Murder Straight Up

10

When I called Mike Perry’s place, I was told by an answering machine that he could be found, if it was any kind of emergency, at the Windsor Park softball field.

The next place I checked was Federated Security to see if they wanted me to work tonight. Bobby Lee answered. “He told me to tell you were put on suspension.”

“Bullshit.”

“Don’t talk to me like that. I’m a lady.”

“Right. And I’m an astronaut. Now let me talk to him.”

There was a pause and then a shocking sound. She was crying. Bobby Lee with the beehive hairdo and the spandex pants was crying. In a soft voice — hell, her pain was pain even if I didn’t like her — I said, “What’s wrong, Bobby Lee?”

“He’s taking her on vacation.”

“Who?”

“His wife. That bitch.”

So much for her being-a-lady theory.

“What’s wrong with that?”

“He never takes me on vacation,” she said.

“I see.”

“You see what?”

“You’re jealous.”

“Well that’s a goddamn nice thing to say.”

“It’s perfectly understandable, Bobby Lee. I’d be jealous, too.”

“You can just piss up a rope as far as I’m concerned.”

Then she slammed the phone down.

There were a few dozen kids in wheelchairs lining a softball diamond. They were muscular dystrophy kids. They had twisted limbs and suffering eyes, and when they talked you could barely understand them. They just sat there and broke your fucking heart.

Next to the field knelt video-tape crews from two different TV stations recording the game itself.

On the mound was Mike Perry. He threw under hand the way Sonny Liston used to throw uppercuts. As if he were trying to penetrate a steel wall.

On first base was Bill Hanratty. While Perry did his pitcher routine — chomping Red Man, letting his fingers find just the right purchase on the rawhide, scratching his balls — Hanratty faced the bleachers and did what he did best: sang. He did “My Way” in his bad booming Irish voice, and all the housewives watching him loved it, clapping and pointing.

Now it would be easy to be cynical and say that Channel 3 and this CBS affiliate put on this softball game for MD kids just to get some self-serving footage on the six-o’clock news. And certainly that crossed their minds, I’m sure. But the charge of cynicism fell away when you looked at the kids themselves — their smiles and the way they moved excitedly in their wheelchairs. Nothing’s pure: the stations were helping themselves, but you sure couldn’t have proved it by the kids.

I sat in the stands for twenty minutes and enjoyed listening to the ball meet the bat and watching an overweight news director make some spectacular catches out in right field. There were apple blossoms nearby, and an old guy with a battered tin box strapped around his shoulder sold hot dogs, and I said fuck it about nitrites and had me two of them, with as much mustard and onions as he could put on them.

After the game all the station personalities went up and spent time with the kids, and it was damn nice of them. The kids got even more excited. Dusk was coming, and the air was sweet with apple blossoms, and not too far away you could hear the river rushing, and close up there was the fragile laughter of these children, and at that moment the world seemed to be in pretty good shape.

Vans came up then, and the kids were put inside by a group of volunteer women. You had to marvel at these women — at their patience and love, in seemingly inexhaustible supply. Mike Perry and Bill Hanratty stood next to one of the vans and handed out autographed softballs. They kissed the little girls and patted the little boys on the backs. The vans left, headed down a winding asphalt road into a salmon-pink dusk.

From the trunks of cars came several cases of beer. The laughter on the air now was different, harsher, masculine. You could imagine that it would have sounded this way centuries earlier in the camps of Attila or Tiberius, just at dusk.

I came down from the bleachers, my hands still sticky from hot dogs, and went over and gave a guy a buck and took two Old Milwaukees from a cooler. Then I walked over to where Mike Perry and Bill Hanratty sat by the backstop. Hanratty recognized me first.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” I replied.

By now Perry had recognized me, too. He scowled. I remembered how angry he’d gotten last night, blaming me for letting the killer into the building. But that was an unproved theory so far. The killer might easily have been inside the building. The killer might easily have been one of the Channel 3 newsteam.

“I wondered if I could talk to you,” I said.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Perry snapped.

“Asking questions.”

“On whose authority?”

“Basically I’m trying to save my job,” I said.

“I could give a rat’s ass what you’re trying to do,” Perry said.

“C’mon. Let’s at least give him a chance.”

“He’s some fucking security guard. Big deal.”

“C’mon now, Mike. C’mon.”

“Jesus,” Perry said. He got up and hurled his beer into the backstop. Golden water sprayed everywhere. “Cocksucker,” he said, and walked away.

It wasn’t real difficult to imagine Mike Perry getting angry enough to kill somebody.

“Boy, he can really be a hothead.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I don’t know how the hell either one of us could help you, though. For one thing we’re both still pretty much in shock. About Dave dying, I mean. Or being murdered, I guess you’d say.”

“Yeah.”

I just watched him as he talked. He had a fleshy handsome baby face, the world’s most successful altar boy maybe, but watching him closely demonstrated to me that he was all artifice. It was in the eyes. The eyes did not reflect the words being spoken. No matter what he said, the eyes remained the same, hard and assessing. In my years on the force I’d noticed this trait in professional criminals: they needed certain social skills to be good at their trade — they had to hoodwink everybody from their mates to their parole officers — and so they got very good at acting. Until you studied their eyes. Then they weren’t worth a damn and they scared the shit out of you.

