Famous Read online

  He slumps in his seat and gazes up at the ceiling. That momentary impishness, that glimpse of the old Avy, disappears. “So everyone can see what a failure I am? So they can see that I didn’t make it?”

  “They won’t care. Just come back with me, okay? This isn’t the right place for you, Avy. These are the wrong people. You need a fresh start. Please? You don’t have to go to your parents’ if you don’t want to. We’ll move in with my father. He’s got room. You can be my roommate. We’ll get you cleaned up and healthy. You can look for acting jobs in New York, and maybe after a while you can come back out here and start fresh.”

  Avy looks across the table at me, and his eyes are soft and sad. He takes a drag off the e-cig and exhales thin vapor. “You mean it, Jamie?”

  “Of course I mean it.”

  A crooked smile creases his lips. “Maybe I should.”

  Inside of me a warm bud of hope blossoms. In the middle of everything that’s gone wrong, maybe this is one thing I can make go right. “Great! We’ll fly back tonight. I’ll put your ticket on my debit card. You can pay me back when you get the money.”

  “Yeah.” Avy nods. “Only, I can’t go back tonight. There’s one thing I have to do first. It’ll just take a few weeks.”

  The blossom begins to wilt. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. It’s just this one thing.”

  The fact that he won’t say what it is worries me. “Can’t you do it when you get back to New York?”

  “No. It’s something . . . I have to do here, Jamie. I promise I’ll come back as soon as it’s over. Really, I will.”

  “In a few weeks?”

  “A month, maybe. Not more than that. I promise.” He’s drumming his fingers, glancing at the coffee shop door.

  A month? What could possibly take a month? “Are you sure, Avy? Why not come back with me tonight? We’ll start all over together. You and me. Just like—” I was going to say “old times,” but it won’t be. I’m not sure what it will be like for Avy back in New York. I can only hope it will be better than it is here.

  He wraps his arms around himself, tucks his hands into his armpits as if the temperature has suddenly dropped. I hear tapping and realize it’s his foot. He takes another puff on his e-cig, then flicks away an imaginary ash with jittery fingers.

  “I’m worried that you’ll change your mind,” I tell him honestly.

  “I won’t, Jamie. I promise. I’ll just take care of this one thing and then I’ll come.” He places his hands on the table and gives me a nod. It’s time to go.

  Out on the sidewalk, Avy spreads his arms for a good-bye hug. I step close and slide my arms around his skinny, bony body.

  “Promise me one more time you’ll come home,” I whisper.

  “I promise,” he says, but he’s already pulling out of my grasp.

  Filled with a sense of foreboding, I grab his shirt and stop him. “Swear?”

  “Swear.” He grins and winks. Then, once again, like that hot summer night back in New York City the previous August, he strides away down the sidewalk.

  We have to tread a very fine line in some of these cases. Especially where there’s been no outright threat. Richard Hildebrandt hadn’t said or written anything threatening to Willow Twine. This was a case where the only person who’d suffered any harm was Richard Hildebrandt himself. If he’d walked into any LAPD station after Sam Russell roughed him up and had shown the police his bruises, I think the police would have been obligated to bring Russell in and book him for assault. It wasn’t like Hildebrandt had been trespassing. He’d been on the street. I guess we’re just lucky that some of these creeps and weirdos don’t realize that the law is there to protect their rights, too.

  Anyway, at that point we knew we had to do something. LA is a funny place. A real company town. Only ten percent of the people who live here actually work in show business, but they’re what keep the rest of this place going. If they ever start to leave, this town is finished. So we had to make sure that Ms. Twine felt protected, even if it was from someone who had not broken any laws.

  In this kind of case the only thing we can do is find out where the person lives and go have a chat with him. You should have seen the dump Hildebrandt lived in. One of those welfare motels with broken windows and weeds growing everywhere. You see these places and you really have to wonder why the Health Department allows them to operate. We waited until Hildebrandt came out, and then we strolled up to him and flashed our badges. He immediately got defensive, like, “What did I do? I haven’t done nothin’.”

