No Wolves in Los Angeles by M S Lawson - HTML preview

NO WOLVES IN

LOS ANGELES

 

By M S Lawson

 

ISBN 978-0-6455245-1-2 (e-book)

 

Copyright© 2023 by Mark Steven Lawson writing as M S Lawson

markslawson@optusnet.com.au

 

Published by Clearvadersname Pty Ltd

 

Website: www.clearvadersname.com

 

All rights reserved. The book contains material protected under international and national copyright laws and treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without express permission from the publisher.

 

Other books by this author

 

Dark Ages – The looming destruction of the Australian power grid

(non-fiction, Connor Court, 2023)

 

Obsidian’s War – the winter city (ebook, 2022)

 

Obsidian’s War (ebook, 2021)

 

The Musketeers of Haven – a science fiction story (ebook, 2020)

 

Claire Takes on The Galaxy (ebook, published on the web site Dreame, 2019)

 

Darth Vader – The good guy who lost (non-fiction ebook, 2018)

 

A Planet for Emily (ebook, 2017)

 

Disgraced in all of Koala Bay (ebook, 2016)

 

The Zen of Being Grumpy (non-fiction published by Connor Court, 2013)

 

Cover image: shutterstock

This book is dedicated to my:

 

Father, Robert Lawson, a Jane Austenophile or Janite.

Sister Joanne who, when told that I was writing a romance asked if I had ever read one.

Daughter Michelle, another Janite, who as a child was worried that there might be Wolves outside the family home when I read her Little Red Riding Hood.

 

CHAPTER ONE

 

When Meghan Kowalski’s father read Little Red Riding Hood to his daughter he was amused by the illustration of the big bad wolf in the bedtime storybook the family used. This showed a suave, smiling wolf dressed in a suit hailing Little Red Riding Hood on the way to her grandmother’s place.

“You might meet lots of wolves when you are older,” said Kowalska senior, as he thought that his Meghan might have inherited much from his mother who had been a beauty queen in her day.

“You mean there are wolves around here?” exclaimed little Meghan.

“No, no wolves now,” said her father. “I meant that you might meet them later, when you are older.”

“There are wolves, then,” said Meghan, looking at the bedroom window in alarm, thinking that there might be wolves right outside.

“No, no, no wolves around here,” said Mr Kowalski, sorry he had made this adult comment. “There are no wolves in Los Angeles.” That was where the family happened to live. “None at all.”

This calmed little Meghan enough to listen to the rest of the story – a sanitised version with the grandmother locked in the closet rather than eaten – although she still found the wolf scary. As she grew up, however, she lost her fear of wolves in dark forests, especially as there were no forests near her up-scale LA suburb. Instead, she became absorbed in school and her friends including Connie Leighton, who also showed promise of being able to catch men’s eyes when she got older.

There were sleepovers and shared confidences which developed into confessions of secret crushes and talk about fending off unwanted attention from boys. Then Meghan took drama and was told that she could act. She also took singing lessons and thought she could sing. Connie took singing lessons and was told that she could sing. She also took drama classes and thought she could act. The two girls competed for the lead role of Blanche DuBois in the school’s production of Tennessee William’s classic A Streetcar Named Desire. Meghan won and turned the play into a triumph, much to Connie’s dismay. They competed in a local singing contest which Connie won hands down, wowing the crowd, with Meghan coming a distant fourth, mainly on her looks, much to her dismay.

Now each other’s nemesis the two girls competed for Prom Queen which, to Meghan’s fury, Connie won handily on a school-wide popular vote despite Meghan campaigning hard and having developed into a stunning blonde who was already getting regular modelling work. She had been discovered by a modeling agent at sixteen while at a street fair with her mother. The now not little Megan took the defeat so personally that she even told the principal that the election must have been fixed. This accusation enraged the Leighton family and embarrassed her father, who had to work hard to smooth over wounded feelings. He wondered what had happened to the girl who had to be reassured over wolves.

Both girls easily got into the American Academy of Dramatic Arts joining Connie’s older brother Ty, also a singer. Meghan dated Ty for a time, infuriating Connie who was still sore about the vote rigging allegation, then dumped him, which infuriated her even more. She accused Megan of deliberately breaking her brother’s heart. Meghan moved on to a good looking senior with acting talent she met during a staging of Macbeth, only for the boy to drop her in favour of dating Connie, whom he met during the musical theatre programme. Meghan accused Connie of deliberately stealing her boyfriend. Meanwhile, just as Mr Kowalski had warned many years before, both girls discovered that there were plenty of male wolves.

Soon after, Connie dropped out of college and all contact with Meghan in favour of fronting a band performing mainly covers in high schools, hotels and bars, anywhere there was an audience and a dance floor. That band eventually dissolved but Connie and the drummer found two guitarists with some original material. She had an affair and a hit single with one of the guitarists before the affair, fame and drugs tore the group apart, but not before an agent scouted her for a band to showcase material from a rising songwriter. For Connie could sing, and that counted for something in the music business. The first hit was helped by a video so salacious it had to be re-edited to meet the requirements of the censors and prompted a concerned call from Connie’s mother.

“It’s the music business Ma,” said Connie.

The video helped push that first single up the charts which was followed by another, solid hit by the rising star who found she had a knack for spotting potential chart toppers. Suddenly Connie Leighton was in the big time.

Meanwhile, the bank that Mr Kowalski had worked for as a senior executive hit major trouble and the stress of picking up the pieces, plus a lung infection, brought on a latent heart condition. His wife and two daughters, Meghan and the somewhat younger Madison, then discovered that Mr Kowalski had put the family’s fortune, plus money borrowed against the family home, into the collapsed bank. On top of this, a long-standing family friend and financial advisor also caught in the bank disaster responded to the crisis by stealing his client’s money, including Meghan’s accumulated modelling fees, and vanishing. Meghan’s father should have also warned his daughter, and himself, about wolves in the financial world.

The Kowalskis were abruptly reduced to a miserable two-bedroom apartment and to having to borrow from family to pay for a modest funeral. Meghan’s degree was abandoned in favour of full-time modeling work, and her mother was forced to take a sales assistant job in an antique furniture store. A keen golfer, Mrs Kowalski also had to give up her expensive golf club membership, declining a well-meant but humiliating offer from friends to pay her dues until she was on her feet.

Fortunately, Meghan was a modeling natural knowing instinctively how to work with the camera. She put off moving to the fashion industry capital of New York to see her mother and sister through the tough time, but remaining in the movie heartland proved an advantage in that she was handed a one-off role in a sitcom, for which she reluctantly took the name Clarise Chalmers.

“It’s branding,” said the agent she had at the time. “No one pays to see shows with a Meghan Kowalski in it, but they will pay to see a Clarise Chalmers.”

As acting and screen presence still counted for a lot in Hollywood, not to mention Meghan-turned-Clarise’s considerable beauty, the one-off appearance turned into a recurring role with one episode featuring a shower scene so salacious that her mother expressed concern.

“It’s Hollywood, mother,” said Clarise-Meghan.

She auditioned for the lead in a major treasure-hunting adventure film not expecting to get it and ended up with the unlikely minor part of a blonde barbarian queen which attracted critical attention. After that came a role as the other woman in a straight-to-streaming-services rom-com movie so syrupy that Clarise had trouble watching it. She acted well enough in another cheap film for the audience to suspend disbelief that a luminously beautiful young woman was somehow a dowdy, lonely New York café waitress.

Her mother and sister now out of poverty, Meghan finally moved to New York to do a season on Broadway plus modeling, sharing a cheap apartment with another actress who drove her crazy, then moved back to Los Angeles when she got her big break playing an international model turned evil mastermind. She trained for weeks with a female fencing grandmaster for a sequence where she duelled with the hero while in her underwear. A role as the girlfriend of a superhero led to a major part in a heist movie. Clarise had decided to show flesh on screen, within reason, and a steamy shower scene that raised questions about the film’s classification – which she did despite detesting her co-star - helped make it a box office smash hit.

Abruptly Meghan found that she had bypassed the long-slow grid of auditions to become a star. Offers of all kinds – financial, promotional, romantic, sexual and for media interviews – poured in. She fell out with her first, down-at-heel agent over accepting the lead in a remake of the Audrey Hepburn – Peter O’Toole 60s classic How to Steal a Million. The agent thought that the fledgling star should make another film that allowed her to show more flesh and offered more money, meaning a larger fee for him. Meghan proved to be the better judge of projects when the remake became a hit, and the other film bombed.

The rising star signed with a big management company that promised her the world, only for these promises to mean the company took bigger fees, in return for sending her endless scripts featuring empty-headed blondes that never got out of the shower. Meghan accepted that being blonde was part of the Clarise brand, but she wanted roles with more class than simulated sex in showers. She told this to the big agency executives who agreed, nodded vigorously and smiled then sent her more scripts with shower scenes, along with more modelling and endorsement work than she could possibly do.

A major distraction from these career and management issues, however, were very handsome leading men and drugs and partying. Meghan-Clarise never had any trouble attracting men but now they flocked around in packs howling. Hot, rich, successful, single men – at least they said they were single – drove her in expensive sports cars to parties in chateaus, super yachts, converted castles and plush apartments while talking of huge business deals and major movie roles. She discovered a previously unsuspected wild streak, which a rich, handsome man – preferably a Latin type – could bring out.

Meghan went swimming in the Seine in Paris with the cast of one film on a dare only to be fished out and fined by bemused French police.

“The river is being cleaned up, Mademoiselle Chalmers,” explained a senior Parisian police officer in perfect English, “but there is still too much pollution to permit public swimming.”

The Italian police were less tolerant of a similar incident involving the Trevi Fountain in Rome, where Meghan happened to be on a modelling assignment, as they found small amounts of drugs on some of the party. Fortunately, they did not find drugs on Meghan, but only because she was already high.

“You may be a rival in beauty for Anita Ekberg, Signoria Chalmers,” a senior Italian police officer told her in perfect English, referring to the classic scene in the 1960 film La Dolce Vita featuring that star cavorting in the fountain. “But too many tourists have been in the fountain since then. We will have to increase the fine.”

When Meghan’s invaluable assistant and best friend Mia fetched her boss from the Roman lockup, she found the star signing autographs and posing for photos with policemen.

Then there was the party in Meghan-Clarise’s fashionable serviced apartment in London where she was shooting the remake of How to Steal a Million. She invited a few friends but they, in turn, invited the wrong people, including top-end drug dealers, representatives of London’s underworld who wanted to meet Clarise-Meghan and members of two rock bands that happened to be deadly rivals. Mayhem! Two celebrities had a fist fight in the apartment’s spa pool, several groupies went topless while another high as a kite invitee emptied the magazine of a small pistol from a balcony into the nearby Thames, at which point the police were called. Meghan hid behind a couch with one of the groupies for the ensuing melee which involved five patrol cars, a police helicopter and the dog squad. One woman constable was slightly injured, a police dog bit a guest and ambulances had to be called for both the brawling celebrities.

“A father of one of our constables says there’s been nothing like it since the Stones’ tours, Ms Chalmers,” said a senior English police officer in a broad Midlands accent to a badly hung over Meghan-Clarise still in her club dress the next day, “and we don’t want to see it again. Given what happened in Paris and Rome, I might also point out that this far downstream you need prior written permission to go swimming in the Thames.”

The incident prompted her mother to suggest rehab.

“I’m having fun, mother,” Meghan said.

But it was the party in New York that turned Meghan from a Diva into a Hollywood bad girl. As she told her mother later it wasn’t her fault that the enormous party in an apartment overlooking Central Park got completely out of control. She hadn’t organised it and only met the owner of the apartment on the night. All she had done was turn up with her billionaire boyfriend of the time. She did not know until interviewed by detectives the next day that two rival sets of gangsters also attended, all of them under the impression that they would have carnal relations with her although she had never met with any of them. Nor did she witness the brawl around the apartment building’s fountain which had to be broken up by police from several squad cars, and subsequent chase through Central Park involving mounted police officers. But because she was the highest profile celebrity at the party her name was mentioned prominently in all the news reports and the public, quite unfairly, came to believe that somehow she was behind the fracas.

Initially horrified by this turn of affairs Meghan found that her new reputation as a party animal (which had some justification) and Hollywood bad girl (which was unfair) meant a huge increase in the fees she could charge. This was helped by the fact that Meghan also had a sense of style that prompted comparisons with the late, great Audrey Hepburn. A bad girl with a sense of style is a winner on magazine covers. She bought a large house in on the edge of Beverley Hills with a pool to match as a home and headquarters and gave money to her mother to buy a partnership in a fashionable antique furniture store.

All that extra money, however, also meant that consultants offering services of all kinds clustered around her howling for fees. She had PR consultants, styling consultants, tax lawyers, corporate lawyers, physical trainers and a very expensive group that managed all forms of social media for her. Meghan’s online profile needed managing, she was told, at a substantial cost. Then there were the website issues, security precautions and legal issues of one kind or another, some of them caused by the high priced consultants themselves who then wanted more fees to resolve them. Other sets of consultants handled whatever money was left over after the fees had been paid.

She invested money with one group, on the recommendation of a family friend. This collective of smooth-talking salesmen, as Meghan thought of them later, put all her money into a high-leverage, high-risk financial product which also happened to pay very high commissions to the salesmen. The product promptly failed miserably with the promoters getting to the airport only a step or two ahead of several Federal agencies. The salesmen got their commissions but Meghan never saw a dollar of her money again. She tried again with another group recommended by someone her mother knew. That group took big management commissions in return for thoughtfully losing only a part of her money – a loss they blamed on “adverse market circumstances”.

“At least Federal agents aren’t involved this time,” thought Meghan.

The death of her father and subsequent, brief poverty had marked Meghan more than she cared to admit, in that she wanted to keep the money she earned, but dollars seemed to flow out the door to buy services she did not really understand and did not know why she needed.

Meanwhile, Connie was developing her own reputation. She got back at a boyfriend who broke her heart by releasing a break up song that went to number one everywhere and forced the ex-boyfriend to undertake relief work in Africa. The singer moved to New York where she had the bad luck/judgment to date a rap artist who turned out to be insanely jealous. A chain of events which started with her exchanging a few, friendly words with the rapper’s major rival at a party culminated in a studio shootout and both men being rushed to hospital.

Connie’s sole contribution to the shootout had been to cower under a music control panel with a back-up singer and her interaction with the rival had been entirely above board, but her boyfriend loudly blamed Connie, and the police interviewed her at length about his allegations before charging both men with various violent crimes. The singer then took her father’s very sensible advice concerning the boyfriend “to dump his arse” and move back to LA. There she bought a large house in Beverley Hills proper and filled it up with a floating cast of music industry wannabees and doubtful hangers-on who amused her.

