‘I’m a writer.’
Brannigan tilted back his head and raised his eyebrows. ‘That so? What do you write?’
‘Fiction. Novels.’
‘What kind of novels? Anything I might have heard of?’
‘Thrillers,’ Ray said, steering around the words ‘crime’ and ‘detective’. He named his last three books.
Gentle Death, The Iceman, and Dying Fall seemed to have flown beneath or above Brannigan’s radar. The Lieutenant said, ‘Do you know Grant Upward? I like his stuff, but he writes books so fast I can’t keep up with the guy. Two of my detectives out there, they read Grant Upward’s books as soon as they come out.’
‘Actually,’ Ray said, ‘Grant and I are old friends.’
‘I’m impressed. Now, tell me about this group of yours. How you met, what the other men do, your connections to Columbia, things like that.’
‘We’re all neighbours,’ Ray said. ‘I met Gus Trayham in 1980, ‘81, something like that, when we used to go to the same bar on Columbus Avenue. He works as a grip for companies that film commercials. Gus took some classes at Columbia in the late sixties, I think, and he started using the gym before the rest of us. I got an MA at Columbia in 1966, so one day I went with him and signed up. That was in the spring of 1990.
‘Around that time, my computer started going haywire, and a writer friend of mine, in fact it was Grant Upward, said I should talk to a guy named Leo Gozzi, who helped writers with their computers, setting them up, doing upgrades, hand-holding, whatever they needed. I called Leo. He came to my place and straightened everything out. He was great. After that I called him every time I needed advice. Leo and I spent so much time together we became friends, which was a good thing, because half the writers in the New York area wound up hearing about him. Later on, through Tommy he began getting calls from actors, too. If he didn’t already know you or like your work, you were out of luck. Turns out Leo graduated from Columbia. When he said he wanted to start exercising, I thought, why not?, and introduced him to Gus. That’s how he got in.’
‘What about Mr Whittle?’
‘Tommy’s an actor who lives on my block. He grew up in our neighbourhood, and Tommy and Gus are old friends. After I started going to the gym, Gus and I told Tommy all he had to do was say he was an alum, and they’d let him buy a card, because they never check.’
‘Do you work out five days a week?’
‘If we can. I might have to meet a deadline, and Gus sometimes has a string of twelve-hour work days. Leo gets stuck in Westchester or New Jersey with a client who’s flipping out because his system just crashed. The actors Tommy put him in touch with introduced him to some famous actors, and those people are like babies, they want everything right now. Tommy goes to a lot of auditions, so he can’t make it every day, either. Clyde was pretty regular, though.’
‘How did Clyde Pepper come into your group?’
‘He and Leo lived about a block away from each other. After they started hanging out, Leo arranged for us to meet Clyde for dinner one night, and he fit right in. For one thing, Clyde looked like he’d been working out all his life. He certainly wasn’t going to be an embarrassment or slow things down. Besides that, he was an interesting guy. In some ways, Clyde fit in better than Leo.’
‘Oh?’ said Brannigan.
‘Well, Leo’s a friend of mine, and if you need someone to hook you up with an Internet provider or lead you through the ins and outs of a software program, he’s your guy. And by working out with us all these years, he managed to get himself into good condition, but that’s not really where he’s coming from. Leo went to Bronx Science.’
‘I’m not sure I follow you.’
‘I’m talking about involvement in athletics. Do they even have sports at Bronx Science? Computers are Leo’s whole life. Right out of college, he was hired by one of those outfits where everybody wears jeans and works twelve hours a day. A few years later, the company took off, and Leo did very well until he discovered the owners were screwing their suppliers. When he spoke up, they dumped him. He went freelance because he couldn’t get another job, and then he came into our group. But he didn’t have the same background.’
‘An athletic background?’
‘Yes,’ Ray said. ‘It makes a difference.’
‘Did Clyde Pepper have an athletic background?’
‘Clyde grew up in Inwood, and he played basketball and ran the half-mile in high school.’
‘What about the rest of you?’
‘Gus played football and basketball at Fisk. Tommy was an all-conference guard his senior year at New Trier, in Illinois, and he made the football team his first year at Carleton, before he got interested in theatre. I did varsity football, basketball and track all though high school. The point is, Clyde had worked under coaches, he’d been through a sports programme. He knew about discipline. He set goals for himself.’
‘His death must have come as a shock to you.’
‘It still is a shock,’ Ray said. ‘If he had to take a walk, I wish he’d come down to our neighbourhood, called one of us up, stopped in for a beer or something. Clyde did that, sometimes. Who goes into Riverside Park late at night?’
‘That’s an interesting question,’ Brannigan said. ‘Was it a habit of his, do you know?’
‘You got me,’ Ray said. ‘But you’d think a guy who used to be a homicide detective would know better.’
‘When was the last time you saw him?’
‘About an hour after we left the gym. We always have lunch at a place down on Broadway. When we’re done, Gus and Tommy and I get into a cab, and Leo and Clyde walk home. The last time I saw Clyde, we were hailing our cab.’
‘Did you talk to him yesterday evening?’
