by Eric Beetner
Celina returned to Hollywood for the filming. She sent me a purloined clip of the murder scene. It was brief, but a showstopper, and my friend was the perfect icy goddess on celluloid. When she finally came back to New York, she was wearing a new ruby ring.
“You’re not engaged?” I asked, horrified.
“No! It was a treat I bought myself, for all I’ve been through.”
“Suffering for your art.”
“More than you know,” she answered. “Where’s the champagne?”
Celina told me more than I wanted to know about Edgar while I watched my daughters playing in the sunroom. Their latest game seemed to involve barnyard animal noises, a blessing since they didn’t hear a word of what Celina said. It was also darkly appropriate, given what she told me.
“You didn’t,” I gasped. “How could you stand it?”
“I kept thinking if it didn’t kill Catherine the Great, it wouldn’t kill me,” Celina shuddered. “But it was horrific. It wasn’t even a full-grown horse.”
“How could you do it?”
“It takes a lot to impress Edgar. He gets bored easily.” She stared at me. “Isn’t that something like what he made you do?”
“No.” I shook my head, pushing the memory as far from my consciousness as I could. “Not even close.”
“He tied you up in his basement,” Celina said, her eyes widening as she remembered the part of the story I’d been able to tell her.
I nodded slowly. “I thought I was going to die.”
“Because of some light bondage?”
“It wasn’t that. He opened up my veins. I thought I was going to bleed out.”
Celina sat ramrod-straight. “I remember now. You were gone for days. I was worried about you! There were a couple of other blonde actresses who went missing back then. I thought you’d be another one.”
I closed my eyes, forcing back the tears. “It was torture,” I whispered.
“That’s grotesque,” Celina said, slumping back. “No wonder you ran away from Hollywood.”
I couldn’t tell Celina the worst part of the story. I glanced at Ava and Aimee, who were engaged in a furious exchange of oinks. If any man ever did to them what Edgar Ravovitch had done to me, I would murder him. There wouldn’t be a hesitation. I wouldn’t even feel a moment’s guilt.
There was a long gulf of silence that opened between us.
“What I need to figure out now is what to wear to the premiere,” said Celina, carrying the conversation over the terrible fault lines I’d opened up. She was oblivious to anything but herself, and I somehow found it endearing. A better friend might have pried. Celina didn’t care enough to. “It’s got to make a statement. It has to be memorable.”
“Versace?”
Celina gave me a disapproving look that might’ve been a frown if she hadn’t just been botoxed. “It can’t be something a starlet would wear. It has to say that I have arrived. A star is born.”
“Vintage Halston?”
Celina sighed. “I need to really cement myself in people’s minds. Hardly anyone noticed Jennifer Lopez until she wore that dress cut down to her navel.” She drank more champagne. “I need a dress that will make me famous.”
The dress that Celina ultimately chose was breathtaking. She wouldn’t tell me where she’d found it, or who the designer was, but it consisted of layer upon layer of sheer silk tulle with a peach body stocking underneath. There were hundreds of tiny, winking crystals sewn into the fabric, making the dress shimmer like a constellation on a summer night. On the night of the New York premiere, she got ready at my brownstone. The twins were at their grandparents’ house in Queens so they wouldn’t be underfoot. After her hairdresser and makeup artist left, Celina studied her reflection in the Cheval mirror in my bedroom. “Seriously, Alice, what do you think?”
“You’re like some impossible combination of Jayne Mansfield and Jean Harlow. Is that even possible? You look absolutely beautiful.” She truly did. Her platinum hair and pale skin made her ethereal, and no one could help but stop and stare at that dress. While I was reassuring her, the doorbell rang.
“That’ll be Harry Winston,” Celina said, as if the jeweler’s was a personal friend. “They’re letting me borrow some diamonds. Earrings worth fifty thousand dollars, or something like that.” She beamed. “Just wait till I’m really famous. Then I’ll get the good stuff. Necklaces worth millions.” She stared at her reflection and smiled, as if envisioning her neck encircled by ropes of priceless stones. “They let you have anything you want when you’re famous.”
