New, Improved Murder

by Ed Gorman

  Her apartment looked as frazzled as she had the first night I’d met her. There was something endearingly sloppy about the paperbacks piled everywhere and the empty TV dinner trays that almost looked like decorator items and an occasional stray piece of clothing. The oblivion express apparently ran through here regularly.

  “Now you know,” she said.

  “Now I know what?”

  “What a shitty housekeeper I am.”

  “Gee, I don’t think I’m going to hate you for it.”

  “My husband did. It was one of the reasons he divorced me.”

  “What were the other reasons?”

  “Nosy bastard, aren’t you?”

  “I seem to remember you asking me a personal question the other night.”

  “He divorced me for several reasons, but the big one was that he fell in love with the court stenographer.”

  “You lost me.”

  “He’s a lawyer.”

  “I see.”

  “And there was a court stenographer who was really quite beautiful and he fell in love with her. I don’t suppose he could help himself, the rotten sonofabitch.”

  “I can tell you don’t hold anything against him.”

  “Not a damn thing as far as I know.”

  We both stood there laughing. She got the sense of what was about to happen at approximately the same time I did. Only she moved away from it, stopped it from happening.

  She took me on a nervous tour of the place rather than face what had passed between us.

  Not much to see, actually: three rooms decorated with posters of people who had been fashionable in the seventies—everybody from Dr. Wayne Dyer to Jerry Brown—but who were now just voices from the media grave.

  The kitchen was big enough to take rumba lessons in, but that was about all. The sink was piled high with dishes left to dry in a drainer. On the counter were two boxes of doughnuts and an angel food cake. How did this woman stay so slim?

  That was where it happened, where I reached out and touched her and brought her to me.

  I couldn’t remember having a kiss like that since high school. My head felt as if it were going to come off. I felt her tender breasts against my chest and the sway of her shapely hips against mine.

  Then she pushed me away. “This is not what I need right now, Dwyer. Sorry.”

  She left me staggering and stammering there, so overcome by desire that all I could do was open my mouth and let spittle run down my jaw.

  “God, Dwyer, do you look silly.”

  “Shit,” I said, “shit.”

  “Very articulate.”

  “Listen, I—”

  A shadow crossed her face and she smiled gently. “I want it, too, Dwyer, I really do. But not now, okay? God, after my divorce I used to hop in the sack with almost anybody who’d ask me, but I kinda lost sight of me in that process, you understand? I want this to mean something because I really kinda like you. Even if you are still in love with Jane.”

  I started to respond to her last statement, but I still hadn’t found my tongue. Anyway, I didn’t know what I felt for Jane anymore. A lot of things—confusing things—maybe nothing more than duty. I wanted to help her out of her predicament with the police, I knew that. Beyond duty, though, I wasn’t sure anymore….

  “Why don’t you ask me what I found out at the bank?” she said.

  Finally I could feel desire slowly, slowly leave me. I said raspily, “Yeah, what?”

  “Boy, that was good. ‘Yeah, what?’”

  She made me laugh, and I loved it. “Okay, what did you find out at the bank?”

  “That an older woman came in, handed over cash, and took a certified check.”

  “Cash?”

  “Cash.”

  “This older woman—” Then I explained to her what the Branigans had told me about the older woman in the art gallery. Who was she? What did she have to do with all this? Was that who Carla Travers had been on the phone with when I was there?

  She whistled softly. “Maybe that’s who I should start checking out.”

  “The older woman?”

  “Yes.”

  “You may make it yet.”

  “As a journalist?”

  “Among other things.”

  “If I put my arm on your shoulder and kiss you on the cheek, will you promise not to grab me?”

  “I’m going to have to think it over.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I.”

  I thought it over. “Okay. But make it fast.”

  “Here goes.”

  She leaned over and kissed me. I wanted to grab her.

  I didn’t.

  “That was sweet,” she said.

  “If you say so.”

  “What a jerk.”

  During our little romance here I’d made up my mind to something. “I have to go,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “You keep trying to find something out about the older woman.”

  “And you’re going to be doing what?”

  I shrugged. “Nothing much,” I said, “just a little breaking and entering.”

  Chapter 13

  Getting in took four good minutes with a wedge of flexible metal I had borrowed one time from a stoolie I’d known during my policeman days. Four cold minutes, thanks to the wind.

  There was an official smell to Elliot’s house now, a residue of the chemicals the ME and the lab people had used during their investigation.

  Even dark, the place was still ridiculously big and the antiques ostentatious. I didn’t know where to start so I elected the most obvious room, the library.

  Fir branches scratched the windows behind the curtains, casting shadows like the fingers of dead men clawing at, me.

  Twenty minutes later I had spread several curious items from his desk drawers on the floor and was looking at them with my flashlight.

  `CULTURE’ IS NOT A DIRTY WORD

  TO THIS AD MAN

  Stephen Elliot, the thirty-nine-year-old creative director of Hammond Advertising, and the man many acknowledge as being the number-one advertising force in the city, is eager to tell you that he prefers classical music to rock, Ingmar Bergman to Alfred Hitchcock.

