The Murderer Vine (7 page)

“I wonder how I can explain my sudden magnetism,” he said as we waited for a cab.

“It’s your charm,” I said. “It is well known that all Canadians are loaded with it. In the meantime, did you notice the way her eyes were glued to your wallet? They burned a hole right through your jacket after you put it in your pocket.”

“Don’t worry about me, Yank,” he said. “When I step out with that broad on Friday, all of it except one hundred and fifty is going to be in my safe-deposit box.”

“Next to the cobwebs.”

He liked that.

It’s a pleasure to deal with smart operators.

After the cab had gone a few blocks, I told the driver to pull over. He was annoyed at losing the long haul to the airport, but he had better manners than a New York hackie would in a similar situation. I waited till he had disappeared. Then I took another cab to McGill University. I have never been there. Moran’s excellent nervousness about the Mafia would suffer a serious setback if he ever found out that I had gone personally to look over McGill.

I got out. I spent two hours walking slowly around the campus, looking at the buildings, memorizing their names and position on the campus. I ambled in and out of the stores that supplied the students.

In a bookstore I bought several books on my new specialty. I made sure they were all secondhand. Then I bought three of the most recent ones. That hurt because the subject was somewhat obscure, and in my field’s postgraduate level that meant fifteen to twenty bucks apiece. But what the hell, it was a business expense, and I grinned as I realized I was automatically thinking of the income tax deductions.

I went by the medical school with my new purchases under my arm. I really looked like a member of McGill, and several students nodded to me, on the principle that it paid to be courteous to any professor. I went up the steps, looking for authentic bits of local color, the kind that could be casually sprinkled in conversation. The kind that would automatically clinch a position. Imagine that you’ve only been in New York for two hours. You wind up walking through Washington Square Park. You stop for a moment and watch the chess games going on at the inlaid tables at the southwest corner of the park. Years later someone asks you if you know New York. You respond with, “Sure. Remember those chess games they used to play on those inlaid tables at the southwest corner of Washington Square Park?” You’ve got it made.

I wandered over to the side streets and found an old bar named Delehanty’s. It must have been popular ever since McGill was founded, judging from the way the wood tables in the back were carved up with initials and years.

I went to the men’s room. Not only did I go there for the usual reason, but because men’s rooms near universities usually have some good remarks lettered above the urinals. As long as you’re there, you might as well write. This urinal was a six-foot-tall porcelain giant, with a huge cake of ice at the bottom into which everyone there earlier had been trying to drill holes. A huge brass handle flushed it with a roar afterwards. There were two good graffiti I decided to memorize. One said:
Tomorrow will be canceled because of technical difficulties. GOD.
The other one said simply,
The whole white race is queer.
Noted for possible use in Mississippi.

The bartender would be a good source of local color. I ordered a beer. There was no one else around. He was a disgruntled man of sixty or so, with lantern jaw and gold-rimmed spectacles. He was polishing glasses and looking off into space.

“Nice day,” I offered.

He looked at me with loathing. He was not Rheingold’s image of your friendly neighborhood bartender.

I amended my remark to “It
was
nice till I came in.”

Nothing.

“Does it snow here in the winter, mister?” I asked, beginning to get annoyed.

He spoke. He said, “You think if you buy one lousy beer you can file a homestead claim on me for the afternoon?”

He had something there.

“Well, no,” I said, trying reason, “but a friendly hello from a stranger is worth a friendly — ”

He reached under the bar and placed a friendly hickory club on the counter.

I could have stayed and escalated our little talk to prove to him and to myself that his manners were bad. But then I would wind up in police court and some bored reporter might give it some play. This was not a good idea if I wanted to make half a million bucks. Some shrewd Southern private detective might be drifting up here someday and, as a lawyer tells clients planning a Nevada divorce and that six-week stay, “Leave a trail of indicia behind you.” I didn’t want to leave any indicia. Discretion — and cash — is the better part of valor.

“That’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” I said. I paused. Since you can’t be in Canada five minutes without finding out what steams up a good, solid, non-French Canadian, I had my exit line. I moved toward the door, turned and said, “I leave you with this thought for the day:
Vive Québec Libre!”

