Killed in Fringe Time Read online

  “What settles what?” the lieutenant wanted to know.

  “The fried chicken. Bentyne went into such a snit about his gluten allergy, he couldn’t have wheat in any form, you remember I told you about that. Then, I hear he has fried chicken zoomed in from his personal kitchen every day for lunch. See, here it is, ‘Place chicken in insulated container and give it to driver from Network.’”

  I shook my head. “This guy must have been a Hugh Hefner fan. Anyway, I never heard of fried chicken made without flour, have you?”

  Mr. M said, “I ought to refuse to answer any questions about fried chicken on the grounds of political correctness, but no, I haven’t.”

  “Neither have I,” I said. “Until now. This recipe calls for finely crushed potato chip crumbs with cheese and garlic for the breading.” I thought about it. “Sounds pretty good.”

  “Garlic,” Rivetz said. “Perfect. Arsenic has a garlicky taste.”

  “Yeah,” the lieutenant said, “but—”

  I never did find out what his objection was, because at that second, an eardrum-busting scream tore the air between us and the living room.

  She woke up, I thought stupidly, and headed for our guest.

  It hadn’t been a dream she was screaming at. A large black man with dreadlocks a foot and a half long stood in the doorway. A broken brown paper bag was at his feet, and various grocery items were plopping or rolling (as their shapes dictated) on the floor.

  I saw him; he saw me; he ran; I chased.

  Sort of. I’d taken about three steps across the carpet when I stepped on a stick of butter or something, and lost my balance.

  This set me staggering, which would have been all right—I’ve fallen down before—except my momentum was taking me right to the open back door and an appointment to be sliced up like corned beef at $6.98 a pound on the broken glass out on the deck.

  I didn’t know what to do, so I just tried to keep moving. It worked. My greasy soles somehow skated across the glass as if it were rough ice, and then I had the edge of the deck to worry about.

  I went off it like a crippled duck, and this time I did fall, hard, on the gravel walk. I struggled to my feet (not the easiest thing in the world to do on gravel, by the way) and resumed the chase.

  It wasn’t long before I could see it was hopeless. He was too far ahead of me; in a few seconds, he’d be out of the wooded area around the house, and out on the road, where he undoubtedly had a car stashed.

  Time to try a wild one. “Stop or I’ll shoot!” I yelled.

  He didn’t stop. But he did look back over his shoulder. This caused him to veer from the center of the path, which in turn caused his head to make the sudden and intimate acquaintance of a fat, droopy willow branch.

  He was easy to catch up with now, mainly because he was stretched full length out on the gravel.

  As Rivetz never tires of pointing out, I am not a cop, and I demonstrated to myself once again that it’s much better that way.

  I was about three steps away from my quarry, just getting ready to dive on him and finish him off, when two heavy hands grabbed me by the shoulders and damn near pulled me off my feet.

  “Easy, Tarzan,” the lieutenant said. “You’ll get yourself in a whole lot of trouble.”

  “But he—but he—”

  “But he what?” the lieutenant demanded, then answered his own question. “He walked through an unlocked door; a woman saw him, and screamed.”

  “But—”

  “He didn’t hurt anybody, he didn’t take anything. All he did was run when three big guys started chasing him.”

  The lieutenant took a deep breath. “Getting too old for all this running,” he said. “Look, Matty, if it had been a blond white man in a gray business suit that walked in, what’s her name would never have screamed, and you wouldn’t have been so convinced you were chasing a killer.”

  He dropped his voice. “The real shame of it is, neither would I.”

  I was pissed off. My knees hurt where I’d skinned them on the gravel, but that was the least of it. What really bothered me was the fact that Mr. M was right.

  “Well, what the hell was he doing here, then?”

  “Maybe he came to read the meter,” Rivetz suggested.

  “Why don’t you ask him?” the lieutenant said.

  I said, “Huh?” Then I looked down and saw he was right. Our guest had been dazed, but apparently not knocked out. Right now, he was lying there, taking it all in. I asked him how he was.

  “Why you want to skeer me like dat, mon?”

  “I jumped to a conclusion.”

