Murder in the Wings (2 page)

T
o date Donna Harris has published only six issues of Ad World, which means that she has yet to master everything required to put out a magazine that caters to the Illinois advertising industry. When she's gathering material and writing, she's great company, as usual. But the closer publication day comes, the more her office becomes a minefield of layouts, photos, odds and ends of manuscript, Hardee's wrappers and empty Tab cans, and she gets to a point where she might pick a fight with Mother Teresa. The pressure gets to her and she doesn't mind sharing it.

After the scene at the theater, I drove around the city, letting the FM jazz station soothe me with some Mulligan doing the theme from Exodus (if you don't think artists can change pop lead into jazz gold, listen to that one) and tried to recognize what was happening to the downtown area.

Three bridges lead into the Loop area proper. Now, in May, Chicago was again transforming itself from the steel of winter to the breezes of spring, the promise of new foliage as vast as the lake that spanned the horizon.

In the cold rain the Loop was finishing up for the night, with only a few trendy spots still shaking a fist at midnight. I waved to a few squad car cops who knew me from my own cop days. They looked bored. Loop duty isn't a lot of fun.

By the time I drove past Donna's office, which is outside the Loop, I was no longer pissed at Wade, if I ever had been exactly. I liked the bastard, couldn't help it, and so did Donna. Now I was worried about what he'd do next. Variety would certainly carry the story about how he'd been fired from a small theater in the boonies. It was just the kind of ammunition West Coast casting directors would need to shut him off for good.

I drove into the parking lot at Donna's. Her car was gone. I felt one of those inexplicable pangs of betrayal. I really needed her. Couldn't she sense that through telepathy or some damn thing?

"You're really in a bad mood, aren't you?" I said after she opened the door in her robe and curlers and stood, hip cocked, glaring at me.

"I will be if you start that number again," she said in her best severe voice.

The "number" she referred to was how I'd simply pointed out that she became intolerable the closer she got to deadline. I'd once made the same observation about the first few days of her period, but she got so mad—I mean fucking crazed—that I knew better than to ever bring that up again.

There was a long and nervous silence. I saw her ironing board up behind her—she hates ironing the way I hate making beds—and the TV was on. It was Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield.

"You could always invite me in."

"Well, you can see the kind of shape the place is in."

"Yeah, and you know how much I care about that sort of thing."

"You sound kinda down."

"I am, I guess."

"Well," she said. "I mean, to be real honest, Dwyer, you think we should be together tonight?"

"Why not?"

"Well, even though I think your routine about me being crabby the closer I get to deadline is all in your imagination, the rain has sort of got me down. Or something. I mean I was sitting there watching a Fritos commercial and I just burst into tears. A Fritos commercial."

"It's the rain."

"Don't sound so goddamn smug."

"Jesus, Donna, lighten up."

"And don't tell me to lighten up."

"All I said," I said, "was that it's the rain. You know how you get."

"And you don't get that way?"

"Well, sort of I do."

"'Sort of.'"

I shook my head. Right then I felt like an orphan. "Maybe you're right. Maybe tonight's not a good night to get together."

She hadn't lightened up any. "Yeah, maybe you are right."

"Well," I said, wanting her to stop me. But she didn't. "Well, good night, Donna." I knew better than to try to kiss her.

"Good night, Dwyer." And with that she closed the door.

I went down the stairs, feeling very sorry for myself. I was about twenty feet down the walk, the cold rain combining now with fog, when I heard a window being pushed up.

"God, Dwyer, I'm sorry. I really am."

I turned around. I had no shame. "So can I spend the night?"

But that only irritated her again. "Why don't you just tell everybody in the apartment house that we sleep together?"

I cupped my hands. "Donna Harris and a guy named Dwyer are sleeping together."

"You asshole."

"So can I come up?"

"You asshole."

I took that to mean I could come up.

It wasn't the sort of lovemaking you read about in Judith Krantz novels. I mean, in terms of the old amore, we've certainly had better nights. I wanted to and she didn't want to, then she wanted to and I didn't want to, then neither of us wanted to, and then both of us wanted to, so we did—but by that time it was doomed to be less than wonderful. Holding each other afterward was actually better than the sex, holding each other and listening to the rain on the roof and watching the shadows of trees play in the streetlight and toss silhouettes across her bedroom walls like magic lanterns.

"I'm sorry it wasn't better for you," she said after a long time. It was the first time all night she had sounded glad to see me.

"Hey, I'm sorry it wasn't better for you. At least I had an orgasm."

"Well, I had an orgasm, too."

"You did? Really?"

"Well, something like an orgasm anyway."

Which meant that she hadn't had an orgasm at all but was being sweet and her being sweet there in the darkness really cranked me up again and when I got cranked up she got cranked up and this time it was really kick-ass good, the way it can be only when you're loving somebody you truly love.

"Boy," she said afterward. "Boy."

"I take it it was better that time."

"You just want a compliment," she said and then promptly fell asleep without giving me one.

I
was on the bottom of an ocean, chained to a rock the size of a house. I was being called urgently to the surface but I couldn't escape, hard as I tried.

I woke up realizing that the phone was ringing. It was on my side of her bed. She had her arms flung wide and was snoring. She was the only woman I'd ever known who could snore cute. I got the phone.

There was a long pause on the other end, a heavy-breather pause. I wondered if it might be a twist-o, or her ex-husband, the very wonderful (just ask him) Chad. But it wasn't.

