Box Office Poison (Linnet Ellery) Read Online Free

channels had a breaking news bulletin. I finally found a local news channel, which was running multiple screens. On one screen there was a helicopter view of a deep blue Ferrari heading down one of the freeways followed by five police cruisers. Stuck behind the phalanx of cops was all the rest of the freeway traffic. Another screen showed a video from an amateur photographer standing on an overpass. Still another showed the newsroom with a pretty, blond female news anchor, her pretty male counterpart, and a former cop discussing the unfolding chase. It didn’t look like much of a chase, since, according to the commentary, the Ferrari was moving at a very discreet thirty miles an hour. I wondered if this was the source of the traffic jam from earlier in the day. If so the cops were certainly not in any hurry to resolve the situation.
    “Do you think they’ll use spikes?” the male anchor asked.
    “Those can be risky, and Kerrinan Ta Shena is famous,” the woman said.
    And I had my explanation. Kerrinan was an Álfar heart throb. Had starred in a boatload of movies. I’d seen a number of them. He was also the primary spokesman for the Android smartphone.
    “Not when you’re moving that slow, and no one is above the law,” said the ex-cop piously.
    So what had happened that he was driving on a freeway with a phalanx of cops? I remembered his wife had died—no, been killed: it had been in the news a few weeks ago. But if they were talking road spikes to deflate the tires, it looked like the authorities had begun to suspect the spouse.
    “I wonder why they don’t just move in,” the female anchor asked.
    “Well, there’s a problem with that, Trina,” the male anchor said in a tone that made it sound like she was retarded. “The Álfar have this ability to move in and out of our reality. Makes it tough to make an arrest.”
    “So why hasn’t he done it? Why hasn’t he left our world? Why spend hours in this glacial chase?”
    “You’ll have to ask him that, Trina, once he’s apprehended.”
    They were joined by a Hollywood reporter, and the group began to discuss Kerrinan’s films. He specialized in frothy romantic comedies where a human woman wins out over all the Álfar hotties for the heart of an elf lord. It had happened in real life too; Kerrinan had married a human actress, Michelle Balley. They had been Hollywood’s “it couple.” Until she fetched up dead.
    There was something riveting about the chase, or maybe that was because I was so tired. I ate, watched the images on the tube, and listened to the never-ending babble. In an effort to fill the slowly passing minutes the reporters and experts in the studio, and their compatriots in the helicopter, in cars, and on bridges, rehashed the events that had led to this chase.
    Three weeks ago Kerrinan had called the police to his Bel Air mansion. They found Michelle brutally murdered, and Kerrinan covered in blood and claiming no memory of the events. His defense attorneys claimed he’d gotten the blood on himself from holding his murdered wife, and that grief and shock had affected his memory. But forensics told a different story. DNA evidence proved that Kerrinan had wielded the knife that killed his wife. The police had been going to his house to arrest him when Kerrinan had fled into the garage, jumped in the Ferrari, and hit the highway. There was more speculation from the blow-dried news readers that the actor had been tipped off by a fan in the police department.
    “Or maybe he just saw the flashing cherries and realized it wasn’t a parade,” the ex-cop said with a look of pity and contempt for the news anchors.
    Forty minutes later I realized nothing had changed or was going to change. I reached for the remote to turn off the TV, when the male model newsreader suddenly shouted, “Whoa!” as the car shimmered, pulsed in and out of view as it phased in and out of our reality, and then vanished.
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