Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 793 & 794, September/October 2007

Ideas in My Head by Janice Law

© 2007 by Janice Law

Janice Law is a prolific short story writer and also an accomplished novelist, who created one of the earliest modern female detectives, Anna Peters. The Edgar-nominated author’s most recent novel, Voices (Forge, 2003) was a finalist for the Connecticut Center for Book Fiction Award. The Hartford Courant praised the book’s “depth and grace.” Booklist called it “quietly compelling.”

You know that old saying, Don’t try to put ideas in my head? I’ve had an interesting example of that, and I can tell you that once certain ideas get into your mind, they lodge there like grit. You can’t get them out and you can’t leave them alone; pretty soon, you can’t think of anything else.

That’s the way it was with Jack and me. Once Herbie had planted the suggestion, there was nothing we could do about it. And anyone who knew Herbie, that’s Herbert A. Rothberger to those of you outside the business, probably wouldn’t blame us at all.

Where was I? Alien ideas in the brain are seriously distracting and some days I have problems putting my thoughts in order. Which is a laugh, being that Jack and I are professional wordsmiths. Arsen and Dutton — you can ask around — everyone knows us. We’re maybe not your top-of-the-line scriptwriters and script doctors — no auteur stuff, no Oscars on our shelves — but we’ve had a couple of pilots made, and we’ve written for most of the top cop shows and hospital dramas, and we’ve both made major money in the soaps. Several film scripts, too — one of them made — I want you to see we’re pros.

Nonetheless, even pros get the blues in the form of rejection slips from baby-faced execs with their feet on their desks and your script bound for the shredder. Jack and I’d hit a run of bad luck, which is why we wound up one wet day — a bad L.A. omen right there — in the offices of Distracting Productions, the bailiwick of Herbert A. Rothberger, a.k.a. Herbie, pitching an action yarn.

Slipstream was a solid piece of work with a nice role for the child phenom of the moment, a moppet with blue eyes and blond hair named Ashley Button. I kid you not. She was known around the studios as Cute-As, as in cute as a button, and she was a serious talent with a good memory and precocious eyes.

Our plot was watertight. That’s Jack’s doing. His dialogue is for the bin, but his plot construction is a thing of beauty, and I think Herbie got to him before he got to me. I think so.

Anyway, we’re sitting in Herbie’s big office beside a NordicTrack with zero miles on its odometer and a spidery Bowflex that looks carnivorous, and a decorative secretary who’s probably not as dumb as she looks. I usually do the talking, so I launch into our spiel: “A big-time hijacking goes bad when the cargo turns out to be nuclear fuel rods. The robbers go on the lam with the representatives of a rogue state behind them and both the CIA and the FBI bringing up the rear.”

“Think The X-Files without the aliens,” says Jack. “Advanced paranoia.”

Maybe wrong to mention a Fox show to Herbie, who had, I seem to recall, a death feud with the network.

“So what the hell is it?” he says, not waiting to find out. “Is this a heist picture?”

“Yeah, a heist picture, but not just a heist picture, because, see, along the way, they’re spotted by this little girl, who gets her father involved, plus we’ve got the subplot with the agents, kind of a father-son or brother-brother thing going...”

This goes nowhere with Herbie. To Herbie, Moby Dick is a fishing story, pure and simple.

“Heist pictures are dead. With Tom Cruise, maybe. Cast of unknowns and the little blond brat — no way.”

“We don’t have to cast unknowns,” I says.

Herbie snorts. He has a particularly repulsive nostril-clearing snort, like a pig with a fly up its nose, that brings his own porcine nature front and center.

“You guys bring me a Tom Cruise, a Cate Blanchett, a Will Smith picture, I’ll be the first to let you know.”

See the kind of guy we’re talking about here? Gratuitous, right? As if he wasn’t resident in the B-picture universe himself.

“However,” I says, “this is a heist picture with a difference. And the script’s like a clockwork toy.” I start to describe the novelties and beauties, the many ingenuities that Jack has concocted and which I have adorned with razor-sharp dialogue.

“Heists are dead,” says Herbie. “Plus, there’s no romance. How’re you going to pull in the date audience with no romance?”

