Time to Murder and Create

Chapter 16

My preliminary statement was sketchy. The man who took it, a detective named Birnbaum, noticed as much. I’d simply said that I had been assaulted by a person unknown to me at a specific place and time, that my assailant had been armed with a knife, that I had been unarmed, and that I had taken defensive measures which had involved throwing my assailant in such a way that, though I had not so intended, the ensuing fall had resulted in his death.

“This punk knew you by name,” Birnbaum said. “That’s what you said before.”

“Right.”

“That’s not in here.” He had a receding hairline, and he paused to rub where the hair had previously been. “You also told Lacey he’d been following you around past couple of days.”

“I noticed him once I’m sure of, and I think I saw him a few other times.”

“Uh-huh. And you want to hang around while we trace the prints and try to figure out who he was.”

“Right.”

“You didn’t wait to see if we turned up any I.D. on him. Which means you probably looked and saw he wasn’t carrying anything.”

“Maybe it was just a hunch,” I suggested. “Man goes out to murder somebody, he doesn’t carry identification around. Just an assumption on my part.”

He raised his eyebrows for a minute, then shrugged. “We can let it go at that, Matt. Lot of times I check out an apartment when nobody’s home, and wouldn’t you know it that they got careless and left the door open, because of course I wouldn’t think of letting myself in with a loid.”

“Because that would be breaking-and-entering.”

“And we wouldn’t want that, would we?” He grinned, then picked up my statement again. “There’s things you know about this bird that you don’t want to tell. Right?”

“No. There’s things I don’t know.”

“I don’t get it.”

I took one of his cigarettes from the pack on the desk. If I wasn’t careful I’d get the habit again. I spent some time lighting up, getting the words in the right order.

I said, “You’re going to be able to clear a case off the books, I think. A homicide.”

“Give me a name.”

“Not yet.”

“Look, Matt—”

I drew on the cigarette. I said, “Let me do it my way for a little while. I’ll fill in part of it for you, but nothing goes on paper for the time being. You’ve got enough already to wrap what happened tonight as justifiable homicide, don’t you? You got a witness and you’ve got a corpse with a knife in his hand.”

“So?”

“The corpse was hired to tag me. When I know who he is I’m probably going to know who hired him. I think he was also hired to kill somebody else a while ago, and when I know his name and background I’ll be able to come up with evidence that should lock right into the person who’s paying the check.”

“And you can’t open up on any of this in the meantime?”

“No.”

“Any particular reason?”

“I don’t want to get the wrong person in trouble.”

“You play a very lone hand, don’t you?”

I shrugged.

“They’re checking downtown right now. If he doesn’t show there, we’ll wire the prints down to the Bureau in D.C. It could add up to a long night.”

“I’ll hang around, if it’s all right.”

“I’d just as soon you did, matter of fact. There’s a couch in the loot’s office if you want to close your eyes for a while.”

I said I’d wait until the word came back from downtown. He found something to do, and I went into an empty office and picked up a newspaper. I guess I fell asleep, because the next thing I knew, Birnbaum was shaking my shoulder. I opened my eyes.

“Nothing downtown, Matt. Our boy’s never taken a bust in New York.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“I thought you didn’t know anything about him.”

“I don’t. I’m running hunches, I told you that.”

“You could save us trouble if you told us where to look.”

I shook my head. “I can’t think of anything faster than wiring Washington.”

“His prints are already on the wire. Might be a couple of hours anyway, and it’s getting light outside already. Why don’t you go home, and I’ll give you a call soon as anything comes in.”

“You got a full set. Doesn’t the Bureau do this sort of things by computer these days?”

“Sure. But somebody has to tell the computer what to do, and they tend to take their time down there. Go home and get some sleep.”

“I’ll wait.”

“Suit yourself.” He started for the door, then turned to remind me about the couch in the lieutenant’s office. But the time I’d dozed in the chair had taken the edge off the urge to sleep. I was exhausted, certainly, but sleep was no longer possible. Too many mental wheels were starting to turn, and I couldn’t shut them off.

He had to be Prager’s boy. It just had to add up that way. Either he had somehow missed the news that Prager was dead and out of the picture, or he was tied in close to Prager and wanted me dead out of spite. Or he had been hired through an intermediary, somehow, and didn’t know that Prager was a part of it. Something, anything, because otherwise—

I didn’t want to think about the otherwise.

