Aftershock (24 page)

And she had found out from one of the girls that Danielle had actually been in a school play. There was even a YouTube video of it.

“But that website, I’m not sure. I checked, and there’s no such address owned by anyone, but putting one up—”

“I can get that done,” I assured her.

D
anielle held on to the heavy-stock card like it was a holy talisman, turning it over and over in her hands. The back replicated the front—no writing, just the colors, making it look as if each band had flowed onto the other side.

“Get the fuck away!” Danielle told one of the boarders who moved closer to us, his fists balled in some kind of sad little protective gesture. “This is business.”

When I turned away and walked toward the Cadillac, she followed like an obedient lamb.

I opened the door for her. She slid in and crossed her legs so that her T-shirt pulled up just far enough. The kind of maneuver she must have practiced with the same intensity with which we had learned to field-strip our weapons. For me then, and for her now, our lives depended on learning to do some things with our eyes closed.

“Is there someplace in this … town where I might talk with you?” I asked, letting a French accent into my voice. I didn’t have to be an actor to do that.

“I’ll show you,” Danielle said. “Just go straight ahead and turn left at the dead-end.”

I did that. We ended up facing the ocean, without even a café in sight.

“This?”

“Yes. It’s the only place where we’ll have any privacy. You probably don’t realize how people in tiny little places like to gossip.”

“That may be correct. I have spent my entire life in … I am not sure how to say in English, but places like Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles,” I replied, making sure I hit “Paris” with a native’s pronunciation. “You have my card. My assignment is to get some unenhanced tape of you.”

“Tape of me doing what?”

“Essentially, speaking. Acting, that is. You may pick any role you like, from any current film you have seen. In fact, if there is some role in such a film you fancy, we can get you the script easily enough.”

“Why me?”

“To be truthful, I do not know. My office was contacted by a director we have engaged on pay-or-play in anticipation of acquiring a certain property. When the owner of the property broke his word and took the material elsewhere, we found another screenplay we rather liked. However, we are, of necessity, on a much tighter schedule now. We were shown footage of you in what appeared to be a school play,” I said, spraying the last two words with a light coat of distaste. “Our researchers brought me here. To a place which appears to have no hotels.”

“Oh, we do!” she assured me. “It’s not like Beverly Hills, but it overlooks the bay, and it’s really quite nice.”

“I am sure. Ah, it does not matter. Give me the name, please.”

She did. I took a wallet-sized cell out of my jacket, hit a speed-dial number.

“I need a suite for tonight at the … What was that again?” I asked Danielle. “Did you hear that?” I asked the person on the other end. “
Bon
. Now, I want—Miss Rontempe, this
is
what a personal assistant does—at least one suite, two if I can get them adjoining,
and I want to be able to check in within two hours, so we still have some natural light if we need it. Make sure the direct billing covers everything; I have no time to waste with some desk clerk.”

I slapped my phone closed in an annoyed gesture. Then I turned to Danielle:

“You are, what, eighteen, nineteen years?”

“Nineteen,” she answered, without breaking stride.

“Very well. You will not need parental permission to sign a contract, then. Nevertheless, please feel free to bring a parent or guardian with you. Or any adult you wish. However, I must insist they remain in the adjacent suite while I am getting you on tape.”

“I don’t need any—”

“I did not ask what you needed,” I said, allowing a slight edge of annoyance to surface. “I merely sought to assure you that you are taking no risk. I requested adjoining suites because some young actresses prefer their parents or whoever accompanies them not to be directly present during a screen test, but would want them close by.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought a screen test was—”

“Yes, I am sure. That was before all the studios went to digital format. Now all we need is some ten-minute snapshot—you will either be instantly right for the role we have in mind or you will not,
comprenez-vous
?”

She nodded vigorously, truly terrified she might say the wrong thing … whatever that might be.

“Do you have a role you feel you could present yourself in?”

“Well, I was thinking of, maybe,
Chocolate Winter
.”

“
Bon
. What role?”

“Rachel Razon?”

I grabbed the phone again and ordered my hapless personal assistant to have a dozen or so pages of that script faxed to the hotel Danielle had told me about. “I will need sides in which Miss Razon had a good number of lines.” Then I hung up on her again.

“We do not have much time,” I told Danielle, glancing at a
ridiculously oversized bootleg copy of what would have been a very expensive wristwatch. “Would seven be satisfactory to you?”

“Sure!”

“Very well. Where shall I take you now? I know you will want to change your clothes before—”

“For sure! I mean, I just put this on as a joke. There’s this guy who has an insane crush on me, and we wanted to gaff him.”

I let a slight shadow of disapproval cross my face. “The address, please?”

“Oh, I don’t need a ride. I live just down the beach from here. It’s easier for me to walk.”

W
hile Dolly was printing out some pages from whatever movie Danielle had yammered about, I went downstairs and checked. Either the task had been simple or the cracker had really jumped on the job:

“I have to work this alone,” I told Dolly. “She’s never seen me, but she could have seen you.”

“I got all the stuff you asked for. And the reservations have already been made. But you can’t run that videocam by yourself, Dell. Even with the tripod.”

“Yeah, I can, honey. Don’t fuss. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

“T
his is just a yes-or-no question, Franklin. Will you do something to help MaryLou?”

“Yes!”

I didn’t expect him to ask for details. “Okay,” I told him. “All you have to do is listen. You’re going to be in a hotel room. Sitting on one side of a wall. Danielle, MaryLou’s little sister, she’s going to be on the other side of that same wall. She’ll be recorded, but she might later lie and claim she never said anything. Then you’d have to go to court and tell what she
actually
said. You wouldn’t have to tell anything but the truth. Can you do that?”

