I laughed. He was good company, a good man.
He took a sip of coffee, then said, “You think maybe you made a mistake leaving the force?”
“Sure. Sometimes I do.”
“I mean, the acting thing—”
He paused, trying to be delicate. With my ex-wife, my mother and father, and every single person I knew on the force, what I want to do with my life will always be “the acting thing” — something pretty abstract and crazy, as that phrase implies.
What happened was this: One of the local TV stations asked me to play a cop in a public service announcement about drunk drivers. Easy enough, since that’s what I was, a cop. Then a talent agent called and asked me if I would be interested in other parts on a moonlighting basis, which I was. A year later I’d appeared in more than two dozen commercials and was taking acting classes from a fairly noteworthy former Broadway actor. Then my marriage started coming apart. I suppose I got obsessive about acting in front of a camera where I could put off the guilt and pain. I decided, against the advice of everybody I knew and to the total befuddlement of my captain, to give up the force and try to become a full-time actor, supporting myself in the meantime with a P.I.’s license and employment with a grocery store security company, busting shoplifters and trying to figure out which employees were stealing.
That was me, Jack Dwyer, thirty-seven, a man who’d become a bit of a joke. Maybe more than a bit, as certain smirks and eye-smiles sometimes conveyed.
“It’s what I want to do with my life,” I said, and I could hear the defensive tone sneaking into my voice. If I’m so damned sure that what I’m doing makes sense, then why do I always feel the need to defend myself? Only my fourteen-year-old son seems to understand even a bit of my motivation. He always gives me a sad, loving kind of encouragement.
“Yeah, sure, hell,” Edelman said, afraid he’d hurt my feelings. “I wanted to be a surgeon at one time.”
I laughed. “Maybe you should start cutting people up. You know, practice it a while, see if you like it. The way I did with acting at first.”
“You’re a crazy sonofabitch, Dwyer. A genuinely weird guy.”
But I couldn’t keep up the patter any longer. “She’s probably in big trouble.”
“Probably. Yeah.”
A uniformed man came running down the hill from his patrol car, through the slushy dead grass and the wraiths of fog and the winter cold.
“Malachie called from this Elliot’s house,” the patrolman told Edelman breathlessly. “Said there’s a body there and that the building manager has positively identified it as Elliot.”
Edelman shook his head and put his big hand on my shoulder. “Looks like we’ve got some problems, my friend.”
3
“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.