Elimination Night (29 page)

“You’re kidding.”

“Absolutely not. Chaz writes whatever I ask him to, more or less. Oh, and see those lights over there?” He pointed out of the window: Beyond it, I could just about trace the illuminated outline of a smaller vessel. I was surprised I hadn’t noticed it from the air.

“Paparazzi,” he said. “I invited them here myself. I even chartered the boat for them. And you know what that means? It means I know exactly what they’re up to, all hours of the day. It also means they keep
other
paparazzi away, to protect their turf. It gives me control, Sasha. I get to be photographed at my best, when I’m not eating. No one looks good when they’re eating, Sasha. Remember that. It’s important.”

“But… don’t these journalists have…
ethics?
”

“C’mon, Sasha. Chaz Chipford isn’t exactly a contender for any literary prizes. Look at him: He’s pathetic. Entertainment reporters have all the sophistication of single-cell amoebas. Have you ever been to a junket before? My God, it’s depressing. Full of broke, ugly, desperate morons. You don’t even have to pay them for a good review most of the time. A free drink and two minutes with a celebrity is enough. It’s incredible that the likes of Len Braithwaite hasn’t figured that out yet. He won’t even provide an open bar for the press at
Project Icon,
never mind a massage room. No wonder the trades have been so hostile. Well, it’s too late now.”

Suddenly, Crowther stood back, grinned, and opened his arms.
Someone he knew was approaching from behind me. I turned—and felt blood drain from my face.

Then I almost lost my balance.

“Hello, Sasha,” said my former boss. “It’s been a while.”

“
Bill,
” I croaked.

“The one and only,” he replied, “Although thanks to you, that’s not exactly true any more, is it? I hear you stole my identity. Just don’t take out any credit cards in my name!”

“But I thought you—?”

“All faked,” interrupted Crowther. “The accident, the light falling from the rig—the blood, the ambulance. That’s why we did it in Denver. We knew no one would ever go visit him.”

“But…
why?
” I could barely move my jaw.

“Bill had a contract he couldn’t get out of, and I needed his help. It’s not easy setting up a franchise like
The Talent Machine
in eighteen months, y’know. I wanted the best of the best. And Bill here was at the top of my list.”

“Sorry, Sash,” offered Bill, sheepishly. “He made it worth my while.”

“Len is gonna freak out!” I blurted.

“Len will
never know,
” said Crowther, firmly. “Remember our little agreement?”

“Oh, the nondisclosure thing, right… look, I don’t mean to be rude, Nigel,
but why am I here?
What was the whole deal with the helicopter? Why am I in Malibu, on a yacht with a basketball court for the president, at ten o’clock at night? I don’t understand.”

“We should talk in private,” he said. “Come to my room.”

“Nigel,” I said, raising my hands in protest. “I really don’t think—”

“Relax, for God’s sake, I’m not Joey Lovecraft. This is strictly business. This way.”

He escorted me out of the room, through a door with a raised threshold, and down a narrow hallway.

“You
like
Joey, don’t you?” said Crowther, when we reached the master suite.

“I’m mad at him, actually,” I replied.

Now we were inside. The room looked pretty much the same as the entertainment area, only with a low, Japanese-style (i.e., hard) bed in the center, covered with monochromatic throw pillows. The entire yacht was such a heterosexual bachelor cliché, I couldn’t help but wonder if its owner was trying to prove something.

“Yeah, but you
like
him,” Crowther continued, pulling out a chair for me by his desk. “Even though I can tell from the look on your face that he’s already made some kind of awful pass at you. God, how predictable. I bet he tried to win you over with the parachute story. That’s his masterpiece, the parachute story. Such a shame it isn’t true.”

“What do you mean,
it isn’t true?
” I said, feeling unexpectedly defensive. “Of course it’s true! A hundred thousand people were at that gig. They all saw it happen.
It was on TV.
”

“Trust me: He didn’t jump out of that plane.”

“But that’s… ridiculous.”

“He didn’t
jump,
Sasha. Blade Morgan
pushed
him.”

“Oh, c’mon.”

