Murder Straight Up
- Автор: Горман Эд
- Серия: Jack Dwyer #3
- Год: 1986
- Язык: английский
- Год: St. Martin's Press
- ISBN: 978-0-312-55325-8
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «Murder Straight Up». Краткое содержание книги:
Murder Straight Up is an intense, gritty crime thriller that pits Dwyer against both the glittery world of television journalism and a sleazy, dangerous criminal underworld — with an innocent boy’s life hanging in the balance.
Who really engineered the death of the anchorman? Was it Kelly Ford, Channel 3’s aging, less-than-beloved news consultant? Or maybe her boss, Robert Fitzgerald, owner of a station whose ratings have declined almost to the point of bankruptcy? What about Mike Perry, pro-football player turned sports announcer, whose sturdy good looks help him hide a secret the victim knew all too well. Where does grizzly old Dev Roberts, Curtis’s co-anchor, fit in? Or Bill Hanratty, the singing weatherman?
Dwyer knows there’s a terrible secret haunting the news team. What is it? And what will all this mean to the ratings?
“Right. You were going to tell me about that.”
“Nothing much to say, really. I came to work one morning and several key research files were gone.”
“Who would have an interest in taking them?”
“Newspeople who were concerned about their jobs, wanting to see how well they tested during phone interviews with viewers.”
That interested me. “Were there any big losers?”
She frowned. “That’s why we’re all nervous around my office. The whole team except for David looks pretty bad. Especially Dev Robards. Then there was one other file, the one that outlined all the changes we’d be making in the next six months. Our competition would love to get their hands on it.”
“You think they’d go that far?”
She put out a slender wrist and slender hand and picked up a water glass. “Sure they would. It would be very valuable information. You know how competitive news operations are. If they got ahold of such a file, they’d know how to play against us perfectly.”
“No ideas about who took it?”
She shook her head.
“No idea.”
Suddenly there was the same half-shocked look I’d seen on her face when Robert Fitzgerald appeared last night. Now the expression was back and so was Fitzgerald. I had the sense that I didn’t need to ask whom she’d been heartbroken over before David Curtis had come into her life. The only people who can inspire the expression Fitzgerald did in her are people who’ve had at your heart with a can opener.
Today he wore a blue pin-striped three-piece suit. With his curly black hair and mesmeric blue eyes, he might have been a B-movie version of the young Tony Curtis. Except for two things: the right leg he dragged around like something dead, and the bitterness of his gaze.
He stood two feet from our table and without even glancing at me said to her, “You pick some damn strange lunch companions, Kelly.”
The blush was back on her cheeks. Worse, there was a real sense of a trapped animal in the way her hands fluttered and her shoulders sagged. I wanted to hold her, help her somehow.
She said nothing. Just put her face down. Said absolutely nothing. I couldn’t believe it.
“Damn strange,” he said, and limped away.
She waited a full minute and then she was up, knocking against the table, her eyes glistening with tears. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m going back to the office.”
Then she was gone, leaving me with the extraordinary echoes of her relationship with Robert Fitzgerald. I felt ashamed for her and enraged for her and utterly helpless.
He came back and grabbed me by the arm. He had a grip that could make you weep. “You stay out of my business and her business and the station’s business,” he said.
“Something’s going on,” I said, “and I’m going to find out what no matter what you say.”
“You don’t know who you’re fucking with, bud,” he said, and left again.
9
In the sunlight she looked even more beautiful, even more overripe and spoiled. I’d followed her out of The Pirate’s Perch and into the parking lot and right up to her brand-new red Firebird.
At first she didn’t seem to recognize me, but then as she realized who I was, she looked as though I’d just handed her a paper bag containing doggie-doo.
“Jesus,” she said, “you followed me out here to put the shot on me?” She threw back her blond hair with a model’s melodramatic air. Her question, an epic of immodesty, made me smile. For a moment Marcie Grant couldn’t imagine, just couldn’t imagine, that anybody of the male sex would want something other than to hump her.
“I wanted to ask you about Mike Perry.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you want to ask me about Mike Perry?”
“Because there are some things I need to know.”
“You’re that security guard aren’t you?” She managed to make it sound like, You’re the guy who burns down orphanages aren’t you? It was then — I’m a slow learner — that I realized why Marcie Grant had the most violet eyes, almost glowing eyes, of any I’d ever seen before. She wore violet contact lenses.
“Yeah,” I said.
She opened her car door.
With speedboats on the river, warm and rich sunlight bathing nearby apple blossom trees and newborn grass blinding you with its green everywhere, this should have been a very nice moment.
Her sneer made it otherwise.
She got into the car, slammed the door shut and started the considerable engine. As she slipped it into gear I knocked on the window. I’d been in a similar situation years ago with my wife during an especially bad argument. She’d backed over my foot and roared away. Now I kept my foot out of Marcie Grant’s way.
She surprised me by rolling down the window. “Did I ever tell you about the story I produced on security people?”
“I guess not.”
“You people are cretins. Cretins. Dishonest, lazy and overpaid cretins.”
“I make five dollars an hour.”
“That’s what I mean. Overpaid.”
“Fuck yourself.”
“I could call the law, you know.”
“Call them.”
“Jesus,” she said, and started rolling the window up again.
Before she quite got it closed, I said, in a voice loud enough to attract the attention of several passersby, “There’s at least a possibility that Mike Perry killed David Curtis, and you know it.”
That was enough.
She stopped with the window. She looked as if somebody had kicked her in the stomach. She didn’t even look quite so beautiful for a terrible moment there.
“Christ, I hope not,” she said.
“We need to talk.”
“I can’t. Not right now. I’m late for an editing session.”
“When’s a good time then?”
“Tonight. Call me. I’m in the book.”
“You think he did it, don’t you?”
She shrugged. “He gets pretty jealous. He could have, I suppose. Or Hanratty.”
“Hanratty?” That was totally unexpected. “Why Hanratty?”
“I’m not sure. I just know that several times over the past month David kept making all these dark suggestions about Hanratty.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, like ‘If we were smart, we wouldn’t trust that asshole.’ ”
“You don’t know what he was referring to?”
“No.”
“I also need to talk to you about Stephen Chandler.”
“The kid who killed himself?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“His death may have something to do with Curtis’s.”
“Great,” she said. Then she shook her head bitterly. “He was a prick, that kid. He just wouldn’t help us get the kind of interview we needed.”
Her sentimentality was impressive.
“I’ll call you tonight,” I said.
“You don’t really think he did it, do you?” she said.
“Who?”
“Mike Perry.”
“I don’t know.”
“It would destroy his whole life. He’d never be able to work in the industry again.”
Nice to know her values were in the right place.
“You ever want to own a tank?”
“Not that I can recall,” I said.
“That’s my ambition. Have my own tank.”
“Well, we all have our dreams, I guess.”
I was standing in the middle of the colosseum, where my casting agency had sent me for a week-long gig at the Guns and Ammo Exhibition. More than a thousand people milled around booths that housed every kind of weapon imaginable, except, of course, “your big military hardware,” as Lynott, my boss here, had informed me. You want a hands-on look at your three-shot burst 9mm Beretta, you got it. You want to heft the Close Assault Weapon System (CAWS) with your full auto, Magazine-fed, optically sighted shotgun? Here you go. Or how about your Horton Safari Magnum crossbow for killers who don’t like to make noise? Pick this little sucker up, bud.