American Beauty (13 page)

Whoa. Paradigm was a huge agency with a lot of clout. In recent years, they’d acquired first the Genesis Agency, then Writers and Artists. If Apex joined their mix … well, Cammie could practically see the zeros mount up in her dad’s bank account.

“Well, that’s great, Dad, I guess,” she stammered.

“No, it’s not. It all fell apart last night.”

“Over what?”

“Peter Bart will say in
Variety
that the personal styles of the principals didn’t mesh, but the bottom line is that they weren’t willing to give Margaret and me offices as big as Norm’s. Doesn’t matter. On to the next. So as you can see, I wasn’t avoiding you. I was looking out for our family.”

Cammie twirled a strawberry blond curl around her right forefinger. He’d had her going, right until this “looking out for our family” line of bullshit. Clark Sheppard never talked about
our
family, which made her think that there was definitely something rotten in the state of
Hermosa Beach
. Not all of it—her dad wouldn’t have mentioned a story in tomorrow’s
Variety
if that story weren’t going to appear. Yet Cammie was a good liar, and a good liar can always uncover a not-so-good lie.

Had the circumstances been different, she would have seized on this. Today, though, she had a larger purpose in mind.

“Here’s what I want to know. The boat, Dad? What happened out there?”

Clark sighed. “I was wrong not to tell you about Sam’s mother. I admit that.”

“No shit.”

“Enough with the fucking cussing, young lady.”

A beat of silence, then they both laughed, and the tension dissipated slightly.

“Okay, you got me.” He tented his fingers. “How the hell was I supposed to tell you? You’d lived so long without knowing, I couldn’t see where it would have made anything but heartache for you and your best friend.”

She swung her feet down from the desk. “Since when do you care?”

“You think I don’t care about you?” He eyed her curiously.

“It must be all the quality time we spend together that tipped me off.”

“Well, you’re wrong,” he stated bluntly. “For Chrissake, you’re my kid.”

“A lot of parents don’t love their children, Clark,” she pointed out. “You’re not the first.”

He leaned in to her. “I don’t suck at loving you. I suck at showing it.”

This tugged at some place deep inside of her, but she reminded herself that he was a master manipulator, and he was damn well not going to manipulate himself out of this one.

“The boat?” she prompted.

“How’d you find out?”

“I …” She was on the verge of telling him about the police documents, then stopped. She owed him nothing—no information. “It doesn’t matter, does it?”

“No, it certainly doesn’t.” Clark smiled broadly, but she could see the tension in his brow. “You were just about to tell me, and yet you stopped yourself. I mean it, Cammie. You know, since you’re not going to college, I would be happy to put you on a desk at the agency as an assistant. Skip the mailroom. You have a future in the business if you ever decide to quit shopping for clothes and start shopping for talent.”

“Nice line, Dad. The boat.
What did you do
?”

“You’re so sure I did something?”

She tried to keep her tone measured. “My mother was a wonderful person. She deserved a hell of a lot better than you. And she loved me. She never would have …” Cammie stopped and swallowed hard. “She never would have left me on purpose. So don’t try to feed me some bullshit about her. Because I know better.” She folded her arms, unable to read the emotions that flitted over his face. “Your turn.”

“Okay, you’re right,” he finally said, looking down. He laid his large palms faceup on the table. “It
was
my fault. I was screwing around behind your mother’s back.”

“I
knew
it.”

Clark sighed. “I had a fling with Sam’s mother. I had lots of flings, come to think of it. She wasn’t happy with Jackson. … These things happen.”

Cammie gritted her teeth. “Oh,
do
they?”

“I’m not saying it was a mature thing to do, but I’ve never been a very mature person that way. Jeanne was on the boat that night—”

“I know that.” Cammie felt a tightening in her chest and pressed her lips together.

“I thought your mom was sound asleep, but she caught us together. I was drunk. I said some dumb-ass things—”

“What?”

Her father waved a hand dismissively. “That … your mom … sucked in the sack, if you must know. It wasn’t true, but, like I said, I was plastered, so …”

Cammie could barely control her vitriol. “And then?”

“And then … nothing. She said she was going back to bed. I don’t know what happened after that.” Clark leaned back slightly in his chair and looked Cammie in the eye.

