Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 122, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 745 & 746, September/October 2003

Eternally by Martin Edwards

In 2002, the British publisher Allison and Busby brought out a new legal/psychological thriller by Liverpudlian Martin Edwards. As in his series books featuring Harry Devlin, the new book’s protagonist is a lawyer, but this time a lawyer turned writer, like the author himself. Mr. Edwards is also one of the leading anthologists and editors in our field. We’re pleased to welcome him back with this tale filled with nostalgia.

Playing for time, I said, “All that happened a long time ago.”

“I’d love you to tell me about it,” Alice said, putting down her notes and leaning over my bed.

Her perfume was discreet, the faintest hint of sandalwood. If only I were a few years younger. Well, quite a lot of years. I doubted she was even thirty-five and already she’d carved out separate reputations, first as an investigative journalist with the Washington Post, more recently as the author of a couple of bestsellers about Hollywood glitterati. She was shrewd and determined. Unwilling to take no for an answer. Exciting in any woman.

I started to cough. A passing nurse paused, but I nodded her away. Alice bent closer to me and I muttered, “You don’t want to listen to a sick old man talking about the past.”

“It took me a long time to find you.” Wagging a slim finger. “Hard work. At least the advance covered my flight to London.”

“Why bother? You can write your book without interviewing me.”

“I don’t cut corners.” A sweet grin. “Besides, I never shopped in Oxford Street before.”

“You haven’t missed much.”

“Also, I’d like to hear what you have to say.”

I sucked in air: not as easy as it used to be. “You said a few minutes ago that you just love a good murder mystery. But you’re wrong. Max didn’t kill his wife. Is that good enough for you?”

The corners of her mouth curved down. The crestfallen expression made her look about nineteen; a man could easily be taken in by it and tell her more than it was safe to disclose.

“You were his friend, of course you believed in him. But even at the time, there was gossip. Rumours that the accident was too convenient.”

“Lorna was pretty, and she died young. It’s the stuff that myths are made of.” I made a show of stifling a yawn. “If she’d been a little more talented, a little brighter, people would still remember her name.”

“Some people still do. That’s why I have to mention her in my book.”

“There isn’t a story. She had too much to drink one evening, fell down the stairs of their Long Island mansion, and broke her pretty little neck.”

Alice touched my hand, grazing the palm with her nails. I felt her warm breath on my cheek. “There is a story if her husband murdered her.”

“You haven’t done your homework. Max was innocent. He spent the evening with us. He’d never have had time to get over to the house and kill Lorna.”

She didn’t blink. “Trust me. I always do my research very thoroughly.”

I burst into a racking cough and within a minute the nurse was pulling the curtains around my bed, shooing Alice away. I shut my eyes. I wasn’t ready to step through death’s door. I needed a little space, a little time, to decide what to say and do. Alice was so focused on making sure she got what she wanted.

In my mind, I saw Max again. A July afternoon in ’sixty-eight. The first time we had met since Lorna’s death. He hadn’t attended the funeral. Too sick, too eaten up with grief, so the story went. I sat in the front row at the church, not blinking, just remembering. There was an empty space beside me. Patty was still in shock after what had happened.

Max and I had been keeping our distance. He didn’t call me, I didn’t call him. When I showed up at his apartment on East 61st Street, unable to stay away any longer, I was shocked by the change in him.

He still dressed like Joe College. Plaid pants, baggy crew-neck sweater, white socks, and white US Keds. But his hair was different. Thick as ever, but with patches of grey that hadn’t existed six months before. He kept glancing past me, as if any moment he expected Lorna’s ghost to slink into the room.

“Thanks for coming,” he said.

A smell of burnt toast hung in the air. At least it was better than cigarette smoke. The Colts and Packers were playing, but he switched off the set and started bustling in the kitchen. The refrigerator was packed to overflowing with lemons and Pepperidge Farm bread. He kept his gaze away from me as he threw raw eggs and coffee ice into the blender.

“How have you been?”

“Oh well, you know.”

Silly question. I suppose we both must have felt nervous. Were my hands shaking, or is that just an illusion of memory? I kept quiet while he made the coffee milkshake and fiddled with cheese and chopped liver for a Dagwood sandwich.