I had been telling Birnbaum the truth. I had a hunch, and the more I thought about it the more I believed in it, and at the same time I kept wanting to be wrong. So I sat around the station house and read newspapers and drank endless cups of weak coffee and tried not to think about all of the things I couldn’t possibly avoid thinking about. Somewhere along the line Birnbaum went home, after he’d briefed another detective named Guzik, and around nine thirty Guzik came over to me and said they had a make from Washington.

He read it off the teletype sheet. “Lundgren, John Michael. Date of birth fourteen March ‘forty-three. Place of birth San Bernardino, California. Whole trail of arrests here, Matt. Living off immoral earnings, assault, assault with a deadly weapon, grand theft auto, grand larceny. He did local bits all up and down the West Coast, pulled some hard time in Quentin.”

“He pulled a one-to-five in Folsom,” I said. “I don’t know whether they called it extortion or larceny. That would have been fairly recent.”

He looked up at me. “I thought you didn’t know him.”

“I don’t. He was working a badger game. Arrested in San Diego, and his partner turned state’s evidence and got off. Sentence suspended.”

“That’s more detail than I’ve got here.”

I asked him if he had a cigarette. He said he didn’t smoke. He turned to ask if anybody had a cigarette, but I told him to forget it. “Get somebody with a steno pad,” I said. “There’s a lot to tell.”

I gave them everything I could think of. How Beverly Ethridge had worked her way in and out of the world of crime. How she had married well and turned herself back into the society type she had been in the first place. How Spinner Jablon had pieced it all together on the strength of a newspaper photo and turned it into a neat little blackmail operation.

“I guess she stalled him for a while,” I said. “But it kept being expensive, and he kept pushing for bigger money. Then her old boyfriend Lundgren came east and showed her a way out. Why pay blackmail when it’s so much easier to kill the blackmailer? Lundgren was a pro as a criminal but an amateur as a killer. He tried a couple of different methods on Spinner. Tried to get him with a car, then wound up hitting him over the head and putting him in the East River. Then he tried for me with the car.”

“And then with the knife.”

“That’s right.”

“How did you get into it?”

I explained, leaving out the names of Spinner’s other blackmail victims. They didn’t like that much, but there wasn’t anything much they could do about it. I told them how I had staked myself out as a target and how Lundgren had taken the bait.

Guzik kept interrupting to tell me I should have given everything to the cops right off, and I kept telling him it was something I had not been willing to do.

“We’d’ve handled it right, Matt. Jesus, you talk about Lundgren’s an amateur, shit, you ran around like an amateur yourself and almost got your ass in the wringer. You wound up going up against a knife with nothing but your hands, and it’s dumb luck you’re alive this minute. The hell, you ought to know better, you were a cop fifteen years, and you act like you don’t know what the department’s all about.”

“How about the people who didn’t kill Spinner? What happens to them if I hand you the whole thing right off the bat?”

“That’s their lookout, isn’t it? They come into it with dirty hands. They got something to hide, that shouldn’t be getting in the way of a murder investigation.”

“But there was no investigation. Nobody gave a shit about Spinner.”

“Because you were withholding evidence.”

I shook my head. “That’s horseshit,” I said. “I didn’t have evidence that anybody killed Spinner. I had evidence that he was blackmailing several people. That was evidence against Spinner, but he was dead, and I didn’t think you were particularly anxious to take him out of the morgue and throw him in a cell. The minute I had murder evidence I put it in your hand. Look, we could argue all day. Why don’t you put out a pickup order on Beverly Ethridge?”

“And charge her with what?”

“Two counts of conspiracy to murder.”

“You’ve got the blackmail evidence?”

“In a safe place. A safe-deposit box. I can bring it here in an hour.”

“I think I’ll come along with you and get it.”

I looked at him.

“Maybe I want to see just what’s in the envelope, Scudder.”

It had been Matt up until then. I wondered what kind of a number he wanted to run. Maybe he was just fishing, but he had visions of something or other. Maybe he wanted to take my place in the blackmail dodge, only he’d want real money, not the name of a murderer. Maybe he figured the other pigeons had committed real crimes and he could buy himself a commendation by knocking them off. I didn’t know him well enough to guess which motivation would be consistent with the man, but it didn’t really make very much difference.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “I give you a homicide collar on a silver platter and you want to melt down the platter.”

