Эд Горман - Murder Straight Up

“Have you told this to the police?”

“Not yet. My friend Edelman hasn’t charged anybody, and I really don’t have anything to tell him so far.”

“But you sound like you don’t think it was the Tomlin boy.”

“I don’t know. That’s why I asked you to lunch. I wanted to ask you a few more questions.”

She laughed with great girly poise. “Gee, so much for romance.”

We let our eyes touch, and there amidst the clang and clatter of a noontime lunch, I prayed a lustful prayer that she felt at least a twinge of what I was feeling.

“What about the suicide? Do you think Curtis pushed things too far?”

She sighed. “I’m not sure what you mean by ‘too far.’ I really wasn’t involved in the story that closely. I originated the idea with the news staff — one thing consultants try to do is feed clients ideas — but a young woman named Marcie Grant was the actual producer.” She sighed again. “I do know that of the five teenagers who were interviewed, Stephen Chandler was the most volatile. David interviewed him three times, and two of those times Chandler tried to hit him. The other time Chandler broke down sobbing, saying that he didn’t want to live.”

I’d heard my own teenage son sob a few times. You never forget the sound.

“There’s a scientific theory that states that sometimes, when you observe certain things, you alter them — just by looking at them. Maybe that’s what we’re talking about here,” she said.

“You mean just by focusing on Chandler’s past suicide attempts, Curtis brought it on?”

She nodded. “Yes. Nothing evil on his part. He just asked questions that made the boy relive certain things in his life. And the memories were so bad, the boy killed himself.”

Of course, there would never be a definitive answer about that. Lots of sad kids killed themselves in this country. It was becoming a chronic problem. The kid next door with the freckles and the nice suburban parents and the secret terrors. One day he’s mowing the lawn, next day his inscrutable altar-boy face is peering out of a casket. The only difference in the Chandler boy’s case was that he didn’t have parents. The only people who mourned him were the scruffy kids of Falworthy House, strong suicide candidates themselves, particularly with a fading, bitter flower child like Karl-with-a- K Eler as their leader.

“You think I could talk to Marcie Grant?”

“I’m sure you could,” she said. She lifted her beautiful chin to the bar. “She’s sitting over there.”

Marcie Grant was in her late twenties, blond in an almost intimidating way and surrounded by enough men to look like the star of a hair-spray commercial.

“It’s all right if you say wow or something,” she said.

“Not my type, actually.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought that Marcie was every man’s type. She’s really beautiful.”

“I like women with a little more dignity.”

She laughed. “Boy, that’s a new one. Dignity.”

“Really. Women who carry themselves with a certain grace.”

“Ingrid Bergman.”

“You’re really shrewd. Ingrid Bergman exactly.”

“Well, I suppose Marcie doesn’t have that.” Then she smiled again. “But that’s all she doesn’t have.”

“You know anybody who drives a black XKE?”

“Are we back to questions about the murder?” I nodded.

“No, I don’t,” she said.

I decided to ask her about Curtis’s landlady’s story of Curtis and sports announcer Mike Perry arguing. “Aren’t Marcie Grant and Mike Perry involved?”

“Does this have anything to do with a black XKE?”

“Maybe.”

“You really jump around when you question people. These aren’t trick questions or anything, are they?”

I smiled. “Not that I know of.”

“Good. Because I’ve never been good at trick questions. I could never even figure out riddles.”

“I just want to know about Marcie Grant and Mike Perry.”

“It’s difficult to keep track. They have a very mercurial relationship. Off and on all the time. But right now, no.”

“Not that I know of.”

“Were you aware that she was seeing David Curtis?”

“There’s no way to say this without seeming catty, but Marcie has a genuine appetite for sex and men, men of all types. So, to answer your question, no I wasn’t aware that she was seeing David, but it doesn’t surprise me.”

“How about Curtis himself?”

For some reason her cheeks flushed slightly. “What about him?”

“What was he like?” The blood remained, tiny roses on her cheeks. I said, “You’re blushing.”

“You could be a gentleman and not point that out.”

Her putdown was worse than a slap and well deserved.

“Now you’re blushing,” she said.

“You had an affair with him?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t call it an affair. We never went to bed or anything. It was more like a high school flirtation. We even left notes for each other. He was intriguing, I’ll say that for him. I was hoping he’d get my mind off somebody else I’d been seeing for a long time but, unfortunately, he didn’t. He got bored when he realized that I wasn’t going to sleep with him. I’m afraid I’m really a very foolish woman. Fortunately for me, I was already brokenhearted when I began seeing him, so he couldn’t really get to me.”

I reached over and touched her hand, and then she smiled with the brilliance of at least a minor sun.

“Thanks,” she said. “That was exactly the right thing to do.”

“So he wasn’t exactly a wonderful guy, huh?”

“No. He was ambitious, successful, polished, but he wasn’t wonderful.” She laughed. “Definitely not wonderful.”

The pirate captain came back then and told us all about dessert, which we both declined.

She put her head on her palm and looked toward the sky showing in the long rear window. “It’s such a perfect day. I wish I didn’t have to go back to the office.”

“I know what you mean.”

“I didn’t sleep well last night.”

I yawned, as if in sympathy. “Murder has that effect on people.”

“It wasn’t just the murder. I’m also concerned about files being taken from my office last week.”

“Right. You were going to tell me about that.”

“Nothing much to say, really. I came to work one morning and several key research files were gone.”

“Who would have an interest in taking them?”

“Newspeople who were concerned about their jobs, wanting to see how well they tested during phone interviews with viewers.”

That interested me. “Were there any big losers?”

She frowned. “That’s why we’re all nervous around my office. The whole team except for David looks pretty bad. Especially Dev Robards. Then there was one other file, the one that outlined all the changes we’d be making in the next six months. Our competition would love to get their hands on it.”

“You think they’d go that far?”

She put out a slender wrist and slender hand and picked up a water glass. “Sure they would. It would be very valuable information. You know how competitive news operations are. If they got ahold of such a file, they’d know how to play against us perfectly.”

“No ideas about who took it?”

She shook her head.

“No idea.”

Suddenly there was the same half-shocked look I’d seen on her face when Robert Fitzgerald appeared last night. Now the expression was back and so was Fitzgerald. I had the sense that I didn’t need to ask whom she’d been heartbroken over before David Curtis had come into her life. The only people who can inspire the expression Fitzgerald did in her are people who’ve had at your heart with a can opener.