Blue Murder

CHAPTER 10

He didn’t go all the way out. He told his arms and legs what to do, but the circuits seemed to be interrupted. He managed only a sluggish movement.

Meanwhile, his two assailants were swarming all over him. He kicked feebly upward at the girl, who seemed to be the fiercer, but his foot was too heavy to get it off the floor. The bottle came at him again. He sagged, turning everything off, and the blow missed.

No words were being spoken, but they were all breathing hard. The blow that finally put Shayne under was delivered by the youth, from the side, again with a bottle. A flashbulb exploded inside his head, driving splinters into his brain.

When he fought his way back, he found himself still on the floor. His mouth was heavily taped, his wrists and ankles bandaged together with strips torn from a sheet.

The girl was talking into the phone, reading Shayne’s identification folder. The youth had pulled on his Bermudas and stood regarding Shayne sleepily, kneading the place where Shayne had hit him.

“You bastard.”

When Shayne grunted, the girl hung up and turned on him. “Are you working for Frankie Capp?”

Shayne half laughed, the effect somewhat spoiled by the tape across his mouth.

“Are you or aren’t you?” the girl said sharply. “Shake your head yes or no.”

Shayne shook his head and hitched around into a sitting position against the wall. She came to stand over him. There was a tiny crucifix on a golden chain between her breasts, her only jewelry. Her fingers were bare. Her eye makeup was smeared, and she had lost one set of artificial lashes. Her hair, which had been under constraint when he saw her come in, was now around her shoulders. She was nicely tanned, in the usual places.

“You have a dirty job. Much dirtier than mine. In my book a private detective is two levels under a Peeping Tom. Look in the next room, Peter. See what kind of setup he’s got there.”

The youth stepped through the open door. The girl stayed close in front of Shayne. Leaning down, she flicked her fingernail contemptuously against the bridge of his nose.

Peter came back. “Not even luggage. Say something and I’ll see if I can hear it through the door.”

He closed the door and the girl directed several obscenities at Shayne, speaking in her ordinary tone. The youth came back.

“I heard you. Now we have to think back and remember what we were talking about.”

“Lots of things. But if we lock him in the bathroom until I get on a plane he can’t report to anybody, can he?”

She went back to sit on the bed and continued going through the things she had taken from Shayne’s pockets.

“It gives me a crawly feeling,” Peter said. “Big Brother’s watching you. Lucky I’m a peaceful fellow, or I’d be tempted to cut off one of his ears.”

She made a small sound as she opened the envelope with the pictures Shayne’s client had given him. She called Peter to the bed, and he made a sound almost a copy of hers. She picked out one picture and waved it in front of Shayne.

“Damn it, we’ll have to take off the tape if we want him to answer questions.”

She picked at a corner of the tape until it began to come, then ripped it off in a quick move.

Shayne said calmly, “My client’s name is Congressman Nicholas Tucker. His wife has been missing three days. Do you know where I can find her?”

Maureen, hardly moving, watched him. “You are so cool. As soon as we have some conversation I think I’m going to have to ball you. Did you ever do it with your hands and feet tied?”

She brought her pelvis forward and brushed his forehead lightly with the hair.

Shayne waited till she withdrew. “You could do worse than deal with me. You were talking about money. Tucker has money, and he can raise more.”

“We meant money. I’m going to talk it over with my friend in the bathroom, and don’t strain your ears because this time we’re going to be careful.”

The bathroom door closed behind them and the shower came on. Shayne fell forward, getting his knees under him, and propelled himself into the space between the beds. One more hard kick took him to the bedside table. He was facing the wrong way, and he had to pull the phone off the table with his teeth. It came apart as it fell. He put his lips to the mouthpiece.

“Operator? Operator?”

Peter came out and clucked when he saw what Shayne was doing. After replacing the phone on the table he dragged Shayne back in the open.

“Peter’s going to leave us alone now,” the girl said, “because I don’t want you to feel shy. Would you like me to feed you some whiskey?”

“Sure.”

Peter stopped at the door. “Are you positive this is the way you want to play it?”

“Positive,” she said. “It’s the only way.”

Peter muttered and went out without looking at Shayne.

“One thing you may not know,” Shayne said, “is that he was parked outside Tucker’s house in Bal Harbour earlier tonight. A package was delivered to Tucker a little later. If he didn’t deliver it, he may know who did.”

He thought she looked interested. “A package.” While she was in the bathroom she had pulled on a loose robe. It had a belt, but she left it dangling. She sat on the edge of the low bed.

“It’s barely possible that we’re going to become friends. Tell me some more. I know Tucker didn’t hire you just because his wife is missing. Is somebody trying to put the bite on him?”

“I think so.”

