The Twenty-Year Death

by Ariel S. Winter

  It was a small booth. Just four chairs along the short wall at the front. The entire track could be taken in at one glance. There were telephone extensions on both sides of the booth at seat level for calling in bets. Merton was alone. He sat in the chair all the way to the left. He didn’t turn around.

  I stepped between the two chairs on the right so that he could see me.

  “Have a seat,” he said, still without looking at me.

  I left a seat between us. In profile he looked like a Roman emperor on an ancient coin. He wore a dark three-piece suit with a starched white shirt. The shadows were deep enough that I couldn’t see very much of him. The family clearly had a predilection for sitting in the dark.

  He didn’t say anything. Neither did I. The announcer’s quick patter announced that the last race of the day was about to begin. The horses were already at their starting gates. There was a moment of anticipation and then the sound of a pistol and the announcer cried, “They’re off.” His voice then droned like a dentist’s drill, telling us what we were seeing. Merton kept his eye on the race but with an expression of indifference. I couldn’t tell if he had bet on it. The horses pounded around to the far side of the track, turning into miniatures. Then they came back around the bend, the clatter of their hooves only just audible over the crowd and the announcer. A red jockey and a green jockey were out a length ahead of the pack, which was bunched close enough that show could have gone to any of them. They barreled past where the gate had been. The red jockey eased his horse out ahead of the green one and they came into the finish that way, the third horse still half a length behind. The people in the grandstand started filing back towards the doors. There was a sense of deflation in the announcer’s voice.

  Merton spoke then. It was the measured voice of a powerful man who had not yet decided to use his power. “What do you want?”

  “Your boys followed me from the studio, but they didn’t quite do their job, did they?”

  “Hub’s boys. Hub gets overexcited sometimes.”

  “Well, when his instructions are to put a stop to all unnecessary inquiries, I could see how he might get confused.”

  He ignored that, and said again, “What do you want?”

  “To not be played for a fool, first off,” I said.

  “You are not a fool. Al Knox made a mistake there.”

  “Did he say I was?”

  “No. I couldn’t imagine that he would know anyone who wasn’t.”

  “You should try sitting down in the stands sometime, then maybe you wouldn’t be so surprised by what the rest of us are like.”

  Merton held up a hand, his five fingers spread to silence me. “What do you want?”

  “Well, since I found you where your daughter told me you’d be...” That got me nothing. “...I guess I want to talk to your son.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “Do I work for you or do I work for the studio?”

  “That’s the same thing.”

  “No, it isn’t. Not when I go to the cops with everything I’ve got. I’ve left some of it out until now, but I can’t do that forever, and I need to know which parts need to be told which way.”

  “Just the other day I read a story in the paper,” he said. “I thought at first I’d try to make a picture out of it, something mysterious and catchy.” He held his outstretched hands in front of him, framing an invisible marquee. “The Great Unknown.” He paused a moment and then dropped his hands. “Then I saw there’s no commercial appeal. But the story still grabs me.”

  “I think it would be best if I talked to your son before talking to the police or the press—”

  He went on talking over me. “Apparently there are people living in South America in the middle of the jungle who have never seen a white man. These people still live in a pre-literate, prehistoric state. They hunt, and they gather their food. They wear almost no clothing. They live like our ancestors did thousands of years before us. They don’t know we exist.”

  “Then how do we know they exist?” I said.

  “Stories told by other tribes. Careful anthropologists. They exist,” Merton said. “I don’t doubt that.” He glanced at me for the first time, but my face must have been just as hidden by shadows as his was to me. “These people have never seen a movie. They don’t even know that movies exist. They don’t know that cameras and film exist. They don’t know that artificial light exists. They can’t even imagine them since they have no frame of reference. No guns, no airplanes, no cars. We know these people exist, but for them, we don’t exist.” He paused, stilled by his own revelation. When he spoke again, it was with unguarded wonder. “Should we contact these people?” he said. “Are they better off knowing less? Without our wars and our diseases and our entertainment?”

  “I don’t know about them, but from where I’m sitting, sometimes I think it would be nice if this city didn’t exist.”

  “If no one knows about something,” he said, “then it doesn’t.”

  I saw where he was going then. “But I know. I know you wanted someone to take the fall for Chloë Rose’s murder. Only she wasn’t the one who got murdered, Mandy Ehrhardt did. But I’m not going to take the fall for that one either. Not when it’s your son that killed her, and at least two other girls that you covered up for him. Now, Mr. Merton, I need to speak to your son.”

  His voice was measured, calm, dispassionate. “We never thought you’d really take the fall if Chloë was killed. Hell, we didn’t want Chloë to be killed, she makes too much money for the studio. But if it happened—if your presence didn’t prevent it—you’d have provided some cover. Some delay.”

  “That’s what you say now,” I told him. “If it had been more convenient to make it stick to me, you’d have done it. Circumstantial doesn’t mean a thing in this town if the right people are involved.”

  He waved his hand in a noncommittal way.

  I stood. “I think I’ll see the police now.”

