The Suspense Is Killing Me

by Thomas Gifford

  “They brought Marty Bjorklund in on their final plan. Maybe they could frame him—child molestation, statutory rape, something to get him under their thumbs. What to do? Then Henry Bernstein spoke up and spoke sense to the group … and Bellerophon was born—”

  Ledbetter interrupted excitedly. “Bellerophon! I’ve got it—they decided to frame JC Tripper for murder and hold it over his head to keep him in line! By God, how devilish!”

  “Not exactly. Devilish? Yes. But not exactly a frame-up.”

  “How do you mean?” Innis said.

  “It was JC Tripper who was murdered … Bellerophon was the plan to murder JC Tripper …”

  Twenty-Three

  FLEURY BLINKED AT THE UPTURNED faces, obviously feeling rather pleased with himself but hardly daring to enjoy it. I shrank away from the whole business. He was so close to the heart of it now, so close. Heidi Dillinger tensed in her chair, watching Fleury for any hints of what was to come. She was sizing him up, her arms wrapped around the leather bag in her lap. The way she stared at him made me feel she had a kind of X-ray vision that tested the truth of everything he said, or the lie. She turned to me, slowly raised her eyebrows inquiringly. Bellerophon was the plan to murder JC … so how much did you know? I avoided her penetrating eyes.

  Sam Innis made a sour face, his little mouth drawn tight. “That’s all well and good, pal, but this one here”—he nodded at Thumper Gordon, “he says JC is alive, here on this island. Now somebody’s got the wrong end of the stick—”

  Morris Fleury had laid the gun on the mantelpiece above the kitchen fireplace and was knocking the corncob against the blackened brick facing, sprinkling ashes. He tucked the corncob into the tobacco pouch and pushed the cherry tobacco into the bowl. “You’re not listening to me,” he said. “I said there was a plan.” He struck a match on the brick and sucked the flame down into the bowl. “I didn’t say it worked.” Slowly he grinned at Innis. “Or maybe it only sort of worked …”

  Sam winced, shook his head. “Oh, come on—what’s that supposed to mean? Who was supposed to kill him?” He jerked his face around toward me. “Why so quiet, Lee? Where the hell were you? You keep telling us your brother’s dead, so what’s your story? You were there—you saw it all, right? Lee, we’re up to our assholes in manure here and I think maybe you should be the one to start shoveling—”

  “Sam,” I said, “you get on my nerves, you know that?”

  Fleury took the gun from the mantelpiece and swung the muzzle in an arc taking us all in. “Maybe we could let me carry on with my story. Trust me. You’ll see things fall into place. At least most things. Let’s go back to Cotter here and me, what he wanted me to do for the team. It was this blackmailer that was workin’ on him—the blackmailer who’d found out everything, who’d somehow uncovered the secret of Bellerophon Marty Bjorklund had hidden in the computer. The blackmailer had Magna twisting in the wind … and they kept trying to figure out who this guy might be … and hell, nobody from Magna had ever seen JC Tripper dead—”

  “What about the killer they sent?” That was Thumper Gordon, caught up in the puzzle.

  “Let’s say the killer they sent to do for JC wasn’t exactly trustworthy,” Fleury said. “So they—Cotter here and Rosen and some of the boys—began to wonder, could JC be alive? Maybe the killer hadn’t gotten him—but no, they couldn’t believe that! It was ridiculous … Well, think about that while we move along—now what did the good folks at Magna want me to do? It ain’t too tough to figure out when you think what’s at stake—they wanted me to find the blackmailer and kill him. I was now stepping into Marty Bjorklund’s shoes, I was now Cotter Whitney’s Marty Bjorklund …

  “But before they sent me out to kill somebody, they decided they had to know whether or not JC was dead or alive. If they knocked off the blackmailer and JC was actually alive, they might still have big trouble on their hands—I mean, let’s face it, JC had wanted to nail Magna twenty years ago, and if he was still alive, he was still a danger, if he was alive and clean and deciding it was time to get even for what they tried to do to him—see, it was one of those awful what-if deals, what if, what if. People with things to hide or fear are always saying ‘What if somebody finds out, then I’ll be in the dumper,’ and that’s where guys like me come in.

