New, Improved Murder

4

The Iron Skillet was not the kind of place Bryce Hammond was used to being in.

A hangout for the last dregs of the “Flower Power” movement, where the guys who work as day laborers and junkmen still wear their hair in ponytails, as if competing to see who can look as scuzzy as an R. Crumb illustration. The Skillet is nice for its total and utter lack of pretension, and for the abundance of home-cooked food you can get inexpensively. They’ve got real dark beer imported from Austria, and the battered booths are so steep you feel as if you’ve got your own private dining room.

“Eve of Destruction,” which the management leaves on the jukebox as a goof, was ripping the air as we walked in. Bryce was as much a freak to the denizens as they were to him. They exchanged looks that were devoutly hostile.

I ordered coffee and a dark beer and, after a long minute of decision, Bryce did too.

After the waitress left, Bryce said, “Do you actually like it here?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m surprised. You a former policeman and all.” He’d had just enough time during our twenty-minute ride over to compose himself, to face the reality of Stephen Elliot’s death, and to start adjusting to it. He was himself again — at least enough to realize that a man of his stature did not belong here.

“Oh, I was in this play a couple of years back,” I explained, “about some people in the antiwar movement and I came in here to study some of the folks. I ended up liking the place. Nobody tries to impress you and they almost never get into fights. You can play chess in the back and on weekends they’ve got some good live jazz.”

He looked around. “Yes, but the people, their clothes—”

“They’re laborers,” I said, his attitude starting to irritate me. “They’re not going to look like bankers.”

He shot them a look of country club contempt, and then he turned his attention back to me.

“Is Jane—?”

I sighed, waited for our waitress to return. After she did I told him everything I knew.

“God,” he said, “the poor kid. It really looks bad for her, doesn’t it?”

I nodded.

“I’d better tell you what happened at the office yesterday.” He pursed his lips again, his handsomeness no longer quite so attractive. “The police will find out anyhow.”

I prepared myself for the worst.

“She stabbed him,” he said.

I jerked in my seat. “Stabbed him?”

“Oh, just with an X-acto knife. But she stabbed him nonetheless. Right in the hand. There were several witnesses.” He shook his head. “They’d split up three months ago, but she was still insanely jealous whenever she found out he was dating somebody.” He sighed, stared at his hands. “I told him about office romances, how they could—” He looked up at me directly and evenly and said, “You know I’m ruined, don’t you?” There was an edge in his voice that I knew could well be hysteria.

I made a pass at calming him down. “Bryce, things could work out. You don’t—”

“Oh,” he said gravely, “don’t sit here and give me that bullshit. You know enough about advertising to know what I’m saying.”

Thirty years ago Bryce Hammond had been the top copywriter and creative director in the city. Eventually he got so hot that he started his own place and prospered. But then, as always happens in the advertising business, his fortunes fell. Clients began to consider him too familiar, passé. He began losing accounts to the degree that he nearly went out of business. Then five years ago Stephen Elliot joined the Hammond agency, and almost immediately things turned around. The agency, thanks to many of Elliot’s TV campaigns, was now back on top and hotter than ever.

That is, until today, when Elliot was murdered.

“Sonofabitch,” he said. I didn’t ask who or what he referred to. I just let him sit there with his anger and bitterness and anxiety and stare at his fists. After a while he said, “You think she did it?”

“I hope not.”

“It looks pretty bad.”

“Yeah, it does.”

He shrugged. “Things turn around.” He looked past me, at nothing, it seemed — at everything, his receding life. “I was nearly out of business once, as you well know. Nobody, not even my own accountant, thought I could turn things around. But I certainly did. I certainly did.” He laughed. There was a lot of anger in the sound. “Or I should say Stephen did. He was the man of the hour, wasn’t he?”

“That’s what I’ve heard.”

“A brand-new product, replacing the old one that had worn out.” He tapped his chest miserably. “I was the old one.”

The misery with which he said it made me aware that he was being serious, not just melodramatic. What an odd fate, to think of yourself as a product, just another box of soap.

“I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do.”

“Why not sit here and drink your beer?”

“I’m going to have to watch it crumble all over again. The whole fucking agency. Down the tubes. It won’t happen overnight, of course. But in the next two years, one by one the important clients will leave me and—” He shrugged. “Fuck it. You’re right, Jack. All I can do now is sit here and drink my beer. Unless this place serves something stronger.”

