55
TOMMY NEWTON GLANCED UP FROM the script he was marking on as his sister walked into the living room of his Los Angeles home, where she was spending the weekend. “What’s wrong?” he asked her.
“You just got a crank call,” she told him with a nervous laugh. “At least, I hope it was.”
“Los Angeles is full of weirdos who make obscene calls,” Tommy reassured her. Jokingly, he added, “In southern California that’s an ordinary means of communication. Everybody here feels alienated, haven’t you heard? That’s why this town is a haven for shrinks.”
“This wasn’t an obscene call, Tommy.”
“What was it then?”
She spoke slowly and shook her head, her brow furrowed in doubt. “The man said he was Zack Benedict.”
“Zack?” Tommy repeated with a short, derisive laugh. “That’s ridiculous. What else did he say?”
“He said . . . to tell you he’s going to kill you. He said you know who killed Rachel and he’s going to kill you for not testifying.”
“That’s crazy!”
“He didn’t sound crazy, Tommy. He sounded dead serious.” She shivered at her unintentional pun. “I think you ought to call the police.”
Tommy hesitated then shook his head. “Whoever it was, he was a crank.”
“How did a crank get your unlisted phone number?”
“Evidently,” he tried to joke, “I’m personally acquainted with a crank.”
His sister picked up the telephone from the table beside the sofa and held the receiver toward him. “Call the police. If you won’t do it for your own safety, do it because it’s your duty.”
“All right,” he said with a sigh, “but they’ll laugh in my face.”
* * *
In her house in Beverly Hills, Diana Copeland pulled out of her lover’s arms and reached for the phone beside the sofa.
“Diana!” he groaned. “Let your maid answer it.”
“This is my private line,” she explained to the man whose face was as familiar as her own to moviegoers. “It might be a change in shooting schedule tomorrow. Hello?” she said.
“This is Zack, Dee Dee,” the deep voice said. “You know who killed Rachel. You let me go to jail for it. Now you’re as good as dead.”
“Zack, wait—!” she burst out, but the line went silent in her hand.
“Who was that?”
Diana stood up, staring blindly at him, her body stiff with shock. “It was Zack Benedict—”
“What? Are you sure?”
“He—he called me Dee Dee. Zack is the only one who ever called me that.”
Turning on her heel, she left him there and went into her bedroom, then she picked up the telephone and dialed a phone number. “Tony?” she said shakily. “I just got a call from—from Zack Benedict.”
“So did I. It’s some crank. It wasn’t Zack.”
“He called me Dee Dee! Only Zack ever did that. He said I know who killed Rachel and I let him go to jail for it. He said he’s going to kill me now.”
“Calm down! It’s bullshit! It’s some crank, maybe even some tabloid reporter, stirring up a new slant on a dying story.”
“I’m calling the cops.”
“Make a fool of yourself if that’s what you want to do, but leave me out of it. That guy wasn’t Zack.”
“I tell you it was!”
* * *
Emily McDaniels sank down on a chaise lounge beside the swimming pool at the sprawling Benedict Canyon house owned by her husband, Dr. Richard Grover. Life had been one long honeymoon for the six months they’d been married, and she watched him swimming laps in the pool, admiring the way his body effortlessly cleaved the water. He cut the last lap short and surfaced at the edge of the pool, right beside her. “Who was on the phone?” he asked, shoving his hair out of his eyes with the long-fingered hands that performed delicate neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. “Tell me it wasn’t my answering service,” he pleaded half-seriously, crossing his arms on the edge of the pool, studying her crestfallen expression.
“It wasn’t.”
“Good,” he said. Reaching out, he grabbed her slender ankles and gave her a comical leer. “Since none of my patients are doing us the discourtesy of interrupting our Saturday night by stroking out, get your sweet body into this pool and show me you still love me.”
“Dick,” she said in a strained voice, “it was my father who called just now.”
“What’s wrong?” he said, sobering at once and shoving up and out of the pool.
