Killed in Fringe Time Page 5

  Vivian Pike regarded her with disdain. “What’s the trouble, Marcie?”

  “One of the props for tonight’s show is missing: You know, the flypaper? The prop man’s complaining about it. Apparently now it’s not in the production cabinet.”

  “Somebody moved it, Marcie. Ask around.”

  “I have. Nobody pays attention around here.” Marcie had defiant dark eyes, magnified by her glasses. “I’m supposed to be an assistant producer, but I don’t get any respect.”

  “Marcie, I’ve told you, respect from these guys doesn’t come with a title. You’ve got to earn it. You’ve got to go kick some ass.”

  “You mean I’ve got to buy into the patriarchy-established hidden rules of this place? No way. I didn’t sue the Network to get this job so I could maintain the status quo. The men around here are defying my authority; as producer it’s your job to do something about it.”

  I was all for more women working at all levels at the Network, although to tell the truth, production staff has always been the one place they weren’t underrepresented. Still, I didn’t see how it struck a blow against the patriarchy to force your boss to come and bail you out of a situation you couldn’t handle yourself.

  Vivian Pike grimaced, gave me directions to Bentyne’s dressing room, and reminded me I’d better have the secret password for the bodyguard outside. Then she left.

  I cheated.

  I didn’t go directly to Richard Bentyne’s dressing room. I hung around awhile and watched a bunch of people go about the business of putting on a TV show. I love TV production—it was the reason I tried to get a job with the Network in the first place. I only got sidetracked into Special Projects because I was young and naive, and somebody in personnel decided that my army service as an MP somehow qualified me for a career of cleaning up after stars and power wielders.

  Maybe it did. But it didn’t mean I had to like it.

  It was good for me to get into a studio every once in a while to remind myself that the ultimate business of the Network was this apparently chaotic bustle of cameramen complaining to unseen technical directors, sound men and lighting men and writers and makeup artists and floor directors, all striving mightily to make the entertainment look effortless.

  It’s so easy to aggrandize ourselves, to make the Network seem like the hub of the universe. We have to remember that what we actually are is a toy for real people.

  I don’t get into these philosophical moods too often, but when I do, I could stand in a blizzard and not notice I was buried in snow.

  So it was a good thing something happened to snap me out of it. A man’s voice, yelling in anger and fear. What it said was, “You son of a bitch! Are you trying to kill me?”

  Richard Bentyne’s voice. I ran.

  “Geez, what a grouch!”

  —DANNY THOMAS

  The Danny Thomas Show, CBS

  6

  BENTYNE’S DRESSING ROOM WAS UP a flight of stairs the entrance to which was behind the permanent desk-and-couch set. I knocked over an end table and a couple of people on my way to them. I bounded up the stairs two at a time, then pushed open a door to find myself staring down the muzzle of a .38-caliber Hopkins & Allen Police Positive. It wasn’t quite the cannon Clement Bates had let off in the Connecticut woods the other night, but it was plenty scary anyway.

  I screeched to a stop, eyes for nothing but the gun.

  Then the wielder of it said, “Oh, it’s you.”

  I could breathe again. This was Cass Le Boudlier, ex-Marine, ex-pro football player, six foot four of massive black muscles from New Orleans. In his other hand, he held, without effort, a small Hispanic youth in restaurant whites, whom he dangled so that just his toes were touching the floor, which was awash with coffee and littered with ruined pastry and cakes.

  The kid, obviously a delivery boy, was terrified, and I couldn’t blame him.

  “What’s going on, Cass?” I asked.

  “Damn if I know,” Cass said. “Kid come in with the tray from the deli, he brings coffee and cake every day this time, they say. Bentyne says, himself. So I let the kid in. Next thing I know, there’s the screaming you must have heard, Bentyne saying the kid wants to kill him, and the kid comes running out through the door. So I grabbed him.”

  Cass paused a moment and looked hurt. “He spilled coffee all over my pants, man.”

  “The Network will spring for the dry cleaning.”

