“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I think I do. She didn’t share things with her editor, that’s for sure. Jane was pretty distraught by Monday afternoon, and after I pushed her some, she admitted talking it over with a couple of people, people she trusted. That would have to include you.”
Fetch sneered, but not very convincingly. “Sure, Jane’s gonna tell me the name of the guy who’s replacing me?”
“No. No, I don’t see it that way. I see it more like Jane needing to talk with someone about her professional problems, and my guess is she just told you about Coyne as her source. You’re the one who put two and two together.”
“You’re crazy.”
“My guess is it made you crazy, thinking about them together, especially given the kind of guy he was.”
“Bullshit.”
“Or maybe Coyne himself told you about them. Bragged to you about how much he satisfied her by comparison.”
“Goddammit! I told you, I had the mumps so I’m—”
“Sterile not impotent. I know. It’s just that Coyne was spreading a different story.”
“You fucking bastard.”
“And speaking of which, then to realize he was the father of her baby—”
“Look!” Fetch leaped up. “When Coyne got killed, I didn’t even know Jane was pregnant! Hell, she didn’t know, just thought the stress and all had fouled up her cycle somehow.”
“Which still leaves you with a pretty strong motive for killing Coyne when he got stabbed, because he was cutting in, humiliating you. Then a stronger motive to kill Jane, when you realized she was carrying his child.”
He brought the injured hand to his face, but winced from a pain that went beyond the finger. “I loved her, for God’s sake. Why can’t you see that? I loved her.”
“What kind of car do you drive, Bruce?”
“What?”
“Your car. What make and model?”
“The hell difference does that make?”
“I’m just curious. Save me a trip to the Registry.”
Fetch seemed to give in, sinking back into his chair. “Ford. Station wagon. Satisfied?”
“Big one?”
“The car?”
“Yes.”
“I guess so. Country Squire. I bought it used off my brother when he was getting a new one. Why do you care about all this?”
“Monday night, the night Jane died, you went to her house, didn’t you?”
“No!”
“Bruce, I know your car was there.”
“I wasn’t there, and it wasn’t there.”
“It was late. You have a date planned with her?”
“No.”
“Reconciliation, maybe?”
“No. Look, why don’t you get out of here?”
“Not until I get the truth. You loved her? Seems to me you’d be interested in finding out who killed her.”
“She killed herself, remember? Suicide, you know?”
“I don’t think so. I think somebody mashed up some pills, a lot of pills, and put them in her cocoa. She didn’t take pills generally, so she’d have no way to judge the potency of the dose from the taste. I think somebody stayed there for a couple of hours, searching the place very carefully and systematically for something, something that wasn’t found at Coyne’s house the night he died and it was ransacked. I think that person sat with Jane, sat and watched her die very slowly from the pills, just slip further and further—”
“Stop it! Stop it now!”
Without knocking, Grace opened the door. “Are you alright, Bruce?”
“Yes.”
She treated me to a murderous glare. “Are you sure?”
Fetch said, “Yes, yes. Leave us alone, okay?”
Reluctantly, she drew back and closed the door.
I said, “You drove there Monday night, didn’t you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why?”
“I knew—I knew she’d been under a lot of pressure, that things weren’t going any better at the paper, especially since Coyne died. She blamed me … no, that’s not fair. She didn’t want to blame me for him being killed. She didn’t want to believe I told anybody about Coyne being her source.”
“Did you?”
“Tell anybody, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
“Did Jane tell you who else she discussed Coyne with?”
“No. She said it was better I didn’t know, like she was some kind of spy or something. I couldn’t believe that she thought the guy was going to help her or anybody else. I kind of knew who he was … that is, I’d seen him down at … down on The Strip once in a while. I went down there … to get stimulated, you know? To see if the … shows and all could help me that way.”
“Go on.”
“Well, one night at this place, a bar called Bun’s, he comes up to me between … between shows and sits down and starts telling me, telling me to my face about how him and Jane … made love. About what she said while he was …”
I gave him a moment. “How did Coyne know who you were?”
“He said from the picture.”
“Picture?”
“Yeah. At Jane’s house. She had a photo of her and me together. On her dresser.”
“That night at Bun’s, you guys fight it out?”
“No. No, I was … too ashamed, I guess. I just ran out of there, never went back. Then Coyne gets killed maybe a week later, and Jane suspects, well, like I said.”
“So why did you go to Jane’s on Monday night?”
“I was home, drinking. I don’t … don’t drink well. I got a little high, and I started calling her. I’m not sure what I was thinking, I guess that I could convince her to take me … to give us another try as a couple. Well, I called her, I don’t know, four or five times, and let it ring out, no answer. So finally I pulled on some sneakers and sweat clothes, and went out to my car, figure to see her face to face but be dressed casually, you know? Like it was a spur-of-the-moment kind of idea.”
“When she wasn’t home?”
“Huh?”
“You expected to see her at her house when she hadn’t been answering her phone?”
