Donald Westlake - Get Real

Next door was the conference room. Once they’d settled themselves in there, Doug said, “This is our story line, you know. We’ve been setting it up for this. In the third season, Kirby gets a girlfriend, just when the audience thinks they already know everything about the Finch family. And next season, the wedding, in sweeps week. Wedding episodes always get the biggest numbers of the year. Kirby and Darlene, true love at last.”

Marcy said, “I’m sorry, Doug, but he won’t do it. I asked him if he could just pretend and he said no. He won’t kiss her, he doesn’t even want to put his arm around her. He says her boobs are too big.”

“Oh, God.” Doug closed his eyes, in an attempt to leave the world behind.

But he hadn’t yet learned the worst. Speaking right through his eyelids, Josh said, “And now that Darlene knows what Kirby thinks of her boobs, she doesn’t want to work with him. She says she wants off the show.”

“Which wouldn’t be terrible,” Marcy said, also talking through the wall of his closed eyelids. “You know, she hasn’t even been introduced on the show yet.”

Doug opened his eyes to find the awful world still unchanged. “Well, it is terrible,” he said. “Are they shooting up there tomorrow?”

“Yes,” Marcy said.

“I’ll have to go up,” Doug decided. “Marcy, you come along, just in case there’s some other throughline we can work out, put it together on the fly up there. But for now, fellas, all three of you, I beg of you. Do not sleep tonight, not for a minute. If we don’t have Kirby and Darlene, what do we have?”

Josh said, “Could it be Lowell and Darlene?” Lowell being Kirby’s big brother.

Doug squinched his face in pain. “No,” he said, “it’s too late for that. We’ve already established Lowell as the loner, the gloomy genius going off to engineering college. He represents the life of the mind, which is why we’ve made sure nobody likes him.” Doug smacked his palm against the table, making everybody jump. “ Why didn’t that little pansy tell us before this?”

“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.”

NINE 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.