Stan said, “You can’t use it, it’s just where I live, it doesn’t have nothing to do with nothing.”
“But you come to Manhattan for the heists,” Doug said, eyes bright with pleasure. “Stan, you commute!”
“Yeah, I guess. I never thought of it like that.”
“But that’s good,” Doug said. “Gives us another demographic. The burglar who commutes to his job.”
“I like it,” Ombelen said. “I could do some very nice visuals with that.”
Doug peered at them all with his freshest, most bright-eyed face. “Anything else? Any little details I should know?”
“I don’t think so,” Dortmunder said. “In fact, I know so. No.”
“Well, this has all been very good,” Doug said, and actually rubbed his hands together. “We’re moving along here. I’ll be back in touch when we’ve got something to show you. And meanwhile, see if you can decide what exactly you’re gonna steal. That’s Manny’s other setting, and he’ll need to know it pretty early.”
“One little favor,” Felder said.
They looked at him. Dortmunder said, “Yeah?”
“Nothing too dark, okay?” Felder spread his hands, looking for understanding and assistance around here. “Somewhere where we can see what you’re doing.”
Kelp laughed, mostly in amazement. “You know,” he said, “usually, everything we do, what we’re trying for is just the reverse of that.”
12
DOUG FELT BUOYANT all the way uptown from Varick Street, cheered by the meeting with The Roscoe Gang (tentative), cheered by the way Roy Ombelen and Manny Felder had immediately seen the potential, and cheered by Babe’s genial manner when he’d left them. Then, the instant he stepped into the office, he sensed something was wrong, and all his mellow mood was instantly flushed away.
What was it? The atmosphere was somehow not its usual self; his antenna tingled with it. He headed straight down the hall toward Lueen, to ask her what had broken down and how much it would spoil his day, but then he saw, in the production assistants’ room, Marcy and Edna and Josh, the three nonwriters, all huddled together, whispering, apparently in a state of shock.
Writers whispering together; never a good sign. Entering their room, Doug said, as though cheerfully, “Hello all. What’s up?”
The three young faces that turned to him were bleak. Marcy said, “It’s Kirby Finch.”
Kirby Finch was the younger son of the family running the farmstand, a strapping handsome boy, nineteen, known to the viewers as a fun-loving cutup. This year he’d be finding a girlfriend, a warm little G-rated romance to keep the audience numbers up. Doug said, “What about Kirby Finch? There wasn’t an accident, was there?”
“Worse,” Josh said. His eyes were wide, and his voice seemed to be coming from an echo chamber.
“He says,” Marcy explained, “he doesn’t want to do all that stuff with Darlene Looper.”
Josh said, “He just saw next week’s script, and he says he won’t do it.”
“Oh, come on,” Doug said. “Kirby shy? I don’t buy it.”
Marcy said, “It isn’t that, Doug.” She seemed reluctant to spell out what the problem was.
“I’ll tell you,” Doug said, “I wouldn’t kick Darlene out of bed.”
“Kirby would,” Marcy said, and the other two sadly nodded.
Doug said, “Does he have a reason?”
“Yes,” Marcy said. “He says he’s gay.”
“Gay!” Doug made a fist and pounded it into his other palm. “No! We shall have no gay farm boys on The Stand! Who gave him that idea, anyway?”
Marcy, on the verge of tears, said, “He says he is gay.”
“Not on our show, he isn’t. In the world of reality, we do not have surprises. Kirby has his role, the impish younger brother who’s finally gonna be okay. No room for sex changes. What does Harry say?” Harry being the father of the Finch family.
Josh shook his head, with a weak apologetic smile. “You know how Harry is.”
Not an authority figure; yes, Doug knew. Whatever they want is okay by me, you know? So far, that had been a plus, meaning there was never any argument with the producers’ plans for the show. Except now.
Marcy said, “I think Harry has the hots for Darlene himself.”
“No, Marcy,” Doug said. “We aren’t going there either. This is a clean wholesome show. You could project it on the wall of a megachurch in the South. Fathers do not hit on their sons’ girlfriends. Come next door, fellas, we’ve got to solve this.”
