“Just some more talk about Tom. And to tell you I like your music.”
The compliment was a nonevent. “Tom,” she sighed heavily. “Can’t we let him rest in peace? He’ll be much happier with the angels than he was here on earth with the rest of us.”
“You can forget him if you want. I think I’ll keep him around for a while.”
She hugged herself for a moment as though I and my mission combined to create a cold wind, then sagged into the chair by the dressing table. “I’m not a monster, Mr. Tanner,” she said, looking in the mirror to confirm it. “I know you won’t believe it, but I’m in a lot of pain over this.”
“I’ll have to take your word for it, I guess. Things looked pretty upbeat from out there.”
“It’s my job to be upbeat.” Her hands dropped away from her chest, and her back stiffened at what she perceived as an insult. “What do you want? I have to get ready for the second show.”
“A lot of people don’t think Tom committed suicide,” I said.
“I don’t think so, either. I already told you that.”
“Some people think he was murdered.”
Her eyes fluttered. “Who? The police?”
I shook my head. “A friend. Of Tom’s.”
“Who is supposed to have murdered him?”
“The friend wasn’t sure.”
“Well, it’s nonsense. Tom just died, that’s all. People die in the Tenderloin every day.”
“You’re sure that’s all it was? A mugging that went too far?”
She met my eye in the mirror. “Yes.”
“No one had a reason to want Tom out of the way?”
“Don’t be silly. Tom was a little man who led a little life. Why would anyone want to kill him?”
“Little men get murdered every day, Mrs. Crandall. You’d know that if you ever read something besides Variety.”
“I asked you not to call me that,” she reminded me. “And if you think Richard had something to do—”
I shook my head. “I agree with you about Sands. I can’t see him indulging in homicide, either; he’s got too much to lose.” I believed it when I said it; then I remembered Tom’s final phone calls and reclaimed the possibility but kept it to myself. “I thought maybe you could put me onto someone else.”
“Like who?” she asked.
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
“Well, I can’t.” She browsed among the makeup and picked out a lipstick tube that looked like a rifle cartridge.
“Nothing unusual in his life lately, nothing he was scared of, nothing that made him mad?”
“Just the usual,” she murmured.
“You mean Sands.”
She shook her head. “I mean Nicky.”
TEN
“Who’s Nicky?”
“Tom’s brother.”
“When I asked Mrs. Crandall about him, she got a strange look in her eye and told me Tom didn’t have a brother.”
Clarissa Crandall laughed dryly. “Everyone gets a strange look in their eye when someone mentions Nicky.”
“Why?”
“Nicky’s been … difficult over the years. People wish he would go away. Permanently. After a while, they start to believe he really has. The fact that no one ever knows where Nicky is makes it easy for them.”
“Tom never mentioned Nicky to me, except at the end when he implied something had happened to him. Do you know anything about that?”
She shook her head. “I doubt it was anything sinister. Tom felt guilty about Nicky. And when Tom felt guilty, Tom kept mum.”
“What made him feel that way?”
Clarissa looked at me closely, canting her head as though that would give her a better view. “That’s a big subject,” she said. “Families and stuff.” She stood up and grabbed a gown off the rack and went behind the screen. “I have to change.”
I took her place at the dressing table and tried to ignore what was going on behind the square of translucent fabric by keeping my eyes on the powders and paints that littered the surface of the table in front of me, bottles and jars and tubes containing compounds I had never seen before or heard of. After a while, I couldn’t resist a peek, but when I glanced in the mirror, the only curves I saw belonged to the champagne bucket and the mums.
Except for the rustling of silks and satins, Clarissa was silent for a long time. “We both think there was something funny about Tom’s death,” I said to fill the void. “And we both doubt there was a reason for Sands to be involved, even indirectly. Which means we’re both afraid there might be someone out there who decided to murder your husband.” I paused. “And we both want to make sure the only one in the Crandall family he has a grudge against was Tom.”
