Mean Woman Blues

they’d had and sent to her shortly after she’d come into her money. That is, he’d sent a
copy
to her and made that fact very clear. If he went down, she went down. She was still smarting about that.
    She knew that she still had the soft, white, unspeakably delicate skin she’d had when she was a teenager, and he stroked her shoulders and her arms and her breasts and belly as he told her his crazy plan. So crazy it just might work.
    And considering the alternative, it had to.
    He started out slow. “I’m going to need some speech lessons.”
    She nodded, thinking it over. She could help him with that. The idea had appeal: Rosemarie Owens as Pygmalion. She wondered if she could pull it off, decided it might be a hell of a lot of fun to try.
    “I know a guy,” she said, “but he’s in England. How would you get a passport?”
    “Maybe you could bring him over. Say you’ve met a diamond in the rough.”
    She nodded, and Earl said, “Do you know an English plastic surgeon?”
    That one was easy. “Mexican. Lots of them.”
    He sighed. “Looks like I’m going to need papers.”
    She made a little face, wondering how to find a reliable forger. The Internet, maybe. “We’re just going to see what we can do, aren’t we? May I ask what you’re going to do once you’ve reinvented yourself?”
    “Well, now. You own a cable television station, don’t you?”
    “I do.”
    “I’m gonna be a TV star. What do you think of that?”
    Now he was getting way too close to home. She gave him the alien look again. “Frankly, Scarlett, I think you’ve got a screw loose.”
    “Just hear me out now. Just hear me out. This is something The Lord showed me. And it’s what I was meant for.” His voice dropped on that one, as if he actually awed himself. “All these years and now I know.”
    Rosemarie rolled her eyes. “You and God, Earl! You and God.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    His eyes flamed fury. She’d forgotten that about him: how fast he could turn mean. Clearly this was no time to make fun of his new life’s work, however crazy it might be.
    “Nothing. Go on; I’m interested.”
    “Well, it was a sort of vision. I was holed up in some cheap motel in Biloxi, and the Lord showed me what I had to do. I looked at those televangelists, and I looked at those talk shows, and I looked at those reality shows, and I thought,
You know what? There needs to be a whole different kind of talk show, a talk show that could help God help real people. A talk show with a mission.
And you know what that mission would be?”
    She shook her head, wondering where on Earth he was going with this.
    “The mission is to right wrongs, lady. Real people’s wrongs. If somebody gets cheated, badly treated, or roughed up by the assholes in power, why, Mr. Right will have them tell the story on his show, and then we’ll follow up with some solid reporting on the underlying phenomenon of whatever it was, and then the show’ll sponsor a letter-writing campaign or whatever seems appropriate. To right the wrong. See?”
    Her heart rate was starting to pick up by a good little bit. This was a bloody great idea, the kind of thing that could really catch on, breathe life back into her floundering cable station. He was right; it combined three incredibly popular genres, and it would give people a chance to act out their angst. Not just the contestants but also the viewers. With the right host, it could become a national sensation.
    She sat up in bed and laughed, breasts flapping like tether-balls. She loved it, actually loved it. “Earl, Earl, Earl,” she said. “Talk about thinking outside the box! You’re a sketch, you know that? I’ll have to keep you around just to amuse myself.” It was daring and dangerous and so insane she just had to do it (leaving escape hatches for herself, of course). “I even like the name.”
    “Mr. Right. That’s me.”
    “You?”
    “Wake up, Rosemary. What the hell do you think the makeover’s for?”
    “You crazy bastard. You can’t get away with that.”
    He rolled over on her. “It’s worth trying, isn’t it? Besides, consider the alternative.”
    She didn’t care to.
    “If you’re going to jail, might as well be later rather than sooner, right, lady?”
    “Oh, well. Maybe I’ll meet an assassin before you get busted.” Or think of some other way out.
    In a matter of months, she made Earl Jackson into David Wright, host of a new show called
Mr. Right
. He now had a