What Remains of Me Page 23

  He wasn’t breathing.

  “DO YOU HAVE ANYBODY YOU CAN CALL, HONEY?” SAID THE EMERGENCY room doctor. “How about your mom?”

  Kelly looked up—not at the doctor. At the clock on the wall. It was almost noon. She’d been here, in the waiting room at Hollywood Presbyterian, for four hours. “I want to see my dad,” she said.

  “I know, sweetie,” said the doctor—a female doctor with big pitying eyes behind thick glasses. “But that’s not gonna be possible for a while.”

  “How long is a while?”

  “Forty-eight hours.”

  Across from her, a Mexican woman who couldn’t speak any English held a baby that wouldn’t stop screaming. The woman and the baby were the only two other people waiting right now, but since she’d been here, Kelly had seen an older man complaining of heart attack symptoms, a panicky mom whose little girl had swallowed bleach, and a boy a few years older than she was rushed in on a stretcher, his leg mangled in a motorcycle accident. Two out of three of them had been treated and left. Even the boy with the mangled leg was seeing visitors. Kelly tried again. “I want to see my dad. Please.”

  “I know it’s a long time,” the doctor said. “But that’ll be how long it takes to detox.”

  “Detox?”

  “You seem like a smart girl so I’m not going to sugarcoat it. Your dad overdosed on Percocet. You know what that is?”

  She nodded.

  “So your dad took around ten times the prescribed amount, mixed with a significant amount of alcohol.”

  Kelly stared at her, awful thoughts running through her mind—Elvis and Keith Moon and Sid Vicious and all those other celebrities she’d read about in her gossip magazines, lifeless on hotel room floors or curled up around toilets, choking on their own vomit, dead on arrival. The screaming headlines: TRAGIC OD, DRUG CASUALTY, GONE TOO SOON . . . She thought about all the times she’d given Jimmy his pills, his glass of Jack on the rocks, and wished she could punch herself, pound her head into the wall. Wished she could take all the pills Jimmy had taken, so she could feel nothing like him.

  “He’ll be fine,” the doctor said. “He didn’t stop breathing long enough to incur much brain damage.”

  “Much?”

  “We just need to clean him out, dust him off, he’ll be good as new.” She looked at her. “But I am going to make a pitch for the Betty Ford Center.”

  Kelly tried to smile. “That’s a good idea,” she said, thinking, Not much brain damage.

  “So,” the doctor said. “Your mom? Should I call her?”

  Kelly shook her head. She heard herself say, “I don’t have a mom.”

  “Your dad said . . .”

  “He’s wrong.”

  “Well, do you have a family friend? You are a minor, and if there’s no one to take care of you, I will have to contact foster services . . .”

  “I have a family friend,” Kelly said quickly.

  The doctor introduced her to a nurse, who brought her to the front desk, let her use the phone. She called Bellamy first, but Flora the housekeeper said she’d gone out. Weird. Bellamy had said “Call me if you need me” this morning, right before Kelly had hung up with her to call the hospital. Had she shut Kelly and Jimmy out of her mind, just like she’d shut out the girl in John McFadden’s window?

  Next, she called Vee’s apartment. He picked up fast. “You’re lucky you caught me here,” he said. “I was just getting a few things.” It wasn’t until she heard his voice that she realized how much she’d missed him these past few weeks while he’d been away shooting Resistance. “Kelly?” he said. “You sound like you’ve been crying. Are you okay?”

  “My dad stopped breathing this morning.”

  “What?”

  She told him everything—from waking up to Bellamy’s phone call on, her voice cracking, breaking over the details. When she got to telling him how she’d pounded on her dad’s chest, how she’d shaken him and driven her fists into him, she felt it again, that blind, awful panic. “I love him so much,” she said. “Why couldn’t I make him stay?”

  Vee said, “Oh my God, if that ever happened to my dad . . .”

  Kelly started to cry.

  “We’ll be right there,” said Vee. “You can stay with us. Long as you need to.”

  She could barely speak. “Thank you.”

  After she hung up and sat back down in the waiting room again, Kelly let Vee’s words sink in. She ran them over in her mind. “We’ll be right there,” he had said. “You can stay with us.”

