The Girl Who Took What She Wanted: Stewart Hoag Mysteries

Book 14: Stewart Hoag Mysteries

by David Handler

Genres: Ghost; Mystery; Amateur Sleuth; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

In this new installment of the Edgar award-winning Stewart Hoag mystery series, the ghostwriting sleuth investigates a trail of murder amidst Hollywood’s rich and famous.

Stewart “Hoagy” Hoag hasn’t written any fiction since his debut novel rocked the literary world of the 1980s and then left him with a paralyzing case of writer’s block. Since then, he’s been reduced to ghostwriting celebrity memoirs. But his newest project could have him diving back into the world of fiction in a way he never imagined.

Nikki Dymtryk is Hollywood’s hottest reality TV star, known for her wild party lifestyle and prolific sexual conquests across the music, film, and sports industries. But when the ratings for her show Being Nikki begin to drop, the Dymtryk family engineers a new plan to keep Nikki in the limelight: reinventing the young star as a bestselling author. Nikki’s team hires Hoagy to ghostwrite a steamy romance novel showcasing the glitz and glamor of the Hollywood elite.

Reluctantly, Hoagy flies out to L.A. with his trusty basset hound Lulu to see what he’s gotten himself into with Nikki. But when he finally meets the starlet, she’s nothing like the aimless, airhead image she presents to the media. This project may just be the key to getting Hoagy’s creative juices flowing again—and staying in L.A. might also give him a chance at getting back together with his actress ex-wife, Merilee. But spending time with Nikki isn’t all parties and poolside lounging. As Hoagy gets closer to the young woman, he begins to uncover the Dymtryk family’s dark secrets. Secrets that are worth killing for.

 

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Release date: March 14, 2023

Publisher: Mysterious Press

Print pages: 325

Sample

CHAPTER ONE

I saw the Silver Fox drinking a piña colada at Trader Vic’s, and her hair was perfect. Then again, my literary agent’s helmet of silver hair was always perfect. Everyone in the publishing world called Alberta Pryce the Silver Fox partly because of her hair but mostly because she’d been the shrewdest literary agent in New York City for thirty-five years. Had represented the likes of John Cheever, Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, and that tall, dashing young superstar Stewart Hoag. That would be me.

And this would be a story from the earliest days of my non-chosen second career as a celebrity ghostwriter that I’ve never shared with you before. It began almost exactly five years ago in the frigid February of 1989, right there in Trader Vic’s, and ended less than a week later on the shores of sunny Southern California. One of the reasons why I’ve never mentioned it is that the project never got off the ground. Real life got in the way, which it has a nasty habit of doing, and real life ended up costing four people their lives. The other reason why I’ve kept it to myself is that I promised someone I would. But for reasons that will eventually become clear to you I’m no longer bound by that promise. I should warn you that this isn’t a pretty story. No story that involves rich, famous people is ever pretty. But I ghosted half a dozen best-selling celebrity memoirs before I at long last found my own voice again, and I must warn you that this particular misadventure stands out in my mind as the single most sordid.

The Silver Fox was wearing those oversized round glasses of hers that made her look like a devious owl, a burgundy shawl-collared cashmere cardigan, gray flannel slacks, and white silk blouse adorned with a silver brooch of a fox that had been given to her many years earlier by Daphne du Maurier. I wore the charcoal glen-plaid suit from Strickland & Sons, Savile Row, with a pale blue shirt and navy blue and pink polka-dot bow tie. I’d checked my trench coat and fedora along with Lulu’s duck-billed rain hat at the coat rack when we’d arrived at Trader Vic’s, the famously kitschy tiki bar that was down a flight of stairs in the basement of the Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue. An icy cold rain was falling that day and Lulu is susceptible to sinus infections. She snores when she gets them. I know this because she likes to sleep on my head.

For as long as I’d been an aspiring novelist, successful novelist, and stoned-out wreck of a novelist—which is to say for as long I’d lived in New York City—Trader Vic’s had been, by unwritten accord, the designated safe haven where literary and theatrical people could meet in public without meeting in public. If a major Broadway star was cheating on his wife, he could safely meet another woman, or man, for a discreet drink there. If a best-selling author was being lured to another house by its editor in chief, the luring took place there. Once you descended into that dimly lit basement grotto you became legally blind. If you saw someone you knew, you didn’t see them and they didn’t see you. Liz Smith, Cindy Adams and the other gossip columnists respected this unwritten accord and never so much as mentioned Trader Vic’s. Sadly, an attention-starved real estate developer/ tabloid clown named Donald Trump had just bought the Plaza and would soon terminate Trader Vic’s lease because he thought the place lacked class. But that winter, it was still the place to be.

