Hollywood Hills

FIVE

Two weeks after the red carpet event at the Kodak Theatre, Hollywood Nate Weiss was lying on the sofa in his North Hollywood apartment, where he lived alone, considering the business card he’d received from the director Rudy Ressler. For years, while working red carpet events and taking every opportunity to chat up the rich and famous, he’d been given plenty of business cards by virtue of being an LAPD cop from people who hoped he could fix a ticket or do other things for them that were equally impossible. He’d tried and mostly failed to meet the kind of people who could get him real work. No one was more aware than Nate that the clock was not on his side.

The last job where he’d had a speaking role was three years ago in an indie production that had vanished and not even gone to DVD. He’d been a day player on that one and of course had been typecast as an LAPD cop. His scripted line was “Put your hands on your head and grab the wall.”

When he’d tried to tell the director, a no-talent bully ten years younger, that it was impossible to grab a wall or anything else when your hands were on your head, the director said, “And what’re your qualifications in such matters?”

The assistant director then whispered to the director that Nate was an LAPD police officer in his other life, and the director grumbled something and then said to Nate, “Just go, ‘Up against the wall.’ And try to act excited because you’ve collared a perp you’ve been looking for.” Then he turned to the assistant director and said, “Or maybe we should have the lieutenant say that?”

“Say what?” the AD asked.

“We just collared a perp we’ve been looking for,” the annoyed director said.

“Excuse me,” Nate interrupted. “The words perp and collar are terms used in the East, and though they’re very popular on TV shows, we don’t use either of them at LAPD. Would you like me to give you some substitute words that we use out here in the West?”

The director had dead-stared him for a moment and said, “Just say ‘Up against the wall’ and let it go at that. So okay, Officer… whatever your name is, let’s try to get it right in one take and move the fuck on!”

Nate figured he must’ve gotten it right in one take. Either that or the little putz simply had had enough of him, because he growled, “Cut,” two seconds after Nate delivered the line. Then he said, “Print it.”

Nate was out of costume and on his way within the hour. If he could do it over again, he’d do or say whatever was asked of him without comment. It had been so hard to get work even as a day player that he hadn’t done anything lately except take jobs as an extra a few times a year. And at age thirty-eight, time was surely of the essence.

Remembering his humiliation at the hands of that director caused him to get up and find the business card of Rudy Ressler. He opened his cell and dialed the number.

A young man answered, saying, “Rudy Ressler’s office.”

“This is Officer Nate Weiss, LAPD,” he said. “Mr. Ressler asked me to call.”

The young man said, “Just a moment,” and put Nate on hold.

Nate almost gave up, but after nearly five minutes, the director came on the line and said, “Officer Weiss. I’m glad to hear from you!”

“You asked me to call you, Mr. Ressler,” Nate said.

“I certainly did,” Rudy Ressler said. “I owe you. Let’s do lunch today. How about two o’clock?”

“You don’t owe me anything,” Nate said, disappointed. He’d hoped for more than lunch from this man.

“I certainly do,” the director said. “And I’d like to discuss the possibility of you reading for me. I’ll be starting a movie for cable a few months after I get back from Europe.”

A job! That perked him up, and Nate said, “I’d love to have-do lunch with you. I don’t have to go on duty till five fifteen. Where and what time?”

After they finished talking, Nate got dressed. He started to put on a Tommy Hilfiger jersey but decided instead to wear a red tapered Polo shirt to reveal his biceps in case the part was for a buff-looking guy. And then he had to settle on gray cargo pants from Banana Republic because they were the only pair he had that was clean other than jeans. He figured the cargos would be okay because he wanted to look younger. He wondered if he should tell Rudy Ressler that gray temples were very premature in his family and offer to dye them dark if the director preferred. He hated to think about the fortieth birthday about to befall him in just eighteen months.

