The Man Who Couldn't Miss

by David Handler

  He ripped it open greedily, shining his flashlight inside. “What the hell’s this?”

  “The current Lyme–Old Lyme phone directory. And they’re damned hard to come by, so I want it back.”

  “Where’s my fucking money?”

  “There is no money, R.J.”

  R.J. gaped at me in disbelief. “What do you mean there’s no money? What the fuck is this?”

  “This is me doing something that absolutely no one else thinks I should do. I’m giving you one last chance to walk away. If you ever come near Merilee again, I’ll kill you. If you try to peddle your version of that hit-and-run incident to the tabloids, I’ll kill you. If you so much as speak to a tabloid reporter, I’ll kill you. I’ll get away with it, too. The police will even thank me. If you’re too stoned or screwed up or just plain stupid to realize that I’m trying to do you a favor, then so be it. But I need to give you this chance. You see, I don’t want you on my conscience. It’s already plenty crowded, and getting more crowded each and every day,” I said as my thoughts turned to Sabrina Meyer from Hack-Hack-Hackensack and her bright future that was never, ever to be.

  R.J. was still gaping at me. “You’re playing head games with me? I owe some very dangerous people that money. I promised I’d have it for ’em tonight. I need that money!”

  “Too bad. You’re not going to get any.”

  “You don’t get to walk away from this, bro.” His voice had turned menacing now. “For this, I have to mess you up.”

  In response, Lulu moved around behind him, a low growl coming from her throat. She has a very menacing growl for someone who once got beat up in Riverside Park by a Pomeranian named Mr. Puffball.

  “Tell her to cut that out,” R.J. warned me, his eyes widening.

  Lulu moved in closer, baring her teeth at him, her growl now a full-throated snarl.

  “I ain’t kidding around. She comes any closer I’ll blow her head off!”

  Actually, what he did was kick her. Or I should say he tried to. Not a wise move. All he got for his trouble was Lulu’s jaws clamped hard around his bare ankle.

  Cursing angrily in pain, R.J. reached into his waistband for his Glock. That was when his nose collided with my right fist. He went straight down, blood gushing from his nose. The Glock clattered away on the pavement. He lunged for it.

  He never made it.

  Two shots rang out from the darkness. R.J. took the first one in the chest, the second in his throat. He let out a soft gurgle, shuddered and then he was gone.

  I whirled—and my flashlight’s beam found Merilee standing there behind me in a safari jacket with the farm’s .38 clutched in her hand and a strangely calm expression on her face. Lulu ran to her and tried to climb up her leg, whooping and moaning. Me, I went and took the gun from her. Then I heard rapid footsteps on the pavement. Someone was running toward us. It seemed Merilee wasn’t the only one who’d decided to tail me that evening.

  Pete Tedone knelt beside the late R. J. Romero, then looked up at us inquiringly.

  “Merilee Nash, say hello to Pete Tedone, Lieutenant Tedone’s brother.”

  “Very pleased to meet you, Mr. Tedone,” she said quietly.

  “The pleasure is all mine, Miss Nash. Which one of you . . . ?”

  “I did,” I said quickly.

  “He did not,” Merilee insisted. “I’m the one who shot him.”

  “Well, you’d both better go right home and stay there. I’ll take over from here.” Tedone pocketed R.J.’s Glock. Then took the .38 from me and gripped it in each hand before he stuck it in R.J.’s dead hand and fired it once into the air. “Okay, here’s what happened,” he explained. “You hired me to make the payoff and it went sour. He pulled his .38, the two of us grappled for it and it went off.”

  “But that .38 is registered to Merilee,” I pointed out.

  “He stole it from the farm when he killed your rooster.”

  “We didn’t report it stolen.”

  Tedone waved me off. “Don’t worry about that. This is what you’re paying me for.” He pointed to the manila envelope tucked under my arm. “Is that the drop money?”

  “No, it’s the Lyme–Old Lyme phone book.”

  Pete Tedone frowned at me. “Where’s the money?”

  “There is no money.”

  “You showed up here without any money?”

  “That’s correct.”

