Hollywood Beginnings (A Novella) (2 page)

Someone needed to look out for her, and I'd been elected by a loss of rock-paper-scissors, so I was going to do a good job of it. But if I opened it, what would my excuse to her be?
It was like that when I found it. I thought it was for me
.
The hotel clerk said it was urgent, and you were in the shower
.

I stalled a minute hoping she'd step out of the bathroom, and I could hand it over before I was guilty of invading her privacy. I lifted the lid on breakfast. There was a lack of sausage, but a spectacular citrus selection. I took a bite of grapefruit then used the end of the spoon to break open the letter. Yep, that was my excuse.
My spoon slipped
.

Inside was a photo of my mother in a pink polka dot bikini, a blonde wig, and a smile. That her waist was tinier at eighteen than mine had been at eight, I barely registered. It was a phrase in the first paragraph that had my full attention...
As
one of
Van Baron's conquests
,
I'd like to interview you
.

I was glad I hadn't eaten yet because the
conquest
was my mother, and you just don't want to see your mother's photo, at any age, next to a word like
conquest
and hope to keep your breakfast down. Besides it was a lie. A lie suggested and an interview requested by a Brian Keller, reporter for
The
Hollywood Daily
.

The bathroom door opened, and I jammed the letter under a stack of hotel stationery as
the conquest
stepped out in the pastel blue terry robe I'd bought for her birthday when I was still in college. She refused to replace because it
still had some wear in it
.
That
was my mother.

I really looked at her, her hair already springing into the tidy short 'do she'd worn since she'd left her Hollywood hair behind along with everything else glamorous. She'd kept the natural caramelly blonde I'd inherited from her. I hoped when I hit her age, I'd have so little silver in mine. She looked sensible and upright standing there, just like a woman who'd been honored twice as the citizen of the year by the Daughters of the Founding Fathers. It hurt me to think of how much pain a lie could cause her back home. While I might be the one child who'd dinged the family's reputation, I could also be the one to protect it.

She opened the top drawer of the dresser where she'd unpacked her clothes for the two day trip and glanced over. "Aren't the grapefruit so much sweeter here?"

It took me a second to respond because I'd never heard her say anything positive about California. "Yeah, they are."

"You can pick oranges right off the tree. We should do that while we're here. It's quite exciting."

The woman who thought picking an orange off a tree was a thrill should not be the target of a lurid story. "Yeah, I'm going to need to go out today. I uh..."

"I wanted to take you to the Walk of Fame. Lassie has a star."

I looked at my watch, just after 9 a.m. which meant my early bird mother had seriously slept in, but she looked ready to make up time. I just needed a couple of hours to stop a disaster, maybe with a hotel pillow over Brian Keller's face. "How about we see the stars around lunch?"

When she pulled a white sleeveless blouse out of the closet to go with her tan slacks, I noticed the clothes I'd set out for the day, a pale yellow camp shirt and khaki capris. I had two disturbing realizations: one,
The nut doesn’t fall far from the tree
and two,
I dress like a sixty-year-old minister's wife
. The only thing of mine she wouldn't have worn were the flip flops. They had embroidered bumble bees on the straps, but they probably still qualified as something worn by AARP members.

She gave me her concerned mother look and narrowed her eyes. "You don't have to work, do you?"

"It's just a little, uh, re-do of a logo for..." I looked around the room, but I'd never been much of a liar. It wasn't a measurement of my character, I just never had the skill for it, and after my husband of two years strangled our marriage in the loose ends of his infidelity, I'd lost any taste for even little white lies. My eye lit on the drawer where I'd put my underwear. "It's a new lingerie store."

"Lingerie?" She clucked her tongue in the native mom language of disapproval. "Really, Amy, women can purchase perfectly fine undergarments at a department store. Those specialty shops aren't fooling anyone. What they specialize in... good women don't need."

"Yeah, they wanted me to go with more of a battery-operated appliance theme."

"What?"

"Nothing."

"Well, I suppose I can entertain myself. And we'll go at lunchtime to see the stars."

