Die Laughing 2: Five More Comic Crime Novels

by Ben Rehder

  “What, you think I got some case more important than this? What’s the story?”

  “It’s a washout.”

  “He didn’t go out?”

  “Yeah. He went out twice. Once to the supermarket and once to the State Capitol.”

  “And what did he do?”

  “First time he bought groceries. Second time he had lunch with someone.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. Guy in a suit. Probably a senator or assemblyman or something. Met him at the State House, they went out for lunch. After that he went home and stayed put.”

  “O.K. Good work.”

  “Good work, hell. It’s a washout.”

  “Why is it a washout?”

  “’Cause he didn’t spot me.”

  “You sure of that?”

  “Absolutely. And he’s not gonna, either. You got to let me crowd him.”

  “No way. Don’t even think that.”

  “If I don’t this is never gonna work.”

  “You’re wrong. This the only way it’s gonna work. You try it your way, you blow it. You blow it for you, you blow it for me. You blow it for me, I’m history. So you don’t try it, you got that?”

  I took a breath. “Yeah.”

  “Fine. You did good. He didn’t spot you today, you hang it up, you try again tomorrow. Don’t worry so much. You’re doing good.”

  The phone clicked dead.

  I looked at it a moment before hanging up. Doing good, was I? I wondered what it felt like to do bad.

  I hung up the phone, got back in the car. Creely’d had me make a reservation at a downtown hotel, just in case. I’d been hoping I wouldn’t have to use it, but I guess I should have known better. I drove over there, registered, and went up to my room, which was as drab and cheerless as I’d expected.

  I called Alice and told her what had happened, or rather what hadn’t. She was sympathetic and supportive as could be, but somehow it didn’t help. I was really bummed out.

  I went down to the lobby, had an overpriced and undistinguished meal in the hotel dining room, bought a paper to check out the movies, didn’t see anything I felt like going to enough to hassle with finding out where they were, went back up to my room and watched TV.

  When eleven o’clock rolled around I found out Trenton’s local news wasn’t any more inspiring than Poughkeepsie’s. I stayed awake through Johnny Carson’s monologue, then switched the set off and went to sleep.

  I woke up to the sound of a key sliding into the lock.

  38.

  THIS WAS IT. Suddenly, unexpectedly, from out of left field, it was happening here and now. Creely was right and I was wrong, and his plan had worked after all, and I was an incompetent detective (“The Number One Answer!”), and despite my best efforts, Carlton Kraswell had spotted me anyway, and backtracked me to the hotel, and here he was coming in the door, and the plan had worked, only I’d told the cops it hadn’t and called them off, and now they were nowhere around, and here was Carlton Kraswell coming in to kill me.

  As I said, I don’t wake up well under the best of circumstances. I tend to be groggy and confused, and have trouble getting my bearings. With a murderer coming in the door, the problem escalates. Holy shit, what do I do now?

  Well, Carlton Kraswell was a shrimp and I’m nearly six feet tall, but I can’t fight to save my life, which is what we’re talking about here, and I’m unarmed and the son of a bitch was bound to have a gun, and guns reduce me to jelly.

  Round One to Kraswell.

  I’m wide awake, skip the coffee, I’ll just get up without it. I’m sure a shot of adrenaline will do.

  The sound of the key turning in the lock provided that.

  I slid out of bed. I was sleeping in my underwear. Momma says always wear clean underwear, you never know when you’re gonna get hit by a truck. Or shot. Actually, my mom never said anything like that, but that’s the way the old saw goes. Or was it clean socks?

  Who cares? Schmuck. What you gonna do?

  No place to run, no place to hide.

  Except the bathroom. I darted for it on little cat feet. Sprang inside.

  Just as the door swung open.

  Shit. Too late. He knows you’re there. So what? You think he wouldn’t find you in the bathroom?

  I slammed the door. Is there a lock? Can’t see, it’s dark, should I risk a light?

  No. No lock. But my hand, groping for it, touched the knob.