“He said Zack Benedict just called him.”
“Benedict?” Dick repeated scornfully, grabbing a towel and drying his arms. “If that creep is actually hanging around Los Angeles, he’s not only a murderer, he’s a nut. The cops will grab him in no time. What did he want?”
“Me. Zack told my father,” she explained, her voice trembling, “that he thinks I know who really killed Rachel. He said he wants me to tell the newspapers who it was, so he doesn’t have to kill everyone who was there that day.” She shook her head as if to clear it and when she spoke again, the fear was gone. “It had to be a crank. Zack would never threaten me, let alone hurt me. Regardless of what you seem to think, Zack wasn’t a creep. He was the finest man I ever met, next to you.”
“You’re sure in the minority if that’s what you believe.”
“It’s what I know. Regardless of what you heard and saw during the trial, the truth is that Rachel Evans was a vicious, scheming bitch who deserved to die! The only thing that was wrong was that Zack went to jail for it.” With a grim laugh, she said, “No one thought Rachel was much of an actress, but the truth is she was a brilliant actress—she was so damned good that hardly anyone ever guessed what she was really like behind that smile of hers. She came off as elegant and sort of reserved and very nice. She was nothing like that. Nothing! She was an alley cat.”
“What do you mean? A slut?”
“That too, but it isn’t what I meant,” Emily said, reaching out and folding a wet towel he’d left near an umbrella table. “I mean that she was like a cat who prowls through alleys, looking through other people’s trash cans, feeding on them without them ever realizing it.”
“Very colorful,” her husband teased, “but not very explanatory.”
Emily flopped back on the lounge chair and tried to be more specific. “If Rachel knew someone wanted something—a part in a film, a man, a particular chair on the set—she went out of her way to make sure they didn’t get it, even if she didn’t want it. I mean, poor Diana Copeland was in love with Zack—really in love with him—but she kept it completely to herself and never made an overture toward him. I was the only one who knew it, and I found out completely by accident.”
When she fell silent, staring at the lights in the pool, Dick said, “You’ve never wanted to talk about Benedict or the trial, but since you’re doing it now, I’ll admit to having an avid curiosity about the stuff that never made the newspapers. It never came out that Diana Copeland was in love with Benedict.”
Emily nodded, accepting his request for more information. “I made it a policy never to talk about any of that because I couldn’t trust anyone, even men I dated, not to go blabbing to some reporter who’d misquote the whole thing and stir everything up again.” She smiled at him and wrinkled her small nose. “I guess I can make an exception now, though, since you’ve vowed to honor and cherish me.”
“I guess you can,” he said with an answering grin.
“I didn’t find out how Diana felt until a few months after the trial, when Zack was already in prison. I’d written him one letter and sent it to him there, but it came back unopened with ‘Return to sender’ scrawled across it in Zack’s handwriting. A few days later, Diana came to see me. Of all things, she wanted me to send Zack a letter she’d written to him, but in an envelope from me. He’d returned her letter the same way he’d returned mine. I knew he’d also returned letters from Harrison Ford and Pat Swayze,
and I told her all that. The next thing I knew, Diana was crying her heart out.”
“Why?”
“Because she’d just come back from Texas, where she’d tried to surprise Zack with a visit. When he saw her on the other side of the screen, he turned his back on her without a word and told the guards to get her out of there. I told her I was certain it was because he was ashamed and didn’t want any of his old friends to see him, and that’s when she started to cry. She said the prison he was in was like a giant nightmare, that it was dirty and squalid, and that they made Zack wear a prison uniform.”
“What did she expect him to be wearing, a Brooks Brothers suit?”
Emily gave a sad little laugh and explained, “Seeing him dressed like that was what hurt her so much. Anyway, she started to cry, and she told me she’d been in love with him and that’s why she’d changed her schedule and took a lesser part in Destiny—to be near him. Rachel guessed how Diana felt somehow, because she teased her about having a crush on Zack one day, and when Diana didn’t deny it, Rachel made a point of climbing all over Zack whenever Diana was around. Keep in mind that Rachel was already having an affair with Tony Austin and intended to file for divorce within days. Then, the following week—the same week Rachel died—several people heard her warn Zack not to use Diana in his next movie.
