by David Daniel
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About the Author
Copyright Page
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A special thanks to Louis Boxer, Ruth Cavin,
Dean Contover, Susan Crawford,
Joyce Rain Latora, Guy Lefebvre, Robert Sanchez,
Elisabeth Story, and Timothy Trask,
who were helpful in various ways.
This book is for Stephanie and Alexandra
1
THE BRUINS HAD the power play going, but it didn’t make a difference. When the clock ran out, it was the Leafs, 3–2, and Bobby Orr, when we needed him, was a pitchman for a Boston bank, golfing on worn-out knees. I signaled to Meg the bartender and told her a Molson’s this time: Canada had earned it. Drinking from the bottle, I turned away from the TV behind the bar and gazed past the paper spiders and bats in the windows at the October night outside.
The mild air had brought fog, and the neon-stained city street was a colorized version of an old movie that looked better in black-and-white. But even the Lowell streets seemed cheerier than the late news. One downbeat story after another, then the highlights of the game I’d just watched. The lone good note was the weather: more Indian summer expected. I finished my beer. Coming up next, the broadcaster’s voice informed me and the scattering of patrons in the Copper Kettle, was The Good Night Show, with host Jerry Corbin, and special guests I’d never heard of. I was ready to call it a wrap when Meg set another beer before me. I lifted my eyebrows.
“Gentleman down the bar,” Meg said.
I looked and saw a tanned fellow, a little younger than I, who had come in between the story on the city’s latest home invasion and robbery and the one about state auto-insurance rates going up again. He faked a smile, so I’d know it wasn’t a pass, and gave the old minstrel-show wave. I lifted the bottle in thanks. He waited a full two swallows before he eased onto the bar stool at my left, planting cowboy boots in some exotic hide on the steel rail. He had on a gray twill suit, black shirt buttoned at the collar, and a bolo tie with a nugget of turquoise on it the size of a hockey puck. He was a fit forty with a smile full of caps that made the foam on my beer seem dingy. He hoisted a briefcase finished in the same hide as his boots onto the bar.
“Howdy,” he said. “My name’s Justin Ross.”
If it was in my mental index, it was misfiled. But somebody buying you a beer this time of night was buying your ear. “Mine’s Rasmussen,” I said, taking his offered hand, which had powerful fingers studded with silver rings and more turquoise.
“Alex Rasmussen. I know. Meg tells me you’re a private eye.”
“She actually said that?”
“She might’ve used ‘investigator.’”
“Odd topic to come up,” I said.
“Well, I asked. In fact, I’ve been tracking you all evening. I want to hire you. Meg.”
My neighborhood tap jockey came hustling in a way she never did for me. “Another Virgin Sunrise,” Justin Ross told her and looked questioningly at me.
I shook my head. A pitch was coming; I didn’t want to be behind the count if I didn’t like it. Ross laid down a fifty as crisp as piecrust. “Give me half back, Meg. Mind if we move to a table, Mr. Rasmussen?”
I didn’t mind at all. I was drinking his beer.
He chose the booth by the window, with an overhead light that displayed miniature Clydesdales hauling a beer wagon. We slid in across from each other. When Meg brought over the booze-free drink, Ross asked her if she’d be so kind as to call a taxi. To me he said he worked for someone well known who was coming to Lowell soon. Ross wanted me to handle security.
“You mean be a bodyguard?” I said.
“What we’re looking at—” He broke off and nodded at the TV.
On screen, Good Night Show host Jerry Corbin was in his trademark pose, one hand on his heart, the other raised—“God’s truth,” it said—doing his monologue. “The other day I’m on Sunset,” Corbin was saying, “and a big woman walking a Pekinese rushes up to me—I mean she was big.”
“How big was she?” the audience roared on cue.
“Big. The size of a Fotomat booth. Had on these white stretch pants, and I mean s-t-r-e-t-c-h.” Corbin spread his arms wide. “When she bent over to pick up her dog I thought I was at a twin drive-in.” He paused for the laughs. “Anyway, she rushes up to me and screams, ‘Jerry, I love you! I go to bed with you every night!’”
