Reckless Eyeballing (2 page)

It was a blue and windy New York day. Jim's scarf almost reached his hips. He had his hands in his pockets as he walked and half ran toward the theater. His black curls seemed to bounce on his head. As he bounded up the stairs, he didn't acknowledge the greeting of two actors who were descending. Mr. Ickey, Becky's assistant, tried to block his way but was unsuccessful. When Jim burst into Becky's office, she became as angry as he was, but managed to put on a professional smile. The German shepherd she kept tied to the leg of her desk stood up and began some ugly barking. She commanded him to sit down. Becky had two guests, an elderly woman with gray-silver hair tied up into a bun and wearing a black velvet dress and black shoes, and the woman's chauffeur, a huge, oafish-looking man with gray hair. He looked as though he weighed about 250 pounds.

“Oh, Jim, I'd like you to meet—”

“I didn't come here to meet anybody. I came to talk to you.”

“What about?” The smile vanished. She was wearing a black dress with a long, white, pointed collar.

“Ickey called me this morning and said that you were going to consider moving Ball's play to the Queen Mother,” Jim said.

“I have a new play. A play that I'm very excited about,” Becky said. The old lady smiled.

“Yes. I read the newspaper. Eva Braun. What are you celebrating that Nazi whore for?” The old woman's cane fell, making a klooking sound on the hardwood floor. She was shaking. The chauffeur scrambled toward the cane and picked it up. The corners of Becky's mouth were twitching. Her skin became red.

“She may be a Nazi whore to sexists like you, but to many of us, she epitomizes women's universal suffering.” She was trembling.

“What? You must be out of your mind. She was married to Adolf Hitler?”

“She was coerced. Just as all women are coerced by men into doing things against their will.”

“Must be written by one of your neurotic feminist friends. You let them use the Mountbatten as some kind of playpen where they can mudsling their invective at men, but you would deny the Mountbatten to Ian Ball.” Jim and Becky were now leaning on the desk and shouting at each other.

“We disagree about that. His play is…well, it reads like a first draft.”

“Who are you to decide the merits of his play? You're just a glorified reader around here. You stupid
shiksa
. It's my directing that draws the numbers, and the numbers get the grants.” The dog was on its feet again. Jim and Ian had laughed as they fantasized about the relationship between Becky and her German shepherd. They had said foul, unprintable things.

The old lady whispered something to her chauffeur. He got up and left the room, giving Jim a nasty stare as he exited. Becky began to sob. Jim shifted his eyes in annoyance, first to the portrait of William Shakespeare on the wall, then to the slim vase holding the tulips on Becky's desk.

“I expect to do
Reckless Eyeballing
in the Mountbatten, and if you stand in my way I'll break your neck.” Jim stormed from the room.

He almost collided with the chauffeur, who was returning with two Diet Coke cans. He gave one to the old woman. Becky recovered her composure as she spoke to her guests.

“I don't have to tell you how sorry I am about this intrusion, but these New York Jews are just…just brazen. They have the manners of the lowly peddlers they are. I don't know what we're going to do with them. But don't worry, Ms. Smith, with your contribution we won't have to worry about donations from those people anymore. You can count on the Mountbatten. He doesn't know it, but I've already begun casting.” The old woman's stiff hands removed the checkbook from her purse; she began to write her signature. Becky smiled and studied the piece of paper that would pay the Mountbatten's expenses for two years. The woman ripped the check from the checkbook and handed it to Becky.

“I still think that you should acknowledge the authorship of the play. The press has been calling. A few interviews might boost ticket sales.” The old woman shook her head.

“As you wish,” Becky said. The dog and the chauffeur were staring at each other. Finally the dog looked askance and began to whine and wag its tail. The chauffeur laughed and continued to drink from the can.

