Murder on the Aisle

9

11:16 P.M.

He tried Neely’s apartment; he tried Neely’s office; he tried Neely’s latest girlfriend; he tried Neely’s most recent ex-girlfriend. Then he ran out of quarters and had to go into a coffee shop where a young couple in a booth, cheery with impending Christmas, pointed to him and whispered and smiled and kind of nodded — yes, it actually was Tobin of TV fame right here in the coffee shop with them, probably here to do something very human like wolf down a burger or use the men’s room.

He got some more quarters and headed outside, grateful for the way the near-zero temperature slapped him around and got him out of the funk the cop Huggins had imposed on him. Standing here on the curb, his breath silver against the light of the street lamps, midnight traffic heading toward the bridges and tunnels that take the suburbanites home, he thought again how ridiculous it all was: Dunphy’s death (Dunphy, for Christ’s sake, dead) and himself a suspect (his father an M.D., his youth spent boying altars and chasing the chastest of Catholic girls) — himself a murder suspect. Bloody Christ. Impossible.

Twenty minutes later he made connections with Neely. Or started to, anyway.

“He said,” said his answering service, “that he will be at Diablo’s. In Queens.”

“Damn.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“I said, ‘Oh, shit,’ ” he said, and hung up.

Diablo’s was a singles bar where guys who still wore walrus mustaches and secretly dreamed of bell bottoms coming back into fashion stood and preened and perched for the attention of women who, alas, really were Those Cosmo Gals — horny, lonely, and desperate as any marooned sailor had ever been.

Confirming all this was the fact that the sound system was blasting 1977’s favorite dip-shit song, “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing” when he arrived. (He had always fantasized about punching Leo Sayer in the mouth. Leo was just one of those guys.)

Christmas decorations floated above the layers of cigarette smoke. Given the predilections of the crowd here, he was surprised he didn’t see condoms twisted into the shapes of reindeer floating from the ceiling.

He found Neely after elbowing his way through a mob of dancers and then a mob of talkers and finally a mob of gawking businessmen who were inclining their heads to a tired sexpot of a secretary who was shaking herself into what seemed to be a trance. The man she danced with, balding and given to lapels wide enough to use as boat oars, glanced at the gawkers occasionally and gave them a smug little smile.

Neely sat in the center of the curving bar, where the barman usually stood, as forlorn as somebody in a late F. Scott Fitzgerald story wiping up gin and tears.

“Hey, Tobin. Qué pasa, man?”

Tobin couldn’t control himself. “Qué pasa? Do you have any idea how dated that particular cliché is?”

But then a Cher record came on the system and Tobin realized it was hopeless. In a time-warp bar like this (you still heard the word “meaningful” a lot here), there was no sense bitching about anything being dated. That’s why they came here.

At one time Neely had been the handsomest man of Tobin’s acquaintance, and that included all the movie stars Tobin interviewed. But now Neely’s hair was graying and a gut hung over his belt. He had the look of a satyr gone to sad seed. “You see that babe on the floor?”

“The one thrashing around?”

“Yeah. Her.” He grinned. “How about those knockolas?”

“I take it you haven’t heard the news.”

Neely’s brow knitted. “She diseased?”

“No, asshole, the news about Dunphy.”

“Oh, Dunphy, that jack-off.”

“He’s dead.”

“Dead? You’re kidding me.”

“Right, Neely. I came all the way over to this despicable dive so I could shit you. Sit at the bar all night long and shit the hell out of you.”

“You kill him?”

“Very funny.”

“I’m serious.”

“You’re serious? Jesus, Neely, do you realize you’re accusing me of murder?”

“Hell, man, you hated him and everybody knew it.”

“I didn’t ‘hate’ him.”

“Intensely disliked him then.”

“We have to talk.”

“No shit.”

“But not here.”

Neely, who could see the dance floor from here, raised his eyes from the dance-contest secretary and said, “Hell, let’s just sit here and enjoy the view.”

“No way. This is serious.”

He watched the secretary. “I can be serious here.”

Tobin frowned. “This is where it ends,” he said.

“What ends?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Hell, no, man, speak your mind. We’re simpático.”

“Simpático. Right.”

“So what did you want to say?”

What he wanted to say, of course, was how could any generation that had such fine and noble ideas as world peace and feeding the hungry end up here — grinding out sex as lonely as masturbation and affairs as doomed as the prayers of TV ministers. And he knew he was no better than the rest of them: four wives, countless girlfriends, two children he didn’t see often enough, greed and envy and spitefulness enough for six people.

Now what was apparently the only current record in Diablo’s collection came on. Julio Iglesias.

“Neely, please. You’re my lawyer. I need to talk to you.”

Neely, ruined on his rum for the night, said, “You sure you wanna talk to me?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m not the best. You know that.”

“You worked in the Da’s office. You understand the process.”

“A lot of people understand the process. Doesn’t mean they can do shit about it.”

“Neely, please.”

Neely laughed then. “Actually, I should be flattered. You’re the first client who’s come to me in a long time.”

“Let’s go to Walley’s.”

“Boy, that sounds like fun.”

Tobin looked around. “At least they don’t play Neil Diamond records.”

“Hey, man, Neil’s cool.”

“Right, Neely. Neil’s cool.”

So they went to Walley’s, a sit-down place with live waitresses and everything. Neely made a semi-drunken pig of himself trying to eat his burger (the meat kept sliding out of the bun and the ketchup and the mustard got smeared all over his mouth and hands and all over the table, mostly thanks to the fact that Neely always had them pile lots of extra vegetables on the burger so that absolutely nobody could manipulate such a monstrosity), and he replied to every third sentence of Tobin’s by saying “Wow, that’s neat,” or “What a downer.”

