by Ed Gorman
Accounts tend to go elsewhere under circumstances like that.
As I rolled into bed in pajamas fresh from the laundry, I took an Arthur C. Clarke novel from the nightstand. Science fiction is my escape. But for once the sentences held no magic for me.
I turned off the light, smoked half-a-dozen cigarettes until the moist nicotine on my lips began to taste salty, and then made the mistake of trying to sleep. I'm sure you're familiar with the process. Getting entangled in the sheets. Dozing off for a few minutes at a time, then waking up pasty and disoriented, as if from a nightmare. Trying to keep your mind blank while keeping it filled with trying to keep your mind blank. Insomnia is one of the few reasons I can see as legitimate for suicide. Enough sleepless nights and anybody would put a gun in his or her mouth.
My life pushed in on me like walls meant to crush. I had responsibilities-three kids to help raise, two of them soon to be college-bound, and a father in a nursing home who twitched at World War II memories. Between the kids and my father, I was always desperate for money, overdrawn too many times a month, sweaty on the phone with the nursing-home people when my payments were late. Given Denny's behavior lately, I was afraid I'd let down the people who depended on me and the thought of that made me crazy in a way I couldn't cope with. My old man had worked thirty-five years in a steel mill without letting his family down even once. I had no right to be any easier on myself… and at my age, starting over in the agency business was impossible.
I don't know what time it was when the city sounds seemed to recede-the distant ambulances less strident, the buzz of traffic less steady-or when I finally fell down an endless well of blackness into sleep… but it was wonderful whenever it happened.
Which was when, of course, the phone rang.
It had to be somebody who really wanted to talk to me, because the phone rang fifty times before I finally disentangled myself from the covers and located the source of the ringing.
I smashed the receiver of the phone to my ear and muttered something like hello-vaguely worried, now that I was waking up, that maybe something was wrong with one of my kids-when a female voice, breathless and a little drunk, said, "I didn't kill him, you've got to believe that."
That was when I started looking for a cigarette. Fortunately, I'd left them on the nightstand. Once my awkward fingers discovered how to make fire-you take the match head and you drag it across the slate and nine times out of ten the darn thing bursts into flame-once I got the lung cancer stirred up in my system and realized the call didn't concern my teenagers, I felt much better.
Then I realized whom I was speaking to. Or, more exactly, who was speaking to me.
Cindy Traynor.
"I know vou saw me there tonight, Michael."
"Uh."
"I just want you to know I… I didn't… I wasn't the one who…"
All I could think of were the puddles of blood on the bed. And the way she'd slugged me from behind. Difficult to tally the nice, breathy voice on the other end of the phone with such carnage-but it was.
"You really hit me," I said.
"Did I hurt you?"
"Not permanently, I guess."
"I'm really sorry. I just got scared. I wanted to leave the house without you hearing me."
"I didn't hear you, believe me."
I thought of her classic blond good looks-the sort that belong in evening dresses of the formal sort in country clubs of the snootiest type. But there was another quality to her I'd always liked, a gentle refinement, almost a melancholy, which is why I'd been almost shocked when I'd found out she'd spent time with Denny. She seemed much, much better than that.
"He was going to dump you, wasn't he?" I said.
An odd laugh rang down the phone line. "Michael, I'm afraid you don't understand my relationship with Denny very well."
"So he didn't meet somebody new?"
Denny usually had a married woman somewhere on the horizon. The private detective had said that Denny had stopped seeing Cindy as often, but he wasn't sure that Denny had a new woman.
"It doesn't matter and that's what you don't understand."
I paused, the weight of the evening crushing in on me. "If your husband finds out where you were tonight," I said, "we're both done for." Then I got curious. "Where are you calling from?"
"My home. Downstairs."
"Clay could be listening."
"He's passed out. Drunk." She paused. "I really didn't kill Denny," she said.
I sighed, had another cigarette. Maybe, from what I knew about psychology, she really didn't think she had killed him. Maybe she was repressing it.
"OK," I said, unable to keep the disbelief out of my voice.
"Really."
"All right. Really."
"You don't believe me."
"I'm not sure."
"May I see you tomorrow?"
"For what?"
"For-maybe you can help me."
"To do what?"
"Deal with this. There's nobody else I can confide in. I'm sorry." She sounded rocky.
I sighed again. "When?"
"For lunch." She sighed. "After you've finished seeing my husband. He said he plans to spend the morning in your offices."
I had forgotten about that. Every third Thursday of the month, Clay Traynor came to our offices to look over new ideas-and to get his ration of bowing and scraping. He had a big appetite.
"My fingerprints," she said. "They're going to be all over Denny's house."
"If you're not implicated in any way," I said, then stopped myself. I was thinking about the private detective I'd hired. He knew what was going on. When he found out that Denny was dead, what would he do with the material he'd collected the last couple weeks? Go to the police? Use it to blackmail both Cindy Traynor and me?
"What's wrong?" she said.
I told her.
"Oh, God," she said, "I've been followed all this time? Why would you do that?"
