Murder on the Aisle

23

Friday 12:23 A.M.

“I’ll be right back,” Tobin told the cabdriver.

Even the Christmas decorations on Ebsen’s street were dark this time of night. Tobin got out of the cab, drawing his topcoat collar up around him. It was three degrees above zero.

There had been a snowfall earlier tonight, so Ebsen’s unshoveled walk was slicker than it had been the past morning. He inched along, staring ahead at the small house. It was as black as the rest of the street. If Ebsen was on the phone, why were there no lights?

Tobin went up and tried to peer through the painted-over windows, but that was useless. Then he stood on tiptoe and tried to look in through the front door. That proved hopeless too.

He decided to do the unlikely thing, knock.

He raised his hand and brought it down in a sharp knock. He was surprised by the sound of something being scraped across the bare wood floor inside.

His knock had apparently startled somebody who had inadvertently made a noise.

He stood there, his nostrils getting frosty, shrinking inside his topcoat from the cold. He listened very carefully for any other evidence of somebody inside, but there was nothing. Then he got an idea and carefully made his way off the porch and down the walk and back into the cab.

“Back home?” the cabbie asked.

“No. Around the block. Then go in the alley.”

He watched the cabbie’s eyes fill the rearview mirror. “You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“I don’t want no trouble.”

“There won’t be any.” Tobin smiled. “It’s my wife. I think she’s got a boyfriend.”

“Long as the boyfriend doesn’t have a gun.”

“He’s her hairdresser.”

“Oh, hell, then. No sweat.” Here was a guy who obviously believed everything he read in the Post.

All the way around the block Tobin wished he could just stay in the back seat of the cab. It felt safe and warm in here. The glow of the dashboard lights. The radio low with Nat “King” Cole’s beautiful “Christmas Song.” The houses that were so shabby during the day were now almost beautiful, tucked in against a backdrop of snow. If he never had to leave the cab, he could spend the rest of his life happily just riding around, maybe coast to coast, or maybe somebody would build a highway across the ocean and he could visit London and Paris, just sitting in the back of the cab, safe from Detective Huggins and safe from his past.

“Here we are,” the cabbie said.

The alley was a tunnel formed by long flanks of tiny one-stall garages, many of which leaned dramatically left or right in various stages of collapse. The moonlight here seemed bright.

“Now we wait.”

“You think she’s gonna come out the back?”

“She’ll have to.”

“Why?”

“There’s her car.”

And so there was. A car. A new gray Mercedes sedan. Parked at an angle in front of Ebsen’s closed one-stall garage. He knew, of course, who owned the car.

“Think I’ll have some coffee. If I had an empty cup, I’d offer you one,” the cabbie said.

“That’s fine. I’m going in.”

“You going to walk in on them?”

“Isn’t that the best way?”

“Man, I don’t know. Seeing your old lady all tangled up in somebody else’s bed. Man, I don’t know if you could ever get that sight out of your mind.”

“It’s the only way,” Tobin said solemnly.

“Well, good luck.”

“Thanks.”

So Tobin got out and started up to the house. The moonlight cast long shadows from a naked elm. Wind whipped up a fine silty snow that was not unlike frozen cocaine. He was cold within a minute of leaving the cab.

On his way he saw a fenced-in area of chicken wire with what appeared to be an oversized doghouse appended to the garage. This was where Ebsen kept his chickens. They were down for the night. Abreast of their house he smelled chicken droppings on the stark night air.

The back porch looked as if it had been stuck on as an afterthought. He tried the screen door and found it open and so then, carefully, carefully, he eased his way up the steps and onto the porch. There were enough beer cases stacked up to start your own Budweiser warehouse.

Then he tripped over a garden rake that had apparently fallen down earlier. He crashed against the beer cases. Glass bottles rattled. As in sympathy, something inside the house fell, too.

Tobin stood in the ensuing silence, his heart a wild animal in his chest, no longer cold but sweating. Waiting.

He was still waiting when the inside back door opened and a tall man in a continental-cut coat stood there dramatically with a pistol in his hand.

“Jesus,” Tobin said. “Are you crazy?”

“I don’t want any of your crap, Tobin. Something terrible has happened here.”

“What?”

Michael Dailey gulped, his handsome, actorish face almost statue-like now that it was not animated either by superiority or malice. He sounded distant, a bit in shock. “Somebody killed Ebsen.”

“That wouldn’t have been you, Michael, would it?”

“I didn’t kill him, Tobin. I promise.”

“Where is he?”

Dailey turned. Tobin followed. One step across the threshold the smells of the slaughterhouse were back. In the thin moonlight through the frosty window and falling across the floor he saw feathers and splotches of blood. Somehow he didn’t think he’d ever feel at home here.

Ebsen was sprawled across the living-room floor. He’d exchanged his T-shirt for a white shirt that looked as though he’d laid it under a freshly killed chicken. The way he was twisted, he might have been a tot fallen asleep watching TV.

“Shot,” Michael Dailey said, as if he needed to explain the situation to Tobin.

“I sort of guessed that.”

“Did you kill him, Tobin?”

“Don’t try it, Michael.”

“What?”

“Trying to convince me that you can implicate me. I’m going over there to the phone and calling the police, Detective Huggins, to be exact, and I’m going to tell them exactly what I found here.”

“God, Tobin, listen, I really didn’t do it. Please. Here, look, I’ll even give you the gun.” When he leaned forward, his white silk scarf fell loose. His Valentino-slick hair glistened.

“No, thanks, Michael. I’d just as soon not have my fingerprints on it.”

