Uncollected Stories 2003 (22 page)

C
onklin’s first, snap, judgement was that this man, Michael Briggs,
was not the sort of fellow who usually sort psychiatric help. He was
dressed in dark corduroy pants, a neat blue shirt, and a sport-coat that
matched – sort of – both. His hair was long, almost shoulder-length.
His face was sunburned. His large hands were chapped, scabbed in a
number of places, and when he reached over the desk to shake, he felt
the rasp of rough calluses.

“Hello, Mr Briggs.”
“Hello.” Briggs smiled – a small ill-at-ease smile. His eyes moved
about the room and centered on the couch – it was an eye movement
Conklin had seen before, but it was no one Conklin associated with
people who had been in therapy before – they knew the couch would be
there. This Briggs with this work-hardened hands and sunburned face
was looking for the profession’s most well-known symbol – the one
they saw in the movies and the magazine cartoons.
“You’re a construction worker?” Conklin asked.
“Yes.” Briggs sat down carefully across the desk.
“You want to talk to me about your son?”
“Yes.”
“Jeremy.”
“Yes.”
A little silence fell. Conklin, used to using silence as a tool, was less
uncomfortable with it than Briggs obviously was. Mrs Adrian, his nurse
and receptionist, had taken the call five days before, and had said Briggs
sounded distraught – a man who had control, she said, but by inches.
Conklin’s specialty was not child psychology and his schedule was full,
but Nancy Adrian’s assessment of the man behind the bare facts typed
onto the printed form in front of him had intrigued him. Michael Briggs
was forty-five, a construction worker who lived in Lovinger, New York,
a town forty miles north of New York City. He was a widower. He
wanted to consult with Conklin about his son, Jeremy, who was seven.
Nancy had promised him a call-back by the end of the day.
“Tell him to try Milton Abrams in Albany,” Conklin had said, sliding
the form back across the desk toward her.
“Can I suggest you see him once before you decide that?” Nancy
Adrian asked.
Conklin looked at her, then leaned back in his chair and took out his
cigarette case. Each morning he filled it with exactly ten Winston 100s
– when they were gone, he was done smoking until the next day. It was
not as good as quitting; he knew that. It was just a truce he had been
able to reach. Now it was the end of the day – no more patients,
anyway – and he deserved a cigarette. And Nancy’s reaction to Briggs
intrigued him. Such suggestions as this were not unheard of, but they
were rare…and the woman’s intuitions were good.
“Why?” he asked, lighting the cigarette.
“Well, I suggested Milton Abrams – he’s close to where this man
Briggs is and he likes kids – but Briggs knows him a little – he worked
on a construction crew that built a pool addition at Abrams’ country
house two years ago. He says he would go to him if you still
recommended it after hearing what he has to say, but that he wanted to
tell a total stranger first and get an opinion. He said ‘I’d tell a priest if I
was Catholic’.”
“Um.”
“He said ‘I just want to know what’s going on with my kid – if it’s me
or what.’ He sounded aggressive about it, but he also sounded very,
very scared.”
“The boy is – ”
“Seven.”
“Um. And you want me to see him.”
She shrugged, then grinned. She was forty-five, but when she grinned
she still looked twenty. “He sounded…concrete. As though he could
tell a clear story with no shadows. Phenomena, not ephemera.”
“Quote me all you want – I still won’t raise your salary.”
She wrinkled her nose at him, then grinned. In his way he loved
Nancy Adrian – once, over drinks, he had called her the Della Street of
psychiatry, and she had almost hit him. But he valued her insights, and
here came one now, clear and simple:
“He sounded like a man who thinks there’s something physically
wrong with his son. Except he called the office of a New York
psychiatrist. An
expensive
New York psychiatrist. And he sounded
scared.”
“All right. Enough.” He butted the cigarette – not without regret.
“Book him next week – Tuesday or Wednesday – around four.”
And here it was, Wednesday afternoon – not around four but 4:03 on the
nose – and here was Mr Briggs sitting opposite him with his
workreddened hands folded in his lap and looking warily at Conklin.

From a 1986 anthology by various authors: King had to contribute a one-page
story that ended with a pun; his punchline consequently became the title of the
compilation.

