This story is for entertainment purposes only and copy written by the author.  Reproduction in any form of this text is forbidden.

 

 

GOSSIP FROM THE GRAVE

©01/2007 by: Mare

 

CHAPTER 1

 

Jozey Markswell sipped wine and ruminated on character assassination.  Her gossip sights were trained on a new target recently tagged with the moniker “Ruffrox.”  Tainting this couple’s romance was more difficult than Jozey had expected.

 

Spencer Ruff had taken such intense tabloid fire for so long, it was hard to find fresh ammo for him.  But Roxana as bull’s eye invited a variety of ordnance.

 

Roxana D’Orsini’s family was antique, with ancestors abounding in European peerage.  Jozey considered snide references to inbreeding.  Or accuse the woman of  pretensions of royalty?  No, that wouldn’t work while her diplomat relatives represented democratic Italy in consular and ambassador posts.  Characteristically Jozey had done scant research but she had discovered that much. However, she could hint that the Orsinis were dismayed by Roxie’s choice of Ruff.  Referencing the ripest selection of gossip from the past...  But what incident could she dream up to illustrate Orsini opprobrium of Ruff –  without drawing expensive legal fire from the family?  Better avoid her kin.

 

Roxie’s love life?  One dead husband, one child legitimately conceived according to her birth certificate, albeit when Roxie was barely eighteen.  Should Jozey fire, say, a nymphomania arrow, it had to be aimed at unknown lovers between Roxie’s husband and Ruff.  The option of hiring some photogenic males to claim adultery with Roxie was also open.  But neither attack was particularly appealing since the facts and venues of her marriage were unknown.  In Jozey’s files there were several unemployed male models.  But those guys were better suited to ‘gay outings’ than wife seductions.

 

Spencer was already cheating?  When, where and with whom?  These lovebirds had worked and dwelt together for the last five months.  And with three kids.

 

Fake boobs or ass or nose or lips?  A magazine article had already featured Roxie’s features assessed by plastic surgeons.  They had pronounced her a natural beauty.  And Spencer’s face witnessed his life like the Portrait of Dorian Gray.  No plastic surgeon could be paid enough to claim responsibility for that masculine mug.  (It didn’t ring Jozey’s bells.  She preferred the milder Metrosexual Male.  Her husband Marvin Markswell was in her view the perfect example.)

 

Sighing, Jozey finished her drink.  To gain fame as the gossip who ended Spencer Ruff’s career – or at least, harpooned his current romance -- she needed an innovative incendiary.

 

~*~

 

The hotel room window overlooked a central-Texas February landscape whose only glint of water came from a golf-course hazard.  And as the time was nearing 2:00 AM that glint was a full-moon-reflection.  But Roxana was enjoying the sunset on narrow bay fringed by boat slips.  Sailboats’ masts were turning gold.  The bay gleamed, moving in metallic arcs of copper and brass.  The sun’s red crown slipped below the horizon it inflamed...

 

Spencer waved his hand across her face.  Blinking, Roxie was astonished by the sudden change in her surroundings: an unfamiliar bedroom with heavy drapes and a TV facing the bed.

 

Spencer she recognized; he was her honey.  He was frowning.

 

When she tried to ask him where they were, a coughing spasm cut her off.

 

Her mismatched eyes widened with the effort to exhale.  Unnatural pallor highlighted the freckled bridge from cheek to cheek.  Her lips were purple.

 

“That’s it,” Spencer muttered, “I’m calling an ambulance.”

 

He did so through the concierge.  Then he helped her pull on socks and a warm bathrobe.

 

“When did we...leave the harbor?”  She murmured dizzily.

 

“What harbor?”

 

“Our vacation...”  Her normally strong, musical voice squeaked, barely audible.  “The masts were... gold... sunset so gorgeous.”  Between phrases her breaths were gasps.

 

“I think you were hallucinating, Sweetheart.  You need oxygen.”

 

She coughed again and gasped.  “I can’t exhale right.  My lung...”

 

“Yeah, I’ll make sure they know about that.  All this coughing, you need oxygen.  Don’t worry.  They’re on their way.”

