Beautiful Stranger (23 page)

She was still musing on this when she ran into Ben, surrounded by a half dozen workers just outside the door. That wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was the torrent of water—a gusher, really—pouring out the front door, and at the same time leaking from the exterior walls of the building.

“What’s going on?” Cammie had to negotiate the water as the workers parted like the Red Sea, and made her way to Ben.

“Some kinda leak. It just started.” He looked harried and stressed.

“That’s not a leak. That’s a tidal wave!”

“Whatever. I’m going in.”

Heedless of the water gushing out, Ben sloshed inside. Cammie thought for a moment about joining him, but realized that her white leather Stuart Weitzman sandals, dark brown Jil Sander silk skirt, and beige silk Michael Kors top were not exactly work clothes. As the flood continued unabated, she couldn’t help picturing what this water had to be doing to their hard-won and expensive renovations. The new floor would be ruined. The walls, too. Probably all the fixtures. What about the basement? The sub-basement? All the electrical equipment that was resting on the floor. Gravity was at work; the water would pool at the lowest possible point.
God
.

This was a disaster. No. This was worse than a disaster. This was catastrophic. To add insult to injury, she saw that many of the workers were packing up the tool bags and belongings that they’d managed to salvage.

“What are you doing?” Cammie demanded. “You’re not done for the day!”

“Oh yeah, we are.” An elderly painter with a scruffy white beard took off his apron. “You’re not gonna be able to paint in there at least for two weeks. Probably more. Too much moisture.”

And still the water continued to pour out. She heard Ben shouting instructions to the workers who were still inside, about main cutoff valves and piping. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the water was cut from a river to a stream, and then to a brook, and then, to an almost piteous trickle. By that time, all the workers were gone.

“Seems like you’ve got a problem.”

Cammie turned. Standing about ten feet from her, arms folded over his chest, wearing baggy plaid pants, black Converse All-Star high-tops, and a black bowling shirt, was John Carlos. He looked as wary of the deluge as Cammie was.

“Just a little plumbing hassle,” she fudged, flipping out inside. Did this guy have to show up now, of all times? But she knew she had to keep her cool. Panic tended to put people off, especially when it was over an obvious flood in their new place of business.

John Carlos surveyed Venice Boulevard in front of the club. It was covered in several inches of water; cars were poking through the man-made lake with great caution.

“More than a hassle. Looks like you decided to import the Marina del Rey.”

Cammie waved a hand dismissively. “We’ll be fine.”

“I don’t think so. I think you’re fucked.”

She put her hands on her hips. “We are not fucked.”

“You’re fucked,” John Carlos repeated evenly. “I was at a club in New York when a water main broke a block away. They were out of business for two months. You’ve got seven days to get it together.”

“Well, it shouldn’t matter to you. Your salary is guaranteed.”

Thank God her father had met with this guy earlier.

“That’s one of the reasons I’m here.”

“What do you mean?”

John Carlos shrugged. “It’s like this. I know I saw your dad today, and I know we worked out an arrangement, but I got a call an hour ago from some dudes in Moscow. Like, fucking Russian mafia. They didn’t say so, but they implied it. They’re opening a new club on Tverskaya Prospekt and they want me to do the music. And for a whole lot more money than what you’re gonna pay me. I’m flying to Russia tonight.”

“But we’ve got a deal!” Cammie protested. The water on Venice Boulevard was overflowing the curb now; she and John Carlos had to take a few steps to find dry ground. “You can’t do that!”

“I just did. Like I said, my boys over there, they’re in the Russian underworld. I suppose you could sue me, but that wouldn’t make ’em happy. And you don’t want these guys unhappy.”

Cammie was incensed. “Maybe you don’t realize who you’re fucking with here. My father is—”

“I know who your father is. He’s a fuzzy little kitten compared to these Russian cats.”

“Then why the hell would you want to work for them?”

John Carlos swiveled his thumb against his middle finger. “It’s all about the green, baby. Hey, good luck with whatever. You’re gonna need it.”

He turned back toward his shiny black Beemer, which he’d parked on dry asphalt.

“You have a contract!” Cammie screamed at his skinny back.

He turned again to her, bemused, hands shoved into the pockets of his plaid pants. “Yeah, well, we both know that don’t mean shit. You said so yourself. See ya.”

