Don't Explain: An Artie Deemer Mystery (2 page)

Then we turned the sheets over. We knew we’d find the scary part on the back.

It was a big and crude cartoon of a TV screen with a talking head. The balloon from his mouth said, “All Hollywood mourns tonight. One of its own is dead…”

The same TV set appeared on the second score sheet. The talking head said, “The R-r-ruff Dog has been killed by an ax-wielding assassin.”

The third said, “Live from our studios, we’ll bring you an exclusive interview with the assassin, when we come back—”

Crystal swept them off the bed. They floated to the floor.

“When, Shelly? When did they come?”

Shelly said the first came a week ago. Three days later the second arrived, and this morning the third.

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner, Shelly?”

“Look, I didn’t want to upset you over nothing before I learned a few things. I took some steps, however—”

“Shelly, were they postmarked from these places? Alamosa, Starkweather, where the fuck else—?”

“No,” said Shelly, “They were postmarked Los Angeles. All three of them.”

I had to sit down. I sat on the bed. Crystal put her arm around me and continued to listen in. Jellyroll, ears down, looked from one of us to the other and back again. He knew.

“Artie, here’s what I’ve already done. I’ve already done a couple of things. I’ve hired a guy, a private cop. I’ve hired him to trace these assholes.” He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “You didn’t hear it from me, but there are ways to handle this situation. The stalker situation. My man says you nip it in the bud early. Early is key. You don’t let the stalker get stronger by feeding off your fear. You know what I’m saying? The earlier the better. Don’t let the stalker get into a routine. Whatever his routine is, you don’t let him get into it.”

“What do you do?”

“Something so he goes away. Something strong, Artie, something devastating. It’s not my area. But it’s my man’s area.”

Crystal asked, “Does most of his fan mail come to you? Most of his fans wouldn’t know who his agent is, would they?”

“It’s a curious thing you ask,” said Shelly. “I asked myself the same question. The answer is no. Most of it goes to the R-r-ruff idiots or to the movie idiots, whatever idiots are appropriate, since Artie stopped answering it.”

Yes, I used to answer fan mail to my dog, but that was a long time ago. I’d pretend that he was writing, and I’d sign a cartoon paw print at the end. The apparent emptiness in the lives of his correspondents, those over ten, at least, was the reason I started and the reason I stopped writing.

“But I don’t keep Jellyroll’s representation secret,” Shelly continued. “Somebody could find out if they wanted to.”

“But a person in the business would already know,” I said, because that’s what Crystal was getting at. “Maybe somebody’s playing a joke on you. Or me.”

“Who’d do such a thing as a joke? If they’re in the business, they know I’ll find out who it was, and they’ll be exposed as flaming assholes. Jellyroll is the hottest thing on four legs in America today. Nobody fucks around with power like that unless they’re totally nuts.
Or
unless they’re out to milk it for publicity. There’s a lot of ink to be had stalking the cutest dog in the world. I don’t think anybody’s ever stalked a dog before, but the principle’s the same, I guess. I got people looking into it, Artie.”

“What about the police?”

“Well, it gets a little funny when you get in that area.”

“What do you mean, funny?”

“I discussed that with my man. He points out that certain states have anti-stalker laws. This is one of them. Stalking itself is a crime in those states. But that doesn’t do any good unless you know who the stalker is. An estranged husband, for instance. Also that law doesn’t even so much as mention dogs. Some psycho could kill him—God forbid, I’m just saying—and not even go to jail. Which is why my man says you got to take private action,
so to speak. I’m going to leave that up to my man entirely. But there’s another problem about involving the police. The chance that publicity itself will create a killer out of some otherwise complacent psycho. Say your entertainment press got hold of this. ‘The R-r-ruff Dog: Stalked.’ That kind of heavy media onslaught can produce what my man calls the copycat factor. Picture all the crazy assholes sitting on their thumbs and rotating in front of their TV sets. You don’t want to give them any ideas, Artie. You know what I mean?”

“Yes,” I muttered weakly.

