Murder Straight Up

17

Before I did anything else I took a shower, and then I had a long solitary drink. I stood in clean underwear by the window looking out at the fog rolling beneath the streetlight. A shabby little room for a shabby little life. The fog didn’t make it any better.

I left his wallet on the table and watched a little TV — a rerun of a “Larry Kane Show” — and I let myself doze off. When I woke up four hours later, I was covered with sweat, and at first I wasn’t sure where I was; then I remembered the accident, the noise of it mostly, and then I looked across the room at the table and the guy’s wallet.

Light was in the window now, early morning light, and the sound of birds pressed against the glass, and in the far left corner of my only window, like a perspective detail in a painting, there was the branch of an elm tree, green and blooming and at the moment looking pretty fucking wonderful. It cheered me up idiotically, and I let myself fall back on the couch and have two more — and much less troubled — hours of sleep. The fog world was behind me.

Knocking woke me, and even through my sleep it seemed familiar knocking, something about the cadence of this knuckle rapping this door in just this way.

You would think that in an efficiency apartment this small I’d have had no trouble finding pants or a robe, but I couldn’t find either. So I just wrapped a blanket around myself and went to the door. I opened it only a crack.

“God, are you all right?” Donna Harris said.

Before I could say anything, her eyes narrowed and she looked at me with something like x-ray vision. It was very still there in my ancient dusty hallway, with just the birds for background.

She looked lovely. She was beautiful in a suburban sort of way, and yet exotic, too, thanks to her one slightly straying eye. In her brown corduroy car coat and starched button-down white shirt she managed to be both schoolgirlish and erotic. But then she trembled as tears came to her eyes, and she said, “You did it, didn’t you?”

“What?”

“He came over last night and asked me if I would but I wouldn’t. Out of fairness to you, I told him.”

“Donna, what are you talking about?” But in a terrible way I already knew what she was talking about.

“I don’t blame you though.” She was gibbering.

“Do you want to come inside?”

“I mean it’s all my fault. It really is. Being so indecisive.”

“If you come inside I’ll make some Nestles hot chocolate.”

“I don’t know why I’m the way I am.”

I put out my hand. She didn’t take it.

“I knew it would have to happen. I mean I knew you could only wait around so long.”

“I love you, Donna.”

“And I don’t have any right at all to be jealous.”

One of my neighbors, a widow whose room was a museum of WWII mementos, shuffled by in fuzzy slippers and shot me a smile, and then looked at Donna and her tears and gave me a scowl as if it were all my fault.

“Come on inside, Donna, please.”

“I guess I’m naive.”

“It’s one of the things I love about you.”

“I’m thirty-six and I’ve only slept with fourteen men.”

“That isn’t very many.”

“I don’t have any right to cry or be jealous, Dwyer. We had an agreement. We’re adults.”

“Sometimes we’re adults.”

“But I am hurt.”

“I know,” I said.

“And I’m pissed off, too.”

“I can see that.”

“I’d like to slap you.”

“I’ve got that coming.”

“Don’t be smug.”

“I’m not trying to be smug. It’s just that I don’t know what to say. You took one look at me and knew what I did last night, and now I don’t know what to say.”

“I would only let Chad kiss me on the lips. I wouldn’t even let him French kiss me. And he’s my own ex-husband. This wasn’t your ex-wife you were with by any chance?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Shit, Dwyer.”

I put out my hand again, and this time she took it and came inside. She sat on the very edge of the couch as if she didn’t plan to stay more than two or three seconds, and then she started crying, really wailing, and I went over and opened the window and got some beautiful morning breeze and sunlight and birdsong in the place, thinking or at least hoping it would help, but it didn’t. She just kept on sobbing, pausing only once to say, “Jealousy’s so goddamned unbecoming,” and then going right on with her tears.

“You want them over easy?”

“This doesn’t make any sense.”

“I need to do some damn thing, Dwyer. I really do. So I’m making you breakfast.”

“I hurt you, Donna. I didn’t mean to, but that was the net effect. So the last thing I expect is for you to make me breakfast.”

“Then I’m going to scramble the goddamn things.”

