Not Famous in Hollywood (Not in Hollywood Book 1)

Chapter Thirteen

Crystal looked at me as if I was an idiot. Of course. Adam Hendricks would give her anything she wanted. She was the gateway to one of the biggest casting agents in Hollywood. For an actor who hadn't quite made it yet, she was the key to the Promised Land. The man would probably give her the house if she wanted it. Luckily we only needed it for a couple of hours.

Pulling up to Ryan Hendricks's house felt like deja vu. There was a small part of me that didn't want to go inside. Edwin whistled low in his throat.

"Nice place," he said. "Very private."

"It needed to be," I said. "This is his second house for when he wanted to do something that wasn't quite right for public consumption."

"So what was he into?" asked Edwin as we went up the stairs.

"Actually," I said, "if you didn't take into account that he slept with anyone in a skirt, he wasn't too bad. He took his craft seriously, didn't do drugs, and didn't drink much at all."

"He used to be great on set," Crystal chimed in. "He was always at work on time, we never had any problems with complaints from producers or directors, unless there was a wife or girlfriend involved."

Looking through the house, we could see where the police had already been. As I feared, there was nothing that we could find that gave any indication of why a healthy man in the prime of his life had succumbed to a heart attack. In the kitchen we had a look around and I opened the massive fridge. In it there were boxes of organic fruit and vegetables and bottles of juice.

"How much of this stuff did he need?" I asked.

Edwin peered over my shoulder. "Looks like he was on that cleansing diet that a lot of celebrities are using to detox their systems," he said.

"How long is it supposed to last?" I asked.

"About five days," Edwin replied.

"There is a lot more than five days' worth here," I said.

"Some people are on it longer if they're trying to lose weight," Edwin said. "Not exactly how you're supposed to do it, but it's one way to go."

"Ryan Hendricks did not need to lose weight," I said. "The man was in amazing shape."

"Actually," Crystal interrupted, "he would have been trying to lose weight."

"Why?" I asked.

"New movie is making the rounds at the moment. Don't have many details but the lead role has a guy who is really thin, as in sick thin. I know Ryan was interested. This role is Oscar material and I think he was getting tired of playing the lead in romantic comedies and action movies. This was his chance to show that he could really act. Word is that Ryan had decided to try to go into the audition as thin as possible to show he could do it."

Shutting the refrigerator door, I reflected on how sad that was. He was working towards what he really wanted and now he would never have that chance.

"Could losing the weight have put some strain on his heart?" I wondered aloud.

"From the looks of it he had only just started a day or too earlier. There was no way he had lost enough weight to cause that kind of issue already," Edwin said, and he would know.

Being a personal trainer, Edwin knew about all the latest fad diets. He came up against them all the time. Edwin was always going on about how people wanted a quick fix. Nobody was interested in doing the hard work over a long period of time.

As we were walking away from the fridge, Crystal bent down. Other than the fact Edwin was admiring her butt, I really didn't see anything.

"What did you find?" I asked.