Maybe my name is familiar to you. I was, for a brief, golden time in the early eighties, the Silver Fox’s hottest client—as big a star as a first novelist could ever hope to be. Hell, the New York Times Book Review called me the first major new literary voice of the 1980s. My novel, Our Family Enterprise, sold so many copies that it made me rich and famous. I married Joe Papp’s loveliest and most gifted young discovery, the Oscar and Tony Awardwinning actress Merilee Nash, and for a while we were New York’s it couple. We bought an apartment on Central Park West with eight windows overlooking the park. We zipped around town in a red 1958 Jaguar XK150 with wire spoke wheels. And we got a basset hound, Lulu, the only dog who’s ever had her own inscribed water bowl at Elaine’s. I’d kept my crappy, unheated fifth-floor walk-up apartment on West Ninety-Third to use as an office. And it turned out to be a good thing I did because it meant that I had somewhere to live after Merilee kicked me out. The pressure to produce an even bigger and better second novel was too much for me to handle. I got writer’s block, snorted my career up my nose and ended up broke and alone, unless you count Lulu. Merilee had been very patient and understanding with me, right up until I started sleeping with her friends. That was when she filed for a divorce. She ended up with the apartment on Central Park West and the Jaguar. She also ended up married to that fabulously successful British playwright Zach somebody.

I read about it in Liz Smith’s column.

By the summer of ‘87 I owed money all over town and was facing the prospect of Lulu and me living out of a shopping cart in Riverside Park, until the Silver Fox talked me into ghosting a memoir for a famous Hollywood comic of the 1950s, Sonny Day, a notoriously difficult nut who’d hired and fired every lunch-pail ghost in New York. But he hadn’t encountered me. I’m plenty difficult myself. And my ego is so huge it recently applied for statehood.

 We fought like crazy, but ended up producing a major best-selling memoir. True, a couple of untimely deaths did occur along the way, but let’s not dwell on that.

I bent over, kissed Alberta on the cheek, and gazed at her barely touched piña colada. “Since when do you drink anything other than straight bourbon?”

“I was feeling festive,” she said dryly, lighting a Newport with a silver lighter. “Care to join me?”

“Have you ever known me to feel festive?” I slid into the booth across from her, ordered a Kirin beer for myself and a small platter of shrimp tempura for my short-legged partner, who has rather unusual habits—and the breath to prove it. She circled around three times under the table before curling up on my feet, where she waited patiently for her treat.

“And bring me a straight bourbon,” Alberta said to our waiter.

“Not feeling festive anymore?” I asked.

“To be honest, I just realized I’m going to need something stronger because of what I’m about to tell you.”

Right away, I felt my stomach muscles tighten. “You’re not dropping me, are you? You sold my first two short stories to the New Yorker. You’re the only agent I’ve ever had. I’ll be lost without you. In fact, I doubt anyone else will take me on.”

“I’m not dropping you, Hoagy. Stop being a neurotic writer.”

“Is there any other kind?”

Alberta studied me through those glasses of hers. “Are you getting any writing done?”

“Feel free to ask me anything else.”

“How are you holding up financially?”

“Try again.”

“Okay, do you hear from Merilee?”

“She sent me a Christmas card.”

“That was cordial.”

“Wasn’t it?”

Our waiter brought me my beer and Lulu her shrimp. I sampled my beer, found it a bit flat, and sprinkled some salt on it.

“I saw her in that lavish film adaptation of Zach’s play,” Alberta said. “I hate to say this, because I adore her so, but it’s the first performance of hers that I haven’t liked. She seemed to be going through the motions.”

“I had the very same reaction. Mind you, I thought that his play was hugely overrated, not that I mean to sound bitter or petty.”

“Of course not. You’re a bigger person than that, dear boy.”

“No, I’m really not. But it was nothing more than bad Pinter, and there’s nothing that lies flatter and deader on the stage floor than bad Pinter. Putting it on film in the lush, green Dorset countryside didn’t help it one bit. Just made it seem even flatter and deader. I could see it in Merilee’s eyes. That she knew it was bad, I mean. Not that I’ve given it much thought.”

“She did her best work when you two were together. You inspired her.”

“It’s true, I did. Right up until I broke her heart.” I sipped my beer. “So what are we doing here? What’s with all the secrecy?”

“There’s someone whom I thought you should meet. Might be something extremely profitable in it for you.”

“Another show-biz memoir?”

“Not exactly.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me about it over the phone?”

“Because if I had you would have said no.”

“This sounds mighty promising.”

“I’ve never lied to you, Hoagy. I’ve got mixed feelings about this one myself. But I figured it was at least worth a face-to-face conversation.” She glanced up. “Ah, here he is . . .”

