Show Business Kills (40 page)

T
hey dozed and woke alternately. Sometimes Marly lay spread out on the floor using her jacket as a pillow, and Ellen and Rose
slept sitting up in the chairs. Nurses who moved in and out of the cubicle to check on Jan tiptoed around them, moving so
silently that the three friends continued to sleep.

They were startled awake at six
A.M.
, when a young, starchily dressed morning-shift nurse, who seemed inconvenienced by their presence, woke them by sliding the
door open noisily and announcing that she had orders from the neurosurgeon to send Jan down to have another CAT scan.

“We need to see if the swelling has improved or become worse,” she said in an all-business tone that had them gathering up
their purses, slipping into their shoes, and walking groggily out of the room.

In the corridor they waited and watched as the bed was trundled out of ICU, and Jan’s inert body jiggled as the orderlies
bumped the cumbersome bed over the sill and into the hall. “Give ‘em hell down there, Janny,” Marly said softly.

Rose tugged at her sleeve, and they headed down the hall
to the ladies’ room. It smelled of a recent mopping with disinfectant, and Rose wrinkled her nose at the acrid odor and walked
to the bank of sinks where the other two stood rinsing their faces.

“We look like the opening scene in
Macbeth
,” Ellen said.

“After we get the results of this test, we ought to take turns going home,” Marly said. Her white hair was wild around her
pretty face. “I need to get to my house and make sure Joey’s being taken care of properly. I felt fine about leaving him with
Maria because she’s been his prime caretaker for so long, but we have to consider the effect of the trauma. We need to find
him a child therapist right away, so he doesn’t walk around with rage inside him for the rest of his life.”

“And grow up to be a studio executive,” Ellen muttered sleepily.

“As soon as we talk to the doctor, you can both go home for a while, and I’ll stay,” Rose said. “Molly has a play date today,
and Andy will come back here to make rounds. So I’ll just call him and ask him if he’ll bring me some clean clothes.”

They rinsed their mouths, Ellen ran a brush through her thick auburn hair, Marly lifted the top of her pouffy cotton-candy
curls with a pick comb, and Rose pushed her hair back behind her ears. “It’ll take them a while to do the tests. Let’s go
for a walk,” she said.

Their heels clicked on the terrazzo floors as they walked down the hall into the elevator and then across the lobby, where
a white-haired guard at a desk was reading a Stephen King paperback. Marly pushed the hospital doors open, and they stepped
outside into the new day.

Silently, they moved together down Beverly Boulevard,
past the Beverly Center. It was just dawn, and they could make out shapes in doorways of the sleeping homeless. A siren screamed,
and an ambulance rushed past them heading for the hospital.

“Oh, what I would give to have my worst worry be Alex Bibberman, the way it was yesterday,” Ellen said.

“Isn’t it awful the way we need disaster to remind us what matters and what’s nonsense?” Marly asked.

“You’re right,” Rose said. “There are days when I get caught up in the insanity and spin out on what I’m not doing, what I
should be doing, what other people are probably doing, and worry myself into a frazzle. Last month I canceled my subscription
to the trade papers because I realized that while I was reading them my stomach ached.”

They moved swiftly, sometimes walking three abreast, sometimes single file, sometimes holding on to one another as they crossed
the streets. At Fairfax Avenue, catty-corner to the snowy white CBS studio, they stopped for a red light, and Rose looked
up and then smiled.

“Look,” she said, and the others followed her gaze. It was a billboard for Billy’s show. A giant picture of Billy with an
ingratiating grin on his cute face. Marly’s face melted into a mixed look of pain and adoration.

She sighed, and without taking her eyes from the billboard, she said, “It’s so ridiculous, but I love him with that same kind
of aching, overwhelming love we used to feel about boys when we were adolescents. I still get a rush every time he walks in
my door. And it never goes away, no matter what name I give it, no matter what cure I take, trying to do away with feelings
I’ve branded with every psychological term ever coined. And you know what? Werner said that life
gets easier if we ride the horse in the direction it’s going, and that’s what I’ve decided I’m going to do. I’m going to call
him and tell him I want him to come home as soon as he can.”

