Show Business is Murder

him… though he must surely still be dreaming, suspended without sensation in this featureless void, a profound absence of feeling throughout his entire body… except maybe his face, seemed he could feel movement of air.

“I did the guy,” the male voice said, followed by an ominous clicking sound.

Weird dream. Maybe one of those lucid kind where you-

– another booming roar!-streak of fire pierced the blackness, briefly illuminating a… hell, he couldn’t be sure he’d glimpsed anything really.

“Never would have suspected she had a lover,” the male voice declared over a papery sound; back of a hand scraping the edge of a lamp shade, groping for a switch.

The woman blurted, “What’re you, jealous?”

The conversation seemed too linear for a dream; Corey’s dreams were usually fragmented, jumping back and forth along the temporal line like a decaying quark, and he didn’t really hear voices in other dreams, somehow just sensed them.

– incredibly harsh light flashed through Corey’s eyes to the back of his brain! So phenomenally bright there should have been pain-which quickly faded into a dark-spotted glow, like flashbulbs discharging in your face, reminding Corey of the hoards of paparazzi at some promo tour or movie premier.

The male voice, exclaiming, “Wha-who in hell is this?”

The words were clear but also distant, like conversation skittering across a still lake at night, voices originating a half-mile away but so distinct it’s as if the people stood next to you on the dock.

“I recognize him, I think, but that’s not your wife!” the woman said.

Vague images began to congeal within the fuzzy glow before him, black spots fading… indistinct forms and surfaces grew ever-more defined, though his line of vision was along a single plane-couldn’t move his eyes or even blink-staring fixedly upward at an angle.

The upper edge of a huge, Spanish-style armoire appeared in the gathering clarity, and a mirror, presumably attached to a dresser below… a closet, though all Corey could see were tops of louvered, white folding doors- above it was all black and empty, as though the periphery of tunnel vision. He was unable to move his line of sight downward, see if there were bodies to go with the voices.

Was there another form next to him? Another person? He sighed inwardly; if there were two of them, lying side-by-side, then this is definitely not a dream. This is getting caught in the act.

Corey felt a movement of air pass over his face, very cool but oddly abrasive, and he could suddenly sense that another form had moved next to the bed, standing there looking down on him-could make out a vague form at the edge of his view but could not move his eyes in order to define features.

“A movie star for Christ’s sake,” the male voice exclaimed. “Why the hell would someone famous be in my house?”

“They’re naked, Vince,” the female voice replied dryly, “it’s obvious what they were doing-what I’d like to know is who’s the woman, and why is she in your bedroom?”

LAST SUMMER…

Corey had removed a section of railing and was sitting on the elevated redwood deck of his Malibu home, legs dangling, gazing out over the frothy surf at the distant horizon of a startlingly blue Pacific-ignoring the giggling covey of string-bikinied starlets jogging by on the raked sand below, glancing up at him, unabashedly displaying their pendulous attributes, doing so with a great deal of enthusiasm.

All Matt Corey noticed was the emptiness he felt. He had always labored under the dense weight of some kind of indefinable angst, but lately the burden of this dark mood had grown intolerable… and now, when he sighed, it was as if it were his last breath.

Margo Aston lay behind him on a chaise longue, topless and gleaming under the afternoon sun-poster girl for tanning oil. “Whatsa matter, superstar?” she asked, using the term she knew he detested, trying to get him stirred up a little-even his explosive anger was better than this tiresome depression.

Making a point of looking around him, palms turned upward, Corey sighed yet again, asking, “This is it-all those movies and all the money, famous all over the planet, and this is all the better it feels?”

“You think too much, Matt,” Margo said, raising eyebrows and causing mirror-glass shades to slip down onto the bridge of her nose.

He pulled up his legs and turned to look at her. Great body. Great personality. Average mind. “And you think too little,” he replied, though of course that was bullshit; he knew she was always thinking, especially about whatever movie project she was producing-she just didn’t cotton to philosophical musing.

Margo put a mirrored gaze on him, saying, “You work more than Hackman, never seen anybody work harder- you need to learn to play hard, too.”

Corey smiled. “You complaining?”

“Not talking about sex, I’m talking about taking chances, living on the edge.”

“You want I should rob a bank?” Pointing a cocked thumb and extended finger her way.

Shook her head, short red hair hardly moving. “Not anything illegal, just improper-course illegal would be better-but nothing with guns or where somebody gets hurt,” Margo said, turning onto her flat stomach.

“You speaking from experience?”

Shrugged, resting her head on crossed hands. “When Jack and I were together we used to…” and she explained some adventures her former lover and she had gone on in Hawaii, Paris, Sao Paulo, and Morocco. “You could do things like that, too,” she said, “nothing really dangerous, but risky in some way… gotta have an imminent deadline, clock ticking, a threat of being caught, something to lose.”

Might work, Corey thought… then wondered what in hell was wrong with him; he was known by a couple billion people around the planet, richer’n Croesus, have any woman he wanted, and yet he was still not satisfied. Looking for some meaning to it all.

Course maybe it was true, you had to struggle to be genuinely happy… take a risk now and then, put something on the line-start out with a few break-ins, then maybe something riskier; he needed something to fan the flames, ’cause it sure seemed that getting there wasn’t just half the fun, it was the whole enchilada.

… THIS IS DEFINITELY not a dream, it’s a real bedroom.

Not his bedroom but something familiar about it.

Those roars must’ve been gunshots. Though if he’d been shot, why no pain? Was he in shock? Trauma- induced catatonia-like that horror flick he’d done early in his career about being buried alive? Or had a bullet severed his spine?

A sudden thought shied beneath him-the body next to him, who was it?

Margo? Yes, it had to be Margo. That was the second shot. Ah, damn… not Margo.

He tried to turn his head but couldn’t move… after a few moments, various lines he’d memorized for doctor roles over the years began echoing through his mind: I’m sorry, Mrs. Baker… no sensorimotor impulses emanating from your husband’s brain… can’t move a muscle.

That fits… friggin’ statue, stone cold and helpless.

Of course now something else has begun to happen-surroundings are growing darker, as though someone was slowly dimming a light switch; could still make out objects, top of the walls, but they seemed vague and indistinct. A grainy dense fog began to materialize in the air, dull and menacing…

Oh, Christ, he’s losing even this limited vision…

– another part he’d played on daytime TV resonated inside his skull: It appears certain, Ms. Moore, that your boyfriend is going blind, what we in the healing business call vision-dead… this is a condition caused by the fact that his primary visual cortex has nearly ceased functioning due to the extensive brain damage.

Having recited that unwieldy line, the script had demanded even more from his character: All that