Murder Straight Up

19

Downstairs in the lobby I tried Becker, but Bobby Lee said he was tied up. “Am I going to get some work for tonight?”

Our brief friendship from yesterday was gone. She was back to her old self. “You really embarrassed the agency, that kid getting into Channel Three while you were on duty.”

“So I’m not going to be working tonight?”

“Not till further notice.”

I hung up.

At home I spread the files out and went through them one by one. Two hours later I still had no real idea what I was looking at.

In Robert Fitzgerald’s file, for example, there was a neatly typed note that said, Obviously he was the main force behind the whole thing.

What whole thing?

In both Hanratty and Robards’ file the same language appeared. Paid them each $1000. Both provided me with information.

What kind of information?

Something was going on here, something that seemed to link the Channel 3 people in some way more binding than merely working together — but what?

I made some instant coffee and sat in the sunlight and thought again about getting a cat (my boy still had the family cat) and tried to guess what Ross’s notes were about, but I couldn’t.

I decided to drive over to Falworthy House before going out to see Kelly Ford.

Karl Eler looked sweatier and more desperate than ever when I arrived. He had a stolid and hostile-looking boy in his office and was trying to make a point to him. “The man from the juvenile bureau is very mad, Ronnie. Very mad. You stayed out past your curfew last night and they picked you up. They could send you to reform school.”

“Fuck ’em.”

You could sense poor Eler writhing inside. Trying to help people who didn’t care if they were helped or not. Being Jesus is never easy. It wasn’t even easy for Jesus himself.

“Ronnie,” he said, and wrung his hands, literally. Ronnie frowned, obviously seeing Eler as less than a man. “Go back to your room,” Eler said. He spoke in a whisper.

Ronnie got up, kind of scratched his balls, kind of shook his head at the pathetic sight of Eler and went out of the room.

When Eler saw me, he said, “I’ve started looking around.”

“Looking around?”

“For other jobs.”

“It getting to you?”

He ran a miserable hand over his miserable face. “Everything’s getting to me, I’m afraid. I’m forty years old. I’ve lost my wife, I don’t have much hair left and for the first time I’m starting to worry about things like cancer and heart disease. I don’t need this kind of torture on top of it.”

“Some of the kids here are pretty nice, for whatever that’s worth.”

He looked melancholy a moment. “Yes, some of them are nice, and some of them appreciate what I try to do for them. But a lot of them...” He shook his head again. “Well, what can I do for you today?”

I had become one of his students. He treated me with professional interest and a certain haste.

“I’d like to see Diane again if I could.”

“Of course. This is one of her work-internship days at Hardee’s, and she’s still upstairs getting ready. I’ll get her.”

I looked at my nickel notepad, on which I’d written down several points. After he called upstairs for Diane, I said, “Did you ever see any older men hanging around here waiting for Stephen Chandler?”

“No. I would have objected if I had. What with all the perversion in the world, I’m not about to stand for things like that.”

“Did Stephen ever mention anything to you about any of the people he might have been hanging out with away from Falworthy House?”

He thought a moment. “Not that I recall.”

“He never mentioned twins?”

“No.”

I closed my notebook and turned to see Diane. She looked tired. Her prettiness was washed out. I wanted to give her a little hug and buy her some breakfast. At the moment she needed a parent. And I needed a child.

“You can go into the sunroom,” Eler suggested. Obviously he had other work he wanted to get back to.

We went into the sunroom.

She sat on the edge of a couch that was ratty with age. The light was dusty and melancholy.

“I kept having dreams about him,” she said. I assumed she was talking about Mitch Tomlin in jail. “God, I really loved him. I wish he hadn’t killed himself.”

All I could do was watch, wait.

She allowed herself a few terrible tears, as if there were an allotted number she couldn’t exceed, and then she started biting on the edge of one already badly bitten nail, and then she started snuffling.

“I need to ask you a few more questions.”

“I think I helped kill him,” she said.

“No, you didn’t, Diane.”

“Toward the last, when he was flying so high, I should have seen that he was just covering up how depressed he was.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“What?”

“When Stephen was flying high.”

“Okay.” She looked curious, even a bit afraid of my business-like tone.

“You remember the twins you mentioned?”

“Yes.”

“I’m trying to find them.”

“Why?”

“Because they can help me prove that Mitch didn’t kill Curtis.”

“Really?”

I nodded.

