Kill Fee (7 page)

FEE FOR SERVICES RENDERED

One murder, arranged to coincide with establishment of Connecticut alibi

Amt. due . . . . $100,000.00

CHAPTER

4

Ellie Murtaugh was worried about her husband. Both of them had long since given up trying not to bring their work home with them; one's work was one's life, not some separate category to be filed away for sixteen hours out of every twenty-four. But now Ellie was beginning to feel a third presence in their marriage. Captain Ansbacher had never set foot in their home—but he was there just the same.

"I don't mind living with one cop," she said one night when her husband couldn't stop talking about Ansbacher, ''but two are beginning to get me down."

James Timothy Murtaugh didn't answer right away. They were in bed, but turning out the light hadn't stopped what had become a nightly tirade. Then, stiffly: "I'm sorry. I didn't realize I was imposing."

Ellie laughed. "Relax. Just put the man out of your mind for a while, Jim."

"Easier said than done."

"
Then find a course of action. Confront him.
Do
something. Don't let it go on festering."

"Easier said than done."

"You already said that."

He sighed. "I know."

Murtaugh was trying hard not to feel depressed; he could no longer avoid facing an unpalatable truth about his life. More than unpalatable—a nauseating, debilitating truth. And that was: he was as far as he would ever go. All these years as lieutenant, and he knew now he'd never make captain. No matter what he did, he was stuck. Advancement was out of the question, and for one simple reason.

Ansbacher.

Captain Ansbacher had blocked Murtaugh's two attempts at getting himself promoted. In Murtaugh's first try, Ansbacher had shot him down during the board interview. Murtaugh didn't know what his superior had done to sabotage the second attempt. But a sympathetic word had filtered down from above:
Make friends with your Captain.

It was impossible even to maintain a friendly atmosphere when Ansbacher was around. Murtaugh tried, but everything about the man rubbed him the wrong way—the way he dismissed your theories about a case without even thinking about them, the way he treated his detectives as if they were dirt. Even the way he talked bothered Murtaugh; every syllable was pronounced
so
carefully,
so
distinctly—as if he were making a special effort to spell things out clearly for the moron he was talking to. Impossible to get along with a man who went out of his way to let you know how deficient he considered you to be. And Ansbacher never reevaluated his opinion of anything.

Once
the man had his mind set, there was no budging him. There would always be people who thought changing one's mind was a sign of weakness, and Ansbacher was one of them. He'd put Murtaugh into a certain category years ago, and there Murtaugh was going to stay. That category wasn't at the
top
of Ansbacher's shit list; the Captain wasn't out to destroy him, only to prevent his rising any higher in the police hierarchy. Murtaugh was luckier than some.

The man was
weird.
He looked upon himself as a bastion of moral strength in a corrupt and uncaring world. Only Captain Ansbacher knew the real difference between right and wrong. An avid churchgoer all his life, he never quoted scripture at you; consequently newcomers who were unlucky enough to joke about organized religion suddenly found themselves in hot water. The Captain stood foursquare for all the conventional virtues. Murtaugh had gotten on Ansbacher's wrong side because he and Ellie had lived together for two years before they married.

"Decided to make an honest woman of her, did you?" had been Ansbacher's remark at the time of the wedding.

A tacky joke, in terrible taste, but Murtaugh had been going to laugh anyway—when he suddenly realized Ansbacher wasn't joking. He meant it.
Make an honest woman of her
—good lord. The man actually thought that way, in this day and in this place. And the Captain's treatment of those who did not conform to his own personal rules of conduct was downright criminal, in Murtaugh's view. Ansbacher had taken one look at a young officer and decided from the way he walked that he was a pansy. The officer's career in law enforcement came to an abrupt end shortly after that.

How
could he do things like that, how could he get away with it? It was something that Murtaugh hadn't been able to puzzle out. Whatever Ansbacher did had the backing of the Commissioner's office, even his meddling in his officers' private lives. There was something warped about Ansbacher, some sexual hang-up that made him rabidly intolerant of any way of life different from his own. There was no he-ing and she-ing among the men and women under Ansbacher's command, no casual talk of affairs. Ansbacher's wife of thirty years was one of the women who "choose to stay at home"; his children were grown and successful and respectable. Murtaugh had no children and his wife worked at a career of her own; ergo, he was suspect.

He was suspect, and he would stay suspect until the day either he or Ansbacher keeled over for good. The Captain would never change his opinion of his lieutenant; he was like a bulldog who'd got a firm grip and wouldn't let go no matter what. Ansbacher even looked a little bit like a bulldog—heavy jowls, pug nose, small eyes.

Albert Payson Terhune—
unbidden, the name floated into Murtaugh's mind. My god, he thought, all those dog stories. He'd read them as a boy, all of them, and hadn't thought about them for years. It must have been seeing Ansbacher as a bulldog that called Terhune to mind. Terhune had been a collie man; and while he acknowledged the strength of a bulldog's jaw in never letting go once the animal had a good grip, he had maintained the collie was the superior fighter. Because the collie was constantly on the move, biting here, nipping there, always looking for a better point of attack. He'd mentioned it several times, in different books. For some reason it had
been
important to Terhune to prove the collie was a better fighter than the bulldog.

So, is there a moral in all this? Murtaugh wondered. Am I supposed to turn collie and keep nipping away at Ansbacher?

"Ellie," he asked, "did you ever read Albert Payson Terhune when you were a kid?"

But she was asleep.