“It doesn’t.”

“Somehow that doesn’t come as a shock.”

I got out my pocket-size notebook.

“What’s that?”

“I want to ask you a few questions,” I said.

“I thought you said I should sit here and drink my beer.”

“Yes, and while you’re doing that, I’m going to ask you a few questions.”

He arched an eyebrow, then sank back in the booth. “You want my opinion?”

I sighed. “I think I can guess what you’re going to say.”

A kind of mourning touched his eyes. He looked older, tired. “I’m afraid I think she killed him. The police evidence is pretty overwhelming.”

“Maybe it’s all too pat.”

His expression was more kind than patronizing. “Yes — maybe.”

“Can I ask you a few questions?”

He smiled wearily. “Sure.”

“I need to know the names of any close friends of Elliot’s.”

He smiled. “He was ambitious enough not to have any friends per se. He didn’t have time for any; they were baggage to him. Besides, he might have to step on somebody, and he didn’t want to feel guilty about it.”

“You say he and Jane split up.”

“Right.”

“You know why?”

“Stephen didn’t want to be tied down. That simple. He had looks, money, and he was the most selfish bastard I’ve ever known.”

“You don’t sound very fond of him.”

He stared at me carefully. “Am I making myself a suspect? Don’t answer that. Whether I am or not, I want to have my little say here. For all my faults, I’m a reasonably charitable man. I take a real interest in most people’s problems and I try to help them out. There wasn’t an ounce of that in Stephen, and for that reason alone I didn’t like him.”

“Any other reason you didn’t like him?”

“You really are turning me into a suspect, aren’t you?”

“I need to know the truth, Bryce.”

He sighed. “Sure there were other reasons I didn’t like him. For one thing, I was jealous.”

“Why?”

“People saw me as pathetic. The agency bore my name, but everybody knew that he was really the main figure, not me. That’s a kind of impotence. But I sure as hell didn’t kill him.”

“Well, if he didn’t have any friends, can you think of anybody who might have wanted him dead? Besides Jane, I mean?”

“I thought about that on the way over here. I guess the first guy I should tell you about is an art director named David Baxter.”

“Why would Baxter want him dead?”

“Baxter’s wife was sleeping with Stephen. She works for me. Baxter found out about it a week ago. There was a very ugly scene in our parking lot.”

“Can you give me Baxter’s address?”

He did. “Anybody else?” I asked.

“This isn’t a suspect, but it’s somebody he hung out with. A media rep named Carla Travers, who sells time for Channel Six.” He snorted. “Do you know about media reps?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Some of them are the worst sort of people you’d ever want to meet — stupid, lazy and really treacherous. They make used car salesmen look like altar boys. They’ll tell any kind of lie to make a sale.” He smiled bitterly. “There’s this little game they play. If the ratings say they’re in last place, some of the sales managers just juggle the figures until they look good. It gets ludicrous — ‘we’re number one,’ but among midget Tasmanian transvestites, that kind of crap. Agencies are pretty well-connected against them because we have our own media buyers who know all about the false claims they make.” Another head shake. “The people I really feel sorry for are the small retailers. The bad reps really feed on them.”

“Aren’t there any good media reps?”

“Oh, sure, of course. Some very good ones. Honest, professional, honorable, but...” He frowned. “But too many of them peddle gossip and lies instead of helpful information.”

I smiled. “Other than that you’re crazy about them.”

“Yes,” he said, smiling back, “other than that. Anyway, Carla Travers may be able to help you. She and Stephen had an odd kind of relationship.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I’m not sure, actually. I once saw him spit in her face — he didn’t know I’d looked in a door by accident. But after that I saw them together several times at the Conquistador.”

The bar he mentioned was the latest fashionable place for media people and the more successful actors.

“You were being literal, about spitting in her face?”

“Quite literal.”

I glanced at my notebook again. “Anything else you can help me with?”

He shook his head. “No.”

I stood up. “Why don’t I give you a ride back to your car?”

Van Morrison thundered on the jukebox. He was probably my favorite singer. “Blue Money.” I wanted to stay and listen and think nice things about my son and my future as an actor and remember what it had been like to hold Jane Branigan during the night when the lightning scared both of us and drew us closer together in a naked, silky, pagan embrace.

Suddenly I felt an urgency to be alone. I made a quick trip of taking Hammond back to his car.