Time to Murder and Create (17 page)

I don't know how long I sat there. A couple of hours, I suppose. Periodically a panhandler would brace me. Sometimes I'd contribute toward the next bottle of sweet wine. Sometimes I'd tell the bum to fuck off.

By the time I left the park and walked over to Ninth Avenue, St. Paul's was closed for the day. The downstairs was opening up, however. It was too late to pray but just the right hour for bingo.

Armstrong's was open, and it had been a long dry night and day. I told them to forget the coffee.

THE next forty hours or so were pretty much of a blur. I don't know how long I stayed in Armstrong's or where I went after that. Sometime Friday morning I woke up alone in a hotel room in the Forties, a squalid room in the kind of hotel to which Times Square streetwalkers take their johns. I had no memory of a woman and my money was all still there, so it looked as though I had probably checked in alone.

There was a pint bottle of bourbon on the dresser, about two-thirds empty. I killed it and left the hotel and went on drinking, and reality faded in and out, and sometime during that night I must have decided I was done, because I managed to find my way back to my hotel.

Saturday morning the telephone woke me. It seemed to ring for a long time before I roused myself enough to reach for it. I managed to knock it off the little nightstand and onto the floor, and by the time I managed to pick it up and get it to my ear I was reasonably close to consciousness.

It was Guzik.

"You're hard to find," he said. "I been trying to reach you since yesterday.

Didn't you get my messages?"

"I didn't stop at the desk."

"I gotta talk to you."

"What about?"

"When I see you. I'll be over in ten minutes."

I told him to give me half an hour. He said he'd meet me in the lobby. I said that would be fine.

I stood under the shower, first hot, then cold. I took a couple of aspirin and drank a lot of water. I had a hangover, which I had certainly earned, but aside from that I felt reasonably good. The drinking had purged me. I would still carry Henry Prager's death around with me--you cannot entirely shrug off such burdens--but I had managed to drown some of the guilt, and it was no longer as oppressive as it had been.

I took the clothes I'd been wearing, wadded them up, and stuffed them into the closet. Eventually I'd decide whether the cleaner could restore them, but for the moment I didn't even want to think about it. I shaved and put on clean clothes and drank two more glasses of tap water. The aspirin had polished off the headache, but I was dehydrated from too many hours of hard drinking, and every cell in my body had an unquenchable thirst.

I got down to the lobby before he arrived. I checked the desk and found that he'd called four times.

There were no other messages, and no mail of any importance. I was reading one of the unimportant letters--an insurance company would give me a leather-covered memorandum book absolutely free if I would tell my date of birth--when Guzik came in. He was wearing a well-tailored suit; you had to look carefully to see he was carrying a gun.

He came over and took a chair next to me. He told me again that I was hard to find. "Wanted to talk to you after I saw Ethridge," he said. "Jesus, she's something, isn't she? She turns the class on and off. One minute you can't believe she was ever a pross, and the next minute you can't believe she was anything else but."

"She's an odd one, all right."

"Uh-huh. She's also getting out sometime today."

"She made bail? I thought they'd book her for Murder One."

"Not bail. Not booking her for anything, Matt. We got nothing to hold her on."

I looked at him. I could feel the muscles in my forearms tightening. I said,

"How much did it cost her?"

"I told you, no bail. We--"

"What did it cost her to buy out of a murder charge? I always heard you could wash homicide if you had enough cash. Never saw it done, but I heard about it, and--"

He was almost ready to swing, and I was by God hoping he would do it, because I wanted an excuse to put him through the wall. A tendon stood out on his neck, and his eyes narrowed to slits. Then he relaxed suddenly, and his face regained its original color.

He said, "Well, you would have to figure it that way, wouldn't you?"

"Well?"

He shook his head. "Nothing to hold her on," he said again. "That's what I was trying to tell you."

"How about Spinner Jablon?"

"She didn't kill him."

