The Biggest Story in Hollywood #2
Tom leaned against the deck’s glass railing. His hair curled in the fog. The smell of the marijuana he lit and drew through a small pipe drifted in and out of awareness in the wind.
“I’d like to tell you what I know,” he said. “This mess of pain and lies should’ve been dealt with years ago. Ramona confided in me what happened the night Juliette died. She needed help.”
Sam felt weak. She braced her elbows on the arms of her chair. “We understand she felt like she’d failed to keep Juliette from partying too much.”
“That’s not what she felt responsible for.”
“Oh.” Bex’s voice was so hushed, so unlike even her whispers, that Sam wished she’d kept her sweater on to ward of the chill of dread. She wasn’t sure she wanted to hear this story after all.
She didn’t tell him to stop.
“Juliette was invited to what she believed would be a party on the boat. Ramona went with her because she didn’t think it was a good idea for Juliette to go alone to any party Chad and Sloan were throwing.
They’d both given interviews where they talked about their romantic relationships with her.
Chad had implied in more than one interview that he’d taken her virginity. It was crass.”
Bex made a noise in her throat she usually reserved for things she found in the pool skimmer.
“Even though she was no longer involved with either of them, the media speculation hadn’t died down.
Ramona told me Juliette wanted to talk to them together, to try to get them to stop jockeying over her.
It was affecting her career and her mental health.
She wanted a chance to start over. She’d recently gotten a spot at a good treatment center.
But when they got to the boat, it wasn’t a party.
It was just Chad and Sloan. They’d been expecting Juliette to come alone. ”
“What did they plan to do?” Bex asked.
“Ramona wasn’t sure. She knew Sloan wanted to get back together with Juliette. She thought maybe Sloan and Chad had a plan to try to convince Juliette she’d made a mistake. Chad being a wingman for Sloan, that kind of thing. But whatever they had in mind, they were unhappy to see Ramona.”
“She got in the way of their being able to manipulate Juliette,” Sam said.
“Yes. Ramona told me that at first things went well. There were drinks, but not many. Ramona made sure she and Juliette stuck to soda. She poured them herself. But after a time, Sloan made a pass at Juliette, and Juliette seized the moment to make her request. She wanted an end to any appearance of a love triangle. No more statements about each other’s private lives in the press.
She was going to rehab. There was a role Juliette wanted, not one of my projects, and the casting agent had told her it would be hers if she made it through her upcoming program.
Chad and Sloan didn’t take Juliette’s new request to publicly part ways well. ”
“In what sense?” Sam reached for her sweater.
“They made it sound like Juliette was blowing their behavior out of proportion. Being hysterical when they’d just been shooting the shit in their interviews.
Locker-room talk, that sort of thing. As if Juliette were the one who was creating the problem, not them, and her request for them to stop was just more evidence of her instability. ”
“Gaslighting,” Sam said.
“She became upset. Juliette was shouting, ‘Fuck you, you’re such an asshole,’ things like that, which witnesses on the nearby boats overheard. She was agitated, and Sloan was angry, getting in her face. Chad was furious.”
Kessler took a long toke from his pipe. Sam thought of Christian’s drinking and Macie’s vaping and cigarettes. Bex started picking at the skin alongside her thumb, a nervous habit she’d defeated ten years ago. “What happened, Tom?”
“Ramona stepped into the middle of the argument and reminded Chad and Sloan there were people at the marina. They would attract attention. It calmed them down. She tried to get Juliette to leave with her, but Juliette wanted to go on good terms. She was like that. The guys went belowdecks for food and more drinks. Juliette was still sticking to soda. Ramona relaxed. This kind of thing happened often—a big blow up, and then, once the feelings had been discharged, everyone was okay. They were just kids, you know?”
Sam did know. The clips Kessler had shown them were of children playing, roughhousing, pulling faces, having emotions that were awkward in their rawness. He didn’t seem to understand they’d needed an adult to protect them.
The people who could have accepted that role had elected to sit behind a camera instead, collecting checks.
