“He must’ve been somebody,” a detective named Dick Malachie said an hour later. The he he had in mind had just been loaded onto a gurney and could now be distinguished only as a lumpy shape inside a shiny black body bag. Two ambulance attendants, obviously bored with the scene, waited impatiently for Malachie to give the word.
“I count four different stations out there,” Malachie said, parting the curtains. “And that’s just the TV people.” He offered the dozen or so people in the room— lab men, several lower-grade detectives, a doctor from the ME’s office, and a lawyer from the County Attorney—something resembling a smile. “I hope wherever Mr. Elliot is at the moment, he appreciates the fact that everybody’s making a big fuss over him.” Malachie, a tall, slender man with dirty-gray hair and a beagle face, shrugged his shoulders and looked at me. “What did this guy do, anyway?”
“Advertising whiz.”
“I guess I don’t know what that means.”
“He was creative director at an advertising agency. Before he got there, the place was almost out of business. He turned everything around.”
“A hero.”
“Sort of, I guess.”
“The press must have known who he was.” He nodded toward the street again. “The mayor getting shot wouldn’t turn out this many people.”
Edelman laughed. “The mayor getting shot would turn out twice as many. Give the people what they want and they’ll show up every time.”
Malachie, who wore Hush Puppies and a plastic pen-and-pencil holder in his shirt pocket, came over and tapped a ballpoint against the evidence bag that held the .45 Edelman had turned over to him.
The gun lay on a marble-topped gilt-wood center table worth many thousands of dollars. Over the past four years I’d worked several security gigs at antiques shows and had gotten to know something about their value. The table was indicative of the entire house—a modern Tudor tucked into a three-acre lot on the south edge of the city, just where the resort area began. It was a rich man’s house, with several expensive Chagall prints on the walls and real Persian rugs on the floors. Outside were a BMW and a Porsche in the three-stall garage. I thought of the months Jane had lived here—a star-struck girl in the clutches of a legend.
“You knew the guy?” Malachie asked me, still prodding the .45 with the ballpoint.
“Knew of him.”
“But you know the chick.”
“Woman, I think you mean.”
He looked up at me sharply, as if I had betrayed some bond between us.
“Oh, yeah, right,” he said, “woman.”
“I know her. Yes.”
“She called you, Edelman said.”
“Yes.”
“What time was this?”
“Eleven-o-three. I looked at my watch.”
“What did she say?”
“Not much of anything. She could barely talk.”
“She must’ve said something.”
“She just asked me to meet her in the park.”
“When was the last time you’d talked to her?”
“Over a year ago.”
“Kind of strange she’d call you, isn’t it?” He wasn’t being hostile. He just had a cop’s curiosity.
“I suppose she remembered I’d been on the force.”
“Edelman tells me you’re an actor now.”
“Sort of, I suppose.”
“Kind of like that Eddie Egan in The French Connection, huh? He was a cop, too.”
I smiled. “He’s doing a little better than I am.”
He shook his head. “Boy, I don’t think that guy can act worth shit.” Then he looked at me directly. “What did she tell you in the park?”
I told him exactly what she said, knowing that I was probably helping convict her. I told him about her “he’s dead” statement and about the gun she’d held. I wondered if, subconsciously, I wasn’t paying her back for the grief she’d caused me. But I doubted it. I had grown up believing in telling the truth, and that’s how I’d conducted myself as a police officer. It wouldn’t be like me to lie now. In most respects I was doomed to being a fucking boy scout.
When I was finished, I could see the case closing in his eyes.
He had the body not ten feet away, the murder weapon at hand, and his killer in a hospital within ten minutes’ drive. He had an appreciation for my condition—he wasn’t doing any macho numbers or acting delighted—but he was quietly happy that he would not have to go through all the tedium and disappointment of a murder investigation. Despite the way they are made to appear on TV, homicide cases are generally dull stuff.
From the front door a shocked male voice said, “I’ve got every goddamn right to be here. Now stand aside!”
I turned to see an elegant-looking man in a three-piece blue suit that must have cost what I make in a year try to push past the uniformed officer at the door. The man was no more than five-nine and he was probably in his late fifties, early sixties, but his tanned, handsome face and his well-kept body gave him an intimidating presence.
I knew who the man was, of course. Bryce Hammond, the president of Hammond Advertising, where Jane worked, and where Stephen Elliot had been creative director.
Malachie, irritated that Hammond was being so pushy, started over to the man, angry already. I was a step ahead of him, walking over to Hammond and pushing out my hand. “Hello, Bryce, how are you?”
Hammond recognized me; we’d gotten along in a weird sort of way at all the office functions I’d gone to during my tenure with Jane. He just seemed shocked and a little confused that I was here.
“Jack—is Stephen—?”
I nodded. Then I pointed to the body bag.
Hammond glanced at the plastic shaping itself to the dead corpse, then back at me. “But—” Nothing coherent came from his lips for at least another three minutes.
Malachie came up to introduce himself. I did most of the talking for Hammond, explaining who he was and why he was here. Hammond managed to say that he had called Elliot’s home half an hour earlier, trying to find Stephen, when a policeman answered. The uniformed cop nodded that, yes, he had taken such a call. Hammond looked back toward the gurney. “God, Jack, what the hell happened? Where’s Jane?”
Malachie took that moment to nod toward the ambulance attendants. They looked eager, fighters waiting for the bell. They moved out immediately.
Malachie said, “Why don’t you buy Mr. Hammond some coffee someplace, Jack?”
“Good idea,” I said. I nodded to Bryce Hammond. Malachie put out his hand and touched Hammond respectfully on the elbow. “I’ll call you tonight or tomorrow, Mr. Hammond. I need to ask you some questions about the lady involved and about Mr. Elliot’s life lately.”
“Of course. Yes. Certainly. Perfectly all right.” Bryce Hammond was babbling in disbelief. He still hadn’t gotten a handle on things.
“Now why don’t you go with Jack here? All right?” Malachie said.
From across the room Edelman gave me a friendly wave and I waved back. There really were times I missed the force. For all the bullshit, there is a camaraderie that becomes a part of you. You don’t find a lot of that in store security work or in auditions where thirty people are vying for the same part.