The Morning Show Murders (1) (8 page)

Though I'm no better judge of comic art than fine art, it seemed to me that Rita's work was professional and commercial. Her funny girls were drawn in an enhanced realistic style. Very beautiful, very shapely. Very, very bisexual. We were in the middle of an adventure in Rome, with Rita providing me with a detailed verbal annotation, when Melody Moon returned.

She was wearing jeans, a gray sweatshirt, and bright red tennis shoes. She stared at us blankly over the huge brown grocery bag she was carrying. She seemed neither surprised to find me in her living room nor curious about why I might be there.

"Look who's here to see you, Melody," Rita said, nervously breaking the silence.

"Let me get that," I said, relieving Melody of the heavy bag.

"Thank you," she said flatly, without affect. "I'll show you where it goes."

Walking stiffly, she led me to a tiny kitchenette just off the living room. It featured a two-burner, a microwave, a small fridge, a sink, and, squeezed beneath it, a mini-dishwasher. After I'd placed the bag on a narrow counter, I noticed the wallpaper--white with little dark illustrations that upon closer examination turned out to be early black-and-white cartoon characters. Bimbo. Koko. Felix the Cat. Betty Boop.

"Comic art is Rita's life," Melody said as she put the perishables away.

"Caught that," I said.

"I appreciate your coming here, chef," she said, shuffling objects in the small freezer to make room for a quart of butter-pecan ice cream, "but I'm doing fine. I'll be okay."

I felt like a louse. She and her roommate were assuming I'd come to lift her spirits, when, in fact, I was there looking for someone to take my place as murder suspect number one. It hadn't even occurred to me that she might be in mourning.

"I'm a little surprised you knew about Rudy and me," she said, folding the now-empty brown bag and placing it with other folded bags in a narrow cabinet. "He told me he was keeping it a secret from the people he worked with. But I guess there are some things you don't hide from friends."

Friends? How low could I feel?

When we returned to the living room, Rita was slipping into what looked like a shiny Day-Glo yellow plastic pea jacket. "Mello," she addressed her roommate, "since the chef's here to keep you company, would it be okay if I ducked out for an hour or so? There's a Love and Rockets retro at a gallery in the Village. Los Bros are supposed to be there."

I hadn't a clue as to what Rita was talking about, but Melody just said, "Go. I'm good."

Rita hugged her. "It'll get better," I heard her whisper.

Then she hugged me. "You're a lovely man to have come here," she said.

If I was so lovely, why was I feeling like a first-class creep?

As soon as Rita closed the door behind her, whatever had been
keeping Melody going suddenly gave up the ghost. Her rigidity dissolved and her legs buckled.

I caught her before she fell onto the footlocker coffee table and helped her to the couch. "You're worn out," I said, sitting beside her. "You need sleep."

"I don't think I can. My head is full of jumbles."

"Why don't I fix you some warm milk?"

"No. Really. I'm okay. I just keep asking myself why somebody would do such a terrible thing. I don't understand it."

"Neither do I," I said truthfully. The guy had been a dick, but that shouldn't have cost him his life.

She looked like she was about to cry, but she took a deep breath and got herself under control. "He was so wonderful to me," she said. "I can't believe he's gone. I've been with ... other guys, but he was the only man I really gave myself to."

Need-to-know basis. Please!

"He was so sweet. He worried that I'd think he was too old, but that didn't matter. For me, it was love at first sight that day at the tryouts."

"He told me he thought you were something special," I said.

She smiled. "I couldn't believe it when he asked me out that night. This great-looking man of the world, who'd been to so many places and done so many things. And he was interested in
me
. Not just in having sex with me. There've been nights when all we did was talk and laugh and not make love at all.

"Did Rudy tell you we were going to be married?"

The question caught me off guard. Luckily, before I could decide whether or not to lie, her mood turned down again and she began to weep. I'd never thought of myself as a father figure, not to mention a grief counselor, but I had no problem putting my arm around her and giving her my Zegna pocket square to mop up her tears.

"He's gone forever," she moaned.

