The Suspense Is Killing Me Read online

  “Listen, this is where I came in. I’ve been all through this once before. JC is dead, ashes scattered across the desert.”

  He smiled at me with an expression of infinite patience. “This will be different. This time you’ve got Allan Bechtol behind you. I’m prepared to put unlimited financial resources behind this search. For however long it takes. I’m also prepared to give you certain pieces of information I’ve collected, stuff that wasn’t available two years ago when you went looking for him.”

  “Why not just hire a private detective? Or better yet, one of the huge outfits with hundreds of agents all over the world? What’s it got to do with me? Maybe I don’t want him found—I’m living off him, remember? I’m his beneficiary … this is crazy, it’s a lousy idea—”

  “Now you’re being glib and irrelevant. You have your own life now.” This from Heidi Dillinger.

  “I do? Not without the ghost of JC, I don’t!”

  “Of course you do. You’re a writer now.”

  “All I’ve ever written about is my brother—”

  She leaned forward, the shadows flickering across her face. She and Bechtol made a good team. “That’s the point,” she said softly. “You were his brother. It would be just the job for you. What more could it have to do with you?”

  “And it could make you financially secure, pal.” Bechtol had picked up the ball again.

  “How do you figure that?”

  “We’ll come to that. But the point is you were with him all those years. You understood him, Lee. He always trusted you. Didn’t he, Lee? Weren’t you always the one he turned to for help and advice?”

  “Who remembers?” I said. “Who cares?”

  “Of course you were. You know damn well you were. What it comes down to is this—if he’s alive, you’re the one person he won’t be able to elude. That’s what I’m counting on.”

  “One question,” I said. “You haven’t told me your excuse for such a harebrained idea. What’s in it for you, Sam?”

  I caught sight of our reflections in the sliding glass doors. We looked like characters in a movie, conspirators, which is what we were, give or take. Sam—Allan, of course—leaning back in his chair, slowly munching on a strawberry, his dark glasses sinister in the evening, in the candlelight. Heidi looking elegant and haughty, head back, looking down her nose, listening, toying with her cognac, circling the rim with the tip of her finger. Then there was me. My headache didn’t show, but Ali and Liston had been going at it between my ears ever since that guy knocked me down the stairs. That was when I’d split the bridge of my nose and why I had the little Band-Aid that I couldn’t avoid seeing no matter where I looked. No one had made jokes about the Band-Aid, which was nice of them. We fit our roles in the movie perfectly. Mr. Big and his gorgeous tootsie and the dumb jerk they were manipulating. Guess who was going to take over the heavy lifting and finally take the fall. Guess who was going up the river. For some reason I’d gotten the Elisha Cook role. I sensed something wrong with this picture. It was me. But my old pal lit up a ten-dollar cigar and I lit one, too, and I kept right on listening, a willing accomplice in my own downfall. My old pal Sam sure knew his man.

  “I take it you’ve read my books,” he said.

  “I’m afraid not. At least not all the way through.”

  “Jeez, you can be disagreeable, Lee. You used to be such a nice guy. Wouldn’t hurt a fly. You left all the fly hurting to JC. Now you do it.”

  “Well, a spade’s a spade,” I said.

  “But you said my present book—the tank and all, with Lawrence of Arabia—you said it sounded better than my usual thing. I naturally thought … well, how the hell do you know?”

  “I’ve read the reviews,” I said. “This one sounded better. That’s all.”

  “Graffiti on a subway car would sound better! Reviews … Christ. Critics!” He spat the word, and considering his reviews I didn’t blame him. Still, why should he care? “Critics! You know what they are. The critics come in after the battle’s over, after the smoke has cleared, and shoot the wounded. Pretenders … poltroons … a swinish lot—no, they give swine a bad name …”

  Heidi Dillinger said, “Allan holds them in low esteem. He takes them too seriously, Mr. Tripper. His readership is so huge, the critics are quite powerless to hurt him—”

  “The fuckers wound my soul,” he shouted.

  “Perhaps you should try one of the books yourself, keep an open mind.” She smiled at me. I wondered what she thought of them.

