Murder Straight Up

23

Twilight had turned The Castle into something resembling its real name. Long shadows hid the plastic look of the place. When you came over the hill and looked down into the valley and saw it there, you could almost imagine what real castles must look like.

A parking attendant took my car. He was a kid, and he grinned when he saw the towel I had over the tear in my seat. It wasn’t an arrogant grin. He probably had a towel over his car seat, too.

You crossed (inevitably) a moat via a drawbridge, and then you went into a gravel area where two big guys got up in armor stood on either side of a huge door, and then you entered the restaurant beneath an arch of crossed swords. This place was a kind of Disneyland for the stomach.

The drunk I saw just inside spoiled the goofy innocence of the place. He was wide and mean and he looked as if he was about to punch out the smaller man he waved a fist at. His about-to-be victim was Hanratty, the singing weatherman.

Hanratty had apparently been coming out of the john when the guy cornered him. The guy’s wife had hold of his elbow, and now the maitre d’ was jumping in. Hanratty, embarrassed, kept his eyes on the floor while the man ranted.

“You think you’re such fucking hot shit, don’t you, pal? Well, you’re nothing but a ridiculous clown.” He seemed to like the taste of that phrase on his tongue. “You hear me? A ridiculous clown.”

That’s when another man appeared. He was big and there was a lot of efficiency in his movements. He got the drunk by the collar and the seat of the pants, and then the whole scene got funny. He wheeled the guy out while onlookers giggled and applauded.

“That’s one thing the public doesn’t realize,” Hanratty told me ten minutes later in the dim bar. “Drunks hassle you all the time. That’s why my wife will hardly go out anymore. It gets pretty miserable.”

The Castle motif was continued in here, too. The young women were dressed as skullery maids (at least that’s what Yvonne DeCarlo always wore when she played a skullery maid), and all types of lances and shields were hung on the wall. There was a candle between us. Its wavering glow made Hanratty’s Irish face look comic.

Hanratty was drinking martinis and obviously working hard at getting drunk. We were waiting for Dev Robards. By the third martini, Hanratty started to sweat. You could see it glisten there in the candlelight. “Something’s wrong,” he said.

“Wrong with what?”

“With Dev. He should have been here by now.”

“Relax.”

“He’s scared. He called me several times this afternoon. Said he was afraid to be alone.”

“You going to tell me?”

His fingers tightened around his drink. “Let’s wait for Dev.”

“We don’t seem to have a lot to talk about, the two of us. No offense.”

“You don’t like me, do you?”

“Would you really give a shit if I said no, I don’t?”

“Sure I would. I like to be liked. That’s why I do all that stuff on the air. Sing those corny songs. Inside I’m still a little altar boy who likes to be told he’s a wonderful kid.”

Boy, was he drunk.

“So your answer’s no?”

“To what?” I said.

“To liking me.”

“All right, I like you.”

“You’re lying.”

“I don’t even know you. How’s that?”

“You hate the songs?”

“Jesus, let’s just sit here, all right?”

We tried that. It lasted about forty-five seconds. He was really freaking. He got up, catching the edge of the table against his thigh. He knocked over a couple of drinks and cursed loudly in the process.

“Sit down,” I said.

“This is getting really weird.”

A waitress came over. Stood and watched him. Shook her head. He’d gotten sloppy drunk very quickly. I suspected he probably drank very little, very rarely. The waitress and I got him to sit down.

He put his face in his hands. I wondered if he was crying, but there was no sound of sobbing, nor did his shoulders move even slightly. When he took his hands away, he looked stern and washed-out and almost sober. “After what we did, I’m through in this business. The kid won’t be singing any more songs, let me tell you.”

“You going to tell me now?”

He looked at me. I could see that not only was he drunk, he was also a little crazy. Maybe more than a little crazy. He just kept looking at me, and then he put his hands back over his face and sat there until the waitress came up with a new martini.

“I don’t think he needs it,” I said.

Hanratty took his hands down. He stared at the drink and smiled. “Welcome aboard,” he said, and picked up the drink.

