WHEN I SHOWED up at the designated address on Pinto Lane the next morning at 6:00. I realized that the soundstage was right next to the Vegas coroner's facility.
Wow. There must be a sweetheart deal between the city, L.V. coroner Grady "Grisly" Bahr, and Nightwine's production company. I suppose there were cases when Hector needed additional corpses in a pinch and the morgue had plenty of unclaimed ones. It would also give the unknowns an unprecedented chance at recognition.
Visiting the morgue earlier with Ric, I'd taken the windowless beige brick building next door for some warehouse, never guessing its equally gruesome purpose.
Once inside, the building was as echoing and barren as I expected. A clerk gave me a long form to fill out. I used mostly made-up answers. I didn't want specifics of my life in Wichita or here on record. For address, I put down the street number of Sunset Park, not Nightwine's estate address, on the odd-numbered side of the road. Hector'd get my pay to me.
I'd worn my gray contact lenses and a big head scarf with a fake fringe of blond bangs. I would unveil only when and where Lilith's famous raven locks, white skin, and vivid blue eyes would blossom for the camera.
After reading my part, I knew just where I could shock and awe to greatest effect. Before I delivered my lines and my own little surprise, I planned to find out all I could about the setup.
I returned the forms and clipboard to the attractive strawberry blonde on desk duty.
"I hope this is all right," I said, sounding flustered. "This is my first real job in film." She eyed me with the disdainful pity you get only from people who really want to be in your shoes but are too proud to admit it.
"This is not 'fillum' work. It's a weekly TV show and you're being paid just one level up from an extra. The only reason you got the job is you're packing a thirty-eight."
"Ah, I'm not armed."
"I meant the bra size, honey. Producers are all the same," she added bitterly.
I checked out her armaments, not my usual routine, and saw she'd supplemented herself to a.45 caliber. No wonder she was bitter. She outgunned me and still only manned a desk. Although I'd hated my early development in that area, I'd found as an adult observer of such things that Mother Nature's sense of proportion is always best.
"Now sit down until you're called to Makeup," she told me. "Better amp up your cell phone web service; you're going to get a very numb ass. The body is the diva around here. It takes at least six hours to prep it for the camera."
"Six hours." I sounded suitably impressed and discouraged. "For a wax dummy?"
She leaned over the desk, eager to showcase her superior qualifications and straighten me out. "You're the dummy if you think it is wax. We need better than mannequins for today's reality TV audiences. Every corpse is either a tranquilized actor or a fresh corpse, in which case the family gets the blood price."
Blood price, Irma repeated. That's what Sansouci had called the killing of Cicereau's daughter and her lover.
I shivered, authentically, to hear an echo of that horrific real-life murder in this place of phony or manipulated death.
Strawberry Blonde snickered. "Hey, the fee is a grand's worth of fuel for the family tank, sister. And relatives get special footage to show at the funeral and family reunions forever and ever amen. Greatest remembrance of a loved one ever: fame."
"Can I order a tape of my... bit?"
"Naw, the videographers don't have time to cut custom tapes of tiny bits like yours." She really emphasized "tiny bits."
"If you're anywhere near the corpse, and as"-she eyed the clipboard-"Female Autopsy Tech Number Two, you should be visible in the background, huh, Lillian? Come on! Are you trying to play off that Lilith-Maggie mania thing? Lame, kid. Get an agent and new screen name when you get your AFTRA card."
"Why would I want this card?"
"For your career. If you actually say lines on a Hector Nightwine production it counts, even if they and your image end up on the cutting room floor."
I winced.
"What's the matter now?"
"That 'cutting room floor' expression takes on a whole other meaning after the Millennium Revelation."
She shook her highlighted head of laser-crimped curls. "Amateurs! God save us!"
Would-be experts, God bless 'em, Irma hissed in my ear. They are so easy to snow... oops! Excuse the expression.
I winced again as I returned to my plastic-shelled seat to kill time. Strawberry Blondness was right.
My ass would be numb in no time.
So this is show business.
"YOU'RE AS PALE as a ghost," the makeup man fretted as he eyed me in the big dressing room mirror.
He was an angular perfectionist whose spray-on tan had crystallized into the sparkling spackle of hard brown-sugar candy. While he frowned at my face, I tried to ignore the host of television "ghosts" milling behind our backs in the mirror, each clamoring for attention. Only I could see them, thanks to my newly discovered "gifts" involving mirrors.
"Keep your eyes still," he ordered.
I hadn't counted on how many corpses might haunt this CSI V set and associated areas, with its reputed actor and real corpses. Luckily, mirrors were confined to the dressing rooms.
"No foundation makeup," a guy with a clipboard declared. "The Great God Nightwine wants her pasty-faced. It says so right here: dead-white skin, black hair."
