New, Improved Murder Page 3

  I just stared at her.

  “I didn’t mean to make you mad.” She frowned. “See, dammit, there I go. I can’t really be assertive when I need to be.”

  I didn’t say anything this time either. She had another go at it. “Maybe Jane Branigan didn’t kill Stephen Elliot.”

  I must have looked curious about her remark.

  “I’ve been doing a story on Elliot for my newsletter. I had an appointment with him this afternoon at his house. When I got there I saw the police and I started asking questions. One of the policemen was real helpful. He mentioned you and he mentioned Jane. I just looked you up in the phone book.”

  I’d make a lousy spy. I left too many easy trails for people.

  “I’m not an expert on advertising,” I said, “but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of your newsletter before.”

  “Oh,” she said, as if I were the world’s leading dope. “The first issue hasn’t been published yet. That’s why this is such a break for me.”

  For the first time, she touched me. Literally, I mean. She put out a hand and placed it on my shoulder.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that coldly. I just meant—”

  I sighed. “I know what you meant.”

  “Just that—”

  “Just that Stephen Elliot being killed will make a big story for your inaugural issue.”

  “Yes. Exactly.” She paused. “Especially if I can help solve the murder, scoop everybody else.”

  So that was it.

  I sat there in the darkness, listening to her heater bang away at the chill, watching a perfectly lovely woman prove herself over and over again certifiable.

  “How long have you been a journalist?” I decided to have some mean fun with her. Right now it was the only game going.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Curious.”

  “Well, not real long, I admit.”

  “How long?”

  “Oh, roughly two weeks, more or less.”

  “More or less.”

  She hurried on. “But I’ve done a lot of writing. Copywriting.”

  “I see.”

  “I’ve won a Clio and probably fifteen Addys.”

  I smiled, liking her despite myself. “You get fired?”

  In a very tiny voice, she said, “Yes.”

  “So you decided to start a newsletter?”

  She nodded.

  “Being a journalist isn’t easy.”

  “Neither is finding another advertising job. I’ve really been trying hard. After the agency I was with lost their biggest account forty-one ad people were dumped on the market—including me.” She shrugged again. Neurotically. “I’ve either got to make this newsletter thing go or— I’ve only got five months’ worth of money saved up. At most.”

  “Something will come along.”

  “You don’t think much of the newsletter idea, huh?”

  “Not really.”

  “I figured it out. If I can sell four hundred subscriptions throughout the state at fifty dollars a year, I can easily pay the printing bills and have a decent salary left over.”

  My father used to have notions like that. A lot of schemes that the whole family found sweet but hopeless.

  “You going to work on it?” she asked.

  “The case?”

  “Yes.”

  “I suppose.”

  “You don’t think she did it.”

  I looked at her. “I hope not.”

  “Maybe we could work together.”

  “I don’t think so. Sorry.”

  “Maybe I could be helpful.”

  I rolled down the window several cracks. The heater was getting to me. “You’re very nice,” I said. “You really are. And I hope you find a job soon.”

  “Shit,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Oh, nothing.” There were tears in her voice. “When I was married that’s how my husband treated me. Every idea I had was ‘charming’ to him. Which translated to the fact that I was crazy. I admit I get carried away sometimes but—”

  She must have heard herself. Her panic, there in her four-year-old Chevrolet.

  I reached over and patted her hand, and for just a moment I wanted to keep touching her. She had a wonderful hand.

  I got out, then put my head back inside. “I wish you luck. I really do.”

  “You still in love with her?”

  Her question rattled me. I tried to think of an appropriate answer. Maybe the real answer was one I didn’t want to admit. Then I said, “I don’t know.”

  “She’s very beautiful.”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe after all this is over you can get back together with her.”

  “Yes. Maybe.”

  “Well,” she said.

  I closed the door, walked away.

  Chapter 6

  A day later I met Jane’s parents in the lobby of the hospital where, despite what the police told the press to the contrary, their daughter was being held prisoner.

  Mrs. Branigan had never liked me. A matron who had started life on a farm upstate and who had eventually become the wife of a successful trial lawyer, she used her good fortune as a kind of judgment about others. Anybody who had not done as well as she and her husband were ultimately to be found lacking. Some longstanding moral curse, perhaps.

  Mrs. Branigan wore a tweed coat cut to hide the abundant flesh of her middle age. She had more luck with makeup, which almost took the hard edge off her otherwise handsome face. She held her sixty years with an imperious regard, like a weapon.

  Her husband was her twin, a ruddy, white-haired man whose girth in his vested suit and whose melodramatic style suggested both alcoholism and a minor case of megalomania. He had once told me during a holiday visit to the family manse—it was not quite a mansion, but it didn’t miss by much—that he had once been a Catholic, but was now a Presbyterian because he’d gotten tired of the joshing at his country club. I’ve always admired people of deep conviction.