  He dropped his hand and spoke without tearing his gaze from the empty racetrack. “1313 West Market Place in Harbor City,” he said. “Too many people have been paid off over this; too many people who want to protect themselves. You were just insurance.”

  I nodded, but he couldn’t see me. “That’s fine. I just need to make sure I’m protected too.” I pulled open the door, and then stopped. “Why’d you want to buy the horse back?”

  “I love that horse,” he said, matter-of-factly. “I couldn’t let it go to that idiot Rosenkrantz if Chloë were to die.”

  I had nothing to say to that.

  “My boy won’t talk to you,” Merton said.

  I left the room.

  THIRTY

  I stopped at a bank of payphones and put a call through to Samuels at the Harbor City station. I checked the time. Nearly 6:30.

  The officer who’d answered came back on the line after setting the phone down for long enough that I’d had to deposit another nickel. “The detective’s not here.”

  “Is he working tonight or did he already go home?” I said.

  That earned a sigh. “Mister, I’m not in charge of where everybody is around here. I’m not even in charge of where I am around here. I just answer the phone.”

  “Will you take a message or is somebody else in charge of that?”

  “You know how many years I had to train to answer this phone? Two years, and that’s not counting kindergarten. And you know how many years I’ve had to answer this phone? Five years, and that’s a quarter of the way to my pension. So you want to tell me what it is you’ve got to report or can I go back to waiting for some other slob to make the thing ring?”

  “How many years did you train to talk like that?”

  “Ah, go to hell.”

  “What’s Samuels’ home number? Maybe I can get him there.”

  “Mister, I’m going to hang up now.”

  “Hang on,” I said. “Here’s the message. Tell Samuels that Dennis Foster called. Tell him to meet me
at 1313 West Market in an hour.” I looked at my watch again. “Make that an hour and a half. Tell him it’s important. You got that?”

  “I got it. An hour and a half. 1313 West Market. Shake a leg. It’s beautiful. It’s a poem.”

  “It’s a message, and he’d better get it.”

  “I get it, it’s a message. Maybe someday someone’ll take a message for me.”

  “A man can dream.”

  He hung up.

  I went to my car and was out on the road in under a minute. It was downhill from Hollywood Park almost the entire way, and I had to keep reminding myself to lay off the gas a little. A minute would go by and I would remind myself again. The closer I got, the more I started to feel that something was not right. Merton had not acted defeated when he gave me the address. There was something I was missing. I noticed my speedometer again and eased off.

  The neighborhood wasn’t about to be written up in any magazines. These were rows of small houses, each one only slightly larger than a shotgun shack. Many of them were unpainted, hard to see in the dark. The bathmat of grass in front of most of the houses was bordered with chain link fencing. I watched the stenciled numbers on the curb to find which one was 1313. It was painted at least, white, and caught whatever light there was, but there were no lights inside. I pulled up to the curb halfway down the block and walked back. Families were sitting out on their front stoops, trying to get whatever relief there was to be had out in the evening air. The sound of children playing in the dark came to me softly from the end of the street. I kept my eyes forward and my head down.

  Some of the shingles at 1313 showed the wood through in the centers and some were replacements, unpainted altogether. The lawn had been hacked at without achieving a positive effect. The push mower leaned beside the front stoop. I mounted the three steps and knocked on the wooden edge of the screen door. No answer. No lights. No sounds. I knocked again. The door rattled in its frame. The latch was off. I waited another moment, and when there was no response, I opened the screen door and tried the doorknob inside. It opened, swinging in.

  Inside, the smell of alcohol was strong. I closed the door behind me and listened for any sounds. Still nothing. I found a switch by the door and turned the overhead light on. It was one large room with an open door at the other end that led to a kitchen. The floor was bare wood without a rug. The living room furniture consisted of a couch and matching armchairs upholstered in peach-colored leather. It had been expensive when it was bought, but the years had worn away the stain in the places people would sit, and there was a ragged gash in the back of one of the armchairs. There wasn’t any other furniture and I figured the couch for a convertible. The rest of the floor was strewn with clothes and trash with no attempt to separate the two. It was the sign of a most slovenly bachelor.

  He was sitting in the other armchair, facing the door. His clothing was not at all slovenly, but instead an expensive tailored blue suit of the kind that was necessary if your friends were of a certain caliber. The coat was draped over the back of the chair behind him. That left him in a monogrammed off-white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. The monogram was tom. He had thick dark hair that he wore pushed back from his forehead. He might have had something nice he called a face, but his head was hanging down at an awkward angle, hiding his features. He could have been asleep or passed out or maybe nodded out on morphine if it wasn’t for the blood. His wrists had been cut lengthwise along the veins, and the blood had stained the arms of the chair and dripped in long strands down the sides. There was no knife in his hand, but there were a couple of empty liquor bottles at his feet. Judging by the smell, most of the alcohol had gone into the floorboards and not into Thomas Oliver Merton.

  I crossed to the couch, not touching anything. I bent down and looked under the couch and chairs to see if the knife he had used was anywhere to be found. What I found instead was two glasses, one by the leg of the couch the other near Merton’s feet. The glass by the couch still contained two fingers of what smelled like bourbon. The glass at Tommy’s feet was nearly emptied. There was a hypodermic needle. There was no knife.

