Rough Cut (6 page)

    Now I had to lie not only about myself last night-about Mr. and Mrs. Traynor as well. Even in death, Denny kept my life stirred up.

    "You mind?" Bonnell said, showing his cigarette pack as if he were on a commercial. I hadn't seen Chesterfields since my college days, especially the stubby ones. I associated them with Humphrey Bogart-that was the brand he'd been rumored to smoke, right up till his death from lung cancer.

    Bonnell took the chair opposite Clay's. After he lit up, he took a small notebook from his topcoat pocket, flicked a ballpoint into action, and said, "I've been talking to several people here about Mr. Harris. Seems to be some difference of opinion about him."

    I shrugged. "I'm sure that's true."

    The dark eyes narrowed. "We didn't get much of a chance to talk earlier, Mr. Ketchum. I guess I didn't get any real understanding of how you felt about him."

    "He was my partner."

    He smiled, looked over to Clay. "Mr. Ketchum here is a very cautious man."

    Clay smiled nervously in return. Hard to believe that a spoiled adolescent like Clay could ever have his faith shaken in the power of his old man's money-but there it was. He looked miserable and guilty and ready to fly apart. "Yeah, he is kinda cautious, I guess."

    Bonnell kept his eyes on him long enough that Clay started squirming in the chair.

    By now I had half convicted Clay in my mind. Somehow he'd found out about Cindy's affair with Denny. Somehow he'd gone to Denny's and…

    …and here I was about to provide him with an alibi. He hadn't been kidding about the Board of Directors. He held their confidence only by a slim margin. Any kind of scandal would lose that margin. And then the account would absolutely change agencies…

    "How about it?" Bonnell pressed. "How did you feel about your partner?"

    I decided to be diplomatic without exactly lying. After talking to various people who worked at the agency, Bonnell would be well aware of the strained relationship between Denny and me. I knew, for example, that he'd talked to Gettig, the producer I'd argued with yesterday about Denny's authority to make final decisions on commercials-Gettig was my enemy. He would be delighted to see me come under suspicion. As would Wickes in accounting-not to mention his secretary, Belinda Matson…

    "We had our differences, I suppose."

    "You suppose?" The irony was in his voice as well as his eyes.

    "Are you accusing me of something?" He smiled. "Not that I know of."

    Then he turned to Clay. "My impression of you and Mr. Harris is that you were good friends, is that right?"

    Clay couldn't find his voice. He had to clear his throat a few times before he could speak.

    I had a vision of him plunging a knife into Denny's back again and again in a sexual rage over his unfaithful wife…

    "Very good friends," he said, almost voiceless.

    Bonnell studied him. "You have a cold, Mr. Traynor? I guess they're going around."

    "Yeah. Cold," Clay said. What an actor.

    By now Bonnell's method was clear. He had spoken briefly to Clay and me, gotten suspicious about something we'd said or done, then gone through the rest of the agency to corroborate his impression. By the time he got back to us, he'd convinced himself that one of us was the perfect candidate for the state's recently reinstated electric chair.

    "Did you see Denny yesterday?" Bonnell asked me. Before I could answer, he stubbed out his cigarette with two nicotine-yellowed fingers. I could imagine what his lungs looked like…

    "No," I said. As I said it I realized how quickly I'd spoken. Too quickly.

    He wrote something in his notebook. He did it with great flourish, flicking his wrist before he began. "How about you Mr. Traynor?"

    Clay did his usual bad job of covering for himself. Before he spoke he looked at me-as if for guidance. Then he turned back to Bonnell. "Uh-uh. I didn't see him, either."

    If there was ever a time for Clay to be his usual arrogant, swaggering self, it was now. Instead he'd become a shrinking violet. All that inflated macho crap-gone.

    Bonnell watched both of us, the irony back. "So neither of you men saw him?"

    "No," I said.

    "No," Clay said.

    "Who do you think would have reason to kill him?" Bonnell said.

    "Personally, from what you said," Clay said, "it sounds like robbery to me."

