Star Stuck Dead

Chapter 1 Sunday, June 23, 1946 I was having a wonderful dream. Then I woke up.I was in the hospital. I didn't remember how I got there.It was a private room. That much I could make out. But somewhere off to my right, an enormous window was letting in entirely too much light. I rolled away from it, flinching and groaning -- making the sounds a person makes when her head is pounding and her stomach is lurching. I buried my face in the pillow and reached for the nurse call button.While I was still groping for it, the nurse came in."You're awake," she said cheerfully. It seemed like the best news she'd had in a week. "Good morning.""Not so far."She chuckled indulgently as she passed the foot of the bed, a brisk blur of white to my one exposed eye. I heard her snap the window shade down. The room got a bit darker."Thanks," I said."How are you feeling?""My head hurts, and I think I might be sick."She pulled a bedpan out of the bedside cabinet and set it on top beside the water carafe. "Use this if you need to. When the doctor comes, we can give you something for the pain."I made a few more groaning noises to indicate that I thought that would be a good idea."Now that you're awake," she said, "I'll go call the police."I brought my other eye out of the pillow. "What?""Don't you remember what happened last night?""I couldn't have been hit by anything smaller than a truck."She chuckled again. "I heard you were a movie writer.""I think I'm usually funnier. What time is it?""About seven-thirty. A Mrs. Ross called and said she'd come by later to pick you up." She started for the door."Nurse, this might sound like a strange question, but where am I?""At County," she said proudly. "Now try to get some rest."There was something else I wanted to ask her. Or was it a hundred things? I couldn't remember what any of them were, so I let her go and concentrated on my groaning.After a while, though, I got tired of it and rolled over and looked around. The window turned out to be only regulation size. Beneath it was a silver radiator and a wide-planked, dark-varnished wooden floor, well scrubbed and hard-used. Almost everything else -- the walls, the chairs, the bedside cabinet -- was the same unfortunate shade of yellow, somewhere between mustard and jaundice. It was just the sort of color the government liked to paint the insides of public buildings, the sort of color no actual member of the public would be caught dead with in his own home. Now that the war was over, and we could get paint again easily, the hospital was apparently repainting with a vengeance.Even a good color would not have helped much: the room would still look as if it had lived through too many years with too little money. The enamel on the slats at the end of the bed was chipped. On the ceiling, there was a faint veining of cracks spreading from the corners and from the edges of the white metal fan. As the breeze lifted the window shade, I could see that the screen was sagging and patched.County. What was I doing at County? Why had I been brought all the way back into Los Angeles? Surely there had been a hospital closer. Maybe the thieves had taken my identification, and County was the only hospital that would accept what might be a charity case. I wondered who had found me all the way out there in Topanga Canyon. I would like to say thank you.I lifted the sheet and examined my body. There were assorted bruises on my forearms, a half dozen stitches across my knee, and a nasty scrape on my hip where I'd fallen in the gravel. On the whole, I thought it would have been simpler if the bastards had just pulled guns. Of course, if they had, they might have shot me before they robbed me. There was that to consider. I could imagine the story in the papers -- on the front page, of course, because of Franklin -- STAR'S WIFE FOUND DEAD IN DITCH.York, Sheila is the author of 'Star Stuck Dead', published 2003 under ISBN 9780743470469 and ISBN 074347046X.