Show Business Kills (29 page)

“Doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who would soil his hands. Naturally we’ll check him out, though,” she said.

“What if it was Terry Penn’s wife who shot Jan?” Ellen asked. “Like in
Presumed Innocent
.”

“I think you’ve been producing too many movies,” Rose
said, and the others laughed. The moment was interrupted by a shrill beeping sound. The detective unbuttoned her blazer to
reveal not only her beeper, but a gun in a shoulder holster. She stood.

“I have to call in. Where do they keep the phones around here?”

“I just realized I have one with me,” Ellen said, opening the zipper on her black Prada purse and pulling out her cellular
flip phone.

“Cool,” Rita Connelly said as Ellen handed it to her.

“Not as intimidating as the paraphernalia you’re packing,” Marly said.

Rita punched some numbers into the small, flat telephone. “Connelly,” she said, followed by a few “Uh-huhs.” Then she pushed
END
and handed the phone back to Ellen.

“They brought in that guy who broke onto the set of ‘My Brightest Day,’ ” she told them. “He has a gun registered to him that’s
the same kind that was used to shoot your friend. He says he can’t remember where it is. Sounds like he could have found his
way over to her house. I’m out of here, ladies. Here’s my card if you need any more advice on the movie about that woman cop.”

Then she stopped and looked at the three of them and said, “I have three kids, and I know how tough it’s going to be on that
little boy if he loses her.” She put her thumb up. “I’ll hold a good thought,” she said, and then she hurried down the hall
and out of sight.

There were just hospital sounds for a long time. Elevator doors whooshing, a floor waxer in the distance, an ambulance outside
with the sound of the siren getting closer.

“Isn’t it interesting,” Ellen said, “that despite appearances,
which nobody knows better than we do how they can always be deceiving… that that woman is one of us.”

“I think there’s a film in it,” Rose said, smiling, “a small unpretentious film about how what we are inside doesn’t always
reflect—“

“Hey, Rose. Let me tell you what to do with your small unpretentious film,” Ellen said and gave her a playful punch on the
arm.

“Why in God’s name if that fan showed up at Jan’s house, would she ever let him in?” Rose asked them, her glasses catching
the strange fluorescent lights. “That’s the odd part.”

“Let’s go down there and be with her,” Marly said and they all stood and moved back down the hall to surgical ICU. Ellen pushed
the buzzer on the white plastic box next to the door.

“Yes?” A woman’s voice replied to the buzz.

“I’m Ellen Bass,” Ellen said to the box. “Jan O’Malley’s friend. If she’s stablized, we want to come in and be with her.”

“I’ll be right out.”

After a minute, the nurse opened the door. She was a blonde in her sixties, with very black mascara caked on her lashes. One
at a time she looked at Ellen, then at Rose, and when she got to Marly, she smiled. “I know you,” she said excitedly. “I loved
every episode of ‘Keeping Up with the Joneses,’ and that other show you were on about the bar. I’m genuinely sorry about your
friend.”

“Thank you,” Marly said.

“I always watch ‘My Brightest Day’ too. She’s so beautiful and talented.” Under all the hard eye makeup the nurse had a warmth
in her eyes. “She’s stable, but she’s still in what they’re calling a light coma. Doctor Schiffman mentioned that
you’d want to come in together, and I think it would be a good idea for her friends to be with her and to keep talking to
her.”

“So do we,” Ellen said, moving past the nurse into the ICU, where ten equipment-filled rooms opened onto a monitoring desk,
above which hung ten computer screens, one for each patient. Two other nurses sat at the desk chatting. Five of the rooms
had patients in them, hooked up to inexplicable machines and tubes.

“I know you don’t particularly like a group in these room,” Marly said to the nurse, “but we really are her extended family,
and I think if what you’re saying is true, our being with her is going to mean a lot to her recovery.”

The nurse patted Marly on the arm in a motherly way, then said, “If I were you, I’d talk as if she was being included in your
conversation. Because hearing is the last sense to go, and I’ve known people to come out of comas and describe conversations
they heard in the room around them from family members who figured they were too out of it to hear. But before you go in,
could I just trouble you for an autograph for my daughter, Miss Bennet? Her name is Jessica.” Marly smiled an assent, and
the nurse produced a pad and a pen. She wrote a message and her signature for the nurse’s daughter.

“I’m Nancy,” the woman said. “And this is Sheila, and Kari,” she said, gesturing to the two nurses at the desk.

