Murder on the Aisle Read online

  "Hi, Tobin," ' she said, leaning in and giving him a Hollywood kiss on the cheek. She smiled and took his hand. Her touch felt wonderful and he decided to like her for sure and for good. "My husband here is all shaken up about what happened with you and Richard last night. But let's try to assure him that everything's going to be fine."

  Frank said, "Tobin thinks I should go over to Delaney's and have something called an IRA cocktail."

  Dorothy laughed. "That sounds like something you could have used this afternoon at the club. Did he tell you about it, Tobin?"

  "I tell Tobin everything," Frank said. "I always tell him he should have been a priest."

  One of the grips came up. "Mr. Emory, there's a call for you."

  Frank nodded.

  Then the grip said, "Mr. Tobin, Linda said to tell you she's waiting."

  "Thank you,"' Tobin said.

  Dorothy kissed him on the cheek again. "Don't worry, Tobin, between your efforts and mine, we'll get my husband to act like a real man someday."

  Then he remembered why he didn't like Dorothy sometimes. She couldn't resist belittling her husband—even when he had it coming.

  "As soon as I'm done with this phone call, I'm definitely going to have one of those cocktails," ' Frank said. "What are they called again?"

  "IRA," Tobin said.

  Dorothy drifted back to the east wing, where there was a comfortable lounge. "I'll see you both later."

  Frank watched her go. "She's a wonderful woman," he said. And then he smiled at Tobin. "Sometimes."

  "You didn't shave very well."

  Tobin leaned forward in the chair and looked into the mirror. "No, I didn't."

  "But you still look cute." Linda, the makeup woman, laughed. She had a great laugh. A great butt, too.

  "Are you sure forty-one-year-old men can still be cute?"

  "Sure."

  "Are you sure that forty-one-year-old men want to be cute?"

  Linda laughed her great laugh again. "Beats being ugly."

  "True enough."

  A knock came. This was the makeup room upstairs, where stars of lesser magnitude prepared. Who'd be calling on him here?

  "You want me to see who's there?"

  "If you wouldn't mind," Tobin said. He felt like a child. She had put a bib on him to protect his shirt from the makeup.

  Linda took her great butt (which Tobin watched with a good deal of reverence in the mirror) over to the door and opened it.

  The woman on the other side of the threshold caught his gaze immediately. "I just wanted to see if Tobin was here." Linda knew who she was, of course, and apparently liked her because her tone was very friendly. "Sure, come on in. I'm all done anyway."

  Tobin watched the mirror as she came in. She was a suburban beauty. Not the exotic sort you found in fashion magazines but the sort you found in supermarkets pushing a shopping cart and two kids. Freckles. Blue eyes. A lovely if not quite spectacular body. She knew at least something about Emmanuel Kant (she'd been a 3.7 student) and she was perfect company on rainy Friday nights for sharing a joint and listening to old Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young albums. She got sentimental very easily but it was a deadly mistake to think of her as uncomplicated because she had as many secrets as a movie star's secretary. She had responded to her husband's unfaithfulness by being unfaithful herself. Though she had always been Dunphy's girl, Tobin had known her first (he still remembered the brilliant autumn afternoon when she'd walked into the student union in her fawn-colored suede jacket and her mysterious blue gaze) and loved her first, and so it had made sense that when Jane wanted to have an affair (not to pay Richard back, only so she could have some sense of purpose in her own life) that Tobin would be the man.

  "Well, good luck on the show tonight," Linda said as she was leaving.

  "Thanks," he said.

  "She's sure a nice woman," Jane Dunphy said.

  Tobin decided to get it over with. "You haven't been returning any of my calls lately."

  "I thought we were taking a break."

  "Some break. We haven't been together for four months. Now I don't even get phone calls."

  "I've really been busy. You know, with the holidays and all."

  "Why the hell don't you just tell me what's going on?"

  "Nothing's going on."

  He got up out of his chair and went over and tried to kiss her but she turned away.

