Killed in Fringe Time Page 3

  “I brought him back to my place and gave him water and splinted up his ankle—it wasn’t broken, but he had a pretty bad sprain, and we got acquainted.

  “He was pretty amused that I didn’t know who he was, and apparently he stayed amused for a month, because he stayed right there, telling me all about his life and asking me all about mine, and eating tons of my squirrel and stew and L.L. Bean pancakes.

  “And he did go on about this TV show he was starting up in New York come spring. I had to come and be a guest on the show. He even offered to make me a regular. I told him mountain stream water was enough to keep anybody regular, but that was just a joke. There was TV before I took to the cabin, you know, and radio. I know what a ‘regular’ is.

  “I told him the idea was pure nonsense, but he kept coming back to it. I told him I liked him okay, but I’d have to love him like a son to follow him back to New York. Finally, the time came when he had to leave, and he left. Not to say he wasn’t on my tail until the very last second about being on his damned show, but he left. I figured that was the end of him.”

  “Well,” I said, “obviously, he eventually won you over somehow, or you wouldn’t be here.”

  It was dark now. I could only see Bates making a face in the headlights of other cars.

  “No, son,” he said, “you’re wrong there. “The fact is, I talked me into it eventually. I was just pottering around out in my cabin, and forgot all about him, really. Then came a day when I figured it had to be May, and I wondered how Bentyne was doing with his show that he’d been so worried about.

  “Then I decided, what the hell. So I did something I don’t usually do—I wrote somebody a letter. Last time was a writer fella who wanted to write a book about me, or a magazine article or something, but nobody would publish it or give him any money for it unless he got an interview with me. So I wrote back to him. You know what I told him? I told him, ‘Good!’”

  He laughed at the memory. “But this time,” he went on, “I wrote to Bentyne and told him that though I didn’t put much store in such foolishness, I hoped his show was going well. Then I surprised myself. I told him that if he still wanted me on the show, I’d come out and do it.

  “I wonder now why I said that. Could it be that I’ve got such an ego, I want to share my accumulated wisdom of thirty-five years with my fellow citizens? You think it could be that?”

  “I don’t think there’s anything deficient about your ego,” I told him.

  “No, there is not. There most certainly is not. You can’t do what I’ve done and stick with it and make it work and have anything wrong with your ego.”

  He shrugged, and leaned back in his seat. “Well, if it turns out to be horrible, I’ll just howl for a few hours, then drag myself back to my mountain and never come out again. Meantime, I wrote that letter, left it out on the stump for the postman to pick up, Bentyne got it, wrote back, and here I am.”

  “And here we are,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  We’d left the highway a while ago. Now I turned off the Fairfield County route onto Richard Bentyne’s private drive. The house was a sprawling, modern thing, all glass and stone. Either Bentyne had left the light on for his visitor, or there was a timing gizmo on the electrical system, because the place was lit up like a Christmas tree.

  “I thought you said this was in the country,” he said. His tone was accusatory.

  “Hey, I was born and raised in Manhattan. To me, this is the Amazon.”

  “Damn it, you can hear the traffic from the road. Listen.”

  I listened. I heard crickets and an owl and some unidentified rustling in the woods that came up nearly to the house.

  When I held my breath, I could hear my heartbeat, and I swear, after a little while of that, I could hear his heartbeat.

  Finally, I thought I just might possibly have heard a truck go by down the other end of the long, winding driveway, though it might have been the blood roaring in my ears the way it does before you pass out from lack of oxygen.

  I let my breath go in a whoosh, and said I was sorry.

  “Country,” he sneered. “There’s gravel on this damned driveway. He kicked some of it, in case I hadn’t noticed.

  “Look,” I told him, “I’ve got promises to keep. I can take you to a hotel, but it’s going to be a whole lot less country than this.”

  “Oh, hell, I don’t mind. This place looks like a tied-down version of your fancy car, there. I just wish people would know what they were talking about.”

