3 Strange Bedfellows Read Free Page A

almost fell asleep standing on their feet. Now whenever they saw me coming they scurried away like rabbits, afraid I'd shower them with yet more vital information about dry rot.
    My movie—actually, after all the rewriting and editing they did, it wasn't quite "my movie" anymore—opened last Christmas and earned the studio enough green stuff to make my million bucks look like chickenfeed. My agent called me with all kinds of lucrative offers to write all kinds of inane movies. My personal favorite was an action-adventure pic about a gang of evil Micronesian terrorists setting loose a thousand cloned grizzly bears in New York City.
    But I said no to all offers. Maybe it was writer's block, or maybe I was just being ornery, or maybe in my heart of hearts I still wanted to write the artsy stuff. All I knew for sure was, the idea of sitting alone in my study and wrestling with adjectives and dangling participles from dawn to dusk, coming up with such deathless lines as "Oh, no! It's the bears!", made me want to scream. I'd rather rehab another house.
    In fact, I was thinking about buying a HUD foreclosure down the street that was going up for auction next month. What the heck, I told myself, if this was a midlife crisis, then it was a darn painless one.
    As I drove up to the radio station, I recalled that the guy who'd interviewed me last year, Charlie Noll, had been going through similar What To Do Next questions about his own life. I'd given him a bunch of tips about getting into freelance writing. I hoped he would remember that and help me out today.
    Parking outside the WTRO building, I was disconcerted by how normal it looked. There was only one cop car out there, and no yellow tape. I went inside and gave my name to the twenty-something, bleached blonde receptionist at the front desk. She recognized my name as belonging to a famous local screenwriter—in upstate New York, I'm a big fish in a small pond—and batted her eyes at me. She batted them for so long, I got nervous she was about to ask me to read a screenplay she wrote. You'd be amazed how often that happens.
    But it didn't happen this time. Maybe she batted her eyes at everyone, just to keep in practice. She escorted me back to the big boss and left us.
    He was a big boss, all right. A burly man in a red flannel shirt, Charlie Noll looked more like a lumberjack than an effete NPR-type intellectual. But he'd been running the station for twenty years now, doing everything from political commentary to DJ'ing to fixing the boiler. When I came in, he put down his thick cigar, rose from his chair, and grabbed my hand heartily. "It's the movie man," he greeted me.
    "Good to see you, Ch arlie. How's the freelance writing business?"
    He waved my query away. "Don't ask. I'm gonna be married to this station until death do us part. So what brings you here —as if I didn't know. You're helping out your old pal Shmuckler, aren't you?"
    "How'd you know we were pals?"
    "Hey, nothing gets past old Charlie. I gotta tell you, I'll bet my right ball Shmuckler did it. I'm the one found the body, you know. Talk about gross. And Shmuckler was standing right there. I asked him straight off, I said, 'Did you kill him?' And he didn't deny it, just stood there."
    "He was probably in shock."
    "Yeah, I would be too, if I just finished killing somebody."
    "Okay, so we won't call you as a defense witness. You wanna show me where it happened?"
    He checked his watch. "Sure, I got a few minutes 'til air time. We're doing a special on filberts."
    "On what?" I asked, as we walked down the hallway.
    "You know, the nut. Studi es show, if you eat at least a quarter pound of filberts per day, it reduces your chances of prostate cancer by thirty-eight percent."
    "I'll keep that in mind." Actually, I'd try to forget it immediately. Filberts? What would they think of next? Besides, I was planning to put off thinking about prostate cancer for at least another twenty years.
    We came to the end of the