  Which started to turn.

  I grabbed it, hung on for dear life.

  There. I’m bigger, I’m stronger, he can’t turn it.

  Wrong again. False premise. It’s easier to turn a doorknob than it is to hold it still.

  The knob was turning. This way, that way, a little more, back and forth—

  Click!

  He’d done it. And now he was heaving his weight, what there was of it, against the door. I pushed back, but Jesus Christ, the door is moving! That little shrimp must really want to kill me bad.

  I heaved back, put my whole weight into it, gained an inch or two back.

  Paranoid-Flash-Number-907: what if he starts shooting through the door?

  He didn’t. He just heaved furiously with a burst that gained a little ground, and I heaved back and he heaved again, and I gave a giant lunge with all my weight and the door slammed shut.

  I grabbed for the knob again.

  But it didn’t turn.

  Instead there was a knock on the door.

  A knock? (“Knock knock.” “Who’s there?” “Carlton.” “Carlton who?” “Carlton Kumta-kilya.”)

  A voice said, “Hastings. Open up.” A familiar voice. A voice affecting a high-pitched Southern drawl.

  I opened the door.

  The lights were on. Chief Creely was standing there. Two Jersey cops were holding a handcuffed Carlton Kraswell.

  I turned to Creely. “How the hell’d you get here?”

  Creely grinned. “You kidding? You think I’d take your word for anything? You tell me he didn’t spot you, it’s odds-on he did. Lucky for us he didn’t spot the two cops that were tailing him too.”

  “You had cops on him all the time?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You didn’t tell me that.”

  “No. You’d have looked for them.” He jerked his thumb at Kraswell. “Probably tipped him off to them too.”

  I looked at Kraswell. “He have a gun?”

  “Oh yeah.” Creely jerked his thumb again, and one of the cops held up a plastic evidence bag. “Didn’t think he’d take on a big bad dude like you with his bare hands, did you? Naw, he was armed and we got him dead to rights.”

  “Then we have our deal?”

  “Well, I could penalize you for telling us the guy wasn’t wise, but basically I’m just a nice guy.”

  Creely turned to the Jersey cops. “O.K., boys, before you run him in, we give this joker five minutes in return for his almost getting killed.”

  One of the cops said, “That’s irregular as all hell.”

  “Ain’t it now?” Creely said. “But on the other hand, who gives a shit?” He jerked his thumb at Kraswell. “This joker’s got the right to remain silent, but that don’t mean he can’t listen.” He turned to me. “All right. You’re on.”

  This was it. My big scene. I was gonna have to play it in my underwear, but what the hell, you gotta work with what you got.

  I grabbed my briefcase, threw it on the bed, and popped it open. I reached in and pulled out a stack of papers, computer printouts I’d had Alice make me. I took them, marched up to Carlton Kraswell, and stuck my finger in his face.

  “You’re busted for murder. But that’s the least of your troubles.” I thrust the papers at him. “You know what this is? It’s a bill for my services. You hired me to do a job for you, I did it, and now you’re gonna pay. I talked to my lawyer about it, and he says there’s no question. All the work I’ve done in this case was a direct result of representations made by you. Now those r
epresentations happen to be false, but that does not relieve you of responsibility, or in any way alter the validity of our oral contract. You’re responsible for everything, up to and including my being here today. These bills come to a total of four thousand, four hundred and twenty-seven dollars and thirty-two cents. The reason there’s so many is, I billed you individually, so I could break ’em down into lots of less than fifteen hundred dollars each, which means I can take you to small claims court. Which means I can make you pay ’em without even having to hire a lawyer. Though if it came to that, my attorney would be happy to oblige. But he says there’s no question—four thousand, four hundred and twenty-seven dollars and thirty-two cents, and you’re gonna have to pay.

  “Which is kind of interesting, don’t you think? ’Cause you’re probably the first murderer in history who ever hired a private detective to help catch him. You can think about that while you’re in jail.”

