The Skelly Man

by David Daniel

  “They’ve already left for the airport. Anyway, it’s not that easy. Jer-Cor Productions is like a family—Justin, me, a few others—but Jerry calls the shots.” She was blinking again, looking around. “Is there a ladies’ room? If I don’t take out these lenses…”

  “In the hall. It’s generic. But knock first, you never know who might’ve got in there.”

  She gave me a hot look and went out. I opened the envelope with my contract in it. The dollar amounts looked okay, and I stuck it in my desk drawer. Curious, I drew the attaché case over. There was a tag attached to the handle by a little leather thong. On it was Chelsea Nash’s name, in care of Jer-Cor Productions in Burbank. I opened the case.

  Inside was a stash of press kits for the new show. There were also a check ledger and a date book. Not looking for anything in particular, I paged through the ledger, skimming the stubs. The most recent checks had been written to a florist in Lowell and a talent agency in Boston. In a divided portion of the ledger was a petty-cash account. Several checks had been listed as “miscellaneous,” including the one Ross had paid me as a retainer. That nettled me; I didn’t like to think of my services as miscellany. One check had been written two days before to the estate of an Isabelle Martin for $11,300. It seemed like a lot for incidentals, though the five grand Ross had paid me hadn’t bounced. I got a feeling they could tap the account all day, all week, all month if they had to and still be in petty cash.

  Sooner than Chelsea Nash could have finished changing her eyes there was a rap on the door that rattled the glass. I slipped the ledger back into the case and went over and opened the door.

  Ed St. Onge looked at me. Behind him, thumbing a moldy issue of Sports Illustrated in my waiting room, was Gus Deemys. He tossed it on the table. Deemys wore an Italian raincoat and natty gray felt hat with a darker satin band and a little yellow feather in it. St. Onge’s garb didn’t bear comment. In the same gesture, I waved them in and laid a manila envelope over the fax Chelsea Nash had brought.

  St. Onge surveyed the office. “How’s the private sector these days?” he asked.

  “Well, you know. Between plugging ham-fisted goons and bedding leggy brunettes, there’s barely enough time anymore to carry my receivables to the bank. It’s why I quit charging fees.”

  “You better start again,” said Deemys. “Who’s your decorator, Robicheau Funeral Service?” He started to whinny, and I thought he’d elbow St. Onge.

  “Who cloned Zeppo Marx, Ed?” I said.

  Deemys’s smile became a knife slash. “What do you, sit around here all day thinking them up? Get plenty of time for it, don’t you? And maybe you’re gonna have a lot more pretty soon.”

  “All right, shut up,” St. Onge said, still looking at me.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  “I ask questions, you give answers. What was this doing over at the university?” He held one of my cards, probably the one I’d given the grandmother in alumni affairs.

  “So I can’t afford a TV spot,” I said. “Is honest poverty a crime?”

  “You’re doing it again. So let’s get to it. You were over there bracing people about yesterday’s assault. That’s interfering in a police investigation. And that’s after I told you to keep away, which also makes it refusing a police order.” He held a thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “You’re skating this close to the hole in the ice that swallows up smart-asses.”

  “I told you,” I said.

  “This close.”

  Just then the door opened and Chelsea Nash came back in. With her round-framed glasses on and her face scrubbed, she was back in school. She was startled to see the others there. Deemys appeared equally surprised, but recovered faster. He touched the knot of his tie. “Morning, ma’am.”

  St. Onge glanced at me then stepped aside and added greetings.

  Chelsea pushed up her glasses and flushed. “Hello.”

  “This is Detective Deemys. I’m Sergeant St. Onge,” Ed reminded her.

  “Yes … I remember.” She glanced darkly at me, and I knew what she was thinking.

  “Why don’t we all sit down,” St. Onge said. He made it sound like a suggestion, but no one was fooled. No one sat, either. Deemys stood by the door, his hands in his coat pockets; I stayed beside my desk. “You know, ma’am,” St. Onge went on, “this makes each of our days a little easier. I was going to come see you later.”

  “Oh?” Chelsea was off balance. I was too. Why hadn’t she gotten herself locked in the bathroom? “What about?” she asked.