The music diva dated a good-looking Hollywood producer who got her a part in a romantic comedy destined to go straight to a streaming service. Then she found out, to her horror and mortification, that the producer was not only very much married his wife confronted Connie at a swanky Hollywood party to accuse the singer of deliberately seducing her husband. Security had to intervene. This was all covered in excruciating detail by the media. Because the producer’s wife defended him with such force, Connie found herself cast in the role of husband-stealer.

“I had no idea he was married, Ma,” she told her mother later. “There was no ring, no wife at his place and he never said a word.”

Her mother believed Connie, but the wife proved better at lying than the singer at telling the truth. Far worse the romantic comedy bombed, with the critics making nasty remarks about the husband-stealer’s acting ability, and the fuss affected her music sales.

Faced with the need to rebuild her public image, and after taking advice from a major public relations firm, Connie started talking about the environment. She owned a jet for touring and saw no problem in also using it to fly to conferences and meetings on the environment to give her opinion on the issue, although all she knew of the environment was the view of her Mansion’s back garden from her bedroom window. To add some media spice to her declarations she thought to revive the old feud between herself and Megan-Clarise.

“Look at the rich movie star,” she told reporters. “What has she ever done for the environment?”

Meghan at first ignored this then took advice from the large public relations firm charging big fees – the same one used by Connie, although she did not realise this. The consultant also told her to talk about the environment.

“What am I to say?” she asked.

“Just say we should reduce emissions,” the consultant replied. “The media don’t seem to care much beyond that.”

Meghan thought that sounded too much like catch-up and that, for the fees she was paying, there could have been more creative thinking but she had no idea what else to say. While she was puzzling over this her assistant and best friend Mia declared that she wanted to go out to have drinks with a mega-rich Silicon Valley type. Meghan’s boyfriend of several months, another successful, good-looking-Latin film star type, was out of town for a few days and Meghan-Clarise had agreed to appear at a party thrown by one of the producers of her latest movie.

“But we have this party to go to,” she said.

“We’ll drop in for a drink and then go on to the party,” said Mia. “We can’t appear too early. If you come, he says he can get someone presentable to keep you company while he talks to me.”

“Urgh,” said Meghan, who had adopted high standards when it came to men. “A rich geek with a presentable friend. Are you really into this guy?”

“Never met him. It’s through friends of friends and a sort-of blind date but he says he wants to find out about the film industry. The upside is that he’s got three hundred million,” said Mia. She was about Meghan’s age, short and stocky, with a mop of curly brown hair and a girl next door appeal that meant she did well for herself in attracting men. “He’s gotta be worth talking to, no matter what he looks like, and it’s at that really ritzy club we were talking about.”

“I want to check out that place out,” admitted Meghan. “I’ll talk to this presentable plus one for a while if you want.”

When they got to the club she wore a hood and sunglasses as she often did in public to avoid attention, but the man at the door still waved the two ladies through without question, directing them to the bar section. They found two men in a booth. One was obviously the mega-rich silicon valley geek and the other the presentable plus one, standing up and staring so intently at the screen above the bar that he did not turn around when the ladies come in.

Meghan thought that the plus one was not bad looking, tall with an athletic build, olive skin and a square jaw. Okay she would talk to him for a few minutes if he ever paid attention. They sat down.

“I’m Hap,” said Hap, offering his hand. Clarise placed her hand briefly on Hap’s hand.

“Who’s your friend?” she asked.

 

 

CHAPTER TWO

 

Brett knew what had to be done. The first squad could still be heard firing but it was only a matter of time before the base was over-run by Zomian warrior-bots, and his friend squad leader Buddy Wilcox was in a bad way. They had stopped the bleeding from his wounds but the displays on Buddy’s tablet showed they were running out of options.

“Only thing for it,” said Brett, “is to disable the Zomian control centre. I’ve got to blow it.”

“But that’s two levels down, outside the base,” said Frieda, looking at the displays on Buddy’s console. “You’ll never get there, and the centre’s got defences.”

“She’s right, boss,” said Buddy, gasping. “That thing is armoured and got three of those big-ass chain guns that have been cutting our guys to pieces.”

“I’ll have to think of something – it’s either that or let ourselves get over run and Buddy here dies,” said Brett. “I can get to the elevator shaft from here, get the doors open and use the cables to get down to the garage level.”

“Then what?” demanded Frieda. “The warrior-bots are already on this floor. They’ll be at least a couple on that level looking for survivors.”

“I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it. You get Buddy here to a medic, and I’ll see you real soon.”

“I outrank you,” said Frieda. “I could order you not to go.”

“Fleet doesn’t get involved in land operations, Lieutenant,” said Brett.

“Oh! If you won’t give up this madness, at least let me do this.” She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him.

 

“Kissing?” said Buck, “We’re into kissing now?”

“Sure,” said Will. “We’re going to adolescent, young adult guy market. They’ll want a lot more than kissing but if we stop at that and go light on the gore then the parents won’t care that their sons are only reading trashy military SF. They’ll be happy that their kid is reading something, instead of playing computer games.”

“I agree,” said Wilma, Buck’s wife, from her desk. “A little gore, a little smooching, have a guy and pretty girl on the cover doing dramatic stuff and the book gets a spot in the son’s bookcase, instead of under the mattress. We’d even get into libraries.”

“Under the mattress would be a lot more profitable,” said Buck, wistfully.

“Not while I’m in this company,” retorted Wilma. “We may be poor but at least we’re ethical.”

“We’ll go bankrupt with dignity,” said Buck.

Buck had a round face, edged with an unkempt beard, lank hair and, to be unkind, a pudgy figure. He had met Wilma, a match in both looks and interests, at a Comic-Con. Almost as part of their marriage vows the pair had set up Buckland Publishing Inc, the international headquarters of which was the garage of their downscale LA home. This company had the honour of publishing the second book in the Stellar Ranger series featuring Technical Sergeant Brett Hardwick by rising author William Moorland. In contrast to the married pair William, or Will to friends, was the square jawed, clean-cut, dark-haired athletic type that could pass muster as an extra in a film pool scene. However, all three spoke the same language of science fiction and fantasy fandom and were dear friends.

“And it marks us out from the Warhammer, Star Wars and Star Trek stuff,” said Will.

Buck rolled his eyes. “Flooding the market – who can keep up.”

“Keep it small scale, personal and mainly human,” said Will, “and maybe we’ll all catch a break.”

“There was some profit in the first one,” conceded Buck, “and a series is always better. We could also try for an audiobook version of the first one and spend a little on marketing.”

“Audiobook?” said Will.

“Sure, growing part of the market, and way easier to distribute,” said Buck. “We can lodge the audio files on a site, nominate the price and it goes everywhere as downloads. We get to keep maybe half the nominated price. The problem is marketing but first, we’ve gotta get the book narrated. You any good at narration?”

“Violet says I’m no actor,” said Will. “Maybe we’d better hire in.”

“Hiring is expensive – couple of thousand to hire through the site, maybe, and you take what you get. But I don’t have a couple of thousand. I have to stall the printer when he wants his money as it is – even pulling casual shifts at Digital Megamall.”

“Times really are tough,” said Will. “I don’t have it either at the moment. Maybe I can find it later; plus money for marketing, you say?”

“Crowded market,” said Buck. “Whatever money you can get and we can split the revenue.”

“After I get the upfront costs back, just like you get your printer costs back before I see a cent on the printed book.”

Buck shrugged. “Fair enough.”

“How is it going with you and Violet?” asked Wilma.

“Pretty good, I’d say,” said Will. “It all seems to be working. Maybe she’ll make an honest man of me.”

“Really?” said Wilma, trying to sound enthusiastic. “That sounds great.”

Wilma had, in fact, spoken with Violet just a few days previously. An aspiring actress Violet had talked of a theatre opportunity back East, and of a major move which did not seem to include Will. That was the reason she’d asked about Violet. Wilma was now fearful that her good friend would have his heart broken.

“You don’t want to rush into anything,” was all she said.

“Of course not,” said Will, who had a ring in the black canvas shoulder satchel which he always carried with him and planned on presenting it that day. He did not have money for book narration because he had been spending it on rings.

“I’ve got something else,” said Buck grabbing a pile of pages off his desk. “You remember I told you about that college roomie of mine who’s done well in Silicon Valley?”

“How could I forget you know someone who actually has money,” said Will.

“He knows you,” said Buck. “He’s read the first Ranger book and wants to read the second.”

“He did and he does?” said Will, then shrugged. “Having a mega-rich reader is better than not having one, I guess. Shouldn’t you try to get him interested in investing in your business, like fund audiobook development and kickstart those graphic novel projects.”

“Yeah – get things moving,” said Wilma.

“He’s got just three hundred million or so which, according to him, is barely worth mentioning in the Valley,” Buck said. “I tried getting him interested in book publishing but he says what he really wants is to produce a film.”

“It’s LA,” said Will. “Everyone wants to produce films.”

“He’s written this script which he’s asked me to get you to look at.”

“Me? You’ve got that graphic novel guy. He’s got several books out and he’s got a big following – way more established than me.”

“He’s also read those but thinks you’re more serious,” said Buck. “If I humour him, maybe I can get some investment out of him.”

Will took the manuscript and read the title aloud.

“Robot Zombie Vampire Strippers from beyond Hell Galaxy. That’s the title? What sort of films did you guys see in college?”

Wilma sighed.

“Those sorts of films,” said Buck, ignoring Wilma. “He’s really into them.”

“It’s not so much a title as a list of genres,” said Will. “Not that I’m against such films but I’m not sure I want to be involved in one.”

“Can you have a look – give him some sort of appraisal?”

Will flicked through the pages.

“Naked girl screaming,” he read. “Cut in half with chainsaw by zombie minion as robot overlord laughs. ‘The time of the human is over. Hell Galaxy Robots will rule.’ At least he keeps the action going.”

“It’s a little rough,” said Buck.

“It’s porno,” said Wilma. “Check out the sex scene in the middle. I read it; now I can’t look at any of my kitchen appliances.”

“Kitchen appliances?” said Will in alarm.

“I’m not repeating any of it,” she said. “Check it out.”

Will sighed. “I’ll look at it but even without reading it I can offer a few comments – getting a production company interested in a script to the point where they are prepared to drop maybe a few million minimum putting it on the screen, is bad enough. Getting interest in anything with a title like Robot Zombie Vampire Strippers from beyond Hell Galaxy is a tough ask. In those sorts of films, the producers are pretty much the same people as the directors who’ve managed to get money from somewhere for a cheap film. Good horror films do get made, but not using scripts like this. Your guy’s got money he should do it himself and try to get distribution.”

“He doesn’t know anything about the film industry,” said Buck.

“He can hire people,” said Will. “It’s LA. And he knows about computers. Monster special effects shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Can you look at it and talk to him?” asked Buck. “I said you had contacts in the film industry.”

“Through Vi, sure,” said Will. “Her friends are always talking about films, but they’re mostly bit players. And when I’m not doing trashy SF I’m writing real estate flyers. However, I can find time to talk to a mega-rich person, even if they only have three hundred million or whatever. Just send me his number when you can. Now I’ve got an important date to keep.”

 

Will noted the strange car in the driveway of the rented condo he shared with Violet but he couldn’t see her car and thought that one of Violet’s friends had given her a lift. Never mind, today was the day. He would pop the question and all would be right with the world. He opened the door and stopped dead. There was a suitcase by the door and cardboard boxes full of her possessions on the table in the kitchen nook. Vi came downstairs at that moment, followed by a man with a full red beard, carrying another box. Will had seen the man before, at a party he thought, but could not recall his name.

“Will, I didn’t expect you home so soon,” said Vi. She was an attractive brunette with a trim figure who favoured pixie cut hairstyles and was obviously embarrassed by the unexpected encounter. “I don’t know if you remember Nolan.”

“Sort of,” said Will, glancing at Nolan.

“I’ll put the stuff in the car,” said Nolan, also obviously embarrassed. He walked out past Will, leaving the pair alone.

“I was going to leave you a note,” said Vi.

“A note?” said Will, “after three years. I even came with you out here.”

“I know, and that was sweet Will,” she said. “But we weren’t going anywhere. You weren’t going anywhere. I wasn’t going anywhere.”

“I was getting books published,” protested Will.

“Your publisher works out of a garage and has to take casual shifts at an IT store to make ends meet,” she said. “You have to write real estate blurbs.”

“I write the real estate copy because I came here with you and it was all I could find. I wasn’t planning on doing it all my life.”

“Then there’s my career,” interrupted Vi. “My agent’s dropped me, and Nolan has got me a part in a production off-Broadway.”

“New York?”

“We’re driving there now,” she said.

“Long drive,” said Will. He had no idea what else to say.

“We’ll do a couple of touristy things on the way. A break.”

Nolan came in through the still open door to pick up the suitcase and left again.

“A break? You’re going with Nolan for a theatre part and putting in vacation time on the way? That’s it after three years?”

“Will, it was time to move on,” she said. “You’re a sweet guy and hot. You’ll find someone else, nice, soon and forget about me.”

“I don’t want to find someone else. I thought we were going well. I thought you were enjoying our time; you were committed to us.”

“Will, I was putting up a front,” she said as if explaining an obvious point to a child. “What can I say, I’m an actress.” She kissed him on the cheek. Will did not move. “Thanks for the good times.”

She left. Nolan came in twice more to pick up boxes. On the second visit he paused to say, “Sorry man.”

Will who had sat down heavily at the kitchen table waved his hand to indicate the door, without looking at the man, but didn’t say anything.

“You want the door left open?”

“Close it and go,” said Will.

He heard Violet and Nolan drive off then pulled the ring case out of his bag and opened it to look at the ring.

“Total idiot,” he muttered to himself. He thrust the case back in the back and went to sit on the condo’s sofa with his thoughts until long after the sun had set.

 

The condo in the suburb of Los Feliz, a short distance (in LA terms) from both Hollywood and the Valley and the natural haunt of every acting wannabe was hardly expensive but Will’s royalty income was trivial and writing real estate advertising copy did not pay well. An additional problem was that he did not think to cancel the credit card he shared with Vi until the next day when he checked to see if she had used it. She had withdrawn cash up to the daily limit three times, including the day before she left, as well as charging the first night’s hotel, petrol and meals for herself and Nolan on it. This came to three thousand two hundred and twenty three dollars and forty three cents – Will counted it up carefully. Now that really hurt.

Will sold the ring back to the store he got it from, which he found highly embarrassing – the sales lady smiled throughout – and moved to an even dingier apartment in the same neighbourhood. This he shared with Leo who worked in the same digital superstore as Buck, Leo’s Goth girlfriend Pandora, always shortened to Pan, and a billion cockroaches. Leo was a cheerful man who declared that he was into satanism and old Westerns.