“Well,” she said, “I did see something kind of weird one night.” She bit at a fingernail, then went on. “I went up to his room upstairs to talk to him, see if we couldn’t get back together and all, but he was getting dressed up. You know how I told you about all the new clothes he’d gotten and everything and nobody could figure out where he was getting the money?”

I nodded.

“Well, anyway, he’s getting dressed up in this really fancy silk shirt and some new leather pants and when I got inside his room he looked real uncomfortable, like it was really a drag to see me. Anyway, I started to talk, but he said he was in a hurry and couldn’t talk, that some people were waiting down on the corner for him. I thought that was real weird, you know, that they’d wait down on the corner instead of out front. So he just brushed past me. I tried to grab him and get him to hold me, but he just looked at me like I was this pain-in-the-ass-little kid, you know, and then he half ran out of the house. I followed him. It was dark out — it was probably eight o’clock or something — and I followed him down the block and then I saw this really incredible car, this red car, it was older but it was really shiny, I think it was a Cadillac, and in the streetlight I could make out these two guys sitting in the front seat, and it was very strange but I got the impression they were both the same guy. I mean the way they sat and the way they wore their hair and the clothes they wore, everything. It was like looking at a — what’s that word — it’s like clown or something?”

“Clone.”

“Yeah, like looking at a clone.”

“But he never said anything about them directly?”

“No.”

“Did he ever mention anything to you about a tape?”

“What kind of tape?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe an audiotape.”

An unlikely and beautiful grin parted her lips suddenly. “Audiotape. Oh, yeah. He was always talking about his tapes. That’s right.”

“What kind of tapes?”

“He said he wanted to be a writer someday but he didn’t know how to type very good, so he’d just put everything down on tape. He always got real high marks in English composition and stuff, especially when he wrote about his life. The teachers were always telling him he should keep on writing about himself because he was so good at it.”

I was beginning to see why Ross had been interested in the tapes — not the videotapes of Curtis’s interview with Stephen Chandler, but audiotapes that Chandler had kept as a diary. “Do you know where he kept his tapes?”

“In his room, I suppose.”

“I imagine by now they’ve moved his stuff.”

“Yeah. It’s probably in the basement.”

“Why would it be there?”

“That’s where Karl moved Stephen’s clothes and stuff. He was going to give them all away but I talked him out of it. It’s kind of nice for some reason, having them around I mean.”

God, I liked her. “How about taking me to the basement?”

“Sure. You think Karl will mind?”

“Probably. But let’s go anyway.”

The grin again.

The basement was divided into sections with pine board and chicken wire. It smelled of dust and dampness, but not unpleasantly so. When you grew up in basements like this, you find yourself missing them in this era of ranch-style houses.

Stephen Chandler’s clothes took up one small corner. Just touching the clothes — the suede jackets and pants, the silky shirts — I saw why it was so odd that Stephen should have had things like this. There was no way he could have afforded them. Legally anyway. I wondered if he hadn’t been helping the twins do something that got to be too much for him, like dealing drugs maybe, and then killed himself when guilt and fear overtook him. Stephen had clearly never been very stable.

She found a box of tapes in the back, a neat stack of cassettes in a shoe box. She handed them over sadly and with reverence. “God, don’t lose these, okay?”

“Don’t worry.” I leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. “When this is all over, I’m going to take you and Mitch out to a great dinner.”

“You really think Mitch is going to get out?”

“You bet he is.”

Fifteen minutes later, a familiar voice on the other end of the phone was saying, “Good morning, Ad World.”

“Good morning yourself. I’ve been thinking about you,” I said.

“I’ve been thinking about you, too. I’m going to do us both a favor and really resolve this thing one way or another with my ex-husband and to hell with Rex.”

“To hell with Rex?” I said.

“Yeah. I think all his theorizing — not to mention his subtle little sexual advances — is just messing me up all the more.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that.”

“Were you ever jealous of Rex?”

“All the time.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah.”

“Jeeze, you really are a jealous person, aren’t you?”

“It’s because I’m so insecure.”

“What are you insecure about?”

“You want to start with the As and work through the alphabet?”

She laughed. “Dwyer, you are really a fine man, you really are.”

“Thank you. Now I want to ask you for some help.” I told her about the tapes I’d just found, and I told her about where they might lead us.

“God,” she said.

“So could you spend the rest of the day listening to them? I’ve got too many appointments.”

“Sure. I didn’t have much to do anyway.”

“Good. I’ll drop them by.”

“Thanks for asking me.” She sounded as if she’d just won an Academy Award.

“Thanks yourself,” I said.