From Barcelona, with Love
Read From Barcelona, with Love Online
Authors: Elizabeth Adler
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For Red and Jerry Shively, dearest friends and the best companions, with whom life is never dull
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Acknowledgments
Thanks, as always, to my dedicated, and fun, St. Martin's team, especially Sally Richardson and my editor, Jen Enderlinâsimply the best. To my lovely agent, Anne Sibbald, and the wonderful team at Janklow & Nesbit Associates. The list could go on, like winners at the Oscars thanking their mothers and fathers, wives, children, great-aunt, and friends, but I'll simply cut to the chase and let you get on with ⦠Barcelona.â¦
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Contents
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Prologue
Los Angeles, California
You could have heard
a pin drop in that courtroom the morning the police informed the judge that they had insufficient evidence to prosecute Isabella Fortuna de Ravel Peretti, whose stage name was Bibi Fortunata, for the murders of her lover and the lover's new “mistress,” who, by the way, also happened to be Bibi's best friend.
Then came the shocked intakes of breath, followed by shouts, jeers, screaming, yelling, chaos in the courtroom, the judge banging his gavel and calling for order and the sheriffs on duty attempting to keep it. But there was no holding back the press, they were out of there like the legendary pack of wolves baying into their cell phones, and the paparazzi, shoving forward, pushing aside all those in their way, jostling cameras up and over to get that money shot of Bibi Fortunata's beautiful face.
Bibi was crying as she was hustled, head down, into the back of the black Range Rover where she sat, knees together like a perfect lady, handbag shielding her face, and was driven away through the surging crowd.
Everyone knew Bibi. She was the hottest ticket in town: singer, songwriter, actress, celebrity, the woman they claimed every woman wanted to be, and every man wanted. Except, it seemed, for Bibi's husband, and also the lover, who had also cheated on her.
She had been good to that lover, had paid his way, introduced him to people who counted in show business, got him acting jobs. It must have gone to his head because, as with most affairs, proximity to a new woman made it easy, especially when it was offered “legs open and available,” as Bibi said when she confronted her “best friend” Brandi about it. “All he had to do was knock on your door and there you were, beckoning him in, naked but for a black lace thong.”
“How do you know that?” Brandi had asked, startled. She'd thought it was private between her and the lover and that he would never tell on her. But he had delighted in doing so, complete with details. “Bastard,” Brandi said, grinding her teeth.
“Bitch,” Bibi said, crying.
And that, Bibi had told the police later, was the last time she had seen her best friend, Brandi, gulping down a glass of white wineâa “Two-Buck-Chuck” Sauvignon Blanc (the two-dollar white wine from Trader Joe's that privately Bibi also thought was very good) while leaving rose-colored lipstick prints on the rim and managing to sneer at Bibi's naïveté at the same time. “I always thought you were dumb,” Brandi said in a parting shot.
That night, the lover, Waldorf Carlyle, was alone at the wheel of Bibi's silver-blue Bentley when it went out of control, spun out over Mulholland, and down into the canyon. It took two days to get the wreck up that steep rocky slope, riddled with earthquake faults and loose rocks. He was dead, of course, and the Bentley was a write-off.
That same night, Brandi was also found dead, long after Bibi had departed leaving her own wine undrunk. Brandi was in her own bed. And, for once, alone.
Bibi became front-page news in a way her publicist had never dreamed of. She went into hiding in her Hollywood Hills mansion, canceling all concerts and appearances. After weeks of investigating, expert witnesses declared the Bentley's brakes had definitely been tampered with, but then were unable to explain exactly how. It was only a suspicion, they said meekly, taking a hefty fee for that noninformation.
“Peaceful,” was how the tabloids described the best friend's death, though how they knew that remains a mystery. As did who took the picture of her that appeared on the Internet, looking eerily beautiful, as if she were simply sleeping, though admittedly her jaw had dropped open and her exposed teeth gleamed too whitely against her now-greenish alabaster face.
Her death, the coroner said, was due to “an overdose of prescription drugs.”
Isn't it always? people asked cynically, wondering if she had taken them deliberately after a fallout with the lover because he wouldn't leave Bibi for her. Or was it the angry Bibi who had slipped the pills into the wine they had shared just an hour before she died? The popular tabloid vote went to Bibi as the killer.
In all this Bibi's Italian husband, Bruno Peretti, a writer, kept out of the scene, holed up in his Palm Springs mid-century-modern house, blinds closed over the windows. There were more windows than walls in that house with views onto the desert and the mountains, beautiful in winter capped with snow, with the palm trees silhouetted black against them and the hard blue of the sky. Instead, he took solitary walks with his new pup, a pale Rottweiller-type with the kind of warning shifty look in its eyes that kept the media at bay. Peretti hung out at Melvyn's, his favorite bar, drinking martinis but always with a designated driver, male of courseâhe wasn't about to mess around with women at a time like this, though he was certainly a good-looking man, all hard chiseled cheekbones and strong nose, thin and fit, and with the same look in his eyes as the Rottweiller.