“All right, all right,” says Jack, who’s quick off the mark plot-wise. I can see the wheels turning in his mind, clear as one of those old clocks with glass front and back so you can see the gears moving. “There’s the kid, we start from the kid, all right, and we add—”

He doesn’t even get the sentence out before Herbie says, “No kids. Kids are for Oxygen, Lifetime, housewives in the afternoon. Forget the kid.”

“Forget the kid,” Jack repeats.

“I wouldn’t touch the kid for an Oscar nomination — her mother’s poison and her dad’s a lawyer.”

“We make her an adult,” says Jack.

Herbie purses his lips. “A hot babe?”

“Combustible,” Jack says.

“Maybe with a thing for one of the robbers?” I suggest.

“Yeah,” says Herbie. “You try that and get back to me.” His hand’s already hovering over his intercom button.

Jack and I get out onto the street. We’ve forgotten umbrellas and it’s pouring. “Remind me never to buy a gun,” Jack says. “I wouldn’t trust myself.”

We go back and rework Slipstream. Cute-As has transmogrified into an eighteen-year-old bombshell who’s definitely trouble. She’s friends with one of the heist team, a fact her FBI agent father only belatedly registers. “We got parental angst, we got family, we got high drama,” I tell Herbie when we see him next.

“And we’ve sharpened up the suspense,” Jack says. “The guys on the heist are really pawns of terrorists. They don’t realize, and when they do...”

His Film Eminence frowns. “People don’t want to be scared,” says Herbie. “They want to be scared, but not of something that could really happen to them.”

“You want Godzilla?” says Jack. “You want Creature of the Black Lagoon?”

“Listen, I’m trying to help you guys.” Herbie’s all offended. “What’s her name, the broad with the father complex—”

“Heather.”

“Heather’s a dumb name, Heather’s been overdone.”

“We can change the name,” I says.

“So change it. She has possibilities. Fuel rods — who the hell understands fuel rods? See what I mean? That’s why I say, heist pictures are dead.”

“Slice of life? A smaller drama?” Jack asks. “Father-daughter conflict — strait-laced agent versus rebel daughter? Heist in the background?”

“Some small pictures have done well lately — good return on investment,” I says.

Herbie agrees to look at the rewrite.

By this time, we’re beginning to sweat. Jack’s been borrowing from me and I’ve been pawning stuff acquired in my palmy days. We buckle down, anyway. Like I say, we’re pros all the way. We lose most of the heist except the actual theft and focus on the conflicting loyalties of the father and daughter.

“We’ve got a different angle on the perpetrators, too,” I tell Herbie at the next meet. “No more professionals. Small-timers, desperate men. There might even be a role for a good kid actor — one of them has a sick child. See, it’s desperate men on both sides.”

Herbie listens to all this. At least this time we get through the whole pitch. “You know, you guys got no sense of the times,” he says when we’re done. “Sympathetic criminals — tricky at best. Okay if they’re rich, get what I mean? You redo Topkapi, professional thieves, glamour guys — women love outlaws — you’re okay. Poor and desperate — no way. Throw the book at them. Where’ve you been?”

Back to professionals. Back to square one, but we don’t mention that. “That can be done,” I says. I’m thinking that we have most of what’s needed back in version one.

But that’s not enough for Herbie. He basically doesn’t like the heist at all.

“Suppose it goes wrong even earlier,” says Jack. “Suppose our juvenile female winds up a hostage? Ropes and bondage,” he adds — Herbie’s tastes being well known.

“I’ll look at it,” he says, and then as an afterthought, he adds, “You get it done fast, drop it off at my house. I’m out of the office for a couple of days.”

This sounds like interest, so, back at the computers, Jack and I pull three straight all-nighters. Now the daughter is hanging out with a trucker who’s unwittingly been assigned the nuclear cargo. Missy’s with him in the truck when they are hijacked at a rest stop. He gets shot — we debate over his fate — and she becomes expendable, but maybe irresistible, supercargo. Lots of opportunity for cleavage and noir closeups; heavy breathing in semidarkness — Herbie stuff all the way.

Jack and I exchange high-fives and figure we’re home free. We messenger the script, and sure enough we get called back into his office pronto, but when we start talking about the fine points of the new story, he’s suddenly not sold. That’s Herbie — New England weather in Southern California — the worst of two worlds.

