Celebrity Spin Doctor

by Celia Mulder

“Details,” Simon said with a wave of his hand.

  “Look. Lucille and I were in the middle of something. Leave,” Brett said through his teeth.

  Lucille spoke up then. This was an out, and she wasn’t going to let it go by. “We were finished. Stay.”

  Brett looked at her. All the indignation and anger had drained from his face, leaving behind a dull, unreadable look. “I thought we were still discussing—”

  “We weren’t. What’s done is done. I think it’s time for you to go.” Lucille kept her face stoic and emotionless. It wasn’t hard; she’d had years of practice. She felt weird, sort of blank inside, empty. She felt distanced from the situation and the man before her, like it was happening to someone else.

  “Okay,” was all Brett said. He walked past Simon, careful not to touch him, his shoulders slumped. She heard him walk down the stairs, the sound of his clothes rustling as he struggled to dress himself, and the front door close behind him.

  Lucille didn’t say anything, though her mind was tumbling with questions for her uncle. Her heart hurt. And she’d identified the weird feeling—it was like kicking a kitten. Which was stupid and crazy because Brett wasn’t a kitten. He was a drunken, slovenly failure who was so far outside of her normal type, she hadn’t known men like him existed before now. But he was funny and caring and incredibly loyal. And he was sarcastic and ironic, couldn’t think on his feet for shit, and he wanted her, all of her. He wanted to make love to her, slowly, languidly, like they had a lifetime to get it right. Goddamn him and his cute butt.

  “That was really weird, Lucy.”

  Lucille turned her attention to Simon. “Aren’t you supposed to be watching Michel?”

  “He’s a big boy. He can take care of himself.”

  Lucille shook her head. “He really can’t. Why do you think Brett was living there? And we took him with us to the island? It wasn’t for his spy skills.”

  “I assumed it was for his hot bod, but after what I walked in on just now...” Simon trailed off, indicating he wasn’t sure what to make of Lucille’s choice in men.

  Whatever. She didn’t need his approval. Not that she was choosing Brett, but if she were, she wouldn’t care what Simon thought. “I’m going to put on a shirt and then you’re going to tell me what you’re doing here.”

  “Can’t an uncle come visit his favorite niece?”

  She gave him a look.

  “I swear, my call is entirely social. I’ll be downstairs.” Simon exited, leaving the door open.

  She could hear him rooting around her living room, then the clink of glass and ice. She sighed and grabbed the first shirt from her closet. It was a red button-down blouse with fitted panels that accented her waist and chest. She swapped her jeans out for her black pants and surveyed herself in the mirror. She felt professional, confident, and collected, almost enough to deal with her uncle. The flippant, flirty Lucille in her short silky dress, ready to bang the first guy who walked through the door, was gone. Now she was back and all business.

  A thought hit her, like pain medication finally kicking in. It was one of those epiphany moments when everything clicked into place and the last, lost piece to the puzzle, the one that was hiding behind the toilet for six months, finally found its home. Before she lost her nerve or the feeling of giddy weightless freedom that had accompanied her realization, she went to confront her uncle.

  When she walked downstairs, Simon was perched in one of the overstuffed chairs in the living room. “The one brilliant thing about the Victorians, and I do mean the one thing, was their ability to craft a liquor cabinet.”

  Lucille didn’t respond. She sat down on the chair facing him, mirroring his relaxed but ready stance. “Simon,” she started out, “you know I’d do anything for you, right?”

  He nodded but narrowed his eyes. “Why are you dressed like that? What do you want from me?”

  She rolled her eyes. “You’re always so suspicious of my motives.”

  “Aren’t you of mine? It’s the business, darling.”

  “That’s what I want to talk about. You want to come back and pick up your old life, right? Be a celebrity spin doctor again?” Lucille was trying to tread carefully. Her future could rest on the way she chose her words.

  “More than anything.” His words were whispered, hopeful.

  “Good. So what do we need to do to get your name cleared?” she asked in a rush.

