The Suspense Is Killing Me

by Thomas Gifford

  “No, I wouldn’t. I’m probably falling in love with you.”

  “For the money?”

  “It couldn’t hurt.”

  “Candor can be so irritating. But back to my bad year and my theory about daring. Those were daring days, whether it was drugs or fast cars or going without a bra or burning your draft card or running for Canada or going south for civil-rights marches and risking the redneck ambushes. It was important to be daring. I didn’t really have the nerve to be daring. So I was foolhardy and managed to cripple myself in the most prosaic way imaginable. I dived from some stupid boat in some stupid lake and hit a shelf of rock and that was that. I’ve been in a wheelchair since the year your brother died. And I’ve been starved for daring and/or foolhardiness ever since. Are you hungry, by the way? Why don’t you try some of my sushi? We have a Japanese cook who is simply wonderful … go ahead, please, be my guest. This is my second plate and I’m stuffed. Here, I’ll pour the last of this wine. Treat it as an appetizer. Cotter’s roasting pigs, so you’ll be having a pig sandwich for the main course. Barbecue sauce. You’ll taste it for a week. So now I’ve told you why I wanted to meet you. I must say that we were terribly upset by your brother’s death … I was pretty depressed myself, crying a lot, wanting to die, and then JC Tripper actually did die and the result was that I came back to reality and began to deal with it—JC died and it made me realize I wanted or needed to live … I had a young child, a loving husband, the best care—”

  “And very good prospects,” I said.

  “And very good prospects. I owe some of my life to your brother’s music and his death. I never got to thank him, now I’m at least telling you. How do you like the sushi?”

  “Delicious. Different from any other I’ve ever tasted.”

  “I can almost guarantee that,” she said. “It’s fugu. My chef smuggles it into the United States. He goes home to visit his family in Japan and somehow brings it back with him. Fugu.”

  “Would it screw up your sense of gratitude if you found out my brother was still alive?”

  She stared at me for a moment, then said, “Is that purely hypothetical?”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “You mean he may be alive?”

  I nodded.

  “And that’s why you’re here to talk to Cotter. Well, good luck to you. He’s not really into the performers but he’s into money … I wonder if JC Tripper is worth more to the MagnaGroup balance sheet dead or alive? Well, I’m sure Cotter will be interested. If not himself very interesting to you—”

  “Well, maybe it’s a wild-goose chase, but I want to know if my brother is still alive. You can’t blame me.”

  “Did you love him? Were you close to him?”

  “We were close. I’ve got a lot of reasons to love him and few to hate him. But more than anything else I want to get it settled, once and for all. He’s dead or alive—which is it?”

  “Finish your lunch, Mr. Tripper.”

  I finished the delicately curled shavings of raw fish and the pungent sauce.

  “I told you how hard up I am for daring these days. Well, you and I have both just done something rather daring. Fugu is the most dangerous fish on earth to eat. It’s also known as puffer or blowfish. You’ve seen the translucent flesh, really exquisite in taste and color. But the guts, the ovaries, and the liver and whatnot are full of something called tetrodotoxin, which is a pretty good bet to kill you if you eat it. The cleaning is a bit of an art. A hundred fatalities a year in Japan from eating fugu.” She took a deep breath and clasped her hands in her lap. “How are you feeling?”

  “Okay, I guess.”

  “Well, it’s probably the most dangerous thing that will happen to you all day.”

  “Don’t forget the pig sandwich.”

  “That’s why I said probably. Well, I’ve taken up enough of your time. If your brother’s alive, I hope you find him. It’ll be considerably easier to find Cotter. He’s the least daring-looking man out there, but don’t underestimate him—he can be an utter devil. He’s short, stocky, not much hair. And there are the pants. He’s wearing a pair of pants made of patches of different fabrics and colors. A Brooks Brothers fashion statement. You can go out through this door.”

  She held out her hand and I kissed it. I didn’t know why exactly. Maybe because daring was important to her.

  I liked that in a woman.

