Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, No. 1. Whole No. 797, January 2008

Santa with Sunglasses by William Link

William Link and his former writing partner Richard Levinson are considered by many to be the most successful collaboration in television history: What few know is that the duo began their professional writing career in EQMM, in 1954. They went on to conceive such immortal TV characters as Columbo and worked together until Levinson’s death in 1987. Mr. Link has gone on to write other top shows, including, The Cosby Mysteries.

Gino Benedetti was her nemesis. Megan’s contempt for him had not yet reached the level of blind hatred, but it was climbing slowly, like the box-office numbers of her current film. The latest irony was that he had shot her and other arriving members of the cast at the gala premiere in Manhattan.

Benedetti was a charter member of the Hollywood paparazzi, a ravenous group of scavengers who fed on the live meat of movie celebrities rather than on the bleeding flesh of roadkill. The unfortunate aftermath was that after the photos were published, the careers of some did indeed become roadkill.

She had no idea why he had fastened his callous lens on her. She was a rising young actress at mid-level stardom, courted already by the entertainment media. But even though she considered herself a hip, college-educated New Yorker, she usually let her press people do all the flesh-pressing.

Was Benedetti somehow in love with her natural beauty? Although most of Hollywood beauty these days, she had to admit, was as natural as a computer graphic or Burt Reynolds’s hairline. Maybe it was what Oscar Wilde had written: We always kill what we love.

The reason for his fascination was relatively unimportant. Megan and her producer husband Arnold couldn’t attend an awards dinner or go to a rave club on Melrose without Benedetti’s intrusive Nikon in their faces or their windshield. But he was especially lasered in on her. He never spoke or joked, flirted, like some of his equally desperate cohorts. He was just a painfully thin, ferretlike young man with slick, combed-back black hair who circled, danced, paraded around her, the camera like an obscene clicking insect in his thrusting hands. He always wore sunglasses, the lenses opaque, black as midnight. She had heard his fervent dream was getting the cover of People.

Christmas Day, they had been invited to a brunch at the home of a producer friend of her husband’s, Jay Graham.

She had left Arnold sleeping off a massive hangover and gone with her stepson Toby to the party, stunned to see the mansion’s lawns and surrounding trees blanketed with snow: a glaring, blinding-white wonderland. When was the last time it had snowed in Beverly Hills? Ever?

Jay explained the phenomenon to her while his adored and adorable daughter Samantha opened her Christmas gifts.

Samantha had read about, or seen on the tube, white Christmases all over the world. How come, she asked her father, she had never seen one out here?

“What could I do, Megan?” Jay asked. “You know I would climb mountains for the child. And then it hit me!”

The solution was his studio bringing trucks at five in the morning and spraying pulverized ice all over their mini-estate. Jay made sure he and his wife were with Samantha in her bedroom when she woke and saw a strange, wavering, eye-dazzling lake of light on the ceiling. Then she ran to the window and experienced her first white Christmas. Perfect, Megan thought: God, like everyone else, was on the studio payroll.

They went back to the periphery of parents monitoring the gift-opening ceremony. Megan saw that the crowd was made up of mostly movie people, no TV stars. In the rigid Hollywood caste system, the Brahmins of the Big Screen rarely consorted with the television Untouchables. And no one was even gawking out the windows at the “snow.” But then in Beverly Hills, no one would ever be caught gawking at anything.

Only later did Santa and his merry elves appear to frolic with the youngsters. Toby seemed bored with them, fascinated only with one of Samantha’s gifts, a Cyber-shot digital camera. “I want one,” he whined.

“You’ll get one for your birthday,” Megan promised.

“That long?” At nine he was already a demanding, overweight brat, a classic TV couch potato who could maneuver his father like a studio animal wrangler. Unfortunately, Dad was fat and demanding too. Sometimes she wished, if it were possible, she could drown them both in their gene pool.

And then she realized that Santa, surprisingly thin in his unpadded red costume, was taking pictures of the children, even at angles that included their parents’ famous faces. She saw too, with a tightening fist of anger in her gut, that Santa was wearing sunglasses.

She quickly ducked away as he tried to take her and Toby’s picture, and nudged the nearby Jay on his arm. “Santa,” she said quietly. “Where did you get him?”

“Agency. Why?”

