3 Strange Bedfellows

by Matt Witten

  Oh, God. I would've given anything not to have to ask this question, but . . . "Who was the friendly politician—Jack Tamarack?"

  "Yeah, he was gonna break the story at that radio debate. To spice it up, I even told him who I got the study from."

  I could hardly breathe. "Did it ever occur to you that Will might've killed Jack Tamarack over that study?"

  For the first time Sarafian looked troubled, and stubbed out his cigarette. "I wondered about that. But I didn't want to get into any big controversy, so I kept my mouth shut. And then it turned out the Hack's father killed him. So it doesn't matter anymore, right?"

  I just sat there. "Right?" Sarafian repeated, eyeing me with growing concern.

  I picked up the photographs and stuck them inside the study. "You mind if I keep this?" I asked, but didn't wait for a reply. Instead I walked out the door, revved up my Camry, and headed home.

  I gripped the steering wheel tight and tried to reign in my racing emotions and think logically and impersonally. The first thing I should do was call Chief Walsh at the station. If he wasn't there, I'd try him at home. If that didn't work, I'd call Lieutenant Foxwell.

  I hurried up the stairs to my front door. I put my key in the lock—

  "Hey, Jake!" someone called out.

  I turned.

  It was Will Shmuckler.

  19

  I instinctively hid that Hudson-Adirondack Preservation Society study behind my back. If Will spotted it, then he would figure out what I'd been up to. Luckily our front porch light was turned off.

  "Hi, Shmuck-man," I said, and was relieved to hear that my voice cracked only slightly. Keep calm, he doesn't know that you know. "How come you're not out drinking Guinness with the Rotary Club paparazzi?"

  "That's not 'til nine. Thought I'd drop by and see if you were still around. I called your mother-in-law, she said you were playing chess tonight."

  "Yeah, I forgot my chess clock. Came back to get it."

  "You mind if I come in and chill out for a while? Seeing as I got some time to kill."

  "Sure, come on in." Holding the study close to my side with my left hand, I unlocked the door. "I'm gonna grab the chess clock and go, but you can stick around if you want."

  We went in. I left the hall light off. Will was a step ahead of me, and my eyes darted around desperately, looking for someplace to stash that study. I found the perfect hiding spot, behind the radiator in the hall. I took a quick half-step over there and was about to drop the study in when Will turned. I put it behind my back again.

  "So have you given any more thought to that whole Ducky Medwick thing you were telling me about?" he asked casually.

  Hoping to keep my tone just as casual, I said, "I did, actually. I talked it over with Andrea."

  If I hadn't been looking for it, I might not have seen his eyes suddenly turn hard. "Oh, yeah? What did she say?"

  I gave a shrug, then regretted it immediately, afraid the movement might call attention to the fact I was holding my left hand behind my back. But Will didn't seem to notice.

  "She agreed with you, that I should just let well enough alone," I said. "She's got a point. It's really not good for the kids if I keep doing this silly Colombo stuff. I mean, the fact is, George Tamarack confessed. He's the guy that did it."

  Will's eyes aimed at me like poisoned arrows. "So you're gonna take Andrea's advice and let this whole thing go?"

  "Yeah, screw it. No sense looking for trouble, right?"

  "Right." Suddenly Will's eyes relaxed. All the hardness went out of them, and my old college roommate and best friend was standing before me once again. "Man, I'm glad to hear you say this. I'm really glad."

  So was I. Now if I could just get Will the hell out of here and call the cops, I'd be home free.

  "Okay, I gotta take off," Will was saying. "Yo, next year. You and me, bro. D.C." He put up his hand to slap me five. I put up my right hand.

  We slapped.

  And the slap jarred loose one of the masked-man photographs that I'd stuck inside the Hudson-Adirondack Preservation Society study. The photo fell to the floor.

  "You dropped something," Will said helpfully. He stooped down to pick it up, and saw what it was. He frowned, then straightened back up.

  "I was just about to throw those photos away, since I don't need them anymore," I said nervously.

  But Will was eyeing my left arm. "You got something behind your back?" he asked.

  "No, of course not," I answered. I could feel a foolish grin spreading on my face.

  He held out his hand. "Let me see."

  I didn't move. There had to be some brilliant trick I could pull here—

  "Let me see," Will repeated harshly.

  If there was a trick, it eluded me. I slowly brought my left hand out from behind my back.

  It only took Will one quick glance to recognize the study. Then he looked up at my face. "You lied to me," he said.

  "I can explain," I said.

  "Go ahead."

  "Well..." I began, but then drew a total blank.

  Will didn't draw a blank. He drew a gun. "Explain."

