The Suspense Is Killing Me

by Thomas Gifford

  I was remembering Annie DeWinter, her thick straight black hair held in place by a brightly colored headband, her tiny breasts loose inside a fringed vest, high boots … My God, that had all been a long time ago. I was wondering what she looked like now, what her frames of reference were, what she’d experienced and learned and cried over and laughed at as two decades had passed. She was taking hold of my mind, digging in and holding on, just the way she had in the old days, when the telephone rang. The voice at the other end was so deep that it sent funny little vibrations bouncing around my eardrums. It was Hugo Ledbetter and he wanted to have dinner with me. He gave me an address in the Trastevere section, told me which bridge to cross, and suggested I leave the taxi before I crossed it. “I want to see you alone, Mr. Tripper. Very much alone.”

  “You’re not sending me a corsage or chocolates, are you?”

  “I’m sure your sense of humor is all the rage in your circle, Mr. Tripper, but it palls very quickly with me.”

  “Then you’re not after my body, that’s definite?”

  “You are nothing like my type, sir. This is business. You may discover that we have congruent interests. Be there at nine, Mr. Tripper, or I shall be put out with you.”

  “Cotter Whitney is a hopeless twat, that’s the problem with the whole bloody thing. He knows frozen peas, he knows fast-food burgers, he knows a lot of things, but he hasn’t any idea what the entertainment business is about. Lord knows, neither do I but for publishing … which is why it’s so important that my new associate should know what he’s doing. Well, that’s what it boils down to, the residue, shall we say.”

  Hugo Ledbetter was putting away his second pound of linguine with clam sauce, occasionally dabbing at the chunks of clam lodged in his beard. We were sitting at a wooden table in the back room of a family groceria, candles flickering on tabletops, dripping onto the sauce-stained cloth. Ledbetter was wearing a straw hat Van Gogh would have admired, a lavender smock, old corduroys, and heavy sandals. His hands were huge but twirled the pasta with practiced care. He drank his dago red with gusto, enjoying it all out of proportion to its quality, as if it were water. He looked like something from another world and sounded a lot like Darth Vader.

  “Somebody is blackmailing Magna,” he said, “and it’s putting me off my stroke. Somebody. Your late brother? Thumper Gordon? How the devil should I know? I’m a publisher. A gentleman publisher, more or less, within limits. But I am not an idiot. I can smell it when somebody farts and this deal has got fart all over it.”

  “Are you sure you’re not a writer?”

  He shoved a great deal of warm crusty bread into the hole in the middle of his beard. Then he reached over to the plate of antipasti, then looked up at me, perplexed. “You’ve eaten all the anchovies.”

  “Salty little bastards,” I said.

  “Very disappointing.”

  “It’s just the way life works sometimes.”

  “Murder. Blackmail. What is going on? That’s a very difficult question to answer, Mr. Tripper. But I’m only interested in one small aspect of it—how it concerns me. And it concerns me only to the extent that I’m involved with this Magna deal. My firm has existed for more than a century without a huge parent company hovering hungrily over us. We can go on a while longer. Even if Allan Bechtol should leave us—say if Magna acquired a different publishing house, or simply started one—we would survive handsomely. Now there are certain advantages for us in merging, I don’t deny that for a moment, but they are far from essential. So when people start getting murdered, and my author is obviously either using or being used in a game I don’t understand, and then a dead rock star may or may not be dead but is certainly involved—then, Mr. Tripper, I smell a fart and when I smell a fart I grow lachrymose and peckish. I grow unhappy. I’ve officially told Whitney that I’m having second thoughts … and he’s upset. He wanted to bag the famous publisher, put his head up on the wall—he doesn’t want to fail, it’s that simple. He doesn’t like being told he’s on the verge of failure … Mr. Tripper, what the fuck is going on?”

  “Very bad things,” I said.

  “How perceptive,” he said between bites.

  “I simply don’t know. But your instincts are probably pretty good. Somewhere in the maze we’re going to find drugs—”

  “Oh, shit! I hate that!”

  “—and murder and … what else? Name it, it’ll be there.”

  “Why don’t you just bow out, then? Or do you want to find your brother?”

