Wanting Sheila Dead(34)
“You can?” Gregor asked.
“Don’t look like that,” Olivia said. “Yes, I can. Mr. Demarkian, if we were going to stage something like that, I’d have to be the one to stage it. Do you know why? Because I’m the only one organized enough to pull it off. Even to pull it off badly. Sheila couldn’t do it herself. Not only is she addled most of the time, and drunk part of it, but she’s got no sense of discretion and she’s completely incapable of keeping her mouth shut. As for the other judges—well. The other judges. Sometimes I think they made it a requirement in the eighties. If you wanted to be a celebrity, you had to have an IQ in single digits.”
“Damn,” Bennis said. “I always kind of liked Pete Waldheim.”
“Oh, Pete is all right,” Olivia said. “But sometimes I think Deedee Plant really is a plant. I mean vegetation. I’ve known broccoli better able to produce linear thought. And as to Mark and Johnny—whatever. Neither Sheila nor any of the twits we have on that panel was capable of putting something like this together.”
“Possibly,” Gregor said. “But you’ve admitted yourself that you were, and it wasn’t put together all that badly. There may be a lot of rumors running around that you staged this thing, but as far as I know, nobody’s been able to prove it. And nobody knows who this mystery girl is. Or do they?”
“No,” Olivia said. “No, they don’t. Although, it’s really odd. She looks so familiar, and I can’t put my finger on why. I thought she might have been a contestant on one of the shows, an early one, maybe—somebody who didn’t make the house. But I’ve looked at all our records, and I can’t find her.”
“Do you even know what her name is?” Gregor asked.
“One of the girls who is in the house this cycle says she talked to her, and the girl said her name is Emily,” Olivia said. “It’s not all that unusual a name, but we’ve only had three Emilys even at auditions, and I called around and found all of those. And she’s—well, I don’t know how to put it. She’s sort of like wallpaper. She just fades into the background. I can’t imagine that she’d make an audition tape good enough for us to call her in for an interview.”
“She’s not on your interview list, either, I take it,” Gregor said.
“No, she isn’t,” Olivia said. “As far as I can figure out, she just came to the building on that day, stood in line, and walked right in. I realized once the trouble happened that it wouldn’t even be hard. You came into the Milky Way Ballroom through the front doors, you went up to a desk and gave your name, you got your waiting room assignment, and then you went there to sit. But there wasn’t really any security. All she had to do was not bother to go to the front tables, to just sort of drift off to the halls on the sides and find a room to sit down in. There was such a crush of people, nobody would have noticed.”
“And you’re contending that nobody did,” Gregor said.
“There really was a crush of people,” Olivia said. “And there is all the way along. You go from your interview room to the ballroom itself. We had it tricked out with curtains. You sat in a little waiting area until it was time to talk to the panel, then you went through those curtains and talked to Sheila and the rest of them. But there were always five or six girls waiting to be interviewed. All she had to do was sit down in one of the chairs. And then, you know, when nobody was looking, she could follow a girl leaving the interview for the room with the first round of contestants in it. I mean, I counted the girls, but this one girl was out of the room in the bathroom and so my count came out all right but it shouldn’t have. I’m sorry I’m not making much sense.”
“You’re making perfect sense,” Gregor said. “I’m not sure I believe it. You’re saying that anybody could just have wandered through into the competition, being filmed all the while—”
“Oh, yes,” Olivia Dahl said. “We’ve got film. We’ve got a lot of it. The police have it for the moment.”
Gregor waved this away. “You’re trying to tell me you had no security at all, on a show hosted by a woman who is notorious for being a world-class, first-rate bitch on wheels, who gets death threats on a regular basis—”
Olivia blushed. “Everybody gets death threats,” she said. “You can’t be a celebrity in this country today without having some people decide they want to send you mail saying they want to kill you. There’s never been a credible death threat against Sheila in spite of the way she behaves. Or maybe because of it. The woman is a complete loose cannon. Maybe even the crazies are afraid of her.”