Nate showered and got to feeling upbeat because this was the first night he’d be working with Hollywood Station’s new arrival, Snuffy Salcedo. Of course, all cops were notorious gossips, and a police station secret was as hard to keep as a first marriage, but Snuffy was surely in a class of his own. Hollywood Nate figured he’d get an earful about the chief and Snuffy’s life among all the police brass and the drones at City Hall. But for now, Nate had big game to hunt.

At 1:50 P.M., Hollywood Nate pulled into the parking lot of a hot restaurant in west Hollywood. It was one of the new Italian places he’d read about that charged exorbitant prices to paint the food on the plate. They featured bite-size morsels of “imaginative” pasta and unrecognizable tidbits of sea creatures that wouldn’t fill the belly of the baby opossums that raided the trash cans near Nate’s apartment in North Hollywood. But he wasn’t there for the food.

He spotted Rudy Ressler sitting at a patio table shaded by potted palms with an attractive woman who Nate figured was probably Ressler’s age, though she looked younger. Nate understood the magic that was performed every day in the offices of plastic surgeons and dermatologists who almost outnumbered Realtors on the west side of Los Angeles. She was dressed for summer in a champagne-colored button-front sleeveless linen dress, and her highlighted chestnut hair was cupped just below her tiny ears.

Next to her was a younger man about Nate’s age in a Calvin Klein multistripe gray suit, a crisp white shirt, and a necktie that cost more than everything on Nate’s body. He had been around Hollywood types long enough to recognize the uniform of the day for agents from ICM and CAA.

Rudy Ressler was dressed supercool in a wrinkled cotton shirt, a black T-shirt beneath it, loose-fitting, acid-washed jeans, and retro black tennis shoes. In short, he took pains to dress as he had when he was in middle school, as did most of the above-the-line people on any shoot that Nate had ever worked. In the light of day the director looked older than he had on the red carpet. His rusty thinning hair was growing out at the roots, and his skin was getting blotchy. The director’s eye job wasn’t great either, and when Nate got close he could see the surgical scars by Ressler’s ear. Nate thought the director ought to sue the quack who remodeled him.

At first Rudy Ressler didn’t recognize Nate, but when he did, he jumped to his feet. “Officer Weiss!” he said, loudly enough for others at nearby tables to hear, obviously thinking it exotic and cool to be doing lunch with a cop.

Nate smiled and they shook hands. Rudy Ressler said, “I’d like you to meet my fiancée, Leona Brueger. And this is my agent, Todd Bachman.”

Leona Brueger gave Nate a dazzling smile, held out her hand palm down, so that he didn’t know whether to shake it or kiss it, and said, “Well, this is a treat. A real cop. Or should I say police officer?”

“Cop’s fine,” Nate said. “In fact, it’s my favorite word.”

He shook her hand, and it was quite cool for such a hot afternoon. The agent gave him a vigorous sweaty handshake and said, “Rudy tells me they call you Hollywood Nate, but I’m not sure why.”

“He works at Hollywood Station,” Rudy Ressler said. “And get this. He has a SAG card!”

“You’re an actor as well as a cop?” Todd Bachman said.

“When I can get work,” Nate said.

Rudy Ressler said to Nate, “Todd’s with CAA.”

“Would I have seen you in anything?” the agent asked Nate.

“I’m not sure,” Nate said self-consciously. “But I’m always available if you need my type in a production you may be packaging.”

Nate thought that everyone laughed too hard at that. He was trying to be amusing but he was also being very serious here.

“Are you represented?” Rudy Ressler asked.

“Well, not exactly,” Nate said, getting stoked over the possibility of being represented by CAA.

Leona Brueger chuckled and said, “He’s got a great look for anyone casting a cop character, doesn’t he, Todd? The camera would love him.”

When she said it, her lashes fluttered subtly, and Nate thought, An older chick batting her eyes at me? But then he noticed that her eyes were a bit heavy-lidded and there was an empty wine bottle in an ice bucket beside her, but neither the agent nor Rudy Ressler had a wineglass in front of him. So then he realized that Ms. Brueger liked to get her drink on.

