Oh, Jesus. She’d been so nervous driving up that little winding road to Jan’s, and then when she found that funny cracker box of a house sticking out over the valley, she thought for a minute she had the wrong place. She’d been expecting something like that house on “Dynasty” where the Carringtons lived. She couldn’t get over that this was where a person who starred on some TV show could live. But that was the address all right.
When she saw the black Lexus with the tinted windows in the driveway, she knew it meant that Jan was probably home. Big deal, she kept telling herself, big fucking deal, she’s your old college buddy. But she was nervous anyway. It didn’t matter what she told herself, the truth was that her old college friend was a star.
When she finally got up her nerve, she got out of her car, walked to the door, and rang the bell, and after a little while Jan looked out one of those windows that were on both sides of the door, and she said, “Who is it?”
When she said her name, there was a long beat while Jan looked closely at her, and then her eyes went wide with surprise and she said, “No!” with real amazement in her voice, and then she opened the door and saw her there and said, “Hi, honeeee!” And gave her a big hug!
Not one word about how old she looked, or how tired, or that maybe it was bad form to drop by like this without calling first or any formal shit like that. Just nonstop talk about the days at Tech and the stuff they did at Tech, and laughing about it. For a long time they just stood there in the front hall of her house, a hallway with toys all over it, laughing about the old days. She didn’t tell Jan how she got her home address, and that was smart, because then Jan would have thought she was some kind of crazo who was stalking her.
She couldn’t believe she’d finally done it and that there was Jan O’Malley, not looking anywhere near as good as she looked on the show, when she had makeup on and all that, but still a big soap star. And she was trying to just act like some old buddy who happened to be stopping by. It was amazingly chatty and chummy, and they just stood there together in Jan’s little house, a little house, not what she expected at all.
Jan’s kid was playing upstairs, probably with the maid, and they could both hear him singing and laughing, so she said, “Aren’t you lucky to have a son. I had kids.” Then she realized she’d said it like that, as if they weren’t hers any more. I had kids. “I’ll show you, “ she said, and she was going to go into her purse and pull out pictures of her kids, but while she was reaching in to get them, the strap on her purse broke. Fucking piece-of-crap purse, and the purse turned over and everything went rolling out, magazines, papers, makeup, hairbrush, wallet. Shit!
As if she wasn’t nervous enough, that really shook her up. Jesus, there she was picking stuff up off the floor, so embarrassed, but Jan was really nice about it and got down on the floor to help her, and then she saw the gun.
“Oh, that,” she said, seeing the look on Jan’s face. “My kids moved in with my husband, and I’m living completely alone, and that’s why I have a gun. I even brought it with me here. Just let somebody try anything with me, I’d shoot them dead.” And she laughed and picked up the gun and put it back into her purse.
That was when Jan got really freaked out. Her face went all tense and she said, “Look, I’m glad you stopped by, but I’m on my way out, so I have to get ready,” and then her whole voice changed and it wasn’t very nice. “You’d better go.” Go? There was no way she was going. She couldn’t go. That wasn’t her plan. She had what she was going to do all worked out, and she had to make it happen. Jan wanted to get rid of her, but she couldn’t go yet. So she tried to make small talk, to keep the light stuff going, but Jan was moving her to the door.
She wouldn’t go. She wanted Jan to see pictures of her kids, and tell her how good she was with the kids. If Jan’s little boy came down and they started to interact, Jan would see how well kids related to her and think she was someone who ought to be around little Joey and give her a job, so she had to say the line she’d rehearsed, which was, “Can’t I meet your son?” She thought Jan would see that as something friendly to say. Meaning after all these years, you have a son, and I want to just take a little peek at him, I love kids. She thought she said that, too, I love kids. But by then Jan was hell-bent on hustling her out of there, probably because of the gun, and it really pissed her off. She was feeling sweaty and afraid and she said, “You know, I don’t have a job, and you could hire me to take care of your son.” Well, that made Jan a little nuts. She was real shaky and she said, “Please get out of here. I didn’t invite you, and I want you to leave right now,” and her tone was so condescending. It was so I’m-on-top-and-you’re-nothing that she decided not to move until she got her point across. “I wrote you some letters,” she said, feeling panicky now and knowing she had to get this in. “I didn’t have this address when I sent them, so I mailed them to the studio, and you know what I got back? An autographed picture that you didn’t even really sign, because I remember your handwriting. How could you let them send an old friend of yours an autographed picture with a fake autograph on it?”
