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By Root 1244 0

in them—fear that I was right, fear for the future … oh, I don’t know. She’d gotten all dressed up to meet me. … I felt suddenly like I was the older one and she was just a kid, all pretty in her sparkly evening dress, a girl at her first prom. She could still look like that, you know, it was nothing to do with age—it was that she always looked sort of pure and innocent despite that sexy body and the reputation … and she was—innocent, I mean. That’s how I was able to take the money from her, she just believed in everybody. There was no badness in Jenny. I’ll bet even now that if I’d told her I’d done it and I was sorry she would’ve forgiven me. But I’d pushed her too far. She didn’t cry, she didn’t threaten or try to get back at me. ‘That’s that, then,’ she said. She walked to the door and then she turned … she looked as though she’d had a knife twisted in her heart.” Rory’s voice sank to a whisper. “I can’t tell you what she said next, Bob, I just can’t … but I’ll tell you this, it haunts me, it fucking haunts me. … I hadn’t realized what I’d done, what it meant to her! She turned and left the house. I heard her start the car. … I could have gone after her, told her I was sorry, that I hadn’t meant it to be like that, that things had just sort of got out of hand….” There was another pause and then a sigh. “You know what happened next.”

“Are you saying she committed suicide, Rory—because of what you did?”

“I don’t know! Don’t you understand, Bob? I don’t know! That’s what keeps me awake at night, and what I dream about when I finally get to sleep—Jenny in her pretty blue dress and the fear in her lovely blue eyes … I feel like some goddamn murderer. The verdict was open, so I’ll never know for sure. Y’know what I’m saying, Bob? I’ll never know if it was because of me. And the stupid thing is that I didn’t think she was a washed-up has-been actress, she was a nice woman—and she was still beautiful. Goddamn, I don’t just screw around with any old woman—Jenny was really something. And she was nice, too good for a shit like me….”

Rory was choking on his own tears. One of his better performances, thought Bill sourly.

“I never told anybody I’d been at the Malibu house,” said Rory, pulling himself together. “Nobody knew except Margie, and she was too dumb and too stoned to count. I couldn’t go to the police and say I was the one she’d been to meet and that we’d had a row—they might have wanted to look into things further … you know how one thing leads to another. I just couldn’t afford that kind of scandal at this point in my career. You can imagine how they would have reacted at the studio—Chelsea’s Game would have been finished. What advertiser stays with a show where the star is involved in such a scandal? I could imagine the headlines—’sex, Drugs, Money—Suicide?’ Maybe they’d even think I did it—killed her, I mean. People speculated on whether she’d done it on purpose, whether it was really an accident. Anyhow,” he added wearily, “it seemed to blow over … last week’s scandal, y’know. And then Stan Reubin called….”

Bill Kaufmann stiffened, feeling McBain’s eyes on him.

“Jenny had spilled it all to Stan and Bill Kaufmann the week before, the whole story about the money. She’d asked them, as friends, to help her, but apparently they told her there wasn’t anything they could do. She’d called Stan again that night just before she left, to tell him she was meeting me at the beach house to have it out with me. I guess Stan wasn’t too thrilled at being woken by an ex-client at one in the morning, but he advised Jenny to tell me that if I gave back all the money I’d stolen—stolen, Bob; goddamn, I earned it—then she wouldn’t prosecute, and she’d forget about the money lost on the bad investments.

“They came to see me, Bob, the pair of them. They caught me at the end of work when I was real tired and the day’s coke high had worn off. Bill was all smiles, said he understood my position as an up-and-coming actor and that Jenny was a difficult woman. Stan was smooth and legal, ‘protecting my interests,’ he said … all I had to do was