Nancy Grace - Death on the D-List

Wrong! He re-narrated his discovery of the fragment sliver.

And to think, he actually got paid for this.

Incredible.

Just then, it hit him… the déjà vu… she was familiar all right. Emory looked at the toe tag. Holey moley.

This was Prentiss Love. He’d had a poster of her tacked up in his bedroom since he was twelve years old. Used to drive his mom crazy.

In retrospect, Emory realized it hadn’t been the poster girl, but instead it was the tacks he’d pushed into the wallpaper to secure the poster to the wall that bugged her.

His mom, God love her, had gone to great lengths to personally spend an entire weekend cutting, pasting, and hanging sports-themed wallpaper up on his walls, covered in footballs, baseballs, and basketballs. His mom had tried anything, especially encouraging sports of all types, to get him to think of something other than dissecting bugs and animals.

So when she saw the Prentiss Love poster, she was probably thrilled he was dreaming about a girl… any girl… any thing , actually, other than dead creatures he could dissect.

But she was proud when he walked across the stage to get that med school diploma and a handshake from the president of the university. They talked on the phone nearly every Sunday. But this time he’d have something to talk about she’d be interested in… not just more dead bodies and where he’d gone to dinner to tell her about.

Wow. Prentiss Love. They’d never believe this back home. Emory took another Polaroid just for good measure.

RACING UPTOWN ON MADISON AVENUE, SOOKIE DOWNS NEARLY VOMITED in the back of the cab. She wasn’t used to this.

First of all, the cab stank. She couldn’t distinguish the exact origin of the stink. Pursing her lips instinctively downward while wrinkling her nose at the smell, she had several candidates from which to choose. There was the white gooey pool of liquid on the backseat’s floorboard beneath her feet. Sookie had no choice but to delicately levitate the black spiked heels of her Dior boots a few inches above the floor mat. She certainly did not want the smell to attach itself to her shoes.

Then there was the clear but extremely sticky substance on the seat on which she was sitting. Just because it was clear didn’t mean it didn’t smell. What was it? Some sort of soup? Chablis, perhaps? Spilled from a celebratory flute there in the back seat? Or was it just old urine? At least she hoped it was old. But did age matter? Was urine sticky? She paused to think. She’d never really changed her children’s diapers herself, so she didn’t know whether urine became gooey or sticky over time, left on a smooth plastic surface such as a dark blue car seat, unattended and unsanitized.

A strong possibility, obviously, was the previous passenger. He looked homeless, with a shock of dreads coming out from under a colorful Rasta hat. He very likely stank.

Sookie just couldn’t be sure. Didn’t Rastas refuse to bathe? Or was it washing their hair they hated? They certainly didn’t take care of their nails, from what she observed in the fleeting moment when they had exchanged looks, each sizing the other up, each looking disdainfully at the other.

Why did he look at her that way? He was the one that stank.

Sookie smelled delicately of perfume that sold for $250 an ounce. She better smell good.

Then there was the cab driver himself. He also looked to Sookie as if he stank. His hair was greasy, from what she could tell in the backseat, separated from the driver by a dingy, scratched-up plastic partition covered almost completely with directions, warnings, fare notices, and a taxi driver identification card bearing the driver’s name and photo.

He could be a terrorist. She couldn’t even mentally pronounce his last name. It was nothing but consonants. And it was probably fake.

Maybe Harry should do a show on terrorists.

No, the viewers would hate hearing about that again.

But they’d love a show on body odor. Hmm. Who could they book, other than stinky people? Doctors, specialists, victims of physical eccentricities that caused horrible smells through no fault of their own?

Anyway, she hoped the smell in the cab did not attach itself to her. That’s the last thing she needed. To absolutely reek in a meeting with Noel Fryer.

Noel was finally out of his bathroom and en route to his office. That’s what his personal assistant had whispered into the phone less than five minutes ago.

Sookie wanted desperately to lower the window. She was so tempted to punch the electric window button there on the door beside her. But A, she’d have to touch the button, and she knew it was a virtual colony of germs more likely at home floating in a petri dish under a microscope. And B, the breeze could ruin her hair.

She’d come this far and she wasn’t ruining her look now. Although vomit on the sides of her mouth would also destroy the look.

Sookie Downs lightly touched the window control, lowering the window only an inch or two so as not to get a direct breeze on her hair.

The cab suddenly took a violent left turn and there they were, in front of GNE.

Sookie handed the driver cash through a small, square slot in the cab’s plastic partition. Not waiting for change, she grabbed the paper receipt he handed out the window to her, for expenses of course, balanced herself on the Dior spikes, straightened her spine, and walked coolly toward the network’s giant, glass-front entrance.

A loud buzzing sound directly behind her made her turn back.

It was Fryer, for Pete’s sake. So much for the casual but dramatic entrance into his all-windowed corner office up on the thirty-first floor. Here he was in the flesh.

She hoped her coppery hair was perfection.

The irritating buzzing sound was coming from Fryer’s moped. Or whatever it was. A Vespa, he’d told her in the past. She’d acted like she knew what a Vespa was, exclaiming about his manly brilliance for purchasing it.

It sounded like “viper.” So this was it? It had to be. No, Fryer’s little motor scooter was in fact the Vespa he’d described. She would somehow work it into the conversation to look in the know.

Fryer dismounted the thing like it was a horse and he was in a Western. Sookie supposed that made him… who? John Wayne? Or did it make him James Dean in motorcycle motif? Or Marlon Brando, who also looked great on-screen on a motorcycle.

But they were all dead. She’d look old and dated if she compared him to them. Think! Damnit! Think of something brilliant to say! Brilliant… but light… something witty…

He left the Vespa parked horizontally in the space between two cars as if he owned the street. Noel Fryer took off his helmet, balancing it briefly on the seat of the Vespa, brushing his hair to the side, what there was of it, and unwrapping the scarf around his neck. Reaching into his front pocket, he pulled out a black cashmere beret. He had recently taken up wearing it around the office. While he unwrapped the scarf, he still left it hanging loose around his neck. He’d walk around the network like this all day, with the cashmere scarf hanging draped around his neck over his hand-tailored suit.

Who the hell did he think he was? Pavarotti?

Utterly ridiculous.

“Hello, you handsome man!”

Did she give it a touch too much verve ?

“Hi, Sookie! I thought that was you when I pulled up. Glad you could make it into the city today.”

“Well, Noel, I’m here every day. You know, for the show.”

A chill went down her back. Did Noel know she actually never came in to the show? Why bother? She could think and direct just as well from her home out in the Hamptons. Her physicality had nothing to do with her talents. It was all in her head. Creative masterminds were all the same. They didn’t fit into the confines of a nine-to-five workaday setting like all the others did.