Hollywood Holiday

by Gemma Halliday

  PRAISE FOR OTHER WORKS BY GEMMA HALLIDAY

  “A saucy combination of romance and suspense that is simply irresistible.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Stylish…nonstop action…guaranteed to keep chick lit and mystery fans happy!”

  —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “Gemma Halliday writes like a seasoned author leaving the reader hanging on to every word, every clue, every delicious scene of the book. It’s a fun and intriguing mystery full of laughs and suspense.”

  —Once Upon A Romance

  “Halliday is on top of her game, and readers will love Maddie’s new adventure.”

  —Booklist

  “It’s rare to find a romantic mystery that’s so funny, but this is certainly one of them. Maddie Springer (is) a ‘Versace’ Nancy Drew everyone can appreciate.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “Do not wait—rush right out and get Mayhem in High Heels and join Maddie and her gang for a thrilling mystery adventure!”

  —Romance Reviews Today

  “Halliday combines investigation with the inevitable romance for a mystery that’s enjoyably by the book.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  OTHER TITLES BY GEMMA HALLIDAY

  HIGH HEELS MYSTERIES:

  SPYING IN HIGH HEELS

  KILLER IN HIGH HEELS

  UNDERCOVER IN HIGH HEELS

  CHRISTMAS IN HIGH HEELS

  ALIBI IN HIGH HEELS

  MAYHEM IN HIGH HEELS

  HONEYMOON IN HIGH HEELS

  SWEETHEART IN HIGH HEELS

  FEARLESS IN HIGH HEELS

  DANGER IN HIGH HEELS

  HOLLYWOOD HEADLINES MYSTERIES:

  HOLLYWOOD SCANDALS

  HOLLYWOOD SECRETS

  HOLLYWOOD CONFESSIONS

  JAMIE BOND MYSTERIES:

  UNBREAKABLE BOND

  SECRET BOND

  BOND BOMBSHELL

  TAHOE TESSIE MYSTERIES:

  LUCK BE A LADY

  YOUNG ADULT BOOKS:

  DEADLY COOL

  SOCIAL SUICIDE

  OTHER WORKS:

  PLAY NICE

  VIVA LAS VEGAS

  A HIGH HEELS HAUNTING

  CONFESSIONS OF A BOMBSHELL BANDIT

  WATCHING YOU

  GEMMA HALLIDAY

  HOLLYWOOD HOLIDAY

  A HOLLYWOOD HEADLINES MYSTERY

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2013 Gemma Halliday

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by StoryFront, Seattle

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and StoryFront are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  eISBN: 9781477869673

  Cover design by Inkd

  HOLLYWOOD HOLIDAY

  “Twelve.”

  I looked up to find Max Beacon peering over the top of my cubicle. “Excuse me?” I asked.

  “The band Twelve. Ever heard of them?”

  I scrunched up my nose, digging into my mental memory bank. “I think so. Eighties group, right? Didn’t they have that one hit about a car or a girl or something?”

  Max nodded. “‘Summertime Girl.’ Only, they’ve mixed it up with some noisy electronic crap, and it’s burning up the charts as ‘Christmastime Girl.’”

  “A holiday remix. Clever.”

  Max shrugged his massive shoulders. “I guess. Too loud, if you ask me. I mean, it’s no ‘White Christmas,’ I’ll tell you that!”

  I grinned. Max was the oldest member of the L.A. Informer staff and did the obits for the tabloid paper. He kept a bottle of Jim Beam in his desk drawer, an inspirational poster of a kitty on his cubicle wall, and his own pre-written obit about how he’d died of cirrhosis of the liver tucked in a frame next to his computer.

  “So, what about Twelve?” I asked.

  “The drummer, Dusty Miller, bought the farm today,” Max informed me.

  “Bummer. How’d he die? Overdose?”

  Max shook his head, his jowls vibrating with the effort as a sly smile tugged at his lips. “You’ll never guess.”

  “Okay, so tell me, old man.”

  “He fell. From the top of a holiday parade float.”

