Murder Straight Up

8

When you talk to very old theater people who grew up around here, they tell you about an opera house built in the 1880s and torn down just after WWII to make way for a boom in downtown building. The opera house was located on the east shore of the river that divides the city. When you look at the street now it is difficult to imagine the livery stables and the trolley car system and the mercantile agency you always see in pen-and-ink drawings of the early city. There remains one relic of the era, a two-story brick building that has seen any number of hopeful restauranteurs try but fail to make a living here. Its present owners call it The Pirate’s Perch. On the second floor you can look out stained-glass windows, and at dusk sometimes it is not difficult to imagine people stepping smartly from coaches in front of the opera house. But now the population is nearly a quarter-million and the industry runs to high-tech and there is not a lot of use for coaches or opera houses.

Now, at noon, the place was crowded with people too busy with gossip to notice the river that occasionally splashed the big windows at the rear of the place.

“Mind if I join you?”

I turned to see Dev Robards, looking today like a lord of the manor strolling his grounds outside Dublin. With his white hair tucked beneath a wool golfing cap, his broad shoulders pushed inside a Harris Tweed sport coat and his beard giving him a professorial air, he gave the impression of a wry superiority.

He came up to the bar, and when the man behind the counter saw him they exchanged a most curious glance, communicating something far too complicated for me to understand.

“What’ll it be today, Mr. Robards?”

“Oh, I think I’ll coast a little. Why don’t I have a ginger ale for starters.”

“Sounds like a very good idea, Mr. Robards.”

Robards smiled at the man, then turned back to me. Between the little exchange of dialogue and a good hard look at him in daylight, I saw his problem. He was sweating a lot, but it was more than heavy tweeds on a spring day; his fingers twitched, but it was more than nervous habit. All I had to see was how he gripped the glass of ginger ale the bartender set down to know that my suspicions were correct.

He sipped the stuff as if he knew it was going to taste very bad indeed, and then he said, “Good stuff, ginger ale.”

Christ on the cross couldn’t have looked much sadder.

I used to visit a buddy on a detox ward, and that’s how I knew the look in the eyes. It’s hope and horror at the same time — hope you can hold out against the hootch, horror that you’re not strong enough.

He put a smile on his face, but his eyes still had the haunted look. “I suppose I’m number one.”

“Number one?”

“Number-one suspect, of course. I had the most to gain from Curtis’s death.”

“Oh, I see.”

“You mean you hadn’t actually thought about me that way.”

“I suppose I had.”

He looked like hell, and I wanted to be away from him. I’d had an uncle like him, a Schlitz man who bumper-pooled and juke-boxed his life away in union bars until the Camels took his lungs and he held my hand there in the hospital, his woman long gone, and said, “I’m so fuckin’ scared, Jack, I’m so fuckin’ scared.” And I was scared watching him, just as I was scared now in the forlorn presence of Dev Robards. You don’t like people who remind you of how little you can do for anybody else.

I had to say something. I said, “So you were with Cronkite?”

He smiled sadly. “Oh, well, the station makes more of that than there really was to it. In 1952 I left Korea and got a job with CBS in New York, and one of my duties was to help Cronkite get ready for the forthcoming political conventions.”

He was right about the way the station played it. According to their commercials, Walter practically owed his career to Dev Robards.

“Of course,” he said, “that’s how news consultants have changed our lives.”

I was curious. “You don’t like Kelly Ford?”

He shrugged. “Oh, personally, I like Kelly a great deal. It’s just her job, how her employers make her treat news like show business. She works for Linda Swanson, you know.”

From what I knew of news consultants, he was right. They generally have two offices, one at their real place of employment, and an informal one at the TV station they’re assigned to, all so that they can know the daily problems better and offer more educated answers. That’s the theory, anyway.

As for Linda Swanson, she was legendary or notorious. You had your choice. She had turned happy news into an even more frenzied affair than it had been originally — goony byplay among the newsteam, stories that did not exceed one minute in length, and the depiction of a world that would have been too sweet even for Bambi. There was poverty and corruption and despair in this town, but not according to most reports on Channel 3. Instead of the homeless you saw roaming the streets, you got a guy in his suburban basement who had a big model-train layout. Instead of the chicken-shit goings-on in city politics, you got cheerleading tryouts at a local high school. Except during ratings periods, of course. That was when the mayor was questioned for his various insufficiencies, and that’s when stories such as the teenage suicide one came into being. Real news was good only when it got you ratings.

“I’m sure that’s why Cronkite got out when he did,” Robards said. “Those dandies in the news consultancy business have even turned the networks into happy news. Look at Rather. The way they’ve got him sitting up so straight and all those eye smiles into the camera. It’s ludicrous.”

