Dead Letter (Digger)

by Warren Murphy

  "If it’s a he," Connie said. "God may be a she. Even dogs’ god."

  "A she named Ralph?" Digger said. "That’s ridiculous. I’m glad you didn’t have the scrod. Have another drink. I love to see women drink."

  "Thank you, I will. I looked up scrod in the dictionary. It isn’t really a fish. It’s a cut of fish, sort of like a fillet from near the tail, but it can come from almost anything."

  "See. Boston scrod, famous Boston scrod, is Boston anything. It means it’s the cheapest fish the restaurant could get a lot of today. How long have you worked for Waldo?"

  "Three years, since I graduated," Connie said. Digger motioned for the waiter to bring them another round of drinks. Even though he had only picked at the meal, the food had been good. But the service was abysmal. The waiters were all tan, too tan for Boston, and they huddled in the corners of the large eating room, like out-of-work actors, gossiping. If they happened to look at one of their tables, it was only by accident. Especially if the table seated a woman as pretty as Connie. Those they seemed to snub totally.

  "What did you major in?" Digger asked.

  "Communication arts," she said. "And when I graduated they offered me a job in the public relations department. I took it until I found out it was crap, sending out news releases to the four hundred weekly papers in Teaneck, New Jersey, announcing that Selma Globular had learned to feed herself this week at Waldo and had gotten a gold star for neatness. When there was an opening on the president’s staff, I took it. I think administration is more my line anyway."

  The young woman drank bourbon neat and while Digger hated bourbon because he was never sure exactly what sour mash was, he respected women who drank neat. Watching most women drinkers, he understood why bartenders hated ladies’ nights. Because women who never drank, suddenly, at a dollar a drink, became drinkers and wanted piña coladas, and kamikazes and iced teas and singapore slings. He knew one bartender who used the same mix formula for every drink, pouring it out of large pitchers he kept in the chillers under the bar. He once said, "Digger, they don’t know what the hell it is they’re drinking anyway. All they know is the name."

  "Nobody ever complains?" Digger had asked.

  "Once a year. I tell them that this is how we make them in Las Vegas, they nod and drink the fucking thing. They’d drink liquid soap if you called it A Foaming Dove."

  Connie was smiling at him. "Penny for your thoughts," she said.

  "Did you ever try to throw away a garbage pail?" Digger said.

  "No. What’s that mean?"

  "You can’t throw one away. You keep putting it out for the garbage man to take and he keeps thinking that you want it and he just empties it and leaves it. To get rid of a garbage pail, you have to cut it up and melt it in a pot on your kitchen stove and then bury the ingot in your backyard."

  "What brought that up?" she asked.

  "Bourbon. You can’t get rid of bourbon, either."

  "I thought I was doing a pretty good job," Connie said.

  "Quiet," Digger said, "I’m on a roll. If you give a party at your house and make the mistake of inviting one bourbon drinker, he knows you’re not going to have any bourbon, so he brings a bottle. Then he only drinks half of the bottle and you’re stuck with half a bottle of bourbon. Multiply this by a dozen parties and you can see where bourbon gets to be a real problem. That’s probably why nobody ever invited you out until now. Do you live alone?"

  "Yes. My family’s in town here, but I have my own place near the school," she said.

  "That was terrible about Otis Redwing, wasn’t it?"

  "It was awful," she agreed. "Just when he was going to move up, too."

  "Was he?"

  She shrugged. "I guess I can tell you now because it’s all immaterial but he had a good shot of being promoted to a vice-presidency at the school."

  "Ahh, affirmative action strikes again," Digger said. "A gay Indian. What could be better for a school?"

  "No, it wasn’t like that. He would have been really good," she said.

  "How would everybody like that?" Digger said. "He was just a young guy."

  "The dean of students might not have liked it, but everybody else would live with it," she said.

  "The dean of students doesn’t like much of anything," Digger said casually. "Not if you listen to Jayne. Doctor Langston."

  "You know Doctor Langston?" Connie asked.

  "One of my closest friends," Digger said. "She’s been telling me about our esteemed dean for years."

