Deal to Die For Read Online Free PDF Page A

definite
power
table, the ultimate see-and-be-seen spot, wondering idly who would command the post on this day.
    Paige turned back to the smiling magazine reporter, trying hard to keep her coffee cup from sloshing over as she raised it toward her lips.
Poise
, she thought. Focus on the concept. Bring it in to the core of yourself, fix it, let it radiate back out. First principles of the profession.
    “It’s all an act,” Paige said, mustering an equally mindless smile. This girl across from her was clearly a rookie, twenty-five, twenty-six tops. Thick mop of blonde hair, flawless skin, jaw-dropping figure inside—more or less inside—those swathes of Banana Republic cotton. What could such a person know about the need to maintain poise? And she’d just used the same word three times in one sentence. Paige hoped there was a good copy editor somewhere in the chain of command.
    The reporter laughed in a good-natured way. “That’s hard to believe,” she said. “The kind of men you’ve played against and all.”
    Paige saw a young man in a sleek three-piece suit cut a glance across the room. Attorney-turned-producer flanked by two others in similar suits, combined age under a hundred, they’d come to Outré to settle all the important business of the entertainment world amid the linen and the china. His gaze flittered across Paige’s features—was there a flicker of recognition there?—then settled in on the bosomy young reporter. Paige wanted to call out to him:
Poise, ace. Give some thought to poise
. But instead, she took a sip of coffee, returned the cup to the saucer. Deep breath. No spills, no rattling of china. Yet.
    The reporter gestured at the empty table then. “That’s Richard Mendanian’s table, you know.” She said it in a hushed voice, no need to startle any fellow diners.
    Paige glanced over, a bit surprised. Richard Mendanian, king of the sleaze pic, when there had been such a domain. He’d offered her a part once, in the early days. She’d turned it down, not necessarily because of the nature of the film, for she’d been too hungry at the time to be fussy about questions of art. She wouldn’t even have minded taking her clothes off in the film Mendanian was making. It was just that she refused to take them off there in Mendanian’s office,
before
the shooting started.
    But now Mendanian was dead, shot to death in the hills. Robbery was the official motive, though one of the trades had speculated that it had been some kind of drug deal gone bad. In any case, Richard Mendanian was dead. And she was dying, too, careerwise, at least.
    “I didn’t know,” she told the reporter at last, surprised he’d have the king-of-the-table locked up.
    “He was spreading the word around he was back in the fast track, that’s what I hear. He took a
lease
on that spot from Albertine. I guess everybody’s too freaked out to want to sit there now. Or maybe his rent’s not up.”
    Paige shrugged. “They’ll put some tourists there soon enough,” she said. The reporter laughed in agreement, took the cue to get back on track. She checked her notes, then glanced up at Paige.
    “I watched
White Dungeons
again yesterday? That nude scene with De Niro? I mean, you just blew him away. And he got to wear a towel through the whole thing. How did you manage to stay so cool?”
    A towel and a beige Speedo underneath that, Paige wanted to add. Instead she smiled. “It helps when you have a good script,” she said. She was wondering when it had happened, when it had come to be you could ask a question without actually posing it, just add a rising inflection at the end of your line.
    Not
line
, she corrected herself,
sentence
. This was real life. This girl was interviewing her, a retrospective piece, she’d said. For Christ’s sake. What did it mean, someone doing a “retrospective piece” before you’d even turned forty?
    “It’s more than that,” the reporter insisted. “Garbo had it, and Hepburn…and