“It’s all right,” he says, “it’s a picture. But I’m thinking chick kidnapping’s been done, know what I mean?”

We do, having hit every cliché in the book as per his own request, because Herbie demands the sure thing. We’d had a script for Cute-As — a genuine talent; we’d had topical suspense — ripped from the headlines, no less, but that was too much novelty for Distracting Productions. So we went the other way and here we sit while he has second thoughts.

“Now,” he says, like he’s just come up with inspiration, “you got a guy kidnapped, man against the elements, that kind of stuff, I’m maybe hearing you.”

Man against the elephants, I think, elephants being a herd of Herbies with loud ties and black shirts and elegant little patent-leather loafers with no socks. I’m getting up from the table before I cross some verbal Rubicon, but Jack’s into the challenge — he later told me he was desperate; he’d maxed all his credit cards and he was ready to run with whatever Herbie threw his way.

“Yeah,” he says, “no heist, no nukes, we heist a guy. A young guy — get the girlie audience.”

Herbie shakes his head. “Stale. You need a guy in his prime. Harrison Ford of a few years ago.”

“More than a few,” I mutter, but Herbie doesn’t notice.

“All right, all right,” Jack goes, “guy in his thirties, maybe.”

“Forties,” says Herbie, who’s closer to fifty, I’m thinking.

That limits the pool of actors — and raises the price, but I can see this is personal for Herbie. He’s got a stake in this, something beyond the usual profit margin for Distracting Productions.

“You want a kidnapping story?” I says. “With a man the victim?”

“Kidnapped but not the victim,” Herbie says. “Not the victim. Where you guys been? Audience surveys pass you by? We’re sick of all these girlie men.”

“Our perpetrators bite off more than they can chew?” This plotline’s been around since O. Henry’s “The Ransom of Red Chief.” Not that Herbie reads.

“Yeah. You got it.”

“Diamond merchant, maybe?”

“Too ethnic,” says Herbie.

“But he’s got portable goods on him. There’s your motive.”

“I got to plot this for you?” asks Herbie. “They hold him for ransom—”

“Requires an organization,” says Jack, thinking out loud.

I realize we could use our heist prep scenes if we modified them a little.

“Smart has organization. Dumb’s different. These guys grab him and go. They’re operating seat-of-the-pants,” says Herbie.

“This is a farce?”

I get a look of thunder. Herbie lowers the boom. Reaches for the death ray.

“Look,” he says, “this is real. This is reality, today’s mean streets. Danger on every corner.”

“Yeah, but the plot’s got to be plausible. You got a big executive, ransom-worthy, he’s got the bodyguard, he’s got the chauffeur.”

“Look,” says Herbie, “not all of us run scared. I drive myself unless I gotta find parking.”

Jack gave me a sideways look. I think that was it; right then, I felt the idea. You know, you can feel an idea coming. Like with a story, you don’t have an idea, and then you still don’t have an idea but you have this feeling that one is in the vicinity, that you just have to watch and wait and you’ll find yourself sitting down at the computer and typing in Scene I. That was the sort of feeling I had when Jack looked over at me.

“Gated property, though,” Jack says. “Like yours.”

We’ve been to Chez Herbie, where we were checked and double-checked and scrutinized by little glowing lights — and recorded, too, probably. All this to keep down the covetousness of the general public, which might cast a longing eye on the velvet lawn, the topiaries, the roses, the marble-fronted palace, the soigné assistant, and the shrewish, if very desirable-looking, blond wife.

Herbie gives a snort of exasperation. “You get him at work.”

“Most executive offices are better protected than your private homes,” Jack says.

“There’s always a weak point,” says Herbie.

“Garage?”

“You got it. The monitoring in this one isn’t worth shit. They got a fortune worth of trash compactors and air filters but they’re cutting corners all the time on the monitors.”

“Problem is their car, though,” I say. “And even a rental—”

“Maybe they walk,” says Herbie. “Maybe they drive both cars. Christ, I thought you were the writers and I was the producer. You get this done, I’m going to take a writing credit. You get him in the garage, see, and you wrestle him into the back of the car.”

“Nobody wrestles Harrison Ford into the back of a car,” I observe. “Not in his heyday.”