In chorus with Corbin, Justin Ross said, “No wonder I’ve been waking up with my pajamas pressed.”
I looked at him. “Old joke?”
“I hope not. That was taped two days ago.”
In Hollywood. Suddenly the tan and the cowboy getup made sense. And something else. “You’re talking about Jerry Corbin?”
“Mr. Good Night America himself. You probably know that Jerry was born and grew up here in Lowell.”
I did know, though not through any advertisement of the fact from Corbin. He was a hometown kid who had left and gone west thirty-odd years ago. He hadn’t been back that I knew of, and Lowell never came up in his monologue. The city newspaper liked to drop his name from time to time.
Ross said, “The deal is, Jerry Corbin is coming to town. He’ll be here next week.”
Well, okay. Guy in late middle age, career on a downswing. Maybe he was having a roots experience.
“Remember the old Gong Show?” Ross asked. “From the sixties?”
“As in there’s a ‘new?’”
He gave the quick smile, as genuine as his teeth. “You don’t read Variety. Jerry’s got a revival idea that has the network brass creaming their Calvins. He’ll host; his company will produce. We’ll go prime time, with plans to tape live in a bunch of cities. The pilot is here. Then on to Providence, Scranton, and Schenectady.”
“Linchpin markets all,” I said.
Ross’s smile was tolerant. “Places where real folks live. I’ve been here setting it up. The city is eager to host him. Plus his alma mater is cooking up an honorary degree. The details have just been finalized, which is why there’s been no fanfare yet—but once the word is out, it’s going to be big.”
“Big as a Fotomat booth?” I said.
No smile this time. He was used to heavyweights like Corbin. Actually, though, the news was interesting. Corbin hadn’t burned up the Nielsens in a long time, and there were periodic rumors of replacements. Still, he was an institution, and he was from Lowell. The city hadn’t got to honor a native show-biz kid since Bette Davis died, and she’d spent most of her life pretending the place didn’t exist.
“The police will be involved, naturally,” Ross said. “Crowd control, traffic details. But there’s a reason I want you. And this is strictly confidential, regardless of whether you and I come to terms.” Although we were the only patrons at this end of the room, Ross had lowered his voice. On the TV behind the bar, Jerry Corbin was flirting with a cotton-candy blonde I couldn’t place. Off-camera, Corbin’s second banana guffawed lasciviously.
“All right,” I said.
Ross reached i
nto his cowboy suit coat and took out a small plastic sandwich bag and handed it to me. The light from the beer lamp wasn’t great, but it was enough to see there wasn’t a sandwich inside. Peering through the plastic, I saw what looked like a greeting card, with a bright red outline of a heart on a sheet of beige industrial grade paper towel with serrated edges top and bottom. In the heart was a text formed of multicolored words cut from magazines and pasted down.
It was a finger-in-the-eye effect, like something you’d see on display if the Institute for Contemporary Art had a branch at Mass. Mental. The words said:
Back in the boneyard
you’ll hear the Gong of Doom …
“That was sent to Jerry three days ago,” Ross said. “It arrived at the studio. The woman who opens mail put it in Jerry’s box without actually reading it; so by the time we thought to check the envelope, the trash had been picked up. She thinks it was postmarked Boston.”
“Does the message mean something particular?”
He shook his head. “It’s crazy.”
“Yet you took it pretty seriously.”
“Jerry’s no stranger to kook mail. He manages to piss off a fair number of people, but yeah. This seems elaborate. Somebody went to some effort.”
Someone had. Despite the bright look, the note had a dark tone, a quality heightened by the fact that the cutting was ragged, as a lunatic negotiating a straight razor might create.
“You think ‘Gong of Doom’ refers to the new show?” I asked.
“It’s a hell of a coincidence if it doesn’t.”
“Did you show this to the L.A. cops?”
