The Suspense Is Killing Me

by Thomas Gifford

  I remembered his telling me he occasionally did some jobs for Freddie Rosen.

  Was this one of them?

  Did Cotter Whitney know what was going on?

  Whitney, hell … did I have any idea what was going on?

  Murder. Drugs. And the widespread belief that a dead rock star was still alive. But how did it fit together? Or didn’t it …?

  Ten

  IT STRUCK ME THAT AN airplane crash in the middle of a party might throw things into a bit of a tizzy, or indeed cast a pall over the proceedings generally, but not so with these determined Minnesotans. They seemed almost to lose interest in the phenomenon about half an hour after the old seaplane had sunk beneath the surface of the lake. The kids were back in the canoes poking at the pontoon and laughing, and the help was at work down at the boathouse. Another bunch of diligent workers were stringing Japanese lanterns around the dance floor and all around the edges of the boathouse. Things were beginning to look like Jay Gatsby’s summer place at East Egg must have looked to young Nick Carraway in the dim long ago. Or was it West Egg? Well, one of those Eggs.

  I didn’t know anyone, so I lurked hither and yon trying to appear like a man who belonged. While I lurked I wrestled with all the demons the whole business kept producing every time I met someone new. It was as if each of my informants had added a new layer of paint on the canvas, so that now the original sketch—what Allan Bechtol had given me—was pretty well obliterated, gone beneath a covering of new story elements. Nothing was what it appeared, and nothing had been since I thought I’d picked Heidi Dillinger up on Fifth Avenue … since Allan Bechtol had turned out to be Sam Innis from Harvard. The surprises began to wear you down eventually, made you wonder if you’d ever get any of it straight.

  I was thinking about Bill Stryker and the cushions packed with cocaine when I saw Cotter Whitney coming toward me across the lawn. He was smiling broadly and shaking his head rather ruefully. “Well, what can I say? We always try to provide a show out here … Chalk up one beat-up old plane. I guess this party will become a legend. At least in our little circle.”

  “Lucky nobody was hurt,” I said. “Do you report the crash to anybody?”

  He shrugged, indifferent. “I hadn’t thought about it. It’s a private lake … my lake, that is. Plane wasn’t worth much, nobody hurt. To whom would I report it? Well, I’ll ask around.”

  “Now you’re stuck for an encore.”

  He shook his head again. “That’s about as much excitement as I can take. Where were we, anyway?”

  Before he could return to another crack at our conversation I said, “Seems to me I recognized the pilot. Bill Stryker, wasn’t it? I met him at Manny Stryker’s place the other day.”

  “Why, yes, that was young Bill. He’s a fine specimen, isn’t he? Cool in a crisis, grace under pressure. And a mighty fine boy. Aren’t kids amazing these days? It’s another era, Tripper. They’re so much more—what’s the word I want? Accomplished, I guess.”

  “Those” who can read,” I said. “The rest?” I shrugged.

  “But those who can—my God, they can do so many things. Take Bill—he’s a licensed pilot, quite a talented documentary filmmaker. USC, y’know. Ellie and I think we’re mighty lucky.” He positively beamed at me, his round little eyes shiny without the sunglasses.

  “Lucky?”

  “Well, you know how it is. Bill and our Amanda are sweethearts. I’ve got the idea that it’s pretty serious. Lovely young couple. Manny’s got a lodge right up on the Canadian border and Bill flies that old heap down here to see Mandy in the summer. She’s going to be getting her MA at USC, special education for handicapped kids. In the summer she works in a center for those kids here in the Twin Cities. Two fine young people.”

  He seemed so overcome with a sense of well-being that I couldn’t think of anything much worse than making some vulgar comment about the cocaine. I wasn’t there to wreck the party. But the questions were crowding everything else out of my mind. Was young Bill in business for himself? Or for Magna in some way I couldn’t quite pin down? Or for Freddie Rosen? Had he brought it in from Canada? Did it have anything at all to do with me and my digging around … or had I just stumbled onto something ugly?

