Wonders Never Cease (2 page)

And in Hollywood the cameras were everywhere, circling like buzzards, searching the landscape for sagging appendages or a heretofore unreported nip or tuck. The buzzards could smell death—
career
death—and the instant they detected the onset of death the cameras all went
click, click, click
. The digital cameras didn't even make a sound—you never knew where they were or when they were clicking away. And just when you thought they had finally left you alone, you would find yourself on the cover of a tabloid looking worse than you ever imagined possible, bulging out of some horrid swimsuit you should have had the sense to drop off at Goodwill ten years ago.

Buzzards, that's what they were. No—the cameras were worse than buzzards, because a buzzard can only eat you once, but a bad photograph can eat away at you forever.

“Why don't we talk about the part?” the director suggested.

“Yes, let's do.”
It's about time
.

She needed this part, because the only antidote for a bad photograph is a good one. The public doesn't have a short memory; it has amnesia. The minute they walk out of that theater they forget your face, and the last image they see of you is the one they remember. This was a smaller film, a film she wouldn't have touched when she was at the top of her game—but that was then and this is now. At least it was a feature film with a respectable budget and decent distribution, not just some pathetic sub-fifteen-million-dollar trailer that would end up buried on the Lifetime Channel. And the role was a good one—the kind that was getting harder to find. Danielle Blakelock, sleek and seductive twenty-five-year-old microbiologist martial arts expert.

Twenty-five. Ouch
.

But she could do it—she could still pull it off. After all, it was the same role she had been playing for twenty years. Different name, different location, same role. Twenty-five—it wasn't such a stretch. If shooting didn't start until summer she still had time to squeeze in three weeks of green tea diets and detox wraps at Las Ventanas. That would do it. That would put her back in top form—except maybe for the close-ups . . .

“Will we be using a body double?” she asked.

The director frowned. “Why would we need to do that?”

She gave him a wink. “I knew I liked you the minute I saw you.” She casually laid her hand on her right thigh and hiked up her skirt a little to show just a bit more leg—then spotted a telltale lacework of faint blue lines and slid it back down again.

“I see this character as essentially tortured,” the director said. “I think her driving motivation is to relieve her own guilt by redeeming the soul of someone she loves.”

“I couldn't agree more.”
Whatever
.

“The opening scene finds her in an alcoholic stupor in the middle of a vacant lot. She opens her eyes and looks around . . . Where is she? How did she get there? How long has she—”

“Wait a minute. She's an alcoholic?”

The director paused. “How could you miss that? It's central to her entire character.”

Liv made a mental note to strangle Morty. “How long has she been an alcoholic?”

“Twenty, maybe twenty-five years.”

“What was she doing, sipping margaritas in her bassinet?”

“Huh?”

“The woman's only twenty-five years old.”

“What are you talking about? She's closer to fifty.”

Liv's left shoe slipped off the footrest and clacked on the tile floor.

“Did she come across younger in the script? I suppose we could knock off a couple of years, but she has to be at least in her mid-forties if she's got a twenty-five-year-old daughter.”

“Daughter?”

“Danielle.”

“I thought we were talking about Danielle.”

“No, we're talking about your character—Margaret Blakelock, Danielle's alcoholic mother.”

A very long pause followed, during which Liv's eyelids slowly lowered until her eyes were only burning slits.

“
Margaret
Blakelock,” she said.

“That's right.”

“Not Danielle.”

“No, Margaret. Didn't your agent tell you—”

“And may I ask who will be playing Danielle?”

“I haven't cast that part yet. I'm thinking about one of the Olsen twins.”

Another long pause.

Without breaking eye contact, Liv reached to her left and picked up a bowl of mixed nuts from the bar. She held the bowl in front of her and slowly sorted through them with her index finger, settling on a filbert of unusual size. She brought the nut to eye level and held it like a dart; she took careful aim, then tossed it at the young director. It bounced off the center of his forehead—
plink
.

The director sat speechless.

Liv reached for another nut—a cashew this time.

“Let me get this straight,” she said. “You want to cast me as the alcoholic mother of an Olsen twin—an actress who would make me look like John Madden in a housedress just by standing beside me.”

She tossed the nut—
plink
.

“I thought you—I thought I made it clear that—”

“Let
me
make something clear: I am Olivia Hayden. I have made twenty-seven feature films, and most of them turned a profit.”

Plink
.

“I was starring in films when you were still in training pants. My face is known all over the world, and my name is practically a household word.”

Plink
.

“I have played a sleek and seductive police officer, a sleek and seductive shuttle astronaut, and a sleek and seductive advertising executive. I can even play a sleek and seductive microbiologist martial arts expert, because I'm a professional and I have that kind of range. But I do
not
—”

Plink
.

“I do
not
—”

Plink
.

“I do
not
play the bloated fifty-year-old mother of an Olsen twin.”

She dumped the remainder of the bowl in his lap, slid off her barstool, and headed for the door without another word.

Liv stood seething in the parking lot while the valet brought her car around. The young man opened the door for her and held it, smiling. She stepped up to the car and then stopped and turned to the valet. “Do you know who I am?” she asked.

The valet's smile vanished. “Uh—BMW M6 ragtop—that's what your claim check says, anyway. Is there some problem with—”

“Get away from my car, moron.” She jerked the door out of his hand and ducked inside.