 

She abandoned a brief attempted argument when she focused on the anxiety in his eyes.

 

Those imperfect-jade eyes, glowing projectors of his inner intensity.  A warm wave of affection washed over her.  Whatever he wanted to do...

 

A quarter-hour later he was curbside helping the EMS crew with paperwork.  Roxie’s litter slid with a jolt in to the ambulance.  She wore an oxygen mask.  Spencer’s bodyguards had charge of the kids and Roxie’s pets who had been ordered to stay in their room until Dad got back.  To the children the guards were “Uncle Hank and Uncle Richie.” To strangers they were an intimidating pair, taller than Spencer’s six feet by several inches and just as beefy as he.

 

Reaching in to pet her blanketed feet Spence held out Roxie’s open wallet with his other hand.  “Here’s her insurance card. Can you read the number, or –”

 

“I got it.”

 

“Roxana D’Orsini.  I’m the fiancé Spencer Ruff.  She –”

 

“Sure, I recognize you all.  Been filming down here, huh?  ‘Bout the Webster Slaughter?”

 

“Yeah, just wrapped.  She’s had a lung problem in the past.  The left one’s been collapsed, and she has a symptom of that, she’s having a hard time exhaling.”

 

The EMS crew woman Sally nodded, and wrote that down.  Her partner put a clip on Roxie’s finger and watched a readout.

 

“And she was hallucinating.”

 

“Sure, she’s obviously hypoxic.”

 

Behind him someone yelled,  “Hey!  What’s the matter with her?  What happened?  Did she O D?”  When Spencer turned a camera’s flash went off repeatedly.

 

Spence was irked but not surprised by the wee-hours presence of a reporter or paparazzi.  He answered,  “No. Bronchitis or something.”

 

“Fever?  Temperature?”  Sally asked.

 

“Actually she was low a couple of hours ago, around 97.”

 

“Oxygen saturation,” reported the crewman inside the ambulance as Sally climbed in, “is 79.”

 

“What’s it supposed to be?” Spence inquired.

 

“Should be in the high nineties.”

 

The reporter was on a cell phone and the cameraman packing up as the ambulance left the canopied curb.  Spence followed in a taxi cab.

 

~*~

 

Six hours later Roxana’s diagnosis was on record.  Not bronchitis, but a severe allergic reaction. Around Austin, Texas from December through February this was nothing unusual.  Male red cedar trees produced pretty blue berries full of pollen noxious to most people, this time of year.  Red cedar trees were everywhere.  And this was a peak year for pollen problems.  Drought, persistent high winds and brush fires had the grains airborne in record-setting amounts.

 

“Plicatic acid is the toxin,” a nurse named Grace explained.  “It just tortures mucous membranes.  Some other mammals react to it, too.  But humans really hate it.”

 

Folding to the children’s demands Spence let Hank bring them to the hospital.  Roxie’s pets were not allowed to visit.  Her daughter Katya left them with fresh water, kibbles and kisses.  The Ruff sons Martin and Dave were five and three and frisky; Katya marshaled them, too, but with greater difficulty.  A widower for sixteen months when they met, Spence had found Roxana on location in New Orleans.  Her brother had a house in NOLA that had survived Katrina.  She knew the place well.  But it was her operatic singing voice that had secured her the part of Ymanja in the same-named film with Spence.  Ymanja would hit theaters in NOLA on Friday, February 21st.   Today was Friday the 14th.   Spencer knew how much Roxie wanted to be at that premiere.  At least they were done with this Texas shoot – Webster Slaughter, their second film together.  They could escape the pollen soon.

 

Characteristically, Katya set to organizing and straightening her mother’s tray table, bedside stand and closet.  Whirling on Dave, she with a crisp clap stopped his pressing the nurse-call button.  Smiling at her, Roxie rasped, “Katya should...run a country someday.  Or Secretary... General of the U N...at least.”

 

“Remarkable girl,” Spence agreed.

 

“She didn’t get it from me.”

 

The boys had to ride the bed up and down and the older one, Martin had to work the controls.  Head up, head down, feet up, feet down, bed high, bed low.  He studied the under-carriage trying to understand why the whole mattress shifted forward and back to raise and lower the head.

