by Jane Haddam
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.”
2
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. Ther
e 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.”
“So Andra Gayle is your stage name.”
“I guess.” Andra didn’t know what a stage name was.
“Why did you want to change your name?”
For a split second, Andra thought about spilling the whole thing right here: her mother the crack addict; the years of “and then” when she was a child; the bar fights; the sleeping in abandoned buildings. Now that would be a personal interview that would definitely make it onto television.
“I want,” she said instead, “to be something else. To be someone else. To be something I wasn’t born to be.”
“And you don’t think there’s anything wrong with that? You don’t think it’s better to be yourself?”
“It depends on who ‘yourself’ is.”
“According to our investigation,” Sheila said, “you’ve been arrested at least a dozen times, all for acts of violence.”
“They weren’t acts of violence,” Andra said quickly. “I didn’t jump people or anything like that. I didn’t go out and try to hurt people. It’s—where I come from, if somebody disrespects you, you gotta do something about it. You can’t just let it go. So I got into a few fights. I never hurt anybody bad enough to put them in the hospital, even. Not for overnight. I never killed someone.”
“Did you ever own a gun?”
“No,” Andra said. “That was my number two.”
“Your number two what?”
Andra looked down at her hands. There was a barking noise from the other side of the lights. She looked up again. She was supposed to look at the camera the whole time. She couldn’t see where the camera was.
“When I was growing up,” she said, “I made a list. I made a list of all the things I would never do. I would never own a gun or live anywhere there were guns in the house. That was my number two.”
“What was your number one?”
“I would never go out on the street and sell it,” Andra said. She was sweating. She could feel the thick wash of it around her neck. It confused her a little, because she did not feel especially stressed. She was just sweating.
Nobody was saying anything. Andra hated the silence so much, she wanted to shout.
“It was what my mother did,” she said finally. “My mother sold herself for as long as she could, and now she’s too old and she just stays wherever. Home, if she’s got one. She doesn’t care as long as she’s high.”
“And do you get high?”
“No. That’s number three.”
“Did you shoot at me at the Milky Way Ballroom?”
“No, I told you. I don’t touch guns.”
“Did you shoot at me here?”
“No.”
“Did you kill that girl who was found dead in the study?”
“No.”
“Do you know who she was?”
“No,” Andra said, and now she was just tired. “I didn’t even get a good look at her at the casting thing. Everything happened so fast and then it was over and the police were there, and I was sort of nervous. But it didn’t happen the way I thought it would. They didn’t, you know, search everybody, or arrest anybody, or whatever.”
“And you were afraid of being searched?”
“No,” Andra said, but she wasn’t thinking about that.
She was thinking that it must be a very odd thing to live a life where you didn’t just automatically expect the police to arrest you, if they were there and you happened to be around.
3
When Andra came out of the interview room, she almost looked like she was in tears. Mary-Louise was impressed. Andra always looked so tough that Mary-Louise didn’t think she ever cried. Olivia Dahl, on the other hand, always looked either disapproving or furious, and she was looking furious now. When she called Mary-Louise’s name, Mary-Louise came forward and did her best to smile.
“This shouldn’t be bad,” she said. “We don’t get judged on this.”
Mary-Louise wanted Olivia Dahl to say “of course not,” or something like it. Mary-Louise really wanted to be sure. It was a little off-putting, the idea of having Sheila Dunham here. Sheila Dunham did a lot of yelling, and she’d already yelled at Mary-Louise once.
Mary-Louise went across the room and sat down in the empty chair. She crossed her legs at her ankles and folded her hands in her lap. They had been instructed to fold their hands in their laps during interviews. You didn’t want to wave your hands about, because if you did it made a distraction and the tape wasn’t worth using. You wanted the show to use your tapes, because then you would get more time on the air, and the more time you got the more famous you would be. You had to let America get to know you. That had been in the lecture Olivia had given right before—well, before.
Mary-Louise smiled. She didn’t know why she was smiling. She always smiled. It was something people did.
“So,” Sheila Dunham said. “Your name is Mary-Louise Verdt, and you’re from Holcomb, Kansas.”
Shei
la pronounced the name as “VerD.”
“Actually,” Mary-Louise said, “you say my last name as ‘VerT’. As if the ‘d’ wasn’t there.”
“Verdt,” Sheila Dunham said, pronouncing it wrong yet again. Mary-Louise let it go. She didn’t want to embarrass anybody. “Tell me,” Sheila said, “about Holcomb, Kansas.”
Mary-Louise was ready for this. When she was first trying to get on the show, the little brochure they had sent her about how to try out had had a list of things that could help her chances, and one of them was writing an application letter that made her sound “interesting.” Mary-Louise did not think she was a very interesting person, but she came from an interesting place, and she was proud of that.
“Holcomb, Kansas, is where the In Cold Blood murders happened,” Mary-Louise said happily. “That was the murder of a whole family in their farmhouse in the middle of the night. Their names were the Clutters. They had a big farm, and a pretty big house, out in the middle of nowhere, really, and then one night this guy who’d worked as a hired hand for them came with another guy he’d met in prison and they robbed the house, and tied up the Clutters, and killed them. It was a really big deal.”
“Was it?” Sheila Dunham said. “I don’t remember hearing about it on the news.”
“Oh, I don’t, either,” Mary-Louise said. “It happened before I was born. It probably happened before you were born, too. November 15, 1959. It was really famous at the time, but what made it more famous and the reason everybody has heard about it is that this writer named Truman Capote wrote a book about it. It’s called In Cold Blood. There have been two movies made of it, and then another movie was made about Truman Capote that was sort of about it, about him writing the book about it, but it wasn’t a very good movie. I mean, I tried to see it in the theater, but I couldn’t keep my mind on it. It was one of those floaty movies, if you know what I mean.”