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

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?”