  “Coincidence. But this seems to be a time of coincidence.” He glanced at Deemys. “The moon full or something?”

  “Not till Halloween,” I said helpfully, patting the almanac.

  “You mentioned that you’re staying at the Riverfront, visiting from California,” said St. Onge.

  “That’s right.” Chelsea seemed uncertain of what role she was expected to play. I couldn’t help because I didn’t know either.

  “Consider this one a moment. A woman who works in the university alumni office claims two people came in there separately yesterday morning asking about Mr. Jerry Corbin, who, as I don’t think either of you needed to read last night’s newspaper to know, happens to be coming to town tonight. From L. A.” St. Onge’s tone had taken on an exaggerated patience. He settled on a windowsill, his gaze on Chelsea Nash. “You didn’t mention, ma’am, that you work for Jerry Corbin.”

  “No,” she murmured.

  “Why not? He’s a celebrity.”

  “I guess I didn’t think it was necessary. When I talked with you, I was still finishing contract arrangements. I didn’t want to complicate that with publicity. Besides, none of that has any bearing on what happened to that poor woman yesterday.”

  “You may be right. What about you?” St. Onge said to me. “I suppose when I ask who you’re working for, you’re going to play it dumb.”

  “Uh-uh. Smart,” I said. “I want to stay in business. I want to keep getting clients.”

  “You won’t need ’em without a license,” Deemys said. “I say we bust this coin-op cop, Ed.”

  “That your answer?” St. Onge asked me.

  I squeezed around behind Chelsea Nash and went over and opened my office door. “Since we’re on the subject of coincidence,” I said, “it just came to me, Ed, that, scrambled, your name is an anagram for ‘gone.’”

  “What’re you going to do if we don’t? Call nine-one-one?”

  “You’re better when you play straight man to the wits you work with,” I said. “There’s nothing I can say you don’t already know; the rest I’m just not going to. I was square with you yesterday. If you’d thought harder, you’d have figured out I left my card before any of that action happened. You’re the one who got sneaky, telling me the Murphy woman had gone to Lowell General. Now you come on with tough. I didn’t like the roust when I was a cop, I like it less now.”

  Deemys shoved his fists deep in his pockets and spread his raincoat open. “Too bad, Coin-op.” I guess the gesture was supposed to be menace. He just looked like an overdressed flasher. With a sigh, St. Onge pushed off the windowsill and motioned Deemys to lead the way out. At the door, St. Onge looked at me. He didn’t say a word. Didn’t have to. I got the message.

  So much for fence-mending. When they had closed both doors and clumped down the hall to the elevator, I sat on the edge of my desk and said to Chelsea Nash, “I’ve got a problem.”

  “With them?”

  “And you.”

  “What? I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m leaving.”

  I gripped her attaché case.

  “Give me that,” she said.

  “Lady, you may think this is live television, for your entertainment, but I can lose my license. Cops don’t like being fooled with. St. Onge takes it especially badly. What do you know that you’re keeping from him?”

  “Nothing. I resent—”

  “So do I! We’re supposed to be on the sa
me side. What’s Florence Murphy got to do with this?”

  She flinched at my raised voice. “I have no idea.”

  “And you just happened to be at the university yesterday.”

  “Yes. Now give me my belongings.”

  “Who’s Isabelle Martin?” I said.

  Her eyes got angry—then scared. I let go of the attaché case. “I was doing the same thing you were doing there,” Chelsea said. “I was at the alumni office trying to get information on Jerry Corbin. I went there to find out about … his past.”

  I took my chair for that one. “What could you learn there that you don’t already know?”

  She shook her head, looking pained. “Nothing,” she said quietly. “And that’s the truth. Now may I go?”

  6

  THE KAPPA TAU house was a big gray clapboard affair on Mount Hope Street, with red shutters and a ramshackle porch, and the Greek letters painted over the entrance. I seemed to recall it as being the frat where a student had tried to do himself in a few semesters back by drinking a whole bottle of Maalox. A fuzzy toy spider hung on the door. I pressed the bell. In a paved side yard, several young men were tossing a Frisbee, playing keep-away from a game mongrel. The dog’s tongue lolled like a ribbon of pink rubber. One of the young men yelled, “Doorbell don’t work. You gotta knock hard.” I waved and did so.

