The Suspense Is Killing Me

by Thomas Gifford

  So we were partners.

  Bechtol gave me a bank draft for a quarter of a million dollars.

  How the hell could I say no?

  Heidi Dillinger shook hands with me too, and handed me an envelope with a couple of sheets of paper in it. She also gave me an airline paper wallet.

  “We’re going to Los Angeles in the morning.”

  We drank a toast and I gathered up my knotted stomach and went home. The rain finally began on the way.

  Five

  DID ANY OF BECHTOL’S STORY make sense?

  Shadow Flicker and Sally Feinman had been murdered in the space of a few days. But were the murders connected by anything other than the time frame? Did anything else tie them together? The answer to that, of course, was JC Tripper. But did it matter? Did it mean there was an effective connection?

  I could see how it would appeal to a man like Bechtol whose business was plotting novels. And in the old days when he was just plain Sam Innis he’d been fond of JC, and maybe that counted for something. But was his view skewed by the needs of his new personality and his peculiar career? Maybe all of his books were about conspiracies.

  I had my doubts.

  Still, there were two dead folks, both of whom I had known, and both had been involved in the life of JC Tripper—one by knowing him, one by researching him, writing about him. Hmmm. And they had both known me …

  I had my doubts, but I also had a chill skittering along my spine. The past was always reaching out, threatening you.

  Why was Bechtol so obsessed with writing a novel based on the death, or faked death, of JC Tripper? Was it that JC was still that hot? It hardly seemed possible. But he was: I had my income, my book to prove it.

  But was he the only goddamned thing Bechtol/Innis could find to write about?

  Who knew how a novelist’s mind worked?

  If Bechtol was an accurate example of the writer-at-work, I could do with never knowing another. The more I thought about him, the crazier I thought he was.

  But that didn’t mean he wasn’t right about the murders of Flicker and Sally.

  It was raining hard by the time I got home, gurgling in the gutters and turning the potholes into small, deadly lakes. The temperature wasn’t going down much, so the feel was tropical, malarial. The thunder was loud and nervous, cracking like gunfire, and lightning was snapping to the west, turning the clouds stark white at fretful intervals. You could smell the rain.

  When I opened the door from the carpeted, mirrored hallway with its Japanese Kabuki paintings, I saw a dim light seeping out of the living room.

  I stood in the doorway, the key in my hand, waiting, wondering, my mind flashing back on Sally and what had happened to her. Maybe she’d walked into her loft without a care in the world and maybe somebody had been waiting for her.

  It was quiet and otherwise dark. The French doors to the terrace were open, as the rain bounced hard on the concrete floor. It dripped thickly from the awning. The light from the living room threw most of its illumination out the window onto the terrace, but it was still soft and dim. I swallowed back the first creeping fear. I told myself to lighten up, for God’s sake.

  I closed the door quietly and crossed the foyer, stared into the living room. A table lamp was turned on. Beside its base lay a novel by Howard Browne. Thunder exploded and the rain drummed and the curtains swayed slightly in the wind. I must have left the light on. I checked out the study, the bedroom, the kitchen. I didn’t want to look in the bathroom. It was silly, but I kept seeing Sally in the water, her dead eyes staring, her teeth sunk into the pulpy, protruding tongue. I was acting like a nitwit. I reached in and flicked on the light. There was no one dead or alive, in the bathroom. I yanked the shower curtain back. Nobody in the tub.

  When I walked back down the hall I thought I smelled something funny. When I stood looking out at the rain on the terrace I felt the flush of breeze and I smelled it again. Just a whiff, then it was gone. Something from childhood, something I should have recognized.

  I dropped the safari jacket over the back of the couch and went into the kitchen. I looked at the contents of the refrigerator. Lime Jell-O with bananas cut up in it. A couple cans of Tecate. I wasn’t quite in the mood for the Jell-O, so I took one of the beers, popped it, and took a big gulp. I went through a big box of Jell-O every day. Lime today, yesterday cherry.

  Cherry.

  I was headed for the terrace when I remembered what it was I was smelling. From childhood, all right. Cherry soda. Cherry cough syrup. That sweet, sickly smell. Cherries.

