But he’d paid with cash, and there was no reason for them to sort him out from the other customers. He didn’t think anything would come from it, and nothing did. The media kept up on the murder mystery, and they even interviewed Polly. He did feel a little bad about that.
It wasn’t just that with the Starlet dead that Polly was out of a job, although there was that. The police might not have been able to link the instant karma to him, but Polly was a prime suspect. She didn’t end up getting arrested, but it ruined her. Johnny felt something like guilt when they found her body. She didn’t need to kill herself, but being that close to the fame and spotlight was too much for some people, he figured.
He thought that taking out the Starlet would be different. He didn’t feel any different. He wasn’t happier. He wasn’t satisfied. The machine went on, and if anything she was even more popular than before. Three months after Johnny Getz killed the Starlet, she was more famous than ever, Polly had been forgotten and nobody knew who the fuck Johnny Getz was.
He decided that he needed to go bigger next time. He needed to do something that couldn’t be ignored. He considered his choices carefully. It wasn’t like he lacked for potential targets. Celebrity had become a cheap commodity, and a thousand different reality shows, tabloids and blogs churned out meaningless stars on what seemed like a daily basis.
The problem with the Starlet was that while it was clearly murder, having her killed by drugs was too close to her normal behavior. There were a lot of theories about why she died, ranging from her family having her killed so that they could reap the profits from increased sales of her older movies to her getting dosed by accident. Nobody ever considered that she died because she was famous and didn’t deserve to be.
That was an outside of context idea for the mediamakers. Fame was the ocean they lived in, and they could never consider that you could drown someone for it. Johnny didn’t think himself as a man with a message, but the more he thought about it, the more he knew they needed to know. He had to choose someone where they couldn’t deny the reasons behind it.
He considered, in passing, blowing up one of the mass auditions for that karaoke contest that passed for the most popular show on television. True, there would be some genuinely talented people there who could hurt or even killed, but the majority of them wanted to be famous to be famous, not because they had any real respect for music. Something that a quick listen to their “singing” would have told anybody.
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