"Michael, I'm not lying to you," she said. She had some more coffee, then continued. "Something's been going on the past four months between Denny and Ron and Merle Wickes. Something-I'm not sure what. All I know is that one night the three of them got into a terrible argument and Ron took a swing at Denny. This was in a bar. Things got so bad the bartender threatened to call the police. Nice publicity for the agency, huh?"
"But you don't know what they were arguing about?"
"No. I really don't."
I thought of the photograph Stokes had taken of the person he claimed was the murderer. I wondered if Ron Gettig was going to pick up that photograph this afternoon…
"Where does Merle Wickes fit in all this?" I said.
"I'm not sure." She laughed. There was a certain malice in her tone. "Merle Wickes. He's almost pathetic. If he weren't so sad, I mean. He's got such a nice wife and here-" Then she caught herself and laughed again. This time the malice was aimed at herself. "And I've got such a nice husband, right?"
"Yeah, Sarah. He is nice. Damned nice."
She finished her coffee, set it down. "So yesterday, anyway, Ron had me help him look for a box. He said it was about the size of a shoe box. He wouldn't tell me what was in it. At the time I was still wrapped up enough in our sleazy little affair that helping him out sounded like the natural thing to do. Right now, all I want to do is get things back to where they were with my husband."
"Does he know?"
The tears were back. "I think he does, yes. I think he has known the past several months. But whenever he looks at me what I see in his eyes is a kind of pity-not anger or hatred or betrayal. Just pity-as if I don't know what I'm doing and managing to hurt both of us in the process. It's kind of the way he looked at me the night I had our first child-the pity, I mean, the love in that kind of pity. It's understanding, really, not just feeling sorry for somebody. Oh, Christ-" Now she broke down a bit more and gasped a couple times, gasped the dry, clutching reach for tears that won't quite come. There was something ancient in her voice and the way her body bent just now-a middle-aged woman resenting the girl she'd let herself foolishly be. "You got a damn hankie, Michael?" she said when she was finished.
I handed her my handkerchief.
Then I handed her the newspaper clipping.
"What's this?"
"I don't know," I said. "I was hoping maybe you could tell me."
She read it. Shrugged. "I don't have a clue."
"Neither do I." Then I explained how, after she and Gettig had left Denny's office yesterday, I'd found it in a drawer. "I don't know," she said.
I glanced at my watch. Smiled. "Don't you think it's time you got back to work?"
"But I told you-" she said.
"All you told me is that you're uncomfortable working around Gettig. And I've already told you that problem is about to be taken care of." I pointed to the door. "Now get back out there before I have to start acting like a boss."
Now it was her turn to smile. "I always was a sucker for taking orders." At the door she turned and said, "Thanks, Michael."
THIRTEEN
I spent the next hour feeling a tad of respect for my much-maligned dead partner.
In advertising agencies, it seems, almost nobody gets along. Bosses and supervisors spend nearly as much time refereeing petty squabbles as they do trying to politic their way up the executive ladder. Rivalries are almost as commonplace as adultery. Almost.
For the next sixty minutes, a dozen people, some in couples, some individually, trooped through my office voicing complaints about co-workers. Usually the complaints had to do with turf. One art director didn't like copywriters who went directly to artists without consulting him first. One copywriter wanted to be taken off an account because it wasn't "creative" anymore what with the money-oriented new account exec running it-God forbid we make money. Then there was the paste-up person who wanted to know why he couldn't jog for two hours over his lunch hour-the extra time bound to make him a better worker. Right.
So it went-and that's why I felt some respect for my ex-partner.
Denny Harris had always relieved me of this pain-in-the-executive-butt part of the job. Denny was famous for listening to everybody's complaint, then promptly and forever doing nothing about it. Denny, out of laziness maybe, or maybe even out of real wisdom, believed that if you let things slide along enough they somehow took care of themselves.
I didn't have the stomach for that. My taint was to be combative, as several disappointed-looking people this morning would tell you.
During the last few complaints, my mind started to wander to the manila envelope I had in my car.
I was still in shock that the private detective I'd hired had turned out to be a blackmailer. Stokes made me feel naive- as if, for all my romantic disillusionment and bitterness, I were some kind of kid. Denny's murder had been shattering enough, but the idea that Stokes was going to feed on Denny vampire-like was even more mind-boggling than the murder.
Which, of course, turned the whole situation right back on me.
Despite the fact that I could tell the police that both the Traynors had been at the murder scene, I did nothing. I was going to save the account-run it up the flagpole and salute my ass off. Which is not the kind of self-image a guy-at least this guy-likes to have of himself. But it was the only way to keep on feeding my family.
The only hope I could see was the newspaper clipping I'd taken from Denny's desk. But I had no idea why he'd kept it-the chances were good that it had absolutely nothing to do with the murder.
***
This time Sarah Anders didn't scream. All Sarah managed to do, on hearing, was faint.
This time it was one of the women from the copy department who told me. A curt knock on my door moments after my last interviewee of the morning, then: "Mr. Ketchum."
"Yes?"
"You, uh, you better go to the screening room, Mr. Ketchum."
"What's wrong?"
"It's Mr. Gettig."
"What about him?"
"He's dead, Mr. Ketchum. He's dead.”
***
Gettig had been sitting in the darkened screening room looking at outtakes on a videotape machine. Because it was video instead of motion picture, he hadn't needed a projectionist. He'd been alone. Somebody had come in. Down the dark aisle. Apparently very quietly. Put something around his neck and pulled. Very, very hard. In the ugly harsh overhead light, Gettig's neck was a mess, black, blue, yellow, almost amber where blood had bruised along tendons.
He was also a mess in other ways. When you strangle somebody, you not only kill them, you make sure you've humiliated them for whoever has the misfortune to find them. The bowels, you know.
