Ed Mcbain - The Frumious Bandersnatch

“But she won’t be doing any concerts till after the album release,” I told him.

“Or got hit by a bus…” he said.

“Oh sure, hit by a bus.”

“Do you remember when this writer Ira Levin wrote a book called A Kiss Before Dying, where the last chapter is this girl gets pushed off the roof? Well, right after the book was published this girl in real life fell off a roof someplace in New York, and she had a copy of the goddamn book in her pocket! Something like that, you know?”

“Sure, we’ll push Tamar off the roof.”

“Come on, Barney…”

He was calling me Barney by then.

“…I’m talking about something spectacular. Something that will make headlines.”

“Like what?”

“Like she gets smacked around by some goon in a disco…”

“No, no.”

“…or somebody’s stalking her…”

“That won’t make headlines.”

“…or she gets kidnapped or something,” Avery said, and we both looked at each other.

There’s that moment, you know?

There’s that moment when you realize this is it.

Avery suggested fifty thousand dollars as the ransom, but I said we’d never find anyone to do it for that kind of money, so he said, “Okay a hundred, how does that sound?” and I said that still sounded too low, one minute he’s talking about spending ten million dollars in as many cities, and now he’s down to a hundred grand! I told him that would sound phony as hell, and besides, no one would risk a kidnapping for a lousy hundred thousand dollars! So we batted it back and forth until we hit on two-fifty, which was, after all, a quarter of a million dollars, a not unreasonable asking price for someone who was not yet a star.

I don’t think he was playing me, do you think he was playing me? I mean, I don’t think he knew all along that he was the one who’d be doing the actual kidnapping, I don’t think he was bargaining for a higher fee. There was an innocence about Avery…well, he double-crossed me later on. But at the time, I think he genuinely was just so enthusiastic about the idea, just into it, you know, working with me to find what would sound like a reasonable ransom demand, not too low, not too high, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars had just the right ring to it, the way the whole idea seemed absolutely right.

But then we faced the reality.

Never mind the fifteen minutes of fame. Who were we going to find who’d risk getting caught doing something as serious as a kidnapping? And who could we trust to keep quiet if they got caught? Who could we trust not to say that Barney Loomis of Bison Records had engineered the kidnapping of his own young recording artist?

“You could trust me, ” Avery said.

I looked at him.

“I’d do it,” he said.

Q: When did you hatch this brilliant scheme?

Little touch of sarcasm there, Carella thought. Be careful, Nellie. He’ll spook and tell you to go to hell, no more questions.

Q: Mr. Loomis? When did you and Mr. Hanes decide that he would be the one to carry out the kidnapping scheme?

A: It must have been in March sometime. We set everything in motion in March. That was when he found the house at the beach…

Q: The house at the beach?

A: South Beach. He rented a house there. To take Tamar to. He had his team together by then, he told me they were both experienced people, it should go off without a hitch. As a matter of fact, it did. Though I have to tell you I could have killed whoever that was with him on the night of the launch, when he slapped Tamar…

Q: The name Calvin Wilkins still doesn’t mean anything to you, is that correct?

A: I never heard of him.

Q: And the first name Kellie?

A: No. Whoever it was, the deal was nobody lays a finger on her, Avery knew that. Keep her for forty-eight hours, collect the ransom—which was really his fee for his role in all this—and then let her go safe and sound. That was the deal. He knew all the details of the launch party, I’d provided him with those, he even had a floor plan of the River Princess. It was frightening as hell when they came down those stairs, wasn’t it? Did you see the Channel Four tape? It looked real as hell, didn’t it?

Q: It was real, Mr. Loomis.

A: Well, certainly. To the observer, it looked real, especially when that idiot hit Tamar’s partner with the rifle and then slapped her, I could’ve killed him. But it was all fake, you see, it was all a hoax, you see. We kept reminding ourselves of that all the time we were planning it. It’s a hoax, stupid, it’s a hoax.

Q: Yes, but it was real.

A: It only became real when he double-crossed me. Asked for a million instead of the two-fifty we’d agreed upon. Well, sure, he saw what was happening, I’m sure he was glued to that television screen day and night. Tamar had her fifteen minutes of fame, all right, in spades. It worked, you see! She was a diva overnight!

“A dead one,” Nellie said.

And Loomis buried his face in his hands and began sobbing again.

BERT KLINGfelt uncomfortable because the comic was telling jokes about black people. Even holding hands with Sharyn Cooke, even sitting at a table with her and Artie Brown and his wife, Kling felt uncomfortable. Maybe that was because he was the only white man in the place.

This was a black comedy club uptown in Diamondback, highly recommended by Brown, seconded as a good idea by Sharyn, who now seemed to be enjoying the black comic’s interpretation of an addict hitting on his mother for money.

“Like this is the first time the poor woman has heard this hard luck story, you know whut I’m sayin?” the comic asked. “Mama, I just needs a li’l bread to tide me over till mornin, Mama, I’ll pay you back then, I swear on Grandma’s grave, may she rest in peace.”

Laughter.

Even from Artie Brown, who’d dealt with a few addicts in his lifetime.

“Same tale he tell her ever time he strung out,” the comic said. “He Mama s’pose to believe it now. He goan take that money, friens, and shoot it in his arm or sniff it up his nose. He Mama know that! Y’know whut she should give him? A swiff kick in the bee -hine!”

Applause now.

“Now whut’s all this fuss about this Tamar whutever her name is, some La-tino name? Ain’t she never dance with a black man before? She got to know, you dance with a black man, he goan rape you. Now that’s it, man. He just goan get all woody in his pants, and he goan rape you. How many of you ladies here has danced with a black man din’t get all woody on you? Am I right? You know whut I’m sayin, ladies, don’choo?”

Everybody laughed again.

Kling was not laughing.

Sharyn looked at him.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing,” he said.

“No, what?” she asked again, and squeezed his hand.

He shook his head.

She looked into his eyes.

“Really,” he said. “Nothing.”

But she knew him.

And it was something.

THEY HAD BEENsitting in Ollie’s car, listening to music and discussing the movie, which he couldn’t get over.

“It was so helpful to an emerging artist like myself,” he told Patricia. “Character,” he said. “Who’d have thought a person had to worry about character? With all the other things that burden a writer?”

“I’m so glad you enjoyed it,” she said. “I was so afraid you might not.”

“Hey, just being with you would have been enough,” he said.

They were both silent for a moment.

It was now almost midnight, and the rain had let up, so Patricia suggested that maybe they should call it a night. Ollie got out of the car, and came around to her side to let her out. The rain had driven all the neighborhood gangstas inside, so he didn’t have to flash the Glock. He took her inside her building, and they waited for the elevator together. They both had to report for work at a quarter to eight, but neither of them seemed aware of the late hour.