Blue Murder

CHAPTER 18

The ranger looked at Gentry for confirmation. Gentry, after a long look at Shayne, shrugged slightly and nodded.

Two cops stayed behind. Gentry waved down the helicopter, and the Land Rover took them out to the highway to be picked up.

“Will you tell me one thing?” Gentry said. “Don’t tell me who killed her and put her in the water if that would betray a confidence. But is that Mrs. Tucker’s body back there, or somebody else’s?”

“It’s Mrs. Tucker. Tim and Baruch both identified her.” He spoke abstractedly, because there were still things he had to work out. “We ought to be at Jackson Memorial right now. There isn’t time to explain. I’ve been telling people that it’s Pomeroy who has access to the important money, but I haven’t followed through on that idea myself. Now we’ve got to hurry, and do it right.”

“Mike—”

“There really is a film called Domestic Relations and there really is a quarter of a million in cash. We’ve got to keep them apart. Can you line up two or three radio cars, and have them meet us?”

Rourke, in the back of the Land Rover, overheard this exchange. “Why not let Pomeroy pay the money and arrest the son of a bitch?”

“Too chancy. We don’t know who has the film.”

“You’re hoping it’s Capp?” Rourke said after a moment.

“I’m hoping it’s not Capp. I want to use it to force Capp to come to us.”

The helicopter rose with its deafening clatter, and Gentry went forward to shout directions to the pilot. As they came in over West Miami, he unhooked the transmitter and began calling police frequencies. Presently he made contact with the Northwest Miami dispatcher, who cut him into the circuit. He directed all circulating cars in this part of town to close in on Jackson Memorial, on Twelfth Avenue at Twentieth, and to report their positions at one-minute intervals.

Almost immediately afterward, Shayne saw the big hospital below and ahead, planted solidly amid acres of parked cars. The craft heeled and started to circle. Gentry was getting his first reports from the ground. Shayne, at the window beside him, picked up the beacon of one police car, then another.

Several moments later, he saw a third. The streets below were black with cars. Slowly the circle began to tighten, with Gentry orchestrating the movement from the hovering helicopter. One of the cars reached the hospital and turned onto Twelfth Avenue.

A report came crackling in: the driver had spotted Capp’s Cadillac.

Gentry pointed. The helicopter came clacking around, and Shayne saw the long black car enter the parking lot from the north.

“Set her down?” Gentry called.

Shayne shook his head and made a swirling motion: continue to circle.

Gentry positioned the police cars so they covered all exits from the lot. The Cadillac was moving erratically, as though searching for somebody. Suddenly one of the parked cars came to life and shot out of line toward Twentieth Street. It was the familiar cream-colored Dodge.

Shayne gestured, and Gentry ordered one of his cars to pick up the Dodge as it came out.

“Siren?” he asked, and when the detective shook his head he called into the transmitter, “No siren.”

The Cadillac braked and reversed, turning in the space left vacant by the Dodge. Accelerating, it frightened a smaller car aside and forced its way into the traffic. For one risky moment, it was running on the wrong side of the two-way separation.

Shayne joined Gentry at the transmitter. The Dodge swung onto Fourteenth Avenue and doubled back on a diagonal street cutting across the terraces at an angle parallel to the river. From above, the street plan was a chessboard and the cars were opposing pieces. Gentry could position his pieces at will, while his two opponents were running blind.

One police car was on Twentieth, moving west. The Cadillac was out of contact with the Dodge, which now made the mistake of staying on Seventeenth instead of disappearing into the maze of short streets to the west. The Cadillac came up fast, swinging in and out of lanes. Soon less than a block separated the two cars.

The Dodge made quick reckless darts one way and another, in an effort to shake its pursuer, but the driver was unfamiliar with the patterns, and he made several costly blunders. The Cadillac continued to hang on his rear bumper, edging into position to come up alongside and force him over.

Shayne made an encircling gesture with both arms, and Gentry ordered the police cars to close in.

The Dodge shot into a school grounds, across and out the opposite side, passing one of the police cars. At the sight of the revolving beacon, the Cadillac, following, slowed for a moment, then speeded up again when at a command from the helicopter, the police car pulled into a driveway and parked.