She said
stars
with such a tourist's tone, I wondered if she even remembered she'd once been one.

I called Brian,
defame a Midwestern minister's wife for kicks
, Keller, and he invited me to meet him at a beachside restaurant in Malibu as if we could have a friendly cup of coffee. I ran down to the lobby to pick up
The Hollywood Daily
, so I'd know what I was up against. It was mostly a regular newspaper with national, local, and sports news, but that normal stuff followed a hard core celebrity gossip section. You know, the kind of
news
that covers who was seen with a pole dancer, who verbally abuses their assistant, who'd gained weight or lost it, and that perennial favorite photo of a nipple slip that comes complete with a blacked out box to mark where the breast had escaped.

Brian Keller worked in the belly of that beast. If he thought he'd drag my mother's good name through the L.A. smog, he was sorely mistaken. For a guy who makes a living writing crap about innocent people, you'd think he'd anticipate a smack-down.

I took a cab, which was a real yellow one and not just a van with a magnetic sign stuck on the side. And it cost me several dollars for the first 1/9
^th
of a mile. Who even measures things in ninths?

The hard part wasn't finding the place, since I had a professional driver who charged by the ninths. The hard part was fighting the urge to change into something more L.A. appropriate. I couldn't tip off Mom by upgrading my flip flops, not that I'd brought much else for the two days. I'd packed funeral clothes and a few things I'd thought of as
warm weather items
. In Minnesota we had two seasons: freezing and bugs. And those were both seasons that didn't require anything L.A. like.

Back home I worked out of my apartment, so I didn't need office clothing. When a sporting goods store needs a flaming basketball sign, they want me to look like I can deliver it efficiently and cheaply, not like I'm some artist playing with my clothing. I had some church clothes for when I was home visiting my parents. Of course, the dark skirt and jacket came in handy for funerals, and I had been to dozens.

Not that I knew all that many people, closely, who'd died. But growing up in a church family where my father presided over every baptism, potluck, and funeral, I'd witnessed a lot of babies anointed, folks buried, and casseroles eaten.

When the driver dropped me near valet parking, and I handed over more money than I normally spent driving to a restaurant, eating, tipping, and going to the grocery store afterward, I wondered how anyone could live here. But then I saw the sign, an old surfboard that would have been right at home in
Beach Towel Twist
, with the word
Café
in Bahama blue. The graphic designer in me loved it. Brian Keller may be journalistic slime, but he might know how to pick a restaurant.

I pulled open the big copper door and searched the waiting area. I didn't want to be guilty of stereotyping, but I knew exactly which man in the place was a celebrity gossip. The guy had tricked out jeans with rhinestones around the front pockets. Where I came from, no self-respecting man wore a bedazzled anything, but it might be the dress code for men who dished about celebrities and innocent women. And my mother was an innocent. She'd spent one year in Hollywood accompanied by her mother, Grandma Ellis, who was scary by every definition. Nothing would have gotten past Grandma's eagle eye, which she possessed until the morning she slept in for the first time in her life because it was the last morning of her life.

My mother carried on that same proud tradition by catching me every single time I snuck out of the house, drank a beer, or kissed a boy. Since Grandma Ellis had managed, despite Van Baron's already questionable reputation, to keep my mother's reputation intact, my mother felt obligated to do the same for me. She'd managed well enough until my divorce, and while that had nothing to do with my parents who'd given me a wonderful model of marriage, we all understood that everyone blames the mom.

I nodded at bedazzled man, and I'm using the word
man
a bit loosely because he was wearing more hair product than I was. But he didn't acknowledge me back. I walked closer. "Brian Keller?" I wanted to say
I presume
in that ominous way of the old movies but I stopped myself in time.

"Uh, no?"

He'd said
no
with enough of a rise in tone that it sounded like a question, so I wasn't sure if it meant
yes
after all. "I'm Amy Moore."

The hostess came out of nowhere all tan and tiny, and I thought,
really?
I couldn't be a petite California girl?

