White Lies Page 2

  Tucked into the corner of the kitchen was an array of photos, all the ex-wives and ex-in-laws. He could feel disapproval radiating from the images. Rita, the first wife, left him before he made it big. She told him he had a dark streak. Even so, they had parted on reasonable terms. Valerie, the second wife, died of an overdose. Her two brothers, Scotty and Paul had died with her. He hardly had any memories of her. Alanna, the third wife, was always trying to fix him. What he remembered of her was the continuous battles, recriminations and demands.

  Who were those women, truthfully? Had he ever know them? Had they ever looked past the money and stardom to see him? Asher, the husband, was a far cry from the public relations façade. At some point, they must have realized the bad deal they'd gotten. That’s when the fights started and tension escalated. He'd start hiding to avoid the confrontations. All that was left was the glitz and the money, not enough to sustain a real marriage.

  He stared into his coffee. The cream left a slick on the surface. Three good women damaged by knowing him. And now an old friend dead. How could it be his fault?

  The whine of power tools irritated him out of his funk. His brain re-engaged, and he decided the police were going about this the wrong way. The gun must be a distraction. But who would want to kill Pam? She'd gone through four husbands and had an ex-client list as long as her arm. If she'd stolen from Asher, there was a good chance he wasn't the only chump. He had no idea how to get his hands on her client list, but the cops would surely follow up on that. He had to be a little more creative.

  Detective Smythe had been more than happy to give him the gory details. The murder was done at close range. That was cold. In the right part of town, it could be blamed on some gang banger, but she was shot in the driveway of her Brentwood home. Someone walked up to her house and while she was getting in the car, put a gun in her face and pulled the trigger. Asher shivered at the brutality. It was an ugly way to die. The fact that the weapon was linked to him was especially disturbing.

  "Asher!" Sharon howled his name from the living room.

  "Kitchen," he growled back at her.

  "I got a fabulous new list." Sharon Ladeen, his twenty-two year old assistant started talking the minute she entered the house, jarring him out of his gloomy thoughts. Perky, peppy and just a whisker shy of manic, she was bright and shiny like a brand new car, one of those cute sub-compacts. And what did that make him? In his heart he felt like an abandoned race car up on blocks without even a tarp to hide his rusted paint and battered frame. The whole world saw him, and even worse, passed him by without a second thought.

  Her unannounced arrival didn't surprise him. She kept an erratic schedule, popping in with food or errands or just a demand to be elsewhere. She thundered into the room with an armful of manila envelopes and multicolored flyers which she dumped on the table. Asher snatched his coffee out from under the avalanche.

  "We need to get these stuffed and into the mail today." She clattered and tinkled with bracelets, anklets and long, swinging earrings as she sorted and rearranged her prizes. The layers of tank tops she wore were very tight and barely reached her waist exposing a firm, tanned expanse of skin above her low-slung short-shorts. Her navel was pierced, and there was a butterfly tattoo on her spine in the small of her back. He made a point not to look at them.

  "I was arrested this morning," he said.

  "Great! For what?" Her eyes were on her piles of paper. "Will it be on the news?"

  "Murder."

  Sharon missed a beat. Papers in hand, she turned her eyes to him. "Murder?"

  "I didn’t do it."

  She blessed him with a sunny smile. "Of course not. That’s crazy." She was back to cruising altitude. "Listen, I figure it’s time for a blanket mailing. We’ll send out a hundred, hundred and fifty. The website is up and running, so we’re going to get a lot of attention."

  Now that he'd said it out loud, his anger came welling back up. "They actually considered me a suspect."

  "The cops?"

  "They think I’m capable of murder."

  "Well, I know you aren’t." She grabbed his head and planted a noisy kiss on top.

  Asher wondered if she understood the finality of death, the cruelty of murder. She might be too young to have lost a loving, breathing person, out of her life forever. "Do you?"

  "Do I what?" She switched the order of the piles and gave each one a satisfied pat. "Here, one, two, three, four and into an envelope."

