New, Improved Murder

by Ed Gorman

  You could tell he was from the agency by the way everybody from the production company started acting servile and making little jokes.

  The way he eyed me and then dismissed me—like that—brought up familiar anger in me.

  I can’t explain to you what happens to me when I act, and even by trying to explain I have to hand in my macho badge. But it’s something like—freedom. I have all this rage inside me, disappointment in myself, disappointment in the world, and somehow acting gets rid of it, at least for the length of time I’m performing.

  I’m decent-looking enough, I suppose – six foot, slender, sandy, gray-flecked hair, features that are handsome without being pretty—and no doubt I’d like to reap some of the movie star rewards, the cars, the bank accounts, the famous friends.

  But that isn’t why I act. The relief from the rage, that’s why. The closest approximation I can give you is running five miles on a hot day. Exhaustion has a way of dissipating anger too.

  Of course, during the time I’d been thinking all this the agency guy was working his way down the line. He didn’t look impressed by any of us. He stood there in his suede car coat and amber turtleneck, his hands shoved into his designer jeans, and frowned the way a child does when an animal fouls the living-room rug.

  “Jerk off,” I muttered.

  Instantly several heads twisted my way. The other actors. They’d heard me.

  So, judging by his look, had the agency man.

  The man from the production company, trying to redeem the moment, threw his arm around the agency guy’s shoulder and led him away, the agency man glaring at me all the while. I glared back. The bastard hadn’t even let us read for the part.

  “You got balls.” The actor next to me laughed as we all stood up.

  “Yeah,” I said, “and they’re worth about twenty-five cents each.”

  The media crowd, at least in this city, is fickle. An “in” place one month is an “out” place the next. Before making restaurant loans, bankers should first consult media people and see if a given loan is a good idea.

  This month the place was called the Conquistador, and for all its dark wood and Spanish leather and burnished bronze instruments hung on the walls, it was the essence of modern urban tackiness. The waiters were got up as buccaneers, the waitresses as serving wenches. The serving crew was a bunch of college kids. They were getting their degrees so they could sit in places like these and have equally shameless college kids wait on them.

  The bartender, a cordial enough man who looked as if he probably threw refrigerators around for relaxation, had no qualms about pointing out David Baxter when I asked if he was there, which his answering service had told me he was.

  Baxter and a fetching, dark-haired lady were sitting at a table in the darkest corner they’d been able to find.

  Baxter, at least from here, bore a resemblance to Paul McCartney, that kind of snotty, preppie self-confidence. He wore a Harris tweed sport coat and a button-down white shirt, and held a pipe the way men do in fancy whiskey ads. He was pretty spiffy until I got closer and took a better look at his eyes. David Baxter had been crying, and quite recently.

  His companion would have made Audrey Hepburn jealous, her graceful face and huge grave eyes a masterpiece of beauty and irony, the mouth suggesting laughter, the fixed blue eyes fatalistic. She wore a woolen jumper, the kind college girls used to wear, and a dazzling white blouse that enhanced the blackness of her hair. By the time I got to their table I saw that she, too, had been crying.

  There were no words between them, just that terrible silence I’d gotten to know in my last days with Jane….

  They were deep enough into their grief that they didn’t notice me. By now I had no doubt that I was looking at Mrs. David Baxter, the woman who’d been sleeping with Stephen Elliot.

  I tried to make it as official as a private investigator’s license can. I said “Excuse me” and pushed my open wallet in front of them.

  They reacted as if they’d been drugged, slowly, without a breath of spontaneity. They stared at my license as if it were something new and unimaginable. Finally he said, “Yes?”

  “My name’s Dwyer. I’m a private investigator.”

  “Yes?”

  “I would like to speak to you. To both of you.”

  He looked at her. She looked at him. There was a third chair at the table, empty. I decided not to wait for an answer. I sat down, signaled for a waitress, ordered a Heineken.

