by Star Jones
When Molly got down on the street, she could hear the wail of ambulance sirens approaching. Or maybe it was the police. She still felt light-headed and out of sorts. Her nap on the floor hadn’t helped much. Molly remembered that she had a show in Atlantic City the next night and she needed to save her voice so she could hit the high notes. Maybe she could go down there a day early, get some rest. Maybe Rain, who was headlining, could go with her. Molly fished her cell out of her big handbag and called Rain’s number. Dara answered.
“Dara, this is Molly. I was looking for Rain. I want to go down to AC tonight, maybe do something to rest. I feel real tired.”
Right away, Dara knew something was wrong. Molly sounded almost unintelligible, like she was talking with a mouth full of cotton in a wind tunnel. Dara knew about Molly’s pills and all of her various problems. Something had happened to her. Maybe something bad.
“Molly, where are you right now?” Dara said, trying to keep the panic out of her voice.
“Where am I? I don’t know, somewhere on the street. I had to get out of there. You know what that fat bitch did, she called the fuckin’ ambulance on me! She called 911. I couldn’t stay there.”
Now Dara was panicked. “Molly, honey, can you get in a cab and come over here, you think?”
“You want me to come all the way down there to Tribeca?”
Perhaps that was a bad idea, Dara thought. Maybe she should go and get her. “Where are you right now, Molly?”
“I feel like I need to sleep. I think that’s my problem.” Her voice started to trail off.
“Molly!” Dara practically shouted into the phone. “Molly! You can’t go to sleep right now because you have to come here!” Dara wondered if perhaps Molly had OD’d on the anti-anxiety pills. How serious was a Xanax overdose?
“Okay, Dara. I’ll see you soon.” And with that, Molly was gone.
“Molly!” Dara shouted into the phone. She heard nothing but the coldness of cell phone silence. Her heart pounding, Dara punched in Rain’s number.
“Rain! I think something is wrong with Molly, like maybe she overdosed or something.”
“Huh? Where is she?” Rain said.
“I think she’s on her way here!”
“You think? What does that mean? How could she be on her way there if she overdosed?!” Now Rain was yelling.
“Rain, why are you arguing with me?” Dara said. “Just get down here as soon as you can!”
AS SHE WALKED OUT of the Four Seasons, her discussion with Riley still bouncing around in her head, Maxine called Karen Siegel and told her they needed to meet right away. Karen fretted for the next forty-five minutes, wondering what was about to go down. When Maxine finally breezed into the office, she gestured at Karen to follow her.
Maxine didn’t waste any time. As soon as she hung up her coat, Maxine turned to Karen and said, “Riley Dufrane wants us to shake things up. Somebody has to go.”
Karen almost gasped out loud. It had been several years since Dara replaced Missy, the last change that had been made to the couch. The trauma surrounding Missy’s dismissal had taken months to die down. It took a while, but eventually everyone had grown comfortable with the current cast of characters. Now they were going to have to endure another traumatic upheaval? Karen sighed. Never a dull moment.
“Let’s discuss our options here,” Maxine said as she sat behind her desk and leaned back in the oversized leather chair. “Who do we think is the least effective cast member right now?”
Karen took the seat opposite Maxine, a bit flattered that Maxine still valued her opinion. But she wasn’t willing to start the discussion. She’d let Maxine go first.
“My first thought is Whitney,” Maxine said. “I’m starting to think that she’s getting increasingly distracted of late. I don’t really see her contributing a lot to most of the discussions. She’s usually not prepared, either.”
Karen cleared her throat. “Um, well, I’m not sure I agree with that.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Maxine’s right eyebrow rise. But she didn’t let that scare her. “She’s not always willing to discuss some of the gossip items at length, but I think that’s because she finds it distasteful, not because she’s unprepared. I feel like Whitney’s certainly more prepared than, say, Molly.”
“You think I enjoy tossing around all that ridiculous crap about who’s sticking it to whom this week?” Maxine said, a bit offended by Karen’s insinuation. But Maxine caught herself before she pushed further. She wanted to encourage Karen to speak freely, not to scare her away. “Anyway, back to Whitney; how much of a fan base does she have? Do you get the impression that people would care one way or the other if she were replaced?”