  “I want to lay JC Tripper to rest once and for all. If I convince Innis—Bechtol—then I figure it’s a wrap. That’s why I’m in it. And for the money, of course. Not only for what Bechtol’s paying me but can you imagine what all this will do for JC’s record sales? I’m his heir … I can afford to give Thumper royalties on the new stuff. So mainly I want JC to die once and for all; I don’t want to find him.”

  “You may have a problem, Mr. Tripper.”

  “What’s that? On my own I can think of a handful, but what’s on your mind?”

  “I’m quite sure that JC Tripper is alive.”

  “Not bloody likely.”

  “Ah, hear me out, you impetuous fellow. It all comes back to JC, when you think about it. Do you really believe this is all some peculiar coincidence? Hardly. No, I think it began with Cotter Whitney … and JC Tripper. For whatever reason, JC faked his death twenty years ago, went off to live the life he wanted, and then decided—again for reasons of his own, his motivations hardly matter—to hold Magna hostage. JC knows enough about Magna, whether it’s drugs or financial irregularities or something else, to scare them. He made contact with Whitney, he sent the song, he made his demands—and scared hell out of the little twat. But Whitney doesn’t know if it’s really JC or Thumper or just some nut. Or someone in between. So he goes to Bechtol with the idea for the novel about the phony death of the rock singer … Bechtol likes the idea, he went to school with you and JC, it all fits … and he makes contact with you, tells you about his idea for the novel, tells you enough about the background to get you interested. And … at the same time it all heats up around you, because real life, real murder, intrudes, and Sally Feinman is dead. It all comes together—JC, Bechtol, Sally Feinman, that disc jockey in Los Angeles, all of them have JC in common. And, lest we forget, they all have you in common, young sir …” He finished our second bottle of wine while I carved away at a giant veal chop. “My scenario answers the one relevant question—do you know what it is?” A third bottle of wine arrived and he poured both our glasses full.

  “Which question is that?”

  “Why are they so obsessed with finding JC? Why are they so desperate? Why not wait for him to find them? If they’re going to pay off, what’s the big hurry?” He grinned as if he were stashing secrets behind the heavy beard. “Because they’re so scared of what he’s holding over them—they can’t wait, they’ve got to seal off the element of chance. He’s toying with them and they can’t stand it. Whitney is having what they’d call in the vernacular a shit fit. They want to make a deal—”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” I said. “If you’re right, they’ll kill him.”

  “I’m not altogether sure that’s true.” He patted his mouth with his soiled napkin. You could have boiled it and made soup. “I’m not sure that they’re doing the killing. What if JC is quite sensibly afraid they will kill him? He might well kill people to keep from being found—it follows, doesn’t it? And he might kill the people with the best chance of finding him.” He leered at me from beneath wild, hairy eyebrows. “I’m naming no names, mind.”

  “My brother is not a threat to my life.”

  “Very loyal of you to say so. But you may be the one most likely to find him, just as Allan says. And, thus, the greatest danger.”

  “My brother’s dead.”

  “And regrettably so are others.” He grinned. “Someone is a liar here, someone is a scoundrel. More likely there are several liars and scoundre
ls, dangerous people. They all make me want to be somewhere else. But I’ve had the use of your ear quite long enough, Mr. Tripper. You’ve been very patient with me and my theories … but I must say I wanted you to be aware of the situation among Whitney, Bechtol, and me. It may or may not be of interest to you, but Whitney is very worried that I’ll forsake his deal because of all this unsavory whatnot … and he really is being held hostage, if not by your brother then by someone else. The danger is real, Mr. Tripper. That’s what I’m saying. Their motives are so baroque, so layered over with lies and denials and fear and greed, they no longer recognize what they were in the beginning. They have lost their way in a wilderness of fear, and such men are dangerous indeed. They have so much to lose. They want to protect what is theirs. And that applies to everyone.” His eyebrows rose and an impish smile formed itself behind the beard. “Even to you, Mr. Tripper. I’ve looked at all of you and you are in some ways the most mysterious of all. Let me in on your secret, Mr. Tripper.”

