The Talk Show Murders

by Al Roker

  I was not exactly alone in the yard. There were two chrome statues. The complete one was of a knee-high, four-legged animal. Probably a dog, though it didn’t have ears, merely a smooth round head and snout. The unfinished work was a slightly oversized, heavily muscled male nude, seated on a matching chrome chair. His right elbow rested on the arm of the chair, his left on his left knee, which was angled to provide an unrestricted view of his supersized chrome plumbing. His right knee—whole right leg, actually—was missing.

  Near the shed was a bleached workbench on which rested a welder’s mask, thick gloves, and portions of a shiny car bumper that the sculptor probably planned to use for the leg. There was also what appeared to be a piece of machinery—a welder, maybe, or a cutting torch—that didn’t strike me as a tool you’d want to leave out in the elements. Its electric cord was still plugged into a socket near the roofline of the shed that also was host to a bare lightbulb.

  I strolled past the incomplete monument to muscular and priapic excess, climbed the rear steps, and tried the back door. Locked.

  Frustrated, I sat on the steps and phoned Kelsto.

  A sound came from inside the house. People laughing.

  It took me a few seconds to realize that Kelsto was using a laugh track as his cellular’s ringtone. It ceased just before the comedian’s digital voice asked me to “leave your name, number, and punch line at the sound of the beep. And make it funny.”

  I wondered if anyone would be moved to comply. I certainly wasn’t. Instead, I put away my phone, stood, and headed for the front.

  I was still on the side path when I heard the gate creaking open.

  Kelsto?

  As I recalled, he wore gym shoes. Whoever had arrived was click-clacking across brick and up the wooden front steps.

  I hesitated before showing myself.

  The doorbell rang. And rang again.

  Reaching the front of the house, I saw a woman at the door trying to peer through one of the small glass panels. She had brunette hair and was wearing a black jacket over a black T-shirt, and very tight gray pants tucked into knee-high black boots with two-inch heels. In one hand she held a pair of overlarge sunglasses, in the other a black leather bag only slightly smaller than a suitcase.

  “Nobody’s home,” I said.

  She made an “Uhh” sound and spun, backing against the door, clearly startled. I was a little startled myself.

  “Hi, Carrie,” I said.

  “Oh, God.” The not-quite-disguised-under-the-brunette-wig Carrie Sands shivered.

  “Didn’t mean to spook you,” I said. “I’m here looking for Kelsto, too.”

  “This was such a mistake,” she said, putting her glasses back on. They didn’t add all that much to her disguise.

  She started for the steps.

  I beat her to the front gate. “Is it true what they say?” I asked.

  That stopped her. “What … do they say?” Confusion was edging out annoyance.

  “That brunettes have more fun than blondes.”

  “Oh, God,” she said again. Then she did a sort of rag-doll slump, the large bag hitting the sidewalk with a clunk. “Please don’t try and be cute.” She cocked her head and seemed to be staring at me, though I couldn’t actually see her eyes. “What’s that little worm have on you?” she asked.

  “You first,” I said, though I thought I knew what Patton and now Kelsto had on her. On Gemma’s show, she’d reacted to a comment the old bastard had made about pole dancers. Having that on a curriculum vitae might seem almost quaint by today’s standards, when porno tapes and reality-show bad behavior were stepping stones to fame and fortune. But for someone serious about an acting career …

  She turned to look at the house. “The front door’s locked. Maybe the rear?”

  I shook my head.

  “And he’s definitely not inside?” she asked.

  I hesitated, wondering if I should tell her my theory about Larry Kelsto being the late Larry Kelsto.

  I didn’t get the chance.

  She twirled and raced up the front steps to the stained-glass window. I arrived just in time to stop her from swinging her large leather bag into it.

  “Damn, girl,” I said, forcibly moving her away from the window. “I don’t think you want to do that.”

  “His … stuff could be here,” she said, struggling in my arms. “He sure as hell isn’t carrying it around with him.”

  “Do you want to get arrested for breaking and entering?”

