"Two days. I don't understand it," Sarah Anders said to me the next morning.
I had walked down the hall from my office pretending to be looking for Denny Harris.
Sarah-a matronly, attractive woman in her late forties, and a woman as sensible as she is compassionate-is the private secretary shared by both Denny and me. Of course, she's much more than a private secretary-she tells us what we need to do, makes sure we do it, and occasionally even gives us ideas for improving our client services. Part of the reason for her knowledgeabiliry is that she has worked in every department in the agency and knows the shop in detail. Probably, truth admitted, better than I do. I've never been convinced that copywriters, which was what I was originally, make the best executives. Nor art directors.
"Two days," Sarah said again, her shining dark eyes staring through the open door into Denny's empty office. Sarah was one of the few people who found virtues in Denny. Despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, he appeared to be redeemable-at least to Sarah. "I'm worried."
"You try his house?" I asked.
She nodded. "Every hour. It was the same way yesterday. No answer."
"He wasn't here at all yesterday, either?"
"No."
Yesterday had been so busy, I hadn't noticed. I was used to my partner's being gone for long stretches-usually trying to pretend he was somehow attending to business-so I never had any accurate sense of just how much time he spent in the office. I'd just as soon not know.
Which was when I caught myself-that thought. The present tense.
I thought of Denny on the bed. The puncture wounds all over his backside, as if somebody had gone at him with a pickax.
"Damn." Sarah slammed the phone down. She'd tried his house once again. She shook her head, perplexed. "I've tried everywhere-bars, health clubs. I just don't know what's left."
I had to play it as I ordinarily would. I put a smirk on my face and said, "Maybe he's found some new female delight to lose himself in."
For the first time, the worry line on her forehead looked less severe. She always got sentimental about Denny's affairs-though she would have been just as upset as I was about Denny and Cindy Traynor, like a mother considering her bad little boy. "He sure does all right with the ladies, doesn't he?" Then she caught herself and flushed. "Oh, sorry."
"It's all right." I waved a hand to my office. "I'll be in there working. If Denny doesn't show up, just show Clay Traynor into my office. I'll handle him till Denny gets here."
There: I had laid all the planks I possibly could so that I could act genuinely surprised when Denny's body was discovered. The dutiful partner, the hard-working businessman, the-show-must-go-on-vice-president-oh, I was a hell of a guy.
Waiting for me on my desk was last month's profit-and-loss statement. Denny took no interest in any detail-just how much we'd earned or lost. I spent more time with the statement, looking for any way we could save money and thereby increase our individual cuts. With teenagers and a dying father, I needed all the help I could get.
The P amp;L didn't tell me much except for one thing-the client-entertainment-expense column was still swelling up. Denny felt he had the right to write off virtually every dime he spent as a legitimate client expense-he hadn't paid for his alcoholism in years-even though he was literally taking it from my pocket. I owned fifty percent of the agency.
If I really wanted to make this look like a typical day, then I'd have to go down the hall to the accounting office and raise a little soft hell with Merle Wickes, the man with the Las Vegas haircut. Once a month I demanded to know why Wickes let Denny get away with it.
My intercom buzzed.
Sarah. "I'm going to call the police. Just have them run out to his house and check and see if everything's all right."
"You really think that's necessary?"
"Yes, I do." She sounded absolute.
What the hell, I thought. May as well get it over with, the discovery of the body, the inevitable questions of the cops.
"Well, OK," I said.
"Thanks, Michael," she said.
We hung up.
"I need to talk to Merle a minute," I said to Belinda Matson, the Accounting Department's secretary, an hour later.
As always of late, she looked unhappy to see me. There had been a time a year or so ago, when she'd first started working here, that I'd had notions about the two of us getting together. Sometimes she brought her lunch and one day in the lunch room I'd seen her reading Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle, a novel whose union theme made me curious about her. I'd asked her about it; she'd said that it had been her favorite novel in high school-she hadn't gone to college- and that she reread it every so often. She was a tiny woman, always pressed and fresh-looking, with a subtle kind of eroticism I found appealing. I'd had my share of fantasies about her-but as the rift between Denny and me widened about his spending habits, she began to see me as the villain who always whumped on her boss, Merle Wickes.