  Softly, Mrs. Baxter said, “I don’t understand.”

  “Why I‘m here, you mean?”

  She nodded. Again the sense that she was drugged. “I’m trying to prove that Jane Branigan didn’t kill Stephen Elliot.”

  She looked confused. “Oh, but she did. It’s in the paper. I even saw it on television. She did kill him.” Then she said, “Wait a minute. You’re Jack Dwyer. You used to live with her, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  For some reason my admission served to charge Baxter out of his stupor.

  “Why are you here bothering us?”

  “Just for the reason I told you. I’m trying to help Jane.”

  “Well, you certainly aren’t helping either of us. We’re—” For just a moment the anger gave way to the grief. I saw his hand tremble and I had the uncomfortable feeling he was going to burst into tears. “We’re—” His eyes sought hers, but she was already removing herself from the table.

  “I need to go to the rest room,” she said, gone before anybody could complain.

  He glared at me. “Thanks a lot.” His preppie face was even redder close up. He looked like a very, very sad kid.

  “I’m really sorry,” I said. “I know what you’re going through. I really do.”

  “Jesus,” he said, “aren’t you something? Do you moonlight as a shrink when you can’t get work as a private investigator?”

  I decided to hit him with it directly. “There’s a good possibility you killed Elliot. I know all about the incident in the parking lot. He was sleeping with your wife.”

  He fought through his pain to his first real clarity. “Don’t think it hadn’t occurred to me, to kill him. Don’t think it hadn’t. But it just so happens I didn’t, okay, pal?”

  “Can you prove where you were the morning he was killed?”

  “No. Can you?”

  He was coming out of it. Given the sneer in his voice, I wasn’t sure I was glad.

  “How about your wife?”

  He shook his razor-cut hair. “Did she kill him, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  He laughed. It was a high, ghoulish sound, odd enough to cause several nearby patrons to look over.

  “You don’t know a hell of a lot about Stephen Elliot, do you?”

  “You’re right. I’m beginning to think I don’t.” I thought of Carla Travers, at least ten years Elliot’s senior, and their strange relationship.

  “He was an aesthete, pal, he wasn’t just some ass-bandit. And you don’t kill aesthetes, you worship them.” He was back into his funk again. He had hit himself with rage and feelings of inadequacy so long he was getting punchy, the way prizefighters get. And this, apparently, was the theme, this was what his wife had told him about Elliot, that he wasn’t a mere lover, somebody who snared flesh, but a very special person. That’s how Jane had once described him to me. “A very special person.” Cliché that it is, it’s not a phrase I’m apt to forget. Ever.

  “Maybe she killed him without planning it, in anger.” The smirk was back. “No, pal, I’m afraid your little honey committed the crime all by her lonesome.” He held his hand over his nose and tried to sniff up his sinuses after his recent tears. Then he sighed. “You know, it would be easier to take if my wife had killed him.” He nodded toward the rest room. Bitterness had replaced rage. “This way he gets to keep her, even from beyond the grave, as the saying goes. She’ll never know if he would have dumped her the way he dumped all the others. She’ll prefer to think he wouldn’t have—so
he’ll always hang on to her, even though I’m married to her.”

  “Then you’re not going to get a divorce.”

  His admission surprised me. “I love her too much. Over the past three months, when it was all going on, I realized that I didn’t give a shit about anything but her.” He smiled dazedly. “You’re married to somebody fourteen years, you tend to forget how important they are to you. Man, this was some goddamn reminder, believe me.’’ He sounded hopeful and despairing at the same time, glad he had her back at least physically, terrified he could never reclaim her emotionally. He put out a hand. “Sorry I was such a prick.”

  We shook.

  “Just the last few months—” He paused. “Well, you know how it goes.”

  When she came back her lips were a bright red and there was a faint sparkle in her eyes. She sat down with a nice girlish primness, one appropriate to her jumper, and offered each of us a tiny smile, the way she might have placed a cupcake before us. “The tension level seems down considerably from when I left.”

