Warren Murphy: Killing Time

Remo stood in silence. It was broken shortly by rude laughter! The fat lady beside him pressed the door back into place with a final whack, her sides shaking with mirth.

"Very funny," Remo said.

"I can tell you've never been here before. Hoo."

"Hoo, yourself. Who else is around?"

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"No one. Just me."

"The senator?"

"He's already at the farm. Mother's gone to join him."

"Mother?" Remo asked. "Who's mother?"

"The dizzy broad who just left. That's Mama. Ma­ter. Mommie Dearest. Mammy. The vine which has yielded the tender grape standing before you. Me."

Remo looked at the woman incredulously. She was easily twice the age of the cookie-eating doll who got into the limo. "You mean she's your stepmother or something," Remo said.

"My real mother, Bozo," she shouted. She scraped some dried egg off her coveralls with a filthy thumb­nail. "I guess I don't look much like a senator's daugh­ter," she said more somberly.

"Look," Remo said. "You can be anybody's daugh­ter you want to be." The world was full of hooples. "Just tell me where I can find-this person-Cecilia Spangler."

"Quit treating me like a fruitcake," she said, her hands resting on her vast hips. "The Spanglers have one daughter, and that's Cecilia, and that's me. But I don't care if you want to talk to me or not, because I'm not going to talk to you. So make like an egg and beat it."

Just then a black maid stepped into the vestibule. "Telephone for you, Miss Spangler."

"Tell whoever it is I'm busy. Tell them I'm dead. I don't care. Neither will they."

"Yes, Miss."

"Probably some charity looking for money. Nobody else calls me," she said.

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Remo looked back at the retreating figure of the maid. "Are you really Cecilia Spangler?"

"I told you who I was. Which is more than you've done. Remo who?"

"Remo Williams. A friend of a friend."

"Friend of whose?"

"Of yours," Remo lied.

"Can it, reporter. I don't have friends who have friends who look like you. Only mother has those friends. And they're all at the same place she is."

"Where's that?"

"Some fat farm or something," Cecilia said, waving the thought away. "She goes there every month. She claims that's how she and daddy stay so young. Big deal. I don't care how she looks. I don't care how I look. I know I'm a pig, and I don't care, see?" Her teeth were bared.

"Fine," Remo said placatingly. "You don't have to get nasty."

"Of course I have to get nasty. Wouldn't you be nasty if your mother looked like your daughter and you looked like everybody's fat maiden aunt?"

"I wouldn't know," Remo said. "I never thought about it." He tweaked her left earlobe. It was one of the 52 steps to sexual ecstasy Chiun had taught him. If anything made women talk, the left earlobe did it. "I'm not a reporter," he said softly, feeling her squirm beneath his touch. "But I've got to ask you some questions about the murder on your lawn last night."

"That feels wonderful," she said, shivering.

"The guy who got killed was the Secretary of the Navy. Did you know that?" He moved slowly toward the inside of her elbows. In the teachings of Sinanju, the rigid sequence of steps had to be followed pre-

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cisely. Each step slowly aroused the woman to the heights of physical pleasure, until she was broken and consumed and satisfied.

Remo had pleasured many women for many pur­poses. Not all of the women had been desirable, and his purposes were rarely spurred by his own desire. But women always performed the way he expected them to under the guidance of his skillful hands. They took the pleasure he gave them, and in return they of­fered him whatever he needed-information, time, complicity.

He hated it. Love was never a question. Neither was pleasure, for Remo. He had ceased deriving pleasure from the act long ago. It was just part of his job, along with watching women like Cecilia Spangler-hurt, long forgotten, ugly girls who were never touched with sincerity or affection and knew it and didn't care any more. Remo felt dirty.

"Of course I knew who he was. I was the one who called the FBI. Everybody else was too drunk. What are you doing to my elbow?"

"Tell me what you know about him. Ives. The Secre­tary of the Navy." Get it over with, he thought.

"Thornton Ives," she said quietly. "He was a nice man. ... He was old. He let himself get old. I liked that." A tear welled up in one eye and rolled down the side of her face. "Please," she said. "Please stop that."

Remo was genuinely surprised. "Why? Don't you like it?"

"Oh, I like it all right," she said. "But sooner or later you'll find out that I don't know anything, and then you'll get mad and call me a fat pig. That's what re­porters usually do with me."

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"I told you, I'm not a reporter," Remo said, exasper­ated. He took her hand. "And I wouldn't do that to you."

She squeezed her eyes shut. "I don't Know any­thing about the murder. I don't know who, I don't know why, I don't know anything except where, because it was in my front yard, and I wanted to keep things quiet because Admiral lves was the only one of Mother's and Daddy's friends who didn't treat me like I was an embarrassment to the family." She stood up and paced around the room, looking like a miserable, shaggy farm animal.

"I was never even invited to their parties, here in my own house. Mother was so afraid somebody would take a look at me and figure out that she's fifty-eight years old. But Admiral !ves didn't care. He could have stayed young. He had the money. But he didn't. He was normal He was the only normal person who ever came to this zoo."

She turned to Remo in a rage. "So don't waste your time seducing me. It won't be worth it."

"You're pretty sharp, aren't you?"

She sat down next to him, her red-rimmed eyes sul­len. Slowly they kindled with the beginnings of a smile. "It was a pretty ridiculous pretense, acting like you wanted me." , "I'm sorry, Cecilia," Remo said.

"it's all right. It's been done before. And my pride isn't holding me back or anything." She laughed softly. "What pride? I'll take anything I can get, usu­ally. But not over this. Thornton Ives was worth more to me than a quick feel. Although I must say you're aw­fully good at it."

Remo smiled.

"You think I'm crazy, don't you?"

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"No," he said softly. "I don't. I think you're less crazy than your mother, for what that's worth. And I think you have more pride than you give yourself credit for."

Cecilia blew her nose into a used Kleenex from her pocket. "You're all right, too. Too bad you're a re­porter."

"Once and for all, I'm not a reporter. I can't tell you who I work for. All I can say is that there are no po­lice on this case, so if you don't help me out, we're all going to lose a lot of time. It's too bad that Ives is dead, but we're dealing with more than just one mur­der."

"Two," Cecilia said. "The Secretary of the Air Force bought the farm yesterday."

"Okay. And you didn't call the FBI instead of the cops just because you forgot the precinct phone num­ber."

She looked at Remo for a long moment. "You really on our side?" she asked.

"I am. Will you help me?"

She shrugged. "If I can. What do you want?"

"A guest list. From the party last night."

"There's one in the library. I'll get it for you."

The list contained more than a hundred names. "Any idea where I should start?"

"It won't take long. Most of the people on that list won't be at home, anyway. They're all over at the fat farm with Mother and Daddy."

"Where's that?"

"I couldn't tell you. I was never invited there. It's not important, anyway. Just some clinic in Pennsylvania, like the ones in Switzerland, only closer. Mud baths, tonic, carrots for dinner, that kind of thing. That's what Mother tells me, anyway."