"He's in a meeting right now," she said. "But I'll tell him you stopped by. Would you like him to call you?" Pleasant, competent, and protective of Merle.
I stared at her blue, blue eyes. She was, I sensed, the kind of woman I needed, but I had no idea how to go about it. "Read In Dubious Battle lately?" I said, embarrassed by my lame approach.
Without missing a beat, she said, "Not lately, I'm afraid." Then she turned her head toward Merle's open office door.
Which was when I raised my head and saw a woman slap Merle Wickes hard across the mouth.
Belinda saw it, too.
Both of us froze, not knowing quite how to respond.
The woman who had slapped Merle was his wife, Julie. A pretty, dark lady of thirty or so, she spent most of her days tending to their retarded son. She usually looked tired- which made her prettiness even more impressive. Today she looked tired plus angry and embarrassed. She turned away from her husband-who stood there stunned-and walked toward me. She was one of the few employee wives I felt really close to. We tended to sit by each other and talk and laugh a lot whenever there were agency functions.
Now, she came abreast of me and touched my arm. "I'm sorry about this. I… couldn't help myself, I guess." She was right at the point where she was going to explode in either tears or anger or both.
I put my hand on her shoulder. "I'll walk you to the elevator.
"
As I spoke, I watched the line of her vision. She wasn't glowering at Merle this time. Instead her gaze was fixed laserlike on Belinda, who had her head down and was blushing.
Merle, looking devastated, glanced at me, then at his wife, then at Belinda, then closed the door quietly, as if he did not have strength to slam it.
I tugged Julie away and headed her toward the elevators down the hall.
Halfway there, she started sobbing. I put my arm around her and guided her along as best I could. Employees in the hallway mugged a variety of stares, even a few sniggers. This, in advertising, was the stuff of legend.
I got Julie on the elevator, then waited till the doors closed. Then I punched the stop button. An elevator between floors seemed like a good place for privacy.
I let her cry until she shook. Occasionally I held her, then let her push gently away. Finally, she said, "I take it you know about it. I suppose everybody does."
"I'm sorry," I said. "I don't know what you're talking about." Though I had a terrible feeling I knew what she was going to say.
"His secretary, that Belinda, they're having an affair."
Of course, I didn't want to believe that. If it were true it would make me feel naive, and not do wonders for my ego, either. I considered myself more appealing to women than Merle Wickes was. "Maybe you're just imagining it," I said.
"No," she said, starting to cry again, "he told me about it. Last night. He, he… said…" She started to choke on her tears. "He said that he loved her." She shook her head in disbelief. I could sympathize. I'd heard similar words from my own wife one night. They were the worst words in the world.
So it was true, then. Curiously, I felt betrayed, too, as if Belinda had owed me something. I thought of her pert face and clean bobbed hair. She could have played an earnest mom in any number of TV spots with cakes and pies in them. She didn't seem the type to-
"But I don't blame Merle," Julie was saying, starting to dry her eyes now. "I blame Denny Harris. He's the one who got Merle to change the way he lived…"
Much as I had disliked and disapproved of Denny, that was one charge I couldn't agree with. The temptation rap was a false one. True, a year ago Merle Wickes had been a cliche of an accountant, a man who'd brought his lunch in a paper sack replete with grease stains, who spent his off-hours attending accountancy seminars, and who was inextricably bound up with the fate of his wife and his retarded son. Then he'd changed, begun hanging around after hours with Denny and Gettig and the rest of the fast-laners in the agency. His Las Vegas hairstyling was emblematic of that change, and of how he'd pulled away from his wife and child…
But was Denny to blame? I didn't see how. The desire and the will for such a change had to be within Merle in the first place. Denny only gave that desire shape…
"I hate him!" Julie said.
The anger in her eyes was terrifying. Because it was more than anger-it was some kind of deep dislocation. "He took my husband from me and my child!"
She grabbed my sleeve and started yanking. She had started sobbing again. "What will I do, Michael! I'm not strong enough to be alone! I'm really not!"
