The Last Cheerleader

Craig wasn’t hiding at all. He was right there on the floor, blood all around his head and slowly seeping along his body to his shoes.

In shock, I could barely think or move. I looked at the window, which was open. Cheap plastic curtains in a gaudy flower pattern were blowing in a lightly salty breeze that came off the ocean from this side of the motel. There were marks on the sill that seemed to be blood, marks that might have come from a killer, possibly escaping that way.

I knelt beside Craig, feeling for a pulse. I couldn’t find one anywhere. I touched his cheek. Still warm. He hadn’t been dead long.

Stroking his forehead, I couldn’t hold back tears. The poor guy never got the chance to get out of the hole he’d dug himself into. And we were so close to getting what he wanted.

I knelt there for a long moment, so staggered I wasn’t able to stand. I guess I noticed the draft, finally, that slammed the front door shut. Grasping the bathroom sink, I pulled myself up slowly and realized there was blood on my skirt and my knees.

I was still standing over Craig’s body, blood all over me, when the police banged on the front door and piled in. “Don’t move!” they ordered, guns pointed directly at me.

I didn’t even breathe.

Also by MEG O’BRIEN

CRIMSON RAIN

GATHERING LIES

SACRED TRUST

CRASHING DOWN

THE FINAL KILL

The Last Cheerleader

Meg O’Brien

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Sergeant Carlos A. Mendoza, Administrative Sergeant, El Segundo Police Department, El Segundo, California, for his unflagging assistance regarding police procedures in the El Segundo and Los Angeles area. Thanks for all the e-mails, and for being so quick to answer mine. If any errors remain, they are all mine.

Thanks again to my children and all my family for helping me in so many ways throughout the writing of my books. As I finish up number fifteen, it seems like just yesterday that I stood in that little health food store in Paradise, California, declaring, “I’m going to be a writer! I’ll give it five years, and if it doesn’t work out, I won’t have lost anything but five years.” I can’t believe no one laughed. At least, not to my face!

It actually took eight years before my first book was published, but who’s counting? From the birth in 1990 of Jessica (Jesse) James, my mystery series reporter, to The Last Cheerleader today, it’s been a great ride, and I hope it goes on forever.

I would also like to thank my good friend Cathy Landrum for her invaluable research assistance, my son, Greg, for his sharp editorial eye, and another good friend, Nancy Baker Jacobs, for all the phone calls, support and helpful ideas along the way. No author should be without someone with whom to bat ideas around!

I am also grateful for the loyal friendship of Alice Austin in North Wildwood, New Jersey, who found me through my book Crashing Down; Michelle and John Jaceks, good neighbors even when they’re off in their shiny new RV, and Bernice Cook, the smartest and dearest lady I know.

Last, but never least, I would like to thank Miranda Stecyk for being such a dream editor, and Dianne Moggy and Amy Moore-Benson for getting me started with MIRA—the best and brightest publishing house around.

“In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read; if they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

—Will Rogers

“The only ‘ism’ Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.”

—Dorothy Parker

“I just want to tell y’all not to worry—them people in New York and Hollywood are not going to change me none.”

—Elvis Presley

Contents

Begin Reading

Epilogue

When a train comes bearing down on one, there’s always a warning. The tracks shake and noise vibrates through them, like the sound of a thousand poor souls in hell. There’s a heavy smell of oil in the air, and if anyone is on those tracks—if they can’t get off, no matter how hard they try—there is also the dreadful, sickening scent of fear.

That’s the way it was for me with Tony. I’d loved him far too long and should have left him long ago. For three years I was on those tracks, and I heard and smelled all the warnings. I just couldn’t get off. I watched while he flirted with other women and didn’t show up on time, drank my coffee and never even brought me a bean. Tony didn’t spend much, and I always knew why. He held on to money as if it pained his palm to pull it out of his pocket. I tried to tell him that if you hold on to money like that it’ll just stop coming, that it’s like a cat, and if you pay too much attention it sticks its nose in the air and prances the other way. I told him he should be more generous, give some of it away, if only to a poor box at a church. I swore that it would always come back twofold, if not more.