“I’m really sorry. I didn’t see your letters,” she said, and it sounded as if she meant, you nobody, why would I see a letter from someone like you? “I get bags of fan mail, and if it came to the studio, it would get thrown into one of those bags, but I have a service that answers all of those,” she said.
That really burned her ass, and she couldn’t play the role of nice, chummy college buddy anymore. “Hey, I’m not your fucking fan, Jan. I’m your equal. You weren’t the one who got the A’s in acting, I was. I won the best actress award our senior year. Not you. And if you want to know the truth, which I’m sure you don’t, the work you do on ‘My Brightest Day’ is real amateur shit.”
“Please just get out of here,” she said. “I’m asking you nicely to please leave.” It didn’t sound as if she was asking so nicely. Then the kid’s voice yelled out, “Mommmmy,” and she was so flustered that she answered for Jan, maybe for herself. Probably it was a reflex, after all the years of her kids hollering for her, but she said, “Yes, honey?” And Jan looked at her with a look that meant, You are a lock-up case. But by then she didn’t care what Jan thought. She just wanted to see that little boy so much that she started for the steps, and Jan grabbed her. Grabbed so hard she pulled her sweater off her shoulders and said, “I told you to go, goddamn it.”
Well, that must have been what put her over the top. Sometimes Lou used to grab her like that in front of the kids. Like that time he grabbed her and, just for fun, cut off all her long, beautiful hair in front of the kids. Well, nobody was going to do that to her ever again. Or talk to her in that tone of voice. For an instant she stepped away from the moment, and it was just like they were on the main stage at Tech again. Jan was the beautiful Adela in The House of Bernarda Alba, and she was the bitter, jealous Marterio.
“Don’t raise that voice of yours to me. It irritates me. I have a heart full of a force so evil that, without my wanting to be, I’m drowned by it.” Jan looked full of fear now, and she was so bummed out by Jan’s attitude, she was glad to see her be afraid. She reached into her purse and took the gun out.
She wasn’t going to shoot Jan. She just wanted to scare her, get her to lay off and let her see the little boy. She wanted that little boy. To see him, that was all, but Jan ran past her now and started up the stairs as if she was going to go and try to hide the kid or something, and she went after her, not to shoot her, but to stop her, and then she hit her with the gun, hard, on the head, and after that the gun went off. Oh God. Oh my God.
Jan turned just before she fell onto the steps, with an awful, shocked expression on her face, and then she said—and this is the part that was so terrible to remember—she said, “Oh no, what about my poor baby?” And then she was lying on the floor, Jan O’Malley, her college friend. Jan was the prettiest one, and she was the best actress. Oh, God, and that was when she got out of there.
She fell in
to her car, and at first it didn’t start, wouldn’t start, made that grinding sound it did when the battery was dead. Dead No, please don’t be dead. Then it started, and she floored it, and after winding around till she thought she was going to drive off the edge of one of those weird little hilly streets, she found her way to the Hollywood Freeway. Cars. There were too many of them in this city. She drove, weaving in and out of them, and finally she found her exit and the street where the hotel was, and she floored it up the long driveway to the parking lot and somehow made it through the lobby and back to this fancy room she couldn’t afford. She was sick from all the shit she’d been eating out of the minibar. She opened the window and tried to take some deep breaths to keep from vomiting. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go for her in Hollywood. All she wanted was a job from one of them, and now she was, oh my God, a murderer.