  He took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. “I got to tell you, Hoagy. For a bright guy you sure know how to act stupid.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “And now I want you to beat it. Both of you. You two were never here tonight, understood?”

  We understood. Started back toward the old stone bridge with Lulu trotting along ahead of us. Merilee had left her beat-up old Land Rover next to the Jag. Tedone’s Chevy Tahoe was parked alongside. When I looked back at him, Tedone was crouched over R.J.’s body with his flashlight, going through his pockets. Merilee didn’t look back. She never looked back.

  “MERILEE, ARE YOU okay?”

  “I’ll be fine, darling. Although I do wish you’d stop asking me that.”

  It was two hours later and I was still waiting for an emotional response from her. Grief. Horror. Something, anything. So far, she’d just behaved as if it were any other night. Pronounced herself starved. Put away a late supper of Caesar salad and four-alarm chili washed down with two frosty bottles of Bass Ale. Had herself a leisurely soak in the claw-footed tub. Now she was snuggled in bed in the moonlight with a cool breeze coming off of Whalebone Cove. The only indication that she was the least bit bothered about having pumped two shots into R. J. Romero earlier that evening was that she asked me if I’d mind keeping her company for a bit. I sat in the worn leather easy chair next to the bed sipping a Bass with Lulu snoring contentedly at my feet.

  “Merilee, I still have one more thing I need to ask you.”

  “Fine. What is it?”

  “Why did you do it?”

  She gazed out the window for a long moment. “As an act of mercy,” she replied softly. “You didn’t know the young R.J. The wild and gifted and beautiful R.J. The man who couldn’t miss. This R.J. was so strung out, desperate and sick that he’d become a menace to everyone, including himself. I did the humane thing by putting him down.”

  “You loved him, didn’t you?”

  “With all of my heart and soul,” she acknowledged readily. “When he and I split up I didn’t think I’d make it. It took months and months for the wounds to heal. And years before I believed it was even possible to love a man again.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  “You did, silly.”

  “Good answer.”

  “Hoagy, would you do me a huge favor and get under the covers with me for a little while?”

  I stripped to my boxers and slid under the covers with her. She rolled onto her hip, her head resting on my chest. I put my arm around her and held her.

  “I still carry it around all of the time,” she confessed. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think about it. We killed that poor man.”

  “You weren’t driving. He was.”

  “But I could have called the police. Given the family some comfort. I could have done something.”

  “You’re absolutely right. And tonight, you did.”

  “I had to. He killed Old Saxophone Joe. You know who was next, don’t you? Lulu. He would have killed Lulu, I swear. And then he’d have gone after you. Do you know what would happen to me if I lost you? I’d fall to pieces.”

  “Why, Merilee, you almost sound as if you’re still a tiny bit fond of me.”

  “Oh, shut up. I had to do it, Hoagy. I had to protect my home. H-had to protect my-my . . .” And then they came. The tears. I held on to her tight as she cried. She cried for the Yale School of Architecture professor whom they’d left for dead that night so many years ago. She cried for the gifted but uncontrollable wild beast from Federal Hill whom she’d loved and los
t and tonight had put down like the rabid animal he’d become. She cried for Greg. She cried for Dini, who’d lost her husband, and for Durango and Cheyenne, who’d lost their father. She cried for Marty, who couldn’t cope with his broken heart and bitterness and, after years and years of trying to destroy himself, had finally succumbed to the darkness and destroyed Greg. And Sabrina. She cried for herself and for her fellow members of their uncommonly gifted class at the Yale School of Drama. There had never been a class nearly as talented before or since. And maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. I’ve begun to think that strange, horrible things can happen when there are too many talented people in the same place at the same time. Somebody ought to write a book about it someday. Not me, but somebody.

  She was still crying when the early predawn birds began to chirp. Didn’t cry herself out until Quasimodo let out his first hoarse crow of the morning, which was so pathetic that it made her laugh through her tears. “I just can’t get used to him. I keep expecting to hear Old Saxophone Joe.”

  “That makes two of us.” Lulu let out a low, unhappy grunt from the leather chair. “Correction, three of us.”

