New, Improved Murder Read online

  NEW, IMPROVED MURDER

  By Ed Gorman

  A Gordian Knot Mystery

  Gordian Knot is an imprint of Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Smashworsd Edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition Copyright © 2014 Ed Gorman

  Cover Photo by Paul Cleary

  Copy-edited by: Patricia Lee Macomber

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  Ed Gorman is an award-winning American author best known for his crime and mystery fiction.

  Book List:

  A Cry of Shadows

  Bad Moon Rising

  Black River Falls

  Blood Moon

  Breaking Up is Hard to Do

  Cast in Dark Waters (with Tom Piccirilli)

  Cold Blue Midnight

  Dark Whispers

  Different Kinds of Dead

  Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool

  Famous Blue Raincoat

  Fools Rush In

  Harlot’s Moon

  Hawk Moon

  Moonchasers and Other Stories

  Murder in the Wings

  Murder on the Aisle

  Murder Straight Up

  New Improved Murder

  Night Screams

  Nightmare Child

  Prisoners and Other Stories

  Rough Cut

  Save the Last Dance for Me

  Serpent’s Kiss

  Several Deaths Later

  Shadow Games

  Showdown

  Survival

  The Autumn Dead

  The Babysitter

  The Dark Fantastic

  The Day the Music Died

  The End of It All

  The Forsaken

  The Girl in the Attic

  The Long Midnight

  The Long Ride Back

  The Long Silence After

  The Night Remembers

  The Poker Club

  The Silver Scream

  The Zone Soldiers

  Ticket to Ride

  Toys in the Attic

  Voodoo Moon

  Wake Up Little Susie

  What the Dead Men Say

  Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow

  Wolf Moon http://newimprovedgorman.blogspot.com/

  DISCOVER CROSSROAD PRESS

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  NEW, IMPROVED MURDER

  Chapter 1

  It wasn’t a park, really, just a strip of grass running along the river. In the summer it was a place for lovers, what with its picnic table and benches. Now, in November, with a steady, bitter wind slamming the gray water below into a jagged rock wall, it was home only for a few pigeons and stray dogs. Which was why the lovely blond woman in the tailored trench coat looked so out of place leaning against the rail above the river.

  She showed no sign of recognition as I moved toward her, and I knew how bad a sign this was. Jane Branigan was almost neurotic about greeting you with deft little jokes and tiny, heartbreaking smiles. I should know. I lived with her for slightly longer than a year.

  By the time I reached her, the noontime fog dampening my face, the chill deadening my fingers and knuckles, I saw that she held something in her left hand, something dangling just out of sight behind her coat. I shifted my steps slightly to the right to get a better look at what she was holding.

  Jane Branigan held a .45 in her hand. Not the sort of thing you expected a woman who worked is a commercial artist, and who was the daughter of a prosperous trial lawyer, to have in her hand.

  She didn’t become aware of me until I was within three feet of her. Then she looked up and said, simply, “He’s dead, Jack. He’s dead.”

  From my years on the force it was easy enough to recognize that she was in shock. The patrician features, the almost eerie ice blue of the eyes were masklike. I was surprised that she even knew who I was.

  “You’d better sit down,” I said.

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Come on,” I said. “It’ll be better for you.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “The way he looked –”

  My impression was that she was going to cry, which would have been better for her, but all she said was “Dead.”

  The .45 slipped from her fingers to the ground. I helped her to the park bench, sat her on the fog-slick surface. She was a statue, sitting there, poised, numbingly beautiful, as dead in her way as the man she mourned.

  “Jane, can you hear me?”

  Nothing.

  “Jane, I have to ask you a few questions.”

  Nothing.

  “Jane, where did you call me from?”

  For now, anyway, it was no use.

  I sat a moment longer staring at her, at her beauty that had turned my bed bitter and lonely, at her predicament, which rendered my old grudges selfish and embarrassing.

  I sat there in silence, trying to think of what to say, what to do. Finally I had an idea. I touched her shoulder and said, “You remember the little puppy we almost bought that Christmas?”

  Our first holiday together, shortly after we moved into our joint apartment, each of us in flight from terrible first marriages. We’d gone to the city pound and nearly taken a small collie home with us. Then we’d decided, sensibly enough, that because both of us had careers, and because we lived in an apartment, such confinement would not be fair to the dog. Still, from time to time, I remembered the pup’s face, his wet black nose and the pink open mouth as we wiggled our fingers at him.

  Apparently Jane had a reasonably clear memory of the dog too. She didn’t smile or say anything specific, but something like a response shaped in her eyes as she stared at me. I took her lifeless hand, held it, saw in the slight tightening of her mouth and the tiny wrinkles around her eyes the stamp of late-thirties on her otherwise flawless face. I felt a little sorry for both of us. Our lives had not been exemplary and we’d hurt many people needlessly along the way. It had taken her hurting me before I understood that.

