THINGS COULD HAVE BEEN WORSE.
The flight to Rome could have been hijacked by the Libyans or the Iranians or the PLO and we could have been left to sit on a wasted corner of tarmac somewhere with the air-conditioning off and a bad-smelling guy shoving an attack rifle up our noses. Or a bomb could have blown us into bits scattering over the Mediterranean. Or we could have been forced to eat the in-flight lunch. None of these things happened, however, so in the larger sense, I was a pretty lucky guy. But you know how it is—it’s always something. Now I had to face the fact that my sleeping companion, my fellow Hardy Boy, my partner in the enterprise was lying to me, playing yet another game, covering up yet another bundle of secrets. This particular bundle was the rumpled, dandruff-dusted creature of the darkness, Morris Fleury.
He seemed at times, in my analytical moments, to have been grafted onto the story, but most of the time I had the uneasy feeling that when it all played out he’d be somewhere near its center doing a Harry Lime on me. Everybody lied about this guy. Nobody admitted knowing him, as if he were the doubtful guest no one wanted to admit inviting. But there was Cotter Whitney, tycoon, communing with him on the dock in the moonlight. There he was in Sally Feinman’s apartment keeping company with her burned and defiled corpse. There he was smoking his pipe, waiting for me in the darkness of my own apartment, waiting to tell me that Sally was betraying me, had a file on me … And now Heidi had lied to me about him. His very existence seemed to drive people to falsehood.
Why was Heidi lying to me? What did she know that I shouldn’t? What kind of doofus guy was I? Weren’t we on the same side, after all?
Who was Fleury working for? Why had he too gone from Cotter Whitney’s estate in Minnesota to Tangier? Was he supposed to be keeping track of me? Or, if he worked for Whitney—which certainly seemed the best bet—maybe he was watching Heidi and me, since we were creatures of Sam Innis/Bechtol. But would Fleury be meeting on the sly with Heidi, then? Not if he was spying on her … unless he was double-crossing his employer …
You see where this kind of thinking can get a chap.
But my head was throbbing anyway. I decided never again to hit my head repeatedly against a wall. And the more I thought about Heidi Dillinger and Morris Fleury in the street below my window, the worse my headache got. It’s always unnerving when you find out unpleasant truths about somebody with whom you’re sleeping … about somebody you trust.
I was in a lousy mood and on my guard when we got to the Hassler in Rome and fell into Sam Innis’s clutches. Heidi must have noticed what a churl I was being, but maybe she’d decided to attribute it to my overall performance in Tangier and the inevitable psychological hangover. There were messages waiting for us at the desk. There was a room reservation in my name, none for Heidi. Innis wanted her to report at once to his suite. I was to settle into my room. “Have a shower and a drink, pussycat,” Innis’s handwritten note suggested.
Easily led, as always, I did as I was told, only I didn’t like showering on my stitches, which I couldn’t quite ignore, though; in fact, they were pretty well hidden by my hair. So I sank into a tub and let the hot water soak out the aches and pains of my drunken Moroccan exploits. The sight of Sally Feinman in her tub, the smell of the scorched flesh flashed across my mind, but eventually that image gave way and my subconscious went ahead considering some of the elements of this entire JC Tripper affair. I found myself humming the plaintive, haunting tune to “Everything’s Hazy in Tangier,” wondering why it had been sent to Freddie Rosen and by whom—what did it mean? Why had Sally and Shadow had to die and how were they connected to the search for my brother? From behind closed eyes I saw the seaplane slowly and with a fine inevitability crashing into Cotter Whitney’s lake … I saw Bill Stryker rescuing the seat cushions with the cocaine packed inside and I tried to square that with the kind of man Whitney seemed to be and it just wouldn’t fit … I saw Heidi Dillinger picking me up so cleverly on Fifth Avenue with Mellow Yellow flicking the cards on the upturned cardboard box … I smelled the cherry tobacco in my darkened apartment, in the narrow stairway to Sally’s, floating in the heat near the boathouse … I tried to plot out in my mind the role of the Magna Group in all of it but it was hopeless; Magna was everywhere …
The telephone woke me up. Sam was ready to see me.
