Beautiful People by Wendy Holden

holster under his arm. Physically as well as professionally, he was never less than prepared to withstand an attack from a rival studio.
        The doors flew back, and in, rather to everyone's amazement, came Belle Murphy, her lavishly lipsticked mouth stretched in a dazzling smile the width of a watermelon.

    "Hi guys!" she trilled. The guys waited for a reference to her lateness, followed by an apology. They were disappointed on both counts.
        Belle looked, Mitch thought, not only smaller than she appeared on screen—every star looked like that—but even smaller than when he had seen her last. Clearly her relationship with food had got that bit more distant in the meantime. For all the movement and vitality of her presence—the shining hair, the flashing sunglasses, the exposed and prominent rounded domes of her breasts rearing beneath a necklace of very big diamonds—Belle's body, Mitch estimated, was about the width and thickness of a copy of Vogue . And not a Christmas issue, either.
        She looked pretty good, all the same. He noted with relief her clinging grey silk dress with plunging neckline, black high heels, enormous black sunglasses, and the way her cascade of white-blonde hair pushed back from her face and poured over her shoulders as far as her elbows. She was working the high-octane glamour look, as she should be. She was doing that bit right at least.
        He shot a timid yet triumphant look at Arlington. Surely even Hollywood's chillest lizard, however angry, couldn't be immune to such a tasty piece of ass as this. He took heart when he saw that Arlington was apparently staring at Belle's breasts.
        Arlington was, however, looking at the bag Belle had under her arm. It was huge, heavy with gilt and buckles, and almost as big as she was. He recognised the type without enthusiasm. His fifth wife had had one in every colour. They cost a minimum of two thousand dollars a pop. What was even less appealing to Arlington was the presence in one corner of the bag of a small, brown dog with a very big diamond collar. It was one of those trembly, skinny, yappy ones, Arlington saw with dislike. It looked restlessly about with enormous and very prominent black eyes. They held a ruthless expression, a look that clearly warned it might go for the throat at any minute. Arlington recognised the expression; it was one he often used himself in business meetings.
        Mitch's expression, meanwhile, was one of abject misery. That Arlington Shorthouse disliked dogs was common knowledge in Hollywood. NBS was the only studio that never put out movies with dogs in them, which were the sort that more or less kept all the other studios afloat.
        "Darling!" breathed Belle in her trademark little-girl voice. Holding out her arms, she staggered across the carpet in her high heels towards the burr-walnut desk. "Arl! May I call you that, for short?"
        The sound now filled the room of four strangled, horrified coughs. Four minds reverberated with one single thought. She had called him Arl, Mitch realised, cringing. No one called Arlington anything for short. No one ever said "short," and she had done that too. "Short" was not a word that was ever breathed in Arlington's presence.
        Mitch, who knew how the studio head also loathed unscheduled physical interaction, now watched in horror as Belle seized Arlington's neck with a white hand on which a huge diamond ring glittered. "Mwah! Mwah!" Arlington gasped with pain as her razor cheekbones banged against his smooth and elastic cheeks.
        It crossed the screeching, veering chaos of Mitch's mind that Belle might be drunk.
        Belle, having smeared Arlington's tanned cheeks with red lipstick, now stood unsteadily erect in her five-inch stilettos. She held up the bag with the dog in.
        "Gentlemen," she pouted breathily, batting her wide, blue eyes behind her sunglasses. "I'd like you all to meet Sugar. It's Sugar's fault