It seems like in 1995 or so the pollution in the atmosphere of London
has started to kill off all the rooks. And the city government is very
concerned because the rooks roosting on the cornices and the odd little
crannies of the public buildings are a big attraction. The Yanks with
their Kodaks, if you get it. So they say, "What are we going to do?"

They get a lot of brochures from places with climates similar to
London's so they can raise the rooks until the pollution problem is
finally licked. One place with a similar climate, but low pollution count,
turns to be Bangor, Maine. So they put an ad in the paper soliciting bird
fanciers and talk to a bunch of guys in the trade. Finally, they engage
this one guy at the rate of $50,000 a year to raise rooks. They send an
ornithologist over on the concord with two cases of rook eggs packed in
these shatterproof cases – they keep the shipping compartment
constantly heated and all that stuff. So this guy has a new business –
North American Rook Farms, Inc. He goes to work right off incubating
new rooks so London will not become a rookless city. The only thing is,
the London City Council is really impatient, and every day they send
him a telegram that says: “
Bred Any Good RooksLately?
”

N
o one knew exactly how long it had been going on. Not long. Two
days, two weeks; it couldn't have been much longer than that, Cheyney
reasoned. Not that it mattered. It was just that people got to watch a
little more of the show with the added thrill of knowing the show was
real. When the United States – the whole world – found out about the
Reploids, it was pretty spectacular. Just as well, maybe. These days,
unless it's spectacular, a thing can go on damned near forever. It is
neither believed nor disbelieved. It is simply part of the weird Godhead
mantra that made up the accelerating flow of events and experience as
the century neared its end. It's harder to get peoples' attention. It takes
machine-guns in a crowded airport or a live grenade rolled up the aisle
of a bus load of nuns stopped at a roadblock in some Central American
country overgrown with guns and greenery. The Reploids became
national – and international – news on the morning of November 30,
1989, after what happened during the first two chaotic minutes of the
Tonight Show
taping in Beautiful Downtown Burbank, California, the
night before. The floor manager watched intently as the red sweep
secondhand moved upward toward the twelve. The studio audience
clockwatched as intently as the floor manager. When the red sweep
second-hand crossed the twelve, it would be five o'clock and taping of
the umpty-umptieth
Tonight Show
would commence. As the red secondhand passed the eight, the audience stirred and muttered with its own
peculiar sort of stage fright. After all, they represented America, didn't
they? Yes!

"Let's have it quiet, people, please," the floor manager said pleasantly,
and the audience quieted like obedient children. Doc Severinsen's
drummer ran off a fast little riff on his snare and then held his sticks
easily between thumbs and fingers, wrists loose, watching the floor
manager instead of the clock, as the show – people always did. For crew
and performers, the floor manager was the clock. When the second-hand
passed the ten, the floor manager counted down aloud to four, and then
held up three fingers, two fingers, one finger...and then a clenched fist
from which one finger pointed dramatically at the audience. An
APPLAUSE sign lit up, but the studio audience was primed to whoop it
up; it would have made no difference if it had been written in Sanskrit.

So things started off just as they were supposed to start off: dead on
time. This was not so surprising; there were crewmembers on the
Tonight Show
who, had they been LAPD officers, could have retired
with full benefits. The Doc Severinsen band, one of the best showbands
in the world, launched into the familiar theme: Ta-da- da-Da-da ... and
the large, rolling voice of Ed McMahon cried enthusiastically: "From
Los Angeles, entertainment capital of the world, it's
The Tonight Show
,
live, with Johnny Carson! Tonight, Johnny's guests are actress Cybill
Shepherd of
Moonlighting
!" Excited applause from the audience.
"Magician Doug Henning!" Even louder applause from the audience.
"Pee Wee Herman!" A fresh wave of applause, this time including hoots
of joy from Pee Wee's rooting section. "From Germany, the Flying
Schnauzers, the world's only canine acrobats!" Increased applause, with
a mixture of laughter from the audience. "Not to mention Doc
Severinsen, the world's only Flying Bandleader, and his canine band!"

