Indiscretions by Elizabeth Adler

newspapers were hinting that maybe pills and booze had had a lot to do with the twisted wreckage of the silver Mercedes at the bottom of Malibu Canyon—that, and possibly a fading career, and the split-up with the live-in lover of the past two years, Rory Grant, almosthalf her age and into his first big break as star of a new TV series.
    The newspapers had thrown it all up, using everything they could find to add dimension to a story whose headline had rocketed around the wire services of the world. Jenny Haven was dead.
    The endless tears slid down Venetia’s cheeks. She didn’t even bother to try to stop them anymore, letting them fall from her swollen eyes, not caring about her blotched face.
    It was India who had been most vehement against the suggestions in the papers. “Suicide!” she’d cried, and her brown eyes had flashed with anger. “If Jenny were committing suicide she’d have done it in the Rolls!” She had been so right that it had struck them as irresistibly funny and the three of them, alone in a VIP waiting room at London’s Heathrow Airport, had fallen into fits of hysterical laughter that had been even more painful than the tears.
    Venetia glanced across the aisle of the private jet to where India sat with her feet curled beneath her and a book in her hands, pretending to read. Venetia hadn’t seen her turn a page in the last half hour. Paris lay full length across three seats behind India, one thin arm flung across her face so that her eyes were hidden. The steward had covered her carefully with a blanket and she seemed to be sleeping, but Venetia doubted it.
    Venetia stretched her stiff legs. It was weariness that she felt, not fatigue. Too much was happening in her head, too many thoughts, too many questions. Too much guilt. If only she’d gone home when Jenny asked her … Abruptly she made her way toward the powder room at the rear of the plane.
    A door stood open on the left and she peered in at the compact, luxurious little room that was almost filled by a low bed covered in a soft dark-brown moleskin rug. Subduedlighting, a large mirror, a console by the bed that controlled the television and movie screens and the music system. Fitz McBain’s bedroom. She could lie down here, now, if she wanted. The bed was there for her to rest on. Venetia wondered briefly about the man whose bedroom this was, the rich man who owned a dozen luxury hotels, a château in France, and a penthouse in New York’s newest and most prestigious building. The plane is his home, Morgan had said. He spends most of his life in transit, flying from one meeting to the next. His father had two of these planes and they were identical. It was almost, thought Venetia, remembering Morgan’s story at dinner last night, as though Fitz McBain still lived in the trailer where he’d had his beginnings. A luxurious airborne trailer, but was there really much difference? Fitz McBain was still living “over the shop.”
    She wandered through to the tiny bathroom and gazed around. Mirrors, crystal knobs on the faucets, bronze tiles … very masculine … a bottle of Lagerfeld cologne, creamy towels monogramed MCB in scarlet. There were few clues to the man who had, when Morgan telephoned him in Hamburg, instantly put his private plane at the Haven daughters’ disposal. That, and any help he could offer, which included the two burly bodyguards sitting, as discreetly as two very large young men could, at the rear of the plane, and when they landed in Los Angeles they would be joined by two more.
    Fitz McBain had thought quickly. “I’ll have the girls picked up in Rome and Paris and get them to London right away. They’ll be all right at Heathrow,” he’d told Morgan. “We’ll get them out before the story breaks. But there’ll be trouble at L.A. International—reporters, TV, you name it. Everyone will be there hoping for the scoop on Jenny Haven’s daughters. She’s kept them out of the limelight all these years