  "It’s his own fault," Connie said as she sipped at her newly arrived drink.

  "I don’t know that it’s that bad," Digger said.

  "No? Well, I do. Staff’s got a responsibility to be…well, responsible. When you’re in a position of power, you’re abusing it when you spend all your time balling female students."

  "The temptations have to be great," Digger said. "Maybe he is more to be envied than censured."

  "Sure," she said with surprising bitterness. "And you see what it got him. His wife packed him in. He blew any chance he ever had of moving up in this school. All because of some kind of unrestrained male libido."

  "Nobody ever got hurt from a little nookie once in a while," Digger said. "If you don’t mind my being crude."

  "Nobody got hurt, huh?" Digger was pleased to see her warming to her subject. It was the nice thing about ideologues. Hit them in their prejudices and they couldn’t stop talking. He wanted her to keep talking even if it meant putting up with her feminist bullshit.

  "You’ve got young, impressionable women," Connie was saying. "Not even really women yet, more like girls. And a guy taking advantage of them as fast as he can. Almost moving a girl in with him? On campus? How tacky can you get? How the hell long did he think he could get away with that? And what kind of scars do you think that leaves on the girl?"

  "How’d she handle it?" Digger asked.

  "Pretty well, actually. She dumped him. And his wife dumped him. I’d say he got what he deserved."

  "That’ll teach him. Have another drink," Digger said.

  "Are you trying to get me drunk?"

  "Of course," Digger said.

  "You don’t have to," she said with a smile. "I told you, I have my own apartment."

  Digger left the table to make a telephone call. Allie answered. "Oh, hi, Digger. Everything’s fine. Danny’s right here. We’re going to study tonight."

  "More exams tomorrow?" Digger asked.

  "No. The next day, though," she said.

  "Okay. If you need me, call that number I gave you and leave a message with the answering service. I’ll call in for messages."

  "All right," she said. He could almost hear her smile across the telephone. "Have a nice night."

  "I’m working on it," Digger said.

  When he walked back into the main room of the restaurant, he smiled across the room at Connie, but as he walked to his table, he heard his name called.

  "Julian."

  He turned and saw Evvie, Arlo Buehler’s wife, seated at a table by herself. He slid into a chair next to her and kissed her on the cheek.

  "Long time, not much see," she said.

  "Always too long with you, Evvie."

  "Julian, I will always know where to find you. Pick the most beautiful woman in the place and she’ll be on your arm."

  "In this case, try the second most beautiful," Digger said. "You’re really looking fine." And she was. Evvie was fashion-model tall and slim, with a regular-featured face, but it was made dazzlingly beautiful by its wonderful bones, its broad, smooth brow, the high cheek-bones that cast natural shadows into the hollows of her cheeks. Her lips were full and lightly glossed and he realized she did not look substantially different from how she looked when she was in college.

  "Where’s Arlo and his date?" she asked with a smile, showing her beautiful teeth. "Hiding in the kitchen, waiting for me to go?"

  Digger shook his head. "The last time I saw Arlo, he was sitting home brooding, t
rying to make his Space Invaders’ game love him. What happened, Ev?"

  "I just got tired, Julian. Tired of the hours, the drinking, the goddam career, tired of being Mrs. Doctor Buehler."

  She looked at him, inviting understanding, but Digger said, "You sure you didn’t just get tired of being thirty-seven years old?"

  She paused before answering. "Yeah. Maybe that, too."

  "Maybe that’s more than a ‘too,’" Digger said. "But Arlo’s getting older, too. What makes you different? He’s getting ready for the middle-age crazies and you were the only thing keeping him from it."

  "Sure," she said derisively. "Me and all those nurses and patients and sweet young things."

  "You know damn well they’re all in his mind," Digger said. "He is the most home-bound one-woman person I ever met. If I were like him, I’d cut my wrists. You know…if he was the guy you thought, he’d be sitting down at the table with me right now, with a girl on his arm. That blonde back there would have had a friend. Evvie, there’s never been any other woman."

