Die Laughing 2: Five More Comic Crime Novels

by Ben Rehder

  She smiled slightly at that. I pressed my advantage.

  “And when you marry a moron, you have to pick carefully, or you’re apt to be in trouble. If the moron you marry happens to be insensitive, unperceptive, and inarticulate, you are in big trouble. You have to make allowances. You know, like when you have friends over, you have to say, ‘And this is the living room, please excuse my husband, the moron, sitting in the corner.’”

  She giggled in spite of herself. Thank god. I hugged her, then played my trump card. “Want some chocolate ice cream?”

  “You got chocolate ice cream?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where is it?”

  I jerked my thumb. “Bag in the kitchen.”

  “You left it out? It’ll melt.”

  She shot me a dirty look and stamped by me into the kitchen.

  I followed, realizing I wasn’t quite out of the doghouse yet.

  Alice pulled the pint of ice cream out of the paper bag, squeezed it, and shook her head.

  “Seems fine,” I told her.

  “Yeah sure,” Alice said. She pulled off the top. Shook her head pityingly. “What else did you leave out?”

  “Nothing that will melt.”

  “No. Just spoil,” she said, pulling cottage cheese out of the bag. She gave me a look, stalked to the refrigerator, and put the cottage cheese inside. She stood up. sighed. “So tell me about it. She never went out, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s good.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “It doesn’t help my client any.”

  “Why not?”

  “It doesn’t prove she’s seeing some man.”

  “Does he want her to be seeing some man?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Then he should be pleased.”

  Women’s logic. God save me. But at least we were over the crisis and back on safe ground. I made a mental note to be sure to use Alice’s letterhead to bill Marvin Nickleson, which, on refection, wasn’t a bad idea, what with him being a day late in paying and me having so many expenses and all. And I made a mental vow to be as supportive as possible of Alice’s work schemes, even though my gut reaction told me there wasn’t any money in resumes and fliers and no one would really be interested, in view of which I made another vow to try not to be patronizing. And I thanked my lucky stars that on this particularly draggy day I’d managed to blunder through relatively unscathed, and was out of the doghouse at last.

  Not quite.

  Alice pulled a box out of the shopping bag and looked at it.

  “Oh,” she said. “You bought Maxi-thins.”

  9.

  MARVIN NICKLESON was pissed.

  But not nearly as pissed as I was. He was pissed about the job I was doing, and I was pissed because he was pissed on the phone instead of being pissed in my office like he should have been.

  It was 9:05 and I was pacing the floor impatiently when the phone rang. I hopped to the desk and scooped it up.

  “Three-four-one-four,” I said.

  “Hastings? Marvin Nickleson.”

  My heart sank. “Where are you?”

  “At work.”

  “What?”

  “At the office.”

  “You’re supposed to be at my office.”

  “I got a rush job. A big account. The boss is throwing a shit fit. I been here all night doing layout sketches. They want ’em yesterday, I’m nowhere near finished, and the boss is poppin’ in every five minutes asking when they’re gonna be done. If I start talking ad copy to you, you’ll know what happened, just play along.”

  “Wait a minute. What—”

  “I got no time for explanations. Did you get anything?”

  “Not really. Look—”

  “Shit. Call you back.”

  The phone went dead. I stared at it for a moment. Slammed it down.

  And proceeded to get pissed.

  On the desk in front of me was a stack of bills, nicely typed out on Alice’s letterhead. One was for $37.50 for an hour of overtime on Tuesday. One was for $200 for Wednesday’s surveillance. One was for $200 for today’s surveillance. One was for $57.80 for Tuesday’s expenses. One was for $44.25 for yesterday’s expenses. On top was a master sheet adding up the total of those separate bills. Alice had typed them up on the computer and run them off for me last night.

  And Marvin Nickleson wasn’t going to see them. Because Marvin Nickleson wasn’t in my office, Marvin Nickleson was in his office, working on ad copy.

  By the time the phone rang ten minutes later I was thoroughly pissed.

  “Three-four-one-four.”

  “Hastings?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sorry. The boss walked in. I gotta make this fast.”

