“Don’t give me oh, that. That was not the look an engaged woman gives a man she has spurned.”
Dan took a breath. “I still love her, Matt.”
I made a face. “Do tell,” I said sourly.
“I don’t like her very much anymore, but I love her. You know what that’s like, dammit. Monica. That girl with the money last fall.”
I did indeed know what it was like. I closed my eyes for a second. I was angry, whether at Dan or myself, I didn’t know. One of the many things Dan and I had in common was a tendency to fall for women to whom love was an event rather than a process. It bothered me beyond rationality that he should be as stupid about these things as I was, and I told him so.
He laughed at me. “All right. At least now I know where you’re coming from. But don’t worry, Matt. After this weekend is over, one way or another, I’m going cold turkey on Debbie. Anything I still owe her will be paid in full by the end of this week.”
“One way or another?” I asked, but he ignored me.
“Oh, and about that face business. It’s nothing, really.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“I promised I wouldn’t—”
“Come on, for—” I had a sudden thought. “You haven’t been sneaking off with her at odd moments, have you? A last little fling for old times’ sake? Instant therapy for when she gets mad at Grant?”
A light came into Dan’s eyes, and I remembered how unhealthy it could be to get this man mad. His hand twitched—it really wasn’t much more than that—and the thick glass handle snapped off his beer mug. His martial arts training, the endless squeezing of hard wax, the constant punching of sacks of polished rice, had given him incredible strength.
I met his eyes. “Well, Dan?”
Dan and I didn’t lie to each other. You can keep an acquaintance going on lies, but a real friendship requires honesty. Dan’s options now were to tell me to screw myself or to answer the question.
“Just once, Matt. Months ago. She had a spat with Grant and came to me, and we wound up in bed. In the morning, she asked me for the phone, dialed Grant’s number, and made up with him.
“That’s when I decided I didn’t like her anymore. That stupid, stupid woman. Why does she act like that? I came within an inch of telling her to find some other jerk to be best man.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I don’t know, Matt. I don’t really know. I remember long ago, I used to have a certain amount of self-respect. Maybe this whole thing is like a funeral for my self-respect, you know? The least I can do is stand there in the church and hear the burial service.”
“Stop it.”
Dan sighed. “Anyway, the face stuff has nothing to do with that.”
“What does it have to do with?”
“Oh, all right, why the hell not? Debbie has splotches on her face.”
“What?”
“Splotches. Little purple marks. Her skin gets discolored. Like wine marks, only smaller. They come and they go, tied in with her nerves or something like that. It drives her crazy.”
I could see where it would Debbie was supposed to be perfect, especially in her appearance. Someone asking her what was wrong with her face would be too much to bear.
“She hides it well,” I said. “All these years, and I never knew.”
“I didn’t know for a long time either. She gets this special makeup from a dermatologist. It’s got medicine in it that treats the condition at the same time the cosmetic covers it up. That’s probably why Spot didn’t like the taste. She wears it all the time, even—even to bed. I’d been with her a year and a half before I found out. Big tearful true confession scene, you know, Matt?
“And it’s a funny thing. Since she’s taken up with Grant again and I’m out, she’s always careful to put her makeup on or touch it up when I’m around. Even that night.”
Interesting, I thought. Debbie’s index of intimacy was her naked face, not her naked body. I wondered if Grant knew about the splotches yet and how often Debbie planned to let her husband see them.
Dan went on. “So that ‘meaningful glance’ you saw was nothing. Debbie was just checking to see if her makeup had survived the licking Spot gave it. I nodded to tell her it had.”
“How do you plan to steer clear of Debbie after Saturday?”
“What’s the matter? Don’t you think I can?”
“I think you can do anything you set your mind to, partner,” I said. That much was true. Any doubts I had concerned what he actually had his mind set on. “All I wanted to know was how.”
Dan showed me a weary smile. “I don’t know, Matt. I’m addicted. I’ll move to New York. Hell, I’ll move to Pago Pago if I have to. But I’ll do it. I would have done it already, but...