“We didn’t think it was much to go with.” He stirred his mocktail, then lifted a shoulder. “The truth is, we’re nervous about adverse.”
As in publicity. It was one of those adjectives that some semiliterate flack had turned into a noun.
“The folks at network are edgy by nature,” Ross went on. “If they got any hint that there might be a hassle, they’d ax the new show.”
“I thought they were hot for it.”
“TV’s a fickle game. One idea—if they’d agree to do it anonymously—was to send that to the FBI for fingerprints or whatever.”
“Ask them to solve the Cock Robin burn while they’re at it.”
He stared at me. “What?”
I said, “You can yank this paper off rolls in ten thousand public johns—no one keeps count. Plus, it’s too absorbent for clean prints. You’ve got magazine cutouts here—big deal. And no direct threat. When I was a cop, I worked with the bureau a few times. They’re good, but forget anonymous. You could paper the Beltway in their official forms.”
Ross nodded slowly. “Point taken.”
Corbin had become tabloid fodder again in the past year over another divorce—his third, I seemed to recall. And if memory served, his guest host was drawing bigger ratings than Corbin was, though you took your chances when you went on vacation as much as Corbin did. Ross said, “Do you know anything about television programming?”
The only TV I watched was right there in the Copper Kettle a few nights a week, when my apartment wallpaper was all reruns. “Nothing you’d want to hear,” I said.
“If a show like this goes into production for one season—forget renewals, aftermarkets—one season, twenty-two episodes, in prime time? With a decent share and good ad accounts, you know what it stands to make?”
Okay, I’d be the straight man. “A lot of mazuma?”
“Try in the neighborhood of forty million bucks.”
“That’s a nice neighborhood to be in.”
“We take this very seriously. But the police are out, for the time being, at least. And that’s where you fit in. If that note is anything more than just a sick joke, you’d be responsible for making sure there isn’t a punch line. And for trying to find the source.”
“Maybe I should go after Cock Robin’s killer,” I said. “How long do I have to think about it?”
He glanced at his watch. “An hour from now I’m in Boston, climbing on the red-eye. You’re right—it could be a tough assignment. But you’ve got a rep for being good and for not being an SOP guy. I’d like you, and I’d make it worth your time. But if you say no, I go elsewhere.” He put the plastic bag back into his pocket. “Your move.”
Decision time. I glanced at the fog swirling in the mild night outside. In a month, it could be snow. Come the holidays, you could bet Bobby Orr wouldn’t be hanging around ice rinks. He’d be on a golf course, someplace warm and green, working on a tan like Justin Ross had. I gave Ross my winning smile. “What are private eyes for?”
“Good,” he said.
I took a card from my wallet and handed it to him, pointing out that the pair of s’s actually went with the second syllable, not the first. R-a-s-m-u-s-s-e-n. It was a printer’s error, and I had a deck of five hundred, but the printer ran a shop as small as my own, so I had let him slide on it. He said he owed me. Ross made the correction with a gold fountain pen. “Want references?” I asked.
“I probably got the best one already.” He nodded at Meg, who was standing over there behind the bar with her arms crossed, gazing up at Jerry Corbin. “She says you’re the only person she knows who talks less and listens more than she does.”
“Pshaw,” I said.
Ross settled his briefcase on its side and thumbed the combination wheels. The hasps sprang open with a soft click. He took out a check ledger finished in the same skin as the briefcase and his boots, and opened it on the table. I had to ask.
“Ostrich,” he said. “Ranch grown in Israel. These are quill pocks.” The checks were painted with desert scenes in dusty pastels and drawn on a Jer-Cor Productions account at the Pacific National Bank of Santa Monica. He printed my name with the gold fountain pen.
“My fee is two-fifty a day, plus my out-of-pocket expenses. I like a two-day—”
The extra zero made me stop. He filled in the stub and tore the check out neatly, waving it once to dry the ink, then slid it over. The memo line said “petty cash account.” The check was for five grand. I picked up the bottle of Molson and drained it to keep my hands from grabbing.
