The Suspense Is Killing Me

A journalist searches for the true story of his glamorous sibling’s death.

When rock star J. C. Tripper died, only his brother Lee was by his side, and in the decades since, Lee has been deviled by questions of what really happened that night in Tangier. He thinks he knows the truth, but his recollection of that final drug-soaked bender is about to be called into question.

An old acquaintance mails Lee a Nazi pistol and four Polaroid pictures of a dead body—an invitation to reopen a long-cold murder investigation. Lee then reconnects with Sam Innis, onetime best friend to the brothers Tripper, who urges him to track down J.C.’s former bandmates and music industry contacts. That night, Lee’s girlfriend, a bestselling conspiracy theorist, is tortured to death in her tub. As his brother comes back to haunt him, Lee must unravel the mystery of J.C.’s last days, or risk joining him behind the velvet rope at the great after-party in the sky.

“Plot surprises galore ... The amusement quotient rises with every page.” - Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Thomas Gifford (1937–2000) was a bestselling author of thriller novels. Born in Dubuque, Iowa, he moved to Minnesota after graduating from Harvard. After eight years as a traveling textbook salesman, he wrote Benchwarmer Bob (1974), a biography of Minnesota Vikings defensive end Bob Lurtsema. The Wind Chill Factor (1975), a novel about dark dealings among ex-Nazis, introduced John Cooper, a character Gifford would revisit in The First Sacrifice (1994). The Wind Chill Factor was one of several books Gifford set in and around Minneapolis.

Gifford won an Edgar Award nomination for The Cavanaugh Quest (1976). The Glendower Legacy (1978), a story about an academic who discovers that George Washington may have been a British spy, was adapted for the film Dirty Tricks (1981), starring Elliott Gould. In the 1980s Gifford wrote suspense novels under the pen names Thomas Maxwell and Dana Clarins. In 1996 he moved back to Dubuque to renovate his childhood home. He died of cancer in 2000.

Author’s Note

ANY WRITER OF FICTION IS bound to be asked the sources of his characters. Are they real? Are they composites of people he has known? Are they entirely fictional? And if so, how is that possible? Writers spend a certain amount of time wriggling away from being too specific, frequently because they can’t really pin down a character’s birth.

A character I find particularly interesting and appealing in this novel, Annie DeWinter, doesn’t appear until fairly late in the proceedings. She is, however, a pivotal character. You don’t have to ask me about her because I’m taking this opportunity to tell you from whence she came.

I found her in Greenwich Village, working in a bookstore about three blocks from where I live. Initially I noticed, as chaps will, that she was strikingly—indeed, almost alarmingly—beautiful. Tall, slender, square-shouldered, her skin very pale, her hair dramatically black. In time I noticed her earrings. They were new ones on me and they were perfect for Annie DeWinter. She was perfect for Annie DeWinter. Her name was Michelle.

Annie was a blank until then. And then she took over Michelle’s body. I asked her for the use of her earrings and she told me how she’d come to get them—also incorporated into the story, at least in outline. Annie became Michelle. And that is how this writer found a crucial character.

Needless to say, Annie’s personality is entirely her own; her experiences and her generation and her life have nothing whatever to do with Michelle. But she wouldn’t be Annie if I hadn’t met Michelle. So, my thanks to Michelle a thousand times over.

Greetings …

I’VE JUST COME BACK FROM visiting my attorney and my banker. I tell them I see them on Visiting Day, not because they are actually in prison but—let’s face it—they might very well be, only a couple more deals down the road. Morris and Harold, to give them names, find me something of a joker, but that’s not to be confused with thinking I’m funny. They seldom smile when I’m around, and even if they had once, they wouldn’t have been smiling much today. They were wearing what you might call their openmouthed, dying-fish looks when I got through with them. I signed a hand-written statement while they looked on and then we made use of a safe-deposit box. Harold Berger looked as if he might be doing something criminal without quite being sure. I was indeed the only one doing any laughing. I handed my key to the box to Morris Dicker. He frowned. It was the look of a man who has just been videotaped accepting the Baggie bulging with cocaine. “Everything be fine,” I said, “everything be cool. Ax me no questions, relax, my man.”

Morris nodded. “You’re an absolute charlie, Lee. There’s no other word for it. For you, I mean.”

“Don’t give me that crapola,” I explained. Then I smilingly outlined his place in the great scheme of things. I told him about the lawyer who fell into the school of feeding sharks but went untouched, climbed back into the boat, and said to his astonished companions, “Professional courtesy.” It is not uncommon for lawyers to forget their place in the g. s. and then they must be reminded. Ditto for investment bankers who are frequently too young to have learned their place. Harold was not an investment banker. He was just a banker banker.

The hell with all this. It’s always a mistake for me to get started on lawyers and bankers. Morris and Harold are okay guys. Slow but okay. And I’ve never actually caught either of them molesting a child.

