Falling Star (33 page)

Oh, my God
. Natalie's hand rose to her
throat.
Not Suzy
.

The woman unlocked the driver's-side door and
got into the Beemer. The car's engine sprang to life.

It's Kelly Devlin. Undeniably Kelly
Devlin
.

Natalie sank into the soft leather bucket
seat, trying to catch her suddenly short breath.
Kelly is
sleeping with Miles. Kelly is sleeping with Miles.
The truth
slammed across her brain like a pinball in a machine. Why else
would Kelly be leaving Miles's house with a duffel bag so early in
the morning?

When had this started? Anger shot through
her.
When Kelly was living in my house? When I got her an
internship at KXLA? Was Miles cheating on me even then? And Kelly?
Sleeping with my husband all the while she was playing the eager
student, grateful to lap up any tidbit about TV news that I might
drop?

The woman who now has my job at KXLA.

Natalie remained in the bucket seat, her body
shaking. She had known for eons that she couldn't trust Kelly, but
she had never imagined a betrayal of this magnitude. And Miles? Had
he ever told her the truth about anything?

You won't get away with it, Miles
, she
vowed silently, staring across PCH at her scumbag of a husband's
multimillion-dollar beachfront love nest.
Somehow I'll find a
way to stop you
.

*

"I'm off-limits!" Tony bellowed out his
office door to Maxine. Then he set down on his desk the three
doughnuts he'd plucked from the box standing open in the
newsroom.

He grabbed a Reese's Pieces doughnut and
started sorting through the dozen phone messages that had already
come in that morning. One was from Rico Jimenez, Kelly's agent.
Greedy prick. Tony had a thing or two to say to him. He paused to
lick some peanut butter off his fingers, instantly feeling better.
He could use a few of these later in the week, when Rhett Pemberley
would show up in town and Tony would have to face the dreaded tee
time at the Riviera Country Club. He knew he was going to embarrass
himself, despite the golf lessons he'd taken. The only question was
how badly.

Tony moved on to an Almond Bear Claw. These
doughnuts were probably a thousand calories each. Not that he
cared.

He saved the Chocolate Cheese Danish for
later, then lumbered to his office door and pulled it open.
"Maxine!" he yelled. "Coffee! And get Elaine in here!"

The station's senior attorney showed up a few
minutes later.

"I want to make Natalie Daniels an offer for
another contract," Tony told her. "Her current one expires in a
little over a month."

Elaine's eyebrows shot up over her granny
glasses and he knew why. The way he'd demoted Princess it would
shock anybody that he wanted to keep her. It sort of shocked him.
But the fact was, she was like an insurance policy. In case Kelly
exploded. In case the ratings didn't go back up, which they hadn't
yet, even with the billboard campaign. In case a huge story broke
and he needed good reporters. He'd been around long enough to know
you just never knew. In TV news, as in birth control, it was better
to be safe than sorry.

"The thing is," he went on, "I don't want to
pay her the same kind of money." He paused. He didn't add what he
was really thinking.
If I do, I'll never get the news department
in the black. And I'll never get my bonus check.

They stared at each other and that same old
amazing thing happened again between him and Elaine. Sometimes, as
pro-ACLU, antigun, marshland-protecting as Elaine was, he felt like
he understood her. And she, him.

Elaine got that he liked keeping options
open. Elaine got that he wanted to get his hands on that goddamn
bonus check before he and Anna-Maria died of old age. And Elaine
got that all of the above meant keeping Natalie Daniels on an
inexpensive string.

In fact, he realized suddenly, it probably
pissed Elaine off, too, that the anchors made so much money. She
might not mind helping take Princess down a peg or two.

"How low do you want to go?" she asked
him.

"As low as I can," he admitted, "and still
keep her."

Elaine nodded, then smiled. "We can do
that."

*

Kelly, lying on her stomach on a Millennium
Club massage table, lifted her head from the padded rest to reread
the loan document that Miles had drafted. It was typed on his
personal stationery, with his Malibu address printed in fancy gold
letters on top. What amazed her was that the thing was only two
paragraphs long.