“Anything with a shootout, Will,” he said. “I love those shootouts.”

He didn’t say anything about Satanism and Will did not ask.

Pan wanted to set Will up with her Goth girlfriends.

“I have a sad romantic history,” he told her, sore over Vi’s sudden departure. “If any of your friends are interested in a gloomy affair ending in a suicide pact, let me know.”

To Will’s alarm Pan reported that there was some interest in the suicide pact idea, and he had to firmly reject all offers, sight unseen.

“Tell them I’m thinking of turning gay,” he said, “and I’ll have the suicide pact with my new gay partner.”

Will reluctantly took casual shifts at the digital superstore as he knew about computers, fumigated the apartment – the cockroaches were initially discouraged – tried not to think about Vi, which was hard, and read the script. He wrote out some of his thoughts, trying to be positive, and sent them to Buck to be relayed to the author, Jason Hap, universally called Hap rather than Jason.

Buck received another request from Hap.

“He wants someone presentable to meet for drinks with a female film industry type,” Buck told Wilma. “He’s taken Will’s advice to heart and is trying to find out more about the industry.”

“Is he trying to find out more about the industry or the assistant?” asked Wilma. “If so, why the presentable plus one?”

Buck shrugged. “The assistant is bringing a girlfriend.”

“Oh, okay,” said Wilma. “Then get Will to go. He’s not only presentable he’s way presentable, not to mention single, and Hap wants to talk to him too. Tell Will if he wants his books published then he’s to quit moping around, get his butt along to this bar and play nice.”

 

Later that day Will fronted up to an exclusive Hollywood nightclub that Violet would have killed to get into, mentioned Hap’s name at the door as instructed and had his identity checked. He found the Silicon Valley tycoon sitting in a booth in the bar section which could accommodate four. Hap motioned Will to sit beside him rather than opposite.

“The ladies will sit there,” he said. “I see you got dressed for the occasion.”

Will was wearing dark suit pants and a sports jacket with a white shirt that was his best outfit, and perhaps the only clothing he had that could be worn in an exclusive club. The tycoon, for his part, was in the Silicon Valley standard of jeans and grey jacket with elbow patches and tee shirt.

“Wilma gave me a talking to about dress standards,” Will said. “I had to describe what I was going to wear and get her approval.”

Hap laughed. “You don’t want to cross Wilma. I was best man at their wedding. I didn’t dare mess up.”

“You’ve done well in the valley, I understand,” said Will. “Are you still in the same venture? Software development aids wasn’t it?”

“Sold out mostly and bought a house closer to Hollywood,” said Hap. “Looking for the next big thing, like everyone else. Oh, okay here are the ladies now.”

Will would have looked but he was distracted by the site of Violet on the TV screen above the bar. She was presenting an exercise aid in a commercial and looked good. Will was vaguely aware of someone sitting opposite him but was so absorbed he did not turn around, instead taking a swig of the foreign beer had had ordered.

He heard someone say, “Who is your friend?” then turned around to find himself looking at a woman he recognised instantly as the famous star Clarise Chalmers.

 

 

CHAPTER THREE

 

One reviewer had commented that Clarise Chalmers had a face that started somewhere around Grace Kelly and ended up at Michelle Pfeiffer via a Victoria Secret angel or two. She had silver blond shoulder length hair that recalled Marilyn Munroe and like Munroe herself, as critics also noted, Clarise Chalmers could light up any film just by being in it. Add in her reputation as a party animal and bad girl, of which Will was well aware, and the result was a sexual appeal bombshell that exploded in the writer’s face.

About to swallow a mouthful of light beer, Will did what any red-blooded American guy would when do in the circumstances - he choked and sat down coughing so hard that Hap patted him on the back.

“When he recovers his name is Will,” said the multi-millionaire.

After some spluttering, thinking how humiliating it all was, Will managed to say “It is a great honour to meet you, Ms Chalmers. I’ve admired your films.”

Hap ordered drinks for the ladies.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Will,” said Meghan-Clarise, amused. She never got tired of the effect she had on good looking men, particularly if they were polite about their admiration as Will had just been. “What do you do in Hollywood?”

Will knew that he had not a hope in all creation of interesting Clarise Chambers and, in any case, after Violet he was wary of actresses, so he thought that he would not lose anything by saying the first thing that came into his head.

“I’m the very lowest of the Hollywood low, Ms Chalmers,” he said, remembering how Violet had been so dismissive of his books. “You really shouldn’t be seen with me. Think of your reputation.”

“My reputation is already trash,” said Clarise, amused. “But thanks for thinking of it. You’re an assistant producer?”

“Royalty compared to me. Their assistants return my calls to tell me to go away.” Will had never tried to call as assistant producer and wasn’t exactly sure what they did, but it seemed a fair bet.

“I see. Stage hand?”

“They’re allowed on set. The likes of me are warned off by security if we’re lucky. If we’re unlucky we’ll get beaten up in a back room.”

“That is bad. Executive assistant?”

“When they do return my calls to their bosses, they sneer at me.”

“Okay, Will, I give up, what do you do?”

“I’m a writer.”

Clarise laughed, surprising Mia who was engrossed in her conversation with Hap.

“Yes, that is low,” said the star. “But not so low that I can’t be seen in a bar with you. I can always just say I didn’t want to be rude.”

It was Will’s turn to laugh. “You remember that old film Shakespeare In Love?”

“Actually, I do,” said Clarise, who had studied Shakespeare as part of her unfinished degree. “Good film.”

“You might remember a part during rehearsals for the first production of Romeo and Juliette when someone points to Shakespeare who’s talking to the actors and asks the theatre manager ‘Who’s he?’ And the manager says, ‘Oh he’s no-one, he’s just the author’. Now if they’re going to say that about the greatest playwright of all time, what are they going to say about someone who writes trashy military SF for fourteen year olds? You’ll need a better excuse for talking to me.”

Will had recovered enough to appreciate that Clarise was braless underneath a low-cut, red club dress (the jacket with the hood had been cast aside) and was struggling not to leer.

The actress giggled softly. She had noticed Will’s struggles and was amused by them. “You’re not trying to sell yourself at all here are you, Will. Men usually sell themselves to me.”

“You would have seen through all of that in a split second, Ms Chalmers. I’m also a nerd as well as a writer. I even have a theory about Darth Vader.”

She laughed again. Will thought that Violet would have killed for a chance to have a drink with Clarise Chalmers.

“This keeps getting worse and worse,” the actress said. “Please don’t tell me your theory about Darth Vader. A boyfriend in college got me to watch the first three movies produced. That’s several hours of my life I won’t get back. Let’s talk about something else.”

“You can always turn this meeting to your advantage,” said Will, “you can say you’ve met a nerd and a writer and they’re not so bad. You can’t let them into the neighbourhood as they bring down property prices, but otherwise they’re okay. Shows that you’re broadminded.”

“As it happens, Will, my life is plagued by writers,” she said.

“It is, why?”

“I need them, so consultants tell me, for my website, Twitter – sorry, X – account, as well as for Instagram, Facebook, Tinder and I don’t know what else besides, all to develop my image.”

“Pardon me, Ms Chalmers but what are you doing on Tinder? It’s a dating app and you have a boyfriend, some big star.”

“Robin Hawke. You read the media news, Will?”

“I knew someone in the acting scene here for a time,” said Will. “Also, why bother to develop anything on Instagram? It’s good for Eastern European models who want to build a profile, but you’re already a star with fans in the millions. You use it to boost your next film or endorsement. If you don’t have anything to sell then send off a couple of pics of you, I dunno, looking fabulous at the latest glitzy star event, with details about where it is. Same for Facebook and X and whatever else. Just keep your millions of fans interested with the occasional bulletin until you’re ready to push something. Needs some writing but not much.”

“I see,” said Clarise, leaning back – Will had to be careful not to look down - and eyeing the writer quizzically. “You use social media yourself much, Will.”

“Some, although I have my doubts about how much my fan base, such as it is, looks at X or Facebook. They’ll look at Instagram, but they’d be way more interested in Eastern European models than my stuff.”

“I also get scripts from writers all the time,” Charise said. “All with shower scenes.”

“You have a reputation for such scenes, Ms Chalmers. I hope you don’t mind if I say I have found them interesting myself, but I guess you want to move beyond them,” said Will.

“Maybe,” said Clarise, thinking that Will had been suitably respectful in the way he had admitted to liking her shower scenes.

“You remember Sharon Stone and the film from way back, Basic Instinct.”

“With the interrogation scene where she isn’t wearing underwear,” said Clarise. “She says she was tricked into doing that.”

“That’s right,” said Will, “but the film made her, and it otherwise has a certain style. It’s not solely about the characters simulating sex. Then there is the case of Jacqueline Bisset’s wet tee shirt in the film The Deep.”

“Haven’t heard of that one.”

“It’s a 70s film so way back. As you’d expect from the name a lot of it is underwater and Ms Bisset wears a wet, see-through tee shirt for the first few minutes of the film. A shot of her in that tee shirt underwater which she did not authorise was a feature of the film’s publicity campaign. She also says that no-one, including her, realised how see through it was until they looked at the actual shots much later. But the sight of Ms Bisset in that shirt made the film. I read one unkind review that said the film was only worth watching for that scene. It’s even credited with starting the fad of wet tee-shirt contests. My point, Ms Chalmers, is that sex still sells, big time.”

“Hmmm!” said Clarise, still eying Will. “How do you know all this stuff?”

“My life at the moment is so interesting I’ve had time to look at film clips on YouTube,” said Will. “On the other side of the sex coin, there’s Charlize Theron in the film Monster; a biopic about the only known female serial killer. She deliberately put on thirty pounds for the role and won both the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for best actress that year. More importantly, as far as Hollywood was concerned, the film was also a big commercial success.”

“Thirty pounds!” exclaimed Clarise.

“And she lost it again – an important point for most women.”

“Look at the time,” said Mia, suddenly, getting up. “We want to be just fashionably late to that party. Good to meet you, Will.”

“And you,” said Will.

“This has been most interesting Will,” said Clarise, also standing up. She turned to go then turned back again. “Before I go what is your take on this thing with Connie Leighton.”

“The singer?” said Will. “You ladies have some sort of history I seem to recall reading. She’s been saying stuff about you.”

“I’m not jetting around talking about the environment enough.”

“Oh right, now I remember,” said Will. “But there is an obvious snap back, isn’t there?”

“Is there?”

“Sure, all she’s really doing is flying into climate conferences on a private jet, telling poor people not to use energy, and flying away again. Doesn’t sound very constructive to me.

Clarise thought about this. “Should I say that?”

“Not quite like that,” said Will, a little surprised that she was taking him seriously. “Maybe say if Leighton really wants to save emissions she’d do a lot more by trading in her private jet for a bicycle than talking about it.”

“Hmmm!” said Clarise.

“If reporters persist say that emissions are a complex problem and governments should do more, which is basically all Leighton is saying. Then walk away.”

“Okaaaay.. most interesting to meet you, Will,” she said and left.

Will’s first act after the ladies left was to bury his head in Hap’s shoulder.

“All I did was babble,” he said, his voice muffled by the entrepreneur’s jacket. Hap patted him on the head with his other hand in mock sympathy.

“There, there,” he said, amused.

At the door to the bar, Clarise looked back, saw this byplay, and giggled. Most gratifying.

“I almost told her my theory on Darth Vader. Thank the lord she stopped me.”

“I heard the name. What is your theory on Darth Vader?”

Will sat up. “That he’s really the good guy trying to hold the empire together, and that the real villain is Luke Skywalker, who was out to grab parts of the Empire for himself”

“Okay,” said Hap, nodding. “I understand. It’s a good theory but maybe someone like Clarise Chalmers is not quite ready for it.”

“Maybe,” said Will. “You didn’t tell me a famous star was coming?”

Hap spread his hands. “I didn’t know. I just thought the assistant would bring another assistant type, not the star herself. Anyway, don’t beat yourself up, you made her laugh a couple of times.”

“I guess,” said Will.

“You can now tell cute girl next door types that you’ve met Clarise Chalmers. It’s a good first date story.”

“Hap, I like your thinking,” said Will, brightening up. “First dates with cute next door types sound more viable if I have a story like that to tell, and I might not babble.”

“There’s room for hope,” said Hap. “I also wanted to talk about the script. You say there’s no point in trying to show it around?”

“Nope. I wouldn’t know where to start but you certainly wouldn’t get any of the major agents, producers or studios interested in anything like that. You want to get out of here and grab some fast food? I’ll offer comments then. This place is way too fancy for my tastes.”

“Why not,” said Hap.

They adjourned to a burger place down the road, sitting opposite one another on the communal table.

“You could make the script more palatable while leaving in some of the elements you have.”

“I’m listening,” said Hap.

“First off let’s dump the sex and slaughter scene involving kitchen appliances. That’s non-negotiable.”

“Awwww!” said Hap. “I liked that scene.”

“Poor Wilma read it and now can’t bring herself to turn on her kitchen blender. The world is not ready for such a scene. There are also continuity issues as it doesn’t really fit with much else in the story.”

“Suppose…,” said Hap.

“But you have these slasher demons that rise from the depths – this hell dimension – to kill randomly, mostly pretty girls. Let’s keep that as one element.”

“Still listening,” said Hap.

“Have you heard of a music festival called Balaton Sound?”

“Can’t say that I have,” said Hap, surprised at the sudden change in subject. “Where is Balaton Sound?”

“It’s in Hungary,” said Will. “There’s a lake South West of Budapest called Lake Balaton. I only know this because I looked it up after seeing clips on YouTube. Basically, it’s big and loud and features water activities – a swimming pool, people messing around in the lake, pretty girls dancing with hunky, bare-chested guys. All meat for these slasher demons.”

“Okay, you think the massacre should be staged at this festival?”

“The festival itself isn’t important. I just mention it as a starting point. You can saw off something like that, with its unbelievable crowds, entertainments, and even carnival attractions, push it into the distant future and stick it on top of some ruins. Then it becomes a New World Party Town.”

“Party town?”

“Sure, in the far future, after we’ve been through wars, diseases and environmental degradation and whatever, humanity has reached this good place where they can send their young people to these party towns for a break from the grim reality of rebuilding the world - a sort of annual ritual where they can dance and frolic semi-naked in water.”

“I’m feeling this more,” said Hap.

“The trouble is that these wars and troubles have also generated monsters – formerly humans that have somehow mutated into hostile slashing machines. No one has seen them for some time and it’s assumed that they are all dead. Party Town has been put on top of an old war ruin because it still has facilities which can be adapted for the fun and frolicking. Access to the under-layers has been sealed off but, well, these demons find a way in and start taking out party goers. Your heroes – the security team maybe – then find the bodies gruesomely dismembered, but those running the place don’t believe that it’s these demons and so on. It then has elements of a future Jaws out of water.”

