“Where the hell did he take this shot from?” Laura asked when she first saw the pictures. There were four of them: One with Jake submerged but with Laura sitting on the top step with her breasts exposed; one with the two of them standing up and about to exit the tub in all of their glory; one of the two of them sharing a kiss on the top steps while holding wine glasses in their hands; and one of the two of them walking up the steps into the house, their naked derrieres on display. Of course, the breasts, genital regions, and butt shots all had those little black lines through the most interesting parts, but little was left to the imagination. JAKE AND LAURA FROLIC NAKED IN THEIR HOLLYWOOD HILLS LOVE NEST declared the headline.
Jake, who had been trying to take the media blitz in stride and help her through it to this point, was very angry about these shots.
“That motherfucker!” he spat, shaking his head in fury. “He had to have been up in the hills near the park to see over the privacy hedges. Probably at least a half a mile away and using a zoom lens as big as a whale’s cock to get detail like this. Look how the angle is always from above. He fucking staked us out in my own goddamn backyard!”
“Can they do that?” Laura asked, quite appalled in her own right. She was a very modest person by nature and upbringing and the thought that her naked breasts—line or no line across them—and her naked butt were now on display at every supermarket check stand in the United States was horrifying.
A quick phone call to Pauline assured them that they could indeed do that.
“You have a right to privacy in your backyard, that is true,” she told him, “as long as it is shielded from public view. If they had climbed your hedge to get those shots, you’d have a case for invasion of privacy and maybe even trespassing. But, if your hot tub area is visible from a public place and anyone standing in that public place has a view into it, they have every right to take those pictures and publish them.”
“But that public place is half a mile away and he had to use a goddamn zoom lens the size of a pony keg to take the shots!” Jake complained.
“That doesn’t matter,” Pauline told him. “He was still in a public place shooting from an unobstructed line of sight. For all intents and purposes, you were in a public place.”
And that was the final word on that. There was nothing they could do about it.
“Laura, really,” her mother said the next time she talked to her on the phone. “Naked in public? Having sex before marriage is one thing, but don’t you have any shame?”
“We weren’t in public!” Laura protested. “We were in Jake’s backyard surrounded by privacy hedges! That slimeball took those shots from up on the hill more than a half mile away!”
“This is the price the sinner plays for rampant sexuality,” Robin said.
“We didn’t even have sex,” Laura told her. “Well ... not in the hot tub anyway. We were just having a glass of wine out there after dinner.”
“You were not raised to be naked outdoors in front of men, young lady,” her mother told her without an ounce of sympathy in her voice. “Your father and I have never been naked before each other even in the privacy of our own room and in the bounds of matrimony. It instills lethal lust.”
“I don’t really need to know what you and Dad do or don’t do in your bedroom, Mom,” she said. “I’m just trying to explain to you that we were doing nothing wrong. We were sitting in the backyard having a glass of wine and just happened to be naked at the time. That paparazzi slimeball had no right to go zooming in on us.”
“Apparently he did have the right,” Robin countered. “Laura ... please come home.”
“Come home?”
“Move out of that house today, right now. Leave that horrid musician behind. Leave that car he bought you in the driveway. Come home to us and make yourself right with the Bishop and the church. I’m begging you, for your immortal soul.”
“My immortal soul will be just fine, Mom,” she told her. “I’ve gotta go now.”
That had been the last time she spoke to her mother. Now, as she left the studio and made her way to her car, she wondered if there was any point in ever speaking to her again. All it did was made both of them angry.
“Laura?” a voice called out to her. “Laura Best?”
Laura looked up and saw a late thirties woman wearing a business pantsuit approaching her. She was platinum blonde and carried a tape recorder in her hands. Laura had never seen her before but she knew who she was—or what she was.
“No comment,” Laura told her, resuming her trek to the car while digging in her purse for the keys.
“I’m Annie Stockland, from the American Watcher,” the woman said.
“Lovely,” Laura said, pulling out the keys and then shuffling her saxophone cases so she could use them. “No comment.”
“You might want to comment on this subject, Ms. Best.”
“No comment,” she repeated.
“It has to do with Dr. David Boulder, DDS,” she said, “and your relationship with him.”
Laura froze in her tracks, adrenaline flooding through her. They know about Dave!
“I can see by your reaction that you are acquainted with Dr. Boulder,” she said with a smile.
“He ... he used to be my dentist,” Laura said.
“My information is that he used to be considerably more than just your dentist,” Stockland said.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said, her eyes looking everywhere but the reporter’s face.
“If you two thought you were being discrete, you are sadly mistaken. Pretty much the entire office knew about the affair between you and the good doctor, pretty much since the first day it started. It was one of the receptionists who contacted our office, after all. She thought the public might like to know what the score had been between the now famous Laura Best and good old Dr. Dave.”
Laura chewed her lip a little and then said, “No comment.”
“It is your right not to comment on this information,” Stockland said with a nod. “However, I have already spoken to Dr. Boulder himself and got his take on the story. It differs greatly from what the receptionists, billing clerks, and one of the other dentists in the office have to say. It is not very flattering toward your image. Are you sure you don’t want to at least listen to what he alleges and maybe offer a counter-statement?”
“What did he say?” she heard herself asking.
“Well ... before I tell you that, how about I tell you what the other office members say? Let’s see, my juiciest information came from the receptionist who first contacted us—she will be identified as ‘an anonymous source within the dental office’ of course, and we did have to pay her ten grand for the information.” She shrugged. “She was small time, not a very good negotiator. We would’ve gone as high as eighteen grand for something as provocative as this. Anyway, she tells me that you used to make dental appointments far more frequently than a reasonably dental hygienically inclined adult really would. She tells us that you called quite frequently, sometimes pretending to be someone else, but that Dr. Dave always took your calls, even if it meant he had to take his hands out of someone’s mouth in order to do so. She tells us that he would frequently leave the office for his lunch hour and then come back looking rather flushed and smelling freshly showered. She tells us that, just before the end, you actually called up and told him that it was you calling but that Dr. Dave had told you to say it was someone else. Shortly after that incident, Dr. Dave left for lunch and returned with a black eye. After that, they heard from you no more.”