Deadly Dues (2 page)

That statement hung in the air for about five seconds. Then, without a word, we backtracked out of the office, turned off the light and closed the door. Pete, who has played a zillion police detectives in a zillion TV movies, swiftly wiped off the light switch and the door handles with his jacket sleeve as we left. Life experience is great. Film and television experience runs a close second.

We paused, looked at the gaping elevator, then nearly trampled each other heading for the stairs. We hit the fire door. Pete paused to wipe the handles. Then we stampeded down the stairs (too bad about Gretchen's elbow in Geoff's groin in our haste) and burst through the door into the deserted parking garage.

“Damn you, Gretchen,” yelped Geoff.

“It was an accident,” said Gretchen plaintively. Gretchen is tall, blonde and model-thin, with a high forehead and pale, delicate skin. She looks like a beautiful, elegant bird. Every part of her lovely body is pointed. Especially her elbows.

“Could you guys stop,” said Pete furiously. “This is not the time.” I agreed with Pete. We were milling around in a dimly lit parking garage with a dead body five floors above us.

Not all of us were milling around. Bent had already sprinted to his twenty-year-old battered Volkswagen van, and started the engine. The sound was, as always, like a demented tractor in heat, and we all cringed. Why is it that the skinniest guys always drive the biggest beaters? Bent was educated and dressed respectably, but for as long as I had known him, had driven embarrassing wrecks. Now in his late thirties (although it was hard to tell, as he tended toward an intriguing, ageless look), he had a host of degrees, which were wasted on his current non-career. His eyes were perpetually wide with moral outrage.

We leapt back as the van veered towards us, the loose left fender dangling dangerously close. Bent rolled down the window and hissed, “Murphy's! Now!” then roared up the ramp to the exit.

We doubled over, choking and hacking in the fumes that he left behind like a trail of sulphur. We were used to it. After we finished coughing, we scrambled to our own cars. Geoff could walk upright now and jumped into his BMW. Pete ran to his SUV. Gretchen and I piled into my Sunfire.

I scrabbled with my keys as Gretchen slammed her door.

“Lu! Speed it up!” she panted.

I turned the key. The engine started immediately. And it then stalled.

Geoff had already roared past us. Pete followed, blowing fumes. Their tail lights disappeared up the exit ramp. That left us in the only real live car in the parking garage. There weren't even any druggies hanging around at this hour. The security cameras had given up the good fight months ago, and had never been replaced. We were alone and unobserved, which would be a good thing, in our present circumstances. But then maybe not such a good thing if a gang of bikers suddenly appeared.

We saw the lights of another car coming down the entrance ramp.

“Start the damned car,” she shouted in her trademark whisper.

She was wearing her usual black designer silk jacket and pants, with a black T-shirt and black shoes. She had money. You'd never know it from her reluctance to pick up the tab in the bar. Stan might have ruined her career, but her finances seemed intact. Then I thought of my own finances and I stamped my foot down on the accelerator.

The engine started. I backed up in roughly the shape of a pretzel and we nipped around the corner of the parking garage just before the other car entered the lower level.

“Not so fast,” hissed Gretchen. “You'll look suspicious.”

“Gretchen, do you want to walk?” I said through gritted teeth. “Because I can let you out right now.”

She pressed her lips together in the little point that most men seemed to find irresistible and just made me want to give her a dog biscuit.

Nevertheless, I slowed down and drove up the exit ramp at a moderate pace, grateful that parking in the grim underground lot was free in the evening. The booth was devoid of human presence, empty and sort of sad, and we escaped into the crisp fall air.

We pulled onto Second Avenue, and I breathed a sigh of relief. At this time of night, the only cars on Second belonged to workaholics, finally heading home after hours of number crunching, or the occasional couple heading to one of the cluster of bistros and ethnic restaurants in the stretch of crazy-quilt blocks.

I rolled down my window and inhaled, grateful for the cool air, and the scent of leaves, exhaust fumes and the grilled duck from Henry's Hot Spot.

The city is growing faster than its streets. The panhandlers sleep under the glossy towers. One block downtown consists of high-end restaurants. One block over, where restoration hasn't happened yet, drug dealers slide around in the shadows. Visiting conventioneers sometimes wander in the wrong direction from their four-star hotels and end up getting the fright of their life, running screaming back to the doorman who forgot to tell them to turn right, not left. Every time a section is demolished to make room for growth and gold-plated condos, more people are out on the street, with nowhere to live and no money to find a place to live, if there were any.

There are more ethnic markets now, and fewer farmers selling fresh vegetables from their trucks in the summer. The money flashes from next year's cars, this year's shoes, the leather jackets and politically incorrect fur that are worn year-round, and the mirrored windows surrounding the steel and glass office buildings. By next year, the money will have disappeared, with staid older-model sedans replacing the flashy sports models. And then the cycle will start over. The only constants are the pursuit of glamour and the homeless living under the shadow of the moneyed towers.

I turned left, pausing briefly to give a guy with a cartful of bottles in black garbage bags the right of way, and, after he sent me a salute of thanks (or was that the finger?), headed toward Murphy's, the actors' hangout.

My Sunfire thumped along the potholes of Ford Street, not yet on the city's list for improvements.

I was sure I was calm, although my hands left wet spots on the steering wheel. I waited for Gretchen to say something.

“Oh damn,” she said mildly, looking down at her black patent stilettos. “I just had new heels put on these. Look at them now, after those cement stairs. We should have taken the elevator.”

We have been going to Murphy's since it opened, too many years ago. Now, like each of us, it has lost some of its lustre, but still has its offbeat charm. The rounded leather booths have darkened from their original red to a deep burgundy, the food is mostly basic burger and fries, and the washrooms generally are to be attempted only in moments of extreme desperation.

