Why not? Sharon Tate was two canyons away.
The option of finishing the script without coke was not available. Not in those days.
The clock was ticking. It was almost one in the morning. The messenger was coming at six for the script.
I scribbled a note, left it by her bed next to her cell phone, closed the door softly, and left the house.
* * *
Fifty minutes later, I’m flying home. Almost two in the morning on a cold starless night on Coldwater Canyon in Beverly Hills. No sidewalks, only narrow shoulders, expensive homes hidden from view behind protective hedges. No street lamps, barely a moon. My headlights the only illumination on the twisting canyon road.
The taste Zeke had given me was amazing. In a flash of insight, I’d seen the whole last act. Everything Jinx Magruder would need to solve the case. It was perfect! How could I have missed it? It was all so clear. Beautifully and intricately connected, layers of meaning reverberating in on themselves. No wonder I used drugs!
I was watching the scenes play out when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw—what was it?—too late—to keep from hitting it.
The jolt of the impact threw me forward, slamming my chest into the wheel, as it spun the car into a skid. I straightened the wheel into the direction of the skid, and the car righted itself and continued careening down the canyon before my mind had registered what had happened.
I’d hit something. What had it been?
Who. Had it been.
I knew I should stop and find out.
But I had two grams of coke in the car. What if I had to wait for the police to file a report?
I rounded one curve and hurtled towards the next. A glance in the rear view mirror revealed only the familiar sight of a terrified woman struggling to appear okay. The road behind was empty.
I’d left Julia at home. If I stopped, Jonathan would find out.
I rounded the curves without downshifting, the downhill momentum increasing my speed. No lights. No sounds. Just the purr of the Porsche and the thud of whatever my fender hit, which now echoed in the blood pounding in my ears.
What had I hit? Stop, and find out.
What if I was arrested? Production would shut down, and we were already over budget. If I went to jail, it could cost us the season. People with families to feed would lose their jobs. It was irresponsible, selfish even to consider it. It must have been a dog.
I love dogs. I should stop and tell the owners.
It didn’t have tags. If it had, I would have seen them.
My sweaty hands gripped the wheel. My foot pressed the accelerator as if I could outpace what I had done. As if, if I just drove fast enough, I could get back to the time before I’d left the house.
Because in some part of my frenzied being, I knew it was no dog. Dogs don’t kneel by the side of the road to change their tires in the middle of the night.
I turned on the radio. And I remember now that as I fled down that dark, twisting canyon, eyes like pinwheels, brain on fire, the Beach Boys sang in celestial harmonies, “She’ll have fun, fun, fun, ‘til her daddy takes her T-Bird away.”
CHAPTER 2
I finished the script in time for the messenger to get it for the six o’clock call.
Jonathan, Julia, and I lived in an old Spanish-style house in Brentwood that had previously been owned by Ida Lupino. Jonathan had turned one of the downstairs bedrooms into a home office for me. My room was on the dark side of the house. Its small windows had a decorative iron grating and let in little sun. I usually kept the drapes drawn anyway. I lay down on the sofa, hoping to catch an hour or so of sleep before I’d have to leave for the studio. As I closed my eyes, the accident replayed in my mind. I rounded the curve and saw in my peripheral vision, too late, a woman changing a tire by the side of the road. My fender had glanced off—what—her shoulder? Knocking her over. But I had already sped round the bend, leaving her behind.
My eyes shut against the scene playing inside them; my heart pounded as it had last night. What could have happened to her? How badly had she been hurt? Why hadn’t I stopped? To offer assistance, to call for help?
Because of the drugs.
Is this who I had become? Someone who’d needed drugs so badly she’d left a child alone in the middle of the night? Someone who would leave the scene of a hit and run?
A knife of pain stabbed me behind my eye. I swung my legs off the sofa onto the Navajo rug on the Mexican tile floor, cupping my eyes with my hands.
If this is how bad a problem I had, I’d better do something about it. And I would. As soon as we finished the season.
Right now, I had a headache only a Fiorinal could cure. I staggered over to the desk and opened the bottom drawer, rummaging through the prescription bottles. I found the Fiorinal and took six, downing them with a swig from my emergency vodka.
I should call the police. Tell them what happened. Tell them it was me.
Then Jonathan would know I’d left Julia alone.
Jonathan hated drugs, couldn’t understand why I needed them. He had an occasional drink, socially. He could never understand why I got drunk. Neither could I.
What if they traced the car? I’d been a crime reporter; my show was a detective series. I knew they had methods for finding people. If they were going to find me anyway, wouldn’t it be better if I turned myself in?
But we were in production. I’d just finished this script; another was due in six days.
What about that poor woman? What if she had medical bills? I had insurance.
I also had responsibility for a show that employed several hundred people and cost the network over two million dollars an episode.
I saw the remnants of last night’s coke. I rubbed my finger in it, put it to my nose, sniffed. I needed it to help me think.
I heard a knock on the door.
“Come in.”
Julia entered wearing her Eastman school uniform of pleated beige skirt and white polo shirt. I knew she was at odds with her rapidly changing body, which was sprouting pimples instead of breasts, growing taller but not softer. It pained me to see her dissatisfaction with her appearance; to me, she always looked wonderful. Now she seemed like an image from a time of innocence, before last night, that was already receding into an irretrievable past.
“Did you finish the script?”
I nodded, and she smiled, happy for me.
Julia’s real mother had died of cancer when Julia was three. Julia was about eight when we’d met, and when Jonathan first introduced us, she had looked at me the way a shipwrecked passenger would gaze at a boat on the horizon. The longing in her eyes terrified me, given the work I’d done to keep anything like it out of my own. My relationship with my own mother didn’t make me eager to recreate the mother-daughter bond. And yet, she’d won me over with her lack of guile. As I fell in love with Jonathan, I also fell in love with her. We’d done our best to be a family ever since.
“I made French toast.”
“Oh, honey...” I reached for her, and she came over to me. I put my arms around her and buried my head against her. “You shouldn’t have to do that. I should be the one making breakfast for you.”
“You were on deadline.” Julia had grown accustomed to taking up the slack for preoccupied grownups.
I gave her a kiss and told her I’d be there in a minute and to get herself ready for school. Fortified by the vodka, Fiorinal, and cocaine, I went upstairs to shower and dress. Julia was waiting for me in the kitchen