The Man Who Couldn't Miss

by David Handler

  Dedication

  For Gunga Dan Mallory, who gave me an Act Three

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*

  About the Author

  About the Book

  Read On

  Also by David Handler

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  His voice on the phone was booming and authoritative, especially for five thirty in the morning. “I’m trying to reach a Mr. Stewart Hoag.”

  “And you have.”

  “Sir, this is Sergeant Frank Tedone of the State Police’s Organized Crime Investigative Task Force. I’m sorry to bother you at such an early hour.”

  “Not a problem. I was already up.” I was up early every morning during that summer of 1993. Merilee’s rooster, Old Saxophone Joe, started crowing well before five. And I’d finally, joyously found my voice again after the somewhat awkward decade-long crash landing since the New York Times Sunday Book Review had proclaimed me the “first major new literary voice of the 1980s.” I was writing like an excited kid again, morning, noon and night. When the phone rang I’d already been pounding away for an hour on my 1958 solid steel Olympia portable out in the spartan guest cottage on my ex-wife’s eighteen-acre farm in Lyme, Connecticut. My fingers could barely keep up with the words that were flying from my head as Lulu, my basset hound, lay under the writing table with her head on my foot, snoring like a lumberjack. Her sinus allergies have a tendency to act up when she spends time in the country.

  Actually, Lulu wasn’t super thrilled about life on Merilee’s farm. She was afraid of the night creatures—coyotes, fishers, bobcats, gray foxes, raccoons and barn owls. She was afraid of the chickens out in their wire coop that was attached to the barn. She was afraid of the ducks in the duck pond. She was afraid of the duck pond itself. Can’t swim. Only dog I’ve ever met who can’t. Just sinks to the bottom glug-glug-glug. Frankly, Lulu would have been a lot happier scarfing up pickled herring in the air-conditioned lobby of the Algonquin Hotel. But wherever I go, Lulu goes. We’re a team, like Flo & Eddie.

  It may interest you New England architectural history buffs to know that Merilee’s guest cottage had originally served as a private chapel back when a prosperous shipping magnate named Josiah Whitcomb built the nine-room farmhouse back in 1736. It may also interest you to know that I would much rather have been sleeping inside of that nine-room farmhouse with Merilee instead of sharing the former chapel’s iron bed every night with Lulu and her snoring. But in the immortal words of Michael Jagger, you can’t always get what you want. Besides, summering anywhere on the farm beat the hell out of sweating away in my steamy fifth-floor walk-up on West Ninety-Third Street.

  “How may I help you, Sergeant?”

  “Mr. Hoag, your name has come up in connection with a criminal investigation.”

  “My name? How so?”

  “Are you acquainted with a Robert Romero? Robert John Romero?”

  I searched my memory bank. My fallback second career as America’s preeminent ghostwriter of celebrity memoirs had brought me into contact with numerous megastars and their hangers-on, quite a few of them murderers. But none named Romero. Robert John Romero. “Don’t believe so, why?”

  “He listed you as a personal reference on a job application he filled out last month at B & B Building Supply in East Fairburn. The address he put down for you is on Joshua Town Road in Lyme. Is that correct?”

  “It is. Actually, it’s my ex-wife’s house.”

  “That would be Miss Nash?”

  “Yes, it would. And yet you say he listed me?”

  “That’s correct. Were you ever contacted by the employer?”

  “No, I wasn’t. He gave them this phone number?”

  “He did. Is there any significance to that?”

  I didn’t tell him that the line he’d reached me on was Merilee’s unlisted business line. That there was absolutely no way someone I’d never heard of would have it. My many scrapes with the law had taught me not to volunteer anything. “Why are you looking for this guy?”

  “B & B hired him as a favor to a mutual friend. Make that former mutual friend. Last week he repaid the favor by taking off with a truckload of custom Marvin windows worth more than fifty grand and never coming back. Romero has ties to organized crime in his background. That’s why we’ve been assigned the case. We’re looking for him hard. If anything comes to you, anything at all, please call me, okay?”