On the upside, the booths are soft and comfortable, and every now and again Murphy hires a baby chef straight out of culinary school, who sneaks a few light and healthy items onto the menu, served with elegant swirls of radishes and kale. Then, a few months later, the same novice chef is lured away to a better establishment, and Murphy starts over with a new king or queen in the kitchen. Sometimes Murphy himself, all two hundred hairy pounds of him, works as a short-order cook between chefs, and we are careful to order only drinks in those instances. The one exception is his fries, which he magically turns into rosy pencil crisps with meltingly fatty insides.

The lighting is dim enough to disguise most of Murphy's sins in decor. The music, surprisingly, is usually Billie Holiday or Ben Webster. Murphy may have fatty tastes in the food department, but when it comes to music, he is lean and elegant.

Murphy's is our home away from home, the place where we have congregated over the years to celebrate new roles, cry over lost roles and, most recently, vilify Stan. At least he brought a new dimension to our conversation.

Bent, Geoff and Pete were already collapsed into our favourite booth, the one with our signed photos on the wall above. We may have variable incomes, and occasional problems with our telephone bills, but our winsome and dramatic photographs (some of them maybe a bit long in the tooth) hang above us as a reminder of our so-called fame.

Geoff stood and plastered himself against the wall in order to avoid contact with Gretchen as she slid into the booth. I crumpled down beside her, and Geoff cautiously sat beside me.

I looked at him.

“I'm not taking any chances,” he said. “She's a demon with a grudge.”

Groan
. As if I cared. Geoff and Gretchen had bonded briefly—and like cement—for maybe five seconds a decade ago, and somehow the unbonding had had all the dignity of a disconnect session with Crazy Glue and had scarred them for life. More accurately, Gretchen was emotionally scarred and hoped to make Geoff physically scarred. I didn't know the details. Geoff had a reputation for working his way through the female cast of any play or film. Gretchen kept her personal life private, but every now and again we would get a hint of a wild affair, which she never discussed. Luckily, neither of them had demanded that we fall into camps of allegiance, and so we, the innocent bystanders, simply tried to ignore the ongoing hostilities. I suppose it was a testimony to our charms that both Geoff and Gretchen endured each other's presence in order to hang out with us.

We sat for a moment in silence. Wally, the wily waiter we have had since day one, soared by and intoned, “Draft, Rainier's, Scotch, Chardonnay, and a Sidecar,” then flew away. We barely registered his ministrations.

“What a mess,” said Pete.

“No kidding,” said Gretchen. “That desk will never get clean.”

“Gretchen,” said Pete evenly. “I was speaking . . . sort of more generally?”

He was always the solid one in our group. No matter what happened, Pete, with his gentle sincerity and strength, kept us grounded. Tonight his rugged face looked tired, older than his fifty-odd years, and his brown eyes were sad. Normally, his stocky build radiated male hormones and goodwill. Now he looked as if everything were sagging. His tweed jacket had elbow patches and a hanging button. The brown T-shirt underneath had spots of white dust, probably flour—from his passion for baking.

Pete was kind. He didn't look at Gretchen with disdain. He accepted her as she was.

“Oh, yeah,” breathed Gretchen. “I sort of meant that.”

The rest of us rolled our eyes. But we still loved her. Gretchen used to have an IQ. She once was able to discuss literature and fashion. But ever since Stan had come along and began alternating sexual harassment with career interference, she seemed to lose an IQ point a week from stress. We were sympathetic. She hadn't had a major audition in over a year, unless you count the local car dealership commercial and the third blonde from the left in a low-budget feature. She passed her waking hours looking in the mirror, wondering what went wrong, cursing Stan and phoning the rest of us in turn, crying and whispering pitifully into the phone. Her sleeping hours she also spent looking in the mirror, wondering what went wrong, cursing Stan, phoning our answering machines and leaving pathetic little tearful messages. Gretchen was bright enough to know that as a slim, beautiful blonde, she had a defined shelf life. The awards she had won should have opened doors to leading roles. Instead, she was biting her nails, trimming them as if they were ornamental hedges, eating entire tubs of frozen yogurt in one sitting (without gaining a pound) and reading comic books and romance novels. We had debated how we could get her out of this state before her IQ dropped to sub-zero. She had an excellent motive to kill Stan, but Gretchen was usually too busy whispering and looking beautiful to take violent action, the event with the statuette being the one exception.

“I did,” she added. “I did too know that.” Her left hand automatically went to her mouth. Pete and I reached over, clamped our hands over hers and lowered it to the table. I grabbed the obligatory bowl of stale nuts and shoved it across the table to her.

“Gretchen,” Pete said. “Eat.”

She sighed and started nibbling on the nuts, picking them up one by one with her pointed little fingers and her erratically pointed bitten-down nails.

“What I was about to say,” said Pete heavily. “Is that we have to figure out what to do.”

“Shouldn't we make an womymous call to the pweese?” said Gretchen, through a mouthful of peanuts.

We looked at her blankly.

“Why?” said Bent, his eyes wide. Bent took everything very seriously. He was five foot four of wild compressed energy. When he was upset, he could vibrate as violently as his old van's engine.

“That's what they do in TV movies,” said Gretchen defensively, swallowing.

Bent leaned over the table and hissed at her, his glasses almost steaming over. He seemed more intense than usual, if that were possible. He began to splutter, which was a sign that he was revved up to high gear.

“This is not a goddammed TV movie,” he spat. “This is life. And we are not morons. We are not going to make any anonymous calls. So that the cops can wonder just who found the body.”