“Oh, no. I … I thought maybe she had somebody else now. Somebody else like Coyne. Every time the phone rang and she didn’t answer that’s what I … pictured in my head. Anyway, I finally got mad enough to drive there. I still … I still had a key to her front door. She gave it to me because the buzzer bothered her landlady.”
“What time was this?”
“I don’t know. Late, maybe eleven-thirty, midnight. I shouldn’t even have been driving, what I’d had to drink. Anyway, I open the door to her place, and the stereo is going, and so I sneak around to the bedroom, to sort of peek in I guess, I didn’t really know what I was doing, and then I see her …” Fetch put his good hand up to his eyes. “She was just lying on the couch, like she’d fallen asleep. I touched … I touched her, and she was cold, and there was this smell, like a clogged toilet, and I realized she … she was dead. I … I’d never seen anybody dead like that. I panicked, I suppose. I remember running toward the front door. And I remember jumping in the car. And that’s all. Except for being scared, every day after that.”
“Scared about what?”
“About what? About finding Jane’s body and not reporting it or anything.”
“But you figured she’d committed suicide, right?”
“I didn’t know what to think, understand? I mean, all I knew was she was dead. I didn’t look around for anything or anybody. I just knew she was dead. It was only when I got back home and stopped shaking that I realized she probably died of something like that. Suicide, I mean. The way she looked, no blood or anything, I never even thought about murder.”
“Tell you what.”
“Huh?”
“Think about it now
.”
Connie eyed me suspiciously as I approached her window.
I said, “Can you get Duckie for me?”
She put her People magazine down carefully, saving her place. “You’re getting to be a real pain in the ass.”
“Pretty please with sugar on it?”
Connie reached under her counter, then made a ceremony of bringing the magazine back up so I couldn’t see her face anymore. My loss.
Aside from four insurance salesmen whooping it up at the bar, Duckie Teevens and I were alone in Bun’s. He’d suggested we take a table off in a corner. Sherry, who seemed to double as daytime waitress, at least for Duckie, took our order. Neither of us said anything until she’d delivered the drinks, whiskey for Duckie and a Michelob for me.
Teevens clinked his glass against the neck of my bottle and said, “So you wanted to talk with me, talk.”
“I haven’t noticed you over my shoulder for a while.”
“Like I told you, Bunny decided he didn’t want me trailing you no more.”
“Can you tell me why?”
“I figure that’s his business.”
“No question you knew Coyne was seeing Jane Rust before he died, right?”
“We told you that, Bunny and me.”
“So you did. About the same time you couldn’t quite remember Gail Fearey’s name. And address.”
Duckie darkened. “That’s right.”
“Funny thing about that. She remembers you pretty clearly.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. She said she used to go with you, and she’s lived in the house there for a long time, used to belong to her parents.”
“So?”
“So I’m wondering why the failure of memory from a guy who seems to have everything else pretty straight.”
Teevens played with his glass, making the little circles again. “Supposing I don’t feel like talking about that?”
“Feel like listening?”
He shrugged.
I said, “You remember pretty well what Gail Fearey looked like some time ago, before she got hooked up with Coyne. I’m thinking that her going for him bothered the hell out of you. Duckie Teevens was trying to make something of himself. The wrong way, maybe, but at least you were going forward. Charlie Coyne was a bum, and you knew it, and it burned you that she couldn’t see it.”
Duckie spoke to his whiskey. “She could see it.”
“She just couldn’t do anything about it.”
“That’s right. Charlie had that, I gotta admit. He had the magic somehow. I never could see it, but the broads sure did.”
“I’m wondering why your boss would have hired old Charlie.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s pretty clear Gotbaum looks on you like a son.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, which makes it odd to me that he’d hire Charlie who cut you out from a girl you liked.”
Teevens emptied his glass and tapped it on the table top. Sherry came over immediately.
She said, “You want another, Duckie?”
“That’s what I want.”
“Kinda early, ain’t it?”
“Another.”
“You got it.”
Teevens waited till the second drink arrived, though he didn’t take any of it. After Sherry went back to the insurance crowd, he said to me, “I asked the boss to put Charlie on.”
“Why?”
“Because Charlie was living with Gail, and she was raising his kid, and they needed the money. And sure as shit nobody else was gonna go out of their way to recruit the guy.”
“Charlie was delivering the porn tapes, right?”
“I told you, I don’t know nothing about that.”
“You’re in the business of showing films, Duckie. Dirty pictures. Only it’s a dying trade, like Bunny told me. ‘The VCR’s, they’re wiping me out,’ he said. But you still want to move into the business. Only one way that works. You don’t have the resources to open a legitimate chain of video stores, and the ones already out there offer most of the kinds of movies you’d have anyway. Except the forbidden fruit, right?”
“You’re fulla shit.”
“The kiddie stuff, Duckie. Maybe snuff or fake snuff films, too. The kinds of things the suburban fathers can’t quite ask the wife to pick up on the way home from school with the kids.”
He downed half the second drink.
