The Morning Show Murders (1) (13 page)

"There we are, approaching the Irish pub," Phil said.

The quintet was suddenly illuminated by a streetlamp. The three armed security guys dressed in camouflage clothing were strangers to me, but I knew the others. Rudy Gallagher, slightly in the bag, and Gin's boyfriend, Ted Parkhurst, looking wary but game and performing a familiar gesture, using his hand to comb back a hank of the fine light-brown hair that was forever falling across his forehead.

"Ted could use a little gel," I said.

"Or find a better barber," Phil said. "But that might not be necessary. My guess is he'll be bald by the time he's forty. Hell of a nice dude, though."

"Yeah, he is. He spend a lot of time with you guys?"

"Hung out with us most nights," Phil said.

"Which one of the camo guys is the one who was murdered, Hall?" I asked.

"The biggest one, with the buzz cut. The guy with the 'stache is Gault. The one with glasses is Fredricks. He was almost human. The others were pricks. Standard merc meatheads."

The men looked as if they were headed for a concrete wall, then veered left and walked around it to the lighted but unmarked door of a mock-Tudor two-story. Hall opened the door and the others followed him inside, Gault remaining behind until even Phil and his camera entered.

They wound up in an Irish pub that couldn't have been any more festive if it had been St. Patrick's Day. Bono was wailing from the loudspeakers. Afghani waiters in white shirts, black bow ties, and black pants moved through the crowd with trays carrying bottles and mugs of beer to mercenaries, soldiers, and men and women in civilian garb.

Phil's camera panned the room, the people, the Afghan carpets covering the floor, the Guinness ads on the walls, the lanterns on the tables ("In case of power failure," Phil explained), and the bar with its green-marble top ("Imported from Ireland").

A giant Afghani who looked like he was about to bust out of his tux stood near the front door. "The dude's a bouncer to keep the natives out," Phil told me. "That's the deal the owners, a couple of Sinn Fein rejects, cut with the local militia: The bar is for the use of foreign visitors only."

"Then how did the guys who started the fight get in?" I asked.

"They were dressed like waiters."

On the screen, Gallagher, Parkhurst, and the Touchstone guards were seated at a long table. Deacon Hall, the soon-to-be victim, gestured for Phil to turn off the camera.

The screen went to black. Then almost immediately it popped back to life, this time from a fixed angle facing down the table. "If he'd asked nicely, I might have kept the camera off," Phil said. "But I don't like muscle boys ordering me around."

Nothing much happened on-screen.

The men talked, mainly about the war, drank, and discussed women, not always in gentlemanly language. Rudy spilled beer on his pressed khaki jacket and emitted a few curses. Ted joined the recorded Clancy Brothers in a stirring rendition of "Fighters and Biters." I was getting bored.

I was about to suggest that Phil use one of his famous wireless buttons to speed up the action when something caught my eye.

"You see that?" I asked.

"What?"

"Reverse it? Great. Now ... stop ... THERE."

The action froze on a still image of Hall leaning toward Rudy, who was seated to his left. "I see it," Phil said. "Their hands. Hall's slipping Rudy something. Something shiny that's causing a little flare-up."

"What's it look like to you?" I asked.

"A Zippo lighter, maybe. No. Thinner. Because of the flare, it's hard to tell."

"Any way you could magnify the image?"

"Maybe," Phil said. "But regardless of what you see on
24
, we can't just zoom in on it now. It'd pixilate into nothing. I'll have to put it through a computer and play around a bit. I don't know if that'll make it any easier to identify the object. You think it's important, Billy?"

"Hall gets murdered in Kabul and Rudy gets murdered here. So ... it just might be very important."

"It'll take some work, and ordinarily I'd tell you to go screw yourself. But that was a hell of a meal, Billy. Let me futz around with it, see what miracles I can make."

I thanked him and thanked him once again when he said he didn't
need any help loading the dishwasher and scrubbing up. I lowered myself to ground level via the warehouse's ancient open-sided pulley-operated lift, took a quick jog over to Ninth Avenue, and caught a cab near one of the flash clubs.