  I raised one eyebrow at him. “Wow. You’re right. I never would have guessed that one.”

  “Oh, it gets better,” Max said, the grin taking over his whole face now. “The fall knocked him out cold, but what did him in was the group of reindeer that were prancing behind his float, pulling Santa’s sleigh. They got totally spooked and trampled him to death.”

  “Ouch. When did this happen?” I asked, already devising a headline for my gossip column: ROCK STAR BECOMES REINDEER ROADKILL. What can I say? I have a thing for alliterations.

  “Just now,” Max replied. “Cam was at the scene shooting pics of the celebrity floats. She tweeted me about the accident so I could get a jump on the obit.”

  “She’s still at the scene now?”

  Cameron Dakota was our staff photographer and resident paparazzo extraordinaire. If there was any chance the press was getting early details of this holiday horror, Cam would be on it.

  Max nodded. “I think so. Hell of a story, right?”

  I certainly hoped so. I looked down at my Hello Kitty watch. I’d been about to knock off for the day, a hot date in my future this evening, but I was only a few blocks from the parade route. I could swing by on my way home, get the deets, and have a headlining column ready to roll with tomorrow’s paper. I grabbed the vintage Strawberry Shortcake lunchbox that doubled as my purse and made for the elevators.

  I was just hitting the Down button when I heard my name.

  “Bender!” my editor barked from his glass-walled office in the center of the newsroom. “My office. Now!”

  “Shit,” I mumbled.

  “I heard that! Swear pig,” he shouted back.

  I clamped my lips shut and thought a much dirtier word. My editor, under the impression that I swear too much, had put a pink piggy bank on my desk, into which I had to deposit twenty-five cents for each infraction. Personally, I wasn’t a fan of the pig. But I was a fan of being employed, so I played along.

  Begrudgingly.

  “Did you want something, boss?” I asked, pasting a fake smile on my face as I backtracked to his office.

  Felix Dunn paced behind his computer, a frown between his sandy brows. “Cam just uploaded photos from the Hollywood parade,” he said, squinting at his screen. Felix was a few years older than I was, wore clothes much more wrinkled than mine, and had a British accent that vacillated between lilting and sputtering depending on how agitated he was. “Twelve’s drummer is dead?” he asked.

  I nodded. “That’s what Max just told me. I’m on my way to the scene now.”

  “Good. I want confirmation from a reliable source, a statement from someone close to the band, and a spin on the story that no one else has,” he said, ticking off bullet points on his fingers.

  I nodded. “Got it. Reliable, close, spun.”

  “This is big, Bender,” he added, shooting me a look that said he wasn’t convinced I could handle “big.” Granted, the wildest thing I’d reported on so far this year had been the color of the new Kardashian baby’s nursery, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t handle more.

  “I’m on it,” I reassured him again. “For realsies.”

  The frown between his brows deepened. “You sure yo
u don’t want Allie to go with you?”

  I rolled my eyes, just barely containing myself from saying another twenty-five-cent word. Allie Quick was the newest reporter at the Informer. She dressed like Barbie, talked like a Valley Girl in a CW show, and rumor had it she was sleeping her way to the top of the tabloid food chain, starting with my fair editor. By contrast, my hair was purple (today), I preferred my knee-high, black combat boots to kitten heels, and the only butt-kissing I did to keep my job was completely proverbial.

  “No, definitely not. This is a solo mission, boss. I’m totally on it. Professional, thorough, and fast as lightning,” I promised, sending him my own verbal bullet points as I backed out of his office.

  “Fine,” Felix called after me. “But I expect copy on this ASAP. And that spin better be bloody original!”

  Tabloid 101: The only thing worse than being last to break news is being the only one without an original take on it.

  I nodded my agreement, waving behind me as I made a beeline for the elevators.

