Death Gets a Time-Out Read Free

table.
    “And yours?” I asked.
    “Donna Karan.”
    “And mine?”
    “Back of your closet, circa 1993. No, wait—1992.”
    “Man, you’re good,” I said.
    I finished gobbling up my rare grilled ahi with mango cilantro salsa, and made my own perusal of the room. The lights were dim, in honor of the carefully sculpted cheekbones and Botoxed foreheads. Plastic surgery looks best in soft light. The tables were set with mint green china that matched the papered walls and complemented the gilded chairs. A lavish arrangement of white lilies and tuberoses spilled over the center of each table. The hum of conversation was pitched at a higher level than normal—there was no bass drone to disturb the soprano whirr. Noticeably absent was the noise of clicking silverware. I appeared to be the only woman eating anything at all.
    At a table close to the front, I saw my friend Lilly Green. She was leaning forward, her perfect, pointed chin resting on one delicate hand. Her mouth was open in a warm and inviting smile that, if I hadn’t known her so well, I would have assumed was absolutely real, signifying nothing so much as her complete absorption in and delight with her tablemates’ conversation. The truth was most likely that she was bored—she usually was at events like this. Unlike other movie stars, Lilly would much rather have spent an evening playing Scrabble with her kids than reveling in the glitz of Hollywood.But she was also invariably polite, and while not the kind of person either to suffer fools gladly, or engage in phony small talk, she also hated to hurt people’s feelings.
    Lilly caught my eye, and waved. I waved back. Stacy looked over at me. “Are you
ever
going to introduce me to her?” she asked.
    “To whom? Lilly?” I pretended innocence but I knew exactly what Stacy was after—a client. I had gotten to know Lilly Green when she made her acting debut in one of Peter’s slasher movies. My husband made his living writing screenplays that appealed to teenage boys and pretty much no one else. They starred cannibals and mummies, supernatural serial killers and bloodthirsty ghouls. Lilly had played a lovely young victim who turned into a homicidal walking corpse. Despite the part my husband had written for her, we became friends. She’d won an Oscar for her next film, and gone from B-movie starlet to full-fledged star. We’d remained close, but I have to admit that I’d grown a little uncomfortable around her. She tended to be surrounded by a retinue of managers, publicists, and assistants, and even though she was still the same, unpretentious woman who picked up Ruby every Wednesday and took her along to riding lessons with her own girls, because Ruby had once mentioned that she liked horses, it was hard for me to figure out how to interact with her. Maybe it all came down to my uncomfortable suspicion of my own motivations. Was I Lilly’s friend because I liked her and had things in common with her, or was I her friend because I liked being friends with a movie star? I didn’t really know the answer to that question.
    “Introduce me,” Stacy said, already halfway out of her chair.
    “Okay,” I said. “But you have to promise me you aren’t going to try to poach her from her agent.”
    Stacy looked shocked, wounded, but I knew better.
    Lilly had shaved her head for her most recent role, the Oscar-friendly tale of a mentally retarded woman with breast cancer, and the hair had just begun to grow back. If anything, her shorn skull highlighted her almost luminous beauty.Next to her, Stacy, who always looked so impeccable, so perfectly put together, seemed a pale contrivance. After Lilly and I rubbed cheeks in an approximation of a kiss, I stroked the top of her head. “You have a mohair head,” I said, and she laughed, although it seemed to me that it wasn’t quite the belly laugh I was used to getting out of her. One of my favorite things about Lilly was how she invariably cracked up at my