FOR NORMAN KEVIC, THE only thing on earth that needed to be kept oiled and well was himself, and he worked at that, assiduously, until he sometimes thought he didn’t do anything else. It was now quarter after ten on the morning of Monday, May 5, and he was exhausted. The show was over and so was his mind, as far as he could tell, drifting out to Venus somewhere and communing with space aliens. Norm had some cocaine in his pocket—usually he was careful not to bring that stuff into the studio; carrying cocaine was a felony in Pennsylvania and he was part-owner of this station; nobody who had been convicted of a felony could own any part at all of a broadcast station—but he had been so bombed out when he came in today he had forgotten all about it. Now he wondered if he ought to find out how much he had and use it, for medicinal purposes only, just to get himself moving in the direction of home. One of the nicer things about being the hottest talk show radio host in the Philadelphia ADI and part-owner of one of the most lucrative radio stations and the man most wanted for supermarket promotions and local people profiles was that he could afford a very nice place, a big house out in Radnor with a swimming pool and three tennis courts and a maid’s room that almost never had a maid in it, because Norm couldn’t keep help. Actually, Norm didn’t blame the help for leaving. His houseboys were offended by his ethnic jokes. Even Norm himself was sometimes offended by his ethnic jokes. His maids had all been intensely Catholic and afraid for their virginity in the onslaught of propositions he unleashed whenever he’d been snorting and drinking at the same time. Norm always wanted to tell them they had nothing to worry about—when he was all hyped up he couldn’t get stiff if his life depended on it—but it was too embarrassing to mention and he preferred the reputation he had for being a lecher and a prick and a devotee of sexual harassment. That was how he had approached the Thomas/Hill hearings on the show—as an opportunity to treat sexual harassment as an art form. It had been one of his better brainstorms. By the second day of the hearings, so many people had been trying to call the show to tell him off, the phone lines were jammed and nobody could get through at all. He’d ended up doing it stream-of-consciousness and getting his third warning from the FCC about “borderline language.”
Actually, Norman Kevic lived a borderline life and he knew it. He was lying here on the couch in his office because he didn’t want to go home, and the exhaustion simply gave him a good excuse. His house was too big and too empty. Because he was who and what he was, he got a lot of sex. It had been years since he had a real relationship, with a woman who would talk to him and be there when he wanted company but didn’t want a party. Nice women never liked him for long, and he didn’t blame them any more than he blamed his maids. His mouth started running and he just couldn’t make it stop. His nerves got to tingling and his body revved up and his mind shifted into high gear and it was all over, nobody could talk to him, nobody to slow him down, he was out and about and on another rampage.
Right now, he was in the middle of another collapse. As soon as the show was over, he had come in here and laid himself out. He wouldn’t be able to get up again for hours unless he made an effort at it, which he did not intend to do. He let his hand drop to the carpet and felt around on the floor for his buzzer. It was the kind of buzzer patients are given in hospitals so they can call a nurse. Norm pressed down on it three or four times and then let it drop.
In no time at all, there were footsteps in the hallway outside, sharp little cracks that spoke of stiletto heels on engineered parquet. Norm considered opening his fly and decided against it. Stiletto heels meant Julia Stern, and Julia Stern had no use for him at all. For a while, Norm had taken to insisting on having his buzzer answered only by the women he wanted it answered by, but it hadn’t worked out in the long run. The women he wanted hadn’t wanted him and had had a tendency to quit when they were forced to deal with him on a regular basis. There were other things he wanted from his partners and the general manager that trading this sort of favor for was an easy way to get Julia Stern didn’t like him, but she was efficient, and he could use a little efficiency for a time.
The stiletto heels stopped just outside the door. The doorknob turned and the door opened. Julia Stern was a woman in her twenties with too much hair piled too high on her head and too much flab around the middle. Norm wondered what it was like, being a woman this homely and knowing that you were homely. He wondered that about a lot of women, and then sat back in astonishment as they each and every one of them got married and settled down to have a passel of kids. They always married just the sort of men Norm thought would be more interested in someone who looked like Melanie Griffith.
Julia Stern was wearing a short black leather skirt cut halfway up her thigh and a long cotton sweater that reached nearly to the skirt’s hem. Norm wondered why it was that heavy young women were always so eager to show off their legs. Julia Stern was chewing gum.
“You buzzed,” she said. “I presume that means you want something.”
“Breakfast,” Norm said solemnly.
“What kind of breakfast? Ham and eggs? Pancakes and syrup? Didn’t you have breakfast before?”
Norm couldn’t remember if he’d had breakfast before or not. The idea of ham and eggs made him ill. The idea of pancakes and syrup made him feel he was suffocating in maple.
“I want three large glasses of orange juice and a pot of coffee,” he said. “I think I’ve got the orange juice in the refrigerator downstairs. I’m dehydrated.”
“Right,” Julia Stern said.
“Go get him something to eat,” the voice of Steve Harald said, booming into the room from the hall. “I’ve got to talk to him and I want him sober.”