  “It’s not that, Matt. My legs are parboiled, on their way to done.”

  “Ah. Okay, give me the kid, go run some cold water on yourself, and come back.”

  “Right.” He handed the delivery boy over. I couldn’t dangle him the way Cass had, so I left him stand on his feet, and grabbed him around the wrist with one hand and just above the elbow on the other. It’s a grip that doesn’t hurt in itself, but still gives you total control.

  “What’s your name?” I asked the kid.

  He shook his head, looking more scared than ever. “No spik Eengliss.”

  I smiled at him. “Muy bien,” I told him. “Yo hablo español,” I actually speak four languages, counting English, but I don’t get much chance to use them, because most of the foreign language speakers I meet want to practice their English.

  Young Anibal Cerros, however, had no English to practice, so he was delighted to tell me in Puerto Rican Spanish, the fastest language known to man, that his Uncle Hector would kill him now for messing up the delivery today, the first chance he, Anibal, had had to do it.

  But how was he to be blamed? He had gone first to the dressing room of Mr. Bentyne, who was some sort of a big shot, following the written instructions on the list his uncle had given him.

  There was a list. I could see it now, wet and translucent in a puddle of coffee.

  Anibal chattered on. He brought the order. He put it down, one coffee very dark, one slice chocolate cake. He had turned to go, having been warned to say nothing to Mr. Bentyne, and having no English in any case.

  And that was when the yellow-haired man, Mr. Bentyne, had started yelling, loco, saying sonovhabeesh, which is one of the few English words Anibal knows, and throwing something at him. Anibal had been afraid, so he ran.

  By this time, Cass had returned. I told Anibal to stay with him while I tried to get this straightened out. I promised that no one was going to hurt him, but if he ran away, we would tell his uncle and let him handle it.

  Anibal agreed. He seemed to be delighted not to have to go back to the deli and face the music yet.

  I went inside, and found Richard Bentyne sitting in an armchair, staring across the room at a polystyrene coffee container and a rather nice-looking piece of devil’s food cake as though he expected them to explode.

  He looked up from the snack for a split second, just to register my face. “Oh, it’s you,” he said, and resumed his vigil.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s me. At your royal command.”

  “Leave comedy to the professionals, Cobb. You haven’t got the instinct for it.”

  “Fine,” I said. “I’m not feeling too humorous at the moment, anyway. Would you mind telling me what the fuck you think is going on around here?”

  “The little bastard tried to kill me. Fat lot of good you or your goddamn bodyguard did me.”

  “The coffee is poisoned?” I demanded. “Or the cake?”

  “The cake.”

  I went over to the cake. I sniffed it. I picked up a moist crumb on a fingertip and tasted it, then did the same with a few molecules of chocolate frosting.

  “There is nothing,” I said, “wrong with this cake.”

  “There is for me,” he said bitterly. “I have a gluten allergy, you asshole. Anything made of wheat. If I’d even taken a bite from that, I’d have been hospital material.”

  “Would you be dead?”

  “Probably. If I ate enough.”

  “I was under the impression you had a piece of chocolate cake every day at this time.”

  “I do.
But not that kind of cake. There’s a special kind they keep for me, chocolate cake, I mean, made with potato flour, with a fudge icing.”

  “Sounds yummy,” I said.

  His voice was rough with hate. “Oh, yeah, Cobb, yuk it up. Do you know what a bitch it is having to go through life avoiding wheat?”

  “I don’t know. Just hanging around you makes me see the humor in the misfortunes of others. What happens to you when you eat this stuff?”

  “Hives. Asthma. Respiratory arrest, if I eat enough.”

  “Would you die?”

  “If you don’t breathe, you die, Cobb. Didn’t you ever take high school biology? Maybe I should save it for my last show—how many slices of bread can Bentyne eat before he snuffs it? Later the Network can sell the video.”

  By then, I was about ready to buy a copy. As Red Skelton said at the funeral of Harry Cohn, “Just give the public what it wants ...”

  “Let me ask you a few questions,” I said.

