Hollywood Hit (7 page)

“Spoke to her this morning,” Bikram said and ran his hand over his balding pate. “Had Liam send the script just now.” 

“This morning?” Mike asked.

BAM was caught. Liam could hear the skepticism in Mike’s voice. Caught in a lie. But being caught in a lie about a script was much easier than being caught with his cock in a PA’s mouth. BAM had no shame—he either didn’t hear Mike’s tone or simply didn’t care.

“I’ll e-mail you a copy.” BAM chortled. “You and Jessica can read
Boundless Bound
together.”

“Send over the script. The biggest hurdle is whether Celeste wants to do the film. You’ve got JP and if Cici says yes? Well, we’re in—Celeste Solange is our business.”

Liam’s heart jolted in his chest. He fisted his hand into the air. A rare, oh-so-rare display of excitement. His instincts were right—the gossip had been true—his keen sense of what was a good script, a great director, and a hungry starlet, would make this movie happen. Liam looked through BAM’s office door for some sign, some smile, some little pet of appreciation thrown from BAM to his ever-loyal, slavering assistant. BAM didn’t even smile—didn’t look Liam’s way—instead, he swiveled his bulbous body away from his office door.

Liam pursed his lips together and squinted his eyes. He was the best assistant in Hollywood, but he was stuck. Castrated in his subservience to BAM. Liam grew weary of this anemic existence; soon, he would tolerate it no more. Oh yes. Soon, very soon, if BAM didn’t promote Liam, then BAM too, most certainly deserved to die.

Silence. Cici looked past the black marble lap pool in her backyard, the vast expanse of green, interlaced with tiny white pebbles and brilliant emerald-colored hedges, past the hydrangeas, the bougainvilleas, past the topiaries cut into whimsical shapes—rabbits and a mad hatter—past her backyard to where the horizon met the blue of the Pacific. Beauty and silence. Sitting upon the hill, behind the home Ted had built for her in Bel Air underneath a roof of blue, Cici heard nothing. She could almost imagine the silence that encapsulated her belied a serenity throughout her life.

Simply not so.

On this day Kiki Dee, Cici’s publicist, braved the traffic from Beverly Hills to Bel Air and traveled to Cici. Cici was not going in for the mandatory hat, wig, dark glasses, and tinted windows of a limo to try to leave her home. Not today. The parasitic photogs were camped out at the bottom of her street. Each time Bel Air patrol shooed the paps away like flies from shit, moments later they emerged and restacked at the bottom of Cici’s drive. She had watched the little dance on her security cameras over breakfast—well, coffee and a half cup of blueberries. She normally ate, and ate well, but she was on her preproduction diet even without her next script in prep.

Cici closed her eyes and envisioned herself walking onto the stage at the Dolby Theater amidst her peers and the seat fillers and the fans. She would find her Oscar-winning role. She would. Until the film appeared, she planned to starve herself in the same way she did before every movie. Half cup of blueberries in the morning, lettuce with undressed greens in the afternoon with a side of fresh tuna, and a grilled chicken breast with asparagus at night. No deviations, no changes, no substitutions. Cici always said the studios paid her not to eat.

Cici flipped open
Us Weekly
to the center and perused the story. She was leaving Ted for Jeb! She’d been caught in an illicit love triangle with her niece! Cici had shot Jeb in a fury over his love for Nikki! Trash. Slander. And more trash. Plus the pictures were horrible.

Disgust raced through Cici.

She tossed the magazine onto the patio table. An array of tabs spread across the glass-top table. Every rag included similar headlines, similar stories, and that awful damn picture. The same grainy shot—or a similar shot—of Cici leaving dead Jeb’s home with her arm around Nikki. Cici’s hair was a mess from having been yanked out of bed, and Nikki’s face was awash with her tears and her fingers pressed against her eyes.

“This is completely out of hand,” Cici said.

“Darling.” Kiki tilted her glass of Chardonnay toward Cici. “I agree.”

Kiki’s daily consumption of wine over the past three years (ever since her horrible falling-out with Terri) had increased at a colossal rate, and yet Kiki still, while pushing sixty-five (ahem, seventy) managed to maintain an ex-dancer’s lithe physique. She maintained her Anna Wintour bob in jet-black and wore black Zelda Kaplan frames.

“This isn’t news,” Cici said.

“Agreed,” Kiki mumbled around a sizeable swig of wine.

