I collected my purse and keys, thinking, How goddamned stupid can you be, Tom? But maybe they don’t teach you at Dartmouth that Hollywood is like a huge hothouse, steamy and enclosed. Everyone’s lives and loves, their fortunes, their so-called sacred honor, their sins, their failings, their bad judgments, their bad breath, their bad debts are like the steam that rises on the hothouse walls, dripping with what everyone—actors, writers, agents, producers, directors, the press, the critics, the musicians and the carpenter, the sound man—knows. In Hollywood fame, money, reputation, friendship, even love and marriage are conditional, flimsy, and often for effect. No one is invincible, Tom. The film business is like the house of straw where everything can be blown away with one foul gust. Just ask Max Leslie. Which is what I intended to do.

Chapter Five

By the time I arrived at Max and Marian’s, the hot August air had dried the champagne from my skirt, leaving the barest outline of a stain. As I pulled into the driveway of their big two-story faux Tudor house on Carolwood Drive, my own ordeal paled in comparison to the scene before me. Someone had splashed buckets of red paint across the front porch, the door, the lower windows. It looked to have dried, but I certainly wasn’t going to step on the porch. I went round to the back, through a rustic gate and arbor draped with red climbing roses. “Max,” I called out. “Marian? It’s me, Roxanne!”

Max, sitting on the edge of the pool, his pants soaked to the knee, looked up. His bare feet were in the water, which was an odd color; a sickly mauve ribbon rose up from the deep end and floated like a banner toward the shallow end, where he sat. He had a glass on one side, a bottle on the other. He smiled, though his eyes were deep-ringed with misery behind his glasses, his gray hair hung lank across his brow.

“Max, what’s happened? Who did this to your house? Who could have done this?”

He rose unsteadily and dripped over to me, took me in a great, warm hug redolent of Scotch and sweat. “Roxanne, dear little Roxanne.”

“Max, have you called the police?”

“The police won’t lift a hand. I’m an avowed Communist, remember? A marked man.”

I glanced over at the pool and saw underwater in the deep end the patio furniture, table, a few chairs, and great sodden cushions that had sunk to the bottom. And a couple of gallon cans of red paint.