Peabody came back, set a bottle of water on the table by Julian.
“What was she holding over your head, Julian? That was another ‘always something’ with her. What did she say she’d do if you refused to lie about Marlo?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Eve glanced at Peabody, nodded slightly.
“Julian.” Peabody reached out, and when she touched Julian’s hand, he pulled back.
“Sorry.” He glanced up, looked down again. “It—you—remind me.”
“But I’m not K.T. I’m not going to yell at you, or threaten you, or say things to make you feel bad. She did that. To you. To a lot of people.”
“I don’t know why some people can’t just be nice. Be happy.”
“She wasn’t happy, and she wasn’t nice. And she always looked for the bad side. Everybody’s got a bad side, or something they don’t want other people to know. She liked to find out, and then use that to make someone hurt, or to pressure them to do something they didn’t want. What did she find out about you?”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Okay.”
“And it wasn’t my fault.”
“I believe you.”
“We were clubbing. I’d just landed the lead in Forgiven. It was mega, a career-maker, so a bunch of us were celebrating. We’d partied pretty hard all night. Drinking, illegals. I don’t do them anymore, but I did. Maybe a little zoner or Hype, something was always right there, like party favors. Women, too. Just there.”
“Forgiven. That came out about ten years ago. You were really young,” Peabody said in that same understanding tone. “Hardly twenty.”
“Twenty-three. It was a major break, a lot of money. We were all high from celebrating, and at this sex club. In and out of the privacy rooms, you know how you do.” He shrugged, drank some water.
“Sure,” Peabody agreed, though she didn’t.
“Then we went back to my place, and some of the women came so we could party some more. And two of them went back to my room with me. In the morning, they’re still there. We just passed out together after. And this guy’s at the door, and he’s screaming. How he’s going to kill me. One of the girls is his daughter. She’s sixteen. Both of them are fucking sixteen.”
He covered his face with his hands, rubbed hard before he dropped them. “How was I supposed to know? They shouldn’t have been in the club. They had bogus IDs, and they said they were twenty-one. I didn’t make them have sex with me. I didn’t force them. But I bought them drinks, I gave them illegals, I had sex with them. If I’d known they were only sixteen I wouldn’t have. I swear. They didn’t look sixteen or act sixteen, and they were in a sex club and all over me.
“He said he was calling the cops, having me arrested for statutory rape. Everybody’s screaming, and he slapped his kid. He really hit her hard, and he jumped me when I tried to stop him from hitting her again. My buddies dragged him off. The girls are hysterical. One of my friends is a lawyer, and he started talking all this legal shit about how the girls were going to end up in juvie, and this guy was going up for assault. It just got worse and worse.”
“What happened?” Peabody asked when he fell silent.
“I gave them money. A lot of money to make it stop. To make it go away. It was a long time ago, and I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong when I was doing it. But it would’ve ruined me. If I’d gotten charged with rape, I’d have been finished. It could still ruin me.”
“And K.T. found out.”
“That’s what she does,” he said, bitterly now. “She finds out. Then she puts the screws to you when it suits her. I never did anything to her, but she said she was going to leak what happened to the media. She even had the names of the guy and his daughter. She said I’d go to jail, and no studio would hire me again. It was almost ten years ago, and she said I’d go to jail.”
“Unless you played along with her and lied about Marlo?”
“Yeah. She said I had to tell Matthew we were screwing on the side, and give him details.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I said no. I wasn’t going to do that to friends. And she said they weren’t my friends. Did I think either of them would go to jail for me? She scared me.”
He took another drink, a long one.
“What did you do?”