Time to Murder and Create

Chapter 7

On his twenty-fifth birthday, Theodore Huysendahl had come into an inheritance of two and a half million dollars. A year later he’d added another million and change by marrying Helen Godwynn, and in the next five years or so he’d increased their total wealth to somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen million dollars. At age thirty-two he sold his business interests, moved from a waterfront estate in Sands Point to a co-op apartment on Fifth Avenue in the Seventies, and devoted his life to public service. The President appointed him to a commission. The Mayor installed him as head of the Parks and Recreation Department. He gave good interviews and made good copy and the press loved him, and as a result he got his name in the papers a lot. For the past few years he’d been making speeches all over the state, turning up at every Democratic fund-raising dinner, calling press conferences all over the place, guesting occasionally on television talk shows. He always said that he was not running for governor, and I don’t think even his own dog was dumb enough to buy that one. He was running, and running very hard, and he had a lot of money to spend and a lot of political favors to call, and he was tall and good-looking and radiantly charming, and if he had a political position, which was doubtful, it was not far enough to either the left or the right to alienate voters in the great middle.

The smart money gave him one shot in three at the nomination, and if he got that far he had a very strong chance for election. And he was only forty-one. He was probably already looking beyond Albany in the direction of Washington.

A handful of nasty little photographs could end all that in a minute.

He had an office in City Hall. I took the subway down to Chambers Street and headed over there, but first I detoured and walked up Centre Street and stood in front of Police Headquarters for a few minutes. There was a bar across the street where we used to go before or after appearing in the Criminal Courts Building. It was a little early for a drink, though, and I didn’t much want to run into anyone, so I went over to City Hall and managed to find Huysendahl’s office.

His secretary was an older woman with wiry gray hair and sharp blue eyes. I told her I wanted to see him, and she asked my name.

I took out my silver dollar. “Watch closely,” I said, and set it spinning on the corner of her desk. “Now just tell Mr. Huysendahl exactly what I’ve done, and that I’d like to see him in private. Now.”

She scrutinized my face for a moment, probably in an attempt to assess my sanity. Then she reached for the telephone, but I put my hand gently atop hers.

“Tell him in person,” I said.

Another long sharp look, with her head cocked slightly to one side. Then, without quite shrugging, she got up and went into his office, closing the door after her.

She wasn’t in there long. She came out looking puzzled and told me Mr. Huysendahl would see me. I’d already hung my coat on a metal rack. I opened Huysendahl’s door, went in, closed it after me.

He started talking before he raised his eyes from the paper he was reading. He said, “I thought it was agreed that you were not to come here. I thought we established—”

Then he looked up and saw me, and something happened to his face.

He said, “You’re not—”

I flipped the dollar into the air and caught it. “I’m not George Raft, either,” I said. “Who were you expecting?”

He looked at me, and I tried to get something out of his face. He looked even better than his newspaper photos, and a lot better than the candid shots I had of him. He was sitting behind a gray steel desk in an office furnished with standard City-issue goods. He could have afforded to redecorate it himself — a lot of people in his position did that. I don’t know what it said about him that he hadn’t, or what it was supposed to say.

I said, “Is that today’s Times? If you were expecting a different man with a silver dollar, you couldn’t have read the paper very carefully. Third page of the second section, toward the bottom of the page.”

“I don’t understand what this is all about.”

I pointed at the paper. “Go ahead. Third page, second section.”

I stayed on my feet while he found the story and read it. I’d seen it myself over breakfast, and I might have missed it if I hadn’t been looking for it. I hadn’t known whether it would make the paper or not, but there were three paragraphs identifying the corpse from the East River as Jacob “Spinner” Jablon and giving a few of the highlights of his career.

I watched carefully while Huysendahl read the squib. There was no way his reaction could have been anything other than legitimate. The color drained instantly from his face, and a pulse hammered in his temple. His hands clenched so violently that the paper tore. It certainly seemed to mean that he hadn’t known Spinner was dead, but it could also mean he hadn’t expected the body to come up and was suddenly realizing what a pot he was in.

“God,” he said. “That’s what I was afraid of. That’s why I wanted — oh, Christ! ”

He wasn’t looking at me and he wasn’t talking to me. I had the feeling that he didn’t remember I was in the room with him. He was looking into the future and watching it go down the drain.

“Just what I was afraid of,” he said again. “I kept telling him that. If anything happened to him, he said, a friend of his would know what to do with those… those pictures. But he had nothing to fear from me, I told him he had nothing to fear from me. I would have paid anything, and he knew that. But what would I do if he died? ‘You better hope I live forever,’ that’s what he said.” He looked up at me. “And now he’s dead,” he said. “Who are you?”

“Matthew Scudder.”

“Are you from the police?”

“No. I left the department a few years ago.”

He blinked. “I don’t know… I don’t know why you’re here,” he said. He sounded lost and helpless, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had started to weep.

“I’m sort of a freelance,” I explained. “I do favors for people, pick up the odd dollar here and there.”

“You’re a private detective?”

“Nothing that formal. I keep my eyes and ears open, that sort of thing.”

“I see.”

“Here I read this item about my old friend Spinner Jablon, and I thought it might put me in a position to do a favor for a person. A favor for you, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh?”

“I figured that maybe Spinner had something that you’d like to have your hands on. Well, you know, keeping my eyes and ears open and all that, you never know what I might come up with. What I figured was that there might be some kind of a reward offered.”

“I see,” he said. He started to say something else, but the phone rang. He picked it up and started to tell the secretary that he wasn’t taking any calls, but this one was from His Honor and he decided not to duck it. I pulled up a chair and sat there while Theodore Huysendahl talked with the Mayor of New York. I didn’t really pay much attention to the conversation. When it ended, he used the intercom to stress that he was out to all callers for the time being. Then he turned to me and sighed heavily.

