Show Business Kills Read Free Page A

described as Sammy Davis laughter. The way Sammy Davis used to laugh when Johnny Carson said something funny.
     Pounding with appreciation on the side of the hot tub, kicking their feet in the water. “Thanks a million, Maximilian.” Those
     four words had become a standard phrase among them after that. Part of their group language. The way they’d express their
     gratitude to one another, forever afterward.
    Thanks a million, Maximilian. Jan laughed to herself now, thinking that one good evening with her women friends could keep
     her going for months afterward. Then she looked over at Shannon Michaels, in the next makeup chair, jabbering away so confidently.
     Noticed the way the young woman tossed her hair and joked with Bert about her date last night, and she was reminded of herself
     at that age. The way all beautiful young ingenues behave, never imagining the day will come when they’ll be the leading lady
     in the next chair so desperately worried about the future.
    MAGGIE STANDS ANGRILY.
    MAGGIE
    Did you hear me, Lydia? I don’t know how you got in here, but I want you gone.
    LYDIA
    I don’t care what you want. Justtell me where Phillip is so I can go to him.
    LYDIA PULLS OUT A GUN.
    MAGGIE
    Put that away, Lydia. Don’t be insane. Phillip means nothing to me. I swear to you…
    LYDIA SMIRKS AND COCKS THE GUN. ON MAGGIE’S FACE. WE CUT TO:
    Wow, great opening scene, Jan thought as she turned the pages looking for more scenes for Maggie, but there weren’t any more
     in Friday’s show. They were ending the week with Maggie’s life in jeopardy. They were going to play that scene on Friday,
     so she had to go home for the weekend not knowing until her pages arrived, and maybe not even then, if she was going to live
     or die. The paranoia crept into her mind and lodged there. She had to get herself to Ed Powell’s office and talk about it
     right now.
    Her hands were damp and she wiped them on the protective Kleenex Bert had stuffed in her collar. “Fight for yourself,” Ellen
     would say. “No agent will do it for you.” Shannon and Bert were laughing a yuck-it-up kind of laugh while Jan took the last
     of the now-cool rollers out of her hair, ran a brush through the stiff curls, and walked out of the makeup room and down the
     hall to the elevator. As it rose to the fifth floor, she thought nervously about what she ought to say when she got to the
     producer’s office.
    The fifth-floor hallway was a gallery of black-and-white eleven-by-fourteen portraits of the cast. She stopped to look at
     the one of herself taken in the seventies, when she’d joined the show to play “the evil vixen, Maggie.” She was thirty-four
     that year. God, I was a vision, she thought with a mixture of pride and wonder. And when she took a step back, the light from
     above made the protective glass on the photo reflect her tired, nearly fifty-year-old face, over her glamorous young one.
    She sighed and turned and walked down the lushly carpeted hall, still not sure what she’d say to the producer, and feeling
     even less confident than she had in the elevator. Ed Powell’s secretary, Maxine, must have gone to the ladies’ room, because
     no one was in the reception area. Perfect, Jan thought, and she walked right past Maxine’s desk into Powell’s office. Jan
     had survived four producers in her fifteen years on this show. They had all either quit or been fired, and the new ones seemed
     to be getting younger each time.
    Last month Ed Powell celebrated a birthday which he kept referring to with dismay as “the big four-oh,” as if that number
     made him ancient. Ed looked up, surprised at first to see her, but then he smiled a very forced smile. “Janny Bear,” he said.
     The big welcome was completely phony. In his eyes she could see he was wondering, “How the fuck did she get past that pit
     bull Maxine?”
    “I came up so you could tell me what Lydia is going to do with the gun, Ed,” Jan said, holding up the