Hollywood Stuff

Chapter One Nothing good ever comes from a conversation that starts with "babe." from Hollywood Diary by Belinda St. Germaine Jane Wheel knew better than to speak on the record. One month ago, when asked if she would be interviewed for a newsmagazine program by the journalist who had written last summer's story of Johnny Sullivan's murder as a syndicated feature, coloring it as cautionary tale of small-town grift and aging Americans in rural isolation, which, truth be told, Jane had thought a bit over the top at the time, she could have and should have said no. And if her mother, Nellie, hadn't agreed with Jane's first impulse, telling her that she would look like a fool, going on television bragging and yammering about other people's business, Jane might have remained firm in her refusal. But something about Nellie's advice to say no turned Jane's no into a yes. That's how she ended up in a small television studio, miked for sound and pancaked for glamour, all of her instincts for self-preservation, her obsessive desire for privacy, her almost paranoid fears of self-revelation conspiring to stop Jane from talking. She choked on a glass of water, causing her to cough unattractively for the first five minutes of the pre-interview. She then felt her muted cell phone vibrate in her pocket. She excused herself, explained that her husband was out of town, she had to answer it in case it was her son calling . . . and left the room. There, she explained in an angry whisper to the actual caller, Tim Lowry, her media-curious best friend, that the interview had barely started, she could hardly tell him how it was going. She returned to the set with her lipstick freshenedTim did know his stuff when it came to cosmetic remindersand, when the camera rolled on her return, answered each question posed about the murder, about the experience in Kankakee at Fuzzy Neilson's farm, as directly and as cautiously as she could. Jane paused for a drink of water, remembering to allow her lips to stay moistenedTim's voice in her ear againand relaxed, just a bit. It was going well. She hadn't cursed, stammered, stuttered, or blurted out anything negative about anyone personally. Then Marisa Brown, the journalist who had written the original story that had been picked up by newspapers in almost every city in the country, leaned forward, girlfriend to girlfriend, and asked Jane Wheel, on camera, the million-dollar question. "One day you were haunting garage sales, the next you were solving murders. Do you ever feel that your life has become a movie?" Jane forgot that there was tape rolling. Her throat suddenly cleared. She opened her brown eyes a bit wider, barely licked her lips, and leaned forward in her chair. "That's exactly how I feel. Every time I find a body, I think somebody's going to jump out and yell, Candid Camera, or what was that new one? Oh yeah . . . Jane Wheel. You've been punk'd." After that, Jane couldn't stop talking. She described her parents, Don and Nellie, their tavern, the EZ Way Inn, the gambling scandal that had involved practically their whole town. She babbled on about her neighbor's murder and mentioned that she had been a suspect in that one because of an innocent kiss. "Hey, it didn't mean anything," Jane said. "I mean, we'd been drinking, for heaven's sake." Jane found that she liked playing to an audience. Marisa was smiling and nodding. Marisa's sister, Laura, who had taken the photographs for the print pieFiffer, Sharon is the author of 'Hollywood Stuff' with ISBN 9780312343064 and ISBN 031234306X.