She looked at her two friends and paused, waiting for the protests, for one of them to say, “Mistake! The man can’t cut it.
He’ll just hurt you again.” But both of them just nodded.

“I think if anyone made me feel that way, I sure as shit would set all the mental health books on fire and grab it,” Ellen
said.

Rose put an arm around Marly. “You’ll make it work,” she said.

Marly knew that they doubted Billy’s staying power as much as she did, but they wanted it to work for her and were willing
to support her through it. As the three friends stood on the street corner, oblivious to the traffic noises that were picking
up, the L.A. morning sun rose in the sky. The Beverly Boulevard bus rumbled to a stop next to them and two women got off chatting
away in Spanish and walked off down the street. The bus pulled away, leaving a cloud of exhaust, but they didn’t notice that,
either.

“I love you both so much,” Marly said. “I want to say it now, because I wish I had said it to Jan more often. All I thought
about last night while we sat in Jan’s room was that I probably hadn’t let her know how much her wonderful gift of friendship
meant to me. How I always loved hearing her voice at the other end of the phone. How sometimes when I felt so low I could
barely move, I’d think about the stories she told that made me laugh so much, and I was grateful that I had her in my life.
So please, let’s not wait to praise one
another, remind each other all the time of everything we have together, and what that’s worth.”

“I love both of you, too,” Ellen said, tears gushing out of her eyes. Cars and trucks were whizzing by the busy Hollywood
corner. “I know I’m tough on you, Mar, and I hear myself doing it sometimes, and I hate myself for it. You two and Janny have
walked me through this life at times when I thought I couldn’t take another step. When Rogie was little and I was so alone,
the times you three had us over for meals, picked him up at school when I couldn’t, gave him advice when he thought my advice
was stupid and yours was cool.”

“We’ve come such a long distance with one another,” Rose said. Marveling while she looked at them through her own puddle-filled
eyes, that she not only knew the reason for nearly every line on their beautiful faces, but the season when it was acquired.

“Yeah,” Ellen joked. “All the way to CBS.” She took a tissue out of her bag, and as she wiped her nose, she looked up and
saw two old Hassidic Jewish men walk by dressed in their long black coats and black hats. This was the neighborhood of delis
and Judaica shops and kosher butcher shops, and home to many elderly Jews.

Ellen smiled. “My friend Artie Butler once told me that he was supposed to meet somebody at CBS one day,” she said. “And the
person he was meeting didn’t know how to get there, so the directions Artie gave the guy were, ‘You go down Fairfax Avenue,
and the first place that doesn’t have a chicken in the window is CBS.’ ”

Laughing, and with their arms around one another, they headed back to the hospital.

At eight-fifteen Jan’s bed came rumbling off the elevator and was wheeled past them in the seventh-floor corridor and back
into ICU. A few minutes later the neurosurgeon arrived. He was a thin, balding man with kind eyes, who nodded to them as he
moved in to the cubicle to examine Jan. When he came out into the hall a few minutes later, his expression was grim.

“Do any of you know if she has a durable power of attorney for health care?” he asked, looking at each of them.

“Oh, God,” Ellen said.

“Her sister told me last night that Jan talked about a will in which she was planning to nominate her as the guardian of her
son, so maybe the durable power of attorney for health care is with it,” Rose told him.

“I can go to her house and look for a will,” Marly said.

“It’s necessary,” the doctor said. “The prognosis is very serious. I reviewed the CAT scan, and her clinical picture has deteriorated
since the imaging study we did before the surgery. The blow to her head caused massive damage and the edema is worse. There’s
a lot of pressure in her skull, and it’s pushing down onto her brain stem.

“We can wait a few days to see if that changes, but I believe if we extubate her, it will only be a very short time until
she dies. Right now I think we should hold off taking out the tube until we determine if her wish is for us to take extraordinary
measures to care for her or not.”

“What are the chances the swelling will go down?” Ellen asked.

“We don’t know.”

“I guess I’d better find out if she put any of that in writing,” Marly said.

“When you do, you can call my office or have me paged here at the hospital.”

When he was gone, none of them spoke. Marly shuffled in her purse looking for the key to Jan’s that she had taken yesterday
from Maria. When she found it, she held it up and said to the others, “I’m going to her house.”

