New, Improved Murder

by Ed Gorman

  At first paralysis overcame me. I thought she was dead.

  But then my eyes fell to the steady rhythm of her breathing and I relaxed.

  I started to look to Edelman, but at that moment the bullet came from nowhere, crashing through the din of the soundtrack, and Edelman spun around. His gun went off, but only into the ceiling. He glanced at me—a plea of fear and terror—and then collapsed in two jerky, seriocomic movements.

  And then he appeared.

  He wore his commodore’s outfit and a kind of sad smirk, as if he knew the joke, this time, was on him.

  He carried a Luger, the drama of the weapon fitting his style.

  He came up from the shadows in the corners of the large room, stepping over Edelman’s fallen body and moving toward me.

  Instead of speaking to me directly, he nodded to the screen. Looked lovingly on his work up there—a woman whistling while she did her gardening.

  “You figured it out, didn’t you, Dwyer?” he said.

  “No, actually Donna and a bartender named Malley did. Or at least they gave me the clues. Malley told me about a comedy skit where a man was nothing more than a windup toy—just the way Stephen Elliot was for you. Then Donna pointed out that when you looked at something Elliot actually wrote, he was nearly illiterate.”

  As I spoke, I looked over nervously at Donna. I assumed she’d been knocked out and would survive. But now, since she had yet to move, I had begun to wonder.

  Another commercial came on. A hamburger that had little tap-dancing feet and did a version of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

  He went over and sat down on the chair next to Donna. He picked up a martini glass. It was full. Apparently he’d been drinking from it before.

  I looked over at Edelman. He’d been my friend. Some terrible weariness pushed through me, blocking out even anger. The way he’d fallen, his arm seemed to have broken. His weapon was inches from his fingers. Hammond said, “I became passé. I was a product that no longer sold. So I invented a new product. Stephen Elliot. I told him all the right things to say, all the right things to do, all the right places to go—and I, secretly, did all the work.” He shook his handsome white head. Bitterly. “Clients just automatically assume you burn out when you reach your forties. So I created Stephen Elliot.”

  “He wasn’t the blackmailer, Hammond. Baxter was.”

  He smiled sadly. “I know that now. Stephen didn’t have to die, after all. Just David.”

  “Just David and Lucy and the motel clerk and Jackie-the-hooker and the two punks in the Frankenstein and Dracula masks.”

  He looked surprised at my tone of indignation. “As far as I’m concerned, that blood’s on Baxter’s hands, not mine. He forced me to do what I did.” He set his drink down. “Believe it or not, Dwyer, I’m a man of principle. I was just trying to stop people like Phil Davies from being blackmailed.” He then spent the next four wobbly minutes wearily reciting what had happened, how he’d found out about the whole blackmail scheme when Davies’s behavior toward him started to change—his old friend and client had now become an enemy of sorts and, when he asked Davies what was wrong, Davies told him. Hammond then started to follow Elliot around, which was how he learned about the motel clerk and the hooker, Jackie, who helped set up others of Hammond’s clients for blackmail photos. By then he was crazy enough to kill everybody involved—it had become a kind of crusade—and he would have murdered Donna, Mrs. Rutledge, and me, too, this afternoon, if the florist hadn’t come along.

  “The irony, of course,” he went on, “was that not until yesterday did I find out that Baxter was the really vicious one in this whole thing.” He paused, glancing at Donna, then up at me. “Elliot liked the pictures because they gave him certain kinky kicks, but Baxter was making a lot of money on what was in the strongbox, really bleeding people.” He shook his head.

  He put the Luger closer to Donna’s head. “The people I’ve had to deal with…” He laughed bitterly. “Carla Travers. That scummy motel clerk. Those two thugs I hired to help find the strongbox and to keep you off my tracks. And Elliot—” He shook his head again. “Elliot wanted to prove to Baxter that he was in control after their partnership began. So he got Lucy Baxter to pose with Davies. She was so much in love with Elliot that … Elliot took that picture himself. Jane was in love with him, too, as you well know. I almost did her a favor when I found her in Elliot’s apartment and put the gun in her hand. She was really insane at that point, strung out on alcohol and drugs. She came in and passed out right away. That’s when I put the gun in her hand. I took her over to the body so that when she woke up she’d think….”

  Hammond seemed much older now. Exhausted. “He needed money, Baxter did, that’s why the blackmail thing appealed to him.”

