New, Improved Murder

by Ed Gorman

  “Yes,” I agreed. “She’s also an innocent woman.”

  “I’m afraid the police have a fairly convincing case.”

  “That’s because they’re not looking at any other facts,” I said. Such as a dead hooker named Jackie and a clerk named Larry. “I’ll try to get in tomorrow. I’m afraid I’m busy today.”

  “That’s fine,” he said. He sounded as if he were absolving me for not rushing right over.

  From the funeral section in yesterday’s newspaper, I’d gotten the home address of the dead prostitute, Jackie.

  She’d lived in a section of tract homes that looked small enough to be fishing cabins. In the overcast morning their faded colors ran the spectrum of dead dreams. Even the toys in the front yards were rusted. The sidewalk was swollen and cracked. I knocked on a tinny-sounding aluminum door.

  The woman wore black hair dye, a yellow sweater that bound up her sagging breasts, and enough malice in her brown eyes to start a small war someplace. She was maybe fifty and damn unhappy about the fact.

  Of course, what interested me most was the black eye that ran in a semicircle under her left eyelid.

  “Yeah?”

  I showed her my license.

  “So?”

  “I’d like to talk to you.”

  “I ain’t got it.”

  I had been there long enough to feel the effects of the smell. She’d made herself something greasy for breakfast. It lay on the air like the odors of a slaughterhouse.

  “Got what?”

  “You think I don’t know shit, don’t you?” she said.

  “Maybe we’d better start over.”

  “The cops wanted it, then this prick who called in the middle of the night, he wanted it too.”

  “Wanted what?”

  “Shit,” she said.

  “I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Jackie’s book.”

  “What book?”

  “The phone book with the names of her customers in it.”

  “Oh.” This was beginning to make some sense now.

  “You mind if I step in?”

  “Yeah. I do mind.”

  I took a twenty from my wallet. “Will this help?”

  She looked at it skeptically. “My frigging daughter gets stabbed to death and all you’re offering me is a frigging twenty?”

  I had underestimated this lady’s sense of status. Two twenties was the price of admission.

  The house looked as if it were a nuclear testing site.

  In front of a TV set watching cartoons was a miniature representation of this woman. Jackie’s daughter. The kid didn’t even look up.

  “So, like I told you, I ain’t got it,” she said.

  “Mind if I ask how you got the black eye?”

  “I thought you were interested in Jackie.”

  “I am. But I’m also interested in your black eye.”

  “I tripped against a cupboard.”

  “Right.”

  “I don’t give a shit if you believe me or not.”

  The little girl turned around. Looked at me. “Are you one of Mommy’s friends?” she asked.

  “No, hon, I’m not.”

  “Good. Mommy’s friends weren’t nice.”

  “Shut up, Sandy,” the grandmother said.

  Sandy shrugged, turned around, went back to Scooby-Doo.

  “I got to go to the funeral parlor and make plans,” the woman said. “So hurry up.”

  “Did your daughter ever mention a man named Stephen Elliot?”

  “No.”

  The way she said it, so fast, so bold, I knew it was a lie.

  “How about Phil Davies?”

  “No.”

  Same impression.

  “Did she ever discuss her—business with you?”

  “Gee, you can say it, mister, unless you’re some kind of frigging altar boy. My daughter was a hooker. You try to live on AFDC sometime and see where you get. Nowhere is where you get.”

  I took out another twenty. This was like playing a very expensive slot machine. “I’d like to know where her phone book is myself.”

  Just then the phone rang. Grandma swore and stalked over to it like a stevedore going to pick up a three-hundred-pound crate.

  The call seemed to be one of sympathy. “Yeah, you just ain’t safe nowhere these days,” Grandma said. I drifted over to the TV.

  Sandy sat amid the mess. The couch was tattered and sprung in several places. One armchair had only two legs. The TV was an Admiral.

  I sat down on an ottoman stained past color recognition.