“Wasn’t it taped off by the police?” Rose asked.

“No, the police who were there when I went by to get Joey yesterday told me that they only do that if the victim…” She couldn’t
make herself say the word dies.

“I’ll walk out with you,” Ellen said to Marly, “and be back this afternoon,” she promised Rose.

When Marly drove up the narrow street and saw Jan’s Lexus in the driveway, her chest ached with sadness. She parked her car
in the carport behind Jan’s and sat for a while. The distant sound of a leaf blower clacking filled the air. The little hill
house was so isolated from the neighboring homes, it was easy to understand how someone could come there, shoot Jan, and get
away without anyone noticing.

She turned the key and walked into the silent foyer. The area rug that usually filled the front hall was gone. Last night
when she came, she saw Jan’s blood on it. The police must have taken it away. There were toys still scattered around, and
everything looked the same.

She took a deep breath as she walked upstairs, and when she passed Joey’s bathroom, she could see the towels still strewn
on the hamper from the bath Maria gave the little boy last night before he went down to find his mommy.

Jan had a desk in her room where she always sat to pay bills, and there was a small wicker filing cabinet next to it.
Marly opened it and looked under
W
for will, but there wasn’t anything. Then she looked to see if there was a file marked “Legal Papers,” but there wasn’t.
So she went through each letter of the alphabet, through contracts and a file on Jan’s sister’s expenses, and bills to pay,
and Joey’s vaccination records, until finally she found what she wanted under M, because the lawyer’s last name was Middelman.

She turned the pages until she came to Nomination of Guardians and scanned it quickly, “If it becomes necessary to appoint
a guardian of the person or the estate of my minor child or children, I nominate my sister, Julie O’Malley, to serve as the
guardian of the person and the estate of my minor child or children.” The sister who doesn’t even want to take Joey, Marly
thought. What chance could he have being parented by someone who didn’t want him? Why hadn’t Jan, so sensitive about everything,
understood that was the case? There were more papers and documents but there was no durable power of attorney for health care.
Julie would have to make that decision, too.

When Ellen opened the door to her house, the cats meowed around her ankles in a frantic circle of fur. She went right to the
pantry for the cans of cat food and stood at the can opener feeling them rubbing against her and purring. The sound of the
can opener made her head pound. As soon as “the beasts,” which was what her mother called them, were facedown in their bowls
of food, she threw off her clothes, pulled on a nightshirt, and crashed into a deep and headachy sleep.

When she woke a few hours later, her head was still throbbing, and she staggered into her kitchen, noticing what she
hadn’t when she’d come in earlier. That there were twenty-nine messages on her answering machine.

She listened to every one of the twenty-nine and jotted down the names and numbers of the ones she had to return. “Ellen,
this is Lindsay in Mr. Bibberman’s office.” Bibberman’s secretary was on the tape six times. It was Saturday. Bibberman’s
secretary worked the same seven-day-a-week schedule as her boss. She was aggressive, ambitious, and knew she was giving up
having a personal life as long as she worked for him.

“Alex,” Ellen said when he took her return call. “If you’re wondering about the meeting on Monday with Jodie Foster, I’ll
be a thousand percent ready for it. I’ll see you there at nine sharp.”

“Fine,” was all he said, and he put down the phone.

Try to warm up your act a little, you putz, she thought. Not one concerned question about Jan. Not one drop of sympathy. “What
did you expect?” she said out loud as she took a can of coffee out of the freezer. “You’re in the meanest town in the world,
in the most competitive business, with the biggest bunch of insecure maniacs who ever lived. You thought maybe there would
be an ‘Ahhh, poor baby.’ Grow up.”

While the coffee perked, she looked down at the rest of the list of people she had to call back and systematically returned
them one at a time. When she came to the call from her pool man, a message she’d listened to so sleepily she couldn’t remember
now what he’d said, she decided to play it back and listen to it again on the machine.

“Hi, Mrs. Bass. I told that lady who was sitting at your pool this morning that I might not be able to come back
today, but I got lucky on my lunch break and found that part for your filter. So I’ll try and get by at around two or three.
See ya.”