The Man Who Couldn't Miss by David Handler

Author:David Handler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

Merilee was up early, her face creased with fatigue as she stood there in a tank top and cutoffs sipping her coffee and watching Quasimodo strut around with the hens inside of the coop as if he owned the place. Her head, I observed, tilted ever so slightly every time she heard him crow. She had to know he wasn’t Old Saxophone Joe, what with his pronounced hunchback—hence the name—plus he was bigger than Joe and his coloring was considerably redder. Clearly, he wasn’t Joe. But, just as clearly, she’d decided she didn’t want to deal with it right now. So the presence of this new rooster in our midst went entirely unspoken as we stood there together, drinking our coffee.

The morning air was deliciously fresh and clean after last night’s storm, and scented with the lavender that was growing in profusion in the herb garden. The dew on the meadow grass glistened in the sunlight. The ducks were quacking in the pond. It was so goddamned beautiful it seemed impossible to believe that less than twelve hours earlier I’d been sloshing around in that flooded dressing room in the basement of the Sherbourne Playhouse. That Greg Farber, one of America’s most beloved movie stars, was dead. That any of it had happened.

Yet it had.

When I went back inside the house to refill my cup I flicked on the television in the parlor. Good Morning America had given over its entire show to memorializing Greg and his storybook Hollywood marriage to Dini. There were snippets of a GMA interview he’d given just last year about how much she and their twins meant to him. There were highlights from his films. Heartfelt video testimonials that were pouring in from Harrison Ford, Annette Bening, Jack Nicholson, Danny DeVito and many other actors with whom he’d worked.

Which isn’t to say that the program was all hugs and kisses. Greg’s “savage” murder was already being hyped as one of the most “explosive” crimes in showbiz history, which afforded them the opportunity to fling open the vault and pull out such grisly chestnuts as the fatal 1958 stabbing of Lana Turner’s mobster boyfriend, Johnny Stompanato, by her fourteen-year-old daughter, Cheryl. Face it, Greg’s slaying was prime crime. It had occurred in a dressing room of the historic Sherbourne Playhouse during a gala charity performance, while Jackie O and every heavy hitter in the New York theatrical world, up to and including Kate the Great, had been right there in the building.

I’m sure it was front-page news, but I didn’t go out to the general store for a newspaper. When I strolled down to the foot of the drive with Lulu I discovered two Connecticut State Police Crown Vics stationed outside of the paddock gate, which the troopers had closed and latched shut. At least thirty reporters, paparazzi and TV news cameramen were crowded out there, their cars and vans lining the narrow country road. As soon as they caught sight of me they made

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