Show Business Is Murder (33 page)

I was sweating beneath my overcoat, and I was covered with blood. I dared not stay where I could be seen, though I craved an audience. I skulked away into the night, assaulted in turns by fear and exaltation.

That was the first of three studies in dying that I arranged for MacCready. And while he was watching death, I was watching him. Breathed as he breathed, lolled my head as he lolled his, sighed just as he sighed.

Over the weeks, his death scenes became more powerful and so did mine.

I had never been adept at learning parts. A line here and there I could manage, but more than a few together left me
stammering and sweating with confusion. Ah, but my dying was exquisite. Even the little ballet girls surrounded me with their fluttery eyes and hands and layers and layers of tulle, tittering over the beauty of my recurring death.

And so what are words? Hardly anyone can remember a speech heard the night before. But long after the words are forgotten, the memory of the twisting, writhing, agony of death remains.

I have studied diligently, learned everything I could. Endured cold, hunger, and impatience to perfect my craft. I think I've got it right now, the precise amount of quiver at the lower extremities, the languid droop of the hand as it slips from the breast or sword. The little ballet girls agree that my dying is quite as good as MacCready's.

And so I have invited MacCready for a dinner of oysters in my rooms. And he has accepted. I am so very honoured. I've bought a special Madeira wine for the occasion and have popped the cork this very minute. I pour it out and hand a glass to MacCready. He holds it to the light, smiles his appreciation, and takes a sip.

I offer him my best armchair and he sits down. We discuss the theater, and I pour more wine. I'm careful not to drink too much. A host must keep his wits about him.

There's a knock at the door and I go to open it. It's the boy from the oyster bar with a platter piled high with oysters. He places it on the center of the table I have pulled away from the wall.

Now here's the tricky part. The piece of stage management upon which everything hangs. I finger the little packet of powder in my waistcoat pocket. It will take a mere second, if MacCready will only turn his back.

I ask if he would mind fetching the wine bottle from the side table behind me. I only need the briefest moment. But my hand turns stiff and MacCready is back with the bottle before I can extract the packet from my pocket.

My hands are sweating just as they do when I have a speech to deliver. I have lost my chance, there may not be another. And yet, here is MacCready asking where he might relieve himself. I point to the screen which conceals the commode.

He nods his thanks and carries his wine glass with him. I cannot believe my good fortune. My fingers are suddenly nimble as if released from a spell. A mere tap of the paper onto the largest oyster, and I place it directly in front of the place where I intend MacCready to sit. I refold the paper and push it back into my waistcoat just as MacCready returns.

I offer him a chair. He sits. I go to the other side of the table and pull out my own chair, and MacCready realizes he has left his wine glass on the window sill next to the convenience. Would I be so kind as to retrieve it for him.

Of course, I say. Anything for my dear MacCready.

When I return, he has already tucked into the oysters, the shells are piling up on the tablecloth. I sit down and reach for one of my own, my eyes on MacCready. I watch his side of the plate of oysters disappear as I eat. I don't want to miss a moment of the great man's death scene.

And then it begins. His hand goes to his throat, his eyes bulge. I feel my own eyes bulge in response. He begins to shake and I shake with him. His eyes are on me now, and mine on his. His body convulses, racked with spasms. I feel his pain. I clutch at my stomach. MacCready is a blur across the table, writhing. We move together, my rhythm, his rhythm. Locked together in a synthesis of the inevitable. It is glorious, this searing, horrible joining. We cry out and our voices commingle over the table.

He pushes to his feet. His chair crashes to the floor. I try to stand, but the pain is too intense. I grope for the table, but my fingers are frozen claws that will not move. He leans forward, peering into my face. He is swaying over me. But
no, it is I who am swaying, not MacCready. I whose entrails are on fire.

I see my hand rise in the air, the fingers grasping. MacCready's fingers grasp the air across the table, mimicking mine.

My hand clutches my throat. MacCready clutches his. My throat is an oyster shell, being ground and crushed and seared with flame. I can not think. I fall back in my chair, watch my legs jerk and twitch beneath me. Fire engulfs me. I hear the rattle of someone choking. I try to scream but my throat closes on the sound. My arms flail outward, then fall limp at my sides. I search for MacCready, my eyes darting about as if controlled by another. At last they latch onto his solid figure and I understand.

Across the table, MacCready is watching . . .

ROBERT LOPRESTI

THE PHONE RANG
and Mitch Renadine jumped a foot. Running across his living room—how had the phone gotten way over
there?
—he felt as if he were moving in slow motion.

It was his mother calling. “I can't talk long, Ma. I'm on the bubble.”

“On the bubble? And what does that mean?”

Mitch sighed, not in the mood for a long explanation. “The network is setting up its fall schedule. Some shows have been cancelled. Some have been renewed. But they haven't decided on
Muldoon
yet. We're waiting to hear, one way or the other. Out here that's called being on the bubble.”

She was outraged. “But your show is in the top twenty, Mickey! How could they think of canceling it?”

Good old Mom. She was the only person in the world who still called him Mickey. Also, the only person who thought
Muldoon
was a hit.