Three of them were waiting for me. I felt like a doctoral candidate about to screw up his orals. Sam Innis didn’t have the tape-recorded dark and stormy night to comfort him, but otherwise he wasn’t much different. He wore rumpled khaki pants and a short-sleeved bush shirt. The wiry hair on his heavy forearms matched the Brillo-pad beard. He wore Clark desert boots and his feet were crossed on the gilt coffee table. He spoke my name and waved me toward a gilt chair with a gold brocade cushion and back. It looked spindly. “You know Cotter,” he said, and Whitney, his round choirboy face in place, stood up and shook my hand. He wore a gray summer-weight pinstripe and smelled of Royall Lyme. “And this big one is my publisher, Hugo Ledbetter.” Ledbetter looked at least as large as he had the night I’d seen him pushing Eleanor Whitney’s wheelchair up the garden path. He’d exchanged the voluminous smock for a dark blue suit. His head, a fullish salt-and-pepper beard included, was about the size of a Rolls-Royce engine block. He was upwards of six and a half feet tall and must have gone well over three hundred pounds. When he stood, the room gave the illusion of lurching into a thirty-degree tilt. “Mr. Tripper,” he rumbled. His voice reminded me of either Orson Welles or God, depending. It was like shaking hands with the business end of a twenty-ton earth scoop. Heidi Dillinger was nowhere to be seen.
Sam Innis pointed to a tray of Diet Cokes and a bucket of ice. “The comforts of home. Wet your whistle, Lee. Tangier is thirsty work, I hear.”
“You have no idea how thirsty,” I said.
“Yes, we do. Heidi related your adventures in some detail. How’s your head, by the way?”
“Reminds me of the old days,” I said.
“Sorry to hear that.”
“I’ll survive.”
Innis nodded. “Well, what do you think, Lee? Is JC still alive?”
“I see no reason to think so. We certainly didn’t learn anything in Tangier to change my mind.”
Heidi had obviously told him something he wanted to hear—part of her job, I supposed, letting him down easily—and he insisted on nattering away about Tangier and Will Sasser and I kept watching his piercing little eyes that made me feel like I was being thumbtacked to a specimen board. So many years had passed between my sightings of Sam Innis, I had to keep remembering that I didn’t know this guy at all. And he sure as hell wasn’t my pal. The question now was whether or not he was my enemy. Heidi worked for Innis and she had lied to me, had known Morris Fleury after all. Did that mean Innis also knew Fleury? And if so, where did that put them when it came to the murder of Sally Feinman … which Morris Fleury knew all about? And may have committed, for all I knew. All my pent-up anxiety called for a Diet Coke.
I found myself in the preposterous situation of not daring to blurt out my questions for fear of what the answers might be. If the enemy—whatever that meant—was in the room, the worst thing I could do was alert him—or them—to the fact that I had peeked under the tent flap and had a glimpse of the freak show. Who was the enemy? Anybody lying to me? Or were they just trying to keep me out of extraneous matters? Why would anyone be my enemy, anyway? What had I done to them? At worst I was only the Judas goat intended to lure JC out somehow—and that was the worst scenario. But then there were JC’s enemies. And JC’s enemies were my enemies, weren’t they? There may have been more ways, simpler ways, to look at it, but we were stuck with mine. And I was both scared and confused, trying to hide it all.
Cotter Whitney screwed his round have-a-nice-day face into a mask of adult concern and edged forward in his chair. “There is a new development, Lee, that could be important. We’ve got to bring you in on it.”
I nodded, waited. Ledbetter was standing by the window, which looked out at the headquarters of the Order of the Sacred Heart and the Spanish Steps. He was humming, recognizably, the opening movement of the Elgar Cello Concerto.
Whitney continued in a slightly perplexed manner. “We seem to have heard from Mr. Thumper Gordon.”
“Seem?” Innis said sourly. He was scratching his beard, flaking dandruff onto his bush shirt. “Seem? Don’t be a pussy, Cotter—”
“Well, we can’t prove it actually came from Gordon,” Whitney said. He was all patience, which was undoubtedly his customary style in the face of crisis.
“We must proceed,” Innis snapped, “as if it did. Period.”
“Listen, the squabbling is fun,” I said, “but you girls don’t need me for it.”
“Careful, laddie,” Innis said, shaking a forefinger at me.
I stood. “Sam, old buddy, fuck yourself.” I reached the door at the same time his voice caught me, brought me back with a forced laugh and an apology. “You guys have got to relax,” I said. “It’s all a game. You know damn well JC’s dead. We’re all running around chasing our tails. You’re going to have to write a novel about a dead rock star, Sam.”
“We’ll see,” he said.
