Bandbox (35 page)

Nan had a suggestion for the boss. “Tell Miss LaRoche to send all her flunkies back to the Plaza. Order her to wait for the photographer, right there by the elevator, and don’t even offer her a glass of water.”

Harris looked incredulous.

“Try it,” urged Nan. “Honest.”

Harris buzzed Mrs. Zimmerman and dared to convey the instructions. After a long moment, during which the receptionist covered the telephone’s mouthpiece, Mrs. Z replied: “It’s all right. She’ll wait.”

Harris still had no idea what they had on this Hollywood dame. Newman might be handsome, but surely something more than a good-looking juicer was keeping LaRoche in that chair out there.

The film star waited a full hour and a half for the photographer to show up. Harris never went out to greet her, just checked with Mrs. Zimmerman every so often to see that she was really still there. Finally, at 3:15, Gardiner Arinopoulos, looking quite white, arrived back at the office. “I’m sorry,” he said, with none of his usual volume or any of the deference Rosemary LaRoche’s presence ought to generate. “I’ll go set up in Studio Two.”

“Are you all right?” asked Mrs. Z.

“Yes, it’s all settled,” said the photographer, with cryptic haste.

It was four o’clock by the time Harris walked into the studio to watch the setup. With all the trouble she’d caused these last two months, he had forgotten how blindingly beautiful—and
hard
—Rosemary was. Like a silver hood ornament. Even under the hot overhead lamps she seemed lit more from within than without.

“Hello, Mr. Harris,” she said.

What, he wondered, had happened to “ ’Phat”?

“It’s a pleasure to see you again,” he replied.

“Yeah,” she said, quietly. “A barrel of laughs.” Something had gone out of her, Harris could tell; the remark was a papier-mâché imitation of her old nasty confidence. But even now, nothing could melt the exterior of this broad. Arinopoulos kept ordering his assistant to move the lights even closer, but Rosemary never blinked or broke a sweat.

Only Bonus Corer, whose cover debut had been pushed back a month, was disappointed by her appearance here today. Everyone else on staff, even Sidney Bruck, found an excuse to enter Studio Two for at least a glimpse of the film star—who, to everybody’s surprise, made no objection to the gawking.

Andrew Burn was the only ogler to arrive with actual business on his mind. As the setup continued, he whispered to Harris a reminder of the outrageous seven-cents-per-copy skim the actress had demanded.

Harris tapped him on the arm and whispered, “Watch this.” Over the groaning movement of stanchions and dollies, he called out to Rosemary: “Wonderful of you to do this for nothing more than the chance to promote
Chained
with our readers.”

Rosemary kept gazing straight into the lights. She didn’t say a word.

Harris, like a fascinated matador, tried to see if he could provoke her.

“It’s a good arrangement, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said, not shifting her eyes. “It’s swell.”

Burn was impressed.

“Gardiner,” called Harris, “are you almost ready?”

“Yes, I believe I am,” said the distracted photographer, without a syllable of emphasis.

“Good,” said Harris, “because I’ve got something to add to your composition. Clear the studio! Everybody not needed here get out!”

Arinopoulos looked perplexed, but not the least bit violated artistically.

Harris picked up the telephone. “Hazel, get the kid.”

It took just five minutes to bring John Shepard from the Commodore up to the Graybar’s fourteenth floor, during which interval Rosemary managed to hold both her tongue and her pose. But then she saw Harold Teen come in, wearing Hart, Schaffner & Marx, a six-dollar pair of blue-striped suspenders, and a cowlick.

“Okay, Shep,” said Harris, “stand next to her.”

“What
is
this?” Rosemary at last allowed herself to say.

“I want you to kiss his cheek,” said Harris, “while with your left hand you muss his hair, and with your right you pull on one of his braces. Get ready to shoot on the count of three, Gardiner.”

John Shepard, thinking of how his mother would scold his pa whenever his suspenders even
showed
in front of a woman, swallowed nervously. Rosemary had the expression of a beautiful, lethal beast whose tranquilizing dart was beginning to wear off. A couple of spectators actually took a step backwards.

But Harris ignored her look of imminent refusal. “Shep,” he ordered, “remember to let your eyes show your excitement.” Then, to guarantee the necessary result, he used the line Nan O’Grady had delphically suggested for this moment: “Remember, you’re being kissed by a movie star, not a grandmother, right?”