“Sounds good, man,” said a student type seated a little down from them getting up to leave. “Hope it gets up.”

“Oh, thanks,” said Will.

“Some of my scenes are part of this?” said Hap.

“Incorporated into the plot – you don’t have much of a plot in your script.”

The entrepreneur was silent for a moment.

“You think I should rewrite with that basic idea? It’s your idea.”

“I have too many ideas,” said Will. “I can give one away and it’s Hollywood, scripts are rewritten all the time.”

“What chance would the script have then?”

“I wouldn’t lie to you – still very little,” said Will. “There are a billion scripts out there and a lot of hard-driving people pushing their ideas. I’m not very competitive, so it’s not the scene for me. I prefer to write military SF novels and have the occasional fan show appreciation. Can’t ask for more.”

“Hmmm!’ said Hap. He took another bite of his hamburger. “Buck said something about making it myself. How much would that cost?”

“When a fellow banker once asked J.P. Morgan how much it cost to own a yacht, he replied that ‘if you have to ask you can’t afford it’. A few million at least for anything halfway decent, and it’s got to be money you’re happy to lose. Lots of films don’t make back their production costs. Maybe you can get it into late night sessions at fringe movie theatres, to see what audiences make of it. One of the streaming services desperate for content might pick it up at a cut rate if it’s not too bad. I’ve seen weirder stuff on those things.”

“A few million you say?”

“At least – depending on what you want to do, what sort of actors you want to hire and so on. You won’t get anyone like Clarise Chalmers for that money but there are plenty of wannabes around.”

“Crowd scenes are expensive, aren’t they?” said Hap.

“Computer graphics does wonders. Use blue or black back drops, or whatever it is they use, for everything and add the backgrounds later, like they did for the Sin City movies. You still gotta have actors and a film crew but with CGI you can set it anywhere. If you want to talk about it further I sort of know a director, an Evan Zagame, who’s in this area. He’s been involved in exactly one film for fringe markets.”

“Which film?”

“Zombie Nazis in LA.”

“It was okay,” said Hap. “But cheap. Effects were stupid. How do you know this guy?”

“I was on the fringe of the film industry here for a time through a girl friend who dumped me. We got to talking at a party.” All of the people Will knew in LA had been through Violet and he had not tried to contact any of them since she had left, but he thought he could find the wanna-be director. “He’s never had any money to make a film. Common problem with film makers.”

“What’s the next step?”

“Get the script into shape and show it to him, but as I said he’s got absolutely no money to make anything. You have to pay him. However, that means you have control of the project. Be firm on the story.”

“You know, Jason Hap film producer has a certain ring to it,” said Hap, taking another bite from his hamburger. “And it sounds like way more fun than producing software development tools. Maybe I’ll take the next step, but I’ve got to tie up other stuff. Do you want to do this script rewrite?”

“Hap, I’d do it but not for free,” said Will. “It’s your project and a slasher zombie film is not how I see myself as a writer.”

“Fair enough,” said Hap. “I can pay out some, maybe a few thousand.”

“Okay, ten thousand.”

“Five,” said Hap, straight away.

Will sighed. He should have made his first bid fifteen. Too late now. “Well, seven and a half then, and that’s dirt cheap for a script.”

“Done – and I want this director to call me.”

“No problem but half my fee up front, Mr Producer, before I start writing.”

“You don’t trust me, Will?” said Hap, smiling.

“It’s Hollywood, Hap. No one trusts anyone. Anyway, I’m broke.”

 

As Will and Hap talked, Clarise and Mia were being driven in a chauffeured, stretch limousine to the producer’s party.

“Will seemed nice,” said Mia.

“I was surprised,” said Clarise. “I mean he not my type at all, but I was interested in what he had to say.”

“Not Latino?”

“Rich, successful, drop dead gorgeous will do,” said Clarise. “Will’s cute but he’s not in Robin’s class.”

“He’s tall and he had you laughing.”

“He was diverting and interesting, like I said, but I need my men to be impressive, and Will isn’t that. How did it go with you and that billionaire.”

“Nah,” said Mia. “He’s okay but no sparks, even if he is mega-rich. We talked about the film industry.”

The arrived at the party which was staked out by plenty of photographers and even reporters. It seemed that a Hollywood star could not even attend a party without being asked for comment. The reporters started calling out the moment Clarise-Meghan stepped out of her limousine.

“Ms Chalmers, Connie Leighton is asking what you’ve been doing for the environment,” said one such down at heel reporter from behind the ring of security guards. Instead of just ignoring the question as she had previously done, Clarise chose to walk up to the reporter.

“Well, what has Leighton done for the environment except tell other people that they should cut emissions while flying around on a fancy jet?” she said. The shouted questions stopped. The reporter’s colleagues were busy scribbling in notebooks or had recording devices out.

“If Leighton wants to cut emissions maybe she could trade her jet in for a bicycle.”

“Do you think emissions are a problem,” said the reporter quickly.

“Emissions are a complex problem and government should do more, and that’s all Leighton is saying. Thankyou.”

Clarise walked away ignoring the other, shouted questions.

 

 

CHAPTER FOUR

 

 

The beautiful male presenter fronting the daily celebrity news program Sidewalk Stars was impressed by Meghan’s response.

 

“Ooooohhhhhweee!” he said, showing gleaming teeth. “Snapback!”

“Yowllll!” said the beautiful female presenter, also showing gleaming teeth. “Imagine Connie Leighton riding a bicycle between gigs.”

They showed a brief animated sequence of a cartoon of Leighton riding a bicycle.

“But maybe Clarise Chalmers has a point,” said the male presenter. “It doesn’t help much just to talk about emissions.”

The next day, trying to forget that he had babbled at a famous actress – at least he thought he had babbled – Will was back earning his bread and butter.

He had been sent a picture of what looked to him to be a run-down timber frame house in a doubtful neighbourhood with a wild-looking front garden and sighed.

“This renovators delight has two bedrooms, one bathroom and a natural garden,” he wrote, then paused to look at the interior shots of a dingy kitchen and sinister-looking living room. “With an interior of character…”

His mobile rang. A private number. He didn’t know anyone who bothered to keep their number private but then thought that it was probably just a new type of scam call.

“Hello, this is Will Moorland.”

“Will, this is Clarise Chalmers from last night.”

“Whoa! Okay.” Will was shocked.

“Mia got your number for me, and I’ll say first that you seem nice but you’re not my type. Anyway, I have a boyfriend.”

“Okaaaay,” said Will. “Ms Chalmers, I get that romantically I am but mud on the underside of your fashionable high heels…”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” said Clarise.

“…Just exaggerating for effect, Ms Chalmers. Guys do that. But women not interested in me usually don’t call me in the first place, or they ignore my calls then send a text saying they are sorry they haven’t got back to me but they’ve been so busy. That’s when I get the hint and stop calling. Was there a reason you called to tell me you’re not interested?”

“Oh yes, what I want to know is what do I do now?”

“Um – I’m still at a loss Ms Chalmers,” said Will. “Make another blockbuster film, marry a billionaire and have perfect children. I’m not sure I can help you much in any of that.”

“What I mean is I took your advice last night and told reporters staking out the party that Connie Leighton should trade her jet in for a bicycle and it worked.”

“Oh right.” Will was astonished. “Well, it was just an off the cuff thought, Ms Chalmers. Don’t you have high powered consultants who advise you on PR and your public profile and all that?”

“I do, they just told me to also talk about the environment. What I want to know is what do you think I should do next.”

“I see... After babbling at you last night I thought it might be more likely I’d be arrested than consulted. I’d have to think.”

“How did you know what to say, or how to respond when they asked more questions?”

“I worked as a journalist for maybe three years back East,” said Will. “I was never anywhere near the celebrity end and never in public relations, but reporters are reporters anywhere, I guess. Now that I think about it, I can at least ask what you want to achieve.” Will remembered a public relations person saying that he asked this of a client and thought that it sounded as if he knew what he was talking about. “I mean, you don’t need to raise your profile, do you? More fans just means more stalkers.”

“I guess not,” said Clarise.

“Then, maybe, change your image somehow, continue your feud with Connie Leighton…”

“I don’t want to feud with anyone,” said Clarise. “She started this climate thing. I just want to get out in front of her on that, I guess, make it go away. Maybe I could soften my image. The Hollywood bad girl thing has its uses, but it could be softened.”

“Okay, I think I see,” said Will. He could not believe he was discussing Clarise Chalmer’s public profile with the star herself. “You’ve told this to your high powered public relations agency?”

“I did. They said the bad girl image was valuable and I should have some more wild parties.”

“I can see their point,” said Will. “The public is more likely to buy tickets to films with bad girls in them, but you don’t want to lose the image altogether you just want to show you have a good side.”

“Yes, that’s it,” said Clarise.

“And they didn’t listen – or just talked you out of it?”

“Yep. All sorts of soft words to talk the diva down.”

“Do you call yourself a diva often?” Will thought that Clarise Chambers was smart and determined, even if she had trouble getting her own way with fee-hungry consultants. To continue the analogy with old stars, as well as Marilyn Munroe and Grace Kelly, she had a touch of Bette Davis.

Clarise giggled softly. “Sometimes, but this time it didn’t help as they didn’t do what I wanted – they did what they wanted so they could charge more fees.”

“One thought that has occurred to me, if you want to do this softening image thing, is to steer clear of the climate debate altogether – every person and their pet talks about climate – and go in for charity.”

“Hmmm! What do you suggest?”

“Well, wasn’t there a children’s hospital in a depressed area that needed money? I thought I saw it mentioned somewhere. I’ll have to look it up. No one can argue with charity work for a children’s hospital.”

“What, you want me to help out in the canteen?”

“No, no, they need money for equipment and renovations,” Will said. “Hold a benefit. A fund raising dinner dance thing. Charge a lot for tickets and give the profits to the hospital. Politicians and charities do fund raisers all the time. Now that I think of it involve Connie Leighton as well.”

“I’m doing this because she started attacking me.”

“It makes for a better story. Two entertainment bad girls forget their feud and band together to raise money for a children’s hospital – a Bad Girls Benefit. Also, she can’t attack you while it’s going on and she can’t say anything much afterwards, and it helps with her image as well. You and Leighton agree to circulate and meet people on the night, and that should sell tickets. A lot of people will pay good money to just be in the same room with famous bad girls and, let’s not forget, the children’s hospital gets money to buy equipment. Lots of winners and no losers that I can see.”

“Hmmm! I want you to come and see me today but for business. It’s not a social or romantic invitation.”

“Ms Chalmers, I get it, you’re not interested,” said Will. “Keep on harping on that point and you’ll hurt my feelings. I’ve got a couple of things to finish up here. After lunch?”

 

The house on the edge of the prime Beverley Hills district was not big enough to be considered a mansion, but it was large enough and had a very big door – Will, could never get over the size of the doors in California – which was opened by an elderly housekeeper. She led the way to the house’s ground floor study which Clarise Chalmers used as an office when not on set. She was dressed in jeans and a blue canvas shirt, top buttons artfully undone, with only touches of make-up – not that she needed much make up to be beautiful. Will, who had dressed in California casual of a blazer and jeans with a white tee shirt, in fact the only clean shirt in the house when he got dressed, tried not to do more than glance at the hint of soft cleavage in a byplay that the star noted with quiet amusement. She was well used to the ways of men looking at her and appreciated that the writer was working hard to be polite. That was important for what she had in mind for Will. His next move, however, she did not expect.

“That’s a big pool for a backyard!” exclaimed Will, going to the study window. The window looked onto a back patio with chairs and a table and then a long, straight pool with a spa attachment about half way along its length. A few paces beyond the pool a high stone wall kept out the voyeurs, not to mention the paparazzi. The only sign of life was an elderly ginger cat sunning itself on one of the patio chairs.

“That’s twenty-five metres, isn’t it?”

“I suppose,” said Clarise. “I was told lap pool when I bought this place.”

“That’s twenty-five metres,” said Will, nodding. “I’m impressed.”

“I’m glad my pool impresses you, Will,” said Clarise, amused. “Please sit.”

“Oh right, yes, pardon me,” said Will, sitting. The star had the study set up like an office so that she sat behind the desk in one corner. “You summoned me, Ms Chalmers.”

“Glad you could come in on a Sunday.”

“If a screen goddess summons a mere mortal, Ms Chalmers, the mere mortal should come. Bad things happen to those who defy the gods. Just look at the super hero movies.”

“Doubt that I’m a goddess,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I eat and go to the bathroom like everyone else, and I will grow old. I also have to think about my public profile, so I want to hear more about this benefit.”

“Not much more to add to what I told you on the phone,” said Will. “The place I was thinking of is the Haddenbach Children’s Hospital in South LA. It’s a public institution and cutbacks have hurt. They’ve launched an appeal for funds to fix real problems with the buildings and buy equipment and stuff. The first step would be to contact the administrators and see if they want to endorse a benefit. Then contact Connie Leighton to see if she wants to be in it, which may be difficult if she’s sore over the crack about trading her jet for a bicycle. You market this event using your social media; see if that Sidewalk Stars show will run an item. Set up a website to sell the highly priced tickets, that is after you’ve decided how much to charge which means finding a venue and caterers and security and, well, a billion other issues which have to be sorted out.”

“Sounds like a lot of work,” said Clarise. “How do you know about this stuff, anyway?”

“My parents, my mother in particular, organise an annual, fund-raising benefit for one of the hospitals where I came from.”

“Where is that, Will?”

“Albany, state capital of New York. It’s West of the Big Apple itself.”

“How come you’re out here?”

“It’s a long, sad story concerning a girl.”

“Sad? Did she die?”

“No, she’s fine as far as I know. The story is sad from my point of view.”

Clarise laughed again. “You make no effort at all to sell yourself do you, Will. Look, I want to help out your sad story if I can by offering you work in organising this benefit.”

“Really?” said Will. “I never said I actually organised one, I just sort of know from my parents some of the ins and outs.”

“Will, you’re trying to talk yourself out of a job,” she said. “I intend to make it a per day thing and if it’s not working out I’ll fire you, no hard feelings.”

“Okay, and I can quit at any time, no hard feelings. What sort of per day amount are you going to pay the lowest of the low?”

“You’ve just been talking yourself down Will, and this is on a trial basis. What do you think would get you in here?”

Will looked at the pool and back at Clarise. “Is it just about the event, assuming it goes ahead?”

“Come to think of it, no,” she said. “I liked what you said about the social media stuff. Take it over and do what you said. Keep the fans happy. The people I have at the moment want to tell me about the responses I’m getting on X, and I’m not sure I care.”

