“How. Did. You. Lose. All. Your. Money?” asked the enraged producer.

“One of the contestants did me in. Her name was Caroline Sedaka. She was dying of ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease. She had three or four years to live. Caroline Sedaka played in the championship round against Jonathan Denko, a quadriplegic. Sedaka gave the correct answer to a really tough question. Denko missed it. That set up Sedaka for the final question, the one worth the money or the coffin. That’s when disaster struck.”

“What do you mean?”

“She got the final question right! Can you believe that!? She got it right! And it was a tough question. I was counting on her missing the question. But that bitch answered it, and by answering the big question correctly, she fucking bankrupted me.”

“Bankrupted you? How did she bankrupt you?”

“I had to pay her off, and I did. She said her family would be well-off now. She said that’s why she agreed to do the show. That was her gamble. Makes sense, I guess. Anyway, seven million dollars is what I paid her. Seven damn million dollars! The production costs were a little higher than I estimated, so I sold my house, my cars, and my Patek Philippe wristwatch collection. They were all auctioned off at Sotheby’s. I loved those watches. Hated selling the watches most of all. Didn’t I tell you all this before? I forget. If I did tell you—”

“Go on.”

“If I didn’t pay Sedaka the seven million, she was going straight to a telephone and call her lawyer. And the newspapers. She had me dead to rights. If she did what she threatened to do, then I would have gone to jail. You see, I had signed papers agreeing to pay the winning contestant seven million dollars. How else would I get someone to risk their life on a TV pilot? I found out the hard way that even terminals want to get paid a lot of money to risk their lives. They prefer cash over the casket. True, most terminals want to die, but—”

“You keep repeating and repeating yourself,” snapped the producer. “Get to the damn point. How did you lose your money?”

“I had no idea Caroline Sedaka was going to go for the money. I made a big mistake and paid for it.”

“What big mistake?”

“Not making the last question, the final question, the one worth all the money, unanswerable. I should have used the question about the Great Wall of China. There isn’t any correct answer to the Great Wall of China question. Not using that question was my big mistake. No, more like my tragic mistake.”

The cripple started coughing again. His face turned crimson. He pressed his chest with his fists. He wanted to stop coughing in the worst way.

And finally he did.