“It was my favorite TV show. Especially Linda Kelsey. She was really good.”
“Yes, she was.”
“Anyway, after I got fired, that’s the idea I had. To be a reporter.”
There was something tirelessly and endearingly wacky about her. At other times I would have felt properly swayed. Now all I could feel was sorry for both of us. This woman, fetching as she was, belonged in a home of some kind.
“Why don’t we start with the basics?” I said.
“Like what?”
“Your name.”
She laughed. “See, that’s how nervous I am. I forgot to tell you my name.”
“You still haven’t.”
She laughed again. “See, as soon as I saw you, I got so nervous I forgot everything I was going to say. I just started gibbering. That’s a word my mother always uses. Gibbering.”
“Do me a favor, all right?”
She shrugged. There was a neurotic quality in the shrug, though I couldn’t exactly tell you what I mean. “Shut up.”
“What?”
“Let’s just sit here and smoke our cigarettes. I’ve OD’d on talking for now.”
“But I haven’t told you my name yet.”
I turned on the radio and put my head back and closed my eyes and took the smoke deep into my lungs and held it there. She was tuned to a Top 40 station that was playing a Michael Jackson song. I felt perfectly safe. She was nuts, but she was harmless. With my eyes shut, I became aware of her perfume. It was a gentle scent, sweet. It fit her.
After a while she cleared her throat. She said, “My name’s Donna Harris and I’m the publisher and editor of a newsletter called Ad World.”
I opened my eyes. She sounded much more together now, and as soon as she mentioned being associated with an advertising publication, I began to understand why she was here.
“I have nothing to tell you,” I said.
“Are you angry?”
I just stared at her.
“I didn’t mean to make you mad.” She frowned. “See, dammit, there I go. I can’t really be assertive when I need to be.”
I didn’t say anything this time either. She had another go at it. “Maybe Jane Branigan didn’t kill Stephen Elliot.”
I must have looked curious about her remark.
“I’ve been doing a story on Elliot for my newsletter. I had an appointment with him this afternoon at his house. When I got there I saw the police and I started asking questions. One of the policemen was real helpful. He mentioned you and he mentioned Jane. I just looked you up in the phone book.”
I’d make a lousy spy. I left too many easy trails for people.
“I’m not an expert on advertising,” I said, “but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of your newsletter before.”
“Oh,” she said, as if I were the world’s leading dope. “The first issue hasn’t been published yet. That’s why this is such a break for me.”
For the first time, she touched me. Literally, I mean. She put out a hand and placed it on my shoulder.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that coldly. I just meant—”
I sighed. “I know what you meant.”
“Just that—”
“Just that Stephen Elliot being killed will make a big story for your inaugural issue.”
“Yes. Exactly.” She paused. “Especially if I can help solve the murder, scoop everybody else.”
So that was it.
I sat there in the darkness, listening to her heater bang away at the chill, watching a perfectly lovely woman prove herself over and over again certifiable.
“How long have you been a journalist?” I decided to have some mean fun with her. Right now it was the only game going.
“Why do you ask?”
“Curious.”
“Well, not real long, I admit.”
“How long?”
“Oh, roughly two weeks, more or less.”
“More or less.”
She hurried on. “But I’ve done a lot of writing. Copywriting.”
“I see.”
“I’ve won a Clio and probably fifteen Addys.”
I smiled, liking her despite myself. “You get fired?”
In a very tiny voice, she said, “Yes.”
“So you decided to start a newsletter?”
She nodded.
“Being a journalist isn’t easy.”
“Neither is finding another advertising job. I’ve really been trying hard. After the agency I was with lost their biggest account forty-one ad people were dumped on the market — including me.” She shrugged again. Neurotically. “I’ve either got to make this newsletter thing go or— I’ve only got five months’ worth of money saved up. At most.”
“Something will come along.”
“You don’t think much of the newsletter idea, huh?”
“Not really.”
“I figured it out. If I can sell four hundred subscriptions throughout the state at fifty dollars a year, I can easily pay the printing bills and have a decent salary left over.”
My father used to have notions like that. A lot of schemes that the whole family found sweet but hopeless.
“You going to work on it?” she asked.
“The case?”
“Yes.”
“I suppose.”
“You don’t think she did it.”
I looked at her. “I hope not.”
“Maybe we could work together.”
“I don’t think so. Sorry.”
“Maybe I could be helpful.”
I rolled down the window several cracks. The heater was getting to me. “You’re very nice,” I said. “You really are. And I hope you find a job soon.”
“Shit,” she said.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing.” There were tears in her voice. “When I was married that’s how my husband treated me. Every idea I had was ‘charming’ to him. Which translated to the fact that I was crazy. I admit I get carried away sometimes but—”
She must have heard herself. Her panic, there in her four-year-old Chevrolet.
I reached over and patted her hand, and for just a moment I wanted to keep touching her. She had a wonderful hand.
I got out, then put my head back inside. “I wish you luck. I really do.”
“You still in love with her?”
Her question rattled me. I tried to think of an appropriate answer. Maybe the real answer was one I didn’t want to admit. Then I said, “I don’t know.”
“She’s very beautiful.”
“Yes.”
“Maybe after all this is over you can get back together with her.”
“Yes. Maybe.”
“Well,” she said.
I closed the door, walked away.
6
A day later I met Jane’s parents in the lobby of the hospital where, despite what the police told the press to the contrary, their daughter was being held prisoner.
Mrs. Branigan had never liked me. A matron who had started life on a farm upstate and who had eventually become the wife of a successful trial lawyer, she used her good fortune as a kind of judgment about others. Anybody who had not done as well as she and her husband were ultimately to be found lacking. Some longstanding moral curse, perhaps.
Mrs. Branigan wore a tweed coat cut to hide the abundant flesh of her middle age. She had more luck with makeup, which almost took the hard edge off her otherwise handsome face. She held her sixty years with an imperious regard, like a weapon.
Her husband was her twin, a ruddy, white-haired man whose girth in his vested suit and whose melodramatic style suggested both alcoholism and a minor case of megalomania. He had once told me during a holiday visit to the family manse — it was not quite a mansion, but it didn’t miss by much — that he had once been a Catholic, but was now a Presbyterian because he’d gotten tired of the joshing at his country club. I’ve always admired people of deep conviction.
When I first saw them I got the distinct impression that they might be plotting to hire an assassin. Rage burned in their faces and gave them a nervousness that was almost ugly. When they saw me their rage only deepened. Here was the man their daughter had not only lived in sin with — the lower-class man who’d been previously married — but worse, whom she’d wasted time with. At one point in our relationship her parents had tried to bribe her away from me by offering her a free and extended trip to Europe. She’d been thirty-four years old at the time.