Long, Lean, and Lethal

  Serena was a wonderful actress, her performances so real in situations so absurd, she had garnered ten Emmy nominations and two awards. She spun to Jay Braden. “Don’t come in, you’ll only be hurt.”

  Jay, stricken by his wife’s infidelity, tightened his facial muscles. A pulse at his throat ticked dramatically. It was one of Jay’s special talents.

  “Let me go, Verona!” he said, pulling away from her and accosting the two in bed.

  “I’ll kill you!” he told Jennifer furiously. “I’ll kill you—”

  “As if you haven’t been cheating on your wife with her own sister,” Andy protested, trying to protect Jennifer’s character.

  “I’ll kill you, too,” Jay said, spinning on Andy. “If I carried a gun, you’d both be dead now!” He reached for Jennifer as he had been directed. “But you, dear wife, you’re coming home with me—now!”

  “Stop it, stop it!” she cried, shrinking into the bed.

  “Leave her alone!” Andy said, going for Jay’s throat.

  “Stop it, both of you stop it!” Serena cried, throwing herself between the men.

  “As if this isn’t what you wanted, Serena,” Jennifer told her soap sister. “Randy, leave me be. It’s over between us, I have nothing—”

  He swept her up, covers and all, and she struggled against him. “Not tonight!” he told her. “It isn’t over by far!” he exclaimed, and striding away with her, he exited the set.

  “You bitch,” Andy accused Serena. “You did this on purpose.”

  “Maybe,” Serena said softly.

  “He’ll kill her. He will kill her,” Andy cried. Camera angles automatically shifted as he rose in the bed, reaching for his pants. He stumbled into them, staring at Serena.

  “Maybe,” Serena repeated.

  “And maybe he’ll wise up and kill you,” Andy told Serena.

  She turned to leave.

  “Oh, no,” he told her, catching her before she could exit the set. “Oh, no, sweetie. You want to interrupt my night? Then you can just remember that you’re my wife.”

  He pulled Serena into his arms.

  “Cut!” Jim Novac called. “A perfect take. I could kiss you all—one take, the camera angles were great. Have a great holiday weekend. Hey, Jennifer! I’m invited to that party you’re having, aren’t I?”

  Jay Braden had set Jennifer upright. She self-consciously adjusted her flesh-colored and far too brief strips of set “clothing.”

  Everyone was staring at her.

  Serena had a look of sympathy on her face. She was a good friend.

  Jennifer grimaced and lifted her hands. “Of course, you’re all invited. What would a party be without you all?”

  Abby was seated in a wicker chair by the pool. The afternoon wasn’t that cool, but she had a blanket drawn up on her lap.

  She was as beautiful as ever, and simply seeing her there, he felt a wave of emotion sear through him. She was no blood relation, but she was still the best parent he’d ever had.

  She was sixty-something, and though she looked frail, and the disease had certainly worn some ravages with her, neither time nor illness could ever dull the beauty of her perfect features, her enormous blue eyes, her generous, full-lipped smile. Abby radiated. The magic that she had given to stage and film alike was not an act, but a warmth from within her, and a love for the world around her. She had lived her life with passion; she had made mistakes. But she had never lied, and she had never paused for regrets, and she had saved his life when he might have gone in a far different direction. She had taught him to take responsibility for himself; to realize that he couldn’t blame his own life on other people, but must take charge of it himself. She had been far more loving and nurturing to him than those who should have cared for him the most.

  “Abby!”

  She smiled, seeing him. She reached out her hands.

  They shook—but only slightly.

  He hurried to her, taking her hands. His grip was firm, and he was glad to see that there was strength in the hold that returned his own. He bent to kiss her cheek. “My God, darling, you look wonderful.”

  She smiled ruefully, a slightly wistful look in her eyes. “Drugs and makeup do wonders, don’t they?”

  “Abby—”

  “Now, now, dear boy, don’t say a word. I’m not feeling sorry for myself. I’m simply being a realist. Come here, closer, let me kiss your cheek. It’s so long between times when I see you!”