A baby Steinway sat in an alcove. On the shelves lay half a dozen score pads scooped together with rubber bands. I hazarded a guess that all of the pages were blank.

“Written anything lately?” I asked.

“Not a note,” he said. “You?”

“Uh-uh.”

I sipped the milkshake. “So you and Chrissie aren’t writing together at present?”

He stared at me. “I haven’t seen Chrissie since Lorna died.”

“I see.”

“Do you?” His cheeks, pale until that moment, suffused with colour. “I don’t think so. Everyone believes that they see. Truth is, they see what they want to see. Something bad.”

I swallowed hard. “Hey, I’m sorry I didn’t get in touch.”

“Why should you have? I was the one who dumped you. Found another lyricist.”

“I couldn’t blame you. Chrissie’s ten years younger and a thousand percent sexier than me.”

“What you aren’t saying is, she never wrote a hit song in her life.”

I shrugged. “Fashions change. The stuff we wrote, it doesn’t make the charts anymore. You were right, we needed a break from each other. Needed to freshen up.”

“Lorna hated me for it. She told me you were worth ten of Chrissie. She was right, but what the hell? Sorry, Steve.”

Awkwardly, he stretched out a hand and I shook it.

“People are whispering, aren’t they?” he said quietly. Not meeting my eyes. Maybe he feared what he might see there.

“What do you mean?”

“C’mon, Steve. We’ve known each other a long time. We’re old friends.”

“The best,” I said fervently. Despite everything, I meant it.

“Then tell me. Everyone thinks I killed Lorna, pushed her down those stairs. Isn’t that the truth?”

“No.” The flat denial startled him, made him catch his breath. “Okay, okay, there are one or two people who love to think the worst.”

“More than one or two. Chrissie’s among them. As usual, she flatters herself.” He paused. “She’s stupid enough to believe I killed Lorna, just to be free for her.”

Next day, with Alice back at my bedside and fiddling with her tape recorder, I said, “I’m not sure Max and I deserve a chapter in your book. We were never Goffin and King, or Leiber and Stoller.”

“You were different, you were a Brit.”

“Who married a girl from Greenwich Village.”

“She was a folk singer,” Alice said, as if I didn’t know. “How romantic.”

“And I was a lyricist whose sole claim to fame was the words to a Cliff Richard B-side. Patty and I met in a club in Soho at the end of the ’fifties. I’d never met anyone quite like her. She was so lovely, so intense.”

“You wrote songs with her?”

“At first. Not a good idea, we both realised in the end. You can’t work with someone you’re passionate about. She was a wannabe Joan Baez, but my heart belonged to Tin Pan Alley. After I followed her to New York, I had a couple of breaks, grabbed a short-term contract with Famous Music. It went from there.”

A dreamy look came into her hazel eyes. “What was it like in those days, working in the Brill Building?”

“One thing it wasn’t, was glamorous. Eleven floors of offices and every one housed a music publisher. Each company had its writers’ rooms, stuffy cubicles with just enough room for a beat-up piano and a couple of chairs. The windows didn’t open; it was hell working with a guy like Max who smoked nonstop.” I coughed to make the point. “I ought to sue, don’t you think? That place surely killed me.”

“You all kept changing partners.”

“Sure. I’d write with one guy in the morning, another in the afternoon. That’s the way it worked. But there was something about Max’s melodies. They seemed to make a better fit with the words I wrote. Bobby Vinton liked our songs, Jay and the Americans gave us a Top Thirty hit. It went on from there. Before long the two of us were a team.”

“You met Lorna Key at a recording session, so the story goes.”

“It’s a true story,” I said. “There was an Isley Brothers session and we had a song on the date. She was one of the girls singing in the background. You couldn’t help but notice her. Even in pigtails and jeans, she was gorgeous. Her voice was raw; even as a kid she was a chain-smoker. Her lungs must have been in worse shape than Max’s, but it wasn’t her lungs that he was interested in. He said she had potential. Nice euphemism, huh? He wanted her to start recording our demos. I went along with it, even though I never cared much for her sound. Subtlety was never her strong point.”

Alice glanced at her notebook. “Soon she signed with Kapp Records.”

