Killed in Fringe Time Page 15

  I stood up again. “All right,” I said. “The cops don’t have to know about this, yet.”

  She got up and ran to me and took my arms. “Oh, Matt,” she said. It was the first time she’d called me Matt. “I’ll make it up to you somehow.”

  “Don’t thank me yet. I’m going to have your story checked—discreetly—by my West Coast people. Then we’ll see.”

  “I’ll trust your judgment.”

  She didn’t have much choice, but I didn’t say that, I just said thanks.

  I’d made it to the front door now; she’d come with me, as though loath to let me go. Then she realized it, and turned to the table where she’d left the mail. She was just slipping a letter opener under the flap of the paddled mailer as I left.

  Bates saw me coming and said howdy. I was about ten yards across the lawn toward the car when he looked up. Vivian Pike’s voice came from behind me, calling “Matt?” and I turned just in time to see the doorway become a rectangle of red flames and black smoke, followed by a roaring noise that shot the woman off the porch and through the air like a missile.

  “That’s the end of this suit!”

  —BERNIE KOPELL

  When Things Were Rotten, ABC

  16

  I RAN TO HER. She was unconscious by the time I got there, which was a mercy, because she was also on fire. I skinned out of my suit jacket, and began beating at the flames.

  She was lying face down. Her hair seemed to be burning the worst, so I concentrated on that, slapping at it again and again with the blue pinstriped worsted.

  I looked at Bates. The man was literally dumbfounded, standing there round-eyed, saying, “But how ...? But how ...?”

  It must have been the corrupting influence of the city, I decided. If he acted that way in the mountains when a crisis came up, he would have been grizzly chow long ago.

  “Bates,” I said, still flapping. The hair was pretty well out now. I started working on the blouse and jeans. “Bates!”

  He pulled his eyes from the flames and looked at me. “Huh?” he said.

  I gave it to him loud and slow, like a man talking to a mental defective.

  “Go inside,” I said. “Find a phone. Call 911. Tell them we’ve got a badly burned woman here, and we need an ambulance right away. Do you remember the address?”

  He recited it for me, then ran inside.

  I got rid of the flames. Vivian Pike’s skin, where it could be seen through charred cloth was red and badly blistered. Unpleasant to look at, but not as bad as it could have been. There was no blackening, no cracking.

  I dropped to the ground beside her, and got my ear close to her mouth. I didn’t want to touch her if I could help it. I listened hard, filtered out the distant sound of traffic, and the summer country noises of birds and bugs.

  I held my breath, and after a few seconds, I heard her breath, a little raspy, but strong.

  “Jesus H. Christ!” Bates announced in an aggrieved tone. “What happened to you now?”

  I sat up. “Nothing,” I said. “Did you get through?”

  “Yeah, they’re on their way. I took the liberty of asking for the fire department, too. Some stuff in there is smoldering pretty good. Maybe we ought to move her away from the house.”

  “With the blast and the fall and all, I don’t know about internal injuries. We’ll move her if we see flames.”

  “Okay by me,” he said. He looked down at her and drew in air through his teeth. “Poor woman, I just don’t want her to get burnt any more. She’s about done on this side, ain’t she?”

  “I hear sirens,” I said. “Let the ambulance guys move her. They’ll know what they’re doing.”

  Which they did. Very efficiently, they started treating Vivian Pike for burns and shock, got her onto a stretcher (still face down), and got her off to the hospital I’d visited the other day.

  Just before they drove away, one of the attendants handed me my suit jacket and told me to hang around, the fire marshals would want to talk to me.

  By this time the fire department had arrived. They showed up in a lime green pumper. Instead of thinking of anything of substance, which I was too agitated to do at the moment anyway, I decided to resent the truck.

  The driver of the truck was a crew-cut, clear-eyed, middle-aged guy who looked a little like Clint Eastwood.

  “Why green?” I demanded. “I mean, why lime green?”

  “Huh?”

