Rough Cut (3 page)

    This time when I stared at the note in the dim light, it no longer looked melodramatic, but rather ominous, conveying that same psychotic edge that Charles Manson brought to his killings-blood as symbol, blood as portent.

    It was this type of unlikely rumination-maybe I'd do a little essay on murder for the local Op-Ed guest editorial column-when something akin to a tree fell on my head.

    Coldness rushed through my nostrils and into my system. Whoever hit me muttered something, and then I was gone, literally and utterly gone, to some pained level of being that was not quite life and not quite death.

    Presumably, the lady whose Mercedes coupe sat in the drive had found me-Cindy Traynor.

    

    

    By the time I came to, the blood on the back of my head had had time to begin scabbing a little. That was the only way I could measure how long I'd been out.

    In the moonlight Denny still lay sprawled ghostly pale in death, dark tears in his body.

    I had no desire whatsoever for heroics. I didn't give a damn if she waited in the shadows watching me. I just wanted out and away.

    I stood up, without much self-confidence, my head hammering, my eyes having trouble focusing, my bladder filling again, and somehow made my way out of the room and down the hall. The stairs I had to be extra careful with- didn't want to take a tumble down those. I used the banister judiciously.

    The driveway was empty. She'd gone.

    I stood in the frosty night, sucking in air, listening to distant animals settling in against the cold, and to a forlorn train punishing the darkness.

    Finally, I got into my car, turned on the heater full blast, and backed out of the long drive.

    I knew where I wanted to go, whom I needed to talk to. At the first sign of a phone, I'd find the address and head there promptly, knowing that soon the police would be involved and I would have to have a story prepared.

    The first phone I came to was attached to a convenience store that stood like a monument to plastic civilization in an otherwise rambling section of fir trees. When I got out of the car, I was dizzy a moment and staggered. The effects of being struck on the head were still with me. I saw the kid behind the counter in the store look at me with a mixture of pity and superiority. Obviously he thought I was drunk.

    Inside the store, the lights bothering my eyes, I went to elaborate lengths to prove I wasn't bombed. But I moved so self-consciously I probably only looked all the drunker.

    I wrote down Stokes's address-this was far too important to trust to a telephone-and went back out into the night.

    Back in the city I found the expressway that would take me to Stokes's neighborhood. I drove toward it like a homing missile. I felt so many things-horror and fear, regret and a terrible nagging sense that somehow Denny had gotten what he'd deserved-that actually I felt nothing; I was really blank as the city rolled by on either side.

    I had taken Stokes's name from the Yellow Pages when I'd first contacted him three weeks ago. I hadn't wanted to ask anybody for a recommendation because then they'd be curious as to why I'd wanted a private eye. But now-as I left the expressway and pulled into a neighborhood ashen with factory soot and a bitter sense of its own demise-I wondered if I shouldn't have gone to one of the big, prestigious investigative agencies. The neighborhood clarified many things about Stokes. He was a tall, fleshy, ominous-looking man who usually wore black. His thick glasses gave him the look of a comic-book World War II German spy. It made sense coming from this part of town, with its whispered white ethnic secrets and its battered pride and its obvious hostility. He would take pleasure from prying into the lives of people like Denny and myself, and feel a power over us for knowing what we were really all about. For the first time I realized that I should not have hired Stokes, but the day I saw the note indicating that Denny and Cindy Traynor were having an affair, I'd gone a little crazy, thinking of all the things Denny was jeopardizing. So I ran my finger down the list of private investigators and chose him simply at random.

    And now here I was-in so deep I had to turn to a man I didn't trust for advice. I had the feeling that Stokes would know what to do, had the feeling that Stokes had lived on the edge of the law all his life.

    It was an old two-story frame house that had once been white but for over a decade or two had evolved into gray. An unlikely red neon sign burned in the gloom, announcing FEDERATED INVESTIGATION SERVICES. I supposed in a neighborhood like this one he got many calls. I parked and went up to the door.

    Three knocks brought me nothing. I looked past the front door and across the screened-in porch to a lace curtain beyond which a small color TV glowed. I made fists of my hands to keep the knuckles from freezing, then pounded again.

    I guess I'd been expecting Stokes. The tiny, shawled old lady who hobbled out looked like somebody central casting had designed to be in sentimental Christmas commercials. Except for the eyes. Even in the darkness there was a glow to the eyes that unnerved me-something brutal and selfish and hostile in their blue fire.

    "Yes?" she said, smelling of warmth and scented tea.

    "I'm looking for Harold Stokes?"

    A surprising tartness came into the voice, the bitchy edge making her seem much younger. "So am I, as a matter of fact. He's two hours late. He hasn't brought me my treat tonight."

    "Your treat?"

    "Why, yes," she said, "my son Harold is a good boy. He's brought me a treat every night since he was a little boy." She frowned. "Except for the few months he was married, that is. The woman never approved of him doing that-so he stopped." She shook her head. "She just didn't understand how much Harold loved me, I guess. She seemed very surprised when he told her he wanted to divorce her and move back with me."

    Great, I thought. Just the kind of private detective I want to get involved with. A mama's boy. I sure knew how to pick 'em.

    I fished a business card out of my pocket and handed it over to her.

    "Would you have him call me as soon as he can at my home number?"

    "I'll be happy to," she said, "as long as he's finished bringing me my treat."

    "Right," I said. I nodded and moved down the stairs as quickly as I could.

    I was in my car-becoming aware of how badly I needed a drink-when I saw a red Mazda fastback in my rearview mirror. I recognized him by his hair-the Las Vegas hairdo Merle Wickes affected thanks to the influence of Denny Harris.

    Wickes parked down the street, then walked back and up the same steps I'd just left. I slumped down in the seat.

