Die Laughing 2: Five More Comic Crime Novels

by Ben Rehder

  The receptionist was a genial young woman who probably could have been a fashion model herself if she’d lost a hundred pounds, bought a new wardrobe, and cut her hair. She took one look at the picture and said, “Yeah. I know her. She was in here last week.”

  “Tuesday?”

  “Could have been Tuesday. I don’t recall.”

  “Can you recall where she went?”

  “She had an appointment with someone. Either Mr. Metzer or Mr. Saltzman.”

  “Are they in today?”

  “Yes they are.”

  “Then I’ll need to see them.”

  She frowned. “What’s this all about?”

  I gave her what I hoped was an enigmatic smile. “I’m sorry, but I need to be the one to tell them. Could you ring them one at a time and send me in please?”

  She gave me a look, but picked up the phone.

  Mr. Metzer turned out to be an overweight middle-aged man with horn-rimmed glasses and a paranoid fear that I was a private detective employed by his wife. He barely glanced at the picture before denying he knew the woman in question. In fact, he began his stream of denials before I even handed him the picture. It was only after I got him to take a good look at it and he suddenly came to the happy realization that he really didn’t know the woman, that I was able to calm him down.

  Of course, that’s just my analysis of the situation, and I’m not that good a judge of character, so I couldn’t really be sure if that were true or if he actually did know her and everything else was just an act.

  Until I met Saltzman.

  Mr. Saltzman was a tall, thin young man, with the calm assurance of someone with executive ability. He took one look at the picture and said, “Yes. I know her. She was in last week.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. Tuesday, I believe. Tuesday afternoon.”

  “She had an appointment with you?”

  He smiled. “Well, now, that’s the thing. She thought she did.”

  “Oh?”

  “But she didn’t. I’d never heard of her, and I’d never made any appointment.”

  “But she claimed you had?”

  “Exactly. She said I’d called her and made the appointment.”

  “You or your secretary?”

  “Me. She said she’d talked to me personally.”

  “And you hadn’t?”

  “No, of course not. Well, I shouldn’t say of course not. She’s a model, and we employ models. In fact, we may have even used her agency.”

  “But not this time?”

  “No. It hadn’t happened. It was a mistake.”

  “How’d she take it when you said you hadn’t called her?”

  “Not well. She was put out. She tried to argue with me. I understood her feelings, but she should have understood mine. Someone played a joke on her, a nasty kind of joke, but it wasn’t my fault.”

  “I understand. Did she say anything else?”

  He frowned. “Why is it important?”

  So far he had all the right answers. I decided to give him a jolt. “Because she wound up dead.”

  His eyes widened. “What?”

  I nodded. “That’s right.”

  “Dead? That woman? Dead?”

  “That’s right,” I said. I added, “Murdered.”

  “Murdered!” He frowned thoughtfully. “I see.”

  “So you see why it’s important. We need to know the events leading up to her death. Particularly anything out of the ordinary. If she thought she had an appointment that she actually didn’t have, that’s interesting. It means someone tricked her. And someone also murdered her. It doesn’t mean they’re necessarily one and the same person, but you can see why it would be important.”

  Saltzman frowned and shook his head. “Yes. I see.”

  “So if you can recall anything about the incident. Anything that she said.”

  He thought a moment. “Well, one thing. When she was arguing with me—when she was still insisting that I had made the appointment, that I’d called her myself—she said I’d actually called her twice. She said I’d called her first Monday morning to make the appointment for Monday afternoon. Then I’d called her back later in the day, told her I had a conflict, and changed it to Tuesday.”

  “I see,” I said.

  And I did. That fit in with everything as I knew it. The bogus Marvin Nickleson would have called her Monday morning to make the Monday afternoon appointment. When I refused to work on Monday, he’d have had to call her back and change it to Tuesday.

  Which was too bad. Because if that were true, it meant the bogus Marvin Nickleson had arranged the whole thing, and Saltzman wasn’t an accomplice after all, just another dead end.

