“A toast to us, luv.”
Webley didn’t remember whether Miss Steele had brought along their glasses or poured fresh drinks from Harrison Dane’s art nouveau bar, shoved against one wall next to the mind transfer machine from “The Wild, Wild Bunch Caper.” He gulped his drink without thinking and moments later regretted it.
“I think I’d like to sit down for a minute,” Webley apologized.
“Drugged drinks!” Miss Steele said brightly. “Just like in The Earth’s End Caper.’ Quick, Dane! Sit down here!”
Webley collapsed into the interrogation chair as directed — it was closest, and he was about to make a scene if he didn’t recover his balance. Automatic cuffs instantly secured his arms, legs, and body to the chair.
“Only in The Earth’s End Caper,”’ said Miss Steele, “I was the one they drugged and fastened into this chair. There to be horribly tortured, unless Harrison Dane came to the rescue.”
Webley turned his head as much as the neck restraints would permit. Miss Steele was laying out an assortment of scalpels and less obvious instruments, recognized by Webley as props from the episode.
“Groovy,” he managed to say.
Miss Steele was assembling some sort of dental drill. “I was always the victim.” She smiled at him with that delightful madcap smile. “I was always the one being captured, humiliated, helplessly awaiting your last-minute mock heroics.”
“Well, not all the time,” Webley protested, going along with the joke. He hoped he wasn’t going to be ill.
“Are these clamps very tight?”
“Yes. Very. The prop seems in perfect working order. I think I really ought to stretch out for a while. Most embarrassing, but I’m afraid that drinking this early…”
“It wasn’t enough that you seduced me and insisted on the abortion for the sake of our careers. It was your egotistical jealousy that finally destroyed me. You couldn’t stand the fact that Stacey Steele was the real star of The Agency, and not Harrison Dane. So you pulled strings until you got me written out of the series. Then you did your best to ruin my career afterward.”
“I don’t feel very good,” Webley muttered. “I think I might be getting sick.”
“Hoping for a last-second rescue?” Stacey Steele selected a scalpel from the tray, and bent over him. Webley had a breathtaking glimpse through the cut-out of LOVE, and then the blade touched his eye.
The police were already there by the time Elisabeth Kent got home. Neighbors’ dogs were barking at something in the brush below her house; some kids went to see what they were after, and then the police were called.
“Did you know the man, Miss Kent?”
Miss Kent nodded her double chins. She was concentrating on stocking her liquor cabinet with the case of generic gin she’d gone out to buy with the advance check Webley had mailed her. She’d planned on fortifying herself for the interview that might mean her comeback, but her aging Nova had refused to start in the parking lot, and the road call had eaten up the remainder of the check that she’d hoped would go toward overdue rent for the one-storey frame dump. She sat down heavily on the best chair of her sparsely furnished living room.
“He was some fan from back east,” she told the investigating officer. “Wanted to interview me for some fan magazine. I’ve got his letter here somewhere. I used to be in films a few years back — maybe you remember.”
“We’ll need to get in touch with next of kin,” the detective said. “Already found the cabbie who let him out here while you were off getting towed.” He was wondering if he had ever seen her in anything. “At a guess, he waited around on your deck, probably leaned against the railing — got a little dizzy, and went over. Might have had a heart attack or something.”
Elisabeth Kent was looking at the empty Glenfiddich bottle and the two glasses.
“Damn you, Stacey Steele,” she whispered. “Goddamn you.”
MORE SINNED AGAINST
Theirs was a story so commonplace that it balanced uneasily between the maudlin and the sordid — a cliche dipped in filth.
Her real name was Katharina Oglethorpe and she changed that to Candace Thornton when she moved to Los Angeles, but she was known as Candi Thorne in the few films she ever made the ones that troubled to list credits. She came from some little Baptist church and textile mill town in eastern North Carolina, although later she said she came from Charlotte. She always insisted that her occasional and transient friends call her Candace, and she signed her name Candace in a large, legible hand for those occasional and compulsive autographs. She had lofty aspirations and only minimal talent. One of her former agents perhaps stated her mot juste: a lady with a lot of guts but too much heart. The police records gave her name as Candy Thorneton.
There had been money once in her family, and with that the staunch pride that comes of having more money than the other thousand or so inhabitants of the town put together. Foreign textiles eventually closed the mill; unfortunate investments leeched the money. Pride of place remained.
By the time that any of her past really matters, Candace had graduated from an area church-supported junior college, where she was homecoming queen, and she’d won one or two regional beauty contests and was almost a runner-up in the Miss North Carolina pageant. Her figure was good, although more for a truckstop waitress than suited to a model’s requirements, and her acting talents were wholehearted, if marginal. Her parents believed she was safely enrolled at U.C.L.A., and they never quite forgave her when they eventually learned otherwise.
Their tuition checks kept Candace afloat as an aspiring young actress/model through a succession of broken promises, phony deals, and predatory agents. Somewhere along the way she sacrificed her cherished virginity a dozen times over, enough so that it no longer pained her, even as the next day dulled the pain of the promised break that never materialized. Her family might have taken back, if not welcomed, their prodigal daughter, had Candace not begged them for money for her first abortion. They refused, Candace got the money anyway, and her family had no more to do with her ever.
He called himself Richards Justin, and there was as much truth to that as to anything else he ever said. He met Candace when she was just on the brink of putting her life together, although he never blamed himself for her subsequent crash. He always said that he was a man who learned from the mistakes of others, and had he said “profited” instead, he might have told the truth for once.
They met because they were sleeping with the same producer, both of them assured of a part in his next film. The producer failed to honor either bargain, and he failed to honor payment for a kilo of coke, after which a South American entrepreneur emptied a Browning Hi-Power into him. Candace and Richards Justin consoled one another over lost opportunity, and afterward he moved in with her.
Candace was sharing a duplex in Venice with two cats and a few thousand roaches. It was a cottage of rotting pink stucco that resembled a gingerbread house left out in the rain. Beside it ran a refuse-choked ditch that had once been a canal. The shack two doors down had been burned out that spring in a shoot-out between rival gangs of bikers. The neighborhood was scheduled for gentrification, but no one had decided yet whether this should entail restoration or razing. The rent was cheaper than an apartment, and against the house grew a massive clump of jade plant that Candace liked to pause before and admire.
At this time Candace was on an upswing and reasonably confident of landing the part of a major victim in a minor stalk-and-slash film. Her face and teeth had always been good; afternoons in the sun and judicious use of rinses on her mousy hair had transformed her into a passable replica of a Malibu blonde. She had that sort of ample figure that looks better with less clothing and best with none at all, and she managed quite well in a few photo spreads in some of the raunchier skin magazines. She was not to be trusted with a speaking part, but some voice and drama coaching might have improved that difficulty in time.