sex.lies.murder.fame.

by Lolita Files

  “No, girlfriend,” said Diamond, sounding irrepressibly giddy, like she was getting more than her share of what Sharlyn wasn’t getting at home. “We’re hanging today while the planners put the party together.”

  “Hanging when?”

  “After Diamond’s done with the show,” said Aurora. “We’re having lunch, getting massages, manicures and pedicures, and then we’re going shopping.”

  “But I was going to write today,” Shar said, flipping on the toothbrush and polishing her teeth.

  “You can write anytime,” Diamond said. “The way you knock those books out, girl, you’re like a machine. Give yourself a break.”

  Shar reached forward and cleared an area of steam from the mirror.

  “She’s right, you know,” Aurora agreed. “Let’s celebrate tonight. It will inspire you, trust me.”

  “I’onoboutalldat.”

  “Ooh, Shar. You could at least wait until we hang up before you do that. You know I got a thing about nice teeth, but I’m not trying to hear you brush yours over the phone.”

  “Rorry, rirl.”

  Shar spat the foam into the sink.

  “Thank you,” Diamond said.

  “All right, ladies, enough of that. We need to coordinate our day. Shar, we’ll pick you up a little before noon. Guess where we’re having lunch?”

  “Cipriani’s?”

  “Yep.”

  An easy lure. It was common knowledge that Shar couldn’t say no to anything Cipriani. Harry Cipriani, one of several Cipriani restaurants throughout Manhattan and the world, was the one she loved best, even more than the original. She’d been a regular for years and had her own special table. The restaurant was inside her second favorite hotel and writing hideaway, the Sherry-Netherland (the Hotel Plaza Athénée was tops). Miles had proposed to her in Italy at Cipriani’s flagship restaurant, the world-renowned Harry’s Bar in Venice, well aware that she’d be most amenable to marriage with a bellini in hand and a tender piece of carpaccio sliding down her throat.

  “Where’s the party tonight?” she asked.

  “Bungalow Eight,” Diamond said. “So be ready to get your boogie on.”

  Good, Sharlyn thought. That meant it would be a smaller gathering, more intimate. Bungalow 8 could only hold a hundred or so people. She could handle that.

  By now the bathroom was a thick stifling fog. Sharlyn could barely see the phone in her hand. Her feet were invisible. She enjoyed the steam. It was purifying. She’d been feeling so toxic lately, filled up with knotted thoughts and feelings that were better off released.

  “I really do need to write, you guys. I’m so behind. Beryl’s all over me.”

  “Beryl’s all over the floor, from what I just read.”

  “That is so wrong,” said Sharlyn.

  “You’re right,” replied Diamond. “I shouldn’t have said that. I know better than anybody how evil that paper can be.”

  “Perhaps you should invite her to the party,” Aurora said. “She’ll need a pick-me-up after dealing with all this.”

  Huge droplets of water were running down Shar’s body. She wiped her brow and leaned against the counter.

  “She won’t come. She’ll be too embarrassed.”

  “Invite her anyway,” Diamond said. “It’ll be good for her to get out. The worst thing you can do is go into hiding over a tabloid story. You’ve gotta keep movin’.”

  “Speaking of which, I need to get in the shower.”

  “All right. We’ll call when we’re downstairs. It’ll be around eleven-thirty.”

  “More like eleven forty-five,” said Diamond.

  “Bye, ladies.”

  She could hear Diamond shrieking something as she clicked off the phone and laid it on the steamy marble counter.

  “Invite Beryl!”

  Shar opened the glass door, stepped under the way-too-hot stream of water, and let the extreme temperature punish her supple skin raw.

  It was seven-twenty A.M.

  Beryl and Penn were still in bed. She was tucked under his armpit, her arms entwined around his middle. They both stared ahead at the colossal clock.

  “Why would you need to know Zulu time?”

  “One of my writers likes to exile herself in Africa when she works. She hates it when I unintentionally call in the middle of the night. I got the clock so I could be sure to call at a decent hour.”

  Penn paused, still staring at the time.

  “That’s not the reason you got that clock.”

  Beryl giggled.

