Get Real (8 page)

“Be fair, Doug,” Marcy said.

“I don’t want to be fair.”

“We don’t tell them the story line ahead of time,” Marcy reminded him, “so they won’t be tempted to play something they’re
not supposed to know yet. Kirby didn’t find out until today.”

“That he’s gay?”

“That he’s supposed to fall in love with Darlene.”

Doug let out a long moan and then just sat there, jaw slack, shoulders sagging.

Marcy, hesitant, said, “How did
The Gang’s All Here
go?”

“What? Oh.” The thought of that bunch restored just a bit of his spirits. Sitting straighter, he said, “The first meeting
was wonderful. We’re gonna have a winner there, boys and girls. But there’s nothing for us to do on
that
score, not now. The Finch family is our problem today, so don’t even think about the gang. We won’t hear a word from them
for a couple of weeks.”

N
INE P.M.
The Holland Tunnel-bound traffic along Varick Street moved more freely now, and two groups of men, pedestrians, a trio and
a duet, converged from north and south toward the GR Development building. As the groups came together on the sidewalk in
front of the metal fire-door entrance to the building, greeting one another as though this were a happy coincidence, three
miles to the north Manny Felder took many Weegee-style photos of the back room at the OJ while out front Roy Ombelen nursed
his white wine and listened with growing astonishment to the regulars discuss the possible meanings of the letters D, V, and
D, and farther east, in midtown, Doug Fairkeep, unable to keep his appointment with the other two at the OJ due to the revelation
of the sexual orientation of Kirby Finch, brainstormed with his production assistants, while growing stacks of Dunkin’ Donuts
coffee containers kept a kind of score.

Andy Kelp liked locks and locks liked Andy Kelp. While the others milled around and chatted to cover his activities, he bent
to the two locks in this door, bearing with him picks and tweezers and narrow little metal spatulas.

Judson took the opportunity to ask Dortmunder, “You think we’re gonna find that cash down here?”

“I think,” Dortmunder said, “Doug has seen cash somewhere and it has to be somewhere he works. The two places we know where
he works are that midtown office building and here. Maybe they wouldn’t want bribe money laying around the office, so we’ll
see what we come up with down here.”

“
There
we go,” Kelp said, and straightened, and pulled open the door.

Pitch-black inside. They all piled in, and only when the door was shut did flashlights appear, two of them, one held by Kelp
and one by Dortmunder, both hooded by electrical tape to limit their beams. The flashlights bobbed around, then closed on
the iron interior staircase along the rear part of the left wall. At this level, it rose from front to back.

Holding the light on the stairs, Kelp moved off across the crowded garage toward it, followed by Tiny, who used his hips and
knees to clear a path through the underbrush of vehicles. Judson went next, then Stan, who said over his shoulder to Dortmunder,
bringing up the rear with the other light, “This reminds me of Maximillian.”

“I know what you mean,” Dortmunder said, Maximillian being the owner and operator of Maximillian’s Used Cars, a fellow known
to purchase rolling stock of dubious provenance, no questions asked. He didn’t pay much, but he paid more than the goods on
offer had cost the offerer.

“A fella,” Stan said, “could switch the cars around in here, waltz out with one a day for a week, they’d never notice.”

“You could be right.”

Kelp had reached the stairs and started up. The others followed, and when Kelp got to the second floor he turned to his right,
tried to open the door there, and it was locked.

As the others crowded up after him, wanting to know the cause of the delay, he studied this blank door in front of him and
said, “That’s weird.”

“What’s weird?” everybody wanted to know.

“It’s locked.”

“Unlock it,” everybody suggested.

“I can’t,” Kelp said. “That’s what’s weird. It isn’t a regular door lock, it’s a palm-print thing. There’s no way to get it
open unless it recognizes your palm.”

Judson said, “Down on the street they put a little simple lock you went through like butter, and up here they’ve got a high-tech
lock?”

“Like I said,” Kelp said. “It’s weird.”

Tiny, next nearest to Kelp, reached past him to thump the door, which made a sound like thumping a tree. “That’s not going
anywhere,” he said.

Dortmunder, well back in the pack and therefore unable to see clearly for himself, called up the stairs, “Then that’s the
one we gotta get into.”

