Rough Cut (2 page)

    "Meaning I screened the spot for Denny and he liked it fine."

    If Denny Harris had okayed the spot, then what I planned to do in half an hour was going to be even more of a confrontation than it already promised to be. It only increased my rage.

    "Aww, you guys," Tommy said. "It's people my age who're supposed to act like that."

    "The Little Drummer Boy," Gettig said sarcastically.

    "He's right," I said, calming down. I paused. "I suppose we're being a little less than professional."

    "I like the spot. I've got no apologies to make," Gettig said.

    "As I said, I'll take it up with Denny."

    "Yeah," he said, "you do that." Gettig looked up the aisle at the door. "I've got an appointment." He nodded a chilly goodnight and left.

    I turned to Tommy. "Sorry Gettig and I are such jerk-offs. Great role models, aren't we?"

    He smiled. "I understand. Psych's my major."

    Now it was my turn to leave. "See you tomorrow."

    "Yeah. You be good to yourself."

    In the twilight gathering in the windows employees threw on scarves, hats, heavy coats. You had the impression they were about to face the Arctic. Actually, it was still above twenty degrees outside. I said maybe half a dozen goodnights, then went into my office, grabbing my phone messages and taking them along with me. Probably more than in any other profession ad people are surgically attached to their phones. When clients need you, they need you.

    None of the calls looked especially urgent, so I allowed myself the luxury of sitting with my face in my hands and calming down from my scene with Ron Gettig. He was typical of the tension in the Harris-Ketchum offices-part of the staff was loyal to Denny, the other half to me. That the larger share belonged to me wasn't as comforting as it should have been-Denny had enough true believers to make life up here, at least on some days, really miserable.

    Glancing at my watch, I lifted the receiver and quickly dialed the number of my personal accountant, Tony Hauser. Tony himself answered. "Hi, I was about to call you," he said.

    My stomach did some unpleasant things in anticipation of bad news. Given what the private detective had told me, I didn't see what could be any worse.

    "You find anything?" I asked.

    "Boy, you sound wound up."

    "Just had a bad scene."

    He laughed. "Why don't you get one of those honeys I always see walking around up there and tell her you need to relax-if you know what I mean."

    Like too many people, my friend Tony believes that because ad agency types occasionally work around models and actresses, we're always spilling our seed. Unfortunately, that's not generally true. Denny Harris, my partner, being an exception to that particular rule.

    "So," I said, wanting to get it over with, "did you find anything out?"

    "Not yet; that's why I was going to call. Kind of a progress report."

    "So you haven't had any trouble geting in?"

    "Not a bit. I may take up burglary."

    For the past three nights, thanks to master keys I'd given him, Tony Hauser had been sneaking in up here and going through the books.

    Denny Harris and I shared a genuine bond of trust, as you can see.

    Tony yawned. "I'm a little tired, though. I mean, working from midnight till three isn't my idea of a good time."

    "Well," I said, thinking of what lay ahead of me, "keep me posted, will you?"

    He laughed again. "Hey, relax, Michael. What's the worst thing I could find out?"

    "That the bastard's robbing me blind."

    He chuckled. "You got a point there."

    I hung up and leaned back in my chair and let my eyes roam the chain of electric lights spreading across the city below. You reach a certain age, or state of mind, and what you find yourself doing is clinging-clinging to things that you once would have scoffed at as mediocre, things that are now embarrassingly important. Stokes, the private detective I'd hired, had already told me some of the things Denny had been up to. On my own, I'd come to wonder about how Denny was handling the business end of things and whether my investment was safe. Mediocre to worry about retirement, which is not, after all, a very romantic subject. But I was of the age, clinging, maybe too tightly, to the few things I could call my own.

    In minutes it was my turn to bundle up against the waiting cold night. I dressed just as excessively as everybody else. All I needed was a damned husky to complete my getup.

    All the way out there I planned what I was going to say to Denny, and just how I was going to say it. In my mind it was a speech equal to Churchill at his best. The only difference was that mine had a few more expletives.

    

    

    Ten years before, Denny Harris had taken what was left of a once-large inheritance and bought himself the kind of stone-and-wood home Hugh Hefner probably dreamed of about the time he was buying his first box of Trojans.

    Situated on a tract of land that lies somewhere between the suburbs and the country, Harris's home is hidden by deep stands of fir trees on both sides. It is an ideal rendezvous for a lifelong bachelor whose only pleasures are alcohol and other men's wives: there are no neighbors in any direction for at least half a mile; Chicago is several miles away.

    Wind promising snow whipped the firs as my headlights speared the driveway. The double-stall garage doors were closed. A Mercedes coupe sat in the drive. I cut the lights, afraid that I recognized the car.

    The lights in the house were out. As I left my car, pulling my collar up as I moved, I thought I saw something blur in the second-floor window but I couldn't be sure.

    I knew I was being watched. Probably they thought it was amusing, my coming out here this way. Denny always likes portraying me as old-fashioned and unhip. Coming here was the sort of thing that would give him good material for cocktail chatter.

    Before going inside, I tried the Mercedes's door. It was open. I leaned in and looked around for the registration. It was in the glove compartment. It did belong to the person I'd suspected.

    My stomach knotted painfully. Tonight I would forgo booze in favor of Di-Gel. At least if I wanted any sleep.

    I went up to the side door of the huge house-Denny refers to it grandly as his estate-and knocked. I knew it would do no good. They would hide like children in the shadows, giggling, and not answer my knock.

    I tried once more, figuring I owed conventionality this much.

    Then I tried the doorknob. It was locked.

    I used my gloved hand to smash in a quarterpane of glass on the door.

    The wind swallowed the sound.

    I reached inside and unlocked the door.

    I listened carefully for any voices, then went in. I felt sure they weren't laughing anymore.