In open traffic, the Dodge was overmatched. Swerving, it ran up on a sidewalk, across a shallow lawn and back, in a fast U-turn. The Cadillac made the turn more slowly at the next intersection, but quickly recovered ground. Gentry, above, was telling his three cars to move in. The parked police car backed out and blocked that street. The Cadillac had overtaken the Dodge and forced it against the curb.

Shayne tapped the pilot’s shoulder and pointed down. The ungainly craft wheeled and settled onto the ball field behind the school.

When Shayne and the others reached the street, all three police cars were in position. Frankie Capp, his face heavily bandaged, backed out of the Dodge, a gun in his hand. Peter, shot, lay in the street.

Capp saw Shayne and Gentry first. He turned one way, then another. Every way he looked, he saw police.

Congressman Nick Tucker, meanwhile, had set a trap of his own, using the same bait — Pomeroy. Earlier, the older congressman had checked a battered suitcase at the International Airport, following instructions he had received by phone. An unknown person — Peter, of course — was to pick him up at the hospital, drive him to the airport and exchange checkroom stubs, the money for the film.

Armed with a small revolver, Tucker waited in Pomeroy’s hospital room for the youth to appear. Pomeroy, with a bad hangover and throbbing feet, had agreed to this procedure. If it had worked — Tucker had convinced him it had a chance of working — it would relieve him of the necessity of handing over a suitcase containing $225,000 that didn’t really belong to him.

Two homicide detectives found the congressmen together. Disregarding Tucker’s protests that he was a busy man, with a crowded schedule, they drove both men to the Warehouse, where Shayne had gathered a small group in one of the screening rooms.

There were twenty seats, half of them filled. Shayne, at the front of the room, seemed in good spirits. He thanked them for coming.

“I don’t know exactly what we’re going to see,” he said. “When we picked Peter off the street — Peter, what’s your last name?”

The youth looked at him sullenly. He had been shot in the fleshy part of his hand, not seriously. His right forearm was also bandaged. Frankie Capp sat several seats away. It was painful for Capp to talk because of his injured jaw, and in this kind of situation, unrepresented by counsel, he would have done as little talking as possible.

“Peter,” Shayne said again. “Your last name.”

“Fisher,” Peter said unwillingly.

“What were you in for?”

When he didn’t reply, Shayne said, “Your hair’s too short. Even soldiers don’t keep it that short anymore. Your prints are on file, so why waste our time? You don’t want to start by making us feel unfriendly.”

“Possession,” Peter said. “A block of hash and four marijuana cigarettes. Four years. I served twenty-eight months in the great state of Texas, where else?”

“O.K., Armand, get the lights. I’m going to give you a little commentary as we go. Peter had a baggage check in his pocket, and when we turned it in at the airport they gave us eight unmarked cans of thirty-five millimeter film. Four of these are the negative. We’re going to start in the logical place, with Reel One.”

The lights blinked off. Baruch stepped into the glassed-in projection booth.

A lighted pattern flashed on the screen, followed by a shot of a naked girl moving slowly in front of a three-panel mirror. The first title card came on: “Domestic Relations, an Armand Baruch presentation.” Other credits followed, printed over the languorous movements of the girl. The author of the screenplay was given as Gretchen Fisher.

“Hold it,” Shayne called, and the action stopped. “Tucker, did you ever meet Gretchen’s brother?”

“Never, I’m glad to say.”

“O.K., here he is now. Brother-in-law, meet brother-in-law.”

“You may think you can get away with this, Shayne,” Tucker warned him, “but I want to tell you—”

Shayne rode him down. “This is what you hired me for. You didn’t want a routine skip trace. You thought you could handle your wife yourself. A woman, after all. But you needed somebody like me to get the film for you, and keep Capp and Baruch sniping at each other and out of your way. You knew all you had to do was mention Capp’s name and I’d jump at the chance to get him. And that part pleases me. I haven’t liked quite a bit of this, but I have the satisfaction of knowing that Frankie’s finally going to get his first major conviction.”

