Blue Murder

CHAPTER 1

Gretchen Tucker, an elegant thin-nosed blonde wearing glasses, very short shorts and a thin sleeveless top, turned out the projection-room lights, and the screening began.

This was a rough cut of scenes shot over the weekend, and the transition between shots was sometimes jarring. They were working against a deadline, attempting to shoot and assemble a four-reel feature in fourteen days. There were only two of them in the room, Gretchen and Armand Baruch, the director and producer, a heavily bearded young man wearing a striped Pakistani robe and sandals. He had extremely dark skin and an intentness when he was working that gave him the look of a mullah who had spent too much time alone in the desert.

He was murmuring instructions to himself into a tape recorder as he watched the action, a medium shot of an attractive blond girl approaching a closed office door. She smoothed her eyebrows and tucked in her blouse more securely, accentuating her breasts. She started to knock, changed her mind and walked in.

Gretchen was playing idly with the hair at the nape of Baruch’s neck. “The suspense is terrific. What’s going to happen now?”

“Suspense is our big problem,” Baruch said gloomily. “Every fool in the audience knows what’s going to happen. The only question is with how many people.”

On the screen, a short pompous-looking man behind a big desk looked up, annoyed. He was smoking a cigarette with an anticancer mouthpiece, and he was obviously very busy. It was also obvious that this was one visitor he was glad to be interrupted by.

“A pleasant surprise,” he said. “I wasn’t sure you knew the way.”

“I was shopping,” she said shyly. “I know this is a little unconventional, but I wanted to tell you that I saw you last night on Johnny Carson, and I thought you were super.”

“I’m glad to hear that. Relieved. I thought I muffed a few questions.”

“Oh, no! You made the rest of them look like jerks. So smooth. So — well—” defiantly — “sexy! And I’ve been having second thoughts about — you know. I shouldn’t have laughed. Will you forgive me?”

“My dear, you’re lovely. Of course I forgive you.”

She was playing with the buttons of her blouse. “And will you let me make it up to you?”

“Here? Now?” He loosened his neck inside his collar. “That would be… interesting.”

“May I confess something? I have this thing for fat people. I love those little folds and creases. I’ve been trying to get over it, and that’s why I laughed when—”

He stood up. “If you like fatties, this is your lucky day.”

“Groovy,” she said bravely.

“I thought I repelled you.”

“Definitely not!”

He switched on his intercom and told his secretary not to disturb him. Old hands in the audience would know, of course, that presently the secretary would forget his instructions and bring in something for him to sign. And after a certain amount of hemming and hawing, she would be asked to join them.

“He really is… rather large, isn’t he?” Gretchen murmured.

“That’s how he gets jobs.”

The fat little man continued to smoke, his cigarette cocked at a jaunty angle. His lovely visitor closed with him, and the camera moved in. She was still wearing her glasses, and her face was nearly hidden by her mass of fair hair. All that showed clearly in the shot were her mouth and tongue.

In spite of a few recent successes, Baruch still ran a marginal operation, cobbling his pictures together with promises and ingenuity and very little cash. The projection room was considered to be air-conditioned, but the equipment functioned only sporadically and never really well. The nudity on the screen was contagious. Gretchen took off her top and used it to wipe the sweat from her arms and shoulders.

“When my dear husband sees this,” she said, “he’s going to hit the ceiling and go right on through.”

“We hope so, don’t we? That’s it for now. Get the lights.”

When the lights came on he talked into the tape recorder for another moment while she watched, smiling.

“You’re a sort of genius, you know that, Armand? You do it so gaily. It’s the way sex ought to be and so seldom is.”

He was pleased. “That’s my aim, to put back the romance. But I can’t move too fast, because I’m not sure the market is ready for it. Come on, we’ve got another scene to shoot.”

Peter Fisher, feeling like a kid playing hide-and-seek, crept under a bush that was heavy with some kind of white flowers, giving off a powerful cloying fragrance. All he’d been told to do was watch the house. But when the uproar started inside, he thought it would be a sound idea to sneak across the yard and find out what was going on.