Ray shook his head. ‘Last night, I was with my girlfriend, Sally Frohman. Around midnight, whenever it was, you called and gave me the news. I talked to my friends for about an hour. We could hardly believe what happened. You don’t expect a friend of yours to get killed.’
‘You were with your girlfriend all night?’
‘Depends what you mean by all night,’ Ray said. ‘Sally rang my buzzer about 11:00, maybe a little later. She was worried about something. Well, she was pissed off at me and wanted to make sure I knew it. Hold on.’ He smiled at Brannigan. ‘Are you checking to see if I have an alibi for the time Clyde was murdered?’
‘I’m asking you what you did last night.’
‘What time was Clyde murdered?’
‘According to the Medical Examiner, sometime between 10:00 and 12:00.’
‘Then I have half an alibi.’ Ray said. ‘But I didn’t do it, if you had any doubts about that. I was fond of Clyde, I liked him a lot. After Sally and I finally got to bed, I cried. I really did, I cried like a baby.’
‘Murderers cry all the time, Mr Constantine. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’ve seen dozens of people who committed murder break down and weep. Some of them were sitting right in that chair. They cry because they almost always killed a friend, a spouse or a child of theirs. You should put it in one of your books.’
Remembering a scene near the end of Dying Fall, Ray said, ‘Now that you mention it, I already did. Funny, isn’t it? Sometimes you write things you weren’t aware of knowing. Grant Upward and I used to talk about that. He said it was one of the reasons he wrote - to discover what he knew.’
‘You get the same thing in police work now and then,’ Brannigan said. ‘If we could bring Clyde Pepper back to life, I think he’d agree with me. The man had one of the best records in this precinct, maybe the best. Not a man who gave up easily. Did he ever talk about his work?’
‘Not that I remember,’ Ray said.
‘He never mentioned a boy named Charles White? Charlie White?’
Ray looked up and brought the tips of his fingers together. ‘If he did, I’ve forgotten all about it.’
‘Three years ago, the case attracted a lot of attention in the press. It wasn’t as big as Robert C
hambers and Jennifer Levin, but it was almost in that league. I’m surprised you don’t remember it, being in your line of work.’
‘This was something Clyde was working on?’ Ray asked.
‘It was one of his last cases. Around 3:00 one morning, a Barnard student and her boyfriend saw a kid lying on the ground inside the gate to the Columbia campus on 116th Street. He was curled up behind his backpack in the dark, off to one side. If his white polo shirt hadn’t caught her eye, the girl would never have spotted him. They thought he was drunk, and they went in to see if they could help him. After they got a good look, the boyfriend called 911 on his cell phone. The kid had been beaten to death. That was Charlie White. He was in his last year of pre-med at Columbia, and he lived in a fraternity house on the other side of 116th Street, a couple of doors down. Ring any bells?’
‘Maybe,’ Ray said.
‘In one of his pockets, our pre-med frat boy was carrying five grams of cocaine in individual packets. The backpack was even better. A rock the size of a walnut wrapped up in a plastic bag was rammed down next to his books. Turned out Charlie White had a reputation for dealing coke to his fraternity brothers. Plus other interested parties.’
‘Oh, yeah, Charlie White,’ Ray said. ‘Sure. He was from a well-off family in the Midwest, wasn’t he? His father had a big job in the Carter administration.’
‘Missouri,’ Brannigan said. ‘His father was Under-Secretary of the Treasury during Reagan’s first term.’
‘He must have been killed over a drug deal,’ Ray said.
‘Your friend Clyde didn’t buy that theory. I’ve been looking through his records, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was right. In the end, Pepper came up empty-handed. Must have been frustrating for a guy like that.’
‘Well, yeah,’ Ray said. ‘But what makes you think he was right?’
‘A couple of things. To beat someone to death, you have to keep coming at him, keep putting in the effort. Drug-related murders are like executions. Turning a guy’s face into mush takes anger, it takes passion. It’s personal.’
‘Maybe the kid burned one of his customers,’ Ray said.
‘Could be. But I suppose it would be the first time in history that a guy killed his dealer and didn’t rip off his stash.’
‘Uh huh. That makes sense.’
‘Do you see what I’m thinking, Mr Constantine? Clyde didn’t want to give up that case. Who knows, maybe he moved out of Riverdale to keep working on it. So I was interested if he ever talked about this to any of you. Anything he might have said could be useful to us.’
‘No, he never did,’ Ray said. ‘Not to me, at least.’
‘Well, I had to ask,’ Brannigan said. ‘Thank you for your cooperation. Would you send in Mr Gozzi, please?’
Ray left the office, closed the door behind him, and went over to the side of the room. ‘Your turn in the barrel,’ he said to Leo, and when Leo stood up, Ray said, ‘Did any of you ever hear Clyde mention an unsolved case he was still working on?’ None of them had. ‘Too bad,’ Ray said. ‘We might have been able to give them some help.’
Ray watched Leo Gozzi enter Brannigan’s office, then sat down beside Gus to wait until the last man came out.
