Rough Cut

by Ed Gorman

  Before going inside, I tried the Mercedes's door. It was open. I leaned in and looked around for the registration. It was in the glove compartment. It did belong to the person I'd suspected.

  My stomach knotted painfully. Tonight I would forgo booze in favor of Di-Gel. At least if I wanted any sleep.

  I went up to the side door of the huge house-Denny refers to it grandly as his estate-and knocked. I knew it would do no good. They would hide like children in the shadows, giggling, and not answer my knock.

  I tried once more, figuring I owed conventionality this much.

  Then I tried the doorknob. It was locked.

  I used my gloved hand to smash in a quarterpane of glass on the door.

  The wind swallowed the sound.

  I reached inside and unlocked the door.

  I listened carefully for any voices, then went in. I felt sure they weren't laughing anymore.

  The house was impenetrable with darkness. Only the kitchen window to my right held any light, the thin silver light of a winter moon. The house smelled pleasantly of spices and wood burning somewhere in a fireplace. I walked into the kitchen and stood still for a time and listened. All I heard was the house creaking and groaning in the wind.

  I went deeper inside, past a fancy dining room at one end of which was a grandfather clock that toned the quarter hour severely, into a living room with built-in bookcases and the kind of leather furniture I'd never been able to afford, even before my divorce.

  Nothing.

  Shadows created by the fire in the walk-in fireplace danced from every corner of the room and played like slippery kids across the floor. The books were an impressive army of leather-bounds, show books in perfect condition, with names such as Socrates, Melville, and Proust on the spines, which was hilarious, if you knew Denny. He had once complained, earnestly, that Playboy was no longer fun to read because there was too much of a text-to-picture ratio. Unlikely that he spent his evenings perusing Galsworthy.

  There was only one place to look. Upstairs.

  At the west end of the room was a sweeping staircase that disappeared ominously into darkness. I stood and stared at it. I was, without quite knowing why, afraid.

  The silence and the wind and the loneliness of the location were getting to me. A thin sheen of sweat covered my body and my pulse hammered faster than was pleasant. I was a kid again, facing not a bully as easily dismissible as Gettig, but something more inexplicable and terrifying-the imaginings of my own mind. God knew what lay upstairs. It was a much easier world when you could call out for your mother and father in the middle of the night.

  I started up the stairs with what I would not call an impressive first step-I tripped and grabbed the banister. If there were ghosts or demons, they would be laughing their collective asses off at the moment, and I couldn't blame them.

  I think I spent around an hour and a half going up the staircase. At least it seemed that long.

  The higher I went, the darker it got, until I seemed to disappear inside the shadows, become a part of the night itself.

  Creaks and groans of wood and glass and stone went off like little alarms every few seconds, causing me to jerk or jump or start every other moment.

  Finally, I lay a shoe on the hall that ran the length of the second floor. Neil Armstrong couldn't have felt any prouder when he first set foot on the moon.

  The first door I opened was the bathroom and I hate to break the mood here and tell you that, intrepid searcher that

  I am, I quit searching and took a pee-but that's exactly what I did. Fear had filled my bladder.

  I decided to forget about good manners. I didn't flush the toilet. The sound of it exploding would have been too much in the tense silence.

  The second door I tried led me to a guest room. I had stayed in it one night while my divorce was finishing up. Denny had had a kind of bachelor party for me, complete with a woman who was his gift to me. I was too drunk and lonely to turn her down. I took her gratefully, waking up in the morning to find that she was all the things hookers weren't supposed to be-gentle, tender, bright, with at least a passing interest in my marital grief. I supposed I would have pursued her if I weren't the jealous type. The idea of her with innumerable men would have driven me crazy. My wife had had only a few lovers-at least that's how many she'd finally admitted to-and that had made me crazy enough

  Despite the ornate woodwork and the expensive appointments, the room had a sterile feel. Too many visitors had robbed it of its personality.