  She shook her head, and I relaxed my hold on her. I also shifted my position to stand between her and the window. “I heard Kelsto’s cellphone ring inside the house,” I said. “He’s a comedian looking for work. I don’t think he’d leave home without the phone.”

  “Then he’s in there. Doing what? Hiding from somebody?”

  “That’s one possibility. The other is that he’s doing a Pat Patton.”

  “Oh.” She winced. “You mean …?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s find out,” she said, and tried to move around me to the window, readying her bag.

  I grabbed her again. “You’re a crazy person,” I said.

  “Let go, damn it,” she ordered. “I don’t care if Kelsto is dead in there or not. I just want to find the damned folder. Leave me alone.”

  I pulled her away from the window. “If you’re hell-bent on going in, let’s be a little more discreet about it.”

  At the rear of the house, I headed for the shed, hoping to find some sculptor’s tool capable of jimmying the back door. Carrie called me back, pointing out a window that was open an inch or two.

  “I can pry it up,” she said, “if we can figure out a way for me to get up there.”

  We both looked around the yard for something for her to climb on.

  “What about that panther?” she asked.

  Funny what odd stuff pops into your head. I suddenly recalled an Ogden Nash poem: “… If called by a panther, don’t anther.”

  “I think it’s a dog,” I told her.

  “I don’t know. It looks feline to me.”

  “Whatever it is, it’s too heavy for me to drag over here without risking a hernia.”

  “Well, what, then?”

  “I’ll boost you up,” I said. A mistake. If I’d thought about it, I’d have realized that though she was far from sumo-wrestler size, anything over a hundred pounds of live weight can be tough on the joints.

  Using the side of the house to brace my back, I managed somehow to hold her in a linked-hands stirrup. She worked her fingers under the window’s lower sash and was able to push it up without driving me into the ground. I was grateful for this, though you would not have known it from the grunting and cursing that escaped my lips.

  She slid over the sill like a snake. A sexy snake.

  I took a deep breath, cracked my neck, wiggled my shoulders. I decided that if I ever elected to become a second-story man, I’d have to get in better shape.

  In a minute or two, Carrie unlocked the back door and asked for her boots, which I’d insisted she take off before her climb. She sat on the stoop to pull them on, presenting a much more pleasing picture of her shapely legs than when she’d been pressing a knee in my face.

  She rescued her leather bag from the yard, and we entered the house, stepping into a small storeroom where cleaning equipment lay strewn across the black-and-white checkerboard linoleum, along with assorted dry goods, a majority of which seemed to be plastic jugs full of “powdered protein for maintaining muscle power.”

  The contents of one of the jugs had been emptied on the floor. Carrie stared at the mess and said, “I passed through the breakfast room and kitchen. It’s like this in there, too.”

  “Maybe we should just … split,” I suggested.

  Ignoring my idea, she hunkered down to examine the powder. “Wonder why they only emptied just the one,” she said, rising. “I bet they were interrupted.”

  I shook my head. “The rest of this
stuff is factory-sealed,” I said.

  “Well … anyway, it’s possible they didn’t find his stash.”

  Buoyed by this ultra-optimistic hope, she moved on. I was happy to see she carefully avoided stepping in the protein powder, which meant she wasn’t a total idiot.

  In the kitchen, pots and pans were scattered, and the oven and dishwasher doors were open, as were cabinet drawers. A black plastic garbage bag had been gutted and was emanating an odor of stale cantaloupe mixed with stale coffee grounds. Speaking of stale, the refrigerator-freezer doors were open, with the meat keeper, veggie, and fruit crisper drawers removed and empty. Their contents rested, fully thawed and ripening, on the linoleum.

  A plastic icemaker bucket lay beside the apples and oranges. Its contents had melted into a puddle. Good. Thawed meat and melted ice cubes suggested that the search had been done a while ago. The searchers were probably long gone. Still, this was not a location where I wanted to linger.