“Have to whack him good,” says Jack.

“No damage,” says Herbie, “not so soon. Drug him, maybe. Save the blood for later.”

We talk about this awhile. Then Jack and I get our marching orders. Back to the script one more time. We’re really punchy, but we rack our brains and study garages until we finally come up with a story that’s ingenious, real quality, but at the same time, no good. We know all too well what Herbie wants now: man against the elephants, i.e., middle-aged, overweight CEO outwits the lowlife and emerges triumphant.

Still, we need money, we need money now. We put aside a clever, if brutal, plot involving a quick killing and a trash compactor and ditch a script loaded with smart lines to bring our CEO home in glory. We call the office and once again Herbie’s secretary tells us to drop it off at his house.

“I don’t like this,” says Jack. “Something here smells funny. Totally funny. It’s like he wants to keep this out of the office. What’s he got going here that’s not strictly flicks?”

“Beats me,” I says. As it turns out, our professional imaginations didn’t run as fast as Herbie’s. “He doesn’t like it, we pitch our other solution.”

Jack looks at me. “He gets one more chance, this is it.”

And I don’t say anything, though I know what he’s talking about and though silence bespeaks assent. Call it a folie à deux. Or trois — I got to include Herbie somehow.

We get the call late. Herbie’s pleased. The script’s crap, but Herbie’s pleased. As writers, we don’t feel great, but we need the cash.

Jack puts on his lucky Toledo Mud Hens hat, and we hustle off to Distracting Productions as lights come on in the City of the Angels. Upstairs, Herbie is alone, his decorative secretary departed. I don’t see any sign of our script, which I take as a bad sign, but he says, “So you got it done. Not bad at all.”

We’re expecting our contract, but Herbie starts talking about his financing difficulties, certain problems with his stake in a special-effects action flick that ran over budget. “I love this, don’t get me wrong; I love this,” Herbie says.

“You could have told us a month ago,” says Jack.

“A month ago, I didn’t love the script,” says Herbie. “You understand this business. Things change.”

We let him have it then, but Herbie didn’t budge. The script was “great, super; ideal for my purposes” and “maybe in the spring finances will allow,” etc., etc.

Jack and I go slamming out of the office. “We’ve been had,” says Jack, “but I don’t know what his game is.”

I’m no wiser, and there we are swearing up a storm and kicking along the sidewalk when Jack says, “I forgot my hat.”

Personally, I never want to see Herbie again, but that hat’s a classic and Jack can’t write without it. To save time, we cut back in the side door of the garage and we’re tearing up the ramp when we see Herbie, suitcase in hand, heading for his black Mercedes. He’s whistling as if he hasn’t a care in the world.

“Hey,” says Jack. “I gotta get my hat out of your office.”

“No time,” says Herbie. “I’m in a major hurry.”

“It’s my Mud Hens hat,” Jack says. “I gotta get it.”

“Tough.” Herbie opens his trunk with the remote, throws in his luggage, and reaches for the door.

I’ve never seen Jack move quicker. Next thing I know, he has Herbie’s arms behind his back. Herbie’s struggling and shouting, and I clock him one and then again. He deserves it. Jack’s trying to trip him up, but Herbie breaks away and I stick out my leg. Crash, Herbie bangs into the side of the car and he kind of staggers and makes a lunge again for the door. I don’t know yet if I hit him or Jack did, but in all the confusion Herbie falls, bam, onto the cement and doesn’t get up.

He’s out cold. So much for man against the elephants. The garage is suddenly very quiet; I can’t even hear the traffic on the Strip. That’s an effect often used in thrillers of the psychological persuasion, but in real life, it surprises me.

Jack and I look at each other. “What are we going to do?” he says.

“He comes to, we don’t work in this town again.”

That’s a consideration. But I take a closer look at Herbie and suddenly I feel sick and hopeful at the same time. “I don’t think he’s coming to.”

Jack disputes this, claiming esoteric medical knowledge.

I check again and shake my head. “He’s not coming to.”