  “We know that,” we told him. “We just want to talk.”

  “What about?” he asked.

  “Willow Twine.”

  That took some of the wind out of his sails. I guess he realized we knew. Sometimes that’s all it takes. They know the jig is up. But not this guy. Suddenly, in his mind, we were all on the same team.

  “Can you help her?” he asked.

  “How?” we asked.

  He actually looked astonished that we didn’t already know. “She’s in danger.”

  “Why?” we asked.

  “Every time she goes out in public, there’s nobody to protect her.”

  “She’s got a bodyguard,” we reminded him.

  “He’s useless!” Hildebrandt started to get upset. “Anyone could get past him and shove a knife in her chest.”

  “Why would anyone want to do that?”

  He looked at us like we were stupid. Like the answer was totally obvious. “Because she’s Willow Twine.”

  I remember sharing a look with my partner at that point, like, Whoa, we’ve got a real freak show here. But at the same time, I got an idea of how we could spin this to our advantage. I said, “Okay, thank you. I’m glad you told us about this. You’re completely right. A star of Willow Twine’s magnitude should have more protection. We are definitely going to speak to her people. My guess is that she’s really going to appreciate you for this.”

  It seemed to work. Hildebrandt seemed satisfied with that. He even thanked us. I thought, Well, that was easier than I expected. To be honest, it was as much as we could do under the circumstances. And even then we were probably stretching the rules a little.

  You know, you try to do the right thing. That’s why you’re in this business. And I think most of the time things do work out for the best. But once in a while, something goes completely haywire. And then you ask yourself, what could I have done differently? How could I have avoided this tragedy? I’ve asked myself that a lot in this case. And to be totally honest, I can’t think of a thing.

  MARCH OF TENTH GRADE, SEVENTH DAY OF SPRING VACATION IN LA

  IT FEELS WRONG TO LEAVE AVY, BUT I HAVE TO GET OUT OF LA BEFORE Willow tracks me down. Everybody flies in and out of LAX. I bet a lot of stars have never even heard of the airport in Ontario, California, so that’s where I take the cab. From the back of the cab, I call Dad.

  “Hey, honey, what’s up?” he asks.

  “Get me on a flight home from Ontario airport ASAP. I don’t care how many connections I have to make.”

  “What’s going on? Is something wrong?”

  “Get me on a plane and call me back. I’ll explain then.”

  “Will do.” One thing I can say about Dad—when I need him to come through, no questions asked, he does it. What a sweetheart.

  Meanwhile, now that I’ve turned my BlackBerry back on I can see that there are dozens of calls and text messages, mostly from Carla and various editors in New York, but also from Doris Remlee, Willow, and someone named Charles DuPont from the LA law firm of Ballard, Harris, and Schmidt. It’s not hard to guess that they want to threaten me with some kind of legal action if I don’t turn over my camera.

  Dad couldn’t get me on a direct flight back to New York, so I had to catch a red-eye to Atlanta, and then an early-morning flight to New York. When I finally trudge, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, out of the terminal at LaGuardia, Dad’s waiting in his car. I lean across the
front seat and kiss him on the cheek. “Thanks, you’re the best.”

  “Where’s your stuff?” he asks as he starts to drive.

  “Had to leave it.”

  He scowls at me. I tell him the whole story while he drives back to the city.

  “I don’t get it,” he says when I’ve finished. “Why would Rex take those pictures?”

  “Don’t have a clue, Dad. Can’t figure it out. Was he high? Was he just goofing around, planning to erase them, but then he forgot? He had to know the danger to Willow’s career. Nothing really makes sense.”

  “So, you’ve really got Willow’s future in the palm of your hands,” Dad says. “And you can probably make big money by selling these pics . . . I mean, didn’t Brangelina’s baby photos sell for something like fourteen million dollars?”

