Killed in Fringe Time Page 2

  “No thanks,” I said.

  “Are you sure? It might cost you your job, but it could make you a star.”

  “Bentyne, I don’t even like you. Or your show.”

  “My God, an honest Network executive with a sense of humor. Rarer than a pregnant unicorn. And you probably wouldn’t lose your job at that, not shacked up with the Network’s largest single stockholder the way you are.”

  “You’re wasting my time. And yours.”

  “Don’t worry about mine. They can’t start without me.”

  “Why don’t you get to the point?”

  “The point. Oh yes, the point. The reason I came here, you mean.”

  I wished there was somebody around to grab my arm so I wouldn’t hit him. I restrained myself, but it wasn’t easy. He was one of the most irritating humans I’d ever met.

  He gave me his trademark chortle. “Actually, I’ve come to ask you a favor.”

  “Interesting approach.”

  “Yeah, well, if I waited to ask favors of people who liked me, I’d never get anything. Nobody likes me. It’s part of my charm.”

  “You come in here, steamroll my secretary, barge in on me, almost hit her, order me to fire her. On top of that, you’ve got a crew and band and guests and an audience waiting for you at your theater. I’ve got two questions. Why should anybody like you, and why should I give you so much as a whiff of Limburger, let alone a favor?”

  He waved it aside. “Someday I’ll do a list of the top-ten reasons people should like me. As for the favor, you won’t be doing it for me, personally, you’ll be doing it for the show. And therefore, for the Network. That’s your job, isn’t it? Helping the Network in all sorts of unusual ways? I probably shouldn’t have called it a favor at all, but I was being polite.”

  I had to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Your idea of politeness. You got my job description right, I suppose, but part of my job is deciding when something is my job.”

  He put on a show of thinking hard. “Um, yeah. It’s a little complicated, but I think I follow you.”

  “All right then, what’s your problem?” I was silently betting it was death threats or blackmail.

  “I need somebody met at the airport,” he said.

  “To have a heapin’ helpin’ of their hospitality.”

  —THEME SONG

  The Beverly Hillbillies, CBS

  2

  AND SO I WAS DRIVING through heavy traffic in an August Friday rush hour, but not to the arms of my beloved. I was on my way to Kennedy International Airport to meet an eccentric millionaire mountain man.

  This job is full of surprises.

  Unfortunately, Bentyne had made out a pretty good case for my doing this. Or he had made up a good story. I had already promised myself to check it with this Bates character when his plane got in.

  If things checked out, fine. If it turned out that Bentyne was jerking me around, I’d take up his offer to go on his show, and I’d tell him a few things. It wouldn’t make the air, of course, but it would make me feel better.

  Bentyne had also made me an offer to make the job less onerous. If I would pick up Clement Bates at Kennedy and drive him up to Connecticut, to Bentyne’s recently bought spread in Darien, I could then high-tail it back to White Plains Airport across the state line in Westchester County, New York, hop a flight for Dulles, rent a car, and join my beloved in Bethesda earlier than I would have if I’d been driving. All this was to be charged not to the Network, but to Richard Bentyne, personally.

  And, while I admit it was a pleasure to relieve him of some of that forty-five million bucks, that was not the reason I had finally agreed to do it. The reason was that, if Bentyne was telling the truth, Clement Bates would be good for the show, and therefore good for the Network.

  Sometimes my devotion to my job makes me ill.

  I parked at the Northwest Airlines terminal about 7:05. (No, the traffic wasn’t that bad, I ate in the city before I headed out, planning to have a late snack with Roxanne when I got to her.)

  This was just about the time the plane was supposed to be landing, but they never arrive on time. My main worry was that the delay would be interminable, and I wouldn’t get to Maryland tonight after all.

  Then I went inside, strolled to the arrivals gate, and surprise, surprise. The video monitor informed me that not only was the flight in question not going to be late, it had come in early.

