“You love me,” the actor said with a sneer.
“I hate you,” Rosemary said, the words pulled out of her.
“Then shoot,” he said easily, still coming toward her.
He froze as the shot exploded, then grabbed his stomach in astonishment and dropped to the floor. Rosemary kept holding the gun out, then lowered her arm, her shoulders shaking.
“Cut,” the director said. “Nice. Let’s get one for safety.”
They did it twice more, then broke to change the set-ups for Rosemary’s reaction shots.
“We’re almost there,” the director said to Rosemary. “The payoff shot. Remember, you still love him.”
“Even while I’m plugging him,” she said wryly.
“And I want to see it right here,” he said, pointing to her eyes. “Watch the dress.”
She stepped back against the slant board.
“That was good,” Ben said.
“It’s always good until you see it.”
“We can talk later if you—”
“They’ll be ten minutes,” she said. “You want to know why he did it? So do I. Don’t you think I’ve asked myself a million times? I never thought there was anything wrong. Maybe one of his other friends didn’t show and he got all upset. I don’t know. Me? All he’d have had to do was pick up the phone.”
“He was seeing someone else?”
“He must have been. Why else would he have the place? We never went there. Well, once—I had somebody staying with me. We used mine. Sometimes little trips. Santa Barbara, the Biltmore. He was romantic like that.” Her voice thickened. “La Valencia, down in La Jolla. Places.”
“But not the Cherokee.”
“Just the once. He said it was a friend’s place. He borrowed it because we couldn’t use any of the hotels—the columns watch. And then I read in the paper that it was his. So there must have been somebody else, without a place. Maybe more than one, who knows? That hurt a little. You like to think— But why should I be surprised? What did I think I was? Someone he saw like that. On the side. Call it romantic— oh, La Valencia. But you know what it is. It didn’t seem that way, though, at the time. It was—nice.”
“How long were you—?”
“A few months. Last spring. V-E Day. I was on loan-out at Republic and they stopped work. All-day party. So I guess I could blame the booze. But it wasn’t.”
“And he wasn’t breaking it off?”
“Not that he told me,” she said, a little sharp. “Maybe he told you.” Ben shook his head. “Then why do you ask?”
“Because he gave notice at the Cherokee. End of the month. I just assumed—he didn’t need it anymore.”
She took this in. “You think someone gave him the brush?”
“I don’t know. Any idea who it might have been?”
“I never even suspected. Why would I? We were good together. You look at it now, and I guess I was a fool, but I never thought— When I first heard, I thought maybe he’d been sick. Some condition. He had a lot of doctor appointments. Then I read the place was his and I thought, oh, that’s where the doctor was. Those kind of appointments.”
“How did you hear?”
“In the papers. I was on the set, and it’s in the papers and I had to pretend it didn’t mean anything. It didn’t say how bad he was. Not that I could go to the hospital anyway.”
“You had no idea he was in a coma?”
“You call and they say ‘stable.’“
“They didn’t know who you were, when you called?”
“What do you think? I’m not supposed to exist, remember?”
“And you weren’t at the Cherokee that night.”
“I told you. Why do you keep asking that?”
“Because if you weren’t—if there was nothing to connect you to him—why would Bunny get the police to file it as an accident?”
She started, then pushed herself away from the slant board, no longer caring about the dress.
“What are you talking about? You think Bunny would fix something for me? I’m not important enough.”
“Did he know about you and Danny?”
“I don’t know. He knows everything. He’s like that. But what if he did? You think the studio’s going to fall apart because somebody sees us necking in La Jolla?”
“With Danny. Not Ty Power. He wouldn’t like that.”
“Then he’d tell me about it. Not go flying around town playing Mr. Fixit. You think he’d do that for me? You don’t know what it’s like here. He can trade me in for a new model any time he likes.”