  In the moonlight, I searched the room; closets, under the bed, corners. I had no idea why I was doing this, or what I was looking for.

  No conscious idea, anyway.

  But the guest room turned up nothing.

  I went back to the hallway and pushed into another door. This one looked immediately promising. This was the den. Half the furniture in it was turned over or smashed. The contents of desk drawers were strewn all over. Any ideas I'd had about walking in on a simple case of adultery were now long gone.

  I reached down and righted a straight-backed chair. Then I picked up some cushions and put them back on the couch. The obvious motive for such a mess was robbery-or looking for something hidden. But somehow I didn't think so, especially when I felt the cold air seeping in and saw the smashed window. There was an air of purposeful violence about the room, somebody enjoying the task of destroying it, down to overturning the wastepaper can.

  But ten minutes later I knew no more, so I moved back to the hallway, toward the one room I should have tried in the first place.

  The master bedroom.

  As I heard my footsteps creak on the floor, I thought of the form I'd seen in the window when I'd pulled in.

  As a kid I'd enjoyed ghost stories. Boris Karloff had made a nice, safe spook. The kinds of ghosts I was likely to meet at my age were far more frightening.

  He was sprawled across the bed, his blond hair silver in the moonlight, clad only in his underwear, blood in splotches across his back and arms as if someone had daubed it on with a paint brush. The white bedspread was a mess, blood in puddles.

  The closer I got the better I could see the puncture wounds in his back. There must have been a dozen of them, each oozing.

  A peculiar fascination came over me. Sickened and afraid as the scene made me, I was somehow riveted by it. Which was why I kept moving nearer. Only the smells his body had made in the aftermath of death slowed me down.

  I kept moving toward the bed and what seemed to be a sheet of typing paper beside the corpse. Just as I drew near the corner of the huge bed, I thought how many husbands in this city would envy me the privilege of seeing Denny Harris this way. Hundreds of husbands. Literally.

  I leaned over the bed and grabbed the paper, the reality of the moment real enough suddenly that I avoided looking at the body on the bed. All I could wonder about was where the other body was-the one that belonged to the Mercedes downstairs.

  Somewhere in the house, for sure. With a knife in her hand and blood on her arms like a surgeon after a morning's work?

  The note was so crude and melodramatic it made me laugh, easing some of the tension that was threatening to make me crazy. Whoever had written it had seen too many Agatha Christie movies.

  Beneath a blotch of blood, which lay in the center of the page, were typed the words, "NOW IT'S YOUR TURN."

  I was literally laughing, faulting the killer for style (face it, advertising people are slaves to surface things) when my nose reminded me of my dead partner on the bed and the wretched, messy, reeking way he'd died.

  This time when I stared at the note in the dim light, it no longer looked melodramatic, but rather ominous, conveying that same psychotic edge that Charles Manson brought to his killings-blood as symbol, blood as portent.

  It was this type of unlikely rumination-maybe I'd do a little essay on murder for the local Op-Ed guest editorial column-when something akin to a tree fell on my head.

  Coldness rushed through my nostri
ls and into my system. Whoever hit me muttered something, and then I was gone, literally and utterly gone, to some pained level of being that was not quite life and not quite death.

  Presumably, the lady whose Mercedes coupe sat in the drive had found me-Cindy Traynor.

  THREE

  By the time I came to, the blood on the back of my head had had time to begin scabbing a little. That was the only way I could measure how long I'd been out.

  In the moonlight Denny still lay sprawled ghostly pale in death, dark tears in his body.

  I had no desire whatsoever for heroics. I didn't give a damn if she waited in the shadows watching me. I just wanted out and away.

  I stood up, without much self-confidence, my head hammering, my eyes having trouble focusing, my bladder filling again, and somehow made my way out of the room and down the hall. The stairs I had to be extra careful with- didn't want to take a tumble down those. I used the banister judiciously.