  When I first saw them I got the distinct impression that they might be plotting to hire an assassin. Rage burned in their faces and gave them a nervousness that was almost ugly. When they saw me their rage only deepened. Here was the man their daughter had not only lived in sin with—the lower-class man who’d been previously married—but worse, whom she’d wasted time with. At one point in our relationship her parents had tried to bribe her away from me by offering her a free and extended trip to Europe. She’d been thirty-four years old at the time.

  I wasn’t sure why I went in there. Maybe there’s some real masochistic compulsion in me. More likely it was because, on my way up to see if the police would let me see Jane, I wanted to know if the Branigans had learned anything new.

  I didn’t offer my hand. I knew better. I wasn’t that much of a masochist. Instead, I said, “I don’t think she did it.”

  “How reassuring,” Mrs. Branigan said tartly.

  Branigan had the grace to look embarrassed. “I’d forgotten. You were a cop once, weren’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “Have they told you anything?”

  “Nothing since yesterday,” I said.

  “She didn’t do it.” He said it absolutely.

  “No. I don’t believe she did.”

  Mrs. Branigan said, “You hadn’t been seeing her again, had you?”

  “Don’t trouble yourself,” I said. “We really had broken off, Mrs. Branigan. I hadn’t put my filthy hands on her in over a year.”

  Mrs. Branigan looked as if my language made her physically ill.

  Mr. Branigan slammed a big fist into an open palm. “My God, I can’t believe this. This just isn’t possible.” He started pacing.

  Mrs. Branigan watched him. I watched Mrs. Branigan. She said to me, “The police have said that she called you.”

  I tried to take some of the anger out of my voice. “Yes, Mrs. Branigan, she did.”

  “I want to know why.”

  �
��I suppose because I used to be a policeman. I suppose she thought I could help her.”

  Now Mrs. Branigan softened her tone. Even some of the contempt went out of her eyes. “Well, as a former policeman, what do you think?”

  “Do I think she’s guilty?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  Mr. Branigan said, “He was a real bastard. She was calling us nearly every night all the time he was breaking things off with her. He went out of his way to make the end as unpleasant as possible.”

  “He even—he even brought another woman to their apartment one night when he thought Jane had to work late,” Mrs. Branigan said. There were tears in her eyes. “I suppose I have to say that much for you—you treated her well.”

  “There’s something you never quite seemed to understand, Mrs. Branigan,” I said. “Jane broke up with me—not the other way around. She convinced herself I was this really terrible guy so that she could justify going off to live with Stephen Elliot. I know that’s not a particularly noble thing to say at a time like this, but I think we should set the record straight.”

  Mr. Branigan pushed out his hand. He looked as if he might consider shaking hands with me, then put his hand away quickly.

  “Did you get a chance to talk to her?”

  “Not much,” I told him. I sketched in our meeting in the park.

  “Then she didn’t mention the older woman in the museum?”

  “No.”

  “She followed him one night. He went to this museum. He spent several hours there with a much older woman.”

  “Do you think that has some bearing on what happened?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did she say anything else about the woman? What museum it was, for instance?”

  Mrs. Branigan spoke up. “Only that there was a traveling Van Gogh show.”

  “Over the next week,” Mr. Branigan said, “he met with this woman several times. In a restaurant there was a scene between them. The woman slapped him.”

  Elliot seemed to have had a predilection for scenes. Spitting in Carla Travers’s face. Getting slapped in a restaurant by an older woman.

  “When Jane asked Elliot who the woman was he got very upset and told her to never mention the woman again—if she wanted to live.”

  “He actually threatened her, physically threatened her life,” Mrs. Branigan said. Her voice had started to keen again. For the first time in my life I found myself feeling something resembling warmth for her. At least a bit.

  I put my hand out and touched her shoulder. She surprised me by not jerking away. “I’m going to do all I can to help her.”

  She looked at me. It would be nice to say that she offered me a warm embrace and told me how wrong she’d been about me and that I was a wonderful guy. But all she said was, “We would appreciate that, Jack. Very much.”

  But that was something. She had never called me “Jack” before. Somehow she’d managed to talk to me without ever using my name.

  “Yes,” Mr. Branigan said, “yes, we certainly would appreciate it. Very much. We’ll be staying at the Hilton if you need to get in touch.”

  I nodded and went upstairs on the elevator.

  The uniformed cop listened to my story patiently, walked down the hall with squeaky shoes, and called his superior. He came back shaking his head.

  They weren’t going to let me see her.

  Chapter 7

  He had arthritic hands and wasted eyes, and if he had much more to live on than his social security, I would be surprised. He came in once a month and tried, as he was trying tonight, to steal a five-pound tin of ham. He was a lousy shoplifter. I was literally afraid that he was going to work himself into such a terrified state—the way he looked around, the half hour he took to get the ham up to his overcoat pocket—that one of these nights he was going to fall over from sheer fright.

  I watched him for five minutes, then walked to the back of the discount store where I was pulling a security gig this week. I had gone there after leaving the hospital, hoping the evening would provide me with some professionals and a few games of cat and mouse. I needed the adrenaline of clean, cold pursuit. Busting old folks didn’t qualify.

