Murder on Location (13 page)

“If that's all there is, I wouldn't worry. She might even be enjoying herself.”

“Not Pye. Those things just make her anxious. Marvin, will you call up the mayor and see if he can do anything? I wouldn't ask for myself.”

“Sure, Neil. Naturally, I'll get her out of there right away.” Raxlin dropped a few bills on the table and left the room. Furlong and I sat side by side without saying anything for a few minutes. The waitress bringing coffee led us back toward the here and now.

“It's a shame,” I said lamely. Furlong didn't answer for a few seconds. He shook his head slowly.

“Pye picked me up when I was just trying to get my foot on the ladder. She saw me through hundreds of hard times. She tried to help this local actor too. She's always been like that.”

“Don't worry about it. Savas can see through brick.” Furlong glanced at me with disbelief, then excused himself. I didn't manage to out-grope him for the check. He looked like he was off to spend the evening in his room with the Gideon bible.

In a few minutes, Raxlin was back. I told him that Furlong was still very upset and had probably returned to his room.

“I'll give him a couple of minutes to get there, then I'll call him. It's amazing the doors Neil's name opens up in this town. I spoke to the mayor, I'd been at his home for dinner a few nights ago, but it was Neil's name that got his attention. It must be wonderful being the white-haired boy in your home town.”

“I don't think this is serious. Unless she really was involved.”

“With Miranda you have to watch out. She's always taking a flyer on somebody. Lasts two, three days, then, poof. Neil's right. She'll tumble for a half-starved genius the way I used to go for blondes with high, squeaky voices. I'm still a push-over for a funny voice. Neil's had a hard time with her over the years. He still looks out for her. Wrote in a part for her in
Ice Bridge
. It fits Miranda like a glove.”

“He calls her Pye.”

“Yeah, funny. Remember her in the
Sally
pictures? That was a beautiful series. Must have been a dozen of them. Yeah, when he was a nobody, she was big. She helped him to get to be as big in the business as she was. She knew everybody. And when he got big, she started to slide. Booze did it. Drugs. Classic story. She got pushed aside by all the young stuff coming up. But Peggy O'Toole herself should look as good as Miranda does at her age. She hasn't done a picture in eight years. She's a good actress. What do you mean? When you can act, you're not finished at forty-five. Her, I'm not worried about; but most of them: poof! Who'll even remember?”

ELEVEN

I had a vague idea of calling it a night. I'd been hobnobbing with the likes of Neil Furlong and talking about his wife, Miranda Pride, like I was a member of the family. It was heady stuff, if you weren't preoccupied by a body in the morgue and a reckoning just twelve hours off. I went through the back door of the Colonel John, taking the time-honoured shortcut to my car. I don't know when I became aware that my footsteps were echoing and that the echo belonged to two pairs of footsteps that had fallen in behind me. It was chilly and my breath hung in the air like a balloon in a comic strip. The footsteps didn't get closer. They didn't go away.

There was a salt-stained Chevy pulled up in front of my Olds, but I wasn't seriously blocked: the driver was still behind the wheel and the motor was purring. As I was about to pass, the door opened on the driver's side and a pallid, lank-haired stringbean got out and stood in my path. I began to get annoyed. There was no way by him, and he didn't look as though he was going to alter the rate of his gum-chewing for me, let alone move out of the road. He looked like a walking definition of dumb insolence. So I turned around. One of the guys behind me
had opened the back door of the Chevy. I was boxed in. Two unfriendly grins met my eyes over the open door. Suddenly I wasn't angry any more. I was scared.

“We don't want any trouble,” the voice of the driver said in my ear. I was going to respond. I could already feel a big sunflower exploding to life behind my right ear. My hands were half-way up to cover my face, when I heard my name.

“Benny! Yoo hoo! Pistachio! Benny Cooperman!”

“Shit!” said the driver. I tilted my still un-sapped head in the direction of the voices. The first thing I saw were uniforms, police officers, four of them. They were standing on the steps of the hotel's back door, with two other figures I couldn't at once make out. The uniforms were advancing.

“We'll catch up with you later,” the driver said. “Scarper.” I heard shoes scraping on the gravel and skidding through the slush. Car doors slammed shut.

