Killed in the Ratings Read online

  I told him I admired his broad-mindedness.

  He tilted his head back and looked at me across his moustache. “Yup. It’s a bummer, for sure. I’d never take it from another chick, but Monica is special. She’s got something ... she could be a Nazi—not that she would, of course—but even if she were, it wouldn’t matter. I don’t know what it is.”

  I did, but then I had known her longer. I knew the bad things, too. “Why tell me?” I asked him.

  “Curiosity. To learn what keeps a chick—a lady like Monica hung up on a guy. And I sure want to know what could keep that guy away from her. You’re not gay, are you?”

  Mr. Tact. “No,” I said wearily, “I’m hardly even cheerful.” My belligerence was gone. Now I was only tired.

  Tony was still serious. “I didn’t think so. So what can it be? Why do you avoid her?”

  “Some other time. It’s too long and sad a story.”

  That was the instant Monica walked in, as though I’d given her entrance cue. She’d put on a hostess pajama in some clingy material with a softly colored floral print. She looked gorgeous.

  She said, “Hello, Matt.”

  “We have to talk, Monica.”

  Tony said, “I, ah, better be running along,” and went to the bedroom to get dressed. I sat looking at Monica.

  You have seen Monica Teobaldi. She was an actress and a dancer, moderately successful and on the way up. Her career was made up of the things most moderately successful New York actresses’ careers are made up of: Broadway, soaps, and commercials.

  She was between shows on Broadway, but she had an important role on another network’s new soap, and of course all those commercials.

  She was long and slim, but far from bony, and she moved with a dancer’s kind of racehorse litheness and grace. Her face wasn’t classically beautiful, but she had an innocent, round-eyed look that was irresistible. The eyes themselves were a pale, pale brown, almost yellow. Her hair was a color called old gold. Her breasts, small but perfect, asserted themselves against the flowered fabric.

  Tony had dressed. He had a green shirt and a red jacket to go with the yellow pants. As unobtrusively as he could in an outfit like that, he walked to the door.

  “Tony,” Monica called, “thanks for everything.”

  He blushed. “It was my pleasure—I mean, I was glad to help.”

  Monica assured him she understood. He left us.

  “What does he do,” I asked Monica, “hire out as a test pattern?”

  Her laugh was a bar from a Herbie Mann solo. “No, he’s just joined the cast. Right out of college. He’s remarkably talented, and very professional, so don’t make fun of him, Matt, he’s a nice boy.”

  “Boy,” I said, “is the key word.”

  “Don’t lecture me, Matt.” A warning, friendly but definite. “This hasn’t been an easy night. I had to identify the body. Tony has been a great help.”

  And a great consolation, I didn’t say. “You seem to be taking it very well.”

  “What do you want me to do? Vince and I were through months ago. I tried to put him out of my mind, never see him again, and the next thing I know—”

  There must have been something in my face she didn’t like. I’m damned if I know what it was, but she got a look, and choked her sentence off. She studied her nails for a few seconds, punishing me by denying me her eyes.

  Finally, she looked up and said, “It took a murder.”

  “What?”

  “Vince had to be murdered before you would come and see me.”

  I didn’t say anything, I was afraid to.

  “I’ve been back in New York for six months now, Matt. You brushed me off on the phone, you don’t answer my letters. That isn’t like you.”

  “You hurt me, Monica.”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “How in the name of God could you marry somebody without meaning to?”

  That one had her stumped. She sat looking helpless.

  There was no stopping me, now. I’d been saving it for two years. “All right. Carlson pleased you better than I did. Fine. I’m a big boy, I could handle that. But after what we’d been to each other, I figured I rated something more than a phone call after the fact.”

  She mumbled something.

  “What?”

  “I said I was afraid you’d talk me out of it.” She stood up and started to pace. It was hard with Monica to tell where the actress left off and the person began.

  She fixed me with her eyes. “You never needed me, Matt.” It was an accusation. I started to deny it, but she cut me off. “You might think so, but it’s not so. You were so—so goddam serene. Anything I did was all right with you, even when I saw other men.

