Party Crashers

suddenly felt light-headed, and she couldn't stop shaking.
    "My book," Carlotta whispered, gazing into the water.
    "Your celebrity book was in your purse?" Jolie asked.
    Carlotta nodded miserably.
    "I'm so sorry," Jolie murmured. "Can you forgive me?"
    " Jolie Goodman ."
    Jolie looked up to see Sammy staring down at her. Unhappily.
    The woman walked closer, hands on hips. "I thought that was you earlier, but I told myself that you wouldn't dare put on a disguise and crash my party! That was you last night at the media reception, too, wasn't it?"
    Jolie could only wince.
    "And you had the nerve to bring these two troublemakers with you!"
    "I brought you a hostess gift," Carlotta muttered.
    "Candles?" Sammy shrieked. "Are you kidding me? I ought to call the police!"
    "They're from Neiman's," Carlotta retorted.
    "I mean to have you arrested for trespassing!" Sammy screeched, her volume off the chart in decibels. She jabbed her finger at Hannah. "And you, for assaulting one of my guests!"
    Hannah glowered at a man across the pool touching his swollen eye. The woman next to him, presumably his wife, appeared ready to black his other eye. Russell Island seemed dazed...and vaguely familiar.
    But enough stalling.
    "Sammy," Jolie said, pushing herself to her wobbly feet. Water ran off her, splashing onto Sammy's shoes. "You do need to call the police."
    "You're bleeding," Sammy said, looking disgusted, as if something might get stained.
    "Yes," Jolie said, feeling bout of nausea coming on. "But it actually gets worse."
    Re-dressed in his black robe, Beck walked up and settled a chenille throw that Jolie had seen on a couch around her shoulders. The warmth was heavenly, but having Beck behind her made her even more nervous—his desire to help her was about to change.
    Sammy flinched at the sight of the expensive throw soaking up pool water. "Jolie, what are you talking about?"
    "G–Gary Hagan is upstairs in the coat check room."
    "Gary Hagan?" Sammy's expression turned lethal. "What on earth is that criminal boyfriend of yours doing in my coat check room?"
    "He's dead," Jolie murmured, seeing starbursts. She was going to faint. And God help her, she aimed herself at Beck for one last favor.

    * * *

    Jolie sat at a table in a holding room wearing an oversized gray "Property of Fulton County, Georgia" sweat suit and flip-flops since the police had confiscated her "borrowed" clothing. How she was going to pay for those nightclothes, she didn't know.
    Of course, at the moment, paying for outrageously expensive clothes wasn't the biggest worry on her plate, but concentrating on the more mundane details helped her not to dwell on the fact that Gary was dead.
    And that the police seemed to think that she and Carlotta and Hannah had something to do with it. The girls were elsewhere, in similar rooms, she assumed. Just like on television, the police had split them up so they couldn't devise a story. As if they would even try to come up with a better one.
    Fatigue weighted her limbs, and her lungs felt raw. Her hair was a crusty nest. She had chewed her fingernails to the quick. She touched a goose egg on her forehead—Beck had caught her when she'd fainted, but she'd cracked her head when she'd gotten into the police car for the ride to the clink. The threesome was instructed by Salyers and her partner not to talk to each other, so Carlotta had cried the entire trip, and Hannah had conjugated her boyfriend's name with every expletive ever conceived.
    Jolie had concentrated on counting the squares in the metal grate between the front seat and the back, trying to forget the look on Beck's face as she was being stuffed into the cruiser. Condescension? Disappointment? He had turned away to put a comforting arm around Della's shoulder, and Jolie imagined they were saying how glad they were that Beck hadn't become involved with the poor-white-trash-shoe-salesperson-slash-real-estate-agent-slash-murderer.
    The clincher was that she wasn't particularly good at any of those things.
    The door to the holding room opened and Detective Salyers walked in, looking none-too-pleased to be awake at three in the morning. By the time she and other officers had been summoned to the scene and guests had been questioned, Carlotta's car impounded, and the three of them transported to jail, a few hours had slipped by.
    "Hi, again," Jolie ventured.
    "Alone at last," Salyers said, tossing a pad of paper on the table. "Ms. Goodman, I thought I told you to