Tony was horrified at that idea. He said he didn’t have “enough” to give away, and I always thought he felt the same way about love. He was terrified that if he gave that to someone, even himself, something terrible would happen. As if he’d wake one morning and find he wasn’t there anymore, that so much had been given away, there would be nothing left.

And what about you? one might well ask. What was wrong with me, that for three years I hoped against hope that one day this fool would wake up in his Brentwood penthouse and find that he couldn’t live another moment without me?

Well, this is what I tell myself, slipping out of my Gucci pumps and slinging my feet up onto my new antique desk: Tony wasn’t someone I could all that easily leave. I’m a literary agent, known as one of the best, and Tony sold more books than all my other clients combined—books that turned, like little miracles, into movies and made millions of dollars. In these days of slow sales in New York, of literary agents dropping by the dozens back there and moving to places like Connecticut and Vermont, working out of their homes to squeeze a dime for all it’s worth, Tony still came up with one blockbuster after another. And Tony was mine. To leave him might have been slaying the goose with the golden egg.

Slaying. An odd word to think of, under the circumstance. I’ve been dwelling more on Tony today because they found him dead last night. Worse—right next to him on the bedroom floor was Arnold Wescott, who for the past ten years had been my ex-husband.

The police called at the crack of dawn to notify, as well as question, me. I drove from my home in Malibu to Tony’s penthouse apartment in Brentwood to identify the bodies, my thoughts a jumbled mess all the way. Tony and Arnold, together? Murdered together? I couldn’t wrap my mind around it.

It didn’t get better with the terrible wrenching horror of seeing Tony on the floor with his forehead crushed in. As the police detective watched, I turned to Arnold, my heart thumping and questions like wasps still buzzing in my brain. Who could have done this? How did it happen?

I had questions but no answers. This was Tony’s apartment, and in the first place, I couldn’t understand what Arnold was doing here. So far as I knew, they’d never had any real connection to each other. Only once in a while did they cross paths in my office, and the two couldn’t have been less alike. Even in death, while Tony’s beautiful Italian face looked pained, Arnold’s was placid, as if he’d finally found peace.

In fact, Arnold—a Woody Allen look-alike—didn’t appear much different from any other day. All the time I’d been married to him, Arnold Wescott seemed largely comatose. The most energy I ever saw him put out was the time he asked me to wear a metal bra so he could see if it really would deflect bullets.

Arnold was sweet, if morose, and at the time I was still struggling to build my stable of authors from an old thirties-era storefront office in the wrong end of Hollywood. Nights, however, I was into any adventure that came my way. So I stupidly let Arnold put the bra on me, his nervous little fingers shaking as he made sure my breasts were evenly cupped. Then, sweat pouring down his forehead, he stepped back six paces and let fly with the bullets.

Arnold was a toy designer, and how a man who spent thirty-two years in a clinical depression could possibly design a toy that a child would like is beyond me. Well, come to think of it, he never did manage that. After scaring half the world’s children to death with GORP, a seven-headed beast that spewed forth murderous threats when his biceps were flexed, he’d turned to designing adult toys. The little rubber bullets were part of a mock-up for GOTCHA, his latest invention. Designed to be pointed at little models of ex-girlfriends wearing metal bras, he had a male doll, too, wearing a metal jockstrap.

That day, the bullets came zooming toward my chest, and I couldn’t help it—I flinched, bent over, and one bullet went straight for my eye.

Arnold had to get me to the hospital, where an unbelieving intern was sure that my husband had deliberately popped me one. That only made me laugh so hard that tears stung the abrasion on my cornea. Arnold, violent? No way. Arnold was meek and mild, and he never once had deliberately lifted a finger in my direction—or any other appendage, for that matter.

So it was a bit of a shock when the cops called last night and said they’d found Arnold dead. Not only that, but he was found next to another man’s body, in that man’s bedroom. Further, the other man was Tony Price, my best-selling author and long-hungered-after love.

Even more of a shock was that both men lay side by side on the floor, and next to them was what the police were sure was the murder weapon—a rare ivory Chinese dildo, a favorite of the gay crowd in West Hollywood.