  I asked a few more questions which accomplished nothing, and got the hell out of there.

  By then it was afternoon, so I headed downtown to check in on MacAullif.

  MacAullif had been busy. He hadn’t solved his ax murder, but he had managed to trace my license plates for me.

  “You traced them all?” I said.

  MacAullif snorted. “Yeah, well I caught a break. There weren’t a thousand, just five hundred and seventy-six.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. Some days you get lucky.”

  “You traced five hundred and seventy-six license plates.”

  “Uh-huh. Don’t say I never did you any favors. I got you names, addresses, the whole schmear.”

  “How the hell’d you do that?”

  MacAullif shrugged. “Piece of cake, really. It’s all computerized. The guy typed in “POP asterisk, asterisk, asterisk,” and asked the machine to do a search and print out.” MacAullif jerked open a desk drawer. “Here you go.”

  MacAullif pulled out a sheaf of papers. I recognized it instantly, being in a computer family now. The pages were joined together and had perforated strips with holes in them on the sides.

  I picked it up. “Thanks a lot.”

  “Yeah,” MacAullif said. “I don’t know what you’re going to do with it, but for what it’s worth, it’s yours. O.K., you’ve worn out your welcome today. I traced five hundred and seventy-six cars for you. Now let me get back to work.”

  I thanked MacAullif again, took the computer printout and went home.

  Where Alice pounced on it the minute I got in the door. Perforated paper is like catnip to a computer junkie. Before I even had my coat off Alice had it out of my hands and was demanding to know what it was. When I told her, she was quick to offer an expert opinion.

  “Ha,” she snorted. “Cheap dot-matrix printer. Terrible font.”

  “It’s not supposed to be artistic. Just functional.”

  “It’s not even that. It’s just a list of the plates in numerical order.”

  “Sure,” I said, parroting back what MacAullif had told me. “The machine searched for POP blank, blank, blank, and it printed out the numbers in order. That’s the beauty of doing a search, right?”

  Alice shook her head. “That’s the first step. You can do so much more than that. What do you want the numbers in order for? That doesn’t help you at all. Wouldn’t you rather have them grouped by geographical location?”

  “Sure, but they can’t do that.”

  Alice gave me one of her withering looks. “Of course they can. It’s easy.”

  “How?”

  “Any way you want. Just tell the computer to do it.”

  Another thing about computer junkies is they always talk as if everyone knows what they’re talking about, and tend to get angry when it turns out they don’t.

  I didn’t want Alice to get angry. “O.K.,” I said. “What could I tell the computer to do?”

  Alice got angry. “Oh, come on. For an intelligent man, sometimes you’re a moron. Think.”

  “I don’t know anything about computers.”

  “You don’t have to know anything about computers. You just have to know what you want. What do you want?”

  I wanted Alice to leave me alone and let
me look at my list, but I didn’t think that was the answer she was looking for. “What you said. To group them geographically.”

  “Fine. So that’s what you tell the computer to do.”

  “How? What do I do, type in ‘group them geographically?’”

  “No, of course not. You have to give the computer a command that it can understand.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, it can alphabetize. You could order it to list them alphabetically by town. What about that?”

  “Yeah. That would do it.”

  “Or numerically by zip code.”

  “Yeah. That would do it too. So, can you do it?”

  “What?”

  “Can you do that for me? On the machine?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the data isn’t in the computer.”

  “You mean you’d have to type it in?”

  Alice nodded. “Unless we had a floppy disk with the data on it.”

  “Which we don’t.”

  “Right. Or unless we had a scanner.”

  “A what?”

  “A scanner. You run it over the printed page and it reads the information into the computer.”

  A warning light had gone on. I could see Alice leading up to making a pitch for the purchase of an expensive piece of sophisticated machinery.