  “It is,” her husband said.

  She turned to me. “You don’t really doubt that Jane killed him, do you?”

  “Yes, I do doubt it.”

  “I was—” She glanced at her husband, as if for permission.

  He nodded. “Go ahead, Lucy. It’s all right.” He looked as if he wasn’t quite sure it was, but he was willing to find out.

  “I was there when she would come up to his apartment and pound on the door,” Lucy Baxter said. “She was like a wild woman. She’d literally fling herself against the door. She had to be hurting herself.”

  I had seen her like that, her despair turning into an animal frenzy that ultimately hurt her more than anybody. I wanted to help her, wondered if I could, wondered if, in fact, she wasn’t guilty….

  “She was obsessive about Stephen—it didn’t have anything to do with real love,” Lucy Baxter said. “Why, she even threatened me several times at work. In front of other people.” She shook her head. The tears started suddenly. “But she had no right to—to—”

  She put her head on the table. A kind of moaning came from her.

  Baxter moved over and put his arms around her. I wanted to ask her about the older woman the Branigans had told me about, but I saw that now was not the time.

  Baxter slipped his arm around her, began to rock her, not giving a damn that he had an audience.

  “We really need to sit here alone,” he said.

  I couldn’t disagree with that. There was nobody else in the world who could deal with what had happened to them. I wasn’t sure even they could.

  I left there already planning ahead for how I’d spend my evening. Maybe I’d learn something important, or maybe I’d end up spending some time in jail.

  Chapter 11

  The rest of the afternoon I did all the things I’ve never learned to enjoy—shopping for groceries, picking up dry cleaning, paying bills. In the past two days I’d collected my paycheck from the security company and three different residual checks from commercials I’d done over the past two years. After subtracting my bimonthly child support payment, I didn’t have a hell of a lot of fun money left over.

  Up on First Avenue there’s a tavern where local theater people hang out. Until ten years ago there was a dinner theater next to the tavern. That building is now one of those dead zones, where a new structure is constantly announced but never seems to get built. Theater people still use the bar, though. Indeed.

  November bleakness was back by the time I rolled my Datsun into the parking lot. On top of a supermarket across the street the lights on a big Christmas tree popped on. I thought of my son when he was little, his delight in the season. Then I started thinking what a lousy father I’d been. Maybe that is what I really like about acting. It allows me to be somebody else.

  The tavern was dark except for the glow of the jukebox and the glow of the backlights that illuminated several rows of liquor bottles along the glass wall behind the cash register. A bumper pool game dominated the middle of the small floor space, dividing the booths on either side.

  I wasn’t four steps inside before I saw the guy I was looking for, a huge, red-bearded descendant of the Vikings named Rolfe Steenman. Days, he sold men’s clothes in an expensive department store in the loop. Nights, he did what the rest of us did—picked up whatever parts he could find in plays, commercials, anything. His biggest distinction to date was that he’d worked on several of the spots that had made Stephen Elliot famous. I didn’t really know Steenman, but I’d heard that he’d become reasonably tight with Elliot, and I thought maybe he could help me.

  He sat at the bar, staring at his drink. A cigarette in the glass ashtray in front of him curled smoke into his face. He didn’t seem to notice.

  “Rolfe.”

  He raised his head lazily. He saw me, recognized me, and seemed to know instantly why I was there.

  “Dwyer. How are you?”

  “Mind if I sit down?”

  “Free country.”

  I ordered a Heineken.

  His size and his strength—he could easily have been an NFL fullback—surprised you in an actor. He was without grace, but he compensated for it with a powerful presence. He was also very good at comedy, which is what he’d done for Stephen Elliot.

  “I suppose you know about Elliot,” I said.

  “Yeah. Your ex-old lady killed him.” He didn’t even make a pass at being civil.

  “First of all, she was never my wife. Second of all, I don’t think she’s guilty.”