 

Spencer put a box of tissues in Roxie’s lap, then squeezed eye drops in to her mismatched eyes.  Roxie was touched and a bit surprised by his solicitude.   She felt disgusting, her eyes were running apace with her nose, her lips were dry and her voice was awful.  She needed a shower.

 

“Phlegm isn’t...flattering,” she rasped.  “Especially by the quart.”

 

“If phlegm were oil, you’d be the Alaska pipeline,” he conceded.

 

A CT scan of her lungs was ordered.  As she was wheeled out, an oxygen tank affixed to the chair, Spence took the boys in to the bathroom.

 

Wandering out to the corridor Katya noticed an elderly woman with her arm in a sling peering at her from two door down.

 

The woman waved.  “Hi!”

 

Politely Katya waved back.  The woman, emboldened, gestured for Katya to come to her room.

 

“Can you help me with my computer?”  The hand of the unbroken arm was also bandaged, Katya saw.  Of course the lady would have trouble typing.  She had a notebook computer sitting on her bed.  Unsteady on her feet (not from injury but from Demerol), the lady had managed to summon her email log-in page.  But red letters told her she had failed in her log-in attempt.  “What’s your name?”

 

“Katya.”

 

Beryl glanced at her mirror reflection.  “God, look at me.  I look like I was in a fight.”

 

“What happened to you?”  Katya asked.  You heard weird gory stories in hospitals.  Beryl had a large bandage over one eye, in addition to the damaged arm.

 

“Oh, I took a spill down my sister’s front stoop, broke my wrist and banged my head.  Had to stay in here so they could check the concussion – that’s when your head bone gets a good knock.  I’m Beryl.  You have your mother’s chestnut hair, don’t you.”  So she doesn’t dye it, Beryl thought.  “I need to check my email.  I’ve flubbed my login twice, now.  Broke my damn glasses, clumsy and blind...  Can you type ‘BLUEGEM’ all caps on the ID line, there?”

 

Katya complied.  She was an ace speller.

 

“My name, Beryl, is a blue gem stone.  Did you know that?  Now on the password line, ‘3-1-4-2-g-e-m’ in lower case, then ‘B-L-U’ upper case.  – Great!  Thank you, Sweetie.  Your mommy and daddy have been making a movie here, haven’t they?”

 

“Uh huh.  They’re finished except for the do-overs.”

 

 “So tell me, what happened to your mom?  Did she have an accident like me?  Or did someone hit her?”

 

“No, she’s sick.”

 

“Oh!  Did she take pills before she came here?”

 

“Um...she took a cold pill but she still couldn’t breathe.”

 

“But did she take too many pills, like diet pills?”

 

“No.”

 

“But she usually takes diet pills?  She’s very slim.”

 

“She didn’t take diet pills, she just started sneezing and coughing.”

 

“Well, why can’t she breathe?  Did she drink something, have a cocktail?”

 

Katya frowned.  These questions made no sense to her.  “She has a bad cough.”

 

“Oh!  Cough medicine – she takes lots of that, I guess, huh?”

 

Katya sighed.  “They give her this stuff that has cold smoke coming in to her mouth from a mask.  Then she breathes better.  But she still has a cough.  It’s an –”

 

“But she’s always on a diet I bet, and likes cough medicine.  What pills does her boyfriend take?  Spencer, the movie star?”

 

“He doesn’t like pills.  He has an allergy too but not bad, so he uses smelly vapor rub.  Us, too.”

 

“But I bet he has little blue pills.  Have you seen his blue pills?”

 

“No.”

 

“Some pills called Viagra or Levitra or Cialis?  Cialis are peach-colored triangles; have you seen him take those?”

 

“No, I never heard of those.”

 

“When are they getting married?”

 

Katya replied with a noncommittal shrug.

 

“How old are you?”

 

“Eight.  Mama and me almost have the same birthday.”

 

“Where is your father?  When did he divorce your mom?”

 

“He died.”

 

Beryl signed out of her mailbox, left the Internet and clicked on a game icon.  “Do you know what Mah Jong is?”

 

“Is that where you match the pictures on the little blocks?”  Katya recognized it.