  “All right, all right, so I saw the thing in one of those Skymall magazines on the plane and I ordered it during the flight.” She squeezed her arms tighter around him. “How’d you know I wasn’t telling the truth?”

  “I don’t know. I just know.”

  One of her bony elbows was digging into his side. He ignored it, willing to take the good with the bad. Ends justified means, he reminded himself. Ends justified means.

  She let out a deep breath.

  “I’m usually up and dressed by now.”

  He pulled away.

  “I’m sorry. I’d better get out of here. I’m probably keeping you from all kinds of—”

  “Nooooo,” she said, pulling him back. “This is cool. I’m always working. It’s nice getting to linger like this.”

  “Yeah?”

  His smile was a twist that curled up on one side.

  “Yeah.”

  She was grinning the broadest of grins. He was grateful for it. In the midst of all else, that grin made things much easier for him to endure. If she was just a bit fleshier, perhaps it would be even better. But a bad face and clanging bones? He was sure there were bruises on his temples from where her femurs had pressed through the slack give of flesh surrounding her thighs and crushed his head like a nut.

  He reached for his tube of Kiehl’s sitting on the nightstand on his side of the bed. He squeezed a bit out and swathed his lips.

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure,” said Penn.

  “Why do you use that so much?”

  “What, the Kiehl’s?”

  “Yeah?”

  “To keep my lips from chapping. What do you think I use it for?”

  “I don’t know,” she shrugged. “I thought maybe you just liked glossy lips.”

  “My lips are glossy?”

  “No, not really.”

  “It’s just lip balm. Sometimes my lips dry out. I can’t stand the feeling, so I use Kiehl’s. Satisfied?”

  He said it with a smirk and a gleam.

  “Yes,” she said, kissing his mouth. “I’d hate it if you had dry lips.”

  She ran her tongue around the side of his mouth, lapping at the coating of balm.

  “Perhaps I’ll play hooky today,” she said.

  “Can you do that?”

  “Sure. I never do, but I can. I’ll just say I’m a little under the weather, so I’m going to work from the house. Then we can spend the whole day together.”

  He didn’t respond.

  “I’m sorry,” Beryl blurted, suddenly nervous. “I just mapped your day out for you without even asking. You probably have to go to work or something.”

  “I work from home,” he said.

  “Doing what?”

  “Well, right now I keep the books for my buddy’s uncle,” Penn lied. He hadn’t done a day’s work for anyone in his whole life. “I’ve got a good eye for numbers, so I do it for the steady income while I’m working on some other things.”

  “Is that what you went to school for? Accounting?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Um…did you go to school? I mean, like, did you go to college? Not that it matters or anything. I didn’t.”

  “Yes, I went. I got my bachelor’s from NYU and an M.F.A. from Columbia.”

  “Wow. That’s pretty impressive.”

  “Eh,” he shrugged. “It’s okay, I guess.”

  He left it at that, not bothering to go into
what he had a bachelor’s in or why he chose to get a master’s in fine arts. The more mystique, the better. A woman like this would work extra hard if there was an element of mystery, something she could strive to attain access to. Women like this believed men like him had a sweet sensitive core, and that all it took was a few whacks at that hard outer shell, and then BOOM!—like some sort of mutant piñata, all kinds of warm and fuzzy goodness would come oozing out.

  Crack on, he thought. There’s nothing under my hard outer shell but layer upon layer of harder inner shells.

  This was going to be fun.

  “Where is she?”

  It was the big boss, Kitty Ellerman. She was standing at Shecky Lehman’s desk. The time was nine-thirty A.M. On the dot.

  Shecky was Beryl’s very pretty, very diligent editorial assistant. She had been at work for two hours already, reading manuscripts from the slush pile (something she’d taken upon herself in the hopes of coming across a diamond somewhere in the mountains of shit) and answering e-mail requests from authors regarding touring schedules and check status. She’d also been fielding calls about Beryl for the past half hour, and had an armful of galleys she was preparing to send out. She was in awe of Ellerman, a woman who, like Beryl, had started at the bottom some twenty-plus years ago typing contracts, then became a successful editor, and now had her own imprint. To Shecky, she was a god. Shecky stood at attention when Ellerman appeared. She might have even saluted if her hands hadn’t been full.