Cammie stood stiffly—she would
not
cry in front of him, no matter what—and deadeyed him. She let out a forced scoff. “Tell me. How does it feel to have murdered your wife?”

“I was an SOB, I grant you, but I certainly didn’t mean for her to kill herself.”

“Please.” She leaned down and scooped up her bag. “You did everything except push her overboard. I will hate you as long as I live.”

Cammie found her best friend just where she thought she’d be, hidden behind black Ray-Bans on a bench that faced the beach, reading the
Hollywood Reporter
.

“So?” Sam looked up.

She didn’t even know where to begin, so she just shook her head.

“That bad?” Sam patted the place next to her on the bench and pushed a Hermosa Beach Coffee Express cup toward her friend.

“Worse.”

“Drink up and tell me all about it.”

Cammie sipped the coffee. Could she even make the words come out of her mouth? As a way of distancing herself, she studied her surroundings. The bench was located on an asphalt path along the beach, like the one in Venice but much bigger and much nicer. Venice Beach attracted bums. Hermosa Beach attracted Yuppies and Guppies, along with the occasional surfer who got lost on the way to Rancho Palos Verdes. As she watched in silence, at least a dozen people in their twenties and thirties jogged, rollerbladed, or bicycled past them, enjoying the magnificent morning by the ocean. Did all these people have such drama in their lives? Did any of them have to tail their fathers to their workplaces just to have a conversation? Had any of them sat with their fathers while said fathers confessed to being monsters?

“I’ll tell you. But just … not yet.”

Sam nodded. “Just tell me this. Was your dad doing my mom?”

Cammie nodded.

“Thought so.” Sam patted her cell phone. “I got busy while you were in there.”

“Eduardo?”

“I wish. Nope. Adam.”

Cammie went on red alert. “You had no right to—”

Sam lifted her sunglasses. “Jeez, chill out. I wanted to talk to his parents. I was looking for the name of a good—no, great—private investigator. To track down my mother.”

Jesus Christ
. Sam was actually following through.

“They gave me some names, I made some calls. I just hired someone named Melanie Mayes—former FBI. Two hundred bucks an hour. But what the fuck? Buy cheap, you get cheap.”

“She says she can find your mother?”

Sam nodded vigorously.

“Good.”

Cammie resisted the urge to say “Thank you,” because there was only so grateful she could be to one person in the space of two days. It struck her anew, though, as they sat together in the bright morning sun: Sam Sharpe was the best friend she would ever have.

Big Bird Hips

“W
hen in doubt, spend,” Sam decreed, as she and Anna took the elevator up from the parking garage at the Beverly Center.

As soon as Ben left, Anna had called Sam. She felt so crazy, so unsure of him, and needed to talk to a friend. Sam said she was with Cammie, but would drop Cammie off, change clothes, and then meet Anna for shopping; it was more a proclamation than a suggestion.

Shopping was not what Anna had in mind. She was thinking deep conversation over espresso and dessert at the Insomnia Cafe on Beverly Boulevard. But Sam said she had an important mission, and unless Anna said yes, she planned to be relentless and obnoxious.

So shopping it was, at the storied Beverly Center across from Ma Maison Sofitel in West Hollywood. The Beverly Center was an atypical mall—instead of being spread out like the ones in suburbia that were surrounded by parking lots, it was a rectangular, multistory structure, with escalators in huge plastic tubes that faced the street, and dozens of boutiques and shops on each of the levels. The top level featured one of the best movie theaters in all of Los Angeles. It was a mecca for shoppers of every nation, even on a weekday afternoon like this one. “I’m not talking about dropping two thou on a Christian Lacroix lime-green miniskirt with an uneven hem on a whim and then realizing when you get home that it makes you look like you’ve got Big Bird hips,” Sam explained fervently. They were the only passengers in the elevator. “I’m talking about spending money to get what you want.”

“Which would not be Big Bird hips.”

“Precisely. So what was it you wanted to see me about anyway?” Sam asked, adjusting her slouchy Stella McCartney sweater (which bared one creamy shoulder), which she’d paired with brown Daryl K. capris and mile-high YSL Rive Gauche platforms. Anna was wearing an ancient Narciso Rodriguez black camisole with her favorite no-name jeans and black linen Prada slides.