  She shrugged. Digger noticed that Connie was fidgeting at their table, playing with a pepper shaker.

  "Are you still staying at the Copley Arms?" Digger asked.

  "Yes."

  "Be in tomorrow night?"

  "Should be. My dance book’s not exactly full yet."

  "I’ll buy you a drink when we can talk, all right?"

  "That’ll be nice," she said.

  "And if you’re really serious about ditching Arlo, I’ll make a run at you myself. You know I always had the hots for you. I never could understand what you saw in that reprobate."

  "A good heart, Julian," she said reflexively, and Digger nodded.

  "That’s what I mean. Even you know it," he said. "I’ll call you tomorrow."

  "Room 718," she said.

  "Okay. By the way, Ev, the blonde back there is business."

  She nodded and Digger knew he had done right by telling her that but he would have told her the same thing even if it hadn’t been true. Women got nervous when they thought their husband’s best friend was a womanizer; almost as if lechery were a contagious disease.

  When he returned to his table, Connie nodded her head toward Evvie and said "Beautiful woman," which Digger knew meant, "I’d like to kill that brazen whore bitch because she’s too perfect to let live." So much for sisterly feminism.

  "I didn’t notice," Digger said.

  "Digger," she said, "we’re getting along fine because I like you and you’re honest. Don’t mess it up now by lying to me."

  "Not really a lie," he said. "My best friend’s wife. I’ve known her forever. Yeah, you’re right, I guess she is beautiful. If you like that type."

  "What type do you like?" she asked, and Digger, as he was required to do, said, "Your type," and as Connie was required to do, she said, "Let’s get out of here."

  She held his arm tightly as they walked past Evvie at her table and Digger nodded to her.

  Connie lived on Beacon Street in a stately old brownstone and Digger was impressed until he found out that her apartment was Basement Left and included a closet-size bedroom, and a long tunnel which housed kitchen, dinette, living room, and bathroom, laid out with all the architectural novelty of a railroad car.

  As soon as they were inside the triple-locked door, Connie turned and put herself in Digger’s arms. Her hands came up and she ran her fingertips around his ears. She pushed herself against him, then winced and pulled away.

  "That stupid tie clip of yours," she said, rubbing a spot on her chest.

  He leaned over and kissed her. "Let me go take it off," he said.

  In the bathroom, Digger undid the tape recorder and the taped wires on his side, and placed the whole works in his jacket pocket, after checking to make sure he had enough tape to handle their whole conversation. Then he turned the recorder on.

  Connie was in the bedroom, already undressed, under the thin cover. Digger put his jacket over a chair, turning it carefully so the frog microphone would face toward them. As he stripped off his clothes, the young blond woman turned off the light.

  She had not told him the truth. Earlier, she had said that her talent lay with administration, but five minutes in bed with her showed Digger that she was mistaken. Her talent lay in sex, not frantic or labored, but calm and open and inventive. She had a habit, before she touched Digger’s body with her hands, of licking and wetting her fingertips and the cool moisture felt almost electric on his skin.

  It was forty minutes later when Digger lit a cigarette, and dialed Buehler’s answering service.

  But there had been no calls for him.

  At 2 A.M., he left Connie’s apartment with a warm feeling, a promise to return, and the knowledge that Allison Stevens was the young Waldo coed who had been "almost living with" Henry Hatcher last year and who had finally dumped the dean of students.

  Sweet, lovable, virginal Allie, Frank Stevens’s straight-A’s, magna-cum-laude, college-glee-club and church-every-Sunday daughter.

  She had certainly led an interesting life for somebody as sheltered as her father thought she had been.

  Chapter Ten

  DIGGER’S LOG:

  Julian Burroughs in the matter of Allison Stevens, 3 A.M., Wednesday.

  The plot thickens.

  In the master file is a tape made tonight with Connie McArdle of the president’s office at Waldo College, in Muggsy’s Restaurant, a dump that inflicts scrod. How can you eat a fish that sounds like a disease? Tape continued elsewhere.

  So Otis Redwing was in line for the job that Henry Hatcher wanted. Isn’t that interesting?