Yes, the show reached the top twenty—sometimes. But it followed a program that usually made the top ten. That meant millions of people hit the remote control as soon as they saw Mitch's smiling face. The network assumed that
Muldoon
was doing as well as it was only because of the strength of its lead-in.

“I love you, Mom. I'll call you as soon as I hear anything.” He hung up and checked for messages. No one else had called. Damn.

Mitch stepped out onto the deck and took a deep breath. There was a beautiful view and he had paid dearly for it. Maybe he shouldn't have spent so much on a house up here in the hills above Laurel Canyon, living like he was already an established star, instead of a near-unknown fronting a rookie TV show.

But damn it, he had paid his dues. He had parked cars, painted houses, done a thousand auditions for a thousand bit parts. And now that he had a starring role—as a tough but caring police lieutenant—why shouldn't he
live
like a star?

Like Lou Garlyle, for instance. Mitch looked down the mountain at his neighbor's estate. Lou lived down the hill, yes, but
his
home had a pool. And Lou had a live-in servant.

They were stars on the same network, but at opposite ends of their careers. Lou had come to TV after twenty years as a movie star when a string of high-budget bombs left his career flailing. For Mitch, TV was a first chance, for Lou it was a last one.

Now they were both on the bubble, waiting to see if their shows would be renewed. Who would sink when the bubble burst, and who would float.

He wondered where Lou was now. Most days when his neighbor wasn't working he sat by his pool, drinking.

“I'm so glad these little fellas are back in style,” he had told Mitch one night as he poured another martini. It was the tail-end of one of Lou's many parties and they were sitting beside the pool. “A few years ago if you ordered anything but wine or spring water in this town they pegged you for a drunk.”

Lou
was
a drunk, of course, getting smashed almost every night. But to his credit, it had never affected his work.
Some critics suggested that that had to do with the quality of his work at the best of times, but you couldn't argue with good box office and Lou had always had it. Always, that was, until a few years ago, and then he had flawlessly made the jump to television.

“That's the thing about styles, Mitch,” he had continued. “They can change overnight. Take you and me, for instance.”

“What about us?”

“We're actors of a certain style.” Lou waved a hand. “I don't mean a school of acting or anything fancy like that. I mean that you and I are both born to play action heroes. Nobody is ever going to ask jokers who look like us to play Hamlet.” He bent over and picked up a big knife, one of at least a dozen of the ugly things he kept lying around his house.

Lou's show was called
Cutting Edge
and he played a bodyguard whose favorite weapon was a throwing knife. He swore he kept them around the house for practice, to look more natural in front of the camera, but Mitch thought it was mostly a publicity gimmick. The photographers loved to show him sitting by the pool, flashing that famous smile and dangling one of those lethal-looking blades like a toy. Mitch had also noticed that at the end of the evening when Lou wanted his guests to leave he could always start tossing blades around.

“How does that relate to style?” Mitch had asked.

“Sometimes action heroes are fashionable. Sometimes sensitive weepy guys are more popular. Four years ago my show went on the air and caught the tail end of the last macho revival. Now your show is fighting against the tide.”

Lou had sipped at his drink. “The big trend today is the so-called reality programming—quiz shows, talk shows, lock-ten-people-in-a-room-and-see-who-cracks shows. That's what we're up against, Mitch. You have to know your enemy. And know who your friends are, too.”

“Who has friends?” Mitch retorted. “This is Hollywood.”

The older man laughed. “Touché. Let's say, at least, that you can have allies. People who share a common goal.” He tossed his knife casually in the air and it came down a few inches from Mitch's sandaled foot. Mitch made a point of not moving his leg. “Damn. Sorry.”

If we're such good allies,
Mitch thought,
why don't you retire and get the hell out of my way?

THAT HAD BEEN
back in December, not long after
Muldoon
was picked up for the second half of the season. Now it was April and Mitch was still waiting to hear if the show would be stay on for another year. And Lou was in the same boat.

His agent called to announce every new blip on the radar. “They cancelled
Lucky Day,
Mitch.”

“That's great, Si.”

“Maybe. Not if they're gonna reshuffle the whole Monday schedule. And they renewed
Puppet Wars.
”

“That's bad.”

“Not necessarily. It's an 8
P.M
. show, so it's not likely to push us out of our slot.”

Slots. Twenty-two hours of prime time. The most expensive real estate on the planet.
Muldoon
owned one hour of Monday night on one network—if they could hold on to it. A show like his employed almost one hundred people. Not just the actors the audience saw, but the writers, the producers, and hell, even the caterers and floorsweepers had a reason to want this show to keep going.

But nobody needed it more than Mitch. When the network stars you in a drama they are resting a million bucks or so on your shoulders. If you drop it down the tubes you needn't hold your breath waiting for them to offer a second chance.

The next day Si called back. “They renewed
Brain Trust,
and
Money for Nothing.
And they're moving
Ike and Alice
to Wednesday.”

“My head is swimming. Who's left on the bubble?”

“A couple of comedies, plus
Muldoon
and
Cutting Edge.
I gotta tell you, Mitch, I think there's only one slot left for a drama.”

