The Murderer Vine (8 page)

“I don’t know about that,” I said. “Chemically, she’s only worth about eighty-three cents.”

He clammed up. I leaned on the dusty banister and smoked. Five minutes later Bryan called us in. The cops put the necklace in a small velvet-lined box. “How do you know that’s not a paste substitute you just put in there?” I asked.

They went out worried, still with their hands on their butts. I held the door and watched them go down the stairs. They kept looking up at me, and one of them tripped on the bottom step. I closed the door.

Bryan said, “You made their day. Why pick on a couple jerks doing their duty?”

“I don’t like nervous guys around guns,” I said. “Some poor kid’ll ask them for a match and they’ll each put five slugs in his belly.”

Bryan was at the window. “Look, look!” he chortled. “They don’t know whether we’ve got the real necklace up here or not, after that crack of yours.”

I went over and looked down. They were arguing outside the armored truck. We were still grinning when Lisa appeared. “Goodbye, Mr. Farr,” she said. She thrust a piece of paper at me with her phone number on it. She giggled and went out. When the door closed, I crumpled it and tossed it in the wastebasket.

“You’re better off, believe me,” Bryan said. He reversed the film in his Leica. “All right. When you wouldn’t tell me over the phone, I knew it was serious.”

“Here’s the situation. I know enough to take flash at night and get those action shots which mean so much to us. You taught me how to get that kind of stuff, how to get it in good focus, suitable for eight-by-ten blowups. But this time it’s going to be a lot more complicated. I need a camera that will take extreme close-ups.”

“Close-ups of what?”

“Teeth.”

He stared at me.

“For dental identification.”

“That’s not hard. You get a good lens, a tripod, take your exposure correctly, and then — ”

“You’re assuming good light conditions.”

“Yes.”

“I can’t assume that. Assume light will be lousy. And no flash.”

“You don’t want to attract attention?”

I nodded.

“Extreme close-up,” he mused. “Depth of field important, especially on teeth. Bad light. You don’t want much, do you?”

“Can do?”

“You’ll need a damn good lens. To grab all the available light. You might need a time exposure. You’ll need a good light meter. A fifty millimeter lens, let’s see — ” He began to write down what I would need. “ — and a tripod,” he finished.

“A
tripod?”

“You might think you have steady hands, but at half or a fifth of a second you’ll wobble that lens like a drunken sailor. And you want a very sharp image which has to be blown up. This isn’t one of your hundredth-of-a-second jobs with flash showing two naked people sitting up in bed, Joe baby. This has got to be real careful and professional. I take it you can’t go back if the first try doesn’t work out.”

“Not likely.”

“Take this list and take it to Sam Belliss, down on Chambers Street. Have Sam put the lens into this model Leica box. Just mention my name. It’ll help a lot. He’ll take off twenty percent. The whole deal should run you about three fifty.”

“Okay. Whatever you say.” He gave me the list.

“And get yourself a depth-of-field scale and study it.”

“A what?”

“You mean you don’t know what a depth-of-field scale is?”

“Nope.”

He held his head.

“Joe. I was supposed to get these prints out to Will Howell by seven tonight. The
New Yorker
goes to press in two days, and they want to make this issue. I wish I never met you. Take a cab to Sam’s, get that stuff, and shoot back here. I’ll give you a careful lecture. Why, oh, why did the Signal Corps stick me in your unit?”

The next day I showed all the symptoms of a man going crazy. I got up, shaved, went downstairs, ate breakfast, read the paper, walked around the block three times with my hands in my pockets, went upstairs, drank two cups of coffee, read a month-old magazine, and finally decided to do something intelligent.

I took out my combat Magnum, police undercover agent special. The last time I had used it was four months ago when a hijack mob stealing bolts of raw silk fired at me. I got one of them in the hip.

This job was a little beauty. She was .357 caliber. Two-and-a-half-inch barrel, and the stock was checked walnut. It was, as one of my police friends fondly said, “round as little sister’s ass, and the rest of her was sweet as taffy candy.” I decided it was time to scrub little sister.