As I’ve said, the fact that Tony was dead, too, was something that stunned me for several moments. Once I managed to collect my thoughts, however, I realized that my opportunity to get off those train tracks had come at last. Oh, it might be a while before I got my whole body off, grief being what it is. I might leave behind a leg or a foot at first, but I wouldn’t be trussed to the tracks any longer, and I’d have a chance to roll free.

If that sounds cold, it’s only because I’d learned to restrain my feelings for Tony over a long period of time—a matter of self-preservation, having been given so little encouragement from that side. He loved going to dinner with me, taking walks with me, even traveling with me. He even said often that he loved me. “Just not that way,” he would add. I’d begun to feel like one of those poor women who go on Montel Williams to reveal, at long last, their love for a male friend. Hoping, of course, that he’ll bubble over with passion and cry, “I’ve always loved you, too!” Inevitably, the friend does end up saying that, but adding the same as Tony: “Just not that way.”

Having lived through a brief and sexless marriage with Arnold, and then a “relationship” with Tony, whatever the hell kind that was, I’d begun to feel as if I had more heads than GORP, not to mention biceps in all the wrong places. Or maybe I was a Ms. Potato Head, with my eyes, ears and nose all screwed up, ugly as sin. The fact that my mirror didn’t support any of that paranoia helped—well-cared-for masses of reddish-blond hair like mine being “in” now, as they are. But there were days…

Now, given the scene before me in Tony’s apartment, I had to wonder—and not for the first time—were Tony and Arnold gay? I never was the kind of woman who immediately labeled a man gay if he wasn’t interested in my womanly charms. But why else would the two of them be here in Tony’s penthouse, and what else could the ornately carved Chinese sex toy be about?

The police, of course, wouldn’t tell me a thing except that there would be autopsies, and that forensics could take a few days. A Detective Dan Rucker was in charge. He looked to be thirtysomething and I guessed that by some standards—not mine—he might be considered cute. He had bright blue eyes and sandy hair that curled below his ears, and he wore an Anaheim Angels baseball cap that he kept putting on and taking off. Every time he took it off, he ran his fingers through his hair as if to make sure it was straight, but it never was. He sported at least a two-day growth of beard, and overall the look was a bit too scruffy for me. He smelled nice, though. Like oranges warming under a noonday sun.

If this were a crime novel, of course, I would have been drawn to the good detective immediately, scruffy or not. We’d have fallen into each other’s arms by sunset, and then we’d have gone off on a crime-busting romp together, to avenge the killing of my ex-husband and my…whatever.

This wasn’t a crime novel, though, and Detective Rucker might have smelled like an orange, but he acted like a sour lemon.

“We’ll need you to come down to the station in the morning to answer more questions,” he had said abruptly, not even looking at me as he paced off the room. He didn’t seem overly suspicious of me, even though I was so close to the deceased. The truth was, I got the distinct impression that the police were thinking of this as a “gay murder.” There had been several, beginning this past spring, and then two more since summer had arrived. Most were in West Hollywood, but one or two were in other areas. The sheriff’s department in West Hollywood had waged a campaign to catch the killers, and while they’d found some of the murders to be gay-bashings by gangs, other cases were still open.

I had gone to the police station this morning, as ordered, for further questioning. But afterward I wondered: Would justice be done for Tony and Arnold? What if it wasn’t a gay-oriented crime? What if it was something entirely different? And why had this happened to two men who were close to me?

I was staring out my office windows around ten-thirty and musing upon this when my phone rang, and a few seconds later my intercom buzzed. I’d asked Nia, my assistant, not to disturb me except for something important, so I knew I’d have to take the call, though it was the last thing in the world I wanted to do. I’d spent over an hour at the police station saying, “Yes, no, yes, no, I don’t know,” and “maybe.” Detective Rucker still hadn’t looked as if he’d had a shower or shaved, and I still wasn’t impressed by his attitude. He was short-tempered with me and talked as if I was taking up his valuable time, whereas he’d been the one to tell me to be there. He seemed to find it hard to sit still, and was up and down, up and down, as we talked. I’d left there on edge, as if I’d taken his ragged energy in and brought it to the office with me. I definitely didn’t feel like talking on the phone now, even though I knew I should, and why.