  Then I got up and went over to the .45. I bent down, took out my handkerchief, and lifted the piece as carefully as possible. It was unremarkable, the sort of weapon sporting goods stores sell as nothing more than a way to get you to come back and buy ammunition. I looked at it in my hand and imagined a prosecutor pointing to it dramatically in the course of a trial.

  Then I went up to the phone booth on the edge of the hill and called 911. It didn’t take them long to arrive. It never does.

  Chapter 2

  Edelman, shrewd man that he is, had learned enough from the dispatcher to bring an ambulance along. Two white-uniformed attendants had helped Jane into the rear of the vehicle and taken her away. They would take her to the closest hospital and the police would decide what to do from there.

  Edelman had also brought along a big red thermos full of steaming coffee, which we shared as we stood at the railing overlooking the river.

  “You aren’t getting any younger, Dwyer,” he said, smiling, taking note of my gray-flecked hair.

  “At least I’ve got enough hair to turn gray.” I smiled
back. Martin Edelman stands six-two, looks as if he trains at Dunkin Donuts, and is sweet enough in disposition to make an unlikely cop, a profession he took up only because, as he once drunkenly confessed to me, he’d been called a sissy during early years. Now the kids who called him names were pencil-pushers and Edelman had earned the right to ask them with his eyes: Who was a sissy and who was not? Like many of us, Edelman spends his older years trying to compensate for the pain of his younger ones.

  We stood silently for a time, blowing into the paper cups of coffee, watching a few straggling birds pumping against the dismal, sunless sky.

  Then he said, “She’s one of the most beautiful fucking women I’ve ever seen.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How do you know her?”

  “She used to be a friend of mine.”

  “Friend. When we were growing up, friend usually meant somebody of the same sex, you know? I can’t get used to the way that word is used today.” He paused. “You mean you slept with her?”

  “Yeah. We lived together for a year or so.”

  “This was after you left the force, I take it?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You don’t sound happy.”

  I stared out at the water. “I’m a little confused right now, Martin.”

  “The gun, you mean?”

  “Confused about a lot of things. My feelings, mostly.” He had been a good enough friend from my detective days that I didn’t have much trouble talking to him. “I had all these plans for us, including marriage. She worked at an advertising agency and fell in love with a guy named Stephen Elliot there. She left me for him.”

  “A good Catholic boy like you should maybe think that God was paying you back for living in sin.”

  Both of us knew he was only half joking.

  “It was a lot more than shacking up, Martin. A lot more. I really loved her.”

  “This Elliot, that’s who we’re checking on now, right?”

  “Right.”

  I had explained to Edelman that I’d had no idea where Jane had called me from when she’d hysterically begged me to meet her here by the river. But what with the gun and all her “he’s dead” references, I thought that the police should check Stephen Elliot’s house, which they were doing now.

  “Heartbroken, huh?” Edelman said.

  “Yeah.”

  “That happened to me, just before I met Shirley. This little Polish girl. Goddamn, she was cute. She kept telling me how much she liked me and I took her real serious. I asked her if she’d marry me and she looked like I’d asked her if she’d get down on the ground and push dog turds around with her nose.”

  “Well, then you know what I was like for a year or so.

  “Greatest diet in the world,” Edelman said. “I dropped thirty pounds. My parents wanted me to stay heartbroken.”

  I laughed. He was good company, a good man.

  He took a sip of coffee, then said, “You think maybe you made a mistake leaving the force?”

  “Sure. Sometimes I do.”

  “I mean, the acting thing—”

  He paused, trying to be delicate. With my ex-wife, my mother and father, and every single person I knew on the force, what I want to do with my life will always be “the acting thing”—something pretty abstract and crazy, as that phrase implies.

  What happened was this: One of the local TV stations asked me to play a cop in a public service announcement about drunk drivers. Easy enough, since that’s what I was, a cop. Then a talent agent called and asked me if I would be interested in other parts on a moonlighting basis, which I was. A year later I’d appeared in more than two dozen commercials and was taking acting classes from a fairly noteworthy former Broadway actor. Then my marriage started coming apart. I suppose I got obsessive about acting in front of a camera where I could put off the guilt and pain. I decided, against the advice of everybody I knew and to the total befuddlement of my captain, to give up the force and try to become a full-time actor, supporting myself in the meantime with a P.I.’s license and employment with a grocery store security company, busting shoplifters and trying to figure out which employees were stealing.

  That was me, Jack Dwyer, thirty-seven, a man who’d become a bit of a joke. Maybe more than a bit, as certain smirks and eye-smiles sometimes conveyed.

  “It’s what I want to do with my life,” I said, and I could hear the defensive tone sneaking into my voice. If I’m so damned sure that what I’m doing makes sense, then why do I always feel the need to defend myself? Only my fourteen-year-old son seems to understand even a bit of my motivation. He always gives me a sad, loving kind of encouragement.

