Murder Straight Up

15

Twenty minutes later I was on an empty one-way street that ran along the river. The water smelled clear and cold. The moon was huge and red, hanging just behind a line of pine trees. I had the radio up loud. I wanted to be younger and smarter. I wanted my kid to be three again and safe on my knee. I wanted to do all the things I had failed to do properly in my life. That’s a special kind of hell.

I drove till the street became a two-way headed out into the country, and then I turned around and came back into the city. I had a bad idea. But at least it was an idea. I found a phone booth and a phone book and looked up Kelly Ford’s address.

Young people with money had been through her neighborhood recently. Five years ago the massive old homes that sat along this avenue had been home to the nomadic poor. Then the Volvos moved in. The homes had been restored to the splendor they’d enjoyed back when big black Packards had been the measure of prestige. Her apartment house came complete with turrets and a captain’s walk. It was three stories high and had a front porch wide enough to play touch football on. Inside the vestibule were six mailboxes, each with its own intercom. I pressed hers. She surprised me by answering immediately. It was after midnight.

“Yes?”

“It’s Dwyer.”

“Jack?”

“Yes.”

“Is everything all right?”

“I’m just in kind of a weird mood, I guess.” It was one of those enigmatic and maybe even meaningless statements that make a lot of sense to people as neurotic as myself.

“Come on up.”

I was as idiotically happy as a freshman who’d just gotten his first date.

She lived on the top floor. From her hallway window you could look down through the tops of blooming elms at the shadows the leaves played on the street. It was beautiful. It made me want the night never to end.

“We must have some kind of telepathy,” she said as soon as she opened the door. She smiled her electric smile. “I’m in a weird mood myself.”

She was wearing a very formal blue robe that fit her with the grace of an evening gown. Even without makeup she still looked lovely. She carried herself with an easy grace that fascinated me.

Her apartment resembled something you’d see in a decorator magazine. Plants of every description filled the place. The art prints ran to modernist, especially Chagall. The furnishings were modern, too, but cushiony enough to be comfortable. Low on the stereo I recognized Handel. The titles, in her bookcase were mostly psychology and studies of media. Not a scrap of poetry, not even a cheap but amusing novel. I wasn’t sure why, but I was disappointed.

“Would you like some tea?”

“You wouldn’t have a beer, would you?”

“I’m afraid I don’t drink beer.”

“Okay. Some tea. That sounds fine.”

She laughed. “You don’t sound like it sounds fine. I have wine.”

“Wine would be great.”

She nodded to the bookcase. “I couldn’t help but notice you looking at my books. You didn’t pick one of them up.”

“I guess I like novels.”

“I used to, but at my age I’m afraid I don’t have time for novels. Too much to learn too fast.”

At the mention of her age a certain bitterness had come into her voice, and I wondered why. I was obviously here on a mission straight from my loins. Her age didn’t bother me any. Before I could respond, she said, “I’ll get your wine,” and left the room.

Near the window inside an otherwise empty bookcase were photographs of a handsome if rather pompous-looking man her age and three very attractive children, two college-age girls and a boy who looked as if he might be athletic.

I was studying them all more closely when she came back and handed me my wine and said, “My family.”

“Great-looking people.”

“Yes, yes they are. And fortunately they’re all doing well. Even Ken.”

“Your husband?”

She nodded. “It took him several years to forgive me. I think he has now. And now that he has forgiven me, there’s no pain for him anymore. I think he’s even got a woman friend.”

“How about you?” I said. I thought of what Marcie Grant had told me about how she’d given up her family. “Are you over your pain?” I was also thinking about the scene this afternoon with Robert Fitzgerald. The air of masochism when she’d fled the restaurant.

“Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

“I guess not. I mean since you’re not going to answer the question I asked you.” I tried to make my statement wry. It just came out stupid.

“Why did you come up here tonight?”

“I’ve still got questions about the case.”

I sensed panic in her and didn’t have the faintest idea why. “They arrested that boy tonight. Tomlin.”