  Already, I heard a raspy voice calling, “Bentyne, where are you, you lying bastard? Bentyne? One of his flunkies? What the hell is going on around here when an old man has to stand around confused in a kind of place he’s never been before? Bentyne, dammit, if you’re out there, show yourself this minute, or I’m going back to Helena and sticking you with the bill.”

  By this time, airport security was moving in on him. Courts have ruled airports public places, wherein First Amendment rights cannot be impinged upon. That’s why you can be buttonholed by Hare Krishnas (freedom of religion) or harangued by LaRouche zombies (freedom of political speech), or buy the world’s raunchiest porno (freedom of artistic expression) at airport bookstores.

  I myself am a virtual First Amendment Absolutist (I would censor only kiddie porn and writings in praise of the Boston Red Sox), but I’ve wondered about the porn for sale in airport bookstores. Who buys the stuff? On an airplane, there’s nowhere to hide a hard-on. Or a little old lady sits next to you. “What’s that you’re reading, young man? Oh, how nice, Oriental Girls with Whips.” Or what if the plane crashes? When St. Peter asks me what I was doing just before I augured in, I want a better answer than, “I was reading Teenage Chainsaw Vixens from Outer Space.”

  Anyway, it’s because of the fact that it is so hard to tell much of religion, politics, or art from just plain nutsiness these days that you see so many weirdos in airports going unattended to.

  Clement Bates (and I was betting that was who it was), though, had apparently been ranting long enough for the guards to decide that this was just an ordinary tirade, and they were about to clear him away.

  I moved in just as they were about to grab him.

  “Excuse me,” I said politely.

  I would have guessed his age at about sixty, though I know he was supposed to be a good ten years older. The top of his head came up to my nose. He had bright blue eyes. He was clean, and smelled of lye soap (no mean feat after four hours on a plane), but his blue serge suit and white shirt were too big for him, his string tie looked like the lace off somebody’s sneaker, and his coarse gray hair and beard, though short, looked as if they’d been trimmed with an ax.

  He lasered me with his eyes. “Who wants to know?”

  I produced a business card. There’s something ineradicably lower middle class about me that never fails to get a kick out of handing somebody my card.

  “Richard Bentyne sent me to meet you.”

  While he scrutinized the card, possibly for secret messages, one of the security guards said, “Can you keep him under control?”

  I said I didn’t know, I’d just met him. The other one told me to do my best, and they faded from the scene.

  Now Bates was giving me the same scrutiny he’d given the card. “Vice President in Charge of Special Projects,” he read. “What’s a special project?”

  “Oh, running errands for big stars and important guests. Special Projects sounds more important.”

  “And this Network has a vice president just for that, huh?”

  “They have a vice president for everything.”

  “I thought you seemed awfully young for a vice president,” he said.

  “Youngest one at the Network. Of course, I hope to work my way up.”

  “How do I know you’re this Matthew Cobb character, anyway?”

  I suppressed a sigh and went for my wallet. I showed him my Visa card, my New York State driver’s license, and my Network ID, at least two of which had my picture on them.

  Once again, h
e took his time looking them over. “Okay,” he said. “You’re you. Let’s get going.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Where’s your bag?”

  He held up a small leather thing smaller than the bag my secretary uses for her makeup.

  “This Bentyne said he’d get me some clothes while I was here,” he explained. “That’s one of the reasons I decided to come.”

  “We’re honored,” I said. I was amazed to discover that I kind of meant it. When a man who’s shunned the sight of human beings for thirty-five years comes to New York City to be on your show, it is an honor.

  I led him out to the car, one of the huge black-outside, white-inside gas guzzlers the Network loved. He climbed in, buckled up, and settled into the leather the Network puts on the inside of those ridiculous vehicles.

  “This is nice,” he said. “Better than the airplane. I might see if I can get a chair like this for my cabin. This is nothing like the taxi I got driven to Helena in, let me tell you. Course, it was nothing like this traffic, either. Never been to New York before. How can you live in a beehive like this.”