  “Yes, but not these,” I answer. “Everyone seems to think I’ve got shots of Rex and Willow, but that’s not what I have. They’re just of Willow. It’s huge news, but it’s negative news. The big media outlets don’t pay a lot for negative news. People magazine would never run these photos. It’s kind of weird. They know their audience wants to know about stuff like this but doesn’t want to actually see it. They’ll pay tons for weddings and pregnancies and new-relationship shots. But what I’ve got really isn’t photos. It’s a story. The photos just prove the story is true. No one feels really proud about taking someone like Willow down. You can’t feel good about destroying someone’s career. It’s not like she’s a bad person. It’s almost like she’s a sad person.”

  Dad nods slowly and we drive off the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge and ease into Manhattan traffic—yellow cabs and big white buses with lots of dark windows. “I’m impressed by how well you understand how these things work,” Dad says. “I guess the thing I don’t understand is, if you can’t make much money from the photos and you feel so bad about hurting Willow’s career, why not just erase them?”

  That’s the big question. And I guess he’s the one person I can admit the truth to. “Because . . . it could be a really huge boost for my career.”

  The words hang between us in the car. Then Dad says, “But you already have a career. Suppose you destroy the photos? You’ve still come back from a week shooting Willow Twine. It’s an exclusive, and it’s all yours.”

  Yes, I think, a nice feather in my cap, but nothing that would really change anything. How can I explain to him what I’m feeling? “Dad, remember the night you got us in to Club Gaia? You couldn’t have done that if I hadn’t been in New York Weekly.”

  His brow furrows as he drives. “Right, but . . . so what?”

  “So what?” I repeat, astonished. “Don’t you want to get in to Club Gaia again?”

  Dad glances at me, and I think I can read in his expression that now he understands. “Seriously? What difference does it make? The only reason I wanted to go there was to see if the story had enough juice to get us in. It was a lark. Just a goof.”

  I’m not sure I believe him. “So . . . you’re saying you don’t really care if you never get in to Club Gaia again?”

  He chuckles. “Come on, honey. I don’t hang out in places like that.”

  I’m still not sure I buy that. “No offense, Dad, but you’re such a groupie,” I tell him, half-teasing, but half-serious. “Like, you always know who all the stars are.”

  “And your point is?”

  The car bumps over a manhole cover. I hear what he says, and I also hear what’s left unsaid: Being able to identify stars doesn’t mean you want to be one. Being able to get in to a club shouldn’t define who you are. You should already know who you are.

  But maybe I’m just finding out.

  APRIL OF TENTH GRADE, AT THE BORDER

  CAN’T TELL YOU HOW GLAD I AM TO GET OFF THAT FREEZING COLD trolley and step into the hot sunshine. I go through the turnstile with the day-trippers, college kids, and maids and walk along the wall with the big mural that leads into Tijuana.

  A few blocks off the main drag is a whole different world. Shanties with corrugated-metal roofs, unpaved dirt streets with foul-smelling rivulets of water running down them, barefoot kids in tattered shorts and stained T-shirts, groups of nasty-looking hombres hanging around in the shadows of doorways. It’s in a kitchen behind a small taco stand that I can finally strip off my girdle of tape and money and hand it over to a short man with greasy black hair and a thick scar under his lower lip. Now I’m free to check in to Dr. Varga’s clinic. When I get out in three weeks, I’ll come back to this taco stand and pick up the goods I’m taking back to San Diego.

  By the way, just because I’ve come to Tijuana for my surgery doesn’t mean Dr. Varga is some crackpot performing operations on his kitchen table. In the good doctor’s office is a framed diploma from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, one of the best medical schools in the United States. His clinic glistens with cleanliness, and everything is new, computerized, and first-rate. The only reason cosmetic surgery is so much cheaper on this side of the border is that doctors don’t have to pay the huge cost of malpractice insurance that doctors in the United States have. But in terms of botched surgeries, you’re just as likely to have one north of the border as you are here.

  MARCH OF TENTH GRADE, EIGHTH DAY OF SPRING VACATION IN NYC

  DAD KEEPS HIS CAR IN A GARAGE A FEW BLOCKS FROM HIS building. We’re walking along the sidewalk when a flash unexpectedly goes off in our faces. It’s quickly followed by another and another. The paparazzi have come out of nowhere—a crowd of them on the sidewalk in front of us. But why are they taking photos of my father and me?