I asked to keep the note Jerry Corbin had received. When I had put it and the check in my inside jacket pocket, Ross said, “This has been easier than I’d expected. I’m sure everyone will be satisfied. I’m going to be in Los Angeles the next few days, but one of our people will be here starting Sunday night. She’ll be your contact until the rest of us come. Her name’s Chelsea Nash.”
I wrote it down in my pocket notebook.
“If all goes according to plan, Jerry will arrive Tuesday evening, the twenty-seventh. We’re booked for six nights at the Riverfront Plaza Hotel.”
“This Ms. Nash,” I said. “Who’s she?”
“Jerry’s personal assistant.”
“I’d have guessed that was your title.”
He flashed a bright smile—the first real one yet—and stood up. “I’m just a guy who gets things done.” He glanced outside. “Time to saddle up.”
I stood, too, and we shook hands again. “I look forward to working with you, Alex,” he said. He called good-bye to Meg and went outside and got into the cab she had summoned.
I walked over to the bar and watched Jerry Corbin till the next commercial, all of ten seconds away, then put on my hat.
“First-class guy,” Meg said.
“Top drawer.” I did a fast body count of patrons, dragged out my wallet, and put down a moldy twenty. “A round for the house,” I said.
As I walked down Middlesex Street toward Kearney Square, where my car was parked behind my office at Number 10, I paused on the bridge over the Pawtucket Canal. Above the thin fog and building tops, a horned autumn moon was pumping itself toward the full. The check in my pocket, with its mesas and saguaro cacti, felt good in there, warm, like an early Christmas bonus. If I’d had the gift of foresight, I might have been at the bank early next morn, cashing out my meager savin
gs account and leaving for Cancún. At the very least, I’d have torn Jerry Corbin’s check into confetti and cast it on the dark water.
2
I DIDN’T GET to the bank on Friday because I was at the beach all day. It wasn’t vacation. I was at Hampton watching a thirty-eight-year-old city worker who had filed for disability retirement because of an injury she had gotten on the job. The insurance company smelled fraud. I had been at it three days; but so far, all I’d gotten was sunburn on my left arm.
Lowell had companies that went back nearly two centuries, like Locks and Canals—where Whistler’s father had been chief engineer, long before son James had thought of painting his mom. And there were still city departments like Ashes and Waste, City Messenger, and Department of Maps: quaint sounding now, but they held on, like a lot of old habits. Like the work habit. Most people had it. They started early and stayed late and gave honest value for their pay. But there were always a few who looked for the golden goose. Part of me devoutly wished the insurance company was being paranoid, that the subject of my stakeout was just getting her due; and through no fault of her own she could live the beach life for a lot of years before Modern Maturity ever showed up in her mailbox. Maybe then the long hours I tended to put into the job when I was working would seem less of a sucker’s game.
Around 3:00 P.M., as I was taking a break from a collection of André Dubus’s stories and washing back fried onion rings with coffee, I saw the subject leave her rented cottage. She had forgone the walker this time in favor of an aluminum cane with four little legs on the bottom. Her handbag hung from her arm. I slipped the Kodak into my pocket, gave her a head start, and tagged along on foot.
We went up G Street onto Ocean Boulevard. Pedestrian traffic was light: retirees out for a jaunt, mostly, moms with strollers, beachniks combing for thrills. Sea gulls floated in the bright blue air. Just over the Massachusetts border in New Hampshire, Hampton Beach has always been a working family’s vacation town, with a long strip of arcades, food joints, and surf shops facing the Atlantic, and behind it narrow lanes of rental shacks. But in the past decade, the honky-tonk charm had faded. The economy was part of it, and families stayed away. On sticky July days, the special police were on constant patrol of the crowds of teenagers who crammed the beach, and at night Ocean Boulevard was a strip for bikes and muscle cars, the air as rancid as the fat in the Fry-O-Laters at the clam joints. I had stopped to wait for a turning car, so I missed the actual contact, but I caught the next part.