Detective Lawrence O'Reedy, “Loathesome Larry,” as he had been nicknamed by generations of admiring rookies (he'd always confront a criminal with his personal snub-nosed .38, Nancy, with the threat, “Give me something to write home to Mother about”), lumbered into the lobby of a fashionable East Side condominium (both down payment and maintenance costs pretty steep) located near the United Nations Plaza, around the comer from Danny Johnson's obelisk for Ralph Bunche. The black doorman gave him some lip, but O'Reedy knocked him to the floor with one punch to the stomach. The doorman, Randy Shank, fell to his knees and held his stomach in agony. O'Reedy was all out of breath when he reached the elevator, and so leaned against the wall, waiting for the elevator to reach the first floor. He was thinking about Florida. In six months he'd retire to Vero Beach and be seated in a deck chair, dressed in golf shorts and Hawaiian shirt, staring out over the reef. Just a few more cases and he'd be out of New York, which had become a toilet for all the human offal of the world. Wasn't like the old days when men were men and you could separate the men from the boys. Nowadays, you just about had to read a criminal a bedtime story before you arrested him. He thought of all the P.R.s and nig—or blacks, as they were calling them these days—he'd arrested. He'd spread-eagled and frisked. The brains blown out. The days when men were men. Been a long time since he'd been one himself. He was even thinking about consulting a Chinese herbalist. Nothing had solved the problem. His wife, Betsy, the Lord bless her. She was patient. She had her women's club and charities.

His esophagus was always burning, and he ate a lot of hard candy because someone had told him that hard candy was effective in treating flatulence. Recently he was having bad dreams in which he'd seen the faces of the dead he'd dispatched to the land of ghosts, blown-up before him. And then, this morning, was it a man, with a part of his skull missing and blood on his shirt, in his house, sitting in his chair, reading his newspaper? It looked up from the newspaper and grinned at O'Reedy, a mass of putrefying flesh hanging from its skull. He screamed and ran back into the bedroom to grab Nancy. Betsy said that she was sure that he was just having a nightmare, but when he went back to get the newspaper, the man had gone, yet the newspaper was scattered about the floor and not outside, on the doormat, folded neatly. Must have been the spaghetti and meatballs he ate the night before. The way he looked at it, those men deserved to die. I mean, they were running away, weren't they, so they must have been guilty. Well, maybe that black jogger was innocent, but it was dark the morning he shot him. He couldn't see so well, and besides there had been a number of rapes in that park. Everybody knew that all black men did was rape white women, so too bad for the jogger, but, well, the way O'Reedy looked at it, this was war, and in war a lot of innocent people get killed. But then, the other day he had opened the shower curtain and those three P.R.s he'd shot one night after a rooftop chase were standing there in the shower, nude, and singing some song in Spanish, and the bullet holes were still visible on their chests, and he didn't understand the Spanish. What really haunted him was the jogger's name: O'Reedy, same as his.

Tremonisha Smarts opened the door upon the detective who'd come to investigate. She'd called after the intruder left. She'd freed herself from the ropes with which he'd tied her into a chair. The detective was breathing heavily. He was a medium-sized man, and was wearing a brown hat with a band of darker brown. He wore a starched white shirt and plain, dull tie. His black shoes had been shined. His lower lip protruded and some of the membrane was exposed. His jaws were slack, and he had a nose that was crooked in the center as though it had been repaired. He identified himself as Detective Lawrence O'Reedy of the New York Police Department. He tipped his hat and smiled at the woman, who was dressed in a manner that revealed much “eye candy,” as people in advertising said. Her head was covered with some white cloth made of what appeared to be a rich fabric. She wore some earrings and bracelets. Tremonisha Smarts. His wife had insisted that he see her play,
Wrong-Headed Man
. She thought that he'd fall asleep, but it turned out that he rather enjoyed it. Especially the scene where the big black ape throws his missionary wife down the stairs. Tremonisha was sobbing. She said something like, “I'm glad you came,” and said it in such a manner that got him excited. She guided him into the living room of the large, high-ceilinged apartment and led him to a seat. O'Reedy slowly lowered his huge bottom into a chair and removed his notebook and pen. “Would you like a drink?” she asked.

“Scotch,” he said. She disappeared into the kitchen. There were some paintings on the wall, and some posters from her play
Wrong-Headed Man
that depicted the controversial scene where Mose, the lead character, stands at the top of the stairs, arms folded and a cigarette dangling from his lips, while at the bottom his missionary wife, whom he has pushed down the stairs, lies sprawled and sobbing, her dress up around her waist. Throughout
Wrong-Headed Man
, Mose goes on a spree of woman-bashing rape and incest. A pain shot through O'Reedy's kidneys. He grimaced. “Is anything wrong?” Tremonisha asked, his drink in her hand. O'Reedy didn't acknowledge the remark. “Could you give me a description of the man?” he asked.