The band members not playing horns obediently barked. The audience
laughed harder, applauded harder.
In the control room of Studio C, no one was laughing.
A man in a loud sport-coat with a shock of curly black hair was
standing in the wings, idly snapping his fingers and looking across the
stage at Ed, but that was all.
The director signaled for Number Two Cam's medium shot on Ed for
the umpty-umptieth time, and there was Ed on the ON SCREEN
monitors. He barely heard someone mutter, "Where the hell is he?"
before Ed's rolling tones announced, also for the umpty-umptieth time:
"And now heeeere's JOHNNY!"
Wild applause from the audience.
"Camera Three," the director snapped.
"But there's only that – "
"Camera Three, goddammit!"
Camera Three came up on the ON SCREEN monitor, showing every TV
director's private nightmare, a dismally empty stage...and then
someone, some stranger, was striding confidently into that empty space,
just as if he had every right in the world to be there, filling it with
unquestionable presence, charm, and authority. But, whoever he was, he
was most definitely not Johnny Carson. Nor was it any of the other
familiar faces TV and studio audiences had grown used to during
Johnny's absences. This man was taller than Johnny, and instead of the
familiar silver hair, there was a luxuriant cap of almost Pan-like
black curls. The stranger's hair was so black that in places it seemed
to glow almost blue, like Superman's hair in the comic-books. The
sport-coat he wore was not quite loud enough to put him in the
Pleesda-Meetcha-IsThis- The-Missus? car salesman category, but Carson
would not have touched it with a twelve-foot pole.
The audience applause continued, but it first seemed to grow slightly
bewildered, and then clearly began to thin.
"What the fuck's going on?" someone in the control room asked. The
director simply watched, mesmerized.
Instead of the familiar swing of the invisible golf-club, punctuated by
a drum-riff and high-spirited hoots of approval from the studio
audience, this dark-haired, broad-shouldered, loud-jacketed, unknown
gentleman began to move his hands up and down, eyes flicking
rhythmically from his moving palms to a spot just above his head – he
was miming a juggler with a lot of fragile items in the air, and doing it
with the easy grace of the long-time showman. It was only something in
his face, something as subtle as a shadow, that told you the objects were
eggs or something, and would break if dropped. It was, in fact, very like
the way Johnny's eyes followed the invisible ball down the invisible
fairway, registering one that had been righteously stroked...unless, of
course, he chose to vary the act, which he could and did do from time to
time, and without even breathing hard.
He made a business of dropping the last egg, or whatever the fragile
object was, and his eyes followed it to the floor with exaggerated
dismay. Then, for a moment, he froze. Then he glanced toward Cam
Three Left...toward Doc and the orchestra, in other words.
After repeated viewings of the videotape, Dave Cheyney came to what
seemed to him to be an irrefutable conclusion, although many of his
colleagues – including his partner – questioned it.
"He was waiting for a sting," Cheyney said. "Look, you can see it on
his face. It's as old as burlesque."
His partner, Pete Jacoby, said, "I thought burlesque was where the girl
with the heroin habit took off her clothes while the guy with the heroin
habit played the trumpet."
Cheyney gestured at him impatiently. "Think of the lady that used to
play the piano in the silent movies, then. Or the one that used to do
schmaltz on the organ during the radio soaps."
Jacoby looked at him, wide-eyed. “Did they have those things when
you were a kid, daddy?" he asked in a falsetto voice.
"Will you for once be serious?" Cheyney asked him. "Because this is a
serious thing we got here, I think."
"What we got here is very simple. We got a nut."
"No," Cheyney said, and hit rewind on the VCR again with one hand
while he lit a fresh cigarette with the other. "What we got is a seasoned
performer who's mad as hell because the guy on the snare dropped his
cue." He paused thoughtfully and added: "Christ, Johnny does it all the
time. And if the guy who was supposed to
lay in the sting dropped his cue, I think he'd look the same way. By then
it didn't matter. The stranger who wasn't Johnny Carson had time to
recover, to look at a flabbergasted Ed McMahon and say, "The moon
must be full tonight, Ed – do you think – " And that was when the NBC
security guards came out and grabbed him. "Hey! What the fuck do you
think you're – "
But by then they had dragged him away.
In the control room of Studio C, there was total silence. The audience
monitors picked up the same silence. Camera Four was swung toward