  “Okay, okay. But right now we’re trying to find out what he sees in JC—”

  “Well,” he said, refusing to calm down, “let me tell you a thing or three about my books. They may be trash, I can understand that, but they’re what I do, and I do the best I can. They may well be quite forgotten in twenty years, I see that. But the little fartbrains who write about them, who are so quick to piss all over them, well, the little fartbrains are forgotten the next day. They’re insects. I resent them. And if I weren’t such a highly controlled man, I might kill a couple just for fucking sport.”

  “Look, if you’re going to babble on about critics, I’m bailing out and going home to bed. I’m as willing to be bored by a windy novelist worth multimillions as the next man, but the next man wouldn’t put up with this gratuitous bullshit either. You’re rich, they’re poor, to hell with them.”

  He waved his cigar at me, the ash falling into his cognac. “Shit! You see? The critics again!” He stared me back down into my chair. “All right, enough.” He sighed and pushed the snifter away. He poured cognac into his coffee cup. “The trademark of my books is their verisimilitude. To one degree or another, they are always related to actual events. I overlay them with a dense layer of fiction—intrigue, sex, inside dope, violence, fairly one-dimensional characters drawn with a broad brush and tangentially based on the kind of dimwits you see in the supermarket tabloids … but that structure, the steel skeleton of my story, the basis of truth, it always shines through, it carries the weight of the story. For instance, I found an Afrika Korps tank out there in the northern desert, the real skeletons still inside the damn thing … Friend of mine told me he’d heard rumors about it, I went all the way over there and found it … It must’ve been like an oven in that tank … forty years and more it sat there and when I found it, it was mostly buried in sand, the cannon barrel sticking up as if it were giving the world the finger! That was my truth. I found out everything I could about the tank, quite a big job for young Dillinger here, and then I began laying the rest of it on … That tank could bear a hell of a lot of weight, you follow me?

  “Well, JC Tripper is the underpinning of my next book. Now is the time to get cracking on the research, so it’ll all be in place when I’m done with Rommel’s tank and dear old Lawrence … he was a great man, a very great man.”

  “JC? You’re kidding, you’ve got to be kidding!”

  “Lawrence. I was speaking of T.E. Lawrence. JC? No. Not a great man. But an interesting man, for all his faults and failings. JC was a prototype. Dramatic, girls fancied him, bit of a satyr—I can’t even imagine some of the stuff he must have got up to, wicked reputation … as I say, a prototype. Your book was fine, but it was superficial—let’s face it, Lee—at least by the standards I bring to this sort of thing. But now you’ve got the chance to find out if he’s really alive! I have to know the truth before I proceed … and you were there, Lee. You more than anyone know what it was like at the end. You saw all the gory details, you must have your own deep, dark, secret ideas …You can’t look me in the eye and tell me you haven’t doubted the official story, the story you backed up with your book … hell, Lee, given the chance and the time, you’re the one person who’s bound to be able to recognize the truth.”

  My old pal was getting on my nerves. Two days ago someone I cared about had been murdered, but her death had been brushed aside by Allan Bechtol and Heidi Dillinger. They were like movie people I’d known. Nothing mattered but their pl
ans. Lost your leg and your baby was kidnapped by skinheads and your sister murdered and eaten by cannibals? Listen, man, that’s heavy, but we’re shooting the scene where the top of the girl’s bikini comes off … They mattered. Not Sally Feinman, not the manner of her death, not my sorrow. They mattered and they were all that mattered, and I’d better get used to the idea if I let them buy me.

  I pushed my chair back and stood up. The lights were winking in the darkness and the night sky glowed pink, as if the city had been torched by General Sherman. I tasted the cigar; too mild for me—a fine Havana. They were both staring at me, unwilling to let me slip away. They had no idea what I was thinking, which was all right with me.

  I was trying to hear a voice, Sally’s. I wanted to hear what she had to say to me. She was someone in whom I had placed complete trust. Her advice would have convinced me about almost anything. The decency and integrity that were the coin of her realm were beyond price in the easy corruption of our lives and times.