 

“You just select pairs and then click them away.  Try to get them all gone.”

 

An orderly knocked on the door.  “Time to go get your cast on, Mrs. Couvier.”

 

“Oh, okay.  Katya, you can keep playing this game if you want.”

 

Katya removed some pairs but was getting bored when Spencer located her.

 

“Whose computer?”  Spence wondered.

 

“The lady’s.  Just a minute, then I’ll turn it off and hide it under the covers.”  Katya knew about theft.

 

“How’d you get in her room?”

 

“She invited me.  She has a broken arm and she couldn’t type right so I helped her put in her username and her password.  For her email.”  Katya grinned and stage-whispered, “I memorized them.  I couldn’t help it.  Then she kept asking me questions.”

 

“What questions?”

 

“About what’s wrong with Mama and pills.”

 

“Pills?”

 

“Did Mama take diet pills, did you take purple pills, or maybe it was blue ones – stuff like that.”

 

Alerted, Spencer checked some papers thumb-tacked to a cork board.  “‘Beryl Marie Couvier,’” he read.  “Just our rotten luck, she’d be here!  Katya, we don’t talk to that lady anymore.  She’ not a nice lady.  She makes her living telling nasty lies about people like your mum and me.”

 

“Like about pills?”

 

Spencer groaned.  “She probably will tell a whopper about pills.  Not your fault, you didn’t know.”

 

“I said you and Mama didn’t take those pills, though.”

 

“Right, good girl.  You say you memorized her username and password for her email? Write them down, quick, now.”   He opened “My Documents” and read the list of titles.

 

“Now Katya, let’s get online and find that mailbox.”

 

That done, Spence sent Katya back to her mother’s room with instructions to have Hank plug in Roxana’s laptop.

 

Minutes later Spence was forwarding emails from Beryl Couvier’s email box to his own.  These transfers accomplished, Spencer emptied the “Sent Mail” folder so Beryl wouldn’t see his email address there.  Then he downloaded and set up a remote-access program registering as Beryl Marie Couvier.  The program would allow him (or Beryl) to open, copy and print Beryl’s files, and using her email account username and password, even read her email, from other computers.

 

He left Beryl’s computer displaying its desktop screen.  Returning to Roxie’s room and computer, he logged in to the remote access program and clicked “Connect.”

 

Opening Beryl’s “My Documents” Spence began to copy files and pictures.

 

He couldn’t resist deleting some items in a folder labeled “Dossiers” – data on himself, Roxie, and a dozen friends.  And from “My Pictures” he deleted over twenty obviously intrusive paparazzi products of people he liked.  Finally, he emptied the “Recycle Bin.”

 

Illegal, he reminded himself.  But so was defamation.  This old viper deserved to be defanged.

 

~*~

 

Returning with her wrist in fiberglass Beryl with difficulty pecked out a rough draft for her next online column.  She was eager to get out of medical stir and transfer to her web site her nasty take on Roxana’s illness:

 

“...an apparent overdose of diet pills and codeine resulting in breathing problems.  Trust me: this Blue Gem’s room is on the same ward as hers, and my injuries do not affect my sight or hearing!  Speaking of pills, my source says the Randy Ruff has been popping those sexed-up little blue ones in advance of his impending honeymoon with Ravishing Roxie.”

 

This was followed by rude remarks on the sex life of Wayne Warren Western, front man of  Gigawest which was currently on tour.

 

“‘W-cubed’ should cut back on his consumption of those prurient pills.  Backstage at his shows there’s always a pack of girls waiting for lap time with Wayne the Wolf.  Where does his long-suffering gal pal Muriel rank in that pack?  Alpha or beta female?  When will she tire of the rest of that long alphabet, and sniff out a monogamous male?”

 

Beryl soon departed the hospital with her sister.  Before she polished and posted her piece, and sent her East Coast protégé Anastasia Dark a copy, Beryl needed to pack.  She had a flight booked to New Orleans for the premiere of Ymanja.

 

~*~

 

“JUST IN:  SPENCER’S GAL PAL ODs!!!”

 

Disgusted, Ruff’s bodyguard Richie phoned the hospital.

