Fast Lane

by Dave Zeltserman

  “Well, you did.”

  I looked him in the eye and we stared at each other. I was starting to get disgusted with the whole thing.

  “Max,” I explained, “that’s just not true. I’ve always been on the level. I never promised you anything except the jobs I’ve given you. And I’ve always paid you fairly. You’ve gotten every dime I’ve owed you.”

  “But,” he was beginning to get flustered, “what are you going to do? Change the names and turn that into next month’s adventure from the files of Johnny Lane?”

  He was glaring at his report. I shook my head, showing my disappointment. “If you feel that strongly about it I certainly won’t. But you’re being unreasonable. You know that’s part of what’s agreed on. I’ll tell you what I think I am going to do,” I said, feeling a meanness edging into my voice. “Next month I’ll introduce my sidekick. Every hero needs a sidekick. Mine can be Max, the dickless dick. Got a nice ring to it. Yes sir, I think the whole next feature will be about how Max became the dickless dick. A pretty funny story, his girlfriend getting all excited and forgetting to take her false teeth out.”

  That left him speechless. And there was quite a bit of truth in it, although you couldn’t really say he was dickless. A doctor was able to stitch it up for him, leaving it almost as good as new. But that’s an awful difficult thing to explain to your wife, why something like that needed to get stitched up. He just about begged me to feed Moira a story about it happening in the line of duty, and only God knows how I was able to do it with a straight face.

  After a few seconds some color came back to his face. “I’ve spent almost twenty years working for you. Helping you build up clients and your business. And I did it because you promised you’d make me a partner.”

  “No, sir. You’ve been working for me because it was the easy way out. I was able to offer you jobs without you having to go out and bust your own hump.” I could feel my temper slipping away. “How many other folks would let you charge five days for a two-day job? Maybe I should pay more attention to you boozing yourself up on my time. Maybe if you took a little responsibility for yourself and cleaned up your act and quit looking like a drunken slob, folks would consider hiring you. You look like a goddamned disgrace.”

  And he did too. A good week’s worth of growth was planted on his face. And it would have taken a far greater detective than myself to figure out which had been cleaned last, his clothes or his hair. Which was just plain lazy, what with the little hair he had left.

  He muttered something that sounded like ‘bass turd’, which was a funny thing to call somebody. I didn’t let it bother me since I couldn’t even begin to imagine what one of those would look like.

  “Look,” I said. “When I was first starting out—”

  “Yeah, I remember reading all about that and it’s something I’ve always wondered about. What exactly did happen?”

  I’d had just about enough. Without really looking at him, I told him it had certainly been a pleasure and he could bet his check would be in the mail as soon as possible.

  He gave me a screw-you-too look, walked as far as the door and stopped. A good while passed without him so much as moving, and then his shoulders collapsed. The sunlight drifting through the window cast his shadow on the opposite wall. With his head bowed and his shoulders slouched forward, it looked like the shadow of a man hanging by his neck.

  He let out a low moan from deep in his gut. In a voice just above a whisper, he asked if we could try talking again.

  I didn’t say anything. He sat back down and without looking at me, at least not exactly, he said, “I guess I lost my temper back there. I—things haven’t been going well for me.” He shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t know where my money goes. I guess with Moira and the boys, and all their expenses, it’s never enough. I’m sorry. I must have been mistaken about what I thought you promised me. This won’t happen again.”

  He was looking as sick as can be. I took out the bottle of rye from my desk drawer and poured us both drinks. He took his in one gulp and I poured him a bigger one.

  “These things happen,” I said. “I guess this must have been building up for some time now?”

  He nodded in agreement.

  “Moira’s been harping about it, hasn’t she? Getting you all worked up?”

  “I-I—” he sputtered, looking awful uncomfortable. “I guess she’s been talking about it, but—”

  “That’s what I thought,” I said. “You should have a talk with her and explain how much I’ve really done for you.”

