“Look, Mrs. Milk. Did two plain-clothes detectives come by here a couple of days ago?”
She clammed up then. She looked worried.
Yarrow said, “How long has Milky been gone?”
Kyter was standing at his desk, waiting for Pendleton when he came in. “He called, all pissy.”
Pendleton spilled down his mobile and his keys. “I expected that.”
“Says he’s gonna call us on it. Gonna write it up.”
“Bullshit. So we got a little creative. Who knew?”
“He wants a favor. Demands it.”
“What the hell now?”
“Not for him. For the mother, he says.”
“For her?” said Pendleton. “What’s that get us?”
“Gets us nothing. But he’s holding our feet to the flames here.”
“To do what?”
“Just show up. Make an appearance.”
“Walk in there?”
“Make like it’s out of respect. The woman’s all alone now. Widow, one son ODed. He says she needs something good to cling to.”
“What are we now, Santa Claus?”
“It’s a gesture. For my own conscience, too.”
“Christ.”
“Don’t hard-ass me. You know we dicked this up. We wanted to put Eddie Milk in his place. Put him on the outs with his little crew there. Well, it big-time backfired. If this is how we pay, if this is the sum total? Then we get off cheap.”
Pendleton said, “He was a weasel. Who got thrown under an Amtrak.”
“Fine,” said Kyter. “Put on your tie.”
In the back room of O’Connor’s, the black-awninged funeral home on Broadway, men sat on padded folding chairs sipping whiskey and paying their respects. In the main parlor, Mrs. Milk sat in a brocaded chair wearing a black crepe dress and white Reeboks. The closed casket was peacocked with a ragged assortment of flowers, the largest wearing a white sash reading “SON.”
The conductor had seen an obstruction on the tracks. He hit the brakes and the body was dragged two hundred feet, sparks igniting its clothes. Between those burns and the wheel cuts, the coroner was at a loss. Milky’s death was ruled a suicide, like his father.
Pendleton and Kyter walked in close to eight. They stood in the receiving line, staring down a couple of punks while waiting their turn. Mrs. Milk recognized the two detectives and rose to her feet. They took her aside and spoke with her quietly. Kyter even held her hand.
In the back room, Derrick grabbed Yarrow’s jacket lapel. “You see that shit? Right there.”
Yarrow watched Kyter patting Mrs. Milk’s shoulder as she convulsed into a black hankie.
Derrick said, “I knew I was right to top him.”
Yarrow froze, the Dixie cup of whiskey in his hand. “What’d you say?”
Derrick stared hard. He wore a grin on his face like a look of sick determination, his breath smelling flammable. “End of the month is officially back on.”
Later, after the mourners had thinned out, Yarrow went up to the bier, kneeling before the walnut veneer of the no-frills casket. Mrs. Milk sat alone in her chair, humming a church hymn to soothe herself. She had her hero now, a martyr to look down over her from the wall in that third-floor walk-up on O Street. She would be consoled. Those two bumblers had done something right for a change.
I knew I was right to top him.
Admission of murder. It didn’t matter now whether or not the end-of-the-month deal went down.
Yarrow made like he was crossing himself, feeling the sweat-dampened front pleat of his shirt, the thin wire that was sewn in there. Under his breath he muttered something — a prayer for Milky, and for all the wayward sons of the town — that only the passive electronic ear could hear. “Never lie to your mother.” Then he stood, touched his fingertips to the coffin’s cool finish, and walked away.
Rupert Holmes
The Monks of the Abbey Victoria
From Dead Man’s Hand
Heads had been known to roll in the RCA Building like cabbages in a coleslaw factory. The maroon hallway carpet on the twenty-first floor often doubled as conveyor belt to the waiting express elevator, which was always eager to facilitate an executive’s plummet back down to the street. I’d hardly been at the network a month when I found my own fair-haired cranium poised fetchingly on the chopping block. But at least I didn’t lack for company.
“This memo in my hand.”
Ken Compton, Vice-President of Programming but second to no network chieftain in his wrath, flourished the document for the four of us to see. The four of us were attorney Shepard Spitz of Practices and Standards, Matty Dancer from Variety and Specials, Harv Braverman in Public Relations, and myself, Dale Winslow, from the catchall hopper dubbed “Broadcasting.” As department heads, we formed the quartet that reported directly to Compton, with News, Sports, and Original Programming having their own hierarchy within both the network and the building. I’d been brought on board to achieve the goal of broadcasting in compatible color from sign-on right up through “Sermonette.” Even the National Anthem and the test pattern were going to be in color.
“This memo in my hand,” Compton reiterated. “It’s worth more to our enemy up the block than the sum total of your lifetime incomes, including retirement benefits. That’s without even factoring in the possibility that one of you won’t be working here tomorrow.”
We sat across his desk, four boarding-school students caught smoking behind the sports-equipment shed.
“Let me tell you how ultra hush-hush this memo was.” He leaned forward as if betraying troop locations in Korea. “I typed it myself.”
There could be no clearer proof of how seriously Ken Compton feared intranetwork espionage than that he would endure the humiliation of sitting at his secretary’s desk to hunt and peck on her electric typewriter. He’d had this fixation since Ted Thissel, my immediate predecessor, had been suspected of selling the previous season’s fall schedule to CBS, forcing Compton to relocate some audience favorites to unfamiliar time slots, a last-minute move which many thought had cost us dearly in the ratings.
“Do you know where I found this memo?” he asked. “Let me tell you where I found this memo. Propped behind a bottle of Vitalis above the sink in the executive washroom. If I hadn’t been the next one in there, this document could have been filched by the cleaning lady and sold to those vipers at CBS.”
The image of our Mrs. Dawkins sitting patiently in William Paley’s outer office, bucket and mop at her side, was the only thing amusing about the moment.
“Spitz, I gave it to you first. Who had it last?”
I knew the answer to this question and sorely wished I didn’t. The memo — which listed by title the films we’d acquired from Paramount that we planned to run as specials against our rivals’ strongest shows — had been addressed to the four of us only, and Compton had intentionally made no carbons or photostats. We were each to read the memo, check off our own name, and hand it to one of the others. The last to read it was to return it personally to Compton.
Harv Braverman’s name was the only one that hadn’t been checked when I’d given the memo to him, but now it was as ticked off as Compton was with us. I looked at Harv, who was peering about the office as if the identity of this incredibly careless executive was an enthralling enigma to him. I turned back to discover the others staring at me. After all, I was the new fellow on the block, a refugee from Ogilvy and Mather. The others were lifetime NBC men. Their blood ran peacock blue.
Spitz said, correctly, that there was no way for him to know. Matty Dancer said he couldn’t remember, as did the blameworthy Braverman, who then turned my way with raised eyebrows.