 

“I’m online and there’s some shit about Roxie overdosing, it’s on Beryl Couvier’s link on the News of the World TV page, tomorrow’s story.”

 

Spence groaned.  “Okay, I’ll see if I can delete the piece off her computer.  You get hold of Lena and do a brief statement she can send round.  Roxie’s CAT scan showed  a collapsing lung.  She’s allergic to red cedar pollen, they call it cedar fever.  Male trees have millions of blue berries and the high winds, drought and wildfires have put record-high amounts of it in the air here.  The pollen has this plicatic acid in it which fucks up your membranes.  They treat the allergy with a steroid called Prednisone and she gets oxygen and breathing treatments, so she’ll be fine.  Got all that?”

 

“Male blueberries, high winds, fucked-up membranes, something that sounds like ‘pregnancy’ – trot that by again, eh?”

 

Spence chuckled, and repeated it slowly.  “How are the critters?”

 

“Cats parked on windowsills watching birds, Martha’s tracking Hank around the halls.  No worries, mate.”

 

“One more thing: buy me a brand new laptop.  Dell’s a Texas company.  Have it delivered, okay?  Pay cash on delivery.  Use a phony name and tip the blonde at the desk, her name’s Nancy, to ring you down to get it.”

 

“A new computer?  Got ya.”  Richie phoned Lena the publicist.

 

Using the remote-access program, Spencer found among her documents Beryl’s next column waiting to be posted.  He deleted it.

 

Roxana’s day nurse Grace was preparing to start her IV steroids, spiking IV ports in her arm.  The room reshaped itself as the needle pierce roused Roxie back to reality.  Where a moment before she’d hallucinated a long ward with other beds, there was a corner.  Grace stood at her elbow, not several beds down.

 

“Wow.  My brain won’t work,” Roxie croaked.

 

“Well, at least you have an excuse.  Hey, I have a nephew who’s a budding actor.  He just downloaded two sides for a film set in New Orleans, like your-all’s.  Two young fishermen -- ‘four-buck parts’ he calls them, since the downloads are four dollars each if you’re not a member.  He is a member.  And his dad ran a shrimp boat in Chef Menteur Pass before the damn hurricane.  So he’s got the accent and the boat savvy.”

 

“A four-buck part is pretty good.  Downloading sides saves so much time.  Gee, I hope he gets his fisherman, or maybe an eight-buck part.”

 

“He’s my sister’s kid.  It’s cool the way producers are shooting flicks over there.  Any plot with a big river, boats, docks, swamps and old graveyards can’t lose filming there, can it.”

 

Roxie added,  “And that wonderful old courthouse.”

 

Magically, it seemed to her, a second nurse materialized at her other elbow.  “Runaway Jury, The Big Easy and the one with James Spader Storyville –  lots of that courthouse.  I’m Vivian, I’ll get your vitals now.”

 

“And the Fairmont.  I love that hotel.”  Roxie smiled  The Fairmont had welcomed her Martha, a big bloodhound, and her two traveling cats.  Special pet food, even.

 

“What were you talking about – ‘sides’?”  Vivian wondered.

 

“Sides are characters’ dialogue from the script so an actor can rehearse a speech for his audition.  From the script when there is a script already done.”

 

“By the way,” Grace continued, injecting a dose of steroids in the new IV port, “my sister’s dislocated, too,  working in a hotel in L. A.  She told me to tell you, guess whose husband has nooners with a girlfriend at her hotel?  You will love this!”

 

~*~

 

Saturday morning, Beryl Couvier’s Ruffrox libel was missing from her column.  Snooping repeatedly on her documents list overnight, Spencer had deleted the final draft before Beryl could post it.  Grinning, he imagined her consternation.

 

But he hadn’t anticipated Beryl’s sending the piece to Anastasia Dark – who printed it in her “DARKTOWN” column.  It appeared that afternoon when Uptown Spy hit newsstands.

 

“Apparently they cross-pollinate,” he growled.  Actually, Dark was Couvier’s protégé and Couvier frequently fed her stories. With repetition the “reports” gathered credibility.