“Yeah, Lorna thought she’d become a star, but the truth is, Max pulled strings. They were married the week before her first single came out.”

“ ‘Eternally.’ ” Alice smiled and crooned the chorus:

I shifted under the bedclothes. “I never claimed to be William Shakespeare.”

She glanced over her shoulder, caught the puzzled frown of the nurse walking into the ward. In the bed opposite, old Arthur gave a toothless grin and tried to mime applause with his wasted hands.

“It has a hook,” she said. “I’ve been humming the blessed thing all day. Can’t seem to get it out of my head.”

“Ah, the potency of cheap music.”

“Lorna’s voice was stronger than mine.”

“She belted it out,” I agreed. “Though that wasn’t what it called for. ‘Eternally’ is a tender love song. But Lorna, she didn’t do tenderness. You talk about murder. Well, she murdered ‘Eternally.’ It was always a favourite of mine. For once, the words came before the music. I’d written it for Patty, a token of our love.”

“I like the melody,” she said. Not altogether tactfully.

“Max was a smart writer. He’d switch time signatures, come up with ten-and-a-half-bar phrases, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Lorna couldn’t handle it. She’d stumble over the tricky bits; we did a dozen takes and then settled for the second. I thought it was lousy, kept asking how you can rasp a love song, but Max said it was wonderful.”

“He was besotted with her.”

“That’s what people forget. And you know something? He was proved right. That song went straight into the charts at number twenty-nine. Almost made it to the Top Ten. Lorna Key never had a bigger record.”

“The publicity must have helped. Her marrying the composer.”

“Sure, the press lapped it up.”

“Did you resent that? Max was always the one in the public eye, not you. Radio announcers used to talk about Max Heller songs, forget they were written by Heller and Jackson.”

I shook my head. “He liked the attention more than I did. You know, Sammy Cahn once said that most songwriters look like dentists, but Max was an exception. He was handsome and talented and even if his wife wasn’t exactly Barbra Streisand, who cared? They made a good-looking couple. So while Patty and I got on with our lives, Max and Lorna kept the scribes busy and our songs benefited. I guess they got more exposure than they deserved.”

“For a while,” she said gently.

“Nothing is forever,” I admitted. “Flower power came and went. Then there was heavy metal. All of a sudden it seemed that the songs Max and I were writing belonged to a bygone age. There was talk of a TV series, with Lorna and Rick Nelson, but Rick’s career was in a tailspin and it all came to nothing.”

“And then you and Max split up.”

“It was no one’s fault,” I insisted, propping myself up in the bed. I shouldn’t be talking so much; the nurse would scold me for tiring myself out. But what did it matter? “Except perhaps it was my fault, for going down with pneumonia at the wrong time. Max and I had been asked to write a couple of numbers for a TV special. I got sick and finished up in hospital. The deadline was forty-eight hours away, so the television company asked Max to work with Chrissie Goldmark. They hit it off straightaway. The songs they wrote were candy floss, but by the time I’d recovered, they were talking to Specter about producing a new album together. Not for Lorna, though.”

“Lorna didn’t take that well, did she?”

“Could you blame her? Chrissie fancied Max, and like all men, he was susceptible to flattery from a pretty girl.”

Alice leaned close again. I supposed it was a trick of hers, a ploy to use when talking to men. A habit, almost. “Were Max and Chrissie lovers?”

“What do you think?” Playing for time again.

“Everyone I’ve spoken to believes the two of them had something going.”

“Maybe they did. So what? It doesn’t make Max a murderer.”

“Lorna was an emotional woman.”

“Emotional woman? Tautology, Alice.”

She wouldn’t be riled. “Lorna was tempestuous. Her career was fading and she hated that. She must have realised her looks wouldn’t last forever. She was smoking eighty a day; her whole life was burning up. Losing her husband to a second-rate wordsmith would have been the last straw. I bet she wanted revenge. Hell hath no fury, you know. Maybe she threatened him with divorce, bad publicity...”

“Max never stopped caring for her. Besides, he wasn’t a violent man.” Suddenly I felt very tired. Reaching back into the past was draining the life from me.

“Anyone can snap,” Alice said softly.

How could I deny it? Clearing the phlegm from my throat, I said, “Max didn’t.”