Next door was the conference room. Once they’d settled themselves in there, Doug said, “This is our story line, you know. We’ve been setting it up for this. In the third season, Kirby gets a girlfriend, just when the audience thinks they already know everything about the Finch family. And next season, the wedding, in sweeps week. Wedding episodes always get the biggest numbers of the year. Kirby and Darlene, true love at last.”
Marcy said, “I’m sorry, Doug, but he won’t do it. I asked him if he could just pretend and he said no. He won’t kiss her, he doesn’t even want to put his arm around her. He says her boobs are too big.”
“Oh, God.” Doug closed his eyes, in an attempt to leave the world behind.
But he hadn’t yet learned the worst. Speaking right through his eyelids, Josh said, “And now that Darlene knows what Kirby thinks of her boobs, she doesn’t want to work with him. She says she wants off the show.”
“Which wouldn’t be terrible,” Marcy said, also talking through the wall of his closed eyelids. “You know, she hasn’t even been introduced on the show yet.”
Doug opened his eyes to find the awful world still unchanged. “Well, it is terrible,” he said. “Are they shooting up there tomorrow?”
“Yes,” Marcy said.
“I’ll have to go up,” Doug decided. “Marcy, you come along, just in case there’s some other throughline we can work out, put it together on the fly up there. But for now, fellas, all three of you, I beg of you. Do not sleep tonight, not for a minute. If we don’t have Kirby and Darlene, what do we have?”
Josh said, “Could it be Lowell and Darlene?” Lowell being Kirby’s big brother.
Doug squinched his face in pain. “No,” he said, “it’s too late for that. We’ve already established Lowell as the loner, the gloomy genius going off to engineering college. He represents the life of the mind, which is why we’ve made sure nobody likes him.” Doug smacked his palm against the table, making everybody jump. “Why didn’t that little pansy tell us before this?”
“Be fair, Doug,” Marcy said.
“I don’t want to be fair.”
“We don’t tell them the story line ahead of time,” Marcy reminded him, “so they won’t be tempted to play something they’re not supposed to know yet. Kirby didn’t find out until today.”
“That he’s gay?”
“That he’s supposed to fall in love with Darlene.”
Doug let out a long moan and then just sat there, jaw slack, shoulders sagging.
Marcy, hesitant, said, “How did The Gang’s All Here go?”
“What? Oh.” The thought of that bunch restored just a bit of his spirits. Sitting straighter, he said, “The first meeting was wonderful. We’re gonna have a winner there, boys and girls. But there’s nothing for us to do on that score, not now. The Finch family is our problem today, so don’t even think about the gang. We won’t hear a word from them for a couple of weeks.”
13
NINE P.M. The Holland Tunnel-bound traffic along Varick Street moved more freely now, and two groups of men, pedestrians, a trio and a duet, converged from north and south toward the GR Development building. As the groups came together on the sidewalk in front of the metal fire-door entrance to the building, greeting one another as though this were a happy coincidence, three miles to the north Manny Felder took many Weegee-style photos of the back room at the OJ while out front Roy Ombelen nursed his white wine and listened with growing asto
nishment to the regulars discuss the possible meanings of the letters D, V, and D, and farther east, in midtown, Doug Fairkeep, unable to keep his appointment with the other two at the OJ due to the revelation of the sexual orientation of Kirby Finch, brainstormed with his production assistants, while growing stacks of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee containers kept a kind of score.
Andy Kelp liked locks and locks liked Andy Kelp. While the others milled around and chatted to cover his activities, he bent to the two locks in this door, bearing with him picks and tweezers and narrow little metal spatulas.
Judson took the opportunity to ask Dortmunder, “You think we’re gonna find that cash down here?”
“I think,” Dortmunder said, “Doug has seen cash somewhere and it has to be somewhere he works. The two places we know where he works are that midtown office building and here. Maybe they wouldn’t want bribe money laying around the office, so we’ll see what we come up with down here.”
