Blue Murder

CHAPTER 9

He called Tim Rourke while he was driving, opening the microphone and hanging it on the dashboard. Rourke took the call in the News morgue.

“Not much in the clips, Mike,” he reported. “But I had a minute with Jake Johnson, who’s been writing backgrounders for twenty years, and I picked up one or two bits. Jake’s heard rumors that Tucker has had meetings with some of those nutty right-wing billionaires in Texas. You know the ones, who won’t eat salad with Russian or French dressing. The aerospace people, the ex-Chiefs of Staff. It’s been kept very quiet, because the candidates they back openly usually have trouble on election day.”

“He’s mainly looking for money?”

“At this stage, mainly money. That’s one thing. The other is that there was a hitch about lining up some of the pols behind Tucker’s nomination, because of some scurrilous phone calls. A female voice. The wife, maybe? There were a couple of weeks delay until he could straighten it out. All right, what’s been happening in the real world, while I’ve been inside getting dust up my nose?”

“Does a Chicago congressman named Barnett Pomeroy mean anything to you?”

“It’s a fair-sized name,” Rourke said thoughtfully. “I don’t connect it with any of this. If you want to hold on, I’ll get out the envelopes.”

Shayne was driving north on Miami Avenue, through light traffic, heading for the Modern Motel, where an actress named Maureen, from Los Angeles, had lived when she was working on Baruch’s sub rosa project. It was a next step, but if she had checked out, Shayne intended to stop for the night and let people sleep.

Rourke came back. “What I thought. A lot of newsprint here, but it’s drab stuff. He’s in his eighth term, and as long as he stays on good terms with the Chicago organization, he can have a ninth. Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which is a key slot.” He was turning over clippings as he talked. “You don’t want any of this. Will he give such-and-such a bill a favorable report, and so on. Nothing.”

“He and Tucker were pushing each other in a parking lot tonight. Come up with a quick theory.”

“Any bill Tucker wants to introduce has to go through Pomeroy’s committee. If Pomeroy decides to sit on it, it’s dead. So Tucker shouldn’t be pushing him in a parking lot. I know a guy in Washington who won’t mind being waked up. He might know something. I’ll call him. Anything else?”

“Something even vaguer. Los Angeles has been mentioned. ‘Some Los Angeles guys are in town.’ That’s a quote. From some rival outfit, apparently. I didn’t have time to go into it, but the Warehouse people are taking it seriously. Sawed-off shotguns. Extra security. What do you think?”

“Pussy Rizzo!” Rourke exclaimed. “Absolutely. The nickname explains itself. He looks the way people who make stag films ought to look. Pockmarked. Thin platinum wristwatch. He dates back. I can see why they’re getting the guns out.”

“Who’s he after?”

“Tucker had him on the stand for two days, and wiped him out. What Tucker did, he subpoenaed all Pussy’s pictures, all the negatives, all the prints in circulation, and then he accidentally lost them.”

“Accidentally?”

“They got misrouted somewhere, and you don’t think a United States congressman would deliberately lie about it, do you? Of course everybody knows what happened — they went through the shredder. Pussy figures the loss at a half million. He was talking about suing but that was before he asked the advice of a lawyer. Without product he’s finished. In some circles it’s considered a triumph for the forces of decency. My paper ran a long editorial commending Tucker for finding extralegal ways to take care of such lice. If Pussy’s in town, tell your client to make sure who it is before he answers the door.”

“Baruch has four films he hasn’t released yet. If these Los Angeles guys grab them and put on new titles—”

“Sure!” Rourke said. “It’d make a very nice rip-off, and what could Baruch do about it? Not a hell of a lot.”

Shayne saw the motel sign ahead, the Vacancy light on. He ended the conversation with Rourke as he turned in and followed arrows to the office. Leaving his car standing with its lights on, he looked for Room 14. He found it on the second floor. Its windows were dark.

He returned to the office. A woman who had been dozing on a cot with the television on snapped awake and patted her hair.

“Can I help you?”

Shayne gave her a quick look at the card that entitled him to ask questions. “I’m trying to catch up with a runaway. Fourteen. She’s traveling with an older man in a green Chevy.” He reached across the counter to pick the registration cards out of an open file. “Just a routine check — I’m hitting all the motels.”

The woman came off the cot, picking at the air with both hands. “Nobody like that here! Those records are in confidence unless you happen to be a police officer or the FBI.”

“I’m neither,” Shayne said, continuing to flip through the cards. “They wouldn’t be up this late. What’s the problem? Nobody else has given me any arguments.”