  “I’ll talk with her, Johnny. I’m sorry and—”

  “Don’t worry about it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s forgotten.”

  I offered him my hand and he took it, being a good deal friendlier about it than when he first came in. He reeled off a few more apologies and I told him again not to worry about any of it. Before leaving, he stopped at the door and asked if I would call him as soon as any jobs came up and I assured him I would.

  I settled down to work, chipping away at the mountain of phone messages that had piled up during my absence. After an hour or so I ended up with one definite job and four appointments. Tommy Burns was available for work so I started him on it, giving him the information he needed over the phone.

  I had hesitated before calling Burns. I couldn’t help feeling a little troubled thinking about Max. We went back a long way, and I was even the godfather to one of his boys. We used to be friends; at least I think we were. But the last few years things had been getting out of hand. And I didn’t like the fact he was bitching to Rude about me.

  Of course I had never promised to make him my partner. I might have joked about it once over a bottle of scotch, but he knew I wasn’t serious. I thought some more about Max and the aggravation he was causing me. After a while, I made a decision. From now on he was only going to get exactly what I owed him.

  Nothing.

  Chapter 8

  In Colorado a few years ago a car flew sixty feet through the air, crashed into a house and killed a woman sitting all alone by her sewing machine. It wasn’t the first car that had hit that particular house, but it was the first car that was airborne at the time.

  The way the house was situated was partly to blame, being at the base of a steep hill, right where the road took a sharp ninety-degree turn. So it wasn’t that unusual for cars traveling down the hill to lose their brakes and go skidding into the front of the house. It happened about once a month and after a while the husband got sick of it and put some boulders out to protect his home and family.

  What happened next, though, wasn’t what you would have expected. Sure enough, a car lost its brakes and skidded into those boulders. But instead of the boulders stopping the car, they acted as kind of a springboard, sending the car flying. You already know what happened next.

  Now you may think it was just plain tragic, and it was, at least for the wife. And you probably would have thought so for the husband also. At least no one would have had any reason to think otherwise if he hadn’t bought an insurance policy on his wife three months earlier. A two and a half million dollar accidental death policy. You couldn’t blame his insurance company for being suspicious, and you sure as hell couldn’t blame them for hiring me to look into it.

  I poked around for two weeks and came up with a hundred reasons that proved it wasn’t any accident. Number one: the husband was a mechanical engineer, and you would think he’d know how a car would act when it hit those boulders.

  Number two were the boulders themselves. They were shaped like ramps, and were placed so that the lower edges faced the road. If you stood behind them you could see how a car would take off when it hit them.

  Number three, he’d had a girlfriend for over a year before the accident. Reasons four through one hundred came from conversations with neighbors, relatives, and whoever else would talk with me. Before his wife’s death, he became obsessed that she use her sewing machine. There were fights about it, intimid
ation, and at times, he even locked her in the room. From what I was able to piece together, his obsession came about around the same time the boulders were put down. All those reasons, along with the insurance policy, were enough to know he had premeditated her death, but none of them were enough to do anything about it.

  I ran out of ideas. I didn’t know what else to do but try putting a scare in him, letting him know I was onto him and that I was going to see him take the fall for his wife’s murder. When I confronted him, he admitted what he’d done, but he made it a big joke, gloating about it and leaving me with nothing. So there I was, knowing he killed his wife, and what was worse, he had me beat.

  He was lucky his wife happened to be sitting where she was when the car went through the wall. Even though he had the game rigged, he couldn’t have known that for sure, but it was still a safe bet. If a car never hit the house, well, that was that. And if a car happened to go through the room and somehow left his wife alive, his home insurance would have paid for the damages. As it turned out, he rolled the dice and they came up sevens and there wasn’t a damned thing anyone could do about it.

  The night I gave up on the case, I was consoling myself with a few drinks when I ran into Eddie Braggs. Eddie was (and still is) the managing editor of the Examiner. We started exchanging war stories and when I told him about this guy getting away with murder, Eddie just about exploded.