“Yes, but he never made another movie, so Diana didn’t lose anything.”
“That’s not the point,” Emily said. “The point is that Rachel was like a beautiful witch. She couldn’t bear to see anyone happy. If she could figure out what you wanted, what would make you happy, no matter how small it was, she’d find a way to stop you from having it or to steal it from you.”
Her husband studied her in silence for a long moment, then he said quietly, “What did she steal from you, Emily?”
Emily’s head jerked up, and then she said, “Tony Austin.”
“You’re joking!”
“I wish I was,” she said somberly. “There’s just no accounting for the blind stupidity of youth. I was completely crazy about him.”
“He’s a junkie and a drunk! His career was already on the skids—”
“I know all that,” Emily said, standing up. “But, you see, I thought I could save him from all that and himself, too. Years later, I figured out that was actually Tony’s big appeal to women: He was so sexy and cool on the surface that you felt as if he could protect you from the world, then you discovered that part of him was actually a vulnerable little boy, and suddenly you wanted to protect him, too. That’s probably why poor Tommy Newton was in love with him. Now, Zack was just the opposite of Tony—he didn’t need anyone, and you felt it.”
Her husband ignored the last sentence. “Tommy Newton,” he repeated in disgust, “the guy who directed your last movie, was in love with Tony Austin?” When Emily nodded, he shook his head and said, “That business you’ve been in since you were a child reminds me of a human cesspool.”
“Sometimes it is,” Emily said with a laugh, “but most of the time it isn’t—it’s just business—just a lot of hardworking people living and working together for four or five months, then going their own way, meeting again someday on another film.”
“It can’t be all bad,” he relented, “because you’ve lived in it for years, and you’re straighter and sweeter than any woman I’ve ever known.” Reverting to their earlier topic, he said thoughtfully, “It’s amazing all that stuff with you and Tony and Diana and Rachel didn’t come out during the trial.”
Emily shrugged. “The police didn’t look very far for other suspects or other motives. You see, they knew Zack put the bullets that killed Rachel into that gun. We all knew it. Besides the fact that he’d threatened to kill her the night before and that he had enormous emotional and financial reasons to kill her, he was also the only one of us with enough guts to do it.”
“He may have had guts, but he had to have been arrogant as hell to think he could actually get away with it.”
“He was definitely that,” Emily agreed, but her smile was sentimental and her voice was threaded with admiration. “Zack was like . . . like an irresistible force, like the wind coming from so many directions, with so many sides, you never knew which one he was going to show to you. He could be incredibly witty or warm, gallant and sweet, or completely suave and sophisticated.”
“He sounds like a damned paragon.”
“He could also be brutal, cold, and heartless.”
“On second thought,” Dick said half-seriously, “he sounds like a multiple personality.”
“He was complex,” Emily admitted. “And private. He did as he pleased when he pleased, and he didn’t give a damn what anybody thought of him. He made a lot of enemies because of that, but even the people who detested him were in awe of him. He didn’t care about being hated, and he didn’t care about being admired either. As near as anyone could tell, the only thing he cared about was his work. He didn’t seem to need people . . . I mean, he didn’t like anyone to get too close, except me. I was probably closer to him than almost anyone.”
“Don’t tell me he was in love with you. I couldn’t stand another triangle.”
Emily gave a shout of laughter. “I was a mere child to him, which is why he let me get as close as he did. He used to talk to me about things I doubt he talked to Rachel about.”
“What sort of things.”
“I don’t know—little things, like the fact that he loved astronomy. One night, when we were shooting on location on a ranch near Dallas, he sat outside pointing out the stars to me and naming them and telling me stories about how the constellations got their names. Rachel came out and asked what we were doing, and when I told her, she was dumbfounded that Zack was interested in astronomy or that he knew anything about it.”