  “Fine. Make it fast. Where’s the money?”

  “I got the money.”

  “Get it over here.”

  “I can’t get away.”

  “Then I’ll come there.”

  “Christ no! You wanna blow everything?”

  “No. I just wanna be paid.”

  “I’ll pay you. I’ll pay you. Jesus Christ. Is it my fault this job came up? Don’t worry. You’ll get your money.”

  “When?”

  I could hear him exhale. “How long you gonna be there?”

  I exhaled myself. “I have an appointment at ten.”

  “That’s no good. I got hours yet. Look, I’ll have to meet you somewhere. We’ll have to work it out.”

  “Where? When?”

  “I don’t know. I said, we’ll have to work it out. Look, give me a rundown on what you got so far and let’s figure out what we want to do.”

  What I wanted to do was slam down the phone and never talk to Marvin Nickleson again.

  But I had those bills on my desk.

  I took a breath. “What I got so far isn’t much.”

  “Well, let’s have it.”

  I gave him a rundown of the previous day’s events.

  That’s when he got pissed.

  “You called her office? You called her at home? Are you crazy? Are you out of your fucking mind?”

  “Now look here—”

  “Calling the office wasn’t that bad. It was after hours. It could have been a business call. That won’t bother her. But Jesus Christ. You called her at home? Twice?”

  “Once was just the answering machine.”

  “Yeah. My answering machine. I know how it works. It counts the calls. Even the hang ups. She’ll know someone called and hung up. Then she gets another call, she answers and you hang up. And you wonder why nothing’s happening. She’s not stupid. You expect her to go out after that? If she’d had a date, she’d have canceled it.”

  “Come on. I get disconnected calls all the time.”

  “Oh yeah? You estranged from your wife? You fooling around? You got something you want to hide? Christ. Why the hell’d you have to call her?”

  “I had to find out if she was home.”

  “Bullshit. No you didn’t. You were hired to watch the apartment. What were you gonna do if she hadn’t answered? Pack up and go home?”

  I said nothing, but I was fuming. Marvin Nickleson was right. It was hard to take having Marvin Nickleson be right. I sat there seething with impotent fury.

  “O.K.,” he said. “It’s a mess. Let’s see what we can do about it.”

  That brought me back. “We’re not doing anything about it until I get paid.”

  “Right, right. We have to work it out. This morning’s out. So’s this afternoon. I’ll either be still working or I’ll be asleep.”

  “I can’t work unless I get paid.”

  “Yeah. All right. Look. Screw the office. Forget this afternoon. Do a half-day. Start at five. At the apartment house. Five to nine. I’ll get the money to you there.”

  “When?”

  “Whenever I can. I tell you, I’m in deep shit over here. This guy don’t like the sketche
s, I’m back to square one.”

  “You’re telling me you might not make it?”

  “I’ll make it. I just don’t know when.”

  “What if she goes out?”

  “You follow her.”

  “And I miss you.”

  “Can I help that? Jesus Christ, what do you want from me? If that happens, I’ll be in your office tomorrow morning at nine. What more can I tell you?”

  I didn’t know.

  I didn’t like it, but I didn’t know what I could do about it. I could refuse, but if I did, the job would be over, Marvin Nickleson would tell me to go fuck myself, and I wouldn’t have a prayer of ever collecting the money he owed me. Even so, it was a big temptation to tell Marvin Nickleson to go fuck himself, money or no money.

  But five hundred and umpteen dollars is a lot of money.

  And in this vale of tears, we’re all whores of one kind or another. Or to look at it another way, after Alice had been so kind as to have typed all those nice bills out, it sure would be a shame not to be able to use them.

  I took a breath. I sighed. “O.K.”

  10.

  IT COULD HAVE BEEN worse.

