Read Online Show Business Is Murder by Stuart M. Kaminsky - Free Book Online Page A

Anyone who wants to talk can talk. I’m the one with something to say.”
    â€œYou see what I mean? You finish my sentences. You do it to everyone. Bobby’s offer to be his assistant choreographer was perfect timing.”
    â€œYou wanted to get away from me.”
    â€œYou chased me away. You chased our friends away. You compete with everyone, even to the point of where to buy the best focaccia.”
    â€œYour lousy friends couldn’t handle how successful I was.”
    â€œThey were our friends once.”
    â€œThey were jealous.”
    â€œThat’s not true. You made them nervous. You talk nonstop right through everyone.”
    He took the coffee beans from the refrigerator and poured some into the grinder, then ground them to drown out her sound. She was gone when he finished, back to the bedroom, back to her barre. She was always walking away from him.
    He poured the hot water through the grounds. “There’s coffee,” he called. She didn’t answer. He could hear her singing as she worked. “Razzle Dazzle.” She’d replaced Ann Reinking in the revival of Chicago . Bebe Neuwirth herself had called and asked Miranda to do it. And Miranda had been a sensation.
    David had hated it. He put his hands over his ears. He didn’t want to hear “Razzle Dazzle.” It reminded him of Fosse and the old days before everything got so complicated, when you knew who your enemies were.
    THEY’D JUST BEGUN to live together. She was sewing elastic across the instep of her new ballet shoes and the needle kept piercing her fingers.
    He licked the blood from her punctured fingers. “You can buy them with the elastic already there,” he said.
    â€œIt’s not the same,” she said. “It has to be perfect. That’s why I do it myself.”
    He knew in that moment she was what he wanted. It was how he felt his life should be. But in the end she was not perfect.
    â€œDAVID,” SHE SAID. “What will you tell Patrick?”
    â€œI’m working on it,” he said. He began looking through the scraps on the table for a clean piece of paper. Patrick was fourteen, almost a man. The best part of Miranda and him.
    The jagged corner of a receipt caught his eye. He knew what it was though no one else would. Dick Boodle & Associates. Boodle was a former cop who’d set up a detective agency. David had used his services for body guards and stage door security for The Naked Truth cast.
    â€œYou’ve been having me followed,” Miranda said, an aura of sweet perspiration surrounding her. “Since the spring.”
    â€œI found out who he was. Advertising. A loser. You fucked me over for a loser.”
    â€œDavid—”
    â€œAfter everything I did for you. How we live, the clothes on your back, and it’s not enough for you.”
    â€œWhat you did for me? Having me followed for the last six months? I haven’t seen him in—”
    â€œYou saw him yesterday.” David knew all about it. She’d met him at the Mark Bar. He shook the memo at her. “It’s here in black and white.”
    â€œI had a drink with him is all—”
    This time it was David who walked away. He opened the door to the terrace and stepped out on the roof. The fog had lifted but the sky was gray and dense, and the temperature had dropped. Snow was in the air. At the edge of the terracewas a low brick wall that separated the terrace from thin air. Below was the closed courtyard, earth and stone now. In the spring, grass and daffodils.
    He heard the phone ringing. He charged back into the apartment. He didn’t want Miranda to get it. The answering machine picked up and the ringing stopped. He listened. She said he had a love affair with the phone. But it was like an extension of his personality. When the Times did the feature on him, they took his picture with a phone on each ear and another on his desk. God, he loved it.