“They keep valuable things in English department offices?”
“That’s the strange thing — no, they don’t.”
Ramano leaned back in his tall leather chair and thought a moment. “What you’re really asking me is if any of my people are regular B and E artists.”
“I guess.”
“They’re not.” There was no hostility in Ramano’s voice. He still seemed perplexed by the whole idea of somebody breaking into an English department office. “But I did just remember something.”
“What?”
“There’s a guy — a few years ago — seems he was taking some kind of night courses.”
“At Hunter?”
“For some reason, I think so. Let me check.”
Ramano got up and went over to a computer terminal that was covered for the night. He sat down and turned the machine on and worked with surprising speed.
While Ramano worked, Tobin glanced around the office. If anybody was dipping into the pension and welfare funds, he wasn’t spending the money on office furniture. This place appeared to have been furnished out of the local Goodwill store. Warped slabs of imitation knotty pine covered the wall; thin maroon carpeting was frazzled in little explosions across the floor; and the desk and filing cabinets looked as if somebody beat on them regularly with hammers.
“Ebsen,” Ramano said, scribbling something on a notepad, then standing up.
“Ebsen.”
“Harold Ebsen. Used to work in a dry cleaner’s when he first joined the union, but then he went part-time last year so he could go back to college part-time and fulfill his dream.” Ramano smiled. “Of being a writer. But that isn’t what you really remember about somebody like him. What you really remember is how crazy he was. Always getting in fights. Very anti-black, anti-Semitic. Always angry. Just another oddball who doesn’t fit in anywhere — but you always sensed he was dangerous. Says here he went back to Hunter.”
“You wouldn’t have his address, would you?”
Ramano tore a sheet off the notepad and handed it to Tobin.
“Here you are.”
“Wonder what he’s doing?”
“Ebsen?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, as I remember, the last time I heard anything about him, he was attending some kind of survivalist classes and writing a book about the coming fascist revolution.”
“Can’t wait to meet him.”
“Take my word for it.”
“What?”
“He’s nobody to fuck with.”
“I’ll need to talk to him anyway.”
“Then you should go in the daytime.”
“Thanks.”
“Now I’d better head back to the floor. See how Gilhooley is doing at keeping the peace.”
“He inspires a lot of confidence in me as a peacekeeper.”
Ramano laughed. “Gilhooley’s a lot easier to handle when he thinks he’s on the side of the law than when somebody’s trying to calm him down.”
“Yeah, I can imagine that.”
Ramano put out his hand. “I’d go very easy with Ebsen. I’ve heard very strange rumors about him.”
“Such as?”
“Oh, eating only organic foods. Somebody told me he even butchers his own meat.”
“You’re starting to convince me.”
“I’m trying to convince you. Even if you underrate Stallone movies.”
“I’m not always right.”
Ramano grinned. “So I’ve noticed.”
Then he asked Ramano if he could call a cab, and while he waited in the vestibule outside, he got to hear a medley of Roy Orbison hits.
14
9:17 P.M.
He was headed home again but an image from earlier in the day forced him to rap on the glass separating him from the driver and tell the man he wanted to go instead to Alfredo’s on the Park.
Fifty-Seventh Street was alive with Christmas decorations swinging in the cold winds. Blue and red and green holiday trees turned in store windows. An angel offering praise to heaven glowed like pure alchemist’s gold against a black office building’s facade. Even the doorman looked festive, a piece of mistletoe on his lapel.
The man nodded at Tobin and opened the door for him. He had not needed to consult his clipboard. Tobin would of course be invited to tonight’s party. That was one of the perks of being semi-famous.
He was shown to the private party room where his first few glimpses were of the New York critical mafia. The occasion tonight was for the Ryder Twins, as they were known, the brother and sister who took a sewing machine fortune made in Cincinnati and bought their way into Hollywood, where they proceeded to produce, in less than five years, such an amalgam of crap and craft that nobody knew what to make of them. The siblings, Karl and Karla, stood now at the front of the party room. Everybody made the pilgrimage, the way one visited special shrines while touring the Vatican. Karl was cross-eyed and pot-bellied, and no amount of Hollywood cash had been able to do anything about his basset-hound face; Karla looked as if she were trying to be the Baby Boomer’s version of Jayne Mansfield. She was given to gold-lamé pedal pushers and push-up bras and actual honest-to-God cigarette holders borrowed from Natasha on the old Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.
Tobin spent the first fifteen minutes seeing how much Scotch he could put away and giving a variety of people fleeting cheek kisses (this was the age of AIDS, there was no social dipping) and pumping hands and egos in a way befitting a society bent on having holiday cheer.
There were a few famous people here but mostly it was second-rank because this was a lousy time to pry major-league celebrities away from their families. But of course he was perfectly comfortable, for he was of the second rank too. He saw Chamales, who offered himself again as Dunphy’s replacement, and then he answered 1,346 questions about Dunphy’s death. And not a single eye that met his failed to contain at least a dim burning diamond of suspicion (murdering your own partner, imagine!). Then he was gone, on to the next set of eyes or breasts or capped teeth. There were orchids in glass bowls and orchids in drinks and orchids on evening gowns. Talk about your festive celebration.
He had come here to see Michael Dailey, Dunphy’s agent, but had yet to find him. But in looking he did see somebody who knew Dailey — somebody who shouldn’t have been here at all.
Apparently she didn’t own a winter cocktail dress because the buff blue gown she wore was summery and reminded Tobin of a prom gown which, given her age, it might well have been. She had her hair done up in a shining chignon and had applied her makeup in such a way that she almost completely camouflaged the fact that she was a film student at Hunter College who got mad when you insulted a jerk like John Hughes.
So here was one half of the riddle Tobin had come to solve — now all he needed to find was the man who’d stood on the college corner this afternoon and handed her a white envelope filled with what Tobin suspected was bribery money.
But bribery for what? That’s what Tobin wanted to discover.
He got himself another Scotch and started over to her.
She stood by a life-size stand-up cutout of the Ryder Twins’ latest creation, Gang Girls, two busty ladies in bikinis and low-slung Levi’s who made Russ Meyers’s women look like Betty Crocker. Of course these two had ammo belts slung over shoulders and breasts. Of course they had daggers stuffed inside their spike-laden belts. Of course they held Uzis aimed directly at you. The Gang Girls had thus far starred in three movies with, given the money they made, many more in prospect.
“Relatives of yours?” Tobin said when he reached Marcie Pierce, nodding to the Gang Girls stand-up.
“Funny,” she said.
“I wonder if I could ask you a question.”