Celebrity in Death

part. It’s a break for me. Then we stopped going out.”
    “Because you got the part?”
    “I know it could look that way. And she liked to think that. Liked to think I’d just used her to get a foot in the door.”
    “Why else then?”
    “Okay.” He rubbed his hands over his thighs, then set them on the table. “We had fun at first. We only went out for about three weeks, and it was fun. And we worked on the auditions together, and it was good. We were good. Then, when she got the part, she started drinking. Really drinking. And she got, well, possessive and paranoid.”
    “How so?”
    “She wanted to know where I was every second. Where I was, what I was doing, who I was with. Or if she wasn’t tagging or texting me, she’d just show up where I was. If we were having dinner and I smiled at the waitress it was because I wanted to fuck her, probably was fucking her. You know how she acted at dinner? She’d do the same sort of thing in public.”
    He picked up his teacup, circled it in his hands. “It was embarrassing, infuriating. She accused me of cheating, lying, using her if I wasn’t paying enough attention. We only went out for a few weeks, like I said, and it wasn’t serious. Not for me, and I didn’t think for her. Then she got scary serious. She’d come by my place in the middle of the night to see if I was with somebody else. She’d start getting physical—shoving, slapping, throwing things. I told her I was done. We were barely intopreproduction when she tried to have me fired. I had to go to Roundtree and lay out the whole mess. He backed me up, said it wasn’t the first time she’d gone off that way.”
    “It couldn’t have been easy working with her.”
    “It’s called acting,” he said with a weak smile. “If it was easy, everyone would do it. Anyway, she eased off for a while, like none of it ever happened. So okay with me. It was working, the characters, I mean. Everybody could see we had something going with this project. It’s just been recently she started up again. Maybe because we’re almost done. Last week, she trashed my trailer. I know it was her. Broke up my stuff, ripped up my clothes. I had to start locking it when I was on set. We don’t have any more scenes together,” he added, then winced. “I mean, before this happened, we’d finished our scenes together.”
    He paused for a moment, stared into the empty cup. “We did good work. Even with all that, we did good work.”
    “Okay, Matthew. That’s all for now. If you’d ask Marlo to come back, then you can go.”
    “You mean home?”
    “For now, yeah.”
    “I’d rather wait until … Is it okay if I stay out there awhile longer?”
    “Up to you, but ask Marlo to come back.”
    He got up, looked from Mira to Eve, then back again. “Thanks for getting the tea.”
    Eve switched off the recorder. “Opinion?” she said to Mira.
    “He seems younger than he did at dinner. He’s still shocked and shaky. Forthcoming, and a little guilty. He can’t decide if he used her or not to get the chance at this part, but knows she believed it, so he feels guilty. My read is he’d chosen to give her as little thought as possible, and now he has no choice but to think about her.”
    Eve turned the recorder on again when Marlo stepped in. She wore black yoga pants and a tank, and her face was bare of enhancements. “I guess I’m next.”
    “I need to record this,” Eve began, and went through the same routine she had with Matthew while Marlo sat, eyes wide, hands clenched in her lap.
    “Why were you and Matthew on the roof?”
    She told the same story with little variation.
    “It was such a beautiful night. A little chilly. Warmer inside the dome, but still a little cool. Then everything was so cold after Matthew pulled her out. I thought she’d start breathing again. She’d cough and spit out water. But she didn’t. He worked and worked to try to make her breathe again, but she didn’t.
    “It was an accident, wasn’t it? I saw the broken glass. She must have slipped and fallen in. Hit her head? She’d been drinking all night.”
    “We can’t say yet.”
    “It had to be. Nobody here would … we’re not murderers.” Her eyes, the same color as Eve’s, came back to life, lit with passion.
    “You were here for that scene she made at dinner, so there’s no point in pretending we were friends. She didn’t have friends. She had competitors, assets, possessions, but not friends. But nobody