Celebrity Spin Doctor

by Celia Mulder

  “Hmm. We did until Simon disappeared.”

  “Oh. He’s at Lucille’s.”

  There was silence on the other end. Brett realized what he’d said and what he’d admitted to by saying it. He should make up an elaborate excuse.

  “You fucked her, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Simon walked in on you?”

  “Well, yes and no.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Yes, he walked in, but we were mostly clothed already and Lucille was in the middle of stomping on my heart.”

  There was the sound of running water on Michel’s end. “Sorry, bro, that sucks.”

  “Yeah, wait, what are you doing?” Brett didn’t want to know. The words came out of him without his consent.

  “I’m taking a bath.” This was accompanied by the sound of water swishing, no doubt as Michel climbed into one of his huge Jacuzzi tubs. Naked. While talking on the phone. To Brett.

  “Dear God, why?” Brett held the phone away from his ear as though that would protect him from the image of Michel naked in the tub. No wonder Simon thinks Michel and I have a gay thing going on. He cringed.

  “What else was I supposed to do? You guys all left. Simon’s not answering his phone. Lucille won’t answer hers. No one’s helping me find Sylvia—”

  “What do you mean Simon and Lucille aren’t answering their phones?” Brett’s heart pounded. Even though Lucille had quit, Simon hadn’t. With a client like Michel, a fortune-making client, one or both of them should be always available. They were attached at the hip to those phones. It was a compulsion for them. If neither one was answering Michel’s calls... He didn’t know what it meant yet, but it wasn’t something good.

  “I mean,” Michel was saying, “when I called them, it went to voicemail. So much for 24/7 spin doctor service. I’m in the middle of a major crisis here, and both of the people I’m paying to help me through it have disappeared. Well, I guess one of them was having sex with you, but what about the other?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Does Simon Anton strike you as a little off?” Michel asked, splashing again.

  “You mean the whole running from the law for eight years without contacting Lucille at all and then trying to blow me up and then helping us, no questions asked?”

  “No, I mean, I think he’s gay. Of course I mean that!”

  Michel was never as dumb as Brett gave him credit for being. Brett’s thoughts were reeling. He was trying to piece together everything that had happened in the last few days from the moment he’d stumbled in on Michel and Lucille in the hotel room. He got briefly distracted by thinking about the dress Lucille had been wearing that night but was soon back on track. Still, it wasn’t fitting together. It was like a small child’s puzzle with those huge wooden pieces that all should fit on the board but don’t. He was banging them against the board, over and over again, but with no luck. There was no doubt about it—he wasn’t destined for a career as a detective.

  “Okay, yeah, that’s all kinda iffy. So what do you think is going on?”

  His shoulder started to ache in its sling. Way to choose the worst moment, he told it sternly.

  “I think,” Michel said from his Jacuzzi bath, “Simon is the one who kidnapped Sylvia.”

  Brett, who’d been looking around for something to ease the pain, jumped up. “What? Really? Oh shit, I have to get to Lucille!”

  “Um, why?”

  “Because, you ass, Simon was with her when I stormed away! If he thinks she knows he’s the kidnapper, he may try to take her out!” Brett was pacing the room, yelling into the phone.

  “Or they’re working together.”

  Brett paused. It was true. They could be working together. “I’ll take my chances. I’d rather be on Lucille’s side than against her any day.”

  “You want a reason to see her again.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Yeah, it is. But whatever. When you’re done being crazy, will you please come over? I want to take a nap, but I’m afraid to close my eyes in case someone drops a toaster in my bath or stabs me or something.”

  With anyone else, Brett could have reassured them they were exaggerating and no one was going to kill them while they slept. With Michel, it was a legitimate concern. “Yeah, sure.”

  “Hurry.” Michel hung up.

  Brett grabbed his jacket from its reclaimed hook on the wall. He opened the door to find Sylvia standing on the other side, flanked by two large, sinister-looking men.

  “Great timing,” she said. “And you’re all ready to go. Saves us a lot of work, you know.”