  I’d smelled it in Sally Feinman’s loft, mixing in my nostrils with the horrible stench of burned flesh coming from the bathroom.

  Now I was home and I was smelling cherries. And the light had been on but I hadn’t left it on. And I was standing in the doorway watching the rain bounce and my knees were beginning to sound like the tap-dancing feet of Astaire.

  There was a man sitting in one of my deck chairs. Most of him was protected by the awning from the rain. He was wearing what seemed to be a venerable seersucker suit, rumpled, wrinkled, shapeless, baggy. A Panama hat with a brightly colored band sat on the little table beside the chair next to a can of Tecate. His trousers had cuffs and they weren’t covered by the awning. Neither were his cream-colored leather shoes with crepe soles. These bottom extremities were very wet. He didn’t seem to mind. There was a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson in his lap. In one hand he held a corncob pipe. It was the tobacco I smelled. A cherry-flavored drugstore brand. His eyes were closed. His face was square, heavy-jowled, thin-lipped, and looked as if it were composed primarily of freshly poured concrete. There were several strands of damp gray hair plastered across the top of his balding head. There was also a large red stain on his blue shirt below a plaid bow tie that looked like it might be a clip-on.

  “Hi, there,” I ventured. I didn’t sound like a man whose native tongue was English. Or any other known earth language.

  He didn’t move.

  I had a dead man on my terrace.

  I took another man-size hit of Tecate. “Shit,” I said, meaning every word of it. I bent down and peered fleetingly at the gory stain, obviously lethal even in the dim light on the terrace. In a lightning flash it really looked god-awful. I inspected the dead gray face. “So who the hell are you, anyway,” I mused. I hated this.

  “Morris Fleury,” the corpse said in a raspy voice thick with weariness and what turned into a Texas drawl or twang or whatever it was. “And you, son, are talking in my sleep.”

  If you’ve never seen a man actually levitate, you’ve really missed something. I’ve never seen it happen either, but I have Morris Fleury’s word for it. He says he figures the only thing that would outright beat it would be spontaneous human combustion, and there we’re talking rare.

  When I settled back onto the terrace, grabbing for the doorframe to keep from falling down, Morris Fleury, the un-dead, surveyed me with scrunched-up sleepy eyes and dropped his pipe. When he reached down to get it, his revolver fell on the floor. He grunted and retrieved both items, held one in each hand, stared at me with a perplexed look on the cement face, as if he were trying to recall just where he was and who I might be.

  “Jesus, your chest—are you all right?”

  “My chest? My chest?”

  “Yes, your chest, there, your chest. You’re wounded.”

  He ducked his chin, trying to see the wound.

  “Ketchup and mayonnaise,” he said. “Double cheeseburger with the works, fries, chocolate malt. Two people I respect have told me to lay off the ketchup.” He yawned mightily, covered his mouth with the hand holding the Smith & Wesson. He looked like he was about to eat it.

  “Two,” I said.

  “My doctor and my dry cleaner.” He made a noise that was a laugh of sorts. “You’ll have to excuse me,” he grumbled, “but I’m bushed. I suppose you’re Lee Tripper.”

  “I suppose.”

  “He supposes,” he said to an invisible au
dience. “That’s a good one.”

  “Please don’t point the gun at me.”

  “Look, you could jump me, overpower me or something. Morris Fleury wasn’t born yesterday.” He didn’t actually say “wasn’t”; he said “wun’t.” If he was ever called upon to say “ ‘ Throw’ me the ball,” he’d say “Tho”; he’d say “bidness,” not “business,” “hep” instead of “help.” You get the idea. But you do the dialect yo’sef, podna, because I’ll go nuts if I try to write it all down phonetically. We’ll both go nuts, for that matter. Back to the story: he decided to put the gun away. He dropped it into the pocket of his baggy jacket. He stared up at me while he stuck the corncob pipe in his mouth and lit it with a Bic lighter. Suddenly the smell of cherries was overwhelming, nauseating.

  “My God, that smells awful. How can you stand it?”

  “If you smoke it, you can’t smell it.”

  I drank some beer. “Sally’s loft reeked of that smell.”