Somebody called the police and somebody else called an ambulance. I wanted to call my travel agent and go someplace. Fast. Far.
Ab Levin put a hand on my shoulder as I turned away from the corpse. He said, "Somebody must hate us, Michael."
At that moment, I didn't understand the significance of what he said. I only nodded dumb agreement. I would have nodded similarly if he'd said that Richard Nixon was a great guy. I'd become a stunned, docile animal.
Around the entrance of the screening room a small crowd had gathered, standing on tippy-toes to peer in, like scared children at a circus tent promising sinister doings inside.
Ab Levin was close on my heels, joining me as I moved down the corridor toward my office.
"You got any idea what's going on, Michael?"
"None. Not a goddamned clue."
He put a fatherly hand on my shoulder. "I shouldn't have bothered you earlier this morning."
"Bothered me?" I said, not understanding what he was talking about.
"You know, about the security-our jobs now that Denny is dead."
"Hell," I said, "that's a natural human reaction."
He shrugged, veered off for his own corridor. "Yeah, I suppose. Take care, Michael.”
***
He must have been waiting around the corner for the call, because by the time I crossed my threshold and started for my desk, he was there.
He wore his trench coat again-apparently not bothered by the slight melodramatic flourish it gave to his job as a detective-and exuded the same working-class energy that said he'd probably be happier unloading trucks than all gussied up in a suit and tie. He had his faults, Detective Bonnell did, but there was something straightforward about him that I liked. Or would have liked, if necessity hadn't made me see him as the enemy.
"You're having a bad week, Mr. Ketchum," he said.
"I'm not," I said. "But Denny Harris and Ron Gettig are."
He shook his head. There was something believable about his moment of melancholy. Seeing the kind of human beings he did, and seeing the messes they got themselves in, his melancholy was probably a very civilized reaction.
I went around and sat down and nodded for him to take a chair.
He held up a halting hand. "I've got to join my people in the-screening room is it called?-give them a hand." His gaze held on me a long moment. He was assessing me.
"I've got an alibi for sure this time," I said.
"I know. I've checked. Otherwise things wouldn't look too good for you. From the little checking I've been able to do, I understand you and Gettig almost got into a fist fight the other day."
"Almost is a long way from actually happening."
His gaze hadn't lowered yet. "Sometimes it is, Mr. Ketchum." He waited just the right number of beats-he had good actorly instincts-and then he said, "What's going on up here, Mr. Ketchum?"
"Going on?"
"There's a good probability the murders are related. It would be damned weird if they weren't. So-what's going on?"
"I don't know."
"You're sure of that?"
He almost seemed to be smiling.
"Yeah, I'm sure." I glanced at my wristwatch. Remembered the manila envelope. The delivery. "I have an appointment. Across town. If you don't need me-"
He shrugged. "I'm sure we can handle it, Mr. Ketchum." The pause again. "Do you have any idea who might have killed Gettig?"
"Not really, no." I did, of course. Sarah Anders. Or Sarah's husband-if he'd somehow managed to find out.
He started watching me again. I suppose I don't have the self-confidence needed to take that kind of thing. I could feel tiny beads of sweat start in my armpits.
Then he laid the bomb on me, the one he'd been waiting to deliver, like a terrorist to the heart of an unsuspecting building.
"You know Clay Traynor's wife, Cindy?" he asked. "A bit. I mean, I see her at agency parties."
"Did she know Denny?"
"Sure."
"The same way she knows you? Seeing you at parties?" The mocking edge had returned to his voice. "Yeah, basically, I guess."
"Then she wouldn't have known him any better than she knows you?"
I sighed. "What is it you're trying to say?"
"Cindy Traynor drives a green Mercedes coupe. I know that because Denny Harris's closest neighbor-maybe half a mile away-remembers seeing a green Mercedes coupe heading for Harris's at dusk. The neighbor was strolling."
"There must be lots of green Mercedes coupes."
"Yeah, but probably not many with the license prefix C-I-N."
This was how it always happens in the movies. Apparently it happens that way in real life, too.
Cindy Traynor was going to get nabbed for the murder of Denny Harris. Clay Traynor was going to find out that his wife had had an affair with Denny.
I was going to lose Clay's account-Cindy might go to prison-and all the while Stokes, the private detective, knew who the real killer was.
"You look nervous, Mr. Ketchum," Bonnell said.
"I'm late," I said, grabbing my briefcase.
And I was-late to do anybody any damned good, including myself.
FOURTEEN
On my way over to the park Ron Gettig's face stayed in my vision. I wasn't much good at this death business. Apparently I wasn't much good at hating, either. Now that Gettig was dead, our dislike of each other seemed petty and silly. For the first time in the five or so years I'd known him, I found myself wondering about his family. All I knew was that he had a wife and daughter downstate someplace. The poor bastard.
I grew up on pop songs about lost summers and early autumns. The city park I looked at now could inspire a whole generation of songwriters-the last red-and-gold leaves tearing away from the otherwise naked trees, the river running through the park peaked with icy-looking waves, the zoo section of the park now just empty cages, the pavilions stacked high with tables and chairs. There was something lonely about all this, you could almost hear the lost laughter of lovers on the bitter wind-but, there, I was writing my own early autumn song.
The duck pond, which I'd expected to be deserted on a snow-promising day like this one, was ringed with maybe half-a-dozen people, all of them looking to be over fifty, tossing bread bits to the ducks that swam by on the other side of the fence. They fed the animals despite a large sign instructing them not to under threat of fine or even imprisonment. The people seemed as imperturbable as the ducks, which, given my mood, buoyed me for a moment. I'm always happy to see people do the right thing despite idiotic laws.