I smiled. I liked the bastard. “You don’t sound like the number-one suspect to me.”

“Why’s that?”

“You don’t sound like you want to stay in this business much longer.”

He sipped some more ginger ale. “Ah, but you can’t discount ego.” He looked out the wide window at the sun-tipped water. “My wife died ten years ago. It was one of those stupid, impossible things. She went to the grocery store and was broadsided in an intersection. Since then I’ve gotten very old.” He put his weary blue gaze on me. His cheeks were still sweaty. The fingers on his right hand still twitched. “Now all I have left is my ego. And I have to admit, as I’m sure others will tell you, that it hasn’t been easy for me, watching Curtis take over my previous position. I used to be number one in this town. I suppose it would have been easier to accept if I’d had any kind of personal life, but— Well, anyway, Curtis was just the kind of pretty boy Linda Swanson wanted.” I didn’t doubt the bitterness in his voice. “At least, that’s what she said her research proved.”

“You doubt her research?”

“Over the years, I’ve become friends with several consultants. Once in a while they’ve told me horror stories about their field — how research gets doctored to prove a certain point; how people in the field are too lazy to get the forms filled out properly so they just fill them out themselves; the way they always blame the stations for their own failures. The consultancy business is a real racket — very low overhead, extremely high profits and practically no accountability, not when you can keep fixing the blame on the very people who hired you.”

“The research is really altered?”

“Oh, not necessarily in the way you might think, but subtly. Consultants tend to know the answers they want in advance, so they do everything they can to subtly influence the outcome. It’s like the news itself — it’s as if Spiro Agnew came back from his grave and became the news czar. Remember how he used to bitch about there not being enough ‘good news’ on the air? Well, the consultants saw a way of getting themselves hired if they followed that formula, and that’s what they did. They convinced station owners that newspeople weren’t the best judges of news stories — hell, what did journalists know, all they were interested in was the facts — while these people with their so-called research knew how to give the public what it really wanted... happy news. The news consultants invented a job for themselves and took it.”

“Free enterprise.”

“Bullshit is more like it.”

A woman’s voice. “God, why do I feel I’m taking my life in my hands by stepping up here?”

I recognized her voice instantly, and even before I turned around, I felt an unmistakable little thrill.

“Hello,” she said.

Kelly Ford was dressed in a blue jersey jumper that gave her middle-aged body the look of a much younger woman. Dev Robards grinned. “I was just boring him to death with my stories of what shits news consultants are.”

“With the exception of me,” she said brightly.

“With the exception of you, of course.”

She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek, and it was plain that there was an easy affection between the two. Only for a moment did something serious pass across her dark eyes. She looked carefully at the glass he held in his hand.

“It’s ginger ale, don’t worry.” He smiled.

“You’re doing very well, Dev. You should be proud.”

“You know, I damn well am proud,” he said, “now that you mention it.”

“Why don’t you join us for lunch?” Kelly asked, and for a terrible moment I thought he was going to say yes, he would join us.

He looked at his ginger ale, killed it and said, “Actually, I have to go out to a grade school this afternoon and talk about news.”

“Nobody knows more on the subject than you,” Kelly said.

He grinned devilishly. There was something boyish about it. “I have research that proves otherwise.”

“He’s incorrigible.” She laughed.

He put down his glass, straightened his golf cap, kissed Kelly on the cheek and then walked away, looking even more now like the lord of a manor outside Dublin.

“The public doesn’t want hard news,” Kelly Ford told me fifteen minutes later, after Robards had left, after a college boy dressed up like Captain Kidd served us our lunch, after what seemed like half the men in the place waved over to Kelly with appreciative, horny smiles. I had asked her about Dev Robards’s accusations. “Dev is a wonderful newsman,” she said. “But times have changed. People don’t have the appetite for hard news they once had. They seem to demand controversy instead of a simple presentation of the facts. It’s a different era from the one Dev grew up in. Today viewers like to be amused and titillated.”

“I suppose. But that doesn’t mean that I want to spend my time looking at stories about model-train collections and barbershop quartets, either.”

“Teenage prostitution,” she said.

“What?”

“Teenage prostitution.”

“What does that mean?”

“If I’d been videotaping your face, I could show you how interested you suddenly got in our conversation. And that’s how viewers respond. Very interested.”

“So that’s how the teenage suicide story came about?”

“Exactly.”

By now, of course, I’d figured out who she was. This morning while I’d been doing my pushups, I’d been watching a rerun of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” and there she was, Kelly Ford. I’d been wondering what had happened to Mary now that she was in her forties. She’d said piss off to Lou and gone into the news consulting business, great looks and all.