  “I’m not surprised.” He struggled to a standing position. About five-eight, about one-ninety, but mostly gut. His seersucker trousers were belted with a slab of leather two inches wide with a flat heavy buckle featuring the head of a longhorn steer inlaid in bone. His legs were spindly and bowed. I couldn’t imagine why he was wearing crepe soles and not cowboy boots unless crepe soles were quieter. He looked at his soaked trouser cuffs and shoes. “You’d think a man would know enough to come in out of the rain. But I slept through it. I coulda slept in the saddle.” He flinched at a whacking great clap of thunder. “Bad coupla days, chumley. Nerves shot. Trigger finger itchy. Morris Fleury’s not the man he once was.”

  “Why are you napping on my terrace?”

  He stared at me, tapping the pipe stem against his teeth.

  “Did you kill Sally Feinman? Look, I don’t know my lines … aren’t you supposed to tell me what’s going on here? Before I pass out from sheer excitement …” I figured he’d put the gun away and that was a good sign. Without the gun he wasn’t a scary guy. I wondered how quick he was on the draw. The Texas drawl made me think twice.

  “Me? Kill Sally Feinman? What the hell you talkin’ about, boy? Snuff my meal ticket? Use your head, Tripper.”

  “Listen, Furry, I don’t know you or anything about you—”

  “Come on, let’s have some respect here. It’s not Furry. It’s Fleury. Morris Fleury.” He jumped again at an avalanche of thunder and lightning. “Can I have another beer?” He nodded toward the kitchen. “Then we can siddown, clear a coupla things up.” Sweat was running down his face. I pointed to the fridge and told him to make it two beers.

  I went into the living room and sank down into the deep gray sofa. Another faint breeze weaseled its way damply through the open window. Morris Fleury came back, handed me a can, and slumped down on the other couch, facing me. He pulled a red bandanna from his back pocket and mopped his face. “This kinda night … reminds me of the worst time of my life … runnin’ guns to some bandidos through Belize … talk about the asshole of the known universe …”

  “We weren’t. We were talking about Sally Feinman. And the smell your tobacco left behind … Now tell me why I should believe you didn’t kill her.”

  “You should believe it because I’m the one with the gun, smartmouth.” He made a lot of noise sucking his beer. “You shoulda been in Belize, smartmouth.”

  “You’re not going to shoot me. We’re having a beer, we’re getting to know each other. Establishing a little trust, Morris. Why were you in her loft? Are you the guy who knocked me down the stairs?” I blithered on while I got back to breathing normally. I kept telling myself there was nothing to be afraid of, not with this guy.

  “I didn’t kill her but you might have. You’re a damn sight better bet than me.” He licked his lips. “She was paying me, why would I kill her? You—you had a motive. Maybe I oughta have me a little confab with the coppers. How would you like that, amigo?” He smirked without much success. “Explain a coupla things to the fuzz.” He coughed up an oily little laugh. He gave the impression that he might have spent a lifetime blackmailing people who couldn’t afford to pay him off.

  “You were working for Sally? Doing what?”

  “Well, you might call it research.”

  “About what? And what the hell was my motive? I loved that woman. I wasn’t in love with her but I loved her. Are these sentiments at all familiar to you?”

  “Don’t be such a jerk, okay? I’ve forgotten more about love than you’ll ever know. Trust me.” As the protestation of a noble nature, it was unconvincing.

  “Talk to me, Morris. Tell me your story.”

  “So you loved Sally Feinman! Well, ain’t that a good one!” He grinned, tilted the can to his mouth, shook his head at the wonder of it all. “Just goes to show you, don’t it?”

  I wasn’t going to ask him any more questions. He could talk or not. He was wearing me out.

  “She hired me to do some legwork, see. She said she was on to the biggest story of her life … You know how writers are, the story’s the thing, I guess. So go figure. It was a big deal to her. You know what it was? This’ll kill ya—it was your brother again! No shit, amigo. She was on to JC Tripper again!” He was sweating again. He pressed the cold beer can to his forehead, rolled it back and forth.

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “She knew JC’s dead.”

  “You think so, do you? Well, not to hear her tell it, my friend. She told me she knew damn well that JC Tripper was alive—”

  “No, that’s nuts. She’d have talked to me about it before anyone else. It was our project, we’d been all through it together—”

  “Exactly. That’s why she didn’t tell you, get it?”

