Killed in the Act Read online

  “According to Variety, he’s producing her next picture,” I said.

  Llona was suddenly angry. “That’s another thing. Who the hell does he think he is? Who says he can produce? I’ve been in the TV business over five years, and they wouldn’t let me produce a station identification slide.” She took it out on her last piece of lettuce, then said, “So who is he? ‘Lorenzo’s Tacos’! And you know what I found out?”

  “What?”

  “He’s from Ohio! His name is really Larry Baker, and he’s about as Mexican as...as that hot dog!”

  I shrugged. “It’s happened before. In the old days, if you wanted to be an actress, you had to sleep with the producer. Now, if you want to be a producer, you have to sleep with the actress.”

  Her face was a lovely shade of red. I wasn’t trying to calm her down, because I recognized her symptoms. PR people have to be nice all the time, no matter what, and it really gets to them if they can’t blow off steam occasionally.

  “Oh, right,” she said with heavy sarcasm. “I suppose if I slept with Burt Reynolds, I could produce his next picture?”

  “You could try.”

  “Don’t tempt me,” she said. Then she laughed. “Okay, Matt, tantrum over. Thanks.”

  “Any time,” I said. “But what’s the matter with Shelby and Green?” I found it hard to believe they didn’t have a good reason for not showing up. I’ve spent a lot of time talking to Millie Heywood in Network Operations—she’s been with the Network a long time, and likes to talk about the old days. According to her, there never was a more professional act than Shelby and Green. They were never unprepared, they were never late, and they always kept the convenience of the crew in mind. Millie had, in fact, been present when short, redheaded Lenny Green and tall, bespectacled Ken Shelby first met. It had been in the old studios on Thirty-fifth Street—Shelby was a staff director with the Network then, and Green was a comedy-magician.

  “We don’t know what the matter is,” Llona whined. “Ritafio sends them telegrams, Porter Reigels sends them telegrams; all they’ll say is ‘Unavoidably detained.’ Reigels is furious—he’s talking about dropping them from the show. Which would be a shame,” she went on. “Do you remember them, Matt? They were something.”

  They certainly were. Saturday night was Shelby and Green night in the Cobb household while I was growing up. They had that telepathic timing that a comedy team must have, and they had their respective characters worked out perfectly. Green was like a frisky puppy, cute, but given to indiscretions. He was highly skilled at sleight of hand, and used the skill in outrageous ways. Shelby was like the puppy’s embarrassed master, always trying to laugh off the damage.

  I was surprised to realize how much I had been looking forward to seeing them together again. I told Llona so.

  “But Porter won’t drop them, now,” Llona said, showing me her crossed fingers. “They’re supposed to be arriving at Kennedy Airport a little after two. Along with Shelby’s wife, of course. Alice Brockway.”

  I smiled. “My first love,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “She used to play the big sister on ‘Home and Mother,’ remember? When I was about seven, I developed a monumental crush on her. Lasted for years.”

  Llona giggled. “But she was so wholesome.”

  “I like wholesome.”

  “That’s a shame,” Llona said, with mock sadness.

  “However,” I said, “I don’t like 100 percent wholesome.”

  She grinned, and looked me over. “I didn’t think so.” She glanced at her watch. “Well, time to get back to work.”

  She rose to go. I did, too. “Llona,” I said, “let’s go to a show or a ball game sometime, all right?”

  “That would be nice. As soon as this nightmare is over, okay?”

  “It’s a date,” I told her.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Okay, Chief, I’ll get on it right away.”

  —EVERETT SLOANE, “THE DICK TRACY SHOW,” SYNDICATED

  SPECIAL PROJECTS WAS NEARLY deserted. The only person there was my secretary, Jasmyn Santiago. If Castro had known how cute and efficient little Jasmyn was going to turn out to be, he would never have chased her family out of Cuba.

  “Did I miss something?” I asked.

  “Oh, hi, Matt,” she said. We’re very informal in Special Projects. “What do you mean?”

