For the two weeks following the passionate encounter after bringing Eileen’s new Mercury Marauder X-100 home, it was as though she and Mason were attempting to break some kind of record for copulation in The Guinness Book of World Records.

Mason, not usually one to speak of such things, couldn’t help but finally saying something to his best friend, Whiskey.  “Swear to god, that little filly may be my downfall.  There is no letting up.  Not that I’m complaining.  But damn.”  Whiskey was duly impressed.

For her part, Eileen was beyond impressed with Mason’s stamina.  She attributed it to his youth.  Having never bedded a twenty-one year old before, she could only assume his age was the source of his god-like ability to perform at the drop of a hat, or even the slightest hint.  All pretense of not being ‘a couple’ was stripped away as quickly as their clothes.  At least, in terms of when they were in one of their apartments at the Alamo Arms.  They still didn’t wander out much together.  Eileen knew that, if people in Fort Stockton saw the two of them together, tongues would wag because of the age difference.  Mason was afraid if they ran into Shannon Hudspeth she would find a way to make the whole thing come crashing down, just like she had in high school.

It was on a Saturday, after the third go round of the day, that Eileen decided to broach the subject that she’d been avoiding.  “I need to come clean.”  It was out-of-the-blue, so Mason wasn’t sure exactly what she was talking about.  The look on his face indicated his level of puzzlement.  “I need to share something,” she said.

“I think you’ve shared pretty much everything you’ve got to offer.  I know for a fact if you’re hiding something, I’d have seen it by now.”  Mason still wasn’t sure what she was talking about.

“The book you’ve been reading, Murder by Moonlight, I wrote it.”  Eileen waited for a response.  It took just a minute.  Then Mason burst out laughing.

“That’s rich.”  The longer he thought about what she’d just said, the harder he laughed.  “Why would you say something so completely ridiculous?”

“I’m going to get in the bath.  Everything needs to soak a bit.”  She smiled at him.  “Go get the book and bring it into the bathroom.”  As she walked naked down the short hall to the bathroom, Eileen glanced over shoulder.  Mason was looking at her like he didn’t think she was serious.  “GO!” She exclaimed.

Eileen ran the bath.  Hot water.  Soapy bubbles.  She put her hair up in a bun on top of her head before she got in.

“Pull up a chair.  Bring the book with you.”  Mason did as instructed.  

“Open the book to any page you’d like to and start reading,” she told him.

“Why?” he asked.

“Just do it,” she said.

Flipping the book open to a random page about a third of the way in, Mason began reading.  No sooner did he finish the second sentence than Eileen read the one following.  Then the paragraph after that.  Nearly word for word.  “How did you do that?” Mason was incredulous.

“Pick another page.  Anywhere you want.”  Eileen was neither smug, not apprehensive.  Just matter-of-fact in her instructions.

Flipping to about three quarters through the book, Mason started reading about the murders of Jimmy and Jeanne.  It was fairly graphic.  Without blinking an eye, Eileen took over and recited the details almost word for word from the book.  Mason stopped reading.  She said, “I can tell you what the bodies looked like.  In detail.  Wasn’t pretty.”

“What the holy hell is going on?”  Mason seemed to be a little distraught.

“I saw the police reports.  The photos.  Read the descriptions.  Everything.”  Eileen stopped and let that sink in a while.  “While I was writing the book.”

“You can keep going if you want to.  But I think you’ll see I can pretty much finish any sentence or paragraph you start.”  Eileen looked him in the eye and paused.  “Because I wrote all of it.”

“It says this was written by . . .”

“Parker McHale.  Parker is my last name.  I kept that part to honor my father.  McHale is another story.  Honoring someone else.  Doesn’t matter.”  Eileen let Mason catch his breath for just a minute.  “I wanted to remain anonymous.  Keep my private life, well, private.  The book sells better when people think a man wrote it.  That’s just the way it is.”

“So I’ve been sleeping with a man the last three weeks?”  There was kind of a chuckle in Mason’s voice when he said it.

Eileen rolled over and sat up on her knees in the tub, soapy water dripping down her exposed female form.  “In name only,” she said.  Her point was made. Sliding back into the water and under the surface up to her neck, she waited for further reaction.  Mason seemed to be processing what she’d just shared.