  “JC Tripper alive was a time bomb, he could blow Magna into a million crispy, bite-sized pieces. He could dig up drugs and murder and mob connections and wreck the present, beat it to death with the past, he was sitting on a scandal that could wreck Magna and Cotter, and the boys were sitting right beside him. So I had two jobs: find the free lance and find JC if he was alive … and kill them both. If JC was the blackmailer, I’d only have to kill one person.” He looked up with the open-mouthed grin full of bad teeth, gray, gapped teeth. “Right, Cotter? Wasn’t that my job?”

  Cotter Whitney said nothing. He didn’t seem to have heard.

  Fleury sipped noisily at a fresh cup of steaming coffee. Thumper laced it with a single malt while Fleury watched. Then Fleury began talking again. “It was then that Allan Bechtol, or Sam Innis, as you call him, Mr. Tripper—Bechtol and Ledbetter came to Magna with this crazy idea for a book, the novel based on the JC Tripper story. So there’s all this to-ing and fro-ing with Magna and Purvis and Ledbetter, Magna wanting to pick up a publisher—this is not my area of expertise, y’unnerstan’. The part that concerned me was what Cotter and I decided right away—could this be a coincidence? Or is JC alive and behind it? And if it is a coincidence, does it mean that Bechtol knows something about JC? Namely that he’s alive? Hell’s bells, we figured Bechtol was a good bet to be working hand-in-glove with JC … or with the blackmailer. I sorta liked that … Innis/Bechtol in league with the blackmailer. Whichever, he seemed like a good source for us to use, being an old pal of JC’s from Harvard days. And then Bechtol says he can sign up JC’s brother Lee too, another big plus, right? So we figured why not get in on the play ourselves? Made good sense. It couldn’t hurt and, anyway, did we have a better way to go? We’d been trying and we weren’t coming up with much … and things were beginning to heat up.”

  Heidi Dillinger interrupted the flow of Fleury’s story. She’d been thinking. “I want to get back to this plot to kill JC Tripper. Are you saying you know he survived? Or were you just speculating?”

  “Oh, my goodness, just speculating, Miss Dillinger. Just playing the cards we were dealt. What if. That’s the name of our game. Course, Mr. Gordon here says—”

  “I know what Mr. Gordon here says,” she snapped. “Mr. Gordon’s brain was probably done sunnyside up in 1969—I believe what I see and I have yet to see JC Tripper on this island. What I want to know is, why didn’t they kill Lee, too? I mean, why leave Lee to run loose and maybe tell what happened to JC—”

  “I was in pretty rotten shape,” I said.

  “Yes, yes, we’ve heard all that before. But then you’re a bit of a joke, aren’t you, Lee?”

  Fleury said, “There’s a good reason why they didn’t plan to kill Lee—ain’t that right, Lee?” He was looking at me. I felt like a guy in a jail break standing in the glare of the spotlight.

  “You’re the man with the answers,” I said. “Get on with your story.”

  “Well, things were heating up, like I said. Somebody had knocked off the deejay, Shadow Flicker—he’d been close to JC, see. Drug runner, distributor, big Magna kickback guy, made him rich at one time, slipping bad in later years—I was a little slow to realize why he had to die, but once the blackmailer was through with him—and he hadn’t learned if JC was alive or dead—he had to die to protect the identity of the blackmailer. Real simple.”

  “Pardon me for being so dense once again,” Hugo Ledbetter rumbled, “but why was this blackmailer of yours so interested in finding JC? What did JC have to do with his blackmail scheme?”

  “The blackmailer wanted to up the ante, to strengthen his hand—JC could deliver all the details about the murder plan and all the rest of the
dirt … They were natural allies, weren’t they? They both had it in for Magna—imagine, JC Tripper back from the dead twenty years later with a hell of a story to tell—jeez, think of it.” Fleury smiled one of his sour smiles primarily to himself. “And if JC didn’t want to team up, then our blackmailer could kill him without the slightest qualm. That’s why, Mr. Ledbetter.” He sighed, remembering where he was in the story. “So Shadow Flicker was a discarded back issue—probably didn’t know a damn thing. And when I got on to Sally Feinman and all of her ideas—I was just getting her confidence, she was gonna tell me her own theories about the Brothers Tripper—somebody bumped her off, too. Not just murders but torture murders—somebody was trying to find out something … and the more I thought about it, the more it looked like it had to be the whereabouts of JC Tripper. Later on, the same thing held true in the case of Clive Taillor, but I found out somebody had been paying Taillor off for twenty years. For his silence, I presumed. Reasonable, right?

