Free Hollywood Hit by Maggie Marr

news coming from Aunt Cici’s publicist, not with Jeb Schmaltzer’s killer still wandering the world and the tabs still sporting front-page shots and interior spreads that included Aunt Cici’s million-dollar mug.
    “Hi, Kiki.” Nikki swallowed around the lump in her throat.
    “Where are you, darling? You sound like you’re in the Himalayas. You didn’t slip out of town, did you, darling?”
    “I’m in Bel Air,” Nikki said. She pulled her beater up beside her aunt’s convertible ice-blue jag.
    “Tell your aunt hello from me,” Kiki said and grunted. Probably in the midst of her late-morning rubdown, which, according to Nikki’s aunt and her friends, often led to Kiki’s afternoon lay. Nikki crinkled her nose with the thought of Kiki, the old crone, high and astride some nubile young stud.
    “So listen, dear,” Kiki gasped out. “I wanted to let you know before you saw the cover of this week’s People magazine.”
    “I thought they found someone else to bother,” Nikki said. She was tired of the blazing headlines announcing to the world that she and Aunt Cici had been involved in an illicit love triangle with Jeb Schmaltzer.
    “Darling, these pictures are new and they’re sans Celeste. They only involve you and one other person.”
    Nikki squinted her eyes. Her most interesting thing to date since moving to LA, aside from Jeb’s death, was discovering Boundless Bound, and that little treasure wasn’t tab-worthy news. With Jeb dead, Boundless Bound wouldn’t be Nikki’s news at all.
    “They’re pictures of you and that little rocker you’ve been bedding from Sick Puppy. He’s got some sort of viral sensation going with his latest song. With your rise to celeb status thanks to dead Jeb, the tabs were salivating for the pics,” Kiki said.
    Nikki’s head hammered with the realization that this was exactly what Aunt Cici had mentioned in the car the night of Jeb’s death.
    “Who sold them?” Nikki asked, her voice weary. She feared she already knew the sad, sick answer to her question.
    “Adam,” Kiki said with the most dramatic of sighs. “And I hear the deal was quite lucrative for him.”
     
    *
     
    Nikki parked her car on Franklin, west of the Whitley intersection, and killed the engine. The snake’s tail of traffic that stood still while Nikki parallel parked rushed by her with a handful of angry honks. She looked across the slightly sloped hill toward the front of Adam’s building. A short, squatty woman ambled down the steps with two liver-colored pit bulls that strained at their leashes.
    Nikki rested her forehead on the steering wheel and stared at her ragged-edged thumbnail that she’d gnawed on her trek from Bel Air to Hollywood. She ran her pointer fingertip around the rough edge of the nail. Aunt Cici had warned her about Adam. Aunt Cici had warned her about a lot of things. She tilted her head and kept the bridge of her nose plastered to the wheel as she speared her gaze at the front of Adam’s building.
    She wasn’t surprised Adam had sold the pictures of them together to the highest bidder, she wasn’t even surprised he’d wanted the publicity for himself and for Sick Puppy, but what Nikki was surprised about was that no matter how “casual” she called their f&ff sessions, somewhere inside—in that attached, private place—sadness meandered along with the feeling of being used.
    Why did Aunt Cici have to be right? Nikki closed her eyes and shut out the taupe-colored apartment building, the green grass, even the sliver of blue sky that peeked through the front windshield. She exhaled a giant stream of air and pressed out the unwanted chunks of ugly emotion that clustered together and stuck to her insides.
    Aunt Cici’s predictions and the predictions of her cadre of friends on the behavior of every inhabitant of La-La Land had been pretty damned accurate. Maybe she should start listening to that cluster of bitches instead of tossing them off with a shake of her