  I assured the sergeant I would, jotted down his number and I went back to my writing, savoring the fresh morning air that was streaming in the windows and screen door. I’d always wanted to be a writer in residence on a historic farm in Connecticut—especially in Lyme, the bucolic Yankee Eden situated at the mouth of the Connecticut River on Long Island Sound, halfway between New York City and Boston. Lyme had a town hall, a Congregational church, a general store, a boatyard on Hamburg Cove and not much else, unless you count the cows and the chickens. Privacy was prized above all. Celebrities like Merilee Nash were left alone. Out here, she was just plain Merilee. And her place was plenty private. Her nearest neighbor on Joshua Town Road, Mr. MacGowan, lived nearly a mile away. In addition to the main house and guest cottage she also had a three-story carriage barn, apple and pear orchards, vegetable garden, and open pasturage that tumbled down to Whalebone Cove, where six acres of freshwater tidal marsh were home to one of the state’s last remaining stands of wild rice, not to mention several rare marsh plants. Also great blue herons, long-billed marsh wrens, ospreys and the occasional bald eagle.

  For me, the farm had never qualified as home. Merilee bought it after we divorced, when the judge awarded her our eight-room apartment on Central Park West and our red 1958 Jaguar XK150. I ended up with Lulu, my crappy old fifth-floor walk-up on West Ninety-Third Street and my second, decidedly less dignified career as a pen for hire. But Merilee, who is nothing but classy, was so thrilled that I was working on a novel again that she’d insisted I come stay with her. She was still rooting for me and, I hoped, rooting for us to get back together. I know I was.

  Not that I’d seen very much of her for the past couple of weeks. She was busy rehearsing around the clock at the Sherbourne Playhouse, the tiny, dilapidated summer theater in nearby Sherbourne, where Merilee was directing and starring in a special one-night-only $1,000-per-seat benefit performance of Noël Coward’s Private Lives. Her dream was to raise the $350,000 that was needed to rescue the legendary playhouse where the likes of Katharine Hepburn, Tallulah Bankhead, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and Merilee herself had made their professional debuts. She was staging Coward’s giddy four-character romantic farce with three equally famous classmates of hers from the Yale School of Drama, all of them fellow Oscar winners—Greg Farber, America’s top hunk of a leading man, Dini Hawes, the slender strawberry blonde with the lilting North Carolina accent who was Greg’s real-life wife, and Marty Miller, the chubby, balding human volcano who’d just won a Tony Award for his portrayal of Willy Loman in last season’s brilliant Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Marty and Dini were playing the delicious lead roles of Elyot and Amanda that Coward had written for himself and Gertrude Lawrence. Merilee and Greg were playing Sybil and Victor. The tiny role of Louise, the frumpy maid, had been given to a gifted young Yale graduate name
d Sabrina Meyer.

  All of the performers were donating their time and talent to try to save the fabled natural-shingled 1911 playhouse, which had originally been a community center back when Sherbourne was a brass mill town known for being the largest maker of ornate casket handles in America. These days, the mill was an abandoned red brick riverfront ruin and the playhouse was sliding off of its rotting foundation sills. It also needed a new roof, siding, plumbing, wiring and septic system. Sherbourne’s building inspector intended to condemn the treasured little theater if Merilee and her friends couldn’t come up with the bucks.

  Merilee was throwing herself body and soul into trying. Private Lives marked her directorial debut. Directing had been a goal of hers for years and she was extremely excited. Also extremely on edge because a star-studded A-list theater crowd would be making the trip out from New York tomorrow night for the show, everyone from Meryl Streep to Elia Kazan. Even the great Kate Hepburn herself, who lived in a waterfront estate in the nearby Fenwick section of Old Saybrook, had plopped down $1,000 to attend.

  The gala performance, which had been garnering huge media coverage, ranked as one of the summer’s major cultural events—right up there alongside of the rollout of Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg’s $150 million computer-enhanced action adventure about a dinosaur theme park gone amok. The managing director of the Sherbourne Playhouse, Mimi Whitfield, was doing a great job of publicizing the hell out of it. If her name sounds familiar to you that’s because Mimi was a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue cover model back in the ’70s. I think she came after Cheryl Tiegs and before Christie Brinkley. When her supermodel days were over, Mimi married and divorced a toad-faced commercial real estate baron. These days she was a forty-something Park Avenue socialite who summered near Sherbourne in the exclusive Point O’Woods beach colony and ran the playhouse.