“Only to move that kind of stuff, you have to be careful, selective, even secretive. So Charlie Coyne is the mule, carrying the stuff around, customer to customer or maybe club to club. Is that how it works, Duckie? The guys get together in a club to sort of pool their capital and swap their favorites?”
Teevens took a deep breath, then let it out and spoke low and quietly. “The fuck do you know about it?”
“Only that I see you with a pretty strong motive for killing Charlie. He gets caught in the net with the wrong kind of movies, and he gets intimate with the wrong kind of reporter, a crusader who thinks she can use him to bring down businesses like yours through her newspaper, bring down the future you’ve put in ten years to inherit.”
“Twelve years. I been with the boss twelve years.”
I didn’t say anything.
He said, “The way you figure it, the same guy who killed Charlie killed the reporter girl, right?”
“Right. And then ripped the hell out of Gail Fearey’s place looking for something.”
“What?”
“The night Charlie was stabbed, somebody ransacked Gail’s house, took a knife to most of the furniture. Looking for something.”
“I didn’t know about that.”
“You didn’t.”
“Not about the searching there, no.”
“But you were here the night Charlie was killed in the alley.”
“I was here. I told you that.”
“Where were you Monday night?”
“Monday night. That’s when the reporter OD’d, right?”
“Maybe with some help.”
Duckie said, “Then you got problems.”
“I’ve got problems?”
“Yeah. If the same guy did Charlie and the girl, the guy can’t be me.”
“Why not?”
“Monday, Bunny had a bad spell. The heart shit, you know?”
“Go ahead.”
“Well, on Monday night, Sherry and me was sitting with him for maybe four or five hours in the hospital over to Fall River there.”
“You were.”
“That’s right. With maybe a dozen docs and nurses and gofers mobbing the boss and us.”
“What time was this?”
“Time? I dunno. No, wait. The spell come over him during the second feature, so maybe seven-thirty, eight o’clock. The hospital there, it’d have when we rolled in. We was there till after midnight, Sher and me. And even after the boss was okay, they said he’d still have to stay the night. Sher was feeling sad and all, so I took her back to my place and consoled the fuckin shit out of her.”
I watched him. Sherry wasn’t exactly a solid alibi, but the rest was a stupid story to trot out if it wasn’t true. He finished the whiskey and rose, not bothering to leave any money on the table.
“Ask Sher, you want to. She’ll remember. They always remember how the Duck makes them happy.”
Fifteen
THE ELDER SCHONSTEIN violated the first rule of being a cop. He listed himself in the telephone directory.
I arrived at the address just after five. It was a modest Cape, two dormers on the second floor and a breezeway connecting a one-car garage. The breezeway had a concrete ramp sloping gently up to the side door of the house itself. In the driveway was a five-year-old predecessor of Hogueira’s Olds staff car, highly polished. The stoop to the front door looked newly poured or little used. I rang the bell.
When the door opened, I had to look down for the voice that said, “Who are you?”
The man was in a wheelchair, a stadium
blanket across his lap, legs, and right hand. His left index finger hovered over buttons on the arm of the chair. Bald, his eyes hid under a craggy brow and above a still-jutting jaw.
“Mr. Schonstein?”
He said, “Yeah, but Schonsy suits me better. You gonna answer my question?”
“My name’s Cuddy, John Cuddy. I’m—”
“I know who you are. With everybody talking about you, I wondered how long it’d be before you got around to me.”
“I was surprised to find you in the phone book.”
“Wouldn’t do much good not to be. Everybody knows where I live.”
“I’d like to ask you some things.”
“I expect you do. Well, come on in before I get a crick in my neck looking up at you.”
Schonstein pressed a button on the armrest, the chair emitting a low whine and turning him into the house. I entered and closed the door behind me. Following him into the living room, I saw an old-fashioned plush sofa with pine coffee and end tables. A big oxblood Barcalounger was centered six feet from a large-screen television. Next to the lounger, newspapers were heaped, with the folds zigzagged, like bricks in a tower built to go as high as possible without tumbling over.
“’Scuse the mess, but being in the chair and all, it’s just easier to leave the damn papers like that. My son comes by once a week or so and cleans ’em out for the scouts.”
“The scouts?”
“Boy scouts. Used to be a troop leader myself. The scouts collect the papers, and somebody helps out with hauling them to a recycling plant somewhere.” He tipped his head toward the couch. “Sofa’s probably the best seat in the house for you. Don’t use it much myself, so watch you don’t choke on the dust.”
I sat down, the cushions enveloping me. I could imagine why he didn’t use it. Once in, he’d have a hell of a time levering himself up and out again.
“Comfy?”
“I would be if you let go of what you’ve got under the blanket.”
Schonstein grinned, teeth a mile too perfect for the rest of the face. Bringing his hand into view, he looked down, rolling the Browning automatic first left, then right, as though it were being featured in an advertising video. With thirteen in the magazine and one in the chamber, it would be a while before he’d have to reload.
“Mark said you were a pretty sharp fella.”
Yesterday's News Page 13
