by Lee Goldberg
DeBono glanced over at Buttonwillow McKittrick, vice president of current programming, always dressed in black, and saw her quickly lick her full, red lips. It was all she could do not to foam at the mouth. She was probably sharpening her icepick, waiting for the first opportunity to stab him in the back. He would be if he were in her position.
After all, that's how he got this job in the first place. Every executive knew the only way to step up in network television was on someone else's back.
If he fell, the network would be hers.
So DeBono had to think fast.
Until Boo Boo was found, it would take raw, programming genius to keep the schedule alive. And if Boo Boo wasn't found, DeBono would have to concoct a sure-fire hit overnight. Nothing short of a miracle.
"Who knows about this?" DeBono asked Gilbert Schlaye, the chicken-necked VP of publicity.
"Everybody everywhere," Schlaye replied. "CNN had it on the satellite two hours ago. Katie Couric burst into tears on the Today show. Three hundred kids broke into sobbing fits at a Chicago grade school—they had to call out the paramedics. They closed the school for the day, and they're offering psychological counselling to the panicked children." Schlaye was no threat, DeBono thought—the guy was a time-card puncher and nothing more.
"Our L.A. station is pre-empting programming for round-the-clock coverage on the search for Boo Boo," interjected Larry Sydes, VP of affiliate relations, and professional interjector. Unwilling to be the first into any fray, he always waited to speak until his voice could be lost among others. The sneaky little shit would go far in network television, DeBono thought. But not on my back.
"Sources tell me Time pulled their issue off the presses," Schlaye added. "Just to put Boo Boo on the cover. Cost 'em millions, but they figure it'll jack up sales so much it will more than make up for it."
It was a bigger disaster than DeBono thought. There wasn't a television viewer from Los Angeles to Peking who wouldn't know the news by lunch time. Everybody would be watching Boo Boo's Dilemma tonight, if only to pay their respects. "How many Boo Boos do we have in the can?" he asked Buttonwillow.
"Three," she replied, barely able to hide her smirk. He was fucked, and she knew it. They'd just reshuffled the schedule, the Thursday night line-up was too new to stand up on its own without Boo Boo. Three episodes was nothing, no time at all to build another show into a hit.
For five years, UBC had been a self-sustaining success, built on its continuing hit series, like Boo Boo and Miss Agatha. Each season. DeBono would place the half-dozen new series on the schedule between two established hits, virtually guaranteeing that the new show would also be a success. And once the new show was a hit, it would be moved to another night, where the process would be repealed. That way, when the established hits began to erode, like Miss Agatha, there were hits to take their place.
There was only one other show that had even a fraction of Boo Boo's popularity, and that was its spin-off, just moved to Sunday nights.
"How many Rappy Scrappys do we have?"
"Thirteen," she said.
His lucky number. Half a season worth of episodes. In that instant, Don DeBono saw his salvation.
His heart pounded furiously. Blood and adrenaline surged through him, his throat went dry, and his prick turned to marble.
He wasn't desperate anymore. He was stoked.
He didn't realize it until that moment, but he had grown complacent, maybe even bored, in the safely of being number one, the numbing predictability of success. He hadn't looked over his shoulder in four years. Now his network was on the edge of disaster, and a roomful of executives were drooling over his job.
This was what television was all about.
Crisis scheduling. Kamikaze programming. Sheer terror.
Oh, how he missed it.
If this was how his career would end, so be it. He'd take the whole damn network with him.
"Pick 'em up for the back nine episodes," he told Buttonwillow, talking so fast he was practically spitting the words into her shocked face. That would bring Rappy Scrappy to a full season of twenty-two episodes.
"I want to see scripts on my desk Monday morning," he said. "Tell 'em to rewrite old Boo Boos if they have to. Hell, tell 'em to do it anyway."
She nodded, shocked, like a woman who'd just seen a corpse suddenly sit up in its casket.
DeBono pointed at Schlaye, who jerked as if slapped. "On Boo Boo tonight, I want you to pump the shit out of Rappy Scrappy during every commercial break."