  “I’m the only one telling the truth,” I lied.

  He began to shake with thunderous mirth, which struck me in the instant as genuine. “Well, you’re all quite mad. What, I wonder, will happen next?”

  I shrugged. “The suspense is killing me.”

  That set him off again, his belly shaking the table between us.

  Fourteen

  THE ALITALIA JET SLIPPED DOWN through the clouds of dusk like a tumbling coin, reflecting bits of setting sunshine along the silver wings, finally dropping through the darkest layer into the murky fog below the mountaintops. The stands of dark-green trees looked black on the mountainside and reminded me of fairy tales and ogres and pulling the covers over my head. I was still thinking of the mountain habitat of bearded trolls with gnarled clubs when the plane settled down on what had always struck me as a postage-stamp runway.

  The Zurich airport echoed emptily, mausoleum-like, a kind of elephants’ graveyard for pilgrims coming to visit their money before dying. Everything was neat and clean. The Mercedes taxi had apparently just rolled off the assembly line and been driven directly to the airport. Inside it I felt hermetically encapsulated. No conversation with the driver, no radio. Soundlessly we arrived at a new, surgically spotless hotel looking down on the city from one of the forested hillsides. From my balcony I could see the huge railway station and by the Limmat Quay the site where the old Central Hotel had once stood. The fog hung low and cool in the treetops and it didn’t seem like summer anymore. The pavement was wet and a steady mist filled the air.

  I took a bath and wondered if Heidi was on her way to meet me. Innis had said not to worry, she’d catch up with me. Well, as far as I was concerned he didn’t know from worry, but I didn’t go into it with him. I didn’t need Heidi, although I might have been happier keeping my eye on her: when I couldn’t see her I wondered if she might be off somewhere whispering with Morris Fleury. I tried not to think about her, concentrating instead on Clive Taillor. Innis had said that Clive was as likely as anyone to know where JC was and, if JC had been alive, Innis would have been right. They had been close, those two, JC and Clive. Clive had been willing to put up with him longer than anyone else.

  I was going through the telephone book looking him up when there was a knock at the door. A bellhop stood there with an envelope resting on a little silver tray. I took it and tipped him and went to stand by the window, where the fog was lowering over the city. The lights below were lit and blurred the face of the city.

  My name was typed on the envelope. I tore it open and there was a single piece of hotel stationery. The message was short and perfectly clear.

  Taillor will meet you at his place. Nine o’clock. Don’t be late.

  An address followed. But for some reason it was unsigned. I called the front desk and they connected me with someone whose job involved messages. This one had come by telephone and been typed by someone at the desk. No, that someone was gone for the day. No, if it wasn’t signed, there was really no way to know if it had been a man or woman, was there? Could the lack of a signature have been an oversight? Perhaps, sir, an oversight by the individual who had left the message.

  I won’t say it didn’t bother me, but what was I supposed to do, run and hide? I’d come to Zurich specifically to see Clive Taillor. Someone had made the appointment for me. It must have been Heidi working to Innis’s order. And if it was someone else, what harm could they do me at Clive Taillor’s place that they couldn’t do anywhere else? I felt like the old Indian chief. Sitting Duck.

  I put on fresh clothing. How could anything happen to you in your good clothes? Gray slacks, a J. Press blazer, a blue shirt, a regimental-stripe tie and shell cordovans I could use for mirrors. Was I a keeper of the old traditions or a hopeless anachronism? Or a worn-out old rocker in disguise?

  I got another Mercedes taxi in front of the hotel. The driver nodded reassuringly when I gave him the address. He popped a Vic Damone tape into the deck and I leaned back against the creaky leather, opened the window and felt the cool mist on my face. It was ten minutes to nine.

  He dropped me at the corner of a steep little cul-de-sac, told me it would be the second or third house on my right. I got out and slipped into my trench coat. The streetlight cast long shadows up the narrow sidewalk. The trees were thick on every side and smelled like Christmas. The houses were hidden behind them, but the lights in the windows winked through the spaces.

