“We’ll keep the crew small,” she added, giving Scarlett a sly glance. “Just you, me, your brother, and Eric. I think they’ll be very enthusiastic about this proposition. We’ll make an excellent team.”
Scarlett waited a moment before answering.
“What do you need me to do?”
“I knew you would do it, O’Hara!” she said, elated. “Now, to pull this off…”
She picked up her notebook from the bed and leafed through several pages of notes.
“…we will need the following. One, a studio. That’s done. Billy has graciously loaned me a secondary studio space of his for a few hours, no questions asked. Two, a camera. Easily purchased in the morning, I should think. Three, a small group of actors skilled in improvisation. That’s Spencer and Eric. And these…”
She took a handful of pages from the bed, printouts of script pages with notes written over them.
“I need you to type these up. This is our script. I’ll need five copies of it ready by noon. Do you think you can manage that? And send Spencer down.”
Her voice had lightened to its normal, happy, command-giving tone. But there was still something there—something deeper. Respect. Affection. Or just some bond people develop when plotting fake auditions together.
“Tomorrow,” she called out as Scarlett departed. “Great things, O’Hara!”
Scarlett was understandably nerve-rattled when she got upstairs. Spencer’s door was open. He had his headphones on and was “cleaning,” which meant he was dumping the contents of boxes onto his bed. The one he was currently working on contained tubes and pots of well-used makeup, fake body hair and skin, and lots of crumpled script pages.
“Trying to find a blood pack,” he explained, when he noticed Scarlett had appeared in his doorway. “Eric and I have been thinking about doing a thing where one of us stabs the other by accident during one of the scenes. We want to run it by Trevor, but it won’t look good unless I bleed. I have about seven of them in here somewhere…Marlene said you brought Eric along to some party she was at tonight.”
He tacked that on to the end very casually while plucking three noses out of the mess and piling them on his pillow. Scarlett spoke fluent Spencer, though, and knew that this was not just a random remark.
“Just for backup,” she said. “It was free food. At the Hard Rock. I would have taken you, but you had gone to work.”
“The Hard Rock?” he repeated. “Why do they always pick janky places?”
The matter had clearly made his radar, but he said no more about it. He continued picking through the debris until he produced a small plastic bag of dark red liquid.
“Here we go,” he said. “I’m thinking stomach. It’s really easy to puncture the bag there and get the blood all over the place.”
He pulled up his T-shirt and started poking around his abdomen for possible locations for his wound.
“Mrs. Amberson needs you,” she said.
He straightened up, a little too quickly.
“Service?” he asked. “I love to give service.”
She narrowed her eyes.
“What?” he asked, all innocence. He jumped up, fished a deodorant from under a stack of clothes, shoved it under his shirt, and applied it liberally. “I am a Martin. Hotel management is in my blood, and customer satisfaction is my life.”
“Every time you flirt with her,” Scarlett said, “a puppy dies.”
PERFORMANCE
The Heart of the Angel (now Empire) was about as generic a cop show as you could possibly want. There was a cop with a dark past, fighting crime in the big city. The scene they had was about a teenager who’d been sexually attacked on a date and was refusing to press charges against her former boyfriend. The Donna character, formerly called “Mike Charlane” (renamed Alice by Mrs. Amberson) was screaming at this poor girl like a maniac, trying to get her to step up and “get some justice,” “fight for justice,” “speak for justice,” and (Scarlett’s personal favorite) “be the covergirl of justice.”
Though Mrs. Amberson hadn’t asked her to, Scarlett took the liberty of improving the scene a little, going beyond the basic guy-to-girl, LA-to-New York changes that Mrs. Amberson had penciled in. Scarlett rewrote the bad speeches, tweaked the dialogue, added a bit to the end of the scene. She was surprised to see the sun coming up outside the Jazz Suite window by the time she finished. As she walked back to her room, she startled Spencer, who was on his way to take a shower.
“Why are you up?” he asked. “Are you sick?”
“I was working,” Scarlett mumbled.
“Yeah…what is this thing today? I was in Amy’s room all night talking about it. I didn’t get all the details, because we got off topic. You know how it goes. Massages. Long games of I Never. Doing each other’s nails.”
She was too tired to respond to his joke. He shook her curls as she stumbled past him.
Scarlett was awakened a few hours later by Mrs. Amberson herself, who had admitted herself to the Orchid Suite.