Ed Gorman - Several Deaths Later

"I don't suppose you'd tell me what was in that notebook you and Iris Graves were wrestling over yesterday, would you?"

"Oh, God, you really are playing detective, aren't you?"

As he seated himself at Alicia Farris's table in one of the smaller lounges, Tobin had of course expected not only resistance but resentment from Alicia. He hadn't expected her wry, even amused glance.

"Nice place, isn't it?" She smiled. "Makes you want to go get a pan and look for some gold."

The motif here was the gold rush, and all the expected cliches of interior decoration had been brought to bear-blowups of forlorn gold mining camps, waitresses got up to resemble saloon hostesses, wagon wheels mounted on the wall, and drinks served in tin pans with fool's gold written on the side. Fortunately, it was pretty dark, so nobody could see Tobin blush. Stuff like this really embarrassed him.

"It's wonderful," he said.

"Now do you want me to tell you what you're wondering?"

"What am I wondering?"

"You're wondering why an otherwise respectable woman such as myself would be sitting alone in a kitschy little lounge having a drink at three in the afternoon."

"Actually, I wasn't wondering that at all."

"Well, in case you hadn't heard, my husband is having an affair."

"I'm sorry." He said it as if she'd just told him her biopsy had been horrible. In a way, he thought, it was sort of the same thing. He had to pretend innocence, of course. If he seemed knowing, she would feel paranoid-as if he were somehow part of a vast conspiracy from which she'd been kept. You got that way when your mate's infidelities became public.

"Oh, he's done it before, Tobin. It's nothing new."

"Still, it can't be much fun."

"You sound as if you know what I'm going through."

"I've been on both ends of that particular gun."

"Well put," she said. Then, "I wish I had. Been on both sides, I mean. To get back at him, I once tried to sleep with a parking lot attendant. He was very beautiful, very brown-he might have been part Negro- and we got so far as his shabby little apartment and I felt ashamed and excited at the same time and then his girlfriend came in. She was very brown-and very angry. She slapped him and then she slapped me and I realized what a silly suburban white woman I was after all and I just ran and ran. One of my heels came off but I kept running down the street anyway, limping, and finally a cop stopped me and asked if I was all right and I said no I wasn't all right, and then I began crying and it was really terrible, right there in the sunlight-it was very hot and very bright-just sobbing and all these fascinated street people gathering around to watch me come undone, and this cop just held me as if he were my father, and just let me cry and it was so decent of him that I just cried all the more and…"

She took a bitter drag of her cigarette. This afternoon she wore a tan blouse and white slacks. She also wore large wooden hoop earrings. Her makeup was flawless. She was still overweight but oddly her weight gave her a real poise and dignity. "He always goes to the same sort."

"Jere?"

"Ummmm."

"What sort is that?"

"You're not having a drink?" she asked, as a waiter dressed up as an old sourdough approached. Tobin, seeing his costume, wanted, most uncivilly, to punch him out. "Diet 7-Up," Tobin said, not looking at the poor kid, who was probably working his way through college. He noticed the way fortyish and overweight Alicia touched the very tip of her tongue to the center of her red upper lip. There was a certain Victorian eroticism about it and he fell for a painful moment to remembering that Cindy McBain had spent the night with Kevin Anderson. "What sort?" he said finally.

"Helpless. The opposite of me. I'm his surrogate mother." The rancor of the deserted mate coarsened her voice. "And I was from the beginning."

"How did you meet?"

She smiled and he saw a flash of the girl in her and rather liked the sight of that girl. "I was a continuity person. Or script girl, as they were called in those days. This was down in Falsworth, Georgia, don't you know." She gave him the benefit of a parody southern accent. Tobin wondered why white northern straight people could never quote blacks, southerners, or homosexuals without resorting to dialects and stereotypes. "It was a low-budget movie and Jere was the director. This was when he was right out of film school at USC, his dues-paying period. He'd tried to get some kind of work with Roger Corman-that's when Brian DePalma and Jack Nicholson and Martin Scorsese were working with Corman-but it just never worked out. So he got offered this kind of second unit job with this very low-budget horror movie being shot in Georgia and he took it. On the way down there, the director died of a heart attack so the production company-the people who had hired me-promoted Jere to director. That's where we all met, as a matter of fact-Todd Ames, Ken Norris, Kevin Anderson."

"You've known each other that long? Since…?"

"Since 1968." She laughed. It was a warm feminine laugh and he wanted to kiss her on the forehead. "God, you should have heard us then, Tobin. We were so pretentious. The movie we made…" The laugh again. Now he heard the melancholy in it. "Really terrible. 'Ingmar Bergman meets The Monsters,' Variety said. And they were being kind."

"And you've been with Jere ever since?"

"Oh, yes. I took out adoption papers shortly after." She stubbed out one cigarette and immediately lit another. "Am I sounding bitchy?"

"Within tolerable limits."

"He's a child."

"Why don't you leave him?"

"I love him. Isn't that the shits?"

"It happens."

"I'm so sensible. Look at these hands." She put her large hands across the table, next to the little electric "kerosene" lamp (probably just the sort real gold miners had used) for his inspection. "Big hands, aren't they?"

"But nicely shaped."

"'Purposeful hands.' That's a line from Steinbeck. I've always liked that. It seemed to describe me exactly." She exhaled. The smoke was a beautiful electric blue in the shadowy bar. They seemed out of time and place here-as if they'd been trapped in some time warp. He did not mind the feeling at all. He thought about ordering a drink but chose not to, knowing he'd only be potzed by dinner.

"Anyway," she said, "I've had to be purposeful for both of us. When he couldn't get work in pictures, I convinced him to go into television. That's how we wound up with 'Celebrity Circle.' We saw Ken and Kevin and Todd all lose their series and so then we heard about this game show packager and we went to them and-well, 'Celebrity Circle' was born. It's been our bread and butter for eight years. And as you can see, it's fed some of us pretty well."

She seemed to want a compliment and he was happy to give her one. "You're a good-looking woman and you know it."

"Do you want to have an affair?"

He laughed. "If we do have an affair, will you tell me why you were wrestling with Iris Graves outside my room the other day?"

"Oh, that, Tobin." She tried to sound dismissive but she couldn't. Not quite. "She's been a pest the past few months. Just trying to dig up some gossip on our show for that rag she works for."

"What was the notebook?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know?"

"I really don't. I'd just had an argument with Jere in our cabin about dear little Joanna Howard and I was walking down the corridor toward the swimming pool and I saw her in a deck chair taking notes and… Well, I'd had a few drinks, to be honest, and I just got irrational. I wanted to take her notebook and rip it up. Suddenly the notebook became very symbolic of everything she did and everything that filthy newspaper stands for. Believe me, Tobin, I don't wish Snoop on my worst enemy. So anyway, I grabbed the notebook from her and started running down the corridor and she came after it. She grabbed me and we started fighting and that's when you came out." She blew out some more blue smoke. There was just the darkness and the frail light of the fake kerosene lamps and the smell of afternoon indulgence and liquor. "Hardly what my mother would call ladylike behavior." Then she paused. "But if you're asking me am I sorry she was murdered, of course I am." She looked at him boldly. Her wooden earrings clattered. "And I didn't have anything to do with it. Nothing."