Show Business Is Murder (34 page)

His one fear had been that the float might burst, making enough noise to wake Lou, but the fabric tore instead, letting water slide in gently. The float had several compartments so it would take a while to sink, but sink it would.

Mitch smiled and dropped the knife. It slipped, shimmering, to the bottom tiles. He gave the back of the float a gentle push, nudging it toward the deepest part of the pool.

Moving quickly now, he slipped back through the gate and up into the brush. When he reached his own property he risked a look behind him. The big red float was in the middle of the pool, listing badly to the left.

Mitch walked over to the compost bin at the far end of
his yard. A few months ago the president of his studio had gotten a bee in her bonnet about organic food and suddenly everyone who worked for the studio had to install one of these damned smelly rat hotels on their property. Now this one was finally earning back its cost. He reached in, still wearing his lab gloves, and shifted the organic muck around.

If by any chance the police suspected him of being involved in Lou's death they would look for evidence that he had taken the trail down to Lou's property. And that brought up something else Detective Chaney had told him about: The Law of Contact.

The Law of Contact was the basic rule of crime-scene technicians. You go somewhere, you leave something behind. You touch something, you take part of it with you. If the techies started looking for signs of him beside Lou's pool they might find them, but could they prove they were from today and not from his last visit, a week ago? Mitch didn't think so.

And if the found Mitch's lab gloves in his own trash, well, the compost easily explained their use, and he figured the organic waste would make it harder to find a trace of chlorine. As a bonus, turning the compost over would explain any vegetation from the trail that stuck to his clothes.

A year of playing Lieutenant Muldoon had taught him well.
Prepared
him well.

Once he had disposed of the gloves, Mitch went back into the house. He forced himself to walk at his usual pace, acting the part of a man without a care in the world.

Only after he poured himself a Scotch did he walk out onto the deck and casually glance down toward his neighbor's property. The float had upended and he saw Lou's arm come out of the water, flailing. He was trying to hold onto the float, but the thing was slippery and unstable and Lou was far too drunk to control it.

Goodbye, old man. You should have retired.

He strolled back into the house. The message light was
blinking on the answering machine. No doubt it would be Si calling with the bad news. Well, the network was going to have to rethink their schedule now, wouldn't they? All of a sudden they had a big hole to fill. He touched a button.

“Hey, Mitch baby, this is Si. I just met with the network guys. Most amazing thing. Turns out we calculated wrong. They had decided to cancel
Muldoon
and
Cutting Edge.
That's right,
both
of them. Make more room for those damned reality shows.

“But hold onto your hat, kid. Your neighbor changed their minds. He convinced them that what they needed to do was run the shows together. He said you're a better lead-in for him than that doctor show they have on now. The network decided he might be right. They're gonna move
Muldoon
to Saturday night, run it between
Private License
and
Cutting Edge.
Call it “Men of Action Night.” Maybe do some crossover episodes.

“You better buy ol' Lou some champagne. He's keeping your show alive. Bye bye, babe. We'll talk later.”

Mitch could hear something down the hill. He knew it must be the wail of a distant siren, but to him it sounded more like the bursting of an enormous bubble.

MAT COWARD

I USED TO
rob women, which is how I got into acting. I don't do it any more because it is morally indefensible (I'm talking about robbing women), but it was a good living for a while. I could easily make five hundred pounds in a day, if it was a good day.

Women in the UK spend twelve million pounds a year on anti-cellulite treatments. There is no such thing as an anti-cellulite treatment, it is a scientific impossibility, but British women spend twelve million quid a year on them. And that is only the tip of the icebird. If you factor in the billions spent on women's magazines, makeup, slimming pills, and so on, you begin to get a picture. I'm not saying all women are stupid, but enough are stupid that robbing them is never hard.

For my targets, I would choose women who were not attractive. I didn't choose out-and-out hounds, because they have nothing to lose—no dignity, no delusions—and so they might possess confidence. I chose women who were
just
sufficiently the right side of ugly so that they'd spend every minute of their lives in a preoccupying torment of hope. I picked them up on the pavements outside busy shops in the West End. I knew the location of every CCTV camera in Oxford Street, believe me.

I would approach them smiling. This in itself is confusing.
Do they know me? I'm a good-looking young man, quite tall, slim . . . I'm smiling at them, but if they knew someone like me surely they'd remember? I'd walk right up to them, my smile not crazy, just confident, and then when I got up close enough to smell their breath, still smiling, I'd slap them across the face with my open hand. Right hand. Big swing. Exactly the way a woman slaps a man when he tries to kiss her in an old film.

