The Suspense Is Killing Me

by Thomas Gifford

  MURDER IN LUXURY SOHO LOFT!

  Sally and I had once agreed that the greatest Post murder headline had been the immortal HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR, and while the morning’s attempt didn’t challenge that, Sal would have gotten a smile out of being called a “hot writer.” Tony said my name was indeed mentioned as a friend of Miss Feinman’s who found the body. Naturally I was identified as JC’s brother, and Tony suggested I might want to screen my calls. He certainly wouldn’t give out my number, but newspapermen and TV reporters had ways of getting numbers. I told him that in my case all they had to do was check the phone book.

  The cop did turn out to be hungry and I insisted on taking him to The Ginger Man. I tried to be helpful, but I knew nothing about enemies Sally might have had or what projects she was working on. We wound up talking about JC Tripper. My fate, it would seem.

  The elevator in my building was pleasantly Art Deco: the elevator in Heidi Dillinger’s building might have been on loan from the Istanbul Museum. It looked as if all the craftsmen of the Sultan had slaved over the wood and the grillwork and the marble flooring until it was something fit for carrying the master to the side of Allah, where he might sit and eat figs and peel grapes throughout eternity. It was apparent that we were dealing with profoundly heavy money here, which made me wonder further about Ms. Dillinger and her resources.

  I stepped off into a foyer of inlaid parquetry, polished wood paneling, bowls of rust and lavender flowers, and Heidi in a lavender-and-beige filmy, flowing, graceful bit of summer dress, underneath which she was moving with athletic ease and grace. Her long tanned arm was extended as she came toward me and the hand at the end of it took mine. She was so glad I could come. She led me past delicately arching date palms that swayed slightly in the breeze of the air conditioners. We passed down a wide carpeted hallway and into a long room that resembled the smoking room of a venerable and well-funded men’s club. Leather furniture with brass studs, a Persian carpet properly threadbare in spots, bellpulls for summoning the staff, a vast refectory table that smelled faintly of lemon polish, several tables with chess pieces deployed at various battle stations. Subtle lighting from large, squat lamps with cream-colored fabric shades made every surface glow.

  There was something weird about the room and it wasn’t just that there was a blazing fire in the huge fireplace complete with lion-head andirons and logs the thickness of telephone poles. The fire crackled and snapped, heedless of the ninety-three degrees of sopping-wet heat prevailing when I’d left my place. It was cooled well down into the sixties in the room and the heat emanating from the fireplace felt good. Heidi Dillinger threw a soft cashmere cardigan around her shoulders as we entered the room. But there was something else. She was regarding me with a smile and I cocked my head, trying to pin it down.

  “It’s the weather,” I said at last. “I’m hearing a storm with lots of wind and rain and some distant thunder. All because you enjoy the fire. Rather conspicuous eccentricity. All on tape, I assume.”

  She lowered herself onto one end of a long leather chesterfield couch, near a table covered with drink mixings. She sat on the edge of the cushion and dug ice out of a sterling bucket with sterling tongs. “Here it is always a dark and stormy night. A small conceit. Does it bother you? Does illusion bother you?” She’d taken the stopper from a bottle of Edradour Scotch and was drizzling it over the ice.

  “Only insofar as this reminds me of President Nixon in the White House with the air conditioners blowing like the billtails of hell in a Washington summer so he could have a nice log fire. While he set things up with the plumbers and bagmen. You and he will be joined in my mind now and ever after. I can stand it if you can. I’ll take soda with that.”

  She sprayed it from a siphon, the kind with metal mesh around it. Mine never works, but hers was right on the money. “Nixon never had this kind of money at his disposal, of course. And this tape system is obviously superior to his.” She handed me my glass and lifted her own, which she’d been nursing along since before I’d arrived. “May we ride out the night’s storms in safety.”

  “And confusion to our enemies,” I said.

  We drank and she grinned at me without indicating any desire to speak.

  “This,” I said, nodding at the room, “is the cat’s pajamas. It must have cost a fortune.”

  “About six million, as I recall. I guess that’s a fortune.”

  “You guess? Well, it’s a good guess. Whither comes this attitude about money, Miss Dillinger? Downright cavalier.”

  “Call me Heidi.”

  “Not until I know you better.”