“Ramona noticed Juliette slurring her speech like she was really drunk. She had stopped watching Chad and Sloan as closely. She got upset, thinking they must have put something in Juliette’s food or a drink, and she’d missed it.
Juliette realized it, too. Ramona said she started yelling again, but she wasn’t making sense.
Ramona tried to get Juliette to stand up so she could help her walk out, but something happened.
Ramona sustained a blow to the head that knocked her unconscious.
Chad would say later that she slipped on the deck while she was trying to get Juliette to make the step onto the dock.
He claimed she fell down and hit her head.
Ramona wasn’t sure if that was true. She didn’t have a memory of how she got the injury. When she woke up, Juliette was gone.”
“In the dinghy,” Bex said. “Juliette got into it while she was under the influence?”
Kessler gave a tight nod. “They found the drugs in her system. Chad and Sloan said that when Juliette stepped into the dinghy, she was angry and high. She started the motor instead of letting them help her back onto the boat. She took off. She didn’t remember the dinghy was tied to the boat, and it ripped off a cleat.
That was confirmed. There was a line with a cleat dragging behind the dinghy when they found her. The engine had run out of gas.”
Sam studied Kessler closely. His emotions were difficult for her to read.
She focused on the story he was telling them.
“But you’re saying Chad and Sloan were the only people who would know if Juliette got into that dinghy under her own power, started the motor, and pulled free from the yacht.
Ramona was unconscious. Juliette didn’t make it.
What about the witnesses at the marina?”
“The dinghy was on the opposite side of the boat from them. They could hear Juliette, but they couldn’t see anything that happened with the dinghy. Ramona came to after Juliette and the dinghy were gone. But she overheard Chad and Sloan talking.”
Kessler looked out at the ocean. Sam’s heart was beating madly in her throat. She and Bex were about to hear something few people knew.
“Ramona heard Chad tell Sloan, ‘Don’t say shit.’ She heard Sloan say, ‘But she can’t swim.
’ Chad said, ‘I don’t care. She said she wanted to leave, and now she’s fucking left, hasn’t she?
If you tell anyone, I’ll kill you.’ Ramona was clear about all this.
I’ve never forgotten the exact words as she spoke them to me. She’d been having nightmares.”
Sam felt her blood drain away, replaced with ice that slowed her heart to a drum that started beating in her ears.
Chad and Sloan had known Juliette couldn’t swim. They’d known she was impaired, because they were the people who’d put her in that state. They’d understood that their actions endangered Juliette’s life, and Chad’s response was to threaten to kill Sloan if he told anyone.
That was conspiracy. Manslaughter. Possibly murder.
It meant that Chad wasn’t paranoid. He and Sloan bore responsibility for Juliette’s death. They’d known it then. They knew it now.
A man responsible for a woman’s death had put surveillance on Sam and Bex.
He knew their movements across L.A. He knew who they had been talking to, at least until the moment they’d pulled into a turnout on Mulholland Drive.
Chad was a man who imagined worst-case scenarios, who jumped to conclusions and accused everyone around him of subterfuge and sabotage.
He’d been keeping this secret for a long time. He’d never had more on the line.
Would he stop at lawyers, lawsuits, and stalking to guarantee Sam and Bex’s silence?
“Why didn’t Ramona tell the police?” Bex asked.
“She did.”
“Then how come Chad and Sloan were never arrested?” Bex’s big strong voice was reduced by half. Sam felt sick to hear a tremble in it.
“By the time Ramona gave her statement, the police had already interviewed people on nearby boats. The witnesses said Juliette was agitated. They’d heard her yelling.
Chad and Sloan had failed sobriety tests, and they said they were all drinking and drugging.
The police on the scene recorded that Ramona smelled like alcohol, too, and had hit her head.
The cleat was torn out. Juliette’s absence got the searchers on the water, but where they eventually found the dinghy in the morning made it clear it had taken off fast enough to catch a seasonal current that took it way out.
There were too many converging details to make it look like anything other than a bad accident.
And the police consume media, don’t forget.
No doubt they were biased by reports of this troubled love triangle. ”
Bex made a noise of protest.