  Since Merilee was so busy with rehearsals, I had the farm to myself most of the time and could make as much noise as I wanted. Music is very important to me when I write. It helps me find what I’m searching for. I’d brought my turntable, speakers and a precious collection of vintage vinyl out to Lyme with me from the city—Patti Smith, Blondie, the Velvet Underground with Nico. But it turned out that absolutely nothing captured what I was trying to get down on paper like the Ramones’ album Rocket to Russia, the louder the better. There was something about the opening chords of “Rockaway Beach” that took me right back to where I wanted to be, which was in the middle of my first wild, crazy love affair when I was a young, would-be writer in New York. My New York—the gritty, grimy, crime-ridden, graffiti- and garbage-strewn New York of the ’70s. The New York of the Mudd Club, Max’s, CBGB and the Chelsea Hotel, where the first great love of my life and I were having sex in her third-floor room on that historic night of October 12, 1978. I was there. I heard the cops and the EMT crew arrive. Heard the crazy commotion coming from room 100, where Sid Vicious, the spiky-haired bass player of the Sex Pistols, had plunged a seven-inch hunting knife into the stomach of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen. Allegedly, I should say. Sid was never convicted of her murder. He died of a drug overdose before he came to trial.

  Every morning now I was up well before dawn writing about those wild days and nights. Every morning I was growing more and more convinced that the novel I was producing, The Sweet Season of Madness, was turning into something truly special. I’ll freely admit it to you it was no The Bridges of Madison County, which was the publishing world’s idea of a genuine blockbuster that summer. But it was raw and real and I hadn’t written anything that felt this good in a long, long time. All of which is my way of saying that when Sergeant Frank Tedone of the Connecticut State Police’s Organized Crime Task Force called me at five thirty on that particular summer morning, life was pretty damned sweet.

  Which should have been my first clue that something was about to go sour.

  The phone rang again. The unlisted business line again. Not ten minutes had passed since Sergeant Tedone had called. I assumed he was calling back to tell me it had all been some kind of crazy misunderstanding.

  “That you, Hoagy?” The voice was hoarse and unfamiliar.

  “And you are . . . ?”

  “Name’s Romero, bro.”

  “Do I know you?”

  His harsh laugh quickly morphed into a wet cough. “Let’s say I know you, okay, bro?”

  “Not okay. What is it you want?”

  “Not much. Some money is all.”

  “Didn’t you just make off with a truckload of windows?”

  “I already owed that money to somebody who was about to break my legs.” He sounded as if he were calling from a highway rest stop. I could hear trucks lurching into gear, cars screaming past. “I need to get far away fast. Mexico, I’m figuring. Things are getting a little too hot around here. Twenty-five thou ought to do. But I need it tonight. It’s gotta be tonight. I’ll call you later with the where and the when. And no games, bro. No cops. Not if you value that happy home of yours. You do this for me and I’ll be out of your hair forever.”

  “I didn’t realize you were in my hair.”

  “Oh, yeah, I’m good and there.”

  “How so? Why would I pay you that kind of money? Who are you?”

  “Ask the great big movie star.”

  “MERILEE, WHO IS Robert John Romero?”

  By now it was eight and we were putting away our respective breakfasts in her huge farmhouse kitchen, complete with its gallantly hideous yellow and red linoleum floor and double work-sink of scarred white porcelain. The kitchen table was a washhouse table from the Shaker colony in Mount Lebanon, New York.

  I was having a toasted baguette with homemade blackberry jam. Merilee was drinking a protein shake. For Lulu it was a half-tin of her 9Lives mackerel for cats. She has mighty strange eating habits and, trust me, the breath to prove it.

  So gifted was Merilee at controlling her responses that her hand on the glass of her protein shake wavered only fractionally at the mention of Romero’s name. I doubt that anyone would have even noticed it, but I’m not anyone.

  She was officially forty now, yet never had looked lovelier. Merilee had never been conventionally pretty. Her jaw was too strong. Nose too long. Forehead too high. Plus she was nearly six feet tall in her bare feet, broad shouldered and big boned. Right now, she had on a tank top and workout pants. Her waist-length golden hair was tied up in a bun. Her heavily marked-up copy of Private Lives sat on the table before her.