I felt better having taken care of business because I’m trying to save myself a lot of heartache and grief and unnecessary confusion later on when the shit hits the f. I’m not sure anything’s going to happen, mind you, but it might, and better safe than sorry. Pay attention to Granny’s samplers and you can never go far wrong. That’s my advice. A fool and his money are soon parted, too.

Now you’d better sort of brace yourself for this story because, let me be absolutely frank with you, it’s full to the brim with deceit and treachery and violence and the occasional laugh to break the tension, and plain, outright, bald-faced lies. I’m going to tell it as it happened, lies and all, and good luck to you. Don’t trust a goddamn thing anybody says and never return by the way you came.

Prologue

THE PACKAGE ARRIVED BY UPS. It was signed for and delivered up to my condominium by one of the smartly attired doormen whose cheery, helpful disposition indicated he knew on which side his croissants were buttered. He all but saluted once he’d handed it over and adroitly stepped away when I reached into my pocket for a tip. “Part of the job, Mr. Tripper,” he said, as he almost always did. He knew the payoff was in the end much larger when he hadn’t nickeled-and-dimed everybody to death all year.

I took it to the terrace, where the afternoon shadows had cooled off one of the summer’s first hot days. The breeze rustling the trees in Central Park below felt good and clean and pure. Summer hadn’t yet beaten Manhattan to its grubby knees.

The return address meant nothing to me. A street somewhere in Seattle, the initials ABM. I slit the twine and tape with the old Swiss Army knife I used for a letter opener and peeled the wrapping paper away, then unfolded the top of a cardboard box somewhat larger than a shoe box.

It contained a letter, an old envelope marked HARRIGAN’S DELUXE PHOTO FINISHING, and a largish, heavy oilskin package with several thick rubber bands tightly enclosing it. The letter was short. It was signed by someone I’d never met.

Dear Mr. Tripper,

My father, Martin Bjorklund, with whom you were once acquainted, died recently. Among his possessions we found the contents of this box with the instructions that upon his death it all be sent to you. I have no idea what either item is but be assured they have not been opened and are exactly as Father left them. Perhaps they are keepsakes with some particular significance to the two of you.

For God’s sake … Marty Bjorklund. I hadn’t seen him in twenty years, not since that last meeting in Tangier.

There were four cracked photographs, each of the same subject. They were Polaroid shots. Harrigan had had nothing to do with them beyond providing an envelope of the right size. They were pictures of a dead man.

I tried unwrapping the rubber bands but they were old and brittle and snapped at my touch. Some of the strands of rubber were embedded in the oilskin, which was itself cracked, dried out. Slowly I unfolded the flaps, it slowly dawning on me what I’d find. When the oilskin was entirely pried away, the heavy oily thing, so redolent of what it was, lay on the table before me.

A Mauser Parabellum nine-millimeter automatic. The four-inch barrel gave it a slender elegance. It was built on the Swiss Luger model.

One

THIS STORY GETS SO HAIRY so fast I vote for a nice calm beginning, saxophones and some strings and your overall Nelson Riddle arrangement. Because soon enough we get to the Death’s Head Rangers and the Traveling Executioner’s Band and there’ll be times when all you can do is put your hands over your ears and wait for it to be over. So, nice and easy does it every time. Incidentally, did you know that the publisher of this tale is giving a very large reward for the longest list of song titles any reader finds embedded in the text? Cheggidout.

The first time you meet me—well, let’s begin with the day I found my first corpse. That put a real crimp in my general state of mind, which was too bad because I’d started the day without a care to my name. It had been a long time since I’d felt so good about things. In fact, now I think about it, I’d never felt so good about things, not once in my entire life, and that was saying something because I’m known for my sunny dispozish. Naturally it couldn’t last, this feeling of well-being. No sane person would expect it to. But a corpse? How often does a corpse louse up your momentary euphoric glimpse of true, unencumbered contentment? Not very damned often, would be my guess.

I was lingering over my coffee and the morning’s papers, sitting on the spacious terrace of my recently acquired home, a condo in a gravely imposing temple to money and the vague New Yorky status that goes with it. Central Park West. Looking out across the topless towers of Ilium or something, looking down on the lakes and meadows of the Park, the Delacorte Theater, Tavern on the Green, all baking under the summer sun. The Metropolitan Museum and the cliffs of Fifth Avenue across the Park. Mia and all the kids lived not far away and Woody was over on the other side cutting his new movie and I could practically hear the Gershwin from Manhattan. Actually I could hear the music from Manhattan because it was playing on the stereo while I breakfasted and enjoyed the view. This, you may already have predicted, was too good to last; but I hadn’t, I admit, seen the inevitability of disaster. I was a silly fellow who thought he’d at last achieved what he’d always deserved. Well, I was just about to, as it turned out.

The striped, fringed awning over the French doors flapped as it caught the morning breeze. My potted palms stood swaying like languid, leftover guests who couldn’t bear the idea of going home. I felt so robust and healthy and happy I was within a hair’s breadth of bellowing and whacking my chest. I had my reasons.