  Shortly after that, Merilee closed her eyes and fell into an exhausted sleep. As she lay there in my arms, it occurred to me that despite all of our ups and downs—the years of loving each other, hating each other—that I still didn’t know Merilee Nash. None of us really know the person whom we love. That’s nothing but a sweet illusion. Then I closed my own eyes and, smiling, fell asleep with the stranger in my arms.

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

  About the Author

  * * *

  Meet David Handler

  About the Book

  * * *

  Meanwhile, Twenty Years Later . . .

  Read On

  * * *

  More from David Handler

  About the Author

  Meet David Handler

  DAVID HANDLER has written ten novels about the witty and dapper celebrity ghostwriter Stewart Hoag and his faithful, neurotic basset hound, Lulu, including the Edgar- and American Mystery Award–winning The Man Who Would Be F. Scott Fitzgerald. He has also written eleven novels in the bestselling Berger & Mitry series and two novels featuring private eye Benji Golden. David was a member of the original writing staff that created the Emmy Award–winning sitcom Kate & Allie, and has continued to write extensively for television and films on both coasts. He lives in a 200-year-old carriage house in Old Lyme, Connecticut.

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  About the Book

  Meanwhile, Twenty Years Later . . .

  Truly, it never occurred to me when I retired the Stewart Hoag series in 1997 that twenty years later I would find myself returning to my witty, dapper celebrity ghostwriter and his faithful, neurotic basset hound Lulu. The advent of the Internet, cell phones and viral videos, not to mention the blood sport competition between twenty-four-hour cable news channels, had convinced me that the era of celebrity secrets was over and out. And so was Hoagy.

  And yet here we are again.

  Hoagy and Lulu returned from their two-decade hiatus last year in The Girl with Kaleidoscope Eyes and now you’ve been reading and, I hope, enjoying its sequel, The Man Who Couldn’t Miss. Meanwhile, as I sit here writing these words, I’m busy plotting out yet another adventure.

  How did this happen? Dan Mallory, who was then an executive editor at William Morrow, talked me into it by throwing a wicked curve ball at me: Reboot the Hoagy series as period novels that take place way back when I was originally writing them. As in, say, back in 1992, when I wrote on a Mac LC that was connected to a printer but not to my phone line. Why would it be? I had no dial-up connection to anything or anyone. E-mail wasn’t yet a part of everybody’s life. Neither were cell phones. The Internet, Google, Facebook, Twitter? All way off in the future. In 1992 I had a landline and an answering machine. Also a fax machine, churning, churning. God, I hated that damned fax machine.

  I was instantly enthralled by Dan’s idea. Couldn’t resist the opportunity. And I can’t begin to tell you how much fun I’ve had writing Hoagy and Lulu again. Especially Lulu. I really missed her.

  Ever since I resumed the series, many readers and fellow authors have asked me whether it was hard to find Hoagy’s voice again. After all, I’d written eleven Berger & Mitry Dorset novels since I’d said goodbye to Hoagy in The Man Who Loved Women to Death, as well as a pair of Benji Golden detective novels and a couple of thrillers. How did I pull it off?

  Actually, it was no problem at all. I just sat down and started writing him again as if I’d never stopped. That’s because Hoagy’s voice is my voice. He is genuine, unfiltered me. Oh, sure, I do a huge amount of polishing and rewriting. Trust me, I’m not nearly as witty and perceptive as Hoagy is morning, noon and night. Sometimes I can be a droning bore. Ask anyone who knows me. They’ll tell you: “Sometimes David can be a droning bore.” But there was no groping around blindly in the darkness to find him again. He was right there. He’s been there all along. Same Hoagy. Same me.

  Actually, allow me to rephrase that. Same Hoagy. Not the same me, which is something I’ve found to be quite fascinating. I mentioned that I stopped writing Hoagy twenty years ago. What I didn’t mention was that I began writing Hoagy long before that. I started my first draft of The Man Who Died Laughing way back in 1985 when I was still in my early thirties. It was only the second novel I’d ever written, and my first crime novel. I recall deciding that I would make Hoagy approximately my age. I also decided that as the series progressed I would obliquely reflect the passage of real time. Over the course of the eight original novels, Hoagy changes from someone who is beginning to notice that thirty is receding in his rearview mirror, to someone who sees forty getting closer and closer in the headlights up ahead. He definitely gets older.