"Her bully boy did. Her pimp, whatever the hell he was. Lundgren."

"No way."

"The hell."

"No way," Guzik said. "He was in California. Town called Santa Paula, it's halfway between L.A. and Santa Barbara."

"He flew here and then flew back."

"No way. He was there from a few weeks before we fished Spinner out of the river until a couple of days afterward, and nobody's gonna shake that alibi. He did thirty days in Santa Paula city jail. They tagged him for assault and let him plead to drunk and disorderly. He did the whole thirty days. Just no way on earth that he was in New York when Spinner got it."

I stared at him.

"So maybe she had another boyfriend," he went on. "We figured that was possible. We could try to turn him up, but does it make any sense that way? She wouldn't use one guy to hit Spinner and another to go after you. It doesn't make sense."

"What about the assault on me?"

"What about it?" He shrugged. "Maybe she put him up to it. Maybe she didn't. She swears she didn't.

Her story is she called him for advice when you put the screws to her and he flew out to see if he could

help. She said she told him not to get rough, that she thought she would be able to buy you off. That's her story, but what can you expect her to say? Maybe she wanted him to kill you and maybe she didn't, but how can you put enough together to make a case out of it? Lundgren is dead, and nobody else has any information that absolutely implicates her. There's no evidence to tie her to the attack on you. You can prove she knew Lundgren and you can prove she had a motive for wanting you dead. You can't prove any kind of an accessory or conspiracy charge. You can't come up with anything to get an indictment returned, you can't even get anything that would make anybody in the District Attorney's office take the whole thing seriously."

"There's no way the Santa Paula records are wrong?"

"No way. Spinner would have had to spend a month in the river, and it didn't happen that way."

"No. He was alive within ten days of the time the body was found. I spoke to him on the telephone. I don't get it. She had to have another accomplice."

"Maybe. Polygraph says no."

"She agreed to take a lie-detector test?"

"We never asked her to. She demanded it. It gets her completely off the hook as far as Spinner was concerned. It's not quite as clear as far as the attack on you was concerned. The expert who administered the test says there's a little stress involved, that his guess would be she did and didn't know Lundgren was going to try to take you out. Like she suspected it but they hadn't talked about it and she'd been able to avoid thinking about it."

"Those tests aren't always a hundred percent."

"They come close enough, Matt. Sometimes they'll make a person look guilty when he's not, especially if the operator isn't very good at what he's doing.

But if they say you're innocent, it's a pretty good bet you are. I think they ought to be admissible in court."

I had always felt that way myself. I sat there for a while trying to run it all through my mind until

everything fell into place. It took its time. Meanwhile, Guzik went on talking about the interrogation of Beverly Ethridge, pointing up his remarks with observations on what he would like to do with her. I didn't pay him much attention.

I said, "The car wasn't him. I should have realized that."

"How's that?"

"The car," I said. "I told you a car took a shot at me one night. The same night I spotted Lundgren for the first time, and the place was the same as where he came at me with the knife, so I had to think it was the same man both times."

"You never saw the driver?"

"No. I figured it was Lundgren because he'd been dogging me earlier that night and I thought he'd been setting me up. But it couldn't have been that way. It wouldn't be his style. He liked that knife too much."

"Then who was it?"

"Spinner said somebody ran up onto a curb after him. The same bit."

"Who?"

"Plus the voice on the phone. Then there were no calls any more."

"I don't follow you, Matt."

I looked at him. "Trying to make the pieces fit. That's all. Somebody killed Spinner."

"The question is who."

I nodded. "That's the question," I said.

"One of the other people he gave you the dope on?"

"They all check out," I said. "Maybe he had more people after him than he ever told me about. Maybe he added somebody to the string after he gave me the envelope. The hell, maybe somebody rolled him for his cash, hit him too hard, panicked, and threw the body in the river."

"It happens."

"Sure it happens."

"You think we'll ever find out who did him?"

I shook my head. "Do you?"