  “We look for a honey,” I said.

  That, apparently, was a thigh-slapper, though I must admit he did not go so far as to actually slap his thigh. He did laugh for a good long time, so long that it sounded a mite forced.

  “A honey,” he said, as the laughter trailed away. “That makes everything some easier to take, doesn’t it? Course, you get to be my age, used to living alone, and women don’t matter so much to you.” He tilted his head as though thinking it over. “Am I gonna meet any pretty women when I’m here, Cobb?”

  “I thought it didn’t matter.”

  “Doesn’t matter so much. I may be a hermit, and I may be cracked, but I ain’t dead, you know.”

  “Hold on a second.” I paid the toll at the Whitestone Bridge, and headed north through the Bronx toward Connecticut.

  “When it comes to meeting women,” I told my passenger, “you’re on your own. My job description does not include introducing people to women.”

  Bates let out an impatient gasp. “I never said it did. What the hell do you take me for, Cobb? People want to know why you go off to live by yourself for thirty-five years, that’s the reason. Nobody around to go getting you wrong every time you open your darn mouth.”

  “Sorry,” I told him.

  “Listen,” he went on, “I wasn’t born on that mountain, you know. In my day, I met lots of women. Got well acquainted with them, too, and rich as I am, never had to pay a penny, all right?”

  “Sure,” I told him. “I said I was sorry. Besides, you won’t need any help, they’ll be all over you. You’ll be a challenge to them.”

  There was just enough light left to see his sly grin. “Yeah, well, you may be right. Bentyne told me the same thing.”

  “Well, if you want to meet anybody this weekend, you’re going to the wrong place. You’re staying alone in Bentyne’s house while he and his girlfriend hit some parties in the city.”

  “I know, I know. And that suits me fine. I’m not a fella as plunges right into the stream, you know. Got to dip a toe in first and get some idea how cold it is, and how fast the current’s flowing.”

  We were headed north on 95, which in that part of the country is mostly east.

  “Mainly,” he said, “I’m going to sit around and eat and watch TV. Get used to human faces again.”

  It occurred to me that if Bentyne was hooked up with cable, as he undoubtedly was, Bates could get used to a lot more human attributes than just faces, but I didn’t tell him. Let him have the fun of discovering for himself.

  “So how did you and Bentyne get together?” I asked.

  “Didn’t he tell you? He said I’d be a legend at that Network of his by the time I got there.”

  “I was sort of brought into this at the last minute,” I temporized. “He’s been hinting at a big mystery guest, of a kind we’ve never seen on television before.”

  “That’s me all right,” he said. “You gonna be there at the show, Monday?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Shame. I’ve been with you almost an hour, now, and I haven’t been tempted to slug you but once.”

  “Oh? Is that another reason you spent all that time up there on the mountain? You go around slugging people when you can reach them?”

  “No. It’s probably been fifty years since I actually hauled off and nailed someone. But when I was going into the office every day, the temptation was horrible. Doesn’t this city ever end?”

  “Oh, we left the New York City limits a while ago. This is New Rochelle.”

  “You could have fooled me.”

  “Tell me how you met Bentyne.”

  “Well, you know, I’ve got this cabin up in the mountains. I used to go there on weekends, when things got too damn nuts in my office in Helena.”

  One of the things about me that I don’t like too much is that I have a heavy dose of New York snobbery. I am still ashamed of the fact that I dissolved into hysterics when I first heard of the Toledo Philharmonic. I fight it, and most of the time these days, I win.

  Therefore, I suppressed any scoffing I might have been inclined to do about a man in Helena, Montana, being overcome with pressure at the office.

  It didn’t matter. Bates read my mind.

  “I’m in the sugar business,” he said. “Beet sugar. We grow beets all through here, the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, even part of Oregon and Washington. Sell it all through the West. Here in the East, you use cane sugar, grown by foreigners, but our stuff is exactly the same. Do some mining too.