I'd swept off my scarf and blond bangs the minute I'd been called into Makeup, but had retained my gray contact lenses. I wasn't going to do the "final reveal" until I was on camera and it was too late for anyone to stop me. I suspected a full-out imitation of Lilith would cause a storm on the set.
"I'll redden her lips a bit, then," Mango Man said, "just so they show."
"She'll be wearing a Plexi visor in the scene," a girl assistant noted, "so her hair doesn't need doing."
"Then what the fuck's she doing in my chair!" he demanded. "I nearly broke my back for four hours over a corpse that will not soften to the needed degree of rigor mortis. And you there, Missy Lillian. There you sit, just as God made you. Well, let God and Max Factor help you. I'm outta here."
The moving chair spun and I was ejected in the same sharp motion.
Mr. Clipboard smiled mechanically. "Wardrobe next. Just scrubs and mask."
As I followed, he frowned at the clipboard, which was nice. I was tired of being the one constantly frowned at.
"Oh, and a custom prop, I see," he crowed. "Aren't we special? I hope somebody already knows about this because I only herd human actors, not vermin."
He pushed me into another room where a short, stout woman ordered, "Strip to your skivvies."
"Hi," I said first. "I'm new at this."
"Stripping to your skivvies?" She rolled humorous brown eyes behind funky old frames. No one wore glasses anymore except to pose as an intellectual or a dot-com billionaire.
"I'm new at that too. Is there someplace less public-?"
"This is it. I'd stand between you and the door but you've got at least eight inches of height on me so it wouldn't do any good. Come on, you're as good as wearing a tent; that's all medical scrubs are. You'll only need to lose your top."
I peeled off my knit tee as fast as possible while the little woman stretched up to cover my shoulders with a pale green cotton hospital gown. I bent my knees to help her as she tied me up the back.
"There you go"-she checked the clipboard that had been left-"Lillian. My name's Erlene. Relax. They don't need you on set for a whole eight minutes."
To a TV newsperson used to thinking in thirty-second slots, that was an eon. I leaned against the makeup chair and ventured a question.
"I've never seen a corpse up close before, Erlene. How will this go? Does the body get rolled in first and the actors gather around?"
"Depends on the director. If he or she wants more action they make a big deal of the camera following the bod being rolled in and then the cast is all 'We gotta do this fast. STAT!' That kind of thing."
So the bodies could come from anywhere, the morgue next door, Central Casting, or... a secret suicide room.
"Will the body... smell?"
Erlene laughed heartily. "Holy corpuscles, no, girl! They're not all really dead, although the show likes that idea to get around. Those actual, dead corpses are ratings boosters. Not many volunteer for that, and even those don't smell. Most are spanking fresh; smell less than a gurney monkey. The production company needs to film the person committing suicide off-set and then being placed on set. Legal proof of the voluntary death.
"In those instances, we have a real coroner on set for the close-up on the Y-cut, forehead saw, what have you."
"Don't the actors... faint sometimes?"
"Listen, faking the right moves and doing them, what's the difference? You'll see. The stars on these forensics shows get paid hundreds of thousands a week. Not so a glorified extra like you, but make a good impression and... who knows? I see you're slotted for a little solo." She eyed the clipboard and winked. "'Know' the producer or the director, huh? That's okay. Pretty girl like you gotta play what she's dealt."
Erlene was beginning to sound like Ric's D.C. mama. I was beginning to believe them. Being force-fed self-esteem was quite a trip.
"Say, Lillian girl," Erlene went on. I think she'd sensed my stage nerves and was trying to sound like my number one ego-booster, Irma. "These are weird props even for CSI V. Should play like flesh-eating beetles in Peoria. " She winked at me again. "My advice is: stay cool, remember your lines, and have an agent on insty-dial. I'm gonna do you up as a ghoul to remember."
"Ghoul?"
"That's what the crew calls the autopsy-room cast members. Nothing personal, sweetie. Now hold still."
Erlene plunked a rubber headache band on my forehead with a Plexiglas shield flipped up above it. I spotted some props laid out on the kind of steel tray that normally holds surgical tools. She picked one up, an exotic silk orchid. It was one of those luridly colored and spotted varieties that look more like giant alien leeches than flowers.
Before I could protest the notion of pinning a corsage on an autopsy tech, she snapped a watch on my left wrist and held up the empty steel tray.
"Spread 'em," she huffed in a voice like a trained seal.
While I struggled to imagine what bizarre rite this was, she nodded impatiently at my hands.
I... spread my hands atop the tray, my fingertips making fuzzy-focus spider-leg reflections, while Erlene slapped a set of adhesive long red false fingernails on my short, naked nails.
I gazed down into the tray at my own blurry but stunned expression. What an unforeseen and nutsy problem! I'd planned to slip out my contact lenses to unveil Lilith's and my signature baby blues just as the cameras rolled.
