nervous, keeping her eyes on his in the rearview mirror. He could feel how urgently she wanted him to believe her. “They were a couple of fun years, and eight good months of marriage, but all in all I would've been better off if I'd never gone to Hollywood.”
“And kept on dancing?” The words were out of his mouth before he realized it. He really hadn't learned much about keeping his damn mouth shut when it counted.
“How do you know about that?”
“My boss again. He said you've got a dance scene in one of your movies that you couldn't have faked.”
“He's got a good eye for talent, that guy.”
“He knows what he likes.”
“You see the film?
“I swear,” Dane said, “I'm gonna rent it tonight.”
“You said your boss was a fan, but not you?”
“I haven't had much opportunity for watching movies, the last couple of years.”
She picked up on what he was saying. “Oh, I see.”
“But back to the feds,” he said. “You're giving them too much credit. They must've built a solid case against your husband in order to take him down, ferret out the laundering fronts. It's been months, you say, so if they haven't brought you into it by now, why do you think they'd keep coming after you?”
“Because I'm an actress. They think it's fun, rubbing elbows with movie people while they're trying to crack some international drug cartel. They want to bust me because it ties the film industry in with importing. Like they never realized before that where there's money, there's drugs.”
“They realize it. They just have to pretend they don't, or they'd have no jobs.”
“So that's why they're clinging to me.”
Dane didn't buy it, but she seemed committed to her reasoning. “If they've already got your man, I don't see why they'd keep after you, even if it is fun for them. Rousting producers and all that. Feds walking into Silver Cup Studios and getting sitcom stars' autographs. Even that would get old quick. They would've either busted you with your husband or right afterward.”
“That's not what my lawyers say.”
“They're stringing you on so you keep paying them.”
“Everybody who's supposed to help clear up the situation just keeps perpetuating it so they get paid?”
“Exactly.”
She thought about it for a minute, doing the math, counting up all the cost for unnecessary hours. “You might be right. But what if you're not?”
“I don't think asking every person you meet if he's a cop is going to do you much good in the world. Be patient. Stay out of the action for a while, go back to LA and make your movies.
“I don't fight them. I just dance for them, you know, seduce and sort of beguile them. Except for at the end, I get to shoot a rocket launcher into the main bad guy, blow him off a bridge.”
“Yeah?”
“Uh-huh. My cool action hero line is, ‘I'm gonna rock your world, baby!' Then I blast him.”
“You do a commentary track on this movie?”
“A special extended edition is due out next year, but with my husband in the joint, I don't think they'll be asking me to participate for a while. Too much bad publicity right now. Later, who knows?”
She'd taken off her shades and Dane could see a mischievous glint in her gaze, maybe because he was talking to her without judgment. Maybe something else they'd eventually get around to. She seemed pleased with herself, playing up to him.
The tabloids and newspapers must be putting her through the wringer, printing her nude pictures with little black x's over the nipples, showing how degenerate she was. “If it's not cost-effective for them, the feds will have to pack up their shit and go on to the next case. If they're even watching you at all.”
“Feds never give up,” she said, like she knew it for a fact. “I've learned that much. All they've got is time. I saw that when they kept coming after my husband, going through every piece of scrap paper, reel of film, interviewing hundreds of members on his film crews.”
“If you're really clean, they'll eventually veer off.”
“I'm not that clean,” she said.
It almost made him laugh. “No one is. You've just got to be less dirty than the guy next to you.”
“I was, but they're still on me.”
“Maybe.”
All that talk and she'd never once mentioned her husband's name.
Dane settled back and she did the same, and the mood grew comfortable, kind of friendly. He double-checked his map and the address on the sheet as he pulled into the village, then drove around the traffic circle and up to Montauk Manor.
A ritzy old-fashioned hotel built a century ago, where some investors owned suites and rented them out like time-shares. Middle of October, with the hint of winter rolling in off the ocean, the place looked pretty empty. He wondered who she was meeting and felt an unexpected pang of jealousy.
He got out and opened the limo door for her. She fumbled for her purse and he said, “It's already taken care of.”
“You deserve a tip.”
They'd shared a little too much and he couldn't take her money, not like a chauffeur, which is really only what he was. Hour to hour, Dane kept forgetting.
Glory Bishop took a few steps toward the fancy front doors of the hotel, then turned and gestured for him to walk closer. He came around the car and she said, “I've got a friend's premiere to go to Saturday night. You want to come?”
“I thought movie premieres were in Hollywood. Where they talk about your dress the next day, say who looked like shit on the red carpet.”
“No, this is an independent feature done mostly in the city.”
He looked at her, trying to decide if she was asking him on a date or whether she was being nice and just wanted to hand out free tickets. Maybe so he could bring Pepe, her number one fan, and she could watch him squirm when she made eyes at him.
It took her a second to let out an authentic smile, not the shining artificial kind celebrities gave the media. Dane liked it, but still said nothing.
She told him, “You'll like the movie. It's got a lesbian scene in it. Two hot chicks making out in a hot tub.”
“Are you one of them?” he asked. There went his mouth again.
Tongue flicking over her top lip, trying to see how easy it might be to get him agitated and start him down the road to infatuation. “Come watch the movie and find out.”
TEN
Back from a weekend pass, with the moonlight flowing over him and pooling, silver and bone white, into his cupped hands, Dane would lie in his bunk with the rest of the squad smelling like beer and the cheap perfume of town whores. He'd shut his eyes tightly against the thrust of his own memories.
They weren't particularly bad ones. Not like he was always thinking of his father with his head laid open like an oyster, or the couple of times he'd seen violent shit in the street when he was a kid. Black guys clubbed to death for walking into the neighborhood. A bag lady frozen in an empty lot one winter, after the dogs had gotten at her.
He'd had warmth and occasional laughter, but somehow the past became the province of wreckage and remains. He had no control over it. Start fantasizing about Maria Monticelli's hair pouring over his chest, and the next thing he's thinking about his mother choking in the back room, or the girl who didn't dance with him in the
