“You’re in the picture!”
—JOHNNY OLSEN
You’re in the Picture, CBS
IT WOULDN’T DO FOR US to wait until the fax came through, and then look at it like sensible adults. No. We had to cram into a closet with a civilian fax machine operator like clowns in a circus car, and watch it come across inch by inch.
“Why’s it so dark?” I asked.
“They’re sending a negative and a positive,” the technician said. “Sometimes things show up one way better than the other.”
So I stood there, sweating like an idiot, watching first a dark gray rectangle with some lighter gray on it appear, followed by a light gray rectangle with some darker areas.
When they’d both come through, along with some technical notes from Connecticut lab boys, the lieutenant grabbed them greedily and brought them back to his office. He lay the documents down on his desk and took a magnifying glass to it.
“There it is,” he said. “17 Aug. Yesterday’s date all right.”
“A.M.,” I added. “So it was mailed in the morning before Bentyne was killed, or almost literally before the body hit the floor. There’s something funny about this?”
Rivetz was indulging himself in a fiendish chortle. “Post Office stuff. Federal business. I was just wondering how the blue boys were going to like this case.”
“Of course, there’s one possibility we didn’t mention,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Two different murderers.”
The two cops groaned.
“We haven’t mentioned it, Matty, because we don’t want to think about it. If there’s two of them out there, we’ve got to catch them both, or there’s no sense of catching any.”
“Why?” I demanded.
“Because defense lawyers aren’t stupid. ‘You mean to say, Lieutenant, that though you accuse my client of poisoning Richard Bentyne, you have no explanation whatever for the bomb that exploded in his house that same morning. That by some extraordinary coincidence someone totally unknown to you was trying to murder Mr. Bentyne? Yet you deny the reasonable possibility that this person might have been responsible for the poisoning as well? Really, Lieutenant.’ And on and on.”
“I hate those guys,” Rivetz said.
“It was the next day,” I said.
“Huh?”
“The bomb went off the next day, not the same day. But you’ve made your point.”
“Two killers is a nightmare. Even one killer and one potential killer.” The lieutenant shook his head. “Two cases to make. Two lawyers. Two trials. If, as I said, you catch them both in the first place. Enough to drive a cop to drink.”
“Okay, okay. I’m sorry I mentioned it.”
“All right, then. If, God forbid, it turns out to be true, we’ll find out the bad news soon enough.” Lieutenant Martin stretched and yawned. “Now, Matty,” he said. “You got any other reason to be here?”
“You trying to get rid of me?”
“Hah!” he said. “I’m trying to get rid of me! I personally got five dozen reasons to hang around here, most of them in the form of paperwork.”
“Me, too,” Rivetz said.
“But paperwork doesn’t do anybody any good when you’re so tired it comes out alphabet soup. I’m gonna go home and get some sleep before I lose the knack.”
“Me, too,” Rivetz said.
“I’ve got to get home and walk the dog,” I said.
Rivetz grinned. “Have fun. Don’t break the poop-scoop law.”
“Neither Spot nor I would dream of it. Good night.”
The lieutenant massaged the back of his neck. “Yeah, good morning. Let us know if you get any more bright ideas, but not for, oh, twelve to sixteen hours, okay? After I wake up, I’m gonna want to eat.”
I told them I’ve never felt farther from a bright idea in my life, and started for the door.
“Matty?”
I turned. “What?”
“Nice haircut,” the lieutenant said.
I walked and fed Spot, caught a few hours of sleep, a shower and a shave, and was at my desk at the Tower of Babble at a time not too unbecoming an executive of my stature. What I would have liked to have been doing was pounding my ear for another eight or ten hours, but I spent so little time actually at the office lately, I thought I’d better put in something longer than a cameo. We run a reasonably loose ship at Special Projects, but I didn’t want Those Higher Up to start asking questions, either. Not that I didn’t have the answers, mind you, I just didn’t want the bother.
It was almost a relief to face a deskful of routine reports and queries.