  Conar bent down by the chair, kissing her cheek, allowing her to kiss his. She smelled of Shalimar; she always did. She smiled at him, her eyes touched with a mist of emotion. “Ah, Conar. Your father was not the best husband, but you’ve been the very best stepson.”

  “Well, you know, Abby, you’ve been awfully good yourself,” he reminded her, trying to speak lightly.

  “How does it feel to be back?”

  He grinned, taking the handsome wicker lawn chair across from her. “I haven’t been back that long. So far, so good.”

  “I hope you don’t regret this decision. I heard you had a great offer over in Europe.”

  “Well, now that’s true, but the sci-fi flick could be a major bomb—it’s another one about a flight crew fighting bugs from outer space,” he said, making a face. “You know, with something like that, you could have a classic, like Alien. You could also have a cheap-looking cheesy disaster as well.” Should he have taken the job? Maybe. The director was a Hollywood powerhouse at the moment.

  He shrugged, looking at Abby, who was staring back intently. “I like soaps. I like the work ethic. And I like the money Joe Penny offered me. Did you have anything to do with that?”

  Abby smiled, shaking her head. “Not really. I just suggested that you might be available—if the price was right.”

  “What does your daughter think about all this?”

  Abby’s brow lifted slightly as she considered her answer.

  Conar felt strange knowing so little about Jennifer Connolly, Abby’s daughter from her marriage to writer Tom Connolly, and that, in all these years, they had spent so little time together. Connolly had supposedly been the love of Abby Sawyer’s life. She’d been young when she’d met him; he’d been ten years her senior. He’d been breaking fiction and literary charts while she’d been a skyrocketing young starlet. Tom Connolly had died in a plane crash ten years after their marriage. The Hollywood rags had claimed that the marriage had been on the rocks. But years later, knowing Abby, Conar had begun to realize that the papers had been woefully wrong. She had lost the one man she had really loved.

  His father had been husband number three for Abby. Conar had been seventeen at the time of their marriage. His mother—bless her now deceased soul—had been a product of her times, a beautiful, liberal folk singer with an addiction to musicians and cocaine. His father had been a semi-famous ballplayer, divorced several years from his mother at the time of his marriage to Abby. Jules Markham had been a traditionalist with a habit of falling for passionate, opinionated women. He’d wanted to love Abby, just as he had wanted to love his son. But his work was on the road; he never really knew either.

  When his father met Abby, Conar felt himself to be on the bottom of the barrel. He played ball—because it was expected of him. Football, baseball, basketball. He didn’t really have a feel for any of them—or maybe it was just that he was his father’s son. He should have been great. Instead, he’d liked the partying with the team. He started with drinking and doing drugs when his father failed to remember little events such as his birthday, the anniversary of his mother’s death—even the concept that his son might want to spend Christmas with him. In fact, Abby came into his life on the Christmas Eve of his senior year in high school.

  That year he’d taken refuge in his flashy car, the fastest girls in school, and in booze. He’d spent Christmas Eve day out—with friends, until all his friends had gone home to be with their families.

  Then Conar had gotten sick.

  Abby found him half-d
ead before the tree at the Malibu beach house. His only excuse for the way he had behaved toward her was the fact that he had blamed her for his father’s absences. He’d been wrong.

  Abby had picked him up, thrown him in the shower, poured coffee down his throat—and yelled when he’d started to whine about his father’s absence. “He’s left us both, it seems. And you know what? I’m hurt, but I’ll deal with it. But you! You should be ashamed of yourself. A handsome young man like you. The world is out there! If someone isn’t standing right here to hand it to you, go out and grab it. You’re old enough now to get out there and be responsible for yourself.”

  He found out later that night that Abby had been on the lonely side herself—her daughter was spending the holidays in Georgia with her father’s family. “It’s you and me, kid, and we’re going to make this a happy holiday, you got it!”

