The Murderer Vine Read online

  As soon as I walked into the waiting room, I heard a shrill rebel yell. I had just enough time to turn around to see a blonde flash coming fast at me. Then I was struck by two arms and a shower of kisses. Some of Kirby’s hair got loose from the silver barrette she was wearing at the back of her neck, and it fell across my face. She gave me a passionate bear hug. She was a strong woman with good back muscles and she was using every one she had.

  I couldn’t afford to be as impetuous as she was. “Take it easy,” I muttered. She paid no attention. She was carried away by the audience.

  She gave me a kiss smack on the mouth, a direct frontal kiss that forced my lips against my teeth rather painfully. It was a hard, sex-starved kiss from a passionate lady who hadn’t seen her husband for one long week and who had been telling everyone how much she loved him.

  I muttered again, “Hey, take it easy!”

  “I can’t,” she hissed. “I told everyone how much I missed you.”

  So I kissed her back. It started out as a supporting role for my Academy Award friend, but after two seconds it got out of control. I realized the lady was serious. She was pressing her breasts against me. She was wearing a thin nylon blouse of an apricot color, and a thin nylon bra underneath. I was wearing a thin cotton jacket on top of a thin drip-dry blue shirt, and I could feel her nipples bulging into my chest as hard as cherry candy.

  I finally pulled away. The small of her back was soaked with sweat.

  I let her take my attaché case and I followed her out to the car. I didn’t like her carrying it. And that shows you how stupid I was. I thought somehow she’d be less involved if she wouldn’t have touched it. As if she wasn’t in it already like someone caught in quicksand...

  SOME OTHER HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS YOU WILL ENJOY:

  LUCKY AT CARDS by Lawrence Block

  ROBBIE’S WIFE by Russell Hill

  THE VENGEFUL VIRGIN by Gil Brewer

  THE WOUNDED AND THE SLAIN by David Goodis

  BLACKMAILER by George Axelrod

  SONGS OF INNOCENCE by Richard Aleas

  FRIGHT by Cornell Woolrich

  KILL NOW, PAY LATER by Robert Terrall

  SLIDE by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr

  DEAD STREET by Mickey Spillane

  DEADLY BELOVED by Max Allan Collins

  A DIET OF TREACLE by Lawrence Block

  MONEY SHOT by Christa Faust

  ZERO COOL by John Lange

  SHOOTING STAR/SPIDERWEB by Robert Bloch

  The MURDERER Vine

  by Shepard Rifkin

  A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

  (HCC-043)

  First Hard Case Crime edition: May 2008

  Published by

  Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street

  London

  SE1 0UP

  in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should know that it is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  Copyright © 1970 by Shepard Rifkin

  Cover painting copyright © 2008 by Ken Laager

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Print edition ISBN 978-0-85768-372-4

  E-book ISBN 978-0-85768-394-6

  Cover design by Cooley Design Lab

  Design direction by Max Phillips

  www.maxphillips.net

  Typeset by Swordsmith Productions

  The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Visit us on the web at www.HardCaseCrime.com

  With many thanks

  to Joseph Barrett and Evelyn Farrell

  SHEPARD RIFKIN

  In the vast jungles of the Amazon Basin the silent war among the plants never stops. They continually strive to penetrate the leaf canopy and attain sunlight — one hundred and fifty feet above the perpetual twilight of the forest floor.

  Here there grows a certain vine.

  In order to reach the light it so desperately needs, it clings for support to the nearest tree.

  Year by year it climbs higher and higher. As it grows, it sends out two armlike tentacles every few feet around the trunk of its host. Thus, securely anchored, it climbs a few more feet. The vine finally reaches the roof of the forest and greedily spreads out its leaves in the sunlight for which it had been searching ever since it sprouted.

  But as the host grows, it slowly becomes strangled by the ever-thickening arms of the vine. Eventually, the green-growing layer of the tree is severed.

  The tree dies.

  And when the day comes in which a powerful windstorm arrives, the tree crashes to the earth, bringing the vine with it.

  Since the vine can no longer reach the light, it also dies.