Ansbacher the Bulldog had gotten something else between his jaws and wouldn't let go: he was convinced Leon Walsh had hired someone to kill his partner. Or at least so he said; he could be pressuring Murtaugh into making an arrest that wouldn't stand up. Something for the file, booking a suspect on insufficient evidence, ammo to use against Murtaugh in his next bid for a captaincy. How did you defend yourself against something like that?

Murtaugh was as sure as he could be that Leon Walsh had not arranged the murder of Jerry Sussman, but he could see the day he might have to arrest the editor just to protect himself against Ansbacher. Would I do it? Murtaugh wondered. Arrest a man I knew was innocent just to get out from under the heat? It wasn't as if Walsh would go to prison—he wouldn't even go to trial. He'd be out as soon as the D.A.'s office decided they didn't have a case.

And Captain Ansbacher could make life hell for any subordinate who didn't toe the line. He'd done it before, and to Murtaugh—especially when Murtaugh had disagreed with him about a case. Ansbacher had forced him to close a few investigations before he was satisfied; he'd always wondered about those. But Ansbacher could do it. In time he could probably force him to arrest a totally innocent Leon Walsh.

No.

Damn it, enough was enough. What had he come to, lying there in the dark actually thinking about bringing charges of murder against a man he felt sure was innocent? Just because one narrow-minded, non-thinking, power-happy police captain had got it into his head that the editor of
Summit
magazine had hired a killer to do his dirty work for him.

What have I come to?
Ellie was right; he needed to confront Ansbacher, or find some course of action to take instead of letting it fester and fester and fester. He needed to
do
something.

He sighed. Easier said than done.

While Murtaugh lay sleepless in his need to decide what to do, a different man in a mid-Manhattan high-rise was also trying to reach a decision.

"It's just that I don't really trust opera singers, you see," he told the wall in a reasonable manner.

The man liked to call himself Pluto—the whimsy of mixing the devil and Mickey Mouse's pet dog appealed to him. He was in his study; one wall was lined with corkboard. Affixed to the corkboard with push-pins were photographs, newspaper clippings, magazine articles, a map. Dead center was an enlarged glossy of a man wearing the costume of the Duke of Mantua in
Rigoletto.

"Italian tenors are the worst," the man who called himself Pluto said. "So temperamental."

The Duke of Mantua seemed to wink at him. The singer in the photo was youngish, good-looking, not too much overweight. He had a distinctive voice, one that could never be confused with any other singer's pearly tones. Next year's superstar, if he lived that long.

It
wasn't
that
tenor's temperament that worried Pluto. Oh no—it was the other one who made him uneasy, the
primo tenore:
Signor Luigi Bàccolo, supertenor, king of the operatic hill for lo these many years. Bàccolo the Great—and he
was
great, at one time, and still was more often than not. Irregular greatness, must be a pain to live with. Never knowing whether tonight was going to be one of the outstanding performances or merely an acceptable one. Eh, Luig'—whassamadda, you slippin'?

The Duke of Mantua in the glossy photograph was John Herman, a blue-eyed, blond Canadian who hid his Nordickness under dark make-up and a wig every time he stepped out on a stage. Some of the world's greatest Italian tenors hadn't been Italian at all—the Swedish Bjoerling, the Jewish-American Tucker, the Spanish Domingo. And now Canadian John Herman, whose concert fees had risen to equal those of Luigi Bàccolo and who was singing more and more of the great Bàccolo's roles.

It was too soon; Bàccolo had years of singing left in him. But the new boy from up north was beginning to catch on with the ever-fickle opera-going public. There were other tenors around, but none to carry the serious threat that the Canadian posed. John Herman smiled out of his photograph, a wickedly sensual Duke of Mantua, a role that once had been Luigi Bàccolo's private property at the Metropolitan Opera.

Bàccolo would pay, the man called Pluto thought, no doubt of that. The tenor would gladly pay for the removal of his rival. But the question was, would he keep his mouth shut afterward? Would he be able to, overemotional and excitable as he was? It would be a risk.

That was the trouble with free-lance murder. So many
risks.

You
just never knew how people were going to react. Pluto knew it was a foolish hope, but he'd still like to see a little gratitude once in a while. When you tell people that their recent good fortune is the direct result of something
you
have done—was it too much to expect at least a thank you? Of course, Pluto always collected his fee—he
always
collected—but still, an occasional expression of appreciation would surely not be amiss.

His clients just didn't realize all that was involved. He couldn't simply push the offending party down a steep flight of stairs and then walk away. That might look like an accident; it was important that the death
not
look like an accident. It had to be quite clearly a case of homicide, the police had to be involved, it had to be in the newspapers and on television. The client had to understand beyond doubt that he personally was benefiting from somebody else's act of murder. Otherwise he might think Pluto was just some nobody trying to cash in on a semi-unfortunate accidental death. The client must be made to understand that he was in debt to
a practiced killer.
That always made collection of the fee a fairly smooth operation.

No one appreciated all the preparation that was involved. He had expenses. Pluto had to research his subjects, even to the point of occasionally employing the services of credit bureaus and detective agencies. When seeking out a prospective source of income, he always looked for a combination of conflict and good money; but he had to know a great deal about the combatants before he took sides. Then too he had to time the killing perfectly; his future client must have an airtight alibi or the whole thing was just so much wasted effort. A client arrested for murder was no client at all. Pluto had actually passed over several rather promising conflicts because
one
or more of the participants had some remote link with organized crime. In such cases the police would immediately think
contract killing
and haul in Pluto's client without a second thought. A hundred thousand dollars down the drain.