“How can they say I’m a suspect or Nikki is a suspect or that I was caught in a love triangle with my niece?
My niece!
That is disgusting, even by their standards.”

“Disgusting sells magazines, darling.” Kiki set her wineglass onto the table.

Cici’s eyes roamed over what was a much-too-relaxed Kiki Dee. Kiki’s job was to fix this PR nightmare. Her publicist’s nonchalance irritated Cici, drove her absolutely insane.

Heat barrel-rolled through Cici’s chest. Irritation kicked her heart into a cataclysmic gallop. Unkind words raced upward through her throat, and prepared to trip off her tongue.

No, no, no.

Cici closed her eyes, placed her palms together in front of her heart, breathed, and counted to ten—hadn’t her guru Garagamesh said she must catch these moments, these moments of abject anger, before they happened?

Cici focused on her inner calm. She opened her eyes and a soft smile played across her lips. “Kiki,” she said in the warmest of tones, “what exactly are you going to do about these?” Cici waved her hand over the foul weeklies that covered the patio table.

“Well, darling,” Kiki said, “I’m not sure—what exactly do you
want
me to do?”

Scalding temper boiled through Cici’s veins. She closed her eyes and ran her fingertips between her brows. What did she want Kiki to do? She wanted Kiki to do her job—a job for which Cici paid Kiki close to ten grand a week. “I’d like you to get them to stop. They are printing lies—slander—surely there is a way to make
that
end.”

Kiki reached for the bottle of wine. “Well”—she cocked her head and a lifted her shoulders in a shrug—“you’d need to call Howard for that. He could write a letter to the publisher, threaten a lawsuit.” Kiki poured more Chardonnay into her glass. “But that’s like poking a stick at a snake.”

“Meaning?”

“You leave that alone,” she said and nodded toward the tabs, “and it’ll pass. Lindsay will run into another tree; Taylor will get knocked up; a Kardashian will get bedded, wedded, or divorced. Then voilà, no more trashy covers for you or Nikki. But you go after the tabs—poke at them—they will continue to make you front cover. With more lies and more salacious fibs. Fibs that are just this side of slander. Plus…” Kiki relaxed back into the patio chair with a full glass of vino. “Darling, they’ll say they have an unnamed source. My God, they’ll ask your dog-walker and pay her big dollars to simply nod her head at their questions.” Kiki slugged back a drink of wine. “Then they’ll call
that
a source.”

Cici looked up into the blue sky. She was used to public humiliation as a by-product of celebrity. She’d experienced embarrassment at the hands of her ex-husband, her ex-lovers, even her former agents and business managers, but she didn’t want this for her niece. Cici hadn’t spoken with Nikki since Jeb’s demise. Cici texted and called. She’d had her assistant drive by Nikki’s apartment, but Nikki didn't respond. If not for the updates provided by Jay from Worldwide Studios, Cici would be in full-throttle panic mode. Perhaps Nikki was angered—hurt. Their conversation in the limo, the night of Jeb’s death, had been unpleasant.

“Give this Jeb mess three more days and it’ll be over. Best bet is to lie low.”

Cici didn’t want to
lie low
—not this time. She’d let other lies and scandals blow by, but those didn’t involve her niece or the disgusting accusation that she and her niece were involved in a three-way love triangle with the likes of Jeb Schmaltzer—this accusation appalled Cici and made her stomach churn with sour bile.

“What do you want me to do with the rock star?” Kiki asked, changing the subject.

Cici shook her head—there were a multitude of problems right now with her niece center stage for all of them.

“Pictures?” Cici asked.

Too dangerous to e-mail—Kiki handed over hard copies to Cici. She flipped through the photos of Nikki with Sick Puppy’s lead singer and guitarist, Adam. The guy was sexy. Cici could see why her niece was fuck-foundered. With his dark hair and ropy muscles along with the string of Asian tattoos up and down his arms, this guy was every little twenty-something’s bad-boy-rock-star-fantasy come true.

“Sexy fucker, isn’t he,” Kiki said.

While pushing the upper echelon of age, Kiki admittedly liked them young—very young. Cici wondered if Kiki was still utilizing that little Boy Toy Service that was available to older ladies out of the Peninsula.

Nikki appeared happy in these pictures. In the photo from the Whiskey A Go Go, Adam had his arm slung around Nikki’s neck. Nikki was laughing uproariously—head pushed forward with a giant openmouthed smile. The pain that seemed ever-present in Nikki’s eyes since the death of her mother was actually absent in these photos.