Julia Stern made a face and turned away, muttering something under her breath that was probably subversive. Norm paid no attention. If he paid attention to every subversive thing every member of his staff ever said, he wouldn’t have any staff. Once the doorway was clear, it was filled with the form of Steve Harald, who was tall and thin and fashionable and the station manager. Norm was almost as curious about him as he was about homely women. When Norm was in high school, it was always people like Steve Harald who were the most important ones, the ones who got elected to things, the ones whose yearbook prophecies were solemn predictions of future success instead of jokey references to adolescent embarrassments. Norm’s yearbook prophecy had read “Most likely to be eating a Hostess Twinkie when the world ends.”
And yet here they were.
Steve was the station manager, with a salary but no stake in the enterprise, with three thousand square feet in Paoli and his kids in public schools.
Norm was the star with a piece of the action.
Was any of this supposed to make any sense?
Steve leaned against the doorjamb and said, “Fifteen Japanese jokes an hour. I counted them.”
“I didn’t know I was being that predictable.”
“I averaged them. All that crap about the fugu.”
“Well, Steve, you have to admit it’s pretty weird. Eating a fish that can kill you if you look at it sideways and getting a kick out of putting your life in danger.”
“That’s not why they do it.”
“How the Hell do you know why they do anything?”
“I know why you do things, Norm, and I’m telling you it’s got to stop. It’s really got to stop. We’re in mucho trouble with the Japanese-American community as it is. We’re going to be in trouble with the FCC before you know it.”
“No we’re not,” Norm said. “It comes under the First Amendment. You know that.”
“I know that these are perfectly tasteless jokes with no point to them at all. This is not Detroit Japan bashing does not go over big here. If you have to get this out of your system, do a show.”
Do a show, Norm thought. The room was looking a little fuzzy. The room had been looking a little fuzzy all along, of course, but the quality of it had changed now, it had become tinged with red, and for a moment Norm thought he was having a vision of Hell. Hell was just the way he had always been told it, would be, full of red flames and grinning Devils. Then the Devils turned into pink-cheeked troll dolls with neon orange hair.
“Steve?” he said.
“What is it?”
“You know that party I’m supposed to go to, the one for the nuns’ convention?”
“Yeah.”
“Is anybody else from the station going to be there?”
“Nobody else from the station, as far as I know. Henry Hare is going to be there from VTZ. It was in the press release your own people put out.”
“Yeah.”
“You can’t remember anything anymore.”
“Yeah. listen, Steve. Are you Catholic?”
“Nope. I think my grandparents were Lutheran. My parents weren’t anything in particular.”
“I’m Catholic.”
“I know.”
“I just keep thinking about it, you know. A big room full of nuns like that. Thousands of nuns all in the same place.”
“So what?”
“So nuns are trouble,” Norman Kevic said. “Nuns have always been trouble. They’re bad luck if they aren’t anything else, and you can’t control them. And I keep thinking—you know who else is going to be at that party?”
“No.”
“Gregor Demarkian. The name mean anything to you?”
Steve Harald hesitated. Norm waited expectantly. He had always suspected Steve of being functionally oblivious—of paying no attention to anything that didn’t relate directly to his job at the station—and now Norm was sure of it.
“Gregor Demarkian,” Norm said, “is the guy who does murders. The one the Philadelphia Inquirer calls ‘the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot’ ”
“Oh,” Steve said.
“Never mind,” Norm said. “But I keep thinking about it, if you know what I mean. I keep thinking about the world’s most famous consultant on murder being right there in the middle of all those nuns, and what we could do with that I hate nuns.”
“You’ve said that,” Steve said.
Actually he hadn’t, but he’d probably implied it, so Norm decided to let it go. The sound of stiletto heels told him that Julia was coming back. He sat up a little on the couch and got ready to throw a hurricane of orange juice down his throat.
“There was a murder in the Motherhouse of their convent a little while ago,” Norm said musingly. “I remember reading about it. Demarkian was in on it.”
“On the murder?”
“On the investigation. I wonder what we could make of it.”
“Don’t make anything of it,” Steve said. “You’re in enough hot water with the Japanese. All you have to do is insult Henry’s wife’s alma mater or her best-remembered nun teacher or what the Hell. You may be part-owner of the station, but Henry is still chairman of the board.”
And Henry’s wife is a little slut with an appetite for nymphomania, Norm thought but he didn’t say it, because it wouldn’t have come as news to anybody and there was no point. Besides, Julia really was there, right behind Steve, carrying a plastic tray from the cafeteria. The tray was covered with glasses of juice and cups of coffee and little bowls full of sugar and creamer. Julia hadn’t been taking any chances.
Steve stood aside to let Julia through. Norm held out his hands for the tray.
“I hate nuns,” Norm said. “I hate them more than I hate the Japanese. At least the Japanese don’t think they’ve got a pipeline right up through the stratosphere to God.”