  “I proudly admit to being a snob,” the darkly handsome ad man says. “If you watch my commercials carefully, you’ll see that I manage to work in a bit of classical music in each one—or even the image of a serious painter or two.”

  Elliot cites his award-winning work for the I’m Chicken fast-food chain and the Go Fast car-rental agencies as examples. Both campaigns feature classical music motifs as part of their novelty.

  Elliot is credited by many in the advertising community with having saved the Hammond shop from bankruptcy. When he joined the firm it had lost millions and was widely assumed to be on the brink of final collapse.

  Elliot’s ideas, according to these insiders, turned Hammond’s fortunes around.

  For all his brashness, Elliot is oddly reticent to discuss the things he’s done for Hammond. Of Bryce Hammond, the agency president, he says, “Bryce is one of the legends in our business. He’s brilliant.”

  Elliot is as much in demand as his commercials. His messianic style, seductive and evangelical at the same time, has made him popular on the speaking circuit—and, many insist, the boudoir circuit as well.

  Unwilling to speak about his past except with the vaguest of generalities, Elliot remains something of a mystery even to those who claim to know him well.

  “I am my work,” he says passionately, a hint of anger in his voice. “I am the Picasso of my business--and that’s how I want to be judged. By my work and nothing else.”

  If he weren’t being buried tomorrow, I would have laughed out loud, or at least smiled at his pretentiousness. But I was beginning to see that that was part of his mystique—his archness. Advertising people would love it—accustomed as they were to the boorishness the field seemed to promote. He looked good in a dinner jacket and mutter
ed a few phrases of French and didn’t tell racist jokes over lunch. What more could you ask for?

  The rest of the stuff in the drawers was mostly a collection of odds and ends, love letters written to him—fortunately for my ego, I didn’t find anything from Jane—innumerable tear sheets from newspapers and magazines with articles about how wonderful he’d been, a framed high-school graduation photo of himself, and finally one of those little cards that come attached to flowers. This one read: “To Buddy, who has taught me far more than I have taught him. All my love. Eve.” Then there was a high-school pennant that said “Grovert Tigers.”

  Finally, I found a small green phone book, a Yellow Pages for the city. On the cover was a name—Eve—with a local phone number. I tore off the section with the number and put it in my pocket.

  I clipped off the flashlight and sat back against a leather couch and thought about everything.

  If I were reasonable at all, I’d go with-the police wisdom and just say that Jane did it. I’d found her with what was presumably the murder weapon in her hand. She’d been out here, she certainly had motive, and she was presently in a state of shock, a circumstance not exactly unknown to killers overcome with remorse and terror.

  But there were troubling and unanswered questions. Where had Stephen Elliot gotten all his money? Who was the older woman at the art gallery who’d slapped him? What was the real nature of the relationship between Elliot and Carla Travers, a woman he could not possibly have considered as a bedmate? And what about David Baxter? In the restaurant that afternoon he’d denied killing Elliot—but what else would he say? There was even Bryce Hammond to consider, though why he would kill Elliot was impossible to guess. Elliot had literally been his meal ticket.

  My mind went back to the mysterious older woman. Where could I find her?

  Going along with the police was beginning to get tempting. Their version of the murder seemed to make the most sense.

  I decided to waste a few more minutes. I brought my flashlight up and peeked inside an unpromising white envelope.

  Even by today’s standards the photographs were startling.

  The fat man wasn’t making love. He was lying back, completely naked, his beer belly riding his otherwise skinny body. He had a beer can in his hand and a silly party hat on his head. His privates were very much at rest. What made him so startling was his grossness—his hairy body, his bald head, his doughy face. He was so real he hurt the eye.

  The contrast between the man and the woman was unbelievable—he was so repellent and she so lovely that they might have been of different species. She was naked, too, lying there next to him on the cheap motel-room bed, but even in this scuzzy circumstance there was beauty in her blond hair and lithe body, the breasts small but shapely, the thatch of hair between her legs as tidy as the rest of her.

  I had forgotten how good Jane looked without her clothes on.

  I don’t know how long I sat there staring at the photo. I wanted to vomit or smash somebody’s face in. Either one would have been all right.

  There were other photos in the envelope. The same man with a different woman, a woman who made David Baxter suddenly a viable suspect. The woman was his wife, Lucy.

  Chapter 14

  I tried to think of her in the hospital, tried to think of her as I’d seen her in the park when she’d called me a few days ago and shown up holding a gun. I tried to relate both these images to the woman I’d just seen in the photographs and—I couldn’t. I had never imagined there was a side to her like that and a part of me still refused to believe it, insisted the snaps were faked. But I knew better, of course; I knew better.

  Stuffing my pockets with various things I’d gleaned from Elliot’s desk, I let myself out again, back to the numbing air that acted now to cleanse me. What I was beginning to learn, and suspect, about Elliot was starting to make me hate him. Then I thought of Jane again, how she’d looked in the lurid light of the amateur photos, and all I could feel was pity—for her, for me, for her parents if they ever found out.

  I got in my car, backed out of Elliot’s curving driveway, and headed for the only man who could answer the questions I now needed to ask.