  “I had a lot of time to think and I’ve got me a nasty little turn of mind. I fussed around with the whole Bellerophon thing, how they were going to polish off JC to save their asses—how they were gonna keep Lee Tripper here from raising hell without having to kill him, too … and I began to see how Bellerophon worked and I remembered something Marty Bjorklund said at the end, the day before his lights went out for good. He kept telling me I had to see Lee. I thought he was rambling and babbling in a kind of delirium, that he was talking about Leo Roarke, one of the guys who ran Magna with D’Allessandro and Bernstein and that bunch. I thought he was thinking Leo was still alive, he kept saying Lee knew it all, and he’d laugh and it was one gruesome sight, I kid you not …

  “Then I had me a brain wave. It was Lee Tripper he was talkin’ about, not old Leo Roarke. He said old Lee knew it all … now what did he mean? Then my deceitful, bent mind began figuring it out. Do you know what he meant, Mr. Tripper?”

  Forever crept past. Whitney said, “Answer the man.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I know exactly what Marty Bjorklund meant.” I heard my voice from a million miles away.

  “Your memory freshening up a bit?” Fleury grinned wetly, licked his lips.

  “I’m still listening,” I said. “Go on, go on.” I was trying hard to think about my options, the cards I’d been dealt so long ago.

  “I knew Lee was deep in it,” Fleury said, enjoying all the insinuations, “but I didn’t know how. Damned if I knew how. But in Zurich I found out how Clive Taillor had been getting those regular payments, twenty years of them. Hush money.” He relished those two words as if he were an actor in the last moments of a thriller, had been waiting for his favorite lines. “I couldn’t get any answers from the bankers in Zurich, they wouldn’t let me in on where that money had come from. Then … then I saw I could come at it from the other end. Who might have paid him off? I made a list … and at the top of the list was the brother. Lee, old pal, I gotta tell you, you’re one for the books, you are.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” I said. Everything at the table was changing. Everybody was turning toward me, everyone but Thumper, who was sipping Scotch, watching.

  “I’ve been a security man for a helluva long time. I’ve got some damn fine connections. Professional courtesy. I had a man back in New York give your banking records a once-over. I didn’t have him go back twenty years, Lee, I didn’t need to.” He puffed out his cheeks and blew out a long sigh. “Lee, you’re the guy who’s been paying Clive Taillor. Lee, you’ve been naughty, haven’t you?”

  “Naughty?” I shrugged. “I have been paying Clive Taillor. I was hoping you wouldn’t find out.”

  “For Christ’s sake!” Innis was looking at me hard. None of them knew quite what to make of it or me.

  “You’re not going to stop now,” I said, “not when you’re on such a roll, surely.”

  “Don’t call me Shirley, Lee.” Fleury grinned. “Shall I explain how Bellerophon worked, Lee?”

  “Give it your best shot,” I said.

  “I looked up the word ‘Bellerophon.’ ” Fleury was still grinning at his own cleverness. “My mythology was always a little weak. But you know who old Bellerophon was? I’ll tell you. He was the fella, along with the flying horse Pegasus—remember the old gas stations, the flying red horse? Well, Bellerophon was the fella who slew the horrible monster Chimera. Bellerophon killed Chimera … Now it don’t take your rocket scientist to know who played the Chimera—JC Tripper was Magna’s Chimera, the monster who had to be slain.” He waited, his moist little eyes darting from face to face. He’d probably never been happier. “Now, who best to slay JC Tripper? Who could play Bellerophon?” He waited. Heidi Dillinger had gotten the idea. But she didn’t know what to think. She was in an odd position, thanks to me. Each of us was in an odd position and it was going to get odder. The whole thing was out of control. Fleury spoke softly, slowly. “Who would you say, Lee?”

  “Oh, Morris. What a guy you turned out to be.”

