“But you can see my point,” she persisted, “can’t you? Don’t you think it’s a tad creepy that you’re aiming this camera at this particular corpse, the most beautiful corpse in the history of the Body Farm?
Crap, Dr. B., she looks better dead than I do alive.”
I glanced from the newswoman’s face to Miranda’s: peaches-and-cream skin and green eyes, framed by a cascade of chestnut hair. I actually preferred Miranda’s looks, but I knew she wouldn’t believe me if I told her so. “Not for long,” I said. “Day by day—hell, hour by hour—she’ll get a lot less gorgeous. We’ll end up with one glamour shot and hundreds of pictures where she goes from bad to worse and from worse to worser.”
“I don’t understand why she asked for this.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Iunderstand, and, more to the point,she understood. She talked to me about it a year or so ago, back when she produced that three-part series about the Body Farm for Channel 10. You remember the end of the series, when she added a ‘Maurie’s Minute’ about the importance of body donations? I thought that was a great touch, signing the consent form at the very end of the newscast.”
“I hated it,” Miranda said. “She was playing to the camera. Or maybe just to Dr. Bill Brockton.”
I stepped away from my own camera and caught Miranda’s eye. “Excuse me,” I said, pointing to the corpse, “but I refute you thus. Looks to me like she said what she meant and meant what she said. Remember what the letter said? ‘I wish I could watch what happens to me’? Her coanchor, Randall Gibbons, said she’d told him she wouldn’t mind being the subject of a science documentary. Postmortem participatory journalism, I guess—one last story, filed from beyond the grave.”
“Swell. Film at eleven, smell at twelve,” Miranda joked mirthlessly. “Deathstyles of the Rich and Famous. We do bow before beauty, don’t we?”
I snapped a picture, then checked the display on the back of the camera. The framing was slightly off and the screen was washed out by the daylight, but I had to agree that Miranda had a point: Even dead, Maurie Gershwin was a beauty, at least for a few more hours. “Her looks did have a lot to do with her success,” I conceded, “but I don’t think they defined her, at least not to herself. In fact, I think she had a healthy sense of irony about the fleeting nature of physical beauty.”
“Yeah, well. Too bad her cardiovascular system wasn’t as strong as her sense of irony,” said Miranda.
“Stroking out at forty-two, and right there on camera no less.”
“Aneurysm,” I said. “Not stroke.” Gershwin had died of an aortic aneurysm that ruptured catastrophically—and in the middle of a newscast. In hindsight, a diagnostic clue had gone undetected.
“Did you see the news any of the last few nights before she died?”
Miranda nodded.
“Did you notice that her voice was a little hoarse?”
She looked at me sharply, her eyebrows shooting up in a question.
“One of the laryngeal nerves—the recurrent vagus nerve, which controls the voice box—wraps around the aortic arch. A fast-growing aneurysm on the aorta can stretch that nerve, causing hoarseness. Maurie thought she’d just strained her voice last week during a charity telethon—that’s what she said on the air two nights ago, right before she died—when in fact her body was trying to warn her.”
Miranda shook her head. “Sad. Ironic. Here’s another irony for you: Her death made her a lot more famous than all those years of reporting the news. Somebody posted an Internet video of that clip from the newscast where she collapses in midsentence. They called it ‘Film at Eleven: Hot News Babe Dies on Camera.’ As of this morning, thirty million people had watched her die.”
“Thirteen million people have seen that footage?”
“Thirtymillion.”
The figure stunned me. “That’s probably twenty-nine and a half million more than ever watched her live.”
“Web fame’s an odd, viral thing.” She shrugged. “You remember Susan Boyle?”
I shook my head.
“Sure you do; you just don’t realize you do. That dumpy, middle-aged Brit who belted out a song on the limey version ofAmerican Idol ?”
That did ring a bell, I realized.