“He’s Gino Benedetti, king of the paparazzi, grabbing photos he’ll be selling to all takers tomorrow.”

Blood climbed high in Jay’s face. “You’re sure?”

“I’d be the last person to get you sued, Jay.”

“Thanks.” He strode angrily off toward Santa, who was shooting pictures now of his vulnerable Samantha, who was grinningly aiming her new camera back at him.

He was making her life a living hell. Now he had followed her to her boyfriend Judd’s apartment in West Hollywood. Megan had seen the anonymous gray SUV moving discreetly on her tail while she drove there from Brentwood, and the klaxon of her fears had sounded like an air-raid siren. Arnold had recently hired a new butler, Tanner, a frozen-faced, self-effacing older Brit, whom she detested every time he obsequiously nodded when she entered a room. Was he on the paparazzo’s payroll, alerting him every time she left the house?

Judd and she had never connected that afternoon, which had led to the relationship’s preordained destruction, her final Dear John (Judd) phone call. He had been fun, a sexy distraction, but she was sure her bemused, work-obsessed husband probably wouldn’t have cared even if he saw a photo of them in coitus with Benedetti’s imprimatur. She had discussed Benedetti with him and received a waved-hand dismissal. “These guys come with the territory, honey. Termites at a lumberyard. We just have to learn to live with them.” She began to think he liked appearing in the movie magazines and the supermarket tabloids with her. Good exposure, she thought, for him and his latest epic.

Almost every afternoon, when she wasn’t shooting, she took a few laps in their pool and tried to teach Toby how to swim. It was a momentous waste of time: The boy mostly paddled in the safe shallow end, splashed the red and yellow ducks she had bought him as a two-year-old, and listened to the rap music blaring from his transistor on the apron of the pool. He treated her like a servant.

After he went back in the house, she usually stripped off her bikini and swam luxuriously back and forth, experiencing the liberated pleasure of heated water stroking her sleek, naked body, a freedom that she had reveled in since she was a child in the Hamptons. She felt perfectly protected, since at this late hour in the afternoon the servants were in the far wing of the house attending to dinner and there were high stucco walls surrounding the pool on all sides. There was only the blue, cloudless ceiling of sky overhead, devoid of peering paparazzi helicopters or Cessnas. She doubted Benedetti had the money for a satellite.

Of course, her afternoon idylls came to an abrupt end when the Enquirer published a nude shot and then the Internet proliferated the outrage. It showed only her face and her bare, ample breasts (she was emerging from the pool), but that was enough to get (no pun) exposure on Entertainment Tonight among other shows, and show-biz immortalization in Jay Leno’s monologue.

Again, Arnold seemed undisturbed. She argued angrily with him at the dinner table that she had become a laughingstock not only in the hermetic, front-stabbing Hollywood community but across the country. She tried to convince him that there was, paradoxically, a bad side to good publicity that could cripple a career in its incubator.

Stepson Toby was no help. “They’ve been talking about it in school,” he said, more impressed with this than he had been with her in her best films. He made it a point of never calling her Mom or Mother. “My friend Scott downloaded it and taped it on my gym locker!”

“Doesn’t that embarrass you?” she asked him, incredulously.

He shrugged pudgy shoulders. “Nope. Scott says you got much bigger ones than his stepmom’s!”

She noticed that their blank-faced butler Tanner had been standing silently near the kitchen door throughout their whole conversation. Usually he remained in the kitchen until he served the next course. Either he was someone who soaked up salaciousness like a thirsty sponge or maybe her earlier suspicions had been correct.

The next morning she was about to unload these suspicions on her husband when the phone rang, her line.

It was her agent, with some demoralizing news: She had been up to get the costarring role with Kevin Costner in his new movie (a big career jump), but the producers had opted to go elsewhere. Sorry, honey, luck of the draw, but there’ll be others, trust me... etc.

That would be the day, trusting an agent. She hung up on the man’s further stream of reassurances. “That was Allan,” she told her husband. “I lost the Kevin Costner thing.”

“Why?”

“My God, Arnold, why do you think?”

For the first time, he seemed concerned. He even left his spoon in his banana-laden corn flakes.

Bare breasts in the Enquirer was one thing, losing a prime part was another. “Who’s producing the picture?”