Her hands go to her face. Naturally—instinct. She can't help it. If she's carrying anything, she drops it. If her bag is still on her arm, I take hold of her wrist and slide the bag off. Then I run, and I can run fast. Along the way I dump the bag; I only ever take cash. Cash is safest.

A woman of that sort—even once she's recovered from the astonishing shock of being slapped like that, almost certainly for the first time in her adult life, and by a handsome young man who was smiling at her—it's going to take her several seconds before she can bring herself to react. To raise her voice, scream, say something, tell someone. Get her breath back. Five seconds, maybe more.

And in five seconds, believe me, I'm in a different borough.

ONE SATURDAY AFTERNOON
during this period of my life I was in a pub in Fitzrovia, having finished work for the day, and the old potman was telling me about some mate of his who'd died the previous day during an operation to remove a brain tumour. “Well, that's the thing about brain tumours,” I said. “You can't live with 'em and you can't live without 'em.”

The potman laughed and said, “I don't know, son, the things you come out with!” Then he went back to collecting pots and I went back to reading the international news in the paper.

I was reading about an attempt by lawmakers in Arkansas to force teachers to declare atheism or agnosticism
along with previous criminal convictions on job application forms, when a female voice said in my ear: “Five hundred quid. Half now, half after, and more to come.” Of course, I looked up and smiled.

She had one of those chafed faces, as if her midwife had buffed it up the middle with a sander. It was pink, with invisible eyelashes, a bent-back tip to the nose, and a moist, quivering chin which was trying to hide behind her Adam's apple. She didn't look like the kind of woman who would have the confidence to say the sort of thing she'd just said, to a handsome young stranger. She was about forty and rather thin. No man had ever looked at this woman lustfully, unless it was her own father. Still, though stereotyping can be a useful tool it makes an unreliable master.

“Have a seat,” I said, standing up and touching her elbow. “Gin and tonic, is it?”

“Thank you,” she said. “No ice.”

I fetched the G&T for her and a particular beer for me. There are great beers from around the globe available easily in London, if you care enough to look for them.

“Do you,” she said, “ever watch daytime TV?”

“My life has never yet been that empty of purpose,” I admitted.

She sipped her drink. “Fair enough. Well, in that case, you won't have seen a cable show called
Libby's Place.
It's presented by a young woman, a very forceful young woman, named Libby Priest, and it takes the form of an audience-participation discussion show, centred around a number of invited guests.”

“Not really my sort of thing. I prefer history shows.”

“Really?” She looked at me over her glass. “Any particular period?”

“All periods,” I said. “There is only one period.”

“The past, you mean?”

“The present,” I said. “From then to now, it's always the present when it happens.”

She nodded. She wasn't that interested. “Well.
Libby's Place
can, itself, be quite educational. The invited guests that I mentioned just now, they aren't experts or celebrities—they're ordinary members of the public. Extraordinary ordinary members of the public. People to whom things have happened, or people who have done things, and they tell Libby about those things, and then the audience—”

“Rips them apart?”

“Discusses what has been shared.”

I finished my beer, and she went to fetch another round. I watched her at the bar, and noticed that not one man looked at her for more than a second, not even the barman. When she returned, I said: “You work on this show?”

“I'm an assistant producer. Specifically, I source guests.”

“You
source
them?”

“Yes.”

“And you wish to
source
me?”

“Yes.”

“And you'll pay me?”

“Yes.”

“And there's a hell of a lot more to it than that?”

She smiled. When she smiled, her face looked like something her worst enemy had done to her and then said,

“What's the matter, can't you take a joke?”

“Yes,” she said. “There is more to it than that.”

And that's how I got into acting.

SHE TOOK ME
out to dinner, to a Thai place, and at the table she showed me her business card and her building pass because she didn't want me to have any doubt about her genuineness. Her name was given on both documents as
Annabelle Inwood. She didn't ask for my name. It was Jez Becker, but she didn't ask for it.

“The trouble is,” said Annabelle, as I ate my curry and she poked at hers with a fork, “there aren't enough genuine weirdoes to go around. This isn't America. In California—I worked there for a while—all you've got to do is open the office door, grab the first half dozen people you see, and you can rely on at least four of them being completely eccentric and perfectly telegenic.”

“But not over here.”

She shook her head. The motion failed to dislodge the piece of rice which was stuck to her chin. “We are handicapped in this country by an archaic belief that personal grief should be kept private. We're getting over it, slowly, but in the meantime—well, there are a lot of shows like mine to be filled.”

“A lot of guests to be sourced.”

“Exactly.”

“I don't think five hundred pounds is very much.”

