I knew who the man was, of course. Bryce Hammond, the president of Hammond Advertising, where Jane worked, and where Stephen Elliot had been creative director.
Malachie, irritated that Hammond was being so pushy, started over to the man, angry already. I was a step ahead of him, walking over to Hammond and pushing out my hand. “Hello, Bryce, how are you?”
Hammond recognized me; we’d gotten along in a weird sort of way at all the office functions I’d gone to during my tenure with Jane. He just seemed shocked and a little confused that I was here.
“Jack — is Stephen—?”
I nodded. Then I pointed to the body bag.
Hammond glanced at the plastic shaping itself to the dead corpse, then back at me. “But—” Nothing coherent came from his lips for at least another three minutes.
Malachie came up to introduce himself. I did most of the talking for Hammond, explaining who he was and why he was here. Hammond managed to say that he had called Elliot’s home half an hour earlier, trying to find Stephen, when a policeman answered. The uniformed cop nodded that, yes, he had taken such a call.
Hammond looked back toward the gurney. “God, Jack, what the hell happened? Where’s Jane?”
Malachie took that moment to nod toward the ambulance attendants. They looked eager, fighters waiting for the bell. They moved out immediately.
Malachie said, “Why don’t you buy Mr. Hammond some coffee someplace, Jack?”
“Good idea,” I said. I nodded to Bryce Hammond.
Malachie put out his hand and touched Hammond respectfully on the elbow. “I’ll call you tonight or tomorrow, Mr. Hammond. I need to ask you some questions about the lady involved and about Mr. Elliot’s life lately.”
“Of course. Yes. Certainly. Perfectly all right.” Bryce Hammond was babbling in disbelief. He still hadn’t gotten a handle on things.
“Now why don’t you go with Jack here? All right?” Malachie said.
From across the room Edelman gave me a friendly wave and I waved back. There really were times I missed the force. For all the bullshit, there is a camaraderie that becomes a part of you. You don’t find a lot of that in store security work or in auditions where thirty people are vying for the same part.
4
The Iron Skillet was not the kind of place Bryce Hammond was used to being in.
A hangout for the last dregs of the “Flower Power” movement, where the guys who work as day laborers and junkmen still wear their hair in ponytails, as if competing to see who can look as scuzzy as an R. Crumb illustration. The Skillet is nice for its total and utter lack of pretension, and for the abundance of home-cooked food you can get inexpensively. They’ve got real dark beer imported from Austria, and the battered booths are so steep you feel as if you’ve got your own private dining room.
“Eve of Destruction,” which the management leaves on the jukebox as a goof, was ripping the air as we walked in. Bryce was as much a freak to the denizens as they were to him. They exchanged looks that were devoutly hostile.
I ordered coffee and a dark beer and, after a long minute of decision, Bryce did too.
After the waitress left, Bryce said, “Do you actually like it here?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m surprised. You a former policeman and all.” He’d had just enough time during our twenty-minute ride over to compose himself, to face the reality of Stephen Elliot’s death, and to start adjusting to it. He was himself again — at least enough to realize that a man of his stature did not belong here.
“Oh, I was in this play a couple of years back,” I explained, “about some people in the antiwar movement and I came in here to study some of the folks. I ended up liking the place. Nobody tries to impress you and they almost never get into fights. You can play chess in the back and on weekends they’ve got some good live jazz.”
He looked around. “Yes, but the people, their clothes—”
“They’re laborers,” I said, his attitude starting to irritate me. “They’re not going to look like bankers.”
He shot them a look of country club contempt, and then he turned his attention back to me.
“Is Jane—?”
I sighed, waited for our waitress to return. After she did I told him everything I knew.
“God,” he said, “the poor kid. It really looks bad for her, doesn’t it?”
I nodded.
“I’d better tell you what happened at the office yesterday.” He pursed his lips again, his handsomeness no longer quite so attractive. “The police will find out anyhow.”
I prepared myself for the worst.
“She stabbed him,” he said.
I jerked in my seat. “Stabbed him?”
“Oh, just with an X-acto knife. But she stabbed him nonetheless. Right in the hand. There were several witnesses.” He shook his head. “They’d split up three months ago, but she was still insanely jealous whenever she found out he was dating somebody.” He sighed, stared at his hands. “I told him about office romances, how they could—” He looked up at me directly and evenly and said, “You know I’m ruined, don’t you?” There was an edge in his voice that I knew could well be hysteria.
I made a pass at calming him down. “Bryce, things could work out. You don’t—”
“Oh,” he said gravely, “don’t sit here and give me that bullshit. You know enough about advertising to know what I’m saying.”
Thirty years ago Bryce Hammond had been the top copywriter and creative director in the city. Eventually he got so hot that he started his own place and prospered. But then, as always happens in the advertising business, his fortunes fell. Clients began to consider him too familiar, passé. He began losing accounts to the degree that he nearly went out of business. Then five years ago Stephen Elliot joined the Hammond agency, and almost immediately things turned around. The agency, thanks to many of Elliot’s TV campaigns, was now back on top and hotter than ever.
That is, until today, when Elliot was murdered.
“Sonofabitch,” he said. I didn’t ask who or what he referred to. I just let him sit there with his anger and bitterness and anxiety and stare at his fists. After a while he said, “You think she did it?”
“I hope not.”
“It looks pretty bad.”
“Yeah, it does.”
He shrugged. “Things turn around.” He looked past me, at nothing, it seemed — at everything, his receding life. “I was nearly out of business once, as you well know. Nobody, not even my own accountant, thought I could turn things around. But I certainly did. I certainly did.” He laughed. There was a lot of anger in the sound. “Or I should say Stephen did. He was the man of the hour, wasn’t he?”
“That’s what I’ve heard.”
“A brand-new product, replacing the old one that had worn out.” He tapped his chest miserably. “I was the old one.”
The misery with which he said it made me aware that he was being serious, not just melodramatic. What an odd fate, to think of yourself as a product, just another box of soap.
“I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do.”
“Why not sit here and drink your beer?”
“I’m going to have to watch it crumble all over again. The whole fucking agency. Down the tubes. It won’t happen overnight, of course. But in the next two years, one by one the important clients will leave me and—” He shrugged. “Fuck it. You’re right, Jack. All I can do now is sit here and drink my beer. Unless this place serves something stronger.”
“It doesn’t.”
“Somehow that doesn’t come as a shock.”
I got out my pocket-size notebook.
“What’s that?”
“I want to ask you a few questions,” I said.
“I thought you said I should sit here and drink my beer.”