Karen was cautious about answering that question. Whatever Whitney’s fan base was, Karen thought it odd that Maxine would start with her. Did she really think that Riley would go along with slashing his lover, his mistress of at least the past two years? Was Maxine really aiming to get rid of Whitney, or was something else going on here? But it wasn’t her job to second-guess the all-powerful Maxine Robinson.
“I think she lends us significant credibility,” Karen said. “With her background and, of course, your background combined, we’re able to talk about any major issue of the day, including politics and the economy.”
Maxine nodded. “Yes, that’s true.” She was silent for a moment. “What about Molly? Can we afford to get rid of her?”
Karen shook her head. “In my opinion, she’s kind of indispensable. Her wit is invaluable.” Karen thought back to the previous day’s show, when Molly was able to take Heather down a few notches at exactly the right moment and defuse an incredibly tense situation. She was like a one-woman bomb squad.
“Nobody is indispensable,” Maxine said. She might have added, “except me,” but didn’t really consider that necessary. Karen didn’t consider it necessary either. Karen wondered if Riley Dufrane considered Maxine indispensable. Would he be willing to pull Maxine off her own show, a television groundbreaker that she had created from her own imagination and that had sprouted imitators all over the dial?
Karen wasn’t sure how to respond to Maxine, so she nodded and remained silent. “How about Shelly?” Maxine asked. “What are your feelings on her?”
Karen shrugged. “Well, I think she represents an important demographic, both she and Dara. I think Shelly adds some spice to the show. And Dara adds a great deal of class. I can’t really see letting either of them go. We’d take a serious hit if we did.”
Maxine scowled. She didn’t like the idea of anybody attacking her commitment to blacks and Latinos. She had opened doors for so many black and Latin women in television, she deserved her own museum somewhere. So if she wanted to axe a black woman or a Latina from her damn show, anybody who wanted to challenge her on it could kiss her big, round, light brown, sixty-five-year-old ass. But then again, she knew Karen was right. They would take a serious hit.
“So damn, where does that leave us?” Maxine said, mainly to herself. “I think that brings us back to Whitney.”
Again, Karen wondered if Maxine knew something about Whitney she didn’t know. Maybe something was coming down the pike, headed straight at Whitney’s head.
“Okay, well, we’ll revisit this,” Maxine said. She pivoted around in her chair and turned on her computer. That was Karen’s cue to get the hell out.
LIZETTE WAS HEADED BACK to her office when her cell phone rang. The phone played the ominous opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth. That was the ringtone Lizette used for Maxine.
“Lizette, where are you, dear?”
Lizette didn’t like the strained, unhappy sound of Maxine’s voice. This definitely was not a social call.
“Um, I’m on my way back to the office. I met with a publishing contact this morning. I think I might be close to getting my hands on that manuscript.” Lizette figured that she would throw everything she had at Maxine right away, to lessen the sting of what was about to come.
T
here were a few seconds of hesitation on the other end, as if Maxine were recalibrating her tone to account for the new information. “Hmm, that’s good, Lizette. Very good. But in the meantime, have you seen this new gossip site on the Internet, this chattercrazy.com?”
Lizette had never heard of chattercrazy.com. She had a sinking feeling in her stomach. A new gossip website that could get Maxine’s attention was something a publicist was supposed to know about.
“Um, no, Maxine, I haven’t seen it.”
“Well, darling, there is an interesting little story on this chattercrazy today. Actually it’s the lead story. It’s about me, and it says that I was apoplectic yesterday after Heather Hope’s appearance, and that I directed my publicist to get her hands on Missy’s book.”
Lizette stopped walking, right in the middle of a New York City sidewalk, causing two people behind her to bump into each other, like a pileup on the expressway. Lizette was floored. She felt a sudden hurricane brewing in her stomach.
“Wow, that’s crazy, Maxine! Where the hell did they get that from?”
“Well, that was exactly the question I had for you, Lizette. How many people could have known what I said to my publicist?”