  He grinned. “So I ’eer. Don’t let it trouble you, mon. If I see the brudder ’ere come for me, I might be just as quick to run.”

  I’m not going to transcribe the sound of him any more. Suffice it to say he had a full-fledged Jamaican accent.

  He declared that his head hurt, but that he was okay. Rivetz didn’t stand still for it. He pulled a little flashlight out of his pocket and checked the guy’s pupils, then made the man follow his finger.

  “You seem all right,” Rivetz admitted grudgingly. “You should see a doctor.”

  “Later, later, man. Maybe first, you like to tell me what you are doing in Mr. Bentyne’s house?”

  “Ah,” I said. I got my card out of my wallet. “I am Matt Cobb, I work for the Network, which owns this house, and I’m helping Lieutenant Martin and Detective Rivetz investigate it.”

  They showed him their buzzers.

  He read them carefully. “City of New York. What are you doing here, then? What’s going on?”

  The lieutenant said, “Routine investigation,” and he and Rivetz went immediately into Serious Cop Mode. “Would you mind telling us who you are?”

  “Jarmy,” he said. “Francis Jarmy. I do cooking and cleaning for Mr. Bentyne.”

  Oh, great, I thought. Another wrong assumption.

  They asked him questions, and he answered them. They didn’t have to read him his rights yet, because this was a field investigation.

  He’d worked for Bentyne for six months, since the comedian had come East. He had a whole bunch of clients, but Bentyne paid the best because he was so particular about the way things were done. Jarmy flew back to Jamaica about once or twice a month. He got along with Bentyne fine, considering he’d only laid eyes on the man one time, when he’d been hired. Ditto Vivian Pike. He didn’t know of any enemies Mr. Bentyne might have had. Why, had something happened to Mr. Bentyne?

  The cops ignored him, and kept on asking questions.

  Jarmy used to consult the computer recipe every day, but now he had it perfectly memorized and seldom bothered. If there were ever special instructions, a disk would be left out marked for his notice; otherwise he followed the routine.

  Had he made the chicken today?

  “Of course I did, mon. What’s the matter, didn’t he like it?”

  “Well,” I said. “He ate it. Listen, when you were cleaning up, did you ever find any drugs around the house?”

  “No way. He told me no drugs. He hated them. If he used them, I wouldn’t have worked for him. It’s hard enough for a Rastaman to have a business dealing with white folks without drugs coming into it. Ganja is holy, but I only smoke it when I go home.”

  On that joyful note, the lieutenant decided to move things inside. Mrs. Anapole was fully awake now. When she saw Jarmy she said, “Oh, Francis, how nice to see you. However did you hurt your head?”

  Turned out they were old friends—Jarmy would be coming or going during the times Barbara had the driveway staked out.

  I shook my head. This was getting too weird. I wished I could just go home and walk the dog.

  “You know he really is

  Man’s Best Friend.”

  —BILL BURRUD

  Kal Kan commercial

  11

  IT WAS A COUPLE of hours before I got my wish, and the sun had a late-afternoon red tinge to it when I got back to the city and retrieved S
pot from the apartment two floors below mine, where he had been spending the weekend with Max and Sara Bialosky, and their English nanny, Miss Featherstone, pronounced “Fearson,” don’t ask me.

  The kids scratched Spot behind his ears, and kissed him good-bye. It isn’t smart to kiss a Samoyed, especially in the summertime. Little Max and Sara would undoubtedly be picking dog hairs out their mouths until bedtime.

  Spot wasn’t actually my dog, but I owed him a lot, my life on several occasions. I owed him something of even more importance to a New Yorker, especially a Manhattanite. I owed him my apartment.

  Well, not my apartment. His.

  Spot’s owners were college friends of mine, Rick and Jane Sloan, the couple Born Out of Time.

  I say that, because they were handsome and rich and clever and eccentric in a way that was much more than the rich version of nuts. They were like refugee rich folks from a 1930s musical.

  The name, for instance. As I mentioned, Spot is a Samoyed, a medium-size Siberian dog bred to pull sleds. He has bright black eyes, perpetually smiling black lips, a black home-plate shape for a nose, pointy little ears, and a big cloud of pure white fur, each hair of which sticks straight out from his body.