  “Yeah, sure, hell,” Edelman said, afraid he’d hurt my feelings. “I wanted to be a surgeon at one time.”

  I laughed. “Maybe you should start cutting people up. You know, practice it a while, see if you like it. The way I did with acting at first.”

  “You’re a crazy sonofabitch, Dwyer. A genuinely weird guy.”

  But I couldn’t keep up the patter any longer. “She’s probably in big trouble.”

  “Probably. Yeah.”

  A uniformed man came running down the hill from his patrol car, through the slushy dead grass and the wraiths of fog and the winter cold.

  “Malachie called from this Elliot’s house,” the patrolman told Edelman breathlessly. “Said there’s a body there and that the building manager has positively identified it as Elliot.”

  Edelman shook his head and put his big hand on my shoulder. “Looks like we’ve got some problems, my friend.”

  Chapter 3

  “He must’ve been somebody,” a detective named Dick Malachie said an hour later. The he he had in mind had just been loaded onto a gurney and could now be distinguished only as a lumpy shape inside a shiny black body bag. Two ambulance attendants, obviously bored with the scene, waited impatiently for Malachie to give the word.

  “I count four different stations out there,” Malachie said, parting the curtains. “And that’s just the TV people.” He offered the dozen or so people in the room— lab men, several lower-grade detectives, a doctor from the ME’s office, and a lawyer from the County Attorney—something resembling a smile. “I hope wherever Mr. Elliot is at the moment, he appreciates the fact that everybody’s making a big fuss over him.” Malachie, a tall, slender man with dirty-gray hair and a beagle face, shrugged his shoulders and looked at me. “What did this guy do, anyway?”

  “Advertising whiz.”

  “I guess I don’t know what that means.”

  “He was creative director at an advertising agency. Before he got there, the place was almost out of business. He turned everything around.”

  “A hero.”

  “Sort of, I guess.”

  “The press must have known who he was.” He nodded toward the street again. “The mayor getting shot wouldn’t turn out this many people.”

  Edelman laughed. “The mayor getting shot would turn out twice as many. Give the people what they want and they’ll show up every time.”

  Malachie, who wore Hush Puppies and a plastic pen-and-pencil holder in his shirt pocket, came over and tapped a ballpoint against the evidence bag that held the .45 Edelman had turned over to him.

  The gun lay on a marble-topped gilt-wood center table worth many thousands of dollars. Over the past four years I’d worked several security gigs at antiques shows and had gotten to know something about their value. The table was indicative of the entire house—a modern Tudor tucked into a three-acre lot on the south edge of the city, just where the resort area began. It was a rich man’s house, with several expensive Chagall prints on the walls and real Persian rugs on the floors. Outside were a BMW and a Porsche in the three-stall garage. I thought of the months Jane had lived here—a star-struck girl in the clutches of a legend.

  “You knew the guy?” Malachie asked me, still prodding the .45 with the ballpoint.

  “Knew of him.”

  “But you know the chick.”


  “Woman, I think you mean.”

  He looked up at me sharply, as if I had betrayed some bond between us.

  “Oh, yeah, right,” he said, “woman.”

  “I know her. Yes.”

  “She called you, Edelman said.”

  “Yes.”

  “What time was this?”

  “Eleven-o-three. I looked at my watch.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Not much of anything. She could barely talk.”

  “She must’ve said something.”

  “She just asked me to meet her in the park.”

  “When was the last time you’d talked to her?”

  “Over a year ago.”

  “Kind of strange she’d call you, isn’t it?” He wasn’t being hostile. He just had a cop’s curiosity.

  “I suppose she remembered I’d been on the force.”

  “Edelman tells me you’re an actor now.”

  “Sort of, I suppose.”

  “Kind of like that Eddie Egan in The French Connection, huh? He was a cop, too.”

  I smiled. “He’s doing a little better than I am.”

  He shook his head. “Boy, I don’t think that guy can act worth shit.” Then he looked at me directly. “What did she tell you in the park?”

  I told him exactly what she said, knowing that I was probably helping convict her. I told him about her “he’s dead” statement and about the gun she’d held. I wondered if, subconsciously, I wasn’t paying her back for the grief she’d caused me. But I doubted it. I had grown up believing in telling the truth, and that’s how I’d conducted myself as a police officer. It wouldn’t be like me to lie now. In most respects I was doomed to being a fucking boy scout.

  When I was finished, I could see the case closing in his eyes.

  He had the body not ten feet away, the murder weapon at hand, and his killer in a hospital within ten minutes’ drive. He had an appreciation for my condition—he wasn’t doing any macho numbers or acting delighted—but he was quietly happy that he would not have to go through all the tedium and disappointment of a murder investigation. Despite the way they are made to appear on TV, homicide cases are generally dull stuff.