The Altar of Bones by Philip Carter

Author:Philip Carter
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Icons, Secrets, General, Couples, Suspense, Thrillers, Suspense fiction, Fiction
ISBN: 9781439199084
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2011-03-08T00:35:04+00:00

SO WE WERE at the Brown Derby one night in the summer of ‘62. Katya, Marilyn, and me.

Marilyn was in what she liked to call her “disguise,” and I’ll admit, it actually wasn’t a bad disguise at that. She had covered up her platinum hair with a scarf, hadn’t put on any makeup, and she didn’t look quite so luscious to me then, with her freckles and plain brown eyes. And she was wearing this dress, some cheap thing with little pink flowers on it. God knows where she’d gotten it—probably off the discount rack in Macy’s basement. Yet, even so, on her it still clung in places so sexy that in some states she would’ve been arrested for indecent exposure.

But the best part of her disguise, the genius of it, I thought, was how she could change the way she walked. She’d lose her swivel—that hip-swaying, butt-undulating thing she could do that was pure, one hundred percent sex appeal. That was pure Marilyn Monroe. If the woman could have patented the move, it would have sold like the Hula-Hoop, and she’d have made a mint off of it too.

And the funny thing was, she could’ve used the money. She was only getting a hundred K for starring in Something’s Got to Give, which might seem like a lot for those days, but when you figure Liz Taylor was paid a million for Cleopatra, and when you’re a movie star, you got to live like a movie star …

So, anyway, Marilyn was in her “disguise” that night, but she had the maître d’ seat us close to her place on the “Wall of Fame”—these framed caricatures of famous and maybe not-so-famous movie stars and other Hollywood big shots that went all the way back to 1929. And she made sure it was a booth with a phone jack, so the waiter could bring a telephone over should an important call come in. Also, no sooner do we sit down then some girl with a cigarette tray and a camera comes along and offers to take our picture for a buck, and Marilyn says, “Sure, honey. Why not?”

I didn’t get the logic of this, going incognito to a place where everyone was sure to recognize you anyway. All that time I spent around the woman, and I never understood the first thing about her. But then I’d probably never seen her when she wasn’t acting.

“You look at her and see a world-famous movie star,” Katya told me once. “But inside she’s feeling like a scared little girl, afraid that if you stripped away her blond hair and breasts, she’d just be a nobody. She wants to be loved for herself, unconditionally, and not as a sex object.”

Unconditional love. Yeah, it sounded good all right, but I’d discovered long ago that there were conditions attached to just about everything. Still, maybe that explained how a world-famous movie star ended up being best friends with a cameraman’s gofer.

Because when Katya Orlova loved you, she did so unconditionally.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.