The Suspense Is Killing Me

by Thomas Gifford

  When she stopped to take a breath I put down my coffee cup and covered her hand with mine. “Heidi,” I said patiently, “He’s dead.” I smiled at her. I pretended that my head wasn’t aching and that I didn’t want to pick at the stitches. I pretended that the idea of another six months in the Feldstein Clinic wasn’t sounding better to me every day.

  “You’re just saying that and you know it. You know I’m right. You know tenacious Heidi Dillinger is on to something.”

  A call came through from Sam Innis shortly before noon when she and I were wrangling over our next destination. I was being an obstructionist in a hopeless cause while she was deciding we’d go to Zurich and catch up on old times with Clive Taillor. I was wishing I’d never gotten into any of it. I wanted to go home. But I also wanted the half million with more to come. And most of all I wanted to get the monkey called JC Tripper off my back.

  The conversation was pretty one-sided once she took Innis’s call. Heidi did most of the listening. I went into the bathroom and came out and stood at the window and flopped down in a chair and got up and paced. She was getting a word in edgewise every so often, telling him what he wanted to hear. Eventually she hung up and sat lost in thought.

  “Well?” I said.

  “We’re going to Rome. Right now.”

  “What happened to Zurich?”

  “Rome.”

  “Don’t be irritating and obscure.”

  “Another party has been heard from.”

  “I refuse to guess.”

  “Thumper Gordon,” she said.

  And I thought I’d had a headache before.

  The whole thing was out of control and we hadn’t had lunch yet.

  She went out to get the tickets. I stood at the hotel window staring out at the traffic, trying to get hold in my mind of Thumper and Annie and dreading everything. I wasn’t thinking about the view in the street and square before me.

  Then I saw Heidi walking through the crowds in that determined way of hers. She was going to pick up the tickets.

  But then I saw someone scuttle up beside her, saw her turn and nod as he fell in beside her. They were talking hard, as if time were limited. They made what struck me as an unlikely pair. And the sight of them frightened me. I was being lied to. And I was doing my share of the lying. I was running out of people to trust.

  Then I watched Heidi Dillinger and Morris Fleury lose themselves in the crowd.

  Thirteen

  THINGS COULD HAVE BEEN WORSE.

  The flight to Rome could have been hijacked by the Libyans or the Iranians or the PLO and we could have been left to sit on a wasted corner of tarmac somewhere with the air-conditioning off and a bad-smelling guy shoving an attack rifle up our noses. Or a bomb could have blown us into bits scattering over the Mediterranean. Or we could have been forced to eat the in-flight lunch. None of these things happened, however, so in the larger sense, I was a pretty lucky guy. But you know how it is—it’s always something. Now I had to face the fact that my sleeping companion, my fellow Hardy Boy, my partner in the enterprise was lying to me, playing yet another game, covering up yet another bundle of secrets. This particular bundle was the rumpled, dandruff-dusted creature of the darkness, Morris Fleury.

  He seemed at times, in my analytical moments, to have been grafted onto the story, but most of the time I had the uneasy feeling that when it all played out he’d be somewhere near its center doing a Harry Lime on me. Everybody lied about this guy. Nobody admitted knowing him, as if he were the doubtful guest no one wanted to admit inviting. But there was Cotter Whitney, tycoon, communing with him on the dock in the moonlight. There he was in Sally Feinman’s apartment keeping company with her burned and defiled corpse. There he was smoking his pipe, waiting for me in the darkness of my own apartment, waiting to tell me that Sally was betraying me, had a file on me … And now Heidi had lied to me about him. His very existence seemed to drive people to falsehood.

  Why was Heidi lying to me? What did she know that I shouldn’t? What kind of doofus guy was I? Weren’t we on the same side, after all?

  Who was Fleury working for? Why had he too gone from Cotter Whitney’s estate in Minnesota to Tangier? Was he supposed to be keeping track of me? Or, if he worked for Whitney—which certainly seemed the best bet—maybe he was watching Heidi and me, since we were creatures of Sam Innis/Bechtol. But would Fleury be meeting on the sly with Heidi, then? Not if he was spying on her … unless he was double-crossing his employer …

  You see where this kind of thinking can get a chap.