  Cotter Whitney was standing alone beneath the vast crown of a huge, towering oak tree not far from the water’s edge. His hands were jammed down in his trouser pockets. The trousers and the man wearing them were exactly as advertised. He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He wasn’t at all tan. He was an indoors type of guy. Plump, unassuming, a little sweaty but very, very clean. The top of his head, with a few strands of dark hair drawn across it, was red with sunburn.

  He saw me closing in on him and waved a small plump hand at me. “Mr. Tripper, how very good of you to come all the way out here to the boonies. Dobson told me you’d arrived.” His eyes slid past me, back up toward the house, to the windows of the porch looking out across the party, the lawn of milling brightly clad guests and the yellow canvas tent where a dance floor had been set up. “I wish Ellie would come out and join the party.” He sighed. “She won’t do it; I’ve tried everything. Did she mention that this is part of her birthday weekend? This shebang here, she insisted we do it. I just don’t understand her sometimes … tomorrow night’s the formal dinner party, a few close friends, she’ll be fine for that. But these people, they’d love to see her, pay their respects. She’s known many of them all her life, but she won’t come down in her chair …” He looked at me inquisitively. “Do you understand women, Mr. Tripper?”

  He shook my hand. The soft white hand clamped on mine like a vise. I had the feeling he could win a lot of money arm wrestling if anybody arm-wrestled where he hung out.

  “Your wife and I shared a lunch of fugu. Beyond what that tells me I’m not qualified to discuss her psychology. As far as women go, I’m with the man who said a woman’s mind is a treacherous swamp.”

  “Fugu. Gosh, I wish she wouldn’t eat that stuff. I mean, what’s the point?” He shifted gears. “Let’s go for a walk. These folks don’t need me. They’re having a fine time.” He smiled at me, putting on a new face. With his moon face and horn-rimmed glasses he looked about twenty, presiding over a frat party. “I wondered when you were going to show up. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

  “I think I’m on the wrong page here. You were expecting me?”

  He leaned down and picked up an errant croquet ball and pitched it back in the general direction of the players. Somebody suggested to Mary that next time she not hit the damned thing quite so hard. “It’s not like baseball, darling,” the voice said and there was a spasm of girlish laughter.

  “Well, I thought you were bound to show up sooner or later.” He wore old penny loafers, kicked them through the long grass. “I assumed Allan Bechtol would send you out here.”

  “You know Bechtol?” I was sounding like an idiot even to myself, but things kept popping up out of nowhere. People were always telling me things, but they never told me everything.

  “Know him? Sure I know him. Heck, he’s the main reason we’re trying to take over his publisher. I’m a great fan of Allan Bechtol’s work. You may not know it, but we’re great readers out in this part of the world. We’ve produced lots of writers, too, some of the big ones. Sinclair Lewis, Scott Fitzgerald; Tom Heggen wrote Mister Roberts; Max Shulman wrote Barefoot Boy with Cheek and created Dobie Gillis, that Tom Gifford fellow wrote The Wind Chill Factor and Judy Guest wrote Ordinary People, there’s that Rebecca Hill up in St. Cloud, there’s Jon Hassler, and Garrison Keillor, though frankly he gets on my nerves … I mean we read and write out here. So my mind turned to publishing and Allan Bechtol. Well, he’s not one of us exactly, but he worked for WCCO radio a million years ago and when it comes to writing he’s a honey, better than Lu
dlum for my money. So, anyway, I got to know Bechtol, put him on the board of the MagnaGroup, got to know him as a man. MagnaFilms has got two of his novels in development right now. So, yes, I know Bechtol, I figured he must have sent you to talk to me, brief me, whatever.” He looked up at me expectantly. I couldn’t see his eyes behind the dark glasses. We passed a bunch of youngsters in the care of a couple of teenagers in swimming suits who were shepherding them into canoes. Much splashing and laughter. Cotter Whitney was looking past my shoulder. I turned. An airplane was turning over the trees, banking far across the lake. Pontoons hung from the wings. At the distance it looked like a great rare bird with very big feet.

  “Brief you about what?”

  “Look, it sounds to me like Allan didn’t put you all the way into the picture. But you can level with me. We at Magna are up to our ears in the JC Tripper industry … heck, we are the JC Tripper industry, everything about JC Tripper is of surpassing interest to us. When Allan told me he was going to write a novel about a dead rock star who turns up alive—well, he hit the jackpot with me. Allan and I are now in this together, you might call it a joint venture.”

