The Man Who Couldn't Miss

by David Handler

  I stashed the Jag in the parking lot of the Sherbourne Inn and strode across the green. Told the trooper who was stationed on the playhouse’s front steps that Lieutenant Tedone was expecting me and went inside.

  I found Mimi in her office, standing at the window behind her desk in a cream silk camisole and jeans watching the workmen on the green. Her shoulders were shaking. It wasn’t until she heard me and turned around that I realized she was crying.

  “It’s you.” Mimi came out from behind the desk and started toward me. “I’m so glad. I was hoping we’d get a chance to . . . to . . .” She broke off and threw herself into my arms, the tears streaming from her sky blue eyes down her perfectly sculpted cheekbones. I put my arms around her and held her as she sobbed and sobbed.

  Until, that is, Lulu started to sneeze violently.

  Mimi pulled away from me, arching an eyebrow at her curiously. “Why is she doing that?”

  “Must be your perfume. Are you wearing Calvin Klein’s Obsession?”

  “Why, yes.”

  “She’s allergic to it,” I said as Lulu escaped into the lobby, sniffling and sneezing. “That’s odd. She was in here with us last evening after Dini collapsed. She didn’t sneeze one bit. Were you wearing it then?”

  “No, I was wearing l’Occitane, a scent that I discovered when I was modeling in Provence years ago. But when I woke up this morning I wanted to smell younger. A bit trashy even. Does that make any sense to you?”

  “No, but that’s okay. It doesn’t have to,” I said, because I knew she was being straight with me. After all, she’d been downstairs in and around the dressing rooms last night shortly before Greg was murdered. If she’d been wearing Obsession at the time Lulu would have been sneezing her head off. But Lulu hadn’t sneezed last night.

  Still, when Mimi sat down at her desk, folding her slender hands in front of her, I noticed that nasty scrape on her knuckles again.

  “What did you do to your hand?” I asked, taking a seat on the sofa.

  She made a face. “I stupidly tried to help the caterer open a crate of champagne. After I immediately managed to make myself bleed he tactfully suggested I find something else to . . . to . . .” She began to cry again. I gave her my linen handkerchief. She dabbed at her eyes and nose. “Sorry, I can’t seem to stop. I was counting on last night’s performance to save this sweet old place.”

  “It did. No one has asked for their money back, have they?”

  “Well, no,” she admitted.

  “If anything, the Sherbourne Playhouse is even more famous now than it was before,” I said, studying her. “You shed a lot of tears last night, too.”

  “Of course I did. I was upset.” Her swollen red eyes met mine. “Are you going somewhere with this?”

  “You were a very successful young model in New York City right around the same time that Greg was a rising young stage star. You traveled in the same circles, hung out at the same bars and restaurants.”

  Her gaze hardened. “You don’t miss much, do you?”

  “I try not to.”

  “It happened before he married Dini. He wasn’t sneaking out on her to be with me. He wasn’t that sort of man. So get that thought out of your head.”

  “Wasn’t in it.”

  Mimi sat back in her chair, sighing mournfully. “He was starring in a revival of Picnic. I was on the cover of that month’s Cosmo. We met at P.J. Clarke’s one night and I swear we were in bed together less than two hours later. I fell incredibly hard for Greg. I loved him more than any man I’d ever met in my whole life, all twenty-three years of it. If he’d asked me to marry him I would have said yes on the spot. But he didn’t feel that way about me. For him, it was strictly physical. After six weeks or so he stopped calling me. Oh, how I cried and cried. And I absolutely hated his guts.” She gazed out the window at the roofers who were wrestling with a wet tarp, shouting and cursing at each other. “And then I ended up calling him. I had to.”

  “To tell him you absolutely hated his guts?”

  “No, to tell him that I was pregnant. I thought he should know.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “And nothing. I had an abortion. It was no big deal.”

  “It’s a very big deal.”

  “I’ve had three. Believe me, it’s nothing.”

