Murder at the Academy Awards (R): A Red Carpet Murder Mystery by Joan Rivers, Jerrilyn Farmer Page A

much older boys. I think she began dating that Alberto character back then, and he must have been twenty-two at the time. Now you tell me what a twenty-two-year-old man wants to do with a twelve-year-old.”
    “It’s tragic,” Dr. Bob agreed. “Who’s looking after you, Max? This has got to be hitting you hard.”
    “I’m fine,” I said, just as Malulu entered the room with a fresh stack of messages.
    “You need time to process all of this.”
    Dr. Bob was probably right. We made plans to meet for dinner later, after I’d had time to rest, and I rang off to get through my growing pile of messages and the newly arrived e-mails Malulu had just printed for me.
    I put aside the numerous well-wishes from my fans and friends over another in-the-can red carpet show and put into a separate pile the news-biz hysteria over Halsey’s death, then read all the way through a most unexpected e-mail from the president of a popular home-shopping channel, a man I’d been begging to meet for a year. He was suddenly anxious to discuss with me my proposal for a line of jewelry I’d wanted to design. How wonderful! I told Malulu to forward that one to my attorney and business managers; then I eyed the rest.
    “Mrs. L,” Malulu said, “the phones are crazy today. Please.” She waved at my pile of messages. “Some of these people call you back three times.”
    The fan mail and friends would have to wait, it seemed, because every news or entertainment outlet in existence had found me and was begging for me to give them an exclusive on the real story of this year’s Academy Awards—my last words with Halsey. As the early twenty-first century would have it, an infinite number of cameras had been trained on the poor young thing last night as she collapsed on the red carpet and brought me down with her. But that, apparently, had only whetted the world’s appetite. From the thousand cell phone digital recorders in the hands of gaping fans in the grandstands to the extreme zoom lenses of the international press corps, so many people present at the Oscar arrivals had some angle on that sad drama. But with Halsey slurring and whispering only to me, not a one of them had been able to record a sound.
    I was the only one on the planet who knew what Halsey had had to say.
    How unfortunate that Halsey had merely talked in wasted riddles and ramblings, and, really, how disturbing that the only phrases that seemed to make sense mentioned my own daughter, Drew, and the infamous nickname of Drew’s Burke, whom many in their young crowd called Wyatt Burp. I considered the impact of the story on a parched media if I told those details now. How quickly it would ravage Burke’s reputation. Even if he had somehow miraculously been blameless in the events that had brought down Halsey, his name would forever be mixed up in the scandal. I toyed with that tantalizing thought: finally, Burke Norris would be made accountable for his worthless soul. And then I sobered up. Even if an outraged but silent mother might be drawn to the idea of making such a loathsome idiot suffer for all his past sins, how quickly would such a story gather fury and, in its terriblewake, blast my own darling Drew and her good blameless name, possibly forever?
    I could hear the suite’s two phones ringing incessantly in the background, Malulu’s patient Samoan lilt taking names and numbers from some relentless reporters, such as Devon Jones, for the fourth time that morning. There was a huge story here. Everyone from Barbara Walters to perezhilton.com was after the truth, and I was the only one on earth who had it. And I, such a staunch advocate of the truth, would take a few hours longer, at least, to gather my wits and decide just how best the truth would have to be spun.
    An hour later, with Malulu’s help, I’d worked through 179 messages, deflecting requests from news agencies from as far away as Tasmania (where they loved their celebrity gossip) to the little local paper