My heavy doping days were behind me. I never thought about all that anymore. If you, gentle reader, peruse these pp. in hope of zeroing in on lurid dramatic reconstructions, you are out of luck. As Katharine Hepburn once said to me and my brother JC on another occasion, “You are barking up a tree you can’t climb.” No recollections of druggy days. Well, maybe the odd reminiscence of my famous brother’s exploits is inevitable, but none of mine. Or damn little of mine, anyway.

This happy, Mary Poppins-like state of mind was of recent origin. Let me tell you how I’d lost touch with reality and found myself in such a good mood.

A couple of years before, I was scraping along as a sort of ragtag journalist, trying to live off my late brother’s reputation and having fairly hard going of it. I was treated in some quarters as a kind of fourth-rate Rock Icon, having you know like been there and all with JC himself—which is just the way these nitwits talk. I was caught between a James Dean Rock Fantasy and the Nostalgia Wave. I was a man with a sketchy-looking future at best and a very messy Rock Generation Gone Sour past, and forgive the capitalizations, but that’s the way the poor jerks who think about those days like their prose. It was all incredibly humbling, having been on top of the pile, no matter if it had been a pretty rubbishy pile. As I sank lower and lower in the pecking order of Post-Modern Rock personages, I didn’t complain: I had my reasons for preferring anonymity. And the truth was, those had been the days, hadn’t they? At least some of them.

Anyway, I’d kicked around Europe and a few other less well-known and certainly less promising continents for more than a decade, lying doggo, like a lost ball in the high weeds, as Robert Ryan says to Dean Jagger in Bad Day at Black Rock. I had a lot of time for movies and books and staring into space, mistakenly looking for my soul because I was trying to recover from the rock days, all those weird rock dreams everybody always used to talk about so long ago. I was getting older, my hair was flecking with gray and I was losing a lot of it. I got used to my face without a beard and it got a good bit fuller. I raised a perfectly respectable crop of jowls. People I’d known for years would see me on the street in Paris or Brisbane or Asunción—that was when I picked up a fair piece of change acting as the radio man on a team trying to locate Martin Bormann but that is most definitely another story—and brush past, not a clue as to who I was. I lived in Paris for a time, did some hiking in the Dordogne and in Tuscany, even went through a misguided attempt at fitness training involving jogging in the Bois de Boulogne. I ran afoul of unpleasant, uncouth scoundrels during what I think of as the Christ of the Andes Blunder. But mainly I let the years pass me by. I watched the river of Time wash away the old days, wash away many of my sins, wash away JC Tripper and his Traveling Executioner’s Band and the huge electric-chair gizmo and JC’s endless girlfriends—they had ends, to be sure, but there were a lot of them, is what I meant to say there—and yes, wash away even the chap who had spent all those years being the brother at JC’s side—me. I enjoyed being washed away. All the memories became blurred; the memory of the person I’d been was one of those memories, and it fared no better than all the others. I was like a snapshot left in the sun on a window ledge, growing dimmer and dimmer as the time passed. Fine. It was better that way and, believe me, no great loss. And eventually it was time to come home.

When I finally got back from the great out-of-touch-ness called abroad, I ran across a woman called Sally Feinman, who was a magazine writer. Once she realized who I was she behaved as if she’d struck the mother lode. After a month of heavy talking on her part and a fair amount of heavy breathing on mine, she wrote her famous piece for New York magazine, “The Traveling Executioner’s Last Trip.”

Sally was the rare sort of person who felt no need to keep all the good things for herself. When the publishers Hawthorne & Hedrick approached her about doing a book on the final days of JC Tripper, she demurred, insisting to them that I was the man they wanted.

An editor by the name of Tony Fleming gave me a call and set things in motion, primarily by waving a contract and an advance of $50,000 at me. Not princely, perhaps, but I liked the cut of his jib and the fact that there would be no wait for the first twenty-five grand. The check was in hand. And all reasonable expenses. If I would tell the true story of JC’s death in Tangier all those years ago. Well, there was the money and I’d been there, an eyewitness. More or less. Unconscious during many of the crucial events, perhaps, but there was no point in going into all that trivia with hopeful, generous Tony. His confidence might reasonably have been expected to flag and I wanted none of that.

The thing was, my brother had surely died back there in Tangier, but you know how it is with the icons of rock and roll. He died of a drug overdose and a liver that had drowned in bourbon and cataclysmic bouts of depression—or “black dog,” as he called it, after Churchill. He also died of excessive adulation, unceasing sexual hysteria, and worrying too much about all of it. He just ceased to exist, only the idea of him remained, and in the end it wasn’t such a hot idea, if you ask me. He died after running through the better part of thirty or forty million bucks. He died of a bloated, infected ego, like a punchy old fighter who thinks he’s got another title shot coming.