  But my head was throbbing anyway. I decided never again to hit my head repeatedly against a wall. And the more I thought about Heidi Dillinger and Morris Fleury in the street below my window, the worse my headache got. It’s always unnerving when you find out unpleasant truths about somebody with whom you’re sleeping … about somebody you trust.

  I was in a lousy mood and on my guard when we got to the Hassler in Rome and fell into Sam Innis’s clutches. Heidi must have noticed what a churl I was being, but maybe she’d decided to attribute it to my overall performance in Tangier and the inevitable psychological hangover. There were messages waiting for us at the desk. There was a room reservation in my name, none for Heidi. Innis wanted her to report at once to his suite. I was to settle into my room. “Have a shower and a drink, pussycat,” Innis’s handwritten note suggested.

  Easily led, as always, I did as I was told, only I didn’t like showering on my stitches, which I couldn’t quite ignore, though; in fact, they were pretty well hidden by my hair. So I sank into a tub and let the hot water soak out the aches and pains of my drunken Moroccan exploits. The sight of Sally Feinman in her tub, the smell of the scorched flesh flashed across my mind, but eventually that image gave way and my subconscious went ahead considering some of the elements of this entire JC Tripper affair. I found myself humming the plaintive, haunting tune to “Everything’s Hazy in Tangier,” wondering why it had been sent to Freddie Rosen and by whom—what did it mean? Why had Sally and Shadow had to die and how were they connected to the search for my brother? From behind closed eyes I saw the seaplane slowly and with a fine inevitability crashing into Cotter Whitney’s lake … I saw Bill Stryker rescuing the seat cushions with the cocaine packed inside and I tried to square that with the kind of man Whitney seemed to be and it just wouldn’t fit … I saw Heidi Dillinger picking me up so cleverly on Fifth Avenue with Mellow Yellow flicking the cards on the upturned cardboard box … I smelled the cherry tobacco in my darkened apartment, in the narrow stairway to Sally’s, floating in the heat near the boathouse … I tried to plot out in my mind the role of the Magna Group in all of it but it was hopeless; Magna was everywhere …

  The telephone woke me up. Sam was ready to see me.

  Three of them were waiting for me. I felt like a doctoral candidate about to screw up his orals. Sam Innis didn’t have the tape-recorded dark and stormy night to comfort him, but otherwise he wasn’t much different. He wore rumpled khaki pants and a short-sleeved bush shirt. The wiry hair on his heavy forearms matched the Brillo-pad beard. He wore Clark desert boots and his feet were crossed on the gilt coffee table. He spoke my name and waved me toward a gilt chair with a gold brocade cushion and back. It looked spindly. “You know Cotter,” he said, and Whitney, his round choirboy face in place, stood up and shook my hand. He wore a gray summer-weight pinstripe and smelled of Royall Lyme. “And this big one is my publisher, Hugo Ledbetter.” Ledbetter looked at least as large as he had the night I’d seen him pushing Eleanor Whitney’s wheelchair up the garden path. He’d exchanged the voluminous smock for a dark blue suit. His head, a fullish salt-and-pepper beard included, was about the size of a Rolls-Royce engine block. He was upwards of six and a half feet tall and must have gone well over three hundred pounds. When he stood, the room gave the illusion of lurching into a thirty-degree tilt. “Mr. Tripper,” he rumbled. His voice reminded me of either Orson Welles or God, depending. It was like shaking hands with the business en
d of a twenty-ton earth scoop. Heidi Dillinger was nowhere to be seen.

  Sam Innis pointed to a tray of Diet Cokes and a bucket of ice. “The comforts of home. Wet your whistle, Lee. Tangier is thirsty work, I hear.”

  “You have no idea how thirsty,” I said.