“Some admirers of yours sent it over.” She nodded to the far corner of the bar, where a group of older people sat. Near them was a piano. “They’ve asked if you’ll sing a song.”

With all the bitter stuff he’d been giving me about being washed up in this business, I figured he’d say no. Instead he said, “By gum, that sounds like a darn good idea.” He was the altar boy again. Praise was being promised him.

I waited in the lobby while he did it. I tried to tune in on the conversations of passersby so I wouldn’t have to hear him. He did “Danny Boy” and “Red Sails in the Sunset” and “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling”; he did everything but “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” I went and emptied my bladder, stepped out into the parking lot and asked the kid if he knew who Dev Robards was (he did) and had he seen him (he hadn’t) and would he run in and tell me if he did (he would).

Finally, maybe half an hour later, Hanratty came up. He was sloshing side to side, and he had lipstick all over him from where the older ladies had kissed him, and he had a grin that was obscene with self-pleasure.

“How’re you?” he said.

He tried to throw his arm around me old-buddy style, but he missed and fell to the floor. Or almost fell. I got him around the stomach and pushed him through the door and told the kid to get my car, and when he came he helped me push Hanratty into it.

“Isn’t that Bill Hanratty?” the kid said.

“Yeah.”

“That fucker’s potzed.”

“Potzed,” I said, roaring my engine into life. “I haven’t heard that one before.”

“It’s a good one, don’t you think?”

“It ain’t bad.”

I got him on the freeway and I kept the windows down and I went seventy and then eighty, and in maybe twenty miles he came around, and as soon as he did he told me to stop the car. He got out and wobbled a ways down the grassy hill. Even above the passing cars I could hear him puking.

When he came back, he looked much too old to be an altar boy.

“Where’s he live?”

“Dev?” he said.

I nodded.

He told me.

“I must’ve really made an ass out of myself back there in the bar,” he said on the way over.

“Look,” I said, “everybody’s under some kind of strain. You needed a release. It wasn’t a big thing. You were very friendly. When I get in your mood I tend to pop people sometimes, and that’s one hell of a lot worse than singing a song.”

“You hit people?”

“Not exactly hit them. More like argue with them. But it has the same spiritual effect on them and me. It’d probably be better for both our sakes if I did hit them.”

“Are you afraid?”

“Of what?”

“Of something having happened to him?”

“Yeah, I am.”

He put his face in his hands again.

Dev Robards lived in a new townhouse. Hanratty recognized his car. “That’s a bad sign, isn’t it?”

“Could be,” I said. “You mind if I wait out here?”

I looked at him. I didn’t understand him. I didn’t care to. “Fine,” I said.

The front door was locked. It took me a good ten minutes to get it open with my pick and credit card. Even then I had to punch out a small pane of glass on the side of the door to reach inside.

I didn’t find him right away. I walked through a bachelor’s living room that had been given over to books and some impressive lithographs, and followed a flight of stairs to a hallway at the end of which the first dark of night filled a long window.

He wasn’t in the bathroom and he wasn’t in the den but he was in the bedroom.

He was wearing boxer shorts and garters and he was skinny and really an old bastard, and he looked funny-comic in a sad kind of way. I had no doubt that he’d been left for dead, but the way his chest rose and fell told me instantly that his would-be killer had botched the job.

I took his pulse. Faint but steady. I opened one eyelid for a look. He grunted something unconsciously. I grabbed the phone and dialed 911 and gave them the address.

Then I got down on my knees and looked over the rug. I started picking up things and looking under them and in them and around them, but I didn’t find a thing. Not a thing.

He took it about the way I expected he would. At first he tried to deny it and then he got pissed off and then he got scared and then he said, “I’m probably next.” He had been waiting in the car but when I’d told him about Robards he’d gotten out of the car and started pacing.

“Let’s get in the car,” I said.

“Did you hear me? I’m probably next.”

I held the door for him. “Get in the car.”

He looked behind him. Frantically. “Aren’t you going to call the police or something?”