  “Don’t we all,” I said.

  I brought him inside. Bentyne had given me a rough idea of the layout of the place, and I showed Bates around. “Your bedroom, there, bathroom in there—”

  We might never have gotten any farther than the bathroom. He kept walking into the shower and looking at its multiple heads. Looking down, he said, “There’s one that’ll give you a squirt right up the—”

  “Yeah.” I showed him the Jacuzzi, too, then out to the rest of the house for the air-conditioning controls, the cable and satellite TV, and the vibra-massage lounger in the armchair.

  Then out to the kitchen, where I showed him the refrigerator. He stood in front of it, watching it like a movie. There was enough food in it to feed all the starters in the New York Marathon, most of the stuff from Dean & Deluca in the city.

  “Well,” I told him, “you won’t have to shoot anything.”

  I decided not to try to teach him how the microwave oven worked.

  He assured me that he would be all right, and anyway, Bentyne was going to call him in the morning. He thanked me for not being an idjit, and I drove off, expecting never to see him again, except maybe on The Richard Bentyne Show.

  “Money changes everything.”

  —CYNDI LAUPER

  MTV

  3

  ABOUT SEVEN HOURS LATER, Roxanne Schick put her hand on my chest, lifted up her head, shook back her dark hair, then fixed me with her big brown eyes.

  “So,” she said. “When are we going to get married.” I include no question mark because it wasn’t exactly a question.

  “Don’t wince,” she said.

  “I didn’t wince.”

  “You didn’t show a wince, but you thought a wince.”

  “You’re such a mind reader, you tell me.”

  “The glass is murky,” she said. “Like your logic.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you love me, and you would marry me in a second if I weren’t so rich. That’s like turning down a limousine as a gift because it has air conditioning. I mean, look at me!”

  I looked. She was as beautiful as ever. Almost ever. When I first met her, she was an emaciated teenaged runaway, turning tricks to buy drugs. She was not beautiful then.

  Finding her had been a job for Special Projects, and I had done it and was happy about it, but I’d figured it was over when I’d brought her home.

  A few years went by, though, and Roxanne got clean, filled out, and grew up. She’d also wised up—a doctor virtually had to threaten her with hospitalization before she’d take so much as an aspirin tablet. When circumstances brought her back into my life, though, she hadn’t wised up enough to have gotten over a rather exaggerated regard for me.

  Eventually, she’d worn me down and gotten me to admit that, yes, I was in fact crazy about her. Now she was talking marriage.

  “It’s like the angler fish,” I told her.

  “The what?”

  “Angler fish. It’s this fish that lives deep below the ocean. It has this little bait gimmick that dangles in front of its mouth, and when some other fish comes and tries to take it, wham, the angler fish scarfs it up.”

  “What does this have to do with us, Cobb? If you haven’t realized it, I’ve already scarfed you up. I’m just proposing to make it legal.”

  “No, that’s not it. Believe me, no man has ever been better or more happily scarfed.” I gave her a kiss and sat up. “See, wh
at everybody thinks of as an angler fish is really the female angler fish. The male angler fish is about one-hundredth the size. It swims up to the chosen female, and bites with little sharp teeth into her stomach. Eventually, the flesh melds, and he lives off her bloodstream.”

  “I’ve heard of couples growing attached,” Roxanne dead-panned, “but this is ridiculous.”

  “Yeah, and they prove the expression two can live as cheaply as one, too, because apparently, she never notices he’s there. His only responsibility is to provide sperm on suitable occasions.”

  Roxanne looked hurt. “Matt, do you honestly think I would make you feel that way?”

  “Of course not,” I said.

  “Good.”

  “Í would make me feel that way.”

  “Men!”

  “Have you ever noticed that when women use ‘men’ as an exclamation, it comes out like a curse, but when men say ‘women’ it comes out like a cry for help?”

  “Never mind that. Get back to the point.”