Mitch stood on his mortgaged deck and looked down the mountain at his neighbor. A washed-up movie star, floating around his pool without a care in the world.

“The Veep says we'll hear by the end of the week. You hang in there, Mitch. It ain't over yet.”

AND NOW IT
was the end of the week and Mitch was still hanging in there, waiting to hear whether he was going to spend the next year collecting paychecks or unemployment. Driving his Lexus or driving a taxi. He thought about calling Lou to see if he had heard anything, but something made him hesitate.

And suddenly he could see Lou, back from wherever he had been. He was out by the pool in his swimming trunks, shouting instructions to Marta, his maid. Mitch watched as Lou stood at the shallow end of the pool, carefully settling himself into his float—not a raft so much as a blow-up chair, complete with indented spaces for a cell phone and a shaker of martinis—and paddling out into the center of the pool to bask in the sun.

What did his neighbor have to look so cheerful about?

The cell phone rang. Mitch yanked it to his ear and heard a familiar Latino accent. “Mr. Renadine? This is Marta. Mr. Garlyle wanted me to invite you to a party tomorrow night.”

Mitch felt a cold fist cramping his guts. But, in spite of what some of the critics said, he was an actor. His voice
came out as cheerful as a talk-show host. “Terrific, Maria. What's the occasion?”

“The network just renewed his show for another year. Isn't that wonderful?”

“Wonderful,” Mitch agreed. “I'll be there. Tell him to have plenty of champagne.”

Then he hung up and began to plan a murder.

WHEN MITCH WAS
a kid he had always felt he was destined for something. Not being a TV star necessarily, but something that would take him out of suburban New Jersey. When they studied
Julius Caesar
in high school and the teacher talked about the concept of fate he felt as if he was at last being introduced properly to someone he had known for years.

Fate, yes. The destiny that shapes our ends.

Until that phone call from Marta homicide had never crossed his mind. He was certain that was true. And yet he had prepared himself for it so perfectly. Or had fate done the preparing?

Mitch was not what Hollywood called a spiritual person but, hell, when ten thousand handsome faces apply for the same acting job there must be someone or something spinning the wheel and deciding who wins and who loses. And that force had given him the tools he needed to win now.

Look at what he needed to know—and
did
know. That Lou would be drunk and probably asleep on his float all afternoon. That Marta would be preparing dinner. That she couldn't see the pool from the kitchen.

And if you argued that he only knew these things because, at some level, he had been preparing for a murder all these months, well, what about buying this house in the first place? Surely that had been fate, preparing him for this day, when he had to climb off the bubble before it burst.

Mitch opened the cabinet under his sink and pulled out a box of disposable latex gloves. He had worn them several times on the show when Lieutenant Muldoon was investigating a crime scene and, having seen how useful they were, he had brought home a box for cleaning up messes.

Was that preparation again? Or fate? He wondered about that as he tucked a pair into his jacket.

The trail through the brush between his yard and Lou's had been worn long before he moved in. Mitch had taken it a dozen times when his neighbor invited him for a drink, so he knew that no one could see him as he moved through the thick brush. At the bottom of the hill he carefully pushed the vines out of his way and looked out at the pool.

Lou was lying on the big red float, his head tilted a little to the side. He snored softly. The martini shaker was in place but the cell phone was not. That was perfectly reasonable. After all, he had already
gotten
the phone call he cared about, the call Mitch had waited for in vain.

The inflatable float drifted slowly clockwise. Soon Lou would be facing away from him.

Mitch knew that no one could see the pool from the neighbor's houses. Except from his, of course. He put on the disposable gloves.

It was easy to open the gate in the fence and step quickly onto the cement surface around the pool. The pool skimmer—a long pole with a hoop and net on the end—hung on the fence not far away.

Mitch was a strong man, built to play an action hero, as Lou had pointed out. It only took a moment for him to pick up the pole, bend over, and tuck the hoop end under the edge of the float and drag it slowly toward the edge of the pool.

Good ol' Lou didn't even stop snoring.

When the back of the float was almost against the edge of the pool, Mitch put the skimmer back in its place on the
fence. A knife lay on the nearest table; one of the throwing knives Lou so loved to show off with.

Mitch picked it up in a gloved hand. He took one last look around and saw only the beautifully cared-for estate and the back of Lou's house. No one in sight.

The idea was simple: make it look as if Lou had thrown the knife in the air and it had landed in the float. What was so odd if a drunk, known for tossing knives around, and not a good swimmer, sank his own float and drowned?

Sure, it might have raised a few eyebrows back in Plainfield, New Jersey, where Mitch grew up. But this was Los Angeles where the coroner heard stranger stories practically every day, most of them having to do with the show biz crowd.

Detective Carl Chaney, the cop who served as technical adviser on
Muldoon,
had told Mitch they even had a name for it: HRD—Hollywood-Related Death.

Mitch studied the float carefully. A knife coming down from the air would only make one cut, so he had to get it right the first time.

Kneeling at the pool's edge Mitch took a deep breath.
My career or your life,
he thought. It was an easy choice. He raised his arm and brought it down hard, cutting through the fabric near the left edge of the float.