  “Too bad,” I said. I picked up a pen from the desk. “I’ll just have to make do with this.” I smiled at Alice and fled for the living room to tally up the names on my list.

  Some fun. To the best that I could determine, in the New York City area there were two hundred and twenty seven POPs. That was including all five boroughs, Long Island, and Westchester County. Of course, there was no reason to assume POP came from the New York City area just because Julie Steinmetz did. After all, she’d been killed in Poughkeepsie.

  There were three POPs in Poughkeepsie, and several more in the immediate vicinity. It was hard pinpointing those, ’cause I wasn’t familiar with the towns, and I had to keep looking at the map.

  Going over the list was beginning to give me a headache. And I rarely get headaches. So this alone was enough to point up the tedium and futility of the task.

  I was getting nowhere, so it was actually a relief when Tommie got home and wanted to play with me.

  I heard the door open and close when he came in, and then I heard Alice intercepting him in the foyer and trying to protect me, saying, “Don’t disturb Daddy, he’s very busy now.” I sprang up, opened the living room door and magnanimously offered to take time off from my work to play with him.

  Tommie wanted to play “Zelda,” one of the adventure games in his Nintendo Entertainment System. I’d figured he would. We’d been playing it off and on all weekend. And it’s a very addictive game. That’s because you don’t start over at the beginning each time, as you do with most video games. Everything you’ve earned, hours and hours of playing time, is stored in the memory of the gamepack. So you can pick up where you left off. And it’s not just fighting—it’s finding things and figuring things out. It’s really challenging, and when you get stuck and can’t do it, it drives you crazy.

  At the moment, Tommie and I were going crazy. We were in the fourth level of the second quest, and we couldn’t find the raft. We’d already been through the whole labyrinth, and we’d killed Digdogger and gotten our extra heart container and our piece of the Triforce, which raised our energy level and transported us outside the labyrinth again, since once you’ve gotten the Triforce you’ve supposedly completed the level.

  Only we hadn’t gotten the raft. And without the raft, you can’t get to level five, because level five is on an island.

  So we were going nuts. The treasures in the labyrinths are always in underground chambers that you reach by killing all the enemies in the room above, and then moving a stone to open a secret passage in the floor. Well, we’d been in every room in the labyrinth, and killed everybody in every room with a stone in it, and tried to move every one of those stones, and still nothing. Zip. Zero. So now we were running around killing everybody in the rooms that didn’t have stones, even though that had to be a futile exercise, since without a stone to move, there could be no secret passage. But we were desperate, and we were trying everything.

  In one room, in a far-off corner of the labyrinth, were six blue Darknuts, which look like little cats with shields. We’d never killed them before, first of all because there was no stone in the room, and second of all, because they’re so damn hard to kill. You can’t hit ’em from the front because of their shields, and the moment you make a move on them, they turn toward you. And the blue ones are twice as tough as the red ones, and take twice as many hits to kill. So out of the kindness of our hearts, we had previously left them alone.

  Now it was death to the Darknuts. Armed with the white sword, twelve bombs, and the water of life, the red potion that costs sixty-eight rubies and allows you to fill up your life-hearts twice during the course of a battle, we waded in and took them on.

  It was close. We’d used up all our bombs, both bottles of potion, and were down to two and a half life-hearts when the final Darknut breathed his last. As expected, no secret passage opened in the floor.

  But the map appeared. The map of the labyrinth. It was lying there on the floor.

  We pushed the buttons and made Link, our young protagonist, walk over and pick it up.

  Immediately, a diagram of the layout of the labyrinth appeared in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. It always does when you get the map.

  Tommie and I looked at it and said, “Wow!”

  There were three rooms we’d never been in. They were beyond the Triforce room, where we’d never thought to look. And why should we? After all, we’d been through nine labyrinths in the first quest, and three labyrinths in the second quest, and there was never anything beyond the Triforce room. You got the Triforce and that was it. But there they were.