  “Where is everybody?”

  “Well, Shirley is out on the actress hunt, and Ragusa and Kolaski are following up the nut letters, to see if we should call in the police.”

  “Good,” I said. “I approve.” This was an easy outfit to be boss of.

  “Harris called from Indiana,” Jazz said. “He’s planning to offer that bribe sometime over the weekend. He wants to know if he should go ahead.”

  “Sure, the sooner the better. Standards has been chewing the carpet over this.” Standards is the department of the Network most people think of as the censor, but that’s not really fair. A big part of their job is to try to keep the Network from being used to rip off the viewers. To do that, they try to check the accuracy of all the commercials we run. Often, Standards will commission an independent testing outfit to check advertisers’ claims. There had been rumors, though, that one particular outfit could be reached by an advertiser eager to have his product pass.

  Harris Brophy, a genial, handsome cynic, and my star operative, was in the field trying to get the truth. Once he had it, we’d turn it over to Standards and let them take it from there. Probably wouldn’t amount to much—they’d tell the Feds, and the Feds would make the testing firm sign a consent order: “I never did anything wrong, but I promise to stop,” that sort of thing.

  With Smith on vacation, and St. John coming in for the graveyard shift, all the East Coast personnel of the department were accounted for. I laughed as I went into my office—Brophy, Arnstein, Ragusa, Kolaski, Santiago, Smith, and St. John—the place always reminded me of a 1942 Hollywood war movie.

  I sat at my desk, opened a package of Sugar Babies, and read a few reports. Tried to read them, anyway. Instead, I found myself thinking about Alice Brockway—not the way she was today, middle-aged, but still pretty and vivacious, showing up in an occasional guest shot on a situation comedy, or giving money away on a game show—but the way she used to be when she played the big sister (also named Alice) on “Home and Mother.”

  The show had already been canceled and sent into syndication before I discovered it. I used to run home from school to watch the reruns. Alice Brockway on that show was the cleanest and nicest person in a world of clean and nice people. She was my idea of female perfection. She lived in a town where everyone owned his own house, with grass around it that dogs never messed on.

  That was exotic to me. I grew up in a neighborhood that would have been a slum, if the people who’d lived there had let it. In that kind of place, you are taught at an early age how to deal with criminals and perverts, the way a kid in Kansas is taught to deal with tornadoes and locusts.

  But the town of “Home and Mother” didn’t have criminals, perverts, tornadoes, or locusts. Alice’s TV father made plenty of money, and was never grouchy when he came home from work.

  That was the place for me, all right. I used to be on my best behavior, trying to be worthy of Alice. If they would only keep those reruns going, I used to tell myself, I could catch up to her in a few more years, and she and I could go steady, and I could take her to the prom, whatever that was.

  I ate another Sugar Baby and laughed at myself about the whole business. I wasn’t stupid enough to expect a flesh-and-blood Alice Brockway to live up to my boyhood fantasies, but I was human enough to hope she would.

  The phone buzzed. “What is it, Jazz?”

  “It’s Shirley, Matt. She says she’s done it.”

  “Terrific. Put her on.” The line clicked. “Shirley?”

  “Hello, Matt.” She sounded pleased with herself, so I could tell she’d managed to track down the long
-running star of our equally long-running soap opera.

  Shirley Arnstein was a workaholic, a pleasantly plain girl, who (before she came to the Network), used to do a lot of the work a certain member of the House of Representatives was supposed to be doing but wasn’t. She was like a mama-tiger when she was protecting the interests of the Network, but extremely shy otherwise. Her biggest complaint was that I didn’t give her enough to do.

  “Congratulations,” I told her, “this is the fastest Doreen has ever been found. Where was she this time?”

  “In a convent up in Duchess County. She was going to become a Sister of Saint—”

  “Never mind. How in the world did you get her out of there?” I didn’t even want to ask how Shirley figured out Doreen was there in the first place.

  “I had to join up, myself,” Shirley said. “Or, rather, I had to tell them I wanted to.”

