Chapter Twenty-One
Twenty-one
I called Kim Lash from my car. It went straight to voicemail, so I left a message. I kept it vague, mentioning Natalie’s name and asking if I could talk to her about Melanie Joan. I figured vague was best. When it came to returning a stranger’s phone call, curiosity could be a powerful motivator.
Before heading to my parents’, I picked up a bottle of my mom’s favorite Chablis, walked and fed Rosie—and left her at my loft.
I didn’t like doing this. Rosie and my dad adored each other, and my mom didn’t mind her, either.
But Elizabeth loved to complain about my dog so much that it was practically a passion, and I wasn’t about to indulge her.
I was around ten minutes away from my parents’ place in Newton when my phone rang. It was Kim Lash. Curiosity strikes again. “Thanks for calling me back,” I said.
“Sure, hon.” She had a gravelly voice. From what, I didn’t know. Cigarettes, age, years of screaming, all of the above…Over the phone, who could tell? “Are you a friend of Natalie’s?” she asked. “I haven’t seen her since she left showbiz.”
“Actually, I just met her today,” I said. “But I’ve known Melanie Joan for years.”
Kim chuckled. “Melanie Joan Hall. She’s something.”
“She sure is.”
“You work for her?”
“Sometimes.”
“What’s your job?”
“I’m a private investigator,” I said. “But right now, I’m kind of…helping her out with damage control.”
She chuckled again. “Man, oh, man. You’ve got your work cut out for you.”
“You’ve heard about what happened?”
“Who hasn’t?” she said.
“Natalie,” I said. “I mean, not when I spoke to her this afternoon.”
“That was probably before Leila Donnelly, right?”
I cringed. “Yeah.”
“It’s been all over the news,” she said.
“It has?”
“Leila Donnelly’s like Garbo,” Kim said. “She never speaks, so when she does, it makes headlines.”
“Garbo…”
“Before your time?”
“No, no. I know who she was. It’s just an interesting analogy,” I said. I was thinking about Blake. The profile he’d come up with on Book Babe. “Do you like books about old Hollywood? Like…movie star memoirs?”
“Sure,” she said.
“How about self-help books?”
“Some of them.”
“You have any young kids?”
She didn’t answer for a few seconds.
“Like two, three years old?”
“If you don’t mind my saying, Sunny, these are some weird-ass questions.”
I exhaled. “I know.” I was five minutes away from my folks’ house, and this wasn’t going anywhere. I decided to cut to the chase. “Look. I talked to Natalie because I thought she could have posted that one-star review of Melanie Joan on ReadAnon.”
Kim snorted. “Natalie’s a doll,” she said, “but she’s not the book-critique-writing type.”
“Are you?”
“What?”
“Are you Book Babe?” I said. “Natalie seemed to think it was possible.”
Kim inhaled sharply, then blew into the phone. Smoking a cigarette. “That’s what Melanie Joan hired you for?” she said. “She’s paying you to find out who shit on her memoir?”
I cleared my throat. “She wants to personally apologize for her inappropriate response to the review.”
“Oh, boy.”
“Are you Book Babe?”
“No.”
“And I should believe you because…”
“I am a big reader, and I have a ReadAnon account. But I just look at other people’s reviews. I don’t post them.”
“Nobody will know, if that’s what you’re concerned about,” I said. “Melanie Joan feels awful about what she said. She wants to apologize. And that apology can be as private as you want. If you’re Book Babe, you can keep posting and be as anonymous as ever.”
“Look,” Kim said. “I like Melanie Joan’s books.”
“You do?”
“A lot. And yes, she can be a nightmare. But I think that comes from perfectionism. She’s probably harder on herself than she is on anybody else, Natalie included.”
I thought for a moment. “That’s interesting.”
“You should have seen her on set. She’d spend all night rewriting her own pages, bring them in early, when nobody was there but the crew, try the new lines out herself in front of the camera…”
“I didn’t know she did that,” I said. “But it doesn’t surprise me.”
Kim took another long drag off her cigarette.
I could practically smell the smoke in my car.
“I’ve worked with a lot of authors turned executive producers and I’ve never seen anyone as committed as Melanie Joan,” she said.
“So even though I like Natalie and I felt bad for Natalie, I understood where the lady was coming from. She doesn’t want anybody messing with all that hard work. ”
I stopped at a red light. I looked out the window.
It was nearly eight p.m. and the sky was a lush violet, shot through with vestiges of the sunset, porch lights glowing.
I thought about the young couple I’d seen earlier on the beach.
Maybe I’d paint them on this street instead.
It would be a good way to escape this case—which was turning out to be so much more frustrating than I’d imagined it would be.
“So, obviously, you understand Melanie Joan,” I said.
“Maybe not completely,” Kim said. “But I do respect her. And I’d never trash her work.”
I swallowed hard. “I believe you.” It was the truth, unfortunately.
“We had some good times on that set, man,” Kim was saying. “Best wrap party I’ve ever been to. Kobe steaks, caviar bar, top-shelf tequila…Her publisher sprung for it. She even came.”
“Gloria Scepter.”
“Lovely woman. She said nothing was too good for Melanie Joan.”
“She passed away.”
“I heard. I also heard her son took over.”
“Yeah,” I said. “He doesn’t share his mother’s enthusiasm.”
“I’m sorry.”
“He just dumped Melanie Joan over this mess. We’re trying to get him to change his mind.”
“Hey, I don’t know how hard it is on an anonymous site,” she said. “But maybe you should find someone who can hack Book Babe’s account.”
I started to explain my ethical issues, but cut myself off mid-sentence. With Melanie Joan in danger of losing both her livelihood and Tony’s, I didn’t feel quite the same conviction that I’d had at lunchtime.
“You said it yourself,” Kim said. “The apology could be done in private. If Book Babe wants to stay anonymous, you guys could honor that.”
I didn’t say anything. But I did find myself nodding.
“Just something to think about,” Kim said.
“I will.” We said goodbye and I ended the call. I thought about it. The light turned green. I pressed the gas pedal, still thinking about what Kim had said. Then I remembered what Richie had told me about his dad, how Desmond was branching out into tech.
I spotted my parents’ house. Elizabeth’s rose-gold Mercedes was parked out front like a high school graduation present.
I wondered whether she’d brought her latest boyfriend—a twenty-eight-year-old content creator named Cody—and if her Spotify was still permanently set to the soundtrack from Wicked.
When we were kids, Elizabeth had been fourteen going on forty—serious and judgmental beyond her years.
But these days, she seemed to be aging in reverse.
She was still judgmental as hell, though. I had to give her that.
I pulled up to the curb behind Elizabeth’s midlife-crisis coupe.
I grabbed my bag and the wine for my mom, but I wasn’t ready to get out of the car.
I kept thinking about the case. About Melanie Joan and what might happen to her if I wasn’t able to find Book Babe quickly.
I started to call Richie, but I decided not to.
He was at work and understaffed on a night that promised to be crushingly busy.
I called his father instead.