Murder Straight Up

21

In another hour I’d be putting in half an afternoon at the Guns and Ammo show. I found a Denny’s, had a luncheon diet special, got a handful of change and started making phone calls, first to my agent to see if Hollywood or something resembling Hollywood had called (he mentioned the possibility of a good dinner-theater role coming up, but then he was a man who always spoke in terms of possibilities), and then to Federated to see if Becker was in (Bobby Lee coldly said no), and finally I called Ad World and spoke with Donna Harris.

“How’s it going with the tapes?”

“God, if he didn’t invent the stuff on these tapes, the Chandler kid led quite a life.”

“How so?”

“A lot of girls, for one thing. At least on the tapes I’ve listened to so far.”

“How about drugs?”

“That’s the odd thing. Apparently, drugs didn’t play a part in his life.”

“They must’ve played some part. He died by overdosing on heroin.”

“He talks a lot about drinking — his hero seemed to be Jack London — but almost never about taking drugs.”

“Anything else?”

“The more recent tapes get sort of enigmatic. I mean on the earlier tapes he always used names and specific places, but these get very vague. He keeps talking about ‘If I do what they want me to, I’ll have it made, I can split for California with money in my pocket.’ That’s a direct quote, about splitting for California.”

“Any sense of who ‘they’ are or what ‘they’ wanted him to do?”

“Not so far.”

“Has he mentioned anything about the Ayres twins?”

“No.” She paused. “But there’s something weird about the tapes.”

“What?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Gee, that’s helpful.”

“Very funny. I just mean that I’m starting to come to some kind of conclusion, but I don’t know what it’s going to be yet.”

“Maybe it’s going to arrive on the next Federal Express shipment.”

“Or maybe the woman you spent last night with is going to tell me what it is.”

That kind of ended my feisty mood.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“That’s okay. We all need to take shots every once in a while.”

“You were perfectly free to do whatever you wanted.”

“Yeah, that’s what you said.”

“I called Rex and canceled my appointment.”

“What did he say?”

“He must have sensed that I was really saying goodbye, because he said, ‘We’re just beginning to make progress, Donna. We really are.’ I pay him fifty-five dollars an hour for him to hustle me, and he says we’re making progress.” There was another pause. “And something else happened, too.”

“What?”

“Chad stopped by.”

Now I knew what she must have felt like this morning when she guessed about Kelly Ford and me. “Oh?” I said. I didn’t have much of a voice.

“He, uh, brought an engagement ring with him.”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.

“I had to tell you, Dwyer.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean I don’t know what I’m going to do, how I’m going to respond. I mean, I just know that I’m being very unfair to you. I mean, I get jealous when you sleep with another woman and I have absolutely no right to.”

“That’s just kind of the way human beings are, I guess.”

“Oh, Dwyer, God, I really care about you so much.”

“Just keep listening to the tapes, okay?”

“Don’t you want to say something?”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Dwyer?”

“Yeah.”

“You know I care about you.”

“Yeah.” I hung up.

I stood in the entrance to Denny’s and people came by and I tried to put on little bright social smiles, but I was a mess inside. I cared about Donna in some high, clean, fine way that I hadn’t cared about anybody in a long time, and I had the sense that it was soon about to end, that I was going to have my high, clean, fine feelings and absolutely nobody to use them on.

After a couple minutes of standing by the phone I took another quarter from my pocket and dropped it in the box and called my answering service. The woman who answered was excited. “You’re to call a Karl Eler. He says it’s an emergency.”

I talked to Eler less than half a minute later.

“My God, Dwyer, somebody came in and grabbed Diane and asked her about some tapes and then knocked her out. She’s got a big goose egg and a very bad headache.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” I said.

And I was.

Eler was waiting for me in the vestibule. He looked terrible. He just kept saying “My God” as he led me up the stairs to the girls’ section of Falworthy. Several girls stood outside Diane’s room. They might have been keeping a vigil — except for the tinny rock song on the radio.

Diane lay fully clothed on top of the covers, a damp washcloth on her head. She had rosary beads entwined in her fingers. When she saw me, she tried to smile but it just came out as a wince. Even from there I could see the purple lump just below her temple. Whoever had hit her had done it with some relish.

I stood above her, reached down and touched her shoulder. “Can you talk okay?”

“I can try,” she said. She was hoarse.

“Did you get a look at them?”

She turned her head almost imperceptibly from side to side. “They had ski masks. But I know who they were.”

“Who?”

“You remember what I said about that Cadillac waiting for Stephen?”

I nodded.

“How the two guys in the front seat seemed to be the same guy. Clones.”

“Right.”

“That’s who it was. Those guys.”