“You let my man take care of everything, Artie.”

“…Okay. Thanks.”

I had intended to accompany Crystal to the tournament, leaving Jellyroll home, but I couldn’t under the circumstances. And it wasn’t only me. Crystal insisted I stay with him.

I ate some left over Chinese that wasn’t any good when it was new. I listened to Coltrane’s
Ascension
, thinking it met my mood, but I couldn’t handle its relentlessness. I wanted female vocalists. I took my place in my morris chair by the western window and looked out across the Hudson River, dead flat at slack tide, the yellow sodium lights of New Jersey undulating on its thick surface. Traffic had congealed on the parkway. A flashing ambulance was trying to get through, but nobody would move aside. Etta James sang “Let the Good Times Roll.”

Jellyroll liked this—listening—or at least he was used to it. This is how we used to live, long solitary listening hours, the history of jazz, before Crystal came into our lives. Jellyroll circled in his Adirondack Spruce Bough Dog Bed and flopped on his side. He sighed, stretched, and flexed his paws with contentment. Everything was fine now. Whew.

But I couldn’t let it go. I assembled the bowling sheets side by side. I wanted to study them for clues. I returned to the names. Three bowling alleys, the same names.

Perry and Dick. Who were Perry and Dick? The stalkers were actually named Perry and Dick? Or was it some kind of twisted hint, a psycho signature? I remembered Shelly’s phrase: feeding off our fear, growing stronger on it. Was that what they were doing with this Perry and Dick bullshit? Or was there something to learn from it, thereby increasing our own strength. We had no strength. Who would you kill? Everybody who looked weird? I was gasping for air.

I called Wayne, a friend of mine who worked at the used books and video store on the corner. Wayne was the sort of guy who knew things. Hollywood was his specialty, but he knew some history, and he read serious fiction.

“How’s it going, Wayne?”

“Oh, well, bad news. My uncle disappeared.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Well, it’s not like we didn’t expect it.”

“You expected him to disappear?”

“The man’s a genius, but he couldn’t handle the structure.”

“What structure was that?”

“So he tended to make things up, and this made them very edgy. Who could blame them for that? Lies are their business.”

You can get in too deep with Wayne. “Hey, Wayne, do the names Perry and Dick mean anything to you?”

“Perry and Dick? In what capacity?”

“I’m not sure. Any capacity you can think of.”

Crystal came home an hour later. That was too early for an amateur tournament. They can go on forever—unless you get eliminated, and Crystal had that eliminated look about her.

“I lost in the first round. No, no, I didn’t lose. That’s not accurate. I got stomped. By a beginner. I was supposed to be the centerpiece of the tournament, give it some weight, Ronny said. I got stomped in the first round by a beginner.”

“You couldn’t concentrate.” I invited her to sit on my lap. Jellyroll came over to comfort her, too. She sat. Jellyroll put his snout on her hand.

“Ronny couldn’t even look me in the eye. I told him I had the flu.”

“Was she really a beginner?”

“Intermediate, tops.”

I hugged her. Jellyroll and I cosseted her for a while, then the phone rang.

“Artie. Wayne here.”

“Hello, Wayne.”

“I thought of something. Perry and Dick.
In Cold Blood
. Truman Capote.”

My heart sank—not
that
Perry and Dick—

“Killed those Clutters, those salt-of-the-earth Clutters. Tied up those Clutters and killed them one by one with a shotgun, for no reason. This was the pinnacle of the senseless-killing school of New Journalism. Largely a sensationalized and discredited genre today, this piece was a knockout. Perry and Dick were top-drawer psychos. They hung them in the end. Nobody minded. Fair movie, too, real grim black-and-white. Robert Blake and Scott Wilson. Why do you ask, Artie?”

TWO

F
irst thing next morning, my friend Clayton Kempshall, as an evil high school principal, sprinted headlong off Pier Twelve into the East River. My snarling dog chased him all the way, but my dog stopped at the end of the pier. My friend did not. Clayton made quite a bit of it, slapstick sprinting in midair. Then he hit the water. Head cocked quizzically, Jellyroll watched from the end of the high pier. People have made a lot of weird moves around him for years, he’s used to it, but this—jumping into the East River—seemed particularly bemusing to him.