  Carrie had moved on to a small dining room with table and chairs that were either antique or Goodwill, a distinction often lost on me. She was standing at a china cabinet. Judging by the paperback books scattered on the floor, it had not housed any china.

  She was rooting through papers that the searchers had left on one shelf.

  “You might want to be a little careful what you touch,” I said.

  “Oh.” She dropped the pages and stepped back. “Even paper?”

  “I think so.”

  “We don’t know for sure that … anything bad …” She didn’t bother finishing the sentence.

  “Let’s go, Carrie. There’s nothing for us here.”

  “We still have time,” she said, and went into the next room. The living room. More aged and weathered furniture that had been shoved to one side so that the dingy rug could be thrown back. Cushions from the couch had been ripped and tossed on the floor, along with several showbiz magazines and issues of Daily Variety. Framed prints had been taken from the walls and cut apart. A copy of The Thief Who Stole Big Ben was lying beside a Komedy Krush coffee mug that had spilled its contents on the now-bare floor. Near the mug was the plastic back panel to a fairly new thin, medium-size-screen TV that rested on a metal stand.

  There were two bedrooms, separated by a single bath on the other side of a hall leading from a kitchen entrance to the front door. The bed in the larger room had been torn apart. More prints had been ripped from its walls. A rough-knit throw rug was balled up in a corner. A small construct-it-yourself bookcase had been tipped over, spilling titles by James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, a poetry collection by N. Scott Momaday, larger volumes on art and sculpture.

  There were also weights and barbells. Just a guess: probably not Kelsto’s room.

  That would be the one with the greasy pizza boxes; bright, too-hip clothes littering the floor; and a collection of video- and audiotape recorders, all of them emptied carelessly.

  “Damn!” Carrie exclaimed in frustration. She was sitting on the floor, sifting through Kelsto’s clothes. “Where the heck are the CDs and DVDs, the computers?”

  “Gone with the gypsies,” I said. “But there is something I don’t see that should be here.”

  I had her full attention as I took out my phone. I dialed Kelsto’s number.

  The sound of laughter came from another part of the house.

  We tracked it to the far end of the hall. But instead of Kelsto’s phone, we found a heating vent near the floor.

  I dialed again, and the laughter echoed up through the vent.

  The phone was in the basement.

  Unfortunately, so was Larry Kelsto.

  Chapter

  SIXTEEN

  The basement was as wrecked as the living room. Moving boxes and old pieces of luggage had been sliced open, their contents spread out on the concrete. But that wasn’t what drew our attention. Somebody—Kelsto, presumably—had turned a section of the room into an approximation of the stage at the Komedy Krush. That’s where we found his body, seated on a director’s chair in front of a fake-brick façade, a few feet from what seemed to be a real standing microphone and a real Minicam attached to a tall tripod. A bright baby spotlight, amateurishly affixed to the basement ceiling, gave us a too-clear picture of his condition.

  He was naked except for his candy-cane-striped shorts. His head slumped forward, his dead, glazed, bulging eyes seemingly staring at his bare feet. From wrists to elbows, he was duct-taped to the arms of the chair. A grayish cloth was stuffed in his mouth. Someone had used his body as an ashtray. The burn marks were particularly livid against his pale, dead flesh.

  They’d used cigars. The stale smoke smell was not quite overpowered by the combined stench of burned flesh and excrement. There were ashes on the cement floor but no cigar butts. I wondered if it was possible to find DNA on ash. Probably not.

  “Gotta get out of here,” Carrie said, rushing for the stairs.

  I was just as anxious to leave but paused to take a quick scan of the basement. More emptied boxes and tossed books.

  And his cellphone. Resting near rumpled pants, shirt, and pink high-top canvas shoes.

  Look at it or not?

  Not, I decided. Leave it as is for the cops.

  Carrie was standing at the top of the stairs, frozen. When she saw me, she put a finger to her lips.

  I heard it, too.

  Someone on the front porch was humming a tune that sounded like “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” There was the distinct click of a key going into the lock.