 

Roxana asked the doctor in charge of her case to release a brief statement explaining her condition.  “I hate to bother you with it, it’s so stupid, but the –”

 

“No problem. Rumor mills churning overtime.”  Helen Gifford was young and cheerful and had seen the gamut of cedar-fever cases.  And her twin twelve-year-old nieces had just called to fill her in on the first tabloid sallies.

 

Ninety minutes later Dr. Gifford released a brief statement.  It succinctly discussed the common allergy and identified the respiratory toxin as plicatic acid.  The patient was undergoing treatment which included oxygen, steroids and Albuterol.  Ms. D’Orsini should recover quickly.

 

Saturday evening, updating her online Markswell Tells, Jozey Markswell mentioned “Spencer’s violent temper” followed by speculation that he had damaged Roxie, “a possible head injury leading to disorientation and hallucination.”  Unnamed “members of the Texas film crew” had “talked about jealous rages.”

 

On an evening tabloid TV show Tad O’Malley, film critic and gossip, said he had heard from “a source at the Austin hotel who overheard Spencer tell paramedics that Roxana was hallucinating.  Whether she took a psychedelic drug or was oxygen-deprived from too much alcohol,  we don’t know yet.”

 

Guy Francis Drake’s “Drake Rakes” piece in the Sunday weekly he wrote for, twisted an allergy in to a botched abortion using “morning-after pills” to which Roxie had reacted badly.  “Hotel staff sources” were vaguely cited.

 

In addition, he had “a friend of actress Monica Matthews” saying “she complained of Robbie Abbot’s body and breath odors after working with him.”

 

Drake also embroidered Beryl’s “Womanizing W-cubed” charges.  According to Drake several starlets accused Wayne of sexual harassment.

 

Monica Matthews phoned the hospital to wish Roxie a full recovery.  Her twittery voice was instantly recognizable. A small voice from a petite blonde, it suited her.

 

“I’m so freaked by that Drake hit!  How do I convince Robbie I never said that?”

 

“Oh, he knows you didn’t.  If he ever sees that trash; he’s on his honeymoon with Emily.  They did it, yes, totally secret.  Apparently they discovered an invisibility spell.”  Robbie and Emily were both former co-stars on Ruff films, and good friends.  “Hey, Monica, are you up for  some payback on Mister Drake?”

 

“That creep, sure!”

 

“Are you going to L. A. weekend after next?  Our premiere there is that Saturday.”

 

“I’m in L.A. now.  Sure, I’ll be at the premiere.”

 

“Bring some girl friends.  Here’s my idea....”

 

~*~

 

Late Sunday afternoon Spence brought the children again.  He sat on the room’s other bed behind closed curtains playing tent and reading to the boys by flashlight, while Roxie ate the borscht he had brought.  His new laptop had arrived and he had set up “Windows” with Beryl Couvier as Administrator, and transferred to it data he had taken from her computer.  He remembered to delete all traces of his theft.  He established a clone email box using her same user ID and same password.  He had correctly guessed that the numbers in her password were her birth date – March 1, 1942.  But he’d confirmed it on her internet biography page.  The new computer was essentially a twin of Beryl’s, traceable only to her.  Spence added it to her remote-access program.  After the free trial period, he would not risk exposing himself through payment.  There was time enough to do what he planned before that deadline.  He had already bought the program for his own PC.

 

When Vivian appeared to change the IV, the boys had to watch.  A purple octopus depicted on her tunic stirred a story out of Spence.  Diving with a pal back home in “Oz” he had caught an octopus of a species considered a delicacy and decided to cook it.  “First you need to rinse out all the ink, and then you pound it to tenderize the meat–”

 

”Not while it’s still alive,” Martin interjected, reassuringly.

 

“Well, I’m glad of that.”

 

“We only killed that octopus because it was in bad shape.  We’d just watched it get ripped by a huge eel.  Anyway, we figured we’d shortcut the rinsing and pounding – we had no bathtub in our flat, see – so we went to the laundry room and put it in a washer.”

 

“No soap suds, though,” Martin added.