“Sometimes,” I said, coming back and sitting down, “I think none of this has anything to do with a novel. I think you’ve all been bullshitting me from Day One … I’m not complaining, it’s your money. But I wish you were all better liars. We’ve got bodies everywhere, we know it’s all connected to JC and Magna and who the hell knows what else … and you’ve got me out on the point. Frankly, though I think you’re mighty swell fellas, I’m getting a wee bit anxious.” They were all looking anywhere but at me. Not exactly forthcoming. I gave up. “So,” I said heartily, “how’s the old Thump?”
“He simply sent me a letter, postmarked London, asking me how Freddie Rosen and I like ‘Everything’s Hazy in Tangier.’ Obviously he’d sent it to Freddie. This letter came from Thumper or someone who knew about the song, anyway.” Whitney sighed wearily. “In other words, a player.”
“It’s a delicate kind of blackmail,” Innis interrupted.
“Doesn’t sound like Thump,” I said.
“I don’t give a shit what it sounds like to you.”
“Careful, laddie,” I said softly, waving a finger at him. “I’m right on the verge of shoving your money up your ass and taking a hike back to sanity.”
“The hell you are,” he said. He was smiling.
“Men, men,” Whitney said, “let’s stay calm. The point is, Lee, there is an element of blackmail, I’m afraid. Very discreet but—”
“If it walks like a duck,” Innis said, “quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck—”
“—but still earmarked by a threat. Mr. Gordon says he has in his possession many unpublished, unheard songs from JC’s final months. He sent us the one as evidence. Now he wants to make a deal with Magna for the songs—he incidentally claims co-authorship of many of them. He wants to make a publishing and recording deal with Magna … and he wants Magna to forgo all profits, instead forwarding the money to Thumper for music-therapy centers for disturbed children. I see you smile—may I ask why?”
“Because it’s beautiful,” I said. “He probably means it.”
“He brings you into it, too. An aspect of his plan which you may find less amusing. Of course, since you are JC’s legal heir, the royalties due JC would go to you … they would amount to a considerable sum. But Mr. Gordon guarantees that you would agree to contribute those royalties to his scheme … guarantees it.” Whitney paused, pursing his lips, giving me a long, liquid stare. “Tell us, Lee, has Mr. Gordon been in touch with you?” He looked as if someone he trusted had stolen his tricycle.
I was laughing, shaking my head no. “But I promise you, this guy is definitely Thumper. And you know what? He’s right. I’ll sign over the royalties to his project. No problem. Man, this is really sinister.” I couldn’t stop smiling.
“But may I ask you, speaking as a businessman,” Whitney said softly, “what’s in it for Magna?”
“I should think that’s obvious. It would be humiliating if someone else, some other label, did a new collection of JC’s stuff. Lousy for your image. And you can publicize what you’re doing … contributing your share of the proceeds to this worthwhile cause. Very good for your image. And if Thumper forms a new group, comes out of retirement, you’d have him and you could cut some deals with him there … and don’t try to make anybody believe that some twenty-five-year-old contract with JC is still in effect. Don’t even try that one. So, why not bite the bullet, drop him a friendly line, say you’ll throw him a party in LA the town will never forget—”
“Your sweet-natured innocence becomes you,” Whitney said. “But I’m persuaded that there is rather more to this than meets the eye.”
Innis was still digging for the mother lode in his beard. “You seriously believe this shit, Lee?”
“Why not?”
“Aw, Lee, gimme a break.”
“I don’t know why I should, actually. But, if you don’t believe it, what are you going to do about it?”
Innis shrugged.
“You’ve got to talk to him,” I said.
“Well, we can’t actually do that,” Whitney said. “He didn’t give us any way to get in touch with him. And he’s been out of sight for years.”
The conversation dribbled on and I learned that Heidi was already off somewhere doing Innis’s bidding and would meet me in Zurich, where we could have a chat with Clive Taillor. Innis made it clear that he believed JC was alive and we’d drive him out of his hole at any moment. I told him it was his money and his brainless faith and I’d keep playing. Whitney discreetly chewed a fingernail. Hugo Ledbetter didn’t say a damned thing.
There was, of course, something going on in that room about which I knew little or nothing. But it was thick and palpable and clung to all three of them as if they’d just waded through a lake of it up to their chins. I thought about it on the way back to my room and decided, all things considered, I didn’t want to know. Well, that was a lie. I did want to know. I just figured it wouldn’t bring me any peace of mind.