  Asher looked at the stacks before him, screamingly bright paper with a bizarre letterhead that had snakes of film careening around the edge of the page. The dense paragraphs, in multiple fonts, were decorated with small flocks of exclamation points. His mind ground gears and jerked in a new direction.

  "Chop chop! We’ve got to get these all stuffed and to the post office before three, if we want them to go out today."

  He picked up the closest one and tried to read it. He had a momentary flash of a studio head squinting at fuchsia paper with, God help us, purple ink, and confusion gave way to full blown panic. "Who are you sending these to?"

  Sharon pulled a rumpled list out of her satchel and handed it to him. "Too bad you’re not a girl. I saw an ad today for 'talented starlet needed'."

  Asher scanned the list and skidded to a halt halfway down. "These companies do porn."

  "Some. They do other stuff, too." She shook a ring-laden finger at him, bracelets hopping down her arm. "Hey, beggars can’t be choosers. This might bring you some work."

  "I don’t do porn," he said firmly. He looked her in the eye to make sure she was paying attention.

  Sharon put her hands on her hips and rolled her eyes. "I’ve seen you do naked stuff."

  "A love scene, in context, when the story required it."

  "You said you would take anything."

  "No, not anything."

  Sharon smacked one of the stacks of papers. "Well, you're going to have to be more flexible now. You're not as hot as you used to be."

  Asher flinched. It was true. No matter how much it hurt to hear her say it, it was true. He looked at the list again. No, this most definitely was not the path he wanted to follow. "I won't do porn, Sharon. If I have to start over with homemade commercials and horror flicks, fine. But that's as low as I go." He folded the list and put a hand on the brilliant blue stack. "Let me look these over, OK? I can tell you who we should really pursue."

  "That's my job! You're always screwing up my plans. Ya know, sometimes I wonder why I took you on."

  Asher blinked at her. Was that really the way it was? He needed to think about this relationship, but right now he needed to make amends. No more burnt bridges. "I'm sorry. Maybe I'm not ready for this."

  Sharon pouted. "I worked really hard on this."

  "I know, sweetie. And I appreciate it. How about you go get us something yummy?"

  "Your treat?"

  He pulled a handful of crumpled bills from his pocket and tossed them on the table. She pushed the dollars to one side and snagged a twenty.

  "Sticky sweet," he said.

  She folded the bill and tucked it in her bra. "Sticky sweet it is."

  He watched her leave, a little wobbly on her stiletto sandals. His eyes lingered on her tattooed ankles. She was young enough to be his daughter. Sometimes he felt like one of those B-movie monsters that fed on the life force of randy teenagers. He needed her. She filled his silences with sounds of life, but he had to remember how very young and naïve she was. Which brought him back to the disastrous mailing.

  One of the stacks was photos Sharon had taken of him. He pulled one over, surprised at his image. Apparently the camera still loved him. His handsome face, weathered by storms of self abuse, managed to kindle its old magic. His blue eyes had that special sparkle. Dark, tousled locks, sparingly peppered with gray, framed a lean face with high cheek bones. Lines by his eyes and around his mouth gave his face a seriousness that the mischievous twinkle in his eye belied.

  When he heard the c
ar door slam, he gathered up all the hot pink, purple, blue and neon green papers and tucked them into a corner of the office. He'd wait a week or so, till she'd forgotten about them, then he'd pitch them into the recycling. She might become a liability. If she had sent this out, it would have been more than humiliating, it would have been detrimental. He needed to make sure that she got his approval first before she tried something like this again.

  The landscapers fired up the leaf blowers and the noise went through his aching head like a bazooka blast. He grabbed his mug and headed for the coffee pot, Pam's murder pressing on him like the heavy air before a dangerous storm.

  Chapter 5

  Sharon returned two hours later with several bags and no change from his twenty. "They didn’t have Danish, so I got cinnamon buns," she yelled from the kitchen.

  "Anything’s fine," he said as he wandered back from his office.