The agent looked at his watch, and Nate saw that it was a Swiss Army watch like the one he wore. The absence of at least a Rolex made Nate conclude that the guy’s client list probably included a lot of B-listers like Rudy Ressler.

The agent said, “Rudy, Leona, must go. More tomorrow. Will loop you in as soon as I hear more from A amp;E. Good to meet you, Officer.”

He kissed the air in Leona’s direction, rose, and departed. And Nate was disheartened that the agent hadn’t even offered him a business card.

When he was gone, Leona Brueger stood wobbling for an instant and said to Rudy, “Damn these new Jimmy Choos. Too sky-high for me.”

Nate looked down and thought that the double ankle straps looked very smart around her shapely ankles, but the leather resembled snakeskin, and he was not fond of reptiles. She took a little step sideways before righting herself and heading for the ladies’ room. Sure, Nate thought, it’s just the shoes.

When she was gone, Rudy Ressler said, “Leona and me, we’re going to Tuscany for three months. At least that’s the idea, but I don’t think I can stay away that long. We plan to get married before the end of the year and move up to Napa. Leona’s got a yen to own a vineyard and make wine.” He pulled a sour expression and said sotto, “I don’t know how long her fantasy will last, but you know how women are.”

Nate said, “And, uh, how about the cable movie you mentioned? When do you think you might start prepping it?”

“Right after the first of the year,” Rudy Ressler said. “I’d like you to read for the part of a police detective. It’s not a big part but it does involve a couple of pages of dialogue and a big action sequence. Would you be interested?”

Nate’s breath caught and he said, “Absolutely.”

“Of course, I can’t promise you the part right now. First you’ll have to read for us. But if you do an acceptable job, it would be fun to have you in the role. The r-e-a-l cop playing the r-e-e-l cop. The publicists could have fun with it, too.”

Nate took an LAPD business card from his wallet with his cell number on the back and said, “I’ll be honored to read for you, Mr. Ressler.”

“That’s fine, Nate,” Ressler said. “Just fine.”

When Leona Brueger returned, she said, “Ready to go, Rudy?”

“I’ll get the car,” he said and headed toward the entrance.

Leona Brueger put her arm through Nate’s and he walked her to the door, where a stunning young hostess who Nate figured for another aspiring thespian said, “Good day, Mrs. Brueger. Hope to see you soon.”

Before Nate pushed open the door, Leona Brueger reached up with her free hand and squeezed his biceps, saying, “You’ve got impressive arms, young man.”

“I have to work extra hard in the gym to keep them,” Nate said. “It’s hell getting older.”

“You don’t know older,” Leona said wistfully, looking up at him. “Sometime you should drive up to my house and I’ll pour you a drink and tell you sad stories about older.”

When they got outside, Rudy Ressler’s Aston Martin was waiting and he was standing beside it with a cell phone to his ear. He said to Leona Bruger, “Damn! Leona, I’m terribly sorry. I just got a call from our editor, who’s practically in a fistfight with the director over the final cut. Can you possibly catch a cab?”

Nate said, “I can take Mrs. Brueger home.”

“Could you, Nate? That’s great,” Ressler said. “Okay with you, Leona?”

“Go referee the fight,” she said. “See you this evening.”

Before he got in his car, Rudy Ressler said, “I just had a thought, Leona. While we’re in Europe, maybe Nate here could drive by in his patrol car once in a while and check in on the house and the new man. What’s his name?”

“Raleigh Dibble,” she said.

Ressler said, “Yeah, Raleigh. Would you mind, Nate? There’s some valuable art in that house and that’s a lotta responsibility for a new guy.”

“Be glad to,” Nate said, realizing that he did not get to do lunch.

When Rudy Ressler had pulled away and Nate was waiting for the parking attendant to retrieve his car, he smiled apologetically and said to Leona Brueger, “When was the last time you rode in a seven-year-old Corvette?”