  “The point is, when we get married—”

  “You said when,” she pointed out, gleefully.

  Mmmm, I thought, so I did. Nice going, subconscious. Well, it (and she) had known I was in love with her before I had, too.

  It’s weird to be in the middle of an argument and realize you have already lost it, but I pressed on.

  “Yeah,” I said. “So?” She just looked smug. I went on. “It would be kind of stupid of me to work once I was married to a jillionaire. I mean, it’s not like I’m some great artist or something, working for some reason other than to make money. And I certainly couldn’t go on working for the Network. Just today, Richard Bentyne was giving me big stondeens about how it was only your being the biggest single stockholder in the Network that was shielding me from his wrath. If I stayed there after we got married, half the people would hate me, and the other half would be afraid of me.”

  “You could be president of the Network, you know.”

  “One, I do not want to be president of the goddamn Network. Secondly, I especially do not want to be president of the goddamn Network by virtue of whom I happen to be sleeping with, okay? Why do you keep bringing that up?”

  “I like to watch the way your integrity gets all huffy when you turn me down. Okay, don’t run the Network. Quit the Network, and handle my money, instead.”

  “Roxanne, my darling, have you ever been poor?”

  “You know I haven’t.”

  “I have. You wouldn’t like it. You just let Mr. Thatcher at the Sloan keep handling your money for you. I can’t even balance my checkbook.”

  “So why do you have to work at all—oh, right, angler fish. Which brings me around to my original question: When are we going to get married.”

  “This is Maryland,” I said. “We could rouse a justice of the peace and be married before sunrise.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You’re bluffing,” she said.

  “Call me.” I was calm as a stagnant pond on the outside. Inside, I was screaming at myself, What the hell are you doing, you fool?!

  “I’m tempted ...” she said.

  Just then, the phone rang.

  Roxanne said an unladylike word. “Who the hell would be calling me here at two-thirty in the morning?” she muttered. She picked up the phone. “Yeah?” she said, then listened for a few seconds, then made a face.

  “It’s for you,” she said. “Harris Brophy.”

  Great, I thought. Harris is a genial, handsome cynic who is my second in command at Special Projects only because he turned down my job, saying that what he liked about it was amusement without responsibility. He thought the foibles and follies of the rich and famous were the most amusing things imaginable. Had he been less literate, he would have been the perfect National Enquirer reader.

  “Hail, O leader of persons,” he greeted me. “I hope I’m interrupting something worthwhile.”

  His jovial tone would have encouraged me if I hadn’t known that Harris was perfectly capable of laughing at an outbreak of bubonic plague, even if he’d caught it himself.

  “Get to the point, Harris.”

  “Yes. I am calling you from the barracks of the Connecticut State Police in Bridgeport, where your pal Clement Bates is currently incarcerated for discharging an unlicensed firearm into the woods surrounding Richard Bentyne’s house. Neighbors complained, the spoilsports.”

  Wonderful, I thought. I could see headlines. NETWORK GUEST SLAUGHTERS SIX.

  “Did he hit anything?”

  “Not that we know of. Emptied a six-shooter, though. You should see it. The size of a leg of lamb. Looks like the original Gun That Won the West.”

  “What was he doing, for God’s sake?”

  “Repelling invaders. Says they were sneaking up on the house, and wouldn’t answer when he called out. So he invited them to eat hot lead. Which meal they declined, according to the cops, if they were ever there in the first place.”

  “Isn’t this a matter for Bentyne’s staff?” I said. Now that I realized this wasn’t a catastrophe, I was beginning to get irritated.

  “Yeah, well, you’re the only person from the Network, aside from Bentyne himself, who he’s met personally. And,” Harris went on accusingly, “you gave him your card.”

  “That’ll teach me.”

  “Let us hope. Anyway, he tried to get you, got me instead, and here we are.”

  “So? Get him bailed out, take him home, and stay with him until you can get him a baby-sitter from Bentyne’s staff.”

