That's when something I had been dimly aware of since one of my annoying conversations with Jerry Jerris and Jay Plankton in Jeris's office started to come back to me.

Chapter 22

I was seated at Dave Welch's kitchen table, and I had Leo Moyle on the phone. On the table in front of me were the few remaining crumbs from the crullers. And instead of joining Welch in a beer, I was back at the takeout coffee, which Welch had zapped in his microwave. This brought out the brew's acidic qualities, which I needed.

A groggy-sounding woman had answered Moyle's telephone. Apparently he had taken Jerry Jeris's advice on how to help regain his mental health. The woman was reluctant to awaken Moyle at daybreak, but when I explained that the information might save Jay Plankton from additional harm, she relented, and Moyle was soon on the line.

I asked him, "What do you know about Steve Glodt's personal life?"

"You woke me up at 5:30 A.M. to ask me whati"

"Jerry Jeris and Jay Plankton once mentioned to me in passing that Steve Glodt had a girlfriend in Oyster Bay who runs a nail parlor. It was my impression from this conversation, as I recall it, that Glodt also has a wife wherever he lives on Long Island. Is all of that true? I'll explain in a minute why I'm waking you up at this early hour, and how all this might be relevant to your kidnapping and to Jay's."

There was a pause, and then Moyle said, "What are you trying to say, Strachey? Just spit it the fuck out. What are you implying about Steve?"

"It sounds, Leo, as if you are ready to be indignant over any imputation of wrongdoing on the part of your big boss, Steve Glodt. I guess you are much fonder of Glodt than it's my impression Jerry Jeris and Jay Plankton are. Your confidence in his integrity is far greater than theirs. They both talked about Glodt as if he is greedy, mendacious, treacherous. Maybe your experience with Glodt has been different."

Moyle said, "Steve's a total asshole, don't get me wrong."

"Uh-huh."

"But what are you saying? That Steve had me snatched and dragged out to the Island and tortured? And now he's doing the same thing to Jay? Even if he was that skanky, why would he do that? Sure, Steve is a depraved son of a bitch. Anybody who's ever been in contract negotiations with him knows that. The man is capable of just about anything he thinks he can get away with. But why would he do this to Jay and I?

There'd be nothing in it for him."

"What about publicity? A spike in the ratings?"

"The show's ratings have never been higher," Moyle said. "Unless. .." There was a silence.

"Unless what?"

"Unless Steve thought that by putting Jay and me through the wringer it would make us angrier."

"Why would he want that?"

Moyle was breathing audibly now, as if the idea that someone was calculatedly trying to make h i m angrier was making him angrier.

"Steve's been working on a deal to get the show simulcast on cable TV-on GSN, the Gonzo Sports Network. But according to Irene Wojkowski, my agent, the GSN people have been offering less money than Steve thinks the deal is worth. They told him they thought the show was losing its edge, that we all weren't angry enough. The angry-white-male audience wants raw red meat, and the GSN people aren't sure we're mean enough. They want us foaming at the mouth for three hours a day, Irene said, and they claim we aren't doing it. Which is idiotic, because Jay and I are as vicious as we've ever been, and if any pussy-whipped dickhead tries to say otherwise to my face, I'll break his pansy-wristed fag neck."

Could necks have wrists? Now was not the time to inquire. "I guess, Leo, that when you use the term 'mean,' you are using it in the Jack Welch-style American corporate sense. By 'mean,' you mean relentlessly, even amorally, profit-oriented."

"Not really," Moyle said. "By 'mean,' I mean shitting on wussy, oversensitive, PC types of people for the sheer, sadistic pleasure of it."

"I'm sorry if I impugned your motives."

"Steve Glodt is only interested in money," Moyle said. "I have my beliefs, and I have my principles."

"So tell me about rotten, unprincipled Steve Glodt's girlfriend in Oyster Bay. She runs a nail parlor there?"

"I've heard that, yeah. She has an apartment over the nail parlor, and Steve spends as much time there as he does with his hideous wife in his mansion in Center Island, according to Irene. The wife knows about it, but what's she gonna do? Out in the open market, she'd be worth about eighty-nine cents a pound, and she'd miss her Chris-Craft and her helipad and her New Year's-to-Groundhog Day in Boca. The setup works perfectly for everybody involved."

"What's the girlfriend's name?"

"Annette, I think. But that might not be her real name. No, it is, it's Annette something. Listen," Moyle said, "do you really think Steve could be behind the kidnappings? I've been fucked over by people I knew before, but… This could be some major shit of a type that a man even as cynical as I can be finds very hard to get my mind around."

"I'm not sure," I said, "but Glodt is looking more and more promising. The girlfriend's apartment over the nail parlor in Oyster Bay might have been where you were held, and it sounds like a good locale to produce an overwhelming smell of nail polish. It's the right distance from the city too, at the end of a route that includes tunnels and expressways. And now you yourself, need I add, have offered up a specific motive, even beyond Glodt's well-known general horri-bleness. Is it safe to say that when you do the J-Bird's show on Monday, you'll be seething?"

"Oh, I'll be pissed beyond belief-at Steve, if he did it."

"But even if you went into the studio Monday morning thinking some radical gay group like the FFF was responsible for what happened to you and the J-Bird, you'd be very, very angry, wouldn't you, Leo?"

"I'd be ripshit."

"A state of affairs that would not go unnoticed at GSN, I'll bet."

I described to Moyle the overnight development in the case, where a moist object that the kidnappers asserted was Jay Plankton's tongue had turned up in the New York Post newsroom. "But I doubt it's actually the J-Bird's tongue," I said. "Plankton would be of no use to Glodt if the J-Bird was in a perpetual rage every weekday morning but his diction was worse than Quasimodo's."

Moyle said, "If Steve is actually behind this, somebody's tongue is gonna get ripped out, but it's not gonna be Jay's. If Annette wants her cunt licked in the future, she's gonna have to go down to the pet store and shop for a new friend other than Steve Glodt."

I guessed Moyle was speaking figuratively in his colorful way, but his breathing was sounding labored again, so I wasn't sure.

Chapter 23

Oyster Bay, despite the popular misconception, was a largely working-class town on the Island's generally silk-stockinged North Shore. Theodore Roosevelt had had a home there-Sagamore Hill, now a museum-but most of the town's residents were neither political nor business aristocracy. They were the people who installed the hot tubs, pumped out the septic tanks, and rolled the lawns of this section of Long Island's old and new rich. Oyster Bay, it appeared, as we drove through it en route to the House of Annette: Nails of Glory-which we had found in the Nassau County yellow pages-was not so much a Jay Gatsby town or a Tom and Daisy Buchanan town as it was a George and Myrtle Wilson town.