    The house was impenetrable with darkness. Only the kitchen window to my right held any light, the thin silver light of a winter moon. The house smelled pleasantly of spices and wood burning somewhere in a fireplace. I walked into the kitchen and stood still for a time and listened. All I heard was the house creaking and groaning in the wind.

    I went deeper inside, past a fancy dining room at one end of which was a grandfather clock that toned the quarter hour severely, into a living room with built-in bookcases and the kind of leather furniture I'd never been able to afford, even before my divorce.

    Nothing.

    Shadows created by the fire in the walk-in fireplace danced from every corner of the room and played like slippery kids across the floor. The books were an impressive army of leather-bounds, show books in perfect condition, with names such as Socrates, Melville, and Proust on the spines, which was hilarious, if you knew Denny. He had once complained, earnestly, that
Playboy
was no longer fun to read because there was too much of a text-to-picture ratio. Unlikely that he spent his evenings perusing Galsworthy.

    There was only one place to look. Upstairs.

    At the west end of the room was a sweeping staircase that disappeared ominously into darkness. I stood and stared at it. I was, without quite knowing why, afraid.

    The silence and the wind and the loneliness of the location were getting to me. A thin sheen of sweat covered my body and my pulse hammered faster than was pleasant. I was a kid again, facing not a bully as easily dismissible as Gettig, but something more inexplicable and terrifying-the imaginings of my own mind. God knew what lay upstairs. It was a much easier world when you could call out for your mother and father in the middle of the night.

    I started up the stairs with what I would not call an impressive first step-I tripped and grabbed the banister. If there were ghosts or demons, they would be laughing their collective asses off at the moment, and I couldn't blame them.

    I think I spent around an hour and a half going up the staircase. At least it seemed that long.

    The higher I went, the darker it got, until I seemed to disappear inside the shadows, become a part of the night itself.

    Creaks and groans of wood and glass and stone went off like little alarms every few seconds, causing me to jerk or jump or start every other moment.

    Finally, I lay a shoe on the hall that ran the length of the second floor. Neil Armstrong couldn't have felt any prouder when he first set foot on the moon.

    The first door I opened was the bathroom and I hate to break the mood here and tell you that, intrepid searcher that

    I am, I quit searching and took a pee-but that's exactly what I did. Fear had filled my bladder.

    I decided to forget about good manners. I didn't flush the toilet. The sound of it exploding would have been too much in the tense silence.

    The second door I tried led me to a guest room. I had stayed in it one night while my divorce was finishing up. Denny had had a kind of bachelor party for me, complete with a woman who was his gift to me. I was too drunk and lonely to turn her down. I took her gratefully, waking up in the morning to find that she was all the things hookers weren't supposed to be-gentle, tender, bright, with at least a passing interest in my marital grief. I supposed I would have pursued her if I weren't the jealous type. The idea of her with innumerable men would have driven me crazy. My wife had had only a few lovers-at least that's how many she'd finally admitted to-and that had made me crazy enough

    Despite the ornate woodwork and the expensive appointments, the room had a sterile feel. Too many visitors had robbed it of its personality.

    In the moonlight, I searched the room; closets, under the bed, corners. I had no idea why I was doing this, or what I was looking for.

    No conscious idea, anyway.

    But the guest room turned up nothing.

    I went back to the hallway and pushed into another door. This one looked immediately promising. This was the den. Half the furniture in it was turned over or smashed. The contents of desk drawers were strewn all over. Any ideas I'd had about walking in on a simple case of adultery were now long gone.

    I reached down and righted a straight-backed chair. Then I picked up some cushions and put them back on the couch. The obvious motive for such a mess was robbery-or looking for something hidden. But somehow I didn't think so, especially when I felt the cold air seeping in and saw the smashed window. There was an air of purposeful violence about the room, somebody enjoying the task of destroying it, down to overturning the wastepaper can.

    But ten minutes later I knew no more, so I moved back to the hallway, toward the one room I should have tried in the first place.

    The master bedroom.

    As I heard my footsteps creak on the floor, I thought of the form I'd seen in the window when I'd pulled in.

    As a kid I'd enjoyed ghost stories. Boris Karloff had made a nice, safe spook. The kinds of ghosts I was likely to meet at my age were far more frightening.

    He was sprawled across the bed, his blond hair silver in the moonlight, clad only in his underwear, blood in splotches across his back and arms as if someone had daubed it on with a paint brush. The white bedspread was a mess, blood in puddles.

    The closer I got the better I could see the puncture wounds in his back. There must have been a dozen of them, each oozing.

    A peculiar fascination came over me. Sickened and afraid as the scene made me, I was somehow riveted by it. Which was why I kept moving nearer. Only the smells his body had made in the aftermath of death slowed me down.

    I kept moving toward the bed and what seemed to be a sheet of typing paper beside the corpse. Just as I drew near the corner of the huge bed, I thought how many husbands in this city would envy me the privilege of seeing Denny Harris this way. Hundreds of husbands. Literally.

    I leaned over the bed and grabbed the paper, the reality of the moment real enough suddenly that I avoided looking at the body on the bed. All I could wonder about was where the other body was-the one that belonged to the Mercedes downstairs.

    Somewhere in the house, for sure. With a knife in her hand and blood on her arms like a surgeon after a morning's work?

    The note was so crude and melodramatic it made me laugh, easing some of the tension that was threatening to make me crazy. Whoever had written it had seen too many Agatha Christie movies.

    Beneath a blotch of blood, which lay in the center of the page, were typed the words, "NOW IT'S YOUR TURN."

    I was literally laughing, faulting the killer for style (face it, advertising people are slaves to surface things) when my nose reminded me of my dead partner on the bed and the wretched, messy, reeking way he'd died.