Remains to Be Scene Read Online Free Page A

definitely catnip to me. Still, I can’t bear Bush.”
    On television, peacock Billy continued with his gleaming if insincere smile. “It was precisely Trixie’s lack of glamour that made her popular with movie-going audiences of all ages,” he said, trying to appear like an analytical film historian, as if the thoughts and words he was speaking were his own. “She was common, and one of the few women in Hollywood who never dated Howard Hughes, Clarke Gable, or Bogey,” he said. “However, we did uncover this snapshot. It’s Trixie on a night out with Regis Philbin.”
    A faded photograph from the 1970s appeared on the television screen. In the image, Trixie was apparently seated in a restaurant’s red leather banquette. She was wearing a plaid sweater accented with a string of pearls around her neck. Holding a glass of red wine in one hand, the look she was blasting at Regis was one of utter boredom.
    “I know how she feels,” Polly said, reading Trixie’s body language. “Regis tried to date me once, and…”
    “…And if you’d only known how stinking rich he was going to be, you’d have said, yes …” Tim completed her thought. It was a story he and Placenta had heard as far back as they could remember.
    When the television camera returned to Billy’s smirking face, he said, “That’s an exclusive, folks. It proves that Trixie did have a life outside of a soundstage.”
    For the remainder of the program, “Access Hollywood” was stuck making do with showing archival film footage as filler between commercials for Clairol hair-coloring products, and repeated showings of a video taken earlier in the day of Liza Minnelli wiping away a tear and sniveling, “I’m just glad that Mama’s not here. This would kill her!”
    As the champagne loosened Tim’s tongue, and after watching so many black and white clips from Trixie’s early films, he stated the obvious. “God, she looked as old in the 1940s as she did in the twenty-first century,” he said.
    Polly, comfortably seated in a leather wingback chair, her feet resting on an ottoman and facing the large television screen, agreed. “That’s the beauty of being a homely girl,” she said, taking another sip of champagne. “We never fade.”
    “We,” was the well-placed cue for Tim to contradict his mother’s self-deprecation. He’d been through this a million times and had learned how to assuage her self-conscious fears—real or imagined. “You’d never have gotten a guy like Dad if you were unattractive,” Tim said with all the warmth and sincerity of an automated voice menu. “He chose you when he could have had a whole stable of starlets,” Tim allowed.
    “And did. Which is why we divorced,” Polly reminded him, pulling an accent pillow out from behind her back and tossing it at Tim. “Trixie may have been a grinning walrus from day one,” she said, “but she made lemonade out of her life. That’s what we actors do, dear. I mean look at Owen Wilson’s broken nose and tiny pouting mouth and wrinkled lips, but by sheer force of personality he became a leading man.” She then switched the channel again.
    Another news anchor on Channel 2 speculated that because Trixie had been working on a closed set, if she in fact met with foul play, it would have had to be an inside job. “Is that right, Tiffany?”
    The screen filled with a honey-blond reporter who could have been a swimsuit model. She was standing at the crime scene with strips of yellow police tape as a backdrop to her story. She said, “That’s right, Kevin. The stars in Hollywood aren’t twinkling so brightly tonight.”
    “Yes, we are,” Polly talked back to the screen.
    Tiffany the reporter continued. “Potentially hundreds of people—film crews and celebrities alike—may become suspects in this all-too-real reality show called, ‘How Did I Die?’” The reporter was doing her best to sound as though crime was a novelty in Tinseltown. “Party princesses