Hollywood Hit (4 page)

“Twenty-two,” Nikki whispered. “I’m twenty-two. And no, we weren’t romantically involved.”

“We need to go,” Cici said. Her words were abrupt, but her movements were smooth and slow as she unfolded from the chair. “Nikki has been through a traumatic experience. If you have any further questions for me or my niece, please contact Howard. We will, of course, be helpful in any way.”

“There’s a black limo with tinted windows out front,” a uniformed cop called from the kitchen.

“That will be our car,” Cici purred. She reached down and grasped Nikki’s arm above the elbow. “Detective Dragatsis, I’d appreciate if once the press leaves you’d have one of your men bring my car home. Keep the plates shielded from the press until then.”

“Want it washed and waxed too?”

Even through the trauma of this night, Nikki could appreciate a hot retort thrown at her superstar aunt.

“Not necessary,” Cici said.

Nikki walked past the detective with her aunt’s protective arm draped around her shoulder. Howard trailed in their wake. Cici paused before entering Jeb’s house and turned back to Detective Dragatsis.

That Celeste Solange face. Her aunt’s face had embellished countless movie screens, launched love affairs and films. Billions of dollars had been made off Aunt Cici’s face. You could not overestimate the power of Celeste.

Cici’s eyes sparkled in the night as if she realized all the thoughts that bounced around both detectives’ brains. The corners of Aunt Cici’s mouth pulled upward in the tiniest of smiles. She locked her gaze on Detective Dragatsis. “Please give Chief White my regards. Let him know Ted and I look forward to seeing him at poker Wednesday night.”

And then with one gentle nudge, Nikki and Aunt Cici were swallowed whole by the Hollywood night.

“Yes, Kiki, I am aware that Nikki is still slumming with that little rocker boy from Sick Puppy.”

Nikki’s toes clenched with the tone of her aunt’s voice, which was slick with judgment. In the back of the black limo, Nikki tucked her feet tighter beneath her body and peered out the window into the night. The Beverly Hills Hotel rushed by the window a blur of pink and green and good lighting.

She pressed her fingertips into her eyebrows and gave her head a tiny shake. Tonight didn’t seem real. A hollow feeling, as though she were part of some weird hallucination, drifted through her limbs. Nikki listened to Aunt’s Cici’s side of the conversation with the publicist Kiki Dee. The hollow feeling widened, bled upward into Nikki’s chest, and congealed in her throat. She couldn't swallow. She definitely didn’t think she could speak. She closed her eyes.

Swirls of red danced in her mind. A deadly gossamer glowed a rusty brown in the turquoise color of the lighted pool. Jeb’s hair wet and plastered to the back of his skull. She’d never seen his face tonight. Only his body bent forward, facedown. His arms had floated in a half circle.

Nikki pulled in a deep breath and put her hands over her face. Finding Jeb dead would cause trouble for Aunt Cici. It didn’t matter that Nikki didn’t kill Jeb Schmaltzer or that it wasn’t her fault he was dead. What mattered was that the twenty-two-year-old niece of Hollywood’s biggest female box-office star had found a D-lister facedown in his pool. The paps had witnessed Cici exiting Jeb Schmaltzer’s house. There would be pictures. Oh so many pictures.

Nikki opened her eyes and looked at her aunt. Cici pressed her phone to her ear and twirled a strand of golden hair between her thumb and forefinger. Even at one a.m. and after a homicide, Aunt Cici still looked every bit the star. Cici’s beauty seemed effortless with her catlike blue eyes flecked with green, Everest-high cheekbones, and her long neck that arched to that impossibly curvy figure. Nikki glanced back out the window. The cold, empty night was easier to watch than her perfect aunt.

“Get in front of the story,” Cici said into her phone. “I pay you a lot of money to spin the shit. Well here’s the shit, now turn it into roses.”

Cici let loose a long sigh. The sigh that told everyone around her that she was ever so tired of being the only smart person in the room—or this time, the car. “Of course I’ve already talked to Jessica.” Her tone was that silky soft one with the underpinning of ice-cold rage. “Kiki, I don’t care how you do it. Just do it.”

Nikki glanced away from the car window as her aunt slipped her phone into her purse. Cici pressed her fingertips to her forehead, above the bridge of her nose. She took a deep breath, straightened her shoulders, and settled her gaze on Nikki.

The condemnation in her aunt’s eyes set Nikki on edge. Her jaw locked and a shiver raced up her spine while bumps prickled the skin on her arms. A sick, sour feeling churned in Nikki’s gut.