  Brett was too shocked to do more than mouth words. “But, what, how, why...?”

  “You have two options: you can either come with us quietly, or I can have these boys rough you up a little. What do you say, cuz?” She smiled as she spoke. For someone who’d spent the past few days hours kidnapped, Sylvia Stanton looked remarkably well. She was dressed head to toe in black, with smoky eyes and bright red lipstick. There were no rips in her clothes, no tangles in her hair, nothing to indicate she’d been held against her will.

  Brett found a bit of his voice to say, “But why me?”

  Sylvia smiled wider. “Isn’t it obvious? You’re the only person I know who’s an ordained minister.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Around the time Brett was startled by Sylvia and her thugs, Lucille waltzed into a hospital, dressed in a commandeered white coat and unfashionable blue scrubs. The unitard had been a joke, but this get-up was hardly better. Simon had a plan. A terrible, simple plan that grew worse and worse the closer she got to the front desk. But it was the only one they had, and this was their one shot, so it had to work.

  The security guard behind the desk barely looked up from his computer as Lucille passed, though her footsteps echoed in the empty hallway. It’s working. He thinks I’m a doctor. The thought had her feeling almost giddy.

  She sobered up as she reached the elevators, faced with an array of lettered wings and numbered floors. If she were a real doctor, she would know whether she wanted A7 or B13. Unlike the staff entrance, where she’d scanned her stolen ID card and strolled through undetected, this area wasn’t empty. There were people constantly moving. Even in the late hours of the night, the hospital never slept.

  Lucille stared down at the clipboard she was carrying, pretending to consult it as she waited for the elevator. “Which floor?” she hissed into the tiny microphone in her cleavage.

  Simon’s voice crackled in her ear. “I’m working on that.”

  Lucille sighed and closed her eyes. She had a dozen retorts at the ready, but she was exposed in her current location, and arguing with Simon would only slow him down. Instead, she stared more intently at the blank chart in her hands.

  A couple of nurses passed her, chatting together. One of them looked at her with a frown but turned back to the group and continued talking. The elevator arrived. Lucille got in.

  “The D wing. She’s on the third floor,” said Simon in her ear.

  Lucille nodded to no one in her empty elevator. When the doors opened again, she stepped out and headed to D, a wing in the back corner of the giant complex, its doors barred from general admittance. The swiped badge got her through and she was inside, standing in the eerie dim light of the psychiatric ward.

  ***

  Brett was shoved into the back seat of a car. There was a sack over his head and his hands were tied behind his back. Like on a crime show where they find the kidnapped person bound and gagged. Only on those shows, they usually don’t reveal said person until they’re being saved, and by then the kidnapped person is so grateful, they forget what the hours of bag prison were like. Hot and stuffy was what they were. And smelly. And itchy. The sack they’d put over his head was some sort of old feed bag, the kind used for horses in the movies. It smelled like something earthy and grainy. It itched against his skin, but with his hands bound behind him, he couldn
’t do a thing about it.

  Unfortunately for them, they hadn’t gagged him. “Sylvia, where the fuck are you taking me?”

  Silence.

  “Hello? Sylvia. This is your cousin Brett. The one you just kidnapped? I repeat, where the fuck are you taking me?”

  Silence. Then a deep voice, one of the men who’d “helped” him to the car. “Miss Stanton isn’t in this vehicle.”

  “Great. Just great. So where are you bozos taking me then?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough,” the voice replied.

  Brett tried to slouch back against the seat, but his hands were in the way. This was doing nothing to ease the pain in his shoulder. He was supposed to be keeping it in the sling in front of him, not twisted behind him. He debated telling his captors this but, considering they wouldn’t tell him simple information like where they were going, decided against it.

  They were smooth drivers, he could give them that. Not once was he bumped or jostled. He might not have even been in a moving car at all if his heightened hearing hadn’t picked up the hum of the engine.