He’d never seen Michael lose his composure before. He sort of enjoyed it.

“Then what were you doing here?”

“I—” Now he was the old Michael again. His eyes became hooded and inscrutable. “I just needed to do something. But I didn’t kill him.”

“Not good enough. Either you tell me what you were doing here or I call Huggins.”

“You’ll just use it to destroy him. You’ll just use it to build yourself up.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Dammit, Tobin, don’t make me tell you. Please. It won’t do anybody any good.”

“Does it have to do with the script Richard sold?”

“No.”

This surprised Tobin. “Then why else would you be here?”

“Because there’s a — book deal pending. I’d been planning to collect all of Richard’s newspaper reviews into a kind of omnibus volume.”

“You’re not making any sense.”

He wasn’t. He was gibbering.

“Ebsen found out something about Richard.”

“From the shotgun microphone?”

“How do you know about that?”

“It doesn’t matter, Michael. I know. So what did he find out?”

“You just want to get back at me for Jane, don’t you? She told me about your visit this afternoon.”

“Jane doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

“You’d like to see me get blamed for this because you think you’d have a chance for Jane again, don’t you? Well, I’ll tell you, Tobin, she’s in love with me. Deeply in love. So you trying to frame me won’t matter. She still won’t love you. No matter what you do.”

Tobin said, “I want to know why you came here tonight.”

“I don’t want to tell you.”

Tobin reached up and slapped him. He got him square enough and hard enough that the slap had the same effect as a punch. Dailey’s head snapped back and he whimpered like a child who’d been kicked.

Dailey surprised him by keeping calm. “You did that because of Jane, didn’t you?”

Tobin said, “Maybe.”

“She said you’re screwed up. Tonight I’m finding out how right she is.”

Dailey meant to hurt him and it worked. Hearing your ex-lover’s nasty words from the mouth of her new lover is the worst kind of punishment. Tobin sighed, depleted of talk and contrivances.

He turned away from Dailey and went over and picked up the phone. In the moonlit silence, chicken blood and feathers strewn all over, the dial tone was very loud.

“What are you doing?” Dailey said sharply.

“Calling the police.”

“Damn you.”

“Just shut up, Michael. Please.”

He had punched out three digits when Michael came over and grabbed him by the shoulder. “All right,” he said, “I’ll tell you.”

“Then tell me right now. No more crap.”

“It was the reviews.”

“What reviews?”

“The reviews Richard did of Peter Larson’s movies.”

“What about them?”

“My God, are you really that naive?”

“Don’t get pissy with me, Michael. I’m in no mood.”

“I need a cigarette.” It was, of course, a Gauloises. Filtered.

Tobin drifted back to the phone. “Tell me. Now.”

Dailey exhaled smoke pure as frost in the moonlight. “My dear wife Joan paid Richard to give Larson’s films good reviews.”

“Jesus. Payola.”

“Exactly. Richard gave them good reviews in all his newspaper pieces and on the TV show.”

“So why was he killed?”

Dailey shrugged. Had some more of his French cigarette. “I’m afraid I don’t know.”

“Why are you here?”

“If the publishing company ever gets wind of the fact that Richard sold his influence, the book project will be off. I came here because our dead friend over there called me tonight and said he knew all about the reviews and wanted three thousand cash.”

“Three must have been his lucky number.”

“Why?”

“That’s what he wanted from me. Three thousand. I brought my checkbook.”

From inside his dazzling coat, Dailey took a white envelope. “I brought cash.”

“I want to see your gun.”

“Why?”

“To see if it’s been fired.”

“For God’s sake, you don’t still think I killed Ebsen, do you?”

“Maybe.”

“I’m a creature of restaurants and salons, Tobin. Not this.”

“The gun.”

He held it, smelled it, handled it, without quite knowing what he was looking for. The gun didn’t smell as if it had been fired recently. He handed it back. “What’s this all about?”

“The gun?”

Tobin nodded.

“I don’t usually come into neighborhoods like this one alone.”

“Did you find anything?”

“The tapes?”

“Right.”

“No.”

Tobin thought of the cabbie. Waiting. And most likely wondering. “Have you looked around?”

“Everywhere.”

“Damn.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t have time to look for myself.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ve got a cab waiting.”

“Oh, Christ, I forgot about you and your cabs.”

“And he’s going to be getting damned curious about what’s going on in here. I’d better get out of here. The police are going to find out about this soon enough.”

Dailey said, “You know that we wish you the best.”

“We, Michael?”

“Jane and I.”

“Oh. Yes. Sure.”

“We do. I mean, in case you were being sarcastic. And I hope you wish us the best, too.”

Tobin sighed. “Michael, don’t ask me to be good-hearted at the moment, all right?”

He had just taken what he hoped was his final morbid look at Ebsen’s corpse and was getting ready to head back outdoors, when the phone rang.

For three rings Tobin and Dailey just stood by the phone and stared at it. Then Tobin went to the phone, putting a finger over his mouth to shush Dailey.

Tobin lifted the receiver, said nothing.

“Did you get the money?”

Now he knew what it was like to be in the electric chair. At the moment the man threw the switch.

He recognized the voice. Of all the voices in the world, why did it have to be this one?

Again, “Did you get the money?” Then, “Damn, Ebsen, are you playing games or what?”

Then, “Shit, that isn’t you, is it, Ebsen?”

Then the line went dead.

“Who was it?” Dailey asked.

“Nobody important,” Tobin said.

Five minutes later he was in the back seat of the cab giving directions.