Elliot’s ideas, according to these insiders, turned Hammond’s fortunes around.
For all his brashness, Elliot is oddly reticent to discuss the things he’s done for Hammond. Of Bryce Hammond, the agency president, he says, “Bryce is one of the legends in our business. He’s brilliant.”
Elliot is as much in demand as his commercials. His messianic style, seductive and evangelical at the same time, has made him popular on the speaking circuit — and, many insist, the boudoir circuit as well.
Unwilling to speak about his past except with the vaguest of generalities, Elliot remains something of a mystery even to those who claim to know him well.
“I am my work,” he says passionately, a hint of anger in his voice. “I am the Picasso of my business — and that’s how I want to be judged. By my work and nothing else.”
If he weren’t being buried tomorrow, I would have laughed out loud, or at least smiled at his pretentiousness. But I was beginning to see that that was part of his mystique — his archness. Advertising people would love it — accustomed as they were to the boorishness the field seemed to promote. He looked good in a dinner jacket and muttered a few phrases of French and didn’t tell racist jokes over lunch. What more could you ask for?
The rest of the stuff in the drawers was mostly a collection of odds and ends, love letters written to him — fortunately for my ego, I didn’t find anything from Jane — innumerable tear sheets from newspapers and magazines with articles about how wonderful he’d been, a framed high-school graduation photo of himself, and finally one of those little cards that come attached to flowers. This one read: “To Buddy, who has taught me far more than I have taught him. All my love. Eve.” Then there was a high-school pennant that said “Grovert Tigers.”
Finally, I found a small green phone book, a Yellow Pages for the city. On the cover was a name — Eve — with a local phone number. I tore off the section with the number and put it in my pocket.
I clipped off the flashlight and sat back against a leather couch and thought about everything.
If I were reasonable at all, I’d go with the police wisdom and just say that Jane did it. I’d found her with what was presumably the murder weapon in her hand. She’d been out here, she certainly had motive, and she was presently in a state of shock, a circumstance not exactly unknown to killers overcome with remorse and terror.
But there were troubling and unanswered questions. Where had Stephen Elliot gotten all his money? Who was the older woman at the art gallery who’d slapped him? What was the real nature of the relationship between Elliot and Carla Travers, a woman he could not possibly have considered as a bedmate? And what about David Baxter? In the restaurant that afternoon he’d denied killing Elliot — but what else would he say? There was even Bryce Hammond to consider, though why he would kill Elliot was impossible to guess. Elliot had literally been his meal ticket.
My mind went back to the mysterious older woman. Where could I find her?
Going along with the police was beginning to get tempting. Their version of the murder seemed to make the most sense.
I decided to waste a few more minutes. I brought my flashlight up and peeked inside an unpromising white envelope.
Even by today’s standards the photographs were startling.
The fat man wasn’t making love. He was lying back, completely naked, his beer belly riding his otherwise skinny body. He had a beer can in his hand and a silly party hat on his head. His privates were very much at rest. What made him so startling was his grossness — his hairy body, his bald head, his doughy face. He was so real he hurt the eye.
The contrast between the man and the woman was unbelievable — he was so repellent and she so lovely that they might have been of different species. She was naked, too, lying there next to him on the cheap motel-room bed, but even in this scuzzy circumstance there was beauty in her blond hair and lithe body, the breasts small but shapely, the thatch of hair between her legs as tidy as the rest of her.
I had forgotten how good Jane looked without her clothes on.
I don’t know how long I sat there staring at the photo. I wanted to vomit or smash somebody’s face in. Either one would have been all right.
There were other photos in the envelope. The same man with a different woman, a woman who made David Baxter suddenly a viable suspect. The woman was his wife, Lucy.
14
I tried to think of her in the hospital, tried to think of her as I’d seen her in the park when she’d called me a few days ago and shown up holding a gun. I tried to relate both these images to the woman I’d just seen in the photographs and — I couldn’t. I had never imagined there was a side to her like that and a part of me still refused to believe it, insisted the snaps were faked. But I knew better, of course; I knew better.
Stuffing my pockets with various things I’d gleaned from Elliot’s desk, I let myself out again, back to the numbing air that acted now to cleanse me. What I was beginning to learn, and suspect, about Elliot was starting to make me hate him. Then I thought of Jane again, how she’d looked in the lurid light of the amateur photos, and all I could feel was pity — for her, for me, for her parents if they ever found out.
I got in my car, backed out of Elliot’s curving driveway, and headed for the only man who could answer the questions I now needed to ask.
Hammond Advertising is located on the top three floors of one of those bunker-like buildings architects are so proud of these days, or at least that generation of architects who have confused function with ugliness. Squat, square, a tribute to concrete, it sat in the center of an island of asphalt, purple except for an occasional lighted window in its twenty stories, the purple of mercury-vapor lights.
The lobby was empty except for a mannish woman bent over, shining windows. Neither of us seemed especially happy to see the other.
I took the elevator up, got off, and stepped into a darkness in which I could make out the shape of a splashy reception area.
I was in a kind of frenzy, looking forward to seeing Bryce the way I’d look forward to seeing a priest. I had to unburden myself of what I’d found tonight. Feelings of love, hate, sorrow — I needed to talk to somebody.
The floor seemed limitless. I walked past dozens of inky office doorways. Scents of everything from tobacco to perfume to artist’s glue to cleaning solvent floated at me like phantoms from the shadows.
An odd noise stopped me a moment. I had a sense that it was an alien noise in this environment, but I wasn’t sure why. I looked left, right, beginning to sweat for no reason. I sensed eyes watching me from the gloom. Then I heard a more familiar noise — the peculiar booming sound a 16-mm motion-picture projector makes. I moved toward it through the gloom.
I opened a door into a screening room, where Bryce Hammond sat in a theater-style seat in the luminous arc of the projector light. Thick blue cigar smoke coiled like snakes through the light. He was laughing so hard he didn’t notice me.
On screen, in a black-and-white commercial that dated from some time in the mid-sixties, a wimpy man with a big hammer was destroying his lawn mower, pounding it into rubble. “Do what you’ve always wanted to do to that mower of yours — then come down and get a genuine Cartwright mower.” The final scene was of the guy standing on his dead mower like a white hunter on a carcass.
Another commercial started to run within seconds of this one, but I cleared my throat so that he’d notice me.
He glanced up, seeming strangely embarrassed. “By God, Dwyer, c’mon in!”
He punched a button on the arm of his chair. The screen darkened and the houselights came up.