won’t film until late December, so we can put that on the back burner for now. I miss you, sweetie. I wish it were next week already so we could be together. It’s midnight here. I’m hitting the sheets. Good night, love.”
Joanne had left the message an hour ago. Avery decided not to call and possibly wake her. Instead, he went to his suitcase in the closet. He snapped open the locks, and took out a video—a sexually explicit video starring Mr. and Mrs. Avery Cooper.
Several months back, he’d been concerned about his first R-rated love scene—in this movie with Traci Hadyn. Joanne had playfully suggested they “rehearse” together. At her urging, he’d broken out the video camera and tripod to tape their lovemaking. After some initial shyness, they began to have fun, and eventually forgot the camera was there. The resulting video was more silly than sexy. Avery stashed the tape in his underwear drawer, and pretty much forgot about it.
But his first night on location here in Vancouver, he’d unpacked his bags, and found Joanne had taken their little sex epic out of mothballs. She’d hidden the video in his suitcase—along with a Post-It note:
Now Avery popped the cassette in the VCR connected to the hotel TV. He sat at the end of his bed and watched. He ignored his own video image: that dumb wiry guy with the erection and the birthmark on his butt. Instead, he focused on Joanne’s lithe body, the way she smiled and giggled. He felt himself grow hard.
Someone knocked on the door. Avery stood up and tried to adjust his erection. His first thought was:
“Mr. Cooper? Turn down your bed?”
Stashing the video back in his suitcase, Avery went to the other room and checked the peephole. It was the old lady who pulled back the bedcovers every night. As far as Avery was concerned, her job was the most useless service a hotel could provide. But, hell, she was a sweet woman of sixty who walked with a limp, and he didn’t want her put out of commission. Besides, slipping her a Canadian five for a tug at the bedsheets and a mint on his pillow made him feel good. He opened the door.
“Hello, Mr. Cooper!” she chirped. “Turn down the bed, aye?”
“Yes, thanks a lot,” he said, stepping aside.
“I know you go to sleep late, aye, so I saved you for last,” she said. With her basket of mints in tow, the uniformed woman hobbled into the bedroom. Then she let out a frail cry that escalated to a scream. It sounded as if she were having a seizure. Avery raced into the room. She was staggering away from his bed, her hand over her mouth. The basket of mints had spilled onto the floor.
“Are you okay?” Avery asked. Then he saw what the old woman had found beneath the quilted bedcover.
On his pillow, someone had left four dead mice, two of them cut in half. And there was a note—on hotel memo paper:
The old woman was still a bit shaken when someone from hotel security led her out of Avery’s suite. The manager on duty kept apologizing to Avery. He didn’t understand how this could have happened—what with the high security and the professional staff. Could they move him to another suite?
Avery told them that would be nice. “And could you please make sure that lady gets a ride home tonight?”
Later he left a message at the house for Joanne, telling her that he’d switched hotel rooms. He didn’t explain why. He said that if she woke up in the middle of the night, she could call him here. It didn’t matter what time. He probably wouldn’t sleep very well tonight anyway.
During a break in filming the next day, Avery retreated to his trailer, sat on the sofa, and telephoned Joanne. “Has anything kind of weird happened to you lately? Have you received any hate mail or strange phone calls?”
“Why do you ask, Avery? Did something kind of weird happen there?”
“Yeah, just a creepy note in my hotel room,” Avery said. “It’s these nuts who didn’t like the TV movie. I’m concerned about you, that’s all.”
“Avery, I can take care of myself,” Joanne calmly pointed out. “That said, okay, yes, something happened last week after the show. I came back to my dressing room, and on the vanity, someone had left a—well, it was a small Gerber’s baby food jar, only they’d stuffed a dead mouse in it.”
“Jesus,” Avery murmured. “Why didn’t you tell me about this?”
“Because you would have freaked out,” Joanne said. “I know what a worrywart you are. Nothing has happened since. They’ve kept a lookout for me backstage, and I’ve been careful. So don’t sweat about it. Okay?”
Avery got to his feet and started pacing around the trailer, the phone to his ear. “Listen, I’m hiring you a bodyguard. Let’s not take any chances—”
“Sweetie, I reiterate,
“Joanne, we aren’t seeing each other for another six days. Until then, I need to make sure you’re safe.”
So when Joanne Lane Cooper arrived at the theater that night, a bodyguard her husband hired introduced himself and showed his credentials. The man, whom Joanne would describe as “a pain in the ass,” guaranteed her safety for the next six days.
Three
A number of bomb threats didn’t keep fourteen thousand people from filling Portland’s Colosseum for the benefit concert. Dayle Sutton read letters of remembrance from several of Tony Katz’s friends and costars. Many of the letters were from AIDS patients he’d visited regularly, a few of them children.
Another actress might have manufactured some high emotion for the presentation, adding her own pregnant pauses and dramatic sighs, or allowing her voice to quiver. But Dayle chose a simple, dignified approach that focused on the letters, not on the celebrity reading them. When she finished, the audience stood and applauded. Dayle walked off stage left. The ovation continued, but she would not return for a bow. They were applauding the letters, not her.
On the other side of the stage, she glimpsed Leigh Simone, waiting in the wings. Dayle still hadn’t met the force behind this benefit fighting discrimination against gays and lesbians. Two women hovered around Leigh, both of them rather chubby: one, a makeup girl, and the other, an older brunette who held a cellular phone and a clipboard. Dayle wondered if this was the assistant, Estelle Collier.
Leigh broke away from the two women, and waved to her. She was so charismatic, and full of energy. She wore a sleeveless, brown sequined dress with a scooped neck and a jagged hem serrating at her upper thighs. Her legs were long and tapered. The thirty-eight-year-old singer could have been an Olympic athlete with her taut, lean body. The cinnamon skin was flawless. She wore her hair pulled back in a long curly ponytail, which had become her trademark. Her smile could dazzle the recipient a hundred feet away.
Dayle waved back at her. Leigh blew her a kiss, then yelled something. But the applause had yet to die down. She took a pen from her assistant, then wrote something on the clipboard, and sent her off. Leigh waved to Dayle again, then shimmied and shook her way onto the stage. A thunderous applause greeted her, and The High Priestess of Rock began to turn her seductive powers on the audience. She sang an electrifying rendition of Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds.” Mesmerized, Dayle watched her.
According to rumor, Leigh was a gay—or at least bisexual. Dayle didn’t take much stock in the grapevine— after all, they were wrong about her. But Leigh never refuted the gossip, and the sexual energy she exuded seemed to spill beyond all boundaries—including gender.
Dayle felt a little silly for even wondering. But Leigh seemed to have been flirting with her from the other side of that stage.
“Pardon me, Ms. Sutton?”
