“Yes, I do doubt it.”
“I was—” She glanced at her husband, as if for permission.
He nodded. “Go ahead, Lucy. It’s all right.” He looked as if he wasn’t quite sure it was, but he was willing to find out.
“I was there when she would come up to his apartment and pound on the door,” Lucy Baxter said. “She was like a wild woman. She’d literally fling herself against the door. She had to be hurting herself.”
I had seen her like that, her despair turning into an animal frenzy that ultimately hurt her more than anybody. I wanted to help her, wondered if I could, wondered if, in fact, she wasn’t guilty...
“She was obsessive about Stephen — it didn’t have anything to do with real love,” Lucy Baxter said. “Why, she even threatened me several times at work. In front of other people.” She shook her head. The tears started suddenly. “But she had no right to... to—”
She put her head on the table. A kind of moaning came from her.
Baxter moved over and put his arms around her. I wanted to ask her about the older woman the Branigans had told me about, but I saw that now was not the time.
Baxter slipped his arm around her, began to rock her, not giving a damn that he had an audience.
“We really need to sit here alone,” he said.
I couldn’t disagree with that. There was nobody else in the world who could deal with what had happened to them. I wasn’t sure even they could.
I left there already planning ahead for how I’d spend my evening. Maybe I’d learn something important, or maybe I’d end up spending some time in jail.
11
The rest of the afternoon I did all the things I’ve never learned to enjoy — shopping for groceries, picking up dry cleaning, paying bills. In the past two days I’d collected my paycheck from the security company and three different residual checks from commercials I’d done over the past two years. After subtracting my bimonthly child support payment, I didn’t have a hell of a lot of fun money left over.
Up on First Avenue there’s a tavern where local theater people hang out. Until ten years ago there was a dinner theater next to the tavern. That building is now one of those dead zones, where a new structure is constantly announced but never seems to get built. Theater people still use the bar, though. Indeed.
November bleakness was back by the time I rolled my Datsun into the parking lot. On top of a supermarket across the street the lights on a big Christmas tree popped on. I thought of my son when he was little, his delight in the season. Then I started thinking what a lousy father I’d been. Maybe that is what I really like about acting. It allows me to be somebody else.
The tavern was dark except for the glow of the jukebox and the glow of the backlights that illuminated several rows of liquor bottles along the glass wall behind the cash register. A bumper pool game dominated the middle of the small floor space, dividing the booths on either side.
I wasn’t four steps inside before I saw the guy I was looking for, a huge, red-bearded descendant of the Vikings named Rolfe Steenman. Days, he sold men’s clothes in an expensive department store in the loop. Nights, he did what the rest of us did — picked up whatever parts he could find in plays, commercials, anything. His biggest distinction to date was that he’d worked on several of the spots that had made Stephen Elliot famous. I didn’t really know Steenman, but I’d heard that he’d become reasonably tight with Elliot, and I thought maybe he could help me.
He sat at the bar, staring at his drink. A cigarette in the glass ashtray in front of him curled smoke into his face. He didn’t seem to notice.
“Rolfe.”
He raised his head lazily. He saw me, recognized me, and seemed to know instantly why I was there.
“Dwyer. How are you?”
“Mind if I sit down?”
“Free country.”
I ordered a Heineken.
His size and his strength — he could easily have been an NFL fullback — surprised you in an actor. He was without grace, but he compensated for it with a powerful presence. He was also very good at comedy, which is what he’d done for Stephen Elliot.
“I suppose you know about Elliot,” I said.
“Yeah. Your ex-old lady killed him.” He didn’t even make a pass at being civil.
“First of all, she was never my wife. Second of all, I don’t think she’s guilty.”
“Oh, yeah. I forgot you were a cop once, weren’t you?”
“I need to ask you some questions about Elliot.”
He looked at me as if he were trying to decide how he wanted to attack me — with his fists or his feet. “Jesus, man, I’m bummed out. Can’t you see?”
The bartender came over with my beer. I thanked him.
I decided to push my luck. “When you were hanging around with Elliot did you ever know anything about him and an older woman?”
He smiled nastily. “You and every other fucking gossipmonger in this town. The ‘older woman’ happens to be his aunt.”
I thought of how the Branigans had described this woman, how she had slapped Elliot when they’d been in an art gallery. That didn’t sound like an aunt.
“You know anybody who’d want to kill Elliot?”
He surprised me by smiling. “I’ve got to give you your nerve, Dwyer. I told you I didn’t want to talk about Elliot and here you are — still asking me questions.”
He turned away from me, back to his drink. The bartender sensed that trouble might be coming. He had started to paw his apron nervously.
What the hell. I wasn’t doing anything this afternoon, may as well get my face pounded in. “You know anybody who’d want to kill him?”
Without looking at me, he said, “A lot of people wanted to kill him.”
When he spoke in a cool but not unfriendly voice the bartender looked relieved as hell.
Steenman turned to me and said, “A lot of people wanted to kill him. Maybe not literally, but figuratively. Because they were jealous. Here was this creative genius, this guy who could do anything, and they couldn’t stand his talent or success. So they wished him the worst. Just like your girlfriend, Dwyer. That’s why she killed him. She couldn’t stand the thought that other women might share a part of him. Just couldn’t stand it.” He was big and he was angry, but now he sounded more sad than anything. “The guy gave me a break, Dwyer. You know that? He saw something in me, some talent, that I didn’t even know I had, and I’ll always be grateful. He was a creative genius, yet he made room for people like you and me in his life.”
I thought of how Lucy Baxter had spoken of Elliot — in the same kind of reverent terms, in the way you’d speak of an especially holy priest, a shaman.
“What about this aunt you mentioned?”
He shrugged. “I never actually met her, but he talked about her quite a bit. Even showed me a picture of her. His parents had died when he was young. She’d raised him.”
“You know her name?”
“Angela. But I don’t know her last name.” He sighed. “He let me be a part of his world. It was exciting for me, believe me. He really knew how to live.”
“Where’d he get all his money?”
“Hell, he had the top advertising job in the city.”
“His house had an easy hundred thousand dollars’ worth of antiques. The police are probably looking into his assets now. I suspect they’re going to find a lot. You can’t make that kind of money in advertising, no matter how successful you are.”
But he hadn’t heard me. He was just thinking of his gratitude to a man who’d taken him along, sort of a Gabby Hayes at the orgy. All the fancy parties, the fancy women, the heady sense of being loved and being envied. For a guy who looked like a Viking, it must have been something truly memorable.