Эд Горман: Murder Straight Up

An hour had passed since Kelly Ford and I had rushed from the coffee room into the news studio, where we had found three horrified members of the newsteam standing over the slumped body of David Curtis. By the time we reached him, the silver spittle that had glistened around his mouth on the screen had turned into a genuine froth. Being a former policeman and all, I probably should have been able to guess what the cause of death was, but I’d never seen anything quite like this before.

By now the studio was packed with bodies, half dangling various forms of official identification from sport jacket pockets, the other half wiping tears from eyes or shaking heads disconsolately.

Edelman said, “I want you to tell me about the intruder again.”

We were standing over by the news desk, which looked shabby compared to the image it made on camera, and Edelman was nodding to this or that piece of evidence that this or that detective had slipped into a clear plastic bag. This was how this particular conversation was going. A part of him would be nodding okay to his people, the other part would be listening to me.

So I told him about the kid. How he’d been hiding upstairs. How I’d trailed his muddy feet down to the first floor. How the muddy tracks had mysteriously stopped only a few feet from the staircase, then just as mysteriously gone back upstairs again. As if the kid had gotten scared all of a sudden and run back to the darkness and a safer hiding place. Then I told him how the kid had gotten away. It’s not the kind of thing an ex-cop likes to admit.

He patted my stomach. “Acting must be treating you well.” I had the beginnings of a gut. Just the beginnings.

“The wife and kids saw you in that commercial for that Guns and Ammo show. My kids said you looked just like Sylvester Stallone, except you’re shorter and look like you haven’t been out in the sun for a long time and look older.”

I grinned. “Other than that, I’m a dead ringer for him, huh?”

“Seriously, though, it going pretty good for you?”

“Pretty good. I’ve got the Guns and Ammo gig starting tomorrow.”

“Those assholes. I wouldn’t want to get that close to ’em. Afraid what I’d do.”

Maybe it’s because he resembles a big sheep dog, maybe it’s because he’s so obviously a Good Daddy kind of guy, but whenever Edelman gets mad, people make the mistake of thinking that he’s just talking, and that anybody this sweet of disposition couldn’t actually hurt anybody. Right. I’d once seen Edelman break a drunk’s jaw after the drunk had kneed him in the nuts with a kind of spectacular malice. Of course, typical of Edelman, he’d afterward gone to visit the guy several times in the county lockup, just to make sure he was all right.

Edelman’s objection to my gig at the Guns and Ammo show was simple. Cops don’t like the idea of citizens armed with grenade launchers and Uzis. You see, if the citizens go bad and need the weapons taken away, then it falls to the police officer to go do that little thing. Put police weaponry — even the stuff the SWAT guys pack — against some of the stuff people keep in their basements, and you’ll soon see just what peril the police are really in these days. Gun nuts are not a cop’s best friend.

Edelman said, “I’ve never seen one before.”

“What?” I’d lost track.

“Somebody killed by cyanide.”

The angle of his blue gaze was tilted to where David Curtis was sprawled across the news desk. Somebody had covered him with a wrinkled plastic bag.

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“Huh-uh. That’s what the silver stuff around his mouth was all about.”

“Cyanide,” I said. “That is really strange.”

“Sir,” a young cop said. “The medical examiner would like to speak to you a minute.”

“Sure,” Edelman said.

He turned away from us a moment. The young cop had no idea what was going on, but I knew. The nose again. When he turned around, he was flicking his forefinger against his thumb and there was a certain look of satisfaction in his eyes. “Talk to you in awhile,” he said to me, and strode off.

I found them in the lunchroom. Three of them and Kelly Ford, the consultant. Hanratty, the singing weatherman, had produced from somewhere a fifth of Cutty Sark, which he kept his hand on, pouring drinks with a kind of papal authority for whoever requested them.

There’s an old saw about how, at a funeral, the death you’re really mourning is your own. Maybe that explains the depth of our shock when someone we know goes violently. That’s what I saw in their faces now — a certain unreality, as if Curtis were going to pop up at any moment and announce that it was all a gag.

I went over and got a Pepsi from the machine. By the time I turned around, I saw that Mike Perry, the ex-NFL tackle now turned sports announcer, was being restrained by Hanratty from lunging at somebody. Since Perry was glaring at me, I assumed that I was the object of his considerable wrath.

One thing movies never convey very accurately about fistfights is the drunkenness that’s usually involved. Now, for instance. Ordinarily, Perry looks like one of those fading pieces of beefcake who spend a little too much time primping, the primping giving him an aura of desperation. The sunlamp tan, the enormous white teeth, the hooded black eyes, the gray-flecked curly hair — each was an element of a huge mannequin that at somewhere around forty was just beginning to show wrinkles. Football autumn was a long way behind him, but he obviously fought its loss with a kind of sad violence that he was unable to control.

Like now.

His eyes looked a little vague from booze, and his mouth was wet from spittle, and his necktie was askew. There was a jock madness loose in him, the kind that always leads star players to get booked for assault and battery during a night of drinking.

“C’mon, Mike, just sit down there,” Hanratty said. Then to me, “Why don’t you go somewhere, okay?”

“Yeah,” Perry said. “Go somewhere before I push your fucking face in.”

“Why don’t you cool out, Perry? He didn’t do anything.”

The speaker was Dev Robards, Channel 3’s co-anchor. An elegant gray-haired man who usually wore blue suits, he had been a local TV institution since I’d been in high school. He was still good, but it was obvious even to the viewers at home that he was gradually being relieved of most of his duties.

“That’s the point — he didn’t do anything, and that’s exactly how that kid got in here and poisoned Dave,” Perry snapped.

So that was it.

Whoever the kid was, he was already the number-one suspect. And it was my fault that he’d managed to get in the first place.

Kelly Ford stood up and came over and stood next to me. “I’m sorry,” she said. “They’re all a little overwrought.”

“Yeah.”

Then Hanratty, the singing weatherman, came up. He looked like the kind of guy you used to see on Lawrence Welk singing Nelson Eddy songs updated with a vaguely disco beat. He winked at me and touched my arm. “For what it’s worth” — and here he leaned in as if he were a doctor about to tell me something terrible — “we know you’re in no way responsible.”

“Gee, thanks.”

For just a moment his head kicked back. He was obviously wondering if my gratitude might not contain just a hint of sarcasm.

“We’re like a family, the whole newsteam,” he said, “just like a family.”

Kelly Ford stepped closer. “Thank you, Bill. Why don’t I talk with him now, all right?”

She was his mother. That was the sense I’d had of her the nights I’d worked here. You remember the very pretty yet somehow remote girl in grade school, the one with neat penmanship who always got As, the one who could have been a real beauty if she hadn’t been quite so square? I had the sense that this was the Kelly Ford story. This is what happened to all those girls later in life. “It’s going to be all right, Bill. We’re going to find out what happened and who did it, and it’s going to be all right.” If she hadn’t talked quite so quickly, and if there hadn’t been an unmistakable tremor in her voice, I might have had a bit more faith in her reassurance. She possessed one of those calming touches that seemed to have been dipped in miracle waters just recently. She used it on me now, steering me out the door before I could object.