  I turned to Creely. “Chief, this is a great pleasure. Allow me to introduce you to Carlton Kraswell, alias Marvin Nickleson.” I turned, gestured to Kraswell, smiled and said, with considerable satisfaction, “My client.”

  39.

  THAT MORE OR LESS wrapped things up. The cops took Kraswell into custody and we all moseyed down to the police station and the Jersey cops charged Kraswell with the attempted murder of me, and Creely charged Kraswell with the murder of Julie Steinmetz, and Kraswell called his attorney, who turned out to be as slick and slippery a shyster as one would have expected, and he showed up and started screaming entrapment and frame-up and police corruption, and Creely started talking about instituting extradition proceedings, and the lawyer started talking about fighting them, and the Jersey cops started talking about which crime took precedence, and Kraswell, who’d been advised by his attorney to remain silent, just sat there tugging at his moustache, and aside from him, all of them seemed happy as clams because it was just business as usual and they were getting on with it.

  Somewhere in all that the cops took my statement and after that I was free to go, and before I knew it there I was, driving up the New Jersey Turnpike through the early morning rush hour traffic just like some damn commuter and just as if the whole thing had never happened.

  But it had happened, every bit of it. And by and large, I had to admit I was pretty pleased with the way it had turned out.

  Which bothered me. Being pleased with it, I mean. ’Cause the thing is, I realized what I was pleased about.

  I suppose I could be proud of my accomplishments. After all, it had been my first real client, my first professional case. And I’d been lied to, cheated and framed. And despite that, I’d managed to plow through the bullshit, sort out the facts, deduce what had happened, and find the killer. Maybe not as quickly and easily as the professionals had, but I’d still done it. Which had to be encouraging to a man in my position. Which had to give me reason for being pleased.

  But that wasn’t it, and I knew it. No, by and large, I had to admit, the thing that pleased me most about the whole affair was the prospect of having Carlton Kraswell pay me my fee.

  Which bothered me a lot.

  You have to understand, I’m a product of the sixties. And if you grew up in the sixties, you’ve got a lot of problems in this day and age. For one thing, you’re getting old. For another thing, you got a legacy from your childhood that’s sometimes hard to live with. For example, it’s embarrassing to be part of a generation that screamed, “Make Love, Not War,” only to find out twenty years later with the advent of AIDS, that making love may kill more people than making war ever did. And it’s hard to emerge from that psychedelic culture into the modern world of crack and death, and find yourself with kids of your own, for whom you’re fighting a valiant struggle to try to teach them to Just Say No. Different times, different values.

  Yeah, values, that’s what it’s all about.

  Value.

  Money.

  When I went to college, none of us studied business administration. Few of us went to med or law school, either. Liberal arts, that was where it was at. Fine arts. And no crass commercialism, either. Art for art’s sake. No, I’m not a money-grubbing industrialist. I’m an actor, a poet, a prophet, a writer, a sage.

  Plans for the future? What future? I don’t trust anyone over thirty, so I’m never gonna be over thirty, right? The Peter Pan generation. I won’t grow up.

  Rude awakenings.

  Yeah, you get older and things change, and you find you have more and more regrets. And you wonder how many of them are just because you’re getting old. And then you start to question your own motives and values and feelings.

  Like my zinging Kevin Drexel in the bar. That was, I must admit, a wholly gratuitous exercise that had absolutely nothing to do with my investigation. And I have to ask myself, did I do it because the smug son of a bitch was a sleazy bribe-taking scum who deserved the comeuppance, or did I do it merely because I’m a middle-aged family man who can’t buy sanitary napkins without blushing, and he’s a handsome young stud, and I couldn’t resist popping him one in front of his flashy blonde?

