New, Improved Murder

by Ed Gorman

  “Jeez, I really appreciate being clued in like this,” she said.

  “You upset?”

  “A little bit, yes.”

  I couldn’t resist. “Well, maybe you’d find these things out sooner if you spent a little more time with me instead of your ex-husband—”

  “Up yours, Dwyer.”

  She sulked for the rest of the dance—kind of a swing version of “The Impossible Dream”—but by the time the combo did their fox-trot rendition of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” she held me tight again.

  The lights had dimmed. The din had dulled. I was struck by how much this reminded me of a high-school prom for chaperones. We were all a little long in the tooth, but we had the same approaching-midnight needs—the ache for fleshly solace, the easing of daily terror, the soothing grace of whispers. I pulled her tighter and then she said, “I’ll tell you about it, if you want.”

  Actually, I’d been trying not to think about it. Not with a lot of success.

  “It’s none of my business.”

  “You really don’t want to know? I mean, I’m in kind of a bind here. If I don’t tell you what happened between Chad and me after dinner last night, I’ll feel as if I’m mistreating you—that you aren’t important enough to level with. But on the other hand if I tell you—”

  “Maybe you’d better not.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah.” I had an image of her in his arms. I wanted to lose that image.

  “Nothing happened.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “You wouldn’t tell me if something had happened between you.”

  “Sure I would. That’s the whole point of bringing it up, Dwyer. So that we’ll get used to telling each other the truth.”

  “Nothing happened? Really?”

  “Really.”

  I smiled and we went on dancing.

  A few minutes later she interrupted my bliss again by saying, “Now that I’ve told you about Chad, how are you feeling about Jane Branigan these days?”

  “I want to help her get free of this murder rap.”

  “Besides that, I mean.”

  “I like her.”

  “How about love her? You still think you love her?”

  “That’s the weird thing. I don’t think I do anymore.” This time she pulled me tighter and we stayed that way for a long, long time.

  Half an hour later we opened the doors leading to the main ballroom, which was presently all got-up in a nightclub motif. Tiny lamps on tiny tables gave the room a European air while on the long stage a master of ceremonies was handing an award to somebody. The three or four hundred people in the ballroom applauded. It was nearly eleven. They had been applauding for almost three hours.

  We took a table in the rear, ordered martinis from the waiter, and sat back to watch the ceremonies for a while.

  “They always leave the important awards till last anyway,” Donna said, lovely in the lamplight. On our way up here she’d plucked an orchid from a vendor’s display and set it jauntily behind her left ear. I wondered if she knew how good she looked to me.

  For the next ten minutes a screen that appeared magically from the top of the stage was filled with examples of commercials. Not one of them starred me or anybody I knew, even though they were all local. So much for vanity.

  Even without me, many of them managed to be very good—by turns funny, warm, instructive. Unfortunately, their makers detracted from the commercials somewhat—accepting the awards with a great deal of arrogance or smugness or artsy posturing.

  Several acceptance speeches later I was worn down. Much as I like acting, close proximity to show-biz types dispirits me. They make me want to hang around plumbers or farmers or guys who fix flat tires. There were too many in-group jokes and far too much credit given and taken. They were honoring people who made TV commercials, for God’s sake, not brain surgeons or missionaries.

  “You look mad,” Donna said.

  “This is getting depressing. All these berserk fucking egos.”

  “You are mad.”

  “Yeah.”

  Then I saw Carla Travers.

  Even in a chiffon evening gown she still looked like a lady who could wheel a semi around an icy corner. Still looked like the lady who’d brained me with a gun in her apartment. She walked a tad unsteadily and there was something sad about her beefy shoulders and the mannish gait to her walk. I thought of her abortion story, how the jukebox had played while the baby was being ripped out, and I thought of her odd, possessive attitude toward Stephen Elliot. I needed to talk to her again.

  Then something else interesting happened.

  Not a minute after Carla left the ballroom so did David and Lucy Baxter. If only one of them had gone, I wouldn’t have thought much of it. But two of them made things suspicious, particularly so soon after Carla.

  God wanted to make sure I got the point—because a minute after the Baxters passed through the doors, Phil Davies got up from somewhere near the front of the room and left, too, looking different from the night he’d begged me to leave his house before his invalid wife got suspicious.

  “Gee,” Donna said.

  “No kidding.”

  “Now if I were a detective, Dwyer, would I follow them?”

  “Right away.”

  “Let’s go.”

  The night crew was vacuuming and dusting and polishing when we reached the staircase.

  We looked left, right, up, down.

  Not a sign of any of them.

  “You take the ladies’ room,” I said.

  The men’s room was empty. So was a small lounge where a piano player played badly at “Skylark.” I tried the swimming pool area. Nothing.

  Ten minutes later I found Donna outside the ballroom again.

  “So much for my first assignment as a detective,” she said. “Zip.”

  “I’ve got an idea.”

  “I’m glad you do.”

  In the elevator she said, “Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “I thought we were working together.”

  “We are.”

  “Then how about giving me a clue about what the heck we’re doing, Dwyer?”