“I’ve had some unfortunate experiences with private detectives, that’s the problem. I don’t hold with any of it. A person who pays for a room is entitled not to be bothered, is my policy.”

Shayne found the card he wanted. Maureen Neal, from Los Angeles, had arrived in a Thunderbird with the two letters on its license plate that identified it as a rented car.

He racked the cards and returned them. “That’s it. I’m calling it a night. How much are your singles?”

“I do have a few vacancies,” she admitted, “but don’t think renting a room will entitle you to look at my cards, because it won’t.”

Shayne proved to be exceptionally fussy about where he slept. After the long day he’d put in, he wanted to be as far as possible from traffic. He wanted a second floor room so the people overhead wouldn’t wake him at dawn. He settled on Room 15 and registered.

All the rooms in that wing had minuscule terraces, looking down on the swimming pool. There was no Thunderbird in the line of cars. Before leaving his own car, Shayne had his operator dial the motel, and when the woman answered he altered his voice and asked for Maureen Neal, in 14. There was no answer in that room, he was told a moment later.

Shayne went up to 15. Rooms 14 and 15 had a common door, so they could be rented together. He unbolted the door on his side.

Turning off the lights, he opened the sliding door onto the terrace. This proved to be a strip of concrete, just deep enough to accommodate two tubular deck chairs, closed on each side by a lattice covered with climbing vines. He swung over the railing and around onto the terrace of Room 14.

He opened the door with a knife blade. Inside, he turned on a single light.

Maureen Neal was an untidy girl. Two suitcases lay open on one of the big beds, but no real effort had been made to subdue the mess in the room and transfer it to the suitcases. Following his usual procedure, Shayne started with the bathroom.

The medicine cabinet was open. Maureen was a pill taker. There were pills to wake up, to sleep, to remain unpregnant, pills against pain, depression, anxiety, tooth decay. She believed in vitamins, and left wet towels on the floor. She used cocaine and vibrators, various cosmetic aids, hair conditioners, shampoos and coloring agents. Bottles and tubes covered every flat surface.

In the bedroom, Shayne continued his inventory. She read paperback Gothics. She had been rubbed recently; there was a massage book and a bowl of coconut oil, and the bedspread was slightly oily. He found two phone numbers scribbled on the back of an envelope. One was Capp’s. The other was preceded by 213, the area code for Los Angeles. A half-dozen new dresses from an expensive Lincoln Road shop hung in the closet, still carrying their sales tags. The interesting thing about these dresses was their label — the shop had been burglarized recently.

He began to get a picture of the girl and the disorganized life she had led in Miami. When the phone rang, he ignored it. An instant later, hearing a car pull into the parking area, he stabbed off the light and tilted a slat of the Venetian blind.

A black Thunderbird was wheeling around to park.

He returned to his own room through the party door, and was at the front window in time to see the Thunderbird’s lights go off. A girl’s elbow withdrew from the window and the glass came up.

Then a second car pulled in: Shayne recognized it at once. It was the Dodge with dealer’s plates and the telltale fenders, that had been parked earlier outside Nick Tucker’s condominium in Bal Harbour.

A young man got out after rolling up the windows. He was tall and angular, wearing only Bermuda shorts, and his back and shoulders were sunburned. The girl was partway out of the Thunderbird by the time he reached her. He waved her back. Shayne, from above, could see only her bare arm and part of one leg.

The young man tried to get her to move over. Instead, her other arm came out and embraced him. He seemed to resist, bracing himself against the car. She must have said something to persuade him, because he moved aside to let her out.

She was wearing a bikini, her black hair pulled back in a knot. Shayne heard her laugh through the sealed window, but not what she was saying. She managed to unfasten the young man’s belt, and as he went in under the overhang, she pulled it out of its loops and began whipping him with it. He leaped away.

Shayne didn’t see them again until they came out at the top of the steps. She had changed the game and was trying to pull his shorts down over his narrow hips. He was responding now. Her bikini top came away in his hand.

She whirled. He caught her and they kissed against the railing. It was a deep kiss, and when she let him go her hands had left white marks on his sunburned back. They broke apart and ran toward the room.

Shayne lowered the slat quietly.

He heard the door of the next room open and close. The girl stumbled against something in the dark and giggled, and a strip of light showed beneath the common door.

“Naked at last,” she announced. “I don’t know why people are so hung-up about clothes.”

“Not everybody looks like you, kid.”

“Oh, sweetheart, that’s beautiful, big like that. I think there’s some coke left. Do you want it?”

“I could force myself.”

There were sounds of moving around.

“Half for you, half for me.”