I, Kelly Devlin, hereby promise to repay
Miles Lambert a loan in the amount of one hundred fifty thousand
dollars. I will repay this loan in two installments of seventy-five
thousand dollars each, the first to be paid one year from the date
of this agreement, as noted above, and the second to be made two
years from the above date.

Then there was a bunch of legal shit that
Miles had told her his attorney said to put in. Below that was
Miles's signature and space for her own. He'd attached carbon paper
and a single copy to the original. The thing was really primitive,
considering that a hundred fifty thousand smackers was changing
hands.

In fact, had
already
changed hands.
Miles had given her the check. And it had cleared. When the escrow
closed, she'd have to sign a buttload of documents and cough up the
whole wad of cash, along with the five thousand she'd advanced on
her credit cards.

"Roll over, Kelly," Sven murmured. "I'm done
with your back and I want to finish your quadriceps."

Why in the world did anybody ever hire a
woman to give them a massage? Kelly didn't bother to keep the towel
tight as she rolled onto her back, but Sven, as usual, kept his
green eyes trained on the wall, using the break to readjust his
ponytail. She didn't think she could get him to look even if she
did a full-out striptease. He was gay, but still.

She sat halfway up, balancing herself on one
elbow, and held out the document. "Will you stuff this in my
satchel?"

He backed off, a horrified look on his face.
"My hands, they are oily."

She shrugged. Who cared? It would still be
legal even if it had almond balm on it.

Sven finally took the papers, holding them by
the corner with his pinkie stretched out.

"Ever buy a house, Sven?" She lay back down.
God, his hands were magic. She knew he lived with some retired
actor in a mansion in Pacific Palisades, basically waiting for the
guy to croak and leave Sven all his money. But with the massages
the old fart probably got, no wonder he refused to kick.

"No." He grinned at her. "Too much
responsibility."

"Yeah, that's what everybody says." But she
needed a house. It was part of keeping up appearances. You got
successful, you needed to look successful, you bought a house.

Her cell phone rang.

"Shit," she murmured, her eyes half closed.
"Sven, get my phone for me."

She heard him rummaging around in her
satchel; then he came back with it. "Yeah?" she answered.

"It's Rico."

Great.
"What do you want?"

Kelly listened to him let out this big sigh,
as if she was putting him through TV-news hell or something. "I
just got off the phone with Tony Scoppio and I'm gonna say it one
more time. Sign ... the... effing.. . contract! He's not gonna go
any higher—he's not—and I'm getting seriously worried that this
whole deal will blow up in your face."

"Your face, too, Rico," she snarled.

"Both our faces, I agree," he said real fast.
Then he got all whiny, as if that would convince her. "Kelly, this
is your first big contract. You'll earn more in the future, I
promise you, but—"

"Forget it." She couldn't settle for a
hundred thirty grand a year. It was too humiliating for an LA
prime-time anchor to make so little. Plus she just couldn't survive
on it. Her mortgage payments alone would be four thousand a month,
plus she had to pay back Miles, plus she needed new furniture for
the house, plus a better wardrobe, plus the Millennium Club dues
...

"Listen, Rico," she growled into the phone,
"you didn't have to do diddly to get me this job. I got it all on
my own. All you have to do is sit on your ass and get me the money
I deserve. So either get me the quarter million a year or I'll get
a new agent. You got that? Good-bye."

She slapped the cell phone shut, then reared
up and threw it in the direction of the satchel. It hit the wall
above the bag, then plopped in. Nice shot. Again Sven was looking
someplace else, as if he hadn't seen or heard a thing. That was
what made him so goddamn good. "I'm booking you for another half
hour," she told him.

He nodded silently. She thought for a moment
that she'd scared him. Fine. So long as he kept his hands
moving.

*

I don't feel like doing this. I don't feel
like doing this. I don't feet like doing this.
Natalie grabbed
her briefcase in one hand and Julio's tripod in the other and
trudged across Pasadena's Colorado Boulevard toward the converted
redbrick warehouse that housed the subject of tonight's package. A
web business called MetroSeek. It was going gangbusters, which
couldn't be said of many web businesses these days, and making its
youthful founders rich beyond their wildest imaginings. She was
already in a pissy mood and interviewing twenty-something
multimillionaires would hardly help.