“I heard. But he didn’t do it.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

My mind kept playing back to her mood over the intercom. She’d been almost girlish at the prospect of seeing me. Now she was anxious, almost angry.

“I want to tell you something.”

“All right,” I said.

“For the past five years I’ve been Robert Fitzgerald’s mistress.”

I didn’t know what to say. “I see.”

“And what’s even worse, I’ve been totally faithful. Totally.”

This time I said nothing, just listened to the traffic on the street below, watched the play of shadows from the trees against the windows. You could almost hear the ghosts of a hundred years of conversations in this old room. Someday the two of us would be dead and ghosts trapped here, too. I needed sex rather desperately at that moment, not so much for itself, of course, but for the freedom from my burdens. Watching her so graceful in her robe, so arch and sad in one way and yet so vital and fresh in another, I went a little crazy from my need. I would have to get out of here. Fast.

“I just wanted you to know that, that I’ve been his mistress,” she said, “and that I’ve been faithful and that right now I’m very frightened.”

Then she reached out with slender, graceful fingers and brought my face gently to hers and I went genuinely crazy.

There was going to be a price for this kind of comfort, of course.

Just after my divorce I started dating an actress who’d been rather spectacularly dumped by a local dreamboat. There was a desperate edge to her love-making that made it thrilling for me, but afterward the desperation translated into something else entirely — her need to review and re-review what seemed like every single moment of their relationship. For the price of very pleasurable sex, I became her shrink. When she had told me everything she could possibly tell me, and when I had given her every piece of fatherly/brotherly/loverly advice I was capable of, she dumped me in a rather spectacular way and found a brand-new sympathetic set of balls and ears.

Kelly Ford had a little round belly, and her flesh was not a young woman’s flesh, as mine was not a young man’s flesh, but she was by turns clever and tender, and she tasted clean and wonderful, and her fingers were marvels and once, as I was kissing her breasts, I looked up and saw her eyes shine with something beautiful and unknowable and profoundly female.

Almost immediately afterward she started crying. “Damn him,” she said and got up and went into the bathroom and stayed there for maybe fifteen minutes. Water ran and the toilet flushed and the medicine cabinet opened and closed and all I could do was lie on her bed and feel the physical relief that I floated on, almost like a marijuana high, and then the terrible sense, not unlike Kelly Ford’s own I suppose, that I was in bed with the wrong person. I was starting to think about Donna Harris again and how much I missed her lopsided smile and what a shit I thought she was sometimes and how much I loved her anyway.

Kelly Ford came back and stood by the window. Against the moving patterns of streetlight and leaves she looked lovely and dramatic.

“I really enjoyed myself,” she said. She sniffled tears.

“Yes. And you sound like it, too.”

Her laugh was gorgeous. “I’m sorry I just got up and left. I got overwhelmed, I guess.”

“I understand.”

“That’s the nice thing about you. I think you do understand.”

“I’m going through it myself.”

“What?”

“An uncertain love affair.”

“Is she married?”

“She’s worse than married. She’s divorced but she can’t break the ties.”

“Sounds terrible.”

“It is.”

“How long will you let it go like this?”

“How long have you let Robert Fitzgerald go like this?”

Her laugh again. This time tinged with a touch of anger. “I was hoping you’d say something brave and inspire me.”

“The hell of it is, nobody can inspire you but you.”

“I know. I’ve bored all my friends with my story so many times. And I’ve been to every kind of shrink there is. But — still.”

“Yeah — still.”

She turned away from the window, came back and sat down on the edge of the bed. It squeaked faintly and pleasantly in the deep shadows.

An image of teenaged Mitch Tomlin in the county lockup came to me. I didn’t think he belonged there. I had to do something about it. I had to restore my own credibility as well. At least to myself.

“He’s in trouble, isn’t he?”

“Who?”

“Fitzgerald,” I said.

“Who told you that?” It was a very sharp question, given that her room was still scented with our lovemaking.

“It doesn’t matter. I’m working on a murder investigation, and there are things I need to know.”

She touched my hand. “I’m sorry. I’m very defensive about him. Not many people like him, you know. Which seems to bring out my maternal feelings.”