  “That used to be my boy’s favorite show,” I said, “until his tenth birthday.”

  “Yeah. Scooby’s my favorite.”

  I smiled. “What other shows do you like?”

  “Oh. Scary ones, you know.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, ‘Nancy Drew’ and ‘Batman.’ They’re good ones.”

  “You like being scared, huh?” I smiled.

  “On TV I like bein’ scared. Not in real life, though. Like those two guys who came here last night.”

  “Two guys?”

  “Yeah. They hurt Grandma.”

  Grandma was watching us and listening and was obviously not happy. To the phone she said, “Hey’m Phyllis, I gotta hurry, okay?”

  “Who were the two guys?” I asked Sandy quickly.

  “I don’t know. They wore masks.”

  I took a shot at it. “Dracula and Frankenstein masks?”

  “Yeah. They were really scary.”

  Grandma slammed the phone and came over. “What the hell you been tellin’ him?”

  She kicked Sandy in the buttock. Not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to make her point.

  “One of them hit me with a crowbar,” I said. “They’re not people to take chances with. I assume you gave them her book.”

  She glared at me. “You assume what you want.” She flung her arm toward the door. “Get out.”

  I nodded good-bye to Sandy and started my way back through the debris.

  “I hope for your sake you gave them the book, otherwise they’ll be back.”

  “You’re damn right I gave them the book. I saw what happened to my own daughter, didn’t I?”

  I looked back at Sandy, a child already so lost no amount of social programs could ever reclaim her. “So long, Sandy,” I said.

  She didn’t acknowledge me. She was back to Scooby-Doo. It was all she had.

  I spent an hour at a casting for a walk-on part as a daddy in a pizza commercial (I’ve got a pretty good daddy-style grin). They’d let me know. Of course.

  Then I called the security service I work for and talked to my boss, who must have bathed himself in Preparation H because he was actually in a decent mood. I wanted to find out if the store I was working in was happy with my work. He said peachy-keen.

  Finally I got to my real work. I drove over to the phone company and looked up a balding guy I’d known from my days on the force. He was an executive now and had the pinkie rings to prove it. But we liked one another and each did the other favors whenever possible or necessary. He took Eve’s phone number from me and went to check it out. He came back twenty minutes later and said, “A hotel suite. Posh fucking territory, my friend. Unlisted number and the whole nine yards.”

  Half an hour later I stood ankle-deep in carpeting in front of the manager’s office at the Wyatt-Smythe hotel, the only luxury place left in the loop. They overdo their image. I wouldn’t want to have illicit kicks in a place that comes on like a cathedral.

  The manager was the new breed. No longer do they try to resemble Adolphe Menjou. Now they’re Corporate America. This guy could be a prosperous word-processor salesman. Gray flannel suit and all.

  He was my age and infinitely brighter. He didn’t seem haughty, just comfortably superior. He didn’t invite me into the office. I wasn’t important enough. He talked to me standing by his receptionist’s desk.
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br />   “I’m working on an investigation,” I said.

  “Oh. You’re a policeman?” He knew better. He just wanted to impress the receptionist.

  “Private.”

  “I assume you have a license.”

  “Of course.” I showed him.

  His receptionist tried to see it too. Probably just curious. He handed it back to me. Then I handed it over to her. I thought it was kind of funny. He didn’t laugh.

  She smiled, anyway, with cute little baby teeth.

  “How may I help you?”

  I showed him the phone number. “This is the number of the penthouse.”

  “It seems to be. Yes, indeed.”

  “I need to know who was in there last night.”

  “Why?”

  “As I said, I’m working on an investigation.”

  “It’s not our policy to divulge things like that.”

  “I can always bring the police in.”

  “Exactly what does that mean?”

  I shrugged. “I’m doing you a favor. This is a nonofficial inquiry. No publicity of any kind.”

  “Why would there be any publicity?”

  “If you knew what I was investigating, you’d know why there would be publicity.”