It occurred to me that I’d done nothing this whole conversation but ask him questions, so I deliberately held back the straight line. When Dan saw I could wait as long as he did, he went on without it.
“Well ... I would have walked out before, but I owe Debbie one more thing.”
“What, for God’s sake?” So much for not asking questions.
“I’ve got to keep her from marrying Grant.”
“Dan, no,” I said. I wanted to cry. He hadn’t learned a thing.
“Yes, Matt, goddammit!” He rattled the table with an open-handed slap. “You don’t know her, you don’t love her! She can be a wonderful woman, if she gets the chance. Okay, I couldn’t make her see that, but I came a hell of a lot closer than Grant ever will!”
Dan was shouting at full volume, and people were starting to look at us. I tried to quiet him down, but when he was in that mood, it was like trying to quiet an avalanche.
“Shut up! This is final! If she marries him, it will be the same as suicide for her. I’m going to stop that marriage if I have to strangle her!”
He stood up, nearly upsetting the table, spun on his heel, and stomped out of the restaurant. I sat there and finished my dumplings, alone with my reflections. I reflected that that was one choice bit of logic he’d departed with, and I mused about the consequences of Dan’s little tirade if someone in the restaurant figured out what wedding we were talking about and got back to the Whittens with it.
I also reflected that Dan wasn’t going any farther than the parking lot because I had the car keys in my pocket, so I took my time finishing. Then I called the waitress over, tipped her generously, and gave her some money to pass along to Hans to pay for the broken glass.
CHAPTER 7
“... just step up to the microphone and tell us what’s on your mind.”
–Steve Allen, “The Tonight Show” (NBC)
EVERYTHING AT THE HEARINGS next morning went about the way I’d figured they would. The hotel management had moved all the tables out of the Grand Ballroom and put rows of gray-beige folding chairs in their place. There was a rostrum at the front of the room; a bunch of guys in charcoal gray suits who called themselves the Mayor’s Commission for Cable Television in Sewanka sat at it, looking solemn. There was a table facing it, for witnesses. The witnesses were solemn, too. I’ve fallen in with some gatherings that took themselves seriously, but they were Pollyannas compared to this crowd. I started to get the feeling I’d walked into the wrong conference, the one that was going to decide if the human race should be wiped out this afternoon.
I wasn’t on the agenda that day, and I was just as glad. Dan and I had spent most of the night talking. He’d asked me what I was going to do now that I knew what he had in mind; I’d told him in all the years I’d known him, neither one of us had ever yet been able to stop the other from doing something stupid, and I was damned if I was going to wear myself out by trying now. That effectively short-circuited the fight.
Having said that, though, I made him promise to keep it rational, if he had it in him. “However great Debbie is or might be, Dan, she’s not worth destroying yourself over.”
He conceded the point, which I took for a victory. We relaxed after that and engaged in harmless n
ostalgia again, this time with no undertones.
I was pretty well convinced that Dan would do what he had to do, but he wouldn’t carry it to the point of strangling. My mind Wednesday morning was free to concentrate on the meeting.
Not that it took a whole lot of concentration. They were at the point of the process where they were listening to outrageous demands from special-interest groups that wanted their own channels on the cable system.
First, the ethnic minorities: Blacks. Hispanics. Italians. Poles. Okay, not so outrageous. There are significant numbers of all these in Sewanka. They wouldn’t each get a channel, but you could bet a channel in the system would be set aside to air anything these groups cared to produce, free of charge or for a nominal fee. Still, the wrangling went on.
The gays and the lesbians were scheduled next, but there was confusion about who’d go first. The two groups got nasty about it. At last, one of the commissioners, who was obviously less than thrilled by the whole business, suggested they fall back on the old standard, “ladies first.” That got a big laugh, but it did nothing to lessen the confusion.