As soon as he stepped onto private property, he began regretting the decision. He was on one of the pill-shaped islands straddling the Venetian Causeway between Miami and Miami Beach. It was a quiet neighborhood, a quiet night. No cars had gone by for some time. But what if one of these quiet neighbors took it into his head to walk his dog? And saw a furtive figure, with heavily muscled shoulders, creeping across the grass, obviously about to commit some felonious act? People in houses with eight bedrooms and three baths kept on cordial terms with the local fuzz, giving them whiskey at Christmas and writing handsome checks to the Police Athletic League. Peter had been out of jail for less than three weeks, and his hair had hardly grown out enough to take a part. He had promised to stay straight, and his parole officer would be very disappointed to hear of this backsliding.

He listened carefully, hearing nothing but the banging of his own pulse. He left the semisecurity of the bush and ran in a half crouch across the open lawn.

He felt less conspicuous among the low shrubs screening the cinder-block foundation. Several windows were lighted. He looked into an empty kitchen. A dog was barking angrily inside the house, causing the sensitive skin at the back of Peter’s skull to wrinkle. Somebody yelled at the dog and the barking stopped.

Peter was trying to talk himself into moving to the next window. The blind there had jammed before it was all the way down, and a thin strip of light showed at the bottom. Should he or shouldn’t he? The truth was, he didn’t give a damn about his parole officer, who was hopelessly square. You couldn’t allow these grubby bureaucrats to organize your life. There was a nice bit of money involved, in the low six figures, as the saying went, and he thought he saw a way of picking off most of this for himself. Admittedly, it couldn’t be done without a little coarseness and brutality, and was he capable of it? He couldn’t be sure until the time came.

It would be dangerous, of course — dangerous as all hell. The man he had followed here, Frankie Capp, believed in violent solutions to even the simplest problems — that was his reputation. If he caught a peeper, he wouldn’t bother the police with it; he would handle it himself, using something lethal like both barrels of a 20-gauge shotgun. Peter’s lifetime policy, in jail and out, had been to ignore the Capps, to assume that sooner or later, like the dinosaur and the passenger pigeon, they would die out. Common sense told him to return quietly to his car and face the fact that he was unlikely ever to have any more money in his pocket than he had now, fifty or sixty lousy bucks.

But when he heard a faint scream, like the cry of a bird, he stepped into the moonlight without any further debate. Going to the lighted window, he went down on one knee and peered in.

A chair lay on its back on a white carpet. Shifting his angle, he saw a woman’s foot, wearing a high-heeled shoe. The rest of her body was hidden by a long couch.

Capp walked into view, a short dark man in his early fifties, wearing heavy-rimmed glasses, a hairpiece that had cost him so much money it looked nearly real. Bushy white sideburns framed his face. He had a good tan, and he wore three rings.

He looked down at the woman and lit a cigar, prodded her with his foot and said something. The house was sealed, with double panes in the windows. Peter heard the sound of Capp’s voice, but couldn’t break it into words.

Capp stooped, pulled the woman forward and threw her roughly onto the couch.

Her head rolled. She seemed only partially aware of what was happening. There was blood on her forehead. She was wearing tight yellow slacks and, like the man standing over her, considerable jewelry. Her unconfined breasts moved inside her buttoned sweater. All the lines of her body were good. This was the kind of female convicts like to pretend they have waiting for them outside.

Stooping again, Capp picked up a flat can marked with a green stripe. Peter’s grip on the windowsill tightened. He was glad now that he had found the courage to look. If that was the Domestic Relations negative, what in God’s name was it doing here? Capp wasn’t even supposed to know it existed. He didn’t have the delicate touch to handle something like this.

Inside, the woman on the couch proved to be less stunned than she seemed. As Capp stepped toward her, she managed to get her hands on a whiskey bottle. She swung it at his groin, and it would have done serious damage if the blow had landed. He doubled forward, covering himself, and the bottle smashed his watch. She brought it around again, more of a push than a blow. It chunked against his head, doing little except to disarrange his hairpiece. Throwing the bottle at him, she ran to the sliding glass doors leading to the terrace overlooking the bay. She fumbled with the unfamiliar latch while he recovered. The door started to move, but he caught her before she was through.

Peter heard: “You stinking bitch, what are you trying to work on me here?”

“Frankie, I had this nutty idea. Let me tell you about it, you’ll love it.”

He hit her. His rings plowed two furrows across her cheek. He had the front of her sweater in his other fist. Continuing to slap her, first with the back of his hand, then with the palm, he walked her into a wall.

“Yeah, let’s talk, and talk fast. I want the whole thing, all the whys and the hows.”

“I noticed something funny about the bed, Frankie! I’ve always had this terrible curiosity. Please don’t. When I found all those film cans, this brainstorm hit me! Money, money. Umm. But I wouldn’t do anything behind your back! I’m greedy but I’m not dumb, not that dumb.”