But it wasn’t armed guards with jewelry, just a messenger with a note for me. I set it on the hall table and went back upstairs to Celina. Her cell phone rang. “My agent,” she sighed before answering. “So where’s my bouquet?” she said to him.
There was a pause. Then all Celina said was, “What?”
She was silent for a long time, her face frozen. Her eyes were wide as the first woman to be sacrificed in any horror movie.
“He can’t do that. He can’t I’ll sue the bastard.” She listened again, her teeth gritted. “Yes, I understand. Yes, I said I get it.”
She shut the phone and threw it at my mirror, shattering the glass. “I’m going to kill that bastard!” she screamed.
“Celina, what…?”
“He cut me out of the movie. He replaced me with another actress.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, and I meant it. This role was everything to Celina, and it had vanished. More than that, it was an opportunity for Edgar Ravovitch to demonstrate how cruel he could be on a whim. “Can you sue for breach of contract?”
Celina turned away and her voice was muffled. “Apparently it’s all kosher with the contract. That bastard Edgar even made an extra payment. Hush money. The notation on it was Pony Express.”
Her anguish and humiliation hit me in the chest. I went to hug her, but she pulled away. “I need to be alone, Alice.”
I muttered a few words and left the room, feeling sorry for my friend, and hoping that this would be the push she needed to get out of a business that ate beautiful women alive.
The freshly delivered envelope was sitting on the hall table, where I’d dropped it. When I opened it, a blue piece of stationery fluttered out, curving through the air and landing at my feet.
It’s such a shame, Alice. You would have been perfect for this role. Not the ghost, but the lead. If you’d stayed the course, you would have one at least one Oscar by now.
I recognized the handwriting, but even without that cue, I would’ve recognized the stench of Edgar Ravovitch anywhere. There was a heavy musk of sweat and blood desperation that hung around him like a shroud. It was in everything he touched. Suddenly, I was twenty-eight again, trapped in Edgar’s basement dungeon for days. I’d thought I would die. Instead…
I rushed up the stairs. Celina was on the floor, sobbing as if her heart might break.
“How badly do you want to be famous?” I asked her.
She stared up at me. “You know I’d do anything.”
“I can make it happen for you.”
“Alice, have you lost your mind?” She made a strangled laugh through her tears “You’re a Brooklyn house-mouse with two little rugrats. What on earth could you do?”
“I can give you exactly what you need. You can take my story and make it yours.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“When I was trapped at Edgar Ravovitch’s house, I wasn’t the only actress in his dungeon. There was another girl there. Remember Contessa Kruzic?”
“Of course I do. That little witch stole a part right out from under me. I hated her.” She stared at me, uncomprehending. “When she went missing, I felt kind of guilty, like maybe I’d caused it by hating her so much.”
“Edgar had both of us tortured. He tied us up, starved us, and then had us both bled until we were weak as newborn kittens. Then he left us with
nothing but a knife.”
Celina’s face went white as the ghost she’d played. “A knife?”
“He told us only one of use could leave the room alive. The one that did would star in his next film. Remember the one about the nineteenth century nurse? The one that won five Oscars? That was the film.” I sank to my knees in front of her. “I killed her, Celina. I crawled to the knife before she got to it. With the last bit of strength I had, I stabbed her in the leg. She’d already lost so much blood. She died quickly.”
“You?” Celina breathed, her eyes fixed on mine. “You did that?”
“Not for the role. I didn’t want to die.” I stared at her, desperate. “Can you understand that? I just wanted to live. That’s why I ran away afterwards. I didn’t want fame after that.”
“I thought Edgar was just a sexually exploitative freak…” she breathed.