the audience, and showed a picture of one hundred and fifty stunned,
silent faces. Camera Two, the one medium-close on Ed McMahon,
showed a man who looked almost cosmically befuddled.
The director took a package of Winstons from his breast pocket, took
one out, put it in his mouth, took it out again and reversed it so the filter
was facing away from him, and abruptly bit the cigarette in two. He
threw the filtered half in one direction and spat the unfiltered half in
another.
"Get up a show from the library with Rickles," he said. "No Joan
Rivers. And if I see Totie Fields, someone's going to get fired."
Then he strode away, head down. He shoved a chair with such
violence on his way out of the control room that it struck the wall,
rebounded, nearly fractured the skull of a white-faced intern from USC,
and fell on its side.
One of the PA's told the intern in a low voice, "Don't worry; that's just
Fred's way of committing honorable
seppuku
."
The man who was not Johnny Carson was taken, bellowing loudly not
about his lawyer but his team of lawyers, to the Burbank Police Station.
In Burbank, as in Beverly Hills and Hollywood Heights, there is a wing
of the police station which is known simply as "special security
functions." This may cover many aspects of the sometimes crazed world
of Tinsel-Town law enforcement. The cops don't like it, the cops don't
respect it...but they ride with it. You don't shit where you eat. Rule One.
"Special security functions" might be the place to which a coke-
snorting movie-star whose last picture grossed seventy million dollars
might be conveyed; the place to which the battered wife of an extremely
powerful film producer might be taken; it was the place to which the
man with the dark crop of curls was taken.
The man who showed up in Johnny Carson's place on the stage of
Studio C on the afternoon of November 29th identified himself as Ed
Paladin, speaking the name with the air of one who expects everyone
who hears it to fall on his or her knees and, perhaps, genuflect. His
California driver's license, Blue Cross-Blue Shield card, Amex and
Diners' Club cards, also identified him as Edward Paladin.
His trip from Studio C ended, at least temporarily, in a room in the
Burbank PD's "special security" area. The room was panelled with
tough plastic that almost did look like mahogany and furnished with a
low, round couch and tasteful chairs. There was a cigarette box on the
glass-topped coffee table filled with Dunhills, and the magazines
included
Fortune
and
Variety
and
Vogue
and
Billboard
and
GQ
. The
wall-to-wall carpet wasn't really ankle-deep but looked it, and there was
a CableView guide on top of the large- screen TV. There was a bar
(now locked), and a very nice neo-Jackson Pollock painting on one of
the walls. The walls, however, were of drilled cork, and the mirror
above the bar was a little bit too large and a little bit too shiny to be
anything but a piece of one-way glass.
The man who called himself Ed Paladin stuck his hands in his just-
too-loud sport-coat pockets, looked around disgustedly, and said: "An
interrogation room by any other name is still an interrogation room."
Detective 1st Grade Richard Cheyney looked at him calmly for a
moment. When he spoke, it was in the soft and polite voice that had
earned him the only halfkidding nickname "Detective to the Stars." Part
of the reason he spoke this way was because he genuinely liked and
respected show people. Part of the reason was because he didn't trust
them. Half the time they were lying they didn't know it.
"Could you tell us, please, Mr Paladin, how you got on the set of
The
Tonight Show
, and where Johnny Carson is?"
"Who's Johnny Carson?"
Pete Jacoby – who wanted to be Henny Youngman when he grew up,
Cheyney often thought – gave Cheyney a momentary dry look every bit
as good as a Jack Benny deadpan. Then he looked back at Edward
Paladin and said, "Johnny Carson's the guy who used to be Mr Ed. You
know, the talking horse? I mean, a lot of people know about Mr Ed, the
famous talking horse, but an awful lot of people don't know that he went
to Geneva to have a species-change operation and when he came back
he was – "
Cheyney often allowed Jacoby his routines (there was really no other
word for them, and Cheyney remembered one occasion when Jacoby
had gotten a man charged with beating his wife and infant son to death
laughing so hard that tears of mirth rather than remorse were rolling
down his cheeks as he signed the confession that was going to put the
bastard in jail for the rest of his life), but he wasn't going to tonight. He
didn't have to see the flame under his ass; he could feel it, and it was
being turned up. Pete was maybe a little slow on the uptake about some
things, and maybe that was why he wasn't going to make Detective 1st