“This is Rose Schiffman and Ellen Bass,” Marly said, and the nurses smiled a polite hello.

“Ellen Bass? Ellen Bass is out there?” They heard a man’s voice call out weakly. “Nurse, do me a favor. Get her in here.”

The nurse looked behind her toward the cubicle from which the voice had come, then back at Ellen. “That’s Mr. Zavitz, Fred
Zavitz, do you know him?”

“Does she know me?” the man’s voice said. “We’re family!”

“He just had a lung removed and he’s in very delicate condition, but I guess it’s okay if you go in and see him.” The nurse
smiled and shrugged.

Fred Zavitz was an old-time producer. When Ellen was a gofer at Screen Gems, he had a deal at Columbia Pictures, where he
produced half a dozen movies. And he was always nice to the kids who worked on the lot. In the days when Ellen worked on “The
Monkees,” next door at Screen Gems, she liked to creep onto the sets at Columbia and watch them shooting the feature films.
Katharine Hepburn and Sidney Poitier filming
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
, or Gregory Peck filming
McKenna’s Gold
. And Fred Zavitz would tell his secretary Libby to make sure to get Ellen a pass or to give her a bogus delivery to make
to the set so she could get in the door and watch them shooting.

The thing in the bed was skeletonlike, but somewhere in and among his features, Ellen recognized Fred Zavitz.

“Hiya, Freddy,” Ellen said in as jovial a voice as she could muster.

“Ellen, darling, why are you here?” he asked, as if he was hoping the answer was that she’d come to see him.

“One of my good friends is in here, Fred.”

“I’m sorry to hear it, dear, but listen, while I’ve got you here, take a minute. I have a great story to tell you.”

Ellen leaned against the wall of Fred Zavitz’s cubicle and tried to look interested. It was the least she could do for a man
who’d just had a lung removed.

“My son and I haven’t spoken in twelve years,” Zavitz said, stopping to lick his dry lips, then going on. “So now I’m dying,
I mean let’s not mince words here, I’m basically
on borrowed time. So who do you think is the specialist in the field of medicine that I need the most? You got it! So unbeknownst
to me, my doctor calls him in to consult on my case, and we’re reunited. Now that’s a movie. I could put a writer on that
thing and have it ready in a month’s time after I get out of here. Provided, of course, that I get out of here. It’s got irony,
it’s got pathos, it’s got big, juicy parts. I see Paul Newman as me and Sam Shepard as my son. Hey, listen, if she wanted
to, Joanne Woodward could play my wife.”

The nurse, who was back in the room now taking Fred Zavitz’s pulse, looked at Ellen as if to urge her to indulge him, but
Ellen didn’t need her cue.

“Newman and Woodward would be great, Freddy,” Ellen said. “They haven’t had a good vehicle together in a while.”

“Am I right?” the pale, bony man in the bed asked, then winced.

“Shall I get you something for the pain?” the nurse asked.

“Not now,” Fred Zavitz told her. “I’m in a meeting.”

“I like it, Fred. You call me when you get on your feet, and if I can’t use it, I’ll make sure you get it to somebody who
can.”

“You’re a doll,” Fred Zavitz said. “A regular doll. Say, listen, I hope your friend is feeling better. What did she have?”

“We’re not sure. But it might have been a fan who loved her too much,” Ellen said, and went to join Marly and Rose, who were
standing next to Jan’s bed. Rose was trying not to recoil as she looked at Jan’s bandaged head and her corpselike face. Marly
was holding Jan’s hand and talking to her inert body.

“Janny, everything is okay. Joey’s at my house and he’s just fine. The twins will hug him and kiss him and play with
him as if he were a doll, and tomorrow morning when he wakes up, I’m going to promise him that you’ll be back soon, because
you will. We’re sending you wellness vibrations and the white light of our love.”

“Janny, you realize you fucked up Girls’ Night,” Ellen said, “so I wish like hell you’d wake up and tell us about Maximilian
Schell. I can use the laugh.”

“Me too,” Marly said.

“This is like a scene from ‘My Brightest Day,’ ” Rose said. “If I’m not mistaken, they even have a permanent ICU set on their
stage because so many people on the show find themselves in comas. Janny, Maggie Flynn would not tolerate this. She’d throw
off the bandages, be wearing a shocking pink nightgown and marabou mules, and tell them all she was on her way to Paris.”

