Kill Fee (12 page)

7

Lieutenant Murtaugh sat in his car in a no-parking zone in front of Murray Hill Academy, a high-priced private school where Ellie reigned as director. On her down days, Ellie tended to grumble that she was willing to settle for promising the parents only that there'd be no muggers or pushers inside the school, and that their offspring would be able to read and write a little when they graduated. Murtaugh thought even that was aiming rather high.

Ten o'clock. He'd been waiting fifteen minutes when she came through the double doors of Murray Hill Academy in the company of a few of the teaching staff. Ellie was walking heavy: tired. Nobody liked night meetings, but sometimes they were unavoidable. The school's director was the only one who ever had a lieutenant of police waiting to escort her home; he hoped Ellie wouldn't ask him to give lifts to any of the others.

She didn't. She settled herself primly on the passenger side, opened her mouth, and screamed.

''Rough day?" he asked sympathetically.

Ellie
hadn't had time to eat, so they stopped at a deli for something to take out. Only when they were home and Ellie had kicked her shoes off and worked her way through half a sandwich did she ask, "Well? Decide what you're going to do?"

He nodded. "I've decided to find out
why.
Not only this time, but the other times as well. There's got to be something. I'm going to try to keep it under wraps, but if I can't. . . well. But there has to be a reason Ansbacher pulls me off when I'm getting close. I'm going to find out what it is."

"What are your chances?"

"Pretty good, I'd say." Murtaugh had already started the long procedure of calling in every favor owed him, from everyone from the detective who'd replaced him on the Parminter case down to a few beat patrolmen whose minor mistakes Murtaugh had overlooked at one time or another.

"Then what?"

"Depends on what I find. If he's been bought off, I'll bring charges of malfeasance. I have to have damned good evidence before I can do anything like that. But a man can't be on the take for years without leaving some sort of trail."

Ellie wiped mustard from her mouth and shook her head. "Hard to think of Ansbacher as taking bribes. He doesn't seem the type."

Murtaugh laughed wryly. "He's exactly the type. Remember the saying, 'Never do business in the amen corner'? These self-righteous bastards are the most double-dealing of the lot. Ansbacher probably has the whole thing rationalized away to fit in with his personal brand of ethics. What a hypocrite."

"You sound already convinced he
is
on the take."

"
What else could it be? There was something fishy going on between Parminter and the Sutton brothers—they've probably taken the city for a bundle over the years. I'm just beginning to put the pieces together when out of the blue Ansbacher tells me I'm off the case. How would you interpret that? I tried to tell him what was going on, but the man just
would not listen.
The only thing I can figure is that he already knew what was going on and had been paid to stop me. What else could it be?"

"I don't know. Did he give you a reason?"

"He said he wanted me to concentrate on solving the Sussman murder. Gave me Sergeant Eberhart to help with the leg work—he's down on Eberhart too right now. But he reassigned all the cases that had come to my desk, not just the Parminter investigation. You see what he's doing? He's putting Eberhart and me on a dead-end case where we can't do
anything,
where we can't interfere with whatever else he might have going. We've been benched, grounded, whatever."

"He's clipped your wings."

"Yeah. I'm supposed to be overseeing the investigation of half a dozen criminal cases, yet he assigns me to investigate personally the one case that everybody knows is going nowhere. Now he wouldn't do that, Ellie, unless he was afraid I'd find something. Well, he's outsmarted himself in a way. Limiting me to the Sussman investigation is going to give me a lot of spare time. I'm going to use it to nail Ansbacher."

Ellie got up from the kitchen table. "This whole thing makes me uneasy. You could be the one that gets nailed, Jim."

"I know," he said. "But I don't see that I have much choice. Ansbacher's as much as warned me my days are numbered." He forced a smile. "Besides, aren't you the
one
who's always telling me I ought to decide on a course of action?"

She kissed him lightly. "I'm going to take a shower."

Murtaugh sat at the table for a while longer, feeling tireder than he had any right to feel. Eventually he decided a shower was what he needed too. When he stood up, he inadvertently kicked over Ellie's book bag that she'd propped against the table leg and then forgotten. He bent over to pick up the scattered papers and notebooks, and found himself holding a copy of
Summit
magazine.