  The next day, he’d found that she was forthright and fascinating, and he loved talking to her. He admitted things to her he’d never said to another human being. He’d admitted that he’d royally screwed up his chances to attend college.

  “What do you want to do? What do you like, what makes you happy?” she asked him.

  “Travel … I think. Exotic places. Discovery. People—what makes people tick, why they do what they do.”

  She grinned. “You could certainly do travel spots for television. You’re articulate, well spoken, and handsome, you know. Like your dad.”

  “Yeah, I’ve broken my nose like him, too. He got smacked in a World Series game. I got knocked out in a barroom fight.”

  “You know what you should do?” she said softly.

  “What?”

  “The service.”

  “Like the Army?”

  “Or the Navy. You’re a California boy at heart—stick with the water. Maybe the Marines. You’ll learn a good sense of responsibility, get some on-the-job training—and you’ll quit worrying about what Daddy is doing.”

  At first, he thought she was full of it, but two weeks later he enlisted in the service. It was the best move he ever made. The service gave him the opportunity to see the world—parts of the Middle East and Western Asia he had never imagined existed—and the chance to pick up a liberal arts degree. His last two years he spent as a commissioned officer in a special diving investigation unit.

  But by that time Abby and his father had divorced. And a year after the divorce, his father suffered a severe heart attack. He entered the hospital and survived several weeks, clinging to life, but dying slowly and irrevocably. Conar was surprised to discover that he could stay at his father’s bedside offering comfort and support. Somehow he was at peace with his father, and himself. Abby had given him that serenity as well.

  And Abby came back to be with them both at the end.

  When it was over, Conar and Abby stayed friends. She wrote to him. When he could, he visited her. No matter how on top of the world she was—and Abby flew, for sure—she had time for him.

  Conar spent some time working for a dive shop. He did piecework as a free agent for local law enforcement agencies, looking for missing persons who might have drowned. He worked on some pleasure craft as an instructor. He usually had better ideas about how to do certain things, and so he toyed with the idea of opening his own dive shop, but the capital he needed for what he wanted to do was fairly steep. His father, the semi-famous ballplayer, had gambled away his considerable income—which was fine. Conar had wanted no part of it. Abby had taught him that it was important to make your own way in life.

  Because of that, he wouldn’t allow her to finance him. He meant to earn the money himself.

  Abby suggested acting. He thought she was crazy then, too. But he needed the money.

  He started with clothing commercials, mainly because the financial rewards were so great. In those days Jennifer Connolly had been attending her last year at a boarding school in Massachusetts. Then he had his own stint on a daytime soap—nearly missing Jennifer completely when she returned for her summer of graduation, because he was heading out on location to do a P.I. movie.

  He hadn’t been terribly impressed by her. At eighteen, she’d been striking, but cold and distant, and she had resented him, no matter how courteous she had kept her insults.

  He returned to the soap come the fall—but by then Jennifer had left to attend a fine arts college in New York. Then, almost by pure accident, he garnered a small, but Emmy Award-nominated role as a ballplayer dying of cancer in a made-for-cable movie. He’d fallen in love with Betty Lou Rodriguez, his co-star. Betty Lou played the poor Mexican girl the ballplayer loved and who returned his love—too late. In real life she was a bundle of energy, always laughing, and always seeing the best in everyone. They became passionately entangled and agreed to marry. He was certain it would be forever.

  Would it have been forever? He didn’t know. The passions that had driven them together might well have torn them apart as well. Betty was fond of certain drugs; he had a well-learned aversion to them. Life had made him cynical, and in their last days together, he feared that much about her that he had loved was a facade she carefully maintained. They argued, threatened to walk out—and made up. Eternal love? Maybe. They might have split in anger. They might have worked it out.

  But he would never know.

  Soon after the movie wrapped, Betty Lou had been killed by a stray bullet in a shoot-out in downtown L.A. Ironically, she’d been attending a benefit for a new hospital in the ethnic neighborhood where she’d grown up.