“Can’t be done, John,” Kelp called back.

Judson said, “What about from upstairs?”

“What, down through the ceiling?” Kelp shook his head and his flashlight beam. “This time,” he said, “we don’t want to leave
any marks we were here.”

“I can’t
see
anything,” Dortmunder complained.

“Okay,” Kelp said. “John, we’ll go on up the next flight.”

Everybody thudded up the stairs, which from the second to the third floor reversed and rose from back to front, and when at
last Dortmunder got to the impassable door he stopped to frown at it all over, to look for hinges to be removed—no, they were
on the inside—and to press his palm to the circle of glass at waist height. But the door didn’t know him, and nothing happened.

The others had gone on up to the third floor so, abandoning the door, Dortmunder trudged on up after them. At the top, he
found them all lolling around at their ease in what looked like a dayroom combined with an office. A few sofas and soft chairs
and small tables were scattered around this part of the building from front to back, with filing cabinets and stacks of cardboard
mover’s cartons along the inside wall. Somebody had even switched on a floor lamp by one of the sofas, making a warm soft
cozy glow.

“John,” Kelp said, from the depths of a green vinyl easy chair, “take a load off.”

“I will.” Dortmunder did, and said, “It’s that door, that’s what we want.”

Tiny said, “Not without demolition.”

“Tiny’s right,” Kelp said. “We can’t get into it, John. Not tonight. Not without doing some damage. And right now, we don’t
want to do damage.”

“We want to know what’s in there,” Dortmunder said. “We need to know, what’s the setup.”

“Won’t happen,” Tiny said.

Dortmunder took from his pocket the drugstore receipt on which he’d written the firm names in this building. “What we got
on this floor,” he said, “is Knickerbocker Storage. It’s all storage areas the other side of that wall.”

Stan said, “There’s a john down at the end there.”

“Fine.” Dortmunder consulted his list. “Up one flight, that’s Scenery Stars, that’s the people gonna make the sets, like the
imitation OJ. And up top is GR Development, their rehearsal space for their reality shows. The question is, what the hell
is the thing
down
one flight? It’s called Combined Tool. What would that be? If your name is Combined Tool, who are you?”

Stan said, “Do they make tools?”

“Where? How? That’s not a factory.”

At a side table, Judson had found phone books, and now he turned from consulting them to say, “Not in any phone book.”

Dortmunder looked at him. “Not at all?”

“Not in the white pages under Combined Tool, not in the yellow pages under Tools-Electric, Tools-Rentals
or
Tools-Repairing & Parts.”

Stan said, “So who the hell are they?”

“You got a company gets big enough,” Dortmunder said, “it’s got a dark side.”

“But it’s still a company,” Kelp said, “so it’s still got to have records and meetings and a history of itself.”

“Down in there,” Dortmunder said.

Stan said, “But what would
Doug
be doing in there? He’s not that important. That door doesn’t know
his
palm print.”

“He’s close to the operation,” Dortmunder said. “He works sometimes out of this same building. He works for them, and they
trust him, and he happened to see something once.”

“You open a door in New York,” Tiny said, “you never know what’s in there.”

Rousing himself from his easy chair, Kelp said, “We might as well take off now. We’re not gonna do anything else in here tonight.”

Dortmunder was reluctant to go, with the mystery of Combined Tool still unsolved, but he knew Kelp was right. Another day.
“I’ll he back,” he vowed.

As they trooped back down the stairs, Stan said, “I think I’ll pick up a car along the way. Won’t take a minute.”

B
Y
M
ONDAY
, Doug knew he just had to get out of Putkin’s Corners,
Stand
or no
Stand.
He’d been here since Friday, struggling with the problem of Kirby Finch’s inversity—if that was a word—and he could feel
himself on the very brink of going native. Even Marcy was beginning to look good.

Fortunately, he had Darlene Looper on hand to remind him what a proper object of lust was supposed to look and sound like.
A talented if unagented actress, Darlene was a corn-fed beauty who, like for instance Lana Turner long before her, could show
glints of a darker side. It was that darker side Doug was determined to tap into.