  And sure enough, when he arrived at the waiting room forty-five minutes later, Vee wasn’t alone. His father was there, standing right behind him, his hands crossed over his chest. “Your dad is one of the strongest men I’ve ever worked with,” he said to Kelly. “I know he’ll pull through this.”

  Vee rushed over to her, hugged her hard. She put her arms around him but her gaze stayed fixed on John McFadden, her whole body tensed, a feeling coursing through her . . . a growing, tearing rage.

  “It’s okay,” Vee said. “It’s okay.”

  Kelly couldn’t reply. She stared at John McFadden and the world turned in on itself, crushing her, taking bits away . . . Why didn’t I see it before? How could I not have known? But she couldn’t say a word about it, not to Vee. How could she? A dim, drunken memory unfolded in her brain. Vee at the Jailbird Party, crying into her neck . . . “I loved her,” he had said. “I loved Catherine.”

  Kelly hugged Vee tighter, tears springing into her eyes.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m here.”

  “I want my dad,” she whispered, crying for Jimmy and for Vee. Poor Vee, who believed he had a father worth wanting.

  John McFadden was dressed all in black. He was wearing the same mirrored aviator glasses, so there was no mistaking it, no lying to herself, no looking away. John McFadden was the man in the Porsche. He was the older man who had taken Catherine home.

  CHAPTER 23

  Guess who was spotted in a corner table at the Polo Lounge, sharing a bottle of Cristale—and what looked like a whole lot more? None other than stunning model Cynthia Jones and Oscar-nominated director John McFadden! Seems Cynthia’s got a part in the lensman’s latest, which has made for some steamy hanky-panky away from the cameras! Sipping champagne with leggy beauties isn’t the usual for McFadden, 40—a teetotaler who’s known for making movies, not moves. But it seems gorgeous Cynthia, 25, has stolen his heart—and changed his stick-in-the-mud ways. “This is a big deal for John,” reveals a pal. “The last lady he romanced like this was his ex-wife, [model Leilani Valle].”

  John McFadden has a type—and it sure is pretty!

  EXCERPTED FROM

  a column in

  Rona Barrett’s Hollywood

  magazine

  May 17, 1980

  CHAPTER 24

  APRIL 23, 2010

  Barry called Kelly Lund’s cell two more times from Sterling Marshall’s burner. It went straight to voice mail both times. Obviously her phone was turned off or the battery was dead. But he’d have been lying if he said it didn’t make him smile, just a little, to know that when she charged up her phone again, she would be greeted, Twilight Zone–style, by three missed calls in a row from the man she killed.

  May have killed. Innocent until proven guilty.

  What Barry wished—what he’d trade in his house and his car and possibly every sexual experience he’d ever had in his life for—was a recording of the 11:49 P.M. phone conversation between Kelly and her father-in-law. Because, while the call had drawn a distinct line between Kelly and Sterling Marshall on the night of his death, the dead man had been the one to draw it.

  Marshall had called Lund, not the other way around—which, in Barry’s book, raised more whys than anything else. The call had been close to midnight—the last call he would ever make, according to the records they had. And they weren’t exactly prone to late-night confidences, Kelly and Sterling. In fact, everyone in the family claimed
they never spoke at all—including Kelly herself.

  “Why do you suppose he called her?” Barry said to Louise as they headed upstairs to the scene of the crime.

  “I’ve been thinking about that.”

  “Maybe he wanted to tell her about his cancer like he did with Shane. Bury the hatchet or whatever?”

  “Seems like a weird reason to buy a burner.”

  Barry nodded. “Yep. Agree.” He still couldn’t figure it out, and he’d been running scenarios through his head ever since he’d pressed redial and heard Kelly Lund’s voice mail recording. Making things even more puzzling, the call to Kelly was the only one that had been made from the burner. When they checked the phone’s call record, there had been no other numbers listed before or after it.