  “Oh, yeah. I forgot you were a cop once, weren’t you?”

  “I need to ask you some questions about Elliot.”

  He looked at me as if he were trying to decide how he wanted to attack me—with his fists or his feet. “Jesus, man, I’m bummed out. Can’t you see?”

  The bartender came over with my beer. I thanked him.

  I decided to push my luck. “When you were hanging around with Elliot did you ever know anything about him and an older woman?”

  He smiled nastily. “You and every other fucking gossipmonger in this town. The ‘older woman’ happens to be his aunt.”

  I thought of how the Branigans had described this woman, how she had slapped Elliot when they’d been in an art gallery. That didn’t sound like an aunt.

  “You know anybody who’d want to kill Elliot?”

  He surprised me by smiling. “I’ve got to give you your nerve, Dwyer. I told you I didn’t want to talk about Elliot and here you are—still asking me questions.”

  He turned away from me, back to his drink. The bartender sensed that trouble might be coming. He had started to paw his apron nervously.

  What the hell. I wasn’t doing anything this afternoon, may as well get my face pounded in. “You know anybody who’d want to kill him?”

  Without looking at me, he said, “A lot of people wanted to kill him.”

  When he spoke in a cool but not unfriendly voice the bartender looked relieved as hell.

  Steenman turned to me and said, “A lot of people wanted to kill him. Maybe not literally, but figuratively. Because they were jealous. Here was this creative genius, this guy who could do anything, and they couldn’t stand his talent or success. So they wished him the worst. Just like your girlfriend, Dwyer. That’s why she killed him. She couldn’t stand the thought that other women might share a part of him. Just couldn’t stand it.” He was big and he was angry, but now he sounded more sad than anything. “The guy gave me a break, Dwyer. You know that? He saw something in me, some talent, that I didn’t even know I had, and I’ll always be grateful. He was a creative genius, yet he made room for people like you and me in his life.”

  I thought of how Lucy Baxter had spoken of Elliot—in the same kind of reverent terms, in the way you’d speak of an especially holy priest, a shaman.

  “What about this aunt you mentioned?”

  He shrugged. “I never actually met her, but he talked about her quite a bit. Even
showed me a picture of her. His parents had died when he was young. She’d raised him.”

  “You know her name?”

  “Angela. But I don’t know her last name.” He sighed. “He let me be a part of his world. It was exciting for me, believe me. He really knew how to live.”

  “Where’d he get all his money?”

  “Hell, he had the top advertising job in the city.”

  “His house had an easy hundred thousand dollars’ worth of antiques. The police are probably looking into his assets now. I suspect they’re going to find a lot. You can’t make that kind of money in advertising, no matter how successful you are.”

  But he hadn’t heard me. He was just thinking of his gratitude to a man who’d taken him along, sort of a Gabby Hayes at the orgy. All the fancy parties, the fancy women, the heady sense of being loved and being envied. For a guy who looked like a Viking, it must have been something truly memorable.

  “You sure you can’t think of his aunt’s name?”

  “Uh-uh. And anyway, what’s the big deal? She’s just his aunt.”

  I stood up. Put down a bill for my beer. Stared at him a moment. He was genuinely sad. No doubt about it. He probably felt the same way about Elliot I had about John Kennedy; all Camelots come to an end.

  “See you,” I said, and left.

  Chapter 12

  You can find Donna Harris’s address merely by looking in the phone book, which is what I did.

  I drove over to the modern and modest brick apartment house, went to her mailbox-speaker, and announced myself.

  “Boy, you really like surprising people, don’t you?”

  “Can I come up?”

  “I don’t look so hot and neither does my apartment.”

  “That’s all right.”

  I knew I should have called, but all of a sudden I had this real need to see her.

  The buzzer sounded in the small lobby and I went on up.

  Donna wore a blue T-shirt with the state university logo on it and designer jeans. I could see she wasn’t wearing a bra. I ached to touch her.