“Say, you missed the excitement tonight.”
“What?”
“Break-in. At the studio.”
“You’re kidding.”
Frank, still drunk, looked at him earnestly. “No, Tobin; why would I kid you about that?”
“It’s just an expression, Frank. Christ.”
“Well, anyway,” Frank said, kind of wobbling on his heels, “there was a break-in. Dunphy’s dressing room.”
“God.”
“What?”
Tobin told Frank about the break-in at Hunter College. Dunphy’s office.
“Shit,” Frank said.
“Exactly.”
“Wonder what they’re looking for.”
Tobin, who had been thinking about this occasionally over the past six hours, said, “Did you know Richard sold a movie script?”
“Not until this morning.”
“So you weren’t aware he was writing one?”
“No. Weren’t you?”
“No,” Tobin said.
“Well, you know how Richard was. He always liked to surprise you.”
“I know. But he also couldn’t keep a secret.”
“That’s true. Now that you mention it.”
“All the time he was writing a novel, that was all he talked about. He knew I’d be jealous.”
“You were jealous?”
“Sure,” Tobin said.
“Why didn’t you just write your own?”
Tobin sipped his drink. “Either I’m saving myself for the right time in my life, or I don’t have a novel in me.”
“So you think he would have said something to you about the screenplay?”
“Right.”
“I guess that is kind of weird, now that you mention it.”
“More than kind of.”
“Oh, damn.”
Tobin knew what Frank was frowning about without asking. Frank’s wife was waving him over to meet the Ryder Twins. Frank, who had an M.B.A., felt a vague contempt for show-biz people and the Ryder Twins were the worst sort of the breed. Being in their company was like spending time with your maiden aunt while all the other kids were outside playing baseball.
“Well,” Frank said. He left, shaking his head.
For the next twenty minutes Tobin made the rounds. He discovered that Dunphy’s death had made him a sought-after celebrity. Everybody had questions and condolences for him. He ogled breasts, stifled yawns, peed three times (he needed some food), exchanged glares with another set of TV critics (suburban boys they were, overripe and gushy, who seemed to enjoy nothing so much as a bad “campy” science-fiction movie), and found himself staring wistfully at Marcie Pierce, who seemed fetchingly lost, wandering about in her summer prom gown, apparently in search of somebody who wanted to talk about D. W. Griffith.
He was on his way to the john for the fourth time (he was going to have to load up on shrimp when he got back or else his wrist was going to get sore from doing and undoing his zipper) when he saw the slap Joan Dailey gave Peter Larson.
The two had stepped out of the party proper. They didn’t see him as Tobin approached so he watched a minute and a half of their arguing. Then the slap.
“You bastard,” she said. “You know you owe it to me.”
It was then that Larson saw Tobin coming toward them. He shushed her and nodded at Tobin. Joan, beautiful in her brittle way, drew into herself, straightening her shoulders, preparing a social smile.
“Hello, again,” she said to Tobin.
“Hi.”
“We were just having a little chat. Very noisy in there,” Peter Larson said. Larson was a producer who did “serious” middle-brow movies on big themes such as War and Death and Intolerance. A few of them had starred Meryl Streep at her histrionic worst. (Tobin was of the opinion that her appearance in Sophie’s Choice was one of the great unheralded comic performances of all time — “Thing you berry mooch—” Sophie says; gimme a break, Meryl — second only to Jane Fonda’s in Julia, when Fonda played the gushy plaster saint Lillian to the whiskey-ad mannequin of Jason Robards’s Dash.) In the last two years, Tobin and Dunphy had had particularly virulent arguments over the Larson films. Dunphy, in fact, had been one of the few major critics to give Larson good reviews.
“Why don’t we go back in and have another drink, Joan? It’s getting a bit chilly out here,” Larson said. He was a fleshy man, once quite good-looking, but now he was sliding into sedentary middle age, and his charm seemed to depend on the fact that he could rarely be glimpsed without his tuxedo on. Tobin wondered if he wore tuxedo jammies, too.
“No need to hurry off because of me,” Tobin said.
“I don’t know what it is about you, Tobin,” Joan said, “but every time I see you I want to hurry off.”
“Now, now, that’s not necessary,” Larson said, embarrassed.
“After all the terrible things he’s said about your movies.”
“Joan, please...” Larson said.
“It’s all right,” Tobin said. “Joan always has been a terrible drunk.”
Tobin got out of there before she could get another shot off at him.
When he got back into the party room, he saw that he was just in time for some sort of event. The lights went down. A spotlight erupted across a small raised platform in the front of the room. And then there they were — the Gang Girls themselves, wearing “Xmas” bikinis of the tiniest kind, with pieces of mistletoe dangling from their breasts and their panties, Uzi machine guns cradled in their arms.
Tobin had attended a bullfight once and heard the same spontaneous reaction that deafened him now — there the bullfighter had gotten wounded, here sex was served up in a mock-serious way that made the party-goers slightly crazy.
Within moments, the Ryder Twins had joined their creations on stage. “Isn’t this what it’s all about?” Karl Ryder yelled.
“Living in a land that lets you make beautiful money?” Karla Ryder yelled back.
And everybody went bug-fuck. What were they applauding exactly? Tobin wondered. Free enterprise? “Xmas-time”? The outrageousness of Karl and Karla’s hokey-dokey flag-waving number? The Gang Girls shook their mistletoe and their Uzis and the crowd applauded. (Christ, there was Stanley Kauffman pounding the hell out of his hands; would he review the girls’ breasts for The New Republic?)
“Do you have anything to say to this wonderful crowd?” Karla screamed at the girls.
“Just that we LOVE you and want to be your Gang Girls!” shouted the blonde.
“And please you in ANYWAY we can!” shouted the other. Tobin wondered if this was the longest piece of dialogue either of them had ever had to memorize.
He couldn’t take it anymore and so did the only thing he could. Went back into the men’s room to beat his kidney against the rock once again.
He had just flushed the urinal and was headed for the sinks when he saw Tom Starrett standing there combing his hair. Starrett got more mileage out of a comb than anybody had since Edd “Kookie” Byrnes. Starrett, tall, “into” bodybuilding, was a Manhattan attorney who represented many show-biz clients, including Richard Dunphy.
When he saw Tobin in the mirror, Starrett frowned. Good hack that he was, Starrett made his client’s enemies his own. Dunphy and Tobin had not exactly ended up friends.
He had a mane of hair, Starrett did, blond, and he kept combing all the time he talked, combing and angling his face in the mirror like some dumb male model trying to get the best angle for the camera. He looked like a disco’s idea of Adonis.
“He wasn’t going to sign with you again,” Starrett said. “So you probably did the right thing.” He paused dramatically. “Killing him.”