“That man looks as if he’s about to die, Max,” said Dooley.
“I’m sure it’s just makeup,” I assured my friend.
“It looks very real,” he said, sounding concerned.
“That’s the point. If it looks real to us, it will look real to the people watching the movie.”
“You were my best friend, Danny,” the man in the captain’s uniform said. “How could you do this to me?”
“I had to, Rafe,” said the man on the floor, his voice raspy and weak.
“You didn’t just betray me, you betrayed your country,” said the captain.
“My country betrayed me, when they killed my parents and murdered my dog and slaughtered my cat.”
“Your parents were Nazis, and I’ll bet your dog was a Nazi, too, and your cat.”
“That doesn’t mean they had to kill them.” A trickle of blood had appeared at the corner of his mouth, and his eyes now turned up in his head.
“It all looks very convincing,” said Dooley next to me.
“Well, it should,” I said, also mesmerized by the scene.
Suddenly, one of the people with the cameras looked up, and stared in our direction. He was a fat little man with no hair. He didn’t look friendly. His next words confirmed this. “Cut!” he shouted, and I saw someone holding up a funny-looking board that read Pearl Harbor III. “Cut! Cut! Cut! What frickin idiot let those frickin cats in!”
“Uh-oh,” I said. “I think we better skedaddle, Dooley.”
“I think you’re right, Max,” said Dooley.
“Get those frickin cats out of here before I have a frickin aneurysm!” the fat man screamed.
So Dooley and I quickly scooted out the hangar door again, distinctly feeling we’d already outstayed our welcome. And as we made our way back to the part of the studio lot where Opal’s show was filmed, Dooley said, “They’re very rude out here in Hollywood, Max. Did you know they were so rude out here in Hollywood?”
“No, I didn’t know that,” I admitted.
“They use a lot of bad words.”
“I guess they do.”
“It’s probably stressful to make movies.”
“I guess it is.”
“Still. That’s no reason to use foul language.”
“No, you’re absolutely right.”
And we’d just entered the building where Opal’s production company was housed when a woman walked in and loudly demanded, “I want to see that horrible Opal Harvey and I want to see her now!”
Chapter 10
“I need more emotion, people—more drama!” Opal said, tapping the table with her finger. She was seated at the head of the table, her team listening intently and jotting down notes on their smartphones and tablets. Odelia wondered if she was the only one who still used pen and paper. Gran, of course, didn’t use anything. She just sat there, arms folded across her chest, looking grim.
“That guy over there looks like a real piece of work,” she suddenly whispered in Odelia’s ear as she pointed to a man whose hair was standing straight up as if he’d stuck his fingers in a power plug that morning. He also had an unnaturally pale pallor.
“It’s rude to point at people,” said Odelia, but she had to admit the young man did look suspicious. Then again, as her experience had taught her, it often wasn’t the people who looked suspicious who were the culprits. It was the ones who looked harmless.
“Give me the long and the short, Suzy,” Opal was saying. “What am I dealing with here?”
“Well, Miriam has been ridiculed in the media for selling weird products on her website but nevertheless has garnered a large and loyal following,” said Suzy, reading from her tablet. She was a roly-poly woman with large glasses and pigtails. “She divorced her husband, a famous musician, but stayed friends with the man in spite of the parting, mostly for the sake of the kids. She and her ex-husband and her new husband and her ex-husband’s new girlfriend even took the kids to Cabo together so that’s pretty special.”
“That is special,” Opal grunted, nodding. She wasn’t taking any notes, Odelia saw, probably committing the whole thing to memory. “But where’s the emotion? So far all I’ve heard is the media has always been mean to her, yadda yadda, divorce, yadda yadda, playing nice for the kids yadda yadda. But where does her story touch people’s hearts?”
“I think we should bring the topic around to the kids,” said the man Gran had deemed suspicious-looking. “I think the kids are the key here.”
“I don’t agree with Kurtz,” a third person piped up, a young woman with a bobbing ponytail. “I think we should leave the kids out of this. Miriam has specifically said she doesn’t want to talk about her kids. She just wants to plug her website.”
“All the more reason to go after the kids,” said the suspicious one with a horrible grin.
“No,” said Opal, after her staff had argued back and forth for a while. “We don’t go after the kids. That’s not who we are. We want emotion, we want personal appeal, but we’re not monsters, and if Miriam doesn’t want to talk about her kids we’ll respect that. But we don’t want her to simply come on the show to plug her website either…” She thought for a moment. “Let’s invite her mother. Let’s make this a double interview and focus on the bond between mother and daughter.”
“Miriam hates her mother,” Suzy said. “They haven’t spoken in years.”
“Exactly! What better way to spice up the interview than to bring them face to face?”
“Are you sure she’ll agree?”
Opal snapped her fingers. “Marcus, get Miriam on the phone. Right now. Tell her that if we can’t have her mother on the show the interview is canceled.”
“Yes, Opal,” said Marcus obediently. He was a smallish man with a wispy little mustache and beard. He removed himself from the room to get Miriam on the phone.
“So what else have we got?” said Opal.
Odelia glanced around the table. It was hard to imagine one of these people could bear such a grudge against their employer they would try to kill her. And yet someone had.
Opal had sent them the files of all of the people on her staff, but so far none of them had raised any red flags. The trouble was, she couldn’t exactly interview them and ask them straight out if they meant Opal harm. She needed to be discreet. No one was supposed to find out what was going on.
“I think they all look suspicious,” Gran grunted. “They all look like serial killers to me.”
“And how would you know what a serial killer looks like?”
“Bad hair, bad breath, bad attitude.”
“In that case we’re all serial killers.”
Gran gave her the once-over, then sniffed her breath. “Yeah, you could use a mint,” she said, “and a haircut, and you could be a hell of a lot nicer to your grandmother.” She promptly got up and grabbed her purse. “I’m getting out of here. I have a headache.”
Odelia decided to follow her grandmother out. They weren’t exactly getting any wiser sitting in on this staff meeting, and she was getting a headache, too, probably from being cooped up inside an air-conditioned space with half a dozen bad-breath people.
Following her grandmother out into the hallway, she saw that Gran was making a beeline for the coffee machine.
“Great idea,” she said gratefully as Gran handed her a cup of the brew and took a sip from her own.
“This show is quickly losing a lot of its appeal for me,” said Gran. “I mean, it’s one thing to watch it on television, but a whole nother thing to watch it being made.”
“You never want to know how the sausage is made,” Odelia agreed.
“More emotion, more emotion!” she mimicked Opal. “We’re being manipulated by these bozos, you know that, right?”