“Your loyalty does you credit,” she said as I closed my eyes. “But how can you be sure?”

“You’re torturing yourself,” I told Max. “And for no reason.”

“I don’t have an alibi, you know. I was hanging out here on my own while Lorna was in the house on Long Island. We’d had a fight. No point in lying to you, it was over Chrissie.”

I checked my fingernails. “She accused you of having an affair?”

“Yeah, the morning she died. It wasn’t an accusation, just a statement of fact. I didn’t try too hard to deny it. She asked if I wanted a divorce. If so, she was willing to agree. She didn’t intend to spend the rest of her life with someone who had fallen out of love with her. I said I didn’t want to rush things and she made a coarse remark and things kind of went downhill from there. You know how it is.”

“So you came back here, to your old bachelor pad.”

“Lucky I kept it on, huh? I haven’t had the heart to spend time on Long Island ever since she tumbled down that staircase. Fact is, I could have gone back and killed her, made it look like an accident after she’d been drinking. Which she’d been doing too much. The house is quiet, no one would have seen me come and go. Who’s to say I’m innocent?”

He leaned back and the kitchen stool wobbled dangerously beneath him. The sink was piled high with dirty dishes; there were coffee cups filled with day-old instant Yuban. Looking out onto the terrace, I could see rumpled beach towels and grubby squeezed-out tubes of Bain de Soleil.

Following my gaze, he said, “I’ve not been in the mood for tidying.”

“It won’t do, Max.”

“Said like a true Englishman. Sorry for falling short in the stiff-upper-lip department, but the truth is, I’m pretty pissed about all this. All of a sudden, nobody wants to know me. Not even the woman I’m supposed to have committed murder for.”

“You’re right,” I said suddenly. “If you had an alibi, the tongues would stop wagging. You could start your life over.”

“Pity I screwed up by not having Chrissie round that night.”

“Where was she?”

“Jiving at some nightclub. Not my scene. I suppose I was already realising she was a bad habit, one I ought to break. I was supposed to be working on a song, but I had a couple of beers, then a couple more. Before I knew what was happening, I was fast asleep. And then the next morning came the cops, knocking on my door to break the news.”

“Aren’t you forgetting something?”

“Like what?”

“Patty and I called round here that night,” I said calmly. “It would have been about eight. She’d persuaded me to make an attempt to bury the hatchet.”

He stared at me. “What are you talking about?”

“Patty thought you and I made a good team. She’s always been fond of you.”

“No, she hasn’t.”

“It’s Lorna she didn’t like.” I sighed. “Trouble was, you and I argued. We’d both had a few beers. I took a swing at you and missed. Patty decided it was time for us to go. Not long after nine o’clock; she checked her watch. By then, you weren’t in a fit state to go anywhere, and anyway, according to what I’ve heard, the authorities are convinced Lorna was already dead.”

His face was stripped of expression. I guessed he was calculating pros and cons. That was Max: He always played the percentages.

“Are you serious about this?”

“Never more so.”

“We don’t have to drag Patty into this.”

I noticed the “we.” Progress. “Yes, we do. After all this time, we need to make it look credible. People might think I was simply trying to save my old partner’s good name if I was the only one giving him an alibi. Trust me, Patty and I have been tossing it around for a few days now. She agrees it’s for the best.”

He rubbed his chin. “I don’t know, Steve.”

“Yes, you do. It’s the only way. I’ll put the word around that I’ve only just got wind that people are seriously pointing the finger at you. You and I may not be working together anymore, but I’m keen to set the record straight.”

“But...”

“No buts. You want to spend the rest of your life like some pariah? Think about it.”

I could imagine his mind working, testing my proposition, checking it for flaws. Of course he would go along with it in the end. He had no choice, if Lorna was not to destroy his life the way she’d almost destroyed mine.

Lorna, Lorna, Lorna. I can still smell the gin on her breath the last time we were together. Still hear her striking the match to light yet another Lucky Strike from the crumpled pack. Still see her cupping her hands over the sudden flame. Still see her flicking ash all over the imitation Versailles rug. She was just waiting for me to call her a slut, but I said nothing, let her scorn wash over me like breakers on the shore. Even now I cringe at the memory of the coarse words, all the more shocking because they came from a scarlet mouth as cute as a bow-ribbon on a candy box.