“In fact, I’d advise you to ignore comments on X altogether,” Will said. “The service has its place and its uses but the people who offer un-asked for comments on it are the likes of crazed retirees and hard line activists. You don’t try to reason with those guys and you don’t pay them any mind.”

“Huh!” said Clarise. “That sounds good to me. Get rid of the people doing it at the moment and then organise all the social media so that it communicates to my fans.”

“Enough comment about your social life and projects to keep them happy, but otherwise you don’t want to know.”

“Yeah, or pay big fees,” said Clarise.

“What about t…” Will almost said two hundred and then remembered his experience with Hap last night. “Three hundred and use of the pool once a day.”

“Two hundred, and you can use the pool any time if I’m not using it for a shoot,” said Clarise. “Why are you so interested in the pool?”

“I like to swim every day. Split the difference. Two fifty and is there some place I can shower.”

“There’s a small change and shower place just here,” said Clarise pointing to the study wall. “You have to go out to the patio to get to it. You can use that. Two fifty, then.”

“I reserve the right to work on my own projects when there’s nothing to do here – you don’t pay me for that time.”

“That’s fair,” Clarise said.

Will made a showing of spitting into his hand and then offering to shake on it, that being a ritual where he came from. Clarise also symbolically spat into the hand and they shook on it. The by-play amused her.

“Another thing, non-negotiable, is that you don’t get romantic ideas about the person paying your daily fee.”

“Got it, boss. All friendly.”

“And don’t call me boss. It makes me feel old. Call me Meghan in private, and I don’t mind Meg,” she said.

“No problem, but why Meghan?”

“Because it’s my name. I’m still legally Meghan Kowalski. Clarise Chalmers is just a branding thing. I never really liked Clarise especially. A stripper’s name. Now where are my manners? I should have already offered coffee as I would to any guest, but it’s just me to make it. The housekeeper would have gone by now.”

“If you don’t mind I can make it. I worked as a barista for a time.”

“Okay, sure, so there’s something about you that’s not sad or hopeless.”

“Yep, my life’s not totally miserable, just almost so.” They walked through to the kitchen where Clarise sat on a stool while Will looked through cupboards. “I couldn’t help but notice,” he said as he filled the kettle, “that there was some material on a cryptocurrency on your desk.”

“Cryptocurrency?”

“Yeah, Be-coin.”

“Oh that, is that a cryptocurrency?”

“There’s a whole heap of those sort of digital exchange currencies. I’ve heard of Be-coin but never looked at it. Were you thinking of investing?”

“I was asking a friend about investing,” she said - in fact, it was her boyfriend Robin Hawke - “and he gave me that. What have you heard about it?”

“Nothing much about that one specifically. My only comment is that I wouldn’t go into cryptocurrencies lightly; just because a friend gave you a pamphlet. It’s high risk, high reward. You could make a lot of money, but you could also lose your whole investment. It’s for those who want to take the risk and are willing to study the market. You already have money and are too busy making it to have time to work out what any of that stuff means.”

“Well, yes,” she said. “When would you recommend then?”

“Advising anyone on investment is a serious matter, Ms Ch… Meg, but at least as a starting point I can ask how much risk are you willing to take? Do you want to go in for crash through or crash, or better returns than simply putting the money into a bank account?’

“Better returns,” she said after a moment’s thought.

“Then you’re set and forget and to start you might as well use mutual funds,” said Will. “Looks like you’ll have to settle for expresso. I can do a mean Mocha, but not today.”

“That’s fine,” said Meghan. “How do I invest in these mutual funds?”

“Get yourself set up on a digital platform connected with a major bank and then you’ll be able to invest in whatever you want, including index funds, particularly market index funds which are a topic for another time. I can at least show you what to look for and the different classes of investment and lecture you about diversifying your investments, but the choice of the investment must remain yours.”

“That’s on your list when you start tomorrow,” said Meghan. “How do you know about this stuff, anyway?”

“Part of my reporting was on personal investment, on the Lakes Guardian in the Chicago district which competes with the Daily Herald and there is no finer newspaper unless you happen to work for the Herald, the Sun-Times or the Tribune, but let’s not go there.”

“Let’s not,” agreed Meghan, smiling.

“For one reason or another I also did property, and I have to say a high end apartment building with all the tenants busy paying rent is not such a bad investment if you can get the location and gearing right. You can put a property manager in place and walk away.”

Meghan thought that sounded like an excellent idea.

“Gearing?” she asked.

“How much debt you take on to pay for the building. You want it low enough so that if there’s a problem with a couple of tenants then your interest payments are still covered.”

“Okay,” said Meghan. “You’ve never had money to do any of this yourself?”

“Nope. No-one’s going to pay to see me on the big screen, so I have to toil away at contract work for major stars who go out of their way to tell me how romantically uninteresting I am.”

“I never said uninteresting,” protested Meghan. “I just have to be careful, especially as I rang you. You know how it is.”

“Yes, I know how it is,” said Will. “I’m a dumb guy who has to be warned off or he gets all sorts of ideas. If I ever have a daughter I’m going to warn her about dumb guys.”

They adjourned to the kitchen table and the talk turned to Meghan’s role as a blonde barbarian queen, with the star saying she was a strange choice for the role.

“You made it work, Meghan, I thought. Anyway, guys don’t care whether the eye candy really fits the role.”

Meghan smiled over the compliment.

“The most ludicrous piece of female miscasting must be of Susan Hayward in an old film ‘The Conqueror’,” continued Will.

“Don’t think I’ve heard of it,” said Meghan.

“It was made in the 1950s. The story is John Wayne, the archetype cowboy star, picked up the script in an agent’s office and decided he really wanted the lead role, although it’s about Genghis Khan, the Mongol warlord who conquered most of the world.”

“John Wayne as a Mongol?”

“It gets worse,” said Will. “Susan Hayward, a typical full-figured, red-haired leading lady of the time, was cast as a Mongol princess.”

Meghan laughed. “Now I don’t feel so bad as a barbarian queen who showers under water falls.”

“The actress herself thought it was hilarious but only the critics seemed to notice. It’s on those lists you see of the worst movies of all time ….”

“None of mine are on those lists yet,” said Megan.

“… But the film didn’t do too badly at the box office although it’s still considered a financial failure. Shows you what star power can do, I guess.”

They talked for some time after that before Will declared that he should go, as he had work to do.

“What work do you have now, if you’re going to start working for me tomorrow,” asked Meghan as she walked with Will out to the front gate. With her boyfriend on a film set somewhere, as he often was, she had enjoyed the company.

“I was writing real estate blurbs when you called,” said Will, “and you remember Hap from last night? He is thinking of producing a slasher film and wants me to rewrite the script he’s written for it.”

“That’s more impressive than anything else you’ve told me,” said Meghan. “You should bill yourself as a script writer.”

“You’d be way less impressed if you saw the script he gave me,” said Will. “It has a sex scene with kitchen appliances.”

“Urgh!”

“And he’s paying me a pittance for the rewrite. Like I said I’m at the bottom end of the Hollywood pecking order.”

“Will we’re going to have to work on how you pitch yourself,” Meghan said. By that time they were out in the street, but the star could not see any vehicle apart from what she took to be an abandoned compact in front of her house. “Where’s your car?”

“Right in front of you,” said Will, unlocking the door of the compact.

“This thing?” said Meghan, looking with horror at what she was later told was a Saturn ION. Recognised as one of the models that helped kill the GM offshoot that made it, the red Saturn showed evidence of a long, hard life. She had a high-end BMW in the garage and her boyfriend drove a Ferrari.

Will leant against the car and laughed. “The look on your face,” he said after a time.

Meghan laughed as well, then looked at the dents in the hood with concern. “It still runs?”

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Meghan,” Will said chuckling and he drove off.

The star went back into the house thinking that Will was the most extraordinary man that she knew, although she could not decide whether that was good or bad extraordinary. Later she settled for interesting, extraordinary.

 

On his way home, Will rang Buck from his mobile phone clamped to a part of the car’s fittings, so that he still had both hands free to drive. Buck was in the middle of a shift at the digimart.

“Buck, hi, I’ve got this strange gig that may make enough to afford the audio project we talked about.”

Then he said who had hired him and why.

“One of her staff called us,” said Buck, “and asked what you were like. Against our better judgment we gave you a good reference. So that’s what it was about, Clarise Chalmers actually rang you?”

“Yep, she went out of her way to tell me it was not a romantic thing, but the result was a paying job. I’m a sort of court Eunuch to a big time star.”

“You don’t have much experience as a journalist and you’ve never organised a big event like that,” said Buck, evidently astonished.

“Not sure how long this’ll last,” admitted Will, “but I seem to get on with the star herself, so maybe I’ll get enough cash together to pay for the narration, and maybe even marketing.”

“At least someone’s earning money,” said Buck.

 

CHAPTER FIVE

 

Meghan was in her kitchen the next day looking for something else to eat besides cornflakes when she was buzzed by someone at the front gate. On the security cam she could see it was Will with a large bag and wearing what appeared to be tee-shirt, shorts and sandals. Thinking that her new hire was already proving surprising, Meghan reassured her off-site security service and let him in.

“You don’t have to come in this early, Will,” she said, “And what’s with the shorts, we’re not that casual.”

“They’re my swimmers, I’m taking my swim before work. Hope you don’t mind. I’ve brought my clothes in the bag, along with the ingredients for a mocha and these,” he produced a package, “English muffins. Cut one in half, toast it, spread it with margarine – I’m not a mayonnaise or a butter guy – and jam and that’s breakfast. I saw you had a four-slice toaster yesterday. Do you want one?”

Like all movie stars and top models, Meghan was on a perpetual diet combined with an exercise regimen that would do credit to a professional athlete but thought that she could fit in an English muffin with jam. She ate hers sitting on a stool at the kitchen’s central bench, while Will ate his moving around the kitchen, organising a mocha for her.

“You didn’t have breakfast at home before you came?”

“Nope. Put on my bathers and came straight here. If you saw the kitchen at my place you’d understand. Best to come here and avoid food poisoning. I appreciate I may be imposing, if so just tell me so.”

“The muffin buys you kitchen time,” said Meghan, while chewing. “I’m generous like that. Is the kitchen really that bad where you live?”

“The cockroaches like it. If you happen to ring me at home again and a cockroach answers the phone you’ll know what’s happened.”

Will gave her coffee in a mug.

“I’ll have mine when I come out,” he said.

Meghan followed Will out to the pool area and sat down at the patio table with her coffee to watch Will take off his shirt, which she found interesting. Her new hire had a real swimmer’s build, she thought. No wonder he had wanted access to the pool. She watched him wash his swimming goggles in the water, put them on then a swimmer’s cap and start his session with a racing dive. The dive woke up the housekeeper’s ginger cat which had been stretched out asleep on another table. The cat, Gato, glared at Will for daring to disrupt her peaceful day, tail lashing the table top.

Meghan was still there when Mia arrived. Her arrival usually marked the start of her day when they went over her schedule.

“What’s with the beefcake?” said Mia, also sitting down. “And that looks like good coffee.”

“It’s Will,” said Meghan. “You remember I got you to get his number and check him out.”

“So it is,” said Mia, looking closer. “You hired him like you said you might. That was fast … and he’s using the pool?”

Meghan told Mia about the interview and what Will had suggested.

“A benefit. Is that going to work?” said the assistant.

“Will’s going to start organising when he gets out of the pool, so we’re going to find out.”

“There’s no need for him to get out of the pool just yet though is there?” said Mia. “He’s already doing well from where I sit.”

“No, no need just yet.”

Mia went over Meghan’s day while Will splashed up and down the pool, changing smoothly from freestyle to breaststroke and then to butterfly, while Gato continued to glare.

“You have Julio coming at 10,” said Mia. (Julio was Meg’s personal trainer. One of the rooms was set up as a gym.) “Then a Zoom conference with the director of The Fermi Interface” (Meghan was cast as a super spy) “at 12, and not much else today. Tomorrow, you do action scenes at a studio.”

“Will is going to coach me in investment today, I hope,” said Meghan.

The ladies were joined by the only other member of Meghan’s small entourage, Emma, a recent college graduate billed as an assistant to Mia but whose main function, as far as Meghan was concerned, was to keep Mia company when Meghan was away. A pretty girl who chatted too much for Meghan’s liking, Emma was taken aback by the sight of Will in the pool.

“Is this a new Diva thing?” she asked.

The others laughed.

“You may be organising a benefit with him,” said Meghan, and took the opportunity of inviting Will over, all wet from the pool, to be introduced to Emma.

She shook hands with him, round-eyed.

“How come the swimming thing, Will?” asked Meg. “You seem to know what you’re doing in a pool.”

“I got through college on a swimming scholarship,” said Will. “I always liked swimming.”

“That’s something else that’s not sad or hopeless,” said Meg.

“True. But you hired me to be a social media-PR type, not to swim, so I’ll be out in a minute,” said Will and he got back into the pool.

“Josh doesn’t have a body like that,” Emma said, after he got back in the pool. Josh was her boyfriend and an endless source of anecdotes.

“Let’s see if he organises as well as he swims and makes coffee,” said Meghan.

Will got out of the pool, had a shower, changed into jeans and a tee shirt, gave Mia and Emma coffee and set Emma to work researching venues.

“Don’t call anyone just yet,” said Will, “but there’ll be websites. We’re looking at a dinner dance and will want to seat several hundred.”

“Really!” said Emma. “This sounds like fun. Are we invited?”

“You’ll be there, but you’ll be too busy working to have fun.”

“Awwww!”

“No fun. Just pain, misery and suffering,” said Will. “Think of it as a life lesson.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“Research the venues. Remember life is grim.”

That kept Emma quiet, or at least quieter, for a time which Meghan thought was a good thing.

Will started making calls. The fund raising office of the Haddenbach Children’s Hospital welcomed the idea but thought the administrator would like to meet with the two entertainers before endorsing the idea. That meant fronting Connie Leighton. A few more calls later Will managed to contact the singer’s staff through an agent. An assistant heard Will out, went and spoke to the singer, then set up a meeting.

Will also showed Megan how to operate the investment platform of the bank that she used.

“You can go directly into shares if you want,” said Will, “but again that’s for those who have the time to research the companies or have some reason to invest in a particular company. Otherwise, you may want to look at a fund that just follows the index or puts money into mutuals that invest in the market, bonds, property and so on.”

“I dunno anything about companies,” said Meghan. “Are you really going to meet with Connie?”

“Seems so,” said Will. “If she’s still mad about bicycle crack I may have trouble making it out alive but I will be earning my per day pay.”