 

“Just ran it through wash and rinse, the agitator did the tenderizing.  But the landlady caught us.  She wasn’t down with that.  Even when we offered her a tentacle to eat.  Washer did require a bit of washing up itself...like prying suckers off the wall with pliers.”

 

“Yuck.  I hope you put some soda in there to kill the fishy smell.”

 

“Well, no, but we did use some detergent.  Didn’t improve our standing with that landlady, though.”

 

When Vivian had the IV  flow resumed she left.  Spence and the boys returned to their “camp.”

 

A solemn foursome hiding its agenda and message-tees asked permission as “fans” to visit Roxana.  She consented as long as they were brief and bore no cameras or camera-phones.    Together at the foot of her bed the four shouted “Murderer!” and opened their jackets exposing ABORTION  IS  MURDER slogans on shirts.  One spindly wild-eyed teenager confronted startled Katya with  “How many brothers and sisters has your mother murdered?” before Spence bounding from the tent bodily ejected him.  The boys stared from their tent, terrified.  Katya burst in to tears.

 

Roxie intervened for the activists who jammed themselves in the doorway fleeing.  “Just get their names and addresses,” she told Spence, “and explain we need them for our lawsuit.  Just tell them they owe us for scaring our kids and hurling lies at me.  We need them to testify against every liar who publishes that trash.  Starting with that asshole Drake.”

 

~*~

 

On Monday Dr. Gifford told Roxana, “I stopped at the local 24-hour joint this morning.  Magazines had you overdosed, suicidal, miscarrying, beaten up, and one was demanding to know who shot you.”

 

“Honestly!  They left out bird flu and attack by aliens.”

 

Gifford addressed the press live on the hospital’s front lawn.  “For our patient’s sake and our staff’s sake, I want to dispel some lies.” Dr. Gifford’s tone was sharp with sarcasm.  “There was no overdose, no gun shot wound or other wound. No abortion took place, spontaneous or induced.”  Reporters clamored for more with ridiculously earnest faces.  One of the anxious ones, a female with a zigzag-parted, youthful hair style around a well-past-youthful face, asked loudly, “Can you confirm there was no abortion or attempted abortion?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“How?  Did an obstetrician examine her?”

 

“Ms. D’Orsini has a contraceptive patch and has used the patch system for years.  She was not pregnant.”

 

The earnest reporter’s self-important expression changed to disappointed, gratifying Gifford.  But then the woman brightened: “Are you sure it’s a contraceptive patch?  Not a patch for an addiction, like –”

 

“I’m sure.  I’m a doctor.  Ms. D’Orsini did not overdose on any substance.  She reacted to red cedar pollen.  You locals know all about that.  I see several drippy noses and red eyes.”  A loud affirming sneeze brought laughter from those locals.

 

~*~

 

With his slim height, dazzling smile and signature arrangement of Dredlocks, Haitian musician Antoine L’Étrange was easily distinguished in most crowds.  He had written music for Ymanja and planned to travel with Spence and Roxana to the New Orleans premiere that weekend.  Slipping a new iPod in his shirt pocket, Antoine went from airport to hospital.  In it his iPod carried the movie’s soundtrack, just released on iTunes, and some classic Reggae.  His own Reggae albums were international hits.  Like Tanya Stevens he could pack a soap opera in to one song.

 

In the hospital lobby Antoine was approached  by a freelance confessed contributor to tabloids.  Known to Antoine only as Mick, he had once offered  a “friendly piece” in exchange for money.  Now Mick said, “My offer stands.  You need it worse than ever.   And pass it on to Ruff and his babe.  They’re going to need good press now, and I’ll make it well worth the price.”

 

Antoine conveyed the proposition.  “Mick will lick your boots if you cross his palm.”  He handed over an envelope in which Mick had put past examples of his work, all complimentary articles about gossips’ favorite victims.  “Sugar stuff.”

 

Wayne Western phoned the hospital room.  Spence picked up.  Conveying wishes for Roxie’s rapid recovery, Wayne soon turned the talk to tabloids.

 

“I’m in trouble from the shit that Couvier cunt and that prissy fuck Drake barfed up.  Muriel is pissed.  She’s supposed to join me in two days, but now she says,” mimicking Muriel’s haughty drawl, “‘you need time to fuck your way through Z, and I’ve got better things to wait for!’”