On the way to my building I was feeling pretty good about my chances of sliding down a few notches on Solomon's list of suspects. In less than forty-eight hours, I'd turned up a little black book with the phone numbers of an assortment of women who had far better motives for murder than I, and now a bit of intrigue linking Rudy to a murder in Kabul.

My mood remained high until I arrived at my darkened building. Was my old visitor, Clove Boy, waiting for me inside?

I unlocked the rear door, turned off the alarm, and immediately reset it. Then I prowled around the building. The only thing I found of note was a message Cassandra had tacked to my office door. Our new E.P., Trina Lomax, had called at six-fifteen. An executive decision had been made: I was to remain on leave from the show until further notice. She'd let me know if and how my series on the Wine & Dine Network might be affected.

Great.

Dispirited, I changed into my pajamas and flopped on the bed.

I lay there, evaluating my situation. I was still at the top of the suspect list. I was out of work. And my restaurant was in lockdown. Not to mention the usual depressing thoughts that pop into your head at that time of night. The concerns about growing old alone, and that chest pain that may not be indigestion, and the fact that you haven't really done much with your life.

It took two hours and half a bottle of Glenmorangie, pride of the Highland peats, to rock me to sleep.

"Why are you going to the weasel's funeral, Billy?" my lawyer Wally Wing asked.

"I worked with the guy."

"Hell, I worked with the guy, too. On your contracts. But you won't catch me anywhere near Saint Pat's. Too nice a day to tempt the fates."

"Tempt what fates? It's a Catholic funeral service."

"You and I know, my brown brother, that as we speak, Gallagher's getting his ass tanned by Satan's furnace. Yet in less than an hour, people are going to be lying through their teeth about what a swell human being he was. In a house of God, no less. I don't need to be soaking up that kind of bad karma."

We were in Wally's office on Mott Street in Chinatown, a few doors down from the Peking Duck House. It was an oddly comfortable room with dark, polished furnishings--black and red lacquered chairs, a black leather couch with legs like lion paws, and Wally's sleek black desk, the size of a dining-room table.

Brightening things up was a large Oriental rug the color of pink rose petals mixed with sky blue. To our right was an altar hosting a foot-high statue of a Chinese god with a furious face, holding a
hammer in his right hand. His name was Lei Kung, Wally had informed me on my first visit to the office. He was the god of retribution, who makes thunder with his hammer and punishes criminals who have escaped the legal system. At the moment, his hammer was quiet, which I took as a sign of affirmation of my innocence. A brass pot near the god's sandaled feet filled the room with the soft scent of sandalwood.

With us was Wally's clerk-assistant, a young woman of heartbreaking loveliness named Tina, who was a recent graduate of the Columbia Law School. Dressed in a dark business suit and pale-pink blouse, she sat nearby with an open steno pad, as if she fervently expected the noted contract attorney Wallace A. Wing to say something worth recording.

Wally, handsome, well-preserved in his early fifties, was garbed in a casual broad-shouldered black cashmere jacket, a black silk shirt with a Mandarin collar, floppy gray linen trousers, and gray silk socks with red clocks on them. His gray suede loafers, which rested just outside the office door, were probably twin brothers of the shoes I considered buying at Ferragamo until I saw the six-hundred-fifty-dollar price tag.

He wore small, round glasses tinted a pale blue and framed in silver. His hair was long, mainly black but with dramatic strands of gray, tied in a ponytail that didn't quite hide the cue underneath. He was a little bit trad, a little bit rock and roll.

"I didn't think you believed in stuff like karma," I told him.

"I do, when I've got a client who can get a seven-figure advance for a book titled
You Can Change Your Karma
."

"At the risk of bringing you down to earth with my petty problems," I said, "why am I here?"

"When you told me what they're trying to pull over at the Glass Tower, I had Tina dust off your contracts. Tell him the good news, hon."

"Bottom line," she said, "they don't have to use you, but they do have to pay you. You've got another three years to run at
WUA!
, with a slight annual bump, and two years on your contract with Wine and Dine. The deal we made for the new series,
Food School 101
, appears to be moot, since they will not be proceeding with the pilot."

"Nice of them to tell me about it."

