Free Nobody Dies in a Casino by Marlys Millhiser Page B

There was something reassuring in Bradone’s smirk and the possibility that the planets had not stood still for her because Richard Morse scored.
    Poor Richard, so insulated by his power status in the positioning of the genders in the Hollywood universe, didn’t hear what he really said. He’d even get torqued when Charlie refused to appreciate insulting jokes. And yet he could be so savvy in other ways. Didn’t add up.
    You’re the one who told her mother to sit in front of a fan.
    â€œRuby is about to implode if you or I don’t answer her messages, Richard. And I don’t know how to answer them.”
    Richard decided Charlie could tell him what Ruby Dillon wanted and he could give Charlie the answer and she could tell his office manager. All because Charlie knew how to E-mail.
    â€œI’m not your secretary.” But she jotted down a few notes to pass on to Ruby as he tried to impress his new girlfriend with sage answers to mundane office matters.
    That was another thing. If you didn’t learn the new technology, you’d fall behind at Congdon and Morse. If you did, someone above you in the food chain would use you and these skills to make his more important work easier. Charlie had other serious misgivings with these timesaving electronic devices that ate up all your time to learn and, when you finally did, forced you to upgrade to something new and the “learning” started all over. Libby’d had to help her out more than once. But Libby learned computer-ease at school, far earlier in life than Charlie. Larry, Charlie’s assistant, treated it with contempt and deigned only to use E-mail, the word processor, and a spreadsheet to log Charlie’s schedule, phone calls, and the script submissions that crowded his cubicle.
    No message from Libby today. Libby hadn’t contacted Edwina either. Charlie could only hope and swallow a lot. She hoped Libby would contact their neighbor Maggie Stutzman if anything earthshaking occurred. Both Maggie and Libby had instructed Charlie to take a vacation and not call them. They’d call her.
    â€œWhat about our boy in Folsom?” Richard asked importantly and informed Bradone, “Keegan Monroe, screenwriter, inked Phantom of the Alpine Tunnel, Shadowscapes, and Zoo Keepers. ”
    Edwina was threatening to go off tamoxifen—a drug prescribed to block natural estrogen production in her body—because the unnatural estrogen prescribed to head off hot flashes, panic attacks, heart disease, osteoporosis, and old age had given her breast cancer.
    Everything Charlie’d read said that synthetic estrogen did not cause breast cancer.
    â€œActually, Keegan’s on chapter ten of his novel,” Charlie answered. Which is further than he’d ever gotten before.
    â€œChrist, with all the time he’s got on his hands, he could of written three Moby Dicks. Tell him to finish the damn book and get back to screenplays that make money.”
    Edwina, who smoked, had said, “Well, tobacco companies used to say cigarettes don’t cause cancer too.” She’d sent Charlie a folded insert that had come in the box containing an old Premarin bottle. It listed, in minuscule print, breast cancer as a possible side effect.
    Now Edwina had found a new wonder drug on her own. Something she called “snake oil.”
    â€œSnakes don’t make oil, right?” Charlie asked, interrupting whatever it was Richard was saying.
    â€œNo, dinosaurs do.” He hated being interrupted. “Snake oil—where the hell did that come from?”
    â€œEdwina called. She wants to go off the tamoxifen and rub this stuff on her skin instead.”
    â€œRub snake oil on—your mother’s always been a few bricks short of a bale, but—”
    â€œ Snake oil is a term used historically to mean a magic elixir, a medicine or concoction that can cure all your ailments at once,” Bradone explained.