American Beauty (3 page)

Caine reached inside the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a Tiffany money clip crammed with cash and ID cards. He flicked out a crisp manila business card.

“My friend is an Allstate agent in Redondo Beach,” he explained with a calm grin. “Mention that you ran into me, Caine Manning—well, you might not want to use the words
ran into,
exactly.”

This coaxed a weak smile from Patrice.

“Now, there’s nothing that he can do about this accident, but my client is willing to walk away from this if you are, each responsible for her own repairs.” He eye-balled Patrice’s battered Honda. “I think you actually came out the worse for it, in fact. But there’ll be no claims or lawsuits. Sound good?”

“Sounds good,” Patrice agreed, perking up considerably. “But I’ve only got one problem. My car won’t start.”

“Let me take a look at that.”

As Anna watched, Caine opened the hood of her cherry-red Civic and moved a few wires and cables around. Moments later, he was slamming the hood shut again. “I think your battery cable came loose when you hit my client. Try it now.”

Patrice got back in and turned the key; the old Honda started right up.

“You’re a lifesaver,” she called through her open window.

“The license and insurance info,” Anna told Caine softly. “Just to be sure.”

“Smart.” He nodded, then turned back to Patrice. “Ms. McMasters? I know we’ve got an agreement here. But let’s exchange our information anyway, so in case there’s a problem we can reach each other?” A pen and small pad of paper materialized from Caine’s back pocket; he smoothly passed them through her cranked-down window. It was like watching a great hypnotist at work, Anna thought as Patrice copied down her information under Caine’s watchful eye. He compared it to her driver’s license and insurance card, then handed both back to her.

“Okay, ’bye now.” Caine touched the hood of the Civic. “Drive safely. Check your radiator fluids when you get a chance.”

Patrice raised a hand and started away as Anna and Caine headed back to her car and his truck. “I can’t believe … I don’t know how you …” She stopped, then started again. “
Thank you
doesn’t even begin to cover it.”

“Hey, no problem. She’s broke and she was scared, that’s all. No sense in suing her. Best thing to do is cut your losses and get on with it.”

They reached the Lexus, where he leaned against Anna’s front door. “Now, hop in my truck. Where ya headed?”

“Marina del Rey, for a party.” She took her phone off the front seat. “If I’m going to leave my car, I need to call Triple-A and ask them to bring it to a Lexus dealership. Isn’t there one in Beverly Hills?”

“There is,” he confirmed.

“Great.” Anna made the call, quickly explained the situation to the harried dispatcher, and then got into Caine’s pickup. “I just want to thank you again—”

“No need.” He smiled at her. Killer smile. He was so kind. Plus, he’d been able to read that shrew of a woman so well. He was right. She hadn’t really been mean; she’d just been scared to death. Anna studied Caine’s profile as he started the engine.

Well, well, well, wasn’t he the intriguing one?

Five minutes later, they were tooling down Venice Boulevard toward Marina del Rey. Anna had called Sam to say she was indeed on her way after her first L.A. car accident, her first
ever
car accident. Sam said she was now an official Los Angelino and that they’d hold the boat.

Anna put her phone back in her hobo bag and turned to her father’s associate.

“I’m curious,” she began. “How’d you know that woman didn’t have insurance?”

Caine shrugged. “I’ve always been good with people. They give off all kinds of clues to what’s really going on with them, especially things they’re trying to hide.”

“You should have been a detective.”

“Not for me. Carmen and I don’t want to work for The Man.”

Anna stared at him quizzically. “Your girlfriend?”

“Carmen. My truck,” he laughed, patting the dashboard.

She studied his large, callused hands on the wheel, and then the tattooed forearms. “An investment banking intern with tattoos and earrings. You can get away with that?”

“The earrings come out on workdays. I wear long sleeves at the office. Besides, your father has been known to loosen up now and then.”

More than that, Anna thought, recalling how she’d come upon him stoned out of his mind a few weeks ago in the garden gazebo. Her tall and lanky father was a very handsome man who looked much younger than he was. He wore his hair spiked and had told his daughter that smoking a blunt now and then helped him unwind.

“What’s the big tattoo on your right arm?”

Caine held it up; a stunningly beautiful woman was etched across his entire forearm, surrounded by lush seashells and swirling clouds. Her wavy hair was woven with vines; sunlight haloed her hair. The figure was vaguely familiar.