I listened to a second rustle of fabric, then the purr of a zipper and the click of a heel on the hardwood floor. When Clarissa reappeared in the mirror, she was as blatantly alluring as before, but this time the theme was red.
Instead of gathered into her sexy stage pout, her face was folded in thought. “You run into a lot of freaks in show business,” she murmured as she regarded herself in the full-length mirror that was affixed to the back of the door.
“What kind of freaks?”
“Guys with hang-ups about women. Guys with obsessions about ‘stars.’ Guys who hear voices telling them I love them, or need them, or want to hurt them.” She shook her head. “The last one kept sending me his undershorts. One pair a day, for three months. Soiled, of course. Disgusting.” Her voice trailed off to a hush made heavy by the perversion she had just described. A moment later, she shuddered for an instant, still revolted by the fan’s effrontery.
“What made him stop?” I asked.
“Richard tracked him down and persuaded him to cease and desist.”
“How did he manage that?”
“I didn’t ask. Would you?”
When I didn’t answer, she came to my side and gave me a nudge. I yielded the dressing table and returned to the love seat. Clarissa replaced me in the chair and began dabbing and rubbing and painting her face. Each stroke made her look more brazen.
“There’s a new one out there, I think,” she said finally.
“A new what?”
“Freak. Guy with hair cut real short and a scar on his cheek. Big. Wears these awful clothes—plaid polyester and gray slacks with brown shoes and like that. He’s been by every night, lately. Late show only. Always by himself. I mean, I’m good but I’m not that good. He gives me the creeps. And I don’t see how he can afford it.”
“Have you sicced Sands on him yet?”
She shook her head.
“Why not?”
“So far he hasn’t done anything but drool. If I scare off the droolers, I’m out of business.”
Clarissa tended to her face some more, then moved to her bust, slipping her gown off her shoulders so she could whiten her chest to mimic the flesh of a bottom fish, oblivious to the effect the rituals of her toilette were having on me, an effect that led me to make a silent apology to Tom.
“Do you have a name for this guy?” I asked as she was finishing.
“He makes his reservation in the name of Kirby.”
“I’ll check him out for you.”
She shrugged her gown back onto her shoulders. “Suit yourself. Who’s paying for all this attention, by the way? If you check him out tonight, it will cost you a twenty-dollar cover and a two-drink minimum at five bucks per belt. Who gets the bill?”
“Only the IRS.”
She looked at me and raised a brow. “Hard to keep yourself in beer and skittles that way, isn’t it?”
“Someone usually turns up to make it worth my while. And what’s a skittle?”
“A game. Like ninepins.”
“Really? I thought it was some sort of food.”
She wasn’t inclined to discuss the derivation of Celtic slang. “Wouldn’t it be better to have your clients lined up in the beginning?” she asked.
“Sometimes people aren’t nervou
s enough to be clients in the beginning.”
“When they get nervous, what do they get nervous about?”
Our eyes met. “That I’m going to learn what they’ve been hiding.”
“You sound like that’s a universal ailment.”
“As universal as perversity.”
Since Mrs. Crandall was included in the scope of my doctrine, I expected a disclaimer of some sort. But all she did was look at her watch.
“Expecting someone?”
“Sometimes Richard stops by between sets.”
“You going to marry him once it’s seemly?” I asked, borrowing an adjective I’d last heard from the mouth of Ellen Simmons and before that from my grandmother’s.
She shrugged. “He hasn’t asked.”
“That’s not what Tom said.”
“Tom liked to read between the lines. Besides, Richard is already married.”
“Does that make a difference?”
She found me in the mirror. “Not to me.”
There was a response to that, but I decided not to use it. While I was debating the point, Clarissa dropped her eyebrow pencil and swiveled toward me. “It wasn’t my fault, you know. What happened between me and Tom.”
“Whose fault was it?”
“Tom’s, mostly.” She saw my look. “All right, both of ours.”
“Yours and Sands’?”
She shook her head impatiently. “Mine and Tom’s.”