* * *
13
Jan O’Malley, the actress who plays Maggie Flynn in the daytime drama ‘My Brightest Day’ was assaulted late this afternoon by an unidentified visitor at her Laurel Canyon home. Police said the forty-nine-year-old O’Malley was shot in the back, probably with a handgun, when she opened the door to her house, admitting the assailant, who argued with her, then shot her and ran.
“Detectives said earlier, ‘We can assume Jan O’Malley knew the attacker, since her housekeeper, who was upstairs with O’Malley’s young son, heard the actress arguing with someone who rang the bell and was admitted by O’Malley.’”
Rose was reworking a scene from one of her screenplays in her head as she drove, so she was only half listening to the car radio when the bulletin came on the news. But she was sure she must have misheard what the man said. She was on her way to Marly’s, and Janny was on her way there, too. She’d be there in five minutes, and surely Jan would come out to greet her and say, “It was a PR stunt, Rosie. Let’s eat.”
“Police say they know of no motive, and no arrests have been made thus far. Again, this just in. Jan O’Malley, Maggie Flynn on ‘My Brightest Day,’ has been rushed to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she’s been pronounced in critical condition, after a shooting at her Hollywood Hills home.”
Rose turned down the radio, and her eyes went dim the way the lights in her house did when there was a power surge. It was at least ninety-five degrees outside, but she was cold and afraid and feeling too shaky to negotiate her car around the tight curves on Sunset Boulevard. As soon as she could make a turn onto a side street, she did and pulled her car into a parking place, leaving the engine running.
Cars whizzed by on Sunset as she pushed the telephone buttons entering Marly’s number. After two rings, Marly’s machine picked up. It was the voice of one of the twins. “Please leave a message.” Marly was probably in the shower. If she hadn’t heard the news, Rose couldn’t leave a message on an answering machine saying that she was sitting in her car on some side street in Brentwood, shaking because she’d just heard Jan was shot. It wasn’t a message you left on an answering machine, so she hung up. Maybe Marly knew about Jan already and was on her way to the hospital.
Rose held tightly to the steering wheel, then put her face against it and tried to decide what to do. Andy was on the staff at Cedars. She’d call him at home, and if he could find someone to stay with Molly, she’d get him to hurry there and find out if Jan was getting the best care possible. With the rush-hour traffic it could take Rose an hour to get to there herself, and it might be too late. Who in God’s name would want to shoot Janny? It must have been a robbery. But didn’t the newscaster say it seemed to be someone Jan knew? Rose always joked about herself that she had a “Movie-of-the-Week” mind, meaning that the minute something eventful happened, she turned it into a story for a script, and she was doing that now. Maybe Jan was shot by the jerko producer of “My Brightest Day.” Jan mentioned to Rose that he was always fretting about the sagging ratings of the show. Maybe he thought a scandal would be good for the numbers. What if it was the wife of that handsome actor who played Jan’s lover on the show? A jealous woman who thought her husband’s love scenes with Jan were starting to look too real.
Now she dialed her home phone on the car phone.
“Andy?”
“Hi, honey.”
“Something awful…”
“I know, I’ve been trying to call you, too,” he said. “I saw it on TV and then called the hospital to get the inside word. One of the neighborhood kids is coming to be with Molly, and as soon as she gets here, I’ll meet you at Cedars. I would think the place is crawling with police, so I’ll clear you and the others with security. I’m sure they have to be afraid the guy who shot her will show up at the hospital.”
It was all so awful, so right out of some TV crime show, she wished someone would yell “Cut,” and make it go away. Waves of anxiety moved through her. A minute before, this was the evening she’d been looking forward to all week. The evening she’d been smiling about all day, after the two stupid meetings she’d had this week. Now the worries that felt so big were absurd.
She put her foot on the gas and headed for the corner, then tried to nose her car into the traffic moving east on Sunset, but none of the aggressive drivers would let her in. “As far as I know, she’s still alive,” Andy’s voice said over the speaker. “I reached one of the doctors at Cedars on the trauma team who told me that the bullet entered the upper part of her back toward her neck.” Rose hated the way her doctor husband was giving her information on the speakerphone in that same clinical voice she’d heard him use with patients. She wanted to scream at him, “Don’t tell me the bloody details. I can’t stand it. “ But instead she listened numbly and watched the West Side commuters’ high-priced cars move past her in a shiny blur.