  We were facing each other in my front hallway, less than three feet apart. I was so petrified with fear that my mental synapses misfired. I found myself flashing back to a September day twenty-four years ago, my first day of college, when I first met Will in the hallway outside our dorm room.

  But now my old roomie brought me back to the present by bashing my right temple—hard—with the barrel of his gun. Dizzy with pain, I stumbled backward into the living room. My legs somehow found a chair, and I sank into it.

  Will turned on the light, then stood in front of me and peered into my eyes. "You went to Sarafian, didn't you?"

  I nodded weakly.

  "And he told you all about me and that PCB study."

  I finally found my tongue. "I don't get it, Will. Why did you sell it to him?"

  "Why the hell not?" he snapped angrily. "It was a damn good study. Showed the best way to deal with PCBs. It was wrong for the Preservation Society to hush it up!"

  "But still, I mean, selling it?" I said disapprovingly, and instantly felt like an incredible idiot. What was I trying to do, make him even angrier?

  But Will seemed to have a need to justify himself. "Hey, selling it didn't hurt anybody, and I made fifty grand. I needed that money for my campaign! Jesus, Jake, what's the matter with you? Come on, you know how hard it is to run as a Democrat in this country, with the Republicans always getting all the money. I just wanted to even the playing field a little, that's all. Like Clinton and Gore did with the Chinese."

  The way Will was talking to me now, like I was a friend and confidante, I felt a ray of hope. Maybe when push came to shove, my old pal wouldn't find it in him to kill me.

  But Will extinguished that ray pretty quickly. "I wish I didn't have to kill you," he said.

  "You don't, Will," I whispered.

  "Sure I do, you're too damn conscientious. You'll tell the cops on me—even if I am a Democrat."

  I couldn't tell if he was joking or serious when he threw in that Democrat line. This man with the gun in his hand was a mystery to me. Politics had twisted Will beyond recognition.

  "If you kill me, Sarafian will figure out what happened," I said. "He'll know you did it."

  "I already thought of that."

  "So why don't you just put down the gun—"

  He shook his head, exasperated. "After I kill you, I'll have to go kill him, too. Goddamn it, Jake, why'd you make me have to do this?"

  "Will, you are out of your fucking mind! I can't believe you're going around killing people. You're against the death penalty, for God's sake!"

  A guilty look flitted across his face. "Hey, I didn't plan on doing all this, it just happened. I'm sitting in that stupid green room and the Hack comes in waving that photograph. Fucking sadist, says he knows all about the fifty grand and he's gonna kill me with it in the debate. Plus he's got friends in the D.A.'s of
fice that'll make sure I do five years in prison for illegal contributions, tax evasion, all kinds of shit. He's trying to get me all rattled before the debate starts, like I'm not rattled enough already. I mean, I didn't sleep for a week, getting ready for that goddamn debate."

  Will's eyes were begging me for understanding. "I got so mad I couldn't think. I had this gun in my backpack—I'd just come back from a gun show, and I bought it off some guy in a stairwell. I was gonna use it for a prop when I talked about gun control, like I told you. So this bastard Tamarack is gloating about how he's gonna send me to jail while he's up in Washington hobnobbing, and he's going on and on and laughing and laughing and all I wanna do is just shut him up, so I reach in my pack and before I know it . . . I'm shooting him." He paused. "I mean, I knew the gun had bullets in it, 'cause the guy told me, but somehow I just didn't believe it would really work."

  Will looked like a lost little boy. He was holding his gun loosely at his side. Now was my chance to spring up out of my chair and bumrush him—

  But he brought his gun back up again and pointed it at my face. "Don't try it."

  "I wasn't trying anything," I said innocently, and quickly added, "So then what happened?"

  I was hoping the gun would go down to his side again if he kept talking. But no such luck; he kept it aimed at me as he said sadly, with an air of wonderment, "Then the Hack falls down dead. And I'm staring at him, but then I get hold of myself. I wipe the gun on my shirt real quick to get rid of fingerprints. Then I rip the photograph into pieces and flush it down the toilet. And then when it turns out I have to kill Zzypowski, I just do it. And now it looks like I have to kill you, too. I'm sorry, Jake."

  I could see his finger starting to squeeze the trigger. "Wait!" I shouted.

  His finger backed off a fraction of an inch. "What?" he said, annoyed at the interruption.

  "There's something I have to tell you," I said, then stopped.

  "Yeah, what?"

  I sat there groping for words. To this day, I have no idea what I would have said next if the doorbell hadn't rung.

  But it did. Will, startled, shifted his gun and pointed it at the door.

  This was the only chance I'd get. I leapt out of my chair and threw a hard forearm at Will's gun. He fired. The shot went through the ceiling.

  Then Chief Walsh suddenly burst into the room, bringing his gun out of its holster.

