“I don’t know. She came over here from London on the tour with him last year. I think that started in the spring, playing outdoor stadiums all across the country. Apparently they’d split up before he died. That’s all I know.”
“Why did they split up?”
Stuart shrugged. “She didn’t say. Just walked out on him.”
“I don’t remember hearing anything about them being an item. Wasn’t there a lot of publicity surrounding their relationship?”
“Not particularly. I mean, she wasn’t well known then. You’d have had to cast a pretty fucking wide net around here to find anyone who’d heard of Sally Bolton. You think everyone sits down and tunes in to PBS?”
“I guess not.”
“You bet your ass not. As far as most people are concerned it’s strictly Beavis and Butt-head, The Simpsons and Married with Children. You can forget your fucking Middlemarches and your endless P.D. James adaptations. Your average television viewer ain’t got the attention span for shit like that. And she looked different then.” Stuart laughed. “Boy did she ever look different. I’ve seen pictures. You know, the frizzy hair, green and orange, and the weird makeup, black lipstick, skin-tight leather pants, bare midriff. Fucking earrings as long as your arm. She even had a tattoo of a butterfly on her left shoulder. Still got it, I guess.” He laughed again. “She sure wasn’t the Sally Bolton who came to my office that day with Ellie.”
“Sarah mentioned Ellie, too,” Arvo said. “Said she was the one who brought the two of you together. That right?”
“Right. Ellie Huysman. She and Sarah went to drama school together in London, then Ellie decided she didn’t have either the talent or the stamina for acting, so she came over here and went into the business side. Eventually got into casting and ended up working for me. Small world, huh?” Stuart laughed. “I think after a couple of years she wished she’d stuck with acting. Would’ve been a lot fucking easier.”
“And you met Sarah through Ellie?”
“That’s right. I was meeting with her one day about this new cop show the network was coming up with and she mentioned she thought Sarah would be perfect. They were looking for something different but the same, as usual on TV, if you get my meaning, and there’s always a pretty good market for the right kind of Brit women. You know, Amanda Donohoe, Emma Thompson, Helena Bonham Carter and the rest. So I ordered some videos of Sarah’s work from PBS, and I saw what Ellie meant.”
“Is Ellie Huysman still around?” Arvo asked.
“Moved to Canada late last year, just after she introduced me to Sally. Said she couldn’t stand living in LA one more minute. Not that I blame her, some days. I mean, we got a few problems here, right? But I ask you, fucking Canada? Anyway, she lives in Toronto now. She’s still in the business. Apparently they make movies up there in the snow, too.”
“You got her number?”
“Sure.” Stuart pulled a small address book from his pocket and gave Arvo a number with a 416 area code. “She’ll be able to tell you a lot more than I can about Sarah,” he said. “Like I said, they’re old friends. Go way back.”
“What does Karen think about your relationship with Sarah?”
Stuart narrowed his eyes. “I know what you’re getting at, Arvo,” he said, “but forget it, there’s nothing like that between us at all. Never was. Sarah’s special. It’s like she’s family.”
“Karen goes along with this?”
“Karen adores her.”
That satisfied Arvo for the moment. He had met Karen a year ago at a party Stuart had thrown. She was a strong-willed, intelligent woman about twenty years younger than Stuart, and she had given up a promising acting career for her husband and family. She and Sarah would be about the same age, Arvo calculated, around thirty-four. If Karen accepted Sarah, that was a good enough character reference for him.
They leaned on the railing and looked out over the ruffled ocean. A smell of fresh-brewed coffee drifted over from a waterfront café and mingled with ozone on the light breeze. Perfect, Arvo thought. Just enough glare to make you put on your shades. Warm, but not so you’d start sweating. There was one more possibility he had to pursue with Stuart.
“Right now Sarah’s hot property, isn’t she?” he asked.
“Up and coming. This series is really putting her on the map. And real quick. We’ve got movies lined up. Real movies. Maybe Merchant-Ivory. You know, all those English country houses and big lawns in the mist and rain. The real thing, not just Hollywood made-for-TV crapola, though there’ll be some of those, too. Bread-and-butter shit.”
“Can you think of any reason why someone might want to sabotage her career before it’s even got off the ground?”
“What?”
“You heard me. I’m saying maybe somebody’s playing games with her, trying to freak her.”
“Oh, come on, Arvo. That’s crazy.”
“No crazier than any other possibility. No matter what you read in papers or see on the screen, there aren’t psychopaths lurking around every street corner. But maybe there is someone who hates Sarah Broughton so much he wants to pull the plug on her career.”
“Like that cheerleader thing, where the girl’s mother tried to have the competitor’s mother killed just to put the kid off her stride?”
“Could be. She must have beaten people out to get the part.”
“Sure, but... No, no, I can’t see it.”
“If Sarah’s a little fragile to start with, you can see how someone might think that sending her crazy letters like that could send her over the edge.”
“Not to mention finding a dismembered body practically right in front of her house?”
“That too.”
Stuart rubbed his chin. “You’re saying that the letters, the love stuff, might just be a way for someone to get at her? That whoever is doing it is crazy in some other way from the way he makes it seem?”
Arvo laughed. “You could put it like that. Sometimes crazy people are clever enough to pretend to be crazy in a different way. People read about stalkers in the newspapers all the time. They’re probably easy enough to imitate. We’ve had at least five false-victim cases. Maybe this is just the other side of the coin, a false-obsessive case. Do you know anything about Sarah’s private life that might help me pin someone down?”
“Far as I can tell, her private life is very private these days, and that means as in by herself private. I know it might seem crazy to you, her being a beautiful Hollywood celebrity and all, but she’s kept to herself that way ever since I’ve known her. No drugs, no wild orgies, no tabloid headlines. This woman is squeaky clean. Christ, she hardly even fucking drinks.”
Stuart paused. Arvo looked out to sea and saw a large oil-tanker drifting across the horizon. From an open window across the street, he could hear Nat King Cole singing about chestnuts roasting on an open fire.
“She buries herself in her work,” Stuart went on. “I’m telling you, this lady is different. Has to be or this town would’ve chewed her up and spit her out by now. She’s not impressed by us. She’s just not your typical asshole star. When she’s not working, she just wants solitude, peace and quiet.”
Arvo looked around. “Hell of a place to come for that.”
Stuart scratched the side of his neck. “Fuck, don’t I know it. But for Chrissake, Arvo, the last guy she was in love with OD’d outside a nightclub. That’s gotta have some effect on a person’s psyche. Maybe work helps keep her mind off things she’d rather not think about. I don’t know. I’m no shrink. But these letters and now this murder... Maybe you’re right. If he keeps this up, it might just send her over the edge. Tough or not, there’s only so much a person can take.”