  Eddie got him on the phone and before long he was shouting and cursing like a crazy man. I had never seen him get mad before, and to be honest, I didn’t think it was possible. The twinkle or sparkle or whatever that was always in his eyes was gone. And that look of his, as if he was just busting a gut to tell you a hot one, was replaced by a cold dead whiteness.

  Eddie fed this guy a fairy tale about how his paper had evidence proving the accident had been planned, and that he was going to keep the story on the front page until the bastard was cold and stiff with a rope burn around his neck.

  He kept at it for almost an hour, his face growing beet red. It was all pretty laughable but the way Eddie was saying it you didn’t want to laugh. The guy should have called Eddie’s bluff and hung up on him, but listening to Eddie you could understand why he didn’t. He ended up letting Eddie get under his skin. He panicked and offered a bribe. The next day the Examiner ran the headline: WIFE MURDERER OFFERS EXAMINER’S EDITOR 50 GRAND TO WITHHOLD EVIDENCE.

  That was it as far as the husband’s neck was concerned.

  The thing with Eddie was that the Examiner had run several stories sympathetic to this guy. So when Eddie heard it was a scam, he took it personally. The Examiner (which to Eddie, was the same as himself) had been played for a jerk.

  That’s just the way Eddie was. On meeting him you would think he was just this fat jolly guy looking to clown around and give you a little ribbing. And most of the time you would be right. But if you crossed him, or if he somehow got it in his head that you did, you’d better not blink. He’d go right for your jugular. And if he got a good enough grip, he’d end up shaking you until something broke.

  I guess all this helps explain why I got so rattled when I found out about the anonymous letters. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  * * * * *

  I spent most of the day debating whether or not to write about Debra Singer for my column. My deadline had arrived and I had nothing else. There wasn’t much Craig Singer could do except make some noise, and no matter how much he made he wouldn’t be able to hide the fact that he had sexually abused his daughter for years. If he sued me or filed charges for assault he’d have to explain why he waited until my column came out. Still, the way I was feeling, I didn’t know if I’d be able to handle even a little noise from him. I also didn’t want to risk making things tougher for Debra.

  At four I headed over to the Examiner’s offices to ask Eddie to reprint one of my old columns. I made my usual walk around the city desk, meeting with folks and swapping stories. I had an uneasy feeling that something was wrong. In the past when I’d made my rounds, folks gathered around to shoot the breeze. This time people were avoiding me and I couldn’t figure out why.

  I knocked on Eddie Braggs’ door and walked in. He was on the phone, and with his free hand signaled for me to sit down. He was only five foot four but must have weighed close to two hundred and fifty pounds. With his bald head and beard and the way he always seemed to be ready to bust out chuckling, he reminded me (at least when he wasn’t steamed and looking for blood) of one of Santa’s fatter and jollier helpers.

  He got off the phone and reached out to shake hands. “You have a new ‘Fast Lane’ for me?”

  “That’s why I came down here,” I told him. “It’s been a slow month and I’ve come up empty. I need to ask a favor and have you reprint one of my old stories.”

  He leaned back and pursed his lips. “That’s not good, Johnny, really not good at all. That’s the fourth time this year. And the timing couldn’t be worse.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “There have been some discussions recently,” he said. “We’ve been trying to decide whether to drop your feature. I’ll tell you, I’m one of the few supporters you have left.”

  I had to swallow with the way my throat was drying up on me. “What’s going on?”

  “Probably no more than you expect,” he shrugged. “People are feeling you’ve been taking us for granted. That the last few years you haven’t been putting as much into your column as you should. And your popularity with our readers has been dropping.”

  “I’ve got to disagree. Plenty of folks stop me to shake my hand.”

  “I’m not saying you don’t have your share of readers. I’m saying you don’t have nearly as many as you used to. According to our marketing studies you’ve got almost forty percent less. We don’t know if we can justify carrying you.”