  The Hollywood Christmas Parade was a tradition that went back over seventy-five years, following a two-and-a-half-mile route down Hollywood Boulevard, Sunset Boulevard, and Vine Street in the heart of Hollywood. Originally called the “Santa Claus Lane” parade, legend has it that it inspired the song “Here Comes Santa Claus” (“right down Santa Claus Lane…”). These days, the parade was a chance for the hottest movie newcomers, old TV faves, and hip musical acts to strut their stuff on national TV while sponsors welcomed in the shopping season. All while dressed in hats, furs, and heavy coats straight out of a holiday movie in the sunny, seventy-degree L.A. winter weather.

  But as I approached Sunset Boulevard, this year the parade site looked more like a scene out of CSI than an Irving Berlin movie. Police had set up plastic barricades to keep the crowds back, a black tarp covered the center of the street, and a large parade float that looked like an ice castle was parked at an awkward angle halfway down the block. I counted at least two dozen police officers scattered down the street—some in plainclothes, jotting down notes, and others in uniforms, trying in vain to tell the assembled crowd that there was nothing to see here. Clearly, there was a lot to see.

  And, luckily, Cam had front-row viewing for it.

  I spotted her right away, her almost-six-foot, former-model frame standing out among the crowd. She had set up camp at the edge of the barricade beside several other people with cameras—some sporting news station logos and others I recognized as fellow paparazzi members of the not-so-legitimate press. Cam had a camera to her eye, popping off shots in rapid succession of the tarp in the middle of the street.

  “Cam!” I called as I edged my way toward her, press pass held in front of me like a shield from the disapproving glare of the uniformed officer standing sentinel at the barricade.

  Cam lowered her camera just long enough to nod a greeting back. “Hey. Max texted that you were on your way over forever ago. What took you so long?”

  “Traffic was backed up for days with all of the looky-loos.”

  “A dead guy at a parade will bring them out,” she said, clicking a few more shots.

  I gestured to the tarp. “So is the dead guy under…,” I trailed off. While I’d like to think of myself as a pretty tough chick, the truth was I was used to reporting on Miley’s latest hairstyle or Jessica’s baby bump. Felix hadn’t been totally incorrect when he’d hinted that dead bodies were a smidge out of my comfort zone.

  But Cam shook her head. “No, the coroner’s van took the body away. You just missed it.”

  Thank God for small favors.

  “The tarp’s just there to preserve evidence.” She paused. “Or at least that’s what I could get out of the officer over there.” She indicated Officer Disapproving Glare.

  “You get anything else useful from him?” I asked, mentally checking off Felix’s first requirement: reliable source.

  “Not much.” She frowned behind her camera as she turned her lens on a pair of plainclothed officers crouching to examine some bit of debris on the road. “Dusty was declared dead at the scene. The band was rushed off to their hotel right away. Cops have been asking if anyone caught video of the scene on their phones.”

  I raised an eyebrow at her. “The cops the only ones asking?”

  She pulled her camera down and grinned at me. “You know me so well. I’ve been working the crowd. My standing offer is a hundred bucks for any usable footage.”

  “Got any takers yet?” I asked, experiencing mixed feelings about seeing said footage. I had a bad hunch that actually watching someone get trampled to death by reindeer was more than my “Tough Chick” could handle.

  Cam nodded, pulling out her phone. “I’ve had about a dozen people send clips to my Twitter account. I haven’t had a chance to take a look yet, though. You want to peek?”

  Not really. But I took the phone anyway, hoping the footage was blurry.

  I leaned my butt against the barricade and cued up the string of videos. As Cam said, there were quite a few parade goers willing to turn their home movies into cash. I watched a few quick clips of various parts of the parade. All of the audio was laced with shouting and singing in the background, which I assumed was Twelve’s “Christmastime Girl” song. It was hard to tell if it was really live or lip-synced, but the instruments looked real enough. A singer in tight leather pants with a head of bushy gray hair took up the front of the float. Two guys with guitars stood behind him, sporting beanie caps and acid-washed jeans. Dusty was seated at the top of the ice castle float, all the way in the back, behind a set of drums. All around the band were guys in snowman suits, swaying and twirling to the beat.