“Edgar’s sexual peccadilloes are just a little hobby on the side,” I said. “His real lust is for blood. The actresses he’s helped are the ones who came out of his little torture chamber. There are at least two others in freezers in his basement. He showed them to me when I was there. Mila Montgomery and Petra Jordan.”
“Edgar killed them?”
“I think they were trapped in the same way I was. He has the girls kill each other, but the blood is all on his hands.” I took a breath. “Look what he sent me tonight.”
I handed her the note and watched her face morph from sorrow to rage. There was enough competition between us, even now, that the idea I could have been the leading lady in the film made her soul burn.
“That bastard,” she seethed. “I really am going to murder him.”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” I said. “Go to the premiere. Stick a knife into him. You’ll be arrested, but when you are, you’re going to tell the police what happened to you. How Edgar tortured you. How he killed other girls. How he’s responsible for the death of Contessa Kruzic.”
“But they’ll blame me.”
“You’re the victim, Celina. You’re like a hostage with Stockholm Syndrome. Edgar terrorized you to the point where you couldn’t tell up from down, right from wrong.”
Her tears were dry, and she was nodding. “I’ve been the victim, all this time.” She was mentally preparing in the way we’d learned at the Lee Strasbourg School, internalizing a role until it rang true, until we were inseparable from it.
“Maybe he told you he wouldn’t hurt other girls if you did what he said,” I suggested. “I don’t know. That’s your part of the character to fill in. But the bottom line is, he’s a monster and you’re the one getting justice for all the women he’s destroyed.”
She nodded, now deep in thought, and got to her feet. “I need to fix my makeup,” she said.
That night, Edgar Ravovitch’s sensational murder dominated the news. The first headline I saw was, Larger-than-life director Edgar Ravovitch attacked by deranged diva at premiere.
It was a fortunate thing that the twins were staying at their grandparents’ house. That meant I could stay up late, watching the news come in over a hundred different websites, each building a new detail on what that last one had. When my husband came home, he peered in as me, hunched over my laptop.
“What’s so interesting, babe?” he asked, coming into the room and kissing the top of my head.
“There’s a director, a monster who abused Celina for years. She finally struck back. Here, read this.” I turned the computer so he could read the latest on TMZ, and I watched his face. He was so handsome, not at all like a leading man, but in a slightly rumpled, bespectacled way that made me feel safe.
“This is horrifying,” he said. “Do you think it’s all true?”
“They say the police have already gone to his home and found the bodies in freezers in his basement.” My voice was shaky. “He made actresses literally fight to the death for starring roles in some of his films.”
I could feel a shudder run through him. “That’s insane. How could anyone…”
“I don’t know,” I said, standing to hug him. “I can’t understand it. But I believe Celina. I know this guy is guilty. I’ve met him. He is evil personified.” I took a couple of sharp breaths. “I’ll have to testify for her in court. I don’t want the girls dragged into anything, but I’ll need to…”
“Don’t worry about the girls. They’re too young to understand whatever craziness Auntie Celina got herself into.” He glanced at the screen again. “I’m so glad you left La-la-Land when you did, Alice. Those people are out of their heads.” He kissed me again. “Do you want to stay up and talk?”
“Let’s just go to bed. Give me a couple of minutes.”
He left the room and I looked at the screen again. The front page of the New York Times had loaded again. There was a huge photograph of Celina at the preview, just after she’d been arrested. Her platinum hair fanned out around her like a halo, and her sheer dress made her look almost as naked as a Roman statue. But her face was the most mesmerizing thing of all. Her perfect features were in stark contrast with her haunted eyes, brimming with loss and sorrow. Avenging Angel, read the headline. Under it were the words Celina St. Cyr Slays Monster Who Murdered Missing Starlets.
In the space of a few hours, the director with the household name had fallen and a new star had arisen. I touched the screen, my index finger at the hollow of Celina’s chiseled cheekbone.
“I always knew you’d be the famous one,” I said, and closed the screen.
