When Foster looked, the something was just a window. Only curtains moving in a window.
Not-Robb stepped against the side of the building as if trying to blend into the brick wall. “I’m only here to deliver a message.” He shot another look at the curtains. “Tell your boss…”
Foster asked, “What boss?”
“Tell Mitzi Ives,” not-Robb clarified, “that she has until Tuesday to turn over the asset in question.”
A new figure was approaching. Another man, a shaggy-haired stranger, slowing as he drew near. Some hemp-headed caveman throwback.
Not-Robb followed Foster’s gaze to this new stranger, a burner type, but lanky. “Tuesday at four o’clock,” not-Robb said. “That’s when my employer will arrive to seize the asset by force.”
Foster asked, “What asset?”
Already backing away, retreating, not-Robb said, “Your boss will know. Tell her to deliver the asset before it’s too late.” And at that he’d turned his back and was jogging into the distance. Even as the new stranger strode up, not-Robb broke into a sprint and disappeared.
For an instant the new man seemed to be walking past. A love-beaded granola type, he scowled. His shoulders bunched, his hands were balled into fists. The man’s arm lashed out, landing a fast, hard crack against the side of Foster’s skull. A strobe flashed behind Foster’s eyes, and his knees gave way. He caught the sidewalk hard, landing on his ass. With the impact of the man’s fist the gun tumbled from Foster’s pocket. Tumbled and clattered across the sidewalk. Clattered and skidded over the curb. Skidded and dropped into a storm drain.
The gun, gone. The man, the man kept walking away. Not a stranger, not entirely. Not anymore.
The stink of patchouli and the words “Harsh, dude” sprang briefly to mind.
Mitzi arrived at the diner wearing the pearls. The booth near the back. The usual arrangement. An actress, a friend, sat waiting. Mitzi slipped into the booth and asked, “You called about a job?”
Blush Gentry didn’t answer, not right away. From behind oversized sunglasses she stared at Mitzi’s swollen belly. “You’re lucky,” she said. “I wish I could have a kid.”
It was clear to Mitzi that Blush had arranged her own kidnapping as an excuse not to attend the Oscar ceremony. She said, “You could have a child with your kidnapper.”
“Not him.” Gentry shook her head. “Too old. He’s shooting nothing but hot water and birth defects, you know?”
A server approached the table. A young woman, part of the new influx of pretty hopefuls migrating to California to revitalize the movie business. Mitzi regarded this one as eager but hopeless. When the advent of sound had killed off a generation of silent stars, their replacements had been recruited from live theater in New York. The theater would once more provide the new stars.
Blush removed her sunglasses. The server’s eyes came to rest on the actress and couldn’t look away. Starstruck, she asked, “What can I start you with?”
“Nothing, sweetheart,” said Gentry. “Maybe coffee.”
Mitzi asked for a glass of wine. White wine. It was lunch. Just wine, a big pour.
The server stared at the pregnant belly, obviously trapped between asking if someone was pregnant or implying Mitzi was fat. She didn’t risk it. “We have a Syrah.”
“Make that two,” Blush said. When the server had left, the actress plucked a napkin from a dispenser on the table and began folding and worrying the paper. Without meeting Mitzi’s gaze, she said, “Certain persons have impressed upon me that you’re in illegal possession of an asset.” Blush’s delivery was wooden and halting. “These…persons have asked me to intervene at this juncture.” An actress reading a script as if English were not her first language. “If you’ve not relinquished said asset by Tuesday at four o’clock, said persons will arrive at your place of business to forcibly take custody.”
As rough as the delivery sounded, Mitzi understood. Someone was going to raid the studio. Special forces would ransack Ives Foley Arts on Tuesday afternoon.
As the server brought their wine, Mitzi reached both hands to the back of her own neck. She undid the clasp and gathered the double strand of pearls cupped in one palm. “Until you have a baby of your own,” she said, and handed the necklace across the table.
Speechless, Blush lifted the two ends and fastened them together around her own neck.
They’d set Foster up, total strangers. They’d bullied him into staging that fake funeral, the carnival freak show, and they’d driven him to explode. Amber had been there, a witness seated in the back. Some crew of people had ambushed him with cell phones in a staged nightmare that had in fact been a plot right up to the email link to the babysitter movie. It sounded crazy, but he was part of something, targeted by something. Strangers had hijacked his anger and grief. Telling it now to Amber, Foster knew that he sounded crazy, too.
Mission accomplished.
Amber kissed his forehead, gently forcing his head down onto a pillow. To find her meant calling her father. And just by chance she’d picked up the phone, and after a moment’s embarrassment Amber had explained that she was hiding out from publicity, hiding from the media at her father’s house, at Paul’s house in the suburbs. And after another moment of embarrassed silence she’d asked him to stop by. And here he was, guided by his ex-wife into a back bedroom and told to sit on the bed and calm down.
“Rest,” she whispered into his hair. Her fingers lifted off his glasses, folded them and set them on a windowsill.
Amber’s dog jumped up on the bed beside him. A small dog. A pug. Maybe it was Paul’s dog, Foster didn’t know.
“They stage-managed everything,” he tried to explain. Minus his glasses, the room swam out of focus.
Amber listened like she did. She
