Wanting Sheila Dead (36 page)

“The police say this other woman is Marco's wife,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “I don't believe it.”

“We need to find out what doctor Sophie was seeing,” Gregor said. “He or she might be able to tell us something about why she's still in a coma. If it is a coma. I get the medical terms confused, sometimes. We need to know why she's unconscious.”

“Really?” Mrs. Vardanian said. “Maybe there isn't any doctor. Sophie wasn't sick. She was never sick. She didn't even get colds. And she didn't have the aches the way the rest of us do. She had a little arthritis, but that's to be expected, Krekor. People didn't always go running off to the doctor every time they have aches. There's no point to it.”

“And it costs a fortune,” Mrs. Melvarian said. “Even with the Medicare.”

“She had to be seeing a doctor,” Gregor said patiently. “She had one of those plastic pill organizers on her when she was taken to the hospital. She had medications, and the only way you can get medications is by seeing a doctor. She had a prescription painkiller for the arthritis. She had one of those drugs that lower blood cholesterol. She had one of the ones that lower blood pressure—”

“She never had any such thing,” Mrs. Vardanian said.

The other two Very old Ladies looked equal startled. “Oh,” Mrs. Edelakian said, “Viola is right. Sophie couldn't have had blood pressure medicine.”

“She really couldn't,” Mrs. Melvarian agreed.

Mrs. Vardanian would have looked triumphant if she hadn't looked so disgusted.

“Sophie Mgrdchian,” she said, “has
low
blood pressure. It's so low
that once when she went in for a gall bladder operation and they gave her Demerol for the pain, when they did the blood pressure test they thought she was dead. Except that she was sitting up and talking, so she wasn't. Sophie Mgrdchian never took a pill to lower her blood pressure in her life. It would have killed her.”

The individual interviews were an important part of the show, just as they were an important part of any reality show. They were always filmed as if the girl being interviewed was talking by herself, as if nobody was asking her questions or even in the room. The trick was to convince the girls that nothing they said would be heard by the judges—and especially by Sheila Dunham—until the show was in postproduction and about to be aired. You didn't want the girls pulling their punches, or saying insipid little nicey-nice things because they were afraid of Sheila having one of her fits, or of being eliminated. You wanted them right there and pumping away, saying the kind of things that made viewers write in and call them bitches.

Olivia Dahl had the schedule for the individual interviews in her hand, on her clipboard, with everything else. She had called the interviewer, an outside film editor whose name she kept screwing up no matter how many times she wrote it down, and told him that he would have to come in and work, regardless.

“I know there's a lot going on,” she'd said, “but we just can't get too far off schedule. We've got commitments to the networks. Try to
think of a way to get them to talk about anything else besides the shooting.”

Actually, Olivia didn't expect them to talk about anything else but the shooting. It wasn't the way this sort of thing went. She just wanted a reasonably calm and not particularly actionable set of interviews, because she was going to need a few for the second episode. With the first episode—the one where they picked the base fourteen—she always had a lot to work with, because there were interviews with the girls who failed as well as the ones who succeeded. She had thirty girls to choose from and more film than she needed. With the second episode, there were only the fourteen, and she got what she got.

The room they had designated for the interviews was called the morning room. It was at the far end of one of the wings, accessed by the main hall that ran in both directions from the back of the stairs in the center core of the house. Olivia had originally chosen this room because it was far away from the main action and therefore more likely to be private. She didn't want girls listening in on other girls. Now the main attraction of the morning room was that it wasn't a crime scene or anywhere near a crime scene.

She stood in the doorway and looked around. There was a fireplace here, but then there were fireplaces in most of the rooms of the house. Or there seemed to be. The ceiling was high. That was true of most of the rooms of the house, too. The crew had cleared out all the furniture that had been in here and substituted just two plain steel and leather chairs of the kind they sometimes used for conference rooms at businesses that didn't have enough money. It didn't matter, nobody was going to see the chairs. Olivia checked off all this on her clipboard, and then she turned around to see what Sheila Dunham was doing.

“Do you mean to follow me around all afternoon?” she asked. “Or are you seeking safety in numbers or something like that?”

“If I was seeking safety in numbers, I wouldn't seek it with you,” Sheila said. Her black hair was pulled back so tightly on her head, it made her forehead look almost smooth. She still looked every day of
fifty-six, and she was nowhere near that old yet. “No,” she said. “I was thinking. Maybe we should come right out and ask them.”

“Ask them what?”

“If they shot at me,” Sheila said.

Olivia sighed. “They won't tell you if they did,” she said. “And they'd have every right to scream bloody murder for their lawyers. And don't think some of them don't have them, or that some of them couldn't get them in a blink.”

“Maybe,” Sheila said. “But have you considered this? Somebody is shooting at me—”

“Apparently, two somebodies.”

“Yes,” Sheila says. “Doesn't that seem odd to you? Never mind. Somebody is shooting at me. She shot at me at the Milky Way Ballroom. She shot at me here. We've got to at least consider the possibility that she shot that girl in the study yesterday.”

“There is no logical reason why the two things have to have anything to do with each other,” Olivia said.

“There's a common-sense reason,” Sheila said. “This isn't some murder mystery from the nineteen thirties. The chances that there are going to be two people running around crazy are pretty slim. There's a lot of nonsense happening, it's probably all by the same person.”

“There were two guns,” Olivia pointed out.

Sheila shrugged. “So what? The other gun wasn't even really a gun, as far as I understand it. I mean, it was a gun, but it didn't shoot anything. However that worked. And then the same gun that shot the actual bullets that hit the wall at the Milky Way Ballroom shot the girl who was killed here. My guess is, that's going to be the gun they found on the floor today. So maybe we should go with the flow.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Maybe we should have what's his name ask them,” Sheila said. “Maybe we should have him ask each one of them if they were the ones who did it all.”