I told her about the note I'd found by accident one day in the conference room, a lovey-dovey number from her to Denny. It was too flirtatious to indicate anything but an affair, even though it was ostensibly nothing more than a thank-you note for a party he'd given. That's when, terrified that he'd lose us our biggest account, I'd put the private detective on him.
"God," she said, "it's so humiliating, being followed like that." She began to weep softly. In the sound of it I heard a deep but inexplicable grief. "My whole life's such a mess… I…"
"Cindy, listen-"
"No, I understand. You were only doing what you had to do. It's just having somebody spy on you…" Trie weeping again. "I think we'd better forget lunch, OK? Good night, Michael." With that she put the receiver down softly.
For a long time afterward, I heard her soft voice in my mind. It represented a curious peace in the ugliness of the night. I wanted to see Cindy Traynor very badly.
FIVE
"Two days. I don't understand it," Sarah Anders said to me the next morning.
I had walked down the hall from my office pretending to be looking for Denny Harris.
Sarah-a matronly, attractive woman in her late forties, and a woman as sensible as she is compassionate-is the private secretary shared by both Denny and me. Of course, she's much more than a private secretary-she tells us what we need to do, makes sure we do it, and occasionally even gives us ideas for improving our client services. Part of the reason for her knowledgeabiliry is that she has worked in every department in the agency and knows the shop in detail. Probably, truth admitted, better than I do. I've never been convinced that copywriters, which was what I was originally, make the best executives. Nor art directors.
"Two days," Sarah said again, her shining dark eyes staring through the open door into Denny's empty office. Sarah was one of the few people who found virtues in Denny. Despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, he appeared to be redeemable-at least to Sarah. "I'm worried."
"You try his house?" I asked.
She nodded. "
Every hour. It was the same way yesterday. No answer."
"He wasn't here at all yesterday, either?"
"No."
Yesterday had been so busy, I hadn't noticed. I was used to my partner's being gone for long stretches-usually trying to pretend he was somehow attending to business-so I never had any accurate sense of just how much time he spent in the office. I'd just as soon not know.
Which was when I caught myself-that thought. The present tense.
I thought of Denny on the bed. The puncture wounds all over his backside, as if somebody had gone at him with a pickax.
"Damn." Sarah slammed the phone down. She'd tried his house once again. She shook her head, perplexed. "I've tried everywhere-bars, health clubs. I just don't know what's left."
I had to play it as I ordinarily would. I put a smirk on my face and said, "Maybe he's found some new female delight to lose himself in."
For the first time, the worry line on her forehead looked less severe. She always got sentimental about Denny's affairs-though she would have been just as upset as I was about Denny and Cindy Traynor, like a mother considering her bad little boy. "He sure does all right with the ladies, doesn't he?" Then she caught herself and flushed. "Oh, sorry."
"It's all right." I waved a hand to my office. "I'll be in there working. If Denny doesn't show up, just show Clay Traynor into my office. I'll handle him till Denny gets here."
There: I had laid all the planks I possibly could so that I could act genuinely surprised when Denny's body was discovered. The dutiful partner, the hard-working businessman, the-show-must-go-on-vice-president-oh, I was a hell of a guy.
Waiting for me on my desk was last month's profit-and-loss statement. Denny took no interest in any detail-just how much we'd earned or lost. I spent more time with the statement, looking for any way we could save money and thereby increase our individual cuts. With teenagers and a dying father, I needed all the help I could get.
The P&L didn't tell me much except for one thing-the client-entertainment-expense column was still swelling up. Denny felt he had the right to write off virtually every dime he spent as a legitimate client expense-he hadn't paid for his alcoholism in years-even though he was literally taking it from my pocket. I owned fifty percent of the agency.
If I really wanted to make this look like a typical day, then I'd have to go down the hall to the accounting office and raise a little soft hell with Merle Wickes, the man with the Las Vegas haircut. Once a month I demanded to know why Wickes let Denny get away with it.
My intercom buzzed.
Sarah. "I'm going to call the police. Just have them run out to his house and check and see if everything's all right."
"You really think that's necessary?"
"Yes, I do." She sounded absolute.
What the hell, I thought. May as well get it over with, the discovery of the body, the inevitable questions of the cops.
"Well, OK," I said.
"Thanks, Michael," she said.
We hung up.
***
"I need to talk to Merle a minute," I said to Belinda Matson, the Accounting Department's secretary, an hour later.
As always of late, she looked unhappy to see me. There had been a time a year or so ago, when she'd first started working here, that I'd had notions about the two of us getting together. Sometimes she brought her lunch and one day in the lunch room I'd seen her reading Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle, a novel whose union theme made me curious about her. I'd asked her about it; she'd said that it had been her favorite novel in high school-she hadn't gone to college- and that she reread it every so often. She was a tiny woman, always pressed and fresh-looking, with a subtle kind of eroticism I found appealing. I'd had my share of fantasies about her-but as the rift between Denny and me widened about his spending habits, she began to see me as the villain who always whumped on her boss, Merle Wickes.
"He's in a meeting right now," she said. "But I'll tell him you stopped by. Would you like him to call you?" Pleasant, competent, and protective of Merle.