Propped up on the desk in my room was an envelope containing a ticket for Zurich and a hotel reservation. I lay down on the bed with all my unanswerable questions and spooky suspicions. I found myself wishing Heidi were there beside me and then I remembered I couldn’t talk to her anymore. Not until I figured out what she and Morris Fleury had in common. Which looked like forever at the rate I was going.
I was remembering Annie DeWinter, her thick straight black hair held in place by a brightly colored headband, her tiny breasts loose inside a fringed vest, high boots … My God, that had all been a long time ago. I was wondering what she looked like now, what her frames of reference were, what she’d experienced and learned and cried over and laughed at as two decades had passed. She was taking hold of my mind, digging in and holding on, just the way she had in the old days, when the telephone rang. The voice at the other end was so deep that it sent funny little vibrations bouncing around my eardrums. It was Hugo Ledbetter and he wanted to have dinner with me. He gave me an address in the Trastevere section, told me which bridge to cross, and suggested I leave the taxi before I crossed it. “I want to see you alone, Mr. Tripper. Very much alone.”
“You’re not sending me a corsage or chocolates, are you?”
“I’m sure your sense of humor is all the rage in your circle, Mr. Tripper, but it palls very quickly with me.”
“Then you’re not after my body, that’s definite?”
“You are nothing like my type, sir. This is business. You may discover that we have congruent interests. Be there at nine, Mr. Tripper, or I shall be put out with you.”
“Cotter Whitney is a hopeless twat, that’s the problem with the whole bloody thing. He knows frozen peas, he knows fast-food burgers, he knows a lot of things, but he hasn’t any idea what the entertainment business is about. Lord knows, neither do I but for publishing … which is why it’s so important that my new associate should know what he’s doing. Well, that’s what it boils down to, the residue, shall we say.”
Hugo Ledbetter was putting away his second pound of linguine with clam sauce, occasionally dabbing at the chunks of clam lodged in his beard. We were sitting at a wooden table in the back room of a family groceria, candles flickering on tabletops, dripping onto the sauce-stained cloth. Ledbetter was wearing a straw hat Van Gogh would have admired, a lavender smock, old corduroys, and heavy sandals. His hands were huge but twirled the pasta with practiced care. He drank his dago red with gusto, enjoying it all out of proportion to its quality, as if it were water. He looked like something from another world and sounded a lot like Darth Vader.
“Somebody is blackmailing Magna,” he said, “and it’s putting me off my stroke. Somebody. Your late brother? Thumper Gordon? How the devil should I know? I’m a publisher. A gentleman publisher, more or less, within limits. But I am not an idiot. I can smell it when somebody farts and this deal has got fart all over it.”
“Are you sure you’re not a writer?”
He shoved a great deal of warm crusty bread into the hole in the middle of his beard. Then he reached over to the plate of antipasti, then looked up at me, perplexed. “You’ve eaten all the anchovies.”
“Salty little bastards,” I said.
“Very disappointing.”
“It’s just the way life works sometimes.”
“Murder. Blackmail. What is going on? That’s a very difficult question to answer, Mr. Tripper. But I’m only interested in one small aspect of it—how it concerns me. And it concerns me only to the extent that I’m involved with this Magna deal. My firm has existed for more than a century without a huge parent company hovering hungrily over us. We can go on a while longer. Even if Allan Bechtol should leave us—say if Magna acquired a different publishing house, or simply started one—we would survive handsomely. Now there are certain advantages for us in merging, I don’t deny that for a moment, but they are far from essential. So when people start getting murdered, and my author is obviously either using or being used in a game I don’t understand, and then a dead rock star may or may not be dead but is certainly involved—then, Mr. Tripper, I smell a fart and when I smell a fart I grow lachrymose and peckish. I grow unhappy. I’ve officially told Whitney that I’m having second thoughts … and he’s upset. He wanted to bag the famous publisher, put his head up on the wall—he doesn’t want to fail, it’s that simple. He doesn’t like being told he’s on the verge of failure … Mr. Tripper, what the fuck is going on?”
“Very bad things,” I said.
“How perceptive,” he said between bites.
“I simply don’t know. But your instincts are probably pretty good. Somewhere in the maze we’re going to find drugs—”
“Oh, shit! I hate that!”
“—and murder and … what else? Name it, it’ll be there.”
