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  After she'd said this a couple times, he reluctantly slid off her and then he sat next to her for a long time in the shadows of the storeroom, with the mannequins watching them so knowingly, and she could tell that if he wasn't mad he was at least profoundly disappointed in her.

  Actually, she'd done more than enough already to make her famous among her friends. They didn't even have to do IT to make this the greatest story of all time. Just being with him and letting him touch her in all the places he had was plenty.

  She'd be on the phone non-stop for the next eighteen days.

  And then she was jolted back to reality because then—

  Then he whipped it out.

  Just like that. Just sitting there.

  And all of a sudden it popped up, big and white, like a jack-in-the-box.

  And that was when he took her small white hand and guided it over to him.

  Her fingers were only half an inch away from IT...she froze her hand. He couldn't budge it.

  "I thought we were friends, Kimberly," he said, sadly.

  "I've—I've never touched anybody there before."

  "God, Kimberly."

  "I'm sorry. I'm just afraid to, Cobey." She was almost in tears now.

  "What are you afraid of?"

  "I'm—I'm not sure."

  He didn't say anything for a time and then he said, "Do you know about a man's needs, Kimberly?"

  She was uncertain. "Sort of, I guess. I mean, about coming."

  "Do you know what happens when a woman stops a man from corning, Kimberly?"

  "I—I suppose it isn't real good."

  "It hurts, Kimberly."

  "Really?"

  "It hurts very much."

  "God."

  "And," he said, "sometimes it can cause permanent damage."

  "Permanent damage?"

  "The come gets so hot inside the man that it burns his whole prostate and then he's infertile. He can't have babies, Kimberly. Not ever..."

  "God," she said again, though she wasn't sure she believed him. In fact, she was more sure than not that she didn't believe him.

  "If you'd touch me just a little bit, I'd come."

  "You would?"

  "You wouldn't have to stroke me, even. Just touch me a little bit. I'm going crazy, Kimberly. I really am. Just touch me a little bit, please?"

  "God."

  He started to move her hand toward him again.

  "Please, Kimberly. Please."

  But she froze her hand again, maybe not any more than a quarter inch away from him.

  And that was when he slapped her.

  Slapped her so hard that everything went starry and then everything went black.

  Starry and black and she fell back against one of the mannequins and it went pitching over backwards, white arms akimbo as the whole thing smashed to the floor.

  By then Kimberly was crying.

  And by then he was on top of her, his hands on her throat, blue, blue eyes crazy as all hell.

  IV

  At this moment, Sharon Marie Bowers was passing by the storeroom door. And she heard Kimberly sobbing. And heard Kimberly gasping for air.

  From the considerable belt Sharon Marie Bowers wore around her middle dangled a jangling group of keys unmatched anywhere for sheer bulk and entanglement. But Sharon, being the type of person she was—organized, dutiful, responsible—knew just which door every key unlocked.

  So, without hesitation, she called out, "I'll be right there!" to Kimberly, and quickly located the proper key.

  And then she threw the door open.

  And saw America's number-one-teen-idol, Cobey Daniels, straddling a half-naked teenage girl.

  His hands around her throat.

  Choking her.

  Sharon Marie Bowers acted instinctively.

  She went wading through the ranks of mannequins, knocking them left and right, some of them falling into each other erotically, and, as she moved, she whipped out her baton and slammed the full hardwood length of it against the back of Cobey Daniels' teen-idol head.

  Cobey fell straight down on top of the half-naked teenage girl, who just kept screaming and screaming and screaming.

  "Are you Kimberly Conners?" Sharon Marie Bowers yelled at the girl.

  The girl kept right on screaming, but she managed to nod her head yes, at which point Sharon Marie Bowers snapped her walkie-talkie from her hip and let the folks in the administrative offices know that the girl had been found. Safe. At last.