  I stared at her, not buying what she was selling.

  “He asked me if I wanted him to pay for it. I said we could go halves. So we split it, just like a dinner tab, and went our separate ways. End of fling. End of story. All except . . .” Her mouth tightened. “Except that for me it was one of those special moments that happen in your life. A critical moment, I guess you writers would call it.”

  “I’d probably go with pivotal, but that’s just me. How so?”

  “I decided that I’d never, ever put myself through that again. Greg was the third guy I’d fallen for since I’d moved to New York from Wisconsin, and all three relationships had ended up with me sobbing my heart out. Never again, I told myself. From now on any relationship that I have with a man will be strictly a business transaction. So I found myself a rich, boring real estate tycoon, got a wedding ring out of him, twelve rooms on Park Avenue and the beach house in Point O’Woods—followed by a handsome seven-figure divorce when he decided it was time to trade me in for a younger model. And so now here I am, free as a bird. If I feel like having a fling I have one. If not then I don’t. No muss, no fuss and no more tears.”

  “You don’t miss it?”

  “Miss what, Hoagy?”

  “Being madly in love.”

  She was silent a moment before she said, “Nothing good comes from it.”

  “You didn’t answer my question, Mimi.”

  “I didn’t bash Greg’s brains in, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Yet you’re looking at me very oddly right now.”

  “I don’t mean to. It’s just that you’re a very attractive woman, free as a bird and I haven’t had sex with anyone during this particular calendar year.” One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned in the ghosting business is that if you want to get something then you have to give something.

  “My, my. You’re full of candid personal details, aren’t you?” She studied me with newfound curiosity. “How are things between you and Merilee?” she asked in a manner that was meant to sound offhanded but wasn’t.

  “I’d like to say they’re looking up, but I don’t know.”

  “You two still love each other, don’t you?”

  “I can’t speak for her, but in my case the answer is yes.”

  “You’re a funny specimen, Stewart Hoag.”

  “How so?”

  “You try to act all hard and cynical except you’re not. Would you like to know what you are?”

  “I’m dying to know.”

  “You’re a romantic fool.”

  “Do me a huge favor and keep that to yourself, will you? You’ll wreck my image.”

  Lulu let out a warning bark from the lobby. Someone was there.

  “Easy there, pooch . . .” It was Lieutenant Carmine Tedone. “Is your tall friend around here someplace?”

  I told Mimi I’d catch up with her later and joined him. Tedone had on another one of his cheap, shiny black suits. I figured he owned at least five, possibly seven, and rotated them daily. He wore a white shirt and a dark, muted tie. I figured he owned at least ten of each of those.

  “How may I help you, Lieutenant?”

  He eyed my persimmon blazer up and down rather coldly. He didn’t seem to care for my summer ensemble at all. In fact, he looked as if he wanted to take a big bite out of my Panama hat. “Walk with me,” he answered gruffly, starting backstage down the service corridor. “We found a stack of those 1924 Tuttle bricks out in the courtyard,” he informed me over his shoulder as I followed him. “We also found out that the crew chief, Cyril Cooper, aka Coop, served time for dealing kilos of pot in Binghamton, New York, back
in the late ’60s.”

  “That’s not saying a whole lot.”

  “Also one of the stage crew, Nona Peachy, who’s a junior at Brown, was busted for coke possession when she was a sophomore at Sherbourne High.”

  “Again, not saying a whole lot.”

  “Hang on, will you? Just clearing my throat. My sergeant, Angelo Bartucca, spent some quality time with two members of the Sherbourne PD last night. It seems they’ve got themselves quite a little heroin problem in this picture postcard village. They took him to an abandoned farmhouse on the outskirts of town that’s a known shooting gallery. Ang found three scuzzy smack freaks who swear that R. J. Romero was shooting up with them there last night right around the time when somebody was beating Greg Farber’s brains in.”

  “And you believe them?”

  “Why not? Just because they’re scuzzy smack freaks doesn’t mean they’re liars.”