I let her cry against my shoulder and stared at a comic-book room that, in spite of its eccentric touches and bursts of color, had grown quite dreary.

Eventually her body stiffened and she pulled away, moving into another stage of grief. She used my sixty-five-dollar pocket square to blow her nose furiously. "Some bastard took Rudy from me," she
said, anger distorting her lovely face. "Business deal, bullshit. Murder business."

"I don't understand," I said.

"He was working on some deal that he said would make it possible for us to get married."

"What kind of deal?" I asked.

"Television, I guess. Rudy didn't say."

"But you think it could have had something to do with his murder?"

"We were supposed to have dinner at his place last night. Like we'd been doing just about every night. But Rudy called and said we couldn't because this important meeting came up. He said he'd phone me if we could get together later. I waited up until midnight, but ... Oh, God. I was even sort of angry with him because he didn't call."

She began crying again.

I let the questions pile up in my head and waited silently for her to cry herself out.

When she did, I asked if I could get her something. Water? Aspirin?

She shook her head no.

"You must miss him, too," she said.

Before I had to lie and say "Yes," she suddenly reached out and plucked something from the coffee table, a thin, transparent jewel box housing a silver disk. "For a cool guy in his forties," she said, "he could be like a little boy at times. You know what he really loved to do in bed?"

I bit my tongue, shook my head, and hoped for the best.

"Watch TV," she said, pressing the jewel box to her chest. "Old shows that he'd had transferred to DVD. Black-and-white, some of 'em. He loved to lie in bed and watch old TV. Had shelves full of disks. He was in a lot of the shows."

"I guess he was," I said, remembering that Rudy's early career had been on-camera. "Melody, when you spoke with him last night, did he mention any details about the meeting? Where it was? Who'd be there?"

She thought for a moment. "It was at his condo, I'm pretty sure he said. But that's about it."

"Was he meeting with a man or a woman?"

"I got the impression it was a man, but I don't know that he said, really."

"You should probably tell all this to the police," I said.

"Oh, God. No police. I can't go to the police."

"Why not?"

She slid away from me against the sofa, arms crossed, chin tucked, shaking her head back and forth. Totally spooked.

"Okay," I said. "No police."

"It's ... I don't want ... some people to know where I am. And if I go to the police ..."

"What people?"

No answer.

"Your mother?"

Hesitation, then the decision to remain silent.

"Father?"

"He's not my father," she almost shouted. "My father died. This one's not much older than my brother. He thinks 'cause he gave my mother a ring, he can do anything he wants to me."

"Okay," I said softly. "I've got the picture. How much does Rita know about it?"

"Not a lot. Doesn't take much to put Rita into attack mode. I'm not lookin' for any payback. I just want that whole part of my life gone and forgotten."

She looked even younger than eighteen. Maybe she was. People have been known to lie about their ages on their contracts, though usually it's in the other direction.

"Melody Moon your real name?"

"It is now," she said. "Aw, hell. Everything would have been so perfect if only Rudy and I could've ..."

She drew her legs up and hugged them.

She must have seen the concern on my face, because she attempted a grin and said, "I'll be okay."

She looked at the disk in her hands. "We would have had a happy family. Rudy loved kids, you know."

"He had children?"

"Oh, not any of his own. He never was married. But when he was starting out he hosted a kids' show on a local station in Cleveland. That's where he's from."

I guess I didn't know very much about Rudy. Maybe I should have
been more curious about the guy who'd won Gretchen's heart and, assuming he'd been straight with Melody, had decided to break it.

"He gave me this," she said, indicating the disk. "Four of his shows. You can see he really cared for the kids. Didn't talk down to them at all. He was so nice to them. Like a real dad.

"You mind if I put this on? It makes me happy to watch it."

"Please," I said.

It was a standard videotaped kids' show circa the 1980s. Produced on the cheap. A youthful, skinny Rudy Gallagher, decked out in what looked like an old brass-buttoned Sergeant Pepper coat and a yachtsman's cap, and operating under the nom de video of Cap'n Rudy, set sail in the good ship USS
Huckleberry
with ten or so kids on board.