“Ah,” said Annabelle. “But, like I said, more to come.”

“I don't see how,” I said. “Surely, once I've been on the show once . . .”

“You'd be surprised. Provided we handle things subtly, and make good use of lighting, makeup and so on, it's perfectly possible for one guest to appear on many shows, over a period of time.”

“And nobody notices?”

She put down her fork. “Look, this kind of program—people don't exactly give it their full attention, you see what I mean? It's something you watch while you're doing the ironing, or feeding the baby.”

“Or applying wrinkle cream.”

She snorted, and the piece of rice finally fell from her chin. “Yes, sure, whatever. So, if a guy called Joe comes on the show and says he's just got engaged to his sister, and
then six weeks later a guy called Phil, who looks
maybe
vaguely like Joe, only without the mustache and with darker hair, says he was born a man but he had an operation to become a woman, only now he's had an operation to turn him back into a man because he dreams of being a professional footballer—well, who's to notice? Who's to care?”

I ate the rest of my meal, even though it wasn't very good, because it is morally indefensible to waste food, and then I said: “What happens when you get caught?”

“We don't get caught.”

“But if you did?”

She shrugged. “Slap on the wrist from the regulators. It's not exactly genocide, is it? It's just showbiz.”

We ordered coffee. “For five hundred pounds, who would I be?”

She got her personal organiser out, and flipped through it to find her place. “Okay, if you're available on Monday, it'd be a choice between ‘Youth Detention Center Turned Me Gay,' or ‘I Oppose Legalising Drugs Cos It'd Put Me Out Of Work.' ”

I stirred my coffee. “I wouldn't like to be a drug dealer. It might cause complications.”

“All right then, you're a queer ex-con. Shall I pencil you in?”

“You have the money with you?”

“Half the money, like I said. Got it right here.” She tapped her trouser pocket. “I never keep money in my bag.”

“Very wise.”

“I know,” she said. She smiled.

I smiled back. “I might be available on Monday.”

“Good.”

“Sure. I think I might be.” I called the waiter over and ordered a brandy. “But I'd like to know why you chose me.”

She shrugged. “Spur of the moment. I saw you in the pub
and thought you looked like the right kind of guy for the job.”

“What kind of guy is that?”

“Guy like you. You see, what we're looking for are people who are convincing, imaginative, talented—and reliable.”

“You could tell all that from looking at me in the pub?”

She picked up the bill, glanced at it, put it back in its saucer and laid her credit card on top of it. “I've watched you working,” she said. “You're a good actor. The way you smile at them.”

I felt like someone had slapped my face.

I DID THE
Monday gig. Annabelle gave me a basic script—more of an outline, really—around which I improvised. That's what it's called, in acting, when you make stuff up: improvisation. Elsewhere, it's just called making stuff up.

The whole thing took maybe two hours. I met Annabelle at a cafe around the corner from the studio, she took me in through a back way, and a makeup woman dusted my face with powder and gave me a shirt to wear. My own shirt wasn't in character. The shirt she gave me was pink and had sweat stains under the arms, though it smelled fresh enough.

I was the first performer (or “guest,” as they say) on the show. I sat on a tubular steel chair and told Libby Priest my sad story. Once or twice she asked a question which I might have known the answer to, but didn't, so when that happened I just cried and said I didn't want to go there. The sad story had a happy ending (“I've learned to accept myself for who I am, and to be my own best friend”), which pleased everyone. The audience offered me various pieces of advice, all of them flatulent. I didn't see anything of Libby Priest before or after my performance, which suited me. I don't care for artificial women.

My work was clearly judged a success, as Annabelle
sourced
me for several other roles over the next couple of months. I appeared, under various guises, not only on
Libby's Place
but also on a spin-off program named
Libby's Out,
in which the studio audience ruled the set in Libby's absence (a far superior format, in my view).

I wore spectacles of various types, and disposable coloured contact lenses during all my performances. Sometimes the makeup woman, or some other functionary, would ask me to take them off, saying they weren't in character, but I always refused. I am no more immune to vanity than anyone else in showbusiness, but I'm not stupid. When you slap a woman's face and take her handbag she will remember your eyes, if nothing else. She may be wrong about your height, build, beard, or clothing—and casual witnesses, bystanders, will be even less accurate—but she will remember the eyes, for sure. And the smile, of course.

It was a decent living; not as rich as robbing had been, but good enough and much easier. I had no regrets about leaving my old line of business. The work came naturally to me. In essence, all I needed to know was when to smile and when to slap. Indeed, life in general can be reduced to this formula, as any study of history will quickly prove.