“Real nice,” Reigels went on, and now that some of the cameramen were moving for their next shots, I could see on the monitors I had been right.
“Just make like an audience for a while. We’ve got the Reluctant Magician and the finale to do, then we can go get pretty for the party.” An open mike in the studio picked up some scattered applause.
Reigels switched from the PA mike to his headset, which tied him in with all the other members of the crew. He asked the stage director if Shelby and Green were ready, and if the cabinet had been set up. He apparently got yesses to both, because he nodded. He spoke to Millie in Master Control.
“Ready to roll and record,” he said. Reigels was taping the dress rehearsal, and would have all day Saturday to go over the tape and decide if he wanted to do anything differently. That is, that was the way it was supposed to happen.
When everyone was in place, Reigels told Master to roll the tape, and when he was informed it was up to speed, he started directing.
“Okay, we’re coming up on camera six. Ready, announcer. Up on six, announce.”
The technical director and audio man pushed the buttons that would make it happen. It’s not as easy as it sounds. With the huge electronic console they’re working, they look like Sulu and Chekov at the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.
Meanwhile, the announcer, who had his own private booth, wrapped his deep, rich voice around his line: “And now, the Great Bomboni!”
Nothing. Camera six took a picture of the magic cabinet on an otherwise empty stage.
“Announce,” Porter Reigels said again, smiling already. The announcer repeated, “The Great Bomboni!”
More nothing, for six interminable seconds. Then Ken Shelby edged sheepishly onto the stage, in the character of the Great Bomboni’s manager. He looked at the camera, and said, “I...I’m afraid the Great Bomboni is still...ah...still attuning himself with the infinite.”
Lenny Green’s voice, off-camera: “I don’t care what you’re paying me for, I’m not getting into that undersized outhouse for anybody!”
Shelby smiles, raises a hand to ask the audience’s indulgence. He walks off-camera, and returns dragging Lenny Green by the elbow. Green is wearing a magnificent black cape with scarlet lining over a rumpled brown suit. He doesn’t walk too steadily. In a stage whisper, he says, “I’m not the Great Bomboni. I’m not the Great Bomboni. This is a fake. They promised me a bottle of—”
He can’t finish, because Shelby has clamped his hand over the smaller man’s mouth. In a supposed aside, through gritted teeth, Shelby says, “The real Bomboni disappeared.”
Green, also through gritted teeth, says, “Well, he’s supposed to, ain’t he?”
“I mean he disappeared with the gate receipts!”
“Oh,” Green says, nodding. “I’ll go look for him.” He starts to walk off, but Shelby has him by the belt.
“You can’t go,” Shelby says, “you’re the only one the magic turban fits!” Shelby ignores Green’s quizzical look, and plays to the audience. “And now, Allura, the Great Bomboni’s trusted assistant, will bring the secret of Bomboni’s power: the Magic Turban of Mysta Maru!”
Green says, “Give Mister Maru his turban back, I’m going.” He starts to leave. Shelby tries the belt trick again, but Green’s pants come away, showing yellow-and-green striped shorts. (Shelby and Green really liked underwear gags.) He gets about halfway off the set, with the camera following him, when he walks right into Melanie Marliss, wearing a few wisps of chiffon and a sequin or two. Green decides to stay.
Usually at a rehearsal, nobody laughs, but about that time, people in Studio J, professionals all, were caught up by the Reluctant Magician. Maybe a hundred people were watching the act, either firsthand or on a studio monitor, and laughing their heads off. We were laughing in the control room, too.
Shelby, Green, and Marliss picked up on the laughter, and it showed in the act. The lines got crisper, and their faces even funnier. Green went into a little impromptu Sally Rand bit with his cape, not quite revealing his hairy legs. It almost broke Melanie up.
Shelby brought them back to the script. He explained how the Great Bomboni was going to go into the cabinet, and how his assistant was going to be locked in the trunk, and how they would magically trade places.