These guys like JC and Jim Morrison and Joplin and the biggest tuna of them all, Elvis, the thing is nobody wants them to be really and truly dead. Truly gone, never to come twanging and throbbing and gyrating and sweating and screaming back into the spotlight. Dead, these guys become the death of youth and hope, the death of whatever they have become in the tiny, unformed, adolescent and utterly hormone-drowned minds of their fans. God damn it, they were supposed to be immortal … when in fact most of them were self-destructive, self-indulgent assholes who bit the big weenie just about on schedule. At least some of them.

The rumors of JC Tripper’s survival, the faked death in a remote part of the world where officialdom was thought to be open to persuasion, his subsequent disappearance into the landscape, a victim of pressure and whatnot … Was any of that true? Or was he dead? There were all these people sitting around The Four Seasons or Mortimer’s or Area in its fleeting day who reflexively gave a knowing wink at the mention of JC’s name. Everybody knew there was a book in it somewhere. Tony Fleming was paying me to write it.

I did what any man in my pozish would have done. I took the money. And I traipsed hither and yon on my expense account, from Tangier to the old Moon Club in Zurich, this way, and that, checking things out in my old diaries, trying to do the job, or at least trying to look like I was doing the job. I told Fleming that I’d replayed the final frenzied years of JC’s life and that, yes, beyond a reasonable doubt, my brother was dead just as I’d told him, his ashes scattered over the Moroccan desert at least a thousand years ago.

JC was, in the opinion of many, one of the era’s greatest figures. Or he wasn’t. What possible difference could it make? I don’t know. But I wrote the book, took the reader back through the finale of rock’s first great age. Tony Fleming got his money’s worth.

While I was writing back in New York, Sally Feinman did another story, this one for the Sunday Times Magazine, about my search for the truth. It made a wonderful promo for my book, which Tony Fleming entitled Rocking Death: The Tangier Days of JC Tripper. The book sold something over a hundred thousand copies in hardcover; the paperback rights brought $700,000 and escalators at auction; and MagnaFilms bought the film rights for $450,000. They also paid Sally Feinman $100,000 for the rights to her two stories, just to cover all the bases and because I told them that my deal hinged on the deal with her. There was a small JC Tripper industry all of a sudden.

And MagnaDisc released his recordings with very snazzy matching artwork in all three formats. As JCs sole heir, I was cleaning up on that front, too. Fried Psychos and Defective Wiring, the first two albums released in CD form, hit the top of the charts. Big money, my friends. And there were thirteen more albums on the way. Recycling, the wave of the future.

Of course, as Somerset Maugham observed, it wasn’t all cakes and ale. Let me give you a for instance. Time’s critic reviewed my book in a couple of brief, dismissive paragraphs and trained his Bofors gun on your hmbl servt. He called me “a pathetic remnant of a drugged-out, sex-obsessed subculture without which an entire generation might have stood some slight chance of developing into conscientious, responsible adults.” That sounded to me as if he’d been paying attention and pretty much got my drift. I was a pathetic twerp feeding off the iconic remains of my brother, etcetera, etcetera. Well, our generation made an inviting target, didn’t it? Who were the survivors? A bunch of gray-bearded ex-hippies who hadn’t quite noticed the parade passing them by. And the rest had been pretty well absorbed into the vast body politic, occasionally squeezing into tie-dyed jeans and shirts and remembering the old days. When you get right down to it, however, I’m not altogether sure a bunch of snot-nosed, post-adolescent, ethically stunted Masters of the Universe, practitioners of corporate raiding and leveraged buyouts and hawkers of junk bonds—greedy little shits who’d sell their grandmothers to make another month’s nut on the condo and the BMW—I can’t really see how they represent some big step upward on the evolutionary ladder. But don’t get me going on all that. Who cares, right? I haven’t got anything original to say about it. Viewed in the proper glare, whose generation can withstand careful scrutiny? We’re all only befuddled travelers on the Circle Line, yesterday, today, and tomorrow, going round and round and round.

What happened is that I met this woman, Heidi Dillinger. One of the oldest and most devoutly adhered-to rules in the history of movie-making is what was dubbed a very long time ago “the cute meet.” Well, Heidi and I should have been in a movie because we definitely met cute. It didn’t last but it was cute.

I left my place about noon with nothing more important on my mind than hitting Dunhill and J & R for cigars, Scribner’s for some book browsing—checking on the supply of my book, which was still selling nine months after publication, testament to old JC, and then maybe a call at Paul Stuart for a gander at the new duds. I could make all that last until mid-afternoon, at which time I’d set off on the shady side of Fifth Avenue for an hour or so of strolling, fetching up at Sally’s loft in SoHo. Cocktails in her sun room, maybe some dinner at an irritating joint called Raoul’s where we’d probably be the only people in the room not gabbling on in French. People thought Raoul’s was still the center of the Eurotrash chow line, but in fact most of them had already begun oiling their way up toward Indochine across the street from Joe Papp’s place. As it turned out, Sally and I never made it to Raoul’s for dinner, but I’m getting ahead of myself here. Nothing turned out the way it was supposed to, not from the time I ran into Mellow Yellow on Fifth Avenue near the entrance to Number 666, beside the B. Dalton Bookstore.