“I’m told he may have to sell the station.”

She sighed. “Yes. That’s one possibility that’s come up.”

I decided to ask her straight out. “Would he have had any reason to kill David Curtis?”

“I knew that’s what you were leading up to.”

“You’re getting defensive again.”

She got up and went over to the window. She Wore a half slip, and in the leaf-shifting light her small stomach might have been a young girl’s in the early stages of pregnancy. Her shoulders sagged. This was not good for her, and I felt like hell but I had to think of the job.

“He didn’t kill him.”

“You’re sure of that?” I asked.

“He had no reason to.”

“Maybe there’s something you don’t know.”

“There’s nothing I don’t know about Robert Fitzgerald.”

“You don’t sound completely happy about that.”

“I’m not. In fact it irritates me. He spends his nights here confiding all his troubles to me, and he always leaves saying, ‘You’ve made me feel much better. Thank you.’ Then he goes home to his wife. She gets him when he’s feeling good about himself.”

I thought of Bobby Lee and her jealousy over the fact that Becker was taking his wife on vacation. Being a mistress isn’t easy.

“Do you have the tapes of the Chandler boy?”

“The series we did on suicide you mean?”

“Yes.”

She nodded. “I keep duplicates of every special feature series we run back in my main office. Sometimes I study them, try to see what we did wrong or right.”

“I was wondering,” I said, “if I could see them.”

“Sure. But why?”

“I’m not sure why. I just have a sense that they’d help me.”

“I’ve got them in my office.”

“Maybe I could stop by tomorrow.”

“Of course.”

“Around eleven or so.”

“That would be fine.” She still sounded troubled. “He’s a decent man, you know. He’s had a very tough life.”

“I sensed that in him.”

“Are you being sarcastic?”

“Jesus,” I said, her defensiveness beginning to irritate me, “no, I’m not being sarcastic. All right?”

“I’m sorry. I really do like you a lot, and I’m afraid I’m fucking up our whole evening, aren’t I?”

I calmed down. “All right.”

“When he was six he was playing in a train yard. Just the thing mothers spend years telling their children not to do. Anyway, he tripped and a train came along and—” Her bare shoulders shuddered. Inwardly I shuddered a bit, too, imagining what it must have been like. The noise of the train. His screams. The pain. “Anyway, that’s what happened to his foot.”

“Do you know if he knows a pair of male twins?”

“Are you joking?”

“No.”

“Male twins?”

“Yes.”

“No, he doesn’t.”

“What did he think of Curtis?”

“If I told you, I’d be incriminating him.”

“I’d appreciate it if you just told me the truth.”

“He thought he was a vain, shallow showboat. Robert has a real respect for the news — that’s why he’s kept Dev Robards on the payroll despite Dev’s ratings. David was the antithesis of what Robert respects.” She looked out the window. The traffic noise grew louder briefly, then faded again. “I’m getting kind of tired.”

I stood up. Went over to her. Took her in my arms. But she didn’t want to kiss me. Was stiff beneath my hands. “I’m sorry for ruining our evening,” I said.

“I thought it was me.”

“No, it was me. With my questions.”

“I love him. I can’t help it.”

“I know.”

“I wish I could break free... I’ll be forty-seven this July.”

“That isn’t so old.”

“It isn’t so young, either.”

There was more traffic. She let herself drift against me; I felt her tender skin and put my face into her hair and closed my eyes. I wanted her again in a sleepy way, wanted to feel good for a moment or two as I had there in our darkness.

When I opened my eyes and looked down to the street and saw it — I thought I must be imagining it. But it shone in the street, parked as discreetly as possible between two infinitely lesser examples of the automobile. The black XKE.

“God,” I said.

“What is it?”

I went to the bed. Began tugging on my clothes. “I have to go.”

“Is everything all right?”

“Yes.”

“Why are you moving so fast?”

“Look downstairs. There’s a black XKE.”

She went over and looked. “What’re you going to do?” she asked.

“I’m not sure,” I said. And I wasn’t.