Rosemary narrowed her eyes.

“DILATE!” cried Gardiner Arinopoulos, whose professional reflexes were at last responding.

With her right heel Rosemary gave the stool she was sitting on a little kick. “This isn’t what—”

“One, two,
three
!” shouted Harris.

And then it was the turn of Rosemary’s professional reflexes to respond. As Arinopoulos’s assistant lit the flash powder, she gave it everything she had—a full, one-hundred-percent blaze of authentic
beauty and false passion—the same as she would for any nellie director who stood between her and a paycheck. She leaned in and planted her blood-red lips on Shep’s cheek. The boy’s eyes popped with more candlepower than the blazing magnesium.

“Again!” cried Harris, six times, until the air was full of fumes and they had the shot. By the time Arinopoulos came out from under the camera’s hood, Rosemary had covered Shep’s cheek with more lipstick than she’d smeared over Stuart two weeks ago, prior to Nan’s rescue.

The smudges gave Shep a look of dissolute innocence, and Richard Lord decided to keep them, unairbrushed, on the cover that was soon laid out to proclaim:

THAT’S OUR BOY!

FILM STAR WELCOMES B’BOX SUBSCRIBER HOME FROM KIDNAP ORDEAL

A Special Investigation by Max Stanwick

President Coolidge threw out the first baseball of the season four days later, but a week after that, on Tuesday, April 17, it seemed as if the long, implacable winter had returned yet again: snow flurries were falling in New York.

Inside the Fifth Avenue Child’s, Stuart Newman ate breakfast and read the paper with his overcoat on. Halfway through his bacon and eggs, he found an item about Rosemary LaRoche. She’d finally returned
to the
Wyoming Wilderness
set, and agreed to pay a fine. Her recent absence was being attributed to romance, the most crowd-pleasing rumor of which involved a possible reconciliation with Howard Kenyon, who was thought to be in the East, “pining for her in an off-season Provincetown hotel.”

Newman was still smiling over this last bit of intelligence when he heard his name being called.

“I was on my way to the library,” said Becky, who came in flushed with the cold. “I saw you through the window.” She had promised to look up something on the Scottish Chaucerians for her boyfriend, but she accepted Newman’s invitation to sit down.

He looked awfully well, thought Becky, if not quite so glamorous. The circles were gone from under his eyes, and he’d put on some weight. The tabletop might even be hiding the beginnings of a paunch. In any case, he appeared more relaxed than she could remember seeing him; the cup of coffee beside his scrambled eggs seemed for once like coffee instead of an antidote.

“Things pretty frantic over there?” he asked.

Becky laughed. “I take it you mean the magazine, not the library. Yes, they are,” she said, though she was sure Nan had kept him informed of everything going on. “I’m not certain what’s holding up Max’s story,” she added, her expression turning grave as soon as she mentioned it. Harris and Spilkes had said nothing about the delay and, unwilling to let their western caper become the basis for renewed daily proximity, Becky hadn’t allowed herself to ask Cuddles about the latest developments—though in fact she’d been hoping he’d invite her to Manking, where over two plates of what he liked to call the “feline duck” they could ponder the great Shep gamble he’d set in motion.

“Well, at least you got your cover shot,” said Newman, whose voice startled Becky out of her revery. “I still don’t know how you managed that,” he continued, smiling through his fib while silently
reflecting on all Nan had done for him. He was so grateful, so proud of her; it seemed a shame not to be able to reveal the story of her sleuthing. He settled for telling Becky how the two of them had gone last night to see the
Greenwich Village Follies
at the Winter Garden. “Blossom Seeley sang, and Dr. Rockwell was the comic,” Newman explained. “I thought he’d be a little broad for Nan’s taste, but I’ve never seen her laugh so hard.”

He looked like a hearth-happy man, daydreaming of home. Becky hadn’t guessed that things had moved quite so fast and favorably for him and Nan, but her deduction of it now made her feel less happy for Newman than anxious about herself. The space around her own half-established hearth had seemed a little too warm last night—stuffy, in fact. Daniel had put Palestrina on the Victrola, and the two of them had listened to the set of four records straight through without speaking a word to each other—not, in her case, from music appreciation; just from having nothing to say. Hearing about Newman’s night at the
Follies
, she knew she would rather have been there, though it wasn’t the sort of thing to which one easily invited Daniel.