“Cut,” called Kevin James, the director, a reasonably sane man who tried to make life easy for his collaborators.

The harbor is nature’s great gift to the City of New York. We’ve turned our back on the waterfront, but without it there’d be no New York. When I first moved to town, I’d take the train down here, sit on a dock and watch it, absorb it somehow. I don’t come down here much anymore because the South Street Seaport development turned it tame and lifeless and indistinguishable, but the water is still wild. Almost invisible out there, Clayton was being swept toward the Brooklyn Bridge by a raging flood tide.

I was feeling a little edgy about this whole business because I got him the gig. It would be an ironic drag to drown in that slate-gray water, boat-hooked ashore seriously bloated somewhere in Queens, for the sake of a gig as an evil high school principal in a Jellyroll movie. Precautions had been taken. He wore an inflatable life jacket under his charcoal-gray suit, and chase boats were waiting to pick him up. Besides which, he didn’t
need
to jump in
the river. They had stunt persons who got paid to do that kind of thing—

“No, Artie, I think it’s important that I do my own stunts. It’ll come in handy in case I ever get a real role. Not to say I don’t appreciate that of an evil high school principal in a Jellyroll movie, no indeed not.”

There seemed to be some kind of problem with the chase boats. Why hadn’t they picked him up yet? Both, low-slung plastic boats with enormous twin outboards, had gathered around his little head bobbing in racing water. But his head zipped out between them. They’d missed him cold. A police boat was standing by, as required by law, and it, too, raced after Clay, now waving his arms, trying to beat back the panic, heading out into the big middle of the river.

Jellyroll looked over his shoulder at me to see whether or not to be upset about it. I shrugged at him. He looked back at the river.

I saw a guy in the chase boat leaning overboard. He came up with Clayton in a bear hug, while his colleague maneuvered the boat in the current. Clayton seemed unable to help himself over the side, so the boat driver left the wheel to help. Up he came stiff as a plank. It’s a cruel business.

Back on the pier, he sat on a low stool and, despite a thick down sleeping bag around his shoulders, shivered. Jellyroll licked his arm. Jellyroll liked Clayton.

“Hey, Joey,” I called to a guy at the coffee-and-doughnut table.

“Yeah, Artie?”

“Can you get this guy something hot?”

“Sure. Like hot chocolate?”

“You like hot chocolate, Clay?”

“Yeah. Great.” His shoulders were hunched. “It looked good, didn’t it, Artie? I mean the running gag? I don’t think it’s out of character, do you?”

“No, it’s good.” I hadn’t actually read the whole script on this one. I’d skimmed it. The plot had something to do with stolen Nazi treasure, an evil school board, a sympathetic little boy, and, of course, his dog. The latter two set the world right at the end. At least I assumed so; that’s what usually happens, but it doesn’t matter. People don’t go to Jellyroll movies for the narrative. They go to watch Jellyroll be sweet and smart, maybe do a trick or two. It’s not an artistically rewarding gig for the humans.

“Jellyroll, what do you think? Was it top-drawer physical comedy or not?” Clayton asked.

Jellyroll cocked his head from side to side inquisitively as he does when you ask him a question, and all the while he smiled up at Clayton. Jellyroll smiles. His sweet nature reflected in that smile has made him the most famous dog in the country. He barked sharply at Clayton.

“What?”

“He wants to chase you off the pier again.”

“Fun idea.”

Kevin James, our director, approached pursued by a half-dozen folks who wanted his undivided attention. He’d directed a few other Jellyroll movies,
Nick Danger’s Dog, Dog of Poker Flats
, and another one I forget, but the projects he cared about were not getting any green lights, as he put it. I could understand his fear he’d be pegged as a dog director for the rest of his life. Consequently he was a little cold to me, but he never fucked me up. What more can one ask?