  The driveway was empty. She'd gone.

  I stood in the frosty night, sucking in air, listening to distant animals settling in against the cold, and to a forlorn train punishing the darkness.

  Finally, I got into my car, turned on the heater full blast, and backed out of the long drive.

  I knew where I wanted to go, whom I needed to talk to. At the first sign of a phone, I'd find the address and head there promptly, knowing that soon the police would be involved and I would have to have a story prepared.

  The first phone I came to was attached to a convenience store that stood like a monument to plastic civilization in an otherwise rambling section of fir trees. When I got out of the car, I was dizzy a moment and staggered. The effects of being struck on the head were still with me. I saw the kid behind the counter in the store look at me with a mixture of pity and superiority. Obviously he thought I was drunk.

  Inside the store, the lights bothering my eyes, I went to elaborate lengths to prove I wasn't bombed. But I moved so self-consciously I probably only looked all the drunker.

  I wrote down Stokes's address-this was far too important to trust to a telephone-and went back out into the night.

  Back in the city I found the expressway that would take me to Stokes's neighborhood. I drove toward it like a homing missile. I felt so many things-horror and fear, regret and a terrible nagging sense that somehow Denny had gotten what he'd deserved-that actually I felt nothing; I was really blank as the city rolled by on either side.

  I had taken Stokes's name from the Yellow Pages when I'd first contacted him three weeks ago. I hadn't wanted to ask anybody for a recommendation because then they'd be curious as to why I'd wanted a private eye. But now-as I left the expressway and pulled into a neighborhood ashen with factory soot and a bitter sense of its own demise-I wondered if I shouldn't have gone to one of the big, prestigious investigative agencies. The neighborhood clarified many things about Stokes. He was a tall, fleshy, ominous-looking man who usually wore black. His thick glasses gave him the look of a comic-book World War II German spy. It made sense coming from this part of town, with its whispered white ethnic secrets and its battered pride and its obvious hostility. He would take pleasure from prying into the lives of people like Denny and myself, and feel a power over us for knowing what we were really all about. For the first time I realized that I should not have hired Stokes, but the day I saw the note indicating that Denny and Cindy Traynor were having an affair, I'd gone a little crazy, thinking of all the things Denny was jeopardizing. So I ran my finger down the list of private investigators and chose him simply at random.

  And now here I was-in so deep I had to turn to a man I didn't trust for advice. I had the feeling that Stokes would know what to do, had the feeling that Stokes had lived on the edge of the law all his life.

  It was an old two-story frame house that had once been white but for over a decade or two had evolved into gray. An unlikely red neon sign burned in the gloom, announcing FEDERATED INVESTIGATION SERVICES. I supposed in a neighborhood like this one he got many calls. I parked and went up to the door.

  Three knocks brought me nothing. I looked past the front door and across the screened-in porch to a lace curtain beyond which a small color TV glowed. I made fists of my hands to keep the knuckles from freezing, then pounded again.

  I guess I'd been expecting Stokes. The tiny, shawled old lady who hobbled out looked like somebody central casting had designed to be in sentimental Christmas commercials. Except for the eyes. Even in the darkness there was a glow to the eyes that unnerved me-something brutal and selfish and hostile in their blue fire.

  "Yes?" she said, smelling of warmth and scented tea.

  "I'm looking for Harold Stokes?"

  A surprising tartness came into the voice, the bitchy edge making her seem much younger. "So am I, as a matter of fact. He's two hours late. He hasn't brought me my treat tonight."

  "Your treat?"

  "Why, yes," she said, "my son Harold is a good boy. He's brought me a treat every night since he was a little boy." She frowned. "Except for the few months he was married, that is. The woman never approved of him doing that-so he stopped." She shook her head. "She just didn't understand how much Harold loved me, I guess. She seemed very surprised when he told her he wanted to divorce her and move back with me."

