Ed Gorman
New, Improved Murder
To my son, Joe,
with admiration and love
1
It wasn’t a park, really, just a strip of grass running along the river. In the summer it was a place for lovers, what with its picnic table and benches. Now, in November, with a steady, bitter wind slamming the gray water below into a jagged rock wall, it was home only for a few pigeons and stray dogs. Which was why the lovely blond woman in the tailored trench coat looked so out of place leaning against the rail above the river.
She showed no sign of recognition as I moved toward her, and I knew how bad a sign this was. Jane Branigan was almost neurotic about greeting you with deft little jokes and tiny, heartbreaking smiles. I should know. I lived with her for slightly longer than a year.
By the time I reached her, the noontime fog dampening my face, the chill deadening my fingers and knuckles, I saw that she held something in her left hand, something dangling just out of sight behind her coat. I shifted my steps slightly to the right to get a better look at what she was holding.
Jane Branigan held a .45 in her hand. Not the sort of thing you expected a woman who worked is a commercial artist, and who was the daughter of a prosperous trial lawyer, to have in her hand.
She didn’t become aware of me until I was within three feet of her. Then she looked up and said, simply, “He’s dead, Jack. He’s dead.”
From my years on the force it was easy enough to recognize that she was in shock. The patrician features, the almost eerie ice blue of the eyes were masklike. I was surprised that she even knew who I was.
“You’d better sit down,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Come on,” I said. “It’ll be better for you.”
“He’s dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“The way he looked—”
My impression was that she was going to cry, which would have been better for her, but all she said was “Dead.”
The .45 slipped from her fingers to the ground. I helped her to the park bench, sat her on the fog-slick surface. She was a statue, sitting there, poised, numbingly beautiful, as dead in her way as the man she mourned.
“Jane, can you hear me?”
Nothing.
“Jane, I have to ask you a few questions.”
Nothing.
“Jane, where did you call me from?”
For now, anyway, it was no use.
I sat a moment longer staring at her, at her beauty that had turned my bed bitter and lonely, at her predicament, which rendered my old grudges selfish and embarrassing.
I sat there in silence, trying to think of what to say, what to do. Finally I had an idea. I touched her shoulder and said, “You remember the little puppy we almost bought that Christmas?”
Our first holiday together, shortly after we moved into our joint apartment, each of us in flight from terrible first marriages. We’d gone to the city pound and nearly taken a small collie home with us. Then we’d decided, sensibly enough, that because both of us had careers, and because we lived in an apartment, such confinement would not be fair to the dog. Still, from time to time, I remembered the pup’s face, his wet black nose and the pink open mouth as we wiggled our fingers at him.
Apparently Jane had a reasonably clear memory of the dog too. She didn’t smile or say anything specific, but something like a response shaped in her eyes as she stared at me. I took her lifeless hand, held it, saw in the slight tightening of her mouth and the tiny wrinkles around her eyes the stamp of late-thirties on her otherwise flawless face. I felt a little sorry for both of us. Our lives had not been exemplary and we’d hurt many people needlessly along the way. It had taken her hurting me before I understood that.
Then I got up and went over to the .45. I bent down, took out my handkerchief, and lifted the piece as carefully as possible. It was unremarkable, the sort of weapon sporting goods stores sell as nothing more than a way to get you to come back and buy ammunition. I looked at it in my hand and imagined a prosecutor pointing to it dramatically in the course of a trial.
Then I went up to the phone booth on the edge of the hill and called 911. It didn’t take them long to arrive. It never does.
2
Edelman, shrewd man that he is, had learned enough from the dispatcher to bring an ambulance along. Two white-uniformed attendants had helped Jane into the rear of the vehicle and taken her away. They would take her to the closest hospital and the police would decide what to do from there.
Edelman had also brought along a big red thermos full of steaming coffee, which we shared as we stood at the railing overlooking the river.
“You aren’t getting any younger, Dwyer,” he said, smiling, taking note of my gray-flecked hair.
“At least I’ve got enough hair to turn gray.” I smiled back. Martin Edelman stands six-two, looks as if he trains at Dunkin Donuts, and is sweet enough in disposition to make an unlikely cop, a profession he took up only because, as he once drunkenly confessed to me, he’d been called a sissy during early years. Now the kids who called him names were pencil-pushers and Edelman had earned the right to ask them with his eyes: Who was a sissy and who was not? Like many of us, Edelman spends his older years trying to compensate for the pain of his younger ones.
We stood silently for a time, blowing into the paper cups of coffee, watching a few straggling birds pumping against the dismal, sunless sky.
Then he said, “She’s one of the most beautiful fucking women I’ve ever seen.”
“Yeah.”
“How do you know her?”
“She used to be a friend of mine.”
“Friend. When we were growing up, friend usually meant somebody of the same sex, you know? I can’t get used to the way that word is used today.” He paused. “You mean you slept with her?”
“Yeah. We lived together for a year or so.”
“This was after you left the force, I take it?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You don’t sound happy.”
I stared out at the water. “I’m a little confused right now, Martin.”
“The gun, you mean?”
“Confused about a lot of things. My feelings, mostly.” He had been a good enough friend from my detective days that I didn’t have much trouble talking to him. “I had all these plans for us, including marriage. She worked at an advertising agency and fell in love with a guy named Stephen Elliot there. She left me for him.”
“A good Catholic boy like you should maybe think that God was paying you back for living in sin.”
Both of us knew he was only half joking.
“It was a lot more than shacking up, Martin. A lot more. I really loved her.”
“This Elliot, that’s who we’re checking on now, right?”
“Right.”
I had explained to Edelman that I’d had no idea where Jane had called me from when she’d hysterically begged me to meet her here by the river. But what with the gun and all her “he’s dead” references, I thought that the police should check Stephen Elliot’s house, which they were doing now.
“Heartbroken, huh?” Edelman said.
“Yeah.”
“That happened to me, just before I met Shirley. This little Polish girl. Goddamn, she was cute. She kept telling me how much she liked me and I took her real serious. I asked her if she’d marry me and she looked like I’d asked her if she’d get down on the ground and push dog turds around with her nose.”
“Well, then you know what I was like for a year or so.
“Greatest diet in the world,” Edelman said. “I dropped thirty pounds. My parents wanted me to stay heartbroken.”