Ian’s eyes flared, and Michael knew if he didn’t take control of the situation, they would relitigate the last flag football game. It had turned into all the guys punching each other.
“MaeBe, why don’t you start? If I’m meeting Ms. Hale this evening, I would like to know a little something about her,” Michael said. This was his op, and he was going to run it without a throwdown between Julian’s mentees.
“Yes, if you two want to fight it out, I can call down and Alex will be more than happy to set up a vat of Jell-O,” Charlotte offered. “But after the meeting.”
“Jell-O?” Wolf asked.
“The women like a good Jell-O wrestling session,” Tessa replied. “Or you can lube up and go at it.”
Wolf frowned. “I feel vaguely offended.”
“You’ll feel vaguely…” Tag began.
“So the subject of our investigation is one Vanessa Hale Benedict.” MaeBe completely cut tag off and started her presentation. “Benedict is her married name. She goes by it.”
“Hale was her stage name, if I’m correct.” Julian seemed ready to get down to business.
“You are, sir.” MaeBe hit a key on her laptop, and the image of a young woman with dark hair and stunning eyes came on the screen. She wore a green dress, and her hair was long and draped over one shoulder. She looked utterly unlike the woman he’d seen on magazine covers, with the exception of that fuck-me mouth of hers. Her lips formed a perfect pink bow that any man of the right persuasion would want to try out.
But not on this woman. This woman looked…innocent. Excited. Ready to take on the world.
God, was Tessa right and he was going into this whole op judging her because of the way she looked now? Because of stories he’d heard?
“She was born Vanessa Jones, but that was considered too boring for Hollywood. She was born here in Dallas. She won a teen modeling contest, and that was how she ended up going to Hollywood. She dropped out of high school to do her first movie,” MaeBe continued, and the slide changed. Now it was a movie poster that showed a younger, but more recognizable Vanessa Hale. She was blonde and busty. “The classic Terror in Walton Woods. She played the flirt who gets chopped up by the crazy former summer camp owner. They liked her so much that she came back as a ghost in the second movie, and as her own evil twin who turned out to be the killer in the third.”
“They’re fun in a totally awful way,” Kyle commented and then frowned. “MaeBe made me watch them.”
“They’re supposed to be tongue in cheek,” MaeBe argued. “But that’s beside the point. From there Vanessa Hale actually became something of an ‘It Girl’ in Hollywood for a couple of years. She did several romantic comedies, and even a drama she got positive reviews for. But then she got a reputation for being difficult.”
“So she was hard to work with?” Ian asked. “Because I got a whole building of difficult here, and they’re still working for me.”
“I remember seeing something about her losing a part because she had crazy demands,” Charlotte began.
MaeBe’s slide show clicked through many of the numerous tabloids to feature Ms. Hale. In each photo she looked sexier and oddly more craven. The photographers caught her frowning and yelling. The headlines questioned everything from whether or not she slept with her married costars, to if she was eating enough, to if she was pregnant or simply letting herself go.
What they all had in common was criticism.
“That’s one rumor, but I couldn’t verify it,” MaeBe replied. “She had an assistant she was close to. Ashton Banks. After she was hired, she moved in, and they lived together for a long time until it came out that Ashton was the one selling the stories to the tabloids. That was kind of where it all spiraled. She got fired from a movie for what they called unrealistic demands. She wanted to be paid what the male lead got. He had way less experience than she did, but he was the producer’s nephew, so she was replaced.”
“So you would say she had fallen on hard times when she met George Benedict?” Julian was carefully studying each picture.
MaeBe turned his way. “He was the producer on the last couple of films she made. He was a billionaire from Houston. He made his money in retail stores and real estate. One of his daughters was a director, and he produced her films. Vanessa starred in the last one, a kind of experimental piece. It did well on some of the festival circuits, but it never found an audience.”
“I believe I remember hearing something about the daughter dying,” Julian mused.
“She did. She was working on a film with Vanessa in France. Lara Benedict was found dead of a drug overdose in the house she’d rented while working there.” MaeBe clicked, and the news headline came up. “Vanessa found her. By this point Vanessa was actually living with the Benedicts. She married George about six weeks after the funeral.”
“That seems fast.” Michael glanced through the folder Charlotte had placed in front of every seat. It was basic information, and he knew most of it.
“Grief can make you do odd things,” Ian murmured.
“It can also make you vulnerable,” Michael countered. He couldn’t reconcile that sweet-faced young woman with the bleach blonde who wore five-inch heels to pick up her dry cleaning.
“While she was married to George, she seemed to try to stay out of the spotlight as much as she could.” MaeBe turned on the lights. “But naturally there were stories. According to the press, she used George cruelly for cash and separated him from his remaining child, George Jr., who was not pleased with the marriage and tried to have his father declared non compos mentis. George died while they were in the middle of that battle, and then the real one began.”
“She recently had to move out of the mansion, didn’t she?” Charlotte asked.
“The judge awarded almost everything to Junior in the last go-round,” MaeBe agreed. “She should have been able to stay in it through the appeals process, but George Jr. played hardball, and when she went to visit her sister here in Dallas, he moved in and changed the locks. She can fight it, but I don’t like her odds.”
“Did George Sr. have a will?” Lodge asked.
“Yep, and he left a huge amount to Vanessa.” Michael knew this part. He’d studied up on her finances. It always came down to money, and George Benedict had a ton of it. Money that probably should have gone to his son and not the twenty-something he’d married on a lark.
“They’ve been fighting over it for the last two years,” MaeBe continued. “The last judgment was against her. The judge ruled that there was enough evidence to believe that George Sr. was under undue influence at the time he wrote the will.”
That told him everything he needed to know. Vanessa wasn’t the same girl in that picture. She’d lost herself somewhere along the way and tried to take the easy route to money. She’d tried to steal it from a frail old man and gotten caught. “How did she come to be in your employ, Julian? She doesn’t seem like the type of person you normally hire.”
“My wife hired her,” Lodge replied. “Technically, Vanessa works for Danielle’s company.”
“How does Dani know her?” Charlotte asked.