Chapters (64)
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- CHAPTER1
- CHAPTER2
- CHAPTER3
- CHAPTER4
- CHAPTER5
- CHAPTER6
- CHAPTER7
- CHAPTER8
- CHAPTER9
- CHAPTER10
- CHAPTER11
- CHAPTER12
- CHAPTER13
- CHAPTER14
- CHAPTER15
- CHAPTER16
- CHAPTER17
- CHAPTER18
- CHAPTER19
- CHAPTER20
- CHAPTER21
- CHAPTER22
- CHAPTER23
- CHAPTER24
- CHAPTER25
- CHAPTER26
- CHAPTER27
- CHAPTER28
- CHAPTER29
- CHAPTER30
- CHAPTER31
- CHAPTER32
- CHAPTER33
- CHAPTER34
- CHAPTER35
- CHAPTER36
- CHAPTER37
- CHAPTER38
- CHAPTER39
- CHAPTER40
- CHAPTER41
- CHAPTER42
- CHAPTER43
- CHAPTER44
- CHAPTER45
- CHAPTER46
- CHAPTER47
- CHAPTER48
- CHAPTER49
- CHAPTER50
- CHAPTER51
- CHAPTER52
- CHAPTER53
- CHAPTER54
- CHAPTER55
- CHAPTER56
- CHAPTER57
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Books by Jonathan Kellerman
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Prema yawned her way down the runway as a Gaultier clothes-hanger, rented herself a garret off Rue Saint-Germain, never bothered to visit her parents’ graves. The combination of passive income and modeling fees allowed her to regularly score chunks of hashish the size of soap bars from Tunisian dealers near the flea market, a treat she shared with her fellow ectomorph beauties.
Her apathy during Fashion Week made her all the more attractive. Elle and Marie Claire vied to feature her as the next jeune fille sensation. Prema turned them down and abruptly abandoned modeling because she found it “stupid and dull.” Back in London, she occasionally ran with a crowd of similarly bored kids but preferred solitary time for smoking weed.
One day, Uncle Max paused long enough in his butchery of Rachmaninoff to suggest his now gorgeous niece attend university. When Prema laughed that off, he offered her a stint as a fairy in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which he was slated to play Oberon.
Prema agreed.
She loved being someone else.
The rest is fan-mag history.
Donald Lee Rumples was born in Oklahoma City where his father worked as a pipe fitter and his mother stayed home raising five kids. Preternaturally handsome but lacking the coordination for athletics enjoyed by his brothers and the attention span for scholarship displayed by his sisters, he dropped out of high school at seventeen, worked as a janitor, then a gutter at a meatpacking plant, gave that all up and hitchhiked to L.A. where he swept up a 7-Eleven on Western Avenue in Hollywood.
That career lasted four months, at which time he wangled a day job as a golf caddie supplemented by a nighttime gig sweeping up a pizza joint in Brentwood. It was there that the wife of a TV producer took a shine to the black-haired, black-eyed kid tidying up the pepperoni and offered him a position as a houseboy at her manse in Holmby Hills.
A year of not-so-clandestine bedding of the somewhat large lady of the very large house led to Donald’s being spotted while serving hors d’oeuvres at his host’s Christmas party. The spotter was a casting agent and the offer was a walk-on part in a low-budget horror flick.