  “Oh,” I said. Who says the TV industry never offers anything different? I thought. Now we had Jewish nuns. Then it occurred to me that might not be so funny. “You didn’t sign anything, did you?”

  “I would have,” she said, “but black looks lousy on me.”

  “You’ve been hanging around Harris too much, wise mouth,” I said, laughing. Then I sighed. “Okay, I’m ready. Let me talk to Doreen.”

  So, as I must do three or four times a year, I talked with Doreen. It was the same old story; she couldn’t stand her character any more. Doreen played a character that every soap has one of—the Normal One. For twenty years (Doreen told me), she had had to listen to all the other actresses talk about their affairs, their abortions, their murder trials, and tell them everything would be all right, and pour them another cup of coffee. “If I have to pat one more shoulder,” she told me through bitter tears, “I’ll go insane!”

  We worked it out. While I kept Doreen talking about her accursed happiness, I had Jazz calling all over the city, trying to find the show’s producer and head writer. When she had, we set up a conference call. The producer and writer promised on their mothers’ souls that within the next month her character would fall in love with a transsexual pro-football player, who was dying of an incurable disease.

  Doreen sniffed back tears. “That’s all I ask,” she said. Fade to black. Another mission accomplished for Cobb’s Commandos.

  I had to laugh. By the time they were ready to start taping the new plot, Doreen would have decided that her image was too important; that her public didn’t want to see her that way. Then, in a few months, she’d run away again.

  Thinking about it made me tired. I looked at my watch, saw that it was close to five o’clock, said, “To hell with it,” to no one in particular, and left the office.

  I intended to head home to my borrowed apartment, but as I stepped into the stainless steel elevator (it always reminded me of the inside of a cigar tube) I was overcome by a strong sense of noblesse oblige. Executives taking off before quitting time used to be one of my pet peeves when I had been punching a clock.

  I decided to go down to Studio J and check in on the preparations for the Big Show. I momentarily forgot what button I wanted to push. NetHQ is a confusing place, especially around the production floors. Unlike CBS and ABC, who have studios in separate buildings in various parts of town, NBC and the Network have production facilities in the same skyscrapers that house their offices. It must have been an interesting problem for the Network’s architect to make it all come out even—Studio B, for example, where Channel 10 News originates, is one-and-one-third stories high.

  Studio J, though the biggest room in the building, wasn’t as much of a problem—it takes up most of the seventh and eighth floors; a two-story rectangle-within-a-rectangle, surrounded by corridors that open out onto dressing rooms and rehearsal rooms on both floors.

  The entrance to the studio proper, I finally remembered, was on the seventh floor. The eighth floor offered access to the control room, which overlooked the studio, and that was about it. That, and the catwalk. They still build TV studios with catwalks above the lighting grids, but they’re very rarely used any more, at least in our studios. Now, when a technician wants to get at the lights, he gets lifted up to them in a portable hydraulic elevator, or has the light mounted on a pantograph, which is an accordion-like gadget that lets you pull the light down to the floor and adjust it there.

  There was a tiny ceremony going on in the seventh-floor hall when I got there. A guy from Building Services was hanging a sign on a door. It could have been the door to just another conference room, complete with low, suspended-tile ceiling with built-in fluorescent lighting, black linoleum floor, and blank white cinderblock walls. Every conference room in the building is that way. I guess they don’t want their creative geniuses distracted by the decor.

  But this (former) conference room was now the J. V. Hewlen Kinescope Library. Young Jerry de Loon, the librarian, was out in the hall superintending the hanging of the sign.

  I joined him. “Very impressive,” I said.

  He grinned. “Yes, indeed, Mr. Cobb. I’m glad they got around to it before I was finished and gone.”

  “How’s the work coming?”

  “Too darn well. I’m into the fifties already.”