  “I do have a theory,” Louise said as they climbed the last of the pink marble stairs, Barry focusing on them more than he should have been. Where do you find pink marble, anyway? They reminded him of the Barbie Dreamhouse his niece, Kaitlyn, used to have. Such a cute kid, but Chris’s first wife had gotten full custody and moved across the country and Barry hadn’t seen her in a dozen years. Jesus, she’d be graduating high school in June . . .

  “You listening?” Louise said.

  “Yeah. What’s your theory?”

  “I don’t think Kelly Lund killed him.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, for one thing, he’s dying anyway—his cancer had progressed a lot more than he let on to his wife and kids, and I think she knew that. I think he may have told her.”

  Barry shook his head, thinking again of Kaitlyn, his only niece. Chris’s only child. Did his dickhead brother ever think of Kaitlyn when he was bleaching teeth or collecting wives? Late at night in his mini-manse, did he ever fill a bowl and take a hit and think of that cute little girl with the Barbie Dreamhouse, now a complete stranger and the same age Kelly Lund had been when he’d tormented Barry with her picture? “We’re all dying, Louise,” he said.

  “Wow. Okay, Mr. Nietzsche.”

  As they reached the study, Barry pulled out his phone and put in a quick call to Kelly Lund. “Hi, Mrs. Marshall,” he said, making sure to use the name she preferred. “This is Detective Dupree. Please call me back as soon as possible.” He ended the call, put the phone back in his pocket.

  Louise tried again. “Okay,” she said, “first of all, Sterling Marshall was basically supporting her.”

  “Huh?” Barry said, but then it dawned on him what she was talking about. Last night, outside the Hollywood station, that writer Sebastian Todd had told them how Kelly Lund had managed to find a good paying job right out of prison.

  “Remember? That cheaters’ Web site she writes the profiles for. Sterling Marshall was a silent partner. He got her that job.”

  “Kelly Lund doesn’t know that, though.”

  “Maybe she does, maybe she doesn’t.”

  “Sebastian Todd says she doesn’t.”

  “Regardless, he bought her and Shane their house. She’s got to know that. He paid for it outright.”

  “So?”

  “So maybe he didn’t hate her as much as everyone thought he did.” She gave him a meaningful look. “Maybe there are other burners that no one knows about. Other conversations that were just between the two of them . . .”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “He’s very good at keeping secrets. Would you have guessed, in a million years, that husband and father-of-the-year Sterling Marshall was part owner of a hookup site for philanderers?”

  “I don’t know.” He thought about what Hank Grayson had told him, how twenty-odd years ago, Sterling had managed to keep Shane out of jail, his violent freak-out away from the press, with only immediate family, arresting officers (and, of course, that poor chef) the wiser. He didn’t say it, though . . .

  “What if he had something going on with Kelly?” Louise said. “What if Shane found out?”

  He winced. “Sterling Marshall wasn’t that kind of guy.”

  “He’s an actor.”

  “He never visited her in prison. Never wrote a letter to the parole board.”

  “He didn’t need to write letters,” she said. “Sterling Marshall was a string-puller.”

  Barry sighed. A group of uniforms passed them, nodding and smiling. If they only knew what we’ve been talking about.

  Once they were out of earshot, Louise said, “You ever wonder why Bellamy Marshall despises Kelly Lund?”

  “Because of what she did to her father.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I meant killing his best friend.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Louise,” he said. “She’s married to his son.”

  “It’s Hollywood.”

  Barry said, “Okay, fine. Sterling Marshall and Kelly Lund have been having a steamy and incredibly disgusting affair for years. That doesn’t mean she didn’t kill him. If we go with your story, she’s got a motive. He could have called her on that burner. Broken things off. He’s dying, like you said. Maybe he wanted to make things right and told her so and she couldn’t handle that.”

  “True,” she said. “But we still don’t know who that is on the surveillance video.”

  Inside the study, the crime scene techs were still bagging evidence, taking pictures. Barry had been in here briefly before, but it had been yesterday, just after his interview with Kelly Lund, when he was still getting acclimated. He paid more attention now—he saw the blood, so much of it, pooling on the floor, spattered across the bookshelves, thick, dark gobs of it, hanging from the draperies. The opposite of a clean kill, which could support Louise’s theory, if you bent it that way. Somebody had obviously been very angry. “Footprints,” Barry said, pointing to the floor. He could make out several sets of them in the cordoned-off area, which made sense—Mary and Bellamy had both been in the room with the body before calling the police. Both women, they had told them, took a size six shoe.