  All right, so I lost a hundred dollars. The bill for two hundred dollars for today’s surveillance would have to be torn up, and Alice would have to type out a new one for a hundred dollars for half a day’s surveillance. But that didn’t really bother me. Actually it was a blessing in disguise. Because Wendy/Janet had given me four sign-ups for today. And seeing as how they were spread out over three boroughs, there was no way I was going to get ’em all done in the morning. I’d have had to stall two of them until tomorrow. I didn’t want to do that, ’cause if I did, it was a cinch Wendy/Janet would beep me with four more assignments for tomorrow, and the whole problem would escalate, and I’d wind up with a whole mess of sign-ups to knock off over the weekend.

  And I wanted to keep my weekend free. Marvin Nickleson hadn’t said anything about the weekend yet, but I had a sneaking suspicion he might consider Saturday and Sunday prime time for marital transgressions. In the event that he did, the son of a bitch was going to discover the weekend was also prime time for me. In other words, work on Saturday or Sunday equals time and a half from hour one. A base rate of three hundred bucks a day.

  So I was happy to get the sign-ups taken care of. I figured, I wasn’t really losing a hundred bucks either. The other way I’d have gotten two hundred bucks out of Marvin Nickleson, plus four hours for Richard Rosenberg equals forty bucks for a total of two hundred and forty. This way I was getting one hundred from Marvin Nickleson plus eight hours from Richard Rosenberg equals eighty for a total of a hundred and eighty. So my net loss was only sixty bucks, not a hundred.

  Besides, four sign-ups fit very comfortably into an eight-hour day. And I was able to spend the day touring around leisurely in my warm Toyota, instead of freezing my ass off on the sidewalk on Third Avenue, trying to spot the elusive Monica Dorlander going into or out of her office building.

  I signed up a gentleman in Queens who’d slipped on the sidewalk, a woman in Brooklyn who’d fallen in a C-Town, a kid in the Bronx who’d been hit by a car, and a man in the Bronx who’d been mugged. All four were simple straightforward cases, even the mugging. The identity of the mugger, still unknown, was not my problem. My only concern was the broken lock that had allowed him access to our client’s foyer.

  In the course of the day’s work I was beeped three times and given three more assignments for Friday morning. Which was kind of nice. I wouldn’t have felt nearly so good about knocking off all my sign-ups today if tomorrow had been dead. For once things were working out. I finished all my assignments and was back in Manhattan in plenty of time to keep up my evening surveillance. I even had time to grab a slice of pizza on the way.

  When I got to 83rd Street I discovered starting at five o’clock had a fringe benefit. Parking regulations on Monica Dorlander’s block were no parking from 8:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. The 6:00 P.M. part, of course, was a joke. By six o’clock on the East Side, there’s not a parking space to be had. Which means people who want to park their cars on the street overnight park ’em at five o’clock, and then sit in them, fending off meter maids, until six o’clock rolls around.

  Which was great. I pulled my car to a stop right across the street from Monica Dorlander’s apartment building and sat in it with the motor running. And there wasn’t anything suspicious about my doing it, because I was only one of a growing number of people doing exactly the same thing.

  By five o’clock the block was already half full. By five-fifteen it was solid. By five-thirty, when Monica Dorlander pulled up in a taxicab and went into her building, there was no reason on god’s green earth why she should have paid the least bit of attention to me.

  I was glad to see her. After all, I hadn’t seen her in two days. My only contact with her had been that time on the phone. I sure wasn’t calling her again. So it was nice to know she’d come home.

  I hoped she’d go out again. More than that, I hoped she’d go out soon. I mean, it was nice sitting in my warm car and all, but when six o’clock rolled around and parking became legal, everybody else would get out of their cars, and then I would look suspicious sitting in mine and I’d have to get out too.

  And not only that, I wanted her to go out because I’d taken this rotten job and, distasteful as it might be, damn it, I wanted to do it.

  She was out at five to six. With a suitcase. Hot damn! A suitcase.

  I was so excited I was falling all over myself. Jesus Christ, what did I do now? Should I follow her on foot or in the car? A suitcase means a trip. She’s going someplace. She could be taking a plane or a train. A bus, even. If so, she’d take a taxi to get there. Should I hail one too? If she’s heading for Port Authority, Grand Central or Penn Station, I should—there’s no place to leave my car there. But if she’s heading for the airport I should drive. Oh shit. What would a real detective do?