Paul Whitmore.

After a few minutes Nia stuck her head around the door. Her short black cut looked frazzled, and I knew she’d been running her pencil’s eraser through it in irritation.

“That’s Paul Whitmore on the phone,” she said, confirming my every fear. “You want me to tell him you’re tied up? He’s called a half-dozen times since I came in this morning.”

Nia came in at seven every morning because of the time difference between L.A. and New York. A lot of our business is done when editors are getting geared up back there, around ten o’clock or so. Nia fielded calls and returned ones that were important but didn’t need my personal touch.

“Don’t I wish I were tied up somewhere,” I replied with a sigh. “Like on a warm desert island with a delightful man tickling my naked body with palm leaves. Anything but dealing with an editor right now.”

Returning Nia’s smile, I added, “But no. I’ll talk to him.”

Sliding my feet off the desk and setting them squarely in my shoes, I stiffened my spine, reached for the phone and held the receiver to my ear. At the same time my eyes scanned my beloved, newish office, with its floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the high-rises of Century City. My desk was a Louis XV, and facing it were the antique chairs on which my authors sat. On a small cherry-wood desk sign were these simple words engraved in gold: Mary Beth Conahan, Literary Agent. In a corner, a white and gold floor-to-ceiling cage held two lovebirds that cooed loudly, as if sounding a warning bell at the mere mention of the name Paul Whitmore—the most important editor in New York City.

The lovebirds had been given to me one Christmas by Tony, and of course I foolishly saw them as a “sign” that he loved me after all. Until I found that he’d given the same gift to his assistant, his maid, his typist and several other people, as a thank-you for the good work they’d been doing.

I wondered how long my stylish digs would last, now that Tony, the golden goose, was gone. The rest of my stable of authors, though exemplary in many ways, wasn’t in his best-selling category.

Putting a smile in my voice, I chirped, “Hello, Paul. What can I do for you?”

“For God’s sake, Mary Beth, what do you mean, what can you do for me? We’re in the middle of negotiations with Craig Dinsmore! I’ve been trying to reach you all morning!”

Paul Whitmore worked for Bronson & Bronson, one of the few publishing houses in New York City that, amazingly, still had deep pockets. As such, most agents bowed and kissed Paul’s feet the minute he phoned.

Most. Not me.

“I’m sorry, Paul,” I said softly with fake remorse. “Your last offer…it didn’t really sit well with my author. And when you didn’t call back yesterday afternoon, I assumed our negotiations were over.”

Whitmore’s voice, though still irritable, responded to my tone. “Of course they weren’t over,” he said more reasonably. “My dear, you know I love Craig Dinsmore’s book. Everyone in-house loves his writing. We just have to come to terms, Mary Beth.”

“But I don’t see how that’s possible,” I said, choosing not to take offense at the patronizing “my dear.”

“What do you mean, not possible? Anything is possible!”

“Not if you don’t come up with more money, Paul. Craig is firm on that.”

I tapped lightly on my chin with my favorite gold pen, studied my luxuriously sheer stockings and six-hundred-dollar shoes and took a deep breath. The truth was, Craig Dinsmore was on the verge of bankruptcy, and Paul had offered a high six figures for Lost Legacy, Craig’s true-crime book about a fallen mafia don. If the deal went through, it could save his neck. But the more desperate my authors became during negotiations, the more relaxed I had to be. And I wanted a solid seven figures. That was the one thing that would make Hollywood perk up its ears and clamor to make a movie out of Craig’s book.

Because the truth is, it doesn’t always matter how good or bad a book is. Once a seven-figure offer has been made and accepted, the news makes its way into Publishers Weekly and assorted media mags, and that’s the kind of money that talks here in Hollywood.

“Dammit, Mary Beth, did you hang up on me?” Paul Whitmore roared through the phone.

I gathered my wits and tried to mimic my cooing lovebirds again. “Of course not, Paul. I was just thinking.”

“I hope you’re thinking that we’ve made a very good offer, and that Craig Dinsmore should be happy for what he can get. Rumors have it he’s on the skids.”