  And isn’t it interesting that Hatcher’s wife left him because of his womanizing and one of his young women, and a serious one, I suppose, was Allison Stevens.

  Why didn’t Allie tell me that? Probably she figured it isn’t any of my business and it wouldn’t be, except for Redwing getting killed. Maybe, just maybe, Hatcher had something to do with that.

  But I don’t know.

  Hatcher as car thief? That doesn’t seem likely. He wears those patches on his elbows and sucks a pipe. That doesn’t spell car thief to me. That spells to me a bubble of air in the bloodstream if you want to kill somebody. Or poison in the pemmican. Not run down the redskin with a stolen car.

  Connie is one of the great women of the world in bed. Her politics suck, but why should they be different?

  Evvie Buehler also eats at Muggsy’s. I have to call her tonight. If I do it right, maybe I can get them together again. She sounded like there was room for movement in that direction.

  If I didn’t have to go to the hospital in the morning, I would have stayed with Connie.

  Allison Stevens, I guess, busted up Jayne Langston’s marriage. Now, would that make Langston hate her? Enough to try to make her crazy?

  No. That just doesn’t square. First of all, when I talked to the esteemed Doctor Langston, she was sympathetic to "poor Allie" getting that nut note. And second, I think whoever wrote it killed Otis Redwing. What reason would Jayne have to kill him? Maybe she’s been hanging around with nuts so long that she’s ready for shelling herself.

  What am I doing here anyway?

  I’d better go to sleep if I’m going to be at the top of my form in the hospital tomorrow.

  Signing off.

  Chapter Eleven

  "Oh, Digger, I got another letter." Allison Stevens’s voice cracked over the telephone, the sound of a woman very close to panic.

  Digger fought himself into wakefulness and said, "Just take it easy. Tell me what happened." He glanced at his watch. It was 8 A.M.

  "Just now, when I got up there was an envelope pushed under my door. It was the same letter, but it said I was going to die. My name was on the list and…Digger, I’m afraid."

  "Good. I’m glad you’re finally afraid. Where’s Danny?"

  "He’s here."

  "Make sure he stays there until I get there."

  "When are you coming?" she as
ked.

  "Right now. And don’t mess up that letter any more with fingerprints."

  Arlo Buehler was still sleeping when Digger left the apartment. Digger left him a note on the small breakfast table. "See you later at the hospital. Had an early stop."

  The doorman called him a cab but it was go-to-work rush hour and by the time the cab had arrived, then crawled slowly across town, it was after 9 A.M. when Digger reached Allie’s dorm.

  He looked at the letter, holding it carefully by a corner. It was another Xerox copy of a typed original. But typed across the top of the chain letter was an additional message. It was written all in capital letters and again the O’s were slightly below the line of type.

  The added message read:

  YOU BROKE THE CHAIN. NOW YOU WILL DIE.

  The name of Allison Stevens was now on the list, right below the name of Jayne Langston. There was a black line through Otis Redwing’s name as there had been through Wally Strickland’s.

  "Shit," Digger said. "Have you heard anything about Langston?"

  "No," Allie said. She was sitting on an overstuffed chair in the corner of her neatly decorated room. Danny Gilligan was perched on the arm of the chair, his arm around Allie’s shoulders.

  "Do you have her office phone number?" Digger asked. Allie read him the number from a well-used telephone book she picked up from an end table.

  "Psychologist’s office," said Mrs. McBride’s voice.

  "Is Doctor Langston in, please?"

  "Yes, but she’s busy with an appointment right now. Who’s calling?"

  "That’s all right," Digger said. "I’ll call back." He hung up quickly and said, "She’s okay. She’s in her office." He sat on the bed and read the letter again and then said, "That’s it. You’re going home. I’m calling your father."

  He lifted the telephone receiver but Allie, barefooted, walked quickly across the room and held down the receiver button. He looked up at her face, his eyes passing first across her wonderful bosom. He could see the small dark rings of her erect nipples through the thin cloth of the plain white T-shirt.