“The twins.”

“Yes.”

“What did they want?”

“Stephen’s tapes.”

“What did you tell them?”

She closed her very blue eyes a moment, as if gathering her courage. When she opened them, she said, “I probably got you in trouble.”

“You told them I had the tapes?”

“Yes.”

I reached down again and took her hand. “That’s fine, honey. You did what you had to.”

“I was just scared.”

“We all get scared, hon. We all do what we have to.”

“They’ll probably come after you now.”

“It’s all right.” I touched the washcloth. “Are you starting to feel any better?”

“A little, I guess.” The eyes closed momentarily again. “I could take a little nap.”

“That’s a good idea.”

“I really like you, Dwyer.”

It was said with such innocent force that it overwhelmed me momentarily.

“I really like you, too, hon.”

“I like it when you call me ‘hon.’ I sort of remember my dad before he died. He called me ‘hon.’ At least I think he did. At least that’s how I like to remember it.”

I took her hand again. “Sleep tight.” I smiled. “Hon.”

Downstairs Eler paced in the vestibule. “What the hell is going on here?” he said. He looked more than ever like somebody about to literally fly apart, like a science-fiction-movie robot coming undone.

“I don’t know,” I said.

And the hell of it was, I didn’t.

The theme of the Guns and Ammo show today was “Salute to Mercenaries.” I guess if there’s one type of guy I really admire, it’s the big crazy galoot who takes pleasure in killing people for dollars.

Backstage I got into my survivalist getup and then went out on the floor and looked at all the fat failed dreamers walking around in their berets and gun belts and flak jackets. You never knew when you’d be walking down the street and somebody would whip out a Beretta AR70 and let you have it. During my years on the force I’d built up a real hatred for many of these people, as had most of my fellow officers. The police officer’s job is dangerous enough without all these maniacs caching up enough weaponry in their basements to start WWIII.

“You look kind of down today,” Lynott said.

“I guess I am.”

“Anything I can help you with?”

“Nah, I guess not.”

Here was this guy I should have hated — the kind of guy who took slime like Jesse Helms and Jerry Falwell seriously — the kind of guy who dreamed of blowing up cities the way other guys dreamed of humping movie stars — and I couldn’t help but sort of like him. Right now, given my mood, I needed badly to hate somebody, but hard as I tried, it wasn’t going to be him.

“Nah,” I said, “I’ll be all right.”

“Must be about a woman.”

“Why’s that?”

“Man looks a special way when he’s down about a woman.”

“Well, it’s partly about a woman and partly about a case I’m working on.”

I had said the right word. Case. It excited him. “You working on a case?”

“Yeah.”

He patted his gunbelt. “You need any firepower?”

“Maybe a couple of jet fighters in case I need to strafe a few people, but other than that I’ll be all right.” I could see I’d hurt his feelings. “Shit, look, I’m sorry, okay? I’m just in an asshole mood.”

“Well, God knows I get in those moods, too.”

“Maybe I’ll go have a smoke. You mind if I take a break?”

“Not at all.”

I had this notion of calling Donna Harris. For one thing I wanted to know what she’d learned about the tapes. For another I felt this need just to hear her voice.

“Well, see you in a couple minutes then,” I said, and took off.

This place had been built just before WWII as part of FDR’s vast plans for employment and urban improvement. To the people of that era it must have been spectacular. Stained-glass windows detailed America’s fighting men from the Revolutionary days onward. Beautiful work. I went up the stairs that tracked these windows to a small ledge where you could stand three stories up and look down into the river. I’m not fond of heights, particularly when I’m outside, but I needed some kind of charge at the moment to blast me from my funk. I stood on the ledge and looked over the city. On the backs of some of the buildings you could see faded signs that had been painted several decades earlier advertising Pepsi for a nickel and Hirschman’s Tailor Shop and the Regal Hotel, and for a long moment that made me feel better. Understanding my place in the blood chain of history was just the kind of abstraction I needed to forget my more emotional problems, and probably if I hadn’t been so rapt, if I hadn’t been perched there right on the tip of the ledge, probably I wouldn’t have been quite so frightened when it happened.

A hand shot out from behind me. Got me by the throat and held me there. “You could fucking die, pal, right fucking here, you understand?” He smelled of expensive after-shave and the sharp sweat of excitement. He was having fun with me.

I looked straight down into the muddy river and calculated my chances of surviving a fall. Eighty to twenty against, the way I saw it. Then he surprised me by jerking me back from the ledge and slamming me against the balcony wall.