  Just as the float was approaching Vine, the song hit a screeching crescendo. Then I watched as Dusty flew off the back of the float, landing on the pavement below. A moment later there was a sound of hoofs, and my view was thankfully obscured by a brown, furry thing, which I assumed was a killer reindeer, darting into the shot. The camera owner starting yelling, “Holy crap, holy crap,” then the feed went dead.

  I shook off a creeped-out feeling of having just witnessed someone’s last moments and cued up the next video. While the footage was the same in this one, the angle was different. This amateur photographer had been on the other side of the float, offering only a partial view of Dusty until he took his fateful fall.

  I watched a handful of other clips from different angles before I finally hit on one video with the primo vantage point. Whoever had shot it looked like they’d been standing on something—a bench or maybe a concrete planter—and had gotten an angle that was higher. In this one I could clearly see Dusty, rocking out behind his drum set. Like the lead singer, he was in a pair of leather pants, which he, or some overpaid stylist, had coupled with a furry white jacket that looked like it was made of Yeti. His brown hair was loose, trailing in long, stringy wisps down his back, though he was thinning noticeably up front. He was slim and had deep wrinkles on his face that spoke to years of living like a rock star, but he looked as energetic as any twenty-something as he pounded on his set.

  Beside him a snowman was waddling to the drumbeat, waving his tiny arms back and forth, his mask stuck in a perpetual smile. Then, just as the music reached a fever pitch of guitar riffs and remixed dance beats, the snowman jerked violently to the left.

  Right into Dusty.

  I heard myself gasp out loud as the snowman’s shoulder plowed purposefully into the drummer, sending him reeling backward, over the edge of the ice castle, and heading, I knew, toward reindeer madness.

  Holy holidays. Dusty hadn’t fallen. He’d been pushed.

  “No freakin’ way!” Cam said as I replayed the video for her a second time.

  “I’m not crazy, right?” I asked her. “He was totally pushed.” New and very original headlines were suddenly dancing in my brain: FEROCIOUS FROSTY FORCES FATAL FALL.

  Cam nodded. “Totally. But why?”

  “I don’t know, but I doubt this was a r
andom pushing. Maybe the snowman had some grudge against Dusty? Or…,” I said, gaining steam, “maybe someone hired him to shove Dusty!”

  “Okay, so who was in the snowman suit?”

  I shook my head. “No way to tell. I mean, we can’t even tell if it’s a he.” Which was true. The suit was so big and bulky that it could have been anyone in it. The face was completely obscured by a giant round headpiece with a carrot nose and two eyes made out of coal.

  Cam pursed her lips, looking up and down the street. “Security rushed the parade performers out of here pretty fast after Dusty fell. It was total chaos. Our snowman could have ended up anywhere.”

  “If he’s smart, he’s long gone by now.” I had counted at least five snowmen dancing on the float itself and another ten or so marching alongside the ice castle. Our murderer would have had no problem blending in long enough to make a getaway. “Have you talked to the band?” I asked, immediately honing in on the people who were closest to Dusty at the time of his death—both literally and figuratively.

  “I wish,” Cam said, taking her phone back as it buzzed with another tweeted video. “Word is they’re scheduling select media interviews tomorrow, but they’re not talking to any press until then.”

  I pursed my lips. Chances were those “select” journalists would not include tabloid reporters.

  “Check this out,” Cam said, showing me the latest video.

  I looked at her screen. It was yet another angle of Dusty going down, this time from the POV of an elf walking in the parade behind him.

  “Felix is going to flip when he sees these,” Cam said.

  She was right. And he’d do a double backflip if I could figure out who was behind the merry murder. Talk about big!

  I glanced down at my watch. Six thirty.

  “Hey, I gotta go,” I reluctantly told her.

  Cam nodded. “No prob. I don’t think there’s much else to see here now anyway.” She paused, then looked up at me, a grin tugging at the corners of her mouth. “So what’s up? Hot date?” she teased

  I couldn’t help grinning back. “As a matter of fact, yes.”