  “But it does mean they don’t have a keen sense of the concept of time. They’re a lot like the French in that regard.” We strode past the aged lighting and sound consoles and arrived backstage. The back door was open to let in the fresh air. The crime scene techies were still coming in and out. “And that’s still not saying a whole lot because R.J. didn’t do it. I already told you that.”

  “So you did,” he growled at me.

  “You seem a tad grouchy this morning, Lieutenant, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

  “I got two hours of sleep last night. I got bosses breathing down my neck. I got journalists everywhere . . .”

  “These aren’t journalists. These are celebrity crime lemmings. Different breed entirely.”

  “Well, you’d know a lot more about that than I would.”

  “Was that supposed to be some kind of a dig?”

  He studied me dubiously with his hooded dark eyes. “My brother Pete says you’ve been around the block more than a few times with this sort of business. That it’s almost a specialty of yours.”

  “I don’t seek it out, Lieutenant, if that’s where your mind is going.”

  “So it just sort of finds you? Is that how you’d put it?”

  “I’d put it that celebrities are very proud, insecure people who have a lot of secrets. I’d put it that they and the people close to them will go to any length to keep those secrets from the public. They also hold grudges.”

  “That what you think happened here? Somebody was settling a grudge?”

  “I really don’t know.”

  We went down the spiral staircase to the basement dressing rooms. The sump pumps had taken care of the floodwaters. Portable box fans had been set up to air the space out. But it still smelled damp and moldy down there, possibly because it was still damp and moldy.

  We stood in the doorway of the men’s dressing room watching Tedone’s crime scene people work. “Have they found anything useful yet?” I asked him.

  “So far they’ve isolated eight different sets of shoe prints on the floor planks in here. When they’re sure that they’ve got them all they’ll try to match them to the individuals who had reason to be in here. It’s tedious work, and there’s no telling if it’ll lead us anywhere, but that’s what they do.”

  “How about the medical examiner? Was he able to determine anything from the blows to the back of Greg’s head? How tall the killer was, whether he or she was right-handed or left-handed . . .”

  “You watched too much TV when you were a kid. The M.E. is rarely able to determine any of those things. Would you like me to tell you why?”

  “Yes, I would.”

  “Because the victim is tumbling to the floor as he’s being hit. That makes it nearly impossible to determine the height of the assailant or whether said assailant was right- or left-handed. We do know that the victim was hit numerous times with considerable force.”

  “What does that suggest?”

  “That someone was really pissed off at him. We also know that he was alive when he went facedown into that water. He drowned.”

  “We knew that last night.”

  “We didn’t know it,” Tedone shot back irritably. “We assumed it.”

  “Lieutenant, what am I doing here? Why did you call me?”

  He raised his chin at me. “Let’s continue this conversation elsewhere.”

  We went upstairs and out the stage door to the courtyard, where the crew members were coming and going from the adjoining barn as they stored the furniture and props from last night’s one and only abbreviated production of Private Lives. Nona Peachy waved at me. I waved back.

  Tedone stood there in the sunlight glaring at me. “Okay, let’s have it. Tell me how you knew.”

  “How I knew what?”

  “You were right about Greg Farber’s blood work. He was HIV-positive. How did you know?”

  “And what about Dini?”

  “What about her?”

  “Did you speak to Doctor Orr? Is she HIV-positive as well?”

  “I’m not discussing any details about her medical condition. Whatever Orr has told me is strictly confidential.”

  “I’m going to take that as a yes.”

  “Take it any way you want, but I am not, repeat not, confirming that Dini Hawes is HIV-positive. That’s beyond the scope of what I can share with you.”

  “Yet you want me to share everything that I know with you. Hardly seems fair.”

  “This isn’t about what’s fair or unfair. And you still haven’t answered my question. How the fuck did you know?”

  “Call it an educated guess.”

  “Based upon what?”