“Anything else I need to know?”  He wasn’t sure if he should even ask.

“I spent the last year in Texarkana, and then Saint Joseph, Missouri.  Researching.  Writing.  Putting the book together, and doing work on another story that will be in the papers soon.  A lot of papers, apparently.  And I slept with someone in each of those places.  You may as well know that.”  She watched Mason’s face for a sign of any reaction to those details.

“Far be it from me to judge someone for who they sleep with,” he told her.  He shared the details of Shannon Hudspeth forcing herself on him in the press box at the Jim Bowie High field and the effect it had on his relationships with key people in his life.

Letting the lukewarm water out of the tub, Eileen stood up.  “Hand me a towel.”

It seems like the secrets they shared while they were in the bathroom were deeper than the intimacy they’d shared in every other room of the apartment.

“Why did you tell me now?”  Mason asked her.  “Why not earlier?  Or why at all?”

“The rights to the books have been sold.  Hollywood is going to make a movie out of it.  That’s how I paid cash for the new Mercury.”  Eileen sat on the old leather couch and waited for Mason to digest all the information.

“I thought newspaper reporters just made a lot of money.  I had no clue.”  The look on his face showed he really didn’t.  Thinking she’d discovered the tradeoff for his stamina in bed, Eileen saw him as a somewhat naive twenty-one-year-old for the first time.

“I have to go to Hollywood soon.  I’m not sure how long I’ll be gone.  I didn’t want it to be a mystery.  But there are a lot of details to be worked out.  I damn sure wasn’t going to lie about it.”  Eileen was making sure there was nothing held back at this point.  She let the chips fall where they may.

“I’ll go with you.” Mason said.  She tried to talk him out of it, but not very hard.

Eileen had done enough driving recently.  The thought of endless hours on the road, even in a new Mercury Marauder X-100, didn’t appeal to her.  Cheap motels held less than desirable memories.  The studio was footing the bill, anyway.  They’d fly.  Neither Eileen nor Mason had ever been to California before; Mason had never left Texas.   They vowed to make the most of it. 

When the plane was wheels down at LAX, the two of them looked out the window and thought they may have landed in a foreign country.  Neither could figure out why the sky wasn’t blue, like back home in Fort Stockton.  “It’s like the sun is out there somewhere, but something’s hiding it,” Mason said.  As they got off the plane, the fact that there were buildings and people and cars as far as far as the eye could see was an even stranger sight than the color of the sky.  “I don’t think we’re in Kansas, anymore,” Mason noted.

Making their way through the airport, getting their bags, and finding the place they’d been told they would be picked up, they quickly found a young man holding a sign with PARKER McHALE written on it in large block letters.  Mason almost walked right past him.  Eileen caught him by the arm.  He looked at the guy again and then it dawned on him whom he was traveling with.

“I’ll be your driver while you’re here in Hollywood,” he told them.  He was the quintessential California guy.  About halfway in age between Eileen and Mason.  Tanned.  Longer hair than anyone in Fort Stockton would ever have.  A full crazy beard.  And a greater than zero chance he may have smoked something other than a KOOL Menthol on the way to the airport.  “Welcome to California.”

Eileen wasn’t sure what she was expecting, but it wasn’t him.  She was fine with it, but caught off guard.  She was expecting someone in a suit.  Older.  Perhaps someone not under the effect of drugs.  But they rolled with it, strangers in a strange land.

What was waiting for them just outside the terminal was a bigger shock than the driver.  A 1941 Chrysler Town & Country Six-Passenger Station Wagon was parked at the curb like an old lion guarding the entrance to a castle.  “Oh my,” is all Eileen could say.  

Mason followed with, “What the absolute hell?  This thing is incredible!  I’ve never seen anything like it!”  The exuberance of youth.  As the driver, whose name they’d learned was Bronson, opened up the clamshell rear doors to slide in their American Touristers, Mason loudly proclaimed, “I can’t effing believe this thing!”  Eileen, who’d recently enjoyed her share of woodies, was equally impressed.

