Killed in Fringe Time Page 17

  There is a God, I thought. “I accept,” I told him.

  “You accept what?”

  “Weren’t you offering me a job in Programming?” Programming, I thought, where conflicts were measured in terms of share points, not bombs. Where I could work at the Network and actually do TV stuff, instead of being a sort of Private Eye on a leash. Programming, where for most of the year the hours were regular, and the biggest danger was an ulcer. I had never before perceived in myself such a burning desire to work there.

  “No, I wasn’t offering you a job! What kind of a job would I be able to offer you? You’re already a vice president! The only job in my department it would be seemly for you to take would be my own!”

  He paused for a second, the added as an aftershout, “And I’m not giving it up, yet!”

  “I wouldn’t want your job, Bart. For one thing, I’m not qualified for it.”

  “Let me tell you a secret: no one is qualified for this job! This job rewards the Lucky Guess and very little else!”

  “So I take it you’ve already got somebody to file papers and sharpen pencils.”

  “Cobb! What’s the matter? You sound unhappy!”

  “No,” I said. “Just tired.”

  “Ahh,” he said, softly for him. “I know that feeling. But listen!”

  I jumped.

  “I do have a job here that I’m trying to fill. Assistant to the head of Daytime, insufficiently exalted for the likes of you!”

  “And?”

  “And one of the applicants has given you as a reference, which I am now checking.”

  “Oh? Who is it?”

  “A Ms. Marcie Nast.”

  I laughed so loud I scared Bart, who ought to have been used to loud noises, living as he did in daily proximity to his own voice.

  It was at least a minute before I could get an intelligible word out of my mouth.

  “Bart,” I breathed, “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay! Only I’d like to be in on the joke!”

  If it was a joke on anybody, it was on me. “Listen!” I said. I was beginning to sound like him. “She gave me as a reference knowing exactly what I was going to say, and I’ll bet she figured it would help her get the job, at that.”

  Either that, I thought, or she was counting on my remembering how ready she was to fling sex-discrimination and harassment charges around, and come through with a glowing little ginger cake endorsement. If that was the case, she was reading from the wrong volume.

  But it didn’t sound like her. All she wanted was to put her size seven-and-a-half foot on the next step up the ladder. But if someone telling the truth about her could help her get a shapely leg on the next rung, she was perfectly willing to accept the truth. Hadn’t she told me she was always perfectly frank when it didn’t make any difference?

  “Well?” Bart Eggelstein demanded. “What are you going to say? By now, I am positively dying to hear it!”

  “In my opinion,” I said, “Marcie West is an acculturated psychopath. I think she is totally ambitious and totally ruthless. Think? She told me so, in so many words. If there are any women in your department between her and the top, she’ll do anything she can to discredit them. Men, too, possibly. If you’ll excuse a personal question, you’re pretty close to retirement age, aren’t you?”

  “Three years.”

  “Then you’re probably safe.”

  “And she gave you as a reference?”

  “I’m not finished. From what I’ve seen of her, if you put her in a position where she’s convinced the best way ahead for her is to do the best possible job for you, she’ll do the best job you ever saw. She could do a historically good job. On drive alone. Just don’t trust her farther than you could throw a steamroller.”

  “Mmmmm,” Bart said, then was silent for a minute. “How long have you known this young lady?”

  “Two days.”

  “She makes a big impression, doesn’t she?”

  “If she wants to.”

  “Would you hire her?”

  “If this were a war, and I was in the OSS, I’d hire her in a shot. Under the current circumstances—well, I could possibly handle her, but I’ll just say I’m glad I don’t have any openings.”

  “Ambition and ruthlessness, I don’t have to tell you, are not necessarily undesirable qualities in a TV executive!”

  “They certainly help get things done—if getting things done is all you care about.”

  “People in this department have been in a rut ... It might be a good idea to light a fire under them ...”

  “I think it would be more like throwing an M-80 in the middle of them.”

  “What’s an M-80?”

