Which is where I was three-and-a-half hours after somebody knocked me out at Denny Harris's house.
The lump on the back of my head did not throb quite so painfully now, nor did my jaw (I'd landed on it). I credited the healing process to the miracle wrought by the combination of hot water and cold gin I mentioned. Only this time I wasn't trying to deprive my senses; I was trying to use most of them in an effort to formulate a plan.
I suppose I could get smarmy here and tell you that seeing Denny lying there dead had made me have second thoughts about him, but it didn't. Like some others in advertising, he'd been a superficial, self-indulgent, lazy cipher who'd prospered on the talents of others and hadn't even had the honor or vision to understand his own parasitic role. He really believed he had something to offer other than hand-holding and racist jokes on the golf course for clients who appreciated such. His loss-sorry, John Donne-did not diminish the human race a whit. In fact, the species was probably the better off for his passing.
What might well be diminished, however, were the coffers of Harris-Ketchum Advertising.
The choice I faced was this-call the police like a good citizen and tell them where to find the body or simply do nothing, let the body be found in its own way, by the person the gods or whoever elected.
The reason the second alternative was appealing was because I would then not have to discuss with the police the identity of the woman who drove the Mercedes that had been parked in Denny's driveway.
Her name was Cindy Traynor. From what the private detective had told me, she and Denny had been having an affair for three months now. Cindy's husband was Clay Traynor, president of Traynor Chain Saws.
It was unlikely he would keep his account with us once he learned that his wife had been having an affair with Denny, and that I was implicating her in a murder charge.
Accounts tend to go elsewhere under circumstances like that.
As I rolled into bed in pajamas fresh from the laundry, I took an Arthur C. Clarke novel from the nightstand. Science fiction is my escape. But for once the sentences held no magic for me.
I turned off the light, smoked half-a-dozen cigarettes until the moist nicotine on my lips began to taste salty, and then made the mistake of trying to sleep. I'm sure you're familiar with the process. Getting entangled in the sheets. Dozing off for a few minutes at a time, then waking up pasty and disoriented, as if from a nightmare. Trying to keep your mind blank while keeping it filled with trying to keep your mind blank. Insomnia is one of the few reasons I can see as legitimate for suicide. Enough sleepless nights and anybody would put a gun in his or her mouth.
My life pushed in on me like walls meant to crush. I had responsibilities-three kids to help raise, two of them soon to be college-bound, and a father in a nursing home who twitched at World War II memories. Between the kids and my father, I was always desperate for money, overdrawn too many times a month, sweaty on the phone with the nursing-home people when my payments were late. Given Denny's behavior lately, I was afraid I'd let down the people who depended on me and the thought of that made me crazy in a way I couldn't cope with. My old man had worked thirty-five years in a steel mill without letting his family down even once. I had no right to be any easier on myself… and at my age, starting over in the agency business was impossible.
I don't know what time it was when the city sounds seemed to recede-the distant ambulances less strident, the buzz of traffic less steady-or when I finally fell down an endless well of blackness into sleep… but it was wonderful whenever it happened.
Which was when, of course, the phone rang.
It had to be somebody who really wanted to talk to me, because the phone rang fifty times before I finally disentangled myself from the covers and located the source of the ringing.
I smashed the receiver of the phone to my ear and muttered something like hello-vaguely worried, now that I was waking up, that maybe something was wrong with one of my kids-when a female voice, breathless and a little drunk, said, "I didn't kill him, you've got to believe that."
That was when I started looking for a cigarette. Fortunately, I'd left them on the nightstand. Once my awkward fingers discovered how to make fire-you take the match head and you drag it across the slate and nine times out of ten the darn thing bursts into flame-once I got the lung cancer stirred up in my system and realized the call didn't concern my teenagers, I felt much better.
Then I realized whom I was speaking to. Or, more exactly, who was speaking to me.
Cindy Traynor.
"I know vou saw me there tonight, Michael."
"Uh."
"I just want you to know I… I didn't… I wasn't the one who…"
All I could think of were the puddles of blood on the bed. And the way she'd slugged me from behind. Difficult to tally the nice, breathy voice on the other end of the phone with such carnage-but it was.
"You really hit me," I said.
"Did I hurt you?"
"Not permanently, I guess."
"I'm really sorry. I just got scared. I wanted to leave the house without you hearing me."
"I didn't hear you, believe me."
I thought of her classic blond good looks-the sort that belong in evening dresses of the formal sort in country clubs of the snootiest type. But there was another quality to her I'd always liked, a gentle refinement, almost a melancholy, which is why I'd been almost shocked when I'd found out she'd spent time with Denny. She seemed much, much better than that.
"He was going to dump you, wasn't he?" I said.
An odd laugh rang down the phone line. "Michael, I'm afraid you don't understand my relationship with Denny very well."
"So he didn't meet somebody new?"
Denny usually had a married woman somewhere on the horizon. The private detective had said that Denny had stopped seeing Cindy as often, but he wasn't sure that Denny had a new woman.
"It doesn't matter and that's what you don't understand."
I paused, the weight of the evening crushing in on me. "If your husband finds out where you were tonight," I said, "we're both done for." Then I got curious. "Where are you calling from?"
"My home. Downstairs."
"Clay could be listening."
"He's passed out. Drunk." She paused. "I really didn't kill Denny," she said.
I sighed, had another cigarette. Maybe, from what I knew about psychology, she really didn't think she had killed him. Maybe she was repressing it.
"OK," I said, unable to keep the disbelief out of my voice.
"Really."
"All right. Really."
"You don't believe me."
"I'm not sure."
"May I see you tomorrow?"
"For what?"
"For-maybe you can help me."
"To do what?"
"Deal with this. There's nobody else I can confide in. I'm sorry." She sounded rocky.
I sighed again. "When?"
"For lunch." She sighed. "After you've finished seeing my husband. He said he plans to spend the morning in your offices."
I had forgotten about that. Every third Thursday of the month, Clay Traynor came to our offices to look over new ideas-and to get his ration of bowing and scraping. He had a big appetite.
"My fingerprints," she said. "They're going to be all over Denny's house."
"If you're not implicated in any way," I said, then stopped myself. I was thinking about the private detective I'd hired. He knew what was going on. When he found out that Denny was dead, what would he do with the material he'd collected the last couple weeks? Go to the police? Use it to blackmail both Cindy Traynor and me?