  “You sound kind of drunk.”

  “I am, but so what?”

  “I thought we’d check out the register.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, at bashes like these, guests sometimes rent rooms or suites for private parties.”

  “Hey, good idea.”

  She really was drunk.

  The night clerk was another IBM graduate. He didn’t look susceptible to my private-eye routine so I pretended we were looking for a private party. “Actually,” I smiled, “it could be listed under several names. If I could see the register—”

  Donna, who was weaving slightly by now, whispered a bit loudly, “Gosh, could you hurry? I really need to find a bathroom.”

  The night clerk, having heard, looked unhappy. But her remark seemed to convince him that we really were just harmless partygoers. He showed us the register. Tonight Room 708 belonged to Phil Davies. We thanked him and left.

  Donna had found a bathroom and redone her makeup and she was walking straighter by the time the elevator let us off on the seventh floor.

  “This is fun,” she said, “being a detective. I may write the story in the first person.”

  “Kind of like a private-eye adventure?”

  “Yeah. Like that.”

  “Right,” I said doubtfully.

  I paused in the corridor, leaned my head into 708, and listened.

  Nothing special. Conversation. Ice cubes dropping into glasses. Water running in a sink someplace.

  “You ready?”

  “You nervous?” she asked.

  “Sort of.”

  “So am I. Only more than sort of.”

  “It’ll be all right.”

  “I sure hope so.”

  I knocked.

&nbs
p; Phil Davies must have been standing next to the door. He opened it instantly. He stood there in his country-western style tuxedo, a deep brown bourbon drink in his hand and a frown on his beefy face.

  “I don’t seem to remember inviting you,” he said.

  Donna squeezed my hand tight enough to grind my knuckles together. She wasn’t kidding about being nervous.

  “You did.” I kept my eyes level on him. “Right after your friends at the motel died.”

  He nodded angrily to Donna. “Who the hell’s she?”

  “Donna Harris. Ad World,” she said. Actually, she sounded pretty good saying it.

  “You’re a reporter?”

  She looked at me as if for confirmation. “Yes, she is,” I said, since she couldn’t seem to speak for herself, “and a damn good one.”

  This time she squeezed my hand in gratitude.

  Lucy Baxter appeared behind Davies, radiant in a green silk dress that flattered her full breasts.

  “Oh, more people? Aren’t you inviting them in, Phil?”

  “I don’t think so,” Davies said. He smiled nastily at me. “Riffraff.”

  “What he means by that,” I said to Lucy Baxter, “is that I’ve never spent a night in the Palms motel.”

  She looked confused by that, shrugged lovely shoulders, and said, “Oh, don’t be a poop, Phil. Let them come in. This party needs a little cheering up.” She was drunker than Donna. There seemed to be a lot of that in the air.

  She slid a long, graceful arm around his waist and angled him away from the door so that we could come in.

  Donna glanced at me skeptically, but I escorted her inside.

  And there they stood—David Baxter, Carla Travers, Lucy Baxter, and Phil Davies.

  Staring at us.

  “Bourbon is fine for me,” I said.

  David and Lucy Baxter exchanged a murky look, and then Lucy said, “What about your friend?”

  “Club soda,” Donna said, trying very hard to act sober.

  The door leading from the room to the veranda was, surprisingly, open. Who would want to stand outside on a night that was below freezing? Then I decided it must be the heat here. The room was hot. And the moods of the people weren’t much different.

  “Lovely dress,” Lucy Baxter said to Donna. I kept remembering how Lucy had looked in the photograph with Phil Davies—her beautiful, young nakedness contrasting with his middle-aged paunch.

  A Nat “King” Cole album started playing on the stereo. “Phil hates rock ‘n’ roll.” David Baxter laughed.

  Lucy and David went out onto the veranda. Danced despite the cold. Phil glowered at me and went to the bathroom. That left us alone with Carla.

  “One thing, Dwyer,” she said. “I’ve got to give you your balls. You got real guts to be here.”

  “Kind of an odd little group, isn’t it?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Only that I’m wondering what you have in common. Why did you decide to have a party together?”

  “Maybe we’re friends.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She knocked back the rest of her drink and staggered over to the bar for another. She looked fat and sad in her prom-like formal. And old.

  “Maybe I should take some guesses about what you have in common,” I said.

  “Maybe you should just get the hell out of here.”

  “Stephen Elliot.”

  “What?”

  “That’s the only thing you people could possibly have in common.”

  “Yeah, that’s what this is, a wake.”

  I walked over to the veranda. Donna sat on the couch, staring at her hands. This embarrassed her, the subtle, social violence of the confrontation.

  “Probably not a wake,” I said, “maybe more like a meeting.”

  Phil Davies appeared again. Carla Travers shot him a warning look.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Dwyer here is trying to figure out why we got together.”

  “It’s none of his damn business,” Davies said. He went to the bar. Refilled. Nat Cole played on. Beautifully. It could have been 1956. I wanted to forget about all this nonsense, dance with Donna. Only an image of Jane in the hospital kept me pushing.

