Getting in took four good minutes with a wedge of flexible metal I had borrowed one time from a stoolie I’d known during my policeman days. Four cold minutes, thanks to the wind.
There was an official smell to Elliot’s house now, a residue of the chemicals the ME and the lab people had used during their investigation.
Even dark, the place was still ridiculously big and the antiques ostentatious. I didn’t know where to start so I elected the most obvious room, the library.
Fir branches scratched the windows behind the curtains, casting shadows like the fingers of dead men clawing at, me.
Twenty minutes later I had spread several curious items from his desk drawers on the floor and was looking at them with my flashlight.
`CULTURE’ IS NOT A DIRTY WORD
TO THIS AD MAN
Stephen Elliot, the thirty-nine-year-old creative director of Hammond Advertising, and the man many acknowledge as being the number-one advertising force in the city, is eager to tell you that he prefers classical music to rock, Ingmar Bergman to Alfred Hitchcock.
“I proudly admit to being a snob,” the darkly handsome ad man says. “If you watch my commercials carefully, you’ll see that I manage to work in a bit of classical music in each one—or even the image of a serious painter or two.”
Elliot cites his award-winning work for the I’m Chicken fast-food chain and the Go Fast car-rental agencies as examples. Both campaigns feature classical music motifs as part of their novelty.
Elliot is credited by many in the advertising community with having saved the Hammond shop from bankruptcy. When he joined the firm it had lost millions and was widely assumed to be on the brink of final collapse.
Elliot’s ideas, according to these insiders, turned Hammond’s fortunes around.
For all his brashness, Elliot is oddly reticent to discuss the things he’s done for Hammond. Of Bryce Hammond, the agency president, he says, “Bryce is one of the legends in our business. He’s brilliant.”
Elliot is as much in demand as his commercials. His messianic style, seductive and evangelical at the same time, has made him popular on the speaking circuit—and, many insist, the boudoir circuit as well.
Unwilling to speak about his past except with the vaguest of generalities, Elliot remains something of a mystery even to those who claim to know him well.
“I am my work,” he says passionately, a hint of anger in his voice. “I am the Picasso of my business--and that’s how I want to be judged. By my work and nothing else.”
If he weren’t being buried tomorrow, I would have laughed out loud, or at least smiled at his pretentiousness. But I was beginning to see that that was part of his mystique—his archness. Advertising people would love it—accustomed as they were to the boorishness the field seemed to promote. He looked good in a dinner jacket and muttered a few phrases of French and didn’t tell racist jokes over lunch. What more could you ask for?
The rest of the stuff in the drawers was mostly a collection of odds and ends, love letters written to him—fortunately for my ego, I didn’t find anything from Jane—innumerable tear sheets from newspapers and magazines with articles about how wonderful he’d been, a framed high-school graduation photo of himself, and finally one of those little cards that come attached to flowers. This one read: “To Buddy, who has taught me far more than I have taught him. All my love. Eve.” Then there was a high-school pennant that said “Grovert Tigers.”
Finally, I found a small green phone book, a Yellow Pages for the city. On the cover was a name—Eve—with a local phone number. I tore off the section with the number and put it in my pocket.
I clipped off the flashlight and sat back against a leather couch and thought about everything.
If I were reasonable at all, I’d go with-the police wisdom and just say that Jane did it. I’d found her with what was presumably the murder weapon in her hand. She’d been out here, she certainly had motive, and she was presently in a state of shock, a circumstance not exactly unknown to killers overcome with remorse and terror.
But there were troubling and unanswered questions. Where had Stephen Elliot gotten all his money? Who was the older woman at the art gallery who’d slapped him? What was the real nature of the relationship between Elliot and Carla Travers, a woman he could not possibly have considered as a bedmate? And what about David Baxter? In the restaurant that afternoon he’d denied killing Elliot—but what else would he say? There was even Bryce Hammond to consider, though why he would kill Elliot was impossible to guess. Elliot had literally been his meal ticket.
My mind went back to the mysterious older woman. Where could I find her?
Going along with the police was beginning to get tempting. Their version of the murder seemed to make the most sense.
I decided to waste a few more minutes. I brought my flashlight up and peeked inside an unpromising white envelope.
Even by today’s standards the photographs were startling.
The fat man wasn’t making love. He was lying back, completely naked, his beer belly riding his otherwise skinny body. He had a beer can in his hand and a silly party hat on his head. His privates were very much at rest. What made him so startling was his grossness—his hairy body, his bald head, his doughy face. He was so real he hurt the eye.
The contrast between the man and the woman was unbelievable—he was so repellent and she so lovely that they might have been of different species. She was naked, too, lying there next to him on the cheap motel-room bed, but even in this scuzzy circumstance there was beauty in her blond hair and lithe body, the breasts small but shapely, the thatch of hair between her legs as tidy as the rest of her.
I had forgotten how good Jane looked without her clothes on.
I don’t know how long I sat there staring at the photo. I wanted to vomit or smash somebody’s face in. Either one would have been all right.
There were other photos in the envelope. The same man with a different woman, a woman who made David Baxter suddenly a viable suspect. The woman was his wife, Lucy.