Chapter 8 Hollywood Official
Hollywood Official
Sam took a sip of her honey latte and watched the espresso ruin the peacock design in the foam. They’d stopped at the Melrose Urth Caffé after leaving Ramona’s, having mutually decided they needed sustenance and an opportunity to regroup.
Bex slid into her seat and set her phone down on the table. She folded her arms tightly across her chest—a response, Sam guessed, to the attention on them and their grim faces after talking to Colin.
Typically, Sam avoided places where celebrities went to see and be seen, but she had a nostalgic attachment to the Melrose Urth, because she and Bex used to come here for brunch with Vic and Frankie in the first few seasons of Craven’s Daughter.
The number of people watching them, whispering, and trying to be subtle as they filmed them was reminding Sam why they’d stopped coming.
There had to be at least a few invisible paps with telephoto lenses pointed at them through the café windows right now, taking pictures that would briefly bomb the Internet with clickbait headlines like FIGHTING ALREADY? SAD SAM WITH BOSSY BEX OVER PASTRY.
“Did you take your phone with you to the bathroom?” Vic asked her sister.
“Yes. I didn’t want to be overheard.”
Vic snorted. “Like that’s ever stopped you before. Remember that time you took a call from your agent in the middle of my school concert, and your phone whisper drowned out the soloist?”
“The viral videos were unkind,” Bex said. “I was trying to be quiet. It wasn’t my fault that child didn’t know how to sing from her diaphragm.”
Sam laughed at the memory, but she agreed with Vic.
It was unusual for Bex to be private about a phone call, even if the circumstances justified it.
Combined with the calls Bex had ignored earlier when they were on the phone together, it made Sam wonder if something was going on that Bex didn’t want her to know about.
And if what was going on with Bex was anything like the multiple calls and emails from her team that Sam was currently dodging.
“Anyway,” Bex said, “I was thinking about Christian. I know someone who’s connected to one of his projects.”
“You hate Christian Stanstedt’s movies,” Vic said, biting into an enormous chocolate croissant. “You said you’ve seen better writing on a jar of face cream.”
“I know that! I’m not actually interested in whatever this project is. It’s a pretense to talk to Christian.”
“I don’t think he has anything to do with Ramona’s disappearance.” Vic licked her finger and picked up croissant crumbs that had rained down onto her plate. “No one that hot with that many connections should have only managed barely half a page on IMDb after so long in the business. He’s lazy.”
Sam forced herself to refocus on the conversation instead of fretting about the things she needed to tell Bex and if there was anything Bex hadn’t told her. “What makes you say that? There’s hundreds of reasons someone doesn’t break out in this town.”
“You think handsome white guys are impeded by ‘hundreds’ of reasons?” Vic let her air quotes hang.
“Even when they’re monsters to work with—even when they end up in jail, or their demands are expensive and compromising—all of their bridges are fireproof.
Christian’s not even out out. I didn’t know he was queer, so that’s not holding him back, either.
He’s coasting on a dragon’s hoard of family money. ”
Bex put down her fork. “I did not know that.”
“Nepotism is one of my areas of interest. He inherited from Brinley Downs.”
“No kidding,” Sam said. Brinley Downs was Old Hollywood.
Her heyday had been the 1940s, when she played a femme fatale in some of the original blockbusters.
After retiring, she’d become a silent partner in more than one big production company.
“I thought Brinley Downs was famously single and childfree.”
“Yep. Christian is her favorite niece’s kid, and she left him everything.
” Vic reached across her bright orange boba tea to snag a bite of Bex’s breakfast burrito.
“He’s worth hundreds of millions, but he’s done fuck-all with it.
He lives in the Swan mansion in Beverly Hills and swims in a lap pool of gold coins in the basement, I guess? ”
“My knowledge of Christian Stanstedt hasn’t been updated since I was eleven,” Sam said.
Middle-school Fergus had been deeply into Christian’s indie debut, a troubling skater movie called Halfcab, whose dark moment involved a head injury at a skate park in Helsinki.
As a preteen queer possessed of zero interest in cis men with poetic hair, Sam was not into it.
“I went to a party at the Swan.” Vic raised her eyebrows at Bex’s shocked gasp.
“What? You’ve been on location, and you won’t let me throw a party at our house!
School is stressful. I have to unwind somehow.