 

Spence repeated that to Roxie.  She suggested in a whisper that Spence pass Wayne  Beryl’s hotel room number in New Orleans, downloaded from her computer with her trip plans.   “Give her a midnight call.  Get creative.  Freak her out, she won’t know how you found her.”

 

“Oh, be advised, I’ll call the bitch,” Wayne promised.  “Hey, though, I’m glad to hear Roxie’s on the mend.  I grew up in that part of Texas.  My brother had asthma and a lot of years, he just had to leave.”

 

“Yeah.  They put the pollen count on the local news.  There have been days with twice the usual counts.  So...her voice is weak, or I’d put her on.  We’ll be in New York early March.  You gonna be around?”

 

“Nope.  But where will you be next week and the week after?  We go from Saint Louis to Denver to San Francisco.”

 

“After New Orleans this weekend and most of next week, we head for L. A,  weekend after next is the premiere there, Saturday March first.”

 

“I’ll plan on being in L. A. when you are.”

 

“Tell Muriel she can’t believe what she reads, man.”

 

“I don’t even think it’s her so much as her family.  Stiff as rebars.  They think I’m fatally bent anyway.”

 

“Seems to me Muriel’s a pretzel herself.  That weekend in Noumea...remind her of that!  See you in L. A.”

 

W-cubed was not a wanker for the uptight, Spence thought.  Raised by fans of “Firesign Theater” humor, Wayne imitated Nick Danger when introduced to Roxie: “Wayne Western ‘at your cervix.’” That was typical Wayne.  But so were genuine friendships and deep generosity.  Ameliorated  by an infectious laugh and a natural diffidence, his raunchy humor seldom offended any but those determined to be offended.

 

Like Antoine, W-cubed was hard to hide: extremely tall, lanky, long-headed with deep-set grey eyes and shaggy black hair, and a voice that thrummed low like some frogs’.  Singing, he bayed the crescendos like a hound.  His lyrics were likewise unique.  Among the most haunting Spence had ever heard, anywhere.

 

But sometimes Spence worried about Wayne.  Like all innately honest people he was alarmed and mystified by lying.  That exacerbated wounds inflicted by the professional liars.  In Wayne anger boiled at a usually safe depth, but libel sent it skyward with volcanic force.

 

After a campaign of tedious duration Spence himself had resigned himself to the sliming.  Losing Cressida to a sudden cerebral hemorrhage had radically realigned his priorities.

 

~*~

 

On Wednesday, February 19th Roxie was discharged.  Departing the hospital with a portable oxygen tank, she with Spence, the children, Antoine, Hank and Richie were on parade for paparazzi.  Provocative shouts pursued them:  “What did you OD on?” and  “Did you abort your baby?” and  “What did you hit her with, Spence?”

 

Antoine shook his head.  He had known Roxana since they were teenagers, Spence since before his wife’s death two years ago.  And he empathized with victims of tabloid libel.  For a year he had fought bigamy rumors arising from claims by  an anonymous stripper.  A putative marriage license had materialized bearing Antoine’s name, though the place of birth listed was different from that on Antoine’s passport.  Still, rumor mongers persisted.  Particularly Guy Francis Drake.

 

And Spence: no one Antoine could recall had suffered slanderous slings and arrows like Ruff had.  If in a café he requested replacement of a curdled pitcher of coffee cream, it was described as “a meltdown.”  If he withdrew from a project because the script was a mess, he “was fired for insisting on complete creative control.”  If he requested a second beer from a flight attendant, that became “a drunken debacle.”  And then there were the totally fictional “reports.”  Never-named “sources” described bad behavior in unspecified places on unspecified dates.  But with Roxana in the picture, the bullshitters would face a formidable bastion: the renowned Gordieva-Orsini law firm.  Antoine anticipated bloodshed.

 

He rotated slowly, grinning, towards the plump, mincing man who shoved a mic up at him and bellowed, “Did Spencer make her get the abortion?”

 

“Why would he?  Look at their children.  Now, your poor dada, he had good reason.  Too bad your mama had no sense.”