New, Improved Murder

32

The police had cornered off the dead-end street where Eve Evanier lived under the name of Helen Dodson.

Neighbors were out in pajamas and robes, pointing to the Dodson house through the fog, as if a Japanese movie monster were about to come looming up out of the darkness.

I got out of the car so quickly I banged my knee. I hobbled over to the nearest policeman and showed him my license. He waved me through. Edelman was waiting for me.

Two steps across the threshold, I thought of the Rutledge woman’s parlor. Despite the modern house outside, the interior here was an anachronism. The furniture was bulky, and sculpted walnut. Doilies were on every available surface. Floor lamps with intricately patterned shades threw soft shadows against the wall.

In front of a fireplace, sitting primly on a divan, was a beautiful, white-haired woman. It was impossible to guess how lovely she’d been earlier in life.

Next to her was a tall, severe man dressed in livery. It was a three-piece suit, but it was also the uniform elected by some domestics. He held a hypodermic needle up to the firelight and squeezed a drop or two of liquid out.

Edelman stood watching him. When he saw me he put a finger up to his lips and nodded to the man.

“Just relax, Eve,” the man said.

She hadn’t noticed me before. She looked up, smiled. In her high, old-fashioned lace collar she might have been posing for a cameo brooch. “Why, aren’t you Stephen’s friend?” she said to me.

Embarrassed, I moved my head in a way she apparently took to be a nod.

“Did you bring him home with you? He’s always staying out late. Then he has to get on my good side by getting me the penthouse at the hotel.” She laughed with a lover’s secret enjoyment.

She sounded friendly and happy. Then the needle was pushed into her arm.

I watched her features look — just for that moment of pain — their real age there in the firelight and the decades-old glow of this museum-like room.

But I couldn’t wait any longer. I crossed to Edelman. “Have you seen him?”

He shook his head. “Her man there, Farrady, says he was here earlier tonight. He had a gun and he got what he came for.” Edelman nodded to Eve Evanier. “Farrady had to give her a sedative. She’s got a heart condition. Apparently she hasn’t been able to deal with Elliot’s death at all, and Farrady’s afraid she’s going to die.”

I grabbed him. “You coming with me?”

“Where?”

“There’s only one place left to look. Come on.”

You might imagine that riding beneath a siren gives you a lot of power. It doesn’t. It just makes you a potential victim. Many people, you see, don’t move over to the curb for you. They try to beat you or race you. Or they’ve got their stereos up so loud they don’t even hear you.

I hadn’t been in a patrol car in several years. I rode shotgun while Edelman drove. The siren sprayed blood into the night — it was a day and night filled with blood — first the thugs — then the Baxters.

By now what had happened and who the killer was no longer mattered. Now I had to find Donna. I tried not to think of what might have happened to her, what, in his psychosis, he might have done to her.

“You sonofabitch,” Edelman said.

“What?” I said, coming out of my reverie.

“Not you. That motherfucker in the middle of the intersection. Won’t move.”

So we went around him. Dangerously. Just like in the movies. Only Edelman was no stunt driver, believe me. And I was no stunt passenger.

The parking lot held two cars when we got there. A garbage truck was eating a dumpster.

The elevator took us swiftly and silently up seventeen floors. Edelman had his piece out. It shone with oil. It was ready. So, apparently, was Edelman. “You like her, huh?” he said, trying to cool me down.

“Yeah.”

“Well, hell, good for you.”

“I hope she’s not dead.” I was starting to lose it. He threw an arm around me.

“Trust your Uncle Edelman, okay rookie?”

“Yeah.”

“And blow your fucking nose.”

When the elevator doors opened I recalled the night when I’d come up here with the porno photos and met Phil Davies. And the absolute sense I’d had that somebody was watching me from the shadows.

I put a hand out, stopping Edelman.

“What?” he said in his normal voice.

“Sssh.”

Both of us peered into the darkness.

I heard her before I saw her. A moan somewhere in the gloom.

I froze. Sweat bloomed on me. Edelman put an avuncular hand on my arm. I let him lead the way over to her.