“At one time in my life I drove an eighteen-year-old bathtub Nash,” she said. “I was only slightly older than my mode of transportation but I loved that beast. I was driving it when I met my first husband, who I came to love a lot less than my old car, but through him I eventually came to meet Sammy Brueger. Now how about the story of your life, Nathan? Do they call you Nathan?”

“My mother and father do,” he said. “But everybody else calls me Nate.”

“Nathan Weiss.” When she said his name, she gave his biceps another squeeze and hung on to him unsteadily. “How is it that a nice Irish-Italian girl like me ends up being attracted to gorgeous Jewish men?”

He smiled self-consciously and said, “Must be the circles you travel in. I haven’t run into all that many gorgeous Jewish men. But I’m not much of a Jew anyway. Haven’t even gone to temple since I was a kid.” Then he paused and said, “Except a couple of times when somebody died.”

“Relatives?”

“Cops.”

“Jewish cops?”

“No, but I still felt compelled to go and pray for them, even though I know it’s all mumbo jumbo.”

She looked up at him and said, “Revealing that personal information to me just made you even more attractive. But I’ll bet you’re used to compliments from women, aren’t you, Nathan?”

Nate was relieved when the parking kid arrived, and he drew the Vette up beside a Ferrari 599 that he’d read in Motor Trend was selling for more than $300,000. Another kid delivered an Audi R8 that Nate had read sold for a paltry $150,000.

The kid held the door open for Leona Brueger, and Nate tipped him $10, the most he had ever tipped for car service.

After he got behind the wheel, Nate said, “I do apologize for my car.”

She smiled and said, “You really are too cute for words, Nathan.” Then she took off her right shoe and said, “These goddamn things’re killing me.”

She removed the left shoe and held it in her hand while Nate drove north in heavy traffic. He looked over and touched the shoe, saying, “Is it really snakeskin?”

“Damned if I know,” she said. “I’m not a shoe whore. I’m one of those broads that just buys the brand and hopes for the best.” She yawned and leaned back, slurring her words slightly and said, “Go ahead and ask me.”

“Ask you what?”

“How much I paid for them.”

“I wasn’t thinking that,” Nate said, but he was.

“Come on, Nathan,” she said. “I’ve had lots of cops in my extended family. The price of things was always on their minds. I understand you. I grew up poorer than you can imagine. I was a regular little Scarlett O’Hara when I came to this town, vowing never to be poor again. It didn’t take me long to learn that everything in Hollywood is for sale if you know how to shop.”

“Okay, how much do those shoes cost?” Nate asked.

Leona yawned again and said, “I think they were thirteen hundred and change.”

That impressed him for sure. He looked down at the shoes again but didn’t touch them this time.

Trying to make conversation to keep her awake, he said, “It sounds like you and Mr. Ressler have a wonderful vacation coming up. Two months in Tuscany sounds great.”

Her eyes were closed when she spoke. “Tuscany again. A different villa this time. Rudy’s never been there. Rudy’s never been many places outside of Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Malibu, and the San Fernando Valley, where he can run his production company on the cheap.”

“And you’re getting married when you get back? Congratulations.”

She opened her eyes and said, “My, my. Rudy shared a lot when I went to the ladies’ room. It must be the badge you carry. He’s very impressed with authority figures. When he has dinner with the chief of police he almost wets his pants.” Then she told him her address in the Hollywood Hills and closed her eyes.

Nate wondered if a bottle of wine always made her so chatty. And he wondered if an innocent flirtation with Leona Brueger might give him more juice with Rudy Ressler. Then he remembered what an assistant director had said to him on one of the last jobs he’d worked. The AD had observed the producer’s wife, a woman twenty years older than Nate, flirting with him. It made him say to Nate, “Officer, if you want to get work in this business, don’t pet the cougars. Not when they belong to the boss.”

She actually began dozing by the time they reached the foot of the Hollywood Hills and the Corvette began climbing up Outpost Drive to Mulholland. Nate had always enjoyed driving in the Hills in a black-and-white, admiring the view homes, fantasizing about that one break that could make it all possible for him, too.

