Murder at the Academy Awards (R): A Red Carpet Murder Mystery by Joan Rivers, Jerrilyn Farmer Read Free Book Online

accusation, I could get out only one loud and rasping “What?”
    “So please tell your cameraman to cooperate. I need the videotape out of his camera.”
    “No, you don’t,” yelled Drew, defensive.
    I bristled. “Are you crazy? That tape is ours.”
    With all the excitement and worry, I had lost sight of what we had. I had sudden visions of the great things we might do with that video. A feature on CBS Nightly News . A segment on 60 Minutes . A “hot topic” on The View. That insane interview, lying on the red carpet with a drunk Halsey Hamilton, could easily become the hottest five minutes on television. And, let’s face it, there was big, big money at hand. I took a nanosecond to dream: paying off some bills. Buying a new coat. Picking up a little house in the south of France.
    Look, although this can seem harsh, this is the way the business works. You have to separate the work from the personal. No one was sadder to see Halsey fall from grace one more time than I. I’m a mother. I feel for her. But if she kept making bad choices, and she chose to do it on live television during my exclusive interview, that tape was news and I had the right to the tape. Besides, I had been on my feet talking off the top of my head for the past two hours. Even during the interview with Halsey, I had to have one eye on the camera, one eye on the monitor, and half my brain thinking of what question I would ask next. Instead of wasting any more time with this hired cop, Drew and I should be back in our hotel suite, where we always went right after a telecast. Normally, we relax and watch the Academy Awards show—wearing three pounds or so of borrowed diamonds can betiring—but I was now dying to see what had really happened to Halsey.
    O’Neil got serious with Danny. “Take my advice. You don’t want any trouble.”
    “What kind of trouble?” Danny asked, looking worried. The big guy was just a big wimp.
    O’Neil kept at him. “I’m sure your network doesn’t want to be dragged down into something nasty. Lawsuits are expensive. They won’t thank you. Sometimes it gets hard to find freelance camera work in this town, I’ve heard.”
    “Well…,” Danny said.
    Well? Well? That was Danny’s tough-guy response to the blithering threats of some idiot with semi-authority? I stepped between Danny and O’Neil and smiled at the fake cop, unimpressed. “Maybe that sort of intimidation works with other kinds of people. People who stay up at night worried they underpaid their income tax. But this is a different world, my friend. Are you kidding? Networks love the gutter. They invented the gutter.”
    “Please hand over the videotape,” O’Neil repeated, still pleasant, but with an edge in his voice.
    I smiled even harder. This was so not going to go the rent-a-cop’s way.
    Danny gulped and looked over at me for moral support. He knew the alpha dog in this setup. Good boy.
    I kept on smiling as I started pulling stray pebbles from my hairdo. “It’s ours. I’ll get my attorney on the phone.” Before I could make a gesture in her direction, Malulu stepped out of her martial arts pose and began speed-dialing my lawyer.
    Killer, with open hatred, stared at O’Neil’s ankle as if it were prime rib. Malulu, always alert to my puppy’s moods, stared atKiller. Drew, feeling unsure how far I’d take this confrontation, stared at Malulu. O’Neil, with a little less open admiration for me than he’d shown earlier, stared at me. I, knowing how easily Danny might be swayed to give up our tape, stared at Danny. Danny, unable to cope with the pressure, stared down at his ridiculously old sneakers. No one moved.
    O’Neil, not much of a negotiator, reopened the talks. “Look, let’s keep calm. No one is saying you and your daughter ought to be banned from future red carpets, but…”
    Five minutes ago I would’ve half-thought this O’Neil guy was cute, but if this was some new twenty-first-century form of flirting, give me