“I’ve already called them.”

“You sure he’s not dead?”

“I’m sure.”

On the freeway with the windows rolled down and both of us freezing our asses off, I said, “I want you to tell me.”

“Maybe you’re better off not knowing.”

“Don’t give me that bullshit. I’ve been through too much to hear it. I want to know what you and Robards were up to.”

He said it then and it was simple as hell. It always is when it’s the truth. “We were selling secrets.”

“To whom?”

“To Channel Six. Our competitor. That’s who Ross, the private detective, worked for.”

“What sort of secrets?”

“Oh, after we’d have a conference where we’d discuss what investigative reports we’d be doing, we’d sell what we knew to Ross and the twins, and they’d sell them to Channel Six.”

I looked over at him. He was reciting all this in a flat dead voice. “Why did you do it?”

“Because we hated them, Fitzgerald and Kelly Ford and all the fucking consultants. They rule our lives, you know. They tell us how to dress, how to behave; they make fun of us to our faces. They were going to replace us — we started stealing the research reports from Kelly Ford’s office over a year ago — and we could see in their private studies that we were going to be fired eventually. So we decided to make money while we could. So we sold the information.”

“Did any of the information have to do with the suicide of the Chandler boy?”

“No. And that’s the funny thing.”

“Why is it funny?”

“That’s all Ross talked about.”

“Stephen Chandler?”

“Yes.”

“He knew the kid, didn’t he?”

Hanratty nodded. “Yes. See, Stephen was on Channel Three six months ago, after the first time he tried to commit suicide.”

That I hadn’t known anything about. But it made me very curious.

“So how does Ross figure in all this?”

“I’m not sure. I just know that he offered me ten thousand dollars if I could find out what really happened to Stephen Chandler.”

“What do you mean, what really happened? He committed suicide, didn’t he?”

He sighed. “I’m in deep shit, Dwyer.”

“Keep talking.”

“Deep shit.”

“Goddammit, go on.”

He sighed again. “One night I went up to Ross’s place.”

He didn’t say anything else.

I said, “Yeah. So what?”

“I started to go in, but I heard all these voices — it was the twins talking with Ross — and what I heard, well... The twins knew the Chandler boy pretty well. They talked about getting him laid and letting him drive their car and giving him pocket money. They had the kid do errands for them, dirty work, mostly. Nothing serious. They were trying to develop him into kind of an assistant because he had good looks and charm and a real lot of balls, I guess. A real lot.”

“So?”

“So they said there was no way he committed suicide. They said somebody murdered him.”

“Jesus,” I said. “What?”

“It makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“What makes sense?”

“Curtis’s death; somebody trying to kill Dev Robards. Because the Chandler kid wasn’t a suicide at all. Somebody murdered him.”

Hanratty looked out the window at the night. Trucks rolled by. Headed for the plains and then the mountains. I wanted to go with them.

“Could Ross have murdered Stephen Chandler?” I said.

“No. In his own way he was honest. He didn’t know who had killed Chandler. He just knew that somebody at Channel Three had gotten the kid unconscious and purposely fed him an overdose and then dumped him back at Falworthy House.” Then he said, “Shit.”

“What?”

“I gotta puke again.”

I wheeled over to the side of the road.

He didn’t make it down the ravine this time. He stood right there off the macadam. Cars honked at him. You could hear laughter.

“You and your wife got any place you can spend the night other than home?”

“I owe her a night at a motel,” he said.

“Make it tonight then.”

He leaned his head in the window. He looked like an altar boy again. “He’s a very nice man.”

“Who?”

“Robards.”

“Yeah, he is.”

“You really think he’s gonna be all right?”

“Yeah, but you two dipshits were way out of your league.”

“You’re right. You’re so fucking right.”

I handed him a stick of gum.

“What’s this for?”

“You won’t smell quite so bad when you see your wife.”

“Oh. Yeah. Right. Thanks.”

He was long gone. Nerves and terror had taken him away, our singing weatherman.