JANUARY 2004 #3
The male officer raised a brow. There was talk then, in Hollywood, of letting celebrities get away with too much. Of needing to make examples.
Evidently they decided Harper was their opportunity.
“Just you we’ll take down then,” he said, gaze cutting to me. “And we can figure out what you want to do about charges when you’re sober.”
———
I phoned Ruchi right away, begged her to get Harper out given she was sober and authoritative and also, Ruchi, a woman with a thousand strings to pull and the right line to talk someone into anything.
I could hear Adrian in the background but still there was nothing they could do until the next morning when Adrian collected Harper from the police station.
“Why?” I demanded when she stepped through the door. “Why would you take the fall like that?”
She gave me a look like she couldn’t believe I was actually asking that.
“They have my prints and samples, Nadine. They don’t have yours. It’s reasonable for mine to be on Joel—but yours? You want them to run your profile and find your DNA matches that found at a murder scene?”
Oh. She’d taken a grenade for me.
And now it was blowing up.
Harper Moore Arrested! Starlet in Brawl with Nadine Heywood, Spends Night in Cell
Harper Moore’s Mugshot Revealed! Star Serves Club-Night-Glam in Steamy Shot!
“She was always volatile,” from Screaming Matches on Red Carpets to Nadine Heywood’s Attempt at a Restraining Order—We Take a Look Back at Harper Moore’s History of Violence
Harper didn’t go out much after that.
And I stopped trying to push her. There seemed to me only two real options: It would die down, or it would escalate.
If it calmed, we would try again.
If it escalated, if evidence was found and Harper’s guilt stopped being a fun little joke and started to become a serious concern then … Well, I would rather spend as much time with her as I could.
Then Ruchi called.
“Nadine, the police want to talk to you.”
———
I refused to talk over the phone—not where they couldn’t verify they were who they said they were. The press would claim to be anyone, after all. But Scotland Yard had seemingly anticipated this, and there was a detective on the ground in LA.
I didn’t want to meet them in public, but bringing them to my house was out of the question.
There were too many hints of Harper. Even who I had become alongside her felt too telling.
I needed a set. A stage. So they came to the Gentle Hour lot instead, and I took the interview right there in my trailer, wrapped in my robe, with hair and makeup scheduled for the moment they left.
The woman introduced herself as Detective Inspector Laurel Hunt, which felt an absurdly deterministic name, and it was all I could think as she ran through pleasantries and innocuous questions before she finally reached the point of all this.
“You stayed in the same Richmond hotel as Harper and Joel, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see them?”
“A little. From afar, obviously. Harper and I don’t exactly talk much.”
“How did they seem?”
I considered how best to phrase it, how to position Harper as innocent without giving her a motive. “Harper was just as obnoxiously in love as always. I never paid much attention to Joel as anything other than Harper’s husband, so all I can really say is … he was there.”
She noted that down. “And you’ve had altercations with Harper. Has she always been particularly violent?”
I pressed my lips thin. “This is on the record?”
“Yes,” she said curtly. “And I’d encourage you to tell the truth, Miss Heywood. If this ends up at trial, you might be summoned as a witness.”
Like I might be seeing this as the final opportunity to throw Harper under and not save her.
“Then no, she’s not violent. She never has been.”
“But Cannes and her arrest last month—”
“It’s Hollywood, detective. Don’t believe a thing you’ve been told.
We collaborated on Cannes—it made good headlines for us both after I tripped and fell into the basin.
Last month was a drunken spat and one I regret to admit I started.
I won’t complain about the press spinning it otherwise.
Harper is a silly, foppish girl, and it’s ridiculous to seriously consider her capable of thinking about anything bigger than her next manicure. ”
———
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Harper snarled, kicking at the tires of her car. We hadn’t even left my garage.
“It’s okay,” I tried. “They might be looking at you as a suspect, but if they’re having to speak to me about it they obviously don’t have much to go on. There’s no need to panic—”
“That’s easy for you to say!” she snarled. “You aren’t the one they’re investigating. You’re just as culpable as I am and no one is even looking at you!”
I could handle Harper having a tantrum, but on that day …
Dear god, it had been a year. A year of worrying about the impact on my sobriety, that the one thing holding me together might be ripped from me at any moment, that I’d launched into all of this for her without even thinking about myself, and had shoved my own fear and guilt down so far to help Harper with hers that suddenly it was all-consuming.