When he got to the address she’d given him, he pulled up to the gate and stopped. It was easily the largest residential property in this part of the Hollywood Hills and Nate had to admit he’d love to be shown around.

He said gently, “Uh, Mrs. Brueger, we’re here.”

She opened her eyes and rummaged in her purse until she found a key ring that had a small remote device on it. She pressed it and the gate swung open. He drove in on a long, curving, faux-cobblestone driveway. He made the circle around a bubbling fountain so that the front of his car was facing the gate and she was on the side in front of the huge tiled arch over the main door.

He jumped out and ran around to open the door for her but she was already out, holding her $1,300 shoes in one hand and her purse in the other.

“Come in for a minute, Nathan,” she said.

“Okay, Mrs. Brueger,” he said.

This was a first. He’d been inside many homes in the Hollywood Hills over the years but as a cop, almost never as a guest.

She unlocked the door and pushed it open, walking to a nearby computer panel on the wall to punch in her code and deactivate the high-pitched alarm warning.

“Follow me,” she said.

He did that, crossing a foyer of Mexican tile until he was looking down two steps into the great room. It was very large and it seemed that almost every square foot of the white plaster walls contained paintings: oils, watercolors, and numbered lithographs.

Leona Brueger tossed her shoes on a massive glass coffee table, knocking over some pricey-looking knickknacks.

She said, “Have a seat. I’ll be right back. What’re you drinking?”

The entire interior was done in cream and custard colors: the walls, the drapes, the carpet, the side tables, and even the twin sofas, with accent pillows in subtle pastels. It all spelled comfort to Hollywood Nate. There was none of that minimalist crap he was constantly seeing in magazines and in the L.A. Times home section. This all looked stuffed and overstuffed. He had the impression of being enveloped by a giant voluptuous marshmallow.

And then there was the view. It was Hollywood, but not his Hollywood down there at asphalt level. This was Hollywood as seen by God, if there was one. The smog from this elevation was not ugly, not a dingy gray blanket of dangerous gases settling over the L.A. basin in late summer. No, this was a blaze of vivid primary colors propelled by offshore breezes and later would be lit by a last solar gasp before the sun fell into the Pacific. It was astonishing how beautiful and even delicious the L.A. smog could look from a $15 million home in the Hollywood Hills.

She paused on the top step and said, “Do you like the view?”

Nate said, “Up here the smog is the color of a cabernet and overripe plums and purple grapes with a spray of peach juice flowing through it. But somehow I don’t think this is what they mean when they say that Hollywood is just a big fruit bowl.”

Leona Brueger said, “Why, Officer Weiss, you do surprise me. Not only do you carry a SAG card but you have a touch of the poet in you. I wonder what other surprises you might be keeping hidden.”

Nate looked at his watch and said, “I have to be at work and in uniform by seventeen fifteen-I mean, five fifteen. I better not have a drink.”

She turned and said, “How about diet soda? You look like the healthy diet soda type.”

“Fine,” he said. “Thanks.”

The coffee table between the two sofas was piled with art books that looked as though they’d never been opened, and women’s magazines that looked well perused. When she returned with his diet soda in a crystal goblet, she had a goblet of white wine for herself. She held her glass up to his and said, “Chin-chin,” which a makeup artist that Nate used to date said was “the cry of the Hills birds,” meaning the women of the Hollywood Hills.

She sat down two feet away from him on the sofa and said, “I gave the butler the afternoon off. He won’t be back until seventeen hundred-I mean, five o’clock.”

That made Nate chuckle, and then he said, “Would he be Raleigh, the guy I’m supposed to see when I check on your property after you’re gone?”

“That’s him,” Leona Brueger said. “Some of my friends say I shouldn’t leave all this”-she waved in the general direction of the paintings-“with a man who’s only worked here such a short time, but he’s also worked for a friend of ours and comes highly recommended. Besides, I don’t give a rat’s eyeball for all this. It was my late husband’s passion, not mine. It’s well insured anyway, so que será, será.”

