Star Island (18 page)

“Not a dollar more,” her sister agreed. “Go too high, he’ll get wise and put the squeeze on you.”

Janet Bunterman took a thousand in hundreds out of the room safe, and sent one of the Larks downstairs to take care of the frantic chauffeur. Then she tried to call Ann on her cell phone, but nobody answered.

“Know what’s super-scary?” Janet Bunterman said to the remaining twin, who happened to be Lila. “This maniac was after Cherry tonight. What if he comes back?”

“Maybe you need more than one bodyguard—Carrie Underwood’s got two, you know.”

True, thought Janet Bunterman, but Carrie Underwood could afford it. Carrie Underwood could sell out the Hard Rock for a year, if she wanted.

“Have you met the new muscle?” Janet Bunterman asked Lila.

“Not yet. Is he bigger than Lev?”

Cherry’s mother polished off the Bloody Mary and said, “You should ask him for a demo.”

“A demo of what?”

“The man could seriously prune your trees,” Janet Bunterman said. “Listen, I’m not up for chatting with the police. Do you mind calling in about the Suburban?”

Lila Lark almost smiled. “No problem. You go on to bed.”

They went out through the Stefano’s kitchen exit and climbed in a charcoal-black minivan. The chauffeur spoke with a Brooklyn accent—a young guy, smooth-shaven and thin.

Said his name was Thad.

Said he was into modeling.

“Who besides your mother gives a flying fuck?” Chemo growled.

Cherry Pye jabbed an elbow into his ribs. “What crawled up your ass and died?”

Chemo said nobody in Brooklyn would ever name their kid Thad.

The driver raised a hand, seeking permission to speak. “He’s right. My real name’s Lou. The modeling agency, they made me change it.”

Cherry leaned forward. “Well, I like Thad. It’s very sexy.”

“Yeah?”

“My name’s Cherish,” she said.

Chemo grimaced. “Stop now,” he told her.

It had been a bad night. Maury Lykes himself had called to chew Chemo out for losing the actress, and to warn him to keep quiet about it.

“Hey, what happened to your hot date?” Cherry needled. “Is that why you’re in a crappy mood—she was a no-show?”

“Yeah. That’s it,” Chemo said. Maury had told him to get Cherry out of the hotel until the cops were gone, but now what?

“My tatt’s sore,” she complained. Leaning forward, she spoke to the back of the driver’s head. “Hey, Thad, where can I score some X?”

“For real?” he asked.

“No, not for real,” Chemo cut in.

“Because I know a guy—”

“No thanks, dickwad. Keep your eyes on the road.” With his only hand, which was exceptionally strong, Chemo squeezed one of Cherry’s arms. “You’ve got no fucking idea who you’re dealing with,” he said.

“Ow! You’re hurting me!”

“One time, lady called me a name and I drowned her. This was the middle of Biscayne Bay,” Chemo said. “I still got the clipping from the newspaper.”

Cherry shook free. “Stop! I didn’t call you a name!”

“Yeah, you did. ‘Waffle Face.’”

“The other night? Omigod, are you serious? I was, like, totally wasted—”

“And I cut you a break,” Chemo said. “Doesn’t mean I forgot about it. Then tonight you go and tell your mother I copped a feel. Trying to get me canned, remember?”

Cherry struck a sulky pose; he could see it in the light cast by oncoming cars. She said, “Sorry, ’kay? I’ll never do it again. Geez.”

Chemo noticed that the driver was listening in and cuffed the side of his head.

“You want one?” Cherry whispered.

“One
what?”

“A feel, man.” She nudged Chemo with a breast. “Go on. Then we’re even.”

He didn’t take his oozy eyes off her face, nor did he move to touch her. He said, “This lady, we were on a boat together. Just me and her.”

“Was it, like, a date?”

He sneered. “We were out lookin’ for her ex. Anyway, she calls me this nasty name so I toss the anchor on her lap and over the side she goes. Bubble, bubble, bubble—yakkin’ the whole way down.”

“Dude, that’s
so
not funny.”

“Point is, don’t push your goddamn luck.”

From the front seat, Thad spoke up in an apologetic tone. “I gotta turn either left or right at this light. Does it matter to you guys which way?”

