New, Improved Murder

by Ed Gorman

  And she had.

  She’d covered the walls of the one-room office with framed copies of her best ads. They lent color and style to the place. The inexpensive filing cabinets were new enough to shine and the round coffee table around which she’d placed three straight-backed chairs gave the room a sense of proportion. Only the glum wintry sky filling the cracked window spoiled her work.

  “Great job,” I said. But I still hadn’t found my voice. All I could think of was them holding hands. Who had a better right than formerly married people? But that didn’t help, of course. My mind had outstripped the reality of Donna and me. There was nothing between us, certain sappy thoughts of mine to the contrary.

  “This should generate a nice little income for her,” Chad was saying.

  “Chad was nice enough to lease this office for me for six months,” Donna said.

  “Boy, that’s wonderful,” I said. “Just fantastic.”

  Maybe I should have tried “absolutely and totally fabulous” or something while I was at it.

  Chad glanced at his watch like a surgeon inspecting a liver. “Damn. Late for court.”

  His hand struck out again.

  We shook.

  He shrugged into his camel’s-hair coat and surveyed the office again, and then did what I’d hoped he wouldn’t. Leaned into Donna and put a possessive arm around her waist and a more than perfunctory kiss on her cheek.

  “Don’t forget about dinner,” he said. “That’s a for-sure, toots.”

  Then he beamed at me magnanimously and I sensed, as I always sense around men like him, all the ways I have failed not only my gender but the fucking human race, and then he did me the inestimable favor of opening the door and leaving.

  We stood in the kind of silence that only lovers can share. Part suppressed anger. Part hurt. Part confusion.

  “Gosh,” she said.

  “Gee,” I said. And pointed out all the things that had just been pointed out by the one and only Chad. “This looks great, fantastic.” There I went again—fabulously wonderful, et cetera.

  “So,” she said.

  “So.”

  “You got my call.”

  “Got your call. Yes indeed.”

  “Were you surprised?”

  “To put it mildly.”

  I knew she was talking about Ad World’s office space so once again I waved my arm in the direction of the ads hanging on the wall. “Fabulous,” I said.

  Then she decided to give us both a break. “It was kind of uncomfortable, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I didn’t expect him to show up. He just kind of popped in and—”

  “Hey, you don’t owe me an explanation.”

  “Well, I do sort of, Dwyer. I mean, we’re in a weird situation here, wouldn’t you say? I mean, we’re not really lovers or anything, and neither of us really owes the other anything, but there is something going on between us, don’t you think?”

  “Something. Yeah.”

  “So here I am holding hands with my ex-husband when you walk in.”

  “Yeah. I noticed that.”

  “Your eyes kind of bugged out. Sort of like a cartoon character.”

  “God, was I that obvious?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Shit.”

  “It’s all right, Dwyer. I don’t handle things like that very well myself.”

  I sat down and lit up a cigarette, confused and miserable. “Maybe it’s better if we don’t talk about it.”

  She lit up too. “Yeah.”

  “So this is really a great office.”

  “The last time you said it was fantastic. In fact, you’ve alternated between fantastic and fabulous. Great is sort of a step down.”

  “Oh. Okay. This is a fantastic office.”

  “Yeah. I really like it.”

  “And it was damn nice of him to lease it for you.” I wanted to cut out Chad’s heart, of course, but there didn’t seem to be any graceful way of working that into the conversation just now.

  “Fabulous of him, actually,” she said. Then she said, “And it was a complete surprise. He calls one week to see how I’m doing—I mean, we’re really good friends these days—and tells me to meet him at this address in half an hour—and voila, Ad World has its first office.”

  “He really seems like a fantastic guy.”

  “You didn’t like him, did you?”

  “I thought he was a jerk.”

  “That’s what I thought you thought.”

  “I mean, if we’re being honest.”

  “I understand.”

  “He kind of sneers.”

  “I know.”

  “And he puts people down.”

  “I kinda figured you didn’t like being called ‘quite a character.’”

  “Also I didn’t like him calling this your ‘little project.’”

  “That’s how he was all the time we were married.”

  I was a fucking lapdog, but I couldn’t help myself. I just wanted her to say something reassuring about us.

  “I can see why you broke up.”

  “He’s dumping the court stenographer.”

  “Oh.”

  “He says he thinks he’s in love with me. He says he thinks he never really fell out of love with me. That the thing with the stenographer was just a middle-age itch.”

  “Well,” I said.

  “I thought I’d better tell you that.”

  “I appreciate it,” I said.

  “You don’t look like you appreciate it.”

  “Well, I can appreciate it without being absolutely fucking thrilled about it, can’t I?” The anger was starting to surface.

  “I really like you a lot.”

  Man, I could hear it coming. I wanted to beat her words to the door.

  “Right now I’m just confused,” she said.

  “Right.”

  “I still want to work with you and – and maybe even see you, you know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But right now …” She paused.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Shit,” she said.

  “That seems to be as good a word as any,” I said.

  I left.

