Scare Tactics Read Online Free

nostrils had dilated; I was again nearly anesthetized by the odor of violets.
    “I think,” she said, “you’ve recognized me already. Although, of course, since David worked nights we were never introduced.”
    “Are you an actress?” I asked her, manufacturing an air of good-humored resignation. “You’re quite good. I hope you’re going to be in the film. Would you like to meet the director? By all means, let me introduce you. Because you’re wasting your considerable talents on this crude and rather insulting—”
    “I have several hundred pages of an earlier draft of David’s novel. Handwritten, on legal pad paper. A draft you never saw. Post-office copyright. It proves beyond any doubt who wrote Angels and Aborigines .” She said all of this without rancor, as if she had no interest in intimidating me; a rueful little smile appeared as she finished. One eyebrow was slightly raised, inviting the denial she knew it was not in me to attempt.
    “You were—a friend of his?” I said, when I could speak again.
    “More than that. Much more. I told you. I was David’s muse.”
    There was a twitching muscle near one corner of my mouth that I couldn’t control. “Oh, yes,” I said, desperately playing along. “Your perfume—the odor of violets. Is that what the gods are wearing on Olympus nowadays?”
    “It isn’t perfume. It’s my natural essence.”
    “And your name is Dierdre. Forgive me, I thought I knew the names of all the muses. Calliope, Thalia, Terpsichore—and so forth. Not a Dierdre in the lot, however.”
    “I’m an apprentice.”
    “Oh, well, that does explain it.”
    “With everybody and his brother writing or composing something these days, they need so many of us. The Association took on ten thousand new apprentices the day before yesterday.”
    “I hope they all look like you.”
    “We come in all shapes and sizes,” she said, not smiling now. “Why don’t you have that drink you came over here for? You look as if you’re going to pass out, Mr. Mayo.”
    I could see no reason for her to continue this labored and unfunny pretense, the exercise in humiliation she seemed determined to put me through. Obviously it was money she was after.
    “How much?” I asked Dierdre. “How much do you want to keep your mouth shut?”
    Dierdre lowered her eyes, and sighed. “I don’t think this is the time, or the place, to discuss restitution.”
    “All right, when?”
    “I’ll be in touch. After the next Association meeting.”
    “The Association? What is that?”
    “I’ll let you know. Later.” She raised her glass in a mock salute, smiled guilelessly, slipped suddenly through a gap in a shifting group of bodies. I started to follow her, felt a tug at my sleeve, looked down. It was our producer, a hunchbacked albino renowned for his conquests of ravishing women.
    “Come with me,” he said. “Want you to meet someone.” He named a prominent studio honcho.
    “Do you know who that girl is?” I demanded of him.
    He looked around with alert bunny eyes. “If she works in the Industry, I know her. Which lovely do you have in mind?”
    “There—the redhead.” But when I searched for Dierdre in the mob I couldn’t find her. I turned back to the producer. “The one I was just talking to.”
    “You’ve been standing here by yourself for the last ten minutes mumbling in your beard. Frankly I thought you’d had a couple too many snorts.”
    “You didn’t see—”
    “You look devastated, Jacky. Want a woman? Pick one. I’ll personally see to it she’s delivered to your doorstep at the hotel by one A.M.”
    I said something to the effect that I could handle my own love life, and went with him. I did not ask him if he also smelled violets. But the hypnotic odor persisted, like an olfactory illusion, although it weakened by the hour as I lay sleepless in my bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Wondering what the outcome would be and if, after all, it was only money that