    "Not to me, Mr. Traynor," Bonnell said. "I feel sure this was done by somebody who knew him and knew him well."

    "Act of passion?" I said.

    "Precisely." He lit another Chesterfield. The sulphur smell from the match stayed on the air a long moment, not unpleasantly. "Maybe what we're talking about here is a jealous husband-or jealous lover at any rate." A kind of chuckle came into his throat. I qualify that only because the noise he made was far more ominous than a chuckle. "From every person I talked to, I got the impression that Mr. Harris was not a stranger to love affairs, particularly with other men's wives."

    As he spoke he focused on me, not on Clay.

    Now it was my turn to clear my voice, to reach far down the well of my throat and try to dredge up some words. "I didn't think people got that bent out of shape anymore. I mean, these are supposedly liberated times."

    "Not that liberated, I'm afraid, Mr. Ketchum." The melancholy in his voice seemed genuine, the irony gone from his gaze. For that instant I wondered if Clay and I weren't being paranoid. Maybe because we had things to hide we were overinterpreting everything Bonnell said. Maybe he didn't suspect us at all…

    "I guess I'm still a little unclear," Bonnell said, "about how you and Denny Harris met each other." He had his pen poised. "Maybe you could run through that for me. Maybe that will help me get a better picture of Mr. Harris."

    Though I wasn't sure why he wanted to know-though I was starting to get suspicious again-I ran through it for him, the same story I'd gone through myself many times.

    I had met Denny Harris when he was an assistant account exec at a large agency where I was a junior copywriter. We shared a hard-core ambition for success. At the large agency we wound up in control of our own team, attracting the second-largest account the agency had, and winning a dozen or so national awards for our work on two or three accounts. Inevitably, we started talking about having our own agency. My wife was equally ambitious. She thought it was a great idea. And that's how it came about. We had opened shop ten years before in a crackerbox over by the river. We did well enough that we had moved downtown before a year was over. Except our relationship started falling apart. Denny had always been the troublesome little boy. He'd managed to be fetching about it-for a while. But I got sick of the hangovers, of the black eyes he occasionally sported, of the innumerable female employees who moped around the shop after he had visited them vampirelike the night before.

    I also began to wonder about the finances of our shop. I was creative director and in charge of all writing, art, and production. Denny was to be in charge of business. But he began being secretive about things. His expense account, for example, swelled beyond recognition. I began to wonder if he ever paid for anything himself. Conservative by nature, I tended to leave everything I could in the business. I asked Wickes about what was going on many times-and many times he responded the same way, by showing me financial statements I didn't quite understand, no matter how hard I tried.

    Along with the perilous business situation, my marriage began to suffer, (which, of course, I didn't share with Bonnell). It was obvious to everybody but me apparently that my wife Sylvia and I had nothing in common anymore. She had taken up the bar scene-the leper colony I referred to earlier-abdicating, as I saw it, her responsibilities as both wife and mother. Fortunately, our kids were old enough that they could accept the inevitable. They accepted it with much more grace than I did. Particularly after she told me she had had lovers over the past three years…

    "I know how all this sounds," I said to Bonnell. "I wish I could say I liked Denny-I'd feel better about myself if I could-but I didn't." I shook my head. "But I didn't kill him, either."

    "I have to ask you something…" Bonnell began.

    And then I knew that Sarah had told him. She was the only person up here who knew it-Denny had told her one day ostensibly because he felt guilty about it and needed to unburden himself; what he was really trying to do was establish himself forever as the dominant figure on this particular landscape. I didn't blame her, not really. She was being a good citizen, that was all, trying to help the police do their job the best way possible.

    "Your wife-" Bonnell began.

    "-Ex-wife-"

    "-had a brief affair with Denny Harris. Is that right?" I nodded.

    I could see by the indifferent way Clay looked that he'd known already. So much for shocking revelations. I suppose Denny had told everybody. I saw a terrible kind of justice in it-the lepers that Sylvia saw as so glittering and so much fun, using her for nothing more than cocktail chatter and gossip.

    "You were married while this was going on?" Bonnell asked.

