Эд Горман - Murder Straight Up

“And David Curtis?”

“Well, he just stood there as if he were stunned. For a long time. Then he drove off, too.”

I went to another page in my notebook. I wanted to signal Mrs. Weldon that things had to move along quickly. I’d driven over here more or less impulsively, thinking I had time to work in this appointment before I was to meet Kelly Ford at The Pirate’s Perch.

“How about the second incident?”

“Oh, yes, right.”

I poised my pencil again. I was getting good at this stuff.

“That involved Perry, Mike Perry.”

“The sports announcer?”

“Yes.”

I wrote his name down.

“In the lobby three nights ago they got into a terrible shouting match.”

“Curtis and Perry?”

She nodded.

“You wouldn’t happen to know why, would you?”

“A woman. Perry’s woman. Marcie Grant. A real beauty. Anyway, it was about her.”

“She had been seeing Curtis, I take it?”

She flushed, laughed. “Eventually, they all saw Curtis. He was quite the ladies’ man.” Her laughter told me that she was fascinated and repelled by the man at the same time.

“I see. How did that end?”

“With Perry stalking off. Very angrily. A few minutes later I heard a crash. Perry had put something through David’s windshield.”

I dutifully wrote that down.

“I warned David about these incidents, of course. We have a very pleasant type of people here. They’re not used to violence of any kind.”

I nodded. “Can you think of anything else, Mrs. Weldon? I mean, you’ve been very helpful and I hate to push you, but—”

“Not really. Except she came up the other night, late, and there was a little bit of a scene.”

“Who?”

“Marcie Grant.”

“What kind of scene?”

“Spurned-lover things. You know. She slammed his door and he ran after her down the hall and then he finally just let her walk out.”

“Nothing else?”

“No. I’m sorry he’s dead — he was a decent young man over all — but I was afraid I was going to have to evict him anyway.”

“All the trouble lately?”

“Yes.”

I stood up, we shook hands and before I got to the door, she was back to waving at elderly people on their way to the snug confines of Cadillacs and Continentals and Mercedes-Benzes.

When I opened the door, she said, “There was one thing about him living here, though.”

“What’s that?”

“He was a celebrity, and whenever I told prospective tenants about him, they seemed impressed.”

That didn’t seem to say a whole hell of a lot for her prospective tenants.

When you talk to very old theater people who grew up around here, they tell you about an opera house built in the 1880s and torn down just after WWII to make way for a boom in downtown building. The opera house was located on the east shore of the river that divides the city. When you look at the street now it is difficult to imagine the livery stables and the trolley car system and the mercantile agency you always see in pen-and-ink drawings of the early city. There remains one relic of the era, a two-story brick building that has seen any number of hopeful restauranteurs try but fail to make a living here. Its present owners call it The Pirate’s Perch. On the second floor you can look out stained-glass windows, and at dusk sometimes it is not difficult to imagine people stepping smartly from coaches in front of the opera house. But now the population is nearly a quarter-million and the industry runs to high-tech and there is not a lot of use for coaches or opera houses.

Now, at noon, the place was crowded with people too busy with gossip to notice the river that occasionally splashed the big windows at the rear of the place.

“Mind if I join you?”

I turned to see Dev Robards, looking today like a lord of the manor strolling his grounds outside Dublin. With his white hair tucked beneath a wool golfing cap, his broad shoulders pushed inside a Harris Tweed sport coat and his beard giving him a professorial air, he gave the impression of a wry superiority.

He came up to the bar, and when the man behind the counter saw him they exchanged a most curious glance, communicating something far too complicated for me to understand.

“What’ll it be today, Mr. Robards?”

“Oh, I think I’ll coast a little. Why don’t I have a ginger ale for starters.”

“Sounds like a very good idea, Mr. Robards.”

Robards smiled at the man, then turned back to me. Between the little exchange of dialogue and a good hard look at him in daylight, I saw his problem. He was sweating a lot, but it was more than heavy tweeds on a spring day; his fingers twitched, but it was more than nervous habit. All I had to see was how he gripped the glass of ginger ale the bartender set down to know that my suspicions were correct.

He sipped the stuff as if he knew it was going to taste very bad indeed, and then he said, “Good stuff, ginger ale.”

Christ on the cross couldn’t have looked much sadder.

I used to visit a buddy on a detox ward, and that’s how I knew the look in the eyes. It’s hope and horror at the same time — hope you can hold out against the hootch, horror that you’re not strong enough.

He put a smile on his face, but his eyes still had the haunted look. “I suppose I’m number one.”

“Number one?”

“Number-one suspect, of course. I had the most to gain from Curtis’s death.”

“Oh, I see.”

“You mean you hadn’t actually thought about me that way.”

“I suppose I had.”

He looked like hell, and I wanted to be away from him. I’d had an uncle like him, a Schlitz man who bumper-pooled and juke-boxed his life away in union bars until the Camels took his lungs and he held my hand there in the hospital, his woman long gone, and said, “I’m so fuckin’ scared, Jack, I’m so fuckin’ scared.” And I was scared watching him, just as I was scared now in the forlorn presence of Dev Robards. You don’t like people who remind you of how little you can do for anybody else.

I had to say something. I said, “So you were with Cronkite?”

He smiled sadly. “Oh, well, the station makes more of that than there really was to it. In 1952 I left Korea and got a job with CBS in New York, and one of my duties was to help Cronkite get ready for the forthcoming political conventions.”

He was right about the way the station played it. According to their commercials, Walter practically owed his career to Dev Robards.

“Of course,” he said, “that’s how news consultants have changed our lives.”

I was curious. “You don’t like Kelly Ford?”

He shrugged. “Oh, personally, I like Kelly a great deal. It’s just her job, how her employers make her treat news like show business. She works for Linda Swanson, you know.”

From what I knew of news consultants, he was right. They generally have two offices, one at their real place of employment, and an informal one at the TV station they’re assigned to, all so that they can know the daily problems better and offer more educated answers. That’s the theory, anyway.

As for Linda Swanson, she was legendary or notorious. You had your choice. She had turned happy news into an even more frenzied affair than it had been originally — goony byplay among the newsteam, stories that did not exceed one minute in length, and the depiction of a world that would have been too sweet even for Bambi. There was poverty and corruption and despair in this town, but not according to most reports on Channel 3. Instead of the homeless you saw roaming the streets, you got a guy in his suburban basement who had a big model-train layout. Instead of the chicken-shit goings-on in city politics, you got cheerleading tryouts at a local high school. Except during ratings periods, of course. That was when the mayor was questioned for his various insufficiencies, and that’s when stories such as the teenage suicide one came into being. Real news was good only when it got you ratings.