  V

  On the six o'clock news that night, Sharon Marie Bowers was shown rushing into the hospital where young Kimberly was taken. Kimberly, being hugged by her mother, was a few steps ahead of the security guard.

  The cameraperson tried to get in close for one of those weepy-creepy shots that news directors love, but Sharon Marie Bowers, being of sound mind and body, slapped the shit out of the cameraperson, and sent camera and operator heading, willy-nilly, into the hedges.

  VI

  "Jesus Christ, Cobey."

  "Please, Lilly. Please."

  Lilly was his agent.

  "She was goddamn jailbait."

  "Please, Lilly. Please."

  "Fourteen years old. I'm surprised you could even get her little pussy opened up."

  "Please, Lilly."

  "I'm getting on a goddamn plane."

  "Lilly, listen, I—"

  "And I'm goddamn flying out there—"

  "Lilly, all I was doing was—"

  "And I'm bringing David Feldman along. He's the best goddamn lawyer I know—and that's exactly what we need right now thanks to the fact that you can't keep your dick in your pants—the best goddamn lawyer I know."

  The flight to Florida took six hours.

  Lilly was in no better mood when she got to the police station and bailed Cobey out.

  "The defendant will please rise and face the bench for sentencing."

  Judge T.K. Stevenson

  The People vs. Cobey Daniels

  Miami, Florida

  August, 1985

  1988

  "Lilly Carlyle would eat her young if she thought they tasted good enough."

  —Unnamed producer

  I

  In Beverly Hills that September, the new exercise guru was a lithe Korean chap who taught that you could will weight and cellulite away. Of course, he also put you on a diet of 834 calories a day, just in case the willing part didn't work so well. But he wore a version of a dobro, one of those white, belted jobs that Tae Kwon Do instructors favored, so he must have known what he was doing, right?

  Anyway, the deal was this: you'd go into a small, dark room that was lit from above only by a small, rose light. In the background, soft Korean music played (or what the Korean chap said was Korean music; actually, it sounded a lot like the 101 Strings Playing Ravi Shankar's Greatest Hits); and then the Korean chap, sitting in the exact center of the floor, with all the overweight ladies around him, would start reciting long lists of presumably Korean phrases, and the overweight ladies would do their best to repeat them.

  This went on for nearly half an hour, at which point the Korean chap stood and went around to each of them and touched his sharp, damp thumb to their foreheads, and said a prayer that they should shed their excess pounds. Again, he spoke what was presumably Korean, though Georgia Feldstein, a wise-ass matron Lilly liked a lot, said that sometimes the man's Korean sounded like some of the things Shemp and Mo muttered to each other in the course of a "Three Stooges" two-reeler.

  The cost for all this was three hundred and fifty dollars a week and, in the first month, Lilly Carlyle lost not a single pound. She had, as always, drawn up a list of "substitutes" for the things the Korean chap had recommended for his 834-calorie diet.

  And they were the usual substitutes, too: cake for bran bread; rich ice cream for Jell-O; and spare ribs for tuna fish. So what were a few more eensy, teensy calories, anyway?

  The sessions with the Korean chap ran five mornings a week, which put
Lilly in her office at International Talent Management just before eleven. By that time of day, she was sure to have received at least six "really urgent" phone messages from the various actors, writers and directors she represented. So what else was new?

  II

  It was a typical Los Angeles autumn morning. Raining like a mother.

  The mayor was asking people not to hate him just because he was black. (They didn't; they hated him for many other reasons.) And there had been another freeway shooting last night. This time, thank God, nobody actually killed, just maimed a little. And a Lakers' cheerleader tearfully told KTLA-TV viewers that her decision to become a nun was not a cheap publicity gimmick just because her agent had dropped her, "the greasy little bastard."

  Lilly drove her twenty-year-old, wire-wheeled Jag from the Korean chap's to the office and arrived just in time to wave goodbye to International's lone superstar, a silver-haired man Lilly had tried to sleep with one drunken night after the Oscars, only to have him turn her down.