    He knocked on the door many times before the old lady came out. I must have put her in a bad mood. Her voice was scratchy and irritable as she informed Merle that her darling son Harold wasn't here.

    Merle left, shaking his head, seeming extremely agitated.

    I sat up and watched him move his pudgy body quickly down the street and into his flashy car-once again, Denny-inspired. For several minutes I rested my chin on the steering wheel, staring blankly out at the neighborhood.

    How the hell did Merle Wickes know Stokes, the private detective I'd hired?

    

    

    I don't know how long I drove around, or what I saw, or even why I was driving. Every few minutes I would become aware of how my leg twitched, or how a shudder would pass through me and make a momentary spastic out of me, or how an uncomfortable sweat coated my body.

    Of all the possibilities that lay before me, not one of them promised a welcome fate.

    There was a possibility that I would be blamed for Denny's murder. We hadn't gotten along, I'd been out to see him shortly after his death (but would the police believe me that I'd found him already dead?), I might even have been seen leaving his place.

    Then there was the possibility that the Traynor account would be leaving the agency and my financial well-being with it, a well-being heavy with various responsibilities…

    From a 7-Eleven store I bought a six-pack of beer and from my coat pocket I bought some relief with two Valiums. I rode around long enough to feel the tranks start to work on me and feel fatigue dull the edge of my anxiety.

    

    

    After my divorce, and before I felt much like falling in love again, I spent many evenings alone in my bachelor apartment feasting on Stouffer's frozen dinners and using self-pity the way other people used drugs. I also got into the habit of approximating a sensory-deprivation tank by sitting in the bathtub, throwing back several gins, and coming dangerously close to dozing off in the hot water.

    Which is where I was three-and-a-half hours after somebody knocked me out at Denny Harris's house.

    The lump on the back of my head did not throb quite so painfully now, nor did my jaw (I'd landed on it). I credited the healing process to the miracle wrought by the combination of hot water and cold gin I mentioned. Only this time I wasn't trying to deprive my senses; I was trying to use most of them in an effort to formulate a plan.

    I suppose I could get smarmy here and tell you that seeing Denny lying there dead had made me have second thoughts about him, but it didn't. Like some others in advertising, he'd been a superficial, self-indulgent, lazy cipher who'd prospered on the talents of others and hadn't even had the honor or vision to understand his own parasitic role. He really believed he had something to offer other than hand-holding and racist jokes on the golf course for clients who appreciated such. His loss-sorry, John Donne-did not diminish the human race a whit. In fact, the species was probably the better off for his passing.

    What might well be diminished, however, were the coffers of Harris-Ketchum Advertising.

    The choice I faced was this-call the police like a good citizen and tell them where to find the body or simply do nothing, let the body be found in its own way, by the person the gods or whoever elected.

    The reason the second alternative was appealing was because I would then not have to discuss with the police the identity of the woman who drove the Mercedes that had been parked in Denny's driveway.

    Her name was Cindy Traynor. From what the private detective had told me, she and Denny had been having an affair for three months now. Cindy's husband was Clay Traynor, president of Traynor Chain Saws.

    It was unlikely he would keep his account with us once he learned that his wife had been having an affair with Denny, and that I was implicating her in a murder charge.

    Accounts tend to go elsewhere under circumstances like that.

    As I rolled into bed in pajamas fresh from the laundry, I took an Arthur C. Clarke novel from the nightstand. Science fiction is my escape. But for once the sentences held no magic for me.

    I turned off the light, smoked half-a-dozen cigarettes until the moist nicotine on my lips began to taste salty, and then made the mistake of trying to sleep. I'm sure you're familiar with the process. Getting entangled in the sheets. Dozing off for a few minutes at a time, then waking up pasty and disoriented, as if from a nightmare. Trying to keep your mind blank while keeping it filled with trying to keep your mind blank. Insomnia is one of the few reasons I can see as legitimate for suicide. Enough sleepless nights and anybody would put a gun in his or her mouth.

    My life pushed in on me like walls meant to crush. I had responsibilities-three kids to help raise, two of them soon to be college-bound, and a father in a nursing home who twitched at World War II memories. Between the kids and my father, I was always desperate for money, overdrawn too many times a month, sweaty on the phone with the nursing-home people when my payments were late. Given Denny's behavior lately, I was afraid I'd let down the people who depended on me and the thought of that made me crazy in a way I couldn't cope with. My old man had worked thirty-five years in a steel mill without letting his family down even once. I had no right to be any easier on myself… and at my age, starting over in the agency business was impossible.

    I don't know what time it was when the city sounds seemed to recede-the distant ambulances less strident, the buzz of traffic less steady-or when I finally fell down an endless well of blackness into sleep… but it was wonderful whenever it happened.

    Which was when, of course, the phone rang.

    It had to be somebody who really wanted to talk to me, because the phone rang fifty times before I finally disentangled myself from the covers and located the source of the ringing.

    I smashed the receiver of the phone to my ear and muttered something like hello-vaguely worried, now that I was waking up, that maybe something was wrong with one of my kids-when a female voice, breathless and a little drunk, said, "I didn't kill him, you've got to believe that."

    That was when I started looking for a cigarette. Fortunately, I'd left them on the nightstand. Once my awkward fingers discovered how to make fire-you take the match head and you drag it across the slate and nine times out of ten the darn thing bursts into flame-once I got the lung cancer stirred up in my system and realized the call didn't concern my teenagers, I felt much better.

    Then I realized whom I was speaking to. Or, more exactly, who was speaking to me.

    Cindy Traynor.

    "I know vou saw me there tonight, Michael."

    "Uh."

    "I just want you to know I… I didn't… I wasn't the one who…"

    All I could think of were the puddles of blood on the bed. And the way she'd slugged me from behind. Difficult to tally the nice, breathy voice on the other end of the phone with such carnage-but it was.