With these scimitars on my fingers, how could I ever pop out the lenses? Only my bright blue natural eye color would evoke Lilith. Nightwine would be furious, I would have wasted my time, and the whole stunt effect would be ruined!
I could live with that but I didn't think Hector would.
I stood there helpless, thinking madly. I was now your typically prepped actor-corpse, tied in a winding sheet, masked by clear plastic, with hands I could only hold in front of me.
Mango Man popped around the doorjamb, frowning at me as usual. "The scarlet Vampira fingerstakes are superlicious, Erlene, but wouldn't an autopsy tech be wearing latex gloves?" he asked.
"Yes, if we were going for verisimilitude," the stumpy wardrobe lady barked back. "This is one of Nightwine's wiggy 'dream sequences.' Wait a second. One... last... delicate touch of glue. There. That'd hold through the sinking of the Titanic.
"Just place her on her spot like a department store mannequin and hope this rookie knows how to hold as still as a corpse and say her lines when the finger of God the director points at her to come to life."
This time I was escorted onto the soundstage itself. My pulses spiked. Cables on the floor connecting lights and cameras were pass�� now. The set was a highly lit centerpiece glittering with stainless steel like Grisly Bahr's real autopsy chamber.
I was guided into position behind the autopsy table with a stunning view of the main event: a naked male corpse minus legs and hands. I fought the prurient urge to see just how high up the torso had been truncated. Three other gowned actors shuffled beside me, knowing their places and taking them, unlike me.
I turned away, using the heels of my hands to shove up the Plexiglas shield. I started to claw at my eyelids with the flats of my fingertips and finally expelled each contact lens. I didn't care where they landed. Contacts nowadays are cheaper by the dozen.
Luckily, actors are pretty self-absorbed, especially just before a director calls "Action." Everyone else was fussing with their hair and wardrobe too. I pulled down the shield and turned back to face the corpse.
"ACTION!" ORDERED A commanding male voice from the darkness beyond.
I jumped like a nervous racehorse, then froze. I was a media pro, dammit, at least on camera, if not as an actor. And I'd already learned some fascinating facts about the links between CSI V and corpses.
All I had to do was follow the other actors' actions with my blue eyes under glass. My lines didn't come until "Special Effect #1" happened: Corpse is cut.
That's when I was supposed to jump (and I bet I really would), look at my wristwatch, and mutter Hector's gibberish I'd memorized. Frankly, I thought the Orson Welles of Sunset Road was losing it.
I watched the surgeon's scalpel press hard into the legless corpse's shoulder to draw the left arm of the Y incision.
"Cut!" another voice from the dark shouted.
I jumped again, rank amateur that I was, but I was sure the camera was in loving corpse close-up by this time anyway.
The "surgeon" quickly stepped aside to be replaced by a costumed "double," the actor playing the surgeon.
"My God," he began, "the skin is heaving..."
Special Effect # 2 spewed out a spray of what I took for cauliflower florets.
"I hate it when that happens," the actor-surgeon sputtered with disgust.
I recognized my cue from the script and glanced at my wrist, absent a watch but sporting the world's ugliest orchid.
Oh, and it also hosted one slick pale macaroni of a Lone Maggot glued to a salmon-and-purple spotted orchid petal. I sensed the camera lens bearing down on me.
Are glorified extras on CSI V sets supposed to heave on camera? I thought not, and began regurgitating my previously meaningless lines, suddenly understanding the cockeyed genius of Hector Nightwine, if not fully appreciating it.
This would be a truly over-the-top unforgettable moment for me and Lilith and little Maggie, who also had a glorified extra role on CSI. Thus spoke Lillian, Tech # 2:
"Our jobs are sad and gruesome to some, yet even the hardest soul can find some guarantee of the goodness of Providence. It rests in the flowers. All our powers, our desires, our food, are really necessary for our existence, but this simple blossom embellishes life. Only goodness gives extras.
"It's all right, Doctor," I said, finishing my interminable monologue, "this small ejected creature you see here is an 'extra,' one of death's tiny unborn messengers sprouting new life from old. Our highest proof of an ultimate Providence lies born of decay on this exotic floral altar of a flower. Our mortal needs and desires make death the worm in the rose, but that which we call a rose is only nature, and the worm within its lovely folds is the future that makes even death smell as sweet."
I now recognized phrases from everything from Shakespeare to Sherlock Holmes to Madison Avenue admixed in the monologue. I almost ad-libbed my own ending. Heck, I would, combining poet Gertrude Stein with Matthew in the New Testament.
"A rose is a rose is a rose," I intoned gravely, "when it is not the least of these, a maggot."
And an ex-TV reporter is an ex-TV reporter, when she is not a ham.
A shocked silence held.
