Night Night, Sleep Tight Read Free

one belching exhaust in front of her now used to pull up in front of her own parents’ house, passengers glued to the windows. Most writers, unless they married Jayne Mansfield, did not merit stars on celebrity road maps. And in the flats between Sunset and Santa Monica where her father lived, notables were TV (not movie) actors, writers (not producers), and agents, all tucked in like plump raisins among the nouveau riche noncelebrity types who’d moved to Beverly Hills, so they’d say, because of the public schools. You had to live north of Sunset to score neighbors like Katharine Hepburn or Gregory Peck. Move up even farther, into the canyons to an ultramodern, super-expensive home to find neighbors like Frank Sinatra and Fred Astaire.
    Arthur Unger had earned his spot on the celebrity bus tour through an act of bravery that had lasted all of thirty seconds. It had been at a poolside party to celebrate the end of filming of Dark Waters, an action-packed saga with a plot recycled from an early Errol Flynn movie. Fox Pearson, the up-and-coming actor featured in the film, either jumped, fell, or was pushed into the pool. Sadly for him, no one noticed as the cast on the broken leg he’d suffered a week earlier doing his own stunts in the movie’s finale dragged him to the bottom of the deep end. Might as well have gone in with his foot stuck in a bucket of concrete.
    A paparazzo had been on hand to immortalize Arthur shucking his shoes and jacket and diving in. Fox Pearson’s final stunt, along with its fortuitous synchronicity with the movie’s title, earned more headlines for the dead actor than any of his roles. Suddenly he was the second coming (and going) of James Dean, a talent that blazed bright and then . . . cue slow drumroll against a setting sun . . . sank below a watery horizon.
    When talking about it in private, Arthur liked to quote a line from Sunset Boulevard . “The poor dope—he always wanted a pool. Well, in the end, he got himself a pool.”
    Deirdre used to dress up in her mother’s silver fox stole and wave at the bus from the window seat of their dining room. She perfected an open handed, tilt-to-tilt wave like one of those gowned-up girls in the Rose Parade. Back then she could dream of being in the royal court. Queen, even. But beauty queens didn’t have withered legs.
    Finally the bus pulled over so that Deirdre and all the cars backed up behind her could pass. A few minutes later she cruised past the familiar brown shield, its message printed out in gold letters: W E L C O M E T O B E V E R L Y H I L L S . After that, the twisty road straightened into a divided parkway and the speed limit dropped to thirty, as if chastened by the wealth surrounding it. There was not a single pedestrian on the sidewalks. Not a soul in the crosswalks or waiting at bus shelters.
    A half-dozen blocks farther along Deirdre turned south. Two blocks down, she pulled over and parked in front of the house where she’d grown up: stucco façade, front courtyard, and arched living room window screened by an elaborate wrought-iron grille. That was Henry’s black Firebird parked in the driveway. Arthur kept his red TR8 in the garage. To the casual observer the house seemed the same as it had for years. Decades, even. She could imagine the ad: Charming one-story Spanish colonial, three bedrooms, two and a half baths, in-ground pool.
    Deirdre sat there for a few moments, listening to the car’s engine tick in the silence and wishing she wasn’t such a compliant daughter. Then she reached for her messenger bag, looped the strap over her head and across her chest, and grabbed her crutch. She climbed out of the car and leaned against the door. Heat seemed to pulse off the macadam. She put on her sunglasses and took a harder look at the house. Terra-cotta roof tiles were missing, and the once white exterior was more the color of weak tea. Deirdre doubted it had been painted since her mother left, the last time for good,