Playing Dead

Yeah, his mother and his wife were right. If a woman got a feeling about something, probably there were some grounds to it. Cara had been going through Rocco’s pockets for weeks, looking for evidence to back up her theory that he was playing away from home; finally, Rocco got careless and she found receipts. Incriminating stuff. And then she had hired Saul. And Saul had done his work, and now . . . now he was going to spin this out just a little longer, bump up the tab. She could afford it.

Rocco got back to the apartment at six. He’d wasted as much time as he could, walking around, just kicking his heels, but finally he had to go home.

‘Where have you been?’ Cara called from the bedroom the instant he walked through the door.

‘I had some business to attend to,’ said Rocco, coming to stand in the open doorway. His expression was closed-off, guarded. She was sitting at her dressing table, brushing her hair, wearing a raspberry-pink silk negligee and matching peignoir.

‘Oh.’ Cara stared at him in the mirror until he looked away.

Did she suspect anything? No, he was sure she didn’t. She turned away, yanking the brush through her long blonde hair and Rocco took the opportunity to stare at his wife. Her hair was beautiful; she was beautiful. But there was an unsatisfied pout to her mouth, and an avaricious look to her dreamy blue eyes that said, Whatever it is, I want it. Right now. Her body was splendid: tall, statuesque. He ought to be a happy man. But he wasn’t.

‘Annie’s going to have a baby,’ said Cara, her lips growing thin.

‘Oh?’ Rocco sat down on the bed. ‘Your father must be pleased.’

‘Pleased?’ Cara gave him a disgusted look. ‘Really, I think he must have lost his mind, marrying that foreigner.’

Rocco said nothing. He was indifferent to his father-in-law’s second wife, but she seemed to make the Don happy, and wasn’t that what counted most?

Cara put the brush down and stood up with a hiss of silk. She came over to the bed and sat down next to him. ‘My lovely husband,’ she said, smiling, and leaned in and grasped his lightly stubbled chin in one elegantly manicured hand. ‘You need a shave,’ she purred, rubbing her fingers over his chin. ‘We’re going out tonight.’

As usual, thought Rocco.

‘To visit the expectant mama,’ said Cara.

Rocco looked at Cara in surprise. She shrugged. ‘We have to keep my father sweet.’

Of course. Rocco knew that the Don’s family hated the Englishwoman, but they had to be seen to fawn over her. Cara’s face was inches from his own. She was beautiful. He leaned forward a little, lightly brushed his lips over hers. Cara gave a smile.

‘So you were busy with work?’ she murmured against his mouth. ‘All day?’

Rocco nodded.

Liar, thought Cara.

She’d already taken a call from Saul Jury. Cara knew exactly where Rocco had been today, and with whom. That woman called Frances Ducane again. Hadn’t there been a film star once, Rick Ducane? Maybe some relative, but who cared? What concerned her now was that soon, very soon, Jury would have all the information she needed to hang Rocco out to dry.

Chapter 8

1950

Rick Ducane was the toast of Hollywood, an action hero with a Brylcreemed slick of British smoothness who could hold his own alongside Flynn and Lancaster. The audiences loved him, like they loved to hear about the young Princess Elizabeth having her second child, a daughter named Anne.

‘The Yanks love all things English,’ said LaLa. ‘We have to capitalize on that.’

Rick knew she was right.

The studio loved him too. He wasn’t beset by women trouble like Flynn, he wasn’t egotistical like Lancaster; he was easy to manage, a workhorse. He arrived promptly for his read-throughs, learning his lines with punctilious care.

Born in poverty, he adored and quickly became adapted to the high life – the private planes, the twenty-four-hour limos and bodyguards, the great house and the swimming pool high up in the Hollywood hills; he’d earned it.

The only slight shadow upon his otherwise dazzling life was his wife, Vivienne – and his son, Frances – now installed in a wing of his palatial house in the Hollywood hills. Vivienne drank to while away the time in her comfy Hollywood prison. She had started having drinking buddies in – Christ alone knew where she met them. That disturbed Rick. Suppose Viv got legless and told one of these wasters who she was married to? The studio would string him up by the balls. But Rick was away so much on location that he frequently – and blissfully – forgot that his wife and son were there at all.