  I placed my sixth call of the evening to the number listed as belonging to “C. Travers” in the phone book. If Bryce Hammond was right, the lady could give me all sorts of useful information about Stephen Elliot, including why he’d spit in her face one day.

  There was no answer. Again. Either she was a busy woman or she had disconnected her phone. I’d been trying to reach her since the day before.

  On the floor, I watched the old man again. He had started into his head-swerving phase, looking around for store dicks like myself.

  Satisfied that he was not being observed, he wrapped a gnarled hand around the ham and began to push it into his pocket. I moved quickly, afraid he might be observed from the manager’s office.

  “Hey,” I said.

  A look of mortification and pure horror filled his face. I touched his hand, guided the ham back to its place in the display.

  “You sure that’s the ham you want?”

  His eyes were ancient, watery. His bones were hard, but his clasp was soft.

  “Huh?” he said, yelling loud as a deaf man.

  “I think you picked up that ham by mistake, didn’t you?”

  He stared at me a long moment, then started getting tears in his eyes. “Yes, I guess I did. By mistake.”

  I could imagine him savoring the ham—sliced and served warm in sandwiches. If the poor bastard had enough to afford bread.

  “Fuck,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “I said fuck.”

  “Fuck what?”

  “Fuck everything, old man.”

  I picked up the ham and a loaf of white bread—I wasn’t doing him any favors—and laid them in his arms. Then I took a ten-dollar bill from my pocket and put it into his.

  “What’re you doing?”

  He still sounded scared.

  “You won the store lottery.”

  “What say?”

  “You won the fucking lottery,” I said.

  He looked confused.

  “Just take the ten and go up front and pay for this stuff, old man.”

  “Huh? I never heard of no store lottery.”

  “Sure. Now hurry along, okay?”

  “Goddamnedest thing ever happened to me.”

  I would have just given him the ham, but all security people have to take lie-detector tests and my largess at the store’s expense would have shown up.

  I pushed him along, walking behind him to the aisle split, which took me back to the phone and C. Travers.

  Nothing.

  The apartment I live in smelled of steam heat. In bed I ate an apple and read through a script I would be auditioning for the next day, this one having me as a garage mechanic dedicated to only one thing, your gosh-darn satisfaction. You betcha.

  I slept very well, awoke around dawn, luxuriating in the feel of my body against the sheets, which were warm in some places, cold in others. I lay there for a time and thought of crazy Donna Harris. She made me feel good—her innocent and somewhat misplaced aggressiveness.

  After a shave and a shower I got in my Datsun and drove over to Carla Travers’s place.

  She lived in one of those new condominiums along the river, steep and secret in firs and pines.

  A few sleepy-eyed people were escaping from her section. They looked at me—even though I wore a new tweed jacket, button-down shirt, and pressed chino pants—as if I had been dropped off here by a muggers’ touring bus.

  In the lobby I found her name, pressed her button, and went up before she could say anything into the speaker. There wasn’t a security door in the place.

  Her hallway was golden with sunlight patterned through the firs. This was going to be a beautiful morning, not the kind you expected in gray November.

  I put a hand on her doorknob and knocked
at the same time.

  The knob turned easily in my hand.

  Three minutes later, after no response, I knocked again.

  After a total of ten minutes I twisted the knob to the right and went inside.

  The apartment was wide and expensive and nicely furnished with contemporary furniture and colorful graphics on the wall, but, curiously, it lacked a personality.

  I said, “Hello,” but I realized it was only a formality. I closed the door behind me and went in.

  Three rooms later I learned that she liked to cook in a wok—she had three of them—had expensive and florid taste in clothes, was sentimental about huge stuffed animals, and had a record collection that ran Neil Diamond and Barry Manilow.

  The final room I checked seemed to be a kind of den, a small room that a family would have used as a bedroom. In it she’d put a single bookcase and filled it with a lot of pop-psych and you-can-win type books, a small desk with air bubbles in the varnish that indicated she’d probably finished it herself, a straight-backed chair, and a file cabinet that promised to be the most interesting thing in her entire apartment, especially considering that on top of the cabinet was a framed photograph of herself and Stephen Elliot, arm in arm, at what appeared to be a resort.

  For the first time since Jane’s arrest I had a feeling that I might actually be making some progress.

  I knelt down, my knees cracking as I did so, and started to pull the top drawer from the cabinet, when I heard something behind me creak.

  Whoever it was moved accurately, crossing the distance between the closet where he or she had been concealed and bringing whatever it was right across the back of my head.

  Before I slipped into darkness I had time to realize that my instructor at the police academy would be very ashamed of me for being so careless.

  Chapter 8

  When I came to the first thing I did was open my eyes slowly and begin to feel the back of my head. The pain was a steady throb, which, if I remembered my first aid right, was a good sign.

  By the time I started to roll over on my side and to think about getting to my feet a female voice, part nicotine and part liquor, said, “I didn’t mean to hit you so hard, but you probably had it coming anyway.”