“I’m sending a couple boys over to pick up Ethridge. In the meantime, you and me are going to open up a safe-deposit box.”

“I could forget where I left the key.”

“And I could make your life difficult.”

“It’s not that much of a cinch as it is. It’s just a few blocks from here.”

“Still raining,” he said. “We’ll take a car.”

We drove over to the Manufacturers Hanover branch at Fifty-seventh and Eighth. He left the black-and-white in a bus stop. All that to save a three-block walk, and it wasn’t raining all that hard any more. We went inside and went down the stairs to the vault, and I gave my key to the guard and signed the signature card.

“Had the damnedest thing you ever heard of a few months back,” Guzik said. He was friendly now that I was going along with him. “This girl rented a box over at Chemical Bank, and she paid her eight bucks for a year, and she was visiting the box three or four times a day. Always with a guy, always a different guy. So the bank got suspicious and asked us to check it out, and wouldn’t you know, the chick is a pross. Instead of taking a hotel room for ten bucks, she’s picking up her tricks on the street and taking them to the fucking bank, for Christ’s sake. Then she gets her box out and they show her to the little room, and she locks the door and gives the guy a quick blow job in complete privacy, and then she sticks the money in the box and locks it up again. And all it runs her is eight bucks for the year instead of ten bucks a trick, and it’s safer than a hotel because if she gets a crazy he’s not going to try beating her up in the middle of a fucking bank, is he? She can’t get beaten up and she can’t get robbed, and it’s perfect.”

By this time the guard had used his key and mine to get the box from the vault. He handed it to me and led us to a cubicle. We entered together, and Guzik closed and locked the door. The room struck me as rather cramped for sex, but I understand people do it in airplane lavatories, and this was spacious in comparison.

I asked Guzik what had happened to the girl.

“Oh, we told the bank not to press charges, or all it would do was give every streetwalker in the business the same idea. We told them to refund her box-rental fee and tell her they didn’t want her business, so I guess that’s what they did. She probably walked across the street and started doing business with another bank.”

“But you never got any more complaints.”

“No. Maybe she’s got a friend at Chase Manhattan.” He laughed hard at his own line, then chopped it off abruptly. “Let’s see what’s in the box, Scudder.”

I handed it to him. “Open it yourself,” I said.

He did, and I watched his face while he looked through everything. He had some interesting comments on the pictures he saw, and he gave the written material a fairly careful reading. Then he looked up suddenly.

“This is all the stuff on the Ethridge dame.”

“Seems that way,” I said.

“What about the others?’ “

“I guess these safe-deposit vaults aren’t as foolproof as they’re supposed to be. Somebody must have come in and taken everything else.”

“You son of a bitch.”

“You’ve got everything you need, Guzik. No more and no less.”

“You took a different box for each one. How many others are there?”

“What difference does it make?”

“You son of a bitch. So we’ll walk back and ask the guard how many other boxes you have here, and we’ll take a look at all of them.”

“If you want. I can save you a little time.”

“Oh?”

“Not just three different boxes, Guzik. Three different banks. And don’t even think about shaking me for the other keys, or running a check on the banks, or anything else you might have in mind. In fact, it might be a good idea if you stopped calling me a son of a bitch, because I might get unhappy, and I might decide not to cooperate in your investigation. I don’t have to cooperate, you know. And if I don’t, your case goes down the drain. You can possibly tie Ethridge to Lundgren without me, but you’ll have a hell of a time finding anything a D.A. is going to want to take to court.”

We looked at each other for a while. A couple of times he started to say something, and a couple of times he figured out that it wasn’t a particularly good idea. Finally something changed in his face, and I knew he’d decided to let it go. He had enough, and he had all he was going to get, and his face said he knew it.

“The hell,” he said, “it’s the cop in me, I want to get to the bottom of things. No offense, I hope.”

“None at all,” I said. I don’t suppose I sounded very convincing.

“They probably hauled Ethridge out of bed by now. I’ll get back and see what she’s got to say. It should make good listening. Or maybe they didn’t haul her out of bed. These pictures, you’d have more fun hauling her into bed than out. Ever get any of that, Scudder?”

“No.”

“I wouldn’t mind a taste myself. Want to come back to the station house with me?”

I didn’t want to go anywhere with him. I didn’t want to see Beverly Ethridge.

“I’ll pass,” I said. “I’ve got an appointment.”