  Across the street, a guy with a blower was cleaning his lawn, sending leaves cartwheeling down the sidewalk to become somebody else’s problem. I watched. If machines mirrored the people who made them, the leaf blower was the perfect twentieth-century American device. Most of the lawns had bright-colored campaign signs pegged in them, promoting next month’s city elections. I didn’t see the same candidate’s name twice. The door opened. A young man with a Pats T-shirt and a flushed face stood there, zipping his fly. Like the guys in the yard, he was on the large side. He looked at me as if he expected me to give a password.

  “Hope I’m not interrupting,” I said. “I’m looking for Vito.” I had phoned ahead and been given the name.

  “Oh, you the guy about Jerry Corbin?”

  “That’s me.”

  He glanced past my shoulder, probably to see if I had a photographer with me to put him in Playgirl: “The Hunks of Kappa Tau.” Disappointed, he motioned me in.

  The house had once been elegant, if you went by the fifteen-foot ceilings, leaded-glass windows, and classical columns; but alas, no more. The oak floor fairly cried for varnish, and there were fraternity letters spray-painted on the walls, as if someone held practice runs before going out and defacing rocks along Route 3. The decor was Greek, all right: spartan. Beer kegs for end tables, sprung easy chairs and shelves of Cliff’s Notes. I quit wondering where the sign for Middlesex Street had gone.

  A green lava lamp blurped on a packing crate in one dim corner. Near it, on a rumpled couch, pretending to study a trigonometry book, sat a rumpled brunette.

  “Midterms,” the guy in the T-shirt said.

  “No pain,” I said, “no brain.”

  “I’ll get Vito.” He disappeared farther into the house. I peered into a side room and saw three guys sitting at a round table, drinking from quart bottles of beer and jotting things on paper. “Cramming for their mixology exam?” I asked the brunette.

  “Friday night’s Halloween,” she said. “They’re the party planning committee.”

  I nodded. Seemed like an easy gig, figuring out how many cases per person you’d need. The brunette said, “You’re not pledging Tau are you? Being as I never seen you.”

  “No.”

  “I thought you seemed kind of old. No offense, hey.”

  I let it alone.

  My host reappeared and told me right this way. We went through other ill-furnished rooms to the foot of a staircase. “Yo, Vito!” he called up. “I’m sending him up.” And to me: “Top floor.”

  Like most of the house, the stairway held little trace of bygone glory: Scarlet O’Hara would never sashay down it on Rhett Butler’s arm. It groaned beneath worn rubber treads, and the gap-toothed banister wobbled. At the top, a small fellow with wire-rim glasses was waiting. He had on chinos and a white polo shirt with the collar up and wore the look of the perpetual club historian. Ten years ago, he probably had overseen the tattered stash of skin mags in his neighborhood tree hut. We greeted each other and shook hands.

  “Yeah, Jerry Corbin was a brother,” Vito said, leading me back into the upper floor. “Which, like, I knew, ’cause someone mentioned it when we were pledging, but it’s nothing anyone made a big deal of. Not like Leo St. Hillaire making All-Pro with the Broncos. He was a brother, Leo. Anyway, I looked up Jerry Corbin after you called.”

  “What did you learn?”

  “Not much. The house files are kind of in a shambles.” He said it with an apologetic frown, as though this were an unexpected oversight here. “His name is on the rolls back in the early sixties. He was on the Greek Week float and the homecoming committees. He played frat football. For all practical purposes, that’d be the story on Big J.”

  “Big J?”

  Vito treated me to a sly look like he’d made a find that would seed masters’ theses for years to come. “What he was called. Come up here a minute”—he opened a door—“I want you to see something.”

  The doorway opened on a flight of steps, boards nailed directly onto the stringer, no risers. I followed Vito, and we emerged in a hot attic, lit only by a dusty skylight. Wasps buzzed, and the trapped air had the tang of insulation dust. I had to stoop until we reached the pitched height at the center. Visible in the gloom, as my eyes adjusted, were a moth-eaten moose head and the chassis of what once had been a chariot float. Festoons of old crepe paper hung from it. Vito pointed up. “There,” he said.