“I don’t know very much about art,” Nate said, sipping his soda and thinking, Yes, this lady really does like to get her drink on.

“Neither do I,” she said. “And I’m too old to learn. And speaking of old, how old did you say you are?”

“I’m thirty-eight,” he said. “I know I’m getting a bit long in the tooth to make it in the movie business. I’ve been a cop since I was a baby of twenty-one.”

“Hah!” she said. “Old. Thirty-eight is old, is it?”

She took a long pull from the wineglass and put it down on the coffee table. She scooted close to him and said, “I’ll bet I could help your career a little bit. As far as the part in whatever the thing is that Rudy’s doing, you’ve got it. I’ll see to that. But it’s only a couple of days’ work. I know other people in the business. People with real topspin. I could introduce you around. Some evening when you’re off duty, would you like to come here to a dinner party and meet a few of my friends?”

“You bet I would,” Nate said, wondering if a chemical peel gave her that buttery skin.

“I have to warn you, though,” she said, “all they talk about is diets, drugs that facilitate diets, and box-office grosses.”

“Fine with me,” he said.

“Can you really act?”

“Well, I’m not one of those who go through life imagining how everything would look through the lens of a Steadicam, but I’ve taken some classes,” he said. “And I’ve had a couple of speaking parts, but not in a feature film yet. And I can’t count the number of times I’ve been an extra.” He stopped when he saw her lips curve up in a little smile, and he felt like a kid bragging to a wealthy aunt. Then he said, “So, yes, I think I can act. But so can thousands-no, make it tens of thousands-of other people trying for the same breaks. I know what I’m up against.”

“Rudy Ressler is no Martin Scorcese,” she said, “but I’m sure you’re aware of that. Is that how you see yourself? In a crime movie directed by Scorcese or maybe by Clint Eastwood?”

“In my fantasies?”

“Yeah, let’s hear your fantasies.”

“To be honest, in my fantasies I’m not playing a cop. I see myself in a Woody Allen movie.”

He watched her burst into laughter, and he wasn’t sure how to interpret it until she stopped and said, “You are adorable, Nathan Weiss. I think I could like you a lot.”

“I like you, too,” he said, not knowing what else to say. And then it occurred to him that what was making him feel so uncomfortable and awkward was not just the fact that she was Rudy Ressler’s fiancée and he wanted the job. And it wasn’t just her age. She was a fit, hot-looking woman, even if she was as old as his mother. It was that she was rich. This was the first time in his life that Nate Weiss was playing a flirtation scene with a seriously wealthy woman.

“Meanwhile, you do have a job that you like, yes?” Leona said.

Nate said, “At Hollywood Station we used to have a sergeant we called the Oracle. He said that doing good police work was the most fun we’d ever have in our entire lives. And I’ve found that to be true.” Then he thought of his former partner, Dana Vaughn, of her lying dead in his arms, and he said, “For the most part it’s been fun.”

“Where does acting come into it, then?” she asked.

Nate said, “I thought acting would be what I could do full-time after my pension is vested. I’ll reach that in three more years, but if I retire at that time, I still won’t be able to draw the pension until I’m fifty years old. I figure I could be a full-time actor in the interim. But I need a break. Don’t we all?”

“So that’s your dream, is it?” she said.

Nate said, “My dreams aren’t complicated. Any one of the Kardashians could interpret them.”

She said, “I’m surprised that when you serve twenty years as a cop you aren’t able to receive any pension money yet.”

“I’ll still be too young then,” Nate said.

“Too young,” she said with a look of melancholy. Then her eyes narrowed and she said, “Me, I’m old enough to have my cop and eat him, too.”

Talk about a cougar! This man-eater looked like she truly could come at him, fang and claw. While he was contemplating that troubling catamount image, she said, “I’m old enough for anything. Any damn thing at all.”

With that she leaned over abruptly and kissed him on the cheek and then on the mouth. Her kiss was open-mouthed and warm, with lots of tongue.