He turned again, whistling, and strode to his black car.

The nerve. The audacity. Cammie simply could not believe it. She knew every Hollywood trick in the book. But … she had just been out-Hollywooded. And she had no clue what to do about it.

An Ace Up the Sleeve of Her Chloé Baby Doll

“M
aybe John Carlos was right.” Ben shook his head slowly as he stirred a heaping spoonful of sugar into his Nate’n Al’s coffee. “Maybe we
are
totally fucked.”

Cammie smiled smugly. Yesterday she would have wondered if Ben was right. Today … well, today she was ba-ack. There was no way she was going to let a skinny, skeevy DJ in an ultra-bad-taste bowling shirt wreck their club.

It was the morning after the double disasters. After the flood had slowed to a trickle yesterday, Ben had picked up a couple of carloads of undocumented workers at the corner of Venice and National and offered them ten bucks an hour each, in cash, plus all the squeegees and work towels they could find at the Culver City OSH hardware store. The goal was to try and restore the interior of Bye, Bye Love to some semblance of dry. Cammie had even pitched in, meaning she had indulged in actual physical labor. Their efforts had proved only marginally successful, and Cammie had ruined her white leather sandals in the process. But there was something satisfying in trying to put the club back in action. She felt like she’d at least done something, however paltry.

By the time midnight came around and the new workers were gone, there was a four-foot-high pile of sodden towels in the kitchen, and the club interior still looked like the aftermath of Katrina. Cammie and Ben had locked up—though who would want to break in now was anyone’s guess—and agreed to meet for breakfast the next morning at Nate’n Al’s in Beverly Hills.

And now … here they were. That was then, this was now, and Cammie had an ace up the sleeve of her bubblegum pink Chloé baby-doll dress. Nate’n Al’s was one of the most famous delis in the city. There was a baked-goods and takeout counter to the left, and a bustling and noisy wood-paneled dining room to the right. As usual, it was filled with Hollywood types drinking coffee, eating breakfast, and making deals.

“I wouldn’t give up so quickly,” she advised. She’d ordered a toasted English muffin and black coffee. She considered adding fresh strawberry jam to the muffin, and then decided she’d prefer the calories in some other way. All around her the young and beautiful women of Hollywood, for whom Nate’n Al’s was the prework equivalent of the Warner Brothers canteen, were making the same decision.

Ben rubbed his forehead wearily. “At some point, you’ve got to face reality.”

Cammie sipped her black coffee and gave him a cool look. “So you’d give up on your dream, just like that, because of some setbacks?”

“Maybe what you took to go to sleep last night isn’t what I took.”

“I didn’t sleep much,” she admitted. “I was working.”

“On what? The club?” Ben had raised a bite of his turkey, avocado, and green apple omelet to his mouth, but mention of the club seemed to make him lose his appetite, and he steadily lowered the forkful down.

Cammie nodded. This was actually true. Her father had been awake when she’d come home. She’d found him on the couch in the living room, reading through a stack of spec scripts by writers he was considering bringing on to
Hermosa Beach,
the hit TV show he’d packaged, set in a beachfront hotel in the town of the same name. Packaging meant he was responsible for the writers, directors—the whole production team. It also meant that his agency, Apex, earned a larger-than-average commission on the deal. He’d seen her bedraggled state and had sat up in concern. After she showered and changed into jeans and a T-shirt, they’d talked long into the night about an action plan. At first, Cammie had been as depressed as Ben, though she wouldn’t let it show. But the longer she talked to her father, the more she thought that there might be a smidgen of hope.

“My father gave me some good advice. He said he’d help us.” She took another sip of coffee. “But if you’re going to give up over some bad luck—”

“Cammie.” Ben reached for her hand across the metal-top table. “It was my knee-jerk reaction. The little voice in my head that agrees with my father and says this whole notion was insane and I should be going back to Princeton. But now the little voice is going back in his little box.” He gave her a winning smile.

And, she couldn’t help noting, he was still holding her hand.

“Okay, so,” Cammie began, “no venue and no DJ …”

“Thanks for that recap,” he muttered grimly.

“Daddy dearest suggested we turn the negative into a positive.”

