twisted external reality to some degree to fit with their own neuroses, their own skewed self-perception. But Lana took the proverbial cake.

‘Have you heard from Johnny lately?’ Nikki threw out the question casually, as if it weren’t charged with a hundred pounds of Semtex. Johnny was Lana’s abusive ex-partner. He still called her from time to time or ‘dropped by’ her place; this despite the fact he was married now to a much younger, much more successful actress and the father of two small boys.

Lana looked out of the window.

‘No.’

Nikki could see at once she was lying.

‘I told you. I blocked his number,’ Lana explained, unnecessarily. ‘He’s dead to me.’

‘So when did you last see him?’ Nikki pressed.

Failed auditions always brought Lana down, but they were also a part of her life routine, a commonplace disappointment. More often than not, when she went off the rails like she had today, acting out sexually and putting herself in danger, ‘Johnny’ was involved somewhere.

‘No idea. Months ago,’ Lana lied.

‘I want you to try and think again about transference, Lana. That’s your “homework” for this week. Try to notice the way that you take emotions that are about one thing or person – like your anger with Anton Wilders; or your shame about your own behavior – and misdirect those feelings towards others. The young women in that auditorium. Me.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Lana, her voice and body both brittle with repressed pain.

Nikki gave her an Oh, I think you do look.

‘Try it,’ she said. ‘See what you notice as you move through your week.’

Lana left, stalking out of the room almost as angry as she’d been an hour ago, and only slightly more enlightened.

‘Take care of yourself,’ Nikki called after her as she left, an ugly sense of foreboding suddenly seizing her out of nowhere.

Too many people were dying around her. She hoped Lana wasn’t about to take any more stupid risks.

Goodman watched as Lana Grey pulled out of Nikki’s building in her leased Prius. He’d already learned that the actress was six months in arrears on the car and owed thousands in unpaid interest on the subprime loan she’d used to pay for it. The Victoria Beckham dress and pumps she wore to the audition had already been returned to Neiman Marcus, right after she finished with hook-up guy but before she swung by therapy. Goodman wondered how Lana was affording Nikki Roberts’ fees. He made a note to check the accounts later.

He assumed she was heading home now to her lonely, rent-controlled apartment in Ocean Park, and an evening of what? Another meaningless encounter with a stranger, perhaps? Or pills, booze and bed? What a tragic life. But he knew everything he needed to for now. He was done following Lana for the day.

Five minutes into his drive home, his phone rang.

‘Anything to report?’ Johnson’s voice sounded crackly. Bad line.

‘I’ll fill you in tomorrow. But no, not really. How about you?’ Goodman asked. ‘Any leads on Brandon Grolsch?’

‘Nothing,’ Johnson admitted. ‘I’m calling it a day. See you bright and early tomorrow.’

‘Mañana.’

Goodman hung up. Then, on a whim he pulled over. Waiting for a break in the traffic, he did a U-turn and headed back towards Century City.

About twenty minutes later, his patience was rewarded. Nikki Roberts’ Mercedes pulled slowly out of the garage beneath her office building, turned into the alleyway and then out onto Avenue of the Stars.

Re-starting his engine, Detective Lou Goodman slipped into the stream of cars behind her.