“Jerk off,” I muttered.
Instantly several heads twisted my way. The other actors. They’d heard me.
So, judging by his look, had the agency man.
The man from the production company, trying to redeem the moment, threw his arm around the agency guy’s shoulder and led him away, the agency man glaring at me all the while. I glared back. The bastard hadn’t even let us read for the part.
“You got balls.” The actor next to me laughed as we all stood up.
“Yeah,” I said, “and they’re worth about twenty-five cents each.”
The media crowd, at least in this city, is fickle. An “in” place one month is an “out” place the next. Before making restaurant loans, bankers should first consult media people and see if a given loan is a good idea.
This month the place was called the Conquistador, and for all its dark wood and Spanish leather and burnished bronze instruments hung on the walls, it was the essence of modern urban tackiness. The waiters were got up as buccaneers, the waitresses as serving wenches. The serving crew was a bunch of college kids. They were getting their degrees so they could sit in places like these and have equally shameless college kids wait on them.
The bartender, a cordial enough man who looked as if he probably threw refrigerators around for relaxation, had no qualms about pointing out David Baxter when I asked if he was there, which his answering service had told me he was.
Baxter and a fetching, dark-haired lady were sitting at a table in the darkest corner they’d been able to find. Baxter, at least from here, bore a resemblance to Paul McCartney, that kind of snotty, preppie self-confidence. He wore a Harris tweed sport coat and a button-down white shirt, and held a pipe the way men do in fancy whiskey ads. He was pretty spiffy until I got closer and took a better look at his eyes. David Baxter had been crying, and quite recently.
His companion would have made Audrey Hepburn jealous, her graceful face and huge grave eyes a masterpiece of beauty and irony, the mouth suggesting laughter, the fixed blue eyes fatalistic. She wore a woolen jumper, the kind college girls used to wear, and a dazzling white blouse that enhanced the blackness of her hair. By the time I got to their table I saw that she, too, had been crying.
There were no words between them, just that terrible silence I’d gotten to know in my last days with Jane....
They were deep enough into their grief that they didn’t notice me. By now I had no doubt that I was looking at Mrs. David Baxter, the woman who’d been sleeping with Stephen Elliot.
I tried to make it as official as a private investigator’s license can. I said “Excuse me” and pushed my open wallet in front of them.
They reacted as if they’d been drugged, slowly, without a breath of spontaneity. They stared at my license as if it were something new and unimaginable. Finally he said, “Yes?”
“My name’s Dwyer. I’m a private investigator.”
“Yes?”
“I would like to speak to you. To both of you.”
He looked at her. She looked at him. There was a third chair at the table, empty. I decided not to wait for an answer. I sat down, signaled for a waitress, ordered a Heineken.
Softly, Mrs. Baxter said, “I don’t understand.”
“Why I‘m here, you mean?”
She nodded. Again the sense that she was drugged.
“I’m trying to prove that Jane Branigan didn’t kill Stephen Elliot.”
She looked confused. “Oh, but she did. It’s in the paper. I even saw it on television. She did kill him.” Then she said, “Wait a minute. You’re Jack Dwyer. You used to live with her, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
For some reason my admission served to charge Baxter out of his stupor.
“Why are you here bothering us?”
“Just for the reason I told you. I’m trying to help Jane.”
“Well, you certainly aren’t helping either of us. We’re—” For just a moment the anger gave way to the grief. I saw his hand tremble and I had the uncomfortable feeling he was going to burst into tears. “We’re—” His eyes sought hers, but she was already removing herself from the table.
“I need to go to the rest room,” she said, gone before anybody could complain.
He glared at me. “Thanks a lot.” His preppie face was even redder close up. He looked like a very, very sad kid.
“I’m really sorry,” I said. “I know what you’re going through. I really do.”
“Jesus,” he said, “aren’t you something? Do you moonlight as a shrink when you can’t get work as a private investigator?”
I decided to hit him with it directly. “There’s a good possibility you killed Elliot. I know all about the incident in the parking lot. He was sleeping with your wife.”
He fought through his pain to his first real clarity. “Don’t think it hadn’t occurred to me, to kill him. Don’t think it hadn’t. But it just so happens I didn’t, okay, pal?”
“Can you prove where you were the morning he was killed?”
“No. Can you?”
He was coming out of it. Given the sneer in his voice, I wasn’t sure I was glad.
“How about your wife?”
He shook his razor-cut hair. “Did she kill him, you mean?”
“Yes.”
He laughed. It was a high, ghoulish sound, odd enough to cause several nearby patrons to look over.
“You don’t know a hell of a lot about Stephen Elliot, do you?”
“You’re right. I’m beginning to think I don’t.” I thought of Carla Travers, at least ten years Elliot’s senior, and their strange relationship.
“He was an aesthete, pal, he wasn’t just some ass-bandit. And you don’t kill aesthetes, you worship them.” He was back into his funk again. He had hit himself with rage and feelings of inadequacy so long he was getting punchy, the way prizefighters get. And this, apparently, was the theme, this was what his wife had told him about Elliot, that he wasn’t a mere lover, somebody who snared flesh, but a very special person. That’s how Jane had once described him to me. “A very special person.” Cliché that it is, it’s not a phrase I’m apt to forget. Ever.
“Maybe she killed him without planning it, in anger.” The smirk was back. “No, pal, I’m afraid your little honey committed the crime all by her lonesome.” He held his hand over his nose and tried to sniff up his sinuses after his recent tears. Then he sighed. “You know, it would be easier to take if my wife had killed him.” He nodded toward the rest room. Bitterness had replaced rage. “This way he gets to keep her, even from beyond the grave, as the saying goes. She’ll never know if he would have dumped her the way he dumped all the others. She’ll prefer to think he wouldn’t have — so he’ll always hang on to her, even though I’m married to her.”
“Then you’re not going to get a divorce.”
His admission surprised me. “I love her too much. Over the past three months, when it was all going on, I realized that I didn’t give a shit about anything but her.” He smiled dazedly. “You’re married to somebody fourteen years, you tend to forget how important they are to you. Man, this was some goddamn reminder, believe me.” He sounded hopeful and despairing at the same time, glad he had her back at least physically, terrified he could never reclaim her emotionally. He put out a hand. “Sorry I was such a prick.”
We shook.
“Just the last few months—” He paused. “Well, you know how it goes.”
When she came back her lips were a bright red and there was a faint sparkle in her eyes. She sat down with a nice girlish primness, one appropriate to her jumper, and offered each of us a tiny smile, the way she might have placed a cupcake before us. “The tension level seems down considerably from when I left.”
“It is,” her husband said.
She turned to me. “You don’t really doubt that Jane killed him, do you?”