  Great, I thought. Just the kind of private detective I want to get involved with. A mama's boy. I sure knew how to pick 'em.

  I fished a business card out of my pocket and handed it over to her.

  "Would you have him call me as soon as he can at my home number?"

  "I'll be happy to," she said, "as long as he's finished bringing me my treat."

  "Right," I said. I nodded and moved down the stairs as quickly as I could.

  I was in my car-becoming aware of how badly I needed a drink-when I saw a red Mazda fastback in my rearview mirror. I recognized him by his hair-the Las Vegas hairdo Merle Wickes affected thanks to the influence of Denny Harris.

  Wickes parked down the street, then walked back and up the same steps I'd just left. I slumped down in the seat.

  He knocked on the door many times before the old lady came out. I must have put her in a bad mood. Her voice was scratchy and irritable as she informed Merle that her darling son Harold wasn't here.

  Merle left, shaking his head, seeming extremely agitated.

  I sat up and watched him move his pudgy body quickly down the street and into his flashy car-once again, Denny-inspired. For several minutes I rested my chin on the steering wheel, staring blankly out at the neighborhood.

  How the hell did Merle Wickes know Stokes, the private detective I'd hired?

  FOUR

  I don't know how long I drove around, or what I saw, or even why I was driving. Every few minutes I would become aware of how my leg twitched, or how a shudder would pass through me and make a momentary spastic out of me, or how an uncomfortable sweat coated my body.

  Of all the possibilities that lay before me, not one of them promised a welcome fate.

  There was a possibility that I would be blamed for Denny's murder. We hadn't gotten along, I'd been out to see him shortly after his death (but would the police believe me that I'd found him already dead?), I might even have been seen leaving his place.

  Then there was the possibility that the Traynor account would be leaving the agency and my financial well-being with it, a well-being heavy with various responsibilities…

  From a 7-Eleven store I bought a six-pack of beer and from my coat pocket I bought some relief with two Valiums. I rode around long enough to feel the tranks start to work on me and feel fatigue dull the edge of my anxiety.

  ***

  After my divorce, and before I felt much like falling in love again, I spent many evenings alone in my bachelor apartment feasting on Stouffer's frozen dinners and using self-pity the way other people used drugs. I also got into the habit of approximating a sensory-deprivation tank by sitting in the bathtub, throwing back several gins, and coming dangerously close to doz
ing off in the hot water.

  Which is where I was three-and-a-half hours after somebody knocked me out at Denny Harris's house.

  The lump on the back of my head did not throb quite so painfully now, nor did my jaw (I'd landed on it). I credited the healing process to the miracle wrought by the combination of hot water and cold gin I mentioned. Only this time I wasn't trying to deprive my senses; I was trying to use most of them in an effort to formulate a plan.

  I suppose I could get smarmy here and tell you that seeing Denny lying there dead had made me have second thoughts about him, but it didn't. Like some others in advertising, he'd been a superficial, self-indulgent, lazy cipher who'd prospered on the talents of others and hadn't even had the honor or vision to understand his own parasitic role. He really believed he had something to offer other than hand-holding and racist jokes on the golf course for clients who appreciated such. His loss-sorry, John Donne-did not diminish the human race a whit. In fact, the species was probably the better off for his passing.

  What might well be diminished, however, were the coffers of Harris-Ketchum Advertising.

  The choice I faced was this-call the police like a good citizen and tell them where to find the body or simply do nothing, let the body be found in its own way, by the person the gods or whoever elected.

  The reason the second alternative was appealing was because I would then not have to discuss with the police the identity of the woman who drove the Mercedes that had been parked in Denny's driveway.

  Her name was Cindy Traynor. From what the private detective had told me, she and Denny had been having an affair for three months now. Cindy's husband was Clay Traynor, president of Traynor Chain Saws.

  It was unlikely he would keep his account with us once he learned that his wife had been having an affair with Denny, and that I was implicating her in a murder charge.