  Simon blinked. She’d stumped him. Under other circumstances, she’d have gloated. Now she needed him to keep up.

  “What do you mean?”

  The rest came pouring out. “I mean, I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to be Lucille Anton, Celebrity Spin Doctor. When I was on the island, I had a team, and we were working together, sort of, and we were doing something, kind of. I got to wear whatever I wanted—”

  “Yeah, about that dress—”

  “—and be around people who knew me. People who I wasn’t trying to play or manipulate or con. You know?”

  Silence.

  “Not really. But let’s pretend I do.”

  “Close enough.” And it was. For her uncle, a man who lived for parties, manipulation, and scandal, even pretending he knew what she was talking about would do. She couldn’t tell him about her loneliness or how she wanted real friends—those were things he wouldn’t understand. She didn’t tell him that she’d spent the last eight years running on guilt and an inflated sense of responsibility. And she especially wouldn’t tell him that she was starting to think of Michel and Brett as her weird, dysfunctional family. She wasn’t even ready to admit that to herself. “So what do we do to clear your name? Assuming that you are, in fact, innocent.”

  Simon watched her for a full minute before answering. “You know, Lucy, most of the time I’m lying through my teeth. But this was the one thing I was truthful about, and it kills me that it’s what I got exiled for.”

  “You didn’t get exiled. You fled.”

  Simon waved his hand. “Semantics. As for how we clear my name, that’s simple.” He took a long, slow drink of his scotch before he continued. “We need to kill Beverly.”

  Lucille, who’d leaned forward as she explained her new life realization, sat back hard in the chair.

  “We need to what?” She tried to process. “Who the fuck is Beverly? Why do we need to kill her? Because won’t that defeat the whole purpose of clearing your name?”

  “Not kill her, kill her. We need to kill her reputation, get the truth out of her, get her to fess up to the crime. Perhaps ‘kill’ was not the right word.”

  “‘Kill’ was definitely not the right word.”

  Simon didn’t respond. He contemplated his glass with the intensity of a man thinking of other things.

  Lucille waited. Her fingernails needed to be dealt with. That manicure had been years ago, judging by the state of them. Of course, if this all worked out and she passed the business back to Simon, would she need manicures anymore? Would she need any of it anymore? Her car, her wardrobe, the houses she had on retainer? The panic bubbled up in her throat. She was making a huge mistake in giving up her livelihood. After all, she hadn’t done well in college, didn’t have any experience in anything legitimate, had never even worked a summer job babysitting! She was unqualified, undereducated, and any other ‘un’ words she could think of at everything except spin doctoring.

  Simon broke through her internal freak-out. “I suppose you want to know what really happened eight years ago.”

  “Yeah, sure,” she said around the lump of terror. If she wanted to take back her words, the time was now. She’d open her mouth and say, Thanks, but never mind, I want the business. Lucille thought of the honest, hopeful look on her uncle’s face when she’d offered him his life back. Goddammit.

  Simon closed his eyes, toying with the glass as he spoke. “It started about ten years ago. I’d taken on one of those cases; you know the kind, the ones you know you should stay away from but can’t?”

&n
bsp; She nodded, her mind still churning.

  “His name was Cooper—”

  “The murdered guy.”

  “Right. Yes, well, he was still alive then. Cooper was into some weird sexual shit—BDSM, orgies, making pornos, everything except bestiality; that was where he drew the line.”

  Lucille grimaced. “No wonder you didn’t tell me about it.” When she’d first started out, she would have thought this Cooper as a real whack job. Now she simply appreciated not having to work with him.

  “Right? Well, you had started dating that cop, and a lot of this stuff wasn’t just kinky, it was illegal. Drugs, prostitutes... Anyway, you know the story—big star who didn’t want people to know what was happening behind closed doors, et cetera.” Simon poured another drink. “One of the parties, an orgy, went horribly wrong. I won’t traumatize you with the details. If I could forget them myself, I absolutely would. It would cut down on at least three of my sleeping pills.” He took a long drink of his scotch.