I tuned out and wondered what Marty Adelman wanted. I’d found a message from him at the hotel when I’d gotten in last night, but it had been too late to call him back. I tried to reach him at his office in the Network before coming to the hearing, but he hadn’t gotten in yet.
It was probably something to do with ComCab—he’d told me he was going to work some sources of his own. Maybe he’d learned something of use—preferably that the whole thing was a mistake, that ComCab was honest, and I could take the rest of the week off.
I studied the specimen who was representing the cable outfit in Sewanka. His nameplate said he was Roger Sparn, and that didn’t strike me as something a nameplate would make up. He didn’t look crooked—he looked too tired to be crooked. He had bags under his eyes, and jowls, and a moustache that had stopped trying to do anything but droop. His hair was thin, and his chin was weak. His suit was rumpled. He looked like he’d wandered in from a production of Death of a Salesman. He could have been a salesman, or a civil servant, or a forgotten clerk in a big corporation.
He sat, sad and silent, all through the morning. Then someone suggested a lunch break I would have applauded if I hadn’t been so relaxed. I pulled myself to my feet and left the Grand Ballroom. Just outside, I felt a hand on my shoulder.
“Mr. Cobb?” The voice was smooth and cultured. I turned and was surprised to learn it belonged to Roger Sparn.
The voice pegged him—that and the surprisingly warm smile that went along with it. The man was an ex-radio actor. You find them in all sorts of fields on the periphery of New York show business, men and women who could read from scripts and sound good but who didn’t look good enough or ad lib well enough to make the transition to TV or film or stage or disc jockey work when radio drama died, around 1960.
A few make big bucks as voice men for cartoons and commercials; most of them work as ad salesmen or continuity directors, or they hang on doing Off-Off Broadway and dinner theaters.
Most of the ones I’ve met, no matter how successful, are kind of sad and bewildered by the loss of radio. One guy I ran into said, “I was Romeo. I was Captain Justice. I was the Red River Kid. Now I’m an ugly little bald guy with a voice.”
Sparn was a tired-looking, medium-sized tubby guy with a voice.
I turned around and told him his name, then asked what I could do for him.
“Nothing,” he said genially. “Nothing at all. It’s just that, unfortunately, we seem to be on opposite sides here, and I wanted to say, no hard feelings. I spent some of the happiest days of my life working for the Network.”
“You were on radio, weren’t you?”
He beamed at me, all but his eyes, and they even lifted the bags a little bit. It made me feel good to brighten the man’s day like that. “Why, yes, I was,” he said, “although I must say you look too young to remember me in my heyday.”
“I remember your voice,” I said, sort of telling the truth. I remembered a lot of voices like it.
He told me a few of the shows he’d been on, but I didn’t remember any of them. I told him it was too bad his new company and the Network couldn’t come to an understanding.
He shook his head and looked sad again. “Network Cable is a bad idea, Mr. Cobb. You can’t support highbrow stuff with advertisers; should have gone pay-cable with it, like with the movie networks, Home Box Office, and the like. ComCab can’t devote one of its channels to a service that’s going to go bankrupt in a few months.”
His voice was getting faster and stronger with every word. I was going to do my bit for the Network, and interrupt him and give him the party line, but he was determined to get out his next sentence. He bowled my interruption over and said, “And that’s what I told your Marty Adelman two weeks ago.”
That was interesting. “Oh, you’ve talked to Marty recently?”
“Yes, I came to visit him at his office. He was trying to talk us into carrying Network Cable. I thought I owed it to him at least to visit him and tell him why it was hopeless.”
“Decent of you,” I said. “But tell me, Mr. Sparn, how is it your company is so successful in winning franchises lately?”
I looked for something besides melancholy in his expression as he answered but couldn’t find anything.
“Research, Mr. Cobb. That’s all. We find out what the community needs, and we provide it.”
“It seems so simple.” I tried to sound naïve and impressed, with minimal success. Substitute “politicians” for “community,” and what he’d just given me could have been a completely accurate description of success by bribery.