“Just as culpable?” I demanded. “I’m not the one who fucking stabbed him, Harper. I have nightmares about it too, you know. I shouldn’t know what congealed blood feels like or what rigor mortis looks like or how much effort a shallow fucking grave takes to dig. But I do because of you.”
She stepped closer to me, all pent-up rage as she snarled, “I don’t remember leveling that blade at you and forcing you to do a thing.”
“No, I chose you. And that’s the worst part of all of this. I’d always choose you. I’d take your place if I could. If they arrested you, I’d confess.”
Her rage broke like the shallow facade it was, devastation taking its place.
“Don’t you dare,” she said, clutching my wrists.
“I used to care about myself,” I said, the tears springing without warning. I used to care because no one else did. Because if I didn’t, they won.
Well, I lost. I surrendered. I sacrificed it all so when did it end? When did it get to stop hurting? Yes, we’d done a terrible thing, but there had to be somewhere to go, some path forward.
Where was the resolution? The climax, the fall—and the hopeful final beat.
Harper released me only so she could pull me closer, wrap her arms around me, and whisper apologies.
“I care about you,” she said. “And I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” she repeated it, again and again, and she was crying too. “I don’t understand why you’re here. And I think I’m trying to punish you for it.”
She brought her hands to my face, clasping my own hair to my cheeks.
“You are the world I’m trying to save, Nadine Heywood. You consume me. And if at the end of all this I burn for what I’ve done, don’t even think about trying to snatch that spotlight from me. It’s my moment.”
“Then take it,” I pushed back. “Stop letting them win. You’re the best actress of a generation so—”
“You’re the best actress of a generation.”
“For now! Next year you’ll claw it all back, and the year after I’ll snatch it in turn, and we’ll keep spinning on unless you’re behind bars.
Act, Harper. Control the narrative. Put on the performance of a lifetime and stay with me.
” I’d have dropped to my knees again if I thought it might have helped.
But despite the depth with which I now knew her, some things remained the same.
And nothing riled Harper into action like a provocation.
“But if you think it’s too much for you then let me know and I’ll stop giving the detectives ammunition for an abetting charge.
Save us both or drag yourself down—pick one. ”
———
Harper filmed a tell-all interview with Declan O’Brien.
After a month of barely leaving the house, there she was, gaunt and tired but trying. Not taking any of this lying down, fighting to regain control one more time.
“Do you think it’ll be convincing?” she asked, the night before it aired.
No. Not when suspecting her was so damn entertaining.
But it might remind everyone that it was a running joke. That to actually believe she did it was a conspiracy too far.
“It will definitely regain some favor.”
“I just never even considered that playing the game wouldn’t be enough,” she said, head on my lap as I wound braids into her hair. I couldn’t keep myself still, not with her. “I never thought I’d lose at it either.”
I couldn’t berate her out of this one—not when this was her trying.
“You’re just letting the understudies have a moment,” I assured her. “People have been suspected of far more than this and are still at the height of their fame. I think the public are poised for a new angle on this, and you’re giving them one.”
“Go on then,” she said. “As the press do. Tell me the best story you know. I don’t care if it’s a real one.”
“The best story I know is presently unfurling.”
Her eyes fluttered shut, and god, I wanted to count each and every eyelash. “Tell me that one. I want to hear who I am through your eyes. Maybe I’ll like her better.”
Harper through my eyes was everything, the whole axis upon which my world hinged. I didn’t know how to tell her that—I was an actress, not the one writing the lines. I could only ever recycle someone else’s words.
But I could try.
So I took a breath, and I began. “This is the truth as I’d only admit it to you, my love: We all stopped talking when Harper Moore walked into the room.”
———
My love. They hadn’t said that word to each other, but Nadine stumbled over it now and Harper caught it—let her linger in it, before sighing and nuzzling farther against her. Unspoken, but declared.
Unspoken, except in every word Nadine was about to say, and every line nestled in between.
“I love you,” she said, when she reached the end, though of course it wasn’t the end, not yet.
“I love you too,” Harper replied.
The interview aired on Friday May 7, 2004.
Harper Moore was arrested the following morning.