The Great Bomboni managed to misconstrue this to mean that he would be locked in the cabinet with Melanie’s pulchritude, and he was suddenly eager to do the trick. After two minutes or so of double entendres, the Great Bomboni said, “Let’s get in the box,” with a leer and a pant that satirized every lecher who ever lived.
He capped this with a look of surprise mixed with confidence when the door of the cabinet opened of its own accord. His face seemed to say, maybe I am magic.
His assistant pointed the way in, and Bomboni entered. Shelby closed the door behind him.
“Hey!” the voice came from inside the cabinet. “Hey! Let me out!”
“The Great Bomboni is calling on his friends in the spirit world to help him out of this worldly prison!” Shelby yelled, trying to drown out the cries of the man in the box.
“I’ll call on my friends in the Police Department and put you in prison,” the Great Bomboni yelled. “Let me out!”
The audience’s laughter got even stronger when the cabinet started to vibrate as the sides rattled to resounding thumps. The yelling never stopped, and neither did the laughter.
Meanwhile, Shelby had assisted Melanie into the trunk and locked her in. The camera draws back and music swells dramatically over the sound of Lenny Green’s voice yelling dire threats if he isn’t released this minute.
Then, with the yelling still going on, the door of the cabinet swings silently open, and Melanie walks out, holding a tape recorder that yells, in Lenny Green’s voice, “Boy, you can’t trust anybody these days, can you?”
Thunderous applause. Shelby returns, opens the trunk, and the Great Bomboni is not there! “Where did he go?” Melanie breathes. “I went to the corner for a drink. I got sick of waiting for you guys. Meet me there,” says the tape recorder.
Shelby and Melanie look at each other, shrug, and leave the stage arm in arm. More applause, and laughter (even applause in the control room, which is practically unheard of).
“Okay,” Porter Reigels said. I was aware of his direction again. “Music up, talent out for a bow, Anchorman goes to greet them, on camera twelve. Now!”
The Anchorman, Melanie, Shelby, and Green were cued accordingly, and assembled on their marks for the bows. Camera twelve, mounted on a boom, put their smiling faces up on the monitor.
Then things started to happen.
Camera twelve’s picture began to look like a painting someone had tried to do on boiling oatmeal. It got lumpy, and ran. Porter Reigels saw it, and from behind him, I could see his head swivel, scanning the other monitors for a shot he could switch to. No dice. All the pictures looked like that.
Over the audio monitor, we could hear the sounds of Studio J; loud shouts, and surprised little screams. There was also a crackling noise, like bacon frying.
Porter Reigels grabbed his headset and yelled, “Somebody tell me what’s going on down there!” When he heard the answer, Reigels said, “Oh no!” and his head sunk to the desk.
I got the information from the technical director, though I had to shake him out of a shocked stupor to get it. “Fire in the carpenter’s bin,” he said. “Sprinklers cut in.”
Just then, the mikes in the studio, which to my surprise had not yet shorted out, picked up a noise that sounded like the end of the world, a roaring, splintering crash that I swear I could have heard even without the microphones.
“What the hell was that?” I demanded, but I guess I didn’t expect an answer, because I was already running from the control room.
I sprinted to the corner of the building, where the stairs were. As I ran down the hall, it occurred to me that we’d have another visit from the fire department, because the sprinklers
were tied in with the alarm system.
Since bells were already ringing, and buzzers already buzzing, it didn’t make much difference if I set off another switch by opening the door to the stairs. Just as I hit the landing that marked the halfway point between the eighth and seventh floors, I heard the seventh-floor fire door bang open. I figured I was going to see a mad rush by panic-stricken celebrities, but only one figure came through the door, a less-than-medium-sized fellow, with soaking wet black hair, and soaking wet high-fashion men’s clothes.
He looked disheveled, furtive, and just plain scared, and it took me a few seconds to recognize him. It was the taco king himself, Lorenzo Baker. I had been meaning to talk to him about Shorty’s call, and now that he was running away the way he was, I wanted to talk to him even more.
I called his name, and chased him down the stairs. He looked at me over his shoulder as though I were a harpy or something. His feet never slowed for a second.