I stared at her blue, blue eyes. She was, I sensed, the kind of woman I needed, but I had no idea how to go about it. "Read In Dubious Battle lately?" I said, embarrassed by my lame approach.
Without missing a beat, she said, "Not lately, I'm afraid." Then she turned her head toward Merle's open office door.
Which was when I raised my head and saw a woman slap Merle Wickes hard across the mouth.
Belinda saw it, too.
Both of us froze, not knowing quite how to respond.
The woman who had slapped Merle was his wife, Julie. A pretty, dark lady of thirty or so, she spent most of her days tending to their retarded son. She usually looked tired- which made her prettiness even more impressive. Today she looked tired plus angry and embarrassed. She turned away from her husband-who stood there stunned-and walked toward me. She was one of the few employee wives I felt really close to. We tended to sit by each other and talk and laugh a lot whenever there were agency functions.
Now, she came abreast of me and touched my arm. "I'm sorry about this. I… couldn't help myself, I guess." She was right at the point where she was going to explode in either tears or anger or both.
I put my hand on her shoulder. "I'll walk you to the elevator. "
As I spoke, I watched the line of her vision. She wasn't glowering at Merle this time. Instead her gaze was fixed laserlike on Belinda, who had her head down and was blushing.
Merle, looking devastated, glanced at me, then at his wife, then at Belinda, then closed the door quietly, as if he did not have strength to slam it.
I tugged Julie away and headed her toward the elevators down the hall.
Halfway there, she started sobbing. I put my arm around her and guided her along as best I could. Employees in the hallway mugged a variety of stares, even a few sniggers. This, in advertising, was the stuff of legend.
I got Julie on the elevator, then waited till the doors closed. Then I punched the stop button. An elevator between floors seemed like a good place for privacy.
I let her cry until she shook. Occasionally I held her, then let her push gently away. Finally, she said, "I take it you know about it. I suppose everybody does."
"I'm sorry," I said. "I don't know what you're talking about." Though I had a terrible feeling I knew what she was going to say.
"His secretary, that Belinda, they're having an affair."
Of course, I didn't want to believe that. If it were true it would make me feel naive, and not do wonders for my ego, either. I considered myself more appealing to women than Merle Wickes was. "Maybe you're just imagining it," I said.
"No," she said, starting to cry again, "he told me about it. Last night. He, he… said…" She started to choke on her tears. "He said that he loved her." She shook her head in disbelief. I could sympathize. I'd heard similar words from my own wife one night. They were the worst words in the world.
So it was true, then. Curiously, I felt betrayed, too, as if Belinda had owed me something. I thought of her pert face and clean bobbed hair. She could have played an earnest mom in any number of TV spots with cakes and pies in them. She didn't seem the type to-
"But I don't blame Merle," Julie was saying, starting to dry her eyes now. "I blame Denny Harris. He's the one who got Merle to change the way he lived…"
Much as I had disliked and disapproved of Denny, that was one charge I couldn't agree with. The temptation rap was a false one. True, a year ago Merle Wickes had been a cliche of an accountant, a man who'd brought his lunch in a paper sack replete with grease stains, who spent his off-hours attending accountancy seminars, and who was inextricably bound up with the fate of his wife and his retarded son. Then he'd changed, begun hanging around after hours with Denny and Gettig and the rest of the fast-laners in the agency. His Las Vegas hairstyling was emblematic of that change, and of how he'd pulled away from his wife and child…
But was Denny to blame? I didn't see how. The desire and the will for s
uch a change had to be within Merle in the first place. Denny only gave that desire shape…
"I hate him!" Julie said.
The anger in her eyes was terrifying. Because it was more than anger-it was some kind of deep dislocation. "He took my husband from me and my child!"
She grabbed my sleeve and started yanking. She had started sobbing again. "What will I do, Michael! I'm not strong enough to be alone! I'm really not!"
I had a terrible, uncharitable thought as I stared at her. I did not think of her grief, or of her wan, anguished child- all I could think of, watching her wild eyes and hearing her curses, was to wonder if she could have killed Denny Harris.
***
Clay Traynor appeared in my office door one hour after Julie Wickes had left, dressed in a red-and-black-checked hunting shirt, a wide, hand-tooled belt, designer jeans, and hunting boots. He was tall and angular and looked like a model for the L. L. Bean Company. In his hand he carried a white Stetson that he tossed dramatically across the room to my desk. It landed with a bounce across my coffee cup. Traynor studied me with his Nordic, good-looking face, testing me to see if I would show annoyance that he'd nearly spilled Brim across several final drafts of scripts. I didn't, of course. I'm a good adman and good admen know how to secrete local anesthetic so they can deaden appropriate nerves.
"Your partner," he said. "Seems he's still out playing." He laughed his big bear laugh and came into my office. He had played soccer in college and he still enjoyed a brawl. Clay had inherited the Traynor business from his father. He had a beautiful, faithless wife and a stadiumful of friends who drank his drinks and indulged his whims and privately considered him a fool. Throwing his cowboy hat across a coffee cup like Buck Jones was only one of a thousand irritating habits he had cultivated. He didn't have much else to do.
That he was also an hour late seemed not to bother him. At least he didn't mention it.