  The J. V. Hewlen Kinescope Library was only a few weeks old. A small warehouse in Passaic, New Jersey, had been condemned to make way for a municipal parking lot or something, and, to everyone’s surprise, it turned out the Network owned it. The place had been full of forgotten kinescopes, sixteen-millimeter movies of TV shows, taken right off the screen. That’s the only way shows could be preserved before videotape became practical in the late fifties. Since kines of many old shows are rare, and some are actually valuable—the Art of today is frequently the Crap of yesterday—the Network fixed up the conference room with a bunch of shelves, a viewer, and a pad and pencil, and hired Jerry to find out exactly what the Network had rediscovered, and to put it in some kind of order. When that was finished, so was Jerry’s job.

  “Don’t be so damned conscientious,” I told him. “They don’t expect you to get it all done in a month.”

  Jerry was a big kid, but not tough. With his round, florid face, and platinum blond hair, he looked like an apprentice Santa Claus.

  He scratched his head. “Hell,” he said. “I just get so involved in watching the shows, I forget to go home.”

  “So watch them twice,” I told him, and he laughed. I said, “Congratulations on your sign,” and left him.

  I’ve always thought the Network could generate a lot more revenue from Studio J if they stopped doing shows from there (they only used about one fifteenth of the floor space for the game show that was the regular tenant) and remodeled it for racquetball. They could get quite a few courts in.

  The place was so vast it was hard to remember I was indoors. When I looked above the top of the standing set, past the light grid and the catwalk, I could see a wide, black ceiling that looked as big as a night sky. There were even twinkling red stars in it—the electric eyes of the smoke detector-sprinkler system. That was relatively new; Falzet had only decided to have the Network spring for it when he saw the news tapes of a high-rise office building fire. The sight of people jumping off the building, choosing death on the pavement when they realized they were cut off above the fire, had made him think. His office is the thirty-seventh-floor penthouse of NetHQ.

  A side effect of the new system was the angry red SMOKING POSITIVELY PROHIBITED signs that had been posted in conspicuous places around the studio. Those smoke detectors were extremely sensitive. One cigarette wouldn’t set the sprinkler off, the firm that installed it had said, but fifteen or twenty would, and nobody was interested in checking the claim.

  I wandered around the studio, watching them put the finishing touches on the set. There was to be no studio audience for “Sight, Sound, & Celebration,” or rather, the performers themselves were to be the audience. The whole studio had been converted into a kind of rolling, multilevel stage, with stars clustered in
informal groups, according to their era. Each cluster was centered around a big TV monitor, so the celebrities wouldn’t have to strain their eyes to see something that was going on at the other end of the room. Acts would be performed in several different areas, eliminating the need to have the stage crew rush like crazy to change sets.

  My ultimate destination was the far wall of the studio, which had been changed into a mini-museum of TV and radio memorabilia—the Golden Baritone’s throat spray, Captain Justice’s mask and ultra stun gun—things like that. I was in no hurry to get there, though. There was a lot to see on the way over.

  Flats had been erected around three walls of the set, each decorated with a picture representing some Great Moment in Network History, starting with a blowup of a three-hundred-fifty-pound woman in a horned hat and fur vest, screaming into a microphone the size of a pie plate. A performance of Die Walküre, sung in New York and transmitted by telephone line to radio stations in Philadelphia and Schenectady, had been the first thing ever broadcast by the Network. This had never been an outfit to do things in a small way.

  Not too far away was a picture I could have re-created from memory. Just seeing it again made me start to laugh. It had happened on the “Shelby and Green Program”—you’ve probably seen the tape of it yourself, or at least the still. The picture shows a very famous, very pompous movie actor, standing with his trousers at half mast, revealing loudly striped boxer shorts. To his right stands Ken Shelby, wearing his patented look of dignified horror. To Ken’s right stands the lovely Melanie Marliss, in her abbreviated (for those days) card-girl outfit. Her uncontrollable laughter threatens to bounce her right out of it. Standing to everyone’s left, behind the dignified personage, who is still oblivious to the situation, Lenny Green, with a look of fiendish glee on his face, is holding the actor’s belt aloft.