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name—Tanner something?” Maury Lykes always liked to know whom his troubled wards were dating. He didn’t wish to read it first in the tabloids, or see it on TMZ.com. “Is that the asshole who fed her all the pills?”
    “It’s just gastritis, Maury. Cherry ate some bad scallops.”
    “Right. Last time it was eggplant.”
    “What’s your point?” said Janet Bunterman.
    “And the time before that, Cobb salad.”
    “She has a hypersensitive stomach. Ask her doctor!”
    Maury Lykes appreciated the value of occasional public misbehavior—it had prolonged the careers of several clients who would otherwise have vanished from the celebrity radar due to a manifest lack of talent. Airport tantrums, DUIs, botched shopliftings and other episodes of delamination could be useful between projects, when there was no other way for a young star to keep from being forgotten. But soon Cherry Pye would be launching a much-anticipated comeback CD (her second), and embarking on a twenty-seven-city concert tour that was (to the deepening consternation of Maury Lykes) not yet sold out. Rumors of another sloppy overdose would dampen advance ticket sales, for at this point even Cherry’s most loyal fans wouldn’t pay forty-two bucks to see her perform in a trashed condition. They could already watch that for free on YouTube: the infamous aborted show at the Boston Garden, a crisp spring evening two years earlier.
    Before the opening number, Cherry had whimsically decided to try crystal meth—“just to see what all the buzz was about,” as she later explained to
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magazine. She’d lasted for three songs, and at no time had the movement of her lips matched the voice track being piped through the speakers. When the crowd in the first few rows had begun to jeer, Cherry had spun around, dropped her leather mini-shorts and bent over to moon the offenders. Naturally she’d lost her balance and fallen on her head, leaving Lev to haul her offstage with a modified fireman’s carry.
    “Pay attention,” Maury Lykes said to Janet Bunterman. “Your daughter’s turning into a cliché, and I don’t represent clichés.”
    “You do if they sell records, Maury.”
    “But they don’t sell records. They just sell magazines,” he said. “So clean her up, and keep her that way.”
    “She needs to watch what she eats,” Janet Bunterman muttered.
    “And don’t let her fuck any more actors, okay? They’re a bad influence.”
    “Now hold on—that boy she was with last night, he’s done Tennessee Williams in Chicago.”
    “I don’t care if he did Tennessee Ernie Ford in the basement of the Grand Ole Opry,” Maury Lykes said, “keep the kid away from her. You got a pen?”
    Janet Bunterman found a pink Sharpie in her purse. Maury Lykes grabbed it and wrote a phone number on the back of his business card. “Cherry’s going to need a new bodyguard.”
    “Who is he? Does he work for you?”
    “If you don’t call him, I will.” Maury Lykes pressed the card into her palm and said, “He’s an expert on ‘gastritis.’”
    Cherry Pye’s mother frowned. “I hope he’s nothing like Lev.”
    “Oh, he’s not like Lev, honey. He’s not like anybody you ever met.”
    Bang Abbott still found pleasure in his craft, such as it was. Unlike most paparazzi, he had once worked for a serious newspaper, back in the day when newspapers mattered. For four years Claude J. Abbott had been a staff photographer for the
St. Petersburg Times
,and during most of that time he’d performed his job without controversy or distinction, shooting murder scenes, car wrecks, hurricanes, flash floods, birthday parties at nursing homes, adoption days at the Pinellas Humane Society, the Buccaneer cheerleader tryouts, the Rays dancer tryouts, the Hooters calendar-girl contest, the trial of a county commissioner who trolled the Internet for Cub Scouts, a 10K run against skin cancer, a 5K run against HIV, a one-mile walk/run against osteoporosis, the birth of