“Well, some of the kids at Falworthy House think that David Curtis went too far.” I’d already told her about my visit with Karl Eler. About seeing Diane Beaufort and Mitch Tomlin at Channel 3 last night. Maybe Curtis’s death had been the result of Stephen Chandler’s suicide. “They seem to think that you people would do anything to make a story sensational.”

She touched a perfect finger to her perfect temple and in so doing made me realize that I was in bad need of being with a woman. Donna Harris and I had not exactly had a wonderful sex life since she’d been debating what to do about her ex-husband. I needed more than sex, of course, I always do, and in the dark shining gaze of Kelly Ford I suspected I’d find it. But there was the business at hand and I had to keep pushing.

“So you think that this Tomlin boy may have killed David?” she said. Whenever she mentioned the death, her eyes pinched just a bit.

“Maybe. But only one thing bothers me about that.”

“What?”

“The muddy tracks the kid made inside Channel Three last night.”

“I don’t understand.”

I signaled for another round.

“You were saying,” she said.

“The door the plumber left open, the door Mitch Tomlin snuck in, was a rear entrance with a flight of stairs to the second floor. The kid must have heard somebody coming as soon as he got inside and got up the steps. After Curtis died, I went back and checked out his tracks. He hid on the second floor, then started downstairs at some point. But that must have been when I went upstairs. So he had to run back up to the second floor and hide. His tracks on the first floor went only as far as the lobby. He didn’t get near Curtis’s dressing room. Not even close to it. It’s hardly conclusive proof, but it makes me wonder.”

“Have you told this to the police?”

“Not yet. My friend Edelman hasn’t charged anybody, and I really don’t have anything to tell him so far.”

“But you sound like you don’t think it was the Tomlin boy.”

“I don’t know. That’s why I asked you to lunch. I wanted to ask you a few more questions.”

She laughed with great girly poise. “Gee, so much for romance.”

We let our eyes touch, and there amidst the clang and clatter of a noontime lunch, I prayed a lustful prayer that she felt at least a twinge of what I was feeling.

“What about the suicide? Do you think Curtis pushed things too far?”

She sighed. “I’m not sure what you mean by ‘too far.’ I really wasn’t involved in the story that closely. I originated the idea with the news staff — one thing consultants try to do is feed clients ideas — but a young woman named Marcie Grant was the actual producer.” She sighed again. “I do know that of the five teenagers who were interviewed, Stephen Chandler was the most volatile. David interviewed him three times, and two of those times Chandler tried to hit him. The other time Chandler broke down sobbing, saying that he didn’t want to live.”

I’d heard my own teenage son sob a few times. You never forget the sound.

“There’s a scientific theory that states that sometimes, when you observe certain things, you alter them — just by looking at them. Maybe that’s what we’re talking about here,” she said.

“You mean just by focusing on Chandler’s past suicide attempts, Curtis brought it on?”

She nodded. “Yes. Nothing evil on his part. He just asked questions that made the boy relive certain things in his life. And the memories were so bad, the boy killed himself.”

Of course, there would never be a definitive answer about that. Lots of sad kids killed themselves in this country. It was becoming a chronic problem. The kid next door with the freckles and the nice suburban parents and the secret terrors. One day he’s mowing the lawn, next day his inscrutable altar-boy face is peering out of a casket. The only difference in the Chandler boy’s case was that he didn’t have parents. The only people who mourned him were the scruffy kids of Falworthy House, strong suicide candidates themselves, particularly with a fading, bitter flower child like Karl-with-a-K Eler as their leader.

“You think I could talk to Marcie Grant?”

“I’m sure you could,” she said. She lifted her beautiful chin to the bar. “She’s sitting over there.”

Marcie Grant was in her late twenties, blond in an almost intimidating way and surrounded by enough men to look like the star of a hair-spray commercial.

“It’s all right if you say wow or something,” she said.

“Not my type, actually.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought that Marcie was every man’s type. She’s really beautiful.”

“I like women with a little more dignity.”

She laughed. “Boy, that’s a new one. Dignity.”

“Really. Women who carry themselves with a certain grace.”

“Ingrid Bergman.”

“You’re really shrewd. Ingrid Bergman exactly.”

“Well, I suppose Marcie doesn’t have that.” Then she smiled again. “But that’s all she doesn’t have.”

“You know anybody who drives a black XKE?”

“Are we back to questions about the murder?” I nodded.

“No, I don’t,” she said.