    "Yes, though I didn't know about it until after I'd filed for divorce."

    "You didn't end your business relationship?" I shrugged. "By then it didn't matter. I was pretty much numb."

    Bonnell nodded. "Yeah, I went through a divorce myself. I know what you mean." Human-at last, and however briefly.

    "I didn't kill him. I really didn't," I said. He assessed me. He seemed to believe me-or was I just hoping?

    "I'm going to have to ask both you gentlemen where you were last evening. We don't have a medical examiner's report yet, but the lab is estimating the death at late afternoon-say around six o'clock."

    Which was when Clay Traynor said, in the cocky way I was used to, "Hate to spoil your fun, Bonnell. But we were together, weren't we Michael? Working late right here in this office." The hangdog Clay and the arrogant one.

    The irony returned to Bonnell's gaze. He looked at me. "True, Mr. Ketchum?"

    At first I couldn't get it out-the single syllable that would make me a perjurer.

    "Mr. Ketchum?" Bonnell repeated.

    I looked at Clay, who was stupidly smiling. I thought of my kids and my old man in the nursing home, his paperlike flesh. The eyes that did not quite know me when I bent to kiss him. Losing the agency would cut me adrift-I wouldn't be able to help them.

    "Yes," I said. "True."

    

    

    Around noon I decided to close the office for the rest of the day. Not out of any respect for Denny, of course-though I was beginning to feel guilty that my thoughts weren't at least occasionally reverent-but rather because nobody was getting anything done.

    Clay Traynor had left a few minutes after Bonnell. Traynor had been grinning as he exited. Apparendy he wasn't feeling any worse about his good friend Denny than I was.

    I closed my door and stood at the window looking down on the city. The sky was the slate gray it had been the past few days. Without snow to accompany them, the Christmas decorations hanging everywhere looked more hopeful than real-like the decorations you see in balmy Florida around the holidays. Shoppers leaned into the bitter wind and fled into storefronts for respite. Even shopping was edged with travail these days-at least that's how I'd come to see the world.

    A knock on my door-discreet as only Sarah Anders could make it-caused me to turn around and get it over with. Sarah was going to apologize and I was going to accept- sincerely-and that was going to be that.

    When I let her in, her eyes were red from crying and her voice was hoarse. She daubed at her cheeks with a handkerchief that had seen extra duty in the past few hours. "I can't believe it," she said. "Dead." I guided her to a chair.

    I went back behind my desk and sat down and let her sniffle and sob until she was done.

    Finally, she looked up and said, "I have to tell you something, Michael."

    I stared across at her, trying to look as pleasant as possible. "I know what you're going to tell me, Sarah."

    "You do?"

    I nodded. "That you had to tell Detective Bonnell that Denny and my ex-wife had a small affair."

    She put her head down, stared at her lap, at her fingers knotted around her handkerchief. "I'm sorry."

    "I understand."

    "Really?"

    "Yeah. Really, Sarah."

    "I was afraid you'd…" She shook her head, started crying again. "…afraid you'd hate me."

    I can't tell you why, but watching her just then I was struck by a false note. Maybe it was the way she started and stopped crying with such regularity. Maybe it was the curious lack of conviction in her apology. Whatever, I was aware that I was watching a performance rather than anything spontaneous-but I couldn't pinpoint why.

    Which led me to wonder for the first time-letting my anger and suspicions come out-why she'd "had to" tell Bonnell about Denny and my ex-wife at all. Had he come right out and asked her if she suspected that I was the killer? Damned unlikely. How had the subject come up unless she'd brought it up herself?

    "Why don't you go home, Sarah," I said, as kindly as possible.

    She glanced up. Started sniffling again. She was a bad actress.

    Looking at her, I realized I was in the throes of a kind of madness. I didn't trust Sarah, Clay Traynor, Cindy Traynor, Bonnell, or Merle or Julie Wickes-and I saw all of them as knowing far more than they were letting on. I needed to turn to somebody, talk to somebody-but who? When you get that sense of isolation, that sense that you can confide in no one, then you're easing open the door of madness and peering inside.