Sometimes O'Reedy went for days without evacuating his wastes and when stools did show up, they were dark and pasty. His wrists were always in pain. Yet it seemed like only yesterday that he calmly drove through the car dealer's showcase window to capture some niggers who were inside, holding a white woman as hostage. That was the day he became a legend. He had pulled his pet heat Nancy on the niggers, and before pasting their insides to the wall he said: “Give me something to write home to Mother about,” the line that became immortal, even quoted by politicians. Hey, he was even mentioned on one of the syndicated shows. “In the news recently, there was an incident involving three hoodlums and a New York City detective. What did the detective say before shooting all three?” The lady answered the question correctly and won fifteen thousand dollars. When O'Reedy had lifted the hysterical woman hostage to her feet and led her outside, the noonday crowd had applauded. That was the year the public, making its wishes known through the polls, had pleaded with him to run for mayor.

“He was a large man. He wore a raincoat, white scarf, and beret. He wore dark glasses. He had the cheekbones of a well-fed cat, and, and…” Tremonisha began to cry. O'Reedy looked up from his notepad. She was wearing silk pajama–type pants, white blouse, and a white turban to cover the damage that her assailant had wrought. She had big eyes and long, dark eyelashes.

“He said all sorts of political things. Said that I was giving the black man a bad name.” (O'Reedy offered her a handkerchief. She declined and took some fancy department store tissue that rested in a pink box on the table next to the chair. She blew her nose.) O'Reedy felt like taking her into his arms, comforting her, and saying things like, “Now, now.”

“Probably some psycho with wounded masculine pride,” O'Reedy said, writing down his observations in his notebook. A political nut. “Outside of the hair…did he harm you in any other way?”

“No, as a matter of fact he left me this.” She showed the detective a chrysanthemum. The detective took it from her and put a handkerchief about it.

“I'll take it down to the lab. He must have some kind of obsession with hair. Why would he cut your hair?”

“He said that the hair was cut because that's what the French did to the women who collaborated with the Nazis during the war.”

“Looks like we have a real lunatic here.” He leaned over and clasped her moist hand. He felt some nerves stirring in his left hand. The hand that had gone numb many years before.

“It's a shame that he did this to you.” He looked up at the turban; he felt like patting her head, but he restrained himself. She smiled and blushed. “Don't worry, Ms. Smarts. I'll get the bastard if it's the last thing that I do.” The phone rang. She walked over to pick it up. The detective glanced at her serendipitous buttocks moving beneath her silk pants. His eyes moved from left to right.

“I can't talk to you now. Tomorrow, Towers. It'll have to be a late flight. You'll arrange it? Why do you keep asking that question? It's fiction, I told you—you keep asking me did it really happen? No, I never had incest with my father. I'm becoming annoyed, Towers. Yes, I'll have dinner with you tomorrow.” She hung up and nervously plucked a cigarette from a box on the table. O'Reedy lit the cigarette. “They're doing a film of
Wrong-Headed Man
,” she said finally, blowing out smoke.

Ian Ball's friends, the black male writers whom he referred to as the fellas, had observed that since the film version of
Wrong-Headed Man
was being produced, directed, and written by white males, that they, the fellas, could look forward to a good media head-whipping just about the time the film came out. They imagined that the white feminist critics were already lining up to review it, queuing up like those people who wait all night for the opportunity to buy a ticket to a Prince concert, even feuding about which one was going to be the first to drub old Mose. Skin Mose—the American black man—alive.

“My wife and I saw it,” O'Reedy said. “That scene—you know the one where the huge black brute throws this mulatress down the stairs, but not before—you know where she is lying there begging for mercy when he—I started to run up on the stage, it was so realistic. All I could think to do was rescue that woman—ever since I saw that, I was wondering, Ms. Smarts, did that really happen? I mean, did some black brute take you—I mean, how was it?”

“Mr. O'Reedy, I really have to be packing. I'm flying to Hollywood tomorrow. I still have to do revisions on the script. Will you be needing me?”

“I think I have enough information. Please call me when you return. We might have some additional clues. We'll do everything we can to stop this creep.”

“Thank you, Detective O'Reedy.” He rose and wobbled to the door, placing the notebook into the pocket of his gray gabardine overcoat. He tipped his brown hat and smiled.