  I tried to make it sound as ominous as possible.

  He sighed. “Helen Dodson is the lady. Older. Wealthy. One of our best clients, and has been for many years.”

  “Nobody named Eve?”

  “As I said,” he reminded me tartly, “her name is Helen Dodson.”

  “Does this Helen Dodson have a servant?”

  “I wouldn’t call him a servant, exactly. That’s a little ostentatious. More like a man Friday, I would say.”

  “Is she up there now?”

  “I’m afraid she checked out.”

  It was becoming obvious that Eve and Helen Dodson probably had nothing in common. The number I’d gotten from Larry-the-motel-clerk’s phone book could have been written down months earlier. This was the kind of wrong turn you got used to as a homicide detective.

  “I wonder if I might have her address?”

  He looked startled. “Mrs. Dodson’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “To be honest, I’m not sure.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t help you.” He consulted a wristwatch worth enough to feed any small African country. “And I’m also late for an appointment. Good day, sir.”

  With that, he was gone.

  The receptionist smiled at me as soon as he disappeared. “Why don’t you wait here a minute?” she said.

  I watched the pleasing shape of her hips work against the fabric of her tweed skirt as she walked over to one of those formidable filing systems that rotate.

  A few minutes later she was back and handed me a slip of paper.

  “Here’s Mrs. Dodson’s address.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “I’ve never met a real private eye before,” she laughed. “Wait till I tell my son.”

  Around two that afternoon I pulled into a quiet residential street that dead-ended on a few acres of timberland. In the assault of cold wind only the houses—mostly brick two-stories that only doctors and accountants could afford—looked warm.

  The large white wood house with the captain’s walk that sat on the edge of a ravine belonged to Mrs. Helen Dodson.

  After a heart-attack lunch in McDonald’s, I decided that checking her out might be worth the trouble. If nothing else, it would eliminate her from future consideration.

  The call from Dr. Chamales had given me my edge back. The police planned to push Jane Branigan as their one and only suspect—without looking at any other possibilities.

  The brown grass on the edge of the driveway leading to the Dodson house was frozen from an earlier rain. I sensed rather than saw somebody staring out at me from one of the windows. I went up and knocked. Getting no response, I rang the bell. Then I knocked again. The grim day chafed. A collie came up, looking cold. He inspected me, then passed on. Still no response from inside, even though I was sure somebody was in there.

  I tried the bell again. Nothing.

  I decided to commit the unpardonable sin in suburbs such as these. I walked across the grass to the next house.

  A stout woman in a housedress whom I took to be a maid—she was dusting—saw me from the front window and opened the door before I reached it.

  “Hi.”

  “May I help you?” she said. The welcome wagon would probably never hire this woman as a representative.

  “I need a little information about the Dodson house.”

  “My employer isn’t home. You’d need to talk to her. Anyway, I don’t know nothing about Mrs. Dodson.”

  “You know how long she’s lived there?”

  “Why?”

  I showed her my wallet.

  “I don’t know nothing about Mrs. Dodson,” she said. Then she closed the door.

  The collie I’d seen earlier was jumping around a panel truck that was just now pulling into the Dodson driveway. A uniformed delivery man got out and brought a package to the front door. From the green wrapping, it was easy to see that he was bringing flowers.

  There was something off about the sign painted on the side of the truck. It read WINDOM’S FLOWERS, TANROW.

  Tanrow was a small town maybe forty miles from here. In this age when florists wired their flowers, why would a truck drive forty miles for a delivery? The guy got in his truck and pulled away. I started after him, yelling.

  He must have had his radio up full blast. Didn’t hear me. He went down the block with me running after. I could see all the people in their living-room windows, looking at me. Probably they’d soon be calling the cops. It was a good time to get out of there.

  I was too distracted by too many things to do much of a job watching shoplifters that night.

