Genuine Lies

Somehow, using a combination of pride and terror, she managed to keep her head up and to choke back the nausea. It wasn’t a nightmare. It wasn’t a dark fantasy she would shake off at dawn. Yet, dreamlike, everything was happening in slow motion. She was fighting to push her way through a thick curtain of water beyond which she could see the faces of the people all around her. Their eyes were hungry; their mouths opened and closed as if they would swallow her whole. Their voices ebbed and flowed like the pounding of waves on rock. Stronger, more insistent, was her heart’s jerky beat, a fierce tango inside her frozen body.
    Keep moving, keep moving, her brain commanded her trembling legs as firm hands pushed her through the crowd and out onto the courthouse steps. The glare of sunlight made her eyes tear, so she fumbled for her sunglasses. They would think she was crying. She couldn’t allow them that dip into her emotions. Silence was her only shield.
    She stumbled and felt a moment of panic. She could not fall. If she fell, the reporters, the curious, would leap on her, snarling and snapping and tearing like wild dogs over a rabbit.She had to stand upright, to stand behind her silence for a few yards. Eve had taught her that much.
    Give them your brains, girl, never your guts.
    Eve. She wanted to scream. To throw her hands up over her face and scream and scream until all the rage, the fear, the grief, emptied out of her.
    Shouted questions assaulted her. Microphones stabbed at her face like deadly little darts as the news crews busily tapped the finale of the arraignment for murder of Julia Summers.
    “Bitch!” shouted someone whose voice was harsh with hate and tears. “Coldhearted bitch.”
    She wanted to stop and scream back:
How do you know what I am? How do you know what I feel?
    But the door of the limo was open. She climbed in to be cocooned by cool air, shielded by tinted glass. The crowd surged forward, pressing against the barricades along the curb. Angry faces encircled her; vultures over a still-bleeding corpse. As the car glided away, she looked straight ahead, her hands fisted in her lap and her eyes mercifully dry.
    She said nothing as her companion fixed her a drink. Two fingers of brandy. When she had taken the first sip, he spoke calmly, almost casually, in the voice she had come to love.
    “Well, Julia, did you kill her?”

She was a legend. A product of time and talent and her own unrelenting ambition. Eve Benedict. Men thirty years her junior desired her. Women envied her. Studio heads courted her, knowing that in this day when movies were made by accountants, her name was solid gold. In a career that had spanned nearly fifty years, Eve Benedict had known the highs, and the lows, and used both to forge herself into what she wanted to be.
    She did as she chose, personally and professionally. If a role interested her, she went after it with the same verve and ferocity she’d used to get her first part. If she desired a man, she snared him, discarding him only when she was done, and—she liked to brag—never with malice. All of her former lovers, and they were legion, remained friends. Or had the good sense to pretend to be.
    At sixty-seven, Eve had maintained her magnificent body through discipline and the surgeon’s art. Over a half century she had honed herself into a sharp blade. She had used both disappointment and triumph to temper that blade into a weapon that was feared and respected in the kingdom of Hollywood.
    She had been a goddess. Now she was a queen with a keen mind and keen tongue. Few knew her heart. None knew her secrets.
    “It’s shit.” Eve tossed the script onto the tiled floor of the solarium, gave it a solid kick, then paced. She moved as she always had, with a thin coat of dignity over a blaze of sensuality. “Everything I’ve read in the last two months has been shit.”
    Her agent, a round, soft-looking woman with a will of iron, shrugged and sipped her afternoon cocktail. “I told you it was trash, Eve, but you wanted to read it.”
    “You said trash.” Eve took a cigarette from a Lalique dish and dug into the pockets of her slacks for a book of matches. “There’s always something redeeming in trash. I’ve done plenty of trash and made it shine. This”—she kicked the script again with relish—“is shit.”
    Margaret Castle took another sip of vodka-laced grapefruit juice. “Right again. The miniseries—”
    A snap of the head, a quick