  Will aimed his gun at the chief's head. I aimed a right jab at Will's face. It hit him just as he pulled the trigger. His shot missed the chief’s head by about two inches.

  Meanwhile the chief was aiming his gun at Will—and at me, since I was only about a foot away from him. If the chief fired now, there was a good chance he'd hit me.

  As I dove to the floor, the chief fired.

  Will gasped. Then he fell down in a heap right next to me and lay flat. His arms and legs splayed in odd directions, and blood poured out of a hole in his chest.

  I lay where I was and watched him for a few moments. I guess I still wasn't totally convinced that he was harmless. Then I crawled over to him and took his hand.

  He died pretty quickly without any famous last words. I held his hand till the very end. That was all I could do for my old buddy now.

  After a while I stood up and nodded to the chief. He nodded back.

  "Hey, thanks for not shooting me," I said.

  "Don't think it didn't cross my mind," he replied.

  20

  The following Tuesday, Will got two percent of the votes in the election. Not a bad showing for a dead guy. He managed to beat out Yancy Huggins for third place. Robert Pierce finished second with a mere twenty-six. Susan Tamarack won in a landslide.

  As for George Tamarack, he was released from prison and stayed alive long enough to see his daughter-in-law and lover get elected. He died the very next morning, at home, with Susan and Sean by his bedside.

  My family stayed at Grandma's house until we got a new living room rug—one that didn't have bloodstains all over it. We were fearful that if Derek Jeter and Bernie Williams found out about Daddy almost getting himself killed again, they might get a tad disturbed.

  It wouldn't surprise me if, despite all our precautions, the kids still found out somehow about my latest brush with death. After all, they do have elephant ears. And when we moved back home, we had a tough week of bedwetting and sleepwalking.

  But the kids never talked to me about it. And fortunately, in the excitement of the major league pennant race, they pretty much forgot about everything else. Why worry about minor details like murders, when their beloved Yankees had a shot at winning yet another World Series?

  Meanwhile Andrea's tenure prospects at Northwoods Community College were looking solid again. Sometimes she'd catch Jeremy Wartheimer eyeing her strangely, but he never said anything.

  I gave Judy Demarest at the Saratogian an exclusive about the murders, and she sold an extra twenty thousand newspapers that day. She had me and Chief Walsh pose together for a front page photo, and you could never tell by looking at us, arm-in-arm and smiling, that we hated each other's guts. It turned out, by the way, that the chief had come looking for me that night because Freshly Scrubbed called the cops about some crazy writer who was poking around the scene where Zzyp was murdered.

  In other news, Ducky and Linda Medwick got back together again. Don't ask me for more details on that. I really don't want to know. Like they say, politics makes strange bedfellows.

  Winter came. I decided to buy that HUD foreclosure down the street and begin the long process of tearing things down and building them back up again. Late one night in February, after a strenuous day of sheetrocking, I grabbed a midnight snack and turned on the television. As I channel surfed, I happened upon Congresswoman Tamarack on the local cable access station. They had a tape of her giving a speech to some PTA group in Ballston Spa. I took my hand off the remote control and listened.

  I was so surprised by what she was saying, and the way she said it, that I spilled potato chips all over the rug. Four months of politics, and being out from under her husband's thumb, had changed the woman. Her woodenness had disappeared. She was actually quite moving. She told her audience that after seeing her father-in-law falsely accused of murder, she could no longer support the death penalty. And after seeing her husband killed, she had changed her mind on gun control.

  It hit me that Susan Tamarack was turning into a pretty good congressperson—maybe even better than my old pal Will Shmuckler would have been. Maybe I should ask her for a legislative aide job. But then she started explaining piously why raising the minimum wage would be just plain bad for poor people. I guess I wouldn't be voting to put her on Mt. Rushmore just yet. I sighed, turned off the tube, and went upstairs.

  Derek and Bernie had fallen asleep with Andrea in our big queen-size bed. I got into bed, too. If I rearranged the boys' bodies a little, and wiggled my own body just right, there'd be room for all four of us. Of course, Bernie might pee in the bed . . . but I'd take that chance.

  We private dicks are pretty tough.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Matt Witten has written four Jacob Burns novels: Breakfast at Madeline’s, Grand Delusion, Strange Bedfellows, and The Killing Bee. He’s written for several television shows including Law & Order, House, and Pretty Little Liars. His published stage plays include The Deal, Washington Square Moves, and The Ties That Bind. His first movie, Drones, will be released in 2014. Matt lived in Saratoga Springs, New York, for ten years with his wife Nancy, who was an English professor, and their two young sons. (Not that Strange Bedfellows is autobiographical or anything.)

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