“Go right,” Cherry said, “to the causeway.”

Chemo shot her a look. “What’s right?”

“Star Island,” she replied. “Where Tanner lives.”

“Who?”

“My boyfriend, remember? God!”

Thad eyed them anxiously in the rearview. “Light’s green,” he said.

“What the hell. Hang a right,” said Chemo. It was better than riding around in circles all night long with this ditz. He was hungry, too, and he figured that anybody living on Star Island was sure to have decent food in the house.

The guard at the gatehouse was gabbing on the phone, and he waved the minivan past with barely a glance. Cherry immediately began pointing out the mansions of celebrities—P. Diddy, Julio Iglesias, A-Rod, the Estefans, Shaq’s ex.

Chemo yawned and said, “I am
so
excited.”

“Know what? Screw you.”

Tanner Dane Keefe was renting a house once owned by either Rosie O’Donnell or Al Capone, depending on which real-estate agent was showing it. Cherry knocked for a while before a young woman wearing red Sarah Palin–style eyeglasses opened the door. She identified herself as Tanner Dane Keefe’s personal assistant, and said he was asleep upstairs.

“Tell him I’m here for a playdate,” Cherry bubbled.

“But it’s two in the morning.”

“Really?” Cherry slipped past the woman and entered the foyer, calling Tanner’s name.

Chemo made his way to the kitchen and piled some smoked turkey on rye bread with tomatoes and buffalo mozzarella. He was slathering the mustard when he heard yelling. He hurried up a marble stairwell and found Cherry in a high-ceilinged bedroom overlooking the bay. She was hopping up and down, shrieking at a young man whom Chemo recognized as her wimpy companion at the tattoo parlor. The man was sitting in bed with a sheet pulled up to his armpits. Beside him, motionless under the covers, was an elongated form.

The woman in the Palin frames pleaded with Cherry to go downstairs, but Cherry grabbed the sheet and furiously tried to yank it off the bed. The unidentified shape next to Tanner Dane Keefe drew itself into the protective shape of a comma.

“Quit hiding, you slut!” Cherry hollered.

Chemo slung his good arm around her waist and pulled her away. She was thrashing and spitting like a cat.

Tanner Dane Keefe had a policy of avoiding violence, which he saw as a threat to his handsomeness and therefore his future in film. He urged Cherry’s bodyguard to stay cool.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” the actor insisted, though the form huddling next to him convulsed in alarm. Moments later, a sweaty
feline head popped out of the covers. It belonged to Tanner Dane Keefe’s personal trainer, a female high jumper on loan from the Syrian national track-and-field squad.

Cherry emitted a whoop of outrage. The woman jackknifed nude from the bed and disappeared out the doorway.

“She was working on my hamstrings,” Tanner Dane Keefe declared.

His personal assistant quickly excused herself.

Cherry Pye shook a fist. “Tanny, I can’t freaking
believe
you’d do this to me!”

“Come here. Lemme see the new tatt.”

“No way,” Cherry said. “How come you didn’t text me back?”

The actor patted the covers. “C’mon,
Cherish
. Don’t be like this.”

At the sound of that name, her anger melted. She leapt to the bed and crawled in beside him.

“See, I even wore a rubber,” he said, lifting the sheet.

“Aw, baby. I love you.”

While the two morons snuggled, Chemo confiscated a prescription bottle of pills from the nightstand and another from the bathroom. Then he walked downstairs, where the actor’s personal assistant brought him a cold Miller Lite.

“Your friend ‘Cherish’ dropped this on the floor. It’s ringing.” She held up a brightly tinted BlackBerry.

Chemo peered. “What do you call that color?”

“Melon?”

“Nah, I don’t think so.”

The woman shrugged. “Tangerine?”

“Lemme have it.”

When he pressed the Connect button, a gravelly voice on the line said, “Abbott?”

“Yeah.”

“Timberlake just checked in at the Mandarin. You want the room?”

“Sure.”

“Fifty bucks?”

“Not a problem.”

“He’s in 710. And Taylor Swift, she’s in 714. I shit you not, brother.”

“Nice.” Chemo hung up. At least he had a name for the kidnapper: Abbott. Somewhere he had a number, too, left over from the camera transaction.