  “Whatever happened to good old-fashioned fire-engine red?”

  The driver looked bored. The smoldering had been taken care of, and the rest of the crew was winding up hoses.

  “Tests have shown,” he said, sounding as if he were quoting from an official report, which he probably was, “that this particular color offers the greatest visibility over the widest spectrum of lighting conditions.”

  “Come on,” I said. “The thing is the size of a two-room bungalow. It comes down the road honking a horn like the roar of a brontosaurus, flashing red and white lights and blowing a siren. You mean to tell me that there has actually been somebody who has failed to see a fire truck?”

  “I just drive ’em,” Clint told me. “I don’t buy ’em.”

  That was fair enough, but it also ended the conversation. I examined my jacket for a while. It smelled of burning hair, either because the wool had gotten scorched (which it had) or because it had soaked up the smell from Vivian Pike’s burning blond tresses. It occurred to me that it smelled an awful lot like Rivetz’s description of burning powdered rhino horn.

  Absentmindedly, I started brushing the thing off with my hand, even though it was obvious that it was a total loss. I doubted that my renter’s insurance would cover it. After all, I had deliberately slapped the thing on the fire myself.

  My brushing hand struck something hard in the jacket pocket. I reached in and pulled out a black plastic rectangle and started to laugh.

  Bates watched me balefully. He seemed to be taking this a lot harder than he’d taken the murder of his erstwhile houseguest.

  “What’s so funny,” he demanded, “about a cellular phone?”

  “Well for one thing,” I said, “if I’d remembered it, I never would have sent you into the building, and we wouldn’t have known about the danger of fire inside until this place was a pile of ashes.”

  He grunted.

  “Another thing,” I went on, “is that I’m glad I didn’t beat her to death with the damned thing while I was putting the flames out.”

  “Yep,” he said. “You’re going to have enough trouble explaining this to the cops as it is, ain’t you?”

  “Am I?”

  “You are if that was a bomb that got her. It was a bomb, wasn’t it?”

  “It was a bomb, all right.” But that wasn’t the half of it.

  “... And away goes trouble,

  down the drain.”

  —ROTO-ROOTER COMMERCIAL

  17

  MANY, MANY, HOURS LATER, well into the dark hours of Tuesday night, not far from the daylight of Wednesday morning, I sat with Lieutenant Martin and Rivetz in an all-night diner on Sixth Avenue and Thirteenth Street called “Earnie’s.” With an “a.”

  I was hot, tired, grubby, frustrated, miserable, and stowing away a dish of greasy hash and home fries that I did not want. I was eating them, and washing them down with some black acid calling itself coffee, because I was hoping that heartburn would keep me awake.

  It had been a busy day. The bomb had definitely been the climax, but things kept hopping after that.

  First of all, I was taken away by a fire marshal named Smedley and some Very Angry Indeed local cops, who collectively wanted to know what the hell. I think the idea was what the hell the Network, as personified by me, was doing with guns and bombs in their peaceful burg, to say nothing of planting celebrities on them who exploit endangered species and then get themselves murdered across the state line so noisily that the echoes of the case hurt their eardrums.

  Or some
thing.

  Whatever the hell they wanted to know, I really wasn’t able to give it to them yet. I would have given them a lot to know what the hell myself.

  As it was, all I could do was stick to the facts, although I must admit, after the ninth or tenth time through them, I was tempted to embroider them a little bit, just to see if they’d been paying attention.

  After a few hours, the cavalry arrived in the form of Lieutenant Martin and Detective Rivetz. They had taken me into custody at the insistence of the Darien chief of police, who refused to let me run around the state of Connecticut a free man.

  “Hey,” I said, looking up from my plate. “Am I still in custody?”

  Lieutenant Martin answered without taking his eyes off the bulldog edition of Newsday. “Yes. Now shut up and eat, or I’ll put you in a cell.”

  I ate. Except for the coffee, it was pretty good stuff, I just wasn’t in the mood for it.