Mellow Yellow was a nimble young fellow of the black persuasion, about six and a half feet high by four feet wide, weighing in at roughly 350, and the operative word would be “roughly.” He habitually wore a yellow T-shirt with MELLOW YELLOW printed in black across his pecs, which looked like sacks of wet cement. He and five of his colleagues operated a three-card monte game on Fifth, Sixth, and down on Forty-second between Sixth and Broadway. He was in his own way a tourist attraction, like the Statue of Liberty, only larger. He had an agreement with the cops on the beat, who only rousted him once a day per location. So Mellow and his merry band were raking in $2500 a day. When I stopped to watch the show he was just getting into it, sucking the tourists in with his patter, with his extraordinary manual dexterity. It was a show, and the price for the wary was right. I figured Mellow may have been the only man in America who was being paid exactly what he was worth, to the penny.

I once knew a man in Zurich who said that the simplest cons were best and the simplest cons were those based on nothing but elementary psychology and pure skill. The con man could attain a level of skill that enabled him to bet on himself with nearly absolute certainty. The rest of it was knowing how to sucker the rubes into insisting that you take their money. Mellow had a benign faith in himself and, since he never lost, I assumed he’d found an inner peace that others could only envy.

Watching him work was a little like watching Art Tatum play the piano. Those big black fingers moved with a kind of effortless Zen concentration, as if they were operating out of a genetic muscle-memory inherited from practitioners on the Mississippi riverboats in the years preceding the Civil War. He used two spades and one diamond drawn from a pinochle deck. He shuffled the three cards back and forth, using a fluid cross-handed motion. Each card was bent in exactly the same way as the others, except that for the moment the diamond carried an extra crease at the corner, making it easily identifiable by even the slowest students. Only a blind man could fail to see it, which is, of course, the point.

Mellow was playing to a crowd of twenty or thirty passersby, several of whom actually worked for him. It was hot and he’d set up just inside the shade of the arcade. Some days he’d have had somebody dispensing free lemonade; he was a hell of a businessman, a Donald Trump of the street. Same street, after all. Fifth Avenue.

I’d been watching for five or ten minutes when I noticed the woman who’d come to stand beside me. She was tall and was craning her neck to get a good view. She wasn’t paying the slightest attention to me, so I gave her a practiced once-over. Five-nine or ten; short, close-cropped blond hair revealing tiny, perfectly shaped ears and a long, slender neck, with the hair cut to a geometric point on the nape. Her face was oval with a faint roundness at the cheekbones, pale eyebrows, a short, straight nose, a flat forehead, unusually pale tan eyes, a wide mouth with thin, precise lips and a bemused, quirky smile. She was wearing a navy-blue summer dress, sleeveless with white piping, a necklace of white balls that looked like wood and emphasized her tan. Blue-and-white spectator pumps. Bracelet matching the necklace. She carried a two-tone brown-and-black briefcase I recognized as a Madler, about $1200. She was clearly all business, no nods to current fashion; a paragon of efficiency who, I’d have guessed, had forgotten what it was like to have a personal life or an emotional attachment to another human being. She was very pretty, but in that first summing-up I saw no particular allure in her looks. Everything about her said I dare you, just try something, make my day … Everything about her was a gauntlet flung down, a challenge. Maybe if she had a weakness, it was gambling. She was a born victim for a guy like Mellow. One look and he’d be licking his lips: she was money in the bank. She thought she was the smartest kid in the class, the smartest thing since Hattie Carnegie’s hat.

Three sticks working with Mellow picked the wrong card three successive times when it was perfectly obvious to everyone in the crowd where the diamond was. The sticks were of Tony Award caliber. One guy, a white yuppie in a three-piece suit, about twenty-five, a Vuitton briefcase under his arm, looked as if he were lunching at Prunelle or “21” before heading back down to Wall Street. Another guy was the classic rube tourist—terry-cloth polo shirt, snappy plaid Bermudas, black socks and thong sandals. The female stick was Hispanic: a bright-eyed, intelligent face, cotton blouse, designer jeans from Fourteenth Street sprayed on, bright red toenails in medium heels, a big leather shoulder bag. Among them they lost a couple hundred bucks in five minutes, while the rest of the crowd felt superior and groaned each time they picked the wrong card. Finally Mellow rapped out some patter about taking candy from babies and allowed someone else into the game. Now the con began in earnest, the shuffling faster and smoother, the cards fluttering to the surface of the upturned cardboard box. There was the telltale crease in the red diamond.

The woman standing beside me chuckled, turned to me, shaking that fine small head. Not a hair out of place. “These people are morons.” Her voice was deep and throaty.

“You’re a romantic. He’s a creep who is proficient at a creepy job. Anybody with half a brain could clean him out.” She was impatient with the stupidity of it all.

“I have an entire brain,” I said, “the full complement of brain. And I wouldn’t have a chance with Mellow here.” I flashed my timeworn boyish grin. “And neither, let me add, would you.”