“So how are you today?” asked Alice as she set up the tape recorder.

I made a slight movement with my shoulders. The doctor had talked to me that morning. There wasn’t much time left.

“You’re flying back home tonight?”

“Uh-huh.” She studied me. “I just want to say thanks for all your help. It can’t be easy for you, reliving the past when you aren’t well.”

“Those were the best years of my life,” I said. “It’s no hardship to bring them back to mind. You know, I never had another Top Thirty hit after the spring of ’sixty-seven. Thank God for Muzak. The royalties never stopped dribbling in, enough to keep Patty and me fed and watered.”

“What happened to her career?”

“Same as happened to mine, I guess.” I sighed, spoke almost to myself. “Doesn’t matter, it’s been a good marriage these past forty-odd years.”

“She’s coming to see you again this afternoon?”

“Never fails. The arthritis gives her hell, but she fights through the pain.”

“Did you stay in touch with Max?”

“Not really. We bumped into each other now and then. Last time I saw him must have been in the early ’seventies, just before he was killed in that plane crash.”

“You never wrote another song together after Lorna died?”

“No, things never seemed to jell. Our time had passed.”

“So why did you alibi him for Lorna’s death?”

Her voice had never sounded so sharp before. I flinched under her laser stare. “I told you before,” I said. “He didn’t kill her.”

“Maybe he didn’t,” she said. “Maybe someone else did.”

All of a sudden, I felt very cold. “What do you mean?”

“I talked to Lorna’s best friend. After all these years, she’s broken her silence, as the saying goes.”

“And?” My voice was no more than a croak.

“Lorna confided in her. Max’s affair pissed her off. So she decided to take revenge by bedding you. Dear, dependable, happily-married Steve. It helped prove how irresistible she was.”

“Girls talking,” I said. “It doesn’t mean a thing.”

She bent over me again. “Did she taunt you? Or threaten your security? Maybe it was that. Perhaps she said she would spill the beans. You couldn’t risk having Patty find out the truth. Was that why you shoved her down the stairs?”

“No,” I whispered. “No, no, no.”

Lorna, Lorna, Lorna. The contempt in her glazed eyes that last time, when I told her life wasn’t like writing songs. You can’t keep changing partners. Nicotine-stained fingers jabbed into my gut as she told me to get out. No one ever dumped her, she said, no one. And certainly not a two-bit rhymester like Steve Jackson.

I could have killed her right then. Oh God, how I wanted to.

Patty arrived an hour later. All the time I’ve been in this place, she’s never missed a day. Her love for me has never skipped a beat. She’s been so faithful.

When I’d finished telling her about my conversations with Alice and the doctor, she took my hand. Hers was knobbly, deformed by the disease in her joints. I closed my eyes, recalling the smoothness of her skin when she was twenty-one.

“So she has her scoop, something to help sell her book? Lorna Key wasn’t killed by her husband but by her lover, Steve Jackson?”

“By the time she publishes, I’ll be dead and buried. She’s made sure of that by taking a good look at me and having a few words with the doctor. No need for her to worry. A corpse can’t sue for libel.”

Patty squeezed my hand tighter. “I won’t let her do it. I won’t let you do it.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“It doesn’t matter now. I may be losing you, but not for long. I still have those pills I told you about. You must tell her the truth.”

“Why me?”

“You’re the one who always had a way with words.”

“Lorna deserved to die.”

“No, she didn’t,” Patty said. “I was just a jealous bitch who killed another woman because I was afraid she’d wreck our marriage.”

Funny, she’d never talked about it before. And I’d never asked; there was no need. I’d guessed her secret as soon as she came home that night, the stench of Lorna’s Lucky Strikes clinging to her clothes, to her hair, to her skin. She’d never meant it to happen, I always told myself. Lorna was just killed by an unlucky strike.

“She didn’t succeed, did she?”

She kissed me lightly on the cheek. “No, darling. No one could ever tear us apart.”

So there it is, Alice. How wrong you were. This isn’t a murder mystery at all. It’s just like one of those trite old lyrics of mine, you see. A tearjerker, a heartbreaker. A story about love.