"This way, Miss Moore. Mr. Keller's waiting for you."

Mr.
Keller? I suddenly wished that
Mr.
Bedazzled was the guy I had to beat into submission, because I could totally take him. Mr. Keller? Maybe not.

I'd have nodded a semi-apology to the guy in the lobby, but he'd already dismissed me. I seriously needed to ditch the bee sandals.

Following the hostess through the cozy café, we headed through French doors to the beach. The view of the ocean made me want to escape from reporters, my mother's reputation, and my current wardrobe, and do nothing but paint. I'd set up an easel right there and capture the shades of turquoise and .....

The hostess handed me a menu and motioned toward a seat. As I turned from the spectacular view of the ocean to the little metal café table right on the sand, Brian Keller rose from his chair to six feet two of muscled gorgeousness.

Well, hell, Malibu had all kinds of natural beauty to admire. I didn't register if he was sizing me up, and no doubt all of me was a lot to size up in a town of size 0s. But I sure took a good look at him. No reason I couldn't briefly admire the blondish streaks in his light brown hair, just a little bit wavy like Hugh Grant, but resting on the shoulders of a professional athlete.

And unlike the bedazzled man in the lobby, this man's highlights looked natural, as if he really did spend time under the sun. The fine lines fanning beneath his eyes, forty years in the making I'd guess, also gave evidence of a healthy life actually lived.

Too bad I had to kick his ass.

I put my hand out. "Amy Moore."

"Brian Keller, nice to meet you."

He'd said
nice
with an extra syllable in it. It was subtle but just a little bit flirty. I wanted to disabuse him of that notion. I would not be called off my mission just because he was handsome and knew how to look at a woman in a way that said,
hmmmm
,
I'm interested
.

I sat, put the menu aside. "So, about my mother..."

He smiled, his teeth as L.A. white as everyone else's, but one tooth on the right had the slightest angle as if he was just a little bit off perfection, as if he were just a little bit human. Human I didn't need. "My mother is not granting any interviews, and you will not print lies about her without facing significant retribution." Damn. When I got riled my diction tended toward Old Testament.

He sat back and took a drink of his coffee as he studied me. He probably needed to know if I posed any danger of a lawsuit.

"You look like her."

"I..?" Well, that was ridiculous. Everyone knew I looked just like my father, so unlike my mother that even my siblings suggested I had been a test tube baby.

He laughed as if he knew what I was thinking. "You have the same heart-shaped face."

From the other side of the table, he traced my face in the air, made a dot at my chin.

"It's sharp there, fairy-like."

My eyebrow rose, but he kept smiling and whispered in a sexy way, "I didn't think I could get away with saying
nymph
."

I narrowed my eyes. "You thought right."

"And you have her cupid's bow."

I tried not to bring my lips together in either irritation or ego, but I was feeling both. I did have my mother's full upper lip and color.

He cleared his throat. "And, of course, her other obvious attributes."

He did
not
just refer to my breasts, did he? I dug for a look of outrage, but god help me, a guy that attractive could give any woman a zing. In fact, the attributes referenced were standing out at attention.

He lifted an eyebrow, his green eyes amused. And what tall, handsome guy also had green eyes? Why couldn't green-eyed Brian Keller have been a nice Minnesota boy when I was looking for a nice Minnesota boy? Instead I'd found a brown-eyed, short, cheater for a spouse.

Well, this man wasn't a nice Minnesota boy either, so I needed to focus. "My mother is a small town minister's wife, and our family attorney will be contacting your editor if you proceed." I hoped my lying had improved because the only attorney I'd ever met with told me to sign where the orange sticky flags were so I'd keep the student loans but lose the husband.

"Understood." He wore a serious face, so I had to give him credit for at least acknowledging I had a case.

But then the waitress appeared to refill his coffee, smiled at him, and ignored me.

When he smiled back, I thought they'd both forgotten me, but he turned back. "Would you like anything, Amy?"

Oh, so we were on a first name basis were we? He was worried alright. His career was on the line, and he knew it.