Page 8 - Like No Business I Know

Movie Time
(Fantastic Transactions 1, 1990)

Heidi Holman had little desire to answer the knock at her door.
Fate entered her life through telephone wires and mailboxes, not on
foot. Or so she might have been thinking as she put on her slippers
and walked the ten paces from her bedroom to the front door. It was
dark; she had come home from the studio about 4:30 p.m., heated
and eaten a TV dinner, and sprawled upon the covers of the bed,
nursing a headache. She peered through the fisheye peephole at a
small plump woman in a business suit.
The caller knocked again, more insistently. Fearful of disturbing
the other tenants in the court apartments, Heidi opened the door.
After noting that the woman carried neither a bible nor a sales order
book, Heidi said, “Yes? What do you want?”
“Miss Holman,” began the woman, who seemed overdressed for a
social call in 1953 Los Angeles, “I am here to discuss the future.”
A religious nut, after all. Heidi started closing the door, saying,
“I’m sorry; I’m not interested in any—”
“Then let us examine the past and present,” interrupted the older
woman, putting her heavily-shod foot in the door. “Are you not the
same Heidi Holman who spent a weekend in Santa Barbara with
Clarence Yabo, the assistant director of ‘Mermaid Parade’ in hopes of
working on his next picture? Aren’t you the Heidi Holman who
substituted an uncorrected draft of ‘Infiltrators in the Infantry’ for
the finished script given to Marilyn Menschenfresser, after she
snubbed you on the set? Weren’t you the recipient of a bottle of—”
“Stop! Ssh! What is this? Where did you get that information? Are
you Louella Parsons?”
Heidi gasped, her throat constricting as she heard these rather
intimate biographical details from her recent past.
“No, my dear. But I do know all about you. Now, may I come in? I
assure you: what I have to say will be of great benefit—to both of
us.”
Heidi hesitated, and then relented. The woman looked harmless
enough, a neighborhood busybody who needed straightening out.

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