"Cut!" the invisible voice from the dark yelled again.
The general soundstage lighting amped up sunrise bright.
Blinking, I was pushed away from the corpse and rapidly guided off the set. Still blinking, I stopped, only to feel the gown and visor ripped off. Next I heard my false fingernails in expert succession pinging into the steel tray like hail, leaving a gummy residue for me to pick off at home.
"Here's your top," Erlene said. We were in the wardrobe room. I grabbed and donned my stretchy knit top, again blinding myself for a few seconds. When I pulled it down and my hair was free, she was propping my blond-banged scarf on one displaying hand.
"Better wear this and haul ass outta here. Your bit created a sensation even on set. That agent on speed-dial should be one happy fella, Lillian."
"The orchid," I said vaguely, "the maggot." She misunderstood me.
"Pros don't ask for souvenirs, even of signature scenes. The flower stays in Wardrobe and the maggot will be recycled to Living Props for use in another shot... if it doesn't get too old and grow too big and is destroyed."
Alas, poor Maggie...
I did as she said and left. The busy crew and cast didn't even notice a blue-eyed blond ing��nue on an exit run. I knew Hector Nightwine had his money shot: an azure-eyed resurrection of Lilith, complete with her single trademark maggot.
And did I know if Lilith was alive or dead? No, but I'd seen that the autopsy scene process could be manipulated, by anyone, even Lilith.
It wasn't until I got home to the Enchanted Cottage and checked myself in the bathroom mirror that I spotted the tiny blue topaz nostril jewel Erlene had slapped on my nose while slamming on my autopsy shield. She could obey a clipboard instruction sheet like crazy.
That touch made me Lilith down to this betraying trademark I'd worn in Kansas and ditched weeks ago when I realized the Lilith CSI V corpse had sported it too.
Hector Nightwine, the Demon Director of Sunset Road, didn't miss a thing.
BY 3:00 P.M. the next day I'd put in a long shift watching over Ric and returned to the Enchanted Cottage, where the estate internal phone line was blinking a message. Nightwine was old-fashioned that way.
A jubilant-sounding Hector was summoning me to his palatial office to view "outtakes" on the giant screen hidden behind his expensive wood paneling. I was curious enough to go straight to his office in the main house for the peep show.
I don't know if he was behind the camera himself but the sequence was... exquisite. My Lilith features were glimpsed through the thin Lexan shield like a fugitive reflection in a moving car window. The high-tech medical spatter guard seemed almost a modern knight's visored helmet. I resembled a pale somber Joan of Arc behind it.
As I spoke the nonsensical lines the camera angles switched between the cuts into the corpse's wan skin welling whip lines of blood to my converging face and hand. Closer and closer the camera came... to my vivid mouth and eyes behind the semi-obscuring plastic... to my pale hands with their bloody perfect false fingernails holding the orchid, which in close-up could be seen to tremble as if the petals breathed... to the wet, pulsing fetal curl of the modern Worm Ouroboros, the lowly maggot.
I held my breath at the morbid beauty of it and heard my own voice-over as some mystical unintelligible poem.
"Maggie lives!" Hector crowed as the segment ended.
He slammed something down hard on his massive wooden desk.
"Don't thank me. I do have my spies on the set. I heard you expressed some interest... no thanks, please, my dear Miss Street. I know you are the sentimental sort."
He prodded something across his desktop. I recoiled at first, thinking it might be one of his repugnantly anonymous edibles.
No. It was ultramodern, a solid block of Plexiglas the size of a notepad square. I leaned close to comprehend it. A clear cube with something inside, something embedded.
I blinked.
I saw my hand, bloody-nailed but flaunting the most perfect manicure I would ever sport. My face and blue eyes lurked behind it through a futuristic plastic veil. My long red fake forefinger nail was just barely touching the maggot atop the exotic flower, glistening like Renaissance mother-of-pearl. These parts of me were from a film still, a photo.
The orchid and the maggot-Lord, that sounded like an antiromance novel's title!-were preserved in plastic, now eternally frozen in 3-D, like those encased desert scorpions and tarantulas sold in tourist shops across the Southwest states.
"This is the numbered First," Nightwine said, his voice trembling with triumph, "of a limited edition of a million pouring out of the Mexican workshops. Fast work, eh? All yours, Delilah, for a very good job. Thanks to you, the Maggie franchise lives!"
I pushed myself out of the heavy chair and picked up the slick square. Its contents were only a reproduction. As in lost wax jewelry casting, the original models, floral and insect, were sacrificed to make the mold.
Nightwine was rerunning his footage, drooling.
He didn't notice me leave his office.
Thank God.
Who would believe this hardened group-home orphan who had refused to cry for herself from toddlerhood on had been brought to the brink of shedding a tear for a dead maggot?
