From The Dead Read Free

greeting, Jada
unleashed as soon as she spotted him on the couch.
    “Can you believe the guy in the next building parked
his crappy car in front of our doorway again? I had to walk halfway
up the block to get here. My Beemer is worth more than that guy’s
gas pedal! What the fuck’s the matter with him?”
    A delicate body figure with a cast-iron tongue.
Polished and professional on the job, though. Not an off-color word
from her on the set. She knew who fed her and how to perform for an
audience of her own.
    Jada left her purse and keys on the breakfast bar,
then plopped down on the sofa beside Jesse and kicked off her
shoes. As Jesse massaged her knee, she drew her legs underneath her
and tugged at a bracelet. “I hate location shoots,” she said.
    That’s right, she spent today in Malibu. “That
bad, huh?”
    “Once the police got the street blocked off and we
started rolling, it went fine. A side street off the 101. We shot a
couple of short scenes in the morning to minimize our days outside
the studio lot.” In a single motion, her eyes lit up and she
engaged her hands in a near pantomime. “Oh, then it got to be noon
and the real fun started. You know those people who wander by and
decide they want to make their screen debut? Someone peeks behind a
building across the street? We got one of those.”
    “A side street in Malibu isn’t what you’d call a high
foot-traffic area.”
    “I don’t know what this guy was thinking, but he’s
coy. Starts out on the 101, just walks by. Maybe a tourist who just
had lunch.”
    “How far away were you from 101?”
    “A couple of blocks, but he wanders up the sidewalk.
No crime. He inches closer till he’s a few feet away from the
action.” She leaned forward and spread her fingers toward Jesse.
“Amanda Galley’s starring in this thing, okay? So she’s hanging
out, flirting with the crew like she does. This tourist guy waddles
up and makes a remark to her, thinks he’s gonna score with this
A-lister. Well, I don’t know what he said to her; the story
versions change depending on who you talk to. But he got assaulted
with a shoe, and—”
    “A shoe? How?”
    “He got hit in the head with a shoe.”
    “Whose shoe?”
“Amanda’s! She’s in costume, some riches-to-rags character, loses
all her money and collects seashells by the seashore in her high
heels. Anyway, she pulls off her shoe and hits the guy right in the
middle of his forehead. Disaster. The guy doesn’t know what
hit him. He starts to scream when a trickle of blood runs down his
nasty face. So now the police wander over to check it out, the guy
says he’s gonna sue, all this shit. Because he got nicked in the
head by Amanda Galley’s pink shoe. She’ll probably show up on the
news tonight. What a moron.”
    “Amanda or the guy?”
“Both of them. Have you ever worked with her?”
    “No.”
    “Prima donna. And if you think about it, she’s never
had a big hit.” In a huff Jada fell back against the sofa and drew
her brunette hair to rest on her shoulders. Jesse found her olive,
Mediterranean skin tone exotic.
    Jada had had dreams of her own at one point. She grew
up in Reno, Nevada, with her own mother as her biggest fan since
infancy. As a preschooler, the talented Jada entered a long list of
beauty pageants, where she performed a tap-dance routine with a
cane and top hat, choreographed by her mom, a former dancer in
Vegas. By first grade, Jada had appeared in a handful of local
commercials and, when she was eight, landed a role on television: Bailey’s Gang , a hip, educational program that started as a
local Reno show and graduated to syndication during the mid 1980s.
Jesse had heard the rundown countless times. Jada played one of a
dozen Tree House Kids on the song-and-sketch show which was, in
actuality, a rip-off of better-known predecessors—an admission Jada
allowed because she considered herself the show’s answer to Annette
Funicello.
    After five years on the air,