So after Tobin got all through running down the past twenty-four hours — how he’d taken a poke at Dunphy last night; wrestled around on the studio floor tonight; been seen being kissed by Jane Dunphy — what did Neely say? “Now that’s a bummer.”

“Yeah. At least.”

“I heard of this Huggins guy. A real bad ass. Law-and-order type with some kind of vague political aspirations.”

“He reminds me of Frog Face McGraw.”

“That a boxer?”

“No, an eighth-grade bully.”

Neely tried his hamburger again but without any appreciable success. “That’s the problem with having them put on extra vegetables. Shit gets all over.”

“So I noticed.”

Neely wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

Tobin said, “I’d like to introduce you to napkins,” and handed him one. “They’re on the market this month but they’re probably going to prove very popular.”

“So I’m a slob.”

“You weren’t years ago. Back when we were in college.”

“It mattered then.”

“What mattered?”

“Everything — living, I guess.”

“Living doesn’t matter now?”

“Not really. It’d all be easier if the world would just end tomorrow — then all the injustice and all the bullshit would be taken care of. Purification.”

Tobin smiled wearily, thinking of a running battle they’d had. “Yeah, but who would buy all the Barbra Streisand records?”

“You still don’t like her, huh?”

“Hate her.”

“You never did have any taste.”

The waitress came with more coffee. She looked at what Neely had done to himself. She looked genuinely disgusted.

When she went away, Tobin said, “Neely, look at me.”

“Huh?”

“Look at me. At my eyes.”

“What about ’em?”

“I’m scared, Neely. They’re really going to try to hang this fucking thing on me.”

“Sounds like it.”

“So you gotta help me.”

Neely put his burger down. “Really, Tobin. I’m trying to help you by saying I wouldn’t hire me if I were you.”

“You’re good. Or you used to be. You won a lot of cases when you were in the Da’s office.”

Neely shook his head. “You really want me to represent you?”

“Yeah I want you to get all that ‘purification’ crap out of your head and put on a clean shirt and a clean tie and represent me. All right?”

Neely shrugged. “All right, my friend. Then if you want my advice, the first thing to do is make a list.”

“What kind of list?”

“A list of all the people who wanted to kill Dunphy. That’s what the cops used to do when I worked in the Da’s office. They had more lists than they had brains.”

“God, it’d fill a notebook.”

“Yeah, in his case I guess it would. Just do a top-ten sorta thing then. You know, like Dick Clark and American Bandstand.” His voice went falsetto. “ ‘Oh, look, Frankie Valli’s number two!’ Like that.”

“Should I put Jane down?”

“His wife?”

“Yeah.”

“You think she’s a possibility?”

Tobin sighed. “Christ, I feel guilty even thinking it.”

“Thinking what?”

“Well, tonight, she talked about how they were going to try again. That was earlier — then, later tonight when I saw her I sensed — I don’t know how to explain it.”

“You still in love with her?”

“God, I don’t know how to answer that. I really don’t. I just assumed I was for so long — but I’m not sure.”

“Then if you’re not sure about your feelings it won’t be so hard.”

“What won’t?”

“Putting her on the list.” Neely made a broad circling gesture with his finger. The waitress, who looked as if she were pissed off at the universe in general and at Neely and Tobin in particular, came over and said, “Yeah.”

“Paper.”

“What?”

“May I have a piece of your order pad?”

“That’s the only thing I’ll give you a piece of.”

“Funny material.”

She ripped off a sheet of her pad as if she were slicing a knife across his throat.

“She may not be the woman I’ve been waiting for after all,” Neely said as the waitress left, and loudly enough so that she’d be sure to hear him. Then he took from inside his sports jacket a ballpoint pen, clicked it, then turned the sheet over to the blank side and wrote something at the top.

He handed the sheet to Tobin. “There.”

Tobin looked at it. “Jesus.”

“You’re going to need remedial reading, my friend. It doesn’t say Jesus, it says Jane.”

“The woman I love.”

“The woman you-assume-you-love-but-don’t-know-for-sure. I think that’s how you put it, anyway.”

“Then who’ll be number two?”

“How the hell do I know? That’s where you come in. Sit up all night and by morning you’ll have your top ten.”

“Jane,” he said. “Jane.” He sounded as if he’d been hit by a hammer.

Neely was sober enough to drive. They stood at his car in neon-splattered snow banks, their breath silver, shaking hands. A computer sign across the street in a display window said FOUR SHOPPING DAYS TILL XMAS. (He was enough of a Catholic yet that “Xmas” still grated — you didn’t celebrate the birthday of X, you celebrated the birthday of Christ.)

“Maybe by tomorrow the cops will have given up on me and gone after the real killer.”

But Neely was no help. “You look too good. Unless somebody a whole hell of a lot better-looking comes along, they’re going to concentrate on you.”

“Jesus, what do we pay those bastards for, anyway?”

“To find new ways of taking bribes, what else?”

Neely laughed then. “Man, Tobin, you look worse than you did the night you found out your first wife was having an affair with that art instructor.”

“Having an affair while she was two months pregnant with our son.”

“It’s a bitch of a world,” Neely said as he turned to be caught up in the shadows outside the neon. “Come on, I’ll give you a ride.”

“No, it’s too far out of your way. There’s a cab parked up there.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure. Thanks anyway.”

“Okay.”

Then Neely left, fading into the gloom until the interior lights of his car went on halfway down the long block.

Then he was gone and Tobin stood there for a time before walking over to the cab, as if he hadn’t a clue where to go or what to do with himself.

Which he didn’t.