After seeing Colleen, I couldn’t celebrate and I couldn’t fake it.
I phoned Sci, told him I had a family emergency, and asked him to stand in for me as host. Then I did the unthinkable. I turned off my phone.
I drove to Forest Lawn, an old and sprawling cemetery where dozens of celebrities were buried. My sweet mom was buried there too.
She’d been taken down by a previously undiagnosed heart disease during the heat and ugliness of my father’s trial. It was a sharp, unexpected ending to an unfulfilled life. Maybe it was my mother and father’s bad relationship that kept me away from marriage.
I took off my jacket and sat on the grass near her simple stone, engraved with hands folded in prayer above an inscription: “Sandra Kreutzer Morgan is with God.”
A lawn mower hummed in the distance, and I saw the flash of Mylar balloons, probably hovering over the grave of some poor child buried nearby.
I didn’t talk to my mother’s bones or her spirit. I didn’t even pray until just before I left.
But I thought about the good times we’d had together: the rare picnics, a few tailgate parties after football games, watching Peter Sellers movies with her on late-night TV. She had probably seen The Pink Panther a hundred times. So had I. So had Tommy.
I grinned thinking about that, and after a while I rolled my jacket into a pillow and lay down. I got mesmerized by the slow shifting of the oak leaves in the branches overhead.
And then I fell off the planet for a while.
I must have slept long and deep, because I was awakened by a groundskeeper shaking my arm, saying, “Sir, we’re closing. You have to leave, sir.”
I touched Mom’s stone, found my car, and as the horse knows the way to carry the sleigh, my car seemed to drive itself to a pretty carriage house I knew well in the flats of Beverly Hills.
I parked on Wetherly, a tidy residential block, and sat for a while just looking at Justine’s small, beautiful house. I turned my phone back on and tapped in her number.
Justine answered on the first ring. “Jack. What was this family emergency?” she asked. “You missed the party.”
“Colleen is going back to Dublin,” I said. “We talked it over. After that I went out to Forest Lawn. I needed time to think.”
“Are you okay?”
“Sure.”
“ ‘Sure,’ he says,” Justine said, tweaking me. “Well, I’ve had to do some mental reorganization of my own. See, um, Bobby dumped me to go back to his wife. Too bad for Bobby, though; she didn’t want him anymore.”
I wanted to comfort Justine, and at the same time I was happy to hear this breaking news. Justine was too good for Bobby Petino, or to get tainted by the smudge and stink of California politics.
I wondered where Justine was right now. I pictured her in a chaise in her study, or lying in bed with the TV turned down, a glass of wine in her hand. My emotional pull toward her was almost a physical force.
“What are you doing right now?” I asked.
“Why?”
“I could come over,” I said. “Just for a while.”
There was a deep pause that I filled with hope.
“Jack, we both know that would be a bad idea,” Justine said. “Why don’t you just get a good night’s sleep, and I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I was saying her name when she disconnected the line. I watched the lights go off in her house, one by one.
And then I drove to my home alone.
Epilogue
Chapter 120
Out-of-work actor Parker Dalton knocked on the door of Suite 34 at the Chateau Marmont.
He held the folding massage table by its handle, reset his cap with his other hand, and waited on the dark print carpet for Mr. Cushman to invite him in for his daily rub.
Dalton loved this job, actually. Stars had always stayed at the Chateau, and some of them actually lived here several months at a time. The sightings of Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, Matthew Perry, and others made fantastic entries on Dalton’s blog and always gave him hope for his own career.
Mr. Cushman was no star, but he was a celebrity, what with his wife having been murdered and the killer still on the loose.
Dalton had tweeted about his sessions with Mr. Cushman, and his friends and innumerable friends of friends begged for more tweets, more details, more snarky observations.
When Mr. Cushman didn’t come to the door, Dalton phoned his room on the direct line. He heard the phone ring inside the suite, and when Mr. Cushman didn’t pick up, he considered his options.
Should he leave-or call the front desk?
It wasn’t exactly rare for Mr. Cushman to be semidrunk when Dalton arrived. But maybe there had been an accident. Maybe he had fallen in the shower.
Dalton finally called the desk, and within minutes the day manager came up, a tall blond guy with a rockin’ build and the name “Mr. Straus” on the tag on his vest. Straus questioned Dalton briefly and then opened the door to Cushman’s suite.
Dalton stood at the threshold and called out, “Mr. Cushman.” When there was no answer, he followed Straus into the large suite.
The spare 1930s-style furniture was undisturbed. Bottles and glasses littered the tabletops, garbage spilled out of trash cans, and white curtains billowed over the unmade bed.
“I don’t see Mr. Cushman anywhere,” said Dalton.
“No kidding,” said Straus.
Dalton watched Straus open the closet doors-and he saw his opportunity to snoop. What did Mr. Cushman wear when he wasn’t naked or in his pajamas?
The closet was empty and so were the dresser drawers.
The bathroom, with its wonderful period black-and-white tiles, was a mess: medicine cabinet open, just a used razor and a bottle of aspirin inside, towels all over the floor.
“Man, looks like he checked out without telling me,” said Parker Dalton.
“Christ,” said the manager, beginning to shake his head. “He didn’t check out. He bolted.”
“Are you calling the police?”
“Be serious. This is the Chateau Marmont.”
Parker Dalton was tweeting before he left the legendary and, some said, haunted hotel. Oh, man, what a tale he had to tell. By the end of the day, twenty thousand nosy people would know that Andy Cushman had stiffed the hotel and scampered away.
Chapter 121
It was late afternoon when Del Rio turned off Lobo Canyon and parked his gray Land Rover off Lobo Vista