  Ricardo, the male secretary who really hated Lilly and vice-versa, lifted his azure gaze and said, sweetly, "How's the diet going, Lilly?" even though he could plainly see that, despite her very chic linen suit, she was still fifty pounds overweight.

  But she was too single-minded this morning to let the little bitch set her off. She went directly to her office and closed the door.

  After she had returned all the "really urgent" messages (only one out of six was really urgent, a very decent director of hers who was sweating out an AIDS test and just wanted a few kind words, which she gave him) and read the usual memos From Above urging all six International agents to try harder for big names, she poured herself a cup of coffee and walked over to the window.

  The size and condition of her office bespoke Suzie O'Malley's (aka Lilly Carlyle—a name she'd taken from a bodice ripper paperback) time in Hollywood.

  While the carpet was pretty good, the furnishings were dated and, if one looked closely, scuffed. The burnt orange couch, for instance, was missing a button which she'd had to cover with a burnt orange throw pillow that did not exactly match the couch itself. There was a tiny cigarette hole in the leather-like armchair that sat next to the wood-like bookcase in which Lilly kept neat stacks of the scripts she was currently schlepping around town.

  Lilly hadn't sold a script in two years.

  The office smelled of something that had been too long deprived of fresh air, a musty smell. Because, Lilly supposed, it was something of a musty agency—or that was its reputation, anyway. International had only one mega-star, and him they clung to with all the fervor and force possible. Nobody in the business could figure out why the guy stayed with Wade Preston and Lilly Carlyle.

  Mostly, International dealt with TV stars, of the sitcom and car chase fodder variety. They'd be big three, four seasons on a hit show, and they'd get lots and lots of press (good press, if Lilly was doing her job), and then the series would fold and go into syndication and then the stars would go into a new sitcom or car chase series and it wouldn't do very well at all. And two seasons later you could catch said stars sitting inside a box and having dimpled John Davidson bounce would-be funny lines off them. That was the arc: nobody to star to nobody. Usually the round trip took seven, eight years. Hey, pal, do you know the way to San Jose?

  With one exception.

  Cobey Daniels.

  Cobey hadn't just been big, he'd been super-big, and if he hadn't gotten in trouble with that fourteen-year-old chick in Florida—

  Lilly'd had to work her considerable ass off to keep him out of the slam. As was only proper. Wade Preston, who was in love with Lilly and at least once a week asked her to marry him, had sold Lilly a sizeable share of the agency several years ago.

  She'd managed to maneuver Cobey into a mental hospital. The usual bit, really: perils-of-teenage-stardom, stress, fatigue, hadn't-really-been-going-to-hurt-the-girl.

  The judge had gone along, God bless him.

  Now, recalling all this, Lilly looked down on Sunset Boulevard.

  How romantic, that name. Sunset Boulevard. She'd come to Hollywood as Suzie O'Malley from a small Ohio town, the same plot setup all those hack musical-comedy writers used in the thirties and forties and fifties.

  She hadn't been a happy girl. She'd been cursed with a gorgeous face sitting atop a seriously overweight body and now she wasn't a happy woman. Twice married, twice divorced. Three abortions. She'd even tried sex with another woman once, an actress who seemed to truly believe that she was in some kind of supernatural contact with Garbo, but that hadn't done it at all. Lilly liked men; or some men, anyway.

  Now she stood looking down at the wrong end of Sunset (the really successful agencies were elsewhere) on a chill, gray, rainy day, and she thought of Cobey.

  She had talked to him many times lately. She had plans for him again.

  He'd blown it the first time, but she was going to make certain he didn't blow it the second time.

  God, she'd fought so hard for him. All those years, ever since he was a six-year-old boy.

  She sighed, turning away from the window.

  It was time to write the letter, time to set it all in motion again.

  She went over to her computer terminal, flipped on the green-glowing machine, and waited for the small electronic dot to explode in the middle of her screen.