She caught my eye with those odd pale tan numbers of hers, a quizzical expression on her face. “You can’t be serious.”

“I’ll tell you what I would bet on. I’ll bet you lunch you can’t beat him once.”

She looked at her gold Rolex, then back up at me. “You look familiar. Are you a well-known loser about town?”

She checked her watch again, then fished a couple of twenties from the green alligator Filofax. She pushed her way to the front of the crowd and waved the bills in front of Mellow, who grinned broadly, lots of gold bridgework showing. The shuffling began, the cards dropped. She cocked her head, calmly watching his hands, a tiny smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. There was a faint patina of perspiration on her upper lip. Now that was alluring.

The cards dropped. Instantaneously, almost as if she weren’t looking at them, had lost interest in them, she pointed at one of them. Just the hint of surprise registered on Mellow’s massive face.

“Let’s do it again,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to think you were letting me win. I’d love to see how mellow you really are, Mellow. I’m a test, the person you prayed you’d never meet.”

He grinned and she won a second time, then a third, collected the money, and stuffed it into the Filofax. Mellow just stared at her impassively, neither angry nor beaten, just relieved to see the last of her. In the end I’m sure it was good for business. Everybody standing around Mellow figured they could do it if this hot-shit broad could do it, but of course they couldn’t.

“There ought to be a law against me,” she said. “It’s your treat. A fool and his money … and you have no excuse. Mellow didn’t know I was going to whip his fat black ass but you, my friend, did.”

“Gambling interests me,” she said. “In all its forms.” She sipped at a tall glass of iced tea. The yellow table umbrellas flapped overhead. There were flowers everywhere, water splashing beneath the golden sculpture of Prometheus overlooking the outdoor cafe at Rock Center. Music tinkled from loudspeakers. Hundreds of tourists leaned on the railings staring down into the sea of yellow canvas, a field of dandelions. “For instance, today’s the hundredth-and-something anniversary of Wild Bill Hickok’s death. He was playing poker in Deadwood, South Dakota, fella shot him in the back. He was holding two pairs, aces and eights. That’s why they call it the Dead Man’s Hand.” She smiled at me but her eyes were still remote and cool and appraising. “You look like a man whose hope blooms eternal. You’ll always try to fill an inside straight and you’ll be lucky if you pull it off five times in your life.”

“I know the con. Obviously it’s not really gambling. Mellow isn’t supposed to run any risk of losing. It’s not sport, it’s Mellow’s business. When I engage in a game of chance I try to remove the element of chance. Like Mellow. It’s a business investment. I hate losing. I mean, what’s the point?”

“It’s the right hand. He can drop the top card or the bottom card. When he’s setting you up he works the top card out first, then the bottom. The two cards in his right hand, the diamond and one of the spades, get dropped bottom-to-top when he’s setting it up, then he goes top-to-bottom when it’s for money—”

“But what about the crease in the diamond?” I said innocently. She seemed to know what she was talking about.

“Oh, Mellow was good enough at his job. He uncreased the diamond and creased a spade, no way you could see him do it. But when he dropped the cards, one thing you knew for sure—the diamond wouldn’t have a crease.” She let the tip of her tongue slowly circle her lips. “Look, people get excited, they want to win, they forget to give the dealer credit for skill and brains. I never get excited and I never underestimate.”

It was hot. We ordered lunch and I shifted around in my sweaty linen suit that was wrinkling just the way it was supposed to, about eighty-five bucks per wrinkle. Lavender-striped shirt, a big floppy lime-green bow tie, a lavender silk pocket square, chocolate-brown reverse calf wing tips. And all of it felt wet. She was, of course, supernaturally cool and dry, perfect. That drove me crazy.

“That’s the jail John Dillinger broke out of with a gun he carved from a bar of soap and blackened with shoe polish. I like that in a man.”

“I’m not talking about me. I’m talking about men. Audacity in a man is good. Brains don’t much matter. I’ve got the brains. My first name is Heidi. You have one, too, right?”

“Ahhh,” she said softly. “Tripper. You do look familiar, don’t you—I read your book about that brother of yours. What an asshole! I can see his face in you. Is he really dead?” She shook her head, laughing. “No, scratch that. You must get that all the time. So you’re a professional brother and—”

“Oh, buck up. You’re made of sterner stuff than that. Mustn’t crumble in the face of little Heidi’s chitchat.”

She daintily chewed a forkful of chicken salad and dabbed at her mouth with the napkin. “I’m an adjunct to the writing business, actually. A wholly owned subsidiary specializing in research.”