“You think so,” Capp muttered.

“Why else am I smiling?” Shayne said. “It’s the first case in a couple of years where I won’t collect a fee. Of course my client’s going to resign from Congress and refuse to run for any other office, so I can write my time off as a public service.”

“I’ve done nothing to be ashamed of,” Tucker said.

“That’s part of your problem.”

To Baruch: “Armand, can you freeze on a front shot of this woman? I want both her face and body.”

The titles continued while the camera moved closer and closer to the girl at the mirror. Her eyes were partly closed. The action stopped.

“How’s this? We cut away in a few more frames.”

“All right. This is a professional porno actress named Maureen Neal, and the reason she was brought east for the role is that she looks a bit like Gretchen Tucker. What do you think, Congressman?” he asked Pomeroy. “You knew Gretchen. You’ve seen her with no clothes on. How close does it come?”

Pomeroy, in the aisle in a wheelchair, blinked at the screen. The skin on his face sagged, and his eyelids were fluttering.

“Not really too close.”

“Tim, give the man a drink of whiskey. He’s in pain.”

Rourke passed his half-pint to the congressman. Shayne continued, “They didn’t need identical twins. All Armand wanted was someone with the same style, the same shape of face. Feel free to break in, Armand.”

“We did a good makeup job — changed the hair and so on. In my pictures the face is never too important, anyway.”

“When Tucker first told me about this,” Shayne said, “the implication was that Gretchen appeared in the picture. I realized later that he never actually said so, in so many words. But that was what was supposed to be so shocking — that the wife of a rising congressman had been persuaded to star in one of these things. And that’s the main thing that’s been bothering me. It wouldn’t have hurt him that much. He’s a great performer in a press conference.” He quoted, with some of Tucker’s stage manner: ‘My wife’s been going to shrinks, and I’m afraid she’s been swallowing too many synthetic chemicals. I’ve done my best to protect her and look after her, but these drug purveyors, these pornographers, have got their claws in her. But I won’t be intimidated! I’ll prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law!’ Tim Rourke even thinks a small jam might have helped him. His trouble has always been that he looks too lucky and handsome and successful.”

“A touch of tragedy,” Rourke said. “Give his face a little character.”

“My God!” Tucker exclaimed. “You talk as though what happened to Gretchen doesn’t matter to me!”

“Does it?” Shayne said gently. “She’s dead, and you haven’t given it a thought. You’re fighting to get out of this with your future intact.” He shook his head. “But you won’t make it. She saw to that by hiring Baruch to make this picture. She never intended to do the scenes herself.”

“She tried a couple,” Baruch said casually, “but the right things didn’t happen. And she was a touch overage, you know? The public likes them young, it’s part of the dream.”

Her brother said, “The weird thing to me, you’re talking about her as if she wasn’t crazy. You just don’t know.”

“I’m beginning to get it,” Rourke said suddenly. “What they were blackmailing Tucker with was the story! Not that she appeared in the film but that she wrote it! A play within a play. Like the one in Hamlet, only here it’s a skin-flick. Terrific.”

Shayne said, “Let’s see.”

He signed to Baruch, and the movie resumed.

The blonde actress was playing a girl named Gretel, married to a congressman named Dick, a former actor. Their domestic life was quirky. Dick showed sex movies in his bedroom while he and his handsome wife occupied separate beds.

“According to Gretch that really happened,” Peter said. “All the films the committee confiscated ended up in my brother-in-law’s closet.”

Tucker snapped, “Absurd.”

Late at night, the congressman in the movie went out to meetings of right-wing business men, which ended in a series of homosexual encounters. He was eager to ingratiate himself and did everything he was asked.

As Shayne had been told, the quality of the moviemaking was good. The tone was light and cool, and many of the lines brought snickers from the audience, in spite of the fact that all but one or two had more pressing things on their minds.

