The back porch looked as if it had been stuck on as an afterthought. He tried the screen door and found it open and so then, carefully, carefully, he eased his way up the steps and onto the porch. There were enough beer cases stacked up to start your own Budweiser warehouse.
Then he tripped over a garden rake that had apparently fallen down earlier. He crashed against the beer cases. Glass bottles rattled. As in sympathy, something inside the house fell, too.
Tobin stood in the ensuing silence, his heart a wild animal in his chest, no longer cold but sweating. Waiting.
He was still waiting when the inside back door opened and a tall man in a continental-cut coat stood there dramatically with a pistol in his hand.
“Jesus,” Tobin said. “Are you crazy?”
“I don’t want any of your crap, Tobin. Something terrible has happened here.”
“What?”
Michael Dailey gulped, his handsome, actorish face almost statue-like now that it was not animated either by superiority or malice. He sounded distant, a bit in shock. “Somebody killed Ebsen.”
“That wouldn’t have been you, Michael, would it?”
“I didn’t kill him, Tobin. I promise.”
“Where is he?”
Dailey turned. Tobin followed. One step across the threshold the smells of the slaughterhouse were back. In the thin moonlight through the frosty window and falling across the floor he saw feathers and splotches of blood. Somehow he didn’t think he’d ever feel at home here.
Ebsen was sprawled across the living-room floor. He’d exchanged his T-shirt for a white shirt that looked as though he’d laid it under a freshly killed chicken. The way he was twisted, he might have been a tot fallen asleep watching TV.
“Shot,” Michael Dailey said, as if he needed to explain the situation to Tobin.
“I sort of guessed that.”
“Did you kill him, Tobin?”
“Don’t try it, Michael.”
“What?”
“Trying to convince me that you can implicate me. I’m going over there to the phone and calling the police, Detective Huggins, to be exact, and I’m going to tell them exactly what I found here.”
“God, Tobin, listen, I really didn’t do it. Please. Here, look, I’ll even give you the gun.” When he leaned forward, his white silk scarf fell loose. His Valentino-slick hair glistened.
“No, thanks, Michael. I’d just as soon not have my fingerprints on it.”
He’d never seen Michael lose his composure before. He sort of enjoyed it.
“Then what were you doing here?”
“I—” Now he was the old Michael again. His eyes became hooded and inscrutable. “I just needed to do something. But I didn’t kill him.”
“Not good enough. Either you tell me what you were doing here or I call Huggins.”
“You’ll just use it to destroy him. You’ll just use it to build yourself up.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Dammit, Tobin, don’t make me tell you. Please. It won’t do anybody any good.”
“Does it have to do with the script Richard sold?”
“No.”
This surprised Tobin. “Then why else would you be here?”
“Because there’s a — book deal pending. I’d been planning to collect all of Richard’s newspaper reviews into a kind of omnibus volume.”
“You’re not making any sense.”
He wasn’t. He was gibbering.
“Ebsen found out something about Richard.”
“From the shotgun microphone?”
“How do you know about that?”
“It doesn’t matter, Michael. I know. So what did he find out?”
“You just want to get back at me for Jane, don’t you? She told me about your visit this afternoon.”
“Jane doesn’t have anything to do with this.”
“You’d like to see me get blamed for this because you think you’d have a chance for Jane again, don’t you? Well, I’ll tell you, Tobin, she’s in love with me. Deeply in love. So you trying to frame me won’t matter. She still won’t love you. No matter what you do.”
Tobin said, “I want to know why you came here tonight.”
“I don’t want to tell you.”
Tobin reached up and slapped him. He got him square enough and hard enough that the slap had the same effect as a punch. Dailey’s head snapped back and he whimpered like a child who’d been kicked.
Dailey surprised him by keeping calm. “You did that because of Jane, didn’t you?”
Tobin said, “Maybe.”
“She said you’re screwed up. Tonight I’m finding out how right she is.”
Dailey meant to hurt him and it worked. Hearing your ex-lover’s nasty words from the mouth of her new lover is the worst kind of punishment. Tobin sighed, depleted of talk and contrivances.
He turned away from Dailey and went over and picked up the phone. In the moonlit silence, chicken blood and feathers strewn all over, the dial tone was very loud.
“What are you doing?” Dailey said sharply.
“Calling the police.”
“Damn you.”
“Just shut up, Michael. Please.”
He had punched out three digits when Michael came over and grabbed him by the shoulder. “All right,” he said, “I’ll tell you.”
“Then tell me right now. No more crap.”
“It was the reviews.”
“What reviews?”
“The reviews Richard did of Peter Larson’s movies.”
“What about them?”
“My God, are you really that naive?”
“Don’t get pissy with me, Michael. I’m in no mood.”
“I need a cigarette.” It was, of course, a Gauloises. Filtered.
Tobin drifted back to the phone. “Tell me. Now.”
Dailey exhaled smoke pure as frost in the moonlight. “My dear wife Joan paid Richard to give Larson’s films good reviews.”
“Jesus. Payola.”
“Exactly. Richard gave them good reviews in all his newspaper pieces and on the TV show.”
“So why was he killed?”
Dailey shrugged. Had some more of his French cigarette. “I’m afraid I don’t know.”
“Why are you here?”
“If the publishing company ever gets wind of the fact that Richard sold his influence, the book project will be off. I came here because our dead friend over there called me tonight and said he knew all about the reviews and wanted three thousand cash.”
“Three must have been his lucky number.”
“Why?”
“That’s what he wanted from me. Three thousand. I brought my checkbook.”
From inside his dazzling coat, Dailey took a white envelope. “I brought cash.”
“I want to see your gun.”
“Why?”
“To see if it’s been fired.”
“For God’s sake, you don’t still think I killed Ebsen, do you?”
“Maybe.”
“I’m a creature of restaurants and salons, Tobin. Not this.”
“The gun.”
He held it, smelled it, handled it, without quite knowing what he was looking for. The gun didn’t smell as if it had been fired recently. He handed it back. “What’s this all about?”
“The gun?”
Tobin nodded.
“I don’t usually come into neighborhoods like this one alone.”
“Did you find anything?”
“The tapes?”
“Right.”
“No.”
Tobin thought of the cabbie. Waiting. And most likely wondering. “Have you looked around?”
“Everywhere.”
“Damn.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t have time to look for myself.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve got a cab waiting.”
“Oh, Christ, I forgot about you and your cabs.”
“And he’s going to be getting damned curious about what’s going on in here. I’d better get out of here. The police are going to find out about this soon enough.”