“David Salter and his partner.”

“I know Dave. I’ll call him, find out what happened.”

Over, done. He went back to his corn flakes.

“Aren’t you at least interested in how somebody got the photo of me?”

He napkined his mouth, simultaneously looking at his watch, late for a meeting at the studio. “Yes, yes, of course. It’s that guy you hate, whatsisname?”

“Benedetti. Gino Benedetti. Those people pay people, Arnold, clerks at the hotels, people who arrange celebrity travel schedules, even servants in our homes.”

“I know all that. What are you getting at, honey? I’m late for a meeting.”

“The new butler you hired. The nodding, silent suckup Tanner?”

“This Benedetti paid him? You know this for a fact?”

“No. But if Benedetti was going to make a deal with anyone in this household I’d say Tanner would be his conspirator of choice.”

That afternoon, she decided to stay away from the pool, which was just fine with Toby because he would not be subjected to her private torture regime: swimming lessons. He could play his video games with his omnipresent Cokes and potato chips. She swore he and his father were prime candidates someday for a gastric bypass.

In the study, Megan had picked up the phone to call her agent when she was surprised to see Tanner in the doorway. He was no longer in his servant’s coat and dark trousers. Now he wore a double-breasted suit and respectful tie. His face was pained, as if he had just been forced to go on a castor-oil regimen.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, madam. But I wanted to say goodbye.”

“Goodbye? Where are you going, Tanner?”

He stood more spine-erect than usual, like a recalcitrant schoolboy in front of the principal. “I was telephonically dismissed this morning.”

“By my husband?” She was more surprised than angry.

“Yes, madam. He questioned me about a gentleman I have never heard of, I believe Benedetti is the name. He intimated that I had taken a photograph of you, ma’am, in dishabille, and sold it to Mr. Benedetti. I told your husband I had no knowledge of the incident he was referring to. But he is very generously releasing me with three months’ remuneration.”

She had totally misjudged Tanner. He was obviously a gentleman of the Old School, a class that had been dismissed years back. What she had condemned as obsequiousness was merely a form of respectful politeness. His silence was just that — he did not chatter or volunteer an opinion, waiting until his master gave him an order. God, it was almost comical — how had she missed it? — he was a living stereotype, the perfect movie butler!

Megan rose from her chair. “Tanner,” she said, her tone graver than she wanted, “this has been some kind of terrible mistake. I don’t want you to leave. I promise you I will clear everything up with my husband.”

“Yes, madam.” The smile was a man sucking on a lemon. “With your permission I will return to my duties.”

He left, and she just stood there, dealing with the breadth and depth of her ignorance.

Later, she drove her Jaguar around to the back of the property: There was only one high tree, an ancient elm, that stood outside the high stucco wall that protected their pool. If someone climbed it they would have a perfect view of the pool and the perfect angle to get the shot of her emerging from the water. But as she carefully inspected the tree, she couldn’t find any evidence on the bark that anyone had ever climbed up. An old tree, but still a virgin.

Driving back to the house, she was convinced that it was an “outside job,” as the cops say in the heist movies. If not the elm, where could someone have been positioned to get the “money shot”?

When she returned to the house, Tanner was waiting for her at the door, announcing that her friend Mrs. Kitridge was in the study.

Puzzled, she went to the study, wondering why Sue Kitridge was paying her an unannounced visit. They had talked on the phone that morning and Sue hadn’t mentioned anything about getting together.

Sue was Megan’s age, blond, intelligent, unassuming; a good friend and a decent person. She had nothing to do with the business, which downgraded her as a “civilian” in Hollywood parlance. Her son Alec was one of Toby’s schoolmates.

“Can I get you something?” Megan asked. “Coffee, some tea?”

For a neat, well-groomed person, Sue looked a bit disheveled today. Megan wondered if it was something about the photo, but they had discussed that ad infinitum this morning on the phone.

Sue removed a snapshot from her handbag and wordlessly handed it to her. At first she thought it was the now infamous picture, but she quickly realized it was different: This one revealed her breasts and her privates.

“Sue,” she stammered, “where—?”

“I caught Alec with it. I can guarantee you he’s going to be severely punished.”

“But where—?”

“Toby. He’s been selling them in school. This is a terrible thing to tell you, but you know we’re such good friends, so — so I thought it was something you’d want to know.”