  I hadn’t been in the mood for the hospital again, either, but that had been our next stop. There we got the good news that Vivian Pike was in no danger, that she wouldn’t be scarred, at least not much, and that once her hair grew back, nobody’d even know she’d been blown up. Except herself, of course.

  It would have been a different story if she’d still been holding the envelope when the bomb when off. According to the fire marshal, in the unlikely event Vivian had lived, it would have been without a face or hands.

  The doctors let us talk to her for a few minutes between the time she regained consciousness and the time she drifted off again to a Demerol-induced slumber.

  I asked her what she’d wanted me for, when she’d come to the door and called my name. In a buzzing, sleepy voice she replied that there was a wire holding the top of the envelope, and she’d heard a click when she’d pulled it loose. The click had made her nervous, so she’d put the envelope down and gone to consult me about it.

  She gave a feeble laugh. “Next time,” she said, “I’ll come clean down the stairs.” She laughed again, then the laugh died away into a soft snore.

  A doctor who looked about eleven years old said, “She’s out. That’s it. Maybe tomorrow, folks.”

  Cops don’t ordinarily like getting chased, by doctors or anybody else, but Mr. M and Rivetz took it meekly this time, a mark, I thought, of the fact that they were as confused as I was.

  This was a good trick, by the way, because I knew something—two things actually—they didn’t know that made this case an even worse mess than it was. I was waiting for the proper moment to tell them.

  Meanwhile, we stepped out of the treatment room into the waiting room to discover a scene that was positively surreal. Clem Bates was there, good as gold, sitting right where we’d left him, only now, sitting next to him and holding his hand with her unbandaged one was Barbara Bentyne Anapole.

  She saw us and gave us a warm smile. “Mr. Martin,” she said. “Mr. Cobb. Mr. Rivetz.” She gave Bates a reassuring pat, and disengaged. She stood up and came to us.

  “I’m so glad to get a chance to see you all again.” She flushed. “I mean, I’m sorry that it has to be another occasion like this—this is a terrible thing, a terrible thing.”

  I was still caught too flatfooted by her appearance there to do anything but agree that it was indeed an absolutely terrible thing.

  “What I should have said,” she went on, “was that I’m happy for an opportunity to apologize for my behavior yesterday. I was in shock; I wasn’t myself. I must have seemed quite hysterical, but I’m better now.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “You mean you realize ...”

  “Yes,” she said. She was very serious. “I’m over my delusion now. I realize that my son Richard is dead.”

  “Oh,” I said. Well, I thought, one delusion down and one big one left to go.

  “That’s why I’m here today, you see.”

  “Not exactly,” I admitted.

  “Why, because of poor Vivian. Who knows better than I do what she’s going through? The shock of loss hasn’t even had time to fully affect her yet, and then this terrible thing happens.”

  “How did you hear about it?” I asked.

  She seemed surprised at the question. “On the radio. And just like yesterday, I caught the first train.”

  I turned to Lieutenant Martin. “Somebody in the Darien Fire Department has a big mouth.”

  Rivetz shook his head. “Emergency band radios. Every two-bit radio station and weekly newspaper in the country has got one, these days. I’m surprised at you, big TV guy and you don’t know that.”

  “I knew it,” I told him. “I just forgot.”

  Mrs. Anapole was sympathetic. “It’s hard to remember things sometimes. Especially in times of stress. That’s why I knew I had to be here for Vivian. We had our differences, and I don’t know that I’ll ever get over her trying to keep me away from my son, but I’ve come to accept the fact that she and I are the two people who loved Richard most, and who he most loved. We’ll need each other in the days ahead, don’t you agree?”

  Mrs. Anapole took silence for assent and said she knew she was doing the right thing. “And your Mr. Bates has been so encouraging, too.”

  I would have given my Mr. Bates a swift kick in the ass about then, if I’d thought it would do any good.