  Monica Dorlander could have solved my problem for me by walking east, because 83rd Street’s a one-way street west, and I’d have had to follow her on foot. But she went the other way. Decisions and revisions that a moment could reverse.

  Fuck it. I killed the motor, banged the code alarm, and hopped out of the car. I crossed the street and tagged along behind her at what I assumed was a discreet distance.

  She never looked back. She went a block and a half and turned into a parking garage.

  Shit. Wrong again. I need my car. Should I get it, or should I hail a cab? What if I miss her? Nonsense, moron, they gotta get her car out. That’ll take time won’t it? Yeah, but how much? How the hell should I know? Decisions, revisions. Holy shit.

  I turned and sprinted down the street, flashed across the avenue dodging traffic, and raced back to my car.

  There was a parking ticket on the windshield. Are you kidding me? I was here at five to six. I grabbed it off, unlocked the door, flung the ticket on the passenger seat, and punched in the computer numbers on the code alarm. The red light went off. I started the car, gunned the motor, and pulled out from the spot.

  I hadn’t noticed, but the guys around me had wedged me in. There was no time to be subtle. I cut the wheel and pulled forward till the bumpers crunched, cut the other way and backed up.

  The guy behind me had a code alarm too, one of the kind that goes off if you bang his bumper. I banged it and it did. The alarm was the kind that is a loud, steady whine that never shuts off. I hate them. Car alarms like that are always going off in my neighborhood, and nobody ever shuts them off, and they whine for hours and drive you nuts. My alarm shuts off after one minute and rearms itself, on the sound theory that by then the thief has either been frightened away or your car has been stolen. It only goes off if you try to get into the car too, not if you bang the bumper. I tend to think of people who have alarms such as mine as responsible citizens. I tend to think of people who have alarms such as the guy in back of me as assholes.

  I banged his
bumper four more times getting out. My head was coming off from the whine. My thoughts were getting jumbled. For a second I wasn’t sure whether I was a car thief or an incompetent detective.

  “Incompetent detective.” I said it out loud, as I have a habit of doing sometimes, particularly when I’m hassled and anxious. And as so often happens when I find myself talking out loud to myself, it started a chain reaction in my head. I was on “Family Feud,” and I had just blurted out the answer “Incompetent detective,” and my family members were all clapping and shouting, “Good answer! Good answer!” and there was a loud ding, “Survey says!” and the number one panel flipped over reading, INCOMPETENT DETECTIVE—87 and the audience was clapping and the family was cheering, and Richard Dawson was saying, “The Number One Answer!” That’s right, Richard Dawson, the original show, not the remake with what’s-his-face—

  A car horn brought me back to reality. I’d just lurched clear of the space right in front of a speeding taxi. The driver swerved around me, still leaning on the horn, and I could see him mouth the word, “Asshole!” I wondered if it was the Number One Answer. “We polled a recent studio audience and got their best response to this: What do you call a man who pulls out without looking?” “Jerk.” Ding. “The Number Two Answer. One answer will beat it …”

  I hurtled down the block, following the cab. It occurred to me it would be a good idea not to rear-end him. Still, I wanted to make the light. It was yellow as the cab whizzed through. I was glad the cabbie decided to go for it. I’d already decided to go for it, and if he’d hit the brakes we’d have been in trouble.

  I flashed across the avenue, hit the brakes, and pulled to a stop alongside the parked cars. Up ahead I could see the driveway to the parking garage. I couldn’t see Monica Dorlander, though. She was standing inside the entrance. Either that or she’d already left. Christ, was it possible? Could the car in front of the taxi stopped at the stoplight up ahead be hers? How the hell should I know? It was dark. All I could see were the damn taillights. Should I pull up ahead maybe, and get a better look? Of what, the garage or the car? Well, if she’s not in the garage, you go after the car. What if she is in the garage, what if she’s standing there, what do you do then? Slam on the brakes and back up? That’s a great idea. Why don’t you just paint a sign on your car, “Private Detective Surveillance Unit.” Yeah, but I could get a little closer, maybe get a little better angle, spot her in the door.