“This guy, Adam? The musician,” Cici said with her perfectly plucked eyebrow arched. “
Not
a good guy.”

Nikki licked her lips and glanced down at her hands. She twisted the opal-and-diamond ring on her right hand, one of the few remnants of her mother.

“We’re not exclusive,” Nikki said. Something hard settled in her chest.

“No kidding.”

A sharp edge sliced through Nikki. While she knew Adam had other girls he hung out with, she’d not been too keen on knowing the exact details of those relationships, nor the number.

 “I hear you’ve been in permanent rotation for the last month.” Cici reached across the limo to the bar and pulled out two rocks glasses. “Look, I get the bad-boy rock-star thing—I did it myself when I was your age—but please do not think for a minute that you can change a guy like that, okay? It’s in their DNA, it’s who they are, it’s—”

Nikki’s eyes narrowed. “Wait… the last month? How did you know I’ve been going over to Adam’s every night for a month?”

Cici’s hand lingered in the air between the ice bucket and a glass. For the tiniest fraction of a second a caught-rabbit look crossed her aunt’s face.

Nikki’s belly jolted tight. “You’re having me followed.”

Ice crackled into crystal. Cici’s eyes focused on filling the two rocks glasses. “
Followed
is such an ugly word.” Cici reached for the vodka.

Confusion crescendoed in Nikki and melded with anger.

Cici made a stiff pour of vodka into each glass. “Darling, I know you don’t want to hear it, and I know you don’t want to believe it, but there are people who may try to use you or even hurt you to get to me.”

Cici poured the tonic and squeezed a slice of lime into each drink. “Here.” She held out the drink to Nikki. “You’ve been through some rough shit tonight and nothing takes the sting off quite like a drink.”

Nikki took the glass from her aunt. She’d asked the driver to crank up the heat, but she was still freezing as though ice dripped through her veins and not blood. Blood. She ran her fingertips over her eyes. All that blood. She’d witnessed gallons of blood before and she doubted that she could ever erase the sight of Jeb facedown in his pool any better than she had the prior memory of thick red blood pouring from a wound.

“Darling, I want you to come and stay with Ted and me tonight.”

Some whack job had killed Jeb Schmaltzer—killed him. A down-on-his-luck D-lister. A shiver raced up Nikki’s spine. Maybe her aunt was right to have someone follow her, watch out for her, try to make sure that she didn’t end up facedown in a Beverly Hills pool.

“I need to go home.”

Cici’s lips tightened. She absolutely, one hundred percent, disagreed with Nikki’s decision.

“I don’t need you to protect me—”

“It’s not just you I’m protecting,” Cici shot out and then took a long swallow from her drink. “Obviously I’m failing miserably at that endeavor.” Silence encapsulated them.

Nikki closed her eyes. Her emotions ran close to the surface. Thoughts bounced and tumbled and she couldn’t hide her feelings behind the cool façade she’d worked hard to achieve with her aunt. Pain. Anger. Frustration at her own fear, and her need to call her aunt for help tumbled through Nikki. She had no ability on this night to keep those emotions from her eyes, better to keep them closed.

“Nikki.” Cici broke the silence with a softer, warmer tone as if she were selling Depend adult diapers to a doddering woman. “Darling, why won’t you let me help you more?”

For a moment Nikki allowed herself to sink farther into blackness behind her eyelids. When she opened her eyes, she turned her hard and cool gaze upon her aunt.

“You never helped us before, why would you want to now?”

The tiniest twitch of Cici’s shoulder and a strain around her usually perfectly pouted lips indicated Nikki’s words had landed a blow. Aunt Cici was hard, she was savvy, she could even be mean, but she wasn’t heartless.

“I believe that assessment is unfair,” Cici said, her tone measured.

Shame burned in Nikki’s chest. Her words were unfair and inaccurate. Aunt Cici had helped, especially near the end of Lacey Solange’s life—when the help was needed most. Nikki turned toward the window before her cheeks reddened. The tears that burned could be for Jeb, they could be for her relentless childhood filled with weekly-rate hotels and her mother’s grabby boyfriends, they could be for wanting to succeed and failing, but Nikki’s tears weren’t for any of those things… The tears that burned were, quite simply, for her mother.

“I thought we’d moved past this,” Cici said, “at the funeral. I thought we’d come to some sort of…” A long wisp of air escaped over her lips. “Some sort of peace with the past.”