I had a terrible, uncharitable thought as I stared at her. I did not think of her grief, or of her wan, anguished child- all I could think of, watching her wild eyes and hearing her curses, was to wonder if she could have killed Denny Harris.
Clay Traynor appeared in my office door one hour after Julie Wickes had left, dressed in a red-and-black-checked hunting shirt, a wide, hand-tooled belt, designer jeans, and hunting boots. He was tall and angular and looked like a model for the L. L. Bean Company. In his hand he carried a white Stetson that he tossed dramatically across the room to my desk. It landed with a bounce across my coffee cup. Traynor studied me with his Nordic, good-looking face, testing me to see if I would show annoyance that he'd nearly spilled Brim across several final drafts of scripts. I didn't, of course. I'm a good adman and good admen know how to secrete local anesthetic so they can deaden appropriate nerves.
"Your partner," he said. "Seems he's still out playing." He laughed his big bear laugh and came into my office. He had played soccer in college and he still enjoyed a brawl. Clay had inherited the Traynor business from his father. He had a beautiful, faithless wife and a stadiumful of friends who drank his drinks and indulged his whims and privately considered him a fool. Throwing his cowboy hat across a coffee cup like Buck Jones was only one of a thousand irritating habits he had cultivated. He didn't have much else to do.
That he was also an hour late seemed not to bother him. At least he didn't mention it.
As he dropped himself in the leather chair across from my desk, I saw that up close his face did not look nearly as self-confident as his getup. A long night with booze had given the eyes a suffering cast and the fingers that barely perceptible twitch that can foreshadow permanent nerve damage. Which, in his case, was entirely possible. His younger cousin Ron actually ran Traynor. Clay was simply a figurehead, a man who divided his time between chasing waitresses and making his advertising people miserable.
To show you the kind of guy I am-obviously superior to a bastard like Clay-four months ago I'd gotten up at his birthday party and proposed a toast to him. And I hadn't stopped there-no, sir. I went right ahead and made a little speech that compared him favorably with Socrates, Babe Ruth, Mother Teresa, and General Douglas MacArthur.
"Made you mad just then, didn't I?" There was a smirk in his voice, but for some reason it was halfhearted. Usually he could get me angry quickly and totally. Today there was something almost pathetic about him, like a pitcher in a slump throwing his best strike-out pitch only to get it knocked out of the park.
"When?" I said, trying to sound surprised and unaware of what he was talking about.
He leaned over and retrieved his hat. "My hat. I could've spilled your coffee all over your desk."
"Oh, that," I said, shrugging it off. "Yeah."
"I could see it in your eyes. You were pissed. No doubt about it." Stalking is one of his favorite games. He was stalking me now. But why?
"Your partner always puts up with me. Maybe now it's your turn."
The way he said it-so sharply-jarred me for a moment. The curiousness of his remark about maybe it being my turn made me stare at him.
Did he somehow know that Denny was dead?
But then I remembered him saying much the same thing to Merle Wickes one afternoon at lunch-something about abusiveness working all the way down the pecking order.
Obviously, the thought of Denny back there bloody and dead in bed was starting to take its toll. I hadn't realized it until now, but at least a part of me had been in shock for many hours after my discovery.
"You still with me, Michael?" Clay was saying.
"Oh, yeah, sorry. My mind was drifting, I guess."
He held up his Rolex as if it were a prop in a TV commercial and tapped it. "Maybe he's visiting the VD clinic downtown. Some of those chicks he spends time with-" He laughed one of those laughs that made me part of an in-group joke.
It wasn't a group I wanted to be a part of. I'd been alone long enough. I wanted a wife, maybe another kid. I didn't want to know any women who spent time with people like Clay or Denny. They were all members of the same leper colony…
"I hope you've got some great ideas for lunch," Clay said. "I'm fresh out."
I was just about to suggest a new seafood restaurant when the scream came.
I didn't have time to get across my office threshold before the screaming became much more serious-became the kind of eternal, baleful sobbing you hear during wartime when mothers learn their sons have been killed…