  He thought about how Lucille would react when she learned he’d been kidnapped. Though, given her radio silence with Michel, it was possible she’d been kidnapped first. Maybe wherever he was going, she’d be there. The idea calmed him a bit. She’d know what to do; she always did.

  After an endless amount of driving, they arrived. They were, of course, at Michel’s mansion, because where else would they be? The trouble had started there, and there the trouble would end. Hopefully.

  ***

  It seemed odd that, unlike the rest of the hospital, the psychiatric ward was mostly deserted. But seeing as Lucille didn’t make a point out of hanging out in psychiatric wards, or hospitals in general, she had no point of comparison. A lone nurse sat at a desk, half asleep over a pile of paperwork. Lucille hurried by, keeping her steps as light as possible. When she was out of sight of the desk, she hissed at Simon, “Which room?”

  This time Simon came through right away. “Solitary confinement room B. Apparently she got into a fight with one of the inmates or, uh, patients earlier and they put her in there. Amazing the stuff you can find when you hack into someone’s files.”

  “I thought you said she was admitted today?”

  “She was. Stay on your toes. This woman is dangerous.”

  Lucille ditched the clipboard and followed the arrows to the solitary confinement area. With the way things were going tonight, she expected to find padded cells holding babbling people in straitjackets. Instead they were normal, single-occupant hospital rooms that locked from the outside.

  She found B and peered through the small window at the plain, white-walled space beyond. On the twin bed lay a woman in a bikini bottom and a floral hospital gown, snoring. Her blonde hair was plastered to her face, damp and sticking out at odd angles. From this distance, Lucille couldn’t tell what age she was. She might have been fifty or fifteen, her plastic surgery was that pervasive.

  “We have a problem,” she said to her microphone.

  “She’s not there?”

  “No, she’s here. She’s most certainly here. She’s passed out in her room, dead to the world. Because, you know, it’s the middle of the night.”

  “That bitch!”

  Lucille contemplated the situation before her. She didn’t want to go into the room. She’d been hoping, unrealistically, that she’d find the occupant awake, in an unbarred room, where she could whisper at her from the doorway. No part of her wanted to be trapped with a murderous lunatic supermodel. Given the choice, she’d take Sylvia Stanton any day. At least Sylvia had only tried to murder someone. Beverly Walton had gone through with it.

  Gathering all her strength and promises to kill Simon herself if she got out of this alive, Lucille unlocked the door and slipped inside, careful to leave a crack so she could escape.

  “Can you wake her up?”

  “Probably, if I can figure out how. You don’t have a long poking stick in that creepy van of yours, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Fine. Then I’ll throw my shoe at her.” And she did. She lifted her pant leg, revealing the leather boots she’d been tiptoeing around on for the better part of an hour. Pulling one off, she leaned against the wall beside the door and lobbed it at Beverly’s head. The boot hit the back wall and fell right onto Beverly’s sleeping face. The model flailed, causing her to fall off the narrow mattress and waking her from her slumber. She gave a bellow and pushed herself off the floor, blinking and glaring through her mess of dirty hair at Lucille.

  “What. The. Fuck.”

  “Yeah, okay, sorry about that.” Lucille gave her best apology smile.

  Beverly scoffed. She had dark rings of mascara around her eyes and lipstick smeared up to her nose. From this new angle, Lucille put her closer to the fifty range and applauded her plastic surgeon for making her look thirty-five.

  “Beverly Walton?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Oh my God. I’m just such a huge fan of yours!” When they’d discussed it earlier, Lucille and Simon had both agreed she should play the woo girl. It felt weird. Lucille hadn’t been a woo girl since high school, but she was a professional.

  “You’re not a doctor.”

  Lucille shook her head, smiling as big as she could. “Nope, but they totally bought it. This was the only way I could get to you. No one’s seen you in years, and oh my God, I can’t believe it’s really you.”

  “Why,” Beverly said, grimacing as she pulled herself off the floor and back to her bed, “did you throw your boot at me? Nice knock-offs, by the way.”