The action moved quickly. Gretel’s brother was caught in Texas with marijuana cigarettes in his car. Narcotics cases in that state are handled with notorious severity, and Gretel urged her husband to intervene. The Texas prosecutor wanted to be made a federal judge. The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Bertram Lovejoy (Barnett Pomeroy), could secure that appointment for him. Lovejoy-Pomeroy was willing enough, Dick reported, but he wanted compensation, in the form of sex with Dick’s wife, a lady he had long admired. Reluctantly, Gretel consented. But her husband double-crossed her. Instead of arranging a nol. pros. for his wife’s brother, in the squalid Texas jail, Dick arranged something to help his own career, a Select Committee to investigate the pornographers who made the films he himself liked to watch.

Shayne told Baruch to stop the film there and turn on the lights. Rourke protested, “The last reel’s the topper, Mike.”

“You’ll have a chance to see it later. This is going to run for months.”

Congressman Pomeroy, in his wheelchair, was looking much better. “I may say,” he said to Baruch when he came out of the booth, “that if you make any attempt to exhibit this picture you’ll answer to a suit for libel and slander.”

“I don’t think so,” Shayne said. “You must be a lawyer. If you’d thought you could stop this legally, you wouldn’t have been so quick to get up a quarter of a million to buy it in. I’m going to back off now and try to put it in chronological sequence. I’ll need help as I go along, especially from you, Peter. Remember, the main person I’m interested in is Frankie Capp. I want him. The rest of you make the best deal you can get.”

Capp growled, “I’m O.K., bastard.”

“You’re far from O.K., if Peter decides to testify against you.”

“That I did what?” Capp said, glancing at the youth.

“You must have realized by now that he saw you get rid of Maureen’s body. There’s a dirt road into the Glades. You had a rubber mattress. You floated her out into the stream and dumped her. I saw the wet mattress in your garage.”

“Talk about crazy.”

“Maybe Peter can do better than that,” Shayne said. “I think he saw you shoot her through the head from behind. Let’s have a comment, Peter.”

“I’m thinking, I’m thinking.”

“Take your time. I’ll go back to last night. Armand said something about arranging the slides in sequence so they’d tell a story. Tucker broke up the sequence and rearranged them before he showed them to me. Now they were random shots of people having sex. The original package may have included a voice-over tape—”

“It did,” Baruch said.

“Tucker didn’t play it for me, just the opening announcement. Now I’m going to ask Tim Rourke a question. If you went to a sneak preview of this film, written by Tucker’s wife, what would be your first move?”

“Call a high-level conference, including attorneys,” Rourke said promptly. “Pomeroy wouldn’t sue Warehouse, but he’d be delighted to sue the News, because we have assets. It’s a hell of a story by itself, just the fact that such a movie has been made. The timing’s perfect, with the convention coming up. First I’d check the Pomeroy angle. Does Gretchen really have a brother in a Texas jail on a drug rap? Is the prosecutor known to be someone who wants a judgeship? We already know Pomeroy pushed through the resolution setting up the Tucker committee, but do the dates fit? What she’s doing here is accusing her husband of pimping, of persuading her to go down on an elderly congressman to get her brother out of jail—”

“The kid brother she’s always been very close to,” Peter put in.

“But how much of it I could write, I’d have to work out with the lawyers. Meanwhile, the public would flock to the picture, and they’d have to believe it was true. All of it. And I think the scene that would hurt Tucker most is that first one, where he’s watching the stag film. The woman was clever.”

“Say something, Tucker,” Shayne said. “We don’t want to do all the talking.”

“Gretchen wasn’t well.”

“And didn’t you have something to do with that? I agree with Tim, people would think so. Well, we’ll find out. I know Armand’s already planning to pull the movie he’s showing now and open Domestic Relations without advertising.”

“Who needs advertising?” Baruch said. “The word of mouth is going to be terrific.”

Gentry said, “Mike, are you suggesting that we let him go ahead and show this movie?”

“I don’t see how we can stop him, Will.”

“There are ways,” Tucker said harshly. “I don’t understand your attitude. Are you working for me or against me? Your fee was contingent on finding and destroying this lying film. It’s true, I didn’t tell you the full story. Would you have acted any differently in my place?” He leaned forward, his hands tightening on his knees. “You don’t think I murdered her, do you?”

Shayne let an instant pass.

“I think you meant to, Tucker.”