She was off
The Stand
now, no salvaging that situation. But how about
Burglars Burgling
(tryout)? Given the right makeup and wardrobe, Doug could just see her as a continuation of the long line of blonde sexpot
gun molls extending back to before movies discovered sound. Give her a short slit skirt, fishnet pantyhose, and a nice small
silver designer pistol slipped under the black frilly garter on her thigh, and there wasn’t a felony on the books a man wouldn’t
be happy to commit with her. Doug saw her as the candy on the arm of Andy; surely
he
wasn’t gay. So back to New York Darlene would come, traveling in Doug’s Yukon with himself and Marcy. Marcy in the backseat,
of course.

None of which dealt with the real problem that had forced him to drive one hundred miles north from the city last Friday.
Now that this year’s story line for
The Stand
had been fatally wounded by young Kirby Finch, what could replace it? What was their throughline story for the year, culminating
in spring’s sweeps week?

Many useless solutions were proposed, starting with the all-night brainbender session at Get Real on Thursday. For instance,
Josh: “Kirby decides to become a priest. The family’s ambivalent, and just when they’re coming around, just when they’re learning
acceptance, he decides he’d rather stay with the family, at least until the farmstand succeeds.” Doug: “No.”

Or Edna: “Kirby’s big brother, Lowell, the intellectual, carrying too heavy a load of books out of the library, trips and
falls and is paralyzed. There’s one slim chance an operation will give him back the use of his arms and legs, and at the end
of the season, where we were going to do the wedding, he walks!” Doug: “No.”

Or Marcy, Friday morning, on the trip up: “We go with the reality. Kirby comes out of the closet.” Doug: “He isn’t
in
the closet, that’s the problem.” Marcy: “He comes out to his family. They don’t know what to do, what to think, and they
finally decide blood is thicker than prejudice, and they’ll stand by him. Everybody learns a wonderful lesson in tolerance.”
Doug; “No.” Marcy: “Doug, it could be very real.” Doug: “But it couldn’t be reality, Marcy, reality shows do not solve society’s
problems. They don’t even
consider
society’s problems. Reality is escapist entertainment at its most pure and mindless.”

All weekend the suggestions kept coming in. Harry Finch, father of the fairy: “What I say is, we bring that Darlene back.
Turns out, she’s my daughter. Wrong side of the blanket, you know. Family’s all upset, thinks she’s trying to horn in on the
success of
The Stand,
they finally come around, see she’s just a poor lost girl, needs a family, at the end we all hug and kiss and have a big
celebration.” Doug: “Let me think about that, Harry,” which is how you say no to a civilian.

Finally, Monday morning, when Doug went along the walk from his motel room to Darlene’s room to see if she was packed and
ready for the trip, he found her appropriately dressed but seated on the bed among her unpacked goods, frowning into space.

“Darlene? What’s up?”

She looked startled out of her reverie. “I was just thinking,” she said.

“We gotta get going, Darlene.”

“Oh, I know that. But I was thinking about the problem here, and I was wondering if something that happened to a friend of
mine might be any use.”

Another “solution” to the problem, eh? Well, might as well listen. “Sure,” he said. “Go ahead.”

“Her folks eloped,” Darlene said. “You know, years ago, just before they had her. I think it was gonna be pretty close, which
came first.”

“That happens sometimes,” Doug agreed.

“Only if you’re not paying attention,” she said, and shrugged. “Years and years later,” she told him, “they found out, that
preacher wasn’t any preacher at all. He was a fake.”

Interested despite himself, Doug said, “The one who married them?”

“Except they wasn’t married,” Darlene said. “You know, they had six kids by then, most of them half grown up, they didn’t
know what to do.”

“A tricky situation,” Doug agreed.

“At first,” she said, “they was just gonna go to some city hall somewhere, get married on the sly, not tell anybody about
anything. But then they thought it over, they decided, the first time they had to run away and elope, didn’t have any proper
family wedding, so now they could. Get the whole family in on it, great big church wedding, big party, the girls were the
bridesmaids, the youngest boy was the ringbearer, it was the best time anybody ever had anywhere.”

“Darlene!” Doug cried. “You’re a genius!” And he flung himself on her on the bed in a massive embrace that was almost entirely
pure.