She was thinking hard. Her tongue came out. She massaged her forehead, to speed up the circulation, and said slowly, “At the Warehouse. I wasn’t supposed to see this, but when I get going I can be nosy as hell. Baruch was splicing single frames back into the negative. I bet he made transparencies! You said a package. Was that what it was? Stills? Like a trailer, coming attractions? To let Tucker know what they had?”

She barked suddenly, like a hound after a coon, and gave a happy laugh. Then she peered at Shayne.

“What did you make of it? I mean you, not Tucker.”

There was an edge to the question, as though it might be more important than it sounded, and Shayne was careful about his answer.

“You want me to guess how much Tucker would be willing to pay for the film. — If we’re going to be friends, why not untie me?”

“Finish,” she said impatiently.

“I think there might be quite a stink if it showed up in the theaters. He’s already imagining the headlines — ‘Anti-Smut Crusader’s Wife in Sex Film.’ And that’s how the story would be played. But somebody said something about the old blackmail ploys, that they don’t work the way they used to. If they broke this at the right time, he could lose this nomination. Otherwise he could ride it out. Naturally he’d like to clamp a lid on the whole thing, but too many greedy people know about it by now. All I’m saying is, there may not be as much money here as everybody seems to think.”

“How do you mean, he could ride it out?”

“She has a history of drug-taking, and she’s been seeing a psychiatrist in Washington.”

She nodded after a moment. “A sick girl. Corrupted by a filthy-minded, pot-smoking extremist Jew.”

“And whose business partner is a mafiosi, of sorts. It was a plot to get Nick, and to make it work they took a woman who was in delicate psychological balance to start with, and drove her nuts. That’s the press conference version. In the pictures I saw, she looked fairly O.K.”

She changed the subject abruptly. “Was I in those shots?”

To refresh his recollection, she opened her robe. A good makeup person could have changed the shape of her face and the color of her hair and the way she wore it, but there were too many important differences between this girl and the girl in the erotic slides. For one thing, that girl hadn’t spent any time out in the sun. Her nipples had been slightly cross-eyed, whereas the breasts Shayne was looking at now pointed slightly outward.

When Shayne shook his head, she bounced off the bed and began moving, her robe flying.

“A congressman’s wife. I knew there was something funny about her. I didn’t think Armand handled her too well. Now I think that was part of it, to make her uncomfortable. We did a Lesbian scene, and she didn’t enjoy one minute of it.” She turned with a quick laugh. “And it was probably the first time in her life! Dig that. On camera.”

She came back. “Do you mind listening to me think aloud? Poor Tucker. His poor helpless wife, out of her skull. But he could only get away with that version if she wasn’t around to contradict it.”

“Where would she be?”

“Dead.” She let the word fall like a stone. “Dead, dummy. She wouldn’t be the first suicide in the sexploitation business. There’ve been some gory ones where I come from. Now if Gretchen — that’s what we called her, is it her right name?”

“Yeah.”

“We keep changing names whenever we change our personality. Do you think I was born Maureen? Never mind. I’m not thinking about her so much because I don’t really know her. I’m thinking about me. Two or three years in the skins is a career. I want to make money now, and make it fast. That’s so you know where I’m at. And one of the ideas that’s running through my head — running, hell, hurdling — is wouldn’t I do better to deal with Tucker direct?”

“Are you in a position to sell him anything?”

“I don’t know yet.”

She looked for cigarettes, but found only an empty package. She picked up the loose cigarette Shayne had dropped. After lighting it, she put it between his lips.

“It’s yours, so you get every other puff. Did Tucker strike you as the kind of guy who would kill somebody if he thought he had to?”

“I didn’t talk to him long enough.”

She took the cigarette back and drew on it deeply. “I happen to be a little high on one thing or another, so shut up and listen. I have psychic feelings about people. The feeling I had about that Gretchen chick was that she didn’t have long to live.”

Shayne made a skeptical noise.

“I know,” she said. “You don’t believe in that crap. But she had this light in her eye. I mean it. She was giving off signals. Hey, I promised you a drink.”

She put the Scotch bottle to his lips, noticed that the cap was still on and removed it. “We were pretty tight there for a couple of days. You can fool the camera when you can’t fool the person who’s down on you. I didn’t get any reaction at all. Like novacaine, man.”

“She wasn’t doing it to have fun.”

“I know that. I wish I wasn’t this coked, I could think better. Do you know who I think of sometimes when I cop somebody? My grandfather. He was a Methodist minister, and I didn’t go to his funeral. But you don’t want me to go into this.”

“That’s right.”

She gave him another swallow of Scotch. “I thought she was just conflicted about — you know, people watching. And with a black, which she did a couple of times, that would be kind of hard for a congressman’s wife, right? That’s why nobody knew where she lived. She didn’t come to a party of mine because she was being careful. Armand had to give her a shot one day to quiet her down. She wasn’t scared of sex. She was scared, period.”