I decided to ask her about Curtis’s landlady’s story of Curtis and sports announcer Mike Perry arguing. “Aren’t Marcie Grant and Mike Perry involved?”

“Does this have anything to do with a black XKE?”

“Maybe.”

“You really jump around when you question people. These aren’t trick questions or anything, are they?”

I smiled. “Not that I know of.”

“Good. Because I’ve never been good at trick questions. I could never even figure out riddles.”

“I just want to know about Marcie Grant and Mike Perry.”

“It’s difficult to keep track. They have a very mercurial relationship. Off and on all the time. But right now, no.”

“Not that I know of.”

“Were you aware that she was seeing David Curtis?”

“There’s no way to say this without seeming catty, but Marcie has a genuine appetite for sex and men, men of all types. So, to answer your question, no I wasn’t aware that she was seeing David, but it doesn’t surprise me.”

“How about Curtis himself?”

For some reason her cheeks flushed slightly. “What about him?”

“What was he like?” The blood remained, tiny roses on her cheeks. I said, “You’re blushing.”

“You could be a gentleman and not point that out.”

Her putdown was worse than a slap and well deserved.

“Now you’re blushing,” she said.

“You had an affair with him?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t call it an affair. We never went to bed or anything. It was more like a high school flirtation. We even left notes for each other. He was intriguing, I’ll say that for him. I was hoping he’d get my mind off somebody else I’d been seeing for a long time but, unfortunately, he didn’t. He got bored when he realized that I wasn’t going to sleep with him. I’m afraid I’m really a very foolish woman. Fortunately for me, I was already brokenhearted when I began seeing him, so he couldn’t really get to me.”

I reached over and touched her hand, and then she smiled with the brilliance of at least a minor sun.

“Thanks,” she said. “That was exactly the right thing to do.”

“So he wasn’t exactly a wonderful guy, huh?”

“No. He was ambitious, successful, polished, but he wasn’t wonderful.” She laughed. “Definitely not wonderful.”

The pirate captain came back then and told us all about dessert, which we both declined.

She put her head on her palm and looked toward the sky showing in the long rear window. “It’s such a perfect day. I wish I didn’t have to go back to the office.”

“I know what you mean.”

“I didn’t sleep well last night.”

I yawned, as if in sympathy. “Murder has that effect on people.”

“It wasn’t just the murder. I’m also concerned about files being taken from my office last week.”

“Right. You were going to tell me about that.”

“Nothing much to say, really. I came to work one morning and several key research files were gone.”

“Who would have an interest in taking them?”

“Newspeople who were concerned about their jobs, wanting to see how well they tested during phone interviews with viewers.”

That interested me. “Were there any big losers?”

She frowned. “That’s why we’re all nervous around my office. The whole team except for David looks pretty bad. Especially Dev Robards. Then there was one other file, the one that outlined all the changes we’d be making in the next six months. Our competition would love to get their hands on it.”

“You think they’d go that far?”

She put out a slender wrist and slender hand and picked up a water glass. “Sure they would. It would be very valuable information. You know how competitive news operations are. If they got ahold of such a file, they’d know how to play against us perfectly.”

“No ideas about who took it?”

She shook her head.

“No idea.”

Suddenly there was the same half-shocked look I’d seen on her face when Robert Fitzgerald appeared last night. Now the expression was back and so was Fitzgerald. I had the sense that I didn’t need to ask whom she’d been heartbroken over before David Curtis had come into her life. The only people who can inspire the expression Fitzgerald did in her are people who’ve had at your heart with a can opener.

Today he wore a blue pin-striped three-piece suit. With his curly black hair and mesmeric blue eyes, he might have been a B-movie version of the young Tony Curtis. Except for two things: the right leg he dragged around like something dead, and the bitterness of his gaze.

He stood two feet from our table and without even glancing at me said to her, “You pick some damn strange lunch companions, Kelly.”

The blush was back on her cheeks. Worse, there was a real sense of a trapped animal in the way her hands fluttered and her shoulders sagged. I wanted to hold her, help her somehow.

She said nothing. Just put her face down. Said absolutely nothing. I couldn’t believe it.

“Damn strange,” he said, and limped away.

She waited a full minute and then she was up, knocking against the table, her eyes glistening with tears. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m going back to the office.”

Then she was gone, leaving me with the extraordinary echoes of her relationship with Robert Fitzgerald. I felt ashamed for her and enraged for her and utterly helpless.

He came back and grabbed me by the arm. He had a grip that could make you weep. “You stay out of my business and her business and the station’s business,” he said.

“Something’s going on,” I said, “and I’m going to find out what no matter what you say.”

“You don’t know who you’re fucking with, bud,” he said, and left again.