  “Firecracker,” I said. “A big one. Equal to a quarter stick of dynamite.”

  “All the better! Get people jumping around here! You know, Cobb, I’m three years away from retirement, and already the power plays around here you wouldn’t believe. A joker in the deck might prove very interesting. Could liven up my declining years considerably.”

  I laughed again, a soft chuckle this time. “So you’re going to do it?”

  “I think I will! Yes, I will! Her ambition and ruthlessness will make us supreme in the ratings into the next century! Or not! Either way, if what you say is true, she’ll open a few eyes around here!”

  “She’ll do that, all right. Bart, do me a favor, will you?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Let me know once you tell her she’s got the job. I think I want to talk to her.”

  I did? I hadn’t realized it until the words were out of my mouth.

  “I’ll do better than that. I’m calling her right away. Wait ten minutes, then ring her. She’s at her brother’s shop.”

  I spent the ten minutes wondering what the hell I thought I was doing, but at the end of it, I made the call.

  “It’s been real.”

  —ERNIE KOVACS

  The Ernie Kovacs Show, CBS

  19

  BUT THE SUDDENLY VERY busy Assistant to the Director of Daytime wouldn’t talk to me on the phone. I could, however, allow her to take me to dinner tonight, by way of celebration.

  “I don’t think—”

  “We could discuss baseball strategy,” she said.

  “I still don’t—”

  “Or I could tell you what I’ve remembered about Poor Richard’s death. It could be something you ought to know.”

  “Yeah? Suppose I just arrange for the cops to meet you for dinner? They know a great place for home-fried potatoes. Then you can tell them directly.”

  “But, Matt dear, I don’t want to tell them, I want to tell you. You’re much more amusing than they are.”

  “But what if the cops kind of show up, anyway?”

  “Don’t be tiresome. I’ll just tell them I made it all up in attempt to get you to go to dinner with me.”

  “One of these days,” I told her, “you’re going to run out of these fast answers.”

  “I doubt it,” she said breezily. “But wouldn’t it be fun for you to be around if I do?”

  I didn’t answer. She went on. “Shall we say sixish? Do you want to eat eat, or just sit around, like last time?”

  “You’re paying? I want to eat.”

  “Oh, Matt, you definitely show promise. Do you know Mazzaroni’s on Eighth Avenue, in the village?”

  “I know it. Give me a chance to get downtown. Make it six-thirty, instead.”

  There are several kinds of Italian restaurants in the Village; in the whole city, really, but like in everything else, in Greenwich Village, they go to extremes. One extreme is the little mom-and-pop place, with ten tables in enough space for six, with red-and-white tablecloths, and the inescapable chianti bottles with candles stuck in them. You can get some incredible food in a place like this, especially pasta sauces, but you’ve got to try a bunch of them before you find one that suits you. These are no places to have private conversations, for all they’re described as “
intimate little places.” What happens is, on a busy night, you get intimate with the owners, their kids, and the other nine couples in the restaurant.

  At the other extreme are places that pretend to be outposts of the Roman Empire, and always have names like Caesar’s Forum, forget the fact that no Caesar ever ate pasta or anything like it. Caesar’s Forum will be spread out over three floors, be covered in flocked satin wallpaper in some shade of beige or pink, resemble a jungle in the number of potted plants inside it, and have a huge fountain in the middle surrounded by reproductions of antique statuary. Again, the food may be surprisingly good, but the waiter will wear a short-jacketed tuxedo and speak with an Italian accent. He will also refer to the woman as Madame, and never speak directly to her.

  If the place in question happens to be in Brooklyn, and you eat there regularly, you’ve got a decent chance to see some Mafia guy get blown away every eighteen months or so. Of course, they come in clusters, so it’s hard to tell.

  It occurred to me that Marcie was just the type to enjoy seeing a well-staged rub-out, but I doubt she would ever go more than once to a place where the waiter never spoke to her directly.

  She picked a good place. Mazzaroni’s had enough room for a private talk, the food was great, and for decor, they had more food. I had a prosciutto secco the size of a truck tire hanging over my head at the corner table the waitress (who spoke pure New York) showed me to.