“So what did happen between you two? Was it mostly Sands?”
She shook her head. “It didn’t have anything to do with Richard Sands. Not at first. It’s just that after a while my problems with Tom were so … enervating that I had a very large need to have my hand held and be told I was beautiful and intelligent and desirable and loved for precisely what I was.”
“It looks to me like there’s a whole room full of people out there who’ve been doing just that for the last hour or so.”
She shook her head. “They don’t count. It has to be someone who knows me, who’s not just slavering over a celebrity. Tom knew me better than anyone, but he stopped telling me those things a long time ago. When Richard came along and offered to fill the void, I couldn’t see any reason not to let him.”
“Even if it made Tom miserable?”
Her voice hardened. “The misery went both ways. Believe me.”
“It always does. And if all you want is to even the score, the relationship falls apart.”
She closed her eyes, but a tear seeped forth nonetheless. A moment later, her brand-new makeup job was ruined.
“You knew him,” she charged suddenly. “You know what he was like. I mean, he was good and true and noble and all that, but Tom Crandall thought it was a crime to be happy. He thought we all had to suffer till the last wretch in the world was saved. Well, I don’t see life that way: I think you should try to be happy, no matter what. If there’s something you can do about the things that make you sad, fine—do them. But if you can choose between being happy and being miserable, why the hell shouldn’t you be happy? Who does it help to mope around all the time? Frankly, I doubt the starving hordes in Ethiopia give a shit, don’t you?”
When she looked at me, I didn’t say anything. Although the object of her rebuttal was her husband, an equally appropriate target was me.
“I spent a lot of years trying to make Tom see things my way,” she went on. “I did two shows a night for the paying customers, then a show at home for my husband. But he was a tough audience. And after a lot of years when I thought that making him happy was the most important job in the world, I decided I didn’t want that job anymore. All of a sudden it wasn’t paying worth a damn.”
“What do you think was wrong with him?”
Her shrug was dispirited. “The war was part of it—he had these flashbacks and nightmares, about things he’d seen and done. But he wouldn’t go see anyone about them; he just sat around and brooded. Plus his job. People do the most horrible things to each other—to themselves, their kids, even their animals. I think the most upset I ever saw him was the night they were called out to get a guy who had slaughtered his dogs before he slaughtered himself.”
“Tom didn’t try therapy at all?”
She shook her head. “He said it was because we couldn’t afford it. But I think it was because he was afraid someone would tell him he was going to end up like his brother.”
“Which is what, exactly?”
She began the new eyeliner. “Paranoid schizophrenic. Clinically. He hears voices and sees ghosts and gets messages—the whole nine yards. Nicky Crandall is so hyper he can’t stay in a room for thirty seconds unless he’s on medication.”
“When’s the last time you saw him?”
“Nicky? It’s been years.”
“Did Tom keep in touch with him?”
“He tried, but it was off and on; Nicky didn’t stay in one place very long. Tom would get postcards—the last one was from Walla Walla. The one before that was from Galveston.”
“Did Tom mention his brother lately?”
She sighed. “Tom didn’t talk about himself at all anymore. Not to me. Apparently he saved it for you and the rest of the boys at Guido’s.” Clarissa blinked away another tear and swore at it. “I didn’t mean to hurt him, Mr. Tanner. But I was in trouble. He made me feel worthless, like nothing I could do would ever make him better, like I was wasting my time to try. I did what I had to do to save myself.”
“Why didn’t you just leave? Dangling Sands under his nose made it pretty tough on him.”
“I should have, I suppose. But I kept thinking my friendship with Richard would make Tom realize how unhappy I was, and then he’d do something about it. He’d see what I was getting from Richard and start giving it to me himself.”
“I think all he could see was Sands’ money. I think Tom saw you being attracted to a man with fifty million dollars, and that was one thing he could never give you.”
“But that wasn’t what I wanted.”
“I have to tell you that in the circumstances, it would be hard for a man to believe that.”