  “I’m trying to do a show here.”

  “You sent for me, you’re struck with me.”

  “Oh,” he groaned petulantly, “get it over with.”

  “Glad to,” I said. “Now, did you eat any of the cake that’s here?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I don’t see any of course about it. How did you know not to?”

  “You can tell by looking at it. This is devil’s food cake, you can see it’s kind of red-brown. The stuff I get is more the color of chocolate milk. And then there’s the texture. The wheatless cake doesn’t have crumbs like this, it’s more grainy, looks almost like marzipan.”

  “Then there’s no chance you would have eaten any of this,” I said.

  “Goddamnit, Cobb, what does it take to get it through your head? That stuff is poison to me!”

  “So the Puerto Rican kid outside, first day on the job, grabbed the wrong cake, and you decided to have a tantrum about it.”

  “How much is the Puerto Rican kid worth to your girlfriend’s Network, Cobb?” he sneered.

  I looked at him for a long time.

  “You are pathetic,” I said at last. “Are you really so worthless in your own estimation that you’ve got to pick on a harmless kid to dramatize yourself?”

  Bentyne turned purple, on his way to black. I was expecting an explosion. I was already rehearsing how I was going to explain to Falzet that though he’d sent me over to humor Bentyne, what I’d wound up doing was driving him off the show instead.

  Then a strange thing happened. He got control of himself. The color drained out of his face until he was damned near white. Finally, he whispered, “Is it that obvious?”

  “To anybody four years old and up who thinks about it for two minutes. Most of them don’t want to think about it, because they see you as a cash cow, and they want to believe you’ll provide decades of healthy milkings.”

  “How are you different?”

  “Me? I just don’t give a shit. I learned a long time ago that people who hate themselves are the most dangerous animals on the planet.”

  “I don’t hate myself,” he said.

  “No?” I shrugged. “Suit yourself. You give a damned good imitation of it. The key thing is the assumption that anybody who actually likes someone like you is either faking it, or such an asshole that they deserve whatever you can do to them, right?”

  “I don’t!” he yelled. “Hate myself, I mean.” He struggled helplessly for a few seconds, as if looking for a word.

  “It’s just like,” he went on at last, “I don’t see what there is to like.”

  He’d leaned way forward in his armchair. Now he plopped back into it in a state of total collapse. “I was a nerd all my life. The people who didn’t laugh at me, ignored me completely. Then in college, it changed. People started laughing at my jokes, and throwing money at me for telling them. The nastier they got, the more they loved me. And it’s still true. People want me to insult them, I’ve been chosen to bring nastiness and insults into their lives.”

  Absentmindedly, he messed up his carefully combed blond hair with his hand. “If I could understand it, I could deal with it better. But I don’t understand it, and I never will.”

  He leaned forward again. “But I’ll tell you one thing, Cobb. I’m not going back. It’s better to be rich than poor. It’s better to be feared than despised, and it’s better to be hated than ignored.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “Fine. You’ve got a nasty comedy persona and it pays off for you. Why don’t you try to save it for the camera? Because you’re going to lose everything but the money eventually.”

  “When did you hang up a shingle?” There was the trace of a sneer; he was rapidly getting back to what passed for normal.

  “I don’t have to hang up a shingle, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Step back and take a look at Vivian Pike.”

  “What about her?”

  “I’ve only spent a couple of minutes with her, but I can see she’s a woman on the verge of burnout.”

  “Well,” he said pulling his lip, “at least she’s giving herself in a good cause.”

  “So you’re stupid as well as neurotic,” I said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that one of these days, she’ll get sick of you, and when she does, she’ll be in a position to squash you.

  He waved it off. “We’ve both been under a lot of pressure lately.”

  “Yeah. Maybe you’d better go twist your leg up in the mountains, again. Clement Bates seems to be the only human being on earth you haven’t alienated yet.”

  His face lit up. “Bates!” he said. “How is the old bastard? Has he come to the studio yet?”

