Wanting Sheila Dead(106)

“Ask them what?”

“If they shot at me,” Sheila said.

Olivia sighed. “They won’t tell you if they did,” she said. “And they’d have every right to scream bloody murder for their lawyers. And don’t think some of them don’t have them, or that some of them couldn’t get them in a blink.”

“Maybe,” Sheila said. “But have you considered this? Somebody is shooting at me—”

“Apparently, two somebodies.”

“Yes,” Sheila says. “Doesn’t that seem odd to you? Never mind. Somebody is shooting at me. She shot at me at the Milky Way Ballroom. She shot at me here. We’ve got to at least consider the possibility that she shot that girl in the study yesterday.”

“There is no logical reason why the two things have to have anything to do with each other,” Olivia said.

“There’s a common-sense reason,” Sheila said. “This isn’t some murder mystery from the nineteen thirties. The chances that there are going to be two people running around crazy are pretty slim. There’s a lot of nonsense happening, it’s probably all by the same person.”

“There were two guns,” Olivia pointed out.

Sheila shrugged. “So what? The other gun wasn’t even really a gun, as far as I understand it. I mean, it was a gun, but it didn’t shoot anything. However that worked. And then the same gun that shot the actual bullets that hit the wall at the Milky Way Ballroom shot the girl who was killed here. My guess is, that’s going to be the gun they found on the floor today. So maybe we should go with the flow.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Maybe we should have what’s his name ask them,” Sheila said. “Maybe we should have him ask each one of them if they were the ones who did it all.”

“And you think one of them is going to confess to murder. On camera.”

“Ask them if they shot at me then,” Sheila said. “Leave the murder out of it. Yes, yes. I know you think we’ll just get a lot of tearful denials, but will we? I mean, think about it. What is this girl doing? She’s staging shooting incidents that will take place on camera. That seems to be the entire point of them. Both times, they’ve happened when we were actually filming for the show. So—”

“What?” Olivia said.

“So,” Sheila said. “Maybe this is somebody who wants to be on camera. Maybe that’s her entire point. Maybe she came here intending to pull the first little stunt if she didn’t get cast, and then she made it into the final thirty, but she thought, oh, that that was as far as it was going to go. So—”

“The other girl wasn’t in the final thirty,” Olivia said. “That was my fault. I screwed up. And I’m sorry about that, Sheila, but it’s a madhouse at casting and you know it. I did go into the room and count the girls—”

“But one of them was in the bathroom,” Sheila said. “I know. I’m just telling you. We should ask them. We should see what they do if we put them on camera. And maybe we should dispense with what’s his name. Maybe I should ask the questions this time.”

Olivia thought she was about to get the mother of all headaches. This kind of absolute crap came up all the time. It was as if the woman had no sense of the way the business worked.

“For God’s sake,” Olivia said. “I could run this show a million times better if I didn’t have you to worry about. I really could. I don’t understand why you can’t ever—and I mean ever—learn the way these things are done. You can’t interview the girls. They won’t be candid if you do. They won’t want to risk getting eliminated because they say something you don’t like and they really won’t want to risk having you have a screaming fit in their faces. We need these interviews to be good. It’s how the audience gets to know the girls and how they follow the plotline. Please just go back to your room and keep out of the way for a while.”

Sheila just smiled. “You,” she said, “couldn’t do any kind of show without me here. Like it or not, it’s me people turn in to see, and it’s me the networks are paying for when they buy the production. Whether you like it or not, no matter how stupid you think I am, I am the one thing essential here. And that’s why I sometimes think that it’s you doing all this nonsense. You’re one of those oppressed, downtrodden types. Maybe you find it a relief to shoot at me.”

“I couldn’t have shot at you in the Milky Way Ballroom,” Olivia said, ready to explode. “I was standing behind you at the front of the room. At least, learn enough physics to do a rough bullet trajectory in your head.”