But my point is that he hasn’t made any kind of notable career for himself despite every opportunity, he was obviously a shit boyfriend, and even if he had actual real feelings about Ramona Watts’s role in the end of his relationship with Colin, I can’t see him luring her to the Swan and pulling a Black Dahlia.
It’s eleven thirty. I doubt he’s even up yet. ”
“Why didn’t you tell us this before?” Bex asked this as a group of young women sat down at a table near them. They were plainly excited to spot Sam and Bex. And, hell, probably Vic.
“You were too busy postgaming our Colin encounter with Sam, and you won’t let me sit in the front seat.”
Bex closed her eyes. “No, I won’t let you sit in the front seat, because Sam is my”—she glanced at Sam, clearly panicked at having to supply a term—“my Sam.”
Sam smiled at her. “Your Sam?”
“Don’t tease me. You can’t.” The strain of trying to hold down her volume was making Bex go hoarse. “There is almost too much going on to keep track of”—she held up her notebook and shook it—“which I hate. Also, I’m not used to hanging out with Vic this much, and I don’t have a nanny anymore.”
“Hey!” Vic shot Bex with laser eyes.
Sam stayed out of the bickering argument that followed, musing instead about when she would have a chance to call this woman “my Bex.”
If only they could get a minute alone.
First, though, there was their favor for Macie.
It made a certain amount of sense to talk to Christian.
They had to find time to review the security footage and track down the man who had come to the house looking for Ramona.
Call Macie with an update. Reach out to the few people remaining on the list from Ramona’s agent.
If Ramona was truly in trouble, there was a clock ticking to find her, and that pressure was alongside the clock counting down six precious days before Sam would have to go to Telluride.
But she was determined to find at least one moment to whisper “my Bex” into her fellow detective’s ear.
“You know what?” she asked, breaking into Bex and Vic’s argument.
“I don’t think we need a pretext to talk to Christian.
” She tucked her tiny pleated skirt under one thigh as she crossed her legs, and the toe of her heel brushed the bag of one of the young women seated near them.
“Sorry,” she mouthed, giving them a grin that one of them snapped a picture of.
As she turned back to Bex, her eyes caught the stare of a woman her age with dark bobbed hair at the table on the other side of the fans.
The woman looked back to her phone quickly.
Bex glanced at the women Sam had grinned at, and her mouth compressed just a little. Jealousy? That was … Well, Sam wasn’t one to condone jealousy, but falling for Bex did mean it hit different.
“Our characters on Craven’s Daughter always needed a pretext, but that’s because they were regular people,” Sam said. “We’re famous TV detectives. What’s the point of being TV detectives if we can’t just walk up to someone’s door with full confidence he’ll let us in?”
“Is that what you want to do?” Bex asked. “Just walk up to Christian Stanstedt’s door?”
“Yeah, why not? Because it’s looking like Ramona may very well be in some kind of trouble. Her agent and her best friend and her guesthouse buddy and her former PA say this isn’t typical Ramona behavior. We’ve learned a potentially dangerous man has strong feelings about her—”
“Who used to be her friend, if we believe all the premiere photos,” Vic interjected.
“—and he just happens to be wealthy and important, not to mention that the entire rest of the Ice Crew may be involved in one way or another. Then there’s Howell Motion Pictures and the threat that Ramona could be terminated in three days.
If she were, then everyone who trusted us to track her down safely and privately would find themselves in the middle of a shitstorm of rumors and bad press. ”
“You’re talking about our reputation,” Bex pointed out. “Because apparently, we’re detectives now.”
“You’re Hollywood official,” Vic said. “Or at least you’ve soft-launched being officially official detectives.”
“Unless you want to go to the police?” Sam dropped her voice even lower. The woman with the dark bob would not look away from them.
“Colin said we’d have to be able to show them Ramona was vulnerable or in mental distress,” Bex said. “We haven’t got any evidence of that.”
“I think we’re still in the zone where Ramona’s reputation will get in the way of law enforcement’s taking us seriously,” Sam agreed. “And then, for sure, it would leak. Beverly Hills isn’t far. Why do we have all this fame if we can’t drop in on a guy at his mansion?”
“You’re saying that we, right now, should drive to Beverly Hills and pull up unannounced to the Swan mansion, a historical and stately edifice with twelve-foot-tall gates, in the hope that Christian Stanstedt will order up a tea service and talk to us?” Bex dipped a bite of burrito into salsa.