The elevator stopped on the first floor. They stepped off it and onto the exterior escalator that overlooked Beverly Boulevard and Ma Maison Sofitel. Anna hesitated. Talking about personal things always made her uncomfortable, but she had been dying to disclose this information to Sam all day. “Well, it’s about Ben. He stayed over last night.”

“Where the hell is that damn store?” Sam asked, looking around as they stepped off the escalator onto the third floor.

“What store?”

“The one I need for Operation Eduardo. I am a woman with a plan and the money to back it up.”

Oh, so
that
was what this was about. It must be nice, Anna mused, to feel so certain of a game plan. Where was her Operation Figure Out What the Hell Was Really Up with Ben? Maybe talking about it would help.

“Something is wrong between Ben and me. Last night he—”

“Ass!” Sam yelled as a group of very large women with lots of bleached hair clamored by, their arms full of shopping bags. One of those bags had just clocked Sam in the back. “Did you see that? I swear, tourists should need visas to get into Beverly Hills. You were saying about Ben. What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know, exactly. He’s … distant. Last night he stayed over and we didn’t … you know.”

“No kosher kielbasa?”

Anna winced. “Now that’s just gross.”

“But accurate,” Sam guessed, as they walked past Bebe, which was showing orange suede with aqua beading in its main window. “So what?”

“Well, I mean … shouldn’t he have … wanted to?”

Sam shook her head. “Honestly, Anna, how obsessive can you be? Ben didn’t want to do it one night.
That’s
your concept of a crisis?”

“Well, no, but—”

“I would
kill
to have with Eduardo what you have with Ben right now, do you realize that?”

“Yes, but …” How could she possibly explain? Maybe she really was overreacting. Sam was the one with the more obvious boyfriend crisis. The least she could do was be supportive.

“So you’re going to buy something for Eduardo?”

“You could say that.”

Anna wasn’t sure she followed this logic; last she’d heard, Eduardo was both rich enough to buy anything he wanted and not speaking to Sam.

The mall was crowded, as always, with an interesting soup of the rich and famous, and those who merely hoped to dress like them. Tourists from everywhere ended up at the Beverly Center, languages and accents flowing like a shopping Tower of Babel, because this very famous mall was listed in every tourist guide from California to Zimbabwe. The Beverly Center was eight levels of retail heaven. Yes, it had your basic Banana Republics and Gaps ad nauseam, but it also had Dolce & Gabbana, Dior, and Jennifer Kaufman. Therefore, the wanna-bes on a budget could move like lemmings into the chain stores and brag later that they’d bought such-and-such at the Beverly Center. Meanwhile, girls both in the know and in the chip could wander into Just Cavalli and find one-of-a-kind hand-tooled pink python cowboy boots hand-set with emeralds in the shape of a cactus, with a ten-thousand-dollar price tag.

The Beverly Center was an exercise in Tinseltown egalitarianism. Shop and let shop.

“This morning, I went to the set of
Hermosa Beach
,” Sam continued, turning and peering around at stores. “With Cammie. Where the hell is it? I know it’s on this floor. Anyway, she was determined to confront her father about … well, that’s her story to tell or not.” Sam took hold of Anna’s arm and pulled her to the right. “Ah, here we are.”

“Here
what
is?”

“What I’m looking for. My point—and I do have one—is that Cammie is actively going after what she wants. Which reminded me that I too should continue to go after what I want. Namely, Eduardo. Which is what you need to do with Ben. Be an active heroine. Try it some time and—ah, here we are.” She waved a hand toward a Verizon cellular telephone service store.

“You’re buying Eduardo a cell phone?”

“No, Anna,” Sam replied patiently. “Why would I do that? Follow me.”

Anna sighed. Really, she had too much on her mind now to try and follow Sam’s flights of illogic. She hadn’t been able to eat anything all day. Why did Ben keep insisting that everything was normal when it obviously wasn’t? The most obvious answer was the one that made her sick to her stomach, the one she was afraid to say aloud lest she somehow make it true—he had met someone else, and he didn’t know how to tell her. One minute the idea of that would fill her with a needy panic. The next it would piss her off so much that she wanted to scream. Was Ben that big of a wuss that he’d skulk around behind her back rather than simply be honest with her? Unfortunately, the two of them didn’t have a very good track record in the honesty department. Other people felt a need to verbalize their internal monologues, but Anna did not, and neither did Ben.