Эд Горман - Murder on the Aisle

“In less than twenty-four hours, you struck Richard twice. Now you’re here going through his personal belongings and I won’t have it.”

Perfect fury blazed in her eyes and Tobin knew better than to say anything at all. He just had to let her work through her rage.

“You knew damn well the public preferred him to you and that’s why you wouldn’t let him out of his contract — because you knew that, without him, you wouldn’t be anything.”

He didn’t believe that. Not at all. But all he could do was let her yell.

“So you killed him.” She started pacing now, and if her gestures — wild hand-flinging and glares that teetered on madness — were somewhat theatrical, he sensed that they were deeply felt, too. He was in the presence of a woman who had loved a man in the most profound way possible, and he couldn’t help, but be awed and moved by the experience. “You did the only thing you could to save your trivial little career — you killed him. You killed him!”

And that was when she slapped him.

A good hard right hand exactly on the right cheekbone. Enough to daze him momentarily.

His right hand came up automatically, but fortunately he stopped it in time.

She stood in front of him, enraged and exhausted and completely spent yet somehow she found the strength to raise her hand again, but this time Baines took her wrist so she couldn’t follow through. He let her fall against him, sobbing. As he led her out the door and back to her office, he nodded silently to Richard’s office, giving approval for Tobin to go in and look around.

Which Tobin, a few minutes later, did.

And didn’t find a damn thing.

He stood on the corner of Sixty-eighth Street listening to Nat “King” Cole’s “Christmas Song” coming from the speaker of a small grocery store nearby and watching people float by with holiday shopping bags and mufflers half hiding their faces. He was waiting for a cab. When one came he got in and gave the driver directions to Emory Communications and that was when he saw them.

Just as the cab was pulling away.

Just when he couldn’t do a damn thing about it. The two of them.

Standing near one of the college buildings. Talking.

Richard Dunphy’s agent Michael Dailey and the film student he’d just met, Marcie Pierce.

Dailey was handing her a white envelope of some kind and Marcie was smiling.

Smiling as if she had just been given a Christmas present that included at least half a dozen rubies.

5:47 P.M.

“My father’s right. I’m not cut out to be a boss.”

“Jesus, Frank.”

“You want to see the books, Tobin? I mean, would you care to sit down and go over the last P and L? You’d know what a fuck-up I really am.”

“There’s nothing like self-confidence, Frank.” But of course he was lying. He really didn’t have much faith in Frank. He’d once attended one of those gaudy conventions where syndicated shows are sold and bartered to local TV stations. Frank had been a Boy Scout in a room filled with child molesters.

“I’m a fuck-up,” Frank went on. “I’m not ashamed to admit it. Some men are tall — no offense, Tobin — some men have red hair, and some men are fuck-ups. It’s all genetical in the end. All genetical.”

“You’re drunk.”

“You’re not doing too bad yourself.”

“At least I’m not making up words.”

“What words?”

“Genetical. That’s not a word.”

“Well, it damn well should be.”

“Will you for Christ’s sake stop pacing?”

“Oh, sure. Sure. Stop pacing so I can sit over there behind the desk. In the boss’s chair.”

“That’s right. In the boss’s chair. Where you, as Frank Emory, President of Emory Communications, belong.” Tobin waved his sloshing drink as he talked. Sloshing on his sleeve. Sloshing on the couch. Tobin and Emory had been pouring whiskey into empty stomachs for two hours now.

At least he went over, Frank did, and sort of squatted on the edge of the desk. At least he was done with his pacing, which was starting to make Tobin seasick.

“I’m no boss, Tobin.”

“Yeah, but you look like one. Six-two. Patrician features. Graying at the temples. Thick wrists.”

“Thick wrists? What has that got to do with anything?”

“People admire men with thick wrists. Look at these.” Tobin waggled his wrists. “I could be a goddamned fourteen-year-old girl. You’ve got thick wrists and you should be proud of it.”

“Three stations canceled this morning, Tobin.”

So there went their little run of hysteria. That simple sentence was the equivalent of running down Fifth Avenue stark-naked when the temperature was subzero.

“Three?” Tobin said.

“Probably more. I haven’t checked with our sales manager in the past half hour.”

“Three,” Tobin muttered to himself. “So she was right.”

“Who?”

“Sarah Nichols.”

“About what?”

“About Richard being the popular one.”

“That doesn’t have anything to do with it. They’re canceling because we’re not fielding a team anymore. They like the back and forth. The yin and yang.”

“Chamales sort of offered himself this morning.”

“Is that the guy who looks like Sebastian Cabot?”

“Yeah.”

“Not a prayer.”

So Tobin sank back on the couch and watched the sun set red and purple and yellow behind the frost on the window and let Frank pace awhile and then he said, “I need to ask you a question, Frank.”

“What?”

“Where were you about nine last night?”

Frank looked at him and for a moment seemed unable to think. “In the production. Watching the replay of the top of the show and seeing if there was anything we could use before the fight broke out. Why?”

“Just curious.”

Then Tobin’s real meaning occurred to Emory. “You’re asking me if I’ve got an alibi, aren’t you?”

Tobin shrugged. “I guess I kind of am, yes.”

“Jesus.”

“They’re trying to nail me, Frank. I didn’t kill Richard, but I need to find out who did.”

“God, it wasn’t me.” He shook his head, dazed. “Hell, now I’ve got to find a replacement for Richard.” He sounded utterly lost. “And if I can’t find a good-enough one...” Misery gripped his voice.

Tobin stood up, knowing he needed to be out of there, and walked over and slid his arm around Emory and said, “Sorry, Frank. I had to ask. I really did.”

Emory smiled bleakly. “I know. I know you did.”

“So why don’t you go sit behind the desk?”

Emory grinned. “Guess I may as well. Somebody has to.”

“That’s right,” Tobin said softly, “Somebody has to.”

He waited for a cab in the lobby, planning all the time to go back to his apartment and settle in for the night with a tape of his favorite film, Out of the Past . But then, standing there, his fingers touched a round and smooth little button in his pocket. The pin of the damn thing stuck him.

Then, as the Checker pulled up in front, he decided not to go straight home after all.

7:58 P.M.

The saxophone player, who was also obviously the star of the six-man group, was as unlikely a Neat Guy as Bill Haley had been in the first place. All the chunky guy in the lewd red dinner jacket, complete with lewd red cummerbund, needed was a little piggy spit curl to complete the image of Bill Haley reborn. He even had Haley’s total lack of talent.

Tobin stood in the back of the union hall (the International Brotherhood of Service People in Bay Ridge), and there in the darkness was reminded of every high-school dance he’d ever attended. The ceiling drooped with streamers, and around a punch bowl wobbled at least two dozen drunks and on the floor short people danced with tall people and fat men danced with skinny ladies and women even danced with women (though this was no homage to Lesbos, simply a tradition necessitated by the fact that some men would rather do anything than dance with their wives), and for every fifty who laughed, ten, inexplicably, sobbed. There was hooch and marijuana on the air and enough Aqua Velva to keep the Green Bay Packers happy for several decades. Across the front of the stage was a big hand-painted sign that read A CHRISTMAS ROMANCE, and beneath it stood the six hack musicians playing cornball rock ’n’ roll (which they alternated with slow songs such as “The Great Pretender” by the Platters so, as in the old days, the guys could take their turns dancing with the girls with big charlies) and trying to keep their cummerbunds from falling over the slopes of their guts. But of course the dancers themselves were not exactly Hollywood material either. Holiday booze had given them a certain frantic energy, but there were too many bald pates and toupees and falsies and girdles and shoe lifts to keep them from seeming young and truly spontaneous.