Микки Спиллейн - The Erection Set

“How about downstairs?”

“A dozen or so autograph hounds, maybe. Joe’s keeping his eye on them.”

“You check the orchestras?”

“Sure. Two fill-ins for a couple who couldn’t make it. They have ID’s and union cards. Every one of those press guys here I know personally. The crews with those TV units are all vouched for. Waiters are all staff personnel.”

“Okay, thanks,” I said. Fifty bucks could buy me a lot of extra security.

Most of the evening I had been dodging Mona Merriman, but she caught up to me on the way to the bar and I had to escort her over for a refill. She stuck the ball-point pen in a clip on her pad and dropped everything in her purse with a sigh and snapped her fingers for a drink. “Someday,” she told me, “I’m going to get an item that’s true, not distorted or contrived and I think I’ll fall over.”

“You give the public what it wants to read.” I raised my glass. “Cheers.”

“Cheers yourself.” She polished her drink off without a pause and told the bartender to fill it up again. She waved her glass at the chattering mob and clucked with disgust. “Look at them. Dig all the phony tits and store-bought hairdos. Everybody out making points.”

“What for?”

My question caught her off base. “You kidding, my big friend?”

“Nope.”

“Hell, there isn’t a kid out there who isn’t angling for a part in that new picture. Tonight everybody even remotely connected with Cable-Howard will be well bedded down and in hock for a line or at the very least a two-shot in a crowd scene. You watch the guys. They’re pulling the same trick too. Two days after a working script is done, pirated copies will be peddled around town so that all the hams will be able to give a good first reading.”

“Crazy,” I said.

“Nice for all the studs, though. Watch the operators go to town. They’ll move in on all the choice ass and cut them out before the idiot dames can find out that they’re only flunkeys on the lot.” She made a motion with her hand at an overly made-up middle-aged woman smiling up at a pair of good-looking young junior executive types. One of them seemed familiar. “It’s not all the dames, either. That’s Sylvia Potter. Her husband’s an assistant director for S. C. Cable. Right now she’s picking herself out a playmate for this week who’ll let her take out all her fetishes on his ripe young body because he thinks she might get him an in with her old man.”

“Will she?”

“A lucky few will make it. Just a bit part that won’t hurt anything. And Bibby Potter will go along or she’ll blow the whistle on him and his philandering and wind up with half his estate.” She took another drink of her highball. “It’s a nutty business.”

“The picture worth all that?”

“Oh, it’ll be a winner. It can’t miss. They’ll drop five million in the production and bring back ten times that You read the book?”

“Haven’t had time. Is it good?”

“Big sex novel,” Mona said. “Living and loving in an old-fashioned nineteenth-century manufacturing town. Pantalettes and petticoats lying all over the place, men struggling out of their waistcoats. You know, zippers were a great invention. Today a couple strips, naked in ten seconds.”

I let her see my expression of disbelief.

“All right, wise guy, except me. At my age I have to have my undergarments engineered for me and they take time to dismantle.”

“I bet it’s worth it.”

“Give it a try and see.”

“Careful, I might.”

“Baloney, you belong out there with the studs. You see those kids eyeing you when they found out you knew Walt? If I were in your shoes I’d be getting all I could.”

“Let’s say I’m particular.”

“Sure you are. Like with... Sheila McMillan?”

“You got a dirty mind, kid. I just met the lady.”

“Then let me clue you... she’s a teaser. That’s what drives her husband nuts. Frigid as a penguin’s balls and as beautiful as they come. You’d never know it to look at her, would you? All that meat just going to waste.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“A bit here, a bit there. Cross let it slip to a business acquaintance who’s a friend of mine during some bourbon blues. Most of it’s servants’ gossip, though.”

“You believe all you hear?”

“Very little of it,” she said, “but in this case it’s true. Why do you think he’s such a tiger when it comes to finance? He takes out all his frustrations raping the business world. He’d give his left nut just to get a hunk of his own wife and it’s never going to happen.”

“Then why did he marry her?”

Mona put her empty glass down on the bar and looked at me like I was a kid. “Because he’s crazy mad in love with her, that’s why. My guess is that she loves him too, but when it comes to sex, it’s forget-it-time.”

I finally found Cross McMillan and his wife across the room. They were standing there talking to a few others and Sheila was smiling at him, her eyes adoring, one hand on his arm. I suddenly felt sorry for the poor bald bastard and wished I hadn’t planted that scar on his pate where everybody could see it. He would have been better off if I had castrated him.

Mona said, “What are you thinking of? You have a funny look on your face.”

“Nothing printable, doll.”

Her finger tapped the back of my hand. “I do have something I can print,” she said mischievously.

“Oh?”

“About a possible romance between a Barrin scion and a certain secretary for a picture firm.”

“Sharon?”

Mona’s raised eyebrows gave me a positive nod.

“Kid, I’m damn near old enough to be her father.”

“A perfect Hollywood twosome,” she smiled. “How would you like to be a son to me?”

“You know what they’d call me then?”

“Sure. A son of a bitch. Very appropriate. You watch out for all those little hot-pants chippies out there, you hear?” Mona said and left.

My watch said ten forty-five. The call should have come in by now. I waved Lee out of the group he was with and made sure he had reservations at his club. He and another member were going to drive Sharon home, be certain she was locked in until I called her, then go directly to the Ryder A.C. where no one except members were admitted. I went out into the lobby, picked up a copy of Fruits of Labor and headed for the elevator.

My contact at Weller-Fabray answered my coded inquiry in French with the statement that they were closed until morning, which meant I was to call back on the hot line that had a scrambler attachment. I redialed and asked, “Your lines bugged?”

“They could be. We had Treasury Department agents in here this morning. Apparently the Sûreté in Marseilles are monitoring overseas calls. Jason placed two to us from the Pavilion of Crosses restaurant just before one of the couriers from Istanbul was shot to death. He had twenty kilos of heroine in a suitcase prepared for shipment to the United States.”

“Who hit him?”

“Nobody knows. They seem to think it was an attempted hijacking. The murderer escaped completely.”

“Damn,” I said. “Who got the stuff?”

The voice on the other end chuckled. “That is the joke. Nobody. The courier had anticipated a possible double cross and had substituted packages. The genuine stuff is still hidden somewhere. Had all gone well he would have accepted the money and told the transfer agent later where to recover the proper goods. Unfortunately, he didn’t anticipate being killed.”

“Any leads at all?”

“So far, none. The courier was a professional. Now the big hunt is on. It will be... how do you say?... finders keepers.”