  Chapter 21

  Malley’s is the only bar I know with a crucifix in plain sight of the drinkers. Bob Malley, a paunchy, bearded guy I made my first communion with, keeps it near the cash register in case a fight breaks out. Over the years he’s gotten his nose and jaw and left arm broken. This, in his own bar. Now when he jumps between two brawlers he takes his crucifix with him, sort of like Darren McGavin fighting off vampires on “The Night Stalker.” The weird thing is, it works, mostly because Malley’s customers consist of innumerable mumbling Irish Catholics in various stages of psychosis. It’s like having a nun appear out of a booze fog and threaten to work you over with her steel-tipped ruler.

  Malley also doubles as a highly opinionated shrink. I tell him my troubles mainly to hear him tell me what a messed-up jerkoff I am. I told him all about Donna and her husband. Malley just snorted at me pityingly and walked away. He was going to formulate a plan for me. I started drinking beer.

  Barbara Mandrell came on the jukebox and then B. J. Thomas and then George Jones. None of them made me feel any better. Malley has this thing for country music now. We used to listen to Dion and the Belmonts.

  I knew there was only one hope for salvation. I needed to be working again. I took out the piece of phone book I had ripped off at Elliot’s place. The one with the name “Eve” on it.

  Eve seemed to have some central connection with the death of Stephen Elliot and Jackie the hooker. Not to mention Larry.

  I went back to the pay phone, slugged in some coins, and got a surprising response.

  The line was busy.

  I’d been expecting the number to be no longer in service. The busy signal buoyed me. I felt some forward progress.

  Kenny Rogers and then Willie Nelson stirred the beery air. Malley used to
be a stone rock ‘n’ roll freak. I couldn’t believe what he’d done to his jukebox. Country music was not my favorite type of music.

  Throughout this mini concert I kept trying the number again. Busy. I went over to the bar and got four quarters for a dollar. I’m at least as superstitious as your average Druid. I figured maybe new coins would unbusy the line. Right.

  “You know what you need, Dwyer? A girl from St. Michael’s,” Malley said. “Find somebody from our old class—shit, man, they’re all divorced now—find one of those babes and start plugging her and get married. Find somebody who cooks good and likes to give head. You make things too complicated.”

  He shook his head at me as I walked away. As if I were the numero uno dumb shit. Crude as he was, and God, was he—to the point of embarrassment most of the time—maybe he had a point after all. Maybe I should find a woman from my own background.

  Maybe that was my trouble. But I kept remembering the last such date I’d had. How she’d kept telling me dirty jokes all night and how she got wine-sappy over Eddie Rabbit records. Despite Thomas Wolfe, you can go home again: it’s just that there are very few people there you want to see.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  He sounded like a bad dinner-theater actor imitating British gentry.

  “Eve,” I repeated. “I’d like to speak to Eve.”

  It had taken me half an hour of changing between dimes and quarters—and half an hour of a regular Grand Ole Opry tribute on the jukebox—but finally the line had cleared, and I asked for Eve.

  Only I got this guy. With his accent. With his ice. “I’m afraid you have the wrong number,” he said.

  “Sir.” He added the last after a two-beat pause, and the way he said it was a masterpiece of subtle venom. Then he hung up.

  I tried to put the phone somewhere deep within the wall on which it hung.

  Malley must have been watching me, because when I got back to the bar he said, “Believe it or not, Dwyer, Ma Bell makes me pay for shit my customers break.”

  “Sorry.”

  He waved his bar rag at me. “You won’t fucking listen, man. Won’t fucking listen.”

  He slid a brew toward me.

  “I know,” I said. “Good eats and good head. Right?”

  He gave me a WW II thumbs-up sign. He didn’t look a damn thing like Harrison Ford. Which is fortunate for Harrison.

  Somebody named Lee Greenwood came on the jukebox. It was getting to be time to leave.

  “I got somebody you should meet,” Malley said.

  “Let me think about it.”

  “Don’t forget your origins, man, that’s what it comes down to.” Yeah, I thought, I want to live in a housing development with fake-brick walls in the basement “rec” room and “naughty” paintings in the bathroom, which is a fair description of Malley’s place.

  Then I felt like a jerk and a snob and I wanted to confess to Malley that I was both those things and that I was sorry and that he should pay no fucking attention to me, drunk or sober, whatsoever.

  But I didn’t.

  I just kind of nodded good-bye, pushed through the smoke, and found the back door. I’d parked in the rear because there was usually a slot there. Tonight that proved to be a mistake.

  I stood for maybe two or three minutes finishing my cigarette. Then, not wanting to go back inside and have another conversation, I decided to relieve myself next to the dumpster.

  They were there all along, of course. Only I had no way of knowing that.

  Steam rose off my work and I rocked on my heels, my head still spinning, and the cold was like being reborn into a terrible gray world from which there was no escape—

  And that was when they appeared.

  They emerged from the blackness like shadows. They wore dime-store Halloween masks, one a Frankenstein, the other a Dracula. One carried a crowbar.

  The other wielded a long piece of pipe. Nothing fancy, which meant they were street types. Which scared me. Pros rarely take pleasure in what they do. Street types sometimes get carried away.