It wasn’t Donna. It was Carla Travers. Or what was passing for her these days. Moonlight sliced by the blinds fell across her tubular body as she tried to crawl away from us. She was no trouble to stop. Edelman just walked around her and stood with his long legs together. She looked up and moaned again, a fat, soon-to-be-old lady with her media-rep hair sprayed hard as a helmet and a sick gleam in her eye.

Edelman reached down and helped her up. He didn’t bother to hide his distaste. There was no time for pleasantries. That was the first good look I got at her bruised and cut face and the wrist bone that jutted through her flesh like a piece of decorative glass. Apparently he’d beaten her for quite a while. This kind of punishment took time.

A few moments later my eyes dropped to the square metal box she’d crawled away from. The strongbox so many people had been looking for. That so many people had died for.

I bent down and picked it up. I walked a few steps closer to the blinds, where the moonlight waited.

The whole thing had been alphabetized. Sometimes there were photographs, sometimes there were note cards. I went to the Ts, pulled Carla’s. The notation was surprisingly formal: “Carla Travers is receiving kickbacks from two ad agencies with whom she’s working a con regarding billing.” Then there were two additional names, presumably the agency people Carla worked the scam with.

The rest of the contents of strongbox was like that. Names, dates, notations. There was some ballpoint writing on the back of Lucy Baxter’s nude photo with Davies. It read “The faithful Mrs. B.” I didn’t feel like looking any longer.

I glanced over to see Edelman holding Carla while she vomited into a wastebasket.

I reached them just in time to hear a few more strangled splashings. Edelman made a face. Then he took handcuffs from his belt and clamped her to a chair.

The noise in the night startled the three of us. Big speakers woofy with the sounds of commercials. The screening room. Bryce Hammond was back there.

We moved through the shadows toward the noise. Edelman’s Smith and Wesson glinted occasionally with the mercury-vapor light spilling in from outside. The air was rife with the smells of furniture wax and coffee.

“What the fuck’s he doing?” Edelman whispered, nodding toward the screening room.

“Jacking off.”

“What?”

“Playing his frigging commercials.”

“I thought Elliot was supposed to be the genius up here.”

“That’s what Bryce Hammond wanted you to think.”

“You’re gonna have to explain that to me.” He waved his piece. “Some other time, though, okay?”

We reached the screening room. He stood on one side of the door. I stood on the other.

He said, “Hammond, make it easy on all of us. Just put down your weapon and come out.”

A minute later Edelman said, “Did you hear me, Hammond?”

No response either time.

Only the loud bright noise of award-winning commercials.

In the shadows I saw Edelman’s large Adam’s apple bobble up and down. He shot me a bemused expression and then we both lunged.

The noise of the large wooden doors being thrown back was drowned out by the commercials. We went in.

She sat on a chair on one side of the console that controlled the big videotape machine.

At first paralysis overcame me. I thought she was dead.

But then my eyes fell to the steady rhythm of her breathing and I relaxed.

I started to look to Edelman, but at that moment the bullet came from nowhere, crashing through the din of the soundtrack, and Edelman spun around. His gun went off, but only into the ceiling. He glanced at me — a plea of fear and terror — and then collapsed in two jerky, seriocomic movements.

And then he appeared.

He wore his commodore’s outfit and a kind of sad smirk, as if he knew the joke, this time, was on him.

He carried a Luger, the drama of the weapon fitting his style.

He came up from the shadows in the corners of the large room, stepping over Edelman’s fallen body and moving toward me.

Instead of speaking to me directly, he nodded to the screen. Looked lovingly on his work up there — a woman whistling while she did her gardening.

“You figured it out, didn’t you, Dwyer?” he said.

“No, actually Donna and a bartender named Malley did. Or at least they gave me the clues. Malley told me about a comedy skit where a man was nothing more than a windup toy — just the way Stephen Elliot was for you. Then Donna pointed out that when you looked at something Elliot actually wrote, he was nearly illiterate.”

As I spoke, I looked over nervously at Donna. I assumed she’d been knocked out and would survive. But now, since she had yet to move, I had begun to wonder.

Another commercial came on. A hamburger that had little tap-dancing feet and did a version of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

He went over and sat down on the chair next to Donna. He picked up a martini glass. It was full. Apparently he’d been drinking from it before.

