Show Business Kills (16 page)

She wouldn’t go. She wanted Jan to see pictures of her kids, and tell her how good she was with the kids. If Jan’s little
boy came down and they started to interact, Jan would see how well kids related to her and think she was someone who ought
to be around little Joey and give her a job, so she had to say the line she’d rehearsed, which was, “Can’t I
meet your son?” She thought Jan would see that as something friendly to say. Meaning after all these years, you have a son,
and I want to just take a little peek at him, I love kids. She thought she said that, too, I love kids. But by then Jan was
hell-bent on hustling her out of there, probably because of the gun, and it really pissed her off. She was feeling sweaty
and afraid and she said, “You know, I don’t have a job, and you could hire me to take care of your son.” Well, that made Jan
a little nuts. She was real shaky and she said, “Please get out of here. I didn’t invite you, and I want you to leave right
now,” and her tone was so condescending. It was so I’m-on-top-and-you’re-nothing that she decided not to move until she got
her point across. “I wrote you some letters,” she said, feeling panicky now and knowing she had to get this in. “I didn’t
have this address when I sent them, so I mailed them to the studio, and you know what I got back? An autographed picture that
you didn’t even really sign, because I remember your handwriting. How could you let them send an old friend of yours an autographed
picture with a fake autograph on it
?”

“
I’m really sorry. I didn’t see your letters,” she said, and it sounded as if she meant, you nobody, why would I see a letter
from someone like you? “I get bags of fan mail, and if it came to the studio, it would get thrown into one of those bags,
but I have a service that answers all of those,” she said
.

That really burned her ass, and she couldn’t play the role of nice, chummy college buddy anymore. “Hey, I’m not your fucking
fan, Jan. I’m your equal. You weren’t the one who got the A’s in acting, I was. I won the best actress award our senior year.
Not you. And if you want to know the truth,
which I’m sure you don’t, the work you do on ‘My Brightest Day’ is real amateur shit
.”

“
Please just get out of here,” she said. “I’m asking you nicely to please leave.” It didn’t sound as if she was asking so nicely.
Then the kid’s voice yelled out, “Mommmmy,” and she was so flustered that she answered for Jan, maybe for herself. Probably
it was a reflex, after all the years of her kids hollering for her, but she said, “Yes, honey?” And Jan looked at her with
a look that meant, You are a lock-up case. But by then she didn’t care what Jan thought. She just wanted to see that little
boy so much that she started for the steps, and Jan grabbed her. Grabbed so hard she pulled her sweater off her shoulders
and said, “I told you to go, goddamn it
.”

Well, that must have been what put her over the top. Sometimes Lou used to grab her like that in front of the kids. Like that
time he grabbed her and, just for fun, cut off all her long, beautiful hair in front of the kids. Well, nobody was going to
do that to her ever again. Or talk to her in that tone of voice. For an instant she stepped away from the moment, and it was
just like they were on the main stage at Tech again. Jan was the beautiful Adela in
The House of Bernarda Alba,
and she was the bitter, jealous Marterio
.

“
Don’t raise that voice of yours to me. It irritates me. I have a heart full of a force so evil that, without my wanting to
be, I’m drowned by it.” Jan looked full of fear now, and she was so bummed out by Jan’s attitude, she was glad to see her
be afraid. She reached into her purse and took the gun out
.

She wasn’t going to shoot Jan. She just wanted to scare her, get her to lay off and let her see the little boy. She
wanted that little boy. To see him, that was all, but Jan ran past her now and started up the stairs as if she was going to
go and try to hide the kid or something, and she went after her, not to shoot her, but to stop her, and then she hit her with
the gun, hard, on the head, and after that the gun went off. Oh God. Oh my God
.

Jan turned just before she fell onto the steps, with an awful, shocked expression on her face, and then she said—and this
is the part that was so terrible to remember—she said, “Oh no, what about my poor baby?” And then she was lying on the floor,
Jan O’Malley, her college friend. Jan was the prettiest one, and she was the best actress. Oh, God, and that was when she
got out of there
.

She fell into her car, and at first it didn’t start, wouldn’t start, made that grinding sound it did when the battery was
dead. Dead No, please don’t be dead. Then it started, and she floored it, and after winding around till she thought she was
going to drive off the edge of one of those weird little hilly streets, she found her way to the Hollywood Freeway. Cars.
There were too many of them in this city. She drove, weaving in and out of them, and finally she found her exit and the street
where the hotel was, and she floored it up the long driveway to the parking lot and somehow made it through the lobby and
back to this fancy room she couldn’t afford. She was sick from all the shit she’d been eating out of the minibar. She opened
the window and tried to take some deep breaths to keep from vomiting. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go for her in
Hollywood. All she wanted was a job from one of them, and now she was, oh my God, a murderer
.

  
13
  

J
an O’Malley, the actress who plays Maggie Flynn in the daytime drama ‘My Brightest Day’ was assaulted late this afternoon
by an unidentified visitor at her Laurel Canyon home. Police said the forty-nine-year-old O’Malley was shot in the back, probably
with a handgun, when she opened the door to her house, admitting the assailant, who argued with her, then shot her and ran.

“Detectives said earlier, ‘We can assume Jan O’Malley knew the attacker, since her housekeeper, who was upstairs with O’Malley’s
young son, heard the actress arguing with someone who rang the bell and was admitted by O’Malley.’”