She nodded grudgingly. “I know that. But I had to do something. At least my friendship with Richard got Tom paying attention to me again.” Her grin was defiant. “Lately Tom gave more thought to my life than I did. He had lots of ideas how I should be living it.”
I decided not to mention that Tom had made much the same complaint about her. Which I suppose is why the divorce courts are at capacity.
“Let’s get back to Nicky,” I said, but before I could ask a question, there was a knock on the door. I expected Sands or one of his henchmen, but the head that entered the room was Mickey Stringer’s. “Randy came up with a new chart on ‘Misty’ I want to go over, and—” He looked at me and frowned. “Tanner, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “Hi, Mickey. Been a long time.”
“Bimbo’s 365.”
“Bimbo’s, right. The good old days.”
“You got that right. What brings you by the Velvet?”
I glanced at Clarissa. “Just a fan.”
“Catch the first show?”
I nodded. “The boys sound great.”
Mickey smiled. “Those kids make me feel like a kid myself. I don’t know how they kept from being dragged under by rock and roll and rap, but thank God they weren’t. The guy—Jarvis—on tenor, he’s got chops like I haven’t heard since Getz.”
I stood up. “I’ll leave you to your labors.” I turned back to Clarissa. “I’d like to stop by the apartment some time. Look through Tom’s things. Maybe talk some more about Nicky.”
She shrugged dubiously. “Maybe. I don’t know. Call me.”
“Do me a favor first.”
“What?”
“Take Tom’s voice off your machine.”
She frowned, then colored. “I … of course. How awful.”
I looked at Mickey. “I’d like a favor from you, too.”
“Yeah?”
“
Next time I’m out front, put ‘You Go to My Head’ on the play list.”
“You got it,” Mickey said, and slugged me on the shoulder. “Want me to tell them to comp you a table for the late show? Not a busy night, they like the seats filled.”
I hadn’t intended to stay, but what with the band and the singer and the lead I’d just come up with, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse.
As I reached the door, I pulled a Columbo. “By the way,” I said to Clarissa, who was making one last check in the mirror. “Do you know what happened to Tom’s Silver Star?”
She looked at me without interest. “I didn’t even know he had one till I read it in the papers.”
ELEVEN
The second show was even better than the first. The band had loosened up, perhaps courtesy of the amenities in the back room, and the charts were out of the books of Ellington, Strayhorn, Herman, and Hefti, with time out for a svelte rendition of my request. For her part, Clarissa wrapped herself around a lot of Porter and Arlen, with a dash of Jimmy Webb and Carole King for good measure, and the crowd—nearly a full house now that the tab was only a cover and minimum instead of a five-course meal—was putty in her red-tipped hands.
After the up-tempo version of “Misty” that Mickey had wanted her to look over, Clarissa left the stage and I decided to depart as well—I wanted to see what would happen when Clarissa left the building. The problem was, it was a big hotel, with lots of ins and outs. Unless a limousine was parked in front of one of them, I didn’t see how I could arrange to be on hand when Clarissa Crandall left the premises.
I was still loitering in the anteroom, trying to form a productive plan under the watchful eye of the cute-but-surly hatcheck girl, when I got a break in the person of a fellow patron. He was big, crew cut, with a scar like a putty smudge along his jaw and a brow that shaded his eyes like a granite visor. He was almost certainly Clarissa’s most recent admirer, and I guessed that he’d know exactly where the object of his desire would turn up when it was time for her to leave, so when he took the elevator to the ground floor, I went along for the ride.
He left through the main entrance, as far as I could tell without the slightest suspicion of me or my motives. After giving him some lead time, I tagged along. I reached the sidewalk in time to see him turn into the alley behind the hotel, which was coincidentally the alley where I’d parked my car with a WORKING PRESS VEHICLE sign in the window. It was also the alley where, sure enough, a pearl-gray limo waited like a mighty stallion to do the bidding of its master. The windows were smoked to black, of course, so I could only guess who was inside, but the license plate read RS-1.
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