  “My granddaddy started the company. Anyway, I’d get away to the cabin, hunt fish, live off the land and L.L.

  Bean pancake flour, and one day it came to me that I had enough money. Enough to last a dozen lifetimes, especially if I just lived the way I liked to. Know what I mean?”

  “I know what you mean. I haven’t gotten there yet, but I know what you mean.”

  That was another thigh-slapper.

  When he subsided, he said, “Well, I hope you make it, boy, because doing exactly what you want with your life is a feeling that can’t be beat.

  “Well, I sold off some of the company to my best assistants, and let them take over the place. They’ve been running it ever since, and I’ve got no complaints.”

  No, I thought, he shouldn’t. According to Bentyne, who’d apparently had his business manager check Bates out, the old man was worth a hundred and thirty million bucks and counting.

  “I became a real mountain man. It may seem crazy to you, but it suits me fine. You really get to know yourself out there. I’d go years at a time without seeing another human. Before Bentyne showed up, I bet it was oh, nine years at least. When that happens, you get to talk to yourself just to make sure your voice still works, if you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah. A second ago, you said, ‘until Bentyne showed up.’ How did he happen to show up?”

  Bates grinned. “In a damn fool way, if you really want to know. First of all, he rented a cabin a few mountains away. Told me later he knew he was going to be under almost unimaginable pressure from a bunch of assholes—his word—and that before he started, he wanted to have some time alone and get centered. That was his word, too. Get centered. What the hell was he talking about?”

  “Got me. Bentyne didn’t know either. That’s the big advance in communications since you’ve been away. We’ve developed so much jargon that it’s possible to bullshit yourself every bit as thoroughly as you can anybody else.”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” the old man told him. “That’s always been the easiest person to fool.”

  He looked out the window for a while. We’d crossed the state line, and were cruising along the shore of Long Island Sound in Greenwich.

  “The lights are pretty,” he observed. “I guess it kind of makes up for not being able to see the stars.”

  “If you look off to your right, there, you can see the Sound.
”

  “Yeah, I see it. Anyway, Bentyne decided to get centered. I told him it was stupid to run away from the pressure before you felt it, and then go running back to wallow in it, but that was what he was doing, and he seemed to think it was helping him, so I didn’t plague him about it.”

  He gave a little self-deprecating laugh. “What the hell, when you’re a hermit by choice, if you don’t believe in ‘live and let live,’ you don’t believe in anything.

  “As for what happened, that was the usual city-slicker-in-the-wilderness story. I won’t bore you with a lot of details. Just one afternoon, he decided to do some ‘exploring.’ He made his way over to my mountain, and explored his way into a twisted ankle.

  “He tried to walk for a while, realized he couldn’t, and started yelling for help.

  “Well, I heard him. I’d known he was in the cabin—well, not him personally, but somebody—because I’d been seeing smoke from the chimney for a couple of days, and I figured it’d be some damn fool who wouldn’t walk down to the end of his block after dark in the city deciding he was Daniel Boone out to conquer the Wilderness Trail.

  “So I let him yell for a couple of hours—”

  “A couple of hours?” I had been developing a liking for my passenger (at least he was different) but this put a crimp in it. “You left a human being—even if it was Richard Bentyne—screaming in pain and fear for a couple of hours?”

  “Yeah, just a couple. I wanted to let the lesson of respecting the wild sink in real good. Tell you the truth, I was hoping somebody else would come along and rescue him. After all, I’d just had company, nine years before. I didn’t want my place turning into a Hilton Hotel, did I?”

  “Oh,” I said. “No. Can’t have that.”

  “Course not,” he agreed. “Anyway, the afternoon wore on, and nobody came and got him, and he kept yelling and yelling like he couldn’t think of anything else to do, and I couldn’t leave him there after dark—lot of critters in the mountains hunt by night would go after an injured man, and I knew the idjit didn’t have a gun, or he would have been shooting it because gunfire carries a lot farther than a yell. So, eventually, I went and got him.