It was. Out of the stubby bar set and down to the right they found two parallel walls propped up to look something like the hall at the OJ, except twice as wide and many times cleaner. Instead of the catchall onetime phone booth there was a many-shelved wooden hutch piled with neat stacks of tablecloths and napkins. There were two doors on the left side, marked DOGGIES with a cartoon dog in a cardigan smoking a pipe and KITTIES with a cartoon slinky cat in a long tight black gown smoking a cigarette with a long holder. Also, the doors didn’t open.

The door at the end of the hall did open, but didn’t lead anywhere, and particularly didn’t lead to the back room. That they found in another quadrant of the rehearsal space with two of its walls propped on dollies so they could be rolled forward and back to accommodate a camera. The table was the right shape, round, and the chairs were the right era, old, but there were no liquor cartons stacked up in front of the cream-painted walls.

“No boxes,” Dortmunder commented.

“Probly,” Kelp said, “it makes it too busy behind people’s heads when they’re filming.”

“Probly.”

Dortmunder sat at the table, automatically taking the chair that faced the open door. The hanging light was a little too high and a little too clean and it didn’t have a bulb in it. “You know what I feel like,” he said.

“No,” Kelp said, interested. “What?”

“One of those guys fakes an autobiography,” Dortmunder said. He gestured at the table, the chairs, the walls. “We haven’t done anything and already this is a lie.”

“We aren’t in this for an autobiography,” Kelp reminded him. “We’re in it for the twenty G.”

“And the per diem.”

“And the per diem.”

Dortmunder got to his feet. “Anything else around here?”

There wasn’t; at least, not of interest to them. So they switched off all the fluorescent lights and, by Dortmunder’s blurred flashlight beam, went on down one flight to Scenery Stars, where there was nothing that caught their eye, except, on a table, scattered photos of the real OJ and the real Rollo in profile and the real sidewalk outside.

Dortmunder said, “I hope Rollo didn’t see them take that.”

“No, it looks okay,” Kelp said. “But even so, those guys could pass for tourists.”

“Easily.”

On down they went to Knickerbocker Storage, the “target” of their robbery, where two security cameras were installed at opposite ends of the hall where they hadn’t been before. Their view was down along the line of closed storage spaces toward one another. They didn’t appear to be operating.

“Looks like they’re giving us a little extra work,” Kelp said.

Dortmunder glowered. “I don’t need that.”

“We’ll talk to them.”

“Not right away. We don’t want them to know we’ve been here.”

“When we come back,” Kelp said, “to see their idea of the OJ, to get a little tour, we’ll be very surprised on the way up. ‘Oh, cameras!’”

“No cameras would be better,” Dortmunder said.

Kelp said, “Well, let’s see what other surprises they got for us.”

They went on down the next two flights, skipping past Combined Tool because they knew there was nothing they could do about that now. On the ground floor, among the automobile menagerie, they skirted the corners of the building and found the main electric service, which someday they might want to interrupt, in a large black metal box in the left rear corner, under the stairs.

Next to this service box, almost impossible to see, was another find, a gray metal fire door, blocked by a few cardboard cartons and a couple of spare tires. They cleared it, Kelp did his stethoscope trick, and they found that this door too was alarmed. They used the same methods to de-claw it, and stepped outside, not having to move the boxes and tires because the door opened outward.

This was a cul-de-sac, a completely enclosed space blocked by the inner walls of buildings on all four sides, each of them with a fire door for access. Looking up by the very uncertain light back here, not wanting to chance a flashlight out here, they could see one small window on the left at each story, which must be for the bathrooms. There were no bars over the second-story window.

Dortmunder nodded at that window. “I bet that isn’t as easy as it looks.”

“You know it.”

They went back inside, made sure their changes to the door didn’t show, and made their way through automotive world to stand on the platform of the elevator and look up at the second floor opening.

“We can’t unalarm the elevator,” Kelp said.

“I know.” Dortmunder waved the flashlight beam along the floor edge above them. “Next time we come here,” he said, “we’ll have to bring a ladder. Either to go up through here or out to that window.”

“We can stash it out there.”

“Good.”

Stepping off the elevator platform, Kelp said, “Okay, we’re done for tonight. What do you think, should we bring Stan a car?”

“All the way to Canarsie?”

“I guess not.”

So they climbed the stairs back to the roof and headed for the olive oil importer’s exit, leaving the GR Development building as ready as a Thanksgiving turkey at noon.

20

HAVING BEEN SUMMONED to Babe Tuck’s office Thursday morning, Doug arrived to find a very dapper fortyish man with a large brushy-haired head and a wide op art necktie seated in one of the big leather chairs facing Babe’s beat-up desk. This fellow stood as Doug entered the room, as did Babe on the other side of the desk, and the new man turned out to be very short, out of proportion to both the large head and the neon necktie. Doug guessed at once that he was an actor.

Babe made the introductions: “Doug Fairkeep, producer of The Crime Show, this is—”

Doug said, “The Crime Show?”

“Temporary title,” Babe told him.

“I’ll think about it.”

“This is,” Babe insisted, “Ray Harbach. With your agreement, I think I want to add him to the show.”

Surprised, Doug said, “As the bartender?”

“No, one of the gang.”

Now Doug frowned, deeply. “Babe, I don’t know,” he said. “They’re pretty much a unit.”

“I feel,” Babe said, “what with one thing and another, we need eyes and ears inside the gang. You know what I mean. We don’t want any surprises, Doug.”

“No, I don’t suppose so.”

“We deliver surprises,” Babe told him. “We don’t collect them.” Gesturing at the chairs, he said, “Come on, at least let’s get comfortable.”

As they all sat, Ray Harbach took a small magazine from his jacket pocket and extended it toward Doug, saying, “I thought, to introduce myself, I’d show you my bio from my last Playbill.” He had a deeply resonant voice, as though speaking from a wine cellar. “We write those ourselves, you know.”

“Yes, I know.”

Ray Harbach had left the Playbill conveniently folded open to the page with his bio, which was fifth among the cast, and which read:

RAY HARBACH (Dippo) is pleased to be back in the Excelsior Theater, where he appeared three seasons ago as Kalmar in the revival of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. Other theater roles have included work by Mamet, Shaw, Osborne, and Orton. Film: Ocean’s 12; Rollerball. Television: The New Adventures of the Virgin Mary and the Seven Dwarfs at the North Pole; The Sopranos; One Life to Live; Sesame Street. I want to dedicate this production to my father, Hank.

“I see,” Doug said, and handed the Playbill back. “Thanks.”

Pocketing the Playbill, Harbach said, “I get the idea this is something a little different here.”

“To begin with,” Doug said, “it’s a reality show.”

Harbach smiled with the self-confidence of a man who will never run out of small parts to pay the rent. “Then what do you need me for?”