The BlackBerry chimed twice. Chemo held it up and saw a text:
kanye just split from pubes, alone, plum bentley
.

Now he understood why Cherry had hung on to the photographer’s smart phone—to someone like her it was golden, a streaming voice-guide to the party circuit.

Tanner Dane Keefe’s personal assistant asked, “Are you her bodyguard, or what?”

“More like a life coach,” Chemo said.

“She needs one. You think they’re screwing? Even after what happened?”

Chemo said it wouldn’t surprise him. “Unless your boy’s too stoned to get it up. I could go for an éclair.”

The personal assistant smiled. “In the fridge, top shelf. How’d you know?”

“This house, it looks like a place where they’d eat éclairs.”

She was doing a poor job of trying not to stare. “Can I ask you something?”

“The answer is six foot nine,” Chemo said tersely.

“Wow. Did you ever play—”

“No.”

“Not even in college?”

In a bladed voice, Chemo said, “Not even in prison.”

Tanner Dane Keefe’s personal assistant seemed unfazed by the information. “How come no hoops? Because of the accident?”

Chemo wondered if she was referring to his arm or his face. It amazed him that people could be so tactless. Being a disfigured felon carried weight in certain social circles, though apparently not on South Beach.

He found himself thinking, for some reason, about the kidnapped actress, Annie. He recalled when they were in the hotel elevator together, and she’d asked him how she looked in her new dress. It had caught him completely off guard, her caring what he
thought. Now she was gone and it was his fault. Chemo had long been immune to normal feelings of guilt, but he was angry at himself.

“Was it a car crash?” she asked.

“What?”

“Where you got so messed up. I’m just curious.”

“Unbelievable.”

“You don’t wanna talk about it, that’s cool.”

“Let me try those.” Chemo lifted the thin rectangular glasses from her nose. When he put them on, he noticed that his vision was unaltered. Everything looked the same.

She said, “It’s okay. They’re non-prescriptions.”

“Then why the hell do you wear them?”

“Are you kidding?” She laughed. “Because they’re smokin’ hot, that’s why.”

“I see,” said Chemo.

He locked the personal assistant in the kitchen pantry and helped himself to two chocolate éclairs from the refrigerator. Then he went upstairs and extricated Cherry Pye from beneath Tanner Dane Keefe, who was grinding away with an expression of grim duty but no discernible lust. The actor seemed almost relieved when Cherry was whisked from the bed, and he floated facedown into the sheets.

As Cherry bleated in protest, Chemo stuffed her mouth with a pair of dirty gym shorts that he’d grabbed off the floor. Then he inserted her into a baggy Dolphins sweatshirt, slung her over one shoulder and trudged downstairs, out the foyer door.

The minivan sat idling at the bottom of the driveway. Chemo slid open a side door and shoved the former Cheryl Bunterman onto one of the bench seats. He squeezed himself upright beside her and told the driver/model to take them back to the hotel.

Thad gave him a thumbs-up. “Nice frames, man.”

“Yeah,” said Chemo. “They smoke.”

Bang Abbott decided to flee the Comfort Inn after catching Ann on the phone in the bathroom. He assumed that she’d blabbed their location to some interested party, if not the cops.

Before leaving, the paparazzo actually took a shower. He and the actress would be keeping company for a while, and he wanted no more wisecracks about body odor. He wasn’t opposed to bathing; he simply had other priorities. Life as a tracker of celebrities was hectic and highly competitive—an hour spent grooming was an hour lost off the streets.

It didn’t improve Bang Abbott’s sporadic relationship with soap that he had no one to clean up for; no wife or girlfriend, not even a dog waiting to greet him after those long nights chasing stars through the streets of Hollywood. He interacted almost exclusively with other paparazzi, whom he didn’t mind offending. In fact, his humid cloud of reek often proved useful on the hunt, clearing a pathway through competing shooters to the front of the pack.

Ann DeLusia said, “Claude, this is so wrong.”

He was making her wait on the toilet lid while he scrubbed himself behind the shower curtain, which was not sufficiently opaque. In one hand he clutched a sudsy washcloth, and in the other he brandished the Colt revolver, draped with a towel to
shield it from the shower spray. He told Ann that he’d shoot her dead if she tried to run from the bathroom.