Nobody understood why Bibi had married Peretti in the first place. Bibi, with her flame-red hair, her pale lake-green eyes, her delicate freckled skin and slender sensuous body. Her looks were as off-beat as the songs she wrote, which were all about a woman finding out who she was; about the way life dealt you one blow after another then suddenly sent you happiness; about loneliness and the intimacy of lying in bed with a man; about making love and delicious calm afterward; about the glass of wine too many and the harsh words spoken that never should have been. Bibi, in torn fishnets and platforms and silver bustiers; or in slender, sensuous sparkled green chiffon, or in plain jeans and a T-shirt, Bibi sang about her own life and everyone knew what she was saying, and every man recognized her passion and, every man, it was said, imagined himself in that lover's place. So why not the husband?
Bibi had asked herself that question many times. Beauty and success is no compensation for loneliness and Bibi knew only too well what loneliness meant: a too-big house staffed with too many assistants, housekeepers, nannies, chefs, stylists, musicians, trainers ⦠Which still left her all alone. She and the child, that is.
The identity of the child's father was Bibi's secret. It was certainly not Peretti; he had merely taken on that role, adopting the daughter when he'd also taken on the role of Bibi's husband. There were rumors, though, that the child's father was a Russian ballet dancer, a star who had absconded from the Kirov on a European tour that included Barcelona. Nobody seemed to remember anything about that, but Barcelona was where Bibi came from, though she rarely went back there.
After the double murder, suspicion hung over her head for months. And then suddenly it was over. There was no evidence against her, but the damage had been done. Her reputation was in shreds. The Italian husband, who was in Palm Springs alone with his dog at the time of the killings and who, in all this, was scarcely mentioned or seen, abandoned both Bibi and her child, Paloma. Who could blame him? Her fans also abandoned her, they were already on to the newest and the next, whose glamorous lifestyle they could aspire to. They wanted “role models” but not this type. Murder was not good for the box office.
Bibi's fame disappeared like smoke. She realized there was no secure life for a child whose mother was branded in people's eyes as a killer. Ruined by the scandal, breaking her heart, she gave up Paloma, and sent her to live with her family in Barcelona. Then Bibi, too, left for Europe, where she quite simply disappeared.
The case was kept open but no one had taken the blame for the double murder.
A couple of years passed. It was as though Bibi had never existed.
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Part One
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Chapter 1
Malibu
Much later,
when Mac thought about it he realized the story had not begun in Barcelona, but at his own funky Malibu beach house, a pistachio-colored wooden shack built in the thirties by an adventurous would-be movie actor who'd never made it. It was rumored to have been lived in by sex goddess Marilyn Monroe, in her early Norma Jean days, and had ended up like a small green barnacle stuck on the end of a row of expensive houses owned by mega-moguls and billionaires, whose sea-view decks took up more space than Mac's entire home.
Anyhow, he happened to be sitting on his own, smaller deck, with his dog, the three-legged, one-eyed Pirate, whose underbite gave him a permanent smile and whose ragged gray-brown fur looked as though the moths had been at it. Mac had rescued him one dark rainy night driving over Malibu Canyon, stopping to scoop up what he thought was a dead mutt, only realizing when it opened its one uninjured eye and looked gratefully at him, that it was still alive. He took off his shirt, wrapped the dog in it, and drove straight to the emergency vet in Santa Monica, where they'd performed a miracle of surgery. The dog lived, and of course he had become Mac's dog.
He'd named him Pirate because of the eye patch the dog had worn, Long John Silverâstyle, until the eye socket healed, and Pirate was now his best buddy. Mac loved that dog and the dog loved him.
“And never the twain shall part,” misquoted Sunny Alvarez, Mac's fiancée. Well, she was his fiancée
again,
after the debacle in Monte Carlo the previous year. At least Mac hoped she was. But that was another story, and anyway, she was right about the dog.
He remembered the evening the Barcelona saga began perfectly. He'd propped his feet on the deck rail and was watching waves crashing onto the sand, comfortable in shorts and a favorite old blue T-shirt, dark hair still wet from the shower and combed hastily back, eyes narrowed against the flame of the setting sun, with not a thought in his head other than that Sunny, his girlfriendâhis loverâhis on-again fiancéeâwas busy in the kitchen. She had gone to fix “something to nibble on,” while they drank what she called “the good stuff,” which meant the bottle of expensive champagne she'd bought to celebrate their reunion.