DeBono whirled, pointing at Clark Van Mitchell, the VP of variety shows and specials, who grabbed his armrests and sat bolt upright.
"I want you to slap together an hour-long salute to Boo Boo for next week, followed by an hour of new Rappy Scrappy episodes," DeBono demanded. "Get Carol Burnett to host the special, tell her to tug her ear and all that shit."
DeBono surprised himself with each word that came out of his mouth, making it up as he went along and knowing, intuitively, that it was right.
"But what do we put in Rappy Scrappy's regular slot on Sunday?" Buttonwillow asked, dazed.
"A very special episode of Rappy Scrappy," he replied, prompting a rapid-fire flurry of guesses from around the table.
"AIDS?"
"Wife-beating?"
''Teen pregnancy?"
"Vivisection?"
"Rappy's Boo Boo Memories," he said, turning again to Clark Van Mitchell. "Go through the Boo Boo episodes, find all the scenes of the two animals together and build me something. Rappy is weak in rural areas, so drag Roy Clark out of mothballs to host and sing a catchy musical salute to Boo Boo."
DeBono stood up and walked around the long table, his executives craning their necks to keep him in sight. "Then, if the dog isn't found, we run all three episodes of Boo Boo on one night as a grand finale."
"All three?" Buttonwillow asked incredulously.
"All of 'em," he said.
She thought it was insanity. It was like drinking all the water you had left while you were still in the middle of the desert.
"What do we do the week after that?" she stammered.
"Who the fuck knows?" He grinned.
And with that, he abruptly left the room, happier than he'd been in years.
# # #
Eddie Planet couldn't remember the last time life was this good. He was enjoying three blistering orgasms and two effortless bowel movements each day. He had a show on the air, and it was getting better ratings every week. All that was missing was a corner office and a private bath.
Getting involved with Pinstripe Productions had turned out to be the shrewdest move of his illustrious career. Was it risky? Of course it was. But risk was Eddie Planet's middle name. If he wanted to play it safe, he wouldn't be in the TV business.
With My Gun Has Bullets gone, Frankencop's ratings were climbing and now, with Boo Boo eliminated, the rug had been pulled from under Miss Agatha. Frankencop was poised for greatness.
Eddie was on his way out to Chatsworth in his leased Cadillac Eldorado to see Otto and Burt when his cellular trilled. Eddie answered it, and was surprised to hear Morrie Lustig, president of MBC, on the other end. They exchanged greetings, and Eddie slipped effortlessly into sales mode.
"Have you seen the Frankencop numbers. Morrie?" Eddie said. "They add up to a hit."
"I got a number for you, Eddie," Lustig replied. "Nine."
"You're picking us up for the back nine?" Eddie pulled over in front of a Taco Bell. They were getting a full season. No show of Eddie's had survived that long since Hollywood and Vine. More importantly, Morrie Lustig was calling Eddie personally to tell him.
"Consider this call the official order," Lustig said. "We're very encouraged by the ratings and the demographics. It's skewing across the board. If we can find a companion piece, we're thinking about moving it to another night."
"Haight-Ashbury," Eddie said, without missing a beat. "Larry Haight is a conservative Frisco ex-cop who doesn't play by the rul
es. Carol Ashbury is a liberal Berkeley psychologist, a child of the sixties. Together, they're private eyes with a difference."
Lustig had a poster in his office that consisted of just four words "... and they're private eyes!" It was a joke, aimed squarely at anachronisms like Eddie Planet. Since Morrie never let him in his office, Eddie had no way of knowing about it.
"We're not really looking for another P.I. show," Lustig said. "But there's an idea we've been kicking around over here. How do you feel about Peter Pan as a cop?"
"Excited," Eddie said.
"Really?" Lustig asked.
"I'm shaking," Eddie said. "It's breakthrough, ground-breaking, highly promotable television. He's young, so you get the kids. He's a fairy, so you get the women and the homos. And he can fly, so you get the Trekkies, the fat people, and the mentally retarded. All he needs is a gun, a badge, and an attitude, and we got the high-testosterone male audience. It's a natural, Morrie. I'm kicking myself for not thinking of it first."