When she pulled away, she looked at him, sloe-eyed, and he figured there was no way out, not if he wanted to be in Ressler’s movie. This menopausal momma was about to debauch him right here in this goddamn marshmallow palace!

Leona stood up and unbuttoned her dress and let it hang open. He saw a lace-trimmed white bra that held breasts he guessed were helped by silicone, and a flat belly that she’d earned, and shapely thighs the color of burnished copper, compliments of a tanning bed, he supposed.

As though reading his thoughts, she said, “The tawny color is mostly mine even without tanning, compliments of my Italian old man. But my ma was Irish, so I can hold a grudge with the best of them. Don’t ever cross me, gorgeous.”

Nate watched her let the dress fall to the floor and he thought that she might be his mother’s age but that’s all they had in common. Then it occurred to him that he had actually flashed on a flittering image of his mother, and he thought, What the hell’s this, Oedipus time? Was Hollywood Nate Weiss just another Jewish momma’s boy? But no, that cliché was just too ridiculous.

Leona said, “We should behave like grown-ups and go to my bedroom for this first-timer, shouldn’t we? Yet somehow, being with a lovely lad like you I don’t want to behave like a grown-up. Do you?”

She unhooked her bra and let it fall to the floor with the linen dress, and he thought, Silicone for sure, but understated and very acceptable. Then it was his turn to give a command performance, so he put his glass on the table beside the sofa and stood. Just then another image flared, as hot and blinding as a red carpet spotlight. His mother still used those same words on him at least once a month: “Behave like a grown-up and find a nice woman, Nathan.” Goddamnit! If he couldn’t sweep away the terrifiying notion that he was about to shtup his own mother, he’d never even get it up!

Nate started feeling feverish and not in a good way. If ever he needed the tips he’d learned in that UCLA film class… Maybe if he were a method actor, he could go all Tom Jones sensuous and imagine something decadent, like a bathtub full of cherries jubilee or something. He had a sudden sensation of flop sweat, and he hadn’t even flopped yet. Then he heard the sound of a car clattering down the axle-cracking, fake-cobblestone driveway, and it didn’t sound like Rudy Ressler’s purring Aston Martin.

“Shit!” she said. “That’s Raleigh’s car. What the hell’s he doing back here after I gave him the fucking afternoon off? Jesus Christ!”

“I’d better get going,” Nate said with more than a small measure of relief. “Does he come in through the main door?”

“No, the kitchen door, damn him. But you don’t have to slink away, Nathan.” She picked up her clothes hastily and said, “Let me run to the bedroom and change. We can still sit and chat.”

“I’d better go,” Nate said, moving quickly to the front door, thinking that he definitely didn’t want the butler to gossip about him to Rudy Ressler. “You can tell him that I dropped you off and came in to use the bathroom for a minute so he doesn’t wonder about my Vette in the driveway, okay?”

She stood with her crumpled dress in her arms and said, “When we get back from Europe, I want you here for dinner parties, yes? And other things?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Nate said with a grin, handing her a business card bearing his private cell number.

“Yes, Leona,” she prompted.

“Yes, Leona,” he said.

“Don’t ever call me ma’am or Mrs. Brueger,” she said. “Never again.”

“Never again, Leona,” he said, with an even bigger grin that required more acting skill.

When Nate was in his Corvette and driving out through her gate, he thought once more of the assistant director who’d said, “Don’t pet the cougar.” It wasn’t until he was motoring down Mulholland Drive that he began to understand his conflicted feelings in that house. Sure, it was her money, and her age, that triggered those childish thoughts of his mother, but there was something else. It was the first time in his entire life that he’d been put in the position of actually living the ultimate Hollywood cliché. She had challenged him to man-up and sell his ass for a movie role, and he had waffled like a teenage ingenue on a casting couch. She had been every inch a man-eating cougar, and Hollywood Nate Weiss had been nothing but a twitchy fucking rabbit.