“Like calling the bomb that fell on Hiroshima an instant urban renewal project,” Ben scoffed.

“Not exactly.” She laughed. “But he had some pretty cool ideas.”

She had actually been stunned by how quickly her father had assessed the situation and made his pithy suggestions. He hadn’t even been that shocked by how John Carlos had betrayed him and flown off to be a DJ for the Russian mob. Shit happens in the business, he’d said, with a shrug of his muscular shoulders. Entertainment wasn’t like accounting or selling commercial real estate. It attracted personalities, and more than a few of them weren’t very stable or loyal. It attracted unforeseen disasters. Sets on movies came crashing to the ground because local workers were incompetent. Hurricanes and thunderstorms interrupted shooting. Actors and actresses were caught driving the wrong way on the 405 and then promptly checked into rehab.

In the scheme of things, a burst pipe and a disappearing DJ were only middling problems, Clark maintained. The important thing was to keep them in perspective and deal with them one step at a time. In this case, he thought that the solution to both problems could come from the same place.

“Cammie, you’re driving me insane,” Ben interrupted, his coffee cup wrapped in both hands. “Enough recap.”

“I’ll let him tell you.”

She took out her cell and, ignoring Ben’s quizzical look, made a quick one-way phone call. “Dad? Yeah. We’re in the back left corner. I’ll pull up a chair for you. See ya.”

“Your father is here?” Ben suddenly looked around.

“Clever deduction.” Cammie waved to her father, who was working his way up the narrow aisle toward them. She always admired that quality that set him off from the people around him. Sure, he had the same robust, tanned, and relaxed stride of his regal Hollywood clientele, but something about him sharpened his features. Not just how he dressed, which today was in casually impeccable Ralph Lauren, but the way one hand held his shark-gray jacket over his shoulder while the other always had a surplus of hands to shake. Six feet tall, rangy build, slicked-back blond hair when he went to work, always in a suit when he was seen in public, Clark was the epitome of a hard-driving, respected Hollywood agent. He stopped to shake hands warmly with Jude Law, who was having breakfast with the director Stephen Frears, and then to exchange a hug with Gail Berman, with whom he’d done numerous deals when she was at Paramount. Cammie knew all these people. Most of them had been guests for dinner or drinks at the Sheppard house at one time or another. Her dad’s philosophy was that unless you were in negotiations—where you could be as big a son of a bitch as you wanted—you should be nice to everyone. Today’s gaffer was tomorrow’s studio head. And vice versa.

“Hey, Dad!” She stood and embraced her father, though she’d seen him not long before for coffee at home. Still, she knew that many people would be watching to see what she did, and if her father was doing a favor for her, she wanted to do one right back.

“Hey, sweetie. Hey, Ben. Heard you got fucked yesterday.”

“Heard you had some way for us to maybe enjoy it,” Ben shot back.

Clark laughed and clapped a hand on Ben’s shoulder. “Good to see you.” He slung his steel gray double-breasted suit jacket over the back of his seat. Like most agents, he dressed far more formally than most male Hollywood creatives, who favored T-shirts, torn jeans, and baseball caps—as did a fair number of females as well. Female writers tended to dress as informally as the guys, but for some reason directors and producers took it a notch up, meaning their jeans were never torn.

“Okay, so here’s the plan,” Clark began as the waitress placed the steaming cup of black coffee he must have already ordered—or had his assistant call in—in front of him. “I talked to Margaret, my partner at Apex. We committed our client list to your opening night. We’re prepared to revise that: commit them this afternoon—as many of them as are available, of course—to come down to the club and work on the renovation. Sound good?”

Ben drummed his fingers on the table impatiently. “They’ll say no.”

Clark’s eyebrows furrowed. “Now you know my clients better than I do?” He leaned forward and dead-eyed him. “I’ve got one word for you, Ben: publicity.”

“It makes the world go round,” Cammie put in.

Ben shook his head. “Okay, I’m lost. Why would Hollywood’s A-list dirty their hands getting our club ready to open, and why would they score publicity for doing it? It’s not like they’re doing it for—”

Cammie watched the light dawn on his face. It was a thing of beauty.

“Charity,” he finished, looking at Clark expectantly. “That’s it, isn’t it?”