I felt better all the way to the airport.

When I got into the office next morning at nine-thirty, Kirby was already there. She demanded to know how soon she could be a spy.

“Soon, soon,” I said. “Type up the Burger report.” Three hundred and fifty bucks could come in handy, and that embezzler’s firm might pay immediately if I attached a little note saying I needed cash right away. Because I’d never see it if things worked out all right with the Parrish deal.

“Yes, sir,” she said. Her spirits seemed dampened.

“And start forgetting all those diction lessons,” I said. “Let’s have that cornpone and fried-chicken routine.”

“Yassuh,” she said glumly, inserting carbons between the blank pages. “Oh, but yassuh.”

I closed the door and phoned Bryan. He said to come on over. I hung up and was there in ten minutes. Bryan was probably the best still photographer alive. He had been a combat photographer in Korea. We met when I was firing a machine gun with serious intent to maim and I suddenly became aware that this little creature, whom I had seen only once before when our captain told us he had been assigned to our outfit, was prone on his belly and looking for a good composition. He wanted to get both me and the North Chinese coming up the hill at me. He had a very expensive Leica with a lens as long as my middle finger and another one for color.

“Hold it!” he said.

I didn’t hold it. Instead I said, “Take that baby Brownie and shove it up your ass!” We’ve been friends ever since.

After Korea he went to Paris on the GI Bill, where he studied art. He got a job with the Paris edition of
Vogue
while he was there and built himself a reputation. From there he went to M.I.T. and studied the physics of light. From then on all he had to do was name his price. From time to time he would go somewhere and take pictures. They were made into books. No gimmicks, no tricks. He could take any camera made and put it together in the dark.

Yet he was the most unnoticeable little man I ever saw. He was five feet four, with an ordinary face and ordinary hair. He was so completely ordinary that he would make the perfect tail. I mean, he could follow some guy for hours who would be suspicious to start with. The guy would turn around and see Bryan three steps behind him staring at him. He’d pay no attention and look for someone else. Ten minutes later he’d turn around, say in an elevator with only the two of them in it, and Bryan would be six inches behind him. “No,” the guy would mutter to himself. “No. This can’t possibly be following me.”

But he was the most talented photographer in the world.

He had a studio and loft combined off Fifth Avenue at 19th Street. It wasn’t a fashionable area, but he didn’t lose any sleep over it. I walked up the creaking, sagging wooden steps three flights to his door.

Outside two private cops were sitting on kitchen chairs.

When I approached, one of them said very politely, “May I help you, sir?”

I was puzzled. “I don’t think so,” I said. “My business is with Mr. Farr.” I started to pass him, but he stood up and blocked me.

I began to get annoyed. “May I have your name, sir?” he asked. I told him.

He opened the door and called inside, “A Mr. Dunne to see you, sir.”

I heard Bryan’s voice yelling, “The international jewel thief! Send him in.” The guard didn’t think that was funny, and I failed to see the point of it myself until I entered.

The studio always looked to me a mile long. There was a big skylight at the far end. There was nothing in the place except Bryan and a naked girl.

“Is she that much in demand?” I asked, jerking a thumb toward the two cops.

“No, but her necklace is,” Bryan said.

The girl was very slender, with sharp little breasts. She had a cold, remote, untouchable, and very expensive aura. She would only be photographed stepping out of a Rolls, or wearing a cashmere sweater and patting a thoroughbred race horse. With hollow cheeks, high cheekbones, sharp little muzzle, and with her yellow-green eyes that were giving me a polar stare, she looked like a bitch-wolf.

I tore my gaze away finally from her private goodies and looked at the necklace.

“It’s got twenty-eight diamonds on it,” Bryan said, “each the size of an almond. It used to belong to ze Grand Duchess Olga of ze Russian imperial family.”

“She give it to you?”

“You really think I look like a gigolo?” he asked, flattered.

“No.”