  “You’re overestimating me, I’m afraid.” I was sweating again. The smell of nighttime summer rain was in the air like a hint of relief, a tinge of madness. There was a real breeze loitering in the Park and I could almost feel it. There was a soft peal of thunder somewhere off across the Hudson. “Think about it. I wasn’t much good to anyone, not to JC and not to myself, not by the time our little caravan got the wagons into a circle in Tangier. I had a dope problem, a very big dope problem—you name it, I was on it. And the dope was made worse by the booze and all of it was complicated and compounded by all the wrong women. Including JC’s hand-me-downs, and their name was legion. Then, when everything started turning Tangier to shit, your faithful servant here went entirely to pieces. I mean like one of those all-red jigsaw puzzles … lots of pieces and it looked like they were never going to get it put back together. The next time I knew my name was in a Swiss hospital. Sanatorium, I guess. I’m not the authority you seem to think I am, that’s what I’m telling you.”

  Bechtol was shaking his head, being patient with me again. “You gotta give me some credit, Lee.” One of the candles had burned down and gone out. The other was flickering low in the stick, the fan threatening it with extinction any moment. His cigar’s tip glowed like a stoplight, a warning. “I’m into details. Obsessive. Ask Heidi. Or trust me on it, it’s true. I know how sloppy that mess at the end was—”

  “Hardly anybody left alive knows how sloppy,” I said.

  “I know about the strange disappearance of the grief-stricken brother. Namely, you. Hell, Lee, one of the main scenarios the fans and the rock magazines used to put out was that maybe you were part of the cover-up surrounding the cause of death, the famous three-day delay … there were people who said you made sure JC got away safe …”

  “Right, that’s it,” I said. “We killed a drunken stranger, cremated the body to give it that little extra touch of realism, then I went bananas to draw attention away from JC. Who then sneaked away wearing a burnoose and riding a camel … damn, we didn’t think anyone would notice.”

  There was a long silence and then Bechtol said, “I’ve heard crazier stories in my time.”

  Heidi Dillinger looked at me, her tan eyes wide. I hadn’t noticed before how they seemed to slant upward slightly, giving her an almost Asian look. “Are you sure that this is absolutely the right time for irony?”

  I shrugged.

  She went on, “There are even those people who have suggested that you killed JC … that you couldn’t live in his shadow anymore, that you were tired of his leftovers—”

  “Let me assure you,” Bechtol said hastily, “we don’t believe that for a moment. Not a moment.” He glanced at her with a look of surprise and irritation.

  “Well, that’s a weight off my shoulders,” I said. “I’ve also heard the cannibal story—it was the best. Clive and Annie and I and assorted guests were supposed to have sort of barbecued JC and dined on him. Giving whole worlds of new meaning to the idea of having lived off someone—”

  “Self-protection through irony again.”

  “Ah, Dr. Dillinger, how good of you to join us. Why shouldn’t I be ironic? I always respond to psychodrama with irony. I don’t like being surprised with truth-game crap and I can’t abide bullshit.” They kept staring at me as if everything I said could be taken down and used against me in a pinch. Or maybe they were just thinking how everything depended on me. I didn’t know it then but I figured it out in due time. Everything had always depended on me. But of course there were things I knew that they didn’t. In a way we each had a private agenda, a private loyalty. Maybe that was the way it always was. “Look, what do you want me to say? I was in the bin, wasn’t I? I was in and out of clinics for a year. More than a year. Not just because of drugs. Psychological refurbishment as well. A head case. Do you hear me?”

  “We hear you, pal. We know all that.”

  “Surviving wasn’t easy,” I said. “It was Clive Taillor—he was JC’s driver—and Annie DeWinter, they pretty much handled things in Tangier. They were pumping out money like blood from a ruptured aorta, paying people off, trying to keep JC’s death from becoming a goddamn carnival. They paid for the three-day delay you’re talking about. They cremated old JC—”

  “You didn’t put all this into your book,” he said.

  “I wasn’t trying to remake the world with that book,” I said. “I was trying to make some money and shut people up.” I was praying for rain. I patted my forehead with my handkerchief. “I never even found the place where they let the wind take the ashes.”

  But none of that mattered to Allan Bechtol, of course, because he’d made up his mind and everything had to conform. He knew what he wanted and he was a very persuasive fellow.