"Tell you what, Eddie. Maybe you could give it some thought, develop the idea a bit, and we can talk about it."
"How about over lunch next week?" Eddie said.
"Lunch is for losers," Lustig said. "We'll have a predawn surf meeting."
"I'll wax my board." Eddie didn't have a board.
"Cowabunga," Lustig said and hung up.
# # #
Otto and Burt lived in a mobile home on a weedy patch of land in an industrial corner of Chatsworth. The rusted hulks of dozens of old cars dotted the field around their house. From a distance, they looked like cattle grazing on the tall, dry grass.
Eddie steered his Cadillac down the gravel drive leading up to their house and honked his horn twice. Otto and Burt were two people he never wanted to catch off guard.
He got out of his car and was immediately hit with the acrid aroma of burning meat. Eddie walked around the mobile home to find Otto and Burt, in matching checked BBQ aprons, standing over a fire in an oil drum, the flames licking at the blackened meat on the grill.
"Howdy, boys," Eddie said. "You wouldn't believe who I was just talking to on the phone."
"David Hasselhoff," Burt said.
"No," Eddie replied.
"Loni Anderson," Otto said.
"The network," Eddie snapped, then forced himself to relax, to put a smile on his face. "They're thrilled with the tremendous favor you did for them last night."
Otto and Burt shared a guilty look. Eddie took it for modesty.
"It was no biggie," Otto said quickly. "So do we get our own show now?"
"Let me tell you, things are really gonna start moving for you boys. Why, just driving over here, I was pitching ideas for you at the network."
"We want to do Sunn of a Gunn," Otto said. "Burt and I, we've been working on a script."
"It's two thousand pages long," Burt said.
"But it's good stuff," Otto added.
"I'm sure it is," Eddie said, "but I don't think there's room on the schedule for that kind of sophisticated programming right now. Look, they are dying to work with you, it's just that we might have to go with something else first. I have this idea about cavemen that I think you two are perfect for."
"What's elegant about a caveman?" Otto asked.
"Animal skins are very classy," Eddie said. "Just look at alligator shoes. But we can discuss it over lunch sometime."
"How about now? We got lunch right here." Burt skewered the slab of meat with a screwdriver, turned it over, then dabbed brown sauce on it with a paintbrush. "It's a little well done, but it's the only way this grill cooks."
''You did clean the oil off the inside of that drum, didn't you?" Eddie asked.
"Hell no, how do you think we light the briquettes?" Otto said.
"Right," Eddie said. "Silly of me. We'll go out for lunch another time. But I am curious about something."
"The barbecue sauce is a secret," Burt said, "but one of the ingredients is Cap'n Crunch."
"Sounds tantalizing." Eddie guessed that was probably the only edible ingredient in the sauce. "Actually, what I was wondering was, well, what exactly did you do with Boo Boo?"
Otto and Burt shared another look. This time, Eddie could clearly see the fear in their eyes.
"Well?" Eddie asked.
Burt took the screwdriver and used it to lift something off the meat. When he held the screwdriver up in front of Eddie, a collar dangled from the end.
Dizziness swept over Eddie. He leaned against the mobile home for support, and took a deep breath.
"Good work," he gurgled, backing away. He gave them the high-five and hurried back to his car. It wasn't until Eddie drove off that Burt tossed the collar into the weeds.
"We're lucky he didn't read the tag." Burt let out a sigh of relief. "Or he would've seen it says Fifi."
"Wouldn't matter," Otto observed calmly. "I don't think he understands French."
CHAPTER NINTEEN
BOO BOO Disappears, UBC Takes Severe Blow
The television landscape was shaken by a major tremor yesterday with news that Boo Boo the dog has disappeared from his Pinnacle Studios compound.
Studio security personnel have searched the studio grounds, while police and animal control officers have prowled the surrounding neighborhood, all to no avail. Authorities suspect foul play, but no evidence has turned up pointing to either a kidnapping plot or murder.