“There we go,” Kelp said, and straightened, and pulled open the door.
Pitch-black inside. They all piled in, and only when the door was shut did flashlights appear, two of them, one held by Kelp and one by Dortmunder, both hooded by electrical tape to limit their beams. The flashlights bobbed around, then closed on the iron interior staircase along the rear part of the left wall. At this level, it rose from front to back.
Holding the light on the stairs, Kelp moved off across the crowded garage toward it, followed by Tiny, who used his hips and knees to clear a path through the underbrush of vehicles. Judson went next, then Stan, who said over his shoulder to Dortmunder, bringing up the rear with the other light, “This reminds me of Maximillian.”
“I know what you mean,” Dortmunder said, Maximillian being the owner and operator of Maximillian’s Used Cars, a fellow known to purchase rolling stock of dubious provenance, no questions asked. He didn’t pay much, but he paid more than the goods on offer had cost the offerer.
“A fella,” Stan said, “could switch the cars around in here, waltz out with one a day for a week, they’d never notice.”
“You could be right.”
Kelp had reached the stairs and started up. The others followed, and when Kelp got to the second floor he turned to his right, tried to open the door there, and it was locked.
As the others crowded up after him, wanting to know the cause of the delay, he studied this blank door in front of him and said, “That’s weird.”
“What’s weird?” everybody wanted to know.
“It’s locked.”
“Unlock it,” everybody suggested.
“I can’t,” Kelp said. “That’s what’s weird. It isn’t a regular door lock, it’s a palm-print thing. There’s no way to get it open unless it recognizes your palm.”
Judson said, “Down on the street they put a little simple lock you went through like butter, and up here they’ve got a high-tech lock?”
“Like I said,” Kelp said. “It’s weird.”
Tiny, next nearest to Kelp, reached past him to thump the door, which made a sound like thumping a tree. “That’s not going anywhere,” he said.
Dortmunder, well back in the pack and therefore unable to see clearly for himself, called up the stairs, “Then that’s the one we gotta get into.”
“Can’t be done, John,” Kelp called back.
Judson said, “What about from upstairs?”
“What, down through the ceiling?” Kelp shook his head and his flashlight beam. “This time,” he said, “we don’t want to leave any marks we were here.”
“I can’t see anything,” Dortmunder complained.
“Okay,” Kelp said. “John, we’ll go on up the next flight.”
Everybody thudded up the stairs, which from the second to the third floor reversed and rose from back to front, and when at last Dortmunder got to the impassable door he stopped to frown at it all over, to look for hinges to be removed—no, they were on the inside—and to press his palm to the circle of glass at waist height. But the door didn’t know him, and nothing happened.
The others had gone on up to the third floor so, abandoning the door, Dortmunder trudged on up after them. At the top, he found them all lolling around at their ease in what looked like a dayroom combined with an office. A few sofas and soft chairs and small tables were scattered around this part of the building from front to back, with filing cabinets and stacks of cardboard mover’s cartons along the inside wall. Somebody had even switched on a floor lamp by one of the sofas, making a warm soft cozy glow.
“John,” Kelp said, from the depths of a green vinyl easy chair, “take a load off.”
“I will.” Dortmunder did, and said, “It’s that door, that’s what we want.”
Tiny said, “Not without demolition.”
“Tiny’s right,” Kelp said. “We can’t get into it, John. Not tonight. Not without doing some damage. And right now, we don’t want to do damage.”
“We want to know what’s in there,” Dortmunder said. “We need to know, what’s the setup.”
“Won’t happen,” Tiny said.
Dortmunder took from his pocket the drugstore receipt on which he’d written the firm names in this building. “What we got on this floor,” he said, “is Knickerbocker Storage. It’s all storage areas the other side of that wall.”
Stan said, “There’s a john down at the end there.”
“Fine.” Dortmunder consulted his list. “Up one flight, that’s Scenery Stars, that’s the people gonna make the sets, like the imitation OJ. And up top is GR Development, their rehearsal space for their reality shows. The question is, what the hell is the thing down one flight? It’s called Combined Tool. What would that be? If your name is Combined Tool, who are you?”