  It had been a bitter time for him, but as usual Abby was there to help him. He had seen Jennifer then—she had deigned to come to the funeral. She even expressed real sympathy. He had almost liked her. But he’d been in too much pain, guilt, and confusion to care too much then about anyone other than the wife he had lost.

  He’d been a hot property, and now he was a tragic romantic hero. He was loved by L.A., but he wanted nothing more than to escape the city that had so wronged the woman he had loved. He’d been offered work on Broadway, thanks to Abby. The concept of live theater appealed to him, and he left for New York. Jennifer Connolly began working on the soap.

  She had made one trip to New York with Abby. She visited him backstage there, but she was distant again—not just to him, but to Abby. And when Abby was briefly swept away by old friends, he’d still been grief-ridden enough not to give a damn about what anyone thought of him—even Abby’s daughter. So he’d had a few choice words about her behavior.

  She’d walked out.

  And he hadn’t seen her since then, though he knew that she’d moved into Granger House with Abby, and there hadn’t been a tabloid able to claim anything other than that Jennifer had been a completely devoted daughter.

  “Abby, what does Jennifer think about all this?” he repeated. She still hadn’t answered.

  Abby smiled at last. “She thinks I’ve asked my stepson to spend time with us since he’s coming back to California to work.”

  She was lying, of course. He couldn’t help but grin.

  “What does she really think?”

  “She thinks I’m crazy as a loon—and that you’re an obnoxious egotist with nothing better to do than steal some other poor actor’s bread-and-butter job when you could probably have any role out there.”

  His smile quickly faded. “If she knows that you brought me in—at double everyone’s salary—it’s natural that she should resent me. Especially when she finds out you want me here to look after her.”

  Abby looked down at her lap. “Well, it’s true, I don’t think she understands all the experience you’ve had in the past with situations other than acting … but don’t worry. Jennifer will come around.”

  He doubted it, though he really didn’t know. Besides those few hostile occasions they had met, he’d seen her only on talk shows. Strangely, she appealed to him as a talk show guest—she was strong, articulate, and passionate when she cared about a subject. She had a beautiful smile—Abby’s smile. On talk shows, she
seemed to be entirely grounded. She almost seemed to have a vulnerable side. But he knew as well that appearances could be deceptive.

  This wasn’t going to be an easy relationship, especially because, in her illness, Abby seemed to think that Jennifer was being stalked by a killer. And that he could somehow help.

  “Abby, I still don’t understand. Why are you so convinced that Jennifer, is in danger? No matter what is happening on the soap, none of it is real.”

  “Someone does want to kill Jennifer. You must protect her,” Abby said, distressed.

  She had been doing so well. Now he saw that her hands were shaking more and more visibly, one with greater spasms than the other. Her head was shaking as well. He hadn’t noticed it before. He had upset her.

  He touched her hands again, feeling awkward. “Abby, is it time for your medication?”

  “No, no, I don’t want any pills right now. Every time I take pills, everyone thinks that I’m seeing things, hearing things … that I’m crazy.”

  “But, Abby, the medication does—”

  “Have an effect on me, I know it. Oh, God, do I know it, Conar!” she said, and the distress in her voice cut right to his heart. “I know it—I see people in the walls when I’m on enough pills, Conar. But don’t go feeling sorry for me. The people in the walls can be nice; they’re my friends, we have great conversations.”

  “Not real, Abby—”

  “I know they’re not real!”

  “So—”

  “The threat to Jennifer is real. There is a killer out there, stalking her.”

  “Abby, I’m trying to understand just what has convinced you that Jennifer is in so much danger. Was it Joe Penny choosing her character to be threatened by so many people in the show? Abby, are you afraid they’re trying to kill off her character in the soap?”

  “Good God, Conar, do you really think I’m so foolish?”

  “Then, what has you so worried?”

  “The whisperer, the one who called me.”