  "Things are more—complicated than that," she said.

  "Jesus."

  "I just came in to say hello. I didn't want a scene."

  "Why can't you be honest with me?"

  She reached out to touch his cheek. Gently. "Did it ever occur to you that I might be trying to spare your feelings?"

  "I don't want them spared. I want the truth."

  She drifted over to the mirror and looked without self-consciousness at her beautiful face. "I'm starting to count the wrinkles."

  "You're beautiful. You know that."

  "We're not young anymore, do you ever think about that?"

  "Sometimes."

  "It's going so fast."

  "Very fast."

  "I wish there were somewhere I could go. Hide out. You know?"

  "I know."

  "I've started thinking of time as this kind of shambling figure, like a hobo. Sometimes I look out my front window and I imagine I see him there, waiting. I'd like to hide, as I say, but I don't know where I'd go."

  " 'I have an appointment in Samarra.’ "

  "What?"

  "John O'Hara lifted that from Somerset Maugham, who lifted it from Arabian literature. A man leaves a town fleeing from Death. On his way to Samarra he sees Death on the road and asks whom he's going to see, and Death says, 'I have an appointment in Samarra. ' "

  "God."

  "Right." Then: "I've missed you. I've missed you a lot, Jane."

  "Well, I've missed you, too."

  "Somehow I don't think we're talking about the same thing."

  "Oh, please, Tobin. I really did just stop in to see how things were going."

  "You know how they're going. Richard and I probably aren't going to be partners anymore."

  "I know."

  Tobin went over and leaned against the dressing table. "So you're not going to tell me?"

  "Tobin, please, I—"

  "You owe it to me."

  She said nothing. She looked at her beautiful hands and then at her beautiful face in the mirror again. "I've started thinking about reincarnation a lot lately."

  "Last year it was transcendental meditation."

  "I think studying reincarnation has been more helpful for me."

  "Good."

  "You don't need to be sarcastic. Just because you don't believe in anything."

  "I believe in lovers telling each other the truth."

  "Tobin—"

  "I knew something was wrong when you wanted to take a 'break.' But now that I don't get phone calls—"

  "Now isn't the time."

  "To tell me the truth?"

  "'It's very complicated."

  "Your favorite word."

  "What?"

  "Whenever you don't want to be honest about something, you say it's complicated."

  "This conversation isn't a lot of fun. I think I'd better be leaving."

  "It shouldn't be fun, Jane. It should be truthful."

  She glanced down at her hands again. "A lot of people were starting to find out about us, Tobin. It was getting messy. You being his partner and all."

  "You could always have left him. We could always have moved in together."

  She sighed. "But that's what I mean, Tobin. It's—more complicated than that. I'm sorry."

  The phone rang. It was the director. "You can drift out anytime you want," he said.

  "All right," Tobin said. He hung up.

  "I want to see you again," Tobin said to Jane. "I want to sit down across a good table at a good restaurant and talk. I want you to tell me everything. Everything. Then at least I wo
n't have to wonder what happened. I'll know what happened."

  She leaned over and kissed him. "I know it hasn't been much fun for you lately. And I'm sorry."

  He pulled her to him and kissed her as he'd been wanting to kiss her for months. He was almost dizzy with the grinding need of his kiss. It was beyond sexual need. It was—he didn't know what else to call it, though he'd called so many things this—love.

  Then she pulled gently away from him. "You'd better get ready for the show."

  "I want to talk to you. Tomorrow."

  "'All right. Call me."

  "I'm serious about this."

  "Fine," she said. "Fine. You're serious about this. Fine." He tried not to notice that, as she was leaving, she was trembling.

  Chapter 3

  6:58 P.M.

  Peeps was the only movie-review TV show with a live audience. During the final segment of the show, the audience got to tell the two critics what they thought of their criticism. Sometimes the result resembled a brawl.