  “Thank you, Lee. High praise from you—”

  “Marty Bjorklund,” I began, “turned up in Tangier. Out of the blue. He was a very pleasant fellow, really. Family man. Nice little wife. We both always liked Marty. But he was up against the wall that time. JC was making trouble, just the way Fleury says.” I remembered the day as if it were yesterday. “JC had to go. JC was about to ruin all our lives … JC had gone off the deep end, JC had to die. Marty didn’t want to kill both of us. Hell, Marty didn’t want to kill anybody. But JC had to die, no two ways about it. If Marty had killed him, then Lee would know … and then Lee would have to be killed, too. You see the way his mind was working? It was pointless—why did both of us have to die? But … if one of us killed the other and Marty held on to the proof of the murderer’s identity, then we’d all be safe and JC would have gone to rock-star heaven … Makes a crazy kind of sense, doesn’t it?” My mouth was dry. What a mess. My God, how the time slips away …

  Fleury couldn’t wait.

  “You, Lee Tripper, were Bellerophon. You, Lee Tripper, killed your brother!”

  “Well, you funny little man,” I said, “you finally figured it out.”

  Twenty-Four

  HEIDI DILLINGER WAS LOOKING AT me through eyes narrowed to slits. I’d turned out to be just what she’d said, a lying scoundrel, but maybe more so than she’d bargained for. I wondered what she was really thinking. Was she remembering how jealous she’d been of Annie? Did she care anymore? Her face was unreadable. Sam Innis wasn’t having quite such a complex reaction to my perfidious behavior.

  “Why, you miserable son of a bitch!” He was starting to rise but sank back when Fleury twitched the shotgun in his direction. “JC was worth ten of you, creep! And you killed him … killed your own brother … Christ! All this time you knew he was dead—”

  “I always told you my brother was dead, Sam. I told everybody. But nobody would believe me. Is that my fault? It was Marty’s plan. Bellerophon. Old Lee was supposed to waste JC … that was the plan, all right. I was Bellerophon.”

  “Good Lord,” Ledbetter murmured, rumbling. “Some stories you just don’t expect. I’d not have thought it of you, Mr. Tripper.”

  Fleury cleared his throat. “You all got your outrage and righteous moral indignation outta the way now? Fine, then let’s get back to bidness here. I’m still working for Magna and the meter’s running—”

  “But where does the killer of Sally Feinman and Mr. Flicker and Clive Taillor, where does he surface?” This was Cotter Whitney, who hadn’t seemed unduly moved by the news that I was Bellerophon. Of course, he hadn’t heard the whole story yet. None of them had.

  “I’m comin’ to that. Finding out that Lee here was a killer, that he’d killed his brother, only made Lee a monster. Nothin’ personal, Lee.”

  “Of course not, Morris,” I said.

  “But my problem wasn’t solved. I knew JC was truly dead … but who was the blackmailer? Who had killed all those people? Well, hell … I got to
think about how I’d put old Lee here under surveillance in the first place. I knew I’d have to talk with him eventually, so I thought I’d have a look at him in his natural habitat, as they say. I had an appointment … well, not an appointment, actually, but I’d planned to see Sally Feinman. But first I was going to have a look at this Lee Tripper character. So I watched Heidi Dillinger pick him up that day on Fifth Avenue … Lee Tripper, this Bechtol/Innis character with his two names—his secret identity, all the bullshit, as if he was important or some damn thing—and his right-hand man Heidi Dillinger. Lots of possibilities in these three, I said to myself … I’d done some checking on the three of them before I went to work, dontcha see? And this Heidi Dillinger, she was the smartest of the three by a longshot. Stuck out like a green thumb, as they say—”

  “Sore thumb,” Heidi said.

  “What?”

  “Forget it.”

  “Well, she had all the brains, all right. Innis was an eccentric egomaniac who seemed to think the world existed only to provide backgrounds for his books—in other words, Innis was a Section Eight, a head case—”

  “You asshole!” Sam again. Once he got mad, he stayed mad. “You insufferable little turd! Who are you to call me a head case?”

  “You are also a bad writer,” Fleury said. “But that’s not punishable by law. You just don’t have the brains for anything really interesting—I got that from reading your books.”

  “Everybody’s a critic,” Innis muttered.

  “Heidi,” Fleury said, “she was the smarty-pants. Maybe Innis didn’t have the idea to do a book based on the search for JC Tripper. Maybe Innis didn’t have the idea to bring Lee Tripper in on it. Maybe the whole damn thing was Heidi Dillinger’s idea. Now that made sense to me. You get used to doing these little double-thinks in my business, everybody’s always using somebody. As soon as you take a look at things, you can be damn sure that nothing is what it seems to be. So you start trying different scenarios. And I was thinking about Heidi, our pretty Heidi. So I began to dig a little more into our Heidi …”