 

Connie Leighton’s house was not far from Casa Meghan, in LA terms, but was a proper mansion with an even bigger door. Will was ushered into the singer’s living room where she sat between two large, male associates who glared at the writer-consultant. While not in the same league as Meghan in looks, the singer was sufficiently easy on the eye to feature on all her album covers and had a body made for cavorting on stage. Leighton was not in the mood to be admired, however, particularly by Will

“Who came up with that line about trading my jet for a bicycle?” she demanded.

“That would be me,” said Will. “I met Meghan in a bar when we were both dragged there by other people. I told her that was an obvious come back and I was surprised when she used it.”

“I’m having venues cancel on me over that affair thing,” said Connie, while her associates continued to glare. “And now I can’t even get between the gigs I’ve got in my jet without the media making nasty cracks.”

“You were attacking my employer and now I’m here to offer you a way out of your troubles – certainly better than the one suggested by your PR agency,” said Will. “Are you using Holstern Media by any chance?”

“How did you know?”

“I didn’t. Meg uses that agency. They seem to be giving the same advice to talk about the environment to everyone. For the record, Meghan doesn’t believe the producer and his wife, and I was surprised with the Me Too movement so active no one took a closer look at the producer.”

“You were surprised?” said Connie forcefully. “I was fucking devastated. Not only are the venues pulling out my label wants to renegotiate my contract.”

“In the hope of making it out of this interview alive,” said Will, “I did some digging, mainly into the wife, as she seemed to be key to the whole affair standing by him the way that she did.”

He took a few sheets of paper out of an envelope he had brought in and passed them over.

“I saw that the wife originally came from New York so I ran her name through a couple of databases I still have access to. Look at the highlighted name on that news item.”

Connie studied it for a moment, then looked up, open mouthed. “She was a sex worker?”

“A high end sex worker, yep,” said Will. “That was a messy divorce and note the name she used when working was different. Once I knew the working name I did some searching online and found the item on the next page. It’s a current listing.”

“This is for the Washington area,” said Connie, after studying the page. “How come she’s attacking me at Hollywood parties?”

“Were you by any chance talking about your future with this guy?”

She sat back. “Yeah, I was. I thought I was in a good place with him. I was talking about the future.”

“The next item in this show and tell,” said Will, “is your former beau’s marriage certificate.”

Connie took the paper offered by Will and studied it.

“He’s not married,” she said, open mouthed, again. “He was divorced two years ago.”

“You’ll note that no children are listed.”

“The children are hers?”

“Couldn’t find any children for her, either.”

“Then where did this happy family I was supposed to have wrecked come from?”

“I’m just guessing at this point but what I think happened was your guy didn’t see things the way you did and wanted out - maybe he had his next girlfriend lined up and was promising to leave you for her.”

“Humph!” said Connie. “Then why didn’t he just dump me? Why do this?”

“Again I’m guessing but you’re a big name who writes a mean break up song. I seem to remember reading that the song about the boyfriend who dumped you made him take up relief work in Africa.”

“You mean, he was worried about blow back?”

“My guess is that he hired this woman to pose as his wife in what was meant to be a minor deception where you’d be the only person to meet her. The moment you realised he had a wife and children and that she was going to stand by him you would have stopped calling – heartbroken but resigned to the fact that you got things wrong.”

“Damn straight.”

“But then the whole thing got completely out of hand. This woman might have got the idea that she was an actual wife, instead of a hired sex worker, along with hired children. Or maybe she threw herself into the role – it’s Hollywood after all. Anyway, I’m pretty sure she wasn’t meant to attack you publicly.”

Connie looked at the pages and then up at Will.

“What can I do with these?” she said.

“There’s not enough there to do a proper job but you can hire a private detective to take a hard look at your guy. Maybe follow him around for a time and do more online searches. Those guys are always serial so there will be others like you, just not as high profile. Maybe the pretend wife’s co-workers can be persuaded to dish some dirt on her, and certainly establish she’s not living with him.”

“This has to be the most complicated way to dump a girl,” said Connie. “And all because I was getting intense?”

“Only scenario I can think of that begins to fit the facts. As for getting intense – I’m the one who gets too intense with girls and gets dumped.”

“Does Meghan get intense?” asked Connie, sharply.

“I wouldn’t know. She spent so much time telling me she wasn’t interested in me romantically when she hired me, I’m now too scared to even comment.”

Connie laughed. “I dunno about intense, but she can be a hard arse. I hire a private detective and then what?”

“I’ve listed someone on the last page, a wannabe actor whose day job is as a private detective. Met him around. He seems pretty good. Once you get some dirt together don’t release it yourself, the media may suggest you’re inventing stuff to get back at your guy. Have the detective tie it all up in a neat bundle and hand it to a media outlet that still does some digging, without saying who’s behind the gift. Maybe that Sidewalk Stars program. If they don’t want to use it, hand it to another.”

Connie thought about this for a moment, looking at the pages.

“Will, this is real sneaky.”

“I prefer to think of it as a creative solution to a problem,” said Will. “But sneaky works. Either way, it’s a peace offering.”

“Gentlemen let’s organise some coffee for our guest,” Connie said, and smiled.

Later the singer rang Meghan, being put through from Meghan-HQ by Mia. It was the first time the two former friends had spoken in years.

“Connie here,” she said without preamble. “What bar did you meet Will in and were there any more like him? I want one.”

“I didn’t see any others like Will,” said Meghan amused. “We talked, he made sense, so I hired him.”

“He’s also hot, did that have anything to do with it?”

“An extra benefit,” said Meghan. “He looks fine in my pool and makes good coffee.”

“Hmmm! hmmm!” said Connie. “All in one package. If you find any others like him, tell them I have an opening.”

“I can do that.”

“Will says you warned him off hard over any romantic ideas.”

“I called him to pick his brains, so I had to,” said Meghan. “He’s very nice but not my type, and I’m taken.”

“You’ve become real choosy about men,” said Connie. “You’re still seeing big time movie star Robin?”

“Still going fine.”

“Will would do for most girls, and he’d be much less trouble.”

“Maybe, and someone nice will pick him up. For the moment he has a sad story about a girl which he won’t tell me.”

“Are we going to do this hospital benefit thing?”

“It’s like Will says, no one can argue with fund raising for a children’s hospital,” said Meghan. “We get a few edges knocked off our profiles, without losing the bad girl tag and the hospital gets money.”

“I’m in, but I want to hold off for a time,” said Connie. “I’ve set stuff in motion at Will’s suggestion which I’d like to finish before we do it.”

“It’ll take us that long to organise, but Will says we’ve got to go to the hospital first. See the sick children.”

“I don’t do sick people so well if you remember,” said Connie.

“I remember,” said Meghan.

“I’ve said I’m going to do it, so get Will to set up a time.”

 

Meghan was only at home for one day of Will’s first week, being at promotional photo shoots for two days and working on the shots for an action film in a warehouse for the other days. This involved actions such as jumping off platforms in skin-tight outfits, while supported by a cable, to land on mats. Then she would send stuntmen flying with pretend blows. Stunt doubles were substituted for anything that required real physical expertise, computer imagery would later add backgrounds such as buildings and bridges and the action occasionally sped up to the point that Meghan had trouble recognising the sequence that she had acted.

In the meantime, the star continued to find uses for her new hire. She got Will to come in a little later so that he could make morning coffee for the other ladies as well as a toasted English muffin for her plus coffee which she could drink in the chauffeured car on the way to the studio while reading the day’s script. The ladies would also drink their coffee while watching Will in the pool. This they considered a major improvement in workplace amenities. Meghan’s employees then sat around the house’s dining table with their laptops and mobiles to do the star’s work.

Meg took to calling the writer during breaks in filming or photoshoots to discuss investments, but occasionally to pass the time in a practice that in larger organisations might have been called “hassling the new hire”, albeit with the new hire doing some hassling of his own.

“You hardly have any tattoos?” she said one time.

“You called me to point that out?” said Will. “What’s the matter you’ve run out of cat videos to look at on your phone?”

“I’m not into cats and what’s the point of paying someone if I can’t pass the time hassling them.”

“I thought you hired me to do your work.”

“That too – what the one word you have in gothic lettering on your shoulder?”

“Mater – it’s Latin for mum.”

Meghan laughed. “And what about that design underneath it?”

“It’s a little fish with a fake shark fin strapped on. That’s how I feel sometimes.”

“Other guys have tatts of eagles and dragons and you have a lame emoji.”

“And mum in Latin,” said Will. “And I only got those because the guys in the swim team were hassling me about having no tatts.”

“You’re such a nerd,” said Meghan. “You also don’t have a stubble like most guys.”

“Always found them scratchy. Clean shaven is easier in any case.”

“I’m supposed to be this style icon and I have a hopeless nerd on my staff.”

“It’s sad isn’t it,” said Will, cheerfully. “If important people come to the house you make me go to that change room I shower in until they’ve gone, then insist I stay there while you watch cat videos.”

The conversations occasionally turned to more important matters. Will was astonished to find that the star still handled routine payments herself and suggested that she could reduce her work load by setting up an account with a comparatively small amount that Mia and Emma could access to pay the likes of electricity for the house, and wages for worthy consultants such as himself. They would then present her with an itemised list of payments at the end of the week.

“That way when Mia empties your account to run off with a handsome con man, you’ve just lost what’s in the account,” said Will.

“Is Mia dating a handsome con man?” Meghan wanted to know.

“Not that I know of – it’s still Jake the assistant director,” said Will, putting the phone on speaker, and explaining the conversation to Mia.

“We’ve only just had a second date,” said Mia who had recently connected with the assistant director she had originally met on one of Meg’s film sets, “but the handsome conman sounds interesting. When do I get to meet him?”

“I can adapt the fantasy to your wishes,” said Will. “You can meet him whenever you like.”

“If you going to take my money and leave, I don’t want you to meet this fantasy conman,” said Meghan.

“I could always meet him, have an affair with lots of sex,” said Mia, hopefully. “Then dump him when he talks about emptying bank accounts.”

“I don’t mind that fantasy,” said Meg. She later set up the account.

As part of that change, Will set up a system for reporting total incomings and outgoings per week and per month. With some effort, as he did not have access to the investment accounts and did not want it, he was also able to set up a way of generating reports on Meghan’s growing investment portfolio. For the first time the star felt like she knew what was happening in her own financial affairs.

The actress also discussed scripts with Will, wondering if the writer had any insights into the vast numbers of scripts that seemed to find their way onto her desk.

“I’ll go through them if you like but you know what they say in Hollywood – no one knows anything,” said Will. “The classic, stand out case of professionals being caught out big time is the original Star Wars film back in the 1970s. The script was just corny space opera, with every SF cliché and a couple from the romcom genre thrown in, yet it was such a huge hit that toy stores are still full of Star Wars merchandising. Mind you, the franchise was really made by the sequels which were a step or two above the corny original but still fun.”

“I don’t think I want to be the next Princess Lea,” said Meghan. “See if anything in the scripts stands out.”

“I never got to tell you my theory about Darth Vader,” said Will.

“I headed you off when you tried to tell me, in that club.”

“I could tell you now.”

“I still don’t want to hear about Darth Vader,” said Meg.

“The Jedis were really a sinister organisation.”

“Tell someone who cares.”

“I have things to say about Ewoks,” said Will, hopefully.

“I don’t care about Ewoks,” said Meg, “and before you ask Wookiees are out too.”

Will laughed; Meg giggled.

“Good answer,” said the writer. “But if you want a fresh take on scripts there is an agent who’s supposed to be good who’s going out on her own. She could be the more personal touch you seem to want. I could set up a meeting.”

“How do you know about agents, Will?” asked Meg.

“It’s part of this sad story involving a girl I told you about.”

In fact, Violet had tried and failed to sign up with the agent he had in mind.

“Is this agent the girl?”

“No not her,” said Will. “The girl is gone.”

“You never told us this sad story, Will,” said Emma who had overheard the conversation.

“Yeah, we want to hear,” said Mia.

“I had my heart cut out,” said Will, “and now I hate all women.”

“Not all women are bad,” said Emma. “How did she cut your heart out?”

“If I don’t share the story my hatred will be more focused.”

“Aww you don’t mean that – you’re too nice a guy to hate anyone.”

“Hate,” said Will, doing his best to glare.

“It’s like that is it?” said Mia, smiling, “well, suit yourself, Will.”

 

 

CHAPTER SIX

 

The agent recommended by Will, Stella Bullingham, proved to be a tall, full figured lady with frizzy hair dressed in a powder-blue power suit. She was shown into Meghan’s study/office during the star’s morning routine, when she was at home, of drinking coffee made by Will while watching her consultant in the pool.

“Who’s the pool hunk, Ms Chalmers?” asked Stella, looking out the window.

“I employ him as my consultant’” she said, smiling. “Please sit.”

“Uhhh – huhhhh,” said Stella, sitting. “Your consultant fills out his swimmers real nice. I’m sorta curious – what does he consult on?”

“Among other things, he got you to come here,” said Meg.

“Oh right, right, this must be Will, the Olympic swimmer,” said Stella. “A real nice guy I was told.”

“Olympics? Will never said anything about the Olympics,” said Meg. “He just said college swimming scholarship.” She went to the door and raised her voice. “Mia, can you ask Will to come in here for a moment.”

Mia, who had also been drinking coffee on the patio while watching the show walked out to the pool and intercepted the writer at the shallow end. Will appeared at the study door towelling himself.

“I won’t come all the way in, as I’ll get chlorinated water on your carpet,” he said. “You must be Stella.”

He shook hands with the agent who thought that the display of flesh was worth the trouble of coming to the house.

“You never told me you were in the Olympics,” said Meg.

“That’s because I wasn’t,” said Will. He turned to Stella. “You heard this from Violet, right?”

“Others who knew her,” the agent said.

“She was always telling people I was in the Olympics to give herself an edge, I guess. I was in the national swimming team for a time – a few months – but I never got to any international meetings, let alone the Olympics. Best I did was bronze in the two hundred metre butterfly in the nationals.”

“That’s impressive enough,” said Meg. “Why talk yourself down all the time?”

“You mean I should slip in a mention of my time on the national team just to impress people? Seems phony. I prefer to play the victim card and hope for sympathy. Anyway, you didn’t hire me because I could swim.”

“Humph!” said Meg, “and is this Violet the sad story girl?”

“Yes, that’s her. Can I get you coffee, Stella? I make a mean mocha.”

“Sounds good, Will,” said Stella amused.

“Then I’ll get back in the pool if I may, boss. I haven’t finished my session.”

“Yes, yes, but finish quickly as I want to talk,” said Meg.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And don’t ‘boss’ or ‘ma’am’ me,” Meghan called after him.

“Okay,” said Will from the kitchen.

“He seems real nice,” said Stella, after Will had gone. “Shame what happened to him.”

“Why, what happened to him?” asked Meg. “He only says his heart got cut out.”