  And then there’s Alice. I think of Alice and I feel bad too, ’cause I realize I’ve done an injustice there. Because Alice’s work on the computer is important to her, and I should take an interest. And looking at it rationally, I know that selling computer programs at seventy-five bucks a pop is just pie in the sky, and isn’t going to get us rich any more than printing resumes at ten cents a page, and it’s wrong for me to be more interested in one because it sounds more lucrative than the other. And even if it was, that shouldn’t matter, I should be supporting her in any case. And yet for all that, here I am, a crass, capitalistic moron, whose interest picked up immensely when she mentioned seventy-five bucks.

  And it bothers me that I ride the subway and am annoyed by homeless beggars, and then get home to find my wife has received a dividend check. And what bothers me is the fact that it doesn’t bother me, that I accept these things as a matter of course. And I have to ask myself, Jesus Christ, how far has this hippie from the sixties come?

  And I don’t really know. The word liberal doesn’t embarrass me the way it embarrassed Dukakis, but as I get older and try to raise my family and make it in the outside world, I have to stop and look around every now and then and wonder just how hypocritical I am. I think I still have the same values that I had back then, back in the Age of Innocence, the age of peace marches and brotherhood, the age of Beatles and Dylan, the age of youth. It’s just the money thing that gets in the way.

  So it bothers me, the satisfaction I get out of the Marvin Nickleson/Carlton Kraswell thing. Out of having had my first real paying client. And the thing is, despite how badly the whole thing went, despite being lied to, set up, framed, arrested, cheated, squeezed and mooched, I have a feeling if another chance came along for me to make two hundred bucks a day plus expenses, I’d probably jump at it.

  And it bothers me that I feel that way. And I question my motives and I question my values, and I try to justify my feelings, and all in all I have to admit, no matter how hard I try to rationalize, the fact is I can’t do it. In point of fact, I have no excuse.

  But I have bad teeth.

  Books by Parnell Hall

  Stanley Hastings private eye mysteries

  Detective

  Murder

  Favor

  Strangler

  Client

  Juror

  Shot

  Actor

  Blackmail

  Movie

  Trial

  Scam

  Suspense

  Cozy

  Manslaughter

  Hitman

  Caper

  Stakeout

  Safari

  Puzzle Lady crossword puzzle mysteries

  A Clue For The Puzzle Lady

  Last Puzzle & Testament

  Puzzled To Death

  A Puzzle In A Pear Tree

  With This Puzzle I Thee Kill

  And A
Puzzle To Die On

  Stalking The Puzzle Lady

  You Have The Right To Remain Puzzled

  The Sudoku Puzzle Murders

  Dead Man’s Puzzle

  The Puzzle Lady vs. The Sudoku Lady

  The KenKen Killings

  $10,000 in Small, Unmarked Puzzles

  Arsenic and Old Puzzles

  NYPD Puzzle

  Puzzled Indemnity

  Steve Winslow courtroom dramas

  The Baxter Trust

  Then Anonymous Client

  The Underground Man

  The Naked Typist

  The Wrong Gun

  The Innocent Woman

  RADIO ACTIVITY – Bill Fitzhugh

  Copyright © 2004 by Reduviidae, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  DEDICATION

  To Sergio Fernandez for teaching me what I needed to know in the production room and for helping me get my first job in radio. This is all your fault and I can’t thank you enough. For the late Wayne Harrison, the late Dave Adcock, and all the jocks who worked at WJDX and WZZQ, 102.9 FM, Jackson. We rocked.

  And finally for Kendall: This one goes out to you.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Once upon a time there was an FM rock radio station in Jackson, Mississippi. Originally WJDX-FM, the call letters changed to WZZQ-FM. It was by all accounts one of the best free-form and, later, album-oriented rock radio stations in the country. It was staffed by people who knew, loved, and played an astounding variety of music. I grew up listening to this station and later, thanks to the Junior Achievement Program, I worked there. It would be an understatement to say this changed my life.

  In addition to my personal knowledge of the artists and music of the sixties and seventies, I relied on the following sources for information: All Music Guide’s website; Joel Whitburn’s The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits; and John Tobler’s 100 Great Albums of the Sixties.