  One unkind critic had called it "Bowling for Movies," but he was probably just jealous because he didn't get to sit in one of the two chairs arranged in a kind of confrontational position and argue not only with his partner but with an audience filled with film students from various schools in and around New York. If there is a group more insular and arrogant than film students, it is still in the experimental stage and has not been mass-released yet.

  Tonight's crowd seemed more aggressive than usual. Frank Emory felt it was a good idea to send one of the show's stars out before the taping to establish an "emotional link," as he liked to call it, with the audience.

  Which is what Tobin was trying to do now.

  "I'd like you to know that we're going to start including more foreign films, the way you've asked," he told the two hundred young people.

  "Yeah, your idea of a foreign film is Rambo Goes to Japan." Somebody laughed from the audience. Then the entire audience—no surprise here—laughed.

  "No, I mean we're going to cover Fellini's new movie, and even do a tribute to Fritz Lang."

  "He's dead!"

  "So is Orson Welles," Tobin said. "So what?"

  "Why don't you cover what's really happening today?"

  "What would that be?" Tobin asked.

  "Music videos."

  "Right. There's a big audience for criticism of music videos." Here he put on a snide voice. "Which Nazi uniform do you like—the red one or the black one?"

  "Up yours! You're an old man!"

  With that, they began chanting, "You're an old man!" and stamping their feet and doing catcalls with chilling perfection.

  Tobin had to go right on pretending to be put out but he knew it was what gave the show its edge and, consequently, its audience. Peeps was kind of a pseudo-intellectual version of mud-wrestling, and for the past four years people had been eating it up.

  Tobin raised his hands high and bowed, as if supplicating himself to the loonies in the audience, then ran offstage like a lounge singer after his last number.

  Backstage he ran right into Richard Dunphy.

  Several people around them stopped doing what they were doing and began watching intently.

  It was the virtual equivalent of two top guns in the Old West facing off in the middle of Main Street.

  Here stood five-five (he used to add "and a half," but that got too embarrassing) Tobin and there stood six-foot-two Richard Dunphy.

  Neither spoke a word.

  They just looked at each other.

  Dunphy said finally, "Hello, Tobin."

  "Hi."

  "I suppose you remember last night." Dunphy's face shook with what seemed equal parts of anger and fear. "You weren't that drunk." Dunphy was going slightly fleshy but he still had a face that appealed to women in a bookish way.

  The horn-rimmed glasses and the tweed jackets with the leather patches and the absent-minded air helped. Dunphy always gave the impression he was thinking of something that would have startled Plutarch. Even when he was reviewing a teenage slasher movie.

  "No, I wasn't that drunk."

  They fell into their silences again.

  More people came. Stood close by. Watched.

  Dunphy said, "You owe me an apology. I hope you know that."

  "You know what I say to that?"

  "What?"

  "Go to hell."

  And with that, Tobin stomped back to his dressing room.

  Chapter 4

  7:02 P.M.

  "There you are,” Michael Dailey said as Tobin put his hands on the doorknob of the upstairs dressing room.

  He recognized Dailey's voice instantly. Tobin turned to face the man the way you might turn to face a firing squad.

  Michael Dailey had made a minor art form out of lounge lizardry. With his slicked-down dark hair, his pencil-line mustache, his heavily lidded eyes, his full ironic mouth, he resembled a gigolo from a thirties movie. He was at least fifty years old. Tonight he wore a narrow-collared black jacket, a brilliantly white shirt, and a red bow tie. It was to his credit that he didn't look silly. Indeed, he looked quite seriously decadent. He was Richard Dunphy's agent.

  Dailey extended a hand that Tobin shook reluctantly. "Isn't it time you two made up?"

  "No," Tobin said and turned back to opening the door.

  "He's a better friend of yours than you might think," Dailey said. "You really hurt his feelings."

  "I don't believe it."

  "I saw Jane leaving your dressing room," Dailey said. "1 should have expected she'd run straight to you."

  The back of Tobin's neck felt tingly. Did Dailey know about the affair he'd been having with Jane Dunphy?