  “Good to see you.” Marcie smiled as I joined her.

  “I’m hungry,” I said. “Ready to order?”

  “I’ve had a peek at the menu,” she conceded.

  “All right. I don’t need the menu; I always get the same thing when I come here.”

  The waitress came by. Marcie ordered a house red, I went for San Pellegrino water. It was more expensive than seltzer, and she was paying. For appetizers, she ordered an antipasto, and I asked for prosciutto and melon.

  The waitress made a face. “The melon is kind of hard, today,” she said. It was another reason I liked this place.

  “Oh, thanks. I’ll have prosciutto e crostini instead.” The waitress approved.

  She also approved our main dish choices, pasta con carne misto, which was shell macaroni in a rich tomato sauce with hunks of beef, pork, and veal for Marcie, while I took pollo fiorentino, boned chicken breast in a thin egg batter cooked in butter over spinach, ditto.

  The waitress read it back to us, then marched off with the air of someone happy in her work. I grabbed a sesame seed breadstick, bit the end off it, and pointed the rest at Marcie.

  “Now,” I said. “You’re going to tell me what you remembered, the thing my friends the cops would want so much to hear.”

  “I never said how much they’d want to hear it. I just said they’d want to.”

  “Stop stalling. Out with it.”

  “For God’s sake, sit still long enough to finish your breadstick first. You could at least pretend you could stand to be with me.”

  “You, the high priestess of frankness, want me to pretend? Here’s me being frank: it scares me, but I can stand to be with you. You’re fascinating, the way a train wreck is fascinating. No, the way a snake is fascinating in nature films as it calmly goes about the business of swallowing a goat.”

  At that point, our appetizers arrived.

  Marcie smiled. “Great timing, Matt.” She took a huge forkful of lettuce and cheese and salami and lifted it to her mouth. She opened her pretty mouth wide, then suddenly wider, as though she’d unhinged her jaws. It was a remarkably snakelike illusion.

  She put her fork down on her plate and laughed. “Oh, you sweet-talker, you.”

  “Very funny,” I said. “But the core of the message is the same: you scare me. If the thing about the case was a scam, I’m walking out of here no matter how good the food is.”

  “No scam, Matt dear.” She sighed. “Oh, all right, if you can talk about snakes swallowing goats while we eat, I suppose I can talk about poison while we eat.”

  “It’s about poison?”

  “I would suppose so. It’s about the flypaper. One of the log-cabin props, you remember. From Clement Bates.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I remember Clement Bates. He’s my other unforgettable character from this case.”

  “Well,” she said, “the police asked us an awful lot about flypaper, especially the angry little one with the hat.”

  “Rivetz,” I said.

  “I suppose so. Anyway, later they wanted especially to know about some missing sheets from the package. Because, I found out later, you can distill arsenic from flypaper, and of course arsenic is what killed Richard. I didn’t know anything about the flypaper itself.”

  “But?” I prompted.

  “But,” she said, “one of the incredibly tedious jobs Vivian made me do was to check the parcels and packages as they came in—not to open them, just to look at addresses, shipping weight, things like that, in order to double check the people in the mailroom over at the Tower of Babble. Apparently she had some trouble with them in the first days of the show.

  “Anyway, I remembered getting a parcel from Bates the week before the fateful day, a neat little rectangle, shipping weight sixteen and a half ounces. I logged it in with the rest. You can probably see the document in Vivian’s office, if they haven’t cleaned it out yet. How is she, by the way?”

  “She’ll be okay. Burned up and down her back, but nothing worse than second degree.”

  “I’ll bet she wishes she still had someone going over her mail.”

  “Yeah, and I’ll bet I know who that is.” I remembered some of the other stuff the lieutenant had gotten from the lab before I’d left. It was a small-scale incendiary, easily made from everyday ingredients, and you could learn how to make one from at least six different books circulated at various revolutionary radical bookstores (yes, we still had them—the city is like a people zoo, we preserve endangered species long after they become extinct in the outside world) within blocks of police headquarters or this very restaurant.