“Botticelli, right?” she asked, nudging her chin toward his arm.

He nodded with a half smile. “I guess you were paying attention in art history.”

“My mother collects Italian painters.”

“Don’t you mean
paintings?
”

“Both, actually,” Anna admitted. “What made you choose that one? Or is it too personal?”

They turned south on Ocean Avenue, picked up speed, and merged with the heavy late-afternoon traffic.“No big secret. My favorite grandmother was from Florence. Angelina Principesssa Filipepi,” he explained.

“Oh my God. She was an actual descendant of Botticelli.”

He gave her a curious glance, then changed lanes to maneuver past a slow-moving truck full of gardeners and lawn equipment. “How did you come up with that?”

“Botticelli’s birth name was Alessandro Filipepi,” Anna recalled. “Wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. I just can’t believe you knew that.”

Anna waved a dismissive hand. “Oh, I’m a fount of useless information. I must have read it somewhere.”

“Impressive. Well, my grandmother fancied herself a distant cousin of the artist—I have no idea whether or not that’s true. She came to America when she was a girl, put herself through school, and taught art at Fremont High School in South Central for twenty-five years. She was like four-foot eleven and as bad-ass as they come.”

Anna knew that South Central was probably the roughest section of Los Angeles.

“You got it to honor her. That’s so sweet.”

“Actually, we got drunk on Sambuca together one night and we both got ’em,” he admitted, laughing. “She raised me after my mom died. Hell of a lady.”

Anna couldn’t help but feel curious as to how and when his mother had died, but it was much too personal a question. She hated people who probed like that. What truly horrified her were the casual confidences she’d been privy to in ladies’ rooms. Once, at the House of Blues, a girl with punked-out black hair and torn stockings—Anna had never met her before in her life, and had never seen her since—had given Anna a blow-by-blow description of her recent diagnosis and treatment for chlamydia.

“Hey, you want AC?” Caine offered. “I hate the stuff myself, but it’s hard to hear you over the noise.”

She nodded. He closed his windows and flipped on the air conditioning.

“So, you’re on your way to a graduation party—your dad told me. I loved being that age; chilling with my friends, you know?”

The truth was, Anna wasn’t yet terribly close with anyone at Beverly Hills High, with the exception of Samantha Sharpe.

“It’s okay,” she allowed. “But there are some girls who will be at this party who make cobras looks like cashmere kittens tucked in a wicker basket.”

Caine’s hearty laughter burst like fireworks. Anna grinned back, stealing a glimpse at his laughing profile. What a truly good guy he was, tattoos and all. Gratitude to him, and just general
liking,
bubbled up inside her. She could be friends with this guy. She really could.

“Are you busy tonight?” she blurted out impetuously, remembering why she’d come to Los Angeles in the first place. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. A person couldn’t have too many friends; she guessed that Ben would really like Caine, too. “If you aren’t, you ought to come with me. There’ll be champagne at sea.”

Caine raised an amused eyebrow. “Aren’t I a little old for your crowd?”

“I know for a fact that you’re only twenty-two.” Anna could be spontaneous, but she was always prepared with the facts.

“There’s light years between seventeen, eighteen, and twenty-one, twenty-two, trust me. Plus, I’m not really big on champagne.”

“What, then?”

“Brew. Ice cold.”

“How many kinds of beer are there in the world?”

Caine looked quizzical. “Can’t say that I know.”

“Well, however many kinds there are, my friend Sam will have them all on the yacht. Trust me.”

He grinned. “Overkill. All a person needs is one great one.” He reached over and slid a CD into Carmen’s sound system and cranked it up.

“King Crimson. You know this? It’s classic.”

Anna shook her head, but listened for a minute. Heavy guitars and a strong drumbeat filled the air, and over them a man’s intense but muffled voice. “I like it.”

“And I like you,” Caine said, flashing that killer grin again. “All righty, then. About this party … Count me in.”

White Imitation of Christ Jeans Covered in Dog Shit

C
ammie Sheppard was the daughter of a Hollywood
über
-agent; she had wined, dined, and reclined with a stellar variety of hot guys on hot yachts since her early teens. Yet even by her own grudging standards, the
Look Sharpe
—the new 120-foot yacht that Sam’s father had acquired as the result of a three-picture, eighty-million-dollar deal with the most major of the major studios—was nothing short of spectacular. Now if only she could get this goddamn ocean wind to stop fucking up her hair. She was standing by the vessel’s teak starboard railing, and every few seconds a gust of air would blow her vivid strawberry blond ringlets against her Bing My Cherry Plump Your Pucker lip-glossed mouth.

