Because
you’re a woman
“Cerulean,” Bunny’s voice whispered as the words dissolved into a skim of mist that took over the screen and slowly dissipated to reveal a bottle of the perfume.
Deirdre turned the television off.
“That woman is a piece of work,” Tyler said.
“She is that,” Deirdre said.
“And she makes it sound as if the story is all about her.”
“It always is.”
Deirdre had been invited to a screening of the movie. She and Henry had gone together. The movie echoed Sunset Boulevard without the grit and irony, with the screenwriter aging and the Hollywood star young and glamorous. Arthur’s life story was relegated to a few meager flashbacks.
In the movie’s climactic scene, Tito works himself into a jealous rage. He hits Bunny repeatedly, then grabs the strand of pearls she’s wearing around her neck, twists it tight, and starts to strangle her. Bunny’s mouth opens in a silent scream, her eyes go wide, and her face turns red. Joelen, played by Winona Ryder, screams at him from the bedroom doorway to stop. Tito drops Bunny and pivots toward Joelen, fingers flexed.
Bunny screams. She sees Joelen has a knife. Tito does not. He lunges for Joelen.
The camera lingers on Tito’s face. Stunned. On Joelen’s face. Shocked. On Bunny’s face. Horrified. Then the camera pans back as Tito drops to the floor, rolls over onto his back, his glazed eyes staring up at the ceiling.
In the movie, there was not a whiff of Deirdre’s presence at the house that night. No trace of Henry’s role in the tragedy, either. Henry still had no idea how close he’d come to being thrust into the limelight. Charged with murder. Revealed as the father of Bunny’s son.
After they sold Arthur’s house, Henry quit his job at the motorcycle dealership and used his share of their earnings to buy a one-story fixer-upper on a canal in Venice. In the garage, he’d opened a small recording studio.
Audio of Bunny’s testimony before the coroner’s jury had played as the movie’s final credits rolled. Sy had gotten Arthur a posthumous screenwriting credit, even though he’d never actually touched the screenplay.
“How would your father feel about the way she hijacked his story?” Tyler asked.
Deirdre paused. How would Arthur have felt? He knew writers got no respect. That his job was to put words on the pages of scripts that directors and actors inevitably rewrote, mangled, or ignored. But now he had a bestselling book. A major motion picture. Earnings that could have easily have paid for a bigger swimming pool and a credit that might yet garner an Academy Award nomination. He was still in the game.
“He’d have been thrilled,” Deirdre said.
Author’s Note
Like any young girl growing up in Beverly Hills, I was fascinated by the 1958 murder of Johnny Stompanato. I was ten years old, and I can remember poring over the pictures and articles that ran in the newspapers. The house where it happened was just a few blocks from where we lived, and Cheryl Crane, Lana Turner’s daughter who confessed to stabbing her mother’s gangster boyfriend to death, was just four years older than me.
Readers may recognize the crime as one of the inspirations for this book. But in researching Night Night, Sleep Tight, beyond rereading news accounts that ran at the time of the crime, I deliberately avoided learning anything about the people involved in the real crime. Instead I took the murder and its trappings, along with my own visceral response to it years ago, as a jumping-off point for an entirely fictional story with fictional characters I could build from the ground up.
About the Author
Author photograph by Lynn Wayne
HALLIE EPHRON is the bestselling, award-winning author of suspense novels. Her novels have been finalists for the Edgar, Anthony, and Mary Higgins Clark awards. With Night Night, Sleep Tight, she takes readers back to early-’60s Beverly Hills, a time and place she knows intimately. She grew up there, the third of four daughters of Hollywood screenwriting duo Henry and Phoebe Ephron, contract writers for Twentieth Century Fox who wrote screenplays for classics like Carousel and Desk Set. Ms. Ephron’s novels have been called “Hitchcockian” by USA Today, and “deliciously creepy” by Publishers Weekly. Her award-winning bestseller Never Tell a Lie was made into a movie for the Lifetime Movie Network. Her essays have been broadcast on NPR and appeared in magazines including More, Writer’s Digest, and O: The Oprah Magazine (“Growing Up Ephron”). She writes a regular crime fiction book review column for the Boston Globe. Ms. Ephron lives near Boston with her husband.
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Also by Hallie Ephron
Fiction
Never Tell a Lie
Come and Find Me
There Was an Old Woman
Nonfiction
Writing and Selling Your Mystery Noveclass="underline" How to Knock ’Em Dead with Style
Credits
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
Cover photograph © by Colleen Farrell/Arcangel Images
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
NIGHT NIGHT, SLEEP TIGHT. Copyright © 2015 by Hallie Ephron. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-211763-2
EPub Edition MARCH 2015 ISBN: 9780062117656
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