Everything looked kosher, but you never know. The hammer was clean and moved nice and easy in its slot. The firing pin tip was hemispherical; if it gets too sharp, it pierces the primer and then the cylinder would freeze up on me when I would wish it wouldn’t. I pulled the trigger. The pin went right through the face of the standing breech. Okay. I took a Q-tip from the medicine chest and cleaned out some un-burned powder grains and assorted pieces of gook — lint, tobacco fragments. They came from under the extractor star — and that’s another thing that could happen — and they might jam the cylinder.

The ejector rod had loosened up. That could get serious. I mean, if it got worse, it could bend against the forward locking lug and then the cylinder wouldn’t rotate. That means I wouldn’t be able to fire little sister. I tightened it. I began whistling. The timing was all right. The blueing was a little worn off the fore sight, but nothing serious. If I had to use it, I didn’t think I’d be using a fore sight, anyway. I’d probably be pointing it like a nozzle on a hose.

Okay. There she was, ready to roll. I had taken fifteen minutes to check her out and scrub her for the road. I carefully put her away in the Bucheimer holster. I liked that holster. I could stick the Magnum in it and turn it upside-down and shake it. Little sister would stay inside and wouldn’t come out. It had an adjustable screw tension post that held her snug. It also had a nice hammer shroud that I liked, ever since last time I had to get her in a hurry and I found out that the hammer caught in my jacket lining and ripped it. The holster cost plenty, but it was worth it. I sat and stared fondly at the both of them. And then I said to myself, Stupid. Boy, you are stupid.

Because I couldn’t take her with me. Why? Because I had to assume suspicion on their part down there. Sooner or later someone might just take a peek at my luggage. Plenty of people pack handguns down there, but who packs a .38 detective special that would set them back a hundred and twenty bucks? No good. It was the traditional police detective weapon.

If I wanted to, I could pick up a cheap handgun down there and keep it in my glove compartment like everyone else, but then, why would a nice peaceful Canadian Ph.D. candidate from the ivy-clad walls of McGill go around toting a gun?

No. A gun like little sister would have to stay home.

I would eventually need a gun, and I would have to make damn sure no one ever caught sight of it until they had to look at it, but by then it wouldn’t matter. And it would have to be some spectacular arrangement of a weapon. Something really special. In the meantime, I had wasted fifteen minutes polishing and whistling. It would be better for me to get out of the house before I cut my throat. I was getting more and more nervous. It wasn’t like me at all. But then I never had had a chance at half a million before. I guess it was excusable.

I shaved again without realizing I had already done so. I put on a clean shirt, tied a knot carefully in the tie, and walked west one block and up five to the Metropolitan Museum. I went up the steps three at a time to get rid of some of that energy, arrived at the top without puffing — those once weekly swimming sessions pay off, eh, Dunne? — and went by the usual giggling group of school kids clustered around the big naked statue of some Roman emperor. Their teacher was telling them about the glories of Ancient Rome with her eyes grimly fixed on the emperor’s toes. I grinned and walked through Ancient Greece and looked at a vase with a javelin thrower poised to really give it a good heave.

Damn it, that made me think of my problem again.

Suppose I arrived at the critical moment. I knew who my five people were. What would I do, stalk them one by one? Let’s say I pick off the first. Maybe I get away with it. How about the second? Maybe I can pull that off too. But by then everyone else will be alerted. It would be about impossible to get close to them. They’d stay up all night with shotguns. And a man can’t go around all night in a small town and escape observation. No. No good.

I found myself in front of the Japanese weapon collection. A staff member had some people arranged in front of him in a semicircle. I stopped to listen.

“Never before or since the eleventh century,” he was saying, “has anyone, anywhere, improved upon the steel in the eleventh-century Japanese sword. The man who made it had priestly status. Women were not allowed nearby while he was working on the sword. It was drawn several times, folded over, drawn again, and so forth. A blade was tested by cutting through twenty copper coins arranged in a stack. If the blade became nicked, it was rejected. The samurai were permitted to try out the blade on prisoners condemned to death. The usual stroke entered the body at the left shoulder blade and made its exit at — ”

So long. The first part was interesting. The details I preferred to skip. I slid around the group and looked in the restaurant by the pool. It looked inviting and not crowded. I took a cup of coffee, found a table next to the water, and listened to the splashing from the bronze figures scattered about the pool.