A perfected flick of one OPI ballet-slipper-pink-polished finger (French manicures were
so
last year) unstuck them, as two well-muscled arms snaked around Cammie’s waist from behind, pressing her close. Adam Flood’s left hand held the necks of two icy cold Coronas. Cammie took one, lifted the glass bottle to her lips, and took a long swallow.

“Great view, huh?” Adam murmured softly into her ear. Cammie nodded in agreement, leaning further into her boyfriend’s embrace. Adam wore khaki cargo shorts and a white linen button-up shirt from the Gap—unlike Cammie and so many of her friends, he had no compunctions about buying clothes without designer labels. And, also unlike Cammie, he’d just gotten a buzz cut that showed off the small blue star tattoo behind his left ear.

Cammie’s clothes were a lot more upscale than Adam’s, but, surprisingly, she didn’t care. It hadn’t taken long to pick her outfit from her cedar-lined walk-in closet: Seven For All Mankind jeans with a special-order Ferrari red leather low-slung belt encrusted with diamonds, and an Ella Moss kimono tee in hot pink held together by only a tiny clasp just below her cleavage so that it blew about her on the yacht, revealing miles of creamy alabaster skin. She didn’t need to worry about a bra, since her large breasts were compliments of silicone and surgery, and remained unnaturally perky at all times. Her shoes were silvery white Jimmy Choo snakeskin pumps that hadn’t even made it to market, courtesy of a 1970s movie star famous for a seminal film in the seventies in which she’d played a notorious female bank robber. This now-over-the-hill star had taken a liking to Cammie and had promised her early dibs on various fashion musts still offered to her by upscale designers who didn’t seem to realize—as Cammie did—that the former star was Birds Eye. As in, frozen. As in, Q rating zero. As in, put her on
Hollywood Squares
if it was still on the air.

It was nearly sunset; the blazing sun low in a sky turned pink and purple, its reflection sparkling in the waters of the Pacific to the west. To either side of them were stretches of oak wood chaises covered in persimmon-toned linen, but most of the partygoers were gathered in the main salon. More accurately, gathered around the mahogany bar inlaid in gold with the titles of each of Jackson Sharpe’s films, where three bartenders borrowed from the Elysian Fields private club for ladies-who-lunch poured Grey Goose vodka and Patron tequila into waiting shot glasses.

Sam had redecorated the expansive room in keeping with the theme of her pregraduation party, the Seven Deadly Sins: Pride, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Greed, and Sloth. The main salon had been transformed into the Sloth room; in addition to the central bar, an enormous statue of the Greek god Dionysus had been reconfigured into a Cristal-spouting fountain. The A-list graduating seniors from Beverly Hills High—and a few lucky A-minus-listers invited because they were hot enough, amusing enough, or weird enough to be entertaining—had draped themselves on lush ochre velvet chaises that had golden legs and were laden with gold goose-down throw pillows.

The crowded salon had been too much for Cammie, so while Adam had stayed to get drinks, she’d ventured out onto the yacht’s promenade deck.

Yet even the relative solitude and the beauty of the approaching evening couldn’t quell the thoughts racing in her brain. Now that she was on the water, she found herself ruminating about her mother. More specifically, her dead mother, who ten years before had gone over-board off a boat off the coast of Santa Barbara and drowned.

It had been ruled an accident, possibly even suicide. Supposedly, Jeanne Reit Sheppard had been drinking, but Cammie couldn’t recall ever once seeing her mother with a cocktail in her hand. Much of the official story didn’t add up. Now Adam was helping her to unravel the mystery. They’d recently learned shocking information from a newly unsealed police document, that Sam’s mom—who’d left Sam and her family to move to the east coast a year later—had been aboard the same boat that very same night, sleeping with Cammie’s father.

At first, when Adam had brought her this report from the Santa Barbara police, Cammie had been pissed at him for getting it without her permission. She was still pissed. Or maybe she was just utterly stressed over the fact that after all this time she still didn’t know the truth, or how knowing the real truth might affect her life, or—