Back to TOC
THE STARRY NIGHT
Grant Jerkins
One
The stars. My God, the stars.
Is what Mr. Landay thought as he looked out the living room window and contemplated his plan. The swirling nighttime sky. The universe expanding. He imagined Vincent van Gogh, in all his self-injurious, bugfuck crazy glory, had gazed upon much the same sight outside his asylum window those many years ago.
Mr. Landay had given his plan a great deal of thought. He was a careful man. And a patient man. He learned patience from the stars. The stars abide.
Mr. Landay had no intention of ever getting caught.
For starters, Mr. Landay never perused his interests online. Never. That was the number one no-no as far as Mr. Landay was concerned. He simply did not understand these men who pursued their hobby in chatrooms and message boards, or via instant messages and texts and photo exchanges and the myriad other electronic ways in which children could be had. Tricked, mislead, blackmailed, et cetera. Why, you couldn’t even turn on the news without seeing some weak-chinned schmo with an uneven goatee blinking under the hot lights. Caught. Caught red-handed meeting up with a child he’d enticed online. Why weren’t people more careful? Discreet?
If it wasn’t that, then it was footage of FBI agents carrying hard drives out of homes to catalog the caches of thousands upon thousands of illegal images their forensic technicians divined from the digital depths of said hard drives. Then the feds sifted through your contacts and next thing you knew they would say you were part of an organization. A child molestation ring. And if one of your fellow hobbyists happened to live in Canada or something, then they would be crowing about you being the lynchpin in an international ring of child pornographers. And when would people learn the simple art of discretion? The stars, the planets. They were discreet. The universe was discreet.
Mr. Landay was a big believer in discretion. Discretion was an art, and Mr. Landay an artist.
The Internet was not safe. It had never been safe. If you used the Internet, you would be caught.
The downside to discretion was that one did not get the opportunity to wallow in one’s basest desires. Chances to indulge those proclivities—safe chances—were few and far between.
Over the years, Mr. Landay had experienced some mild successes. Nothing epic, though. He was still waiting for the one experience that would define him. Someone to be Ryan O’Neal to his Ali MacGraw. There h
ad been a neighbor boy whom he’d caught setting fires. Blackmailed him. That had lasted almost three months. Until the boy’s family had moved away. Even though the boy remained emotionally detached (perhaps clinically so), Mr. Landay missed him. He had been deeply troubled, and Mr. Landay hoped he would find peace in this world.
There were the twins. Alicia and Alice. His sister’s girls. But he’d never felt right about that. It had been wrong. And he was certain they’d been too young to remember. If they did remember, they certainly gave no indication when he saw them over the holidays. Although Alice was apparently a lesbian now. Transgendered. Something like that. And Alicia was filling her skin with tattoos. Just filling herself up, inking herself like she thought human beings were blank coloring books in need of a crayon.
Unlike some, Mr. Landay did not differentiate between boys and girls. All that mattered was their essence. Their goodness. Their scent. The smell of children. He inhaled it. Savored it. He was driven. Compelled. Even though he knew he would spend eternity in hell (deservedly so,) it was worth it.
He could not stop. But he could be careful. Safe.
Mr. Landay had worked at the hospital in a janitorial capacity for all of his adult life. Environmental Services. It was a good job with decent pay, and he had taken on more and more responsibilities over the years, so that he now oversaw the safe disposal of biohazard and infectious waste materials—he ran the incinerator.
He oversaw the destruction by fire of bloody gauze, pus filled dressings, urine soaked pads, biopsied tissue samples, excised tumors, aborted fetuses, amputated fingers toes hands breasts limbs etc. He went from floor to floor gathering red bags and sharps boxes onto his special cart. During busy times, when the combustion chamber never even got to cool down between loads, the different departments brought the red bags down to him. Delivered them to him. And all he had to do was keep the temperature up to state regs and keep an eye on the exhaust readouts and keep the numbers within BACT and MACT air standards.