When he did come home he was harangued by Viv for being late, absent, uncaring.

‘You’ve got a child,’ she ranted at him, gin bottle swinging from her hand, her bleached-blonde hair showing an inch of black untended roots and her once-pretty eyes slitted and mean with drunken rage. ‘Don’t that mean a thing to you, you cocksucker?’

Rick cast a look at the child. Nearly ten years old now, and watching them with hunted eyes as they shouted and swore over his head.

Actually, it didn’t mean much to Rick. He’d been brought up by a chilly, unmaternal woman, and as a consequence he didn’t feel particularly bothered about kids. He’d had her, she’d got pregnant: the luck of the draw.

Or not, depending on your viewpoint.

His viewpoint was that he wished he had never met her, wished he had never stuck his dick up her in the first place; then there would be no Viv staggering around the place night and day giving him earache, when all he wanted was peace and quiet after a hard day’s work, and no kid skulking in corners watching him with hostile eyes.

‘You bastard,’ she was shouting. ‘We’re just your dirty little secret, aren’t we? You’d rather we didn’t exist at all – wouldn’t you!’

Frances looked on the verge of tears.

Viv was raging.

‘Fuck this,’ said Rick.

He turned on his heel, left the house, got back in his car – she followed him out, shrieking and cursing at him as he started the engine and then drove away.

Rick called one of the older, dimming stars he’d once been a walker for at the Oscars. Chloe Kane was no old fart. She was still beautiful, but calls from screenwriters and producers and the press had all but dried up. What the hell – she was forty and everyone knew that once a woman hit the big four-oh in this town, she was done for.

But Jesus, she was still so beautiful, even if her allure was waning. Thick glossy red hair – which must be dyed, but who cared? – and a mouth that still invited trouble. A body that would make a bishop kick a hole through a stained-glass window, even if she had let her personal grooming slide and her bush was a tangle of red and grey that extended down her thighs and up to her navel. But so what? She was stacked, and last time they’d spoken she’d said call me – please.

So here he was, calling her. And she liked that. It soothed his sour mood, how pleased she was to hear from him. When had his wife ever sounded like that? She invited him over. Poor cow had nothing going on except an evening in on her own with her pet pooch for company; he was doing her a favour.

‘Darling,’ she greeted him at the door in that famous, breathy tone she had used to such good effect up on the silver screen. ‘How lovely. Come on in.’

There had followed a wild night in which they had made out in the hall, on the stairs, in her huge, imposing bedroom (‘Strictly for press shots, darling; actually I sleep in a teensy little room down the hall’), much to the pooch’s annoyance.

It was gone two in the morning by the time he got home. He crept in, fearful of waking Viv. The last thing he wanted now was another argument. He was exhausted. Chloe was very demanding.

In the lounge he found empty bottles and upturned bowls of nuts and nibbles that crunched under his feet as he walked. A thousand-dollar rug and she treats it like this, he thought. Nat King Cole was stuck singing ‘Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa’ over and over again. He went over and switched Nat off.

Then he went through to the master bedroom. The coverlet was perfectly in place, the bed still made.

Now what the hell?

Had she gone out somewhere? He hoped not. She was a crazy driver in her too-visible red Corvette at the best of times – oh, and the arguments they’d had about that – but today she’d had a skinful. What he didn’t need was her wrapping her damned car around a tree and the press getting wind of her existence. She was just a nobody.

He hurried along the hall, past the closed door of Frances’s room.

That kid. Strange little fellow: he wanted to be an actor when he grew up like his dad, and Rick was flattered by that, but – for fuck’s sake – the kid didn’t have the talent; all he could manage was a few lines of amateurish mimicry. He would deter him from entering the industry if he could – do the kid a favour. Bad enough when you had that special touch of stardust; it was still hard, gruelling work all the way. But without it . . . Hollywood would break your heart. No doubt about that.