  Lucille’s heart rate had returned to normal as she listened. The panic was passing. She found her uncle’s story comforting in a twisted sort of way. It was comforting to think that, no matter what she’d be doing from here on out, it wouldn’t involve unstable celebrities and their deviant behavior. “Did someone die?”

  Simon nodded. “Yeah, and it was gruesome. When I saw Cooper soon after, he was still shaken from it. He came to see me one night at the house.”

  Lucille remembered that night. It had been the night her life had gone belly up. It had been summertime, she was learning the family business by day and sneaking out to see Matt at night. Simon had hated Matt, even before he had real reason to. The sneaking around allowed Simon to conveniently ignore Matt as much as he wanted, until that night. It had been late—Lucille had just said good night to Matt and climbed in through the window.

  She’d heard voices downstairs and had crept to the railing. Simon had been standing in the hallway, wearing a red smoking jacket and black lounge pants, the closest he got to casual. She’d been able to see his face, and he’d looked concerned, his hand on the arm of the man whose back had been to her. A taller, dark-haired man with slumped shoulders. Her uncle had seen her right away, before she’d been able to make out what the stranger had been saying. His eyes had ordered her to go back in her room, and she’d done so. Her uncle had never been strict—so when he’d wanted her to do something, it was for her own protection. The first rule he’d taught her was to keep the ones you love at a distance. To let them in was to put them at risk. What she had picked up was that the man had been in a panic, talking fast and crying.

  “There was a video. Cooper liked to film his parties. He had it and he wanted to go to the police with it. He was terrified that it hadn’t been an accident and he was going to be next. There were five people, including the victim and himself, who could be identified on that video.”

  “One of them was Beverly?”

  “One of them was Beverly. Beverly Walton, your typical up-and-coming model with everything to lose. She was in a dozen ad campaigns that summer alone, and she was a frequent attendee at Cooper’s parties.”

  “She was the one who killed the person in the orgy.”

  Simon paused. “No. I mean, I don’t know. I never saw the video, and Cooper never said.”

  “Then why do we need to find her?”

  “Because,” he said, gripping his glass, “she murdered Cooper.”

  Not even two minutes after Lucille had closed her bedroom door, there’d been a gunshot and yelling. She hadn’t been able to ignore it, her heart pounding as she’d imagined that tall man killing her uncle again and again. Only when she’d reached the stair landing, the tall man had been the one who’d lain dead, and it had been her uncle being cuffed and led away. Cuffed by none other than her off-duty cop boyfriend who’d come back for one final good-night kiss.

  Throughout the trial, Lucille had stood by her uncle. She’d known nothing about Cooper or how Simon had been involved, so it hadn’t been hard to tell the truth. She hadn’t lied when she’d said her uncle wasn’t capable of killing an unarmed man in cold blood. Even when Matt, wearing a wire and using their relationship as a weapon, had tried to get her to break, she hadn’t. But she’d always wondered. The evidence, and lack of evidence, had been overwhelming against her uncle. Simon had been given life in prison and would have been there now if he hadn’t escaped, using connections she knew nothing about.

  “You thought I did it,” Simon said. He was watching her again, as though trying to see inside her mind while she processed the bombshells.

  “I didn’t know,” she answered honestly.

  He smiled. “Smart girl. But you never talked. I couldn’t have been more proud of you.”

  She smiled back. “Thanks. You know, other families are proud of good grades and trophies. We’re proud of being able to keep our mouths shut.”

  Simon laughed. “I know. We’d be great in the mob.”

  Lucille laughed too. It felt weird and right, and she doubted anyone but the two of them would understand. “So, what really happened that night?”

  “While I was trying to talk Cooper out of going to the police until we could figure out a strategy that would involve keeping him safe and everyone’s reputation intact, Beverly opened the front door, shot him, and bolted.”

  “Don’t they have ballistics tests for things like that? And fingerprinting?”

  Simon sighed. “The bitch shot him from right beside me. Cooper didn’t see her since he was a blubbering, snotty mess, rest his soul. She used a gun from my father’s collection. She wore gloves so there were no discernible fingerprints.