  “Now I’ve gotta tell you some harsh facts of life, Lee.” The smoke drifted into the candle’s dying flame, was sucked upward into the night. Heidi Dillinger was watching him now, as if it were the most interesting example of harsh facts she’d ever heard. “I think JC is tucked away in his own jolly corner with good reason. I think we’re not the only people looking for him. There are other people who are very serious about finding him. Or—try to follow this very closely, old son—or JC himself is going to considerable extremes to stay hidden.” He sighed. “Or … both.”

  “What he’s saying,” she said quietly, “is that there is a certain element of danger in all this. Risk.”

  “Risk,” I said, “sounds like something you’d manage.”

  “I’d try. Probably.” She smiled.

  “What makes you think there’s danger? Maybe your imagination is working overtime.”

  “I don’t think so,” Allan said. He got up from the table and came to stand beside me. He slipped the tinted specs off and put them in his breast pocket. His face bore an expression of heartbreaking sincerity. “A disc jockey in Los Angeles who was very, very close to JC—”

  “You must mean Shadow Flicker,” I interrupted. “They were buddies, that’s true.”

  “He’s the one. Somebody murdered him just a few days ago.”

  It hit me hard. Flicker had been all right. He’d never betrayed JC, never used him. It was always a two-way street with Shadow. “If we can’t use each other,” he’d say, “we’ll skip it. There’ll always be another time, my man,” he’d say. Well, there wouldn’t be another time now. My stomach had felt a whole lot better in its time and my eyes filled up, thinking about Flicker. It must have been a drug deal. Or maybe he’d been porking a record exec’s wife. Or daughter. It had to be something like that. Flicker was a little wild and not the type who would mellow, who would chill out with age.

  “There’s more, Lee. I’m sorry to break this stuff to you. But I gotta tell you, gotta be fair—I’ve got a feeling that the murder of Sally Feinman is connected, too. Too much coincidence for it to be any other way. Flicker was JC’s friend and Sally was a reporter, she’d written too much about JC, and she was, y’know, very close to you.”

  “You might say,” Hei
di Dillinger said softly, “that she was Tripper-Intensive.”

  “You might say it,” I said and dropped it. I turned to Bechtol. “You think JC might be having people killed to maintain his privacy? Maybe Elvis and Marilyn are in it with him. And Jack Kennedy, too.”

  “It ain’t funny, Lee. If JC’s alive, who knows what he’s like now? Maybe he’s got a reason we can’t imagine. And maybe he’s got nothing to do with it. Maybe people looking for JC are just very determined to find him. The point is, I don’t know. But there sure as hell is something scary going on.”

  “What if you just scared me all the way off?”

  “I figure half a million dollars might bring you back.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Seems like serious money to me. I’m always serious about money. Half of it now, tonight, and the rest when it’s over. When we mutually agree it’s over. It’s a lot of money, Lee.”

  “You are serious,” I said. “Which means you’re one of the people wanting to find JC. Which means you might have killed Shadow and Sally, and because you struck out with them you turn to me with a somewhat altered approach—how’s that? Sound like a novel for Allan Bechtol?”

  “Lee, I’m not going to take umbrage at that. But it’s not worthy of you.”

  “Okay, okay. I’m trying to cope here …” I looked up slowly to give them the benefit of my radiant smile, what little they could see of it in the night. “Let’s get serious, then. Let’s say the half million is an advance against ten percent of world royalties, print and film and TV, if you ever write the novel. If you don’t, the half million is mine for combat pay. You have a problem with that?”

  Bechtol’s mouth dropped open on that one.

  Heidi Dillinger laughed, a surprising, rather musical sound. “And he thinks we’re the cold-blooded cynics! You’re a rogue, Lee. A real rogue and a scoundrel!”

  “And I’ll bet you like that in a man,” I said.

  Bechtol and I shook hands on the deal. Heidi Dillinger jotted the primary elements of the deal on a piece of Bechtol’s stationery and we signed it. She was a notary public. She got out her stamp and notarized it. She gave it to me to hold on to. “You’ve got to trust Mr. Bechtol,” she said. “This will help.”