Murder Straight Up

9

In the sunlight she looked even more beautiful, even more overripe and spoiled. I’d followed her out of The Pirate’s Perch and into the parking lot and right up to her brand-new red Firebird.

At first she didn’t seem to recognize me, but then as she realized who I was, she looked as though I’d just handed her a paper bag containing doggie-doo.

“Jesus,” she said, “you followed me out here to put the shot on me?” She threw back her blond hair with a model’s melodramatic air. Her question, an epic of immodesty, made me smile. For a moment Marcie Grant couldn’t imagine, just couldn’t imagine, that anybody of the male sex would want something other than to hump her.

“I wanted to ask you about Mike Perry.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do you want to ask me about Mike Perry?”

“Because there are some things I need to know.”

“You’re that security guard aren’t you?” She managed to make it sound like, You’re the guy who burns down orphanages aren’t you? It was then — I’m a slow learner — that I realized why Marcie Grant had the most violet eyes, almost glowing eyes, of any I’d ever seen before. She wore violet contact lenses.

“Yeah,” I said.

She opened her car door.

With speedboats on the river, warm and rich sunlight bathing nearby apple blossom trees and newborn grass blinding you with its green everywhere, this should have been a very nice moment.

Her sneer made it otherwise.

She got into the car, slammed the door shut and started the considerable engine. As she slipped it into gear I knocked on the window. I’d been in a similar situation years ago with my wife during an especially bad argument. She’d backed over my foot and roared away. Now I kept my foot out of Marcie Grant’s way.

She surprised me by rolling down the window. “Did I ever tell you about the story I produced on security people?”

“I guess not.”

“You people are cretins. Cretins. Dishonest, lazy and overpaid cretins.”

“I make five dollars an hour.”

“That’s what I mean. Overpaid.”

“Fuck yourself.”

“I could call the law, you know.”

“Call them.”

“Jesus,” she said, and started rolling the window up again.

Before she quite got it closed, I said, in a voice loud enough to attract the attention of several passersby, “There’s at least a possibility that Mike Perry killed David Curtis, and you know it.”

That was enough.

She stopped with the window. She looked as if somebody had kicked her in the stomach. She didn’t even look quite so beautiful for a terrible moment there.

“Christ, I hope not,” she said.

“We need to talk.”

“I can’t. Not right now. I’m late for an editing session.”

“When’s a good time then?”

“Tonight. Call me. I’m in the book.”

“You think he did it, don’t you?”

She shrugged. “He gets pretty jealous. He could have, I suppose. Or Hanratty.”

“Hanratty?” That was totally unexpected. “Why Hanratty?”

“I’m not sure. I just know that several times over the past month David kept making all these dark suggestions about Hanratty.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, like ‘If we were smart, we wouldn’t trust that asshole.’ ”

“You don’t know what he was referring to?”

“No.”

“I also need to talk to you about Stephen Chandler.”

“The kid who killed himself?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“His death may have something to do with Curtis’s.”

“Great,” she said. Then she shook her head bitterly. “He was a prick, that kid. He just wouldn’t help us get the kind of interview we needed.”

Her sentimentality was impressive.

“I’ll call you tonight,” I said.

“You don’t really think he did it, do you?” she said.

“Who?”

“Mike Perry.”

“I don’t know.”

“It would destroy his whole life. He’d never be able to work in the industry again.”

Nice to know her values were in the right place.

“You ever want to own a tank?”

“Not that I can recall,” I said.

“That’s my ambition. Have my own tank.”

“Well, we all have our dreams, I guess.”

I was standing in the middle of the colosseum, where my casting agency had sent me for a week-long gig at the Guns and Ammo Exhibition. More than a thousand people milled around booths that housed every kind of weapon imaginable, except, of course, “your big military hardware,” as Lynott, my boss here, had informed me. You want a hands-on look at your three-shot burst 9mm Beretta, you got it. You want to heft the Close Assault Weapon System (CAWS) with your full auto, Magazine-fed, optically sighted shotgun? Here you go. Or how about your Horton Safari Magnum crossbow for killers who don’t like to make noise? Pick this little sucker up, bud.

And so on: Hermann Goring’s wet dream.

Round and round the tight circle of booths they went, mostly suburban types, engineers, CPAs, ad-men, no different from farmers at a county fair examining produce and flowers, except that these guys were looking at hard-core weapons of death.

The tenor of the whole event was set by the huge poster that hung above the stage showing Sylvester Stallone in Rambo drag. In his headband and his shoulder-strap ammo belt and his carefully mussed hair, he looked like the Liberace of survivalists.

My part was pretty simple, actually. I’d been hired to don camouflage gear and grease my face and stand on the stage reading a lot of hokey copy provided me by Lynott, the guy who’d just asked if I’d ever wanted to own a tank.

“In this era, brave warriors must match their courage with the proper weaponry if freedom is to be preserved.” Shit like that. In the old barn of a colosseum my voice bounced off the high ceilings and reverberated throughout the booths. Not that anybody paid attention. They were too orgasmically involved with guns.

“Part of learning your craft,” as my agent always said. “An actor’s got to take work where he can find it.” Actually I was getting union scale, which worked out to be three times as much as my job for Federated Security paid.

“The hell of it is,” Morg Lynott was explaining, “you can get the tank all right. It’s getting the goddamn ammo that’s the hard part. Leave it to the limp dicks in Washington to come up with a deal like that. They’ll let you go out and buy your tank, but just try and buy ammo for the sucker and the firearms boys will be all over your ass like a rash.”

Now you’ve already got him pictured as some good-old-boy slob who wants nothing more than to torture Democrats and homosexuals with bamboo shoots and electric prods, right? Wrong. And that’s the hell of it. Morg Lynott is this big sheep dog of a man who runs a John Hancock insurance agency and is actually a generous, warm and intelligent man. He just happens to be right wing and crazy as shit.

But that’s a contradiction I’ve always found. Many of the neo-Nazi types I know are actually more decent human beings than many of the snotty liberals who polish their Volvos and give you big speeches about Civil Rights and The Bomb. When I’m around the do-gooders long enough, I almost hate my humanitarian impulses.

“Yeah, that’s a bitch, Morg,” I said, “not being able to get ammo for your tank.”

He laughed. “You’re being a liberal again, Dwyer.” He rubbed hands on his khaki jacket.

“I suppose I am.”

“Nothing wrong with a guy having a tank. The Constitution gives us the right to bear arms.”

“I suppose you’re right. I’ve always wanted an aircraft carrier myself. You know, put it up there in my efficiency apartment, and I’d sleep a lot safer at night.”

Then it was time to go back to the stage and read some more war stuff. Morg handed me the copy and said, “My wife wrote this stuff. We’re damn proud of it.”

I made the mistake of not reading it to myself first. Because when I got up there and actually started reading, I almost started laughing. The copy she wrote was about what would happen when the Russians invaded and saw all the beautiful American women. “If we aren’t armed with our own auto pistols, with our own Enfield assault rifles, with our own mini-Uzi submachine guns, then these Russian bears are going to spread wide the unity of American virtue and drive deep into our very souls the thrusting rod of Communism.”

Apparently, Mrs. Lynott read a lot of costume romances.