Celebrity in Death (In Death #34)(18)

“It couldn’t have been easy working with her.”

“It’s called acting,” he said with a weak smile. “If it was easy, everyone would do it. Anyway, she eased off for a while, like none of it ever happened. So okay with me. It was working, the characters, I mean. Everybody could see we had something going with this project. It’s just been recently she started up again. Maybe because we’re almost done. Last week, she trashed my trailer. I know it was her. Broke up my stuff, ripped up my clothes. I had to start locking it when I was on set. We don’t have any more scenes together,” he added, then winced. “I mean, before this happened, we’d finished our scenes together.”

He paused for a moment, stared into the empty cup. “We did good work. Even with all that, we did good work.”

“Okay, Matthew. That’s all for now. If you’d ask Marlo to come back, then you can go.”

“You mean home?”

“For now, yeah.”

“I’d rather wait until … Is it okay if I stay out there awhile longer?”

“Up to you, but ask Marlo to come back.”

He got up, looked from Mira to Eve, then back again. “Thanks for getting the tea.”

Eve switched off the recorder. “Opinion?” she said to Mira.

“He seems younger than he did at dinner. He’s still shocked and shaky. Forthcoming, and a little guilty. He can’t decide if he used her or not to get the chance at this part, but knows she believed it, so he feels guilty. My read is he’d chosen to give her as little thought as possible, and now he has no choice but to think about her.”

Eve turned the recorder on again when Marlo stepped in. She wore black yoga pants and a tank, and her face was bare of enhancements. “I guess I’m next.”

“I need to record this,” Eve began, and went through the same routine she had with Matthew while Marlo sat, eyes wide, hands clenched in her lap.

“Why were you and Matthew on the roof?”

She told the same story with little variation.

“It was such a beautiful night. A little chilly. Warmer inside the dome, but still a little cool. Then everything was so cold after Matthew pulled her out. I thought she’d start breathing again. She’d cough and spit out water. But she didn’t. He worked and worked to try to make her breathe again, but she didn’t.

“It was an accident, wasn’t it? I saw the broken glass. She must have slipped and fallen in. Hit her head? She’d been drinking all night.”

“We can’t say yet.”

“It had to be. Nobody here would … we’re not murderers.” Her eyes, the same color as Eve’s, came back to life, lit with passion.

“You were here for that scene she made at dinner, so there’s no point in pretending we were friends. She didn’t have friends. She had competitors, assets, possessions, but not friends. But nobody would kill her. We like drama, and we’re lying when we say otherwise. We feed on it. But not like this.”

“Do you have specific problems with her? Personally?”

“Oh, let me count.” She shoved at her hair in a way Eve found oddly familiar to her own impatient gesture. “She hated me.”

“For any particular reason?”

“Again, let me count. I’ve had an Oscar nomination. I didn’t win, but I’m an Academy Award–nominated actor—and that was a pisser for her. She let me know she knew I’d slept my way to that part. I’d dated the screenwriter—before he wrote it, before the casting, before any of it, but we had dated, and we’d stayed friends. She considered that whoring my way to an Oscar nod. I was hogging the screen time in this project, pushing Roundtree to diminish her role and so on and so on. She cornered me tonight, right before the gag reel. She wanted to know how I’d feel when the media got wind I was blowing Roundtree, Matthew, and Julian. She said Connie knew all about it, and Nadine would be leading off with a segment on how I sucked my way to every part on the next installment of Now.”

“How did you respond to that?”

“I told her to go f**k herself. That was the last thing I said to her. ‘Why don’t you go f**k yourself, K.T., because nobody else wants to.’” She squeezed her eyes shut. “God.”

“If someone said that to me, I’d want to punch them—at minimum.”

“If I’d been in character, I might’ve punched her.” After letting out a breath, Marlo stared at Eve, eyes miserable. “Then I guess I’d feel worse than I do now.”

“Okay, that should do it for the moment. You can go home. Ask Connie to come in before you leave.”

“That’s it?”

“For right now.”

“Will you tell us when you know what happened?”

“Yes. I’ll be in touch.”

Marlo got up, started for the door. “We are suspects, aren’t we?” she asked Eve.

“You researched the part. What do you think?”

“That you think K.T. was murdered, and one of us did it.” Marlo shuddered. “I keep waiting for someone to yell ‘Cut.’”

“She doesn’t like knowing the last thing she said to a dead woman was ugly,” Mira commented. “She didn’t like her, and quite a bit, but she also felt the victim was beneath her. She found her crude, pathetic, and as ugly as that last comment.”