  Lulu? She never gets any older. Can’t. I didn’t want to deal with the reality that dogs age faster than people do and—if the series lasted for more than ten or twelve years—she’d, well, die. I remember asking my original editor, Kate Miciak, what the rules were about the aging of pet sidekicks. After an incredibly long silence she responded: “Um, David, there are no rules.”

  To me, Hoagy’s voice seems exactly the same now as it did before. Nothing has changed. He’s still staring at forty. Still wondering if he’ll ever be able to rediscover the elusive writing talent that prompted the New York Sunday Times Book Review to label him “the first major new literary voice of the 1980s.” Yet, as I was working away on The Girl with Kaleidoscope Eyes, I slowly became aware of a reality that should have been incredibly obvious to me from page one.

  Hoagy’s the same age, but I’m not.

  I’m twenty years older. That’s twenty years of wisdom and bewilderment—heavy on the bewilderment. Twenty years of successes and failures. Twenty years of joy and agony. Twenty years of friends and loved ones lost. I’d written fifteen books during those twenty years. Liked most of them. Some I didn’t. It never occurred to me that any of this would make Hoagy’s voice any richer or more insightful.

  And yet it apparently has.

  When I finished the first draft of The Girl with Kaleidoscope Eyes, I e-mailed the manuscript to my agent, Dominick Abel. When I got home from my Sunday evening yoga class a few days later, there was a voice mail on my cell phone from Dominick, a very proper Brit who never calls me on the weekend. When I played it back I heard him say, “H-Hello, David . . .” His voice was choking with emotion. I immediately panicked, thinking the next words I was about to hear were “grapefruit-sized tumor.” But no, he was calling to tell me that he’d just finished reading the new Hoagy and that it was “just . . . just wonderful.” When Dan Mallory finished reading this book, The Man Who Couldn’t Miss, he wrote me to tell me how much the relationship between Hoagy and his beloved ex-wife, Merilee Nash, has grown. He used words like poignancy and maturity.

  “Maturity?” Me?

  I�
��m beginning to realize that these new Hoagy novels have more going for them than they did before. More emotional weight. I know, I know—it came as a complete surprise to me, too. They’re still funny. Or at least I think they’re still funny. Hoagy is still Hoagy. Lulu is still Lulu. And I’m still the same smart aleck who was always getting sent to the principal’s office for being “a disruptive influence” and constantly “sassing the teacher.” I haven’t changed a bit. Really, I haven’t.

  I’m just a teeny, tiny bit older, that’s all.

  David Handler

  Old Lyme, Connecticut

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  More from David Handler

  THE GIRL WITH KALEIDOSCOPE EYES

  * * *

  Once upon a time, Hoagy had it all: a hugely successful debut novel, a gorgeous celebrity wife, the glamorous world of New York City at his feet. These days, he scrapes by as a celebrity ghostwriter. A celebrity ghostwriter who finds himself investigating murders more often than he’d like.

  And once upon a time, Richard Aintree was the most famous writer in America—high school students across the country read his one and only novel, a modern classic on par with The Catcher in the Rye. But after his wife’s suicide, Richard went into mourning . . . and then into hiding. No one has seen him or heard from him in twenty years.

  Until now. Richard Aintree—or someone pretending to be Richard Aintree—has at long last reached out to his two estranged daughters. Monette is a Martha Stewart–style lifestyle queen whose empire is crumbling; and once upon a time, Reggie, a gifted poet, was the first great love of Hoagy’s life. Both sisters have received mysterious typewritten letters from their father.

  Hoagy is already on the case, having been hired to ghostwrite a tell-all book about the troubled Aintree family. But no sooner does he set up shop in the pool house of Monette’s Los Angeles mansion than murder strikes. With Lulu at his side—or more often cowering in his shadow—it’s up to Hoagy to unravel the mystery, catch the killer, and pour himself that perfect single-malt Scotch . . . before it’s too late.