Our waiter was leading a tall, lean, extremely tanned man in his fifties who possessed an aura of

confidence and power toward our table, and right away I understood why she’d been so secretive. The only people who are that deeply tanned in February are Left Coasters. We New Yorkers generally tend to develop a ghostly, slightly greenish pallor by mid-January. He was most certainly Hollywood from head to toe with his long, silver-streaked blond hair that he combed straight back and gathered in a pigtail. He wore a tweed jacket, a western-style flannel shirt with snaps instead of buttons, pressed blue jeans, and cowboy boots. He was handsome enough to be a movie actor but wasn’t one, although he did appear quite often on television. He was Jack Dymtryk, one of the two or three top entertainment lawyers in the movie business. If one film studio or talent agency was negotiating to gobble up another one, they called in Jack Dymtryk. The man was a great white shark.

But that was only one of the reasons why I knew who he was.

The other was that he was the father of Nikki Dymtryk.

Jack greeted Alberta warmly and gave me an easy, relaxed grin. I stood and shook his hand. His grip was strong, his hand dry. He was an inch or two taller than me, which made him close to six feet five. On his left wrist he wore a Rolex Zenith Daytona chronograph, the watch of choice of professional racers.

“What do you drive?” I asked him.

“A Lamborghini Countach 5000 QV,” he said as he sat, ordered a Perrier with a twist of lime, and gave Lulu a friendly pat on the head.

“That’s the one with the longitudinally mounted V-12 engine and gull wing doors. Like it?”

“Love it. My wife, Pam, hates it. Or I should say hates the door. She’s convinced it’s going to fall on her and brain her, even though my mechanic has checked it three times. So I have to open and close it for her.”

“That’s because she wants to make a dramatic entrance and exit. She is an actress, after all.” His second wife, Pam Hamilton, star of the prime-time TV soap opera Mill Valley, was a gorgeous dark-eyed brunette in her midthirties, which made her at least fifteen years younger than Jack.

He gave me that relaxed grin again. “I guess you’d know all about that.”

I sipped my beer in silence. At my feet, Lulu made a low, unhappy noise.

“Sorry,” Jack said. “Didn’t mean to summon sour memories.”

“You didn’t. They haven’t gone anywhere.”

“The surf was up Sunday morning,” he said, deftly shifting topics. “I took the Countach out to my beach house up past Malibu in Trancas at seven A.M. and cruised PCH—Pacific Coast Highway—at a hundred miles per hour. My idea of a slice of heaven. So is my beach house. I have one of the last of the honest old shacks that’s still left out there. I haven’t gussied it up one bit since I bought it back in the sixties. I pull into my driveway, close my eyes and I’m the real me again, driving my VW bus with my board in back and the Beach Boys playing ‘Surfin’ Safari’ on the radio.”

“You like to surf?”

“Love it. My kid brother, Kenny, and I grew up in Santa Monica. The wrong side of the tracks but walking distance to the beach. Our dad was a plumber. Our mom waited tables at the Fox and Hounds on Wilshire. Surfing was my whole life when I was a teenager. And it’s still how I maintain my sanity in this crazy business. Nikki and her sister, Lisa, who’s two years older, practically grew up in Trancas when summer vacation arrived. I’d commute to the office as often as I could, and weekends we’d spend hours in the water together. Build a bonfire at night and eat s’mores. They loved it. So did Kenny, his wife Enid, and little Kenny Junior. They’d come out to stay all the time. And if Rita was on hiatus . . .” His first wife, Rita Copeland, had been a gorgeous TV actress, too. The man had a definite type. “We’d slip away to Europe for a genuine vacation while Kenny and Enid would stay out there 

with the kids.”

Kenny was Jack’s partner of sorts—the top business manager in town. He handled the financial affairs of everyone from moguls to major screen and rock ‘n’ roll stars. Worked out of the same suite of offices in Beverly Hills as Jack. Got his undergraduate degree at Dartmouth and his MBA from Wharton. Jack had never left home. Got both his BA and law degree from UCLA.

Our waiter brought him his Perrier and glanced down at Lulu’s clean plate. “She wants seconds, maybe?”

Lulu let out a low whoop, her tail thumping.

“That’s a yes,” I said as he whisked her plate away, chuckling to himself.

“So this is the famous Lulu,” Jack said, patting her some more.

“Indeed. I got her in the divorce. Lost the apartment, lost the ‘58 Jaguar XK150 . . .”

“And a genuine class act when you lost Merilee.”

“Correct.”

He took a small sip of his Perrier, letting out a rueful sigh. “I lost everything myself when my marriage to Rita imploded.” Rita Copeland had been the star of a hit spy series back in the midsixties. Also one of my first adolescent crushes—right up there with Diana Rigg and Anne Francis. No one could flare her nostrils in the super sexy way Rita could. But she was over fifty now and didn’t get offered many roles anymore. It’s not a kind business for actresses who get paid to be adolescent crush objects. “Pam is wonderful. You’ll have to come over for dinner when you come out.”