“Given all that, how do you explain the fact that he made a threatening call to your father tonight?”
She swung her legs over the side of the chaise. “I think it was a crank and my father was mistaken,” she said. “My father also said he thought he saw someone who looked like Zack hanging around across the street from his apartment last night.”
Her husband’s concerned frown faded to a look of irritated comprehension. “By any chance was your father drunk when he called you?”
“I . . . I couldn’t tell. Maybe. Don’t be too hard on him,” she said, putting her hand on his arm, “he’s lonely with me gone. I was his whole life, and then I deserted him to marry you.”
“You didn’t ‘desert’ him! You’re his daughter, not his wife.”
She put her arm around his waist and laid her head on his shoulder. “I know that, and so does he.” As they headed inside, she added, “A few minutes ago, you congratulated me on staying so sweet and straight after all my years in the business. Try to remember that the only reason I managed to become what I am is because of his vigilance. He sacrificed his own life for me.”
Her husband kissed her forehead. “I know.”
56
BY THE TIME JULIE PULLED into her driveway, it was midnight, and she’d spent all seven of the hours since leaving Zack’s grandmother fighting a mental battle against the insidious doubt and confusion that had haunted her at that house. She’d won her battle and now that she was home, she felt much better. She opened the front door, turned on the living room lights, and looked at the cheerful, cozy room. Here, the idea that Zack was insane seemed so ludicrous that she was angry with herself for ever entertaining the notion. In this very room, she remembered as she hung her coat in the front closet, Matt and Meredith Farrell had spent a wonderful evening with her and bade her good luck and good-bye. Matthew Farrell, she realized, would have laughed in Mrs. Stanhope’s face for suggesting Zack was insane, and that was exactly what she herself should have done!
Shaking her head in self-disgust, she walked into her bedroom, sat down on the bed, and took Zack’s letter from the nightstand drawer. She reread every beautiful, loving word, and her shame for ever doubting him was as
great as her sudden need to scrub away the traces of her journey to his home. Putting his letter aside, she pulled off her sweater, stepped out of her skirt, then she went into the bathroom and turned on the shower.
She washed her body and her hair as if they’d been contaminated by the malevolent atmosphere of that gloomy pile of rocks that Zack had once called home. There was no warmth there, not in the house nor the people who lived in it, she thought as she blew her hair dry and brushed it. If anyone was suffering from vicious delusions, it was his grandmother! And her butler! And Zack’s brother, Alex!
Except, her mind argued, that his grandmother had actually seemed more despondent than vicious, at least toward the very end. And the butler had looked a little forlorn but absolutely certain of what he said. Why would they both lie about Zack’s fight with Justin, Julie wondered. Shoving the question aside, Julie yanked the blow dryer’s plug out of the wall, tightened the belt of her bathrobe, and walked into the living room. Maybe they only thought Justin and Zack had quarreled, she decided as she turned on the television set and turned it to CNN so she could watch the latest news.
But there was one fact she couldn’t avoid, justify, or dispute: Zack had lied about the way Justin died.
Either he’d lied to her or he’d lied to the police, the newspapers, and the coroner.
Her mind skated away from that unsolvable dilemma, and she looked around the living room for something that was out of place, something to physically straighten and put to rights, except there wasn’t anything. Her normally neat home was now antiseptically clean because she’d spent all her free time during the last five days making it ready to be examined by police and reporters when she vanished. The plant near her left had a yellow leaf on it, so she reached over and plucked it off, then she stopped, warmed by the sudden memory of Zack in Colorado when he’d watched her doing something like this. “Is that a nervous habit you have—straightening things out when you feel uneasy?’ Just thinking of that lazy smile of his and the way his eyes had gleamed with amusement made her feel all right somehow. She needed to concentrate on those memories, she realized, because they were real. He was real. And he was waiting for her in Mexico.