for another two or three years...if he ever did.
Some ten years ago a really awful thing had happened in a little
nothing town called Chowchilla. Two people (they had walked on two
legs, anyway, if you could believe the newsfilm) had hijacked a busload
of kids, buried them alive, and then had demanded a huge sum of
money. Otherwise, they said, those kiddies could just stay where they
were and swap baseball trading cards until their air ran out. That one
had ended happily, but it could have been a nightmare. And God knew
Johnny Carson was no busload of schoolkids, but the case had the same
kind of fruitcake appeal: here was that rare event about which both the
Los Angeles Times-Mirror
and
The National Enquirer
would hobnob on
their front pages. What Pete didn't understand was that something
extremely rare had happened to them: in the world of day-to-day police
work, a world where almost everything came in shades of gray, they had
suddenly been placed in a situation of stark and simple contrasts:
produce within twenty-four hours, thirty-six at the outside, or watch the
Feds come in...and kiss your ass goodbye.
Things happened so rapidly that even later he wasn't completely sure,
but he believed both of them had been going on the unspoken
presumption, even then, that Carson had been kidnapped and this guy
was part of it.
"We're going to do it by the numbers, Mr Paladin," Cheyney said, and
although he was speaking to the man glaring up at him from one of the
chairs (he had refused the sofa at once), his eyes flicked briefly to Pete.
They had been partners for nearly twelve years, and a glance was all it
took.
No more Comedy Store routines, Pete.
Message received.
"First comes the Miranda Warning," Cheyney said pleasantly. "I am
required to inform you that you are in the custody of the Burbank City
Police. Although not required to do so immediately, I'll add that a
preliminary charge of trespassing – "
"Trespassing!" An angry flush burst over Paladin's face.
" – on property both owned and leased by the National Broadcasting
Company has been lodged against you. I am Detective 1st Grade
Richard Cheyney. This man with me is my partner, Detective 2nd Grade
Peter Jacoby. We'd like to interview you."
"Fucking interrogate me is what you mean."
"I only have one question, as far as interrogation goes," Cheyney said.
"Otherwise, I only want to interview you at this time. In other words, I
have one question relevant to the charge which has been lodged; the rest
deal with other matters."
"Well, what's the fucking question?"
"That wouldn't be going by the numbers," Jacoby said.
Cheyney said: "I am required to tell you that you have the right – "
"To have my lawyer here, you bet," Paladin said. "And I just decided
that before I answer a single fucking question, and that includes where I
went to lunch today and what I had, he's going to be in here. Albert K.
Dellums."
He spoke this name as if it should rock both detectives back on their
heels, but Cheyney had never heard of it and could tell by Pete's
expression that he hadn't either.
Whatever sort of crazy this Ed Paladin might turn out to be, he was no
dullard. He saw the quick glances which passed between the two
detectives and read them easily.
You know him?
Cheyney's eyes asked
Jacoby's, and Jacoby's replied,
Never heard of him in my life.
For the first time an expression of perplexity – it was not fear, not yet
– crossed Mr Edward Paladin's face.
"Al Dellums," he said, raising his voice like some Americans overseas
who seem to believe they can make the waiter understand if they only
speak loudly enough and slowly enough. "Al Dellums of Dellums,
Carthage, Stoneham, and Taylor. I guess I shouldn't be all that surprised
that you haven't heard of him. He's only one of the most important,
well-known lawyers in the country." Paladin shot the left cuff of his
just-slightly-too-loud sport-coat and glanced at his watch. "If you reach
him at home, gentlemen, he'll be pissed. If you have to call his club –
and I think this is his club- night – he's going to be pissed like a bear."
Cheyney was not impressed by bluster. If you could sell it at a quarter
a pound, he never would have had to turn his hand at another day's
work. But even a quick peek had been enough to show him that the watch
Paladin was wearing was not just a Rolex but a Rolex Midnight Star. It
might be an imitation, of course, but his gut told him it was genuine.
Part of it was his clear impression that Paladin wasn't trying to make
an impression – he'd wanted to see what time it was, no more or less
than that. And if the watch was the McCoy...well, there were
cabincruisers you could buy for less. What was a man who could afford a
Rolex Midnight Star doing mixed up in something weird like this?