“Janny,” Ellen said, “a police officer told us they think they may have the man in custody who did this to you. They took
him in for questioning. They think that guy who broke onto the lot was the one.” There was a sudden spasm from Jan, and they
all held their breath, hoping it was signaling her awakening, but then she settled into the same placid state she’d been in
before.

“Janny, come out of this and get old with us. It won’t be so bad because we have each other. We can be crotchety, wrinkled
ladies at the Motion Picture Convalescent Home. Race our walkers down Ventura Boulevard and put Krazy Glue in Jack Solomon’s
Polident,” Rose said.

“Janny,” Marly said, “I know how you felt about what happened to you with Jack Solomon. You felt seduced. But it was no big
deal. We’ve all been seduced. Billy seduced me this morning. He came over and wanted to make love, and I
agreed because I’ve missed him so much, and now it’s all over the papers that he’s being accused of some child-molesting charge.
So now I feel like he was just hoping to get me to be on his side when it all came down.”

It was the first Ellen and Rose had heard about Marly’s visit from Billy, and Rose saw the hurt on her face and understood
now why everything the ladies in the cafeteria said had made her so crazy.

“I’m sure we’ve all done things we wish we hadn’t,” Ellen said. “Hell, I gave one of the Monkees a blow job.”

Marly shrieked, “You don’t mean it! Which one?”

“Does it matter? It was when I worked for them. One day in a dressing room at Screen Gems.”

Rose and Ellen laughed loudly, and through the glass they saw the ICU nurses glancing over at them. “Which one?” Ellen wondered
aloud, her brow furrowed. “I don’t have a clue. Maybe it was Mickey Dolenz. Or Peter. Hah! Peter something.” That made Marly
and Rose laugh even more.

“Peter Gazinya! Remember that joke from when you were a kid?” Rose laughed and took off her glasses and wiped her eyes.

“You never told us that before,” Marly said.

“I guess at the time I was too embarrassed,” Ellen said through her laughter. “I don’t even remember why. I hated all four
of them,” she said. “I couldn’t wait to leave that show.”

“I have a memory like that,” Rose said. “About six months after Allan died, the lawyer who was handling his estate fixed me
up with a man who was visiting from England. The lawyer said, ‘Nothing serious, Rose. It’ll just be someone nice to take you
to dinner.’ Well, the man was very attractive and after I’d had three glasses of wine, and you know what
that can do to me, the guy told me that the reason he was in town was to close a deal on a picture with Marlon Brando.”

“Uh-oh,” Ellen said, “we all know how Rosie loves Marlon Brando.”

Rose flushed. “So then he said that he was staying at Marlon Brando’s house, and that Marlon was in town on a rare visit from
Tahiti, and he asked if I wanted to meet him. And I nearly melted down. ‘Marlon will love you,’ he told me. ‘He’s crazy about
petite, dark-haired women.’

“Aside from the fact that I love Marlon Brando, I also had been thinking for years about a great movie idea for him, and all
the way over to his house, in my half-smashed state, I tried to remember the details of the plot so I could tell them to Marlon,
and I was high enough to believe that he was going to love the idea and sign on the dotted line to star in my movie. I kept
thinking, I’ll tell my agent, ‘This is an idea for Marlon Brando,’ and he’ll say, ‘How do you think you’re going to get Marlon
Brando, Rose?’ And I’d say, ‘I already have him, Marty!’ ”

“Let me guess,” Ellen said. “You got to the house, there was no Marlon Brando, and the Brit jumped you.”

“Have I told this story before?” Rose wondered out loud, and Marly and Ellen laughed. “In the morning, I remember telling
myself, ‘I’m a widow, Allan and I didn’t have sex for a very long time because of the illness, I forgive myself.’ And on my
way home, I realized that the house I was leaving was off Coldwater Canyon, and even people who buy those maps to the stars’
homes know that Marlon Brando’s house is on Mulholland Drive.”

Marly tsked, and smiled a how-foolish-we-all-are smile. “Why we let ourselves be conned,” she said. “And boy have I let myself
be conned a few million times in this life. By
salespeople, by charlatans, by my kids, and always by Billy. There was one story I haven’t told any of you before now because
I felt so awful about it. I think I’m just getting to where I can tell it now. Janny will enjoy it especially.”

“Was it more awful than blowing one of the Monkees and not remembering which one it was?” Ellen asked, laughing.

“Much more,” Marly said. Standing over Jan’s bed, her sentences punctuated by the breathing machine attached to Jan, she told
them.