Everything she said seemed to get my attention. Allan Bechtol was one of the world’s best-selling novelists—unreadable in my view, but he didn’t notice that I no longer bought his books. He was a highly reclusive writer of gigantic thrillers that might just as well have been sold by the pound. Each book contained a great deal of information, so when you finished reading one of the damn things—while the plot may have made no sense—you sort of felt like you’d learned something. He’d written one about the world of computer hackers and viruses, and that literary weekly People ran a piece telling how the book had dramatically goosed the sales of some new personal computer. He’d written another one set in a national park, dealing with the search for a Russian mole who had taken refuge among diseased killer bears. That one had really worn your polish off after 750 pages. And the country had gone nuts about bears. Research was what set his books apart. Heidi Dillinger’s contribution. It was reported in the press that Bechtol’s advance for a novel was approaching five million dollars.

“You must be very well compensated,” I said. “Without the fruits of your labors, he’d have to pay people to read that crap.”

“I do all right, but of course you see the truth of things. So I’m not doing as well as I should be. My owning him would be a better arrangement. I’m nothing if not candid.”

She laughed at me. “You think I haven’t told him the same thing? Don’t kid yourself. Of course you’re a romantic. Kidding yourself is your style.”

“Did you just spring full-grown from Bechtol’s brow, or did you do something before Bechtol?”

“Well, he didn’t invent me. I was a yup computer whiz after Cal Tech and suddenly I realized I was surrounded by major nerds and I was only making a couple hundred thousand a year. My analyst at the time told me I was a ‘people person.’ Two things happened. I realized I could not tell my innermost thoughts, fears, hopes, and dreams to a woman who let the words ‘people person’ escape her lips. And I saw that in a way she was right. Computers were not my life and I didn’t mind dealing with people … if they bathed regularly and so on. So I quit the computer business, quit my analyst, got an angle on Bechtol and blindsided him with my brains and—relatively speaking—my looks. Four years ago. I’m thirty-one.” She looked at her watch again. “Look, I really have to run. Have you enjoyed our little talk, Mr. Tripper?”

“The judicious approach. Not exactly timid. I make people timid sometimes. Well, I’ve enjoyed it, too. You’re a good listener—I like that in a man. You won’t believe me, but I very seldom want to talk about myself. Today was the day, I guess. Maybe it has something to do with my period. Would it be nice to meet again and then maybe you could decide for sure if you enjoy my company? What about dinner tomorrow?”

“I already have. Give me your number and I’ll call you with time and place. My treat. You have a machine?”

“That I doubt.” She pushed her chair back and stood up before I could move. “Mr. Tripper, you’re easy, very easy, and …” She waited.

She patted my arm. “I’ll call you tomorrow. Don’t get up. Finish your lunch. You look like a member of the Clean Plate Club.”

Two

THE TEMPERATURE HIT NINETY-SIX later that afternoon. Even on the shady side of Fifth it was too hot to live, let alone walk around, but the chances of getting an air-conditioned cab were too low to make the effort. So I walked and tried to catch every breeze. I walked down through Washington Square where the arch baked in the direct sunlight and gave off heat waves you could actually feel. It was like watching one of those scary movies of an atomic explosion. A one-man steel band was clanging away, tolling the end of civilization as we knew it, and a few roller skaters moseyed listlessly around the basin. That was it. Everybody else had lost consciousness.

The radiator cap had blown off a T-bird on Houston and gone halfway through the hood, where it remained looking like a groundhog checking for its shadow. I saw it happen. Thwang—bang-thunk. The driver just pulled over to the curb, slid to a stop by a young entrepreneur engaged in purveying crack to the masses, and slumped slowly across his steering wheel. A broken man who might never see his split-level rambler in Jersey again. I had my jacket slung over my shoulder by then and my shoes were doing that unhealthy thing where they stick to the streets and sidewalk. It was a struggle. The nice thing, what kept me going, was the knowledge that Sally kept two industrial-strength air conditioners going in her Prince Street loft. I liked that in a woman.

I was still thinking about Heidi Dillinger. She’d told me more about herself than would have seemed likely, given her type, but as she’d said, she’d felt like talking and maybe it was, after all, her period. Still, her face—particularly those pale, coffee-with-cream eyes—was one that gave nothing away, continually insisted on tabulating a running score and calculated each and every angle. She wasn’t the sort of creature who would allow herself to get picked up. Unless, of course, that was the point.

She couldn’t have been less like Sally Feinman, who was Brooklyn-born and raised, who was the daughter of respectable fellow travelers destroyed in the Red Scare of the fifties, who’d been a teenager in the sixties and never got over it. Her consciousness had been raised on cut-rate campus grass, the assassinations, the Beatles and the Stones, Vietnam body counts, burning bras and draft cards, Mayor Daley and Chicago in the summer of 1968, civil rights marches in Alabama, police brutality, sexual intercourse as the basic grammar of your communication. Sally always looked intense and committed and funny and ironic and serious. She saw two Establishment politicians together and she saw yet another lethal conspiracy. She looked as if she’d gotten a frizzy permanent in the sixties and never been able to wash it out. She was short and stocky and sexy, and though we’d never had what anyone might call an affair, we’d certainly had a great deal of what any right-thinker would call sex. Sally was at home with sex. Comfortable with it, confident, sure that everybody was going to wind up wearing a smile. The first day we knew each other we did indeed go to sleep with smiles on our faces. But it wasn’t an affair and we weren’t in love. I wasn’t committed enough to anything, didn’t take anything seriously enough for her. I told her how I felt about the Yankees and she said baseball didn’t count. But we loved each other. It was all very sixties. We couldn’t help it. It was in our genes.