The chase was on for real, now. I was determined to catch him if I had to chase him all the way back to Los Angeles. I mean, it could have been he was just rushing back to the Brant to change into some dry clothes, but I doubted it. I didn’t want him to get away.
Baker’s mind was working in one direction—straight down. He could have left the stairwell at any floor and had a good chance of losing me in the corridors, but he stuck to his original plan of heading for the bottom of the building and out.
I had longer legs, but he had a half-story head start, and he was fast. I gained on him, but only a step or two at a time. I didn’t catch him until the landing of the second floor, the headquarters of Channel 10.
I reached out and grabbed a handful of wet Botany 500. It spun Baker around, and I edged past him, positioning myself so that I could defend the door to the building or the stairs to the ground floor.
If Baker wanted to, he could have turned and headed back up the stairs, but I doubted he would. In fact, I prayed he wouldn’t. I was breathing like a steam calliope, and my legs were lead. Baker looked better, but not much.
I was still trying to collect air enough to speak when Baker, seeing I had cut off his path, got a cold look in his eye.
I braced myself for a rush, but got a scream instead. “Hai-ya!” Baker had dropped into a crouch, and was waving open hands at me. One panicky corner of my mind made a note of the fact that Baker was wearing a black belt. That was just stupid, and I told myself so. Karate black belts are not used to hold up pants.
Actually, the whole thing was academic. Baker could hold a paisley belt and still be trouble. Street fighting and army judo don’t exactly add up to a Martial Art.
Baker waved a hand to indicate I should get out of his path, and yelled “Wa!” I wondered if it was impossible to do karate and speak English at the same time.
I waited too long for Baker’s taste. He decided to move me himself. Recognizing me for a pigeon, he didn’t bother with faking or feinting. He aimed a vicious swipe at me with the edge of his hand. I managed to block it with my left forearm, but the impact left my arm numb. It fell, and I couldn’t lift it.
He tried a kick this time. With fear-quickened reflexes, I dodged clear, and the kick hit the door to Channel 10 like the proverbial ton of bricks.
I resolved to start kicking at him. What the hell, I figured, I might get lucky. As it turned out, I got luckier than I had any right to hope.
Baker launched what was supposed to be the coup de grâce, a flying kick at my head. It was lovely to see, and I saw it in a kind of psychic slow motion. David Carradine would have been proud of it. If it had connected, my head was good for a fifty-yard flight.
But the kick never reached home. Instead, the door to the corridor leading to Channel 10 opened up, and the mild-mannered host of “Rise and Shine, New York,” a local talk show, asked what all the noise was about.
Baker’s sidewinding leg smacked the edge of the opening door, changing the direction of the force of the kick, and knocking him off balance.
Baker went flying ass-over-teakettle, as my grandmother used to say. He landed hard on his back on the stairs. The wind was knocked out of him, and he was going to have an interesting, parallel set of bruises, but he was okay.
The talk show host seemed puzzled by my gratitude, but not so much that he didn’t accept my offer to buy him a steak at the earliest opportunity.
He went on his way. I put out a hand to help Baker up, being careful to stay out of kicking range. He looked at the hand as though he was trying to decide whether to take it or snatch a pebble from it. He took it. I pulled him to his feet, whipped him around so I was behind him, and got his arm in the come-along hold, a useful little trick they teach to the MP’s. He could try the karate to his heart’s content, now, because any strenuous effort on his part was going to break his arm.
Baker must have known intuitively that it would be much wiser of him to keep his mouth shut, and he did. I marched him down the hall to the elevator. A couple of Channel 10 employees asked what we were doing. I told them Bakers back had come out and I was helping him get it back in.
I was deliberately not thinking of what we were going to find on the seventh floor. I was especially not thinking about that splintering crash. On a radio show called “Lights Out,” they once did a sound effect of a man being turned inside out by twisting a belt so it creaked, and crushing strawberry boxes. The sound I’d heard had been like that, only louder.
