Show Business Kills (17 page)

Ellen always took the long way to the city over Cahuenga Pass and then west on Sunset, because her car phone didn’t work in
the canyons, and she liked to return some of her business calls, to get them out of the way while she drove. Tonight on her
way to Marly’s, she was in the middle of a conversation with Garry Marshall about the grosses on his newest picture when a
click told her it was her call waiting, and she asked Garry to hold.

“Yo,” she said, knowing the call beeping in had to be Greenie. “Where are you, Ellen?” he asked her.

“In my leased German car, Greenberg of the Jacksonville, Florida, Greenbergs. Who wants to know?” Her last meeting tonight
had actually ended at seven, but only because the “boys” were going to see a screening of a competitor’s picture. They were
all hurrying out the door tonight when Schatzmann said to her, “I’ll come in your car. Since the screening’s at Universal,
you can drop me back here.”

“I’m not coming to the screening,” Ellen said.

“Friday night services?” Bibberman asked her, overhearing. “Say Kaddish for your career.” The prayer for the dead. “El, I
want you to get off the other line and pull your car
over to the side of the road. “ Greenie’s voice was too serious.

“Oh, shit,” she said, trying to guess why the doom and gloom. “Did Bibberman freak out because I didn’t go to the screening?”

“Ellen, do what I’m telling you!”

“Greenie, I’m on the other line with a director who can make a deal. I’ll call you back. “

“Hang up on whoever it is, and do as I tell you.”

“Greens, I’m at Yucca Street in downtown Hollywood. A single white woman in a sixty-five-thousand-dollar car pulling over
here would be committing a serious faux pas if she intended to stay alive. Didn’t you read
Bonfire of the Vanities
? I know you didn’t see the movie, because nobody did. Happily, it wasn’t my picture.”

“Get off the other line.”

“You’re pushy,” she said and clicked to the other line to say good-bye to Garry Marshall.

“Garry? I’ve got a fire I have to put out on line two. I’ll check in with you tomorrow. “ She sighed before she paused the
button again. “I just talked to my mother in Miami Beach five minutes ago, and Roger this morning, and they were both okay,
so what requires stopping the car on my way to Girls’ Night?”

“It’s Jan,” Greenie told her. “It’s all over the news.”

Rose knew a back way in to the underground parking at Cedars. It was an entrance she’d discovered in the months when Allan
was sick and she was practically living in the hospital. Tonight after she drove up to the ticket machine and pulled out the
ticket, she automatically steered her car into a
parking space right near the elevator, and then remembered that this had been her regular parking spot. The one she pulled
into on those mornings when she brought Allan a shopping bag full of goodies she hoped would cheer him.

Tonight when she turned off the engine, she sighed and sat wishing she was anywhere in the world but at that hospital. She
could hear the whine of an ambulance in the distance, and she tried to get herself ready to face whatever was happening with
Jan.

Maybe she’d get up to the seventh floor to find that Jan didn’t make it through the surgery alive. Maybe she’d be alive but
close to death in the coma Andy described, and the friends would sit by her bed for weeks or months waiting, the way Rose
had with Allan. Watching a myriad of doctors moving in and out of the room, shrugging their shoulders and saying what they
had said to her so many times, “There’s not a whole lot more we can do.”

Rose was afraid she couldn’t handle another hospital deathwatch. Marly, Jan, and Ellen were all stronger than she was when
it came to emergencies. They had practically carried her through those last weeks when she was saying her good-byes to Allan.
Sometimes Marly would come and sit in the waiting room on the seventh floor, where Allan’s room was, not wanting to intrude
on Rose and Allan’s last precious hours. When Rose eventually came out to take a breath that wasn’t fetid with death, Marly
would be there.

Together the two friends would walk up and down the echoing hospital halls, down to the twenty-four-hour cafeteria with its
own heavy, greasy odor, to the gift shop in the lobby with its too-cheerful volunteer salesladies hovering.

And on the days Marly could get Rose to leave the building
for a while, they’d stroll down La Cienega Boulevard to the Beverly Center, where the flashy stores would be a bright, distracting
show as they walked. Sometimes they’d move side by side silently, sometimes Marly would jabber away in small talk invented
to amuse Rose.