  Shecky was blessed with good height. At five ten, she was just tall enough to inspire awe in other women, but not so Amazonian that she intimidated men. She had a fine bone structure that was draped in the best clothing her parents’ long showbiz money could buy. Her father was a successful Broadway producer who’d had hopes his brilliant and gorgeous summa cum laude Dartmouth grad would become a playwright and create material he could stage. Shecky couldn’t be less interested. And despite the attempts of every major agency in the city to lure her into modeling, the erudite Shecky wanted one thing and one thing only: to be the head of an imprint, perhaps even a publishing group. She wanted to be…dare she think it? A Kitty Ellerman herself.

  Her name, Shecky Lehman, was ready-made for it. It had that minimum three, maximum five, mostly four syllable rhythm that seemed to be the rule for heads of publishing. Son-ny Meh-ta. Phyl-lis Grann. Pe-ter Ol-son. Shec-ky Leh-man. It was a natural fit.

  She’d get there. She was working on it by reading unsolicited material (something Beryl encouraged her to do as a way to possibly discover some gems of her own), being ickily agreeable to in-house authors, and getting to know the people that mattered. Beryl had even gotten her input on manuscripts she edited. Shecky relished the opportunity, envisioning her own fast track within the publishing realm. In the meantime, she was a paragon of efficiency as she strutted her stuff down the hallowed halls of CarterHobbs as though it were a catwalk and she was Giselle. She moved like a pony on the trot, knees marching higher than nature intended, hips asway, her gait full of restrained sexuality that never breached the bonds of propriety. Men and women stopped what they were doing just to watch her go by, all pomp and circumstance, two and a half feet of loose chestnut curls billowing in her wake. It was a real show, one to which nobody ever quite knew how to react, as most were unsure whether it was farce or form. She had been voted Most Likely to Fuck Her Way Up by a spiteful faction of her sorority at Dartmouth. They couldn’t have been more wrong about her.

  Shecky had the great misfortune of being a Puritan in a Playmate’s body. It never occurred to her to use sex to advance. She was much too confident in her ability to get to the top on sheer brains and ambition. She believed a woman’s real power lay in her thinking, not in her thong, and she resented the ones who used sex as a tool for advancement or manipulation. They made it harder on those with real ethics and commitment. She had equal scorn for those who could be manipulated by sex. Shecky Lehman was a woman with a rigid moral core—integrity, with a capital Teg— and that batch of mean-spirited girls in her sorority had had no evidence to support their salacious opinion of her.

  The only reason she’d joined Kappa Kappa Gamma was because it was her mother’s dream. Margaret “Maggie” Lehman, née Barrett, had desperately wanted to be in KKG when she was at Dartmouth twenty-seven years before, but she was a Jew, and KKG—a most excellent and prestigious sorority—was comprised of girls of impeccable WASP lineage. Maggie had tried to slide under the radar with her unassuming last name, a name that had formerly been Lipshitz until her father gave it an overhaul. (The name Barrett had been derived from the Middle English barat, a word that meant trouble, strife, and, ironically, deception.) The KKG girls weren’t easily deceived. They’d smelled the Jew in her right off. Maggie had never gotten over the snub. When her daughter was accepted at Dartmouth, Maggie saw the chance to set things right, and, by golly, she was determined to see that Shecky did. After nearly two weeks of rush parties and events, on Preference Night Shecky had chosen KKG as the sorority she most wanted to join, not just because of her mother, but because she genuinely liked the girls that she’d met. Four sororities put in a bid for her, including KKG. They were impressed with her striking beauty and sophistication, and the fact that her name screamed Jew didn’t seem to matter. Shecky sank her bid, agreeing to join. Mother Maggie was both vindicated and thrilled. It was a new day, and overt racism at the Panhellenic level was no longer condoned. But girls would be girls, and they had much more insidious methods of torturing each other than racism.

  Like voting someone Most Likely to Fuck Her Way Up.