Stan said, “Do they make tools?”
“Where? How? That’s not a factory.”
At a side table, Judson had found phone books, and now he turned from consulting them to say, “Not in any phone book.”
Dortmunder looked at him. “Not at all?”
“Not in the white pages under Combined Tool, not in the yellow pages under Tools-Electric, Tools-Rentals or Tools-Repairing & Parts.”
Stan said, “So who the hell are they?”
“You got a company gets big enough,” Dortmunder said, “it’s got a dark side.”
“But it’s still a company,” Kelp said, “so it’s still got to have records and meetings and a history of itself.”
“Down in there,” Dortmunder said.
Stan said, “But what would Doug be doing in there? He’s not that important. That door doesn’t know his palm print.”
“He’s close to the operation,” Dortmunder said. “He works sometimes out of this same building. He works for them, and they trust him, and he happened to see something once.”
“You open a door in New York,” Tiny said, “you never know what’s in there.”
Rousing himself from his easy chair, Kelp said, “We might as well take off now. We’re not gonna do anything else in here tonight.”
Dortmunder was reluctant to go, with the mystery of Combined Tool still unsolved, but he knew Kelp was right. Another day. “I’ll he back,” he vowed.
As they trooped back down the stairs, Stan said, “I think I’ll pick up a car along the way. Won’t take a minute.”
14
BY MONDAY, Doug knew he just had to get out of Putkin’s Corners, Stand or no Stand. He’d been here since Friday, struggling with the problem of Kirby Finch’s inversity—if that was a word—and he could feel himself on the very brink of going native. Even Marcy was beginning to look good.
Fortunately, he had Darlene Looper on hand to remind him what a proper object of lust was supposed to look and sound like. A talented if unagented actress, Darlene was a corn-fed beauty who, like for instance Lana Turner long before her, could show glints of a darker side. It was that darker side Doug was determined to tap into.
She was off The Stand now, no salvaging that situation. But how about Bu
rglars Burgling (tryout)? Given the right makeup and wardrobe, Doug could just see her as a continuation of the long line of blonde sexpot gun molls extending back to before movies discovered sound. Give her a short slit skirt, fishnet pantyhose, and a nice small silver designer pistol slipped under the black frilly garter on her thigh, and there wasn’t a felony on the books a man wouldn’t be happy to commit with her. Doug saw her as the candy on the arm of Andy; surely he wasn’t gay. So back to New York Darlene would come, traveling in Doug’s Yukon with himself and Marcy. Marcy in the backseat, of course.
None of which dealt with the real problem that had forced him to drive one hundred miles north from the city last Friday. Now that this year’s story line for The Stand had been fatally wounded by young Kirby Finch, what could replace it? What was their throughline story for the year, culminating in spring’s sweeps week?
Many useless solutions were proposed, starting with the all-night brainbender session at Get Real on Thursday. For instance, Josh: “Kirby decides to become a priest. The family’s ambivalent, and just when they’re coming around, just when they’re learning acceptance, he decides he’d rather stay with the family, at least until the farmstand succeeds.” Doug: “No.”
Or Edna: “Kirby’s big brother, Lowell, the intellectual, carrying too heavy a load of books out of the library, trips and falls and is paralyzed. There’s one slim chance an operation will give him back the use of his arms and legs, and at the end of the season, where we were going to do the wedding, he walks!” Doug: “No.”
Or Marcy, Friday morning, on the trip up: “We go with the reality. Kirby comes out of the closet.” Doug: “He isn’t in the closet, that’s the problem.” Marcy: “He comes out to his family. They don’t know what to do, what to think, and they finally decide blood is thicker than prejudice, and they’ll stand by him. Everybody learns a wonderful lesson in tolerance.” Doug; “No.” Marcy: “Doug, it could be very real.” Doug: “But it couldn’t be reality, Marcy, reality shows do not solve society’s problems. They don’t even consider society’s problems. Reality is escapist entertainment at its most pure and mindless.”
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