Megan nodded, still peering at the photo. In a way she was relieved — she no longer had to build her stupid sand castles on suspicions of butlers and elm trees.

“Where could Toby have gotten it?” Sue asked.

“I don’t know,” she lied. “But rest assured, I’m going to find out.”

She reached over and grabbed Sue’s hands. “You’re a dear, dear friend and you mustn’t feel you’ve hurt me.”

Sue smiled faintly, her hands squeezing Megan’s in return.

While Toby was snacking before dinner in the kitchen, Megan made a quick search of his room. She found a digital camera, but it was a different model than Samantha’s gift. Didn’t matter: The once murky waters were clearing, and another, more sinister picture was slowly coming up in the developing tray.

Toby had coveted his friend’s camera and “Santa,” observing that at the brunch, had seized on the opening. Get a juicy photo of Stepmom and there was money for Toby. He probably even gave him a free digital to do the dirty work, which must have maximized the boy’s incentive. Benedetti had probably scoped out the house and seen the inviting elm, but why use that when he had an accomplice now in the very heart, if not the breast, of the victim?

Megan changed into her bikini and went down to the kitchen, collared her stepson. “Swimming lesson, young man. Let’s go.”

“Do I have to?” The classic plea of the parent-oppressed child.

“Yes, you have to. I promise it’ll be a very short but important lesson today. And don’t turn on your rap.”

She tried to relax on the chaise lounge, knowing he was purposely keeping her waiting while he changed into his swimming trunks. Finally he came out into the darkening afternoon, the lengthening shadows on the bright tiles. She knew he was picking up on something hostile in her gaze.

She dove into the pool, gesturing him to follow. Once he was in the water with her she knew he would be more vulnerable to what she had to say.

“Okay, make it fast,” he said, once he was treading water next to her. “What do we do first?”

“We tell the truth. You admit you took those photos of me and gave one to Gino Benedetti.”

He didn’t answer, tried to paddle away, but she grabbed him by a slippery arm. He turned his head, but wouldn’t face her.

“Admit it, Toby. If not now, then tonight, when I accuse you in front of your father.”

Now the boy’s head swiveled defiantly to look at her. He laughed. “Dad? He’d never believe you. He said you’re just a gold-digging bitch who married him for his money and his power to make you a big-deal movie star. And you cheat with other guys. Get lost, Megan.”

For a moment her words wouldn’t come. Then: “Your father loves me. He would never say hurtful things like that.”

“He did! He said he never should’ve divorced Mom. Biggest mistake of his life. So don’t go tell him your lies. I never took any pictures of you. And the one I told you Scott saw?” Laughing, having the time of his life now: “He said you’re just an anorexic bitch, old lady floppy jugs, a real turnoff—”

Her hands closed on his wet shoulders. He tried to shrug them away, but her anger thrived on their potato-chip flabbiness. “Go on,” she said, her voice incredibly even. “Tell me more.”

“You’re a Playboy reject. Look in the mirror, bitch. You’re laughable. You really lost that movie because you can’t act! That’s what Dad says!” He laughed again, his hands almost playfully trying to claw hers away. “You got a smell comes off the screen! Don’t you know that? You stink! You’ll never make it!”

There was no strength in his soft, Big Mac arms. It was easy to hold his head under water, his words just a gurgle now, the frantic pleas trapped in the pitiful air bubbles escaping from his almost-closed, hate-filled mouth.

When she went back in the house she found herself surprisingly calm. Already she had her story: She had left him there practicing his breast stroke and when he had overexerted himself he had called for help, but unfortunately no one heard. She was sure she had been careful enough to leave no marks on his shoulders.

Arnold was devastated. The police told him accidents happen when children are left unsupervised. Megan tearfully accepted the blame, and her husband’s pathetic anger, but she knew she was home free. All their friends came over to commiserate that night and Arnold drank himself into a tearful oblivion.

It was almost a day and a half later when the police returned.

They showed her a vivid, graphic photo of her drowning Toby in the pool.

It immediately metastasized into a major media event, with Arnold refusing to pay her bail. And Gino Benedetti, her nemesis, from his elm-tree vantage point, had finally realized his dream... the cover of People magazine.

(c)2007 by William Link