“Of what?”

“I said I’m thinking aloud. Do I want to deliver the girl to that shitty husband? The answer could be no.”

“You can’t deliver her unless you know where she is.”

“No, I mean, do I want to? For Tucker to get the kind of publicity you were talking about, she has to go all the way. The Big Sleep, baby. For the last scene, she has to stop hallucinating and understand what they’re doing to Mr. Clean. Remorse! She’s got this self-destructive thing anyhow — ask her doctor. So she gets in a car and slams into an abutment at ninety miles an hour. And whose fault? Not Tucker’s! Baruch. Frankie. Beethoven on the sound track for the finish. Wrap it. — I don’t mean she’d do it! I mean Tucker would arrange it, and that’s how it would look! If you aren’t following, are you trying?”

“Is this part of your psychic feeling, or do you have anything to go on?”

“Will you stop trying to put me down?” she said crossly. “I’m good at reading character, I really am. She’s a Taurus. There’s a toughness there. She knew what she was doing. It was hard for her but she gritted her teeth and did it, of course with some help from the drug industry, legal and illegal. The more I think about it…”

She probed her cheek with her tongue and looked at Shayne speculatively.

“Here we start lying,” he said.

“Not at all. I remember that jolt Armand gave her. I think it was Darvon. It takes off the edges, and you get a better perspective. That was the day he was shooting a wheel. You know, four people? When you’re into Darvon, you ask yourself, does it matter? After we finished the shot, the guys took off and we stayed on the bed, Gretchen and me, smoking and generally, you know, grooving. She said various things. How she didn’t like men. In contrast to me, because I’m omnivorous, if that’s the word.”

“That means you eat everything.”

“Everybody.” She was becoming more playful as she spun out the story. “And she let something go, I wish I could remember the words. Husbands will kill you every time. They’ll kill you. She’d moved out on him, but if he ever caught up with her—”

Again, as so often tonight, Shayne had the feeling that he was watching a performance, in a role that hadn’t been defined by the playwright and still needed considerable work.

“She had good reason to be nervous,” Shayne said. “Tucker hates pornographers, and I don’t think that’s just a gag to get space in the papers. By making a dirty movie, she’s trying to hit him where it hurts. Stay out of it, Maureen. You’re outclassed. There are other people involved besides Tucker. Frankie Capp. Somebody shot his dog tonight, so he wired a bomb to the ignition of my car, on the chance it might have been me. But I’ve been dealing with people like Capp for years, and we go off fairly even.”

She interrupted. “I know Frankie, and he doesn’t impress me. Who else? I mean, I want to know, you still might persuade me.”

“Some people from Los Angeles. Pussy Rizzo is the name I have. You’ve been phoning an LA number, and maybe you’re the one who brought them in. Then there’s a congressman I don’t know much about, except that he has a certain amount of seniority, which gives him leverage.”

“Named what?”

“Barnett Pomeroy.”

Shayne’s own psychic powers were limited to what he could see and hear, but the change in the girl’s face told him that she knew the name, and it alarmed her. She walked quickly away, to make her adjustments without being watched.

“You know him,” Shayne said.

“Heard of him,” she said without turning. “From Chicago, right? What’s he doing here?”

“They brought him in for the convention. Tucker didn’t want to tell me much about him either.”

“Leverage. Oh, yes. If Barney makes a phone call to the winter White House they’ll move in an airborne division. Outclassed? Maybe I am. But when I see an opportunity to solve all my problems, I think I owe it to myself—”

“We aren’t necessarily on opposite sides.”

“Yes, we are. Yes, we are. There are a million things you don’t know.”

She turned back, her face showing that she had come to a decision. “If I was going for the money against that competition, I’d need your help. But the hell with it. What good’s money if you get in a car and it blows up under you? So I’m back to my original thing, leave you here and let the maid find you. I’ll have to put the tape back on your mouth. Sorry. Unless you hold still I’ll have to clout you again. And you don’t want that, because I wouldn’t know how hard to do it. I’m a beginner.”

She turned again, sharply, at the sound of feet on the gallery. An instant later, a knock came at the door.

“Maureen.”

It was a statement, not a question: a man’s voice. She had been thinking about giving Shayne another mouthful of Scotch. The bottle flew out of her hand and landed on the bed, spurting whiskey. She whirled on Shayne, using both hands to tell him to be silent.

“Come on, come on, wake up,” the voice said, and the doorknob rattled.

She pulled at Shayne’s shoulder, indicating that he should propel himself to the connecting door. Her mouth was a straight tense line. He nodded toward the table.

“Wallet.”

Two quick steps took her between the beds. Change spilled on the floor. Shayne rolled back on his elbows and pumped hard. He worked himself to the doorway and through it. She was a step behind.

She shut the door carefully and locked it.