  My mind went over it even as my thighs complained about squatting so long. The police wouldn’t trust a suicide without a weapon nearby, it was always hard to believe the dead man had gotten up to put it away before he died. The scene could play suicide or homicide, depending on which facts the police were convinced to ignore. The hypodermic could be the last ounce of courage to go through the business with the wrists or it could be an overdose to make it easy for someone else to make the cuts. Merton Senior must have known that his son was dead when I saw him at the races. He wanted it to go murder to avoid the scandal of suicide in the family. He’d played me for a fool again when he’d given me the address. If a recently hired private dick was found at the scene, it was good for the murder rap. The police would be there any moment, no doubt. But Merton hadn’t counted on me calling my own police too. That hurt his frame and meant the police would like someone else for the murder. Suicide would be better for everyone.

  I stood and crossed back to the door and killed the light. Lights from other houses on the street provided a weak orange glow through the windows. I gave my eyes a moment to adjust and then made my way back to the couch. I took out my handkerchief and picked up both glasses. It was better for the police to think that Tommy had been alone, and two glasses would put someone else in the room, at least at some point in recent memory. I went into the kitchen and dumped their contents in the sink and then set the glasses in the basin. There were other unwashed dishes there. No one would notice a couple more. Tommy Merton hadn’t been big on cleanliness.

  I got out my penlight and started going through drawers. The drawer closest to the back door was a junk drawer, filled with unmatched buttons, broken springs, a screwdriver and a hammer, matchbooks, string, the kind of things people kept around just in case. The three drawers below it were empty. The house was clearly just a place for when Tommy couldn’t make it home or to his father’s office, or maybe when he wasn’t welcome at either. Maybe he didn’t have any silverware besides what was in the sink.

  I crossed to the set of drawers on the other side of the sink, between the stove and the icebox. There was loose silverware in the top drawer, but nothing sharper than a butter knife. The next one down had the carving knives. I picked a knife that wasn’t long enough to be unwieldy, but was sharp enough to do real damage. It could have been the knife. There wasn’t any reason to say it wasn’t. Except if the knife was wrong the M.E. would know, because one knife doesn’t cut the same as another. But I had the feeling the M.E. wouldn’t be as diligent as he normally was. The police like a neat suicide to keep their murder rate down, and there might be somebody exerting pressure to not look a gift horse in the mouth. I held the knife handle through my handkerchief and shut the drawer.

  Before I could take a step, the front door opened and closed with a click. There was the sound of the switch and then the light in the front room went on, spilling a rectangle onto the kitchen floor.

  THIRTY-ONE

  I stood still and listened. There was no audible reaction to the sight of the dead man. The police would have knocked first and there would have been at least two of them, but no one spoke. Footsteps crossed the floor and stopped right about where Merton’s body was. They were high-heeled footsteps.

  I stepped into the doorway. Vera Merton was standing in front of her brother. She was wearing the same clothing I had seen her in that afternoon. She reached into a small clutch purse, her head down, her hair hiding her face. When her right hand withdrew from the bag it was holding a silver-plated .22.

  “You won’t need that. He’s already dead,” I said, stepping into the room.

  Her head jerked up. Her eyes were red despite an expert attempt to hide the signs of crying with makeup. The hand with the gun in it jerked up too, drawing a bead on my chest.

  “And you might want to turn out the light. Anyone can see you from the s
treet through that window.”

  She didn’t look behind her to see which window I meant. She steadied the gun. “What are you doing with that knife,” she said.

  I reversed my hold on the knife so that it was not threatening. “Knife’s missing from the scene. I was just going to add it in. It’ll look more real that way. You really don’t need the gun.”

  She didn’t lower it. “What are you doing here?”

  “Your father sent me. I think he meant for me to take the fall for this.”

  Her face broke a little then, and no makeup could hide the pain in it. “He called me and said that he was going to call the police. I was just going to make sure...I knew Tommy was...”

  “I’m taking care of it. Put away the gun and turn out the light. We haven’t much time.”

  She lowered the weapon then, but she didn’t move. Instead her eyes went back to the body, and her head and shoulders fell. She might have been crying.

  I went and turned out the light. “How’d your father know what was here?”

  “He came by this afternoon.”

  “Your brother gets a lot of visitors for a dead man.”

  I stepped around her, wiped the knife clean with my handkerchief, pressed it against his fingers, and then put it on the floor below his hand.

  She spoke behind me. “Father wanted to talk about Tommy’s options. As if Tommy had any options.”

  I checked the window. There was no sign of the police. Even with the lights out, we could probably be seen from outside. I took her arm. “We have to go. Where’d you park your car?”

  She didn’t move. “There’s something wrong with us, isn’t there?”

  “Nothing a little hard work wouldn’t cure.”

  She looked up then, her eyes hidden in the dark. “Hard work!” There was a note of hysteria. “Do you know what Tommy did? What we let him do again and again?”