“Why don’t you just bow out, then? Or do you want to find your brother?”
“I want to lay JC Tripper to rest once and for all. If I convince Innis—Bechtol—then I figure it’s a wrap. That’s why I’m in it. And for the money, of course. Not only for what Bechtol’s paying me but can you imagine what all this will do for JC’s record sales? I’m his heir … I can afford to give Thumper royalties on the new stuff. So mainly I want JC to die once and for all; I don’t want to find him.”
“You may have a problem, Mr. Tripper.”
“What’s that? On my own I can think of a handful, but what’s on your mind?”
“I’m quite sure that JC Tripper is alive.”
“Not bloody likely.”
“Ah, hear me out, you impetuous fellow. It all comes back to JC, when you think about it. Do you really believe this is all some peculiar coincidence? Hardly. No, I think it began with Cotter Whitney … and JC Tripper. For whatever reason, JC faked his death twenty years ago, went off to live the life he wanted, and then decided—again for reasons of his own, his motivations hardly matter—to hold Magna hostage. JC knows enough about Magna, whether it’s drugs or financial irregularities or something else, to scare them. He made contact with Whitney, he sent the song, he made his demands—and scared hell out of the little twat. But Whitney doesn’t know if it’s really JC or Thumper or just some nut. Or someone in between. So he goes to Bechtol with the idea for the novel about the phony death of the rock singer … Bechtol likes the idea, he went to school with you and JC, it all fits … and he makes contact with you, tells you about his idea for the novel, tells you enough about the background to get you interested. And … at the same time it all heats up around you, because real life, real murder, intrudes, and Sally Feinman is dead. It all comes together—JC, Bechtol, Sally Feinman, that disc jockey in Los Angeles, all of them have JC in common. And, lest we forget, they all have you in common, young sir …” He finished our second bottle of wine while I carved away at a giant veal chop. “My scenario answers the one relevant question—do you know what it is?” A third bottle of wine arrived and he poured both our glasses full.
“Which question is that?”
“Why are they so obsessed with finding JC? Why are they so desperate? Why not wait for him to find them? If they’re going to pay off, what’s the big hurry?” He grinned as if he were stashing secrets behind the heavy beard. “Because they’re so scared of what he’s holding over them—they can’t wait, they’ve got to seal off the element of chance. He’s toying with them and they can’t stand it. Whitney is having what they’d call in the vernacular a shit fit. They want to make a deal—”
“Don’t kid yourself,” I said. “If you’re right, they’ll kill him.”
“I’m not altogether sure that’s true.” He patted his mouth with his soiled napkin. You could have boiled it and made soup. “I’m not sure that they’re doing the killing. What if JC is quite sensibly afraid they will kill him? He might well kill people to keep from being found—it follows, doesn’t it? And he might kill the people with the best chance of finding him.” He leered at me from beneath wild, hairy eyebrows. “I’m naming no names, mind.”
“My brother is not a threat to my life.”
“Very loyal of you to say so. But you may be the one most likely to find him, just as Allan says. And, thus, the greatest danger.”
“My brother’s dead.”
“And regrettably so are others.” He grinned. “Someone is a liar here, someone is a scoundrel. More likely there are several liars and scoundrels, dangerous people. They all make me want to be somewhere else. But I’ve had the use of your ear quite long enough, Mr. Tripper. You’ve been very patient with me and my theories … but I must say I wanted you to be aware of the situation among Whitney, Bechtol, and me. It may or may not be of interest to you, but Whitney is very worried that I’ll forsake his deal because of all this unsavory whatnot … and he really is being held hostage, if not by your brother then by someone else. The danger is real, Mr. Tripper. That’s what I’m saying. Their motives are so baroque, so layered over with lies and denials and fear and greed, they no longer recognize what they were in the beginning. They have lost their way in a wilderness of fear, and such men are dangerous indeed. They have so much to lose. They want to protect what is theirs. And that applies to everyone.” His eyebrows rose and an impish smile formed itself behind the beard. “Even to you, Mr. Tripper. I’ve looked at all of you and you are in some ways the most mysterious of all. Let me in on your secret, Mr. Tripper.”
“I’m the only one telling the truth,” I lied.
He began to shake with thunderous mirth, which struck me in the instant as genuine. “Well, you’re all quite mad. What, I wonder, will happen next?”
I shrugged. “The suspense is killing me.”
That set him off again, his belly shaking the table between us.