  “No, I don’t get it.” What the hell was going on? Suddenly everybody had decided that my long-dead brother was doing an encore.

  “She smelled a rat, Lee. Bottom line, the girl had a nose for news. A nose for news!” He seemed to like the sound of that. “So she hired Morris Fleury to check up on a coupla things. ‘Discretion with Reasonable Rates, Fleury’s the Man.’ Lemme throw some names at you … a fella by the name of Clive Taillor, he was JC’s driver, boozin’ buddy …”

  “I’m aware of who Clive Taillor is,” I said.

  “Damn right you are. Clive Taillor, now resident in Zurich. And there was this other fella Feinman was interested in, fella by the name of Flicker … he’s had some bad luck lately, though, along the lines of Sally Feinman’s bad luck. You hear the one about this Flicker? My friend Flicker? Old pal of JC’s, disc jockey in LA. You hear about him?” His small eyes, shiny and close together, were suddenly very alert. “No? Well, he’s no longer with us. Died. He wound up looking like the Death of a Thousand Cuts. He only lived through the first hundred or so, that’s my guess. They found him clogging up a cistern in some place called Pacoima. I’m told he was all shriveled up. Looked like one of them dancin’ California raisins, that’s what I hear. Then she said there’s a strange report or two outta London about Annie DeWinter, who was JC’s old girlfriend … Whattaya make of this?” He laughed. I was getting tired of his laugh. “Well, I got one more name for you—gonna blow your cotton-pickin’ mind. Ready?”

  “Amaze me, Mr. Fleury.”

  “Lee Tripper.”

  “What’s that mean? Lee Tripper?”

  “You. Don’t you get it? This woman you loved so much! I told you—you’re the one with the motive, not me. She was just about to turn me loose on you. Deep research. She was gonna give me a file she’d been collecting, all about Lee Tripper—”

  “This is insane,” I said. “Sally wouldn’t—”

  “She thought you’d lied to her. She thought you’d written your book to cover your tracks, chumley.” He grinned, not a winning sight. “She wanted your ass. True, as God is my witness. You love her now?”

  “My faith in human nature is, I admit, badly shaken.” I swallowed hard. The trick was to stay cool. I didn’t want to show Fleury any
weakness. He’d never let you forget it. That was his nature.

  “She thought you had something to do with whatever happened to JC. His death … or his disappearing, willing or otherwise. Maybe you murdered him. Maybe you got him to wherever the dickens he wanted to go. Whichever—she figured that keeping it secret was pretty important to you. Now she’s dead … Was it that important to you, amigo? I told you, you’re the one with the motive, see.”

  I was trying to keep track of all the things I could say in my defense, but what was the point in wasting them on him? Sally had never let on a word to me. But I wasn’t an idiot, appearances to the contrary. Fleury might be telling me the truth, and if he was, then I’d badly misunderstood Sally. I’d truly thought we were square with one another. More or less. Well, you live and learn, la-di-da.

  “So what brought you here? Your employer is dead, you’re out of a job.”

  He shrugged. “She’d paid me and I thought I owed it to her. I’ve always made that my rule, good value for money. Ask around. You’ll find out.”

  “What a bullshitter! You’d probably like to put the squeeze on me. Get me to fall for your story about Sally investigating me and you’d have a perfect pigeon for a little blackmail. Except you don’t know what she thought she had on me—if anything. So you’re a brick shy of a load. I’ll bet that’s the story of your life.”

  “You have a cow pie for a mind, my friend. I went to see her, she was gonna give me this file she had—”

  “On me?”

  “On the whole business. You included, I suppose. Even if you didn’t kill her, you were there, you know what I found. I did a pretty thorough search, like lookin’ for a tick on an old black hound. But there wasn’t anything. She was a helluva mess, though. Well, I don’t know what to think, so I go back down to the street. I’m thinking I don’t know what’s goin’ on … so I go stand in the shade down the block a ways. I get me a Sabrett’s, put a lotta mustard on it … you shoulda seen that shit by the time I got done … and then you show up, all dewy-eyed and in love, heh, heh … And then a little while later we got curb-to-curb cops, a field of blue … and I think to myself, dear old Lee Tripper is Johnny-on-the-spot—”