  “Call me Heidi. You’ll never know me any better.”

  “About the cavalier way with a dollar?”

  The sound of rain lashed at windows that didn’t exist. It sounded like the storm that raised such hell in Key Largo. “You probably drew the inference from my invitation to dinner that this was my place.”

  “Silly me,” I said.

  “It isn’t mine. I only work here. This is Allan Bechtol’s home. Allan Bechtol’s money, Allan Bechtol’s never-ending dark and stormy night.” She sipped her drink, leaned back and crossed her legs, sank into the leather corner, awesomely aware of her body and in absolute control. My sweat-dampened suit clung clammily to my ditto self.

  “What are you telling me? Is this the old story about the mice playing while the cat’s away?”

  “Not at all. Mr. Bechtol is in the galley preparing our dinner even now. Nothing elaborate, but it will be perfect. He loves to cook.”

  “And you hate to cook?”

  “Never tried. Mr. Bechtol does it because he likes to, not to fend off starvation. The staff can do that.”

  “This Bechtol—is he crazy? Never grants interviews, his photograph never appears on the dust jackets of his books, he won’t promote the books, he lives in this phony storm … It seems to me he has a serious problem.”

  “He likes it this way. He does what he likes.”

  “And what do you do because you like to?”

  “I play chess. That’s one thing.” She waved vaguely at the games arrayed about the room. “Please don’t tell me that you play.”

  “I won’t. I played as a kid. It took more concentration than I could muster once I grew up.”

  “Good. I never play against people. When I did, they invariably ended up hating me. Now I play only against computers. It’s good for my character.”

  “Do you ever beat them?”

  “I always beat them. Losing does nothing for one’s character, surely. Winning is very helpful. I have lost two matches in the last three hundred, and I always play it out to the end: Artificial intelligence has … a lot to learn.”

  “I thought machines could be made that would always win.”

  “I’m sure one could be made.” She sighed. “I always feel a little pang of sorrow for the machine, the computer, the pure mind. If it can’t outthink me, then what can it do? The intelligence is trapped in the box and it is so prosaic, so pedestrian. It can’t write a poem. It can’t go to Harry Winston to reward itself … it’s trapped, and in this instance all it can do is play chess. If it can’t win at that, it might as well pull the plug on itself. But someone would just come along and plug it back in, I suppose.”

  “You speak as if there’s a soul in the machine,” I said.

  “Silly, isn’t it? But I do feel sorry for them, all the creatures of artificial intelligence. We create them, we teach them to do the things we find the most difficult to do—consider all the options, retrieve data, find one needle in a million haystacks, analyze thousands upon thousands of chess moves … But try to teach a robotic to reach out and move a poor little pawn—there’s where you’ve got a problem, I’m afraid. And I can beat them, anyway. It’s a dog’s life, Mr. Tripper. Take a robot for a walk around the block and you’ll spend the whole time picking him up and getting him walking again. My, you were thirsty.”

  Allan Bechtol came in from the hall
way wearing an apron bearing some fresh stains, a plaid shirt, tan corduroy slacks, beat-up old penny loafers, white sweat socks. He was a burly man of medium height, just under six feet tall. His crop of thinning red hair had gone mostly gray. His beard matched. Definitely grizzled. His small, slightly bulbous nose wore a couple of broken veins accenting the tip. His eyes grabbed your attention: small, clear blue, intense, intelligent, with a tendency to fix on you and stay there. He stood watching me, a kitchen towel in one hand, a can of Diet Cherry Coke in the other, smiling at me so his uneven gray teeth appeared like smudges behind the scruffy facial hair that had encroached raggedly on his mouth.

  “Soup’s on, more or less.” His voice had a resonant, moist quality, deep and metallic like a great baseball announcer, a voice that could mesmerize, hypnotize, convince. I couldn’t tell all that from those five words. But I’d heard him say a lot more in my time.

  I’d known him long ago, and his name sure as hell hadn’t been Allan Bechtol. He just kept smiling at me, waiting for me to catch on. Heidi Dillinger was looking from one of us to the other. When she started to break the silence Bechtol shook his head at her and she swallowed whatever she might have said.