  On a great flat sweep of lawn beyond the greenhouse and the stables a softball game was forming of its own will, as if it had a mind of its own. Whitney leaned against the rough trunk of a mighty oak, crossed his arms like the village smithy, and surveyed his domain. From the look on his round face it was clear that he found it good. On the seventh day he would probably rest. “The dance floor,” he said, “you recognize it?” I looked properly stupefied. “Picnic;” he said. “Kim Novak, Bill Holden … my God, they made movies in those days, didn’t they? I’m thinking about pushing a remake—what do you think of that?”

  “Why? They’ll only desecrate a masterpiece. Madonna and Sean Penn, maybe? It’s going to be tough finding another Kim Novak. There was just the one.”

  “Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson,” he said matter-of-factly. “There’s always another Kim Novak.” He was either very stupid or very smart. “Freddie Rosen wants to feature that new rock band from St. Paul, A Damned Good Thrashing. No matter what anybody says, any idea at all about anything, Freddie coughs up A Damned Good Thrashing. Or DGT, as he intends to call them. He wants to build the darned picnic itself around these guys, this band … One-Track-Mind Freddie. OTMF.” He rolled his eyes in exaggerated disgust.

  “He must have known what he was talking about once,” I said.

  Whitney shrugged. “I suppose. He must have.”

  “Somebody,” I said slowly, “thought enough of him to send him JC’s song …”

  He shrugged again. “Somebody,” he repeated, then focused on me, dismissing Freddie Rosen to the outer limits. “I’m not an entertainment genius. Or if I am, they don’t know it yet. I’m a guy who goes to the movies. I read when I have the time. I am a businessman—not a genius, not by a long shot—just a kid who got to run the family store. But there are a couple things I know … Now let’s face it, what we’re talking about—when we talk about this JC Tripper thing—is big. The recording and movie divisions of Magna are very visible, very high-profile aspects of Magna Group. We’ve got fast-food franchises, we’ve got frozen food, we’re going through the roof on microwaveable crap I wouldn’t feed my worst enemy, we’ve got the paper-products division, we’ve got the motel chain, but records and movies—little-nothing businesses, three, four percent of our gross revenues, really nothing—they’re what people know about. That’s what Magna means to most people. It’s crazy. And the fact is they are at best very erratic profit centers … up, down, up, down, all worth in a good year about one moderately large hill of beans—which would cost a heck of a lot less to produce and which we could freeze and which we’d know ahead of time people would buy. Not with movies and records. But if you do this JC Tripper thing right, we could have something … a mixture of Midnight Express and Prince and The Mad Dogs and Englishmen Tour and Lord Byron and everything else you’ve ever seen about a doomed romantic hero … I think of JC Tripper that way, the Lord Byron of Rock—”

  “You’re talking about the same fella I am,” I said, “Joseph Christian Tripper? My brother?” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  “The Lord Byron of Rock,” he repeated.

  “Stop saying that.”

  “Why shouldn’t I? I like it. That’s what he was, the—”

  “Stop.”

  “—Lord Byron—”

  “Why do you keep saying this?”

  “—of Rock. Why? Because it works for me. Because it spells very, very big money. More than a hill of beans.”

  “Show biz has you in its magical grip,” I said.

  “We make the film about JC’s last days—”

  “I thought he’s supposed to be alive.”

  “—with some kid like the young Peter O’Toole—”

  “I suppose there’s always another Pete
r O’Toole around. Probably on the same island as the young Kim Novak.”

  “—and we push, push, push—all the old records, the new sound track, we re-package, we put videos together, we push and we push—”

  “And huff and puff, I’ll bet, and blow the house down.”

  “No, no, we go right off the charts is what we do, and I go to my board and to the stockholders and you know what happens? In the words of the late great Harry Pebble, I look like a genius-boy. It’s a scene I’d like to play, Mr. Tripper. And your brother, late or otherwise, can help me play it.”

  “Well, you’ve got it bad,” I said.