  “Anyway, first there was all this racket and Cooper’s bleeding out and my eardrums are completely shot. Then your boyfriend shows up with his handcuffs and police buddies to find me standing over the dying man, a smoking gun on the floor, and no sign of Beverly. Well, you remember the rest.”

  Lucille nodded. “Vividly. I was so pissed at Matt for arresting you I broke up with him over it.”

  Simon threw back his head and laughed. “I’d have liked to see that.”

  She smirked. “It was good. Horrible at the time. I thought I was in love with him. But he honestly had no idea what he did wrong. Like arresting my only family was no big deal.”

  “Men.”

  She nodded. “Okay, so what do we need to do?”

  Simon smiled. “Do you still have your black unitard?”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Brett went back to his apartment. In times of great upheaval and stress, a man needed his home. His home was his castle. But when he heaved himself through the scratched white door that always stuck, the sight within was less than comforting.

  “This place is a dump,” he said to the piles of dirty clothes and dishes in his path. He stood in the doorway, surveying his garbage can of a castle. Something inside of him snapped. He could either leave, walk away from his mess, and pretend it didn’t exist, or he could stay and deal with it. There was nowhere to walk to. He couldn’t handle Michel’s drama, and he’d burned his bridge to Lucille. The sad truth of it was, he had no one else to turn to. No other friends. His family—was he not speaking to them, or had they cut him off? Both were likely, and either way, they were unavailable.

  He hadn’t noticed before that he lived in such squalor. Michel had told him as much a few nights back when he’d arrived to pick up Brett for their sleepover. This new awareness could be because, apart from the pain meds he’d left at Michel’s, he hadn’t had anything in the past twenty-four hours. Not a drop of liquor. He was perfectly, horribly sober, staring at the manifestation of his shitty life.

  He began to clean. This wasn’t an eighties movie montage with friends and a great soundtrack. It was grueling, silent, and long. His iPod was broken and he was alone.

  Once the clothes and dishes were cleared and the empty whiskey bottles and beer cans recycled, he found his layer of discarded drafts. The sequel t
o The Night Before the Apocalypse, now so long overdue he’d been dropped by the studio and his agent, abandoned by the few fans he had, and rejected by the girl he loved. The last didn’t have anything to do with his film, but it seemed fitting to include in his laundry list of life failures.

  He stuffed the crumpled pieces of paper in a bag and tied it closed. This wasn’t one of those moments when he would unfold his work and begin to read with a heavy heart, only to find that the words on the page weren’t half as bad as he’d dreaded. That the script only needed tweaking to become the next great thing. No, this was one of those moments when he decided enough was enough. That script would never get written. He hadn’t written for days, and he didn’t miss it now. That had to be some sort of a sign.

  By his bed he found a couple of condom wrappers. He couldn’t remember when they were from or who he’d been with. Great. He added banging random girls and not remembering it to his failure list.

  On the bed were all of his books. At some point in his drunken slump he’d started sleeping with them, wrapping them around him like an uncomfortably hard and pointy-edged cocoon. Every zombie novel ever written. His collector’s edition of Frankenstein. Some contemporary mysteries, some classics, some non-fictions about travel and living in the wild. Plus his well-worn chemistry texts, beloved yet abandoned.

  Brett put the books back on the empty shelves, turning over each one as he did. They were his grown-up teddy bears. They had been his only comfort when his life bottomed had out. It was time to be an adult again and put them away.

  The sheets crinkled when he pulled them back. He almost vomited.

  As he put the final touches on his cleaned abode, his cell phone rang. It was charging by the couch in the living room, and he lunged for it, hoping against hope someone had changed her mind and wanted him back. It was Michel.

  “Where are you?”

  Brett sank down on his couch with his disappointment. “I’m at my place.”

  “Oh. Why?”

  Brett shrugged. Stupid. He was talking on the phone. “I needed to take a step back, and it seemed like you and Simon had everything under control.”