Soap Opera Slaughters Read Free Page B

often heard the name. Hilary doesn’t talk much about her girlhood, unless to complain about her father. But on those infrequent occasions that find Hilary in a rare nostalgic mood, she usually mentions her cousin Lainie— Laraine—with a mixture of affection and envy. Lara née Laraine was a breezy, outgoing, assertive young woman; everything Hilary wasn’t and wished she could be. Hilary constantly argued with her mother, but Lainie got away with lots of things without ever being caught or scolded. Oddly, Hilary never considered it unfair; she loved her cousin and secretly vowed to be more like her when she grew older. I had no idea if she’d succeeded, but I always thought it’d be interesting to meet Lainie and compare her with Hilary. Nothing ever was said about Lainie being an actress, so it didn’t dawn on me that Lara’s uncanny resemblance to Hilary was anything but coincidence.
    Sipping at her Kirin beer, Hilary told me she got a phone call from Lara several weeks after I took a job at Buder’s Djinn Investigations in Philadelphia. “The two of us got together and talked over ancient history. I agreed to handle Lara’s PR, but that wasn’t till after I helped get her work on ‘Riverday.’”
    “How’d you manage that?” I asked, amazed. Soap casting is very much of a closed-shop affair.
    “Do you remember Abel Harrison?”
    Trim-Tram Toys? Sure.”
    “He left Trim-Tram and formed his own ad agency. Recently he diversified into talent.”
    Harrison was a wispy nebbish who kept his tenure at the toy firm because he was the president’s brother-in-law. Otherwise, he was a family thorn, a genius at botching every assignment. But then Hilary got mixed up in a small problem of industrial thievery at the company, and by the time she unraveled things, Harrison inherited the ad department He surprised everyone, himself included, by showing remarkable eptness for the field.
    “Harrison Talent,” Hilary continued, “is the new name of Maggert-Axel, which Abel bought out. Now he supplies extras for a lot of East Coast films and does all the casting for ‘Riverday.’ I called in an old debt and got Lara her part”
    I suppressed an urge to ask whether she also helped Harry onto the show.
    The press room door opened. A dapper man entered. Trim, dark, with close-cropped curly brown hair and a narrow nose supporting black spectacles, he was, according to Hilary, Barry Clover, publicity coordinator for, and partner in CloverLeaf Shows, the major producer of soap festivals throughout the country—specializing in anything from ticketed bruncheons accommodating perhaps a hundred hard-core fans to free monster rallies like the one I was attending. The latter events, I was told later, draw anywhere from six thousand to ten thousand people in a single day.
    Clover stepped to the floor mike, gently tapped it to make sure it was live,” then said, The one o’clock show begins in ten minutes. I’ll lead anyone who wants to see it to the reserved press section in front. Those of you in the middle of interviews don’t have to rush if you don’t want to. The press room’s open all day, the food’ll keep coming and the bar won’t run dry.”
    An audible sigh from the working press.
    Hilary finished her beer and stood. “I have to watch the show. Want to see how Lara does?”
    I nodded, though my feelings were mixed. I would have liked to be alone with Hilary. But I wanted to meet my dream girl too, preferably without Hilary hanging over me. That, of course, was now impossible. As Lara’s PR agent, Hilary would be right at my elbow. It also occurred to me that Hilary wouldn’t much like it if she knew my reason for coming to the mall. She’d assumed my fortuitous arrival to be nothing more than a geographical coincidence. She has the typical New Yorker’s Lilliputian concept of the size of Philadelphia.
    Clover led us to the parking lot and beyond to the far end of the mall, where we came upon some enormous