Chapter 31

WHEN KITTY OPENED the door to her dressing room at noon that day, I was sitting on one of her chintz-covered chairs, waiting for her. She taped her daily hour-long talk show in Studio 26, two floors below where we taped Love of My Life. Nathan Hughes’s secretary had given me her arrival, rehearsal and taping schedule when I told her I wanted to invite Kitty to appear on Love.

The moment she saw me, her face went pale with dread. Her huge green eyes—those eyes that, when she was a child movie star, were so beguiling in close-up—filled with tears. Concerned, I got up from the chair. “Kitty, are you all right?” I started toward her, but she shrank back against the door, as far away from me as she could get.

“What do you want from me?” She emphasized “you.”

“I don’t want anything from you,” I said. “I’m here because—”

“Then you’re not by?”

“By? By what?”

Kitty stared at me until she realized I truly had no idea what she was talking about. Then she started to laugh. It was a weak laugh, about two breaths short of hysteria. “Bi-sexual,” she said. “I thought you were here because . . . you know.”

What? Every time I think I can’t be shocked anymore, something happens to shock me. This was a biggie. “Why in the world would you think that?”

“You were there that night, you saw what happened, too.” Her voice had become like a child’s.

“At Damon’s?” I was beginning to understand. “Has somebody who was there that night . . . threatened you?”

She didn’t answer in words. Tears began running down her cheeks, cutting little trails through the thick TV makeup. I flashed back four months to Damon’s apartment.

I had gone to his party only because Tommy had pleaded with me, saying Damon would take my no-show out on him if I didn’t. I offered him a deal. “I’ll go, but only if you’ll be my escort.” Tommy agreed. We arrived together, and were paired at the sit-down dinner for twelve, but then Tommy disappeared immediately after coffee was served, leaving me to handle whatever might happen next.

What happened next was nothing I could have predicted, or even imagined.

There were four guests remaining: Kitty, Rick Spencer, Joe Niles—whose scowling wife had stalked out earlier—and me. The staff had been dismissed, and we were in the living room. I was talking to Joe about the technical difficulties of an upcoming episode when I realized Joe wasn’t listening. Instead he was looking past me. I turned, following his gaze, and saw Damon sitting in one of the large club chairs that flanked the fireplace. His legs were stretched out in front of him, and they were slightly apart. With one hand gripping Kitty’s hair and the other pulling her by the arm, Damon was forcing Kitty to kneel down in front of him.

Kitty was crying, “No, Damon. No, please, not here.”

“Yes, right here. I want our friends to see what your greatest talent really is.”

Damon forced Kitty’s head down to his open fly—and I got out of there so fast I forgot to take my evening bag. I was the only one who left.

Rick Spencer and Joe Niles stayed for the show.

I walked home as fast as it was possible to walk in evening shoes. My keys were in the bag I had left behind, so when I reached the Dakota, Frank, the night security man, let me into my apartment. The first thing I did was telephone an all-night locksmith and have the locks on my apartment and my office doors changed. What I could not change was the image of Kitty Leigh’s forced public humiliation.

“Kitty,” I said, “I came to see you because I’m writing a new story line for Love of My Life. I’d like you to be in it. Do you watch the show?”

Surprised and relieved, Kitty wiped her eyes. A little color began to seep back into her face under the smeared makeup. Catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror, she sat down and picked up a small triangular sponge. “I tape it and watch it every night when I go home,” she said. She deftly began repairing her face. “Your show, and All My Children, although I’m not too crazy about what’s happening on All My Children right now.” She glanced up at me before reapplying her mascara. “What did you have in mind?”

“Since you watch the show, you’ve seen Nicky—”

“He’s a cutie,” she said. “A sweet puppy dog. I could go for him, but honestly, I don’t know what Kira sees in him.”

You and most of our audience. “I’m fixing that,” I said. “Don’t miss any shows this week and next. Now, here’s my plan: I’m going to have Nicky buy a nightclub and turn it into the town’s hottest hot spot. I’d like you to come to the club and sing—you can appear as yourself, or I’ll write a character for you to play. Your choice. And we’ll make sure the tape schedule doesn’t interfere with your talk show. What do you think?”

“I like it,” she said.

She seemed genuinely pleased, but she was cautious.

“I don’t want to be me. Create a character—after all, I’m an actor.” She paused for a moment, put down the mascara wand and looked up at me. “One thing.” There was a flash of fire in her eyes. “I don’t care what you pay me—scale, whatever . . . if the part catches on with the audience, you can talk to my agent. And I won’t need a private dressing room or any special treatment when I’m upstairs with you guys—unless the part catches on, of course. Then we might make some adjustments. But there’s one thing that I do want right now. It’s the deal-breaker for me.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“How many of your shows does Joe Niles direct?”

“One out of every four. Sometimes one out of three if he has an overhang episode.”

“He cannot—can not—direct me. Ever. Will you promise me that?”

“Tommy Zenos is the executive producer,” I said, “but having you on the show will be such a coup, I know he’ll honor your request.”

She nodded, turned away from me and went back to fixing her makeup. I sensed she wanted to say something else, so I waited quietly until she was ready. “That son-of-a-bitch stayed and watched,” she said into the mirror. “You left. That’s why I’m talking to you.”

