Long Shot

by Paul Monette

  Artie heard the paper rustle among his things, unavoidable as a subpoena. He pulled out an ink-green velvet dress, slung it over one arm, and bent to the table to take a look.

  “My, my,” he declared, “you are thorough.”

  He stared in the mirror again, as he held the green dress up against him. He winced with sudden displeasure. He balled it up in a pettish way and heaved it in a corner. A woman, thought Greg, would not have done it quite that way. For all his flash and artifice, Artie looked just then like nothing more than a man with dirty laundry, putting his gym gear out to wash. He turned and grabbed at a jersey gown—this in a pretty salmon color, which did a lot more for the white of his skin.

  “Listen, honey,” he said, “I think the quickest way is for you to tell me what you know.”

  In other words, tell it straight through from start to finish. Greg had to bridge the last ten years with a rope as thin as a spider’s web. It wasn’t that he couldn’t do it. Having told it over and over in his head, he could lay it all out in a narrative in ten minutes flat. He didn’t object to the suspect’s getting dressed while he was speaking, even. But he had the strangest sense that he’d dropped through a hole in time, and come up playing the writer again. As if, after all these years, he was about to pitch a plot for a feature to an agent who hated everything.

  The door knocked once, and Artie called the barman in. The latter was much more raw and violent here than he seemed a few minutes back—with a string of rawhide tied around one bicep, and the Levi’s riding low against his hips. He set down an improbable linen-draped tray, with the Scotch in shots and a silver-aluminum bucket of ice. It looked like the Beverly Hilton.

  “Hey, Artie—this guy giving you problems?”

  “It’s okay, Roy. Just an old admirer.”

  The drinks were mixed, the soda splashed, and Roy retreated most discreetly. The moment the door was shut behind him, Artie stripped out of his T-shirt. He pulled open the center drawer in the table, lifted out a padded bra, and slipped his arms into the straps. He wasn’t going to utter another word till Greg had said his piece.

  With a voice gone suddenly thin, Greg sketched the other’s long-ago career, with snippets out of reviews and bits of Carbon Mountain lore. Through it all, Artie betrayed no special surprise. He smiled a quarter smile as he fastened the hooks of his bra in back. Then he dropped his shorts without any fanfare, revealing a perfectly good-sized tool—but only for a moment. He shimmied right into a dance belt, tucking the extra equipment out of sight.

  He turned his back and asked to be zipped, just as Greg began the account of the winter trip downriver. Greg slid the zipper a couple of feet, but his aim was off because he was talking. It caught on a curl of fabric halfway up. He bent very near to pull it loose, but found it could only be done a millimeter at a time. It was lucky he had a proper feel for close work, having stuffed a thousand envelopes and fixed a thousand stamps. In any case, it didn’t stop him talking. All the while he unraveled the dress, he brought the canoe trip down to its fatal hour.

  “… then somebody says, ‘Hey, I don’t know about you guys—I’m gonna walk home.’ Like he was daring everyone else to follow. Four men started off—you and Jasper, a guy named Barlow, and somebody else. Sixty miles cross-country.”

  “It was Jasper said it,” Artie volunteered in a shaky voice.

  Just then, the zipper broke free of the snag and sailed all the way to the neckline. Artie took a step forward to the table. He put out a hand to a cardboard box, brim-full of costume jewelry. He snatched up several thin gold bracelets and forced them over his wrist. Greg couldn’t say, though he darted a look in the mirror to check their faces, just what Artie felt right now. The transformation from tough guy to showgirl was so far advanced, he couldn’t see his way back to Artie all alone.

  “Okay,” said Artie, “you’ve made your point. Could we stop right there, do you think? I already took the heat for that. Go on to Jasper. Why did I kill him?”

  The phone rang out, as if it couldn’t bear to hear. Artie picked it up, throwing back the long bleached hair to put the receiver to his ear. He listened, then snapped out:

  “I know what time it is. Announce me.”

  He hung up, slid open the bra drawer one more time, and brought out opera gloves. As he drew them on, Greg could see the fingertips were smudged.