“Luckily…” Andy’s disembodied voice filled the car, and Rose wondered what in the hell he could possibly find in this situation that started with the word “luckily.” “. .… it missed her aorta, but it collapsed a lung. It just nicked her spine and fractured off some pieces of bone from her upper thoracic and lower cervical spine, so she has an inflammation of the spinal cord.”
“Andy…”
“She also had a blow to her head that made her unconscious, so they rushed her into surgery.”
“Please get over to Cedars and make sure they’re on top of this case,” Rose said. A white stretch limo stopped and let her pull her car into the traffic, but the line of cars was slowing down, and after she’d gone only a few car lengths, the traffic was completely stopped.
“I’m on my way,” Andy said. “In fact, there’s the doorbell. It’s probably Tracy Gellman to stay with Molly. I’m going to walk right out when she comes in, so I’ll see you when you get there. Surgical ICU.”
“Tell Tracy to lock the door and turn on the alarm, and—“ Andy had clicked off. The traffic was still at a dead halt, and in her rearview mirror, Rose could see the woman driving a Jaguar sedan behind her looking at herself in her own rearview mirror, applying lipstick with a brush. “Janny,” Rose said out loud. “Don’t die. I’m on my way to help you come back. Hang in.”
Her Filofax was lying on the passenger seat, so she riffled through the pages until she found Ellen’s car phone number, but when she called, the line was busy. Ellen’s car had call waiting, so the busy signals meant she had someone on both lines. Three less than were usually holding for her, Rose thought, as she pushed CLEAR and END.
Ellen always took the long way to the city over Cahuenga Pass and then west on Sunset, because her car phone didn’t work in the canyons, and she liked to return some of her business calls, to get them out of the way while she drove. Tonight on her way to Marly’s, she was in the middle of a conversation with Garry Marshall about the grosses on his newest picture when a click told her it was her call waiting, and she asked Garry to hold.
“Yo,” she said, knowing the call beeping in had to be Greenie. “Where are you, Ellen?” he asked her.
“In my leased German car, Greenberg of the Jacksonville, Flor
ida, Greenbergs. Who wants to know?” Her last meeting tonight had actually ended at seven, but only because the “boys” were going to see a screening of a competitor’s picture. They were all hurrying out the door tonight when Schatzmann said to her, “I’ll come in your car. Since the screening’s at Universal, you can drop me back here.”
“I’m not coming to the screening,” Ellen said.
“Friday night services?” Bibberman asked her, overhearing. “Say Kaddish for your career.” The prayer for the dead. “El, I want you to get off the other line and pull your car over to the side of the road. “ Greenie’s voice was too serious.
“Oh, shit,” she said, trying to guess why the doom and gloom. “Did Bibberman freak out because I didn’t go to the screening?”
“Ellen, do what I’m telling you!”
“Greenie, I’m on the other line with a director who can make a deal. I’ll call you back. “
“Hang up on whoever it is, and do as I tell you.”
“Greens, I’m at Yucca Street in downtown Hollywood. A single white woman in a sixty-five-thousand-dollar car pulling over here would be committing a serious faux pas if she intended to stay alive. Didn’t you read Bonfire of the Vanities? I know you didn’t see the movie, because nobody did. Happily, it wasn’t my picture.”
“Get off the other line.”
“You’re pushy,” she said and clicked to the other line to say good-bye to Garry Marshall.
“Garry? I’ve got a fire I have to put out on line two. I’ll check in with you tomorrow. “ She sighed before she paused the button again. “I just talked to my mother in Miami Beach five minutes ago, and Roger this morning, and they were both okay, so what requires stopping the car on my way to Girls’ Night?”
“It’s Jan,” Greenie told her. “It’s all over the news.”
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