He took the magazine to the bedroom with him and leafed through it. He read Leon Walsh's editorial, about the way contemporary America takes its language from advertising instead of from books. It was a familiar argument; Murtaugh had been expecting something more original from Walsh. An off-month, perhaps—the time of Jerry Sussman's murder? He didn't know how long ago the editorial had been written.

When he heard the water stop, he went into the bathroom. "I thought you didn't read
Summit
any more."

"What?" Ellie was drying herself. "Oh—well, I got interested again, since you were investigating those people. I was curious, too."

"About anything in particular?"

"No, I just wanted to see if the magazine was going to go back to what it used to be. You know, quality material aimed at a limited readership. I think it might be—it's a little early to tell."

"I suppose they're committed to print things months in advance."

"Mmm. Funny thing, Jim, it actually has a murder story in there. Utterly unrealistic premise, but the story's kind of interesting just the same."

"What's it called?"

"
'The Man from Porlock'—I forget who wrote it."

Murtaugh turned to the contents page. "J. J. Kellerman."

"That sounds right. I'm finished here—do you want to take a shower?"

Murtaugh showered quickly and climbed into bed clutching the copy of
Summit.
Ellie was lying on her stomach, grimly making her way through an article in an educational journal.

"There's no written language anywhere in the world as awful as
Educationese,"
she groaned. "It always makes me move my lips."

Murtaugh patted her bottom absently and turned to "The Man from Porlock." He read casually at first, and then with increasing concentration. By the time he'd finished, he was holding his breath.

Was that it, could that have been how it happened? The story was about the near loss of a radio station instead of a magazine, but other than that it was an almost literal retelling of the Leon Walsh/Jerry Sussman conflict—with a bizarre explanation of the murder tacked on. Crazy. He went back and read again the part about the free-lance killer's first phone call to his "client"—and Murtaugh found himself believing it. But he'd heard Ellie say fiction was supposed to be a transformation of fact, not a literal reporting of it.

"Who's J. J. Kellerman?" he asked.

"Mm?"

"Kellerman—the author of this story. Do you know anything about him?"

"No, I don't think I ever heard of him."

"I don't get the title. 'The Man from Porlock'—Porlock isn't even mentioned in the story. What is it?"

"
A little town in England. The title's an allusion to how Samuel Taylor Coleridge came to write 'Kubla Khan' and why the poem was never finished."

Murtaugh raised one eyebrow. "Coleridge isn't mentioned in the story either."

Ellie smiled tiredly. "You're supposed to know the story. Coleridge was staying out in the country somewhere near Porlock. He woke up from an opium dream with his head so full of images that he sat down and started writing the poem. You remember it, Jim—'In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree. . . .' "

Murtaugh shook his head. He must have read it in high school, but it was too many years ago.

"Anyway," Ellie went on, "while he was writing, he was interrupted by a knock at the door. It was a bill-collector from the town of Porlock. Coleridge finally got rid of him—but when he sat back down to write, his mind was blank. The vision was gone. And so the poem was never finished."

"So 'The Man from Porlock' refers to . . . ?"

"An interrupter, a destroyer of dreams."

"Or a bill-collector?"

"Yes, that too."

A bill-collector.

"The idea is preposterous," Ellie was saying. "Whoever heard of anyone going around killing people and then later collecting from other people who had nothing to do with it! Have you ever run across anything like that?"

"No."

"The story's not badly told, though. A few intrusive writerish tricks. But on the whole not too bad."

Murtaugh
didn't say anything; he was thinking. The idea
was
preposterous, Ellie was right. But he'd run into even more preposterous things during his seventeen years on the force. People were capable of performing any absurd act the mind could conceive. Could J. J. Kellerman be Leon Walsh? Murtaugh tried to compare the styles of the short story and the editorial Walsh had written, but he didn't really know what to look for; he'd ask Ellie to do it tomorrow. Had Walsh written fiction before? Ellie said the story had a few writerish tricks in it but on the whole wasn't bad. Murtaugh didn't know anything about literary values.