  “They aren’t knock-offs. They’re originals from your line. I’ve had them for years and knew I had to wear them when I came to see you!”

  “Am I supposed to be flattered that you threw one of my own boots at me?”

  Lucille looked contrite. “I really am sorry. It’s just...you were sleeping, and I really need to talk to you...”

  Lucille waited for Beverly to ask why she hadn’t nudged her awake like a normal person. She didn’t.

  “Can’t it wait until tomorrow, when I get out of this hellhole?” Beverly’s gaze roamed the empty room, unfocused and incoherent. According to Simon’s source, Beverly had laid low for the past eight years but was a regular guest at this particular psych ward, checked in once a month by her eighty-five-year-old mother.

  Lucille looked down at her solitary boot. “No.”

  Beverly gave a huge sigh, leaned back against the wall, and closed her eyes. “Then what?”

  Lucille paused long enough for Beverly to open her eyes. Then she glanced out to the empty hallway, like she didn’t want this to be overheard. “It’s private.”

  The model rolled her eyes. “There’s no one here. They shut all the crazies up and turned out the lights.”

  “It’s about...Simon Anton,” Lucille whispered.

  The change in Beverly’s expression was immediate. Instead of unfocused, detached, and drugged, she looked sober, wide-awake, and very interested. “Oh honey, what’d that fucker do to you?”

  Lucille drew back for effect. “What makes you think he did something to me?”

  “Because it’s what he does. He comes into your life playing fucking Jesus and then slips away when all hell breaks loose.” Beverly’s jaw clenched. Her face would have turned red in anger, but she didn’t seem to have the ability to show emotion any longer.

  Lucille looked at Beverly long and hard, sizing her up. Then allowed her shoulders to crumble, in a vulnerable breakdown. “Yeah, he did. He ruined my career, my marriage, my life. Because of him, my sweet twin babies have to...have to...go to public school!”

  Beverly inhaled sharply. “No.”

  Lucille nodded, hiding her face in her hands. “It’s true.”

  “That bastard!” Beverly stood up and started pacing her little room, unsteady on her own bare feet, favoring her left side. “That conniving asshole. That goddamn motherf
ucker!”

  This went on for quite a while, with Lucille fake crying, Beverly running through her repertoire of curse words, and no one coming to check on the commotion. Finally, Beverly sank down on the starched sheets, too exhausted to hold up her own weight anymore. Lucille wiped her dry eyes but let her lip quiver.

  “I know you want revenge, honey. I want it too. I almost had it once. But I’ve been trying to track down that man for eight years with no luck.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Beverly got a long, far-off look on her face. “He disappeared without a trace right after—” She choked, her own fake tears caught in her throat. “But that’s a long story.”

  Lucille’s face was intent on Beverly’s. In her ear, Simon was listening so hard she could hear him breathing. “I have time.”

  It was Beverly’s turn to eye her up and down. She walked over, picked up the discarded boot from the floor, and handed it to Lucille. “I guess anyone who still has the boots from my collection seven years after they were discontinued has to be trustworthy, right?”

  Lucille nodded. She didn’t mention that they’d picked the boots up that night from one of Simon’s old connections, a costume shop he used to frequent under the name Anton Marcos. They were uncomfortable, a size too small, and the best decision Lucille had made that night was taking the one off to throw at their designer. Now she put it back on, trying to hide her flinch as she zipped it up.

  “Simon Anton was arrested eight years ago after my friend and part-time lover Cooper was horribly murdered.”

  Lucille gasped appropriately. “No. And you think he did it?”

  Beverly laughed. It was a cold, empty laugh. “No, but it was his fault.”

  Lucille shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

  Beverly sighed. “I told you it was a long story. Let me go back. I met Cooper one night at a party. One of those parties where everyone has already fucked everyone else and is just waiting for the right moment to release nude pics on the Internet, you know?”

  Lucille would like to say she didn’t know, but she’d worked in this town for too long and had cleaned up after more than a few of those parties. So she nodded.