Wanting Sheila Dead(105)

“And it costs a fortune,” Mrs. Melvarian said. “Even with the Medicare.”

“She had to be seeing a doctor,” Gregor said patiently. “She had one of those plastic pill organizers on her when she was taken to the hospital. She had medications, and the only way you can get medications is by seeing a doctor. She had a prescription painkiller for the arthritis. She had one of those drugs that lower blood cholesterol. She had one of the ones that lower blood pressure—”

“She never had any such thing,” Mrs. Vardanian said.

The other two Very old Ladies looked equal startled. “Oh,” Mrs. Edelakian said, “Viola is right. Sophie couldn’t have had blood pressure medicine.”

“She really couldn’t,” Mrs. Melvarian agreed.

Mrs. Vardanian would have looked triumphant if she hadn’t looked so disgusted.

“Sophie Mgrdchian,” she said, “has low blood pressure. It’s so low that once when she went in for a gall bladder operation and they gave her Demerol for the pain, when they did the blood pressure test they thought she was dead. Except that she was sitting up and talking, so she wasn’t. Sophie Mgrdchian never took a pill to lower her blood pressure in her life. It would have killed her.”





FOUR



1


The individual interviews were an important part of the show, just as they were an important part of any reality show. They were always filmed as if the girl being interviewed was talking by herself, as if nobody was asking her questions or even in the room. The trick was to convince the girls that nothing they said would be heard by the judges—and especially by Sheila Dunham—until the show was in postproduction and about to be aired. You didn’t want the girls pulling their punches, or saying insipid little nicey-nice things because they were afraid of Sheila having one of her fits, or of being eliminated. You wanted them right there and pumping away, saying the kind of things that made viewers write in and call them bitches.

Olivia Dahl had the schedule for the individual interviews in her hand, on her clipboard, with everything else. She had called the interviewer, an outside film editor whose name she kept screwing up no matter how many times she wrote it down, and told him that he would have to come in and work, regardless.

“I know there’s a lot going on,” she’d said, “but we just can’t get too far off schedule. We’ve got commitments to the networks. Try to think of a way to get them to talk about anything else besides the shooting.”

Actually, Olivia didn’t expect them to talk about anything else but the shooting. It wasn’t the way this sort of thing went. She just wanted a reasonably calm and not particularly actionable set of interviews, because she was going to need a few for the second episode. With the first episode—the one where they picked the base fourteen—she always had a lot to work with, because there were interviews with the girls who failed as well as the ones who succeeded. She had thirty girls to choose from and more film than she needed. With the second episode, there were only the fourteen, and she got what she got.

The room they had designated for the interviews was called the morning room. It was at the far end of one of the wings, accessed by the main hall that ran in both directions from the back of the stairs in the center core of the house. Olivia had originally chosen this room because it was far away from the main action and therefore more likely to be private. She didn’t want girls listening in on other girls. Now the main attraction of the morning room was that it wasn’t a crime scene or anywhere near a crime scene.

She stood in the doorway and looked around. There was a fireplace here, but then there were fireplaces in most of the rooms of the house. Or there seemed to be. The ceiling was high. That was true of most of the rooms of the house, too. The crew had cleared out all the furniture that had been in here and substituted just two plain steel and leather chairs of the kind they sometimes used for conference rooms at businesses that didn’t have enough money. It didn’t matter, nobody was going to see the chairs. Olivia checked off all this on her clipboard, and then she turned around to see what Sheila Dunham was doing.

“Do you mean to follow me around all afternoon?” she asked. “Or are you seeking safety in numbers or something like that?”

“If I was seeking safety in numbers, I wouldn’t seek it with you,” Sheila said. Her black hair was pulled back so tightly on her head, it made her forehead look almost smooth. She still looked every day of fifty-six, and she was nowhere near that old yet. “No,” she said. “I was thinking. Maybe we should come right out and ask them.”