When he let her go she moved to put the couch between them. He rubbed his fingertips together, then settled his hairpiece more securely with both hands.

“You could have deballed me with that bottle, you know that?”

“Jesus, I’m sorry! You had that look in your eye. I thought you were going to massacre me.”

“How do I look now?”

“Not much better!”

He walked past and closed the heavy glass door, after which he drew the drapes so they couldn’t be seen by anyone on a passing boat. She didn’t like this and watched him warily, her eyes skittering to the doors and the dog.

He retrieved his cigar and rotated it until he had it drawing evenly. He motioned her to a chair. She wanted to do something about her face, which was bleeding badly, but he cut the request short with a gesture. Blood dripped onto her sweater.

He disappeared into another room and came back with a glass of whiskey. After studying her for a moment, his face unfriendly, he drank most of it in one long pull.

Now that the door was shut, Peter could hear nothing they were saying. She shook her head emphatically. Capp snapped another question. Peter thought he heard a name. Was it Baruch, the blue-movie man? She answered with a flood of words, sawing the air. Whatever the trouble was, she was taking it seriously.

Capp, his lips working on the cigar, moved back from the couch and stopped, facing Peter’s window. Peter willed himself not to move. The tension was making one eyelid twitch and flutter. Capp was staring straight at the closed blind. The muscles contracted around his eyes, bringing the overhanging brows closely together.

He rolled the cigar between thumb and fingertips, dislodged the ash, and after asking one more question, seemed to reach a decision. His features relaxed into a kind of smile. It had a good effect on the girl, but it didn’t reassure Peter.

Turning, Capp left the room and came back with a washcloth and a large towel. He folded the towel and put it behind her head. Suspicious at first, she was persuaded to put her head back and let him look at her cuts. He sponged off some of the blood, touching her face with surprising gentleness. Then he took out a short-barreled pistol, equipped with a silencer, and shot her in the head.

Peter made an involuntary sound, as though he, not the girl, had been shot, and dropped to both knees. There was some kind of stoppage in his brain. He knew what he had seen, but he couldn’t accept it. It was out of proportion. It didn’t fit with anything else he’d been told. Peter was temperamentally opposed to all forms of excess, of which murder was certainly one. This had begun as a joke, and when he heard the idea first, he had laughed so hard his face ached.

It was a joke no longer. He had witnessed a passionless murder by a man who happened to be an important person in the illegal life of this city, and Peter knew it would be wise to start traveling, wasting no time on good-byes. The hell with the money. If people were going to start murdering people, he wanted to be elsewhere.

And then what he had been worrying about actually happened. He heard a clack of footsteps and a woman’s voice speaking crossly to her dog.

“Now go, Buttons. What makes you so fussy? One tree is as good as another.”

A fruit tree had been espaliered to the wall on either side of the window. Peter remained still, holding the windowsill with both hands, but he was under no illusion that he looked like a fruit tree.

The footsteps halted briefly, then continued, moving in spurts while the dog weighed its decision.

Peter moved his head. For the moment, the patch of sidewalk in front of the house was empty. He came up on one knee again, but before he could push off there was another, more alarming sound.

The glass door onto the terrace was being opened.

He applied his eye again to the strip of unobstructed glass, trying to control his panic. Undoubtedly that gun of Capp’s had other bullets in it. The worst thing he could do was run.

The man inside hesitated at the open door. The murdered woman lay on the bare floor with her face on a folded newspaper. The large German shepherd sniffed her bloody head until Capp ordered him off.

“Not the boat,” Capp said softly, after another moment. “Too goddamn public.”

He slid the door shut and reclosed the drapes. The woman on the sidewalk came back briskly, and from the comments she was making to her dog, it was clear that the animal was still holding off. Waiting for Capp to commit himself, Peter continued to pretend that he was an espaliered tree.

Inside, Capp poured himself another drink and drank it slowly. Returning to the body, he undressed it carefully, making an attempt to keep the blood off his hands. He removed the girl’s rings and stood up painfully, kneading the small of his back.

After that he did an odd thing. He opened the dead woman’s legs and stuffed her jewelry into her vagina. Then he took off his belt and whipped her hard enough to leave marks. Peter, pinned to the window, could see that he wasn’t enjoying this, but was doing it to make the crime seem like a sexual murder.