  “What happened with Willow?”

  “Is it true that you stole something from her?”

  “We heard you guys were good friends.”

  “You trying to give the paparazzi a bad name?”

  “What are you talking about? She’s not paparazzi. She’s a celebrity photographer!”

  The strobes flash, and the video lights are blinding. My eyes are so blitzed by blazing illumination that I can hardly see. I raise my hand—a natural reaction to block the intense glare, but also a shot the paparazzi loves. A raised hand shouts, Leave me alone! and I don’t want my photo taken! and I’m guilty!

  Dad shields his eyes too, and we keep walking while the paparazzi swarm. It’s so strange, because I know, or at least recognize, so many of them.

  “What’s the matter, Jamie? Can’t talk?”

  “Think you’re too good for us now?”

  They’re right. What am I doing? Even though I know I’m not supposed to stop, I have to. These are the people I work with, and now that I’m back in New York I’ll be spending a lot of time with them. At least, I hope I will. The strobes keep flashing; the shutters are a din of clicking. I concentrate on appearing relaxed and open. “Seriously, guys? I haven’t taken anything from anyone. I really don’t understand what’s going on with Willow. I’m just a photographer like the rest of you. I have a feeling you’ve gotten some bad information.”

  My old pal Davy steps forward out of the silhouettes and flashing lights. “Come on, Jamie, that’s BS and you know it.”

  More strobes flash, but the group quiets as if they’re waiting to hear how I respond. “All I can tell you is that I didn’t take anything from Willow Twine. And I don’t know what’s going on.”

  Both of these statements are true. The photos belong to me, and I don’t know why Rex took them.

  “They’re saying you climbed a wall to get off Willow’s property,” someone says.

  The answer to that one comes so quickly it surprises me. “The wall around Willow’s house must be twelve feet tall,” I reply. “Look at me. You really think I could climb something like that?”

  A couple of the paparazzi chuckle as if they realize how ridiculous the idea is, even though that’s exactly what I did do. The cameras stop flashing.

  “I’m sorry, guys, really,” I tell them. “I hate to have to tell you that you’re wasting your time. I’m not t
he news. I’m just one of you.”

  Looking disappointed, they lower their cameras and switch off their video equipment. The crowd starts to disperse. Davy lingers behind the others, waiting until they’re gone. When it’s just my dad, him, and me, he asks, “So, how was it? I mean, hanging out with Willow for a week?”

  “A real eye-opener,” I answer.

  Davy gives me an arch look, as if he’s smart enough to know how many different meanings that answer could have. I step a little closer and lower my voice. “I promise I’ll tell you the whole story when I can, okay? But I’m not news. I’m really not.”

  “Okay, kid,” he says. “And well, anyway, welcome back.”

  New York Times

  HOLLYWOOD STARLET STABBED TO DEATH Willow Twine, the actress, singer, and idol to millions of preteen girls, died from stab wounds this afternoon inflicted by an apparently deranged man who accosted her on the sidewalk outside a popular Rodeo Drive eatery.

  Police said Ms. Twine, whose real name is Jane Ellen Hutter, had just left Encore Django when she was approached by the man, tentatively identified as Richard C. Hildebrandt, who thrust a nine-inch knife into her chest. Hildebrandt was quickly subdued by Ms. Twine’s bodyguard, and police were called, but an EMT who was on the scene said later that the actress expired before the ambulance arrived.

  “There was massive internal bleeding,” said the EMT, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak on the record. “If I had to guess, I’d say that the knife must’ve severed her aorta.”

  A spokesperson at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center would say only that despite emergency surgery, Ms. Twine could not be revived.

  Word of Ms. Twine’s untimely death spread quickly on Twitter, with several websites reporting the news within minutes. Tearful, heartbroken fans soon began to gather at the restaurant with flowers, framed photos, notes of tribute, and candles for the young actress. Most expressed shock and dismay that anyone would want to harm the young woman. . . .