  “Yes, we do. Heidi related your adventures in some detail. How’s your head, by the way?”

  “Reminds me of the old days,” I said.

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “I’ll survive.”

  Innis nodded. “Well, what do you think, Lee? Is JC still alive?”

  “I see no reason to think so. We certainly didn’t learn anything in Tangier to change my mind.”

  Heidi had obviously told him something he wanted to hear—part of her job, I supposed, letting him down easily—and he insisted on nattering away about Tangier and Will Sasser and I kept watching his piercing little eyes that made me feel like I was being thumbtacked to a specimen board. So many years had passed between my sightings of Sam Innis, I had to keep remembering that I didn’t know this guy at all. And he sure as hell wasn’t my pal. The question now was whether or not he was my enemy. Heidi worked for Innis and she had lied to me, had known Morris Fleury after all. Did that mean Innis also knew Fleury? And if so, where did that put them when it came to the murder of Sally Feinman … which Morris Fleury knew all about? And may have committed, for all I knew. All my pent-up anxiety called for a Diet Coke.

  I found myself in the preposterous situation of not daring to blurt out my questions for fear of what the answers might be. If the enemy—whatever that meant—was in the room, the worst thing I could do was alert him—or them—to the fact that I had peeked under the tent flap and had a glimpse of the freak show. Who was the enemy? Anybody lying to me? Or were they just trying to keep me out of extraneous matters? Why would anyone be my enemy, anyway? What had I done to them? At worst I was only the Judas goat intended to lure JC out somehow—and that was the worst scenario. But then there were JC’s enemies. And JC’s enemies were my enemies, weren’t they? There may have been more ways, simpler ways, to look at it, but we were stuck with mine. And I was both scared and confused, trying to hide it all.

  Cotter Whitney screwed his round have-a-nice-day face into a mask of adult concern and edged forward in his chair. “There is a new development, Lee, that could be important. We’ve got to bring you in on it.”

  I nodded, waited. Ledbetter was standing by the window, which looked out at the headquarters of the Order of the Sacred Heart and the Spanish Steps. He was humming, recognizably, the opening movement of the Elgar Cello Concerto.

  Whitney continued in a slightly perplexed manner. “We seem to have heard from Mr. Thumper Gordon.”

  “Seem?” Innis said sourly. He was scratching his beard, flaking dandruff onto his bush shirt. “Seem? Don’t be a pussy, Cotter—”

  “Well, we can’t prove it actually came from Gordon,” Whitney said. He was all patience, which was undoubtedly his customary style in the face of crisis.

  “We must proceed,” Innis snapped, “as if it did. Period.”

  “Listen, the squabbling is fun,” I said, “but you girls don’t need me for it.”

  “Careful, laddie,” Innis said, shaking a forefinger at me.

  I stood. “Sam, old buddy, fuck yourself.” I reached the door at the same time his voice caught me, brought me back with a forced laugh and an apology. “You guys have got to relax,” I said. “It’s all a game. You know damn well JC’s dead. We’re all running around chasing our tails. You’re going to have to write a novel about a dead rock star, Sam.”

  “We’ll see,” he said.

  “Sometimes,” I said, coming back and sitting down, “I think none of this has anything to do with a novel. I think you’ve all been bullshitting me from Day One … I’m not complaining, it’s your money. But I wish you were all better liars. We’ve got bodies everywhere, we know it’s all connected to JC and Magna and who the hell knows what else … and you’ve got me out on the point. Frankly, though I think you’re mighty swell fellas, I’m getting a wee bit anxious.” They were all looking anywhere but at me. Not exactly forthcoming. I gave up. “So,” I said heartily, “how’s the old Thump?”

  “He simply sent me a letter, postmarked London, asking me how Freddie Rosen and I like ‘Everything’s Hazy in Tangier.’ Obviously he’d sent it to Freddie. This letter came from Thumper or someone who knew about the song, anyway.” Whitney sighed wearily. “In other words, a player.”

  “It’s a delicate kind of blackmail,” Innis interrupted.