“Pretty cool, huh?”  Bronson opened the door for Eileen to enter the front seat, then the rear door for Mason to take his place behind her.  Not the first time he’d taken his place behind her, nor would it be the last.

“Not at all what I was expecting,” Eileen told Bronson as he cranked up the single carbureted 241.5 L-head inline six and slid the Fluid Drive into gear.  I thought maybe something nice.  A new Cadillac or something.  But this?”

“Makes a statement, don’t it?”  Bronson was used to explaining the car.  “Makes an impression right off the bat, huh?  Screams old school Hollywood.  Makes guests feel like they’re back in the Golden Age of Motion Pictures the moment they get in.”  While he navigated his way out of the airport and into LA traffic he discreetly looked at his female passenger next to him, her ‘gentleman friend’ in the back seat and tried to fill in the gaps of what he knew with what he could surmise.  He’d been in Hollywood too long not to look for the story.  He quickly came up with one. It wasn’t that far off the mark.

“I’ll be taking you to the hotel to check in and let you grab a bite at the restaurant if you’d like.”  He looked in the rearview mirror, back at Mason.  “Or whatever.  I’ll be back at 3:00 to pick you up and take you to the studio for some meetings and introductions.  You just let me know if you need anything.”  He handed a card to Eileen with his name and a phone number on it, along with the studio logo on it, all emblazoned in gold raised lettering.  “Tell whomever answers what you need and they’ll get word to me.”

At the Roosevelt, the Town & Country pulled under the portico and came to an elegant stop.  Those standing around were apparently used to the sight of the big black, ash and mahogany beast pulling up and didn’t take particular note of the car, but strained to see who was inside.  While impressed with the handsome couple exiting the studio car, there was disappointment it was nobody famous.  Not yet, anyway.

Bronson handed the bags off to the bell captain who put them on a cart and whistled for a bell boy to take them to the room.  Making sure everyone involved in the operation was adequately tipped, Bronson got back in the Chrysler and it smoothly and silently pulled out into the endless flow of traffic on Hollywood Boulevard.

Up in their suite overlooking the pool and Hollywood beyond, Eileen looked around the room.  It was the nicest hotel she’d ever been in.  It was the only one Mason had ever been in.  “Don’t think they’re all like this one,” Eileen told him as she stepped out of the silk floral print dress she’d been unbuttoning while Mason looked in the bathroom.  “They don’t all come equipped with this.”  And then she let it fall to the thick carpeted floor in a perfect pile of floral cotton and stepped out of it.  She left it to him to take care of the dainty unmentionables still being worn.  He made short work of the task.

Two hours later the sun reflecting off the ocean blue water of the pool below woke Mason up.  Looking at the clock, he realized it was only twenty minutes before Bronson would magically appear downstairs, ready to whisk them to whatever undiscovered places people of importance were whisked to in LA.  He nudged Eileen awake, but not before admiring how she looked in the light.  The nooks and crannies and soft curves of her body made him wish they had longer than twenty minutes.  Not a lot longer, but just enough longer.

Downstairs Bronson was waiting back in the exact same spot he’d been when he’d dropped them off earlier.  As he saw them coming, he opened the front passenger door for Eileen.  She promptly shut it, opened the rear door and slid all the way in, Mason following her inside.  Bronson smirked and went around to the driver’s side, got in, and eased out into traffic.  “Everything to your satisfaction?” He asked, breaking the silence.

“Indeed,” Eileen said.

The young Texas couple was driven to the studio, each of them looking out the window of the T & C, taking in the sites of Los Angeles they heard about, but never experienced.  The trip from the Hotel Roosevelt to Culver City was less than 8 miles away, but took nearly 40 minutes.  “We could have driven around all of Fort Stockton seven times in the time it took to drive those eight miles,” Mason said as Bronson wheeled the massive Chrysler into the studio lot.

Surprisingly, they didn’t have to wait long to get into the office of the man they’d come to see.  “I trust you’ve been taken care of so far,” he said as he stood from behind the desk and walked around to greet the couple.  Eileen wondered if everyone in the state had the same tan.

“Bronson has been most helpful, thank you.”  Eileen took a seat across the desk as the studio exec walked back around and sat down after shaking Mason’s hand.

“Who?”  he asked.