  There were no welcoming lights behind the trees at Clive Taillor’s house. The fir trees encroached on the narrow width of the stone stairway winding up toward the house from the sidewalk. It was like stepping into a very dicey tunnel. The light behind me was being curtained off by the foliage. It was becoming a very wet night. A dog was yapping nearby and I heard laughter, a party, people having fun next door. Then I stepped out of the tunnel just a few feet from Taillor’s front door. There was a dim little light burning beside the empty mailbox. The door was heavy and solid. The windows were dark. The house was a kind of mini-chalet with a balcony, not at all common in the area of Zurich. Weedy plants hung in pots dangling from hooks. The windows upstairs were shuttered. Not much of a welcome.

  I lifted the heavy brass knocker—a fox’s head, a very pointy nose real enough to twitch—and let it fall, but there was no answer. I knew there wouldn’t be, but I was there, it was a time for observing the formalities. If for some reason a trap had been laid, I’d walked into it. The only thing lacking was the sudden whiff of cherry pipe tobacco, the scent of brimstone. But there was only the smell of the mist on the trees. Somebody put a record on next door and it might have been twenty years ago. “MacArthur Park” was melting in the dark and all the sweet green icing was flowing down … I hadn’t heard that one in a very long time.

  I knocked with the fox’s head again, then followed the line of shrubbery around the house, leaning up to peer into the darkness behind the windows. I went all the way around the house hoping to God nobody thought I was a burglar and called the cops. I heard a champagne cork popping, female squeals. Someone had left the cake out in the rain and there was doubt that the recipe could be found again … Then I was back at the front door.

  The message I’d received had apparently been in error.

  By a quarter to ten I was down by the quay, sitting on a stool in a small dark bar nursing a Bushmill’s and thinking about a fool and all his errands. I felt a little like a man sent plunging down the blackness of an old well. It wasn’t funny but I felt myself smiling a loser’s smile into the whiskey. I was feeling very hungry.

  The bartender came down to my end of the bar, the empty end. He dribbled a bit more Bushmill’s into the fat, squat glass. I lifted it, proposed a toast. “Life,” I said. “A very rum go, all things considered.”

  An American, he looked up sharply. “You can say that again, pal.”

  I dined in a large restaurant with gray-and-cream walls, gray vases full of flowers, a haze of cigar smoke, bottom-heavy women in print dresses with husbands yawning
behind meaty fists, and a determined string quartet sawing away on a minimally elevated stage in the corner. There was a steady hum of German-sounding conversation. I had that feeling of perfect anonymity, which suited my increasingly somber mood. Poking around an empty house when you’d expected a party, a reunion, had that effect on a fellow. No Heidi. Somebody leaving a message with all the wrong information and neglecting to sign it.

  A tall woman with long black hair caught my eye and then looked away. She might have been Annie DeWinter twenty years ago. I’d been in Zurich with her once and she’d been going through one of her depressions. She’d turned to me for help and I suppose I’d failed her. Still, she hadn’t killed herself. Not a complete failure, then. JC had written a song about her in those days when the bottom seemed to fall out of her desire to live, walking along the Limmat Quay wondering if she should jump, standing staring at the reflection of the full moon in the water, wondering if it was a target like a bull’s-eye taunting her to jump, or rather a rippling, glowing sign of hope and life and the future. It was a wrenching ballad, “Moon in Black Water,” and Annie had sung it with the band. It had been the song that started her own two-year career as a singer, but that, too, had ended when JC died. Now I smiled at the woman and she smiled back, then put her hand on her husband’s sleeve and turned away from me. Of course, Annie DeWinter was twenty years older now, caught in the same squeeze as the rest of us. JC had been terribly afraid of growing old, had seemed to sense the impact of time rushing toward him—seemed to see it coming long before the rest of us. He’d sensed that the sixties represented a kind of playpen for quasi-adults, at least the sixties we lived in. While the rest of us were stumbling around thinking that it was never going to end, JC always knew it was a short-term thing, that all the beautiful birds and the kicky leaps at romance were only flashing past and then we’d all have to face reality, and reality was no picnic. He knew we were just playing while the rest of us thought the world had changed and this was the way it was going to be. JC had that sense of doom and decay that lay ahead of us and it was a curse. He hated the idea of it.