“Violet is also an actor. I looked at her but decided I couldn’t help her,” said Stella. “Another client who knows them says that she took up with a theatre producer who could get her a part back East. Will arrived home unexpectedly with a ring in his bag ready to give her, to find Violet loading up the producer’s car for the trip back. Took him completely by surprise. They’d been together for three years. That’s what I heard anyway.”

“Oh my, quite a story,” said Meg. “No wonder he’s not dating.”

“It is a more interesting back story than usual, Ms Chalmers, but yours is the one that has my attention, now. Will thought I might be able to help you.”

“I understand I’m the blonde and sex sells and all that,” said Meghan. “I don’t even mind the beach volleyball movie role.”

Stella chortled. “I’ve placed a couple of the minor characters in that one. It ain’t Shakespeare that’s for sure, but they’ve got a lot of eye candy, boy and girl, lined up. They won’t have to say much to fill the theatres.”

“I have scenes that’ll raise questions about ratings.”

“I was also aware of that, Ms Chalmers,” said Stella, smiling. “Like I said, they’ll be lining up.”

“But my present agents are sending me more of that stuff than I can possibly do,” said Meghan, “and it’s all the same blonde roles. I don’t want to do films as a female weightlifter or a truck driving mama, but I can act. There must be parts a step or two above just playing eye candy. Then there are all the endorsements and appearances at night clubs and promotional parties. It’s good money, but I’m sure I don’t need to do all of it. When I complain, they just tell me it all has to be done or if I don’t turn up I’ll damage my image or I’m already contracted in even though I didn’t agree to it, or some other crap. I don’t want to have to argue with them.”

“Shower scenes with a hot leading man in a box office hit gets you promotional deals and the brand can look after itself, Ms Chalmers,” said Stella. “Sounds as if your agents are milking you for whatever they can get while you’re still hot.”

“Okay, what can you do for me?” said Meghan.

“In the interests of full disclosure, Ms Chalmers, it would be quite a coup for me if you come on board with me as I’m going out on my own. That said, you’re already established and you’ve got the assets, if you don’t mind me saying, and you can act. I saw you when you did Broadway. I was impressed.”

“Thank you,” said Meghan. She decided that she liked Stella.

“If you sign with me you’ll still get scripts sent to you, no problem there, and the choice ones because the producers will want you no matter who represents you. I can certainly promise to listen to what you say and agree on an acceptable work load in appearances and endorsements. It’s not good to do too much of that stuff, in any case.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Meghan, “and call me Meg in private, as that’s my name. Not ‘boss’ or ‘ma’am’ either,” she said sternly to Will as he reappeared with Stella’s coffee.

“Has she told you yet about how she’s not really a diva?” Will said to Stella, unabashed.

“Not yet,” said Stella, laughing while Meghan glared. “But it doesn’t seem like her staff is afraid of her.”

“If signing is an issue a copy of the contract with your present agent is in that folder on your desk, not-boss,” said Will. Meghan made a face at him. “Basically, any jobs you’ve already agreed to, and specifically you not just the agents, has to be done and they get the commission. Otherwise, you can just change – although you have to tell them, formally, and that can be tricky, as they’ll be losing fees.”

Will got back into the pool while the ladies talked, eventually agreeing to let Stella be her lead agent on trial.

“You’re going to tell your present agents?” said Stella, tentatively.

“I’ll get Will to do it,” said Meghan. “If it’s anything like getting rid of the social media consultants I was with he writes a letter which I sign, and he takes the calls. It’s very convenient.”

Stella laughed again. “He’s really a consultant then, and not just a bod in a pool.”

“The pool thing is an interesting bonus,” said Meghan. “But I’d keep him around just to take the calls from consultants. He put a couple from the social media consultants on speaker while I was here so we could listen. They were nasty, claiming I was destroying my fan base and ruining my future. Will didn’t lose his temper with them or even snap back and eventually they gave up.”

“I know getting rid of Bennett’s” (that was Meghan’s present agency) “can be hard, if you’re an established, commission-generating star,” said Stella. “Wish Will luck for me.”

“I dunno if I’ll get around to wishing him luck,” said Meghan. “I have questions to ask.”

Later, when Will appeared at her study door showered and ready for the day, she said in her best boss voice, “come in Will and sit down.”

Will did so, wondering if he was about to be fired.

“It looks like I will go with Stella as my lead agent,” she said. “Which means firing Bennett’s.”

Will shrugged. “No problem, Meghan. I’ll write you a polite letter thanking them for their services and listing those events and roles they can expect commissions for, then take the calls. Can they contact you directly?”

“Always through Mia. I also get emails.”

“I’ll brief Mia and I’ll show you how to set your inbox so that the emails are forwarded to me automatically.”

“All good,” said Meghan. “Now!” Will recoiled at the ‘now’ thinking that he was going to be yelled at. “Tell me about this breakup with Violet.”

“But what do you care?” protested Will, taken aback. “You went out of your way to tell me you had a boyfriend and weren’t interested in me romantically during that first call. Harped on the point, in fact.”

“Gossiping about you is way different from dating you, Will Moreland,” she said. “I’m allowed to be curious about the lives of my own staff. Violet is an actress how did you meet her?”

“Through friends at the University of Chicago.”

“This is the college you got into on a swimming scholarship?”

“That’s right. She was in a theatre programme there. I knew her for a while before she took it into her head to date me.”

“She made the first move,” said Meghan.

“Called me, in fact. Now that I look back on it, she wanted someone to take her to a theatre function and that was it, but things went from there.”

“How come you two ended up in LA?”

“She wanted to try the West Coast acting scene, and she asked me to come with her. I gave up my reporting job to come.”

“You couldn’t get a journalist job here?”

“Nope,” said Will. “Traditional newspapers have been dying for some time. Plenty of web sites but none hiring. It doesn’t help that I’m not very competitive.”

“I’ve noted that,” said Meghan, leaning back and crossing her arms. Will thought even in her morning attire of track suit pants and black tee shirt with the words ‘TOP MODEL’ in bold white letters she looked fabulous, but he was careful not to show this. “How come you ended up with that Silicon Valley type you were with at the bar when we met?”

“I hadn’t met Hap before that night, but he was the college roomie of another good friend and he read my book…”

“Book! Now I find out about a book?”

“… I told you I wrote trashy military SF,” said Will. “It’s not the sort of thing you’d read, so what would you care?”

“But it’s still more impressive than real estate ads,” said Meghan. “That’s what you said you were doing.”

“The real estate blurbs paid way more, and you wouldn’t be impressed if you could see the publisher’s office. It’s in a garage, and the chief executive does casual shifts at a computer store to make ends meet – a point that Vi made when I last spoke to her. Writers are low, according to her.”

“At least it makes more sense that you talked yourself down,” said Meghan. “You were in love with this Violet?”

“After three and a half years I thought it would go all the way. Then I came in just as she was about to charge off to New York with this guy who could get her a job. Then she basically said she’d just been acting, and she stole from me by using our joint credit card, knowing she wouldn’t get the bill. Three thousand two hundred and twenty three dollars and forty three cents. I counted carefully.”

“Ouch!” said Meghan.

“Now I’m convinced that all actresses are faithless, heartless, scheming, hateful creatures.”

“Hey, we’re not that bad. I’ve a grudge against men. I’ve been dumped heaps of times.”

“Yeah, right. Clarise Chalmers has been dumped,” said Will.

“I have to.”

As far as I’m concerned all actresses are hateful,” said Will, although without any heat, “and they should all be dumped.”

Meg rolled her eyes. “Oh, suit yourself. Have you spoken to Violet since?”

“You remember when we met, I didn’t see you come in because I was looking at the screen above the bar?”

“And you nearly choked to death when you saw me,” said Meghan, smiling. “I remember.”

“I was distracted because I could see Violet on the screen. She was in a commercial, presenting an exercise machine. Only time I’ve seen her since she left. I haven’t spoken to her at all.”

“No one else since?”

“My roomie’s Goth girlfriend wants to set me up with her Goth girlfriends.”

“Not into Goths?”

“Don’t look so good in leather with purple hair,” said Will. “Can I go now, not-boss Meg? I have your work to do.”

“Are you going to keep playing the victim?”

“I am a victim – of actresses.”

“Ha!”

“I’m a victim in other ways,” said Will.

“How so?”

“I’m a fashion victim.”

Meghan laughed. “I’d noticed,” she said. “Oh, go away and do my work, but this isn’t over, Will Moreland.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And don’t call me ma’am,” she yelled at Will as he retreated out the study door.

“She also isn’t a diva,” he whispered to Mia, who giggled then tried to keep her face straight when Meghan glared at her through the study door.

Shortly after Meghan’s interrogation of Will, she was distracted by her boyfriend and major screen heart throb, Robin Hawke, finally coming back to town, and Will had an adventure of his own. This started at a small supermarket close to Meghan’s house where he stopped for groceries on his way home. After a day of calls from the sacked agency demanding to be put through to Meghan so that they could lobby for reinstatement, and unhappy with the response that she was on a photo shoot, Will was thinking about the script he was rewriting for Hap.

Will had not written a script before but after reading up online he thought he could present it properly and, more importantly, estimate the screen time required for what he had written. He was aiming for a film of somewhere between ninety to one hundred and twenty minutes. But the real trick was to keep enough of the content written by Hap, the client, to ensure the embryonic producer remained on board while making the film coherent and suspenseful. Will thought he had mostly solved the problems, but there were still details to attend to and, while thinking of those the girl at the checkout counter – the store was too small for automated check-outs – offered him a promotional card, one of a series of cards connected to a popular Disney children’s film. Those who collected enough of them would assemble a set and get some sort of prize.

“I don’t have any use for them,” said Will, taking it. “But perhaps this lady might have,” and handed the card on to the woman behind whose very young daughter holding onto the woman’s shopping trolley, he realised, was gazing at the card.

“Thanks, mister,” she said, “we’re trying for that set.”

“Thank you,” said the girl.

“No trouble. I have no use for them myself at all,” said Will, smiling.

He turned away and was outside with his bag of groceries when someone behind him said “that was nice of you”.

Will turned around to see a woman perhaps a few years older than himself, with auburn hair in a pixie cut and wearing outsized, red-framed glasses. Her chin was too pointed for her to be considered beautiful, but her features were symmetrical and the eyes behind the glasses sparkled with intelligence. Wearing a smart grey business dress and blazer, she looked as if she had come from a corporate meeting which, in fact, she had.

“It was really no trouble,” said Will, surprised. “Like I said, I’ve got no use for them myself.”

“Couple of frozen dinners,” she said, nodding at the bag. “A night in?”

“Sometimes my roomie and his girlfriend are there for dinner but I don’t think so tonight,” said Will. “I just like to buy backups.”

She smiled. “You want to grab some coffee…”

“Will, my name’s Will and sure, although my frozen stuff will melt if I stay too long. It’s a long drive home for me.”

“I’m Charlotte, Will, and in that case why don’t we have coffee at my serviced apartment? It’s not far from here and there’s a freezer.”

Will thought that was an invitation if ever there was one, and it had been a long time since Violet had left. Why not?

“Sure,” he said.

The scriptwriting could wait.

 

CHAPTER SEVEN

 

 

Hollywood Howl had something else to discuss besides the usual fare of babies, divorces and romances of major stars.

“The big news this week,” said Ken Barbie anchorman “is that the wife of major producer Gordon Greenwald, who accused singer Connie Leighton of stealing her man, has been revealed as a sex worker who has never been married to Greenwald and never lived with him. Sidewalk Stars can exclusively reveal that the sex worker, Karen Purbeck, who also has the working name of Larissa Diamond, was paid to confront Connie Leighton and make those claims, as an elaborate way for the producer to end his romantic involvement with Leighton…

 

Charlotte had little interest in the preliminaries of chatting, all but dragging Will into the serviced apartment’s large bed and moaning throughout the coupling.

“Sorry about the noise, Will,” she said as they lay, gasping, bodies intertwined. “I was always into sex, and it’s been a while for me.”

“You don’t need to apologise to a guy for that,” said Will. “The noise is a compliment.”

She giggled and ran her fingers over Will’s shoulders, sweaty from the exercise.

“Good body,” she said. “Few tatts, that’s unusual these days.”

“Never into them,” he said.

He caressed her breast and side, making her gasp until she wanted to couple again, this time with much less urgency. Afterwards Charlotte rested her head on his shoulder and they exchanged life stories. Violet had gained considerable amusement from drilling Will in what to do and not do in bed, including the need to talk afterwards, for as long as the woman wanted.

Will’s new found sexual partner declared herself to be a divorced head of a small company that specialised in contract marketing, design and image services for law firms. Although she was based in New York, the company had an office in Los Angeles which she wanted to expand.

“Lots of law firms out here,” she said.

Charlotte expressed sympathy over Will’s tale of abandonment by Violet and amusement over his day of stonewalling a sacked agency, although Will was careful not to name the star he worked for – an omission that Charlotte accepted without argument. Will could have his secrets as far as she was concerned. They got up to have the long delayed coffee then Charlotte declared that she had to take a late flight back to New York and would not have time for more than a quick meal at the airport.

Declining Will’s offer to drive her saying that he would distract her, Charlotte took his number while declining to give hers.

“I need to concentrate for a week or so, then I’ll be back for a couple of days and we’ll have dinner then,” she said. She kissed him goodbye passionately at the door and Will left, feeling that the whole episode had been unreal. As Charlotte had also declined to give the name of her company and even say what part of New York she lived in Will half expected not to hear from her again, but a few days later she called while he was sitting around the dining room table with Mia and Emma. Although he went out to the pool area for the bulk of the conversation as he did when his parents or his sister called, the two ladies immediately suspected it was from a woman.

“Well, yes, an older woman,” he said. “She runs a legal consultancy and comes out to the LA office sometimes.”

“How much older?” Emma wanted to know.

“Few years, not that much older.”

“A junior cougar?” said Mia.

“That’s a thought,” said Will, who declined to give any further details.

Then it was time for the two bad girls to visit the Haddenbach Children’s Hospital. With Connie Leighton publicly acceptable again – her former boyfriend now busy denying all sorts of dark secrets that had crawled out of the woodwork when the public spotlight had turned on him – the administrators were quite happy to have both ladies visit as a way of promoting the benefit, lifting the institution’s rather low public profile and, oh yes, raising the spirits of the hospital’s young inmates.

As the public relations man for both Meghan and, as far as the benefit went, for Connie, Will now had a list of media contacts to alert to the visit. Those who did not have the resources to send photographers, and that was most of the websites and even some of the newspapers would be sent material to be taken by a photographer hired for the day. That photographer was Jake, the assistant director Mia was now dating regularly.

“Will, you’re driving me to this thing,” said Meghan throwing him the keys for her BMW to Will.