  “The show is half an hour,” said Artie. “I’d prefer if you waited here. Do you mind? There’s magazines. You got a little fridge in the closet, if you’re hungry.”

  He took a last look in the mirror—cool, objective, frank—and seemed content with the whole effect. As he crossed in front of Greg, he went into a kind of glide, like a dancer.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he said, relenting some, “I’ll let you come to the late show. By then, I’ll be too drunk to notice.”

  With that, he opened the door and hurried away along the hall—leaving Greg with the smoking pistol. The room was suddenly deadly quiet, the mirror empty of even the barest transformation. Greg sat down at the table and picked up his drink. Far away through the walls, he could hear a scattered round of applause as Artie took the stage. He had no idea what the act involved. Bawdy songs, he supposed, tied up with a string of one-liners. The give-and-take with the audience was doubtless very heavy. It was safe to say there wasn’t much in the way of Shakespeare.

  This, then, was the alibi that Vivien had alluded to. On the night of the third, his man was all dolled up and doing a show when Jasper Cokes was killed. Greg had imagined all these scenes. Artie picking up Harry off the street to go meet Jasper Cokes—spooning the ground-up pills in the wine—slitting their wrists to ribbons. Moments that had come to seem so actual, they had the same authority as moments Greg remembered out of life.

  Now he watched his whole case slip away.

  He drained the J & B, picked up the one that Artie hadn’t touched, and made for the door. He only wanted a glimpse. He’d gladly wait till later for the show, but he had to see what it was like. Rounding the bend in the long red hall, he heard a noisy melody, half drowned out by catcalls. He stopped just shy of the doorway, keeping back in the shadows. He couldn’t see round to the stage—it was off to the left—but he noticed the place had filled in the twenty minutes since he’d arrived. There must have been thirty or forty now, at the bar and just in front. It seemed they came for the show alone. From the way they hooted and grinned, it seemed they never missed a night.

  The song was taped. Artie sang along like someone with the radio turned up. Though the mixer had left no room for a human voice, Artie had gone through too many summer-stock heroes, doing Lerner and Loewe in tents, to be drowned out by a lush arrangement. He had his own way with a lyric—down in the throat like Peggy Lee, every word freighted with time gone by.

  Give a girl a chance

  And she’ll learn to dance—

  All it takes to be gay is a man.

  All full of smoke and whiskey. When he drew the last line out a second time, he quavered over it ripely till he drained it of all its sap.

  Awful, really. But how could you argue with what went over? They hollered for more at the end as if it were Vegas itself up there.

  “Reminds me of a cruise I went on once,” said Artie, right up close to the mike. “We had a little trouble, see? This sailor, he runs up to me screaming, ‘Women and children first!’ So I say, ‘Okay, honey, but I’m second.’”

  A roar of laughter swept the room, right on the edge of the joke—like they would have laughed no matter what, or they knew the punch line all along. The voice that Artie opted for had a certain basso root to it, rather like Tallulah. Not so much female as feline. Greg leaned into the room and peeked. What he saw was a white and smoky light shining around the up-lit star. The dress glowed orange. The hair was all platinum flash.

  “I’ll tell you something, honey,” Artie said. “You never shake the past. When you get to be my age, you can’t go out without you meet a man who’s fucked yo
u over. This guy says, ‘I know you. Remember? New Year’s Eve at the Golden Bowl?’ I mean, puh-leeze! The whole thing’s such a blur!”

  It didn’t make the slightest bit of difference, not to Greg, how Artie dressed for after dark. The people of the night were always Chaplinesque. He did, however, stop to wonder where a man’s profession had a right to lead him. Was it worth it to be an actor and end up here? Perhaps it wasn’t so bad, given the choices. Money aside, Artie was no worse off than Jasper Cokes, with his string of cheap-shot comic strips. At least a thing like this was theater.

  Besides, he thought, a man like Artie wasn’t in it for the money, what with Jasper’s five per cent coming in like a gusher. He probably didn’t give two shits about fame, either, having served so many years as handmaid to it. He acted up a storm on the stage of a two-bit bar. It wasn’t the storm in Lear, perhaps, but so what? In the end, it all came down to having a little work to do.