“We're over here, Benny. What's the matter?”

I coughed up some dust from the exhaust abandoned by the car that had been blocking me. I still had the Spearmint breath of the driver in my nostrils and his message, “We'll catch you up later,” was sinking in deeper. The sunflower of pain hadn't exploded in my head, but I felt as though it had. “Benny, are you trying to high-hat us?” It was Peggy O'Toole in a lumberjack's mackinaw and knitted cap with Dawson Williams standing with the cops slightly behind her. I felt like hugging all of them. With the car of my would-be abductors pulled suddenly
off the face of Thursday night, it left a large space of gravel, ice and slush between us. I cut the distance down by getting my stunned body moving again.

“I say, your friends left in a hurry. I hope it wasn't on our account.” Williams was blinking a little under the mercury lights of the parking lot. They made even Peggy's golden skin look blotchy. “We were just on our way to find some low life. Want to join us? The officer here was trying to talk us out of it.” I couldn't tell whether Williams recognized me from the other night or not. Maybe he assumed he knew everybody since everybody knew him.

“Hello there, Pistachio,” she said, and that's all she had to say. My cheek were she'd kissed me good night began to burn all over again. “Dawson's heard of a wonderfully low place on the other side of town.”

“It's not the safest place in the city,” said one of the uniforms to me with a grim look. Dawson Williams clapped the officer on the back and assured him that they would be fine. “Well,” said the policeman, with a glance at his mates, “we'll try to keep an eye on you from outside. We don't like to go into those places unless there's a riot going on inside.”

“Officer,” said Dawson, “don't give it a second thought. If I can't handle the situation, I shouldn't be allowed out after dark.”

I slipped the cops a look of confidence and a grin to Peggy and Dawson. I joined in, flanking Peggy's left side, and following them to a compact Buick that looked
clean enough to be rented. I took a fast glance over my shoulder to see if we were being watched, then slipped into the seat beside Peggy. Williams took the wheel and backed with authority out of the tight corner he was wedged into. The cops were climbing into an unmarked car parked on the street. They kept in the curb lane and followed us into traffic.

“Did you hear about Miranda?” Peggy asked. I nodded.

“They wouldn't treat her that way if she was a nobody,” Dawson Williams offered. “These places are all alike. Coattails are for climbing on, what?”

“She's probably back at her hotel by now. The police aren't going to hold her unless someone saw her waving the smoking gun.”

“Well, they
did
know one another, you know,” Williams said, without taking his eye off the road.

“About as well as you did?”

He fired a look at me.

“Me? I didn't know him from Adam, old boy. Oh! A fleeting introduction perhaps. But if you're thinking of the other evening, that's as close as we ever got. Miranda was having one of her famous three-day infatuations. You know the old proverb: Hot love is soonest cold.”

“Dawson, you didn't tell me you knew the dead man? What was he like?”

“Now, Peggy, don't embroider it. I met him with your friend here. He was drunk, insulting, then sick. Cooperman here trundled him off to bed with the maître d'.”

“I miss all the excitement,” Peggy pouted.

“My dear Peggy, you very often are the excitement. I shouldn't carry on about it if I were you. We're nearly there.”

Outside the windows the neon-lit signs had been flashing by. I hadn't been paying too much attention, except to notice that the further we got from the parking lot the better I felt. He pulled off the main street into a side-alley and parked. “This will do,” he said putting on the emergency brake.

Peggy put her arm through mine and Williams led the way down the block. He paused in a sheltered doorway and pulled Peggy and me after him. “Here you are, old girl. Try that on.” When she grinned at me she was wearing a false nose which took me by surprise. It wouldn't pass a close-up test, but from where I was it transformed her completely. I was hardly used to the new Peggy when the new Dawson appeared in heavy-rimmed plastic glasses. He looked Peggy over expertly. “That will do very well. It's not perfection but in an odd way it suits you, my dear.” He tweaked the nose playfully then continued the safari. “Just stay close to us and no giggling, mind. From what I've heard, this place is deliciously low. Don't give in to panic. Keep calm. These places can go off like a bomb.”