“Well, nevertheless, the neck — ”

“Hurry up, will you, Mr. Farr,” she said. “This goddam necklace weighs a ton, honest.”

She tugged it up with one aristocratic slender hand while the other set of long exquisite fingers rubbed the back of her neck.

“Hold on,” he said. “It’ll be over soon.”

While he was adjusting a muslin sheet under the skylight, he spoke. “It belongs to Will Howell. He just bought it. I’m taking the shot to illustrate the full-page ad he’s going to run in
Fortune.
It’ll just show Elisa here backing up the necklace and at the bottom it’ll read, spelled out, no figures, seven hundred and fifty thousand. Plus tax. At the upper left-hand corner it’ll say, small, lowercase,
Will Howell.
And at the lower right hand it’ll say, awful small,
Bryan Farr.”

“You’ve come far, Bryan.”

Elisa burst out into laughter. “That’s funny!” she cried. “That’s really awfully funny.” I thought she was kidding, but I realized she was serious. She was holding the necklace up in the air and the strain on her shoulder made that perfect little cone stick out all by itself.

“Throw the necklace out the window,” I said. “The valuable item is underneath it.”

I walked over and held the necklace up so that I took the weight off her neck. I thought she was kidding a little about the weight but this girl was serious about everything. It
was
heavy.

“Hey,” she said to Bryan, twisting around to look up at me, “I like your friend.”

“All right, Joe. You can help. Hold up the necklace. I got to get this light just right.” He was using natural light plus a purple spot to bring out the highlights in the diamonds. He prowled around, trying the spot at different heights.

“Boy,” she said, “you don’t know what a relief it is to get that thing off my boobs. They’re sensitive to pressure, you know.”

“So I hear.”

She had round little nipples the size and color of ripe raspberries.

“You like me?”

“Bryan,” I said, “go to the movies.”

“Not when she gets seventy-five bucks an hour. Control yourself.”

“I can tell you’re not a fag,” she said. “This business is just loaded with them. Oh, not Mr. Farr! He said I’m not his style. He said I’m too skinny. He said when I pulled out my permanent back molars to get this great high cheekbone effect, he said, Lisa, you have the brains of a cockroach. He said, Lisa, if brains were beans, he said, you don’t have enough to make a mosquito fart.”

She giggled.

I began to reconsider our romance.

“Yes,” she said, “he really did say that.” She repeated it in case I might have missed it the first time. “Listen,” she said, “I really like you. Even though you’re old, and got some gray hair. Why don’t you ask me for a date?”

I didn’t want to ask her for a date anymore. But who knows, if I kept her mouth filled with food and liquor she might stop talking.

“How about tonight?”

“Great!”

“Shall I pick you up at eight?”

“Sure. But you’ll have to bring me home by nine-thirty. I go to bed by ten.”

“And that’s exactly right, Joe.”

“Yes,” Lisa said primly. “I sleep ten hours every night. Except Saturday night. Saturday night I can stay up till midnight. You know why?”

“Because then you turn into a pumpkin?”

“No, you’re silly! But that’s funny! A pumpkin!”

There was something appealing about a girl who liked all my jokes. One could get attached to her. I began to rethink my sour attitude.

“I stay up till midnight on Saturday,” she continued, “because unless I get ten hours a night, it shows around my eyes. They get all baggy. On Saturday night it doesn’t matter so much because on Sunday I go to bed at seven to make up for the time I lost on Saturday. Those three hours extra — ”

“I get it,” I said kindly.

“Those three hours extra,” she went on, “they make up for going to bed late on Saturday. You know why I need so much sleep? Because,” she said impressively, “because the camera
does not lie.”

“That’s a very impressive statement,” I said. “Please repeat it so I won’t forget it.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Bryan said.

She repeated it.

“I must remember that,” I said.

“Joe,” Bryan said, “as a matter of fact, why don’t you go and stand in the hallway for a few minutes? I don’t think I can stand this much more.”

I went out and stood next to the cops. They eyed me and kept their hands near their gun butts. I told them to relax.

“That’s a very valuable piece in there,” one of them said importantly.