  Everything in the room, in his world, for all I knew, was some kind of illusion. The computerized chess players who couldn’t beat the girl. The weather was rough and it had begun to thunder, but it was all on tape and bore no relationship to reality. And the host was passing himself off under an alias. I was beginning to have serious doubts about the role of fate in bringing me together with Heidi Dillinger on Fifth Avenue.

  “Sam,” I said. “You wanted to see me, you could have just called me.”

  “Heidi needed a workout on the street. You know how it is with skills, use ’em or lose ’em.” The hairy face kept grinning at me. “You’ve changed, Lee. Took off some weight. You remind me of JC now. Rest his soul. You’re looking good.” He hadn’t moved. Then he took a sip of the Coke.

  “You haven’t changed much,” I said. “You still look like a bucket of shit.”

  “Hey, remember we used to think we’d open a chain of burger joints? Chili, burgers, tacos. The Bucket o’ Shit. And the first one was going to be in Harvard Square. Dammit, Lee, it was more than a quarter of a century ago. We even had a slogan, right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Just Throw It in the Toilet … Cut Out the Middleman!”

  “We were scintillating wits in those days. Why am I here, Sam?”

  “Come on, follow me, we’ll chow down. I’ll tell you all about it. And don’t get all shirty with me and pissed off at little Heidi here. She was just doing her job. I’ve gotten a little strange over the years, Lee. Gotta make a game out of everything. Only way I can stay interested.” He hung his arm around my shoulders. It felt just as it had hundreds of years ago when we’d gone down to the Cape on September weekends and got drunk together, got laid together, and talked a lot of collegiate bullshit together. We were always draping an arm over the next guy’s shoulders, sucking on something in a can, wearing our madras Bermudas and loafers. JC had called us all the sad young men, drinking in the bars, but he had a poetic soul in those days. We were a good threesome. JC and me and Sam Innis. Now JC was dead, Sam Innis had become somebody else, and I was something of a changed man myself. Nothing ever stayed the same and everybody was always telling lies.

  “I’m not pissed off,” I said. “But soon I’ll want to twist somebody’s head off. When JC went, his legacy to me was his short fuse.”

  “You have changed, pal.”

  “Everybody’s changed. It’s been a helluva long time.”

  “Whatever happened to the Law of Immutability?”

  “Shut up, Sam. Let’s just get on with the game.”

  Heidi Dillinger said, “Am I going to have to listen to dumb repartee all evening?”

  “You work for this man,” I said. “You ought to be used to it.”

  The dining room was as spare and antiseptic and minimal as the other room—library, study, whatever it was—had been traditional, cluttered, and maximalist. The table was gleaming black lacquer with chairs to match in an Art Deco mode, there were a black-and-white carpet, a gold Japanese screen painting covering one wall, high windows looking out over the Park to the lights of the West Side, a Jasper Johns target filling another wall above a black-lacquered sideboard, and in the middle of the table was an unusual centerpiece—a large model of an Afrika Korps tank set atop a mound of loose sand. The long barrel of the gun was pointing out toward Central Park. A black lacquer bowl shone on the sideboard, full of bright scarlet flowers.

  Dinner was simple and superb. Black squid-ink pasta with bright green broccoli buds, slivers of red and yellow peppers, oil and garlic and coarsely ground black pepper and capers, with individual pots of Parmesan beside each plain white plate; followed by delicate scallopine of veal sautéed with butter, lemon, and capers; then a simple salad of arugula, endive, walnuts, and crumbled Gorgonzola; concluding with rich, high Italian cheesecake, lemony and crumbs everywhere. The wines were cold and smooth and not at all intimidating. Sam Innis knew his way around the kitchen. While he ate he kept coming at me from every angle, dazzling me with his footwork, all the time taking a reading on me while giving me only what he wanted me to have.

  “The tank sits there to keep me in mind of the book I’m writing. It’s a little departure for me, just off the scary edge of science fiction. Time-warp kind of thing. A lost tank, one of Rommel’s, wanders aimlessly in the desert, losing track of time and space and finally slipping through one of eternity’s cracks … they crest this big fucking dune and who do they find? T. E. Lawrence. Lawrence of Arabia. Who is their only hope of being saved. Lawrence discovers the English are once again at war with the Germans, just as they’d been twenty-five years before, when he had rallied the Arabs against the Turks. Now he must decide to save these doomed Germans or not …” He looked up at me, tucking black pasta into the corners of his mouth. “That’s the setup, anyway. How does it sound?”

