New, Improved Murder

by Ed Gorman

  “I see,” I said.

  He shook his head. “You got eight points out of ten until you opened your mouth, young man.”

  “I must’ve been thinking of some other kind of pizza.”

  One of the production people said, “Daddy Number Four just came in, Mr. Todd.”

  I took my cardigan sweater and left.

  * * *

  I tried Donna’s office several times, but there was no answer. I needed some friendship, so I swung by Malley’s bar, where he can usually be seen having a microwave sandwich for lunch, which is just what he was doing today.

  He was also watching the noon news. “Reagan, man, he’s made a big difference in this country.”

  “Yeah. Most of us are starving to death.”

  “Crap—he’s the best thing that’s happened to us.”

  “I’d hate to see the worst.”

  He glowered and went back to watching the tube. The local newsman was of the hair-spray, Ken doll type. With his big hairy paw, he gestured at the screen. “Lookit that bastard. So pretty.” He minced his voice. “I seen this Sid Caesar routine once. Had a guy like this newscaster, right? Only when the camera went around his back, there was this windup key. The guy was like a prop or something.”

  For some reason Malley’s image made me laugh out loud. Maybe I needed relief from knowing that Jane Branigan was being booked, from knowing that my detective days seemed far behind me. Thus far I’d proven myself to be pretty inept.

  “Good to hear you laugh,” Malley said. “You had me worried the other night. You were really down.”

  I kept watching the screen. I suspected that there was indeed a windup key sticking out of the news anchor’s back.

  “Now all I got to do is get you fixed up with the right broad,” Malley said.

  “I think I met her.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Donna.”

  He thought about it. Apparently if her name had been Polly or Sheena, he would have complained.

  “Not bad,” he said. “College grad?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “You’re making a mistake.”

  “Why?”

  “When you think about it, we all had good mothers, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And not one of them was a college grad.”

  “Yeah. I guess so.”

  “Well.”

  “Well, what?”

  “So how come you’re so unhappy with broads all the time?”

  “Maybe because I’m a jerk. Maybe I make myself unhappy.”

  “Uh-uh. It’s because you go out with college grads. I mean, look at the fucking record. Your wife was a college grad, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Then Jane Branigan. College grad?”

  I nodded.

  “And now this Donna. Do I have to predict how it’s going to end up?”

  Malley always pursued his ideas with the passion, if not the panache, of an Oxford don in a debating society. He banged his fist and jabbed the air. He was a frustrated prosecuting attorney.

  “So what’m I supposed to do, walk up to a woman on the street and ask her IQ?”

  “Right,” he said, “and if it’s below sixty, jump ‘er.”

  I didn’t know which was funnier—his image of the windup newsman or his theory about the women in my life.

  “Actually, I’d better go back and call her,” I said. “Cruisin’ for a bruisin’, Dwyer, that’s you.”

  An Alabama song accompanied my phone call to Donna.

  “I’ve been wondering about you,” I said. “How’s it going?”

  Something was odd, wrong, in her voice. “Oh, pretty good.”

  “You sound really thrilled about hearing from me.”

  “Things are just a little screwed up, is all.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Oh, nothing’s really wrong. Chad’s just asked me to marry him.”

  I thought of Malley’s theory. Maybe he was right. Maybe I should go out looking for a woman who liked “Gilligan’s Island” reruns and thought Liberace was a concert pianist.

  “You still there?” she said.

  “Yeah.” A frog the size of a Shetland pony had jumped down my throat.

  “It’s a bummer.”

  “There’s an expression I haven’t heard in fifteen years,” I said. I tried to be light. Lead pancakes.

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  That line worked on me like surgery. Implicit in it was that she was at least thinking it over.

  A familiar panic rose up in me, a mild form of hyperventilation. Damn, but I liked this woman and I didn’t want to see her—

  “How about going for a ride with me?” I said.

  “Where?”

  The idea was ridiculous and unnecessary and I knew she wouldn’t go for it—but I also had the hope that she would say yes and be alone with me for a few hours and let my modest charms work on her.

  “Tanrow.”

  “Where?”

  “I told you. The other day. Those flowers being delivered.”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  “There could be,” I said, flinging my voice like a pair of doomed dice, “something important to the case there.”

  For the first time she sounded at least a tad less than suicidal.

  “You really think so?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You going now?”

  “I thought I would.”

  I wanted her alone in my car.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “This could be the break we’ve been waiting for.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Well …”

  “I’ll be out in front of your office in twenty minutes.”

  I hung up before she could say no.

  Chapter 28

  “I don’t want to lose your friendship, no matter what happens,” Donna Harris said when we were on the interstate and about ten miles from the exit that would take us to Tanrow.

  A low sky filled with fat black clouds. Snow. Or rain. Or both. Lonely cows on frozen hills. Perfect complement to my mood.

  During the drive she’d explained what had happened. How Chad had had some kind of “vision,” it seemed. One that “proved” they were destined to be together. He was already in the process of dumping his stenographer. She was already seeing a Japanese shrink (the significance of his nationality eluded me, but I didn’t say anything).

