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  55

  TOMMY NEWTON GLANCED UP FROM the script he was marking on as his sister walked into the living room of his Los Angeles home, where she was spending the weekend. “What’s wrong?” he asked her.

  “You just got a crank call,” she told him with a nervous laugh. “At least, I hope it was.”

  “Los Angeles is full of weirdos who make obscene calls,” Tommy reassured her. Jokingly, he added, “In southern California that’s an ordinary means of communication. Everybody here feels alienated, haven’t you heard? That’s why this town is a haven for shrinks.”

  “This wasn’t an obscene call, Tommy.”

  “What was it then?”

  She spoke slowly and shook her head, her brow furrowed in doubt. “The man said he was Zack Benedict.”

  “Zack?” Tommy repeated with a short, derisive laugh. “That’s ridiculous. What else did he say?”

  “He said . . . to tell you he’s going to kill you. He said you know who killed Rachel and he’s going to kill you for not testifying.”

  “That’s crazy!”

  “He didn’t sound crazy, Tommy. He sounded dead serious.” She shivered at her unintentional pun. “I think you ought to call the police.”

  Tommy hesitated then shook his head. “Whoever it was, he was a crank.”

  “How did a crank get your unlisted phone number?”

  “Evidently,” he tried to joke, “I’m personally acquainted with a crank.”

  His sister picked up the telephone from the table beside the sofa and held the receiver toward him. “Call the police. If you won’t do it for your own safety, do it because it’s your duty.”

  “All right,” he said with a sigh, “but they’ll laugh in my face.”

  * * *

  In her house in Beverly Hills, Diana Copeland pulled out of her lover’s arms and reached for the phone beside the sofa.

  “Diana!” he groaned. “Let your maid answer it.”

  “This is my private line,” she explained to the man whose face was as familiar as her own to moviegoers. “It might be a change in shooting schedule tomorrow. Hello?” she said.

  “This is Zack, Dee Dee,” the deep voice said. “You know who killed Rachel. You let me go to jail for it. Now you’re as good as dead.”

  “Zack, wait—!” she burst out, but the line went silent in her hand.

  “Who was that?”

  Diana stood up, staring blindly at him, her body stiff with shock. “It was Zack Benedict—”

  “What? Are you sure?”

  “He—he called me Dee Dee. Zack is the only one who ever called me that.”

  Turning on her heel, she left him there and went into her bedroom, then she picked up the telephone and dialed a phone number. “Tony?” she said shakily. “I just got a call from—from Zack Benedict.”

  “So did I. It’s some crank. It wasn’t Zack.”

  “He called me Dee Dee! Only Zack ever did that. He said I know who killed Rachel and I let him go to jail for it. He said he’s going to kill me now.”

  “Calm down! It’s bullshit! It’s some crank, maybe even some tabloid reporter, stirring up a new slant on a dying story.”

  “I’m calling the cops.”

  “Make a fool of yourself if that’s what you want to do, but leave me out of it. That guy wasn’t Zack.”

  “I tell you it was!”

  * * *

  Emily McDaniels sank down on a chaise lounge beside the swimming pool at the sprawling Benedict Canyon house owned by her husband, Dr. Richard Grover. Life had been one long honeymoon for the six months they’d been married, and she watched him swimming laps in the pool, admiring the way his body effortlessly cleaved the water. He cut the last lap short and surfaced at the edge of the pool, right beside her. “Who was on the phone?” he asked, shoving his hair out of his eyes with the long-fingered hands that performed delicate neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. “Tell me it wasn’t my answering service,” he pleaded half-seriously, crossing his arms on the edge of the pool, studying her crestfallen expression.

  “It wasn’t.”

  “Good,” he said. Reaching out, he grabbed her slender ankles and gave her a comical leer. “Since none of my patients are doing us the discourtesy of interrupting our Saturday night by stroking out, get your sweet body into this pool and show me you still love me.”

  “Dick,” she said in a strained voice, “it was my father who called just now.”

  “What’s wrong?” he said, sobering at once and shoving up and out of the pool.

  “He said Zack Benedict just called him.”

  “Benedict?” Dick repeated scornfully, grabbing a towel and drying his arms. “If that creep is actually hanging around Los Angeles, he’s not only a murderer, he’s a nut. The cops will grab him in no time. What did he want?”

  “Me. Zack told my father,” she explained, her voice trembling, “that he thinks I know who really killed Rachel. He said he wants me to tell the newspapers who it was, so he doesn’t have to kill everyone who was there that day.” She shook her head as if to clear it and when she spoke again, the fear was gone. “It had to be a crank. Zack would never threaten me, let alone hurt me. Regardless of what you seem to think, Zack wasn’t a creep. He was the finest man I ever met, next to you.”

  “You’re sure in the minority if that’s what you believe.”

  “It’s what I know. Regardless of what you heard and saw during the trial, the truth is that Rachel Evans was a vicious, scheming bitch who deserved to die! The only thing that was wrong was that Zack went to jail for it.” With a grim laugh, she said, “No one thought Rachel was much of an actress, but the truth is she was a brilliant actress—she was so damned good that hardly anyone ever guessed what she was really like behind that smile of hers. She came off as elegant and sort of reserved and very nice. She was nothing like that. Nothing! She was an alley cat.”

  “What do you mean? A slut?”

  “That too, but it isn’t what I meant,” Emily said, reaching out and folding a wet towel he’d left near an umbrella table. “I mean that she was like a cat who prowls through alleys, looking through other people’s trash cans, feeding on them without them ever realizing it.”

  “Very colorful,” her husband teased, “but not very explanatory.”

  Emily flopped back on the lounge chair and tried to be more specific. “If Rachel knew someone wanted something—a part in a film, a man, a particular chair on the set—she went out of her way to make sure they didn’t get it, even if she didn’t want it. I mean, poor Diana Copeland was in love with Zack—really in love with him—but she kept it completely to herself and never made an overture toward him. I was the only one who knew it, and I found out completely by accident.”

  When she fell silent, staring at the lights in the pool, Dick said, “You’ve never wanted to talk about Benedict or the trial, but since you’re doing it now, I’ll admit to having an avid curiosity about the stuff that never made the newspapers. It never came out that Diana Copeland was in love with Benedict.”

  Emily nodded, accepting his request for more information. “I made it a policy never to talk about any of that because I couldn’t trust anyone, even men I dated, not to go blabbing to some reporter who’d misquote the whole thing and stir everything up again.” She smiled at him and wrinkled her small nose. “I guess I can make an exception now, though, since you’ve vowed to honor and cherish me.”

  “I guess you can,” he said with an answering grin.

  “I didn’t find out how Diana felt until a few months after the trial, when Zack was already in prison. I’d written him one letter and sent it to him there, but it came back unopened with ‘Return to sender’ scrawled across it in Zack’s handwriting. A few days later, Diana came to see me. Of all things, she wanted me to send Zack a letter she’d written to him, but in an envelope from me. He’d returned her letter the same way he’d returned mine. I knew he’d also returned letters from Harrison Ford and Pat Swayze,