“Sure!”

“There’s also a bunch of equipment we have to set up. Some of it’s pretty heavy. Probably not for you, but it would be for me if I had to do it myself.”

“I can move stuff.”

“I know you can, Franklin. And MaryLou said she knew I could count on you, too.”

He was still beaming when I pulled away, telling him I’d be back in an hour.

T
he hotel’s security system consisted of a peephole in the door. It was only two stories high, with each unit in duplex style, so renting two adjoining “suites” gave us a total of four quadrants of controlled space.

The view from the terrace overlooking the bay was drab. Opening the sliding glass doors cured me of ever doing that again—dead fish don’t do any better in intense sunlight than human corpses, and the blazing ball was taking its own sweet time dropping below the Pacific horizon.

We were a little pressed for time—I’d told Danielle the test was at seven, and I figured she’d be early. But Franklin took all the tension away by lifting ridiculous amounts of weight like they were cartons of bubble-wrap. We had all the equipment hooked up, tested, and running, with Franklin installed on his side of the second-story wall, still with a good half-hour to spare.

She was about ten minutes early, her knock confident and assured. It didn’t surprise me that she’d come alone.

This time she was dressed in a black jersey V-neck sheath, with a short skirt that was just on the right side of decorous, and matching pumps that she handled a lot better than those stripper-spikes she’d worn to the skateboard park.

By then, she would have checked out www.aafpi.com and been shocked by the truly impressive list of films with which the bogus company had been “associated,” as well as the “talent” it had both discovered and developed, never mind the overseas representation of stars whose names Dolly assured me
any
teenage girl would recognize.

Danielle could only access the site by using the “private password” I’d written on the back of my business card. My expert had answered my request with an artist’s contempt:

Since no one else would know of the site’s existence, and it was way too early for it to be picked up on any random search, it would already be either overloaded or one-time-accessed, depending on Danielle’s personality.

I
ushered Danielle into the suite, asked her to have a seat while I made some final adjustments. If Franklin couldn’t hear us both by ten after seven, he would thump on the wall. I hoped that didn’t happen, because then I’d have to come up with a good excuse to leave for a few minutes. Besides, I wasn’t sure these walls would hold Franklin’s idea of a “thump.”

I started playing my role immediately, with “I would offer you a drink, but …”

“Oh, that’s no problem,” she assured me.

“Perhaps not for you,” I said, with that touch of asperity the French specialize in.
“Pour moi, servir de l’alcool à un mineur est inacceptable.”

“Sure. I mean, I party—I mean, drink—sometimes, but I don’t, like,
need
one. I just meant I can be sociable if the occasion calls for it.”

Remember!
I admonished myself.
Don’t let the outfit fool you. You’re not just dealing with some slutty little girl here—she’s got a heavyweight IQ
.

“Bon,”
I said, handing her the printed-out pages from
Chocolate Winter
. “Now, if you will just—”

The incoming call on my cell came exactly on time.

“No,” I told my personal assistant, “that is
not
acceptable. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to run all over the country to these godforsaken places every time A.A. hears some rumor about which actress is going to be the next big thing?”

I listened as my personal assistant whispered something Danielle couldn’t pick up even if her ears had been shotgun microphones.

“Ah! Wait, I will ask.”

I turned to Danielle. “Your full name is …?”

“Danielle. Only I spell it ‘Danyelle.’ That way, you can split it into two names if that works better, see?”

“Yes. Your full name, please.”

“Danielle Denise McCoy,” she said, looking more subdued by the second.

“Oui,”
I said into the phone. “It is as you say.”

“Is anything—?” Danielle started to say, but snapped her jaw closed so quickly I could hear the click when I held up my hand for silence.

“
This
is his latest high-concept?” I said into the phone.

Silence.

“Very well,” I said. Then turned to Danielle. “Do you have an agent?”

“I … Not now, I don’t.”

“Oh,” I said, pretending I’d been taken in by the implication that her last agent had proved himself unsatisfactory in some way.

I went back to the phone. “I was specifically told that this was not a
vérité
project.” Pause. “Yes, I do realize that the company is capable of more than—Ah, never mind. I will present it to
la jeune fille
. If she agrees, I will call back when the test is complete and we have examined the raw footage. If she does not, I will call, and
you can book me”—glancing at my silly wristwatch—“on the latest flight to LAX. I am not going to spend a night at some airport hotel ever again.”

I slapped the phone closed. Either Danielle was getting more anxious by the second, or she was a better actress than even she thought she was.

“Your sister is MaryLou McCoy?”

“Yes, but—”

“You do understand that she is going to be quite famous. Or, I should say, ‘infamous.’ ”

“I guess so.”

“Well, the gifted
artiste
who runs our company is convinced that a documentary of the case, from start to finish, would be very well received. And, more important, we want to be in a position where any fictionalized version would have the same focal point.”

When she gave me a doe-eyed look, I changed tone, talking down to her, as if I was disappointed with her lack of knowledge of “the industry.”

“You remember
Monster
, yes?” I said, grateful for Dolly’s skillful coaching. (“Remember, honey. When it doubt, just act as snotty and superior as you can pull off. The French accent will be a help there.”) “It only won Charlize Theron an Oscar. But there were several other so-called docudramas which
preceded
it. One had Park Overall—who, frankly, is a more gifted actress than Ms. Theron—fittingly playing the more difficult role of Wuornos’s girlfriend, Tyria Moore. But the sole
actual
documentary provided the impetus for a big-budget effort. I refer to Nick Broomfield’s work,
Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer
, which preceded the film by a good ten years!