  “Doesn’t sound like Thump,” I said.

  “I don’t give a shit what it sounds like to you.”

  “Careful, laddie,” I said softly, waving a finger at him. “I’m right on the verge of shoving your money up your ass and taking a hike back to sanity.”

  “The hell you are,” he said. He was smiling.

  “Men, men,” Whitney said, “let’s stay calm. The point is, Lee, there is an element of blackmail, I’m afraid. Very discreet but—”

  “If it walks like a duck,” Innis said, “quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck—”

  “—but still earmarked by a threat. Mr. Gordon says he has in his possession many unpublished, unheard songs from JC’s final months. He sent us the one as evidence. Now he wants to make a deal with Magna for the songs—he incidentally claims co-authorship of many of them. He wants to make a publishing and recording deal with Magna … and he wants Magna to forgo all profits, instead forwarding the money to Thumper for music-therapy centers for disturbed children. I see you smile—may I ask why?”

  “Because it’s beautiful,” I said. “He probably means it.”

  “He brings you into it, too. An aspect of his plan which you may find less amusing. Of course, since you are JC’s legal heir, the royalties due JC would go to you … they would amount to a considerable sum. But Mr. Gordon guarantees that you would agree to contribute those royalties to his scheme … guarantees it.” Whitney paused, pursing his lips, giving me a long, liquid stare. “Tell us, Lee, has Mr. Gordon been in touch with you?” He looked as if someone he trusted had stolen his tricycle.

  I was laughing, shaking my head no. “But I promise you, this guy is definitely Thumper. And you know what? He’s right. I’ll sign over the royalties to his project. No problem. Man, this is really sinister.” I couldn’t stop smiling.

  “But may I ask you, speaking as a businessman,” Whitney said softly, “what’s in it for Magna?”

  “I should think that’s obvious. It would be humiliating if someone else, some other label, did a new collection of JC’s stuff. Lousy for your image. And you can publicize what you’re doing … contributing your share of the proceeds to this worthwhile cause. Very good for your image. And if Thumper forms a new group, comes out of retirement, you’d have him and you could cut some deals with him there … and don’t try to make anybody believe that some twenty-five-year-old contract with JC is still in effect. Don’t even try that one. So, why not bite the bullet, drop him a friendly line, say you’ll throw him a party in LA the town will never forget—”

  “Your sweet-natured innocence becomes you,” Whitney said. “But I’m persuaded that there is rather more to this than meets the eye.”

  Innis was still digging for the mother lode in his beard. “You seriously believe this shit, Lee?”

  “Why not?”

  “Aw, Lee, gimme a break.”

  “I don’t know why I should, actually. But, if you don’t believe it, what are you going to do about it?”

  Innis shrugged.

  “You’ve got to talk to him,” I said.

  “Well, we can’t actually do that,” Whitney said. “He didn’t give us any way to get in touch with him. And he’s been out of sight for years.”

  The conversation dribbled on and I learned that Heidi was already off somewhere doing Innis’s bidding and would meet me in Zurich, where we could have a chat with Clive Taill
or. Innis made it clear that he believed JC was alive and we’d drive him out of his hole at any moment. I told him it was his money and his brainless faith and I’d keep playing. Whitney discreetly chewed a fingernail. Hugo Ledbetter didn’t say a damned thing.

  There was, of course, something going on in that room about which I knew little or nothing. But it was thick and palpable and clung to all three of them as if they’d just waded through a lake of it up to their chins. I thought about it on the way back to my room and decided, all things considered, I didn’t want to know. Well, that was a lie. I did want to know. I just figured it wouldn’t bring me any peace of mind.

  Propped up on the desk in my room was an envelope containing a ticket for Zurich and a hotel reservation. I lay down on the bed with all my unanswerable questions and spooky suspicions. I found myself wishing Heidi were there beside me and then I remembered I couldn’t talk to her anymore. Not until I figured out what she and Morris Fleury had in common. Which looked like forever at the rate I was going.