  The airplane—or seaplane, I should say—was slowly circling the lake, wobbling a bit like a fat bee trying to get his gyrocompass in working order. Both Whitney and I were watching it, hearing the shouts of the kids splashing around with the canoes. Whitney muttered something under his breath and waved at the teenagers in charge of the kids. “Get those canoes out of there,” he said just loud enough for me to hear. Then he turned his attention back to me.

  “Joint venture?” Everything I said sounded sort of simple-minded to me. I felt like a dummy who had lost his ventriloquist.

  “You’re getting half a million, correct? Seems like a lot to me, if you don’t mind my saying so, but I’m new to all this. And in the light of Allan’s sales, well, half a million may be fair, if he gets a big book out of it. Anyway, half of it is Magna’s money. So”—he ducked his head a trifle sheepishly as if he weren’t altogether comfortable saying such things—“you might say you’re working for me, heh, heh.”

  “What do you know about this idea that JC’s alive somewhere? Who starts this kind of rumor? Are there things I’m not being told? Everyone’s so committed to the idea that he’s out there … all this money being thrown around—”

  “Know? I don’t know a darn thing. That’s why I’m putting up a quarter of a million dollars—to find out if he’s alive or not. It’ll turn out that the whole half million comes out of my hide sooner or later, as an advance or something, if I know Allan Bechtol.”

  “How do the murders fit into your scheme of things?”

  He favored me with a blank stare.

  “The murders,” I repeated. “The woman in New York, friend of mine, worked with me on the first JC pieces … then Shadow Flicker, the disc jockey in LA—”

  “Oh my gosh, the murders, yes, sure, where do they fit in? Well, beats me. Heck, this is Minnesota. I don’t know much about murders. In New York and LA, they’re pretty standard equipment, right? But here? Murders? Out of my league. Do they have anything to do with finding JC Tripper?” He shrugged, pushing his hands deep into the pockets of his spectacularly weird trousers. “You’re the man who’s going to find out.” The thought seemed to comfort him. Sally Feinman would have loved the whole scene.

  “And what if I find him? Just what if … what then?”

  “Now you’re talking, Mr. Tripper. This is what I like to hear. Positive thinking. Did you ever read Hubbard?”

  The name meant nothing to me. “Hubbard?”

  “L. Ron Hubbard. Scientology. Oh, it’s all a bunch of garbage, as Ellie keeps reminding me, but still … I’ve read him. There’s something there. Give it a quick read. Life problems. Positive thinking. It’s that kind of thing—”

  “All I know about L. Ron Hubbard is that there was a place on Melrose, I think it was, long time ago, may not be there anymore, they sold plaster fawns and mythological gods and golden gnomes and stuff for your yard—they used to sell these big plaster busts of L. Ron Hubbard in that stupid little hat he wore—”

  “I know the place.” He smiled. “You may have noticed the various deities surrounding my forecourt out front—got those at the place you’re talking about. It’s a small world, isn’t it, Mr. Tripper?”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “Now, if JC’s found alive … JC Tripper back from the Other Side. Not a bad title for his return album, Back from the Other Side. He would be a considerable asset to MagnaDisc, would he not? Money, Mr. Tripper, it all comes down to money, just as my father and grandfather always told me. And, of course, it would, I’m afraid, impact on Freddie Rosen. Can we be frank …” His eyes wandered up to the seaplane, which was circling away from us again, its wings at an angle, banking. “Freddie is, to be brutally honest, past it. We have to face it.”

  “It’s no problem for me,” I said. But suddenly I was thinking of Sammy the Shit and Freddie Deuce and Donna Kordova out at the marina in her new condo, all Freddie’s people.

  “MagnaDisc is in big trouble. Freddie is a relic of another age, an age of gold chains and bell-bottoms and, heaven help us, Carnaby Street. An age gone by, in short. Did you ever see the man? It’s embarrassing. He’s a rusted golden oldie, he’s pretty creepy—”

  “I get the idea,” I said. “He wouldn’t fit in here today. Is that what you’re saying? You’ve really got it all over him when it comes to pants.”