She gave me the opening I needed. “Kitty, when you came in, why did you think . . . what you thought?” I asked.

Her eyes met mine in the mirror. “Niles and the other little shit, Rick Spencer, have been blackmailing me. They won’t spread the story, they say, if I . . . favor them. When I found you in my dressing room, I thought . . .”

“Those creeps. Kitty, I’m disgusted at both of them. At all of them.”

“Since I was eight years old,” she said softly. She had finished her makeup and now sat staring at the mirror, gazing into the dark infinity of her own eyes as though mesmerized. “You never get over it,” she whispered, “being treated like that.”

I didn’t know if she was talking to me or to herself. I remembered thinking, as I was walking home the night of Damon’s grotesque party, that if Kitty decided to kill Damon, I would volunteer to give her a phony alibi. “She was right here with me at the time of his death,” I would swear. Now someone had killed Damon, and watching the emotionally fragile woman staring at herself in the mirror, I was sure it had not been Kitty. She looked as though she was one stiff breeze away from a nervous breakdown, and I sensed that she knew it, too.

Mentally, I struck Kitty Leigh off my list of suspects.

And then there were four.

I LEFT KITTY’S dressing room and headed for the fire stairs to walk up the two flights to the Love studios. Cybelle was scheduled to tape some inserts, and I wanted to see how she was feeling. Also, I wanted to talk to Tommy Zenos about the new Nicky story line, and about my idea for Kitty Leigh’s involvement.

All the bright lights were on in Kitty’s talk show studio, which was right next to the door to the interior stairs. As I passed through the studio, I saw Kitty’s new audience (all of whom had written to the network for tickets) being led to their seats by interns. The TV lights were so blinding that when I pulled open the heavy emergency door and stepped onto the landing, it wasn’t until the door clanged shut behind me that I realized the fire stairs were in total darkness. I pushed down onto the horizontal steel bar that opened the fireproof door to return to the corridor.

That’s when I discovered the door locked automatically when it swung closed.

Uh-oh. Now that I was locked in the fire stairs, I remembered—obviously too late—a memo that had gone out. It had explained that due to security concerns, the fire stairs were henceforth going to lock from the inside, and that they were to be used only for purposes of evacuation. Because I worked at my office in the Dakota and seldom went to the Mother Ship, I’d barely scanned the memo before tossing it into the trash with the other memos that came from the network. Since I was stuck anyway, and would have to pound on a door until someone heard me and let me out, I decided I might as well make my way up the two flights to where our show was taped. If I am going to be embarrassed, I prefer to be embarrassed among friends.

Much as I dislike clichés, it truly was so dark on those stairs that I couldn’t see my own hand in front of my face. I gripped the railing along the wall and started up the concrete stairs, careful not to slip on the protective waterproof sealant that made the surface of the concrete slick to the touch. Ian used to say admiringly that I had the steady nerves of a burglar, but it’s a lot easier to be brave when you can see where you’re going. Caught in the darkness, I was feeling more than a little uneasy. My heart was beating faster than normal, and it wasn’t from exertion. When I reached the landing on the floor above Kitty’s studio, I let go of the railing and stretched my hands out in front of me, moving them around, using them like the whiskers on a cat. I was trying not to bump into the wall as I fumbled to reach the next flight of stairs.

Suddenly my right foot bumped against a large, soft object.

Disoriented in the darkness, I stumbled and fell forward across what felt like a duffel bag. Reflexively, my hands shot out in an attempt to break my fall. They smacked hard against the floor, but instead of keeping my torso upright, the palms of my hands were sliding. Without traction, my hands could not brace me and my full weight collapsed on top of the soft object. I realized with a powerful jolt of horror that I was sprawled across the back of a human body. The slippery substance that covered my hands and wrists was faintly warm. To my exploring fingers, it had the texture of blood.

I screamed.

As I scrambled to my feet in the darkness, my hand brushed against a hard object. Reflexively I picked it up. Whatever it was weighed several pounds and was inside a fabric that stretched. Like a sock. Something heavy inside a sock . . .

Oh my God. What if this is the weapon?

Immediately, I dropped it.

It fell with a metallic clunk onto the sealed concrete floor and I managed to stumble a few steps away from the body before I bumped up against the emergency door. I pounded on the door with my fists. I grabbed the steel bar and rattled it. I yanked at the bar as I threw myself against it—and nearly fell out into the corridor as the heavy fire door flew open. Because my head was down, a small, creased cardboard rectangle at my feet caught my eye. It was the front flap of a green matchbook cover, folded lengthwise.

It lay on the floor near the doorway.

Had it been wedged into the door by someone who wanted to keep it from locking automatically?

I looked up, trying to adjust my eyes to the sudden assault of bright lights, and realized I was just outside Studio 31, one of the two large facilities where Trauma Center was taped Monday through Friday. The powerful lights from the floor flooded the landing behind me. I turned to look, and saw that the body I had fallen over was a woman’s. She was lying facedown. Blood had pooled around her head, blood that had been smeared by the palms of my hands when I stumbled over her. It wasn’t necessary for me to see the woman’s face because I recognized her as soon as I saw her platinum hair.

The unmistakable platinum hair of a former daytime diva.

The woman lying dead, whose blood covered my hands and stained my clothes, was Serena McCall.