I looked over at Edelman. He’d been my friend. Some terrible weariness pushed through me, blocking out even anger. The way he’d fallen, his arm seemed to have broken. His weapon was inches from his fingers.

Hammond said, “I became passé. I was a product that no longer sold. So I invented a new product. Stephen Elliot. I told him all the right things to say, all the right things to do, all the right places to go — and I, secretly, did all the work.” He shook his handsome white head. Bitterly. “Clients just automatically assume you burn out when you reach your forties. So I created Stephen Elliot.”

“He wasn’t the blackmailer, Hammond. Baxter was.”

He smiled sadly. “I know that now. Stephen didn’t have to die, after all. Just David.”

“Just David and Lucy and the motel clerk and Jackie-the-hooker and the two punks in the Frankenstein and Dracula masks.”

He looked surprised at my tone of indignation. “As far as I’m concerned, that blood’s on Baxter’s hands, not mine. He forced me to do what I did.” He set his drink down. “Believe it or not, Dwyer, I’m a man of principle. I was just trying to stop people like Phil Davies from being blackmailed.” He then spent the next four wobbly minutes wearily reciting what had happened, how he’d found out about the whole blackmail scheme when Davies’s behavior toward him started to change — his old friend and client had now become an enemy of sorts and, when he asked Davies what was wrong, Davies told him. Hammond then started to follow Elliot around, which was how he learned about the motel clerk and the hooker, Jackie, who helped set up others of Hammond’s clients for blackmail photos. By then he was crazy enough to kill everybody involved — it had become a kind of crusade — and he would have murdered Donna, Mrs. Rutledge, and me, too, this afternoon, if the florist hadn’t come along.

“The irony, of course,” he went on, “was that not until yesterday did I find out that Baxter was the really vicious one in this whole thing.” He paused, glancing at Donna, then up at me. “Elliot liked the pictures because they gave him certain kinky kicks, but Baxter was making a lot of money on what was in the strongbox, really bleeding people.” He shook his head.

He put the Luger closer to Donna’s head. “The people I’ve had to deal with...” He laughed bitterly. “Carla Travers. That scummy motel clerk. Those two thugs I hired to help find the strongbox and to keep you off my tracks. And Elliot—” He shook his head again. “Elliot wanted to prove to Baxter that he was in control after their partnership began. So he got Lucy Baxter to pose with Davies. She was so much in love with Elliot that... Elliot took that picture himself. Jane was in love with him, too, as you well know. I almost did her a favor when I found her in Elliot’s apartment and put the gun in her hand. She was really insane at that point, strung out on alcohol and drugs. She came in and passed out right away. That’s when I put the gun in her hand. I took her over to the body so that when she woke up she’d think...”

Hammond seemed much older now. Exhausted. “He needed money, Baxter did, that’s why the blackmail thing appealed to him.”

Hammond picked his drink up again. “Poor Eve — that’s how I met Stephen. She brought him up here, years ago, to apply for a sales job. Came right along with him. As if she were his mother.” He finished his martini. He took the glass in his palm and smashed it hard against the console. Blood ran down his fingers instantly. The pain seemed to give him some satisfaction. “Everybody died so fucking unhappily. Only Eve was spared the sorrow — crazy as a fucking bedbug. Probably always has been.” He was doing King Lear. Raving. He threw his hand majestically to the screen. “Those are all the things that made Stephen Elliot so famous. But I wrote them. Every last fucking one of them. And I made him rich too.”

For the past few minutes I’d been watching what was about to happen peripherally. All I would have time to do was dive for Donna and knock her out of the line of fire.

“The only reason I killed them, Dwyer, was to protect my clients, I swear to you,” Bryce Hammond said. “I swear to you. He blackmailed them all.”

Edelman got up on one knee.

I put my head down and dove for her.

Hammond saw what was going to happen. He brought up his Luger.

Edelman opened fire.

The gun roared above the soundtrack. Like God’s wrath finally manifest.

After several long minutes I got up. I didn’t look at what was left of Hammond. There’d been enough death impressed on my vision.

I just grabbed Donna and pulled her up against me tight and struggled my way out of the screening room that had been Bryce Hammond’s temple.