  “No one calls him Robert,” she said after a long silence. “He’s always been R.J.”

  “Fine. Now that we’ve got that cleared up, who is he?”

  “Someone I knew back when I was in New Haven. So did Greg, Dini and Marty. We all did.”

  “He was at Yale with you?” The fact that his name rang no bells didn’t necessarily mean anything. Plenty of people who come out of prestigious programs such as the Yale School of Drama don’t make it. In fact, most don’t.

  “Yes, he was. And we . . . he and I went out for a while,” she added, coloring slightly.

  “Is that all you two did?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Merilee, I don’t own your past any more than you own mine. You have your secrets. I sure as hell have plenty of my own. But the Connecticut State Police are after this guy and he seems to think he has something on you. Something that I should give him money to keep quiet about.”

  “How much more does he want?”

  “Twenty-five thousand. And you just said the word more. Have you been paying him off?”

  Merilee nodded her head, swallowing. “He showed up here out of the blue one morning two weeks ago. That day you went into New York to get your teeth whitened.”

  “Cleaned and polished, not whitened. How many times must I tell you?”

  “They look distinctly whiter.”

  “Because I have a summer tan. And you’re straying. He showed up here . . .”

  “Not more than ten minutes aft
er you left. I swear, it was as if he’d been watching the house.” She shot a glance out the windows at the woods beyond the duck pond before turning back to me. “I hadn’t seen him in over fifteen years. He acted like it was last Tuesday. Flopped right down at this table, chattering nonstop, and waited for me to make him breakfast.” Which explained how he’d come by her business phone number—it was printed on a card that was stuck to the refrigerator door. “So I gave him some ham and eggs. And then I gave him ten thousand dollars.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “In the hope that he’d go away. But I-I . . .” She faltered, her face etching with concern. “I’ve just made a mess of things instead.”

  “Not necessarily. And don’t furrow your brow or you’ll get lines.”

  Merilee got up, poured us more coffee and sat back down at the table, gazing out the window. “Plus I really, really don’t need this right now. We go out on that stage tomorrow night live in front of the likes of Mike Nichols and Arthur Miller. Jackie O is going to be there. Everyone is going to be there.” She heaved a sigh of profound regret. “And by the time the curtain falls my very short directing career will be over.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because we’re simply not ready to go on. We need to rehearse all night tonight, and even that won’t do the trick.”

  “What’s wrong, Merilee?”

  “Greg and Dini are what’s wrong. Their energy and focus just aren’t there. Greg’s a solid leading man but when it comes to dry British humor he’s outright terrible. Plus he still hasn’t nailed down his accent. Sometimes he sounds like John Cleese playing Basil Fawlty. Other times he’s channeling James Mason in North by Northwest. And that’s not even the biggest problem.”

  “Which is . . . ?”

  “No matter what I say to him he keeps missing his beat. You can’t fool around with Noël Coward’s timing. Coward’s all about the rhythm. If you play him right, his words soar into the clouds. If you play him wrong the words just lie there on the stage floor like a sack of potatoes. Which is precisely where we are right now. I’m incredibly grateful that Greg and Dini have given me these two weeks. But they’re just so distracted. They’ve got their twin girls here with them along with Dini’s mother, Glenda. And the instant the curtain falls tomorrow night a limo will be waiting to whisk them directly to JFK. Greg is flying off to spend sixty days in Death Valley shooting the new Clint Eastwood western. Dini is heading down to Savannah to costar in the new Julia Roberts for Jonathan Demme. Both productions are waiting on them. All I hear about day and night are the logistical details. How the twins will be going to Savannah with Dini and Glenda while Steve and Eydie, their golden retrievers, will be heading for the desert with Greg and his personal assistant, Eugene. Except Eugene and the dogs aren’t here because the beach house that Greg and Dini have been renting wouldn’t allow dogs. Which means that the limo will have to stop off at their apartment on Riverside Drive to pick them up en route to JFK and so on and . . .” Merilee shook her head wearily. “I’m not unsympathetic. They lead busy lives. Plus I think Dini is coming down with the flu. But I need their full attention for the next thirty-six hours or I will become a theatrical laughingstock.”