  Hammond Advertising is located on the top three floors of one of those bunker-like buildings architects are so proud of these days, or at least that generation of architects who have confused function with ugliness. Squat, square, a tribute to concrete, it sat in the center of an island of asphalt, purple except for an occasional lighted window in its twenty stories, the purple of mercury-vapor lights.

  The lobby was empty except for a mannish woman bent over, shining windows. Neither of us seemed especially happy to see the other.

  I took the elevator up, got off, and stepped into a darkness in which I could make out the shape of a splashy reception area.

  I was in a kind of frenzy, looking forward to seeing Bryce the way I’d look forward to seeing a priest. I had to unburden myself of what I’d found tonight. Feelings of love, hate, sorrow—I needed to talk to somebody.

  The floor seemed limitless. I walked past dozens of inky office doorways. Scents of everything from tobacco to perfume to artist’s glue to cleaning solvent floated at me like phantoms from the shadows.

  An odd noise stopped me a moment. I had a sense that it was an alien noise in this environment, but I wasn’t sure why. I looked left, right, beginning to sweat for no reason. I sensed eyes watching me from the gloom. Then I heard a more familiar noise—the peculiar booming sound a 16-mm motion-picture projector makes. I moved toward it through the gloom.

  I opened a door into a screening room, where Bryce Hammond sat in a theater-style seat in the luminous arc of the projector light. Thick blue cigar smoke coiled like snakes through the light. He was laughing so hard he didn’t notice me.

  On screen, in a black-and-white commercial that dated from some time in the mid-sixties, a wimpy man with a big hammer was destroying his lawn mower, pounding it into rubble. “Do what you’ve always wanted to do to that mower of yours—then come down and get a genuine Cartwright mower.” The final scene was of the guy standing on his dead mower like a white hunter on a carcass.

  Another commercial started to run within seconds of this one, but I cleared my throat so that he’d notice me.

  He glanced up, seeming strangely embarrassed. “By God, Dwyer, c’mon in!”

  He punched a button on the arm of his chair. The screen darkened and the houselights came up.

  “You caught me,” he said. “I was screening some of my old commercials for a client, some of the ones that won the Clios. I guess I take an inordinate pride in the work I did when I was—hot.” He waved an arm. Laughed. “You’re wondering where the client is, right? He’s off taking a leak.” He stared at me. “You all right?”

  “Not right now I’m not,” I said. “I need to ask you some questions.”

  His brow knitted, his handsome face grew serious. He nodded for me to sit down.

  “Care for a beer?” he asked.

  “Yeah. That sounds good.”

  He went over to a wall panel, stepped deliberately on the floor, and the panel opened to reveal a dry bar. He took two bottles of imported beer from a small refrigerator and brought one of them over to me.

  “Thanks.”

  “You bet. Hell, you look like you could use it.”

  I decided to get on with it. “What can you tell me about Stephen Elliot’s sexual tastes?”

  He was obviously surprised by my question. “He was a lady-killer as far as I know.”

  “No rumors to the contrary?”

  He smiled. “There are always rumors to the contrary, you know that. Everybody thinks everybody else is queer, just as the old Quaker saying has it.”

  “But nothing ever substantiated?”

  He swigged from his beer. Even in a brown suit he seemed better suited to the deck of a yacht than an office. He shrugged. “No.”

  “What about his background?”

  “His background
?”

  “Yes, where he came from. What college did he go to? Where did he get his agency experience?”

  He eyed me levelly. “Forgive my saying so, but you seem a little— Well, why don’t you try just sitting there and relaxing? You look like you’re going to jump down my throat if I say the wrong thing.”

  “There’s something very wrong here, Bryce.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the way Elliot spent money. You admitted he couldn’t have made it all from advertising.”

  “What else?”

  “His relationship with an older woman—nobody seems to know anything about her. Just that she seemed to fit into his life somehow. Know who I’m talking about?”

  If he was lying, he was good at it. “No.” He paused. “Why did you ask me about his sex life?”

  I had come here to take him into my confidence, to use him as a combination friend-shrink, but now I realized that I couldn’t, that I owed it to Jane to keep the photos secret.

  “Why did you ask?” he repeated.

  “I heard something.”

  “What?”

  I paused, seeing I was getting exactly nowhere. I made a show of relaxing. I even smiled. “I think maybe you’re right, Bryce. I think I’m a bit overwrought.”

  “Hell, man, that’s easy to understand, what with Jane—well, you know.” He leaned forward, swigged his beer again. Then, “If it’ll comfort your mind any, I think Elliot was as straight as a ruler. He liked women too much to be anything else.”

  He had just gotten done reassuring me when the door to the screening room opened and a man walked in.

  The man came over in his country club style western clothes and when Bryce introduced him as Phil Davies, he shook my hand as if he were trying to choke it.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said, and then I turned to Bryce, cuffing him on the shoulder. “I appreciate the beer and the talk. I guess I’m getting a little strung out is all. You know.”

  “I sure do.” He grimaced. “This hasn’t exactly been my idea of a fun couple of days, either. As you know.”