“Believe what you want. The truth is, Joey screwed Blade’s wife. Knocked her up. And while he was screwing her
in Blade’s own bed,
he also took the liberty of stealing his drugs—even more of a betrayal, in those days. He’s a very twisted man, Joey Lovecraft. All the fault of his Danish mother, apparently—she used to throw boiling water at him when he sat under her piano. Anyway, in the plane, Joey gave Blade that whole speech about jumping—how the band was worth more to him than his own life, et cetera, et cetera—and before he could finish it, Blade just pushed him out. He figured that if Joey was going to die anyway, he might as well have the satisfaction of being the one who killed him. Then obviously he changed his mind, and went out and caught him.”

“How can you be so
sure?
”

“Blade is a good friend. He regrets saving Joey to this day—wakes up in the night screaming about it. He says that if he’d let Joey die, Honeyload would have hired a new singer, and the last thirty-five years might have actually been fun.”

“
He
sounds like the twisted one.”

“Joey’s not the
worst
of your colleagues, of course,” Nigel went on, ignoring me. “God, no. I mean, who could ever hope to compete with Wayne Shoreline? He’s a functioning psychopath, y’know. Len showed me the medical file that Rabbit had to send to the insurance company when he joined the show. Absolutely terrifying.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know about Wayne.”

I wished Crowther would get to the point. This was getting exhausting. But he seemed to be relishing this opportunity to speak ill of his former coworkers.

“Let me tell you something about Wayne, Sasha,” he said. “The morning of the first ever ‘results show’—in the days when
Project Icon
had only one voting line, because no one thought we’d make it past the midnight time slot in August—he called me at home. Told me he had a plane waiting, and we needed to go somewhere special for a late breakfast. Of course I was intrigued, so I went along for the ride. We flew down past San Diego, across Baja California, and over to some godforsaken island in the Gulf of California. Must have taken an hour and fifteen minutes to get there, maybe a bit longer. Anyway, so we land on this island—which is part of Mexico—and go to its only restaurant. Wayne insists on ordering for both us: some kind of thick—almost black—very spicy stew. It’s the last thing I want to eat for breakfast, frankly. I can get only two or three spoonfuls down. But Wayne, he practically licks his plate clean, grinning the whole time. Then he gets the chef to come out and explain to us what it is we’ve just eaten.

“You know what the chef did? He just
whistled
—and all these dogs came running out of the backyard. Young dogs. Puppies. Very cute. Then he points to them and makes a throat-slitting motion. That’s what was in the stew:
Puppy.
‘El Woofaleah,’ the dish was called. Some ancient Mayan recipe, apparently. Or maybe it was Aztec. Whatever. Obviously, I was terribly upset. I happen to like puppies very much. But then Wayne got very serious. He told me that when he looked in the contestants’ eyes that evening, he wanted to be utterly without
mercy. El Woofaleah had been his mental preparation—like he was Muhammad Ali, getting ready for a fight.
‘I don’t want to feel like a human being,
’ he said. And in truth, I think it helped him during the broadcast. He single-handedly delivered the most exquisite cruelty that Americans had ever witnessed on live TV. Back then, remember, we’d all seen kids get voted off reality shows before. But what Wayne did… oh, it was very different. I mean, here was a guy who walked on stage knowing that he’d just eaten a
puppy
for breakfast. No one ever called it a ‘results show’ again after that. God, no—it was an
elimination night.
”

“This is a joke, right?” I said, wanting to throw up.

“Ask Wayne,” shrugged Crowther, as the intercom on his desk lit up. Crowther reached for the handset. “Okay, I’ll be right there, captain,” he said. Then, to me: “One moment. I’m needed on the bridge.” When he left the room, I put my head in my hands. So much information to process. Bill Redmond wasn’t on life support.
ShowBiz
reporters took bribes in exchange for positive coverage. Joey hadn’t jumped out of that plane.
Wayne Shoreline ate puppies for breakfast.

I needed a drink of water. Looking around, I noticed an unopened bottle on Crowther’s desk, so I reached over to get it, glancing at his laptop as I did so. The e-mail program was running, with a message in the center of the screen. I tried not to look… but couldn’t resist. The “From” line was familiar enough, but the rest was in some unintelligible font. I peered closer—I couldn’t make out a single word—and then almost fell off my chair with fright when something moved against my right leg. False alarm: It was my phone, vibrating. Composing myself, I pulled it out of the buttoned cargo pocket on my thigh.