“I’ve got to run,” said Becky, as soon as she found herself thinking of just who
would
have been the ideal date for such an occasion.

Daisy sat by herself in the fact-checkers’ bull pen, reading the same item Newman had about Rosemary LaRoche. Oh, to abscond from the stage-set of her own life, if only for a week! But there was no escaping the terrible pressures she was under. On Thursday the judge would have to sentence Gianni Roma, and right after that—having failed to get the prosecutors to drop the case—he’d have to begin getting ready for the trial of the Juniper Park foreman. Poor Francis was now like a crooked referee waiting for the opening bell. The messengers had made it plain that the judge’s securing of bail for the defendant was regarded, by The Brain himself, as a less than sufficient effort.

The messengers had also been talking about events “out in California,” which she assumed had something to do with Cuddles’ interest in that ranch hideout and the rediscovery of that attractive boy from Indiana. But she didn’t know much more about the situation. Max’s current piece, said to be about all this, would not, she’d been informed, be passing through the Research Department—on account of its “special sensitivity.” Daisy had seen no sign of it, or for that matter of Max himself. Well, she already had too much to do for the May issue as it was, what with Chip always off shopping, instead of being at his desk.

She looked around for him now but saw only Allen Case, who was passing through the corridor and, to her amazement,
whistling
, without the least bit of faltering between notes. He was also eating a doughnut, food she’d once heard him condemn, at Mrs. Washington’s coffee wagon, for being “f-fried in others’ f-fat.” He appeared to be on some sort of holiday from himself.

Allen was, in fact, still so happy that he’d quite forgotten any culinary crimes to which the doughnut might be accessory. Last Monday, Arinopoulos had furnished proof that the surviving warehouse animals were on their way, via trucks equipped with the latest in ventilation, to the San Rafael Valley, where they would be cared for inside Isidore Mazzaferro’s nature preserve. The photographer had arranged, in a series of telegrams, for the superannuated mobster to take charge of this little group of creatures he claimed to have discovered living in APPALLING conditions when he was out in Long Island City to shoot the mechanical marvel of the Silvercup sign.

At the other end of the floor, Joe Harris sat in a state of nervousness beyond any Daisy was enduring. Chewing his nails, he still waited for news of what had happened out in California. So far there had been only an abundance of rumor: the cops had made arrests and
were on their way back to New York with Rothstein’s henchmen; no, the local authorities had not allowed extradition; actually, the police had gotten all the way across the country and then failed to arrest anyone; in fact, despite Boylan’s promises, they’d never gone out there in the first place. Every hour it was something else. Had he been double-crossed? All Harris knew for certain was that the May issue, already printed, included a picture of Boylan and a vaguely phrased but still declarative paragraph about how his boys in blue had made masterful use of Max Stanwick’s detection and brought Shep’s tormentors back to the bar of New York justice.

If the cops
had
gone to California, and
had
made arrests, and
had
gotten extradition, there were now three days left for them to get back here. Actually, only two, until Harris would no longer be able to stop the issue from leaving the Connecticut printing plant for newsstands all over town.

He was looking up at his picture of Yvette, whose countenance offered no odds on the outcome, when the telephone rang.

“Congratulations,” said Betty.

“Thank God!” responded Harris. “I don’t think I’d have survived waiting till Friday.”

“What do you mean? You’ve got to.”

Confused, Harris said nothing.

“You and Jimmy are both nominated for Distinguished Achievement in a new men’s category. The awards breakfast is Friday. Read the memo. It’s got to be somewhere on Hazel’s desk.”

“Oh,” sighed Harris. “The GMEs.”

“That’s all you can say?” Betty, who remembered his up-all-night cravings for these awards, hardly knew what to do. “You need to call Jimmy and offer congratulations” was all she could think to suggest.

Harris barely heard her. No GME was going to provide relief. Oldcastle wouldn’t be impressed with a whole row of the silver-pencil
trophies now that the competition, and maybe the cops, were closing in on Joe Harris.