  Tommie and I were hot to check ’em out. But first we had to get out of the labyrinth and go to the fairy pond and fill up our life-hearts, and get twelve more bombs, and buy more water of life. That accomplished, we returned to the labyrinth, fought our way to the Triforce room, walked behind the altar, pushed the up button on the controller, and disappeared through the wall.

  Into the promised land.

  We fought our way through a room of red Darknuts, knocked off three Dodongos, and, with our last life-heart ebbing away, polished off an assortment of enemies in the third room. We pushed all the stones in the room until one moved. A passage opened and we went down and grabbed the elusive raft.

  I can’t tell you what a feeling of accomplishment that gave us. Tommie and I were both jumping up and down and yelling and giving each other high-fives. And Alice heard the commotion and came popping in from the kitchen, saying, “You got the raft?” ’cause we’d been talking about it all weekend and what else could it be? And she stayed and watched while we took the raft to level five, and a grand old time was had by all.

  But eventually, all good things must end. Tommie had to stop and do his homework.

  I had to stop and do mine.

  But with a fresh new outlook.

  Now, I wouldn’t want you to think that finding the map in “Zelda” told me I had to look at my map. After all, I had the map out already, checking the towns around Poughkeepsie. And it wasn’t even as if finding the three rooms beyond the Triforce room told me I hadn’t gone far enough and wasn’t looking in the right place. Though all that did occur to me later.

  No, I think it was just the whole “Zelda” experience was so exhilarating it raised my expectations. It made me feel a seemingly insoluble problem could be solved, if you just approached it in the right way. So I was full of confidence when I pulled out the map.

  My confidence quickly ebbed. The map looked just as it had before. There was Poughkeepsie. There were the outlying towns with their potential POPs.

  So what? />
  In “Zelda,” aside from getting the map, you can also get a compass. When you pick up the compass a light goes on on the map, telling you where the Triforce room is.

  That was the problem. I had no compass. No light went on on my map.

  As I stared at the map my eyes began to glaze over, my feeling of exhilaration was gone, and I was right back where I started again.

  I set the map aside, leaned back and rubbed my head. All right, the hell with the map. Let’s just try to figure this out.

  I thought about it, and I decided what the “Zelda” experience really taught me was, I’m not as smart as I think I am. And whatever the hell it is I’m thinking is probably wrong, so I ought to take a good hard look at it and try thinking something else.

  So that’s what I did.

  Julie Steinmetz had driven up to Poughkeepsie and registered at a motel. Not to mention the murderer, she’d had at least two callers, Check-hat and POP. I didn’t know why she’d gone there, or why they’d come to see her, or what it was all about. But it had happened in Poughkeepsie. Why? I mean, what the hell’s in Poughkeepsie anyway?

  I didn’t know.

  But I did know this. Julie Steinmetz had gotten involved in something important enough to have gotten her killed. Now what the hell could that have been?

  Well, organized crime would fit the bill. But I couldn’t see an attractive young fashion model getting involved in organized crime somehow. Or maybe I just didn’t want to think that. Because if that was true, then I was in way over my head, and the situation was so bad there was nothing I could do about it. The saving grace was, if she was somehow involved with the mob, surely the police would uncover the connection. Though, on reflection, with Chief Creely in charge of the investigation, they probably wouldn’t.

  Organized crime was a thought, but for practical purposes I could pretty well wash it out.

  What did that leave? What other motivations for murder were there?

  Sex? Always a biggie, but not likely here. Not with Check-hat in and out in five minutes flat.

  Drugs? Slightly more likely, but even so. I mean come on, Julie Steinmetz, high-class fashion model, leading a double life as the Poughkeepsie Connection? Well, if that were true, wouldn’t the cops have found some evidence of it? No. Any drugs involved, the killer would have taken away. But even so, could there really be two big time drug dealers in Poughkeepsie, POP and Check-hat, and yet another who had seen fit to kill her and rip her off? Somehow I didn’t think so.