At first I thought that I’d injured my head and was suffering double vision. There were two of them, and they looked so much alike they were impossible to tell apart. They were dark-haired with the too slick handsomeness of matinee idols of the forties. They wore California sports clothes, yellow golf shirts tucked discreetly into white linen trousers. But what they most had in common wasn’t what they wore; rather it was the expression in their amused dark eyes. A cynicism and urbane evil I’d never seen before. These two looked as if they were capable of performing any crime the human mind could conceive of.

One of them had a knife at my throat before I had time to slow my breathing down. “We want the tapes, asshole,” he said.

“I don’t have them.”

“We’ve been looking a long time, ever since the Chandler kid died, and we’re getting real tired. Now who’s got them?”

“I don’t know.” The knife smelled of oil and clean steel. Its point penetrated flesh to the right of my Adam’s apple.

He smiled. “For a security guard, man, you sure do get around.”

“I used to be a cop.” I knew instantly it was the wrong thing to say. Just the kind of line hip guys like these two fed on.

“Gee, a cop. I’m impressed. Aren’t you impressed?” he asked his twin.

“Yeah, I’m real impressed.”

“Protect and serve and all that happy horseshit.”

He was spoiling the breeze. Here I was pinned at knife point to a wall, and what crossed my mind just now was how good the breeze felt.

He let me have a bit more of the knife. “You’re really fucking sweating, pal,” he said, the same glib amused tone in his voice.

All I could do was bug my eyes out a bit.

“I’ll bet he can sweat more than that,” the twin said.

“Gosh, I don’t know. I’ve given it my best shot. You care to take a stab at it?” He grinned. “Get it? Take a ‘stab’ at it?”

“Guess I may as well,” the twin said.

From his pocket he quick-drew a long knife identical to the one his brother held. He snicked it open and walked over. He put it up alongside his brother’s knife. This close up you could see that they were virtually identical. Eerily so.

The first twin took his knife away and was starting to back off when I heard the footsteps behind them. By the time they turned, I had already had a look at who had appeared.

Somehow Lynott had figured out I was in trouble and enlisted three of his fellow survivalists. The four of them in their fatigues ringed the doorway. They had enough weaponry to blow away half the city.

“Jesus Christ,” the first twin said.

His brother, keeping the knife right at my throat, turned around and saw the good ol’ boys. “God damn,” he said.

“You two look like some kind of fruits to me,” Lynott said, stepping out onto the balcony.

“Are you for real?”

“You give me half a chance, you pervert, and I’ll show just how real I am.”

It happened in an instant, and I only noticed it because they were standing so close to me. A kind of telepathy. One twin looked at the other, and before anybody could do anything, they dove straight from the ledge three stories down into the water.

The four guys in the khaki uniforms took this as a perfect excuse to start a war. They stood on the ledge and fired into the water below, where the twins could be seen swimming in the rapid current. You had your ROK assault rifle. You had your Max 11 semiautomatic. You had your FAMAS submachine gun. You even had your MPRG riot gun. So many rounds were fired in so short a time that the balcony was engulfed in smoke, and I had to crush my hands to my ears to protect my hearing.

The twins, meanwhile, had gone underwater and were out of sight.

I finally got the cavalry to stop firing only by going up to Lynott and grabbing his elbow. “They’re gone!” I screamed over the barrage of firepower.

“That’s what they want us to think!” he screamed back.

By now, of course, there were only slightly more sirens going off in the streets below than had gone off in Berlin in the spring of 1945. The police take a decided interest when citizens decide to unleash this kind of exchange.

Lynott frowned, looking as if he’d just found out that his wife slept around. Glumly he gave the signal to the others to stop firing. They did so with the same gloomy expression. Damn but they looked disappointed.

“Now, the cops are going to be up here and asking questions. But we’ve got a perfectly good excuse,” Lynott said. “I happened to come up here looking to see if my old buddy Dwyer was doing okay, him being pretty dejected lately and all, and I happened to see these two pretty boys holding knives on him. So I went and got some of my buddies, and by God if we didn’t end up savin’ Dwyer’s life.”

For all his hokum, he had in fact saved my life.

“I appreciate it, you guys, I really do. I mean I don’t think it was necessary to use quite as much firepower as you did, but what the fuck.”

“Absolutely right. What the fuck. Just as long as you’re willing to say that to the cops.”

Which I did five minutes later when a couple of guys from the SWAT team plus maybe half a dozen guns-drawn uniformed officers swarmed around the balcony. The survivalists were told to put their guns down and their hands up. Then the detective in charge came over and asked “just what the goddamn fucking hell” was the idea of scaring the shit out of half the city and endangering the lives of anybody who had the misfortune of being in or around the river.

“Couple of fags,” Lynott said.

As you can imagine, the detective did not look impressed.