  “Did you ever get lost in a blizzard?” Artie asked. “If you do, you better bring a marine along—’cause honey, it gets cold!”

  They even laughed at that. It didn’t appear to matter that it wasn’t especially funny.

  “I double-dated in a blizzard once,” said Artie. “It’s just like anything else, believe me. You always think the other two are getting more than you are.”

  In a monologue, thought Greg, you don’t stick with anything long, or you lose them. A digression is never more than three beats, start to finish. Artie was already deep in the middle of another story—a smutty bit about a politician, caught going down on a butch little page in the Senate cloakroom. Greg didn’t stay to hear the upshot. He pivoted round and felt his way to the dressing room, trying to decide if what he’d heard was as good as a signed confession. He wandered into the windowless room and stood by the hat-rack, dazed and fretful. He sat at the mirror drinking, weighing what it meant. From the other room he could hear a bellow of laughter every ten seconds, like clockwork.

  The phone rang, loud enough to wake the dead. Greg started. It wasn’t for him, he was pretty sure, but if it proved to be, the only one who knew he was here was Vivien. If he’d thought about it, he would have realized—she was getting to be the only one who ever called him anymore.

  “Hello,” he said. “Stage Door Canteen.”

  “Oh—it’s you,” she answered, a bit off balance.

  “Who did you expect?”

  “Greg, listen—the police are on their way.”

  “Here?”

  “No—here,” she said emphatically. He caught for the first time all the drained emotion in her voice. Before he knew what was going on, he knew it was out of their hands.

  “They’re coming for Carl?” he asked.

  “That’s right.”

  It was as if she wanted to talk but couldn’t. If he didn’t pull it out of her with questions, they might not get to it otherwise for hours.

  “Has he called his lawyer?”

  “Greg—he’s dead.”

  And now it was he who couldn’t speak. The shock was sharper here, perhaps, than what he had felt two weeks ago, though the loss was nothing to him. It had to do with hearing it person to person. The phone brought him in at the level of things that needed attending to. He thought: Tell her you’ll be right there. Not that he wanted to, not at all, but he had no choice. In a way, it was all his fault that she was in this deep.

  “I got home about eight,” she said. His eyes glanced right. It was 9:36 by the digital clock on the dressing table. “I didn’t expect there’d be anyone here. The servants are gone by six. But it got so quiet, I couldn’t sit still. I went through the whole house, room by room. Like I had to turn on every light and check the doors and windows. Greg, I never do that. I’m not the type.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Well, that’s the funny thing,” she said. “I was satisfied. Everything looked the same as ever. I started back to my room, and then—I don’t know why—I decided to come up here.”

  When she paused again, he realized what it was: She was trying to fill up the empty space before the cops took over.

  “You mean Jasper’s room?”

  “That’s it!” she replied excitedly, as if he’d guessed a riddle. “Shot himself in the head. The gun’s right here in front of me.”

  “Look—why don’t you wait downstairs?”

  “Oh, it’s all right—there’s no blood. He fell in the water and floated out. He’s right on the edge of the falls, like he’s just about to go over.”

  “You want me to come?”

  “No, no,” she said. “If I’m all alone, they’ll go to a lot of trouble to make it easy. It’s one of the perks, you know.”

  In the silence now, he saw her staring down the stream to where the rag-doll figure of the dead man poised at the lip of the stream. Beyond it, the dark bowl of the canyon. Somehow, this was the plainest talk they’d ever had.

  “What about Artie? You want me to break it to him?”

  “I guess so,” she said vaguely—as if, in half a minute, she’d forgotten it was Artie she had just been trying to reach. That Greg was only an accident, coming in on the line this way. “Be good about it, will you, Greg? He hated Carl like crazy, but they go back a long way.”

  He ended it with promises to be there later on. She protested gamely, but he overrode her. With one last bit of advice: “Hey, Viv, don’t let them take a thing except the body. As far as you know, he died of grief.”