Ellen’s visits to Allan were always early in the morning, on her way to what was then her low-level studio job, to bring him
pirated videos of films that hadn’t been released yet. Allan was a big movie buff, and during the long night when he thrashed
in pain and needed diversion, he loved to watch the previews of films on a VCR Rose brought in.

Jan worked all day on the soap, but she came to the hospital at night to check in on Allan and Rose, joking that she was really
coming so that maybe she’d get lucky and “meet somebody.” On the nights when all three friends showed up, after Allan fell
asleep and Rose came out of the room, not wanting to go home in case he awakened and needed her, Marly, Jan, and Ellen would
sit the deathwatch with her in the waiting room, able to make her laugh with their stories.

The levity the friends’ visits brought to Rose, who was so bloated with grief she was sure she’d never laugh or love or work
again, felt like a magic drug that momentarily blurred her pain. Even though the giggles soon segued into tears and then became
sobs that seized and shook her. And each of her friends took turns holding on to her, hugging her silently, helping her let
Allan go. How would she have ever made it through this life without them?

Thanks a million, Maximilian. Maybe that was the first time Jan told it, when Allan was dying. Rose remembered the way the
other people in the waiting room had looked over at them disapprovingly when the four friends laughed at
Jan’s best story. Now she took a deep breath as she got on the elevator and pushed the button for seven. The elevator hissed
up one floor from the underground parking, and at the lobby the doors opened for someone to get on. But no one did.

Rose spotted a group of paparazzi milling around outside the front entrance to the hospital. Probably hospital security wouldn’t
let them in. They must be waiting for some of the stars from “My Brightest Day” to show up, so they could snap some shots
of the actors’ concerned faces as they came to check on Jan.
SOAP OPERA ACTRESS SHOT BY UNKNOWN ASSAILANT
would make a great story for all the sleaze gazettes.

She saw one of the photographers glance through the glass door at the elevator and look at her appraisingly, not recognize
her, then turn back to keep watch for somebody with a recognizable face to shoot, so he could sell the pictures to the tabloids.
The elevator doors closed and Rose realized when it stopped again on the second floor that in this hospital, for the benefit
of the orthodox Jews who were not allowed to press a button on Shabbat, the elevator stopped on every floor.

The continuous stops created an odd visual for her. In a script it would have said
DOORS OPEN, ROSE’S POINT OF VIEW:
orderlies on their break, chatting,
CLOSE, DOORS OPEN, ROSE’S POINT OF VIEW:
two doctors in suits, consulting,
CLOSE, DOORS OPEN
, nobody: just a piece of strange modern art on the wall, CLOSE.

Andy was waiting for her on the seventh floor in the surgical ICU waiting room. Rose was sure those were the same orange,
peach, and silk flowers that had been sitting on that same Formica table when she sat here after Allan’s last surgery. She
remembered thinking then how tacky silk flowers
were. Now Allan was long dead and the silk flowers were still there and poor Jan might be dead soon, too, and the silk flowers
would outlive her.

Andy pulled her close against him, and she could feel his sweet furry face against her forehead. “I know how you feel about
this place, and I guess I didn’t think about it when we were on the phone, but on my way over here…”

“How is she?” Rose asked. She had to be able to tough it out, try to put the past out of her mind, to be there for Jan, didn’t
she? Maybe not. Maybe there were only so many hospital days one had to serve in this life, and she had done her time. She
imagined someone stopping her on her way in to see Jan, saying “You don’t have to do this, Mrs. Schiffman. You have a Ph.D.
in hospital crisis.”

“She’s in recovery, she’s still unconscious. She either fell or had a blow to the head. She has a subdural hematoma, so they
not only had to remove the bullet but the blow caused the blood vessels under her skull to rupture, so they also have to deal
with a collection of blood under her skull. The edema in her head is what’s causing the coma.”

Rose leaned into her husband and put her face against him, and after a minute or two she felt Marly’s arms and recognized
the scent of Joy, and then Ellen’s scent of Norell, and now they all stood in a circle with Andy, too, holding on to one another
as Andy told the others what he’d just told Rose.