Damn, was Maxine actually accusing her of leaking something like that? What exactly would Lizette have to gain by giving such information to a gossip site?
“Well, Maxine, quite a few people heard you yesterday when you came off the set and gave me those instructions,” Lizette said. She tried to keep her voice steady, to not reveal any anger over Maxine’s crazy accusation.
“So what you’re saying is that we have a rat on our staff?” Maxine’s voice was rising, meaning she was getting angrier by the minute. Lizette’s job at this moment was to calm her boss, not to get her more riled up.
“No, that’s not really what I’m saying, Maxine.” Lizette started walking again. She was just minutes from the office, but now she wasn’t so sure she wanted to see Maxine in person. Maybe it was better to let this cool down over the weekend. “Let’s just think about this for a second,” she continued. “Really, that story could have gotten to them in a million different ways. Usually the way these things spread is not through a direct source, but through a secondary source. Or maybe even more than secondary. Somebody on the crew like a cameraman or something could have gone home and told his wife after dinner about his day, and he mentioned what happened on the set. His wife could have gotten on the phone and told her girlfriend. The girlfriend then calls up somebody she knows at some random website that nobody’s ever heard of, and next thing you know it’s all over the place.”
Maxine was silent for a moment, considering what Lizette said. “Well, okay, I can see something like that happening. But maybe I should give a speech to the crew about the need for them to show some discretion.”
“Yeah, you could do that. But maybe we should just let it go for now and be more careful in the future about discussing things we wouldn’t want to see in a gossip column,” Lizette said. She could imagine the behind-her-back eye-rolling that would accompany a Maxine speech to the crew. She was just trying to save Maxine from herself.
More silence from Maxine. “Well, I tell you, Lizette, I really don’t want to read any more on the Internet about what I tell my publicist.”
That sounded to Lizette like a threat. But she let it go—after all, what else could she say? She could, however, turn back around and make sure Maxine didn’t have a chance to get in her face about it. Besides, she had an important dinner to attend that night with Mr. Channing Cary. If she headed uptown to Saks, she had time to get something utterly fabulous that would make Channing beg her to marry him.
Lizette turned around and dashed toward the curb, waving frantically for a taxicab. After she had settled into the cab, she got out her cell phone and typed chattercrazy.com into the browser. When she read the item, she could feel the sweat forming in her palms. The item was eerily accurate and longer than Lizette expected, describing in detail how the crew reacted when none of the cohosts said anything for all those seconds after Heather’s bombshell. It almost sounded like it could have come directly from Lizette’s mouth. Where did this chattercrazy.com get this information from? Maybe Maxine was right—maybe there was a rat on the crew.
Eric Harlington was happy. He was far away from civilization’s prying eyes, locked down in the basement of his Nantucket home, where he was free to indulge his obsession. In his earlier years he tried to deny it, to ignore it, to close himself off from it. That was easiest. But only in the last five years or so had Eric allowed himself to engage the thirst, to take steps to feed it. Eric Harlington liked having sex with young girls. Before giving in, Eric had tried other ways to deal with his obsession. He tended toward thin women who weren’t overly endowed—though that certainly didn’t describe the woman he ended up marrying, Whitney, whose large breasts and round hips were Eric’s lame attempt to force his desires in a different direction.
In his basement in Nantucket, Eric accumulated a stash of photographs of his conquests over the years, little girls he had had the pleasure of possessing, of worshipping. He resisted the many urges to look for additional pictures on the Internet, knowing that such searches would easily attract attention and leave him open for discovery. Eric was a clever pedophile; he had seen all the Primeline specials and read reports of FBI stings, so he was always wary about leaving a trail. His primary method of selecting victims was to do most of his dirty work overseas, far from the meddling eyes of U.S. authorities. Over the last four years, Eric had taken a half dozen trips to Southeast Asia. He used his position as an international correspondent for the Affiliated Press to feed his addiction. When he heard about a new country or city that was a haven for child prostitution, Eric would find a story there that he could cover.