  I didn’t respond. Just waited him out. Took my hat off, adjusted the brim ever so slightly. Settled it back on my head. Watched Lulu mosey over to a pile of bricks—vintage Tuttles just like the murder weapon—and begin sniffing at them delicately.

  Finally, Tedone said, “We’ve reached out to Farber’s personal physician in New York City, but he’s on vacation in Crete. Until we can talk to him we have no idea when Farber contracted the AIDs virus. Or if he even knew that he had contracted it, for that matter.” He glared at me some more. “Now talk to me about this educated guess of yours. You have any idea how he picked it up?”

  “How would I know that?”

  “You two were friends, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, we were. Which is why I’m not going to speculate.”

  “Was he stepping out on his wife?”

  “If he was, he didn’t say anything to me about it.”

  “Must have been,” Tedone mused aloud. “Picked it up from having unprotected sex with some bimbo.”

  “That’s certainly one possibility.”

  He peered at me intently. “What’s another?”

  “I just told you, Lieutenant. I’m not going to speculate.”

  “If that is how he picked it up, then he sure was behaving recklessly in this day and age.” Tedone ran a meaty hand over his face. “You think it’s possible he didn’t know that he had it?”

  “I do, actually. He was scheduled to fly out to L.A. last night to begin shooting the new Clint Eastwood western. When stars of Greg’s stature sign on to do a picture the studio makes them take a preproduction physical for insurance purposes. I have no doubt they’d have given him a blood test in L.A. before he left for Death Valley. If Greg knew that he was HIV-positive, then there was no way he would have passed that test. Maybe he’d schemed a way of getting around it, like bribing the medical technician to substitute someone else’s blood. I’ve heard of it being done. But he wasn’t like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “He was a straight shooter. A decent, honest guy.”

  “Really? Because he sure doesn’t come off like one.”

  I let that particular dig slide on by. “Lieutenant, has Dini been officially notified that Greg was HIV-positive?”

  “I’m on my way over to Point O’Woods to tell her right now,” he said unhappily.

  “Is Marty Miller still around or has he gone back to Ne
w York City?”

  “He’s still at the inn. So is Sabrina Meyer.”

  “Do you consider them suspects?”

  “I consider them persons of interest. I want to have another conversation with each of them before I let them go.”

  “Same as you’re having another conversation with me?”

  “Well, yeah, if you want to look at it that way.”

  “I’m curious about something, Lieutenant.”

  He sighed irritably. “Yeah, what is it?”

  “Why have you shared this with me before you’ve informed Dini?”

  Tedone wouldn’t tell me. Just glanced down at Lulu, who was stretched out at my feet having a little snooze, before he said, “For your information, I’m not buying that ‘educated guess’ line of BS you gave me when I asked you how you knew he was HIV-positive. You’re holding out on me. What’s the deal? Are you protecting somebody?”

  “I could be.”

  “Who?”

  “If I told you then I wouldn’t be protecting them, would I?”

  “Meaning you don’t trust me, is that it?”

  “Meaning I’ve learned the hard way that law enforcement agencies are incapable of keeping anything under wraps. It always leaks out. Always. Nothing personal, Lieutenant.”

  Tedone shoved his lower lip in and out. “I got to say, I’m still not entirely sold on you, despite your advance billing.”

  “What advance billing? To whom have you been speaking about me?”

  “For my money, you strike me as just a little bit too slippery.”

  That was enough to wake up Lulu, who let out a low growl. I told her to let me handle it.

  “Why do you say that, Lieutenant?”

  “Because I get the feeling you’re working me.”

  “Are you trying to tell me that you’re not working me?”

  “I’m doing my job. What are you doing?”

  “Trying to find out who killed my friend,” I said. “And I will.”

  “HUH . . . WHA?”

  When I phoned up to Marty’s room from the lobby of the Sherbourne Inn I’d apparently awakened him from a heavy slumber, even though it was nearly noon. “I thought we should have a talk. Shall I come up or would you rather come down?”