Bandbox (32 page)

Cuddles himself, despite his pouting, continued to seem energetic, even hopeful this morning. He’d seen a good omen in their having found a Mexican restaurant as awful as Manking.

After making two more of the turns on Daisy’s map, Becky noticed a change in terrain—fewer wildflowers and more chapparal. She could also see a line of fir trees atop a distant ridge. Before long she and Cuddles spotted the ranch house, a big split-log pile with mortar like the chalk stripes on one of Rothstein’s suits. The whole effect was so native that one instantly knew it belonged to an Easterner who’d never been on a horse. Two German shepherds on the porch looked as imported as the architecture. One of them slept while the other—with a suggestion of bared teeth—barked to beat the band.

“Well,” said Cuddles, “I’ve got a pretty good idea which one’s Hannelore and which one’s Siegfried.”

Her hands shaking a little, Becky managed to park the Ford. A minute later the door was answered by a handsome cowboy in dungarees and a Stetson. He took off the hat to say, “Ma’am?”

Cuddles made note of Becky’s little swoon. “So that’s what it takes,” he muttered.

Becky thanked the cowboy, who went to get his associate, “Mr. Jones.” Dressed in an expensive suit—maybe one of the two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar numbers from Wallach’s that Rothstein had made his men wear after getting a grip on that haberdashery—Jones approached Becky and Cuddles while straightening the polka-dot handkerchief in his breast pocket.

Becky explained their geologic purpose.

Mr. Jones smiled. “ ’Course, you don’t never know how many bodies was inside the dam
before
it busted.”

Becky and Cuddles each responded with something closer to a gulp than a laugh.

“You and your friend don’t make small talk?” asked Mr. Jones. He seemed to be weighing suspicion of them against the prudence of complying with the state’s rock cops. “Okay,” he said, finally. “But don’t take too long. And no wandering inside the house.”

The “equipment” Cuddles and Becky had brought along consisted of several beheaded knitting needles, two slide rules, a package of litmus paper and a few small, impressively labeled bottles that actually held sarsaparilla and ginger ale. Cuddles had counted on the ranch-house occupants’ being less than highly educated, and his assumption seemed borne out by their lack of any questions about the “soil sampling” he and Becky now performed in close proximity to the house. The two of them managed a glance or two through the windows, but saw nothing of interest except an old copy of
Bandbox
inside a small room at the back. Even that probably signified nothing more than what Andrew Burn liked to call the magazine’s “excellent penetration” of the western states.

Becky once more started to think the whole mission might be crazy—Cuddles was starting to display unmistakable signs of belief in his geological efforts—but then, halfway up the closest ridge, only a couple of hundred yards to the north, she could see a young man, clearly not to the saddle born, sitting wobbly atop a bay horse. She nudged Cuddles.

“Yep,” he said, shading his eyes and taking a look. “Yonder.” He regarded the cowboys and cattle just ahead of the boy they now both recognized as Shep. “Jesus, that longhorned thing at the head of the parade would scare even Case.” He and Becky quickly turned away from the riders, though there was little chance Shep would recognize the two of them, clad as they were in a pith helmet and wide-brimmed gardening hat.

“Shouldn’t we let him know?” whispered Becky, beginning to feel guilty about their plan.

“Nope,” said Cuddles. “Can’t risk his blurting stuff out before the real cavalry gets here.” That, as he’d explained last night over dinner, would be Max and Gardiner Arinopoulos, whom they now could summon to write and photograph a piece that would prove Shep’s whereabouts and make
Bandbox
his heroic rescuer.

Back inside the ranch house, Cuddles pronounced its surrounding earth “tiptop topsoil, rock-solid safe,” to Mr. Jones, who responded by saying, with a snort, “Yeah, a regular fuckin’ Gibraltar,” perhaps a reference to Rothstein’s shaky current affairs.

A few hours later, back in Los Angeles, Cuddles and Becky wired Max, in his own idiom, at the Graybar Building in New York:

By late morning the following Monday, the radio was forecasting the biggest-volume stock session ever; General Motors, the lead bull, looked ready to crash past $200 a share. Harris listened to the news in his office, wishing that Oldcastle Publications were publicly traded. A dizzying run-up of its stock might distract Hi from the corporate soft spot
Bandbox
had suddenly become. Burn had just been in to report that Knox Hats was forsaking
Bandbox
for
Cutaway
. And before that, news had arrived that Jimmy was about to land Tunney for a fashion spread. Christ, down here on fourteen, Fine was still fooling around with those Golden Gloves amateurs.