  It was only when he hung up that he realized she and Artie might just want to be alone. After all, they were two out of four and counting down. As he drained his second J & B and rolled an ice cube round his mouth, he realized something harder still—he was glad it was over and glad she’d won. He was sick of thinking in overdrive.

  There was no need to let this business out. Who could it possibly profit to have the tale told straight? The storm of Jasper’s headlines had only just died down, till a reader had to flip through fifteen pages to get to the day’s terse update. Justice—or some more rabid force—had already done its damnedest over Carl. The wider proclamation of the charges laid against him had no appeal to Greg, though here he could be overruled by Vivien and Artie. They had the prior claim.

  But how would it make things better to say that Carl was the culprit? Jasper would never again be restored to his former larky prominence as macho man-about-town.

  What about Harry Dawes? Wasn’t he reason enough to trumpet the facts abroad? If only to clear his name in Turner’s Falls, Wisconsin—where in one fell swoop they’d lost their Eagle Scout, as well as their very own Candide. Greg had a moment of pure and unspecific sentiment, in which he waffled back and forth. As it happened, he also had a mirror not two feet off, in which he watched a veil of sorrow gauze across his eyes.

  As if from an aerial view, he saw the whole Midwest as a string of towns where men had names their whole lives long and sought to keep them clean. It was nothing but a fantasy, of course. What did a boy from the Near North reaches of Chicago know of the real Midwest? Yet he wondered now if there wasn’t something deep in the land that explained the furies that blew up here. They had all come such a long, long way. By the thousands, they couldn’t go home. They would not say who they used to be, and time wasn’t on their side.

  He was struck so sad, he gasped. The crack inside him widened. He was only moments short of sobs—when the door flew open and the star sailed in.

  “You peeked—I saw you,” Artie swore, flinging a white silk scarf at him. It swirled and streamed and fell in a pool on the makeup table. Greg was lightning quick. He had his mask in place in half a second. He smiled in a sleepy way, like he’d had too much to drink.

  “What shall it be tonight?” asked the man in the salmon jersey, sweeping back and forth. “‘Mad About the Boy’? ‘Satin Doll’?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “My encore, dummy!”

  Greg could hear the clamor from the bar as it rose another notch. They clearly wa
nted more.

  “How would I know?”

  “It’s settled, then—we’ll do ‘April in Paris.’ Order me up some oysters, won’t you, darling? I’m feeling a little mad tonight.”

  He pulled the door wide and vanished.

  Greg, who was still not finished processing Vivien’s call, realized he was half a step behind, the whole way through the scene. He’d become convinced that he had in hand the missing piece of the bigger picture. He was just about to set it in place, when Artie came and went like a false alarm. It was something to do with the pairing-up at Carbon Mountain long ago. He’d lost it now. He would have called Vivien back to ask, except he was pretty sure it was nothing she said.

  He wondered if this new death would cancel Friday night. Could they get a body in the ground that fast? Would the mourning up at Steepside be sufficiently low-key to let the screening go on as planned? There was something here that would not fit—not till they’d connected up with Jasper once again. If they could only get to him, just to see the way he moved in the days before he died, the rest would surely fall in place.

  Okay, so it was over. The last gun had been fired. Greg wasn’t out to beat a dead horse, just because he’d been one-upped in the pinning down of the killer. But really, he thought, this story had no passion. So what if Carl had been cracking at the seams, from living out his life in Jasper’s shadow? What had all of that to do with Jasper? For two weeks now, Greg had been digging for a concrete act that could trigger a murder ten years down the line. He figured it must be something completely specific, to leave a welt so deep on somebody else’s heart.

  Perhaps he fell wide of the mark because he never had a good look at Jasper Cokes. He’d avoided all his cruddy movies automatically. Never liked his look, somehow. It was just such a hard and antic manner, sleek with lust and effortless charm, that proved to Greg he was less a man himself, way back in the jungle of high school. Jasper’s pitch—the sneering kiss and the one-way rush, the locker-room swagger of a tennis jock—was more than a delicate sort could bear. Greg wouldn’t play ball with the enemy. He’d stick to Laverne and Shirley before he’d pay four-fifty to have his cock teased.