Rose was reworking a scene from one of her screenplays in her head as she drove, so she was only half listening to the car
radio when the bulletin came on the news. But she was sure she must have misheard what the man said. She was on her way to
Marly’s, and Janny was on her way there, too. She’d be there in five minutes, and surely Jan would come out to greet her and
say, “It was a PR stunt, Rosie. Let’s eat.”

“Police say they know of no motive, and no arrests have been made thus far. Again, this just in. Jan O’Malley, Maggie Flynn
on ‘My Brightest Day,’ has been rushed to Cedars-Sinai
Medical Center, where she’s been pronounced in critical condition, after a shooting at her Hollywood Hills home.”

Rose turned down the radio, and her eyes went dim the way the lights in her house did when there was a power surge. It was
at least ninety-five degrees outside, but she was cold and afraid and feeling too shaky to negotiate her car around the tight
curves on Sunset Boulevard. As soon as she could make a turn onto a side street, she did and pulled her car into a parking
place, leaving the engine running.

Cars whizzed by on Sunset as she pushed the telephone buttons entering Marly’s number. After two rings, Marly’s machine picked
up. It was the voice of one of the twins. “Please leave a message.” Marly was probably in the shower. If she hadn’t heard
the news, Rose couldn’t leave a message on an answering machine saying that she was sitting in her car on some side street
in Brentwood, shaking because she’d just heard Jan was shot. It wasn’t a message you left on an answering machine, so she
hung up. Maybe Marly knew about Jan already and was on her way to the hospital.

Rose held tightly to the steering wheel, then put her face against it and tried to decide what to do. Andy was on the staff
at Cedars. She’d call him at home, and if he could find someone to stay with Molly, she’d get him to hurry there and find
out if Jan was getting the best care possible. With the rush-hour traffic it could take Rose an hour to get to there herself,
and it might be too late. Who in God’s name would want to shoot Janny? It must have been a robbery. But didn’t the newscaster
say it seemed to be someone Jan knew? Rose always joked about herself that she had a “Movie-of-the-Week” mind, meaning that
the minute something eventful happened, she turned it into a story for a script, and she was
doing that now. Maybe Jan was shot by the jerko producer of “My Brightest Day.” Jan mentioned to Rose that he was always fretting
about the sagging ratings of the show. Maybe he thought a scandal would be good for the numbers. What if it was the wife of
that handsome actor who played Jan’s lover on the show? A jealous woman who thought her husband’s love scenes with Jan were
starting to look too real.

Now she dialed her home phone on the car phone.

“Andy?”

“Hi, honey.”

“Something awful…”

“I know, I’ve been trying to call you, too,” he said. “I saw it on TV and then called the hospital to get the inside word.
One of the neighborhood kids is coming to be with Molly, and as soon as she gets here, I’ll meet you at Cedars. I would think
the place is crawling with police, so I’ll clear you and the others with security. I’m sure they have to be afraid the guy
who shot her will show up at the hospital.”

It was all so awful, so right out of some TV crime show, she wished someone would yell “Cut,” and make it go away. Waves of
anxiety moved through her. A minute before, this was the evening she’d been looking forward to all week. The evening she’d
been smiling about all day, after the two stupid meetings she’d had this week. Now the worries that felt so big were absurd.

She put her foot on the gas and headed for the corner, then tried to nose her car into the traffic moving east on Sunset,
but none of the aggressive drivers would let her in. “As far as I know, she’s still alive,” Andy’s voice said over the speaker.
“I reached one of the doctors at Cedars on the trauma team who told me that the bullet entered the upper part of her back
toward her neck.” Rose hated the way her doctor husband was giving her information on the speakerphone in that same clinical
voice she’d heard him use with patients. She wanted to scream at him, “Don’t tell me the bloody details. I can’t stand it.
“ But instead she listened numbly and watched the West Side commuters’ high-priced cars move past her in a shiny blur.

“Luckily…” Andy’s disembodied voice filled the car, and Rose wondered what in the hell he could possibly find in this situation
that started with the word “luckily.” “. .… it missed her aorta, but it collapsed a lung. It just nicked her spine and fractured
off some pieces of bone from her upper thoracic and lower cervical spine, so she has an inflammation of the spinal cord.”

“Andy…”

“She also had a blow to her head that made her unconscious, so they rushed her into surgery.”

“Please get over to Cedars and make sure they’re on top of this case,” Rose said. A white stretch limo stopped and let her
pull her car into the traffic, but the line of cars was slowing down, and after she’d gone only a few car lengths, the traffic
was completely stopped.

“I’m on my way,” Andy said. “In fact, there’s the doorbell. It’s probably Tracy Gellman to stay with Molly. I’m going to walk
right out when she comes in, so I’ll see you when you get there. Surgical ICU.”

“Tell Tracy to lock the door and turn on the alarm, and—“ Andy had clicked off. The traffic was still at a dead halt, and
in her rearview mirror, Rose could see the woman driving a Jaguar sedan behind her looking at herself in her own rearview
mirror, applying lipstick with a brush. “Janny,”
Rose said out loud. “Don’t die. I’m on my way to help you come back. Hang in.”

Her Filofax was lying on the passenger seat, so she riffled through the pages until she found Ellen’s car phone number, but
when she called, the line was busy. Ellen’s car had call waiting, so the busy signals meant she had someone on both lines.
Three less than were usually holding for her, Rose thought, as she pushed
CLEAR
and
END
.