  In South America, the vine is called

  La Liana Matador

  or

  The Murderer Vine

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  1

  Here we sit in Puerto Lagarto — Port Lizard. It’s on the old Mosquito Coast. Lizard and Mosquito, the two specialties down here. We’re far below Yucatán. Compared to this dump Yucatán is civilization. You put on a fresh shirt and thirty seconds later it’s sopping wet. No paved streets and only one place with ice. That’s the local cantina, La Amargura de Amor. The Bitterness of Love. Narcisco Ramirez owns it. He owns the only refrigerator. He packs it full of beer every morning. I sit in the Bitterness and drink my way from the front to the back of the refrigerator and look at the bay.

  I’ve been here two years now. I haven’t seen a single person from outside all that time except you. You’re the first. People paddle down in their canoes from the interior. They bring
alligator and boa constrictor skins. Once in a while jaguar. They call it tigre here. They sell the skins to Narcisco and go back up the river with salt and cartridges and cans of peaches. No one else visits. No tourists. No ruins to look at, no hotels, no airports. If someone came here by mistake, he wouldn’t like the food or the damp heat or the hammocks or the people. I don’t like them either. But there’s one big advantage living here. They don’t extradite.

  Narcisco is also the jefe de policía. His cousin Alejandro works up in the capital in the Guardia Nacional, the combination army-police force of the country. Alejandro is a major and he reads and speaks English pretty good. It’s his job to censor all the cables and letters and to interview all the English-speaking travelers who look interesting.

  All police business in English goes through him. He also grants the entry permits. You want to visit this country, you see Alejandro. Yes, he’s the man you saw on Calle Bolívar, in that office overlooking the patio filled with bougainvillea and palms.

  I made a deal with Alejandro and Narcisco. They each get fifty bucks a month from me. That’s a lot of money down here. They don’t get it directly either. That would give them the idea they could lay their hands on the cash all at once. They’d figure they could persuade me to talk and tell them where the little metal box is with all the gringo pesos. If I’d have it in a local bank it would take a little more time.

  I order my bank in Geneva — yes, Father, I have one of those numbered accounts — I order my bank to mail them each a check on the first of the month. And on Christmas they each get a thousand bucks to show how much I like them. If something happens to me — no more checks.

  I told them that maybe someday someone might be down here looking for me. Maybe a private citizen, maybe a couple detectives with a State Department request. Maybe there might be a cable making preliminary inquiries. Someone might offer five thousand bucks for information — or ten. “That’s a lot of money,” I told them. “But you each get sixteen hundred a year from me. In ten years that’s sixteen thousand. In fifteen years that’s twenty-four thousand. And so on.”

  They looked at me thoughtfully. So now Alejandro watches at the capital and Narcisco, who owns three fishing boats, keeps a very good eye out for me along the coast. He’s sort of my personal Coast Guard.

  You ought to see Narcisco when I want to go swimming and there’s sharks around. He also worries about my diet. He won’t let a woman come near me unless she’s been carefully checked out by the doctor. He’s spread word around that anyone who messes around with me will be very, very sorry.

  How do you put a price tag on that?

  2

  You know why I tell you all this, Father. How can you repeat it? And the idea of an American in a clerical collar chasing butterflies with a net because that’s his idea of a vacation — well, when I saw you plunging into the swamp next to the landing, you gave me the best laugh I’ve had in months.

  Father, that’s Yucateca you’re drinking. The best beer in the Western Hemisphere. It comes out of Mexico, and the best beer in Mexico comes from Yucatán, and the best beer in Yucatán is Yucateca.

  I drink it a lot. I sit and put my hands around the cold, sweating glass. Then I rub my hands across my face. It’s the closest I can come to winter in New York. Did you ever drive through Central Park after it had snowed all night? And be the first one? And see how all the branches were bending with the weight of the snow? I miss that. I think about those days. I would rather not.

  I used to be on the cops in New York. Detectives. Then I quit and became a private detective. My own outfit. I did pretty good for a few years. Then this thing.

  Narcisco once let me go out on one of his boats when I first came here — the Dolores. I laid in four cases of Yucateca. We threw the empties overboard and shot at them with Narcisco’s rusty Winchester. My nose turned red in the sun. My skin had salt spray all over it. I felt bone-tired. I slept ten hours in a row. Ten hours! I haven’t slept three hours straight since it happened. Next week I went out again. But there was no flavor in it. So I didn’t do it anymore.

  You’re not going to sleep much tonight, Father. It’s too hot. The only air conditioning we get down here comes with the hurