Murder Straight Up

4

Exhaustion overwhelmed me the moment I stepped inside my tiny efficiency apartment. When my fifteen-year-old son comes to visit me, he always takes a quick look around and says, “Hey, Dad, why don’t we go to McDonald’s and get something to eat, okay?” He says this without quite getting all the way inside. You don’t need to, really, to get any true sense of the place. Maybe it’s the urine-specimen-yellow color of the wallpaper. Maybe it’s the variously ripped and rent furnishings. Or maybe it’s the fact that there are no windows. A woman I used to sleep with (as opposed to be in love with or even really like all that much) once laid her head on my arm afterward, looked around and said, “I’ll bet it’s nicer in San Quentin than here.”

Anyway, at the end of a long day during which I’d lost not one but two parts (one a voice-over for a muffler shop, the second a walk-on role in a doughnut commercial), and during which I’d ruined an otherwise good record as a security man by letting not one but two people escape my clutches, my place was not exactly the kind of haven where you went to get cheered up.

The first thing I did was check my phone service. One call. Donna Harris. “She said she’d be up watching The Asphalt Jungle, so call even if it’s late,” the woman on the service said.

“Thanks,” I said.

“You sound kinda tired tonight, Dwyer.”

“I am.”

Then I dialed Donna.

“Boy you sound grouchy,” she said.

Did I really want to relive all the bullshit by repeating it, even if she was capable of giving me world-class sympathy? I decided no.

“Been a long day,” was all I said.

“Yeah, me too. The printer has decided he needs a fourteen-percent increase to keep on printing my newsletter, so I’ve been running all over the city trying to find somebody who’ll do it for the old price.”

“No luck?”

“Not yet.”

“Don’t worry, it’s a hungry world out there. You’ll find somebody.”

“I sure hope so. I’m just starting to get the subscription list to really make this thing pay.”

Donna writes, edits and publishes a newsletter for the advertising agencies in this state called Ad World. It was because of the newsletter, in fact, that we’d met several months earlier. She’d been covering a murder investigation that, together, we more or less helped bring to an end.

I’d also managed to fall in love with her, or something so much like it that I couldn’t tell the difference. There was, and remained, however, a Problem. Her ex-husband. Forget he’s rich. Forget he’s handsome. Forget he’s manipulative. What he also is a fucking child. He dumped her for a younger woman (Donna’s in her mid-thirties), then in turn dumped the younger woman for Donna. Then he did the same thing all over again. It was a testament to his prowess that he managed to keep both these women totally locked into his games. The upshot, anyway, was that Donna was now seeing a shrink and trying to “work through her feelings,” as the jargon goes.

We hadn’t seen each other for two weeks because Rex, the shrink, thought she needed time to herself to see what she really felt. Meanwhile my life went on pretty much as always. By day I made the rounds at auditions, by night I worked my security-guard gig. I was nearly forty. I felt like the world’s oldest teenager. This was not the kind of life the Sisters of Mercy foresaw for me.

“So how did it go with Rex this afternoon?”

“I’m beginning to wonder about him,” she said. Donna was about as good at hiding her feelings as Jerry Lewis.

“What happened?”

“It’s hardly worth talking about.”

“You want to, though. ‘Hardly’ gave you away.”

“What?”

“The word ‘hardly.’ Hardly means you want me to ask you about it. If you hadn’t wanted me to ask you, you wouldn’t have brought it up in the first place or you would have just said, ‘It isn’t worth talking about.’ There wouldn’t have been any ‘hardly.’ ”

“I think he’s putting the moves on me.”

“Jesus.”

“Really. He’s started touching me a lot.”

“Well, you’re only paying him fifty bucks an hour.”

“Funny, Dwyer. And anyway, it’s fifty-five an hour.”

“He raised his rates?”

“Said his bookkeeping costs went up.”

“The poor dear.”

“So anyway he’s lost some credibility. I mean since he’s gotten all touchy feely.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“No you’re not. You’ve always hated Rex.”

“I just think he’s a twink.”

“I’m just sort of afraid to break the bond. I’ve gotten used to seeing him twice a week now.”

“You’d survive.”

She sighed. “I need a lot of help right now. I’m so damn indecisive.”

“Gee, you could have fooled me.”

“I don’t know why you put up with me.”

“I don’t either.”

“I’m serious, Dwyer.”

“So am I.”

She waited and then said, “You really don’t know why you put up with me?”

“I was only half serious.”

“Half. That still hurts my feelings.”

“Okay. Make it a quarter then.”

“I really miss you, Dwyer.”

“I know.”

“I do.”

“You don’t sound like you do,” I said.

“God,” she said.

“Are you in your bunny jammies?” I asked.

“No, when I wear them I think about you.”

“There are worse people to think about.”

She laughed. “Name one.”

“Rex, for one.”

“Okay, Rex is pretty bad to think about.” I could feel her frown over the phone. “Damn, I really used to trust him.”

“Actually, it’s too bad.”

“It is.”

“Don’t get so paranoid,” I said. “I’m agreeing with you. Seriously. I thought you were getting somewhere with him, you know, when he explained how much Chad was acting out the role of your father, and how Chad tended to reject you in just about the same ways your father did. It all sounded very Freudian and very likely. Then Rex had to go and fuck everything up by putting the moves on you.”

“It’s his shoes — I should have known better.”

“His shoes?”

“He wears clogs.”

“Shower clogs?”

“No, you know, the wooden kind that men wear in the summer. He wears them year round.”

“His name is Rex and he wears clogs. Year round. He sounds fine to me. Of course what do I know? I drink Blatz.”

“You just don’t like him.”

“Really? What gave me away?”

I looked at the TV. The Asphalt Jungle was starting. I just wanted to sit down and relax and forget it all, the killing tonight and the kid on the second floor and my competence being called into question and how Donna couldn’t make up her mind whether or not to finally break the ties with her husband.

“The Asphalt Jungle is on.”

“Do you want to watch it?”

“Kind of, I guess.”

“God, Rex would say you’re not being demonstrative. You should just say I’d really like to watch it and then say good night and hang up.”

“Fuck Rex.”

“Why don’t you just say you want to go?”

“Okay, I want to go.”

“You don’t miss me, do you, Dwyer?” She was starting to cry.

“Why don’t you ditch your ex-husband and really give us a chance, Donna? I love your ass off, kiddo, I really do.”

“I guess that’s a decent way of putting it.” Then she said, “Good night, Dwyer. I love your ass off, too.”

Twenty minutes later, just when I was spreading mayo on dark bread, just when Sterling Hayden was talking about the robbery he knew he could pull off, the phone rang and a gruff male voice, Becker from Federated, said, “Seems like we’d better have a little talk tomorrow morning, Dwyer.”

“Seems like,” I said.

He slammed the phone down.