Эд Горман: Murder on the Aisle

Tuesday: 5:35 P.M.

“You see ’em, don’t you?” the cabbie asked.

“Yeah, I see them.”

“Around the block again?”

“Yeah, around the block again,” Tobin said.

He sat back in the cab and tried to prepare himself for the confrontation he had been avoiding all day.

The cabbie, glancing in his rearview mirror, said, “I always liked you better anyway.”

“I’m sorry,” Tobin said, coming up through his thoughts as if from deep water. “I wasn’t listening.”

“I said I always liked you better anyway.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. You. I mean better than that partner of yours, that Dunphy guy. He’s kind of a snob. You’re more like the average man. Like me. That’s why I always liked you better.”

“Well, thank you.”

“My wife always watches you guys, too. She loves it when you get to arguing about a movie. She even tries to predict which ones you’ll like and which ones you won’t. You know — it’s like handicapping horses or something.”

“I’m glad you enjoy the show.”

“I’m gonna tell her you were one of my fares today and she’ll tell everybody she knows. She’s like that.” He nodded ahead to the Emory Communications Building. “They’re still there.”

“Yeah. I see ’em.”

“They must really want you bad.”

“They do.”

“Mind if I ask why?”

Tobin sighed. “Well, my partner and I had a little disagreement last night.”

The cabbie laughed. “Hey, that’s great.” Then he said, “I think they’ve figured it out.”

“Figured out what?”

“That you’re in the cab.”

“Why?”

“They’re pointing at it.”

“Shits.”

“Why don’t you duck down? I’ve had a lot of people duck down in my cabs.”

“Great idea. Thanks.” Tobin ducked down. He wondered if Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel ever had to duck down this way.

“So you want me to slow down?”

“How about one more time around the block?”

“Fine with me.”

“Tell me when I can sit up.”

“We’re going past now.”

“Are they looking?”

“Yeah, they’re looking and pointing.”

“Shit.”

“We’re past ’em now.”

“You sure?”

“Sure Sure I’m sure. You can sit up.”

So he sat up. Now, at dusk, Manhattan was alive with Christmas decorations swinging in the chill winds. There were plastic Santa Clauses with light bulbs inside their bellies and little elves with big hammers and reindeer who looked realistic enough to do everything except take a dump.

Then they were around the block again.

“You better duck down again.”

Tobin sighed. “The hell with it.”

“Huh?”

“May as well just get it over with.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I’ve got to be inside there anyway in the next twenty minutes to tape a segment. They’re going to catch me one way or the other. Why don’t you just pull up to the curb?”

“Sure. If you say so.”

They parked about a hundred yards down the street from Emory Communications.

Then the reporters started approaching.

Actually, it was only one of them, and the closer the man got, the more obvious it became who he was: Carmichael, from one of Rupert Murdoch’s rags. Carmichael, though essentially a gossip columnist, always wore designer combat fatigues. It’s a jungle out there.

Tobin sank back and waited.

Carmichael came up with a microphone pack slung over his right shoulder. It might have been a Geiger counter checking for radioactivity. He came up to the rear window and looked in. “How’s it going, Tobin?”

Carmichael waited a decent time for a response — all the while locked in a stare-down with Tobin — then rapped his knuckles on the window.

“Might as well get it over with, Tobin. And you might as well talk it over with somebody who likes you instead of—”

He nodded over his shoulder and rolled his eyes as if lepers had just strolled by. “Instead of them.”

Tobin sighed, hit the button for the window to descend. When the electric whirring stopped, Tobin said, “It wasn’t a big thing.”

“Well,” Carmichael said. “It was in a very fashionable restaurant.”

“It still wasn’t a big thing.”

“Tobin, Christ, you decked him.”

“See!” Tobin half-shouted. “See! I knew this thing would get blown out of all proportion!”

Carmichael looked embarrassed.

Tobin slumped in the seat. He was wondering how long it took to become autistic. Autism sure would come in handy right now.

“Tobin?” Carmichael said after a bit.

Tobin kept his chin on his chest. “What?”

“You did hit him, right? I mean, you’re not trying to deny that, are you?”

“Mhjrygmj.” He spoke directly into the woolen scarf he had wrapped around his neck to keep Mr. December from biting him on the ass and all those other delicate places.

“What?”

Tobin raised his chin slightly from the muff of his scarf and said, “I hit him but I didn’t ‘deck’ him.”

“You sure?”

“What’s the first joke people make about me?”

Carmichael thought a moment. “That you’re cheap?”

Tobin grew impatient. “Besides the fact that I’m cheap.”

“That you’ve been married four times?”

“Besides the fact that I’ve been married four times.”

Carmichael looked stumped. “Hell, Tobin, what?”

“God, man, how tall am I?”

“Oh, right. Your height.”

“Yes, my height. How tall am I?”

“Say, that’s right. You’re just a little ba... bugger. Five-four?”

“Five-five.”

“Five-five,” Carmichael repeated.

“So how tall is Dunphy?”

Carmichael shrugged. “How the hell would I know?”

“His driver’s license says he’s six-two.”

“So?”

“So how could somebody who’s five-five ‘deck’ somebody who’s six-two — unless he was standing on a chair, which the restaurant didn’t provide me last night, at least not to stand on so I could punch somebody’s lights out. You see, Carmichael?”

“But you do admit you hit him?”

“As I already said, I do agree I hit him.”

“And you do agree that you two haven’t gotten along for quite a while.”

“I’ll let Dunphy speak to that.”

“And it’s also true that Dunphy is thinking of not signing on again when his contract runs out after tonight’s show, isn’t that right?”

“Gee, Carmichael, I don’t even need to respond. You seem to have all the answers.”

Carmichael said, “You two were roomies in college, weren’t you?”

“I believe those were his feet I always smelled, yes.”

“And you were the best man at his wedding, weren’t you?”

“Yes, and he was best man at three out of my four weddings, too. He would have been at my fourth but he came down with appendicitis, the lucky bastard.”

“He was lucky to have appendicitis?”

“I should have been so lucky,” Tobin said. “If I’d had some sort of affliction at the time, then I couldn’t have married my fourth: the woman who proved that Vassar girls are, in fact, descended from a strain of the hunter shark.”

“So maybe you’ll patch it up?”

Tobin leaned forward, eyes scanning the pinkish dying sky alight with scattered stars. A traffic chopper did figure eights or some goddamn thing above the silhouettes of office buildings.