He was a top-notch reporter with the unbeatable combination of an unerring nose for scandal and a smooth, accessible writing style. In the early 1990s, when Eric was an investigative reporter at the Philadelphia Ledger, he and a colleague won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories uncovering a vast scheme of kickbacks on Philadelphia city contracts that had led to eight indictments, including the deputy mayor. When Eric was hired away, he was told that he could go anywhere in the world he wanted and write about whatever he wanted. It was a reporter’s dream job. He could probably go five or six months without producing copy and still not raise any eyebrows, but Eric had never gone that long—primarily because he couldn’t go that long without tasting some young girls somewhere in the world.
The overseas days would be spent working as a news reporter exposing every ill imaginable; at night he would dive with glee into his own world of fantasy, where men can love little girls and no one will judge them. In the ultimate irony, Eric had developed a reputation in journalistic circles as something of an expert on Southeast Asia and he had even been a finalist for another Pulitzer for a story he had done three years earlier about sweatshops in Kuala Lumpur—oh, the joys Eric found while working on that story in Malaysia, where the sweatshops were sometimes just around the corner from endless dens of young girls willing to fulfill his aching need.
A ritual developed when Eric was alone in Nantucket. He would go to the store and get enough groceries to last him several days. He would bolt the doors and close all the blinds, then he would descend into the basement. Eric had purposely left the basement unfinished and resisted all entreaties by Whitney and the kids to have it completed. The more unattractive and scary the basement was, the less chance that his wife or his kids would snoop around down there. Eric would remove all of his clothes, get a bottle of baby oil, and pleasure himself for hours at a time while his lurid slideshow played on the laptop, the more explicit the better. Eric liked them about thirteen or fourteen, when their bodies were still in the process of growing into womanhood. The pictures were all stored on memory cards that Eric kept stashed away in a lockbox that he buried underneath boxes of discarded children’s clothing, holiday decorations, and
unused china in a basement crawl space.
Never once did he see his actions as perverse or exploitive. He rationalized that in many cultures, at that age the girls were already married and having children of their own. He made himself believe they were old enough to know what sex was and even to like it, so he could tell himself that they were enjoying themselves as much as he was. He would take many shots of the girls, some half clothed, some completely nude, their shy eyes sometimes fearful, sometimes empty. Then, using a tripod and a timer, Eric would join them on the bed and he would take pictures of the two of them engaged in sexual positions that he had dreamed up while excited and alone in the Nantucket basement.
Eric’s predilections had come up against an unwelcome development when his twins, Ashley and Bailey, grew into young womanhood. How could he justify the things he did to these other girls when his own daughters were the same age, when he actually recognized some of his daughters’ mannerisms and facial expressions in these adolescent girls halfway across the globe? Somewhere deep inside, Eric knew his attraction to young girls was a time bomb waiting to explode, so he put as much distance as possible between him and his own growing girls. He slowly began withdrawing a bit from his daughters when they hit middle school—a change noticed by Whitney, who didn’t understand it, and which led to further rifts in her relationship with her husband. But the twins had become intent on spending as much time as possible away from their parents anyway, so they appreciated having a dad who no longer pried in their business.
Eric recently found a new spot on the global map of child exploitation, Prague in the Czech Republic. This time he stepped up his plans to memorialize the trip—he had purchased a small, high-definition video camera. Eric was giddy about the possibility of taking actual video footage of his pleasures that he could relive over and over again in his basement. He was scheduled to leave the following Tuesday, under the guise of a big feature on the rise and prevalence of plastic surgery in Eastern Europe. The trip was all that he could think about for the past week. He had a few more phone calls to make to his new contact in Prague, and he had to wire some money across the Atlantic. This trip was going to cost Eric much more than his excursions to Southeast Asia. White European girls were a lot more expensive than Asian ones—or maybe the dealers (pimps) who procured the girls in Europe were a lot greedier than the ones in Asia. Eric was still working on the story he would give Whitney about why their bank account suddenly had a twenty-five-thousand-dollar hole. But he would worry about that when he got back. He just knew that whatever the cost, it would be worth every penny.