* * * *
‘I’m sorry, but I think we’re at a dead end,’ said Sally Frohman. ‘I really wish I didn’t, because I like you a lot, Ray, and I thought we had a relationship that was going somewhere. You’re a good writer, too - I never had any doubts about that. When I got my first job, some of the women told me never to get involved with writers, it didn’t take me long to learn why, but I always thought it could be different if you respected the guy’s work. I guess I was wrong. Or there might be some other problem, one that has nothing to do with your being a writer, I don’t know, at this point everything seems connected to everything else, but what I do know is, this thing isn’t working, and I think it would be better if we stopped seeing each other.’
She had left two messages on Ray’s machine, arrived at his door toting a manuscript-laden briefcase, shared take-out Thai food and a bottle of Beaulieu Vineyards chardonnay at the kitchen table, adventurously and with a hint of desperation observable only to an experienced Sally Frohman-watcher strewn her clothes here and there on both floors of his brownstone apartment, and concluded her farewell performance in abravura trifecta, most of which, Ray hoped, had been genuine. Presently, which is to say at 10:35 p.m., they lay recumbent between daisy-printed sheets. The fragrantly chromatic harmonies of Faure’s Second Quartet for Piano and Strings drifted about them, courtesy of WNYC.
‘Gee,’ Ray said, ‘you respect my work?’
Sally gave him a dark, deeply reproving look. Her hair fuzzed out electrically around her head, and the distance between her eyes seemed about an inch wider than usual. ‘Is that your final comment?’
‘No, sorry. Just an ill-advised attempt at levity. You never told me anything like that before.’
‘Didn’t I?’ For a moment, she seemed stricken. ‘Well, maybe not in so many words. But you’re changing the subject. Tonight was lovely, and I’m going to miss you, but we’re not going anywhere, are we? This is as much as there’s ever going to be, and it isn’t enough.’
‘Sally,’ he said, ‘your timing is incredibly bad. One of my closest friends was killed yesterday. Clyde didn’t have a heart attack, he wasn’t wasting away from some disease, he wasknifed. Some creep cut his throat. The guy smashed in Clyde’sskull. I don’t see how you can...Aaah, hell.’ He flattened his palms over his eyes, then dropped his hands at his sides. ‘If you want to know the truth, Sally, in a way - and take this however you like - it’s like my son died all over again. This is not the moment to start whining about our relationship, all right?’
‘No,’ Sally said. ‘It isn’t all right. I’ll overlook the part about whining, because I know none of this is easy for you. Ray, I am very, very sorry about your friend.’ She sat up straight and wrapped the sheet around her. ‘Do you know why I came here tonight? I wanted to do whatever I could for you - I wanted to help you get through this. I thought you might need me, Ray.’
‘I’m glad,’ he said.
‘But did you talk to me about your friend? Did you let me know what you were feeling? Ray, you completely shut me out. Before dinner, I asked you about what happened at the police station, and you said it was nothing. During dinner, you said that your friend Leo looked distressed at the gym today, and I gathered you were concerned about him, but when I asked, you clammed up. You wouldn’t have said anything if I hadn’t forced the issue. You’re like this glassy, frozen surface - you never open up. In the entire time we have been together, you never told me any more about your son than that his name was Paolo and he died of an overdose. I don’t know how old he was, or where he was when it happened.’
‘He was twenty,’ Ray said. ‘It happened, as you put it, in his apartment, during his third year at RISDE. RISDE is an acronym for the Rhode Island School of Design, located in Providence, Rhode Island. Is that what you wanted to hear? Do you feel more informed?’
‘You’re never going to let anyone in,’ Sally said. ‘I feel sorry for you. Even more than that, you make me sad. You have nothing but those guys at the gym and your work.’
‘You’d be surprised at what I have,’ Ray said.
The telephone rang. Sally did not take her gaze from him, and the telephone kept ringing.
‘What happened to your answering machine?’
‘I turned it off,’ he said, and leaned sideways and picked up the receiver. After a short time, he said, ‘No, I haven’t heard from him.’ Ray listened to his caller some more and said, ‘Okay, yeah. I’ll be right there.’ He hung up.
‘Don’t take this personally, but I have to leave. That was Gus Trayham. He’s been trying to talk to Leo all night, but Leo isn’t answering, and Gus is worried. He and Tommy are up on 107th Street, trying to convince the super to let them into Leo’s apartment. I should be there when they get in.’
‘I don’t even want to say.’ Ray got out of bed and began hunting for his clothes. ‘Talk about lousy timing. What do you want to do, stay here?’
‘I’ll wait for you to get back,’ Sally said. ‘Unless you want me to come with you.’
‘No, no,’ Ray said. ‘With luck. I won’t be gone more than half an hour. If it’s going to be later, I’ll call.’
A few minutes after midnight, Ray let himself back into his apartment. Fully dressed, Sally was seated on his sofa, dividing her attention between the stack of pages on her lap and Channel One, the 24-hour local news station.
‘Well?’ she said.
Ray shook his head and walked into the kitchen. He took a glass from a shelf, dropped in ice cubes from a bowl in the freezer, and half-filled the glass with whiskey. When he turned around, Sally was leaning against the counter just inside the entrance, part of the manuscript still in her hands.
Dark Terrors 5 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology] Page 56