  She wagged a finger at him. "No. Wrong attitude, hon. We deserve to get what we want, right?"

  Asher smiled at her hackneyed mottos. She was always spouting cobbled together bits of pop-psych. "Whatever you say."

  Sharon unpacked one bag, her long earrings swinging with every movement. He noticed she had new highlights in her hair, today's color was cherry Jell-O red. Artfully disheveled and heavily moussed locks hung in her face nearly hiding one eye. "I am going to get you back up there. You mark my words. A-list in a year."

  "That would be great, Sharon." It was an automatic answer. That hope or wish was much too fragile right now. He needed to take the days as they came and not expect too much of them.

  "Will be! Positive thinking, remember."

  She had come to his door on a particularly bleak day, and stood on his porch just glowing with life, the raw enthusiasm of youth dripping out of every pore. He had to let her into his house, into his life. She bubbled and giggled and chased away some of his shadows. She hadn't a clue as to the job she'd taken on, but that didn't matter at all. That wasn't why he needed her.

  "I’m trying."

  "No try, do," she said as she opened the box and helped herself to a cinnamon bun. "Or whatever the hell Yoda said."

  A smile tugged at his mouth. "But I'm not supposed to listen to little green men anymore."

  Sharon upended the bag scattering napkins across the table. "Green men?" She handed him one.

  "Yoda?"

  She wrinkled her nose. "What about him?"

  Asher watched her a moment, then with a shake of the head, turned his attention to the pastries.

  Sharon announced that if she didn't have to do a mailing, she had better things to do with her time and left.

  Asher ate three cinnamon buns, dripping with thick white icing, and drank two more cups of coffee. He felt high on the jittery buzz of caffeine and sugar, all of the shakes and none of the euphoria. He stayed in the kitchen, staring out the window and racking his brain for some kind of logic that would explain Pam's death. The phone interrupted him, and he was glad to put that line of thought aside.

  "Asher, it's Fred."

  "Hey." Ash grinned. Fred had been his accountant for well over a decade, and yet he always identified himself in the first breath as if worried Asher would hang up.

  "I have a man here from a landscaping company demanding payment. Did you hire someone?"

  "No, must have been Sharon. But pay him, Fred. They did a wonderful job."

  There was a smudge of sound as Fred covered the phone and relayed approval to his assistant. "OK. I, um, I also wanted to ask if you'd heard about Pam."

  Asher sighed. "I can't believe it."

  "It's a shock."

  "The cops questioned me." He dropped that bomb fearing the response.

  "Why?"

  Relief flooded him at Fred's tone of indignation. "The gun was from that spy flick."

  "Johnny Amsterdam?"

  "Wow, you remembered."

  "I have the signed poster in my waiting room."

  "Huh. I can't figure out why anybody would kill her."

  "Other than being obnoxious, conniving and a thief?" There was a snarl to Fred's voice that seemed uncharacteristic.

  "Ouch. You are speaking very ill of the dead there, buddy."

  "I couldn't stand that woman, Ash, and you know it."

  Asher noted that down on the corner of Sharon's mailing list. "Other than you, who would want her dead?"

  "Anyone who's worked with her," Fred snapped. "I gotta go. Have to sign the check for the landscaper."

  "OK, bye."

  Asher stared at the phone for a moment. He hadn't known that Fred hated Pam that much. There were some vague memories of head-butting over odd expenses, but nothing that shrieked hatred. It grated that the first name on his list of suspects was a man that had not only stood by him through the worst of the worst, but had also made a point of protecting him from himself.

  The day was heating toward a scorcher. Asher made himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and grabbed a Coke. With fortification in hand, he forged onward to the Internet. He was fast mastering his search skills. They'd introduced him to the Internet in rehab, with the idea that he might need job skills. He pulled up a handful of articles on Pam and made a list of her ex-husbands' names – Ron, Dave, Mike and Joe, remarkably common names for ultimately unremarkable men. Pam was a charismatic bully, and she ended up with men who would easily capitulate, which was probably why Fred didn't like her. He was a straight arrow. All her crumpled invoices and smeared receipts set off alarm bells for him. Which, thank heavens, meant Asher still had enough in the bank to get by until he started working again.