I was so surprised by the disguises that I let myself be led into the droning din of the Men's Beverage Room at the Clifford Arms, the hotel with my pyjamas in Room 209. The noise and smoke surrounded us like a feather-bed.
Waiters dressed in white carried crowded trays of draft beer, dropping rounds into the midst of disputes and smoky anecdotes. I scouted for a table.

“Benny Cooperman, as I live and breathe! Have a beer! Have two!” It was Ned Evans, the director of
A Midsummer's Night Dream
, surrounded by his Grantham cronies. Wally had warned me. Peggy and Dawson shot me the same surprised look of alarm. They had been on the lookout for low-life, but was this stretching it? Dawson looked around the room a little worried about being recognized and about not being recognized.

Ned hopped up from his chair, letting the weight of his parka tip it over backwards. Jack Ringer, whose father ran the bookstore, cleared coats from chairs and shifted the furniture so that Peggy, Dawson and I could settle. Will Chapman, a little dried-up man with red bird-tracks on his cheeks and nose, was staring into his beer until he felt the table rattle, then he looked up and saw the three of us without surprise. Peggy's eyes were bright as she wolfed down a draft. Dawson and I sipped ours.

“Well, I guess you're all here for the same reason,” Ned said, nodding like a magistrate. “Ed Noonan told me we can all depend on at least five days' work. But there won't be any contracts. We're just casual local labour.”

From Ned's ape-like bouncing up and down as he talked, I could tell that he and the boys had started their drinking some time ago. Jack eyed Peggy suspiciously, while Ned seemed to take everybody on faith. Will sat
like he was sipping through a stuffed straw and could see the world in his glass.

“Benny,” said Ned. “I'm thinking of doing
Richard III
in the spring. What do you think?” He hiked his right shoulder up and dropped his chin so that I'd get the idea. Peggy smiled over at Dawson, who winked at me. “I will, of course, play Dirty Dick myself, with Monica Bett recreating the role of Lady Anne. We once did a scene at the Library together: ‘Poor keycold figure of a holy king!' You know the bit.”

“Ned used a dummy from Hoffman's store for the corpse on a litter,” I explained to Dawson and Peggy. “Only one night Jack here took the dummy's place. After Ned pulled the sheet away, he needed a dry costume.” Ned swished a swallow of beer around the front of his teeth. He smiled sleepily at the sight of us laughing.

“I remember hearing of a performance of
Salomé
,” said Dawson, “that went off the rails when the tray supposed to hold the head of John the Baptist was revealed to bear a stuffed bull terrier instead.” Ned joined in that time, leaning his big head back into the conversation. Jack repeated the punchline to Will. Peggy seemed to be enjoying herself, although she sometimes sniffed at Will's jacket. Her rubber nose was slipping, but it didn't matter; in a place like this nobody looked at anything that required focussing. Even the waiters, who swam above most of the smoke like white icebergs in the flood, ignored the customers' faces. They only saw money and empty glasses.

“Benny,” Ned said, “I see you as Lord Mayor of London. You could carry a cat. I think it was Dick Whittington. I'll have to look it up. Or do you want to be the one of the Murderers? I've promised Clarence to Jack.”

“That's right,” said Jack. “‘What, shall we stab him as he sleeps?'”

Now I'm not all that familiar with the
Complete Works of Shakespeare
and I've known Ned long enough to place a heavy lid of caution on my theatrical ambitions. Ned does a couple of plays a year, but he plans a new production every night. One time he was going to shock everybody by having Lady Macbeth eight months pregnant in the early part of the play, then have her do the sleepwalking scene after a miscarriage. A few months later he was hot about doing
The Merchant of Venice
with Gratiano, the pal of the leading man, played as though he was a Jew trying to pass as a Gentile, and wasn't fooling as many people as he thought. Ned was a gift to a small place like Grantham. We were lucky he could step in when Monty Blair died.

“You heard about David Hayes, Ned?”

“Yes. That's a tragic loss. That boy had talent.”

“He was as tight as a Dublin tinker,” added Will without looking up. “He owes me ten bucks.”

“Will, the man is dead. Forgive and forget,” said Ned. Will didn't even shrug.