  “Vince really needed me, me or somebody. And I loved him, too.”

  “So you divorced him,” I said cruelly.

  “Yes I did,” she whispered. “Vince just couldn’t stop gambling. I tried to help him, I honestly did. It got to the point where I wasn’t helping him, I was only destroying me. Then the threats started.”

  “Threats?”

  She nodded. “Vince gambled his salary away, but he wouldn’t touch mine. He once said he was still that much of a man, anyway. He borrowed money from loan sharks, and lost and kept losing.”

  “It’s a disease,” I said, inanely. It was as though her husband were dying of cancer and I tried to soothe her by telling her it was a disease.

  “One day a phone call came,” she said, ignoring the comment. “A man told me to ask my husband how many jobs an actress would get with acid scars on her face.

  “So I left him. He didn’t contest the action.” She didn’t try to defend herself, and I didn’t judge her. It’s easy to say we would have the guts to stick out a situation like that, but who really knows?

  Monica’s mistake was in not realizing you can’t love people by changing them. They must change themselves for love of you, or you must adapt yourself to them.

  “I was kidding myself when I thought I could be strong for Vince,” she said. “I need someone to be strong for me. I should have called you sooner, Matt.” She sat next to me on the couch and took my hand. “I think you would have saved me from a terrible mistake. I think we could still be good together, Matt.”

  “Same as before?” I asked.

  “Same as before,” she said.

  I thought about it. Knowing Monica, I couldn’t blame her for marrying Carlson; she was the kind of romantic who never could have resisted saving a man from himself, the way things happen in the movies. If anybody was to blame, it was the drama critic of the New York Times. If he hadn’t raved over her performance, she wouldn’t have been offered the gig with the Capitol Players, and never would have gone to Washington and met Carlson in the first place.

  But loving Monica, I couldn’t change her; and I couldn’t twist myself into the shape of the kind of man I’d have to be to make her happy: the calm, strong father image Tony mentioned. Hell, I didn’t even like being responsible for myself.

  My head throbbed from thinking about it. “Do you have any aspirin?”

  She took her hand away. Her voice was bitter with self-mockery. “Not tonight, dear, I have a headache.”

  “Not tonight, dear, a murderer caressed my skull with an ashtray.”

  Her look softened. “I’ll see if I have any.” She went into the bathroom. “Does it have to be aspirin?” she called.

  “Anacin, Bufferin, anything,” I answered.

  “Midol?”

  “It’s my head that hurts, Monica,” I reminded her. It struck us as terribly comical, and we laughed for a long time.

  She was still laughing when she came back with two tablets and a cup of water. “I had some aspirin in my purse,” she said when I looked at them suspiciously.

  I shrugged, and swallowed them.

  “What was Carlson going to tell me, Monica?”

  “Didn’t you tell the police it was something about a business deal?”

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nbsp; “I suggested it as a possibility, which they laughed off. Come on, Monica, he said it was trouble, for the whole industry.”

  Her golden eyes widened. “Then you did lie to the police?”

  “What was he going to tell me?”

  “I backed up whatever you said, because I thought Vinnie misled you!”

  “Goddammit, Monica, what was he going to tell me!”

  “Don’t yell at me. Anyway, I don’t know.”

  “Monica, please. You sent him to me. He was killed. The cops know we were lovers, and some of them have a pretty strong notion I did it!”

  The look on her face would have been the same if someone had hit her with a fist. “But ... that’s ridiculous!”

  “Is it? Look at what they see. Dead husband, ex-wife’s ex-boyfriend standing over the body. They think we both did it, you set him up and I killed him.”

  “But why?”

  “Let them worry about that. By tomorrow, they’ll have seventeen theories about our motive.”

  She took a deep breath, facing facts, but not liking them. “What should we do?” she asked.