The ship's bulkheads were black muslin, the portholes cardboard with cartoon waves. Rudy and the kids sat on fold-up chairs while some unidentified hapless station gofer, whom the cap'n called Yeoman Yuckie, pretended to operate an ancient motion-picture projector ostensibly showing Hanna-Barbera cartoons that suddenly filled the screen. Chief among the characters was Huckleberry Hound, hence the show's title.

Melody fast-forwarded through the cartoon segments, making the usually lethargic, blue-coated Huckleberry move faster than the Road Runner. Then she hit the play button and we watched young Rudy bonding with the kids, listening to their stories, singing sea chanteys and employing a truly awful "Avast ye, mateys" old-salt growl to spin tall tales that were rewarded with youthful cheers and laughter.

While I found these blasts from the past initially interesting, they quickly lost their charm for anyone who'd not been in love with Rudy Gallagher. By the time I'd endured two of the thirty-minute episodes, my eyes were starting to roll back in my skull.

To keep from screaming, I excused myself and went to the kitchenette, where I found an assortment of booze. I selected a half-full pint bottle of bourbon, took a sip to make sure it wasn't turpentine, and used another inch of it to fashion a medicinal warm-milk punch for Melody.

She accepted it, took a tentative sip, and pronounced it "delicious," taking a larger swallow. "Do you think any of Rudy's old shows might be for sale on eBay?" she asked. "Maybe more of these
Huckleberrys?
"

"Wouldn't hurt to check," I said.

The possibility of owning more video minutes of Rudy seemed to please her immensely. She settled back against the couch and drank more of the milk punch.

We were halfway through yet another
Huckleberry
episode when Melody put the empty glass on the coffee table and stood up, unsteadily. "Excuse me for a minute?" she mumbled and tottered off.

When fifteen minutes had passed, I put the TV and myself out of our shared misery and went looking for her.

There were two bedrooms just past the kitchenette. The first had, in addition to the usual bedroom furniture, an artboard, inks, paints, and a floor littered with discarded sketches.

I moved on to the second. A bedside lamp was lit, but Melody was fast asleep. There was a pink woolen coverlet folded at the foot of the bed. As I eased it from under her legs, I noticed that a red-leather wallet had worked its way free of her jeans pocket. I picked it up and draped the coverlet over her.

I scanned the room, saw nothing more interesting than the wallet, which I took to the living room. I plopped down on one of the soft, pink chairs to do some snooping. At first I found nothing of consequence. A credit card in her name, a reminder of a hair appointment at Roland's in the Village, two ten-dollar bills, a five, two ones, a receipt from a neighborhood dry-cleaning establishment named Pressing Matters, and several business cards.

My big discovery was an Illinois driver's license with her photo, which was tucked in one of the wallet's folds. It had been issued eight months before to a Mary Lou Meeshon, then a resident of 13121/2 North Welles Street in Chicago. According to Mary Lou's birth date, she was still a few months shy of eighteen.

I pawed through the rest of the wallet, but the only other things of note were two photos: a creased snapshot of a little female toddler being held by a black man, his bearded face softened by a grin of parental pride, and a more recent version of that same toddler, all grown up or nearly so, sharing a love seat with Rudy Gallagher, staring at a camera that Rudy was holding up in front of them. Mary Lou and her real father, and Melody and her father figure.

I took the wallet back to Melody's room and placed it under the coverlet near her. She was still sleeping comfortably. I was reluctant to leave her alone in the apartment. I doubted she needed babysitting,
but I didn't know her well enough to make that call. I'd been wrong about her before; at the
Food School
tryouts, she'd struck me as nothing more than a pampered, self-centered bubblehead, albeit a pretty one. So though I had no reason to suppose she might wake up depressed enough to do damage to herself, I didn't want to risk it.

I thought about searching the place, checking the medicine cabinet, the closets, but I could think of no good reason to invade their privacy further. Instead I went back to the pink chair in the living room and waited for Rita Margolis to return.

It wasn't a long wait.

She rushed in, saw me, did a quick scan of the room, then demanded, "Where's Melody?"

"In her room, asleep."