  Hammond picked his drink up again. “Poor Eve—that’s how I met Stephen. She brought him up here, years ago, to apply for a sales job. Came right along with him. As if she were his mother.” He finished his martini. He took the glass in his palm and smashed it hard against the console. Blood ran down his fingers instantly. The pain seemed to give him some satisfaction. “Everybody died so fucking unhappily. Only Eve was spared the sorrow—crazy as a fucking bedbug. Probably always has been.” He was doing King Lear. Raving. He threw his hand majestically to the screen. “Those are all the things that made Stephen Elliot so famous. But I wrote them. Every last fucking one of them. And I made him rich too.”

  For the past few minutes I’d been watching what was about to happen peripherally. All I would have time to do was dive for Donna and knock her out of the line of fire.

  “The only reason I killed them, Dwyer, was to protect my clients, I swear to you,” Bryce Hammond said. “I swear to you. He blackmailed them all.”

  Edelman got up on one knee.

  I put my head down and dove for her.

  Hammond saw what was going to happen. He brought up his Luger.

  Edelman opened fire.

  The gun roared above the soundtrack. Like God’s wrath finally manifest.

  After several long minutes I got up. I didn’t look at what was left of Hammond. There’d been enough death impressed on my vision.

  I just grabbed Donna and pulled her up against me tight and struggled my way out of the screening room that had been Bryce Hammond’s temple.

  Chapter 33

  I wish I could tell you that a lot of really dramatic things happened as a result of Bryce Hammond’s death. But not much did, really. Donna, Edelman and I went to the nearest emergency room. Edelman was worked on and went home. Donna, who’d only been knocked out, was checked for a concussion, then left on the arm of Chad, whom she’d called soon after reaching the hospital. I ended up spending the hours till dawn talking to a detective named Sullivan, patiently explaining the case and all its entanglements.

  Carla Travers, who in addition to having a wrist fractured in three places also had a concussion and two broken ribs, had told Edelman and me everything from her hospital bed.

  The time I’d visited her apartment and heard her say, “You know what I want and I better goddamn get it,” she’d been talking to Baxter. She wanted money, or she threatened to expose the entire blackmail scheme to the police. But then she got a better idea—she would find the strongbox herself and begin her own blackmail plan. She had used Eliot’s alcoholism against him but was now playing against somebody treacherous—Bryce Hammond.

  The watching eyes I’d felt on me that first night I’d been at Hammond’s agency had belonged to Carla. She’d been there to steal the box, thinking Elliot might have hidden it in a trick magic box he’d been given by Eve as a present—Elliot being the kind of drinker who talked too much, eventually told his sycophant Carla nearly everything. But Carla hadn’t found the box. So that night at the hotel she joined all the others in the room to demand that Baxter stop blackmailing them, Baxter being the culprit that Stephen Elliot had named to her. Only not even Baxter had the box that night. It then resided at Eve’s, where Elliot had hidd
en it before he died. Bryce Hammond had exhausted all other possibilities but Eve’s—where he went and found the strongbox.

  Of course, Carla had mistakenly blamed Eve for everything all along, anyway. Elliot’s whining, drunken conversations had led her to believe that Eve had hired the thugs who broke into Carla’s apartment—when it had been Bryce who’d hired them to search for the strongbox.

  Carla related all this in a voice she’d borrowed from a corpse.

  Then I went out and had a huge breakfast and woke up late the next morning to a ringing phone to find that I’d been selected to play the daddy in the pizza commercial, after all. In the afternoon I visited Jane Branigan and her parents in the hospital. It was a melancholy hour.

  That night I went to work. The old bastard who always tries to steal ham came in and tried again. This time, being broke, I just scooted him out of the store. After my shift was over I went to Malley’s, where he told me about this really stupid woman he thought I should date.

  Then I went home and that’s where I saw her. Sitting in my parking lot. The way she’d been the first time I’d seen her. She rolled down her window.

  “You want to get in and smoke?” she said.

  “I don’t know.”

  She smiled. “You playing hard to get, Dwyer?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe I’m just tired.”

  “You should read the story I wrote for the first issue of Ad World. You come off sounding like Dashiell Hammett.”

  I just stared at her. “I missed you.”

  She took a while to say it. “I missed you too.”

  “What about Chad?”

  “Honest?”

  “Honest.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’d be a lot better for you.”

  “I think you would be. At least, sometimes I think you would be. I’m pretty confused, Dwyer, about a lot of things. All the killings—you and me—”

  After a while I said, “Maybe I can help unconfuse you.”

  “Maybe you can.”

  “If I get in, can we listen to a jazz station?”

  She laughed. “You’re crazy, you know that?”

  I got in and shut the door and immediately pulled her to me. “Look who’s talking,” I said.

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