“You thought there might be a reward.”

I nodded. “To justify my time and expenses.”

“Are you the… friend Jablon spoke of?”

“I was a friend of his,” I admitted.

“Do you have those pictures?”

“Let’s say I might know where they are.”

He rested his forehead on the heel of his hand and scratched his hair. The hair was a medium brown, not too long and not too short; like his political position, it was designed to avoid irritating anyone. He looked at me over the tops of his glasses and sighed again.

Levelly he said, “I would pay a substantial sum to have those pictures in hand.”

“I can understand that.”

“The reward would be… a generous one.”

“I thought it probably would be.”

“I can afford a generous reward, Mr.. I don’t think I got your name.”

“Matthew Scudder.”

“Of course. I’m usually quite good at names, actually.” His eyes narrowed. “As I said, Mr. Scudder, I can afford a generous reward. What I cannot afford is for that material to remain in existence.” He drew a breath and straightened up in his chair. “I am going to be the next governor of the State of New York.”

“So a lot of people say.”

“More people will say it. I have scope, I have imagination, I have vision. I’m not a party hack in debt to the bosses. I’m independently wealthy, I’m not looking to enrich myself out of the public till. I could be an excellent governor. The state needs leadership. I could—”

“Maybe I’ll vote for you.”

He smiled ruefully. “I don’t suppose it’s time for a political speech, is it? Especially at a time when I’m so careful to deny that I’m a candidate. But you must see the importance of this to me, Mr. Scudder.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Did you have a specific reward in mind?”

“You’d have to set that figure. Of course, the higher it is, the more of an incentive it would be.”

He put his fingertips together and thought it over. “One hundred thousand dollars.”

“That’s quite generous.”

“That’s what I would pay as a reward. For the return of absolutely everything.”

“How would you know you got everything back?”

“I’ve thought of that. I had that problem with Jablon. Our negotiations were complicated by the difficulty I found in being in the same room with him. I knew instinctively that I would be at his mercy on a permanent basis. If I gave him substantial funds, he’d run through them sooner or later and be back for more money. Blackmailers always are, from what I understand.”

“Usually.”

“So I paid him so much a week. A weekly envelope, old bills out of sequence, as if I were paying ransom. As in a sense I was. I was ransoming all my tomorrows.” He leaned back in his wooden swivel chair and closed his eyes. He had a good head, a strong face. I suppose there must have been weakness in it, because he had shown this weakness in his behavior, and sooner or later your character shows up in your face. It takes longer in some faces than in others; if there was weakness there, I couldn’t spot it.

“All my tomorrows,” he said. “I could afford that weekly payment. I could think of it”—that quick, rueful smile—”as a campaign expense. An ongoing one. What worried me was my continued vulnerability, not to Mr. Jablon but to what might come to pass should he die. My God, people die every day. Do you know how many New Yorkers are murdered in the average day?”

“It used to be three,” I said. “A homicide once every eight hours, that was the average. I suppose it’s higher now.”

“The figure I heard was five.”

“Higher in the summer. One week last July the tally ran over fifty. Fourteen of them in one day.”

“Yes, I remember that week.” He looked away for a moment, evidently lost in thought. I didn’t know whether he was planning how to reduce homicide rates when he was governor or how to add my name to the list of victims. He said, “Can I assume that Jablon was murdered?”

“I don’t see how you can assume anything else.”

“I thought that might happen. I worried about it, that is. That sort of man, his kind runs a higher-than-average risk of being murdered. I’m sure I wasn’t his only victim.” His voice rose in pitch on the last words of the sentence, and he waited for me to confirm or deny his guess. I outwaited him, and he went on. “But even if he weren’t murdered, Mr. Scudder, men die. They don’t live forever. I didn’t like paying that slimy gentleman every week, but the prospect of ceasing to pay him was significantly worse. He could die in any number of ways, anything at all. A drug overdose, say.”

“I don’t think he used anything.”

“Well, you understand my point.”

“He could have been hit by a bus,” I said.

“Exactly.” Another long sigh. “I can’t go through this again. Let me state my case quite plainly. If you… recover the material, I’ll pay you the figure I stated. One hundred thousand dollars, paid in any fashion you care to specify. Paid into a private Swiss account, if you prefer. Or handed over to you in cash. For that I’ll expect the return of absolutely everything and your continued silence.”

“That makes sense.”

“I should think so.”

“But what guarantee would you have that you’re getting what you pay for?”

His eyes studied me keenly before he spoke. “I think I’m rather good at judging men.”

“And you’ve decided I’m honest?”

“Hardly that. No insult intended, Mr. Scudder, but such a conclusion would be naive on my part, wouldn’t it?”

“Probably.”

“What I have decided,” he said, “is that you are intelligent. So let me spell things out. I will pay you the sum I’ve mentioned. And if, at any time in the future, you should attempt to extort further funds from me, on whatever pretext, I would make contact with… certain people. And have you killed.”

“Which might put you right on the spot.”

“It might,” he agreed. “But in a certain position I would have to take just that chance. And I said before that I believe you are intelligent. What I meant was that I feel you would be intelligent enough to avoid finding out whether or not I’m bluffing. One hundred thousand dollars should be a sufficient reward. I don’t think you’d be foolish enough to push your luck.”

I thought it over, gave a slow nod. “One question.”

“Ask it.”

“Why didn’t you think of making this offer to the Spinner?”

“I did think of it.”

“But you didn’t make it.”

“No, Mr. Scudder, I did not.”

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t think he was sufficiently intelligent.”

“I guess you were right about that.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He wound up in the river,” I said. “That wasn’t very bright of him.”