“Oh, really?” I said in my best “ridiculous!” tone. “Where on earth did you ever hear something like that? Craig is doing extremely well, Paul. He’s just purchased a new home near Laguna Beach, you know. Not too far from the one Dean Koontz built a few years ago.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, why would I lie?” I sure couldn’t tell him that Craig was holed up in a cheap motel over by the airport, writing his brains out in a push to survive. Or that I hadn’t yet told Craig about Paul’s six-figure offer. I knew he’d want to grab it and not try for more.

“Listen, Paul, I have calls coming in by the dozens. I’ll have to get back to you.”

“Wait.”

“I really have to—”

“Tell Craig Dinsmore we’ll come up by ten thousand. That’ll put him over the seven-figure mark, which I’m sure is what you’re angling for. I’ll also go from eight percent to ten percent on the paperback royalties. That’s the best we can do, Mary Beth, and it’s damn good.”

Screw you, I thought. If you’re willing to go another ten, another twenty won’t hurt a bit.

“I’ll pass the word along, Paul,” I said lightly. “That’s if I can rouse Craig. You know, he’s working round the clock to finish his next book, and he’s not always answering his phone.”

“Then send a messenger, Mary Beth! This is my final offer, and I need to know by five p.m. my time. The offer’s only good till then.”

“I’ll see what I can do, Paul. Ta.”

I hung up softly and sat thinking. Five his time meant two here, and since it was nearly eleven now, that gave me only three hours. Damn! My stomach was churning, and I realized I’d bitten off a nail during the call. I’d have to phone Craig and ask him if he wanted me to hold Paul Whitmore’s feet to the fire or accept what he said was his final offer. I personally didn’t believe it was final. Still, I couldn’t play fast and loose with Craig’s income without his consent, now that the offer was over seven figures.

I called out to Nia on the intercom and asked her to find Craig for me as quickly as possible.

“I’m already on it,” she said. “He still isn’t answering his phone, and his machine’s turned off. I’m trying all the bars around that area now.”

“You think he’s started drinking again?” I asked worriedly.

“Not necessarily. I just don’t know where else to start. And you know how he likes to hang out in bars and talk.”

Craig became a near hermit last year when he began to attend AA meetings. Then, in the fall, he told me he wasn’t going to the meetings anymore. He felt that saying “I am an alcoholic” only imprinted it on his mind—thus making it a fact that could never be erased, leaving no hope for a “cure.”

“I’m going it alone now,” he’d said. “I’m doing yoga, meditation, vitamins and herbs. My yoga teacher says that while I may have a problem with alcohol right now, it’s not right to label myself an alcoholic, or anything else, for life. That not doing so leaves the door wide-open for releasing the problem. Or, as he calls it, the challenge.”

That kind of approach made me a bit nervous. It was hanging out in bars and entertaining the other hangers-on with tales of past exploits and publishing successes that had started Craig on that downward slide. All too often talking becomes the highlight of the day, taking over an author’s life and keeping him from applying his butt to a chair and his fingers to the keys.

Nia knocked softly and opened my door. “No luck so far with the bars. You want me to go look for him?”

Her hair was even more disheveled now, and I knew she’d been tugging at it while on the phone. There were shadows under her eyes, too, as if she hadn’t slept well.

“No, I’ll go,” I said. “You’ve done enough today, fielding all those calls.”

She came over and sat tiredly in one of the chairs across from me. “Here are the messages.” She handed a monument-size stack of them across the desk.

“There must be a hundred here,” I said, groaning.

“Fifty or so, anyway.”

“Anything urgent?”

She shook her head. “Mostly the usual, authors calling to see if you got their manuscripts and if you’ve got them a deal yet. Editors returning your calls from yesterday. Most of the editors called early, while you were at the police station this morning. How did that go?”

I stared out the window, questions starting to whirl through my brain again. “I don’t think I was much help. They wanted me to tell them anything I knew about the private lives of Tony and Arnold. I haven’t known much about Arnold’s life, though, since we were divorced ten years ago. I told them I never asked for alimony, so there wasn’t much reason for us to stay in touch. We ran into each other now and then in restaurants, and once in a while he came by here to talk about that toy-creations book I sold for him years ago. As for Tony…” I shrugged.