I blinked at him. “I’m coming out?”

He frowned at Alberta. “You haven’t filled him in yet?”

“I’m afraid Hoagy still has no idea why he’s here. I’ve left the proposition entirely up to you.” Alberta lit a Newport as the waiter arrived with another plate of shrimp tempura for Lulu. “But I should warn you that Lulu’s a fast eater, so you have approximately sixty seconds to make your pitch.”

“More like thirty,” I said, not liking where this conversation was, or I should say wasn’t, going. “What’s this all about?”

His eyes met mine. “Nikki.”

“Alberta was absolutely right. If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have come.”

The reason being that Nikki Dymtryk was the shallowest, sleaziest, most distasteful celebrity of the past several years, a potent downward drag on American popular culture who had, by the age of twenty-three, enjoyed a meteoric rise to superstardom despite a total absence of any acting or singing talent. Her one and only gift was knowing how to use her blond, beautiful good looks and killer bod to brazenly, calculatingly sleep her way up a ladder of so many male celebrities that she’d become famous for being famous. I considered getting up and leaving right then, but Jack Dymtryk was an important man and I owed him the professional courtesy of at least hearing him out.

But first let me tell you a bit more about Nikki. She never used her last name, by the way. She was simply Nikki, same as Madonna was simply Madonna. Except that Madonna could sing. Kind of.

Nikki’s career—I guess I have to call it that—began in 1984 when she was a senior at Beverly Hills High. Nikki, her sister Lisa, Jack, and Rita lived in a hilltop mansion off Coldwater Canyon on a street that bordered Beverly Hills but was technically considered part of Bel Air. Still, Jack called in some favors and got her into Beverly Hills High, same as he had Lisa before her. Unlike Lisa, a serious and highly gifted student at the Otis Arts Institute whose field was fashion design, Nikki was a spoiled wild child who routinely ditched classes to get stoned with her friends. All she wanted to do was party. And she was so rich and beautiful that she was accustomed to taking and getting whatever—and whomever—she wanted. Seemingly, Jack and Rita made no effort to instill any personal discipline in her. They were much too preoccupied with their own lives. Jack was busy having a torrid affair with Pam. And Rita was trying, and failing, to keep her sexpot acting career alive by means of endless rounds of plastic surgery.

Nikki had the looks and the contacts to follow in her mother’s footsteps, but no interest in acting, a career that requires training, discipline, and hard work. But she did have

ambition, and launched her own career at age eighteen when she asked Jack to snag her and a friend backstage passes to a We Are You concert at the Forum. We Are You was the hottest boy band in America. Every teenage girl in the country was gaga over its four heartthrob members—especially lead singer Trey Sinclair. Nikki promptly maneuvered her way into his bed and his life. When he left the band at her urging to launch a solo career, his first album, Me, Alone, became a mega platinum hit thanks in no small part to Nikki’s appearance in the steamy video on MTV for his hit single, “Take Me,” which consisted of her climbing in and out of bed with him wearing almost no clothing.

In fact, the video was so hot it inspired a hit song by the hip-hop artist H Rapper Brown (né Clarence Jackson) that was mostly a tribute to the awesomeness of Nikki’s shapely ass, which led to Nikki modeling that shapely, oiled-up ass in Playboy. Practically overnight, Nikki had the distinction of owning the most famous ass in America. She and her famous ass promptly ditched Trey for H Rapper Brown, which did not go over well with Brown’s rapper girlfriend, Lil’ Bit’ch (née Diane Chichester), who shot up Nikki’s yellow Porsche Carrera with a SIG when she spotted it parked next to Brown’s Hummer at a club on Sunset that was popular with the young, hot and restless. Nikki was so thrilled by the bullet holes that she decided to leave them there as a mark of distinction. However, things soon turned seriously ugly when Brown got into a shoving match in a recording studio with Da Real (né Reggie Witherspoon), a rough-edged gangsta rapper from Compton who considered himself more authentically street than Brown. Angry words were exchanged by members of the two performers’ posses, and later that night Brown was killed in a drive-by shooting at a fastfood restaurant. Da Real and his posse were questioned but not charged due to lack of evidence. A terrified Lil’ Bit’ch decided to spend some quality time with her mom in Atlanta and disappeared from the LA scene.

An equally terrified Nikki made a quick career pivot to athletes. Even though she’d barely managed to graduate from Beverly Hills High, Jack had major pull at UCLA, where she was accepted—although she never attended classes. She was too busy seducing the Bruins’ golden boy, all-American quarterback Rick Smith, who fell so madly in love with her that he wanted her to move to Buffalo with him when he was selected in the first round of the NFL draft by the Bills. ...