We look at each other for a moment, then bang. That’s what I mean by ideas in your head. We’ve plotted this out. And when somehow the situation jumps from the page to the VIP section of Herbie’s garage, we know what to do. Without thinking whether this is a good idea or a bad idea, we pick up his keys, grab Herbie the Inert and drag him to the back, where, yes, indeed, there’s the trash-compactor chute. Jack punches in the numbers; he always does his research, right down to trash-compactor access. With the over-the-top plots we cook up, you gotta have the details right.

Just the same, I’m in a sweat until the thing starts to grumble and the door slides open. One, two, three, heave! Herbie with his patent-leather loafers and his mean disposition disappears with a soft thud.

“What about his car?” I ask as Jack wipes the keypad and the handle.

“Leave it. We gotta get that hat, though.”

Up the back stairs, down the hall. I’m drenched with sweat and I can hardly breathe. Doing stuff like this is seriously different from even the most vivid imagining. At the door, I pull my shirt cuff over my hand and when Jack turns the key, we open the door, adrenaline bathing every cell, alert for alarms and sirens. I think I’m going to pass out before Jack grabs his hat and we get ourselves downstairs and onto the street. It feels like we’ve hit a wormhole and accessed some parallel universe, because everything looks the same but feels different.

Nothing is quite real to us; we’re light and new. At the same time, any thoughts about the garage and Herbie and the sound of the compactor bring certain details up to more reality than we can handle, number one being the script we followed. This is burned soonest and wiped off our computer disks, and we make an effort to erase the plotline from our neurons as well.

All this ultracaution blows up when we remember that our earlier copies made their way to Chez Herbie. Crisis time. Whatever fiscal or domestic machinations Herbie had in hand, he’d made sure his wife had access to our work. What for?

We’re clueless, but anyone who looks at the script’s evolution from heist to accidental kidnapping to executive kidnapping would sure have questions now. Especially the bereaved Mrs. Herbie.

By the end of the week, Jack and I are little more than sweat-soaked nerves. I get so that I’m hallucinating LAPD cruisers and I about leave my skin every time the phone rings. The longer — inexplicably longer — we wait for what seems inevitable, the worse it gets, and I think we’d both have been committable but for a lucky spell of hurry-up work on a soap pilot.

By the time we come up for air, the Rothberger case is on the back pages. A few months later, it’s stony cold. Herbert A. Rothberger disappeared from his office, leaving half a million dollars skimmed from Distracting Productions in the trunk of his Mercedes. No one has heard from him since.

A year later, Jack and I have almost convinced ourselves none of this had anything to do with us, when we get a call from Leonie Rothberger. Major panic attack, but we can hardly snub the new — and able — head of Distracting Productions.

Next afternoon: same office, different secretary; no more Bowflex and NordicTrack. Mrs. R. ran to a nice line of Asian porcelain and modern furniture. She had a big mane of blond hair and a vaguely predatory air. A fat pile of familiar-looking scripts sat on her desk.

“I’ve been going through the files,” she says. “Herbert had a number of your properties.”

“We’d been discussing some projects with him at the time — of his—” I’m at a loss for words, so I add, “So tragic for you,” though she hardly looks consumed with grief.

“Slipstream is a nice piece of work. I’d like to option it.”

Well, well! It’s nice to be appreciated even by the dangerous Leonie Rothberger. We have a good meeting about casting and production and she offers very fair terms. At the end, she puts her hand on the rest of the scripts. “What do we do with these?”

“We were under a bad influence at the time,” says Jack. “I think the shredder’s the best place for them.”

Leonie Rothberger gave a faint smile. She’s not a woman to reveal her emotions, but — scriptwriter’s eye — I pick up on that. “The wisest thing for your reputations.” A little pause; a warning? “Kidnappings and ransoms are so overdone.”

“And maybe for you too,” I says.

“He’d have taken the money and run, if he hadn’t been — intercepted somehow.” She looks at us very steadily. I guess right then that she has a good working theory of whatever Herbie’s game was and maybe also who did the intercepting.

I don’t trust myself to answer and neither does Jack. After a beat, Leonie Rothberger switches on an industrial-strength shredder and starts feeding in the scripts. “I hate to do this to gentlemen with imagination,” she says as our writing turns into packing filler. “But it’s for your own good.”

“Ashes to ashes and pulp to pulp,” says Jack.

Mrs. Rothberger gives a feline smile. “Amen to that,” she says.