Brian Freeman - Stripped

“What’s on your mind?” he asked.

Serena took a long time to reply, and he wondered if she would drop it and go back to something safe, like work or music or the lights in the valley.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about Deidre,” she said.

Deidre was the girl who had come to Las Vegas with Serena when she escaped from Phoenix at the age of sixteen. Serena had never told him much about her. Only how she died.

“Strange, huh?” she went on. “I really haven’t thought about her in years, but she’s been in my dreams lately. I fall asleep, and there she is.”

“She got AIDS. That wasn’t your fault.”

Serena rubbed her shoulders as if she were cold. “The thing is, I never went to see her. Maybe there was nothing I could do, but I didn’t have to let her die alone. I mean, she saved me. Back in Phoenix? She saved me. I was being abused night and day, and she helped me escape. I loved her, Jonny. I really loved her, those first few years we were together. But I just let her die.”

“You don’t need me to tell you that isn’t true, do you?” Stride asked.

Serena shrugged. “No. But it keeps coming back to me. You’d think by now it would all be gone, dead, not a big deal. But I can’t switch on part of myself with you and keep the rest shut off.”

Stride frowned. ‘’How can I help?”

“I’m not sure you can.”

“So I guess one alternative is to shut me off, too,” he said.

“Sure it is. But that’s not what I want. I just have to learn how to deal with all this-and keep you around.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

She turned to him, unconvinced. “I know how you feel about this place. I’m worried that you’ll hate this city more than you love me. You’ll go back home to Minnesota, where your heart is.”

“My heart’s here with you.”

Serena took one of his hands and kissed his fingertips. “Thank you for saying that.”

But he wasn’t sure she believed him. He wasn’t sure he believed himself.

He went to reach for her again, but somewhere on the floor mat, where her jeans were crumpled, her cell phone started ringing. Serena laughed, setting the tense moment aside, and found the phone.

Stride heard a man’s voice. Serena brightened. “Hey, Jay, hang on a second.”

She quickly covered the phone and whispered to Stride. “Jay Walling is a detective I know in Reno. Sixty years old and very dapper. Watches too many Sinatra movies.” She spoke into the phone again. “Jay, I’ve got another detective with me. I’m going to put you on speaker.”

She pushed a button and then continued, “Jay Walling, meet Jonathan Stride, and vice versa.”

“How are you, Jay?” Stride said.

“Excellent, thanks.” His voice had a smooth elegance. “So, Serena, is this the man you’re playing house with? Or did Cordy finally get arrested on a morals charge?”

Even in the darkness of the car, Stride could feel Serena flush with embarrassment.

“Nice to see the rumors have made their way across the state, Jay. Yes, Jonny and I are an item, and no, the women of Las Vegas are still not safe from Cordy. Mind if I ask who told you about us?”

“My lieutenant, actually,” Walling said. “He’s tight with Sawhill.”

“Great, just great.”

“Don’t be offended, darling. My wife will be relieved. She’s been looking for someone to fix you up with since we worked that case together last year.”

“Don’t make it sound like the impossible dream,” Serena snapped.

“Nonsense. You just have high standards. Detective Stride, my congratulations. Serena is one of my favorite people in the whole world, so treat her nice or I’ll have to have you rubbed out.”

Stride laughed, and Serena groaned. “Jay, if you don’t shut up, I’m going to have you rubbed out. Now, did you run down that receipt for me from my hit-and-run car?”

Walling chuckled. “Six Krispy Kreme doughnuts and a Sprite. At least we know your perp isn’t diabetic.”

“Funny.”

“I tracked down the store, but it was a cash sale, and the owner doesn’t remember a thing.”

“No surprise. That’s what I figured. Thanks for trying.”

“Yes, but there’s something else. I was hoping you might be able to fly up to Reno tomorrow.”

“Oh? Why?”

“Because I don’t like coincidences,” Walling said. “The same day your perp got his sugar fix in Reno, a woman got murdered on a ranch a few miles south of here. Someone cut her throat.”

Stride began to do research on MJ’s father, Walker Lane, following dozens of links on the Web from the computer in his cubicle. There was no official home page about the man, just gossipy sites that rehashed the same dry facts from his Hollywood biography and spiced up the written record with hints about his reclusive lifestyle in Canada.

There was plenty of information about Lane’s early days in the 1960s, when he was a wunderkind producer-director who struck it rich with his first self-funded film. From the beginning, he was about money, not art. Cherry Tree featured a fifteen-year-old newcomer, sort of a Hayley Mills with breasts, whose huge eyes and innocent sex appeal won over audiences, despite a lame spy story about a teenager helping George Washington win the Revolutionary War. Two more family comedies followed, both hugely successful, and Lane won a reputation as Frank Capra Lite, the boy with the golden touch. Because he hadn’t thrown in his lot with the big studios, he reaped the financial rewards himself.

Scandal dogged him, mostly because there were rumors on the set that he had been having an affair with his underaged star since their first film together. Lane denied it, but he didn’t hide his playboy ways, partying in L.A. and Vegas, and leaving a trail of photographs of himself with starlets on his arm.

Then came the big disappearance.

As far as Stride could tell, it happened in 1967. Lane left Hollywood, moved to Canada, and essentially vanished from the public eye. From a distance, he continued to build his reputation as a mover and shaker. He chose and funded a series of monster hits throughout the next three decades, deftly moving in and out of comedy and drama as public tastes changed. He never directed again, not as far as Stride could tell, but he became a huge force, a star-maker, without ever setting foot out of his estate in British Columbia. He was the executive producer behind two of the twenty highest-grossing films ever.

He became almost fanatically private. Actors and directors who met with him signed nondisclosure agreements. Like Howard Hughes, he seemed to run his empire primarily by phone. Stride couldn’t find a photograph of the man taken in the last twenty years. There were rumors of a disabling illness that left him in a wheelchair and of facial degeneration that had ravaged his once handsome, boyish looks. There were also rumors of a scandal that had driven him out of the country, but as far as Stride could tell, no one had pierced the veil and uncovered the real story.

Lane married a young actress in the early 1980s, after she interviewed for a role in a science fiction film he was bankrolling. She didn’t get the part, but she got Walker, and two years later, MJ was born. There were no public details about the relationship between Walker and his twenty-something wife, but somewhere along the line, it went badly wrong. Stride found news reports from 1990 about the woman’s suicide. There was no public memorial, no photograph of a grieving Walker Lane, and no public comment. She might as well not have existed.

Stride couldn’t find any evidence that Lane had given an interview in decades. That wasn’t a good sign. He didn’t expect the man to open up and discuss all his father-son secrets with a police detective from Las Vegas.