I thought of trivial things instead. I thought of how Shelby and Green had worked that trick—Green and Marliss switching boxes by way of the trap doors. The oldest gimmick in the book, really. What made it go was the illusion that Green was still in the box. The deception was manufactured by Green’s voice on the tape recorder, and a motor-driven weight that made the thumps and shaking. The comedy helped, of course. It’s hard to laugh and figure at the same time.
I thought of how pleased I was to have the power to spike Baker’s romance with Melanie. Especially now. Lorenzo Baker would do a little dancing today, to any tune I cared to whistle.
I thought of how my arm hurt, but that made it feel worse. I wondered how Shorty had forgotten to tell me about Baker’s karate.
I thought of Llona, then asked myself how she got in there.
As always, the anticipation of what I’d find on the seventh floor seemed to have been worse than the fact. Of course, I didn’t know what the fact was yet, but that was how it seemed. Building Services had the sprinkler off, and Colonel Coyle and the Security boys were dealing with crowd control. They had their guns on, today. Coyle wasn’t fooling around.
The colonel was supervising as a couple of his men took names from the hundred or so wet, miserable-looking people who were lined up all the way down the hall. There’s only one reason to do that.
“Called the police, eh, Colonel?” I asked.
“I have.”
“Good move,” I said. “I caught this one trying to run away. Ah, thanks.” A couple of uniformed guards took Baker off my hands. “Watch him,” I said, “he’s a black belt.”
One guard, a black guy who must have stood six-six and weighed two-ninety said, “Me too.” That was the end of my worries about Baker. I told the taco tycoon we’d talk to him later, or the police would.
“Have you been inside?” I asked Coyle. I suddenly noticed that while I had seen Alice Brockway (she’d been in the line outside the studio), I hadn’t seen Ken Shelby, Lenny Green, or Melanie Marliss. I felt just a little sick.
“I have,” Coyle said again. “That’s why I summoned the police. I bleeve”—Coyle was from the Midwest—“I bleeve we’ve got an attempted homicide. It all comes from amateurs dictating policy, especially when it comes to Security. Why—”
I’m sure there was more, but by then I was opening the door to Studio J to see for myself.
I climbed up to the set, and felt the rug squish under my feet. The whole place felt like a swamp. Spraying water had peeled all those beautiful big pictures off the walls.
They weren’t standing exactly where they’d been before, because the magical cabinet was there. It was lying on its side, but at a funny angle. Something was wrong with the floor, but I didn’t think the water had done it.
I was right. When I got there, I found out the water hadn’t done anything to the floor. The cabinet was the way it was because it had not quite fallen through a big jagged hole in the wooden floor of the set.
“Coyle told us to wait here,” Lenny Green said tonelessly. He still had the turban on. It was unraveling. He still wore no pants.
“Somebody tried to kill us,” Melanie said. She had a tone of wonder in her voice, as though she were a child, or trying to impress a child. Ken Shelby was comforting her, and she needed it. She was trembling. She was also, I noticed in spite of myself, almost unbearably sexy. Her costume hadn’t stood up to the water very well, and what was left was transparent where it touched her, and translucent where it didn’t. I had to remind myself to get back to work.
Shelby was plenty shook up himself, but he seemed to be in the best shape. I loaned him my handkerchief to wipe his glasses, then put the question to him. “Somebody dropped something from the catwalk on you?”
He pushed wet gray hair from his forehead. “It would have been on us—right on our marks. Thank God that fire started.”
Green was nodding like a bobbing-head doll. “Uh huh. We ran for cover when the sprinkler started, and Bam!”
“I’m interested,” I said quietly, “to see just what it was he dropped on you. Help me lift the cabinet out of the way, all right?”
They looked at me. Even in an emergency, they thought of Network protocol.
“Look, I’ll pay union dues for us, all right?”
That did it. We lifted up the cabinet, and looked into the hole.
I knew what was going to be there. I’m not clairvoyant, or anything—my life is just like that. I live bad jokes.
Killed in the Act Page 14
