by Ed Gorman
"I talked to the young kid for a while."
I looked at Tommy Byrnes's retreating car. "Tommy?"
"Yes. He saw me sitting here and came over. He's very nice."
My eyes studied her in the darkness, her blondness, the slightly drugged beauty of her features. She looked tired. She sighed, tried something like a smile. "I don't know why I came here."
"To talk, I suppose. I need to talk to somebody, too. Given the circumstances, I'd say that's pretty normal."
"This afternoon I had some wine and took a Librium, and I thought they would help me sleep but they haven't." She shrugged. "I've never been involved in anything like this, have you?"
"No."
"My parents were very strict Lutherans. Very strict. They didn't prepare me to commit adultery or be involved in murder cases." The muzziness of her voice was starting to have a sexual effect on me, like the slow blue gaze of her sleepy eyes. "Do you ever think about death?"
"You know what?" I said. "Maybe there's a better place to have a discussion like this one."
"You didn't answer my question."
"Sure, I think about death."
"Does it scare you?"
"Yes."
"Do you believe in God?"
"Sort of."
"Yeah, me too. Sort of. My mother believes in Him absolutely and that's a great comfort to her. Last Thanksgiving I walked in on her. She was on her hands and knees, praying. I was really moved. I wish I could be like that but I'm afraid I lead a different kind of life, don't I?"
I laughed. "Maybe it's our generation."
She laughed too. "That's a handy excuse, anyway." She paused. "I was going to go into the agency and get you but I was afraid I'd run into Clay."
"He left a few hours ago."
"He's afraid."
"I know."
"I feel sorry for him. He doesn't know what to do."
I hesitated. "You know, there's a possibility he may have killed Denny."
She shook her head. "There's a possibility that any number of us may have killed Denny." She folded her hands primly and went back to staring at the wall. Then, "Where did you have in mind to go?"
'To my apartment."
"Maybe you've got the wrong impression of me. I really don't sleep around. Sorry. Denny's the only affair I ever had."
"I thought maybe we could talk."
"We're talking here."
"Where we could be more comfortable, I mean."
"I'm very vulnerable right now. I might say yes to something I'd regret."
"Did you kill him?"
"No. Did you?"
"No."
"Do you think my husband did?"
"I don't know," I said.
"Is your apartment nice?"
"It's tolerable."
"Does it have a fireplace?"
"Yes."
"Please don't try to get me into bed, all right?"
"All right."
"Promise?"
"Yes. Promise.”
***
"The first time I ever met Clay he was in the college library studying a Shakespeare play. He was very nice-looking and very clean-cut and he had this little-boy look of confusion on his face whenever he came to a part that he didn't understand. He sort of fascinated me-just watching him, I mean-because I sensed that here was somebody I could help. I usually attracted the type of men who ruled the earth, if you know what I mean. Everything I wanted to do was silly; I was supposed to just listen to them and everything would be fine.
"But Clay really needed somebody. He put on the swagger act but he was really lost. For one thing he was completely overshadowed by his father, who'd built the Traynor company from nothing. Both Clay and his father knew that Clay could never run the company. That's why Clay's father started grooming his nephew to take over the reins-even though Clay would always be called president-when the nephew was only fifteen years old. Clay told me that his cousin spent half his Saturdays at the company with Clay's father. Clay was never invited and he didn't seem to care. He was into his pleasures."
She was curled up at the opposite end of the couch from me. For the past three hours we'd found a respite from the events pressing in on us. I'd found some decent frozen food to pop into the microwave; we'd watched the fog curl around the window in my front room, and the fire crackled in the shadows. I was starting to trust her and like her and in the lazy moments of our time here, I sensed she was experiencing the same thing. She was not the woman I'd stereotyped her into being, particularly as she talked about Clay and how much she'd loved him once and how the loss of their love had crushed her. I knew what she was talking about.
"The one thing people never give Clay as president is that he was very good as a representative of the company at one time. Until he got so caught up with all his women." She paused, touching her head as if she had a migraine. "I thought maybe his fascination for other women would pass- I even used to pray about it-but it never did. And all the while he was getting worse and worse at his job. That's when his cousin really started accumulating power.
"Anyway, I suppose that's why I had hope for us for so long despite a lot of evidence to the contrary." She smiled with a melancholy that revitalized her face. "You know, I always tried to believe that he was just as blameless as he said he was-that all the nights he was gone he was just innocently playing poker or having a few drinks with his buddies. This was back in the sixties, the early sixties, you understand, when it was still possible to delude yourself that way." She laughed gently, sadly. "Then one night at a party I went out to our car and I found him in the back seat with a young girl. They were both naked. The human body had never disgusted me before-but it did then. It was two years before I'd even look at myself in the mirror. I just kept thinking of them in the back seat. I admit it probably wasn't easy for Clay during that time. I could have forgiven him and we could have taken up our lives again. I don't know how many times I tried-hoped.