  “Answer some questions for me, all right?” She agreed. “Okay,” I said. “First, why did Carlson call me, as opposed to an officer of the law, for example? He mentioned the FBI. How did he even know I existed in the first place? We never met.”

  “I told him about you. I was still seeing you when I first met Vince. I ... I talked about you a lot.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Not much, really. Nothing I can remember.”

  “And that’s it? After two years, when he’s in so much trouble he’s killed for it, he remembers and comes to me?”

  “No, Matt,” she said. She took my hand again. “In August, I think,” she began, then paused, to be sure, scraping upper teeth over lower lip. On her, it was beautiful.

  “Late July, or early August, about a month after the divorce, I met him in a bar. He’d started having alcohol trouble along with the gambling trouble. He was very drunk. He started to cry when he saw me. He wanted to talk to me.

  “I owed him that, at least. He told me he didn’t want to do it—”

  “Do what?”

  She shook her head. “I asked him, but he just kept repeating it. He said he was doing it for me.”

  “Can you remember his exact words?”

  Her face drew up in a pained expression, but she gave it a try.

  “He said, ‘I don’t want to do it, but I’ve got to, you understand, don’t you, Honeypot?’ He used to call me Honeypot.”

  I said nothing.

  She went on. “I asked him what he was talking about, and he said, ‘I’m doing it for you, you know.’ Then he said, “The divorce doesn’t make any difference to them,’ or something like that. Then he told me not to worry.

  “He told me he was the one who had to worry. I asked him what he had to worry about, but he wouldn’t say. He just got very serious, the way drunks do, you know how they can be, and said, ‘After I do this, Monica, I’ll have nowhere to turn. They’ll own me, all of them, and the industry will hate me, too.’

  “Then he said, ‘Honeypot, I hope this never happens to you, that you get in bad trouble with no one to turn to.’ Then he said, ‘Oh, I made a mistake, you’ll always have your old boyfriend, Sir Galahad.’ He made a remark about your collecting a fee in trade.

  “I told him he was wrong, and I told him if he was that desperate, he should get in touch with you, that you could do things nobody else could. I wrote your name and phone number out for him.”

  I closed my eyes. “You used me, Monica. You used me as a club to beat hat poor bastard over the head with. And he took you at your word. If he’d gone straight to the cops—” I cut myself off before I said, “he’d probably still be alive.” Monica didn’t need to hear that.

  “But you are the best person to go to! I know you’ve helped lots of people. Hugh McFeeley once told me you were the one guy in the whole business straight enough to trust and smart enough to help both the Network and the poor slobs that get in its way.”

  Big help I was to Carlson, I thought.

  She read my mind, or at least my face. “At least you went to see him. You tried. I’m really the guilty one.”

  “You? How? You gave him eighteen months out of your life.”

  “I mean later on, at that bar. I could have found out what he was up to. He could never keep a secret, from me or anybody. He liked to talk about his problems, I could have found out and made him stop.

  “But he embarrassed me. I couldn’t get out of that bar fast enough. Just the sight of him reminded me I wasn’t woman enough to help a man I’d loved.” She was going to cry, but fought it back.

  “You know,” she said, trying to smile, “in one way, he was like you.”

  “How was that?” I asked, interested to know we had something besides Monica in common.

  “Dedication. He was in love with the TV industry, the same way you are. Passionately. Like it was his family and his alma mater all in one.”

  “Do you know a man named Vern Devlin?” I asked.

  “Not all that well. He works in the same department as Vince.”

  Since the only way I’d ever seen Vince was dead, her slip into the present tense for him seemed bizarre. I suppressed a shudder. “What do you know about him?”

  “Not that much, really. He ran the football pool at CRI, went to the track with Vince a few times. He was a bad influence on Vince, I thought.”

  “They got along all right, though?”

  “Yes, I suppose so. Vince would have told me if they’d quarreled, the way he told me everything else.”

  I realized there was something very important I didn’t know. “What exactly did your husband do for CRI?”

  “He was in charge of ARGUS.”

  “ARGUS.” I was puzzled.