  I tried, of course. I spent a full hour trailing two teenage girls who came awfully close to getting a hair dryer out the door—but they finally figured out who I was and gave up. A pro came in, a three-piece-suit type of pro, and we thrusted and parried for the better part of two hours. When he decided to call it quits he stood near the entrance door and offered me a smile and a salute. I sort of saluted back.

  Without knowing why, I kept thinking about the flower truck from the town of Tanrow. Damn long drive. Of course, I had other things to think about-such as Jane Branigan in the hospital waiting to regain her full faculties so the police could arrest her. And Donna Harris lying abed, as the poets say, with Chad the charmer.

  Then the call came. There couldn’t have been any call in the world that would have surprised me more than that one.

  Chapter 24

  “Anyway,” Donna Harris said, angling her Chevrolet into a parking place outside the Hilton located along the river, “I figured it would be a good excuse to see you. Plus we can check out all the suspects.”

  Earlier tonight I’d had Donna, in my mind, ready to remarry her ex-husband. All she’d tell me was, “Maybe I’ll tell you later.” She’d said that while she’d waited for me in my living room as I changed from work clothes to a suit and tie. We were going, at her expense, to the Addy Awards, the local ad club’s annual bash.

  Now that we were there, I realized that I was likely to irritate more than a few people tonight, among them Carla Travers, David and Lucy Baxter, and probably even Bryce Hammond. Private detectives had a way of spoiling festivities.

  The wind chewed at us as we entered along a wall of glass that revealed a poolside party. Perhaps as many as two hundred people in tuxes and evening gowns stood by the water, holding champagne glasses and making like windup toys with little bursts of laughter. Were they really having as good a time as they seemed? She took my hand.

  “You mind?” she asked.

  “Not at all.”

  “Good.”

  Her words made me feel ridiculously happy. Her perfume did the rest of the job, seducing me despite the
chilly, starless night.

  Only a few people seemed interested in us as we descended the steps. The combo in the corner kept right on playing what seemed to be a disco version of “My Funny Valentine” (I do not lie).

  “Hey,” several people said to her.

  Donna smiled and said “Hey” right back. (“What the hell is ‘hey’ supposed to mean?” she asked. “I think they pick that stuff up in places like Atlantic City and Vegas,” I explained. “Yeah, along with crabs.”) We found drinks—bourbon for me, scotch for her, though she admitted this would be her one and only hard liquor drink for the night—and then we danced two or three times in the deepest shadows we could find. I held her tighter than I should have for public view and she held me back just as tight. I lost myself in the clean smell of her red hair and the tang of her neck as I kissed it.

  Then she said “God!” as if she’d discovered oil and I realized then that she’d touched the goose egg on the back of my head. “What happened to you?”

  So I told her about the punks at Malley’s bar. I tried not to sound too much like Clint Eastwood saying it was nothing, but I’d honestly forgotten about my head until she mentioned it.

  Then I told her about the threatening phone call afterward.

  “Well, that clears Jane Branigan, doesn’t it?”

  “It does for me, anyway.”

  “Well, won’t the police agree with you?”

  I shrugged. “Not necessarily. A good cop would just say that the mugging and the phone call were a coincidence. That they were talking about some other case.”

  “What other case?”

  “It wouldn’t matter. Since the punks didn’t mention Jane, the police would still insist it was all a coincidence—or at least that I needed a lot more proof for them to pay any serious attention.”

  She frowned. We had gone back to dancing, but now we held each other at arm’s length so we could talk. “My first issue’s got to be finished a week from today. I talked to the printer. I haven’t been doing a very good job, I’m afraid.”

  “A wonderful job.”

  She stared at my eyes. “You’re getting dippy, Dwyer.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’m serious. Don’t placate me. I’m doing a lousy job. I haven’t even found out about who the older woman was in Stephen Elliot’s life.”

  I told her about the penthouse and the phone number and Mrs. Helen Dodson and the flower truck from Tanrow.