  And so here was Donna, not knowing what to do. On the one hand she loved him (“I have to be honest with you, Dwyer”), but on the other hand she wasn’t exactly certain about the quality of that love (“I’ve spent the last fifteen years of my life with him, maybe it’s just a habit”), but then again there was me (“God, I really like you, Dwyer, I mean in all respects. You’re really tender and you’re really funny and you’re really cute”) and couldn’t I see what a mess things were?

  “But no matter what happens,” she repeated, “I don’t want to lose your friendship, all right?”

  “Sure. We can always exchange recipes.”

  “I’m serious.”

  I went back to staring at the frozen farmland that cleaved the line of gray horizon.

  I leaned forward and found a jazz station on the radio. Miles came on. Bleak as the day itself, but beautifully so.

  “God, Dwyer, I hate to ask you, but could we change stations?”

  “Why?”

  “Jazz really bums me out.”

  “Jazz does?”

  “That’s why I listen to Top 40.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s just like Muzak.”

  She found a Top 40 station.

  Despite her tear-threatening eyes and the sullen angle of her otherwise lovely mouth, her foot started tapping. I had to smile. She was crazy and I loved her.

  Maybe precisely because she was crazy.

  “Maybe we should talk about the case,” she said,
seeing the Tanrow exit sign ahead.

  “Yeah,” I said, though obviously I didn’t feel much like it.

  “You think there’s something funny about the flowers being delivered from here?”

  “Sure.” I explained about florists wiring or phoning orders to one another.

  “So why didn’t you just call the florist yourself?”

  I decided to just admit it. “I wanted to be alone with you. Plead my case.” I looked over at her. Held out my hand. She put hers in it. I felt wonderful and terrible at the same time—filled equally with hope and despair.

  “I don’t want you to go back to your husband.”

  “I know you don’t, Dwyer, and I’m sorry things are so screwed up.”

  I let her cry.

  She leaned over and snapped off the Top 40. “That stuff’s such shit,” she sobbed.

  Tanrow was one of those movie-set little towns you see less and less often in the Midwest these days. A town square complete with Civil War memorial and bandstand. Neat little businesses with striped tarp awnings built around the square. A church steeple like a rocket against the sky. Big-eyed children marking the progress of our car, our out-of-county license plates making us curiosities of a sort. A theater with a marquee at least forty years old sat on the corner where we pulled into a parking place. I could imagine the marquee resplendent with such names as Alan Ladd and Randolph Scott and Rory Calhoun.

  The truck I’d seen the other day was parked in an alley next to the florist shop.

  We sat staring at the place, the people going in and out. One of my bucolic moments overcame me. I’d always had this fantasy of moving to a small town such as this. Start another family. Learn how to talk to birds and plant tomatoes. It’s never going to happen.

  “Gee, this is the first time I’ve really felt like a detective,” Donna said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Just sitting here. Watching. Kind of a stakeout, right?”

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  “I’m sorry things are so crazy, Dwyer.”

  “I know.”

  She touched my hand again. “You know I like you.”

  I nodded.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  The various flower scents combined to create an almost narcotic odor, like a room where marijuana is smoked too much and too often. My stomach curdled. “Boy, doesn’t it smell beautiful in here?” Donna said.

  On either side of the place were big refrigerated glass panels behind which lay jungles of flowers. A neat little man with horn-rimmed glasses in a white doctor’s smock was making up a colorful arrangement. “Hi,” he said in a booster-club voice, “may I help you?”

  I put out my hand. He shook it with a hard, quick grip, like a snakebite. “Ab Windom,” he introduced himself. Then I showed him my license.

  He looked at me with a smile on his face. “I think we should give you some sort of plaque or something.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I’ll bet you’re the first private investigator who ever set foot in Tanrow. You’re about as unlikely as an astronaut coming through here.”

  “Well,” I laughed, “it’s nice to be a pioneer, I guess.”

  “How may I help you?”

  “Your truck was in the city the other day.” I gave him the Dodson woman’s address.

  “Sure,” he said confidently. “We’re there every week.”

  “Every week?”

  “Yes, and have been for the past six years.”

  “Mind if I ask why?”

  He smiled. “The customer wants it, that’s why. Two dozen roses. Once a week.”

  “Why don’t you just wire the flowers?”

  “Like I said, that isn’t what the customer wants.”

  “Would you tell me who the customer is?”

  He shrugged. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know.”

  “What?”

  “Afraid I don’t.”

  Donna looked at me and said. “Well, how does he get paid?”

  “Ask him,” I said.

  She turned to Windom. She was nervous. “How do you get paid?”

  “You must be his assistant, right?”

  “I’m a reporter,” she said. There was pride in her voice. Even confidence. It was fetching.

  “Reporter? Hey, what’s going on here?” He adjusted his glasses as if to get a better look at us.

  “A murder investigation,” I said, hoping the ominousness of my remark would ensure his cooperation.

