Edelman got up on one knee.
I put my head down and dove for her.
Hammond saw what was going to happen. He brought up his Luger.
Edelman opened fire.
The gun roared above the soundtrack. Like God’s wrath finally manifest.
After several long minutes I got up. I didn’t look at what was left of Hammond. There’d been enough death impressed on my vision.
I just grabbed Donna and pulled her up against me tight and struggled my way out of the screening room that had been Bryce Hammond’s temple.
33
I wish I could tell you that a lot of really dramatic things happened as a result of Bryce Hammond’s death. But not much did, really. Donna, Edelman and I went to the nearest emergency room. Edelman was worked on and went home. Donna, who’d only been knocked out, was checked for a concussion, then left on the arm of Chad, whom she’d called soon after reaching the hospital. I ended up spending the hours till dawn talking to a detective named Sullivan, patiently explaining the case and all its entanglements.
Carla Travers, who in addition to having a wrist fractured in three places also had a concussion and two broken ribs, had told Edelman and me everything from her hospital bed.
The time I’d visited her apartment and heard her say, “You know what I want and I better goddamn get it,” she’d been talking to Baxter. She wanted money, or she threatened to expose the entire blackmail scheme to the police. But then she got a better idea — she would find the strongbox herself and begin her own blackmail plan. She had used Eliot’s alcoholism against him but was now playing against somebody treacherous — Bryce Hammond.
The watching eyes I’d felt on me that first night I’d been at Hammond’s agency had belonged to Carla. She’d been there to steal the box, thinking Elliot might have hidden it in a trick magic box he’d been given by Eve as a present — Elliot being the kind of drinker who talked too much, eventually told his sycophant Carla nearly everything. But Carla hadn’t found the box. So that night at the hotel she joined all the others in the room to demand that Baxter stop blackmailing them, Baxter being the culprit that Stephen Elliot had named to her. Only not even Baxter had the box that night. It then resided at Eve’s, where Elliot had hidden it before he died. Bryce Hammond had exhausted all other possibilities but Eve’s — where he went and found the strongbox.
Of course, Carla had mistakenly blamed Eve for everything all along, anyway. Elliot’s whining, drunken conversations had led her to believe that Eve had hired the thugs who broke into Carla’s apartment — when it had been Bryce who’d hired them to search for the strongbox.
Carla related all this in a voice she’d borrowed from a corpse.
Then I went out and had a huge breakfast and woke up late the next morning to a ringing phone to find that I’d been selected to play the daddy in the pizza commercial, after all. In the afternoon I visited Jane Branigan and her parents in the hospital. It was a melancholy hour.
That night I went to work. The old bastard who always tries to steal ham came in and tried again. This time, being broke, I just scooted him out of the store. After my shift was over I went to Malley’s, where he told me about this really stupid woman he thought I should date.
Then I went home and that’s where I saw her. Sitting in my parking lot. The way she’d been the first time I’d seen her. She rolled down her window.
“You want to get in and smoke?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
She smiled. “You playing hard to get, Dwyer?”
I shrugged. “Maybe I’m just tired.”
“You should read the story I wrote for the first issue of Ad World. You come off sounding like Dashiell Hammett.”
I just stared at her. “I missed you.”
She took a while to say it. “I missed you too.”
“What about Chad?”
“Honest?”
“Honest.”
“I don’t know.”
“I’d be a lot better for you.”
“I think you would be. At least, sometimes I think you would be. I’m pretty confused, Dwyer, about a lot of things. All the killings — you and me—”
After a while I said, “Maybe I can help unconfuse you.”
“Maybe you can.”
“If I get in, can we listen to a jazz station?”
She laughed. “You’re crazy, you know that?”
I got in and shut the door and immediately pulled her to me. “Look who’s talking,” I said.