Throughout his frustrated musings on these events, Harris’s face—with walnut shells over his eyes—remained under the ultraviolet lamp Betty had installed to the left of his desk. His troubles were giving him a bad pallor, she insisted, which would only compound his troubles by its suggestion of beleaguerment and weakness. Harris himself had always thought he’d look better with a
beard, but sporting one would only further mark him as a man of the past, an appearance to be avoided at all costs right now.

“Mr. Harris?”

He could hear Nan O’Grady knocking on the frosted glass. Where was Hazel, who should be out there saving him from such a thing? Oh, if only the copy chief were coming in to complain of a
schvantz
in Max’s latest piece! Such an objection would mean there was a piece to complain
about
, whereas Max had so far been everywhere—from Shep’s old frat house to the New York recruiting office of the French Foreign Legion—and come up with nothing. A few days ago he’d disappeared altogether. How much time could be left until the magazine publicly had to give up on the kid and look even more foolish than it did already?

Harris at last raised his head; the walnut shells fell from his eyes. “Yes, Miss O’Grady?”

Nan entered but did not sit down. “You may want to put in a call to the Plaza. Rosemary LaRoche has been there for a week.”

Harris turned off the lamp. “Our dealings with Miss LaRoche are finished. Miss Walter struck out with her in Hollywood, trying to pinch hit for your friend Mr. Newman.”

Nan fought to control her blushing. “Miss LaRoche has agreed to do the story and the cover.”

Harris raised a skeptical eyebrow in the direction of his newly tanned forehead.

“I’m not at liberty to tell you why,” said Nan, who’d decided it was best not to reveal the family history that had brought Rosemary low, or the several days of moping the star had done before realizing there was no way of refusing Nan’s demands—not without having herself and Baby Waldo all over the pink pages of the
Graphic
.

“Okay,” said Harris, slowly. “Get Newman back here from the
Presbyterian Post
or wherever he’s gone. Tell him we can wipe the slate clean.”

“Catholic World,”
said Nan. “And I’m afraid he’s not quite ready to return here, certainly not for Rosemary LaRoche. Who, by the way, has agreed to let Becky write the story. Is she on her way back?”

“I don’t know where
anyone
is!” cried Harris. “
She’s
disappeared.
Houlihan’s
gone.
Stanwick
is gone. And your own Romeo can’t bring himself to write about a movie goddess who won’t keep her hands off him!”

“If you still want this story—”

“Of course I want this story!”

“Then hold Stuart’s job for him. And send Becky to the Plaza whenever she gets back. Miss LaRoche won’t be going anywhere, believe me.”

At the same hour, out in California, Mr. Jones was banging on a cuckoo clock. “Sing, ya bastard,” he urged the tiny mechanical bird, once he’d coaxed it to emerge, twenty minutes early, from behind the little handcarved doors. But the artificial creature held its tongue, and the house-proud Mr. Jones had to propose an alternative delight to his two visitors: “How about gettin’ a picture of the best rug?” The Mexican housemaid, he explained, kept their polar bear pelt, which lay on the floor of a bedroom once used by Rothstein himself, absolutely snow-white.

Max had been acquainted with Mr. Jones (real name Ivan Jacobs) even before doing his profile of The Brain. Until this morning’s conversation turned to interior decoration, they’d been chatting about “Diamond Joe” Esposito, whose murder was being investigated in Chicago. The coroner’s office said he’d sustained fifty-eight shotgun wounds; a police source put the count at sixty-one. Either way, it was a shame.

Max had arrived here at the ranch house with Gardiner Arinopoulos and informed Mr. Jones that Rothstein was so pleased with
the story about himself in
Bandbox
that he’d agreed to allow some of his domains—the Fifth Avenue apartment, this ranch, a farmhouse in New England—to be photographed by Mr. Arinopoulos for Oldcastle’s
Manse
. Max would supply a little bit of text, strictly atmospheric, to run alongside the pictures.

