In another inset blowup, the Web site lovingly called attention to a production glitch: a strap of Becca’s thong was showing. The whole spectacle made her feel kind of violated, but Larry said she should get over herself. He said it was a hoot — with all the negative attention she’d gotten lately she should feel good about it and just do what everyone else did in this town, which was to find a way to exploit whatever press came their way. It had been Larry’s opinion all along that, instead of running from it, she should be actively milking the look-alike cause célèbre. She totally felt like Monica Lewinsky.
• • •
BECCA WAS A little uncomfortable lodging at the Dunsmores — she didn’t like being beholden. (Annie said she could stay with her awhile, but Annie was the kind of girlfriend who would get too dependent, and resent Becca when she finally found her own place.) She could have used the money Cass gave her to pay first and last on an apartment, but then what? In a few months, she’d have been scrambling again. At least this way, she could feel what it was like to have a nest egg. Besides, if she split, the Dunsmores might get grudgey, and that was one more problem she didn’t need. They might try to fuck with her. Since Rusty’s arrest and Grady’s attack of nerves, they’d actually been behaving pretty well. Their attempts to enlist her in ménage à whatevers were half-assed, and she’d made her feelings about that exceptionally clear.
She thought about going home. She couldn’t even believe Rusty was from Virginia and had lied all that time. He’d lied about a lot of things. (Though she felt ambivalent about him these days, Becca still nursed the hope he hadn’t lied about his feelings for her.) But she kind of needed to stay put awhile because with Rusty about to be extradited, if she flew to Waynesboro it would almost be like they were going back as a couple. Becca didn’t want to be psychically, or tabloidally, linked. She was still kind of in shock about it all.
One thing she did know was she wanted her mommy. Needed her — called and said she better come to Hollywood, right now. Sang into the phone while Dixie laughed: “Right here, right now, there is no other place I want you to be. Right here, right now, watching the world wake up from history.” They’d share the bed and spoon like when she was little and everything would be all right. Grady had better not perv on her, but Dixie could handle herself — hell, if she handled Daddy, she could sure handle Grady. Besides, the Dunsmores had more bark than bite. Dixie would have fun and be so impressed because the whole Mulholland Drive experience was kind of a magical mystery tour. And poor Dix never got a chance to go anywhere. She actually did visit New York three years ago as a job performance bonus and loved it so much she’d been planning another trip. Who needs loser New York? Everything’s so expensive the only thing a person can afford to do is go stare at that open grave. The dirty Bath Tub, or whatever the fuck they call it. Oh, Becca, you are terrible. C’mon, Mama, don’t you want to come see your baby? Don’t you love your baby? Now course I do, you know I do. Course I’m gonna come. Then c’mon, and she started singing “Right Here Right Now” again. She said the Dunsmores would rent limos and take them to all the fancy clubs and restaurants, the ones Dixie read about in Us Weekly and InStyle.
Dixie said Sadge had called, looking for her. He’d been trying to reach her ever since Rusty’s arrest. (Annie said he’d been calling her too.) Becca was avoiding him because she knew that whatever sympathy he put on, all Sadge really wanted was to gloat. He was still in love with her and that was his way.
• • •
VIV WEMBLEY WAS mortified that the waif whom she took into her home and her trust had been exposed as the lover of a suspected murderer and his associate — the latter being the very man who, for all intents and purposes, had killed her fiancé (and, uh, had creepily made his living impersonating). It was like one of those old Vincent Price movies that Kit used to love. When she thought of this Trojan horse, this Manson girl, roving through her Beachwood Canyon home unsupervised, her blood ran cold. (She wondered if Becca had been in cahoots with Gingher, that other thief and criminal, from the very beginning.) When at their last meeting, as part of an ill-timed, messy catharsis, a hysterical Becca had tearfully begged Viv to believe that she knew nothing about her boyfriend’s or his psycho friend’s “alleged” crimes while at the same time misguidedly confessing to myriad deceits regarding her noncancerous mom, Viv had literally pushed her from the house, run to the front bathroom, and thrown up.
• • •
RUSTY FINALLY consented to a visit.
(She could never bring herself to call him Herke.)
Grady had already been to see him and supposedly closed the deal on “To Kill a Unicorn,” privileged information that the Dunsmores shared with Becca only after becoming amazingly shitfaced on a hellacious combo plate of she knew not what. Even though the LAPD were aware of its role in ensnaring their suspect, they still didn’t have, as Grady liked to say, a “habeas scriptus.” To date, the prisoner’s creation was hearsay (though its whereabouts were a recurring theme of Becca’s station house interrogations). But Grady had a feeling the detectives were beginning to write “Unicorn” off; from everything he had heard, the Virginia D.A. was building a case just fine without it. After all, they had their corpus. Rusty talked about that missing screenplay like it was the Holy Grail, and Grady could understand why. Shit, he’d done the same type of thing when he was incarcerated — a man in prison had to hold on to something — but for the QuestraWorld president and secretary-in-motherfucking-arms, “To Kill a Unicorn” wasn’t so much the grail as it was his ace in the hole, a heat-generating ticket to ride in the Hollywood Derby. Rusty said it was buried in the desert somewhere, to be revealed at a future date. Mama Cass said her husband was a fool for believing him, but Grady fronted seventy-five hundred into his jailhouse account on good faith before declaring the whole topic verboten—it being the pardoned parolee’s superstitious opinion that even mentioning “the property” would not only endanger his own actual freedom but quite possibly jeopardize the Dunsmores’ most valuable holding, ergo threatening the very existence of QuestraWorld itself. He was certain the Mulholland digs were bugged.
Becca told Annie she couldn’t understand how anyone survived even a minute behind bars. It was funny — now he looked more like Russell Crowe than ever, all tousle-haired and gorgeous, sulky and dreamily wronged. Even his sweat smelled sweet. He told her he was sorry he’d “withheld” certain things and that he never meant to hurt her. When she asked if he loved her, he lowered his head like the genius in A Beautiful Mind, mumbling, “Pretty much, yeah. I pretty much did. And do.” She was glad he tacked on “and do.”
She asked about his crimes, but he simply shook his head. “Has your mother been to see you?” The tender question came unexpectedly from her depths. Again he shook his head, with forlorn indifference. He hadn’t really known the woman — his mother — all that long, he said. Their first meeting had occurred just three years ago. Becca presumed that Cassandra’s hypothesis was correct and that Rusty had been raised as an orphan. (Perhaps the tragedy had been set in motion when he decided to seek his ancestry.) Now was not the time to probe; it was a story she might never know. He wondered if she knew anything about the release date of the Spike Jonze film. Becca said she’d heard it was sometime in the fall. “Ah,” he said, with a scampish wink. “Did a little A.D. tell you?” He said that Grady told him there was something in the paper about his role being chopped down to nothing. Becca had heard the same thing on Access Hollywood but said she didn’t really know anything about it.