"We didn't make love for two years. His father would have disinherited him if we divorced, so we had to keep up pretenses. Clay had his life and I had mine-which mostly consisted of watching TV and taking tranquilizers and seeing shrinks. It never occurred to me to take a lover, even during the seventies when all my female friends had lovers all the time. The only reason I finally went to bed with Denny was because I found out about Clay and the girl in your accounting department. What's her name-Belinda?"
"Belinda Matson?" The name rocked me. Literally. I straightened up, my drowsiness gone.
"You sound surprised?"
I laughed. Bitterly. "What a snake pit it all is."
"Well, that's the only reason I went to bed with Denny. One night I was downtown and I saw Clay and this Belinda. I recognized her from your agency party. I'd thought by that time that I was beyond caring, but it hurt me. Well, I ran into Denny an hour later and he bought me a drink and…" She shook her head. "We were both very drunk. I have doubts that he even remembered it exactly. The odd thing was, I never enjoyed it-never cared about him one way or the other. It was crazy. I just needed to be with somebody, even somebody like him."
But I was still thinking of Belinda Matson and Clay-and of poor slob Merle Wickes, who probably thought he was Belinda's only lover.
She stared into the fire. "I wrote him the note you found because I was trying to make myself feel a little better about committing adultery. I thought maybe if I could convince myself that I actually cared for Denny… My mother produced a much better Lutheran than she realized. I was going to cut it off with Denny, which is why I'd gone to his place last night. But…"
She surprised me by leaning over and taking my hands in hers. "I have to tell you something, but I'm afraid."
I shook my head. "I guess we don't have any choice except to trust each other now."
"I'm afraid for Clay."
"Why?"
"Because…" She paused. "When I pulled up in Denny's driveway last night, I saw Clay's car there. I think he overheard Denny and me talking on the p
hone one night. Anyway I panicked and backed out and parked down the road. Then I saw Clay come running out. He didn't see me, he was too wild to see anything." She shuddered. "I think Clay killed him."
"I'm his alibi otherwise."
"What?"
I told her about the lie I'd told Detective Bonnell to clear Clay.
"So you're not going to help the police and neither am I," she said.
"Maybe he didn't do it."
"Do you believe that?"
"I don't know what to believe."
And then I kissed her.
It happened that suddenly and inevitably. I eased her back against the couch and what I'd intended for a chaste kiss of friendship became something I could hardly control. I felt the flesh of her beneath and against me, the taste of her mouth and the scent of her hair and the tang of her skin.
"Please," she said, pushing away, "you promised."
All I could do was sit there, jangled as I'd been after finding Denny, lost in my desires and terrors.
She moved quickly, to the closet where I'd put her coat, and then to the front door.
I started to stand up but she put up a stopping hand.
She looked weary again. Confused. "I'm starting to feel as sorry for us as I do for Clay," she said.
She shook her lovely head and was gone.
ELEVEN
The call came-according to the digital clock next to my bed-at 2:28 a.m.
By the time I'd reached bed I'd been exhausted enough to sleep till noon.
Responding to the call was not easy. I had to swim upward through several miles of subconsciousness and then groggily figure out where the phone was and how to operate it.
He might have been selling insurance, the way he sounded so chipper and bright. A deal I couldn't refuse.
"Mr. Ketchum," he boomed.
"Huh, wha-"
"Mr. Ketchum, I realize it's late-or early-depending on your point of view-but I have got to talk to you about something that both of us have a mutual interest in."
And then I realized who I was talking to. The queer bird with the Coke-bottle glasses and the pale flesh and the sinister black clothing.
Stokes. The private detective I'd hired.
"I'd like to come over, Mr. Ketchum."
"Now?" I said, startled.
"If you wouldn't mind.''
"God. Can't it wait until morning?"
"By morning, Mr. Ketchum, you could very well be out of business."
"Damn," I said.
"Twenty minutes," he said.
And hung up.
***
Coffee, cigarettes, soaking my face in cold water, and a terrible certainty that Stokes wasn't kidding about his bad news brought me awake in less than fifteen minutes.
Because patience is not among my chief virtues anyway, the remaining twenty-minute wait caused me to get a workout by pacing the living room. I was eager to ask him what Merle Wickes had been doing at his office.
I was glancing out the window when I saw headlights wash against the naked trees running along the edge of the parking area.
Then it was another few-but interminable-minutes before I heard steps trudging up the stairs. Stokes had a knock like somebody throwing an anvil against a piece of fiber-board. I half expected to see the door sag in the middle under the pressure of his fist.
When I opened the door and saw him, I wondered for the first time if Stokes ever changed clothes. His attire contributed to both sinister and comic impressions. He wore the double-knit black sport coat with lapels wide enough to play shuffleboard on. His tie was one of those striped jobs that men used to affect with leisure suits-except his stripes ran to the funereal-a gray stripe, then a black stripe, then a gray stripe. Real festive stuff-as Stokes was festive. The doughy face was half-covered by huge eyeglasses thick as the bottoms of drinking glasses. Behind them swam two eyes that seemed to be half blind, squinting. The rest of his face was pinched-a sharp, disapproving nose; a thin, disapproving mouth-sitting on top of a pear-shaped body that, like his face, managed to convey the sinister and the comic.