  Dailey said, "She should have come to Joan, if anybody. Joan could have helped her and not made the situation worse by stirring up your feelings about Richard again." Joan was Dailey's wife, a former runway model, blond, pale, inexorably of the night. Mrs. Dracula.

  "Yeah, right; Joan's the first one I'd turn to in a crisis." Dailey bristled. "Are you disparaging my wife?"

  Tobin sighed. "Michael, what the hell are you doing up here talking to me? You should be down talking to Richard. I just treated him very badly. He probably needs comforting. You know Richard."

  "I'm trying to settle your childish dispute once and for all."

  "You're doing a rotten job of it. Anyway, you don't have to worry about Richard and me anymore. Since he won't sign the contract, there's no reason we'll have to be together under any circumstances."

  "But that's one of the things I came up here to tell you."

  Tobin's heart speeded up. "You mean he's considering signing?"

  "Possibly."

  But Tobin could see that Dailey was only doing one of his agent routines. "He hasn't reconsidered, has he?"

  Dailey was very good. Without in the least admitting that he'd just told a lie, he said, "I think he'd be so overwhelmed by an apology from you that he'd get swept up and sign the papers without thinking."

  Dailey had just finished his sentence when a young woman in her mid-twenties appeared at the top of the stairs, looked around, then came over to the men.

  Sarah Nichols was a Ph.D. candidate who was also Richard Dunphy's assistant, which translated into latest hump. She was a natural beauty with auburn hair that sparkled and cheeks that shone and teeth that gleamed. She was given to cardigan sweaters that took not a whit away from her wonderful breasts and long peasant skirts that thankfully hid nothing of her precious ankles. She had hazel eyes you could dote on for hours. She loathed Tobin.

  "I need to see you, Michael,” she said. She made sure that her eyes never lighted on Tobin. He could have taken out his little dick and waved it at her, she would have favored him with nary a glance. "Downstairs," she said to Dailey.

  "Is something wrong?" Dailey asked.

  "Everything's fine. We just need to talk."

  "Hello, Sarah," Tobin said as he usually did, mocking the fact that she would not lay eyes on him.

  S
he slipped her arm through Michael's. "Hurry."

  "Think over what I said," Dailey called to Tobin as Sarah led him away.

  Chapter 5

  7:45 P.M.

  When the house lights went down for the first part of the show, Tobin experienced his usual moment of fear. Sometimes he even had a special dream about this particular part of the show: Here sat the two of them, Tobin and Dunphy, America's favorite movie critics, being examined by Martians. Or Venusians. Or somebody like that. Because, see, when the house lights go down and the audience vanishes into the darkness, what happens is these rodent-like beings from outer space sneak in on kind of a sociological tour, to see why two grown men would sit facing each other in the darkness except for a cone of sterile white light encircling them, arguing vehemently about some colored images flashed on an otherwise blank white screen to their right.

  But then the APPLAUSE sign came on and the film students did their part by smacking hands together and thus the show began.

  Tobin leaned forward, stared into the beady red eye of camera 3, and said, "Whatever you've heard to the contrary, folks, we really do hate each other and we're here tonight to prove it."

  Dunphy said, "That's a really brilliant opening line. Really brilliant."

  That's how it started.

  How it finished was this: Although they had earlier agreed on the Sylvester Stallone movie ("Even by his Neanderthal standards, this is a low point in his mediocre career," Dunphy said) and split only mildly on the new Alan Alda ("All that's left for Alan to do is ascend into heaven and sit at the right hand of God," Tobin said, laughing, speaking of Alda's role as Albert Schweitzer), it was the third movie that gave them the opportunity to do what they wanted to do—find a film they could disagree about bitterly.

  It was a "small" movie about a farm kid's first leave as a sailor in New York City. In the course of it he encountered every possible kind of street person—from panhandlers to evangelists, from rough trade to rude shoppers—and about the impact it had on him.