But he thought he recognized a plea for sympathy when he ran into one.

The voice on the answering machine said, "For crying out loud, Leila, why don't you return my calls? What do I need—a note from my mother?"

Leila Hudson turned off the machine. Leon always understood only what it was convenient for him to understand.

He'd paid her back twenty-five hundred of the twenty-five thousand he owed her. "Ten percent for a start," he'd smiled, trying to be charming. It was wasted effort. He'd already killed any chance for a reconciliation when he pulled that stomach-turning stunt on her—just to talk her into a loan.

Leila had sat at that table at Luchow's and listened to Leon lying to her about how her own life would be in danger if she didn't come up with twenty-five thousand dollars immediately. She'd sat there thinking
I don't believe this
while he went on embellishing the story. Leon was so transparent a liar that a child could see through him. This was something he was never able to under
stand,
even though he'd been told so several times. Leila had told him once herself.

In the end she'd decided to let him have the money because obviously he had to be desperate to resort to such underhandedness. Leila didn't know what kind of trouble he was in, but it had to be serious. And the money did seem to do the trick; Leon was able to buy his way out.

But at what cost! Whatever respect and sympathy and concern for his well-being that had been left over from their marriage—now it was all as dead as Jacob Marley and his doornail.
My supply of charitable understanding is exhausted,
Leila thought. Used up. Gone. How could Leon have done such a thing to her? He'd always used her to a certain extent; that's what had caused the divorce in the first place, his tendency to assume her primary function was to make him feel good. There'd been no malice in it; only thoughtlessness and a seeming inability to learn.

But telling her that grotesque and melodramatic story, trying to make her
feel afraid
—oh, that was unforgivable. Before he did that, they'd actually reached a point where Leon had begun hinting that maybe this time they could make a go of it. But now she didn't even want to talk to him on the telephone.

Leila was sick at heart. Once again she'd allowed Leon Walsh to let her down.

Pluto was displeased. He was displeased with the weather, he was displeased with having to use the .45 again so soon, he was displeased with having to do so many jobs close together. But most of all he was displeased with a smartass young millionaire named Roscoe Malucci.

It had finally happened. Pluto had often wondered
what
he'd do if it ever did happen, but without really believing that it
would.
But now it had. Roscoe Malucci had refused to pay his bill.

Prudence said,
Let it go, forget it, write it off.
Pride said to Prudence,
Get stuffed.
Still, if he failed to collect this one time, nobody would know about it. "Not true," Pluto said aloud in the back seat of the taxi.
"I
would know about it."

"You say something, Mac?"

"No, no—just drive."

Pluto's normal workload was three jobs per year. He'd found he could live quite comfortably on three hundred thousand tax-free dollars a year. (It used to be only two jobs a year, but what with inflation, etc., etc.) Pluto wasn't avaricious; his needs were moderate. He prided himself on not being like rock stars or advertising executives or ballplayers. Or like pretty-boy anchormen who were paid $650,000 a year for reading the news on local television—
local,
not even network. Pluto tut-tutted at that; no sense of proportion. He, on the other hand, charged a reasonable fee for doing a dangerous job that others didn't want to do.

That was the way it used to be. This year, however, he'd already done eight jobs—and he was behind schedule. Because now he needed money. He'd thought about raising his rates but decided against it. People with money were willing to pay a hundred thousand to have their problems solved for them, but over that amount they tended to get panicky. Pluto didn't want to push his clients over the edge; they were no good to him that way. A hundred thousand was just about right.

He wanted to buy a chalet in Switzerland. He had come upon it quite by accident last year while on vacation, and he'd immediately fallen in love with it. The
chalet
was tucked away among the vineyards between Geneva and Lausanne, on an estate that itself produced a modest four thousand bottles a year. Pluto had tried the wine and found it a typical Swiss white with no great pretensions; a pleasant wine. The idea of inviting the neighbors over for a glass of wine from the back yard appealed to Pluto. The chalet itself was a work of art, designed to house other works of art. Suddenly Pluto's middle-class, three-hundred-thousand-dollars-a-year way of living no longer satisfied him. He aspired to better things.