Which is what she did. Sort of anyway. About halfway through her Betty Crocker routine she got to crying again, and then she really got pissed and started slamming things around. As a consequence my eggs had sharp little pieces of shell in them and my toast was black. “I hope you’re going to be gentleman enough to keep your girlfriend’s identity to yourself.”

“She’s hardly my girlfriend.”

“I just hope it’s nobody I know.”

“You and I don’t know anybody in common.”

“In this crummy world, Dwyer, you can never be sure.”

She banged down the plate with the bacon on it, then dropped the jam jar from a height of two feet. She sat down and put her lovely hurt face in her skinny hands and looked at me and said, “I’m being a baby, aren’t I?”

“Not really.”

“You had every right to sleep with her.”

“Yeah. That’s what you said.”

“I guess I just thought you’d give me a little more time before you slept with anybody.”

“Now I wish I had. I made a mistake. I care about you too much to fuck things up this way.”

“You had every right though.”

“If you say that again, I’m going to step on your foot. Hard.”

“It’s true.”

“Just shut up, okay?”

“Okay.”

She sat there and watched me finish off my breakfast. When I got to the bacon, she said, “Boy, that’s where we’re really different. When I really let somebody down, the last thing I can do is eat.”

“The way you hand out the guilt messages, you should have been a nun.”

“After what you did last night, maybe I’ll consider it.”

I got up and went over and kissed her.

“You’ve got jam on your mouth,” she said, and then she started crying again and then she grabbed me and pulled me to her and kissed me really hard.

We made love on the sleeper.

“I’m sorry about what I did last night.”

“Let’s talk about something else now. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

We were there in the sunlight among the mussed sheets. The birds were at it again. I smelled pleasantly of breakfast and of Donna.

“Tell me about David Curtis getting murdered,” she said. “That’s really weird.”

So I did, and it kind of helped me get everything into perspective again.

I told her about hearing Mitch Tomlin on the second floor of Channel 3. I told her about being in the lunchroom with Kelly Ford when Curtis died. I told her that the killer had put the cyanide in Curtis’s laxative. Then I described chasing Tomlin’s friend Diane Beaufort and how that had led me to Falworthy House and Karl Eler. I told her that while Edelman had had no choice but to arrest Mitch Tomlin, I thought the real killer was to be found among the Channel 3 staff. Mike Perry, the sportscaster, had a violent temper and had been humiliated by Curtis. Dev Robards was slowly being phased out by David Curtis. Robert Fitzgerald was a man losing his station to debt; he was desperate and maybe had a reason to kill Curtis that I hadn’t uncovered yet. Bill Hanratty had some sort of connection with a sinister man in a black XKE, who had been killed last night during a chase.

“You mentioned somebody but didn’t make her a suspect.”

“Who?” I said. If her radar was good enough to pick up that I’d been unfaithful, then maybe she knew by some weird intonation in my voice that I’d been unfaithful with Kelly Ford.

“Marcie Grant.”

“Why would she kill Curtis?” I asked.

She shrugged a beautiful bare shoulder. “She was the producer of the series about suicide. And that sounds funny to me.”

“What does?”

“Oh, maybe she was jealous that Curtis got all the glory or something.”

“Doubtful.”

She sighed. “This is really confusing, isn’t it?”

“Yeah it is.”

“And I’m not being much help.”

“Sure you are. Just your talking about it helps me.”

“You’re sweet.”

“There’s something that bothers me about it all, and I still don’t know what.”

“I have the same feeling.”

We didn’t say anything for a long time. I got sentimental about her in the silence.

“How’s the paper going?” I asked her.

“Pretty good.”

“I’m sorry about last night.”

“I know.”

“And I love you.”

“I know that, too. And I love you.”

“Are you going to see Rex today?”

“Rex is an asshole.”

“That makes me happy to hear.”

“He really is.”

“Hey, you don’t have to convince me.”

“I should charge him instead of him charging me. As if I don’t have enough problems already.”

“No argument there.”

She frowned. “You didn’t need to say that.”

After I dropped her off, I drove downtown. The radio had stories about the truck accident and then about how Mitch Tomlin was being held on a quarter-of-a-million-dollar bond. All I could think of was the kid sitting in the cell with the type of cons you tend to meet in a county lockup. The poor bastard.