I decided to jab him hard. “Today somebody told me that David Curtis didn’t trust you.”

He had been drinking his beer. He stopped. Looked at me over the edge of the can. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t have any idea.”

“Then why ask me?”

“I wanted to see what you’d say.”

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

“Do you know anybody who drives a black XKE?”

For the first time I had said something that caused some shift in his eyes. I had no idea what I was looking at. All I knew was that something had changed.

“No, I don’t.”

We stared at each other. After a while I said, “All right.”

“Maybe I don’t like this. Maybe Mike’s right.”

“About what?”

“About you. Why would you go around asking us questions? You’re a security guard.”

“I need to know what happened — otherwise I’m going to be blamed for letting the killer in, and I can’t live with that. Besides, I need the job.” I wasn’t kidding him. I was going to be blamed, and I did need the job.

“Well, I’ve never said anything about blaming you, did I? It was that damn plumber.”

“Did you know that Perry’s girlfriend was sleeping with Curtis?”

He stared at me again. “Yes, I guess I did.”

“You seem to be a pretty good friend of Perry’s. How was he handling it?”

“Pretty good, I guess.”

“Pretty good? Could you be a little more specific?”

“You mean do I think he killed Curtis?”

“Yeah, that’s probably what I do mean.”

“No, he didn’t.”

I watched his eyes closely again. “And you don’t know anybody who drives a black XKE?”

He was a quick study. He’d been waiting for me. This time he said no and nothing changed in his gaze. Nothing at all.

I looked around. Perry was over in the bleachers.

“We brought separate cars,” Hanratty said. “I guess I’ll head back to the station.”

I nodded.

“One thing,” he said.

“What?”

He nodded over to the bleachers. “You fuck with him, he’ll tear your face off. I’ve seen him when he gets angry.”

“Yeah, I noticed that last night.”

“That wasn’t anything.”

“You’re not exactly helping his case. You should be trying to convince me what a sweet, gentle guy he is.”

“He didn’t kill Curtis. But he isn’t any sweet, gentle guy, believe me.”

“What about Curtis?”

“What about him?”

“Did you like him?” I asked.

“He was typical.”

“Of what?”

“Of the people you meet in this business. We tend to worry about our careers to the exclusion of everything else. We put in very long hours and we don’t get paid very well, all things considered, not on the local level anyway. So we tend to always be thinking about our careers and how we can improve them.”

“Mind if I try my question again?”

“Did I like him, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“He was too much of a glamor boy for my taste. Kind of dark and good-looking and not much else. He wasn’t what you’d call real deep.”

“He did well with the ladies?”

“Very well.”

“Anybody he was friendly with lately besides Marcie Grant?”

He frowned. “Kelly Ford.”

I nodded. “You know anything about the Stephen Chandler story, the kid who committed suicide?”

“Just that it bothered Curtis a lot, when the kid died, I mean.”

“He say anything to you about it?”

“He didn’t have to. The day the kid died, Curtis went kind of crazy in one of the editing rooms. Damn near demolished the place.”

“Guilt, maybe?”

“I suppose. I think he pushed those kids a little hard to get his story. Maybe he did blame himself.”

The car starting in the gloom surprised me. Mike Perry was leaving.

“Guess you’re going to have to catch him later,” Hanratty said.

We shook hands.

“Thanks for talking,” I said.

“I hope your job turns out all right.”

I smiled. “So do I.”

We went to our respective cars, got in and drove off.

I turned on the headlights. The spring night was chilly suddenly. I hit the heater. As we wound through the park, I felt snug with the Coltrane song on the jazz station and the womb of heat enveloping me. I just kept thinking about Hanratty’s eyes. He was a much nicer guy than anybody else at the station and five times scarier.

Maybe that’s why, as we drove between the birches that flanked the river, I decided to follow him.

By the time we reached the city, all the lights were on in the haze, red and yellow and blue neon against the gloom, the tall downtown buildings lit in the darkness. I had dropped back half a block. The easy way he drove told me that he didn’t suspect I was behind him.

He led us within several blocks of the station, and by now I had no idea why I’d decided to tail him. Maybe I’d been bored and it had sounded like a way to deal with the monotony. But then he turned right when he should have turned left. He pulled into the parking lot of a sleazy motel that had a discreet little bar where couples who did not want to be seen could meet for drinks before going upstairs.

A tryst? Smiling Bill Hanratty, the happy altar boy who seemed to embody all the virtues middle America professes to love — a tryst?

He leaned against his car, watching people park and head inside. I was across the street, slouched down.

His body language told me he was nervous. He looked around too sharply and he couldn’t stand still. He’d lean against his car and then he’d lean away from his car. He’d pace off a little circle and then he’d lean against his car again.

His anxiety was explained three minutes later, when another car pulled into the lot and he stalked over to it almost angrily.

The car was a black XKE.