  So Rick named him Spot.

  When I asked what for, he said, “My God, Matt, he’s named for the gigantic white spot that covers his entire body.”

  Eccentric. But I have to admit, their eccentricity did lead them to find a use for their money other than buying ever more expensive electronic toys from The Sharper Image.

  They went to a lecture at the Museum of Natural History, and got bit by the archaeology bug. I mean, they got it bad. Not only did they decide to sponsor an expedition, they went along on it. Since they’d both majored in Nothing Much in college (Rick, at six eight was my teammate on the basketball team), they went along as simple grunt labor.

  This involved them in things they’d never experienced before. Sweating somewhere other than at the tennis club. Getting actual dirt on their actual hands. Growing calluses.

  It was a revelation to them, and they kept finding (and working on) new digs.

  What this meant to me was that what had started out as a six-month doggie-and-apartment-sitting gig for a couple of friends had stretched out over years, and I was getting spoiled. I had come to think of the Central Park West penthouse as home. I subscribed to magazines from there. It was my voting address. I had now had possession of Spot longer than they had had, even if I didn’t pay for his obedience and attack training, or for his silver-studded collars. I did buy him special pet-store-only dog food and used this smelly blue shampoo on him that kept him extra fluffy and white, but I figured that was the least I could do.

  In the meantime, I lived in constant fear for the Sloans. Archaeology, at least the Sloans’ kind, seems to happen only in dangerous places. I don’t know why ancient civilizations left their ruins in war-torn hell holes like the Middle East or Indochina rather than St. Louis Park, Minnesota, or Montclair, New Jersey, but they did.

  So the Sloans went to the Middle East, and Indochina, and risked bugs and sun, and dug. Not only that, but it wasn’t safe to be an American in a lot of those places. It was even less safe to be a rich American.

  I worried about them not only because I liked them a lot but because if they were killed, somebody would inherit this apartment, and the odds were extremely slim that it would be me. It would probably be somebody like cousin Beauregard Sloan, of the Tidewater Sloans, or something like that.

  But there was no need to borrow trouble. I had enough of that already.

  On the way out of the building, I asked Ramiro, the doorman, if he was done with his New York Times. He looked at Spot, smiled, and handed it over. The traffic was light, pre-rush hour, so we jaywalked across the street to the park.

  Once there, I kept Spot on the lead until he had attended to his alimentary requirements, then told him sternly to wait while I pulled out a page.

  I deposited the parcel in a wastebasket (I’ve always wondered how guys who empty those things feel about the pooper-scooper law), found a bench, and let Spot run free for a while.

  He looked at me when I did it. This was a rare treat, and he was making sure it wasn’t some mistake.

  I patted his head. “Go,” I said. “Enjoy.”

  So he went. He got involved in a Frisbee game with a couple of teenagers. He made a very pretty tableau—the white dog against the green grass, silver buildings, the blue sky, with the red disk in his mouth and the laughing kids around him; it was one of those New York Moments, the kind where, if you love the place, you can forget the strife and the crime and the pollution and the incompetence and just revel in it. There are a lot fewer of those these days than there used to be. Or maybe I was just getting old.

  In any case, I enjoyed it, and it had the added benefit of taking my mind off Richard Bentyne and his murder for thirty whole seconds.

  But my mind was back on it, now, so I thought about it.

  It didn’t do any good to say it was a mess. That was the kind of information you could get from an accountant—100 percent accurate and absolutely useless. To do myself any good, I’d have to work out exactly what kind of mess it was.

  Well, to start off, it was a public relations nightmare.

  We pay the guy the earth to come to the Network, and he gets murdered on the job. Under the nose of a bodyguard.

  This wasn’t going to be so hot for morale, either.

  Or for me. One of the reasons I was sitting here on a park bench rather than acting responsibly and manning my battle station at the Tower of Babble was the virtual certainty that Falzet was waiting there to tear off a wide strip of my hide.

