Remember the Los Angeles ad man who used to breeze through these pages? Well, he’s back in circulation, still the father confessor to some of the kookiest kooks in Tinsel Town. This time the dramatis personae include one of America’s top models; a writer named Macho Sweeze; the ex-king of Zayt; a commercial artist who specializes in fruit; a Country-and-Western singer; and, of course, the Blind Butcher... a typical Hollywood cast, wouldn’t you say?
Twenty-six million people saw them die, and that’s not counting reruns.
Real murder is rare on television, particularly on a talk show. If you weren’t one of those who caught the actual broadcast, you probably saw the pertinent footage on one of the evening network newscasts. The killer, who also appeared briefly on the talk show, eventually did a lot of explaining and so most everybody, including the police, thinks they know just about the entire story. Actually, the murderer himself barely knew half of what was going on.
I knew the victims and the killer, although I didn’t realize until too late that they were going to be the victims and the killer. Since the authorities have the killer in custody, and since I hate to get myself tangled in public messes, there’s no reason for me to volunteer the information I have as to the true causes of the effect all those millions of viewers witnessed. Sometimes when we’re filming a commercial with Glorious MacKenzie and I notice her between takes, staring forlornly into her cup of Wake Up! Coffee, I’m tempted to tell her all I know. But I resist the temptation.
It was because of the lovely Glorious, one of America’s top five models, that Norbert Tuffy concocted his whole caper. We’d been using the stunning redhaired Glorious in our Wake Up! Coffee television spots for nearly a year, ever since the Wake Up! lab back in Battle Creek had made their scientific breakthrough and we’d been able to use the very effective slogan, “Wake Up! The only coffee that’s 100 % coffee free!”
Norbert and Glorious were living together in his mansion out on the Pacific Palisades when I’d first met him at a cocktail party that my advertising agency gave for all our commercial talent. Norbert, who was very good in a scrap despite his size, helped me out when the actor who’d just been fired from our Grrrowl Dog Grub account tried to bite my ankle. I’d been expecting trouble from the moment I noticed the actor had crashed the party wearing his Grrrowl police-dog costume. At any rate, the small feisty Norbert and I became friends as a result of that incident.
It was several months later, over lunch at the Quick-Frozen Mandarin in Santa Monica, that he first alluded to the Blind Butcher affair. I was already in the booth when Norbert came scurrying in out of a hazy spring afternoon.
He was clad in one of those maroon running suits he was so fond of for daytime wear. “It was an omen.” He plopped down opposite me and poured himself a cup of lukewarm tea.
“What?”
“When my house fell down the hill and into the sea last month.”
“I thought the house only made it as far as the middle of the Pacific Coast Highway.”
“The symbolism was there to be read by one and all. The decline and fall of Norbert Tuffy.”
“Still haven’t picked up a new scripting assignment?”
“I haven’t had a TV script credit in four months. I am definitely on the proverbial skids.”
“Maybe I can get you some freelance ad copy—”
“Ha,” he said scornfully. “That would really finish me. It’s bad enough my house fell into the Pacific because of a mud slide, it’s bad enough my favorite Siamese cat was eaten by the pet wolfhound of a noted rock millionaire, it’s bad enough Glorious is now living alone in a Westwood condo, it’s bad enough I haven’t won an Emmy in three years, it’s bad enough I am virtually blacklisted because it’s rumored I am suffering from writer’s block, it’s bad enough I’m being robbed of potential millions by a swine calling himself Macho Sweeze — and now you suggest I top it all by working in a cesspool such as that ad agency of yours.”
“We pay as much as—”
“Forget it. I’d rather play piano in a bordello.”
“You’d have to join the musicians’ union to do that.”
“Funny as a funeral is what you are,” he observed as he snatched up the menu.
“Listen, you’re letting a temporary setback cloud your whole—”
“Don’t give me slogans. Do you realize Glorious and I may never get back together?”
“I wasn’t even aware you two weren’t living together. When we shot the last Wake Up! commercial with her the other day, she seemed happy.”
“Sure, dumping me makes her euphoric,” he said, summoning the waiter in the silk kimono. “Bring me the Number Six lunch, and pronto.”
“Being on the skids sure hasn’t helped your disposition, Mr. Tuffy,” remarked the waiter. “And you, sir?”
I ordered a Number Five. “You and Glorious have parted before, Norbert, and always—”
“Oh, I’ll get that incredibly lovely bimbo back,” he assured me. “I know exactly how and when. When I collect the $54,000.”
“$54,000?”
“Happens to be the exact sum I need to pay off my debts and get back on my feet again.”
“Then you are going to get the assignment to do the pilot script for My Old Man’s a Garbage Man?”
“Naw, they double-crossed me out of that gig, too, even after I laid an absolutely socko treatment on ’em,” Norbert said. “I intend to acquire the $54,000 in question from Macho Sweeze. It’s one half of $108,000.”
“It is, but why’s Macho going to give it to you?”
“You know that scum?”
“We had some commercials for 150 %, the Headache Pill for a Headache and a Half on a movie of the week he wrote and I met him at the—”
“Wrote? That goon couldn’t scrawl an X without help.”
“I sense a bitterness in your tone.”
Norbert fell silent until after our freshly thawed Chinese lunches has been placed before us. “Ever hear of a series of spy novels about a guy known as the Blind Butcher?” he asked me. “Allegedly penned by one Dan X. Spear. Published by Capstone Books.”
“Vaguely.” I poked my eggroll with my plastic fork and caused it to make a squeaking sound. “Why?”
“I created that series and wrote all six of the paperback novels.”
“So you’re Dan X. Spear?”
Norbert’s teeth gnashed on his stir-fried tempeh. “Macho Sweeze is Dan X. Spear,” he snarled. “See, this was all four, five years in the past, before I’d reached the dizzying pinnacle of success which I am presently toppling from. Macho had this vague nitwit idea for a series and he was going around with the granddaughter of Oscar Dragomann, the publisher of Capstone Books. A spindly broad of about seventeen summers, but Macho’s always gone in for ladies with underdeveloped minds and bodies.”
“What did you do, Norbert, sign some kind of agreement with Macho that gave him all rights in the project?”
He snarled again. “Norbert Tuffy doesn’t, not ever, do anything dumb,” he told me, pointing his plastic fork. “I was, let us say, injudicious. Something I have been known to be in moments of extreme financial deprivation. Some people get woozy when you take away oxygen, I get careless when I’m suffering from lack of money.”
“Where does the amount of $108,000 come from?”
“The series was less than a hit,” explained Norbert. “In fact, the final book in our series, The Spy Who Broke His Leg, never even got out of Dragomann’s central warehouse down in Whittier.” He paused to gobble a few bites of food. “We now dissolve from back then to now. Macho, lord knows how, is presently a dazzling star in the Hollywood writing firmament. Furthermore, he has become, possibly because of their mutual interest in young ladies who’ve only recently shed their braces, a close chum of ex-king Maktab Al-barid.”