"Let me get the tripod," Julio offered from
behind her as they approached the entry door.

"I've got it." She hated when female
reporters never carried anything. And that was what she was now. A
female reporter. Forty years old and back doing what she'd been
doing years ago.

For a lot more money
, an inner voice
reminded her.
But still powerless
, her pissy inner voice
shot back.

"What's this company do?" Julio asked.

Awkwardly she wrested open the heavy glass
door, the tripod banging painfully against her shin. "They're an
on-line guide to entertainment, restaurants, city tours—that land
of thing," she panted. "City by city, so you plug in LA and all
kinds of info pops out."

"Can you buy stuff through them?"

"Tickets, yes. And you can make reservations.
They have other services on their site, too, apparently. Even a
little local news."

Julio made an appreciative grunt but Natalie
couldn't summon even that degree of interest. Business stories were
hell to do on TV, the main reason they were done so rarely. Boring
pictures, at best. Lots of talking heads. Difficult and
time-consuming and dull, dull, dull.

Which was no doubt why Tony had assigned it
to her.

They made their way deep into the bowels of
the warehouse, heading in the direction of the loudest noise, and
eventually arrived at MetroSeek's beehive of an office, crammed to
bursting with desks and computers and phones and people. Slowly
Natalie lowered the tripod to the ground, Julio at her side. "This
isn't what I expected."

"None too corporate, is it?"

"It's like a newsroom." It was the same open,
semidecrepit space, with a similar buzz, except that it was even
noisier and more crowded. Everyone was young and casually dressed
and moving at high speed. There were no cubicles or separations of
any kind; desks were cheek by jowl, everywhere; there was a lot of
shouting across the high-ceilinged, fluorescent-lit room. "I like
it." Natalie turned to Julio, her interest piqued. "We can do a lot
with this."

"I agree."

"You must be the TV people." A young blond
man in Dockers khakis and a light green polo shirt approached and
held out his hand to Natalie, grinning. "I'm Brad Fenton."

Natalie's eyes widened. "The CEO?" He looked
mid-twenties, max.

"Founder and. Come with me." He wrested the
tripod out of Natalie's hand and ushered her and Julio across the
mayhem, stopping at a central module that could easily pass for an
Assignment Desk. "Sound bites or B-roll first?" he asked
Natalie.

She arched her brows. "You certainly know the
lingo."

"There's a little TV news in my past." He
grinned. "Before I wised up to where the real action is. Coffee?
Water?"

Both Natalie and Julio accepted the former
and Brad Fenton loped off. Julio laughed. "He's not old enough to
have a past."

"You're telling me."

"I say we get the interview first." Julio
began to attach the broadcast camera to the tripod.

"Sure."
Before he wised up to where the
real action is?

Brad Fenton returned with two Styrofoam cups
full of coffee and Natalie eyed him as he handed her hers. "I was
telling Julio you even do a little local news on your web
site."

"Too little." He raked his hand through his
close-cropped hair. "We don't have the bandwidth to do more."

"Come again?"

"The resources, even the time to figure out
how to do it right. We're all going flat-out doing just what we
absolutely have to." He arranged himself in the chair Julio set up.
"It's hard to believe but great opportunities fall by the wayside
that way."

She sat in the chair opposite and began to
dress her mike for the interview, "You mean you think there are
great opportunities on the web in local news?"

"Absolutely."

"Even these days when it's harder than ever
to make money?"

"I repeat, absolutely."

Natalie noticed Julio giving her a funny
look. She ignored him and focused on Brad Fenton. "Maybe when we're
done with the interview I can get you to tell me more."

Friday, August 23, 7:26 PM

One more tape and she'd finally be done.

Kelly popped the last of the nine CNN
cassettes for the
Kids in Danger
special in the betatape
machine. She was alone in the darkened editing booth, her butt sore
from sitting so many hours logging tapes, her fingers stiff from
typing so many time codes and video notations.