She jammed the pedal to the floor and hit Wilshire Boulevard with the tires already smoking. It was after four o'clock and the streets were all but vacant; she raced down Wilshire without regard for speed limits or stoplights, half hoping that a cop would pull her over just so she could pull a Zsa Zsa and slap the fool broadside. She was dying to slap somebody—she needed it bad. She glanced around at the empty streets.
There's never a cop around when you need one
.

She reached the 405 a few minutes later and headed south with no particular destination in mind. She just wanted to drive, and anywhere would do.

Margaret Blakelock
, she thought.
Not Danielle—of course
not! No, we need someone younger to play that role, someone
without distracting body features—like skin! An Olsen twin—I
weigh more than both of them combined! I'd have to face sideways
the whole picture!

She passed a minivan like it was standing still and crossed all eight lanes just to feel the car swerve.

The alcoholic mother
, she thought.
How glamorous! I can
see it now: As the scene opens I'm lying drunk in some vacant
lot. I lift my bloated head and drool runs down my chin . . .
Cut! Print it! Boy, I hope they pick a nice shooting location—a
vacant lot in Jamaica maybe. Morty—he knew about this. I'm
gonna kill that guy. You keep an agent for twenty years, and this
is what he does to you? He didn't send me the wrong pages—he
did it on purpose! He's trying to tell me that I'm getting old—that
I'm going to have to start taking different parts. Well, thanks for
the press release, Morty, but I already knew that
.

She shot under an overpass at ninety miles per hour. The wind swirling behind her BMW blasted the concrete abutment with bits of sand and gravel.

Goldie Hawn was right, there are only three ages for women
in Hollywood: Babe, District Attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy.
What happened to me? Yesterday I was sleek and seductive—
suddenly I'm the alcoholic mother of sleek and seductive.
Tomorrow I'll probably be checking myself into Betty Ford
.

She glanced in the rearview mirror and to her astonishment found a vehicle trailing behind her barely a car length off her bumper. “Moron!” she shouted at the mirror.
Eight
empty lanes and this idiot still wants to tailgate! Welcome to
Los Angeles
.

For a split second she considered slamming on her brakes and sending him slamming into her tail end, but she knew that at ninety miles per hour his engine would end up in her lap. She tapped on her brakes instead; the car behind her slowed down a little but still remained a single car length behind.

She hit the gas and accelerated—the car behind her kept pace. She changed lanes twice—so did her pursuer.
Who is this
idiot
? she wondered, and suddenly she knew.

Buzzards!

The paparazzi—they must have been waiting for her outside Kate Mantilini's. Don't those people
ever
have enough pictures? Doesn't an editor ever have the decency to say, “Enough! We've got photos of this chick coming out the wazoo—give her some privacy.” Couldn't some sympathetic editor at least remind them, “Look—nobody wants to see this woman walking out of a Walgreens with a bottle of Metamucil. And no more shots of her stuffing her face with french fries either—nobody wants to see that.” But no, the buzzards were never satisfied.

She glared into the mirror. Where did this guy think she was going at four o'clock in the morning? What was the big attraction? The way he was driving you'd think he was following her to the Golden Globes!

She lowered her window and screamed into the wind, “Get off my tail, you moron! I'm just an alcoholic mother—you have me confused with someone else!”

But the car stayed right behind her.

And that's when Olivia Hayden got mad.

She was sick to death of feeding these buzzards, and she made up her mind right then and there that this guy was one bird that wasn't going to eat tonight. She would outdrive him if it took her all night; she would take the 405 all the way to Irvine, then jump onto the San Diego Freeway and take it all the way to Tijuana if she had to.

An Olsen twin
, she kept repeating to herself, and her hands gripped the steering wheel until her knuckles turned white.

Ramon Munoz reached out the window and smacked the 24-Hour Pizza light that was magnetically attached to the roof of his car. The light flickered once and went out again, and he decided to leave it that way. Hey, it was only for advertising—what did he care? It's not like he was driving a cop car—nobody was yelling, “Pull over! Let the pizza guy through!”

He glanced over at the street address taped to the top of the pizza warmer—some place in Inglewood. He hoped he didn't get lost again. The drivers were no longer obligated to make their deliveries in thirty minutes or less—too many accidents—but a slow delivery meant a cold pizza, and a cold pizza meant a bad tip.
Why don't they give us GPS units? The
owner—he's the man, he's got the money. A nice Garmin or
something—that would speed things up
. Still, Ramon managed to make most of his deliveries in the originally promised thirty minutes or less, but not because of satellite technology. He managed it because he was smart.

Take this evening, for example. He had spotted the lone BMW zooming down the 405 and had pulled in close behind it, drafting in its wake.
Shrewd move, Ramon
—it would knock a few minutes off his time and it was good for gas mileage too. Hey—it worked for the NASCAR drivers, so it should work for him.

And the BMW obviously wasn't worried about the cops; maybe the driver was somebody important—maybe they had a radar detector. Besides, Ramon got a quick glimpse of the driver when she looked at him in her rearview mirror—the woman was hot. Who were the cops going to pull over, the pizza guy in the '97 Corolla or the
chica guapa
in the bloodred M6? He settled back in his seat and fired up the radio. Ramon knew he had it made.

He just wished the crazy woman would stay in one lane . . .

The two cars went screaming down the 405 bumper to bumper.