  On a thick rafter, something was written in what appeared to be charcoal. I had to squint to read it. Big J planked Betty Crown 4/25/62. There were other markings on the rafter, though none of the names was Corbin’s.

  “This used to be like a house totem pole,” Vito said with a kind of vicarious pride. The most recent date I saw was 1982. The verbs changed too. It was a pop-cultural history of sexual slang.

  “Any idea who Betty Crown was?” I asked.

  “Some hot party girl, I figure, which is why her name’s here. There’ve been a lot of them over the years.” Vito stood on tiptoe to run his fingers down the splintery wood, as if it might bring him luck.

  “If these walls could talk,” I said.

  Sweating, we picked our way back across the planks. “So that’s the complete file on Big J?” I said when we had descended the steps.

  “Seems like he was a regular guy. Lots of babes. Pulled okay grades.”

  “And now he’s Mr. Good Night America.”

  Vito nodded. “I was thinking like maybe I should do up an article for the school paper. Get some press for the house.” For an instant his eyes may have glowed with the light of reflected glory, a small man in a house of large men. Then it faded. “But nah, if I don’t, like, ace a couple midterms, I’m history.”

  I took out my wallet and extracted one of my cards and two twenty-dollar bills. His eyes clamped on the bills. I aligned them face to back. “Would a monetary inducement interest you?” I said.

  “To dig some more?”

  “Sure. And write your piece if you want to.”

  He scratched his nose. “Well … cool.”

  I tore the bills in half. I handed him two halves, along with the card. “If you get me anything else about Big J, I’ll give you these.” I put my halves into my shirt pocket.

  He tried matching his, but came up only with a mutant Andrew Jackson. “How long’ve I got?”

  “Couple days. After that, we can both pin them on the wall and write ‘tempus fugit’ underneath.”

  Vito walked me downstairs. The planning committee was still in closed session, probably trying to figure out whether to decorate in orange and black or vice versa. Outside, the neighbor’s lawn was clear of lea
ves, and he and his blower were gone. The guys with the Frisbee were gone, too. I looked around for the young dog. Ditto.

  7

  AT 10:55 THAT evening, I rode the elevator to the top floor of the Riverfront Plaza Hotel. I smoothed my hair and cinched up my tie. It wasn’t every night I got to meet a legend. I heard the festivities before I was halfway down the corridor: music and talk and the plink of glasses. I knocked on the door where the sounds were loudest. As I waited, I stepped over to a window and looked out. A three-quarter moon glowed in the autumn sky, brushing the buildings with gold. There were leaves still on the trees, and street lamps threw bright circles among them. Beyond, the river was scaled with moonlight. Like a lot of cities, Lowell looked better the higher up you went. From a blimp it could win beauty prizes.

  I was about to knock again when the door opened. The guy who opened it stood medium height, but that was the only thing medium about him. His shoulders filled the doorway. He was a hulk of tanned, gym-trained muscle, with veins snaking over his biceps. He was in a faux leopard-skin tank top and baggy white crepe slacks, held aloft with purple suspenders. His golden hair was sculpted in a pompadour that surfed over his broad forehead and curled just off his earlobes, in one of which a diamond stud winked like a stage light. He wore espadrilles the same pale blue as the long-lashed eyes he had clamped on me. For a moment I wondered if I was at the right room, or in the right hotel, or even in the right city. Then I spotted Justin Ross inside, talking to people. I told the guy at the door who I was.

  His manner changed. “Hey, all right! Good to see you.”

  When he finished crushing my hand, I squeezed past him into the alcove while he did a quick scan of the corridor and shut the door. “Are you packing, Mr. R.?” he asked earnestly.

  “Not I.”

  “Gonna have to frisk you anyway. Sorry.”

  Why not? I spread my arms. “No tickling,” I said.

  He did it efficiently, moving right down to my shoes. “Okey-doke.” He rose. “Entrez vous.”