Shirley Arnstein reported from Washington that it was in fact true that News’s new Supreme Court correspondent was a Scientologist. Did we care?
As a strict believer in the First Amendment, I certainly didn’t give a damn, as long as the guy didn’t try to put the Chief Justice on the cans and discover his hidden traumatic birth engrams, which he wouldn’t be able to do and keep his job, anyway. I decided to kick the whole matter back to News, with a recommendation that the Network mind its own damn business, and who over there started this inquiry, anyhow?
There was a short report from Harris Brophy. Harris’s reports of failure were always short. In this case, he was telling me that nobody’d heard from Frank Harlan in a year and a half at least, but that he’d keep trying.
Well, I thought, Harris is the best there is. If he can’t find Frank Harlan, then Frank Harlan was nowhere around to be found.
Who the hell was Frank Harlan?
It took me a good two minutes to remember. Frank Harlan was the writer who’d wanted to do the bio of Clement Bates. I’d wanted to talk to him, but the case had sort of twisted away from that line of thinking. I made a note to tell Harris to forget it, when I saw him.
Bookkeeping had sent a query—our expenses for June and July had been down 30 percent from the same period in the previous year—was there something wrong?
There is no pleasing these people. If you spend more than they think you should, they gripe about it, and if you spend less, like a true corporate hero, their sleazy little bookkeeping brains give birth to the suspicions that you’re not doing your job.
I had Jazz get them on the phone, and once I had them, I explained with all the patience I could muster on three hours’ sleep that Special Projects wasn’t like other departments at the Network. We couldn’t predict, we had to react. The reason we spent more money last June and July than for the same two months this year was that last year we had three potential scandals we had to defuse with a lot of travel and large-scale bribery, and this year we didn’t.
The talk did about as much good as usual.
Then there was a note from Bart Eggelstein in Programming.
I thought, Programming? Programming was a bunch of people who sat in the dark all day long looking alternately at pilots of TV shows and computer printouts of demographics, arranging little blocks of time on a magnetic board, and giving themselves ulcers trying to figure out in advance what The American Viewer (whoever that was) was going to want to watch next season. They were kings and queens when they guessed right, and unemployed when they guessed wrong.
But isolated as they were, they never had anything to do with Special Projects.
The novelty of the thing led me to place the call to Bart Eggelstein myself. That and Network protocol. He and I were both vice presidents, but that’s a lot like saying Carl Lewis and your golf-playing Uncle Wally are both athletes. Strictly true, but laughable in reality.
I got through to him in about a minute and a half, a pretty fair indication of our relative importance in the Network scheme of things.
“Cobb!” Eggelstein yelled. He wasn’t mad, that was just his style, a very New York style. He didn’t just talk, he made declarations! The late Isaac Asimov was the same way. I think the fact that you usually find this trait in successful people is no accident—they always sound so excited about everything, you get swept along just talking to them.
“Yes, I’m returning your call.”
“Yes! Very good of you to be so prompt!”
“What can I do for you?”
“Well, first of all, you could tell me what to put on in place of Bentyne. I’m going with old cop show reruns, but I don’t like it. Also, I have an opening in my department, and I—”
There is a God, I thought. “I accept,” I told him.
“You accept what?”
“Weren’t you offering me a job in Programming?” Programming, I thought, where conflicts were measured in terms of share points, not bombs. Where I could work at the Network and actually do TV stuff, instead of being a sort of Private Eye on a leash. Programming, where for most of the year the hours were regular, and the biggest danger was an ulcer. I had never before perceived in myself such a burning desire to work there.
“No, I wasn’t offering you a job! What kind of a job would I be able to offer you? You’re already a vice president! The only job in my department it would be seemly for you to take would be my own!”
He paused for a second, the added as an aftershout, “And I’m not giving it up, yet!”
“I wouldn’t want your job, Bart. For one thing, I’m not qualified for it.”
“Let me tell you a secret: no one is qualified for this job! This job rewards the Lucky Guess and very little else!”