  I’d seen his name checked off on the redheaded gatekeeper’s list. “He’s here,” I said. “I haven’t seen him personally. I’ve been chasing false alarms.”

  “Go see if he’s all right,” Bentyne commanded. “That’s really the kind of thing I wanted you here for today.”

  I thought of seven thousand, five hundred forty-three suitable responses, but since none of them would do any good, I shelved them. I reached for the door.

  Behind me, Bentyne said, “Cobb?” I turned. “Thanks for all your help,” he said. “I really mean it.”

  “Name your poison, mister.”

  —GLENN STRANGE

  Gunsmoke, CBS

  7

  I GOT THINGS STRAIGHTENED out in the hallway, told Anibal he could go back to the diner, and not to worry. I suggested that Cass personally take any deliveries to Bentyne’s dressing room, and bring them in himself. Somehow, I didn’t think Bentyne would try to intimidate Cass the way he had the delivery boy.

  The next thing to do was to look up Vivian Pike. She had somehow come to grips with the Marcie situation. I could see a happy Marcie lording it over a stagehand who’d probably been at the Network since before she was born.

  Vivian Pike, it was safe to say, did not look happy. I approached her, since glum as she was she seemed to be the only sane one in the place.

  I started to ask her where Bates was hiding when she cut me off.

  “The flypaper turned up. A few sheets missing. What do you think of our little Marcie?” she asked.

  I made a face. “Do I have to?”

  “Have to what? Tell me?”

  “No. Think about her. That kind of person always makes me depressed.”

  She gave a tired simulation of a laugh. “Me, too.”

  “You do seem to be knee-deep in them.”

  She looked at me for a second through a haze of smoke. “Oh,” she said. “You mean Richard. No, there’s no similarity between them. Richard’s a spoiled child. Marcie’s a barracuda.”

  “What the hell,” I said. “You’re the producer, aren’t you? If you can’t fire her, and you probably can’t given the lawsuit, get her moved to another show. You’ve probably got enough juice to get her promoted to another show. Then she couldn’t complain of discrimination, and
you’d have her out of your hair.”

  “It’s a good idea,” Vivian Pike conceded. “Only one problem with it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Richard is fucking her.”

  “Oh,” I said. “You appear to be taking it calmly.”

  “Who me? I take everything calmly. That’s why God gave us Valium.”

  She took another deep drag on her cigarette, and it occurred to me that tobacco and prescription tranquilizers were two of the unhippest drugs around these days. I was surprised using them didn’t disqualify her from the show.

  “Besides,” she continued, “I only live with the man, I don’t own him. The spirit of tomorrow, you know? I happen to know that Marcie has a bitchin’ bod, as we say in California, under that sweatsuit, so what the hell? We’re liberated, we’re free, we’re—Oh, you know the rest of the bullshit as well as I do.”

  She took another deep drag and added under her breath, “Besides, the bastard never touches me anymore, anyway.” In a louder voice, she said, “What can I do for you?”

  The juxtaposition was suggestive, but she probably didn’t mean it, and even if she did, I wasn’t having any.

  It occurred to me that she might have taken a little extra Valium today, and that her mouth was loosening up along with her nerves, but I kept the observation to myself, and asked her where I might find Clement Bates.

  “Oh, good,” she said. “Go keep the loony busy before he starts shooting at pigeons in the rafters. You know what I think?” she said.

  I bit. “What?”

  “I think the Mountain Man is going to wimp out. He’s already hiding from the production crew. He’s going to come out on stage, see the audience, and shit his buckskin pants, won’t say a word on the air, and I’ll be a laughingstock in all tomorrow’s papers.”

  “Maybe you should slip him a Valium.”

  “Up his. I’ll need all I’ve got.” She told me where to find him, and off I went.

  Because he’d shown up so early (most of the guests would show up about an hour before the 5:30 P.M. taping time, although a real big star could walk right off the street and be led directly to the couch), Clement Bates had not been ensconced in the mysteriously named Green Room, none of which is ever green, and had been given a dressing room of his own, as if he were Madonna or somebody.