  “And Freddie has run MagnaDisc into the ground. We just can’t have that, can we? We are all answerable to our boards, our shareholder. So, if we find JC and pension Freddie off, we can get MagnaDisc back with the program, back where the Magna name belongs. On top.”

  “All this planning and thinking based on a bit of fiction,” I said. “My brother is dead. It’s crazy, my friend.”

  “Crazy? Well, we shall see. But somebody sent that song … Somebody trying to prove a point. Now … we can’t help wondering, who? And what is the point?” His gaze moved away from me again, back up into the sky over the lake. “Well, look at that … Jesus-fucking-Christ!”

  I saw his point.

  The seaplane was shuddering as it came closer and closer to where we stood, sinking toward the lake past a couple of sailboats, the plane looking older and older the closer it came, the wings struggling, seeming to bend and flex as the pilot fought to level off. The single cyclopean engine was choking to death. The nose pushed upward, a final spasm, then dipped toward the water, the wings at a thirty-degree angle. And then it hit.

  The tip of one wing caught the water. The plane began to spin slowly like the Tilt-a-Whirl at the carnival. One fat pontoon, looking like a big sausage, slid deep into the water and broke off, but by then it had skewed the plane, slowing and then stopping the spinning motion. The plane wobbled irresolutely forward and began to settle as it edged closer to the dock. The spray it had sent up was settling across the fuselage, twinkling in the glare of the sun. The thick snubbed nose with the big propeller was nosing down. The pilot was pushing the hatch open before the water pressure sealed him inside. He struggled out, trying to get a foothold on the strut and the remaining pontoon. He was a big kid and looked vaguely familiar behind the big lenses of his sunglasses. He wore a blue denim work shirt and chino slacks and Reeboks. He was clutching three green seat cushions.

  The canoes were coming in closer now, the pilot shouting to the teenagers guiding them. The crowd, exclaiming in a single voice as crowds often do, had moved down across the grass to watch the unexpected entertainment. The danger, for a few moments so very possible, had passed and people were laughing, kidding Whitney about the flyover, asking where the parachutists would be landing. Whitney stood still, watching, as the pilot threw the seat cushions into the canoes. The plane was going down fast, the lake sucking it toward the deep mud at the bottom.

  The pilot had a deep tan and wore a headband. He was laughing now, exchanging shouts with the kids in t
he canoes. He was about thirty yards from shore. With tremendous elan he stepped off into the water and began swimming toward the dock. The canoes accompanied him and a welcoming committee of party guests moved down toward the weather-beaten old dock.

  Whitney looked at me and heaved an enormous sigh of relief. “What next, I ask you?” he said. “Will you excuse me? All these folks could make the dock go … I don’t want this party to become a legend.” He scuttled off toward the dock, calling to his friends, trying to wave them off the old wooden structure.

  I’d seen it all but I was running it back in slo-mo, trying to differentiate one moment from another in my mind. There was no point in my going down to get a close-up. The swimmer reached the dock and was hoisted up. No one seemed to be concerned at what had happened, how narrowly something horrible had been avoided. All that remained of the plane now was the tip of one wing and the tail, and as I watched the lake got them, too.

  The canoes reached the dock and the seat cushions were handed up to the pilot, who took them. He was smiling and talking to Cotter Whitney as others crowded around him, clapping him on the back as if he were a local hero. Finally Whitney led him through the jostling guests and on up across the lawn. The pilot had suffered a cut above one eye. He was still holding those valuable cushions.

  I waited near the bank until the crowd had filtered back up across the sweep of green acreage. I watched one pontoon floating quietly on the still surface of the lake. I went down to the dock and found the spot I was looking for, knelt down, and peered at the rutted wooden planks. I wetted my finger and placed it in the dusting of fine white powder. It had all but been ground away by the passage of so many feet. I recognized the taste, of course, but it had been a long time. It wasn’t just a guess on my part. I’d seen a white smudge on one of the cushions as the pilot had passed me, walking with Cotter Whitney.

  William Randolph Stryker, Manny’s son, was the pilot.