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Afraid not.”

  “God. A murder investigation.”

  “So how do you get paid?”

  “Well, every month I get a money order.”

  “Return address?”

  “Your hometown. Just the postmark.”

  “You say this has been going on for six years?”

  “Yes. A man called me back there. Placed a standing order. I haven’t heard from him since.”

  From my wallet I took a clip of the newspaper story concerning Stephen Elliot’s death. “You ever see this man before?”

  He stared at it and started to shake his head no, and then he said, “Why, my God, that’s Gil.”

  “Gil?”

  “Gil Powell. I wouldn’t have recognized him.”

  “You know him?”

  “Knew him. He grew up in Tanrow. Then he— Well, something happened.” Windom seemed reluctant to talk. “Lot of painful memories for this town.”

  Donna said, “Like what?” She was getting better at it.

  The door opened behind us. An elderly couple came in. Windom excused himself. The couple wanted an anniversary corsage. They were in their seventies and holding hands. I admired and envied them.

  “Maybe we’re on to something,” Donna said excitedly.

  “Maybe we are.”

  “God, this is great.”

  Then Windom came back and she was all business again.

  “What about the painful memories?” Donna said.

  Windom shrugged. “Well, it’s no secret. He got himself involved—romantically involved, if you understand me—with a high-school teacher. The woman was a—well, very beautiful, very high-strung. There were some who said she was insane and some who said she was an alcoholic. But—” A kind of sadness came into his eyes. “I was single myself in those days. Had a few dates with her. She was very—sophisticated—for a town like Tanrow. Didn’t have many friends. Then she and Gil—”

  This time it was a young man who came in and interrupted us. He seemed as nervous about buying flowers as I’d been at his age buying condoms.

  Then a middle-aged woman walked through the door.

  Windom smiled. “Business is getting good. Tell you what, who you should talk to, I mean, is Mrs. Paul Rutledge. She had a rooming house where the teacher stayed. Mrs. Rutledge is in the phone book.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I turned and started to leave.

  “Wait a minute,” Donna said. “You forgot to ask him something.”

  “What?”

  “Mr. Windom?”

  “Yes,” he said, turning back to Donna.

  “What was the teacher’s name?”

  “Oh,” he smiled. “I forgot to tell you, didn’t I? It was Eve. Eve Evanier.”

  Chapter 29

  The Rutledge house was one of those big old three-story jobs that seemed ideal for hiding secrets. Shuttered windows hid the interior from scrutiny and the chipped paint and the leaning chimney spoke of tough times. A lean dog that seemed to be all ribs and teeth flung himself at the car like an arrow.

  “No way,” Donna said. “I’ll wait here.”

  “Hey, detectives and mail carriers aren’t supposed to care. We go anyway.”

  “Not me.”

  “C’mon.”

  I opened the door to show her that I wasn’t afraid. Then the mutt tried to eat my hand. I closed the door instantly. His head came up to the window. He showed
me his molars as if I were doing a dental inspection.

  “God, look at him,” she said as he drooled all over the window.

  His spittle formed clammy puddles on the glass. He was pretty disgusting.

  Donna and I sat back and watched the house. The only thing that struck me as odd was the Oldsmobile convertible parked at an angle to the house. Ready for a fast getaway.

  “How are we going to get in there?” Donna asked.

  “Simple. I’m going to drive right up to the front door and we’re going to make a run for the screened-in porch. We should be able to beat the dog.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.”

  “You’re really crazy. He’ll gnaw my leg off by the time I get to the porch.”

  “Lucky dog.” Even given the turmoil of our emotional life, I had hardly forgotten how desirable she was. So far all we’d shared was some relatively chaste kissing.

  I started the car again.

  “You ready?” I asked.

  “Jeez.”

  I put the car in gear. Drove up to the porch. My plan was simple. Run for the door. Fling it open. Keep the dog outside.

  “Okay,” I said.

  And I took off.

  The Rutledge house was located on the edge of town. There were no other houses within a half mile.

  The dog could eat us and nobody would know. He got close to my heel, but I did a kind of kick—part Kung Fu, part Fred Astaire—and held him off just enough so that I could reach the steps three feet away.

  “Shit!” Donna screamed behind me.

  She was only two steps behind me. “Hurry up!”

  I reached the screen door, ripped it open, and let her run in past me. Then I jerked the door closed and watched the mutt hurl himself against the screening.

  He was mad.

  Donna was ecstatic. “We showed him.”

  “Yeah. We did.”

  “He really pisses me off.”

  “The dog?” She sounded as if she were describing Richard Speck.

  “Who else would I be talking about?”

  “Oh.”

  The front door led to a venerable vestibule that smelled of old wood, dust, and furniture polish. A different world spun in the molecules of this place—the world of my grandfather. We went inside.

  On the right wall were several handmade wooden mailboxes. They stood empty. I glanced inside. Dust had accumulated in them an inch thick. The rooming house had fallen on hard times long ago.