"No," Guzik said. "No, I don't think we ever will."

I had never been in the building before. There were two doormen on duty, and the elevator was manned. The doormen made sure that I was expected, and the elevator operator whisked me up eighteen floors and indicated which door was the one I was looking for. He didn't budge until I had rung the bell and been admitted.

The apartment was as impressive as the rest of the building. There was a stairway leading to a second floor. An olive-skinned maid led me into a large den with oak-paneled walls and a fireplace. About half the books on the shelves were bound in leather. It was a very comfortable room in a very spacious apartment. The apartment had cost almost two hundred thousand dollars, and the monthly maintenance charge came to something like fifteen hundred.

When you've got enough money, you can buy just about anything you want.

"He will be with you in a moment," the maid said. "He said for you to help yourself to a drink."

She pointed to a serving bar alongside the fireplace. There was ice in a silver bucket, and a couple of dozen bottles. I sat in a red leather chair and waited for him.

I didn't have to wait very long. He entered the room. He was wearing white flannel slacks and a plaid blazer. He had a pair of leather house slippers on his feet.

"Well, now," he said. He smiled to show how genuinely glad he was to see me. "You'll have something to drink, I hope."

"Not just now."

"It's a little early for me too, as a matter of fact. You sounded quite urgent on the phone, Mr. Scudder. I gather you've had second thoughts about working for me."

"No."

"I received the impression--"

"That was to get in here."

He frowned. "I'm not sure I understand."

"I'm really not sure whether you do or not, Mr. Huysendahl. I think you'd better close the door."

"I don't care for your tone."

"You're not going to care for any of this," I said. "You'll like it less with the door open. I think you should close it."

He was about to say something, perhaps another observation about my tone of voice and how little he cared for it, but instead he closed the door.

"Sit down, Mr. Huysendahl."

He was used to giving orders, not taking them, and I thought he was going to make an issue out of it. But he sat down, and his face wasn't quite enough of a mask to keep me from knowing that he knew what it was all about. I'd known anyway, because there was just no other way the pieces could fit together, but his face confirmed it for me.

"Are you going to tell me what this is all about?"

"Oh, I'm going to tell you. But I think you already know. Don't you?"

"Certainly not."

I looked over his shoulder at an oil painting of somebody's ancestor. Maybe one of his. I didn't notice any family resemblance, though.

I said, "You killed Spinner Jablon."

"You're out of your mind."

"No."

"You already found out who killed Jablon. You told me that the day before yesterday."

"I was wrong."

"I don't know what you're driving at, Scudder--"

"A man tried to kill me Wednesday night," I said. "You know about that. I assumed he was the same man who killed Spinner, and I managed to tie him to one of Spinner's other suckers, so I thought that cleared you. But it turns out that he couldn't have killed Spinner, because he was on the other side of the country at the time. His alibi for Spinner's death was as solid as they come. He was in jail at the time."

I looked at him. He was patient now, hearing me out with the same intent stare he had fixed on me Thursday afternoon when I told him he was in the clear.

I said, "I should have known he wasn't the only one involved, that more than one of Spinner's victims had decided to fight back. The man who tried to kill me was a loner. He liked to use a knife. But I'd been attacked earlier by one or more men in a car, a stolen car. And a few minutes after that attack I had a phone call from an older man with a New York accent. I'd had a call from that man before. It didn't make sense that the knife artist would have had anybody else in on it. So somebody else was behind the dodge with the car, and somebody else was responsible for knocking Spinner on the head and dumping him in the river."

"That doesn't mean I had anything to do with it."

"I think it does. As soon as the man with the knife is taken out of the picture, it's obvious that everything was pointing to you all along. He was an amateur, but in other respects the operation was all quite professional. A car stolen from another neighborhood with a very good man at the wheel. Some men who were good enough to find Spinner when he didn't want to be found. You had the money to hire that kind of talent. And you had the connections."