A text from Mitch:

“IT’S JOEY. COME QUICK. CYPRESS.”

I’d barely reached the word “Cypress”—which presumably meant Mount Cypress Medical Center in Beverly Hills—when Crowther returned. He seemed impatient now, colder.

“Okay,” he said. “Down to business. I want you to come and work for
The Talent Machine.
Bill’s been monitoring your progress at
Icon,
and thinks you’d make an excellent deputy. I can offer you a car—my assistant will coordinate between you and Aston Martin of Beverly Hills—plus the use of a penthouse at Seventy-eight La Brea. Salary: Two hundred thousand dollars, details to be agreed between my office and your representative. Only of course you don’t have a representative, so I’ll have to get you one of those, too. Oh, and while we’re on the subject, I hear you’re writing a novel, so I suppose you’d like to speak to my literary agent, Rick Ponderosa, who as I’m sure you know is the very best in New York.”

“This can’t be… real.”

“Well, it won’t be real unless you give me your answer in twelve hours. Which—as you know—is approximately two hours before the results of a certain pee test are due back from a certain laboratory in the San Fernando Valley. Although I suspect that Joey has more urgent problems to deal with, given his current location.”

I froze.

“How do you… who
told
you… ?”

“
Please.
I have my sources. David’s waiting for you in the chopper outside. I’m afraid the closest he can get to the hospital is Santa Monica Airport. You can order a cab from there. Remember, Sasha: Twelve hours.
Yes or no.
”

Room 709

JOEY PRACTICALLY KEPT
an open suite at Mount Cypress Medical Center, ready to take him at a moment’s notice. It was one of those running jokes. “Call Cypress!” he’d yell to Mitch whenever something trivial was upsetting him. “Tell ’em to prepare my room. I’m comin’ in!” Everyone would laugh. But it didn’t seem so funny now.

He’d overdosed, according to Mitch’s second text, which had arrived when I was in the air.

It was bad.

After that, no more updates: Mitch had gone offline, wouldn’t pick up his phone. So I did as he’d instructed, and made my way to the hospital as quickly as possible. I hardly dared think what might have prompted Mitch’s silence:
Was Joey even still alive?
I kept checking the
ShowBiz
website, just in case. There were no dead rock star stories, thank God: Just another page one feature about Sir Harold’s German problems, which appeared to be getting worse. “Big Corp implosion buys resurgent
Icon
more time,” it read. “Could lucky break save unlucky season thirteen?”

Resurgent?
Even
ShowBiz
must have expected last night’s ratings to be good.

What a moment for Joey to fall off the wagon.

Three hundred dollars, the lousy cab driver charged me. For a fifteen-minute journey. I guess it was my own fault for calling him in advance, which meant he got to see me arrive at Santa Monica airport in a presidential-grade helicopter. I didn’t even argue with his crooked meter, which had raced upward like the jackpot on a one-armed bandit. I just signed the receipt and threw it at him through the hatch. “No wonder everyone buys their own damn car in this city,” I said, climbing out.

Security was tight at the hospital: Black-and-whites on the street, armed guards in the lobby. And of course no one wanted to tell me Joey Lovecraft’s room number:
“Joey who? I’m afraid there’s no Joey-whatever-his-name-is here. You must be mistaken.”

This was precisely why Joey always went to Mount Cypress: The place was built for celebrities in distress, what with the two-thousand-square-foot “recovery suites” and counterpaparazzi squads at every entry and exit point. Not that I’d noticed any telltale blacked-out SUVs on the way in, which suggested no one knew about this yet—or at least no one other than
Nigel Crowther
…

Holy crap, tonight had been weird.

I couldn’t even
begin
to think about who Crowther’s “source” might be—or anything else regarding my time aboard
The Talent and the Glory,
for that matter. With Joey in the hospital, in God knows what condition, it made me feel almost traitorous.

At the reception desk, I tried desperately to remember the fake name Joey had used when booking himself into hotels on the
Project Icon
auditions tour. It was a cartoon character, I knew that much. But which one?
Think, Sash, think.
“I’m here to see Mr. Scooby-Doo,” I announced, eventually, to the exhausted-looking and bespectacled African American man behind the counter. “He’s in one of the private recovery suites.”