  Then she set to work.

  Doctor Robert Reeves

  Chief Psychiatrist

  Menlow Park Hospital

  St. Louis, Missouri

  Dear Doctor Reeves.

  When we spoke a year ago. you said you felt that if everything went well in the next twelve months, Cobey would be released this fall.

  I've seen Cobey four times in the past year and I speak to him at least once a week on the phone. I can honestly say he looks and sounds like the old Cobey. I believe he's ready for release and I hope you agree with me.

  I should add a cautionary note here. The Hollywood press—including the tabloids—has been eagerly awaiting his release. There's nothing they love more than finding a new angle on an old scandal. They'll bring it all up again, too—how Cobey was the most beloved teenage star of the early eighties, and what happened that day at the Florida shopping mall. Not to mention several other incidents in which he was involved.

  In light of this, I'm asking you to keep his release a secret. I have employed a Hollywood private investigative firm whose people are also trained bodyguards. A man named William Puckett will be meeting with you and arranging for Cobey's final release. He will fly with Cobey back to Los Angeles, at which point I will take over. I have already contacted a psychiatrist here so that Cobey can begin seeing him at once, three times a week.

  I appreciate your cooperation in this matter and if you have any questions, please contact me. Cobey's release is my chief concern in life because he is the son I never had...

  Sincerely,

  Lilly Carlyle

  III

  Family Life had once taped one of those "serious" episodes cast with one eye on an Emmy and one eye on even greater ratings.

  In this episode, Cobey's nineteen-year-old sister had a breakdown and was sent to a mental hospital.

  This was the first time Cobey had ever heard of electric-shock treatments, of how they strapped you down and zapped your brain with several thousand volts of electricity. Supposedly, the shock would bring you out of your deep depression.

  Cobey was seventeen at the time of the episode. For days he went around thinking of electric-shock as something like Frankenstein's monster, jagged blue bolts of electricity crisscrossing the air above the skull, the entire body convulsing. He'd also been told that in the early days of electric-shock the convulsions had been so severe that some people actually broke arms and legs; and a few even swallowed their tongues and strangled to death.

  And two days before his twenty-first birthday, early in his second year at Menlow Park Hospital, Cobey received his first electric-shock treatment, which som
e of the patients called "riding the lightning."

  The odd thing was, it wasn't so bad, not really. Cobey went into this small, white room adjacent to the big, white operating room and he read magazines and he chatted with the other patients awaiting treatments and then a slender, very pretty nurse came into the room and called Cobey's name and then led him very sweetly into an anteroom where he was given a white hospital gown and told to lie down on a gurney. Then the same very pretty nurse, talking and smiling all the time, strapped Cobey down and pushed him into the operating room.

  Seen from the gurney, the room was white and vast. It smelled of various tart medicines and it was so cold that Cobey could feel goose bumps all over his arms and legs.

  Everything, from Cobey's perspective, was upside down, of course.

  A doctor and three nurses peered down at him, their heads forming a semicircle.

  The nurses were pretty. The doctor had wide, hairy nostrils.

  "Do you know what Sodium Pentathol is?" the doctor asked. He had a beard and he was young and he sort of looked like a hippie.

  "Truth serum?" Cobey said.

  The doctor smiled. "Well, that's its popular name. We call it Sodium Pentathol. Nurse Irene is going to give you an injection of it. All you need to do is start counting backwards from one hundred. You'll never reach ninety-six."

  Cobey thought that was highly unlikely. Who couldn't count backwards from one hundred to ninety-six?

  He couldn't.

  He reached ninety-seven and the universe exploded. Freezing blackness—the darkness between the stars could be no colder or vaster—overwhelmed him and he ceased, at least as far as he knew, to exist.

  Extinction.

  He was next aware of struggling to open his eyes. Brightness pushed against his lids and a human voice rumbled something not quite understandable.