I tested out some more ideas. Good names for me and Kirby. Moran would be bringing down two blank Canadian driving licenses, neatly stamped and issued. He knew someone who would remove the real names and data chemically, and Kirby and I would have two nicely worn proofs we really existed.

“Is this table taken?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“This is a table for four, young man, and you’re sitting all alone. Are you or are you
not
waiting for your friends?”

The restaurant had filled up while I was daydreaming.

“No, ma’am.” I pulled my legs under my chair, brought my elbows close to my body, and dragged the ashtray in front of me. I had been sprawled all over.

“You had your legs stretched out,” she began, in a piercing whine. She removed her bread pudding and salad with Russian dressing. She banged down her empty tray at my elbow and sat down. She picked up her spoon and added, “All I can say is, some people are very inconsiderate.”

“I beg your pardon.” I pulled my legs even more tightly under my chair.

She hadn’t finished.

Oh, the women I’d been meeting! The first was my date on Kirby’s diction money. Alice was all right, and adequate in bed, a cheese sandwich when you’re hungry. It stops the hunger, but its anticipation and consumption and after-image and desire to repeat are at zero degrees.

Then those two call girls at L’Horloge, the ones with arctic eyes. No point in thinking further about them.

Then Lisa. Good instincts, but the brain capacity of early Neanderthal woman.

And now this stupid bag who’d gotten the world’s hook in her mouth — by her looks, at an early age — complained about it feverishly, and would die in ten minutes, like a fish out of water, if it were suddenly removed.

“I’m really very sorry. I had no idea I was obstructing — ”

You have to admit I was trying.

“The trouble with New York, young man — ” she began, but I took last honors there.

“Is
you
madam,” I said, and got up.

I wandered out and wound up somehow in the American Wing. I liked the simple looks of colonial furniture. I stopped at the dining room of a rich Charlestown merchant, 1745. There was a full-size mannequin of the lady of the house, standing near the fireplace and smiling at me, as if she was welcoming me to her house.

“Hello, baby,” I said.

She kept smiling. I suddenly found myself thinking of Kirby. She could be standing there in front of the fireplace, in one of those long, low-cut gowns, with a white powdered wig, a black heart-shaped beauty mark just at the swell of the left breast. I bet she’d look great, with her long legs and firm bust, and with that shrewd little sparkle in her eyes that came whenever she was excited and interested in what was going on.

There wouldn’t be any herbivorous calm or icy calculation or stupidity or a perpetual whine about her. I began to think I was very lucky at having her for an assistant — no, it was her idea to use her accent as camouflage. Let’s call her an associate in this joint venture. I felt suddenly much better about the whole thing. I’d always operated alone; it felt damn good to work for a change with someone bright and funny. Thinking of her was a good omen, and, ten minutes later, when I was in the antique gun collection looking at a sixteenth-century pistol with six barrels, each having its own trigger, I had an idea that would solve my last problem.

I went right to the museum entrance, got into a phone booth, and called George Foglia.

George never talked on phones. You said, “Hi, George, how’s things?” He knew that meant you wanted to discuss serious matters. If he said, “Fine, how’s yourself?” it meant he was open for a meeting.

George answered the phone. “Hi, George,” I said. “Joe Dunne. How’s things?”

“Fine. How’s yourself?”

“Fine, just fine, George.”

“Where you hangin’ out these days?”

“The Metropolitan Museum.”

“You’re kiddin’.”

When I convinced him I was really there, he said, “You know, I never made a sale there yet.”

“There’s always the first time.”

“Well, why not? I’ll be over right away.”

We met in the bookshop off the main entrance. I was killing time by looking through a book on Etruscan art. He came in and peeked at it over my shoulder.

“Hey,” he said, “ain’t that one the forgery we sold the Museum? That guy with the sword?”

It was. George swelled with pride.

“You gotta admit it,” he said, “we wops are great at forgeries. Catch some wop museum buyin’ a forgery! It’ll never happen. Right?”