Boo Boo's trainer, Lyle Spreen, remains hospitalized in critical condition at Cedars Sinai after an undisclosed accident occurred at his Malibu ranch following news of the winsome pooch's disappearance.
The unexpected loss of the powerhouse Boo Boo's Dilemma hits UBC at a particularly vulnerable moment. The web is still smarting from the abrupt cancellation of My Gun Has Bullets, due to the accidental shooting of actor Darren Clarke during filming. And the web recently shuffled its winning primetime skeds on Thursday and Sunday evenings. The loss of Boo Boo is expected to cripple the Thursday slate, and is sure to bring down the net's overall weekly averages.
Pundits predict the likely winners will be DBC's sitcoms Adopted Family and My Wife Next Door at 8 P.M., taking the charge from UBC's Energizer Bunny at 8:30. Meanwhile UBC's sitcoms Broad Squad and The Anson Williams Show, even without the benefit of the Boo Boo lead-in, are likely to beat DBC's lackluster Young Hudson Hawk and MBC's aging Dedicated Doctors, if only by a slim margin.
The big slugfest will be 10 p.m., where the surprisingly strong Frankencop, renewed for the full season and benefiting from the loss of the Two Dicks (due to the tragic death of its stars), will go up against the venerable Miss Agatha.
The Esther Radcliffe whodunit has been winning the slot in its initial outings, but with numbers far below those it was garnering on Sundays. Whether that can continue with the loss of audience flow from Boo Boo remains to be seen.
lndustry insiders believe Miss Agatha's competitiveness against the high-concept actioner Frankencop will depend on the drawing power of Sabrina Bishop with men 18-45. Bishop, who won popularity in direct-to-video soft-core thrillers, has a large following among men and younger viewers, the demographic groups seen as the core audience of Frankencop.
Although UBC has yet to officially announce its plans, insiders report prexy Don DeBono will play out the remaining Boo Boo episodes in the 8 p.m. slot, followed by specials ...
Charlie had turned his master bathroom into a makeshift darkroom and was now carefully developing the photos he took on his surveillance.
McGarrett lay curled up on the bathmat, sound asleep, his muffled barks and twitching legs showing that he had a far more active dream life than the one he led awake.
Charlie almost envied him. He pulled an eight-by-ten of Flint Westwood out of the chemicals in his sink, carefully stepped over his dog, and hung the picture up to dry in his shower, right next to several photos of Esther Radcliffe.
By themselves, the grainy photos didn't say much, but what they hinted at was tantalizing. Esther was convinced Charlie was blackmail
ing her, so convinced she tried to kill him, and yet her costly tormentor was actually the guy she'd spent six hours with yesterday afternoon.
And Charlie didn't think they spent the time playing checkers.
On the radio, propped on the top of the toilet bowl, KNX 1070 continued to report on the disappearance of Boo Boo, a dog kids who couldn't count or read a grocery list nevertheless knew was a reincarnated Catskills comic living with a typical American family. Bob Tur, in Air 1070, flew his chopper in circles over the Valley, improbably hoping to catch a peek of the elusive superstar pooch from the sky.
If Charlie didn't know better, he'd think Esther was behind the disappearance. But there was no logical reason for Esther to kill the dog. Unless, perhaps, it had pissed on her Rolls, dumped a load outside her trailer, and had the audacity to bark at her. Those were all very real possibilities. He didn't put anything past Esther.
Charlie slipped the photographs and the negatives into a large manila envelope, which he carried with him into the bedroom. He put the envelope on his bureau and picked up a tiny transmitter that was about the size and shape of a coin.
The device could fit easily in a telephone handset and was powered by the phone itself. The bug could pick up anything spoken in its immediate vicinity. This technological wonder sent everything it heard, to be captured for posterity and extortion, on a small, voice-activated tape recorder that could be hidden anywhere within thirty feet.
Charlie admired the devices for a moment, thankful for the amazing stocking stuffers one could find in the classified pages of a mercenary magazine. He slipped the bug and recorder into his jacket pockets, along with a pocket screwdriver, wire cutter, and some black electrical tape.