Free Getting Up With Fleas (Trace 7) by Warren Murphy Page A

hand around the room, taking them all in—“and a man from the insurance company. And we’re getting ready to make a motion picture. Golly, I’ll tell you, that’s a lot of distance to come for a kid who used to sit in front of the radio and practice being a baseball announcer. ‘DiMaggio swings. Click. There’s a long high drive to left center field. Wertz goes back, back, back. No use. It’s up and in for a home run. A four-bagger for the Yankee Clipper!’”
    He paused and looked around, and Birnbaum clapped.
    “‘The next batter up is Charlie Keller.’”
    “Nothing succeeds like excess,” McCue grunted to me.
    He waited again for applause. Again Birnbaum didn’t disappoint him.
    Ramona leaned over to me and said, “Why is that Fluff woman glaring at you?”
    I glanced over and saw the platinum blonde staring through me, like an X-ray machine.
    “She just found out I’m not going to star her in my next movie,” I said. “ Beach Blanket Bimbo .”
    Ramona nodded and looked back at Jack Scott, who was saying what a terrific movie Corridors of Death was going to be.
    “And sure, I want us to make money. I want us to make the greatest darned smash in the history of movies, a movie so big that we’ll do a dozen sequels before we’re finished. But most of all I want us to have fun. We want to have a good…”
    He stopped in the middle of the sentence and stared over as the sliding doors to the dining room opened.
    Through the doors stepped an apparition wearing a green rubber suit painted to look like the skin of a vegetable. On top of the person’s head rose a stalk of rubber reeds with little balls on the end. I guess it was supposed to be an asparagus.
    The creature, short and shapeless in the rubber costume, pushed the door shut behind him and stood there.
    McCue jumped to his feet. “Don’t worry, folks,” he shouted. “Electricity will kill it.”
    The creature shuffled forward into the middle of the dance floor and pointed a finger at Scott, who seemed visibly to shrink.
    “Good time?” the creature said. The voice was a man’s voice, deep and gravelly and muffled by the rubber suit. “You say we’re here to have a good time. I saw what you did to my script. You raped my script.”
    I touched McCue’s shoulder and the actor sat down. “Arden Harden?” I asked.
    “Right,” McCue said. “Absolute jerk-off of the western world.”
    “Why is he dressed up to look like an asparagus?” I asked. I noticed that Jack Scott was sputtering and the asparagus was still shaking an accusing finger at him. I thought that it looked like the ghost of Hamlet’s father. If Hamlet had been a rutabaga. Instead of a wimp.
    “He’s short,” McCue said to me.
    “That’s my answer? That’s why he dresses up like a finger food?”
    “He likes to attract attention,” McCue said. “He comes to parties dressed like the Mad Hatter, like Porky Pig, anything to make people look.”
    “Okay for parties,” I said. “But this is like the work situation. I don’t think there’s much room for asparagi in the workplace. Does he show up on the sets like this?”
    “He would if he thought people were ignoring him,” McCue said. He called out again, “I told you, electricity will kill it.” He jumped up from the table, ran across the room, and yanked an extension cord from the wall. He came back and wrapped the end of the cord around the asparagus’s right leg.
    “Quick, somebody. Find a socket. Plug this in,” McCue yelled, holding the end of the extension cord in his hand.
    Harden swatted at it, then bent down and pulled the extension cord loose from his leg.
    Jack Scott recovered, smiled, and said loudly, “As always, ladies and gentlemen, we can count on a spectacular entrance by our head writer, Arden Harden.”
    He tried to lead applause. The smile on Scott’s face was strained and thin and he looked even older than he had entering the room. Nobody joined in the applause.
    “Come on, folks.