Heidi Dillinger wouldn’t have understood. She’d have thought we were morons who weren’t maximizing our various potentials. But we were all products of our times, Heidi in her cool remote-distancing just as much as laid-back, ex-druggy me and weight-of-the-world-on-her-shoulders Sally. We were what we were. And the gulf between me on one side and Heidi on the other seemed wider and more unbridgeable than ever. Perhaps I was about to learn whether or not we could make sense of one another. Some things never changed, not even for the Heidi Dillingers of this world.

I had to get her out of my mind. I was already thinking about her too much. That’s a cute meet for you. Everything is suddenly out of proportion, all because it was cute. A Heidi Dillinger got hold of you with her cute little personality, all decked out with alluring contradictions, and the real people, like Sal, got bumped from the next flight.

The street-level door was a half-assed affair of chipped green paint, protective wire mesh over a glass panel, iron bars bolted on top of the mesh. As usual, it stood open about an inch, so much for space-age security. Any random homicidal maniac could enter unannounced and work off his frustrations about the cost of condos with a meat cleaver. The stairway was dark, lit only by a smudged, begrimed skylight five stories above. The freight elevator was padlocked. The building housed a couple of painters, a sculptor who worked in neon tubing, a couple who operated a jewelry-making concern, and Sally. Sally often carried a flashlight in her bag for illuminating the stairway at night, along with Mace and a brass whistle and a spring-loaded knife big enough to geld a water buffalo. And this was SoHo, not a slum, not Alphabet City, not Bed-Stuy. This was a loft for which she’d paid several hundred thousand dollars. And so it goes.

I was halfway up the second flight of stairs when I heard something in the gloom above me. I looked up just in time to catch the full impact of a man’s shoulder in my chest. He’d come hurtling around the landing, head down, a blur of motion, I thought a dark suit maybe or a blazer, a necktie flapping, then the shoulder and the grunting sound—me or him—and I was slammed to my right against the blistered wall where I hit hard, the blows to front and back knocking the wind out of me and shooting a rocket through my kidneys. He stumbled going past me, reached out with a fist or elbow and clipped my knee. I heard him hit the landing below me, turn without looking back and head down the steps sounding like a man and a piano in the middle of a bad mistake. I was collapsing from the dig to my knee, skidding forward, hands out trying to grab the banister, failing, jamming my wrist against a step, then pitching six or seven more steps down to the landing, where I lay on my side, doubled up, wondering whether my forehead, wrist, knee, chest, or kidney needed attention first. My one clear thought was that—since people were stacked up in New York City emergency rooms for twenty-four to thirty-six hours waiting to see doctors—the hospital was clearly the last place I wanted to go. Better to die where I was. All this in four or five seconds. I’d been reduced to a bedraggled bag of blood and pain and bruises, a hit-and-run victim with a tear in his linen Paul Stuart suit pants, a split seam in the coat which I’d put on before entering the building, a bloody nose from cleverly using it to break my fall. I strained to see the judges’ scorecards. 2-2-1-2-1-1-1 …

My breathing apparatus slowly returned to the fray; I could stop gagging and gasping and rely primarily on moaning. I held on to the wall like a drunk grappling with a lamppost and gingerly drew myself into a sagging upright squat. I reminded myself of one of the schoolroom posters depicting the evolution of the species. From the looks of things I’d just crawled out of the slime and didn’t quite know what to make of dry land. I held my handkerchief to my nose. My suit, shirt, tie, and sense of irony were in ruins. Five seconds without the blow of a fist. God help me if I ever found myself in a fight. I wished I had a steering wheel across which I could slump. But instead I dragged myself the rest of the way up and climbed, panting, bleeding, trying to rearrange my kidneys, until I stood outside Sally’s door. It too stood slightly ajar.

I pushed it open and shouted her name, deciding I should prepare her for the spectacle she was about to confront.

“Sally, I am a wounded man, a thing of shreds and patches! I have become a statistic!”

At the very least I could retain my good humor and make a New York story out of my disaster. Left for dead by speeding man in blazer. “Sally?”

Everything seemed in order. Her huge desk was relatively neat. The computer sat ready to go, the couches and chairs and palm trees and paintings and throw rugs were all as they always were.

I stood still, sweating like Doc Gooden in a ninth-inning jam with Kirk Gibson coming to bat. I let my eyes roam slowly across the huge space. It was like being the Pillsbury Doughboy in the oven, the heat finishing me off.

The Suspense Is Killing Me

Thomas Maxwell

About the Book

About the Author

Contents

Author’s Note

Greetings …

Prologue

One

Two