He caught my ambiguity and gave me back some of his own. “It works every time, Mr. Cobb. See you this afternoon.” He turned and left me.
I watched him go. He even walked sadly. He got me thinking. Why the hell had he approached me? I did not buy his nostalgia for the Network. If he was chock-full of that stuff, there’d be no satisfaction in coming to me about it. I’d been in grade school when the last of the radio soaps went off the air—and my mother didn’t even listen to them.
I decided to forget it for a while and call Marty at the Network before I got some lunch. Big mistake. I still haven’t had that lunch.
A phone at the Network is answered according to formula. Your secretary says your function and that it’s your office. If you ever call me at work, you will hear Jazz say, “Special Projects, Mr. Cobb’s office, may I help you?” Someone who works in the department answers the phone with the department and his own name. Executive types like me pick up the phone and just say the name, assuming the underlings have already made our position clear.
Nobody picks up the phone and says, “Who’s this?”—especially not in tears. I was about to hang up and dial the number again; I was sure I’d gotten it wrong, but the question was repeated, with anger as well as the tears.
“Is this Marty Adelman’s office?” I asked.
“Y-yes,” the voice replied.
“Sally?” Sally was Marty’s secretary, Network standard issue-smart, competent, and unflappable.
“Yes! Who is this?” she flapped. I pictured the Network as an inferno whence all but Sally had fled. It had to be something drastic to induce hysteria in a Network secretary.
“It’s Matt Cobb, Sally. Is Marty in? Is anything wrong?”
She answered both questions at once. “He’s in the hospital!” She started to sob. “He may be dead!”
Now I was starting to get hysterical. “Dead?” I bellowed. “How? Where?”
“I don’t know! I think a car. Mr. Brophy just told me he was critically injured, and to switch you to him—Mr. Brophy, I mean—if you should happen to call Mr. Ad—Mr. Adel ... The rest of it got washed out in sobs.
“Okay, Sally,” I told her. “You switch my call the way Mr. Brophy told you, then take the rest of the day off, or go see the nurse, or do whatever you have to do to calm down.�
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“Will that be all right? He’s a very nice man. I—I want to know what happened.”
“Tell you what. I’ll have Mr. Brophy report to you personally when I’m done with him. Go to the nurse’s office and wait.”
She thanked me profusely, then switched the call. Brophy must have been sitting on his phone; he picked it up before the first ring was done.
It’s little things like that that reveal Harris Brophy’s inner emotions, if any. He is brilliant and handsome, and I couldn’t run Special Projects without him, but he is the coldest, most detached, most cynical son of a bitch I have ever had to deal with on a regular basis. For some reason he likes me, I don’t know why. I do know why he loves his job. Human folly is Harris’s favorite spectator sport, and at the Network, people are always in mid-season form.
“Talk to me,” I told him.
“Matt?” That was another sign of agitation. He knows my voice.
“Yeah. What the hell happened?”
“You know about Marty?”
“Sally told me he was hurt, but that was about it. How did it happen?”
“Hit-and-run driver. Got him about two blocks from his house—he lives in Brooklyn Heights—on Atlantic Avenue. The police called here looking for you, but I stalled them off.”
“Mmm. How did they like that?”
“Not much, but what could they do about it? I only told them the truth. You are out of town, and you couldn’t be reached. Besides, I wanted to talk to you first.”
“Why did the police want me?” It had taken me a while to wonder about that. Usually, when the Network was tied up in something, the cops got to me sooner or later, but this would normally be handled as a matter of Marty’s private life, at least at the start.
Normally. I should give up hoping for normally.
“Marty had a piece of paper in his pocket,” Harris said, “with your name on it. It said, ‘Call Matt Cobb—Important.’”
I thought that over for a little while. After fifteen seconds or so, Harris said, “Matt?”
“What?”
“Nothing. I was just afraid you’d passed out on me.”
Killed with a Passion Page 4