  “A helluva lot better than your other stuff,” I said. “You need an editor, somebody to cut your stuff. That’s your big problem.”

  “You’re probably right.” He paid no attention to the aspersions I was casting. “Anyway, the tank keeps me centered, as the shrinks say.”

  “I know more about the Afrika Korps,” Heidi Dillinger said, “than Rommel did.”

  “Look, what is behind the Allan Bechtol routine? What am I doing here, Sam?”

  “I must tell you I’m a little disappointed at the cool reception,” he said, trying to look hurt. “You seem to have forgotten how close the three of us were—”

  “I haven’t heard a word from you in twenty years. Somewhere along the way you lost your grip on my affections. Now you’re somebody else and you get me here under false pretenses—”

  “False pretenses! Jesus, Lee—”

  “And I’ve had an absolute bitch of a time ever since this Dillinger character slithered across my path. So, in general terms, why not just cut the shit and tell me what’s going on?”

  “I did not slither! What is your problem, anyway? Is it just that you can’t take a joke, or what?” She was vastly amused.

  “I know you’ve had a lousy twenty-four hours, pal. And I want to talk to you about that. But really I just wanted to renew our friendship. A fella gets older, he wants to reconnect with his past. Continuity. We’re middle-aged men; all of a sudden we aren’t going to live forever. So now that JC’s gone, I thought about you—”

  “He’s been gone a long time,” I said. “You just hear about it, Sam?”

  “No, no, I’ve known about it just like everybody else, no need to get snotty. There’s a time for things. This was the time to get together, that’s all, Lee.” He finished off the last of his salad, put his fork aside and leaned back, staring at me again as if lost in deepest, darkest thought.

  Heidi Dillinger stood up, went to the sideboard and pressed a small black
button recessed in the wood. A Japanese gentleman wearing an alpaca jacket over a white shirt came in soundlessly within half a minute and cleared the table. Then he was back with a Melior infusion coffee maker, a steaming teakettle, and a grinder full of beans. He set it all in front of Sam Innis and was gone, as if Mellow Yellow had made him disappear.

  Sam made the coffee grinder pulverize the beans, then transferred them to the glass cylinder. He poured the boiling water in on top of them, inserted the press and left it at the top of the cylinder, while the coffee brewed.

  “I’m something of a fake, Lee,” he said at last. The aroma of the rich coffee filled the room. “I wrote some books after we left Harvard, terrible stuff, I suppose. I didn’t think of myself as a writer, didn’t think I was really capable. I was just a guy who hated working and couldn’t act or sing like JC or play a goddamn guitar and I didn’t have much money. So I kicked around some radio stations here and there, staff announcing jobs, sold some time for the ad guys, did a little sports announcing … that was Sam Innis. But all the time I was wondering what it took to write. So I read and read and read, mostly the old serial writers from Saturday Evening Post in the forties, and I kept notebooks on how I’d update the stories—not just the details but the tone. The tone was everything. I rewrote the serials. Actually rewrote them. I learned structure, but I had to invent the new tone. And I had to figure out how the readers’ values had changed, I had to plug into the tone and values that would attract the masses of readers now … then I had to make it simple and flashy and bright. While I was making headway at that, I set about creating a character who’d be a writer, the writer I’d become, not just Sam Innis scraping along picking up the scraps. Thus Allan Bechtol, writer, was born. I didn’t write the books. I became Allan Bechtol, and he wrote them. And he was a rather mysterious fellow, reclusive, impossible to pin down. Sam Innis just sort of wasted away and I became Allan Bechtol. And it worked, you see. As Bechtol I am hugely successful. Sam Innis would never have been so successful. Believe me.” He plunged the press down through the dark coffee, forcing the grounds to the bottom of the cylinder. “I became someone else and …” He shrugged. “I went into the darkness a failure called Sam Innis and when I came out I was Allan Bechtol, and by God I was rich and famous!” He began pouring the coffee into our cups. “I didn’t want to explain the transformation to my old friends. Maybe you can understand why. The whole thing needed time. Now I can face it. At least with you, Lee. You’re the first person from the past who knows. I just want to be friends again. That’s all.”