  I was just getting my pants zipped when one of them, Dracula, swung the piece of pipe.

  It made a whooshing sound as I ducked under it.

  I had found my balance, all right. The problem was that Frankenstein had worked his way to my left. Now he was coming up from behind.

  I was already sweaty. Nerves. And a tic worked my right eyelid. Nerves. I started to yell for help and that’s when Dracula, who was much better at this than I was, made his move. He came straight for me, and I had no choice but to answer him.

  I brought my right foot up and caught him in the groin, but he grinned despite his pain.

  Frankenstein came from behind—a crunch of gravel, a muttered curse in Spanish—and brought oblivion with him, swinging the crowbar exactly against the middle of the back of my head.

  I went out. Absolutely out.

  Chapter 22

  In Malley’s that night I became a celebrity. Everybody had to come up and look me over. There was a couple in square-dancing clothes and a couple in polka clothes and a couple in evening clothes of the sort Lawrence Welk probably had wet dreams about. There were racists—”You can bet they was fuckin’ niggers”; philosophers—”Hey, man, you’re alive, thank God for that”; vigilantes—”I say we get goddamn grenade launchers and go after those sonsabitches.” There were ladies who wanted to commiserate—”Malley tells me your old lady dumped you, huh? I ain’t doin’ nothin’ tonight”; and ladies who didn’t seem to want much of anything at all—”My ex-husband, he spilled his motorcycle, he hurt his head just like that, yeah.”

  That was how I spent the next four hours of my somewhat dubious life, propped up in a corner under a TV set while ESPN reran an Ali fight from 1971 and the announcers had to pretend to get excited all over again.

  Every few minutes Malley came by and said, “I still think I should call the cops.”

  “I appreciate the offer, but I’m all right. I don’t feel like sitting in a station and filling out forms.”

  He alternated between wanting to call the cops and wanting to call an ambulance. According to him, he knew the signs of concussion, so several times he shined this searchlight-size flashlight into my face and started mumbling doctor-like things to himself. The square dancers and the polka folks and the evening-outers all crowded around and kibitzed on my condition.

  He was halfway through his fourth such number with me when the phone rang and he had to reluctantly put down the light to answer it.

  He shoved a finger in an ear so he could hear and then surprise parted his lips and he pushed the phone at me.

  “It’s for you,” he said.

  Moving still hurt so I took my time. Right after waking up in Malley’s alley, I’d figured the mugging for a coincidence. Then slowly, as my senses returned, I knew better. By now I was half expecting this call.

  I took it. Put my own finger in my own ear. Dolly Parton was singing now.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You got a hard head, meester.”

  “Yeah. I must.”

  “We went easy this time. Next time—no.”

  “Mind telling me what you’ve got against me?”

  By now Malley had caught the drift of the conversation. He made a theatrical gesture to a guy behind the bar who himself made a theatrical gesture out of picking up a double-barreled shotgun and handing it to Malley.

  “You tell that cocksucker to come over here,” Malley said. Malley’s face looked like somebody who’d gone crazy in a panel of a Sergeant Rock comic book. All he needed was a stubby cigar hanging out of the corner of his mouth.

  “You lay off the investigation you got going, man,” the voice on the phone was saying. “Otherwise we’re going to lay on the hands again. A lot harder. You dig me?”

  He was doing a bad imitation of a juvenile delinquent in an old Glenn Ford movie. At least he hadn’t called me “chickie baby.”

  I handed the phone to Malley.
r />   Before the poor bastard on the other end hung up Malley had insulted the guy’s father, mother, sister, brother, and dog.

  “Here,” Malley said after slamming the phone.

  He presented me with the shotgun as if he were a king sending his most trusted knight into battle.

  I thanked him but declined the offer. The police department probably wouldn’t be too happy to see me riding around with a shotgun in my car. They just don’t have the sense of humor most normal people do.

  This time when I got outside all that was waiting for me was the realization that I was totally alone. A veritable hunchback of self-pity.

  Chapter 23

  In the morning I stood inside the shower long enough to get Simonized. My head, surprisingly, didn’t feel too bad unless I touched the goose egg itself.

  The first thing I did after dressing was check in with my answering service. A Dr. George Chamales had called. So had Donna Harris. At the mention of her name my heart did several silly things. Then I thought of Chad-the-charmer and felt out-leagued.

  I decided to call Dr. Chamales and worry about Donna later.

  He had a voice that could easily put me out of a job. Med students all seem to take drama courses these days. They’re much smoother than the previous generation.

  “I’m the psychiatrist working with Jane Branigan,” he explained. “I feel we’re making very rapid progress. I wondered if you could come in and see me in the next day or so. Perhaps our having a conversation would help.”

  “Is she talking yet?”

  “Not speaking on the subject of the murder, if that’s what you mean. But she is coming out of shock. We’re very optimistic. She’s a lovely woman.”

  His remark about her loveliness caught me in an odd way. I realized then that I no longer loved her, at least not as I once had. There was an emptiness in me now and I almost missed the pain of grieving over her.