“Bronson,” Eileen said as she pointed to the driver by the door.

“Really?  His name was ‘Clint’ last week.”  The driver just shrugged.  It was obvious he had his sights set on bigger things in Hollywood.  Eileen chuckled at that, but then she remembered she was also ‘Parker McHale’, and realized that maybe everybody had more than one persona.

“Let’s skip to the chase, if we can,” the exec said.  “We’re in a downward spiral here.  Paramount is kicking our ass with a damn gangster flick called The Godfather.  Universal has a hit on their hands with The Sting.  Columbia cleaned up with The Last Picture Show.  It’s in black and white for god sakes, but people are acting it like it’s the best damn story ever told.  Making it sound like that McMurtry kid who wrote it is some kind of genius.”  He studied Eileen as he shared the backstory of why she’d been invited.  He wasn’t sure if she was connecting the dots.  “What do all those films have in common?”

After thinking for a minute, Eileen said, “Nostalgia.”  Mason looked at her, impressed.  He hadn’t caught that.  “And a good story being told about history being reimagined.”

The exec smiled.  “You’re damn right.  It doesn’t hurt to throw in some blood and guts.  The baptism scene alone in The Godfather graphically shows half a dozen brutal murders while Michael renounces ‘Satan and all his works’.  People  want a romanticized version of the past, even if it involves abhorrent crimes.”

Eileen nodded in response.  Mason looked out the window behind the desk and thought he might have seen Dustin Hoffman walking by.  He loved The Graduate.

“That’s where you come in.  You’ve struck a nerve with the whole Murder by Moonlight story.  There have got to be others out there just like it.  I’ve read your work on the Greenlease kidnapping,” the exec said.  “People love the mystery.  They want to be shocked by the brutality, but tantalized by the sordid details.”   Mason thought back to what had happened in the hotel room an hour earlier.

“Exactly what do you want me to provide?” Eileen was intrigued, but overwhelmed.

“Initially we’re going to need a screenplay for the Texarkana murders story.  I want your immediate help on that.  We’ll look at the Greenlease kidnapping and see what we can develop that into.  There’s a series of other crimes that might be worthy of consideration.”  There was a stack of file folders of varying thickness on his desk that the exec slid across in Eileen’s direction.

Picking up the first several folders, Eileen glanced over the details.  “The Boy in the Box:  The Unsolved Case of America’s Unknown Child”, “The Barricaded Blonde”, “The Curious Death of Peter Pivaroff”, and “The Black Dahlia Murder” were all in the group.  There were newspaper clippings, police reports, and crime scene photographs in each one.  As she set the files down in her lap, Eileen said “I can’t solve murders.”

“Not what we want you to do.  If the experts couldn’t solve them, we don’t expect you to.”  The exec leaned over the desk and looked her in the eye, “We want you to make each one a story people will pay to go see.  The fact that the story isn’t solved at the end makes it all the more oddly interesting.  It makes it stick with people. Keeps them talking about it long after they leave the theater. You have a knack.  We want to be able to take full advantage of it.  It might not be as sexy as walking past a bookstore and seeing your novel on display in the window, but it’s a rush seeing your name in the credits at the end of the movie.  An even bigger rush getting residuals.”

“How long do I have to think about it?”  Eileen’s head was spinning.

The exec slid a multi-page legal document across the desk.  “This is the contract.  A copy has been sent to your attorney in Fort Stockton.”  Eileen tried to look calm as she saw the number that represented her yearly salary.  “Have him look over the details.   Kirk Kerkorian bought 40% of the stock two years ago.  He’s not a man known for his patience.  You and your friend are guests of the studio through the end of the week.  See LA.  Take in the sights.  Your flight back to Texas is in four days.  We’ll need the signed contract in our office before you leave town.”

He stood.  Eileen stood.  Mason stood.  Handshakes were exchanged.  “Clint, or Bronson, or Burt, or whatever the hell he’s calling himself this week will be at your disposal throughout your stay.  He’s been given the resources to cover your expenses.  Call my secretary if you have any questions.  I hope to see a contract back on my desk soon.”

“With either her signature or her brains on it?” Mason asked.  It was probably too soon for that.