Эд Горман - Murder on the Aisle

Tobin went up and tried to peer through the painted-over windows, but that was useless. Then he stood on tiptoe and tried to look in through the front door. That proved hopeless too.

He decided to do the unlikely thing, knock.

He raised his hand and brought it down in a sharp knock. He was surprised by the sound of something being scraped across the bare wood floor inside.

His knock had apparently startled somebody who had inadvertently made a noise.

He stood there, his nostrils getting frosty, shrinking inside his topcoat from the cold. He listened very carefully for any other evidence of somebody inside, but there was nothing. Then he got an idea and carefully made his way off the porch and down the walk and back into the cab.

“Back home?” the cabbie asked.

“No. Around the block. Then go in the alley.”

He watched the cabbie’s eyes fill the rearview mirror. “You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“I don’t want no trouble.”

“There won’t be any.” Tobin smiled. “It’s my wife. I think she’s got a boyfriend.”

“Long as the boyfriend doesn’t have a gun.”

“He’s her hairdresser.”

“Oh, hell, then. No sweat.” Here was a guy who obviously believed everything he read in the Post.

All the way around the block Tobin wished he could just stay in the back seat of the cab. It felt safe and warm in here. The glow of the dashboard lights. The radio low with Nat “King” Cole’s beautiful “Christmas Song.” The houses that were so shabby during the day were now almost beautiful, tucked in against a backdrop of snow. If he never had to leave the cab, he could spend the rest of his life happily just riding around, maybe coast to coast, or maybe somebody would build a highway across the ocean and he could visit London and Paris, just sitting in the back of the cab, safe from Detective Huggins and safe from his past.

“Here we are,” the cabbie said.

The alley was a tunnel formed by long flanks of tiny one-stall garages, many of which leaned dramatically left or right in various stages of collapse. The moonlight here seemed bright.

“Now we wait.”

“You think she’s gonna come out the back?”

“She’ll have to.”

“Why?”

“There’s her car.”

And so there was. A car. A new gray Mercedes sedan. Parked at an angle in front of Ebsen’s closed one-stall garage. He knew, of course, who owned the car.

“Think I’ll have some coffee. If I had an empty cup, I’d offer you one,” the cabbie said.

“That’s fine. I’m going in.”

“You going to walk in on them?”

“Isn’t that the best way?”

“Man, I don’t know. Seeing your old lady all tangled up in somebody else’s bed. Man, I don’t know if you could ever get that sight out of your mind.”

“It’s the only way,” Tobin said solemnly.

“Well, good luck.”

“Thanks.”

So Tobin got out and started up to the house. The moonlight cast long shadows from a naked elm. Wind whipped up a fine silty snow that was not unlike frozen cocaine. He was cold within a minute of leaving the cab.

On his way he saw a fenced-in area of chicken wire with what appeared to be an oversized doghouse appended to the garage. This was where Ebsen kept his chickens. They were down for the night. Abreast of their house he smelled chicken droppings on the stark night air.

The back porch looked as if it had been stuck on as an afterthought. He tried the screen door and found it open and so then, carefully, carefully, he eased his way up the steps and onto the porch. There were enough beer cases stacked up to start your own Budweiser warehouse.

Then he tripped over a garden rake that had apparently fallen down earlier. He crashed against the beer cases. Glass bottles rattled. As in sympathy, something inside the house fell, too.

Tobin stood in the ensuing silence, his heart a wild animal in his chest, no longer cold but sweating. Waiting.

He was still waiting when the inside back door opened and a tall man in a continental-cut coat stood there dramatically with a pistol in his hand.

“Jesus,” Tobin said. “Are you crazy?”

“I don’t want any of your crap, Tobin. Something terrible has happened here.”

“What?”

Michael Dailey gulped, his handsome, actorish face almost statue-like now that it was not animated either by superiority or malice. He sounded distant, a bit in shock. “Somebody killed Ebsen.”

“That wouldn’t have been you, Michael, would it?”

“I didn’t kill him, Tobin. I promise.”

“Where is he?”

Dailey turned. Tobin followed. One step across the threshold the smells of the slaughterhouse were back. In the thin moonlight through the frosty window and falling across the floor he saw feathers and splotches of blood. Somehow he didn’t think he’d ever feel at home here.

Ebsen was sprawled across the living-room floor. He’d exchanged his T-shirt for a white shirt that looked as though he’d laid it under a freshly killed chicken. The way he was twisted, he might have been a tot fallen asleep watching TV.

“Shot,” Michael Dailey said, as if he needed to explain the situation to Tobin.

“I sort of guessed that.”

“Did you kill him, Tobin?”

“Don’t try it, Michael.”

“What?”

“Trying to convince me that you can implicate me. I’m going over there to the phone and calling the police, Detective Huggins, to be exact, and I’m going to tell them exactly what I found here.”

“God, Tobin, listen, I really didn’t do it. Please. Here, look, I’ll even give you the gun.” When he leaned forward, his white silk scarf fell loose. His Valentino-slick hair glistened.

“No, thanks, Michael. I’d just as soon not have my fingerprints on it.”

He’d never seen Michael lose his composure before. He sort of enjoyed it.

“Then what were you doing here?”

“I—” Now he was the old Michael again. His eyes became hooded and inscrutable. “I just needed to do something. But I didn’t kill him.”

“Not good enough. Either you tell me what you were doing here or I call Huggins.”

“You’ll just use it to destroy him. You’ll just use it to build yourself up.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Dammit, Tobin, don’t make me tell you. Please. It won’t do anybody any good.”

“Does it have to do with the script Richard sold?”

“No.”

This surprised Tobin. “Then why else would you be here?”

“Because there’s a — book deal pending. I’d been planning to collect all of Richard’s newspaper reviews into a kind of omnibus volume.”

“You’re not making any sense.”

He wasn’t. He was gibbering.

“Ebsen found out something about Richard.”

“From the shotgun microphone?”

“How do you know about that?”

“It doesn’t matter, Michael. I know. So what did he find out?”

“You just want to get back at me for Jane, don’t you? She told me about your visit this afternoon.”

“Jane doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

“You’d like to see me get blamed for this because you think you’d have a chance for Jane again, don’t you? Well, I’ll tell you, Tobin, she’s in love with me. Deeply in love. So you trying to frame me won’t matter. She still won’t love you. No matter what you do.”

Tobin said, “I want to know why you came here tonight.”

“I don’t want to tell you.”

Tobin reached up and slapped him. He got him square enough and hard enough that the slap had the same effect as a punch. Dailey’s head snapped back and he whimpered like a child who’d been kicked.

Dailey surprised him by keeping calm. “You did that because of Jane, didn’t you?”