  That said, the heartless logic of the situation (and broadcasting knows no other kind) led to the conclusion that in the long run, this situation need not be so bad for the Network. No matter how many times Network executives had talked about building an audience for the new Bentyne show over time, that they didn’t expect him to show up and walk on water and jump right to the top of the profitable fringe-time ratings, that was a lot of bull.

  For forty-five million dollars, that was exactly what they expected. For that kind of money, they wanted him to walk on water, dominate the ratings, cure cancer, and talk Madonna into entering a Benedictine convent—on the air.

  And he hadn’t done it. He’d been building an audience—slowly. And this is not a patient business.

  Maybe I should tell Lieutenant Martin to arrest Tom Falzet.

  Seriously, though, no contract in show business is unbreakable. If they’d really gotten sick of Bentyne, they would have bought him out. Falzet himself had told me there was such a clause in the contract.

  On a personal level, I knew from experience that Bentyne was a neurotic (to say the least) pain in the ass. And while it’s not unheard of for people to get killed for being pains in the ass, that sort of thing usually happens on the spur of the moment, with a bottle of Schlitz across the temple in a bar or at a family cookout.

  They don’t happen as the result of mysterious poisonings.

  Besides which, while Bentyne may have been a pain in the ass to everyone who knew him, he was also the meal ticket for virtually everybody involved. As far as I could tell, everyone involved in that show, except for the Network union-enrolled contract technical personnel, was out of a job as of now. And any of the union people who hadn’t liked working with Bentyne could have asked for, and gotten, transferred.

  You don’t kill the source of your income, the goose that lays the golden checks, just because he’s a pain in the ass. You only do it if he’s a mortal threat to you, if he’s threatened to cut off the flow of gold or something worse.

  This went even for the person with the most obvious motive—Vivian Pike. Of course, I only knew her extremely superficially, but she didn’t give the impression of being so desperately in love with Bentyne that she’d kill him to keep him out of the arms of another woman.

  Of course, if
she’d poisoned the chicken, and was counting on her lover to bite the dust within the next half-hour or so, she might have created the impression of indifference just for me. She was the one, after all, who’d told me that Bentyne was having it off with Marcie, a fact, I suddenly realized in support of which I had only Vivian Pike’s word.

  Well, Lieutenant Martin’s minions had been questioning everyone connected with the Bentyne show all day—they’d turn up anything that was there to be turned up along those lines.

  Even if it were all true, though, it still didn’t make sense. If this Vivian-Pike-of-the-mind, this jealous killer I’d been hypothesizing, were going to start offing people, the one to start with would have been Marcie.

  It made psycho-political sense, in light of today’s psycho politics. Vivian Pike was the producer of an important Network series because she was the star’s girlfriend. Very un-PC. What she had to do was prove herself capable of the job as quickly as possible, and remove the bimbo-stigma. Even if she had gotten sick of Bentyne on a personal level, she had to know without him there was no job, and therefore no proof, and therefore no continued big-time.

  So she wouldn’t kill him for running around on her. From her point of view, guys to sleep with had to be easier to come by than top-quality jobs.

  It might have been different if Bentyne had been preparing to kiss her off as producer as well as two-time her as lover, but that simply wasn’t true. Just a couple of days ago he had informed the Network that he was exercising his contractual right to lock in Vivian Pike as his producer for the next five years.

  This left us with the unknown, what Lieutenant Martin likes to call the Nut Factor.

  Well, we certainly had nuts. Always did, since this wasn’t the kind of business that called forth sanity.

  So who was there?

  Alf Kriecz, the comedy writer and put-on artist? Didn’t know enough about him to be definitive, but all the things I said about motive applied to him. There are a lot more comedy writers than there are shows to write for.

  Marcie Nast, the associate producer with the victim mentality? The reverse of Vivian Pike. If she’d had somebody she wanted dead, it would have been the official girlfriend and head producer. If Vivian had been on the level, Marcie had nothing to fear from Bentyne. Literally and figuratively, she had him by the balls. If he got tired of playing footsie before she did, she could go the press with a tale of sexual harassment, cry a little, and sue him and the Network for a big hunk of that forty-five million. Wouldn’t matter if she won or not—the bad publicity would be revenge enough.