“I haven’t seen her having that much fun since…” Cici let the words drift away. Hot tears settled in the backs of her eyes. Kiki wasn’t her shrink, Kiki was her publicist. Kiki had worked a miracle by managing to give Cici’s sister’s death some semblance of privacy—a miracle and a shitload of payoffs. “I wish she’d find someone better for her.”

“She’s a beautiful girl,” Kiki said.

“What’s he after with these?” Cici asked. She laid the pics across the patio table as if setting up for a hand of high-stakes poker.

“What you thought. A little door opener and bit of leverage. Some press to get the record execs attention.”

“And where?”

“The usual suspects—
Us
,
People
,
Enquirer
.” Kiki drained her second glass of Chardonnay.

“Takers?”

“One, so far as I know.”

“And this is it? No sex shots, no nude shots, nothing indecent or unseemly?” Cici asked.

Her eyes skirted over the pictures. One with Nikki holding a guitar in a shithole of an apartment. Adam stood behind her with his arms wrapped around her, teaching her to play.

“Not that I’ve found and not that I’ve heard.”

Cici’s phone buzzed. She tilted it toward her and looked at the name. A picture of Jessica Caulfield-Fox with her two sons popped onto the screen.

“It’s Jess,” Cici said. “I need to take this.” She didn’t move to stand and Kiki didn’t move to leave. They both—whether they wanted to or not—knew too much about each other to need that kind of formality.

“Jess!” Cici said. “Calling to congratulate me on all my tabloid covers?”

“Ha! You have Kiki with you?” Jessica asked.

Cici nodded—her friend knew her so well. “Right here.” Cici picked up a picture of Nikki at a Westside park, lying under a tree with her head in Adam’s lap.

“I got two interesting calls,” Jessica said.

“From?”

“One was from Mike. And one was from Bikram Shasta.”

“Bikram Shasta?” Cici asked. “I thought he was dead?”

“Not quite—south of Pico.”

“He might as well be dead. What does Bikram have that you and Mike would want?”

“Well it would seem a bit of a script with a certain director attached.”

Cici’s fingertips tingled and her heart pitter-pattered at a higher rate in her chest.

“JP Anderson,” Jessica said.

Cici gulped in air. She closed her eyes. She might give her right kidney to work with JP Anderson. The last three actresses who had starred in JP Anderson films had gotten a nomination for an Oscar and two had won.

“And the script?” Cici whispered.

“Pretty fucking good,” Jessica said. “I’m halfway through and it’s brilliant. I mean, when you throw JP into the mix—Cici, this thing could be awesome.”

Cici’s heart ka-thwapped against her ribs. Bikram had called Jessica because JP wanted her—no, needed her, in that role.

“And he wants…” Cici closed her eyes. “JP wants me?” she whispered softly.

“According to Bikram,” Jessica said. “JP will only do the film if you’re in the lead.”

“Send it to me,” Cici gasped out. “I want it. I want it now. Have to read it—send it now!”

“Already done,” Jessica said. “Check your e-mail.”

Cici smiled. Her eyes continued to glance across the pictures of Nikki on the table, but there was a too-long pause from Jessica—a pause that made Cici’s breath become shallow and her heart hammer faster.

“What is it Jess,” Cici said. “There’s something else—a shoe to drop?”

Jessica sighed into the phone. Cici could picture her with her chin on her hand, trying to figure out how to tell Cici something that Jess knew for certain that Cici didn’t want to hear.

“Let it rip, Jess.”

“Well… it’s the script.”

“You said it was brilliant.” Cici’s brows furrowed.

“It is brilliant,” Jessica said. “But it’s
Boundless Bound
.”

“
Boundless Bound,
” Cici whispered and glanced over at Kiki, whose eyes where wide and her lips were formed into a perfect O.
“Boundless Bound
—how do I know that name?”

Then it hit Cici—a sack of wet cement to the gut.
Boundless Bound
!

“Oh my fucking God,” Cici said. “That’s Jebidiah Schmaltzer’s script!”

“And there is the problem,” Jessica said.

Cici closed her eyes. Nothing came easy for her. Every advantage, every gain, every positive thing in her life always came vacuum-packed in problems. She should be used to the good coming with the cream-filled bad.

“We could push,” Cici said, already knowing that Jess would have tried to think of every possible solution.

“JP has the next four slots full. We push and it’s at least another eighteen months before we go into production.”