As he came in, he said, looking around, "Shoulda figured you'd have money, Ketchum."
Which told me a lot about Mr. Stokes. If he thought I had money-the furniture was mostly from secondhand stores, literally-then he must really be from hunger. Maybe he was responding to the decor, which had been done free of charge by a onetime girlfriend of mine. But whatever his reason for saying it, he made the remark unpleasant, full of envy and even menace.
"You want a drink?" I said. I didn't sound any happier about seeing him than he'd sounded about seeing me.
"Just a minute," he said, waving me off.
He stood in the middle of my living room, smelling like a wet dog.
"People's places," he said, almost to himself, "they tell you secrets sometimes. All you have to do is stand still and look them over."
Stokes was one of those people who give other people the creeps-though you might not exactly be able to say why. You wouldn't be surprised to see his photo on the tube in conjunction with the ax deaths of a suburban couple and their children. I'd picked a honey when I'd called Federated Investigation Services. He'd been smart enough-each of us has some advertising instincts-to pick the Federated name, which gave him a lot more weight in the Yellow Pages than A-l or Nocturne, which is way too dramatic. Federated sounds vaguely like a bank. I'd expected somebody in pinstripes with a college degree who just happened to carry a Mauser. Instead, I got Stokes here.
"You learn all my secrets yet?" I said, more harshly than I'd intended.
A smirk parted his lips, revealing teeth the color of a urine specimen. I had hoped he would take the money I paid him and go straight to his dentist's. "You'd be surprised what I know," he said.
To hell with him. I went over and fixed myself another drink. Meanwhile, he kept looking around my apartment.
As I was coming around the tiny wet bar, I saw the newspaper clipping I'd taken from my suitcoat earlier. The one about the robbery I'd found in Denny Harris's desk. I studied it a moment, then decided to leave it where it was. I had no intention of sharing it with Stokes. I'd already decided to pay him off and get rid of him.
He lit a Camel from a crumpled pack, a real Camel, not one of those sissified things they push these days. No wonder his teeth looked the way they did.
I went over to the couch and sat on the edge while Stokes finished examining a Chagall lithograph I own, my only expensive indulgence since the divorce.
When he finished, he turned around and said, "Guess where I was last night."
"Your mom's?" I joked.
For the first time since I'd met him, he showed anger. He pushed his body forward. His eyes flashed. "I don't make jokes about my mother." He had to somewhere near fifty. That he was that sensitive about his mother made me very suspicious, made him all the more odd and dangerous in my mind.
"Sorry," I said, "if I offended you." I could not quite get the irony out of my voice, a problem I sometimes have.
I decided not to let him rest. He'd been no help to me. I'd left my card last night and he hadn't called back. I wanted him off the case and out of my life.
"I want you to submit your bill," I said.
A kind of smirk touched his mouth. "You firing me?"
"You could call it that."
He looked around again. "Guy lives in a place like this, he gets the idea he can do anything he wants, push anybody around, I guess."
"Yeah," I said, "that's me OK. A regular Mussolini."
He faced me. "You know something, Ketchum?"
"What?"
"You're a punk."
"Gee, thanks."
"You got a fancy apartment, fancy business, you think you know everything. You don't know shit."
"That's been pointed out to me. Many times."
"Well, it's true."
"So you've told me."
He reached inside his coat and pulled out a manila envelope. "I'm gonna hav
e you do me a little favor," he said. "I don't think so, Stokes. You're done."
"I wouldn't count on that."
"I would, Stokes."
"A little bitty favor. Or else."
"Or else what?"
"Or else I phone the police."
"And say hi?"
"And tell them who happened to be at Denny Harris's house last night about the time he happened to get murdered."
Ever since talking to his mother and finding out that he'd been late bringing her his treat-a ritual I assumed he treated with utmost respect-I'd wondered where Stokes had been that night.
Maybe I was about to find out.
"Meaning what?" I said lamely.
"Meaning what?" he mocked. "Shit, c'mon, Ketchum, you think I'm some moron?"
"I think you're a lot of things, Stokes, but I guess a moron isn't one of them."
"Hey," he said, "you're really crushing me, you know?" He waved the manila envelope again. "Meaning you were out at Harris's last night, and if I have to, I can prove it."
"Gee, I was always under the impression that when you paid a private detective, he went to work for you. I didn't know that blackmail was a part of the deal."
"Like I said, Ketchum, there's a lot of things you don't know."
What I really wanted to talk about was what Merle Wickes was doing at Stokes's place last night-but I knew better. Despite my naivete, I was beginning to see that in a sleazy game like this one, the less you said the safer you were. I'd already said and done way too much.
"What's in the envelope?" I asked.
"That isn't important. It's what I want you to do with it that matters."
"Which is?"
"I want you to take this someplace for me."
"Where?"
"You know the duck pond in Bridges Park?"
"Yeah."
"Next to the duck pond there are all these feeders where seed is stored for the birds. The feeders are marked A, B, C, and so forth. I want you to take this envelope and put it in there at a quarter till noon tomorrow."
"What if I look inside?"
"What you see won't make any sense to you."
"I may not be as dumb as you think."