After he finished, Capp needed another drink, a strong one. He was sweating.

Peter told himself that he really had to go. If he waited to find out what happened to the body, it would give him a hold over Capp, but trying to blackmail such a man was no way to stay healthy. Capp put down his glass, gathered up the cans of film and took them to a bedroom. Without moving from his position, Peter could see the foot of a double bed. To make it more firm, Capp had inserted a sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood between the mattress and the springs. Raising this, he slipped the cans in one by one.

He returned to the living room bringing a long plastic bag, the kind used to store clothes. He laid it on the floor, open, and rolled the dead woman into it, then zipped it up. He had a separate, smaller bag for her clothes, shoes and purse. After sealing the bag with tape, he had to rip off the tape and open it again because he had forgotten to put in the gun.

Now, Peter thought, before Capp began loading these packages into his car?

He came to his feet and forced himself to walk slowly away. His spine prickled, all the way down. He had thought he was finished with the woman and her damn dog, but not at all; here they were again.

“Buttons, will you cooperate?” the woman was saying. “I know you don’t care, but I have a man waiting.”

Peter threw himself to the grass and wriggled quickly to the nearest bush.

It had been an eventful evening, and now, to make it complete, Buttons made his selection. Out of all the trees and shrubbery on the block, he picked the one bush under which Peter happened to be lying. Various disagreeable and degrading things had happened to Peter lately, but nothing had been quite as bad as this. When it was over, the animal wanted to investigate further, but his owner had had enough and dragged him away.

A screen door opened and shut. Capp’s garage was connected to the house by a short covered walkway. Peter kept his head down. A scheme was beginning to form. There might be more money than he had allowed himself to imagine. Capp wouldn’t be taking a chance like this for peanuts. It would be the riskiest thing Peter had ever done, but with a little luck, a little intelligence, why shouldn’t it work? He couldn’t go on losing forever.

The overhead garage door went up with a bang. Peter got ready to run, relaxing again when he understood what was happening. Capp’s car was too long to fit comfortably inside the garage. He backed out to the street, reversed, and came in again backward, stopping halfway. The screen door banged, and banged again. Peter heard a dragging sound. He knew what was taking place without going any closer. The body was being manhandled into the trunk, and this couldn’t have been easy for a man with a bad back.

The trunk hatch slammed. After another trip to the house for the smaller parcel, Capp moved the Cadillac out of the garage, closed the garage door and drove off. Peter started to count to ten. At the count of six he was up and running.

He had a three-year-old Dodge, completely anonymous, with dealer’s plates and a tendency to flood under pressure. This time it started like more reliable cars. He took the looping drive the wrong way, against the traffic if there had been any, and came out of the bend at the end of the island in time to see the Cadillac, ahead, going up the ramp to the causeway, taking the turn toward Miami. Hurrying, Peter followed.

Out in the open on the causeway, Peter passed several cars and dropped into line two spaces behind the Cadillac. There was nothing to worry about now. Capp had no reason to suspect his existence. Peter was new in Miami, with an equal right to space on the highways.

After leaving the causeway, the Cadillac worked south to Eighth Street, where it turned west. They passed through Coral Gables, West Miami. At the Palmetto Expressway interchange, an intricate tangle of concrete flung across the intersection of the Grand and Tamiami canals, Capp performed a quick maneuver, swinging over on an exit ramp to fling his smaller parcel into the water. He circled back and continued west.

They were meeting less traffic, and Peter began to tighten. This was the Tamiami Trail across the Everglades, and by this time it was obvious what Capp intended to do: ditch the body somewhere in the Glades. Peter had never tailed anyone in a car, and he didn’t know the technique.

He fell farther behind, speeding up occasionally to make sure he was in touch. A heavy produce truck roared past, and he let it pull him in its wake. After a time he pulled out to the left so he could see ahead. The Cadillac was gone.

He came about in a tight U. A narrow dirt road leading into the park to the south was the only one the Cadillac could have used. Peter pulled up in front of a ramshackle building, advertising cold drinks and Seminole artifacts, and consulted a road map. The dirt road, not important enough to deserve its own number, came to an abrupt end at what must be a boat-launching area a quarter of a mile away.

A braver or more foolhardy man might have pulled his car out of sight and gone down on foot, to pinpoint the exact spot where Capp dumped his victim, but for Peter this was close enough.

He headed back toward Miami, stopping at the first roadside tavern with a telephone sign.