“So I take it you’ve already got somebody to file papers and sharpen pencils.”
“Cobb! What’s the matter? You sound unhappy!”
“No,” I said. “Just tired.”
“Ahh,” he said, softly for him. “I know that feeling. But listen!”
I jumped.
“I do have a job here that I’m trying to fill. Assistant to the head of Daytime, insufficiently exalted for the likes of you!”
“And?”
“And one of the applicants has given you as a reference, which I am now checking.”
“Oh? Who is it?”
“A Ms. Marcie Nast.”
I laughed so loud I scared Bart, who ought to have been used to loud noises, living as he did in daily proximity to his own voice.
It was at least a minute before I could get an intelligible word out of my mouth.
“Bart,” I breathed, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay! Only I’d like to be in on the joke!”
If it was a joke on anybody, it was on me. “Listen!” I said. I was beginning to sound like him. “She gave me as a reference knowing exactly what I was going to say, and I’ll bet she figured it would help her get the job, at that.”
Either that, I thought, or she was counting on my remembering how ready she was to fling sex-discrimination and harassment charges around, and come through with a glowing little ginger cake endorsement. If that was the case, she was reading from the wrong volume.
But it didn’t sound like her. All she wanted was to put her size seven-and-a-half foot on the next step up the ladder. But if someone telling the truth about her could help her get a shapely leg on the next rung, she was perfectly willing to accept the truth. Hadn’t she told me she was always perfectly frank when it didn’t make any difference?
“Well?” Bart Eggelstein demanded. “What are you going to say? By now, I am positively dying to hear it!”
“In my opinion,” I said, “Marcie West is an acculturated psychopath. I think she is totally ambitious and totally ruthless. Think? She told me so, in so many words. If there are any women in your department between her and the top, she’ll do anything she can to discredit them. Men, too, possibly. If you’ll excuse a personal question, you’re pretty close to retirement age, aren’t you?”
“Three years.”
“Then you’re probably safe.”
“And she gave you as a reference?”
“I’m not finished. From what I’ve seen of her, if you put her in a position where she’s convinced the best way ahead for her is to do the best possible job for you, she’ll do the best job you ever saw. She could do a historically good job. On drive alone. Just don’t trust her farther than you could throw a steamroller.”
“Mmmmm,” Bart said, then was silent for a minute. “How long have you known this young lady?”
“Two days.”
“She makes a big impression, doesn’t she?”
“If she wants to.”
“Would you hire her?”
“If this were a war, and I was in the OSS, I’d hire her in a shot. Under the current circumstances—well, I could possibly handle her, but I’ll just say I’m glad I don’t have any openings.”
“Ambition and ruthlessness, I don’t have to tell you, are not necessarily undesirable qualities in a TV executive!”
“They certainly help get things done—if getting things done is all you care about.”
“People in this department have been in a rut ... It might be a good idea to light a fire under them ...”
“I think it would be more like throwing an M-80 in the middle of them.”
“What’s an M-80?”
“Firecracker,” I said. “A big one. Equal to a quarter stick of dynamite.”
“All the better! Get people jumping around here! You know, Cobb, I’m three years away from retirement, and already the power plays around here you wouldn’t believe. A joker in the deck might prove very interesting. Could liven up my declining years considerably.”
I laughed again, a soft chuckle this time. “So you’re going to do it?”
“I think I will! Yes, I will! Her ambition and ruthlessness will make us supreme in the ratings into the next century! Or not! Either way, if what you say is true, she’ll open a few eyes around here!”
“She’ll do that, all right. Bart, do me a favor, will you?”
“What’s that?”
“Let me know once you tell her she’s got the job. I think I want to talk to her.”
I did? I hadn’t realized it until the words were out of my mouth.
“I’ll do better than that. I’m calling her right away. Wait ten minutes, then ring her. She’s at her brother’s shop.”
I spent the ten minutes wondering what the hell I thought I was doing, but at the end of it, I made the call.