  The Kappa Kappa Gamma girls had given yet another Lehman a chip to carry. Shecky was going to prove that she was more than just the butt of an ugly sorority joke. KKG would be clamoring to claim her as part of its ranks once she hit her career stride. She’d show them—every single one of those girls who’d called her “fuck up” behind her back (it was an abbreviated spin on “one who fucks their way up”). They’d see how wrong they were, and they’d be sorry. All of them.

  “Beryl called in sick, Ms. Ellerman.”

  The CEO nodded with concern.

  “Of course she did. She’s seen Page Six?”

  “I’m assuming so, Ms. Ellerman. There was a message from her on my voice mail when I came in. She said she was under the weather, but that I could e-mail her if I needed to. She didn’t answer the phone when I called her at home.”

  Ellerman pursed her lips.

  “She must have seen it. Poor dear.”

  Shecky reserved comment.

  “It’s just awful,” Ellerman tsked. “Well, I hope she doesn’t let it get to her. She’s not the first editor to get reamed in the media. She certainly won’t be the last. No matter what, you don’t let this kind of nonsense bring you to your knees.”

  Too late.

  Beryl was on her knees, and had been for the past ten minutes, taking it up the love canal doggy-style, head pressed against the cushy McRoskey Airflex, bare ass pointed toward the borealis. She’d never done doggy before (she’d never done anything, really), even though Snoop D-O-Double once gave her a drawn-out description of its merits as she worked with him on a book. She’d seen pictures in sex manuals and had watched porn movies in slow-mo (the better to perfect her skills, should they one day be called upon), but nothing could compare to being in the moment, getting reamed, and getting reamed well. Penn’s smacks on her bony backside echoed around the pristine bedroom, resonating throughout the brilliant acoustics of the apartment. He leaned into her, slipping his hands underneath so he could ply and knead her meager breasts. Beryl was frenzied, her neck, shoulders, and back flushed with patches of red. The golden god was giving her the golden rod, and she was loving it.

  And how.

  “Is she there?”

  “No, Mrs. Tate. She called in sick.”

  “Damn. She saw the Post, didn’t she?”

  “I’m guessing she did, Mrs. Tate.”

  “Is she checking her messa
ges?”

  “So far she hasn’t, but she said she’ll be checking e-mail.”

  “Right,” Sharlyn said. “Hmmm.”

  “Mrs. Tate, I must tell you, I’m really looking forward to reading your new manuscript.”

  This bitch, Shar thought. Shecky knew damn well the manuscript was nowhere close to being read by anybody anytime soon. There was no manuscript. Fucking bitch.

  “All right, Shecky. I’ll just shoot Beryl a note on her BlackBerry to make sure she’s okay.”

  “Sure, Mrs. Tate.”

  “Thanks.” Shar’s tone was sharp.

  “I wasn’t trying to be offensive, Mrs. Tate. I really am looking forward to your book.”

  Sharlyn couldn’t believe Shecky mentioned the manuscript again.

  The two women were at a nice-nasty impasse. A long pocket of dead air hung between them.

  “I’ll tell her you called then, Mrs. Tate.”

  “Bye, Shecky.”

  “Bitch,” Sharlyn muttered once the phone was dead. She didn’t like that girl, even though a lot of other authors, mostly men, seemed to think she was choice. That whole “Mrs. Tate” business. So egregiously deferential and helpful. It was irritating, bordering on condescension. Sharlyn could almost hear the gears turning in Shecky’s mechanical head every time she spoke. The only person’s opinion that seemed to matter to her was Kitty Ellerman’s. Beryl was just a stepping-stone to get her closer to the Big Lady and the Bigger Job. Shar knew it, even though Beryl didn’t seem to. Shecky knew just how to flaunt her good looks, ice-princess aloofness, and exceptional competence. Beryl loved her. Shecky’s attention to detail was ideally suited to Beryl’s personality. Kitty Ellerman thought she had great potential.

  The girl gave Sharlyn the heebies.

  “She’s not that bad,” Beryl had said, but Sharlyn didn’t buy it.

  Something about Shecky just didn’t bode well. She was too perfect. People that perfect should always be watched.

  Ten thirty-eight A.M. loomed in bright red LCD largeness, reminding them of the realities of existence. Things like hunger, a bath, coffee. Salve.