  According to the last article, Pam was on her way to a new job. It was her first day at Franklin Taylor Agency as an agent-in-training. He hadn't heard of it, but a lot of boutique agencies had popped up lately. He scanned a few more articles to confirm that she'd left the industry right after being accused of embezzlement. Her present husband had big bucks, some insurance group or something, so she didn't have to work. He wondered what made her decide to wade back into the shark tank after so many years.

  Too many unrelated thoughts were circling his brain. He dug through the desk until he found a stack of journals. On the advice of a shrink, he had bought them to write out his inner thoughts. After cracking the cover of the first one, he discovered that journaling was definitely not his forte. He ripped out the four measly entries, each of which consisted of a list of mundane activities like: Got up, showered, didn't shave today. He would put them to a better use now.

  Chapter 6

  Sharon burst through the back door onto the little porch nearly knocking Asher over. "Here you are!" Exasperation dripped from her words, as if searching for him in the small, five room house was more than anyone should demand of her. "What are you doing?"

  He held up the bag of cat food and pointed to the freshly filled bowls.

  "You aren't supposed to feed strays. They carry diseases. I'll call those people that trap them."

  "No!" Asher was surprised at how that thought disturbed him. "I'm going to adopt them."

  Sharon rolled her eyes. "Great. An unemployed actor with too many cats. That's really going to help your rep. Which is why I am here. We need to go out tonight."

  He chose to ignore that barb, squeezing past her, back into the kitchen.

  "Ew. You don’t smell so hot either. Go hop in the shower. We need to go be seen."

  It was his turn to roll his eyes. In his opinion, their nightly jaunts were just an opportunity for Sharon to get a free night on the town.

  * * *

  Asher glanced through the menu, no prices. There would definitely be a phone call from Fred about this credit card bill. The restaurant was new, a place he'd never been before. He was painfully underdressed, and he couldn't even imagine what talk Sharon's ensemble was generating. Asher had gotten used to her over-the-top fashion sense, but it was totally out of place here. The maître'd deserved a big tip. One look at Sharon's skintight leggings and rhinestone trimmed busti
er had him blinking and sputtering. He was about to turn them away when he recognized Asher. God bless the man. The small table in the dark alcove was perfect. With luck, no one would even notice them.

  "I don't know why you said a quiet corner," Sharon scolded from behind her menu. "We're here to be seen."

  Asher smiled indulgently. He'd seen a couple of politicians and a lot of businessmen. Although it might be expensive, he was fairly sure this wasn't the right venue for rubbing influential Hollywood elbows. Which, to him, was a relief. He wasn't ready to view all those burned bridges, yet.

  "We're being mysterious," he replied in a stage whisper.

  She nodded knowingly and batted her cerulean blue eyelashes at him. He rubbed his mouth, fighting a hysterical giggle. She looked so young. They'd all think him a pedophile. He might need to rethink being out and about with her. It wasn't at all the image he wanted to cultivate.

  Sharon slapped her menu down. "No crab dip."

  Asher looked over the selections. "How about crab-stuffed mushrooms?"

  "Not the same." She flipped open the menu and tapped the appetizer listing. "No nachos, no poppers, God!"

  "Would you prefer Mexican?" he asked. It would be a relief to slink out.

  She shook her head and pouted. "We need to be seen."

  Asher glanced at the wedge of dining room visible from his vantage point. Heavy wooden chairs with thick upholstery were tucked into long white tablecloths that hung to the floor. Deep pile carpeting swallowed the noise of the diners, dimming it to a distant murmur punctuated with the tinkles and clinks of cutlery and crystal. Strategically placed palms and ficus trees created privacy screens between tables. He relaxed a bit. There was very little chance he'd run into anyone he knew.