“Me, seriously?” said Will.

Meghan paid about as much attention to the BMW series 5 in her garage as she did her kitchen, preferring cars organised by the studios or agencies to pick her up or for boyfriends to drive her in their luxury cars.

“We could always make a statement and take my car,” said Will.

“And put that eyesore you call a car in the spare spot in the garage from now on,” said Meg. “I’m told the neighbours have been complaining about it being in the street.”

“It gets me places,” protested Will, “and I told you I’m a fashion victim. You should be kind to victims.”

“I am being kind to your car,” retorted Meghan, “And I’m being patient with you. Shut up and put it in the garage and get mine out. At least with that grey jacket and khaki slacks look you’ve got going today the police won’t stop you on suspicion of car theft. Come on, chop, chop!”

“Who says chop, chop these days?” complained Will to Mia who shrugged and smiled. But he put his car in the garage as he was told and got into the BMW, relieved to find that, as it was a nine speed automatic, he would not make a fool of himself driving it.

“I hear you’re dating a young cougar,” said Meghan as they drove.

“That’s Mia’s description. She’s not that much older than me, although she did pick me up at a supermarket.”

“Really,” gasped Meghan. “I didn’t hear about that.”

“I didn’t tell the others that part.” Will told her the story.

“It was nice of you to offer your card to that girl,” said Meghan. “And this Charlotte checked on you being single right at the start.”

“Well, yeah,” said Will. “She didn’t have a ring and asked if I wanted coffee at her place. I’m a guy. A good looking woman offers me coffee, I accept.”

“Did you get coffee?”

“Eventually.”

“Ha!” said Meghan, then, “Men!”

“It was her choice all along the line,” protested Will, “and you’re meant to be the Hollywood bad girl remember? You’re supposed to chew guys up and spit them out.”

“That’s my screen image,” she said. “The real Meghan is more conventional. I’ve never picked up a guy in a supermarket line.”

“Would the real Meghan ask a guy out?”

“Hmmm! I’ve never had to.”

“I can well believe that,” said Will.

Meghan liked that compliment. Will was now a friend with whom she was comfortable enough to occasionally argue with, tease, or tell off, without heat, and who didn’t mind being bossed around. But a part of her wondered why Will wasn’t showing more interest. Meghan told herself that romantic overtures from Will would be a major complication and might result in her losing him as a friend, but she was used to men fawning and even fighting over her. An attractive one that she saw shirtless most days that treated her as a friend was an affront. An occasional compliment helped.

“You spent the weekend with Robin,” said Will. “How was that?”

“We went to a party with film types,” said Meghan. “It was fun.”

(Actually, she had argued with Robin about men paying attention to her at the party.

“You encourage those guys too much,” he had said.

“I just wasn’t being rude,” said Meghan, “and so what if they are paying attention? I’m not going to do anything.”

“I don’t like it babe,” Robin had said, “they’ll take advantage.”)

“A party with cool, famous people,” said Will, as they drove. “Did any of them wear khaki slacks?”

“There was one,” said Meghan, laughing, “but security threw him out when someone complained.”

They got to the hospital, a series of white buildings crammed into a suburban site and met Connie – the first time the two stars had seen one another in the flesh in years – as well as the grey-haired hospital administrator, Helen Judson. In short order, they then met the head of surgery, chief of medical staff, director of nursing services and various other hospital executives. Then they met the patients, the children, whose reactions varied – the younger ones didn’t understand who they were – but all seemed pleased to see them. They met several parents who were too taken up with concern over their child’s health to be overcome by star power.

The cancer ward was the worst with the children looking forlorn, some without hair and tubes in their noses who smiled bravely when the woman approached. Connie was particularly affected.

“The cure rates for children with cancer are pretty good,” said one of the doctors, “much better than for adults, but there is the occasional one of course, which is very sad.”

Then they were out in a corridor and the visit was almost over when they passed a group of nurses and nursing aides.

Will noticed the woman a couple of seconds before she acted. Unlike the others who were smiling, the short, fiery Latin type dressed as a nursing aide was staring at Meghan with what seemed to be real hate. She was also holding a flower vase without flowers in front of her, rather than under one arm. She stepped forward, glaring at Meghan and, suddenly realising what she was about to do, Will swung around in front of the star, putting his back to the woman. Meghan had the sense to duck.

Will felt something splash on his jacket and heard someone scream “Maria, what are you doing?”

“Was that acid?” asked Will, in alarm, hurriedly shrugging his jacket off and letting it fall to the floor. He thought a little had got onto his neck and right hand but there was no burning sensation.

“No, it’s piss from the bed patients,” spat the aide. “Miss high and mighty Chalmers should know what it feels like to be covered with piss.”

“I was just trying to help,” said Meghan, indignantly

Connie, who had been a few paces away, came over. “Are you guys alright?”

“Only casualty is my jacket,” said Will, picking the jacket up with one finger and examining it ruefully as the aide was taken away by security. “But a dry cleaning should fix it.”

The administrator was full of apologies.

“The staff know you’re just trying to help,” she said. “Maria is always angry. We’ll fire her of course.”

“Please don’t fire her over this,” said Will, looking around.

“She should be fired,” said Meghan.

“Damn straight,” said Connie. “Throwing patient’s piss on visitors has got to be worth getting fired.”

“She’s minimum wage, right?” said Will.

“She would be,” said the administrator nodding.

“Then it still looks bad, especially as no real harm’s been done. Star taking vengeance on poor worker. Reprimand her and make sure she’s never anywhere near visitors. If she does it again do what you like, but don’t fire her over this, unless the two ladies here object.”

“It’s up to the hospital,” said Meghan after a pause. “The problem, William Moorland, is that you’re too nice.”

“Yeah, that’s bad,” said Connie, who was pleased enough with Will to hassle him as a friend might. “You’re way too nice, Will.”

“Nice, nothing,” said Will. “I’m looking out for you ladies. If she’s fired that woman will be free to complain, saying she’s got children at home, or whatever, and now no job all because of heartless stars objecting to one of their entourage being splashed with piss. Wacked out crap I know, and she should be fired, but it could get traction. This way the hospital and you guys look like merciful angels doing good deeds rather than divas.”

“Now you’re thinking too much,” said Meghan smiling.

“That’s also bad,” said Connie. “We like our men decorative and dumb. If they think too much, they get ideas.”

“I’ll try to do better,” said Will, then asked the administrator for a bag to put his damp jacket in. After visiting the bathroom to clean the few splashes off himself, Will joined Meg and Connie by their respective cars in the visitor’s car park.

“BMW is that the best you can do?” Connie was telling Meg as Will walked up.

“What’s wrong with a BMW?” asked Meg. “I feel safer in it than I would yours.”

“It’s a series five,” said Will. “It’s not series seven but it’s still six figures.”

“The problem is it’s not a bad girl car,” said Connie. She pointed to her own vehicle. “This is a bad girl car.”

“A red Lamborghini,” said Will. “Just the thing for going to the mall.”

“If you have one of these, you don’t need to go to the mall,” said Connie. “The mall comes to you.”

“I’ve seen videos where guys driving this sort of car can pick up girls without saying a word,” said Will. “They just drive up and the girls get in.”

“I ain’t picking up strange men in this car,” said Connie. “I don’t know where they’ve been. What car do you drive, Will?”

“Don’t ask,” said Meghan, laughing.

“Mine’s a Saturn ION,” said Will.

“A what?” said Connie as the two male members of her entourage – the same good-looking men who had been at the original meeting with Will – laughed.

“I tell people I’m working up a script about an undercover detective in South LA,” said Will, “and the car helps me get a better feel for the part.”

“Your detective needs to trade a little up even for South LA, man,” said one of the good-looking members of the entourage, called Colby.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” said Will. “My other cover story is to say I’m waiting until the car becomes a collector’s item before selling it.”

“Got a few years to wait for the Saturns,” said Colby.

“Anyway, you ladies should have a bad-girl brand,” said Will, “so other bad girls will know what to buy.”

“There’s a bad girl brand already,” said Connie, “but it ain’t a bad idea.”

On the return trip, Meghan said, “I agreed with Connie on one thing while I was there.”

“What’s that?” said Will.

“We agreed that you’re a weird dude, Will Moorland.”

“I prefer the phrases free spirited or independent minded over weird.”

“I’m the diva and I say weird,” said Meghan.

“Sigh! As you like,” said Will.

“You were also talking to Connie,” she said.

“She wanted to know how to respond when reporters ask her about her former lover sinking fast into a sea of shit. I told her just to play it straight. Neglect to mention that she had a detective package up the story for handing over to a media outlet but play up the fact she was devastated that no one believed her story, although it was entirely true. It’s a further illustration of the way that powerful guys are allowed to prey on vulnerable women and so on.”

“I never thought of Connie as vulnerable,” said Meghan.

“It makes a better story if she can play that card,” said Will.

“And she’s using my consultant for advice.”

“Your consultant is trying to stay in one piece. Her entourage is a lot bigger and meaner than yours. As the problems with her label and in booking venues for tours have now vanished, your consultant lives to run away another time.”

Back at Meghan-Diva HQ, the first call Will got was from Hap who had been reading the rewritten script Will had sent back to him.

“Will, that’s a real story,” he said. “They have to hunt for those creatures underneath this Party Town otherwise they rip the people having a good time to shreds.”

“Okay, thanks, does that mean I get the other half of my generous rewrite fee?”

“No problem, but what do we do now?” asked Hap. “We try the studios with this?”

“We might have a chance with it,” said Will, “although I dunno where to start and it’ll probably take months and maybe years to get anyone interested.”

“Years!” said Hap.

“Getting scripts up is not easy, as I told you,” said Will, “and impossible for me as I’m not competitive enough. You need real drive to get those things accepted by any of the majors. The other option is to start the development process yourself, as we discussed. Get a storyboard together and work out some sort of budget you’d be comfortable with.”

“Storyboard?”

“Sure, as I understand it a storyboard is a sort of rough graphic novel of the film,” said Will. “You plot it out, scene by scene from the script with the characters and background in outline.”

“That sounds cool,” said Hap. “I like it. How do we do that?”

“I’ve never actually done it, but there’s plenty of material online, and there’s that director I told you about Evan Zagame. If you pay him he’ll help out. As I’m now the script co-writer who knows the story, I can pitch in but I’d also want to be paid for my time.”

“We get together then,” said Hap, tentatively.

“I dunno how it works but we can spend a few days at your place, say, working up a storyboard. Then you’ve got to decide just how, and if, you’re going to do this – what actors we’d like to get as opposed to those you can afford, where to film as opposed to simply using CGI - a lot of choices to make. Give Evan a call and send him the script. Discuss it with him.”

The next caller was agent Stella Bullingham who wanted to talk to Will rather than Meghan.

“Will, I just got off the phone with the agent for Connie Leighton who wanted to know about this ‘bad girl’ brand proposal. I was told you know something about this.”

“Oh right,” said Will. “That was an off the cuff remark and Connie said at the time the ‘bad girl’ tag was probably taken.” Will told her the story.

“That Lamborghini sounds expensive,” she said.

“Six figures starting with a two. Cruising chicks is no problem with one of those, but we’re talking about bad girls not bad boys.”

“Have you ever cruised chicks, Will?” asked Stella.

“Never really had the right car. With the car I’ve got now the chicks are more likely to call the police than get in.”

Stella laughed. “Does Ford have a bad girl car?”

“Maybe, or maybe we’re really thinking about a clothing brand,” said Will. “What about the words ‘Diva’ or ‘Scandal’.”

“Think Scandal is also taken by a perfume brand,” said Stella. “The name can be workshopped. Will, what I need are some words, a brief, about the proposal. A handful of sentences at most. I can fire that off to Connie’s agent and it becomes the basis for more discussion.”

“Well, I guess I can do that,” said Will. “Although I should warn you that Meghan thinks I’m a sort of fashion black hole.”

“Girls who’ve seen you without your shirt, Will, won’t care about your fashion sense. Just give us some words.”

 

CHAPTER EIGHT

 

 

Sidewalk Stars anchorman Ken Barbie flashed his brilliant teeth.

“And now to Diana Dupont who has a story on bad girls getting into charity.”

“Yes, Ken,” said Diana in the next shot. “Connie Leighton and Clarise Chalmers are taking time out from affairs, shoot outs and wild parties, and have dropped a feud stretching all the way back to the prom queen contest in the high school they both attended, to jointly organise a benefit for the Haddenbach Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles. Hard hit by cutbacks the hospital …

 

After some discussion and Will calling his mother, who was astonished to hear he was organising a benefit, for advice, Will and Emma had opted for a three hundred seat event. Anything larger would be unmanageable and, Will thought, they had enough guaranteed star power to fill the venue. As it was the event sold out in just two weeks, except for a few places which Will held back, following his mother’s advice, for last minute requests from VIPs and as favours.

When Meghan, on one of her days at home, called Will into her study/office the writer thought it was to discuss the details of the benefit. Instead, she wanted to talk about an investment proposal her boyfriend Robin had given to her.

“He wants you to invest in NFTs?” said Will, trying to keep the astonishment out of his voice, as he looked at the proposal document.

“They’re some sort of digital asset,” said Meghan, “Non-funge something.”

“Non-Fungible Tokens. I know what they are, kinda,” said Will, leafing through the proposal which was a few pages stapled together. “You’re not investing directly in these NFTs, according to this, but in a consortium that will trade these tokens for big profits, they hope. The profits will be split among the participants.”

“Okay, that’s what Robin was talking about,” said Meghan. “Some friends of his are in it. Guaranteed big returns, he said.”

Since working for Meghan Will had developed a highly uncomplimentary view of the financial judgment of Robin Hawk, with his string of get rich quick schemes in which he was always trying to involve Meghan. He kept that opinion to himself. Instead, he said: “You remember I spoke of two rules of investing. The first is that if you don’t understand what you’re investing in, then don’t. The second rule is that if it sounds too good to be true then it probably is. NFTs could earn big bucks, sure, but they could also lose all your investment, and they’re difficult for anyone to understand.”

He flicked to the back pages of the proposal.

“You’re relying on the trading skills and judgment of two guys, although there is very little detail about their careers, and they’re both at a brokerage I’ve never heard of. I could check it out further if you want. How much are they asking from the consortium members? It doesn’t say here.”

“Half a million minimum,” said Meg.

“Wow! Well, at least they’re not thinking small,” said Will. “But that still means you’re handing over half a million plus to two guys working in an office somewhere in New York, in the hope that they’ll give it back plus big profits, on the basis of four pages stapled together. If they’re that good, why aren’t they trading for themselves? The choice is yours but maybe you could tell Robin that you’re a conventional, real estate kinda girl who’s saving up to buy the high end residential tower filled with paying tenants of your girlish dreams?”