Emily Roswell—Beautiful hands. Shame.
Diane Howard Murray—Begged for life, made me angry, she deserved it.
The next one will be your fault. I’ll hook another girl, and you will have BLOOD on your hands.
Twenty-One
The mansion, surroundedby hundreds of flaming tiki torches, looms high above a white-paved driveway. Margot has driven deep into the hills of Benedict Canyon to get here, the road a coiled serpent, headlights illuminating spectral branches of trees, skittish raccoons and expensive real estate. At the center of the turning circle at the end of the drive, there’s a fountain lit by spotlights that cast the water in silver. She can hear the thudding of music from inside. Jagger wants everything black.
The women decided at the hotel that Elsie would investigate the logo—the one Diane Howard Murray had stitched onto her apron and that Elsie had seen on the van at Cheryl Herrera’s vigil. Margot’s job is to get to Clarke, see what she can find out. Is it possible that Mason Clarke, one of Hollywood’s most powerful movie directors, is a killer? Margot has heard rumors, of course, about unsavory sexual behavior, unwanted advances. The man is a pest. But he is rich, and untouchable. Until now. She smiles.
She looks up at the mansion again, takes a cigarette from the case in her pocket, lights it.
Mason Clarke doesn’t really fit the profile they’ve built: a loner who drives himself around and has a reason to resent women; in his mid-twenties to mid-forties, but most likely around thirty-five years of age; relatively fit and strong, with an ability to fly under the radar, appear trustworthy.
Mason Clarke is in his early sixties, but he has an imposing physique, so she wouldn’t put it past him to be strong enough to get Emily Roswell into the lake and Diane Howard Murray into the alley.
Motive, though—what motive could a wealthy film director have to commit these crimes? She runs through a list of possibilities: lust, power, greed, sheer psychopathy. A movie director is creative, she supposes. Creative enough to “set the scene” by posing bodies after death? He certainly has access to multiple cars, although she can’t really imagine him driving himself around suburban LA unnoticed. But he is influential, charming. No one says no to him, ever. That could be a very dangerous thing.
She makes her way toward the party, the acetate of her André Courrèges dress iridescent under moonlight. She reaches the vast lawn just as a window on the third floor is opened and a porcelain vase the size of a man is hurled out. It smashes into pieces on the grass below. She doesn’t have to inspect the shards to know it’s Ming.
Back when Stephen was alive, they hosted parties like this at their house in the Hamptons. Margot remembers one time, way back then, when she didn’t know, when she had no suspicions at all. She woke to a world turned upside down. She remembers blinking five, six times in succession, confused, fighting the leaden pounding that boomed in her head. Then she realized, the room shifting into focus, that she’d passed out hanging backward off the bed. She raised herself up and groaned. She was still fully clothed. Stephen was nowhere around. Thehouse was quiet. Looking out toward the pool, Margot could see a few bodies draped across sun loungers, still asleep, or lost on their acid trips.
She called out for him, then went to search the rest of the rooms. There were bodies everywhere, making out in the drowsy light of morning; actors whose posters adorned little girls’ walls snorting amphetamines off naked, sleep-dampened skin.
But there was no Stephen.
She pushed her way farther through the house, dragging herself along the hallways, stumbling, the remnants of drugs clouding her system. Then she went to the front door and stepped out onto the driveway to check for his Rolls-Royce. Maybe he’d gone out there to sleep on the back seat. He did that sometimes, said it was peaceful, gave him time to think.
He wasn’t there, but she took a lap around the vehicle anyway. The car looked clean—too clean, almost, as if someone had polished it just that morning, before the sun came up. Her head pulsed. She needed coffee and Tylenol stat. So she turned to make her way back into the house, but as she did, she noticed something on the concrete near the trunk of the car. She stepped closer to it, peered down and gasped. She looked again. It was blood, dried crimson in the shape of a boot sole. A sour taste crawled up through her throat. Had something happened to Stephen? Or…no. She stopped herself. She couldn’t really be thinking that, could she? But something compelled her to go inside, to their bedroom. It made her open the closet doors and pull out one of his boots from the rack of assembled pairs. With the boot in hand, she marched back outside, to the car. She crouched over the print, then rested the boot on top of it. She looked at the house, thinking of all the times Stephen had left her in the middle of the night to sleep in his car. Then she looked back down to the bloody footprint, and Stephen’s boot, exactly the same size, atop it.
Margot steps over the Ming tragedy now and passes the pool, the heat from the tiki torches caressing her bare limbs. The Stones make way for Cher on the sound system.
Bang, bang…
The haunting words spiral out into the night air.
Bang, bang…
A bunch of men she recognizes fromBillboardmagazine are gathered by the loungers, shirtless and guzzling beer, trousers so tight around the thighs that they look as if they have been sprayed on.
Bang, bang…
The men holler at Margot as she passes.
She flashes them a smile, then realizes they are watching something in the water.
She pauses, scans the surface and sees the flash of an armored tail, and the hefty bulk of a crocodile floating in the spotlit pool. One of the guys has a leash around his wrist, the end of it attached to a collar on the animal. A fucking crocodile. It seems surprisingly docile, and she wonders, with a beat of concern, what they’ve fed it.
The mansion doors are ajar.
My baby shot me down…
Margot slips inside.
Twenty-Two
The bar’s exterioris neon lit, bright as a fairground ride—a deceiving illumination given that, when Elsie and Patti push through the door, the light inside is so low that it takes a while for their eyes to adjust.