  The song ended and the Baxters came back in. They were flushed from the cold night. Lucy said, “Looks like the party came to an abrupt halt.”

  “Uninvited guests,” David Baxter said. He still looked like Paul McCartney, but a malevolent version. He had the swagger you get from walking the deck of a yacht. “Probably time they leave.”

  “One of you killed Stephen Elliot,” I said.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” David Baxter said.

  “One of you killed Elliot. And a motel clerk and a hooker named Jackie. You also hired two punks to work me over last night.”

  Davies laughed. “You’re real good at trying to pin things on people. The other night I was your prime suspect.”

  “Maybe you still are,” I said.

  “Why the hell did you come here?”

  “To serve notice,” I said. “One of you is a killer and you’re not going to get away with it. There’s some reason you came together here tonight, some reason I don’t know yet. Maybe when I figure it out everything will make more sense.”

  David Baxter stepped forward. “Go figure it out somewhere else, asshole.”

  Lucy put a hand on his arm.

  There was no point in pushing further. I had done what I’d wanted to do. Whoever of them was the killer would be rattled enough to respond somehow, all I had to do was wait. I planned to call Edelman the next day and tell him all about it and have the police keep tight scrutiny on every one of them.

  “Get out of here,” Baxter said again.

  Donna was up. Pulling me away.

  For a moment they froze—like a photograph—the four of them. They did not work at the same agency; they obviously came from widely divergent social backgrounds; they didn’t even have age in common. What could have brought them to this room together tonight?

  “Come on,” Donna said.

  As we left the snapshot stayed in my mind. Why were they together tonight?

  Near the ballroom, on our way out, several small groups of people stood finishing nightcaps and comparing notes on the now concluded awards ceremony.

  “You know,” Donna said, squeezing my arm, “I kind of miss being in advertising. I knew a lot of nice people, actually.”

  This was the first thing she’d said to me since we’d left Davies’s room.

  “You could always get an agency job again,” I said.

  She pulled on my arm, stopping me. “I’m just scared, is all. I mean, up there in that room— One of those people probably is a murderer, right?”

  “Right.”

  “God, I just can’t believe it.”

  “Yeah, but think what a great story it will make for Ad World.”

  But her wine-buzzy senses were still reeling. “It’s sort of biblical. Cain and Abel. A real murder, I mean.”

  “Land o’goshin.”‘ I smiled.

  “Oh, don’t be so smug.”

  I was about to say that I’d leave that to her first husband, but a hand gripped my biceps and turned me partially around.

  In his black dinner jacket and black tie, his white mane of hair contrasting with his tanned face, Bryce Hammond was an impressive man. He even knew how to carry a drink just so, like in whiskey ads.

  “Your lot seems to be improving these days,” Hammond smiled.

  “Hi, Mr. Hammond,” Donna said. She sounded as if she were about ten.

  “’Mr. Hammond’?” he said. “How about Bryce?”

  “You don’t know who I am, do you?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t, young lady, but I’m certain I’ve never met you. I wouldn’t have forgotten you.”

  “Well, actually, you did meet me, Mr. Hammond.”

  “Outrageous. I don’t believe it.” He
was trying out for Cary Grant.

  “I applied for a copywriting job right out of college. You met me in the hall one day and said I should calm down or I’d never get a job. It was really sweet of you.”

  “Well,” he said, “I guess at my age being sweet is about the best you can do.”

  “Oh, Mr. Hammond.”

  I was about to throw up. I didn’t know who was worse, Hammond for fishing for compliments or Donna for feeding them to him.

  A portly, bearded man in a cutaway walked past carrying several Addy awards.

  Hammond raised his drink to the man in salute. “Reeves. Good art director. Worked a lot with Stephen Elliot.” He shook his head, seeming suddenly unhappy. “With Elliot dead, this will be the last year we win any major awards, I’m afraid.”

  Donna went at it again. “Oh, but you’re a famous copywriter, Mr. Hammond.”

  “Was, my dear, was.”

  The portly man was about to have his picture taken and was waving for Hammond to join him.

  “Do you mind?” he asked.

  “Not at all,” I said.

  “Nice to meet you,” he said to Donna.

  She looked thrilled.

  When he left she said, “He was really a legend a long time ago. In my advertising classes in college we studied his commercials.”

  “Then Stephen Elliot came along.”

  “Don’t you think Mr. Hammond ever got jealous?”

  “I’m sure he did. But what could he do? He’s a realist. His time had passed. Elliot paid the bills.” She shook her head. “The poor man.”

  “Come on,” I said, “or I’m the one who’s going to get jealous.”

  She stopped me as I tugged her toward the door. She touched her head. “Guess what I’ve got?”

  She looked like the “before” part in an Anacin commercial.

  “This much alcohol always gives me a headache. I guess I should’ve told you, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “huh.”

  Chapter 25

  On the way to the hospital in the morning I called the security firm I worked for and asked one of the younger people if they’d do me a favor and run a credit check on all the people who’d been in Phil Davies’s hotel room the night before. Credit checks lead in all kinds of interesting directions sometimes.

  “Hello.”