  I pointed to the dining room, and we crept there and continued creeping through the kitchen and storeroom and out the rear door, which I eased shut.

  Taking the lead, I moved slowly along the side path.

  Whoever had been on the front porch was now inside the house. Judging by the sound of her voice, it was a woman. We were within a few feet of the front gate when she exclaimed, “Oh, my dear sweet Jesus!” which meant she’d just seen the mess the house was in.

  Wait till she gets a load of Kelsto, I thought.

  I stopped Carrie from opening the gate and causing a screeching noise loud enough to wake the … bad metaphor.

  By lifting the gate on its hinge and moving it very carefully, I was able to open it enough for us to squeeze through.

  We were all the way to Wells Street when I realized we’d have to go back.

  “Go back? Are you crazy?”

  “We … didn’t clean up,” I said. “We left fingerprints.”

  “Forget it. I’m not going back.”

  “You and I are on a murdered man’s—no, make that on two murdered men’s—blackmail lists. Maybe there’s no evidence of that lying around for the cops to find. And maybe they won’t find your prints on the sill of a half-open window. But that’s a bet with bad odds.”

  “How does going back help?”

  I explained my plan.

  The woman who answered the doorbell at Kelsto’s was tall, fit, and in her fifties, skin the color of caramel, hair wiry and black with streaks of gray. She’d exercised caution, keeping the door locked until, peeking out through the tiny glass panes, she was able to verify that I was “the guy from the morning show.”

  She opened the door.

  “Hi,” I said. “We’re here to see Larry.”

  “Uh … I don’t think … I clean for Mr. Kelsto and Mr. Parkins. They’re not home.”

  “Well, I’m sure Larry’ll be here shortly,” I said, stepping into the hall. “He’s expecting us.”

  “Thing is … something’s not right here,” she said, forehead wrinkled in concern. “I come in once a week to clean, and sometimes, if they have themselves a party, it’ll be a mess. But this is … Something’s not right.”

  She gestured toward the entrance to the living room. Carrie and I looked in on the disorder that hadn’t changed in the last few minutes. “Holy mackerel,” I said, hoping it sounded more sincere to the housekeeper than it did to me.

  “This is ju
st terrible,” Carrie said with impressive conviction. But she was a professional liar. She bent down to fondle a few items. “It looks like there’s been a robbery.”

  I touched some stuff, too, making sure the housekeeper noticed. “It does look like a robbery. Maybe the police should be notified.”

  That panicked the housekeeper. “I don’t want any business with the po-leese. ’Sides, could be the boys did this.”

  “Cut up their cushions and throw pillows? Pried the back off the TV?” Carrie asked.

  The housekeeper was blinking now, edging toward the hall. Getting ready to scamper?

  I quickly joined her, took her hand, and said, “Any robbers would be long gone by now. And we’re here to keep you company. You know my name. I’m Billy. That’s Carrie. And you’re …?”

  “Josepha Davis. Josie.”

  “Well, Josie, it might be a good idea if you did call the police.”

  She shook her head and pulled back her hand. “No. No po-leese. I’ll just clean best I can, and the boys can do what they want about the po-leese when they get here.”

  Carrie and I exchanged looks. My great plan wouldn’t work unless she called the cops.

  “Maybe you should phone the boys, Josie,” Carrie said.

  The housekeeper was amenable to that. “I’ll go get my phone,” she said, and left the room.

  I nodded to Carrie, and we took off to the kitchen, where she began wiping the window and sill with a silk neckerchief. Using my handkerchief, I lowered the window and locked it. Then I ran to the back door and gave that a hearty wipe-down.

  We returned to the living room to await the next event.

  It came in the form of Kelsto’s laughter ringtone.

  A few beats after it stopped, Josie joined us, saying, “I couldn’t get through to either of ’em. You say Mr. Kelsto’s supposed to be meeting you here?”

  “That was the plan when we talked yesterday,” I said.

  “Then he’ll know what to do when he gets here.”

  Carrie was looking at me anxiously. “He’s not answering his phone, huh?” she said.