"I think they either have notified or are about to notify your partner in the project, Lily Conover," Tina said. "In any case, there is a generous kill fee now due."

"So I just sit out the other jobs?" I asked Wally.

"If you want," Wally said. "But I gave Gretchen a jingle, and she says you can come back to work whenever you so desire."

"Just like that?"

"I had to sell her, of course," he said. "I told her how much the show sucked this morning without you. And she agreed."

"You watched the show?"

"Billy, on the rare occasion I'm up at seven a.m., I watch the
Today
show. Or maybe, if I'm feeling just a little too upbeat, CNBC, to see how much loot I'm losing."

"So you never watch my show?"

"Say the word and I'll watch it every morning and just add the hours to your bill."

"Stick with the
Today
show," I said, standing. "Although I'm not so crazy about the weather guy, the rest of them are pretty good. I'll be going to church now, where I will pray for your enlightenment. Tina, a pleasure seeing you, as always."

"Hold on," Wally said, hopping to his sock feet. He circled the desk and walked me to the door, saying, "There's more good news. My source at the DA's office says they're letting you get back to business at the Bistro."

"That is good news," I said.

"In the words of my glorious ancestor, Charlie Chan, 'Settle one difficulty, and you keep a hundred others away.' Go forth, my brown brother, and remain difficulty-free."

If I really was free from difficulties, most of the mourners at Rudy's funeral hadn't gotten the word. They were gathered, some fifty strong, near a side altar in the massive cathedral. In any normal-size church, they would have seemed a crowd. In that huge, high-domed, white-marble edifice, they barely qualified as a gathering.

In any case, it was a gathering where I was clearly persona non grata. But not a total outcast. My coproducer Lily Conover seemed glad to see me. She'd been standing at the rear of the church, checking things out before committing herself to a pew.

"I'd have thought the crowd would be bigger," she whispered.

"You're thinking of those movies with half the church filled with the deceased's mistresses in black, weeping," I said.

"No. I'm thinking of Red Skelton's quip at Harry Cohn's packed funeral: 'Give the people what they want ...'"

"I hear our
Food School
pilot has been given an Incomplete," I said.

"Yeah," Lily said. "I got the call yesterday. Just as well. At the risk of speaking ill of the departed, it was a frigging boneheaded concept."

We were about to slink into an empty pew when the commander spied us and waved us to his, urging Gretchen and the row of other executives to squeeze together to make room.

"Feeling better, Billy?" he asked.

An odd question, but I replied, "Feeling fine. And you?"

"Tip-top. So you'll be back at work tomorrow?"

Gretchen was observing us anxiously, and I realized she must have told the old man I'd been absent because of my health.

"Back tomorrow, with bells on," I said, smiling at his daughter.

"Good, good. That young hippy with the long hair, Slater, or whatever his name is, was supposed to be reviewing a book this morning, and he was holding the goddamned thing upside down."

"Dad, please," Gretchen said. "We are in church."

"Well, I don't like the little cretin," the commander said. I suspected he knew Chuck Slater was sitting right behind us, turning a lovely shade of crimson.

The funeral mass was delivered by a monsignor. Gretchen had probably tried for the new archbishop, then the rector, and then settled for a monsignor. He wasn't a bad choice, tall, graying, and stately in his white vestments, which, according to the handout, symbolized the Resurrection of the Spirit. Good luck with that, Rudy.

The monsignor moved the service along smartly, allowing only one chorus of "The Hymn of Saint Patrick" and the Offertory hymn, "There Is a Wideness in God's Mercy." His sermon, in which he praised Rudy's "lifetime of service to a community that depended on him for entertainment and information," lasted twelve minutes by my watch. Very few mourners took Communion. It wasn't that kind of crowd.

According to the handout, we were asked to save our eulogies for the more private gathering at the gravesite, which took care of Wally's concern about karma and made the whole service--from "Welcome" to
"Requiescat in pace!
"--clock in at just under forty-five minutes. If there had been commercials, we could've sold it as an hour. Rudy would've been pleased.

As I left the pew I caught sight of another outcast heading to the door. Melody Moon, in a simple light-gray dress with long sleeves and a white collar and cuffs, had been sitting at the rear of the church.