This room was a very odd place. Marcey didn’t think she had ever really looked at it before. You didn’t look at rentals, really, unless there was something spectacular about them. This place was just “nice.” It was the best they could get, because the people who had the spectacular houses on Margaret’s Harbor didn’t rent them. Kendra should have had them to stay at the Point, but she hadn’t.
This room had a lot of framed posters on the walls. The posters were all of old paintings, the kind they sometimes used to frontpiece a movie or do the cover on the kind of book she always passed by without checking into. Marcey didn’t know if the people who owned this house had put up posters because they couldn’t afford real paintings, or if they just didn’t like real paintings. These were not the kinds of paintings she would have wanted in her house in any case. They showed things that were ugly, like people dying.
Marcey bit her lip and then instantly stuck out her tongue to wet it. She tried another deep breath. She was making herself dizzy.
“You can’t do this,” she said finally. “This isn’t like leaving her passed out in a bar somewhere and then laughing at the pictures afterward. They’ve arrested her. She’s in jail. The judge wouldn’t even set bail.”
“I know. That happens in murder cases,” Kendra said. “But they’ll set bail eventually. Just watch. They can’t keep somebody that famous in jail when she hasn’t been convicted yet. It was the same with Robert Blake and O.J.”
“This isn’t O.J.”
“It’s pretty close,” Kendra said. “It’s close to Robert Blake, too. Washed-up has-been who used to be famous goes on trial for murder. They don’t convict those people. Do you even remember why anybody would think Robert Blake was a celebrity? Had you ever heard of him?”
“He was in In Cold Blood,” Marcey said automatically. “The first one, from the 1960s. It was in black and white. Kendra, seriously. She’s in jail. And she didn’t kill anybody. And you know it. You were there.”
“Was I?”
“Yes, you were. I saw you there. I was there.”
“You haven’t said anything about it,” Kendra said.
“No, I haven’t said, because—because you said not to. We talked about it. You said that nothing would happen, and it would only be the wrong kind of publicity. And that’s true. It is the wrong kind of publicity. But we can’t just not say anything if Arrow is going to go to jail unless we tell.”
“I can,” Kendra said. “Besides, what would you say when they wanted to know why you hadn’t said anything up to now? You’d end up sounding like an idiot, and then they could charge you with one of those things. Accessory before the fact. Accessory after the fact. I don’t know. There are things.”
“Things as bad as sending Arrow to the electric chair?”
“She won’t have a career after this, you know,” Kendra said. “She barely had one before it. She’d been going completely to hell, and it was getting so boring I could barely stand it. But after this, she’ll be nowhere.”
“She doesn’t have to be dead. Or locked up.”
“It would come to the same thing,” Kendra said. “She won’t be able to go clubbing anymore. The clubs won’t let her in. Quite frankly, they were iffy even before this, but she was with us, so they let it pass. She won’t be invited to openings. I can’t imagine what that would be like. It would be like being wiped out, don’t you think?”
“Wiped out?”
“As if you didn’t exist anymore,” Kendra said. “You know what I mean. You said it to me. She’d gotten to be a terrible bore before this and now with this it will all be over. And if you get yourself charged with something, it will be over for you, too. Can’t you feel it? This is the first movie you’ve done in two years, and it isn’t exactly the kind of thing that wins an Oscar.”
“You don’t have a career to worry about,” Marcey said. “And nobody is going to stop you from going clubbing. Your family has money in half the clubs in L.A. There’d be no reason for you not to tell.”
“Except that I don’t want to,” Kendra said, “and I’m not sure I have anything to say. It’s ridiculous the kind of fuss they make about these things. He wasn’t anybody. Why should anybody care?”
One of the posters on the wall the fireplace was on seemed to be a painting that was two paintings in one. In the front there were a lot of young men dressed up in old-fashioned clothes, all in bright colors, and with things in their hair. In the back, almost in black and white, there was a man in nothing but a rag around his waist tied against a pillar, and another man was beating him, and other men were around them both, watching. The juxtaposition of the two scenes made Marcey feel a little dizzy.