He was very drunk and he had to say it twice before I could understand what the hell he was saying. " 's big trull. 's big big trull."

Big big trouble.

I remembered my police training. When you talk to somebody drunk or desperate, stay calm.

"Where are you?"

" 's one piece 'a trull I won't get outta."

"Stephen, where are you?"

Another long pause. I heard a match being struck. In the receiver it sounded like a bomb going off. "Where are you?" I repeated.

The cigarette had apparently helped a bit. At least I could understand him on the first sentence now. "I'm at his apartment."

"Whose apartment?"

"Reeves's."

"Reeves's? Stephen, what the hell are you doing there?"

By now Donna was awake, whispering, "Is he all right?" She had a daughterly affection for Wade. At moments such as these it would translate into terror.

"Came over to 'pologize," he said.

"So what happened?"

There was a long sigh and then a silence and then a sigh again. "Fucker's dead."

"Dead?"

Another sigh. When he spoke again, he sounded miserable and lost. He sounded on the verge of tears. "I don't know what happened over here, Dwyer. Please come over right away. Please."

With that, he hung up the phone.

T
he closer we got to Reeves's apartment, the more Pizza Huts and Hardee's and Long-John Silver's we saw. In the rain all the neon had a certain beauty.

Reeves lived in a neighborhood on the edge of what had once been the Czech section of the city. Now some of the Czechs had moved out (literally), looking down on the houses they'd left behind—houses today occupied by people with NRA and country-and-western radio station stickers on their bumpers. It had become a lower-class white bastion. Blacks knew better than to move in. Reeves's place was just on the dividing line. White upper-class couples had recently started refurbishing some of the rambling old houses into mock-Victorian apartment houses. We found Reeves's building.

The run through the rain, from the driveway to the porch, got us soaked. In the vestibule we looked for his name along the row of ten mailboxes, and then we went up the curving staircase. The place smelled of fresh paint.

Reeves's apartment was in the rear. A silver number 11 identified it. If you looked closely, you could see that the door was ajar.

"Boy," Donna whispered, taking my hand and placing it over her breast. "Feel my heart."

It was racing, pounding, and I didn't blame it a damn bit.

I eased the door open. It squeaked so loudly I could imagine lights going on all over this side of town.

"Maybe we should just call the police," she whispered again.

"Don't you want to help Wade?"

I knew that would get her. She looked instantly guilty. She liked and, more importantly, felt sorry for Wade. She made a grim little expression with her mouth and nodded for me to proceed.

The first thing I noticed inside was the aquarium. It surprised me only because Reeves spent so much time playing the cool theatrical wizard. What the fuck would a cool theatrical wizard be doing with a tank full of fishies?

Light from the big fish tank was the only illumination in the front room. The rest of the place ran more to my expectations. The walls were decorated with posters from plays he'd directed as well as photographs of himself and the semi-famous actors he'd worked with at the Bridges Theater. Bookcases made of bricks and boards ran the length of the rear wall and were crammed with plays and quality paperbacks by writers as varied as Aristophanes and Neil Simon. That was the only time Simon would ever keep company with Aristophanes.

The furniture reminded me of my own stuff. A green couch that didn't at all match the green overstuffed chair that clashed with the dark blue drapes. In other words, a salute to Goodwill stores everywhere.

Three halls led off from the living room. One went to the kitchen, which was empty and smelled of dishes left in the sink for days. Another went to a screened-in porch at the back that smelled of new spring grass and rain. The third hall led to his bedroom and that's where we found him, sprawled across the bed. A butcher knife stuck out from between his shoulder blades, and a dark puddle of blood had seeped from the wound.

As Donna and I moved closer she started saying "Boy" and then "God," and then alternating the expressions back and forth the closer we got.

The bedroom was sparsely decorated—a few more play posters, a few more photos of himself with the famous. A clothes hamper stood open. Apparently he washed his clothes about as often as he did his dishes. I angled away from the smell.

"That's how I found him," a rough voice said from behind us.

Stephen Wade, dressed in a dark turtleneck sweater, a hound's-tooth Stanley Blacker sport coat, and a pair of dark pleated slacks, stepped from the walk-in closet looking dapper and very theatrical, as if he was playing a role in a British crime drama. To complete the image, he waved a .45 at us.

"God, Stephen," Donna said, "what's the gun for?"

I turned on a table lamp. He was sobering up fast, but a kind of madness, founded on fear I suppose, was setting in. His gaze was narrow and furtive. I wanted to say something to help—to calm him; to get that goddamn look out of his eyes—but nothing came to mind.

Donna started over to him. Maybe it was because her father had never been home when she was a child and as a consequence she secretly felt she'd never really had a father. Maybe it was because, with his large, handsome, silver-haired head, Wade looked like the ultimate TV-commercial father—or grandfather. Or maybe I was full of beans and she just plain old had a crush him. Whatever it was, being around Wade sort of unglued Donna, and she got real maternal. Now, as she moved toward him, she held out her hand for him to give her the gun.

He took her in his arms and they hugged. I heard her sob, and for a moment I saw him close his eyes in a kind of surrender to her presence, but then he gently pushed her away and said, "I don't think I killed him, but I'm not sure."

"Oh, Stephen," she said, "you couldn't have killed him. You just couldn't." She turned back to me. "Tell him, Dwyer. Tell him he couldn't have killed him."

"I appreciate your confidence," Wade said. "I just wish I could share it."

I looked at the body and then at Wade. His eyes seemed worse by the minute. The soberer he got, the more shock set in.