'What do you mean she won't attend the funeral?' he yelled at MacMordie when he was told that Miss Futtle sent her regrets but was not prepared to take part in a farce simply to promote the sales of Pause.
'She says without bodies in the coffins...' MacMordie began before being silenced by an apoplectic Hutchmeyer. 'Where the fuck does she think I'm going to get the bodies from? The cops can't get them. The insurance investigators can't get them. The fucking coastguard divers can't get them. And I'm supposed to go find the things? By this time they're way out in the Atlantic some place or the sharks have got them.'
'But I thought you said they were weighted down like with concrete,' said MacMordie, 'and if they are...'
'Never mind what I said, MacMordie. What I'm saying now is we've got to think positive about Baby and Piper.'
'Isn't that a bit difficult? Them being dead and missing and all. I mean...'
'And I mean we've got a promotional set-up here that can put Pause right up the charts.'
'The computer says sales are good already.'
'Good? Good's not good enough. They've got to be terrific. Now the way I see it we've got an opportunity for building this Piper guy up with a reputation like...Who was that bastard got himself knocked off in a car smash?'
'Well there've been so many it's a little difficult to...'
'In Hollywood. Famous guy.'
'James Dean,' said MacMordie.
'Not him. A writer. Wrote a great book about insects.'
'Insects?' said MacMordie. 'You mean like ants. I read a great book about ants once...'
'Not ants for Chrissake. Things with long legs like grasshoppers. Eat every goddam thing for miles.'
'Oh, locusts. The Day of The Locust. A great movie. They had this one scene where there's a guy jumping up and down on this little kid and '
'I don't want to know about the movie, MacMordie. Who wrote the book?'
'West,' said MacMordie, 'Nathanel West. Only his real name was Weinstein.'
'So who cares what his real name was? Nobody's ever heard of him and he gets himself killed in a pile-up and suddenly he's famous. With Piper we've got it even better. I mean we've got mystery. Maybe mobsters. House burning, boats exploding, the guy's in love with old women and suddenly it's all happening to him.'
'Past tense,' said MacMordie.
'Damn right, and that's what I want on him. His past. A full rundown on him, where he lived, what he did, the women he loved...'
'Like Miss Futtle?' said MacMordie tactlessly.
'No,' yelled Hutchmeyer, 'not like Miss Futtle. She won't even come to the poor guy's funeral. Other women. With what he put in that book there've got to be other women.'
'With what he put in that book they'll have maybe died by now. I mean the heroine was eighty and he was seventeen. This Piper was twenty-eight, thirty so it's got to have been eleven years ago which would put her up in the nineties and around that age they tend to forget things.'
'Jesus, do I have to tell you everything? Fabricate, MacMordie, fabricate. Call London and speak to Frensic and get the press cuttings. There's bound to be something there we can use.'
MacMordie left the room and put through the call to London. He returned twenty minutes later with the news that Frensic was being uncooperative.
'He says he doesn't know anything,' he told a glowering Hutchmeyer. 'Seems this Piper just sent in the book, Frensic read it, sent it to Corkadales, they liked it and bought and that's about the sum total. No background. Nothing.'
'There's got to be something. He was born some place, wasn't he? And his mother...'