Shayne looked at the luminous dial of his watch. Something about the scene being played in the next room bothered him. There was some kind of undercurrent running. Why had they come in two cars?

“Now where’s that nice warm glow?” The girl’s voice. “What did somebody do, switch some bicarbonate of soda in on me? There it is. There it is. Lovely. And the nice thing is, it’s habit forming.”

The TV sound came on, too loud at first. One of them throttled it down.

“Umm,” the girl said. “Now how shall we do it? Tonight I decide.”

“You’re getting to be sort of bossy, you know?”

“Do what I tell you or I’ll scratch you. With that sunburn you’re helpless.”

Sounds of lovemaking followed. Shayne finished his cigarette and put another in his mouth, but didn’t light it at once.

The girl said, “Will I see you in LA?”

“You know. Maybe.”

“I thought it was great out there.”

“Part of it was great. The hassles I can do without.”

“One guy isn’t enough for me! A woman can come more times than a man — everybody knows that. I need that contented feeling. Otherwise I jitter so much I rattle the windowpanes. And the bread. When was the last time you picked up a check?”

“I don’t believe in it. How much did you milk out of Frankie?”

“Nickels and dimes. Will you stop bugging me about it? If I told you how he liked his sex, you wouldn’t believe me. Machismo, my ass. What did we get started on this for?”

The bed complained as they changed position. Shayne checked the time again. This was producing very little, but it would be unfair to walk in before they were finished.

By gradual stages, the activity next door picked up speed and intensity. The woman was running it. She carried him along, asking for comments but paying little attention to what he said. The bed’s headboard was loose, and it creaked like a chorus of frogs. The girl’s breathing became more and more rapid, and she finished with a yell.

He decided to give them three minutes to wind down.

“There,” the girl’s voice said. “Any Scotch in the bottle?”

The bottle was found.

“You know what the next step’s going to be in blue movies?” she said. “Animals. I don’t know if I dig that.”

“Two to one you will. What was it about this picture he just shot? Did you figure it out?”

In the next room, Shayne had been about to get up. He sat back to listen.

“I saw some of the dailies,” the girl said.

She went into the bathroom and called, over the sound of running water, “He paid me in cash, which I don’t mind, naturally. Then all this secrecy. I mean, why? I went out today and asked around, but nobody knows a thing.”

“That blonde chick, Gretchen.”

A toilet flushed. “I thought I’d get her to come to a party here and loosen up—”

Shayne lost what was said next.

“—nowhere. They never saw her before.”

“I’ll tell you my idea,” the young man said. “Could you get hold of a print?”

“Probably not, but why?”

“It’s worth money to somebody, that’s all we know. So let’s screen the mother and see.”

After a moment, slowly: “No chance.”

“They know you, they’d let you through that first door. Drop it to me out the window.”

“Can’t be done. They even put the outtakes in the vault, and it’s a combination dial, the size of a grapefruit. You don’t peel that with a can opener.”

Impatiently: “I’m not talking breaking into vaults. There must be a way to get the combination. Like Frankie Capp must know it.”

“I agree with you. So?”

“Feed him some barbs in coffee. Espresso, to kill the taste. I’ll rent a U-Haul, and while he’s asleep we’ll clean out his place, rugs, pictures, whatever. Those guys keep plenty of cash for emergencies, right? So if we don’t find the combination we don’t lose.”

“Frankie Capp? This is the coke talking. Miami’s his town.”

The young man’s enthusiasm vanished abruptly. “I know we won’t do it. It’s always somebody else who makes the million dollars. I really hate it. Something big’s going on, and we can’t even find out what.”

She stopped him with a hiss. “The door’s unlocked.”

“No, it’s not. I locked it.”

“Whisper,” she whispered, and Shayne missed the next thing she said. Then: “We better get some help in here.”

Shayne stood up, the unlighted cigarette still in his mouth. He unlocked the door on his side and went into the next room.

The girl, naked, was alone on the bed, against pillows. She stared up at Shayne.

“Who the hell are you?”

A violent blow against the door knocked it out of Shayne’s hand. He was moving, instinct telling him — a tick too late — that he had walked into an ambush. The youth had the Johnnie Walker bottle, bringing it around and up. Shayne caught the blow on his raised arm. The girl, moving fast, slithered off the bed, bringing the bedspread with her, and netted Shayne with it.

Shayne punched out blindly. He caught the youth a hard blow in the kidneys. Shayne went after him, trying to throw off the bedspread, and the girl hit him from behind, probably with another bottle. She wasn’t sure she had done enough damage, though Shayne was shuffling woozily, and she hit him once more.

He went down.