  “Did you see this one?” Louise crouched down and pointed to a sneaker imprint—the logo visible at the center.

  “Adidas?”

  “Size eight,” she said. “Men’s. There was another one in the kitchen.”

  BACK IN THE DEN, MARY MARSHALL LOOKED A GOOD DEAL WORSE than she had half an hour ago—pale and drawn, her head lolling back in a way that made Barry pretty sure she’d gotten into the pills again.

  But when Louise asked if they could “shoot her a few questions” about Kelly Lund, she didn’t fall asleep or tell Barry and her to go screw themselves, as Barry imagined she would. She even managed to lift her head and look at them. “Sure,” she said, the word hissing out of her, her eyes working to be alert.

  “We could always come back at another time, ma’am,” Barry said.

  But she shook her head. “No, no, no,” she said. “I want to help.”

  “You happen to know what shoe size your son takes?” Louise asked.

  “Not sure,” she said. “Eight or nine, maybe?”

  Louise wrote it down in her notebook.

  “I thought you wanted to ask me about Kelly Lund.”

  “We do, ma’am,” said Barry.

  Mary leaned back, energy seeping back out of her. “She was such a sweet girl when she was young,” Mary said. “Always said hello to me. None of Bellamy’s other friends would give me the time of day.”

  Barry looked at her. “So you guys liked Kelly, when she was a kid?”

  She shook her head. “I liked Kelly,” she said. “Sterling didn’t. He never said why . . .” Her eyelids fluttered closed for a few moments. “What were we talking about?”

  Louise said, “Kelly Lund.”

  “You know what’s strange?” Mary said.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve been married to Sterling for fifty-one years, and there are still so many things I never knew about him.” She pulled the handkerchief from her sleeve, swatted away at a tear. “I didn’t know how close he and John McFadden were until John was shot. I didn’t
know that John McFadden had given Sterling his gun—or even that Sterling had any desire to own a gun—until I found him dead in his study.”

  “You didn’t know he had a gun?” Louise said. “Really?”

  “I know it sounds strange,” she said. “But at this point in my life, I know for a fact that the reason why Sterling and I stayed married—the only reason at all as to why we were so compatible, so happy . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “We were never honest with each other. About anything.” She smiled—a sad, vacant smile.

  Louise gave Barry a look.

  “Stop it,” he said, very quietly.

  “Oh you’re here!” Mary said, her face lighting up as Bellamy Marshall walked into the room, trailing expensive perfume. She wore a deep red blouse with three buttons undone, tight jeans, black hair washed and shiny—a 100 percent improvement over yesterday. Barry made a point of not gawking at her, though she really did clean up well.

  “I’m sorry we’re late,” Bellamy said. She gave her mother a quick hug and then made way for her brother, who held on longer, tighter. She smiled at Barry. “We hit a lot of traffic,” she said.

  Barry’s gaze traveled to the mother, looking at her daughter as though she was drowning, Bellamy the last lifeboat.

  What did that mean: We were never honest with each other. About anything.

  Shane Marshall cleaned up well too—although to be fair, Barry had only seen him passed out in a holding cell, and there were very few sentient beings who couldn’t clean up better than the way he’d looked then. When he pulled away and sat down, Barry noticed how sallow Shane’s skin was, the dark circles and that look in his eyes . . . It was something beyond grief. Something tired and defeated and drained of hope. Instinctively, Barry looked down at Shane Marshall’s shoes—hiking boots. Probably more of a size ten. “Detective Braddock?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’d like to change my previous statement,” he said. “What I told you yesterday.”

  Louise tapped on her notebook, flipped the page. “Which one?” she said.

  He tried to smile, then gave up. He shoved his hands into his pockets, but not before Barry noticed that they were shaking. “I want to change what I told you about my wife,” he said. “About my wife being home last night.”