  I took a deep breath. “Look, if you drop me there are going to be some unhappy people out there. My column’s a tradition in this town.”

  “Tradition or not, if we were to keep ‘The Fast Lane’, and you were to keep letting us down, where would that leave us?”

  “Well, maybe I haven’t been putting as much into my column as I should, but—”

  “No maybes about it, Johnny.”

  My throat now felt as if I’d swallowed a cactus. “Okay,” I conceded. “Let’s say I’ve been taking things for granted. That doesn’t mean I can’t do better. What if I did more promotion? I haven’t been on a radio show in a long time and that would help get folks back into the fold.”

  He was nodding, giving the idea some thought. “It would help,” he admitted. “At least it would calm some people down around here. I have an idea for this month’s column, so I’ll be generous and forgive you for now. You won’t let me down again, will you?”

  I told him there was no chance of that, and I meant it. It wouldn’t happen overnight, probably take a few years, but if I was dropped from the paper, eventually my business would dwindle away to nothing. Without my column, folks would forget all about Johnny Lane. I would end up no better than Max Roth and I couldn’t let that happen.

  “Good.” Eddie gave me a false smile. “That’s what I want to hear.” He paused for a moment. “There’s something else,” he said. “We’ve been getting anonymous letters about you.”

  At first all I could do was stare at him. After a while I asked him what they said.

  He started to laugh. It choked somewhere inside him and came out as a wheeze. “Mostly that you have been blackmailing your clients. You haven’t been doing that, have you?”

  I blinked a few times before the impact of what he said hit me. Then I was so mad I could barely see. I snapped at him, asking him what the hell he thought.

  As he looked at me his eyes closed to slits and that gave me a start. He was sizing me up. Then he started chuckling, his eyes back to normal.

  “I’m sorry, Johnny. Just pulling your chain a little. Some people around here try to pull a story out from every piece of
horse dung tossed against our door. I guess that’s part of working for a newspaper. Convicted until proven innocent.”

  He laughed some more and again it died down pretty quick. “Let us hypothesize a little. If those letters are true, it means that we, the Examiner, have been promoting a common criminal, building him up into the public’s trusting eye for almost twenty years. I don’t believe I could have had my nose rubbed in it for that long without smelling anything.”

  “If I found out I had,” he went on, “I would have no choice but to destroy the bastard, or at least use all the paper’s resources trying. I would feel obligated to hound him incessantly. Publish stories to get the public so incensed they’d as soon hang him as spit on him. Of course, the courts would soon enough feel they had no choice but to go after this bastard, and I’d make sure they did so with a vengeance. In the end, his life wouldn’t be worth a nickel.”

  He winked at me. “I’ll tell you, Johnny, it’s a good thing those letters are crap.

  * * * * *

  God only knows how I sat there. The pounding in my ears had gotten so bad I could barely hear above it. I guess we shook hands, but I couldn’t say for sure. All I really knew was I somehow got out of there without harming anyone. And I don’t think even God could’ve figured that one out.

  Leaving the building, I was staggering, a red haze blinding me. Even with my eyes wide open I couldn’t see anything more than shadows. I guess nature works in miraculous ways, because if I could have seen any of those smug goddamned self-important faces, I would have turned them right back into the crap they really were. So I reeled down the street like a stinking drunk, bumping into people along the way, and lucky for all concerned no one made as much as a peep because that would have been all I needed. And in the long run that wouldn’t have done me any good.

  I don’t know how I ended up where I did, but whatever self-preservation instinct had blinded and deafened me also delivered me right to that bar.

  Of course, there was no truth to those letters. Eddie Braggs had sense enough to know it, and he could’ve asked each of my clients and they’d tell him that. Still, it was another burden to bear. If those letters were sent out to enough people they’d hurt me some. Maybe more than some. And it wouldn’t matter whether there was a word of truth in them. I was going to have to look into it. Sooner or later, I’d find out who was sending them and why.