Genuine Lies

plaques were interspersed with photographs and playbills and memorabilia from her movies.
    Julia recognized the white lace fan that had been a prop in an antebellum film, the sexy red high heeled shoes Eve had worn when she’d played an equally scarlet saloon singer, the rag doll she had clung to when she’d starred as a mother searching for a lost child.
    She also noted that the office wasn’t as tidy as the rest of the house. It was as richly furnished with a combination of antiques and vivid colors. The wallpaper was silk, the carpet deep and soft. But beside the huge rosewood desk where Eve sat were piles of scripts. A coffee machine, its pot already half empty, stood on a Queen Anne table. Stacks of
Variety
littered the floor, and the ashtray beside the phone Eve was barking into overflowed.
    “They can take their certificate of honor and shove it.” She gestured Julia inside with a smoldering cigarette, then took a deep drag. “I don’t give a fuck if it is good press, Drake, I’m not flying out to Timbuktu to sit through a chicken dinner with a bunch of bloody Republicans. It may be the nation’s capital, but it’s Timbuktu to me. I didn’t vote for the sucker, I’m not going to have dinner with him.” She gave a snort and tapped the cigarette partially out on the corpses of others. “You handle it. That’s what you’re paid to do.” Hanging up, she waved Julia toward a seat. “Politics. It’s for idiots and bad actors.”
    Julia placed her briefcase beside her chair. “Shall I quote you?”
    Eve merely smiled. “I take it you’re ready to get to work. I thought we should have our first session in a businesslike atmosphere.”
    “Wherever you’re comfortable.” Julia glanced at the mound of scripts. “Rejections?”
    “Half of them want me to play somebody’s grandmother, the other half want me to take my clothes off.” She hefted a foot clad in a red sneaker and gave the pile a shove. It toppled over, an avalanche of dreams. “A good writer’s worth a king’s ransom.”
    “And a good actor?”
    Eve laughed. “Knows how to turn straw into gold—like any magician.” She lifted a brow when Julia took her tape recorder and set it on the coffee table. “What’s on and off the record is up to me.”
    “Naturally.” She’d simply make sure to get everything she wanted on the record. “I don’t break trusts, Miss Benedict.”
    “Everyone does, eventually.” She waved a long, narrow hand studded with a single, glowing ruby. “Before I begin breaking mine, I want to know more about you—and not just the crap in your press kit. Your parents?”
    More impatient than annoyed, Julia folded her hands in her lap. “They’re both dead.”
    “Siblings?”
    “I was an only child.”
    “You never married.”
    “No.”
    “Why?”
    Though there was a little twist of pain, Julia’s voice remained level and calm. “I never chose to.”
    “As I’ve been in and out of the institution four times, I can’t recommend it, but it seems to me that raising a child alone would be difficult.”
    “It has its problems, and its rewards.”
    “Such as?”
    The question threw her so that she had to school herself not to squirm. “Such as having only your own feelings to rely on when making decisions.”
    “And is that problem or reward?”
    A faint smile curved Julia’s lips. “Both.” She took her pad and a pencil out of her briefcase. “Since you can give me only two hours today, I’d like to get started. Naturally I know the background information that’s been made public. You were born in Omaha, the second of three children. Your father was a salesman.”
    All right, Eve decided, they would begin. What she had to learn she would learn as they went along. “A travelingsalesman,” Eve put in as Julia pressed the record button. “I’ve always suspected I had several half siblings scattered through the central plains. In fact, I’ve been approached many times by people claiming relationships, and hoping for handouts.” “How do you feel about that?”
    “It was my father’s problem, not mine. An accident of birth doesn’t equal a free ride.” Steepling her fingers, she sat back. “I made my success. On my own. If I were still Betty Berenski from Omaha, do you think any of those people would have bothered with me? But Eve Benedict’s a different matter. I left Betty and the cornfields behind when I was eighteen. I don’t believe in looking back.”
    That was a