“And you think one of them is going to confess to murder. On camera.”

“Ask them if they shot at me then,” Sheila said. “Leave the murder out of it. Yes, yes. I know you think we'll just get a lot of tearful denials, but will we? I mean, think about it. What is this girl doing? She's staging shooting incidents that will take place on camera. That seems to be the entire point of them. Both times, they've happened when we were actually filming for the show. So—”

“What?” Olivia said.

“So,” Sheila said. “Maybe this is somebody who wants to be on camera. Maybe that's her entire point. Maybe she came here intending to pull the first little stunt if she didn't get cast, and then she made it into the final thirty, but she thought, oh, that that was as far as it was going to go. So—”

“The other girl wasn't in the final thirty,” Olivia said. “That was my fault. I screwed up. And I'm sorry about that, Sheila, but it's a madhouse at casting and you know it. I did go into the room and count the girls—”

“But one of them was in the bathroom,” Sheila said. “I know. I'm just telling you. We should ask them. We should see what they do if we put them on camera. And maybe we should dispense with what's his name. Maybe I should ask the questions this time.”

Olivia thought she was about to get the mother of all headaches. This kind of absolute crap came up all the time. It was as if the woman had no sense of the way the business worked.

“For God's sake,” Olivia said. “I could run this show a million times better if I didn't have you to worry about. I really could. I don't understand why you can't ever—and I mean ever—learn the way these things are done. You can't interview the girls. They won't be candid if you do. They won't want to risk getting eliminated because they say something you don't like and they really won't want to risk having you have a screaming fit in their faces. We need these interviews to be good. It's how the audience gets to know the girls and how they follow the plotline. Please just go back to your room and keep out of the way for a while.”

Sheila just smiled. “You,” she said, “couldn't do any kind of show
without me here. Like it or not, it's me people turn in to see, and it's me the networks are paying for when they buy the production. Whether you like it or not, no matter how stupid you think I am, I am the one thing essential here. And that's why I sometimes think that it's you doing all this nonsense. You're one of those oppressed, downtrodden types. Maybe you find it a relief to shoot at me.”

“I couldn't have shot at you in the Milky Way Ballroom,” Olivia said, ready to explode. “I was standing behind you at the front of the room. At least, learn enough physics to do a rough bullet trajectory in your head.”

“You know what Aristotle said?”

Olivia didn't really believe Sheila had ever read Aristotle. She hung on to her clipboard and kept her mouth shut.

“Aristotle said,” Sheila went on, “that some people are born to be subservient. It's their nature. I've always thought that that was a very insightful comment.”

The word went around that Sheila Dunham was going to be at the individual interviews in person, and Andra thought she was going to faint. This experience had not been what she expected it to be, and she hadn't been here one whole week. It wasn't as easy to pass for something you hadn't ever had a chance to be. There were the things that she had expected to go wrong, like her voice. She knew she talked “ghetto,” as people said. Even black people said it. She talked “ghetto,” and she was supposed to talk like Tyra Banks, or Barack Obama. The speech thing was a dead giveaway. There were things she had not expected to go wrong, and that she didn't know what to do with. There was the thing with the anger, for instance. If people criticized her, she got angry. She blew up. She told them off. She got in their face. It was what you did. You never let anyone disrespect you.

But people here did not do that. People here stayed polite, almost all the time, and they never, ever, ever got physical. They didn't push
each other. They really never had full-out fights. Andra had been in at least a dozen of those over the course of her life. One time, her forehead had been cracked by a bitch with a beer bottle. That had happened in a bar somewhere in the Bronx, and the police had been called, and she had been the only one arrested, because she had been the only one still there. She hadn't been able to go anywhere because her head was bleeding. The blood was getting into her eyes and making her blind. They took her to the hospital and got her bandaged up, and in the end they didn't arrest her. It wasn't against the law to have blood flowing into your eyes. There was nobody around to say she'd hit them, too.

Olivia Dahl came out into the hallway and called her name. Andra adjusted her tank top and rubbed her right ankle into the top of her left foot. Her clothes were wrong. She knew that, too. The other girls wore things that didn't fit too tightly on their bodies, and that weren't very bright in color. Grace, who was the classiest girl Andra had ever known, always looked as if she didn't have a real body under her clothes, and her clothes floated when she walked. The other girls walked differently, too. It had gotten to the point where Andra was afraid to stand up and go anywhere. She felt like she was a billboard screaming
STREET HO! STREET HO!

But she had never been a street whore. That was the truth. It had always been number one on Andra's list of things she would never do.

Olivia was standing at the door, holding it back. Andra went in. She saw the plain black and metal chair at the other end of the room right away. There were lights beaming down on it. That was obviously where she was supposed to go. She tried to walk very slowly past where Sheila Dunham and the man from the interviews at the ballroom were sitting. The man who had done the interviews at the ballroom was sitting in a chair just like the one that had been put out for Andra. Sheila was sitting in something fancy in green upholstery. Andra had no idea why she was noticing any of these things.

Andra sat down. She couldn't see Sheila or the interview guy because the lights were right behind them, or something. When Andra
looked in their direction, all she got was glare. She folded her hands in her lap.

“Let's start at the beginning,” Sheila said. “Your name isn't Andra Gayle.”

Andra felt her stomach clench. If she ever ate anything, she would throw it up. She never ate anything. That wasn't right. She never ate much. She didn't like most food.

“Ms. Gayle,” Sheila said.

Andra made herself concentrate. “My birth name is Shanequa Johnson,” she said, “but it's not right to say my name isn't Andra Gayle. Lots of people change their names when they go into show business.”