Had they? The entire event was a blur of dark colors and rain that ended with a long ride on Ted’s private jet.

“Nikki,” Cici said and leaned forward as though a part of her longed to touch her niece, to fold Nikki into a hug, but couldn’t. “Darling, I want to do more for you. I can do more if you’ll let me.”

Nikki’s silence greeted her aunt’s plea. Nikki didn’t want Aunt Cici’s help. Tonight she’d needed it, and for that, shame wound a tight knot in her chest.

“It was so tough for me when I got here.” Cici angled her chin and peered into her glass. “I don’t want that for you.” She rattled her ice and then upended her drink. She dotted the corners of her mouth with her pointer finger. “So you don’t want my help, nor my friends’, nor all the open doors my name can provide.”

Nikki looked into her aunt’s eyes. “No.”

The corners of Aunt Cici’s lips turned up the tiniest bit and she nodded as though to agree. Aunt Cici would not capitulate. She would not lose. She would not stop until she got what she wanted, and what she wanted was Nikki firmly entrenched under her wing. Protected. If only to make up for her own miserable guilt.

“You know,” Cici said, her voice soft, “that little rocker friend of yours is dropping our last name to get access.”

Nikki’s throat tightened. Her stomach burbled with a slimy, sick feeling.

“There’re even pictures of the two of you that he’s been shopping to the tabs.”

“Pictures?” Nikki forced herself to breathe. “What kind of pictures?”

Cici shrugged her shoulders and tilted her head. “Not the kind you’re worried about, but all the same, he’s trying to use you, and by extension me, to get himself and his little band some press. I heard some A & R execs have been sniffing around his band.”

Nikki’s throat choked tight. She didn’t like this scenario—it was sick and twisted and so close to everything she wanted to avoid. Nikki had nothing to say. She had no comeback or retort. She wanted to argue that it couldn’t be true, that Adam would never do something so disgusting, but in the hot, white heat of LA, where everyone clawed and tore to get the tiniest bit of leverage to make the climb up the hill to success, she felt certain that what Aunt Cici was telling her about Adam was true.

“I need you to be aware of the inherent market value that comes with our shared last name,” Cici said. Her voice was colder with a slight edge. “Jeb was going to try to convince you to star in his film and secure his financing and distribution by selling the project on your name.
Our
name. Adam is doing something similar.”

Nikki wasn’t trading on her aunt’s success and cachet, but apparently others were, and she was the passive participant.

“You’re a smart girl, and if you won’t trade on your name, I’m guessing you don’t want those around you to be trading on it either.”

The deep night air washed cool and wet across Rush’s arms and face. The charred smell of wet asphalt fought the sweet earthy scents of grass and dew, scents like the exhaust from the never-ending stream of cars cruising over the pavement prevented Los Angelenos in the daytime from smelling. Rush’s running shoes slapped against the wet road. With each long stride, the impact of rubber on asphalt barreled up from his heels and jolted his legs.

Rush wouldn’t sleep—couldn’t sleep—so he’d slipped on sweats, a UCLA sweatshirt, and his running shoes, strapped his phone to his arm, and run. He listened to his body to assess how much juice he had left, how hard he wanted to push, and how far he needed to go. Tonight, with questions burning his mind, he needed to go far.

He turned up Alta and slowed as he ran by the Schmaltzer house. There was a black-and-white stationed on the drive. In the morning he’d use his contacts on the BHPD to dig into what the techs had found at the crime scene. He'd already heard from one contact that they hadn’t found much. No prints. No treads. No shoe marks on the marble hall. No nothing. There wasn’t even a sign of a forced entry, so Schmaltzer must have opened the door. Maybe he knew whoever had blown him away.

Rush picked up his pace and turned left onto Sunset. The boulevard was empty. He went west in the eastbound lane. His feet slapped against the center white line. His thighs ached with acid and his lungs sucked hard for air. He poured on the speed and forced himself through the burn in his chest and the deep throb of his calf muscles and thighs. He could grit through pain.

Headlights burned through the mist. A car blazed down Sunset. Rush raced faster, harder. His sweatshirt was Bruin blue and decorated around the neck and down each arm with a reflective strip. If the driver was flying high on booze or drugs, Rush’s reflectors wouldn’t matter. In ten seconds more, the driver wouldn’t have time to jerk the wheel, and if his reflexes were impaired, the time for the driver to change his trajectory had already slipped past.