  “Naturally. It’s already in the works. But first, he wants to talk to you. Nobody’s gonna get any peace around here until he does.”

  Wonderful, I thought again. I wondered if this guy was going to haunt me like a stray dog I’d fed. “Okay, put him on.”

  Bates must have been standing right there to snatch the phone away from Harris, because the words were hardly out of my mouth before I heard, “Cobb! When can you get up here to straighten these idjits out?”

  “I’m not coming up there, Mr. Bates.”

  “Call me Clem.”

  I’d been afraid he was going to say that.

  “I’m not coming up, Clem. You know how you put good people in place, and took the next thirty-five years off? That’s how I handle my weekends. Mr. Brophy is an excellent man, and he can do anything I could do, I promise.

  “Hell, he’s mostly done it already. That’s not the point.”

  I didn’t wait for him to tell me what the point was; I had something I wanted to say.

  “Clem,” I said. “The next time you get nervous, will you please call the police instead of blasting away?”

  He sniffed. “I’m used to being seventy-five miles from the nearest police. Until tonight, I hadn’t seen a policeman in—”

  “I know, I know, twenty-seven years.”

  “Twenty-two, actually. Some idjit tourist disappeared or something, and the rangers must have thought I ate him.”

  “All the same, Clem,” I began. You cannot believe the trouble I had bringing myself to call a real human being “Clem.”

  “All the same, nothing. What do you think about those boys I scared off tonight?”

  What did I think? I thought they were undigested traffic noises filtered through an imagination warped by too much time alone. I thought that quaint, funny old Clem Bates was wearing out his welcome with me, really fast. I thought my none-too-potent diplomatic skills were wearing thin.

  “Burglars?” I suggested.

  Bates made a rude noise in my ear. “I don’t believe it. You said yourself, the place was lit up like a Christmas tree.”

  For a second, I put aside my irritation and did my job. That is, I asked myself to suppose this guy was telling the truth, wasn’t just imagining the horrible home invaders.

  A second was all it took. Nobody but Bentyne and me, and possibly Harris, depending on whether he’d read the briefing memo I’d left him (he’d swear that he had) knew that it was Clem who w
as going to be there, with the owner staying in the city.

  That meant that whoever was creeping up on the place was expecting to find ...

  “Let me speak to Harris Brophy again.”

  “Ha! I knew you weren’t an idjit.”

  “No. I’m a genius. Give him the phone.”

  “I’m back, O mighty one,” Harris said.

  “Yeah. Get in touch with security. Have them find Bentyne and slap some extra security on him. Just in case our rustic friend is right.”

  “Will do. See you Monday.”

  I hung up. Roxanne asked me what it was all about.

  “Nothing, I hope.” I looked at her, so beautiful and loving and reasonably sane.

  “You know,” I said, “suddenly getting married to you makes more sense than anything I can think of.”

  “You mean that?”

  “Yeah. I do. Let’s go do it.”

  “No. When we get married, we’re going to do it big. Soon, but big.”

  I smiled at her. “However you want it.”

  “In the meantime, though, there’s no reason we can’t act married.”

  “No,” I said around kisses, “none at all.”

  “Will he be a dream? Or a dud?”

  —MYSTERY DATE COMMERCIAL

  4

  AND SO WE SPENT the rest of the weekend in what can best be described as bliss, acting married, swimming, eating crabs, acting married some more. I kept realizing at intervals that I had gotten engaged Friday night, and I really liked the idea each time I thought of it.

  The only flaw in the gem that was my life was the fear that I’d open a newspaper to read NETWORK STAR KILLED. It didn’t happen. Nothing happened. It was the slowest news weekend since the Sunday before God started the Creation. Let me put it this way. A girl with Roxanne’s dough would definitely make The New York Times with news of her engagement. For all their liberal policies, the Times loves people with dough. If we’d announced our engagement that weekend, though, it would have made the front page above the fold.