Then Ella went off to South Africa to make Kimberley, about the diamond trade, and Loni, who is at the stage of her career when any publicity at all is good for her, agreed to become the other woman who broke Ella’s heart.
The triangle produced a massive number of Bruce-generated headlines, in which Ella wept to her friends, or broke down on the set of Kimberley, or flew to the States to beg me to come back to her. Some weeks the tabloids dutifully reported that Loni and I were fighting on the set or had broken up; some weeks we were about to announce our engagement. Sometimes she’d catch me talking on the phone to Ella and be furious, and sometimes I secretly flew off to Africa to be with Ella.
I was always happy to see myself in the headlines, even if the stories weren’t remotely true.
If you’re in the news, it means people care. I like it when people care. Seeing my name on the front page of the tabloids warms my heart.
But there are a few disadvantages to becoming such a tabloid celebrity, including the camera-carrying drone aircraft that paparazzi send buzzing over our living and work spaces. These are illegal, at least in the States, but you can’t arrest a drone; and if you can find and arrest the operator, all you have is a man with a controller, and you can’t prove that he’s done anything with his controller that’s against the law.
To me, the drones are cheating. As far as I’m concerned, the tabloids are supposed to report the stories our publicists give them, not start their own air force and find out stuff on their own.
Still, Loni had known what to do when the report came of a drone camera-bombing the hotel. She’d gone from her room to my cabana, as if for a rendezvous, and made certain that the Tale, or the Weekly Damage, or whoever, had their next story. Loni’s Secret Night Visits to Sean, or something.
“Is the drone still up?” I ask.
Loni looks at her handheld and checks the report filed by our nighttime security staff. “Apparently not,” she says. “The coast is clear.”
I walk up to her and help myself to a sip of her orange juice.
“You can stay if you like,” I say.
She offers a little apologetic smile. “I’ll go back to my room, if that’s okay. I need a few more hours on social media tonight.”
The aspiring star must network, or so it seems. “Have fun,” I tell her, and finish her orange juice as she heads for the door.
Exit, texting. Apparently I’m sleeping alone tonight.
Next morning I’m underwater, in scuba gear, doing about a zillion reaction shots. With the camera close on my face, I mime surprise, anger, determination, desperation, and duress. I swim across the frame left to right. I swim right to left. I go up and down. I crouch behind coral heads while imaginary bad guys swim overhead. I handle underwater salvage apparatus with apparent competence.
The director, an Englishman named Hadley, sits in a kind of tent on a converted barge and gives me instructions through underwater speakers. He’s not even getting his feet wet; all he’s doing is watching video monitors and sipping a macchiato made by his personal barista.
“Too small,” he says. “Make it bigger.”
“Too big,” he says. “Make it smaller.”
I hate the underwater stuff. We all do. I tried to convince the producers that we could do this all on green screen, but they didn’t believe me.
I’m done by twelve thirty, but the better part of four hours in the water has me exhausted, and the diver’s mask has scored a red circle around my nose and eyes. I’m lucky that everything was filmed at shallow depth, where there’s ample natural light, and I don’t have to go through decompression.
A powerboat takes me back to the hotel, and on the way I decide to stop by Loni Rowe’s room. I’d seen the call sheets that morning and noted that the shooting schedule’s changed and I’ve got a scene with Loni the next day. I want to talk to her about it—I’m thinking of giving her some of my lines actually, because they’re too on the nose, as they say, for my character but would be okay for her.
She’s got a ground-floor suite in one wing of the hotel, with a patio looking out on the beach, and on the patio is some lawn furniture where a bathing suit and some towels are drying in the breeze. The bathing suit is big enough to cover her whole body, like a wet suit, and aids the pale redhead in hiding from the sun. There’s a cardboard sign by the door with Loni’s name, L. ROWE, so that people from the production staff won’t wake someone else by accident.
I notice that the sliding glass door is cracked—a bird probably hit it, I think, a gull or something—and then I knock on the doorframe, open the door, and step into the air-conditioned interior.
Loni lies dead on the tiles. There’s not a lot of doubt about her status, because her head is a bloody mess. Her pink sundress is spattered with a deeper shade of red, deeper even than the red of her hair. A broken coffee cup lies on the floor next to her in a puddle of mocha liquid. There’s a cloying scent in the air that wraps itself around my senses.
I look around wildly to see if there’s anyone else in the room, particularly anyone with a weapon. There isn’t.
My heart pounds in my throat, and my pulse is so loud in my ears that I can no longer hear the breeze, the ocean waves, or my own thoughts. I’m not a complete stranger to dead bodies, but if I’m going to face death, I need more preparation.
I back out of the room and try to remember if I touched anything. As I back onto the porch I get a tissue out of my pocket, and I scrub the door handle. Then I shut the sliding glass door, and suddenly all the glass in the doorframe falls out and crashes to the ground in a huge pile of glittering rainbow shards. The sound is louder than the cry of a guilty conscience.
Again I look around wildly, but no one seems to be paying attention. I scuttle to my cabana, and then I do the obvious thing for someone in my position.
I call my agent.
“So Loni’s been shot?” Bruce says.
“Shot? I guess.” My gut clenches, and I bend over my dinette in a sudden agonizing spasm. “I don’t know how she was killed,” I say. “I only know she’s dead.”
“But you didn’t kill her.”
“No.”
He ticks off the next question on his mental list.
“Do you have an alibi?”
I try to think. Thinking is hard, because my mind keeps whirling, and my guts are in a turmoil, and I keep seeing Loni’s body crumpled on the floor in her pink sundress.
“I was on the underwater set all morning,” I say.
“So you’re fine,” Bruce says. There’s a tone of self-congratulation in his voice, in the logical way he’s handling the crisis. “You’re in the clear.”
“Bruce,” I say, “these aren’t the Beverly Hills police we have down here. These aren’t kid-gloves kind of police. They might just pin this on me because I’m handy.”
“That’s why you only talk with one of our lawyers present,” Bruce says. “I’ll have someone on his way to you in a few minutes, along with a Mexican colleague.”
The gut spasm passes. I straighten. The panic begins to fade.
“Sean,” Bruce says, “do you think this might have been aimed at you? Because of, you know, what happened.”
What happened a couple years ago, when a surprising number of people were trying to screw up my comeback by killing me.
Bruce’s question sends a wave of paranoia jittering along my nerves, but then I consider the timeline of events.
“I don’t see how,” I say.
Because really, all those bad times are behind me, those times when I was traveling with bodyguards and hiding in hotel rooms and complete strangers were trying to stick me with kitchen knives.
I’m a big star now. People love me. Nobody wants me dead now except for maybe a few spoilsports.
“It’s all good, Sean,” Bruce says. “You’re absolutely in the clear. And we’ll make sure you don’t have any problems.”