  “But,” he cautioned, finger raised, “we cannot get caught with our pants down on this is-he-alive-or-is-he-dead flimflam. We have got to know the truth. No two ways about it. This is not frozen peas or beans or fast-food burritos. Any mistake is too visible, another Heaven’s Gate, God forbid. As an entity, Magna could absorb the loss of a Heaven’s Gate—a hundred fifty, two hundred million—and barely notice it. You’d have a tough time finding it on the balance sheet. Magna is big, Mr. Tripper … B-I-G. But it would look terrible in the papers. So I don’t want to go forward unless your brother is all cut-and-dried, pardon the expression, because as far as I’m concerned we’ve gone as far with the uncertainty thing as we can.” He slapped me shyly on the shoulder. “Which is your cue, my fine-feathered friend.”

  A representative of the softball game was trotting toward us. He was a middle-aged man, gaunt, with a long face and more hair than was good for him. “Come on, Piggers,” he said with the snotty good humor you found between chaps who’d given each other the occasional hand job at Choate in their salad days. “We need an umpire.” He stood before us perspiring heavily, half out of breath. “You’re the man. We tried to get Hugo, but he’s such an old fruit … claimed he knew nothing of the game. So it’s you.”

  Whitney nodded. “In a minute,” he said. The fellow grinned and jogged away. Just watching him sweat was exhausting work. My host turned back to me, wiping his forehead with his handkerchief. “If I were you—in your shoes, so to speak—I’d start all over again in Tangier. If he’s alive, that must be the spot where the hoax began. As I understand it, you were there when it was all coming to an end … but I also understand that you were in pretty rocky condition. Go back with fresh, clear eyes—who knows what you might shake loose with all the money you’ve got to throw around now.”

  “It was a hell of a long time ago,” I said dubiously.

  “Well, it’s just a thought. I leave it up to you and Bechtol. You must suit yourselves, of course.”

  As the sun drifted lower, slowly easing itself down behind the trees and out of the day, the humidity increased and the crowd seemed to grow larger until it furled like the sea across the shadowy green expanses of lawn. The softball game went on and on into the deepening twilight. Shouts and screams, the soft thunk of bat on ball, the blur as it flew through the gathering dark, runners lumbering around the bases, girls throwing the ball in that fetching, ungainly way they have.

  I stood on the edges of the game, drinking gin and tonic, feeling the humidity condense on the cold glass, making it slippery. A brace of Dalmatians added to the confusion by scampering in and out among the players, chasing the ball. Bill Stryker was pitching for one of the teams, and his girlfriend, Amanda Whitney, was playing an enthusiastic second base. The expenditure of energy was frightening. I felt as if I were watching a sacrificial rite of some kind. I’d once read somewhere that the Aztecs or Mayans had played something like football in something like our stadia, but it was all rather more in earnest than our games. The losers were slaughtered. Cotter Whitney, umpiring in the old-fashioned way from behind the pitcher, would have been some kind of high priest. I suppose that in a way he was.

  My eyes were beginning to glaze over. The game was taking on the tempo of something that would go on forever, something by which we could measure the remainder of our lives. I was tired and hot, and some kind of bug was making an appearance with the growing darkness. They flitted about, bumping into one another in their haste to get to my face. There couldn’t have been more than ten or twenty million of them in my immediate vicinity.

  Then, as I stood there batting the air—apparently a gesture that attracted rather than discouraged the little bastards—I thought I saw someone I recognized across the ball field, over behind the third-base bag. It was too dark to be sure. A shape, perhaps looking across at me. Perhaps not.

  I tried to react casually, taking some time to think. What would my quarry of the moment be doing here? It was a long way from home. But then, where was home?

  I slowly moved around the edges of the cheering players and their advocates. Every so often I’d look across toward where I’d seen the face, but I couldn’t be sure if it was still there. By the time I got there, all that remained was a scent in the air. But that was enough.

  The figure was moving ahead of me through the shadows, drifting in and out of view, past the dance floor where the Japanese lanterns in red and green and blue and yellow were lit and a dance band from another era was setting up. It wasn’t A Damned Good Thrashing. This was a bunch of guys with gray hair and one of them was blowing the melodic line of “Blue Moon” on a saxophone.

  He slipped out of sight past the bandstand and I’d begun to think I was following a figment of my imagination. I’d had a long day. I was probably just losing my mind.