  This type of letter bomb was very popular with the IRA in the late seventies and early eighties. It produces a very small, but very intense fireball, and it’s built with a sweet little delay switch that usually ensures the victim is either looking into the envelope, or actually holding the bomb in his hand when it goes off.

  “I’m glad she’s okay,” Marcie said.

  I looked at her.

  “I mean it,” Marcie said. “She’s out of my way, and I’m out of her reach. She hates me now, but in a few years, I’ll be in a position to throw a lot of work her way—she’s a very good producer, you know—and then she’ll love me.”

  “Tell me more about flypaper,” I said.

  “Matt, you can’t sit there thinking I’m inhuman, and I know you do, then jump all over me when I inquired about the welfare of a fellow being.”

  “Flypaper.”

  “Oh, all right. Today I remembered how on Monday morning the cops showed us the package of flypaper, torn open at the corner, you know? And asked us about it. It occurred to me today that that’s what might have been in the sixteen-and-a-half-ounce rectangular package.

  “Luckily, I remembered the brand name—Pestik.”

  “Sounds like a linebacker for the Steelers,” I said.

  “I like the L.A. Raiders.”

  “Figures. What about Pestik?”

  “I went looking for some. Hardware stores, you know. And I found some! Who would have thought you could find old-fashioned flypaper in Manhattan today? I found the identical package, and I had the man at the store weight it. It weighed sixteen ounces, exactly.”

  “So allow half an ounce for wrapping paper and tape, and there’s your package.”

  “Not only that,” she said. “Herbie, the prop man, had been sick and missed a few days, so the package stayed locked up in my cabinet until I gave it to him on Monday morning.”

  I sat up. “Is that solid?”

  “Absolutely. Of course, I
haven’t proved conclusively that the flypaper was in that package, but it does sort of present itself, doesn’t it?”

  “It presents itself, all right,” I said. “What, if anything, do you think you have proved?”

  She thought it over, touching the tip of her tongue to the middle of her upper lip.

  “Assuming that the package did contain the flypaper, I think I’ve proven that he wasn’t poisoned with it. Doesn’t it take more time to get the arsenic out of the paper than there was?”

  I told her it did. I didn’t tell her that the cops already knew it wasn’t the flypaper but Deth-on-Ratz—they were saving that.

  “It proves something else, too,” I said. “Assuming, as always, that your parcel was the flypaper. And assuming you’re telling the truth.”

  “Why should I be lying about this?”

  “God knows.”

  “What else did I prove?”

  I just grinned. Marcie was going to get insistent, but just then the waiter came with our main courses. It wasn’t until the smell of butter and lemon and garlic hit my nostrils that I realized how hungry I was.

  “Buon appetito,” I smiled, and dug in.

  Marcie, of course, had no intention of letting it go at that, but after three or four attempts, she finally accepted that the subject was closed.

  Then we just talked. We talked about the food. We talked about baseball, as advertised. She said she was a great admirer of George Steinbrenner (I said that figured too) and weren’t the Yankees doing great this year?

  I enjoyed it, as I enjoyed dinner, but in the back of my mind was a nagging irritation caused by Marcie’s little spell of detective work. Couldn’t she see what else her story of the package indicated?

  It indicated that on that fateful Monday morning, not only was poison being prepared for the famous Richard Bentyne; not only was a bomb being dropped in the mail addressed to same, it also meant somebody had been sneaking around the studio stealing flypaper for no goddamn reason whatsoever.

  As with dumping the arsenic in the chicken itself, anybody could have snitched the flypaper, from Vivian Pike, who had conflicting motives and had been the victim of the bomb, to Marcie Nast, who had only the feeblest of motives and brought the matter to my attention (without her, who would have known?), to Millionaire Mountain Man Clement Bates, who not only had no motive whatsoever but was the owner of the wretched stuff in the first place.