  “Don’t you know about ARGUS?” She might have been asking me if I knew who Jimmy Carter was.

  “I assume you don’t mean the Greek guy with a hundred eyes,” I said.

  She looked thoughtful. “How clever,” she said. “Now I know how they got the name. ARGUS is the computer, the one that does the ratings for TV. It stands for Audience Research General Utilization System. He helped develop it. You know how it monitors all those sets at once?”

  “ARGUS. A hundred eyes. Naturally,” I said.

  Monica said, “Anything else?”

  “Yeah. Walter Schick. Name mean anything to you?”

  She thought it over for a second. “Wasn’t he a big shot at the Network—yours I mean—who got killed or something?”

  “Or something. Right. How do you know him?” You would be amazed at some of the things actors don’t know about television.

  “I think Vince mentioned him a few times. There was a big presentation at CRI to sell the networks on ARGUS, and I think Vince met him there; Schick was representing your Network.”

  “When was this?”

  “Oh, just before Vince and I were married. You must know when the Network started using ARGUS,” she said.

  “Well yeah, but we just call them the overnights.” A horrible thought dashed across the surface of my mind like a cockroach looking for a place to hide. I pinned it down and took a look at it.

  “Monica, does Devlin talk like this?” I gave her a sample of Devlin’s gargles-with-peanut-butter baritone. I’m good at impressions, and I wanted to be very sure I’d spoken to the real Vern Devlin.

  “That’s pretty close,” she said, surprised. “How do you know how he sounds?”

  “I know a lot of things I’d be better off not knowing, Dumpling.” It slipped out. I hadn’t called her Dumpling for a long time. I hoped she hadn’t noticed, but I was sure she had.

  I stood up, started to say good-bye.

  “You’re not leaving!” she said.

  “It’s almost one-thirty,” I told her, “and I have to be at the office tomorrow. I’m sore, and depressed, and confused, and
I need some sleep.”

  She was furious. “I threw a man out of my bed for you!”

  I stopped with my hand on the knob, asking myself life’s two Great Questions: “Why me?” and “What do I do now?” I couldn’t come up with an answer for either one of them. I dropped my hand and turned to face her. She was standing with her hands on her hips, eyes wide, nostrils flared.

  She couldn’t keep it up. She sobbed. Her lip started to quiver, and she ran to me, clung to me. She was trembling.

  I put my arms around her. She raised her face to me. The reflection from the lamp made her tears look golden, as though her eyes were melting and running down her face.

  I kissed her.

  To hell with everything, I thought, to hell with the dead man, and the Network, and the truth about Walter Schick, whatever it was. I was holding Monica again, feeling her tongue like honeyed fire on mine again, so to hell with ratings, and Lieutenant Martin, and Tom Falzet, too.

  But even before I finished thinking that, I knew it was nonsense, that I had to get out of there. Loving Monica was like being addicted to heroin, needing something all the time you know it’s killing you. And I had responsibilities to all those people I had dispatched to hell a few seconds ago.

  It took more willpower than I thought I had, but I forced my hands to stop and pulled them away from Monica. I separated us, gently. She backed away, looking hurt and bewildered.

  I let myself out. Outside, I walked east to Broadway, and got a cab downtown.

  6

  “Good boy, Rinty!”

  —James Brown, “The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin” (ABC)

  HINDSIGHT ALWAYS WORKS BETTER than foresight, and mine was in rare form in that cab going home. I was telling myself I never should have goaded Carlson into giving me those little teasers of what he wanted to talk about. I could close my eyes and see it like a blurb on the cover of a cheap fan magazine: “The Awful Truth About Walter Schick!!!”

  Leaving Schick out of it, there was a nice neat scenario of the murder. Carlson is a gambler, deep in debt. He can’t pay. Gamblers (or loan sharks) are miffed. Gamblers (or loan sharks) have Carlson killed, or maybe do it themselves, just to keep their hand in. Beautifully compact. I hoped the police liked it, because that’s what I’d left for them.