“You know, you really nailed him,” said Mr. Jones, full of admiration. “Right down to his shoe size.” Far from seeing any reason to doubt Stanwick’s stated purpose in being here, Mr. Jones was eager to get into the pictures Arinopoulos was already shooting of the tasteful, rustic decor. When the photographer mentioned his new penchant for man-and-machine shots, the obliging host asked if he could pose with the automatic weapon behind one of the couches.

He pointed out that the ranch also had “some nice animals who could say cheese for ya.” Arinopoulos emphatically declined the opportunity.

But Max overruled his colleague. “Sure he’d like it.” He shot Arinopoulos a stern glance, reminding him of the actual, documentary reason for their trip here. Miffed, but compliant, the photographer announced that he would look at the creatures “RIGHT now.” A cowboy named Daryl was summoned to take him up to the little wildlife preserve over the ridge and introduce him to Mr. Mazzaferro.

“Neither one of us will need much time,” Max assured Mr. Jones. “Mr. Arinopoulos works fast, and if you can give me the run of the place for about an hour—I might even drive around—I should be able to soak up the scene, ignite my impressions.”

“Absotively posilutely,” said Mr. Jones. “You’re the master, Max.” His hospitable manner clouded over for only a moment, when he seemed to remember something. “Daryl,” he called out to the cowboy, who’d started shouldering Arinopoulos’s equipment. “Is the kid around?”

“He’s out for a walk with one of the dogs. He ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

“Okay,” Mr. Jones said to the visitors. “Knock yourselves out.”

Back outside, Max could well believe from the look of the fencing that Shep wasn’t going anywhere, at least not without a little help. For the next forty-five minutes or so, the writer was all business—seriously surveying the sage, no shilly-shallying in the chapparal. He wasn’t bothered that Houlihan had been the one to crack the case, so long as the rescue and the writing were left to himself. Meanwhile, Arinopoulos took pictures of the topography and the animals and then nearly every cranny of the ranch house. Max was glad to get away from the photographer, whose random fortissimos had effected a queasy-making syncopation with his own alliterations on the long days of train travel out here.

The shutterbug had required no persuasion to accept the assignment, when Max advised him he was needed in California. Arinopoulos had gotten tremendously excited, dashing off for a minute and then returning to Max’s office (Paulie’s, actually) with a fistful of tearsheets from an old
Manse
article on Oldcastle’s ranch in New Mexico. The photographer had shot the rustic retreat a couple of years back, and thought he could produce something even better with another crack at another ranch house. Max took the pages and stuffed them into the drawer, reminding GA that on this new assignment, for all that they’d like some vivacious visuals, proof trumped artistry. What’s more, until they got what they were going out there for, ’Phat and Spilkes were to be kept in the dark, by Houlihan’s say-so.

Now, a week later, Max drove the ranch’s pebbly paths with great care, looking back every so often to make sure nobody went into the house without his noticing. It was wearying work, until suddenly—just ahead, on a sandy stretch Max had already been over twice—thar she blew: a boy and his dog. Shep and a German shepherd.

Max pulled the car even with him. “Kid,” he said, “tell the pooch to make a beeline back to the bunkhouse. You’re coming with me.”

When neither creature, two-footed or four-, seemed ready to budge
from its confusion, Max addressed the dog directly: “On, King! Go see what’s churnin’ on the chuck wagon.”

John had been figuring he was in for one more pointless ride or roughing up. But when he heard the stranger’s canine command, he realized this wasn’t a stranger at all. “Mr. Stanwick?” he cried, struggling to hold down the volume.

“Sssssssh,” said Max, at some length, enjoying the sound’s extended action. “Yeah, kid, it’s me.”

The young man began babbling out his story at the same giddy clip he’d spoken during his days in New York. But Max managed to shut him down: “Not now, my heroic little Hoosier. Tie your tongue and take the trunk.”

With John packed inside, just the way he’d departed Oldcastle’s penthouse, Max drove the car back down to the ranch house. Making sure they were alone, he gave the high sign to Arinopoulos, who was in the process of shooting a chromium thermometer fixed to a windowsill. Max let Shep out of the trunk for no more than a minute, just long enough for Arinopoulos to photograph him beside the house, and then against a backdrop of mountains, each time holding a copy of today’s newspaper. Max trusted that the pictures’ elements would combine into something more convincing than Macfadden’s Composographs.