  But there he was again.

  Standing by the boathouse, slowly looking back in my general direction. At me? I didn’t know. Then he was disappearing again, through the doorway and into the boathouse.

  Along the dock some of the staff were lining up a flotilla of rowboats, fitting them out with candles in more Japanese lanterns in the bows. The bright colors glowed softly, reflecting in the water.

  I reached the boathouse, stood watching the boats, which bobbed gently, glowing, enchanting.

  Morris Fleury had been there. There was no mistaking the ripe smell of the cherry pipe tobacco, the round-shouldered shape, the rumpled seersucker suit that was so right for him.

  What was he doing at Cotter Whitney’s party?

  I was pondering that one when I heard a voice behind me.

  “Are you going to dance with me? Will you take me out in a rowboat and play your banjo?”

  I turned and saw Heidi Dillinger regarding me with a big soft smile. The remote, brittle ironist seemed to have been sent packing, replaced by a very pretty girl.

  I thought that maybe she was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen.

  Eleven

  NO, ACTUALLY, SHE WASN’T THE prettiest girl I’d ever seen. She wasn’t as pretty as Julie Christie or Natalie Wood or Jean Seberg or Inger Stevens, all of whom at one time or another I’d seen at close range. But three of them are dead, and in the battle for the top spot among the live beauties Heidi Dillinger, that night, was a very serious contender. Maybe it was partly the setting, maybe my mood. Maybe the scales had fallen from my eyes. Maybe the fairies had sprinkled moon dust on our heads. That was probably it. Fairies. Moon dust. It fit.

  “You’re looking at me,” she said, “like you’re about to turn into Mr. Hyde.”

  “I always look like that when I’m happy.”

  “Great. Just great.”

  She was wearing a loose-fitting dress with a dropped waist that rested rakishly on her hips. The material looked like an African print—dancing figures, masks, shields, spears. I thought I’d seen the dress in the window at Putumayo on Lexington. I watched her moving inside the dress, her breasts and her thighs occasionally stretching the fabric, and every few seconds the dress would grab at her hips and cling for dear life. Airplanes falling out of the sky? Seat cushions full of cocaine? Two people tortured and snuffed? Lee Tripper could handle all that. But this woman moving around inside that dress—now we’re talking dangerous.

  Her arms and legs were golden. Her legs were bare and she was wearing sandals and her toenails were br
ight red. She did a girlish pirouette and stood looking out at the lake, at the bobbing brightly colored lights in the rowboats. The band was playing “Moon over Miami.” Lots of saxophones. The evening breeze caressed the trees as I knew it would. “What a heavenly night,” she said. “I’m glad you’re here but—well, what exactly brings you here?”

  “A nose for news. Too bad I have to find everything out for myself, but …” I shrugged philosophically. “Did you see the guy who was just standing here?”

  “What guy?” She was still looking at the lights on the water.

  “Can you smell it? Cherry pipe tobacco?”

  “Smells like cough syrup.”

  “Funny guy, rumpled seersucker suit that looks like he’s had it on since last summer. Panama hat with a loud band.”

  “Loud as A Damned Good Thrashing?”

  I ignored her. Better she should leave the jokes to me. “Smoking a corncob pipe. I followed him down here. He went into the boathouse.” Shadows dropped across us, willows swaying.

  She went to the door and opened it. It was dark inside, but the far end was open to the lake and kids were finishing up putting the candles in the boats. The water slushed and lapped at the hulls of a couple of motorboats. I peered into the corners. He wasn’t there.

  “The little man,” she murmured, “who wasn’t there.”

  “He’s the kind of guy who’s probably good at disappearing.”

  “Friend of yours?”

  “No. A guy named Morris Fleury. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “Should it?” She was shaking her head no.

  “He knew Sally Feinman. I was just surprised to see him here.”

  “It’s dark. It was probably somebody else.” She was standing in the doorway. Behind her, up the sloping lawn, some people had begun dancing. She held out her hand. “Come on.”

  She led me up toward the dance floor. I was soaked with sweat. She was calm and shimmery and cool. “I’ll bet you’ve mastered the box step.”