  I told Mrs. Anapole she had a good heart, which she did—it was her brain that was the problem. Then I excused myself, found the doctor, and warned him of the impending collision. He said he’d taken care of it; I told him I was glad it was his problem and not mine.

  Next, I went back to the waiting room, grabbed Mr. Bates, and told the cops I’d meet them back in the city if they wanted to grill me.

  “I’d like to grill you,” Martin said, “like a chop. Why don’t you and the Network haul ass off to New Jersey the way you’re always threatening to do?”

  From this, I gathered he was not in a good mood. I told them I’d drop by headquarters right after I delivered Mr. Bates and returned the Network car.

  Bates wasn’t too excited about the idea of being delivered. To him, remember, the purpose of this trip had been to allow him to breathe semi-country air and to relieve his boredom, and from that standpoint, it had been a big success.

  “Why don’t you keep me with you?” he suggested. “You might need someone to make another phone call.”

  “Oh yeah, you’re a big help. Mrs. Anapole needs encouragement in her delusions the way I need another navel.”

  “Everybody has a right to try to arrange reality the way they want,” he said, somewhat surprisingly. “That’s what I’ve done,” he said. “Mrs. Anapole does it with a little more imagination than most, that’s all. What else does the pursuit of happiness mean, Cobb?”

  “This is a pearl of homespun philosophy? The kind you were going to drop on the Bentyne show?”

  “That’s right. And don’t think the country wouldn’t be better off for hearing it, either.”

  I was delighted to drop him off at the Hilton.

  “You’d better not leave me here to rot,” he told me in parting.

  I told him I’d arrange for the manager of the hotel to keep him in the freezer so he’d stay fresh. Then I drove the New York one-way street system for nine blocks in order to get one block south to the Network garage to drop off the car. I was delighted to do that, too. Sometimes I like driving, but lately it seemed every time I got behind the wheel, I wound up heading north like a duck in springtime, splashing down at that goddamn house the Network bought, and up to my knees in ever-rising insanity.

  Not that I was out of it yet. Having delivered the car, it was more or less incumbent on me to bring Falzet up to date. Not that I usually report to the Network president every time I step back in out of the rain, but Falzet had a personal interest in this one, and had made his desire to be kept up to speed on this matter manifest.

  Tough, I thought.

  I was in no mood for him, especially considering that there was something ahead I just couldn’t av
oid doing—I had to go talk to Lieutenant Martin before he got the idea I wasn’t cooperating.

  I flagged a taxi and let him do the driving. I told him whatever he did, not to turn north.

  When I walked into headquarters that evening, the guy at the desk didn’t even ask my name. He just handed me a visitor’s badge and handed me the clipboarded sheets to sign.

  It occurred to me that this was another place where I was spending too much time.

  The lieutenant and Rivetz were both reading reports when I walked in. They kept reading them a good ten seconds before they looked up and greeted me.

  Rivetz met my eyes first, pretended to be surprised.

  “Whaddaya know,” he said. “He meant it.”

  The lieutenant played along. “We’re honored by your presence, O Media One.”

  “It occurred to me that you guys haven’t actually questioned me, yet.”

  “New policy,” Martin announced.

  “Yeah,” Rivetz said. “It never does any good to question you anyway. You tell us what you want, cover up what you want. All in an effort to keep your girlfriend rich.”

  Lieutenant Martin pushed down his springy white hair. “So from now on, I’ve decided not to waste the effort questioning you. I’m just gonna let you come across in your own good time.”

  “Gee,” I said. “Perfect timing. Because I’ve walked in here bursting with things to tell you?”

  “Oh yeah? What for instance?”

  I laughed. “That policy lasted a long time, didn’t it?”

  The lieutenant made a couple of rude suggestions.

  “No thanks,” I said. “But you guys seem to be in a surprisingly good mood. Has there been some sort of break?”

  “In the case? No, the case is as screwed up as ever. It’s just that my depression muscles wore out. I also decided to keep my eyes focused straight ahead, and not worry about the razzle-dazzle you TV people throw off like sweat.”