“Poor Maria and little Joey. I went to pick them up and take them to my house,” Marly said. “The police were there. Maria
told me that she was about to bathe Joey and she heard a man’s voice downstairs talking to Jan and Jan and the man seemed
to be fighting. She said the bath was running when they heard a loud noise, but she thought it was just the front
door slamming. When Joey had his pajamas on, she sent him down to be with Jan, and he was the one who found her.”

“Oh, no,” Rose said. “That poor baby.”

“Do they have any idea who did it?” Ellen asked.

“The police I talked to when I went up to the house said that they’re pretty sure it was some fan who broke onto the set the
other day. Jan was shot with a thirty-eight-caliber gun, and that fan has one registered to him. They figured he probably
followed her home and staked her out for a few days, and then today he got up his nerve and rang the bell,” Marly said.

“Do they have him in custody?” Andy asked.

“Not yet, but they think he’ll be easy to find,” Marly answered.

“On the radio they said they thought Jan let the man in,” Rose said.

“Oh, you know Jan. She probably thought she could reason with him and get him to leave her alone,” Marly said.

“Never. She wouldn’t let someone like that in. She was much too protective of Joey.” Ellen shook her head in certainty.

“How could anyone hurt her?” Marly wondered out loud.

“If life was fair,” Ellen said, “the guy would have gone over to my studio and mowed down the schmucks I work for.”

Everyone laughed a little laugh and Marly said, “Or to Billy’s,” and then everyone laughed another pained laugh.

“Did you see the people out front?” Ellen asked Rose.

“What people? I came in the back way.”

“The fans,” Marly said, moving Rose toward one of the giant windows that overlooked the courtyard between the
north and south towers of the hospital. “My God, there are already twice as many as there were when I drove in,” Marly said,
and Rose could see more than a hundred people milling in the now dark night, holding flickering candles.

“They have signs that say, ‘
WE LOVE YOU, MAGGIE FLYNN
,’ ” Marly told her.

“It’s so eerie,” Rose said, shivering.

“What can we do, Andy?” Marly asked.

“Nothing but wait,” he said. “I’ll try to make sure we’re updated on anything that happens. I know she doesn’t have any parents
left, but eventually one of us should call her sister and tell her how serious this is, in case she wants to come in from
Pennsylvania.” They all stood quietly, Andy with his hands in his pockets, rocking back and forth on his heels. They all knew
that calling Jan’s sister would mean Jan was about to die.

“They’ll bring her to surgical ICU after recovery. It’s right down the hall, but if they let you in to see her, it’ll only
be for a very few minutes, so I’m not even sure you three should stay here.”

“Are you crazy? We’re not moving an inch,” Marly said, and Rose was sure those were the same words she’d heard her say in
that same voice that time long ago when they stood together outside an abortion clinic, and the police warned them that the
militant right-to-lifers were on their way. Andy knew Marly well enough not to argue.

“I’ll be back in a little while,” he said to all of them, then gave Rose a little hug before he moved with a brisk doctorly
walk down the hall. The waiting area was grouped into sections. In one there was an older man reading the newspaper and a
woman doing needlepoint. In another section a boy of
about eighteen sat engrossed in whatever was being pumped into his ears from a Walkman, his big high-topped basketball-shod
feet on the little coffee table.

The three women sat on the hard blue armchairs with uncomfortable curved wooden arms. The same chairs they sat in years before
when Allan was dying. Ellen took off her cashmere Escada blazer and put it over her to serve as a blanket. Rose sighed and
shuffled through some of the magazines on the table, and Marly somehow managed to get her legs up into a lotus position, which
she sat in serenely with her eyes closed.

“Not exactly what we had in mind for Girls’ Night,” Ellen said.

“Not exactly,” Marly said, opening her eyes. “Let’s all hold hands right now and send Jan healing energy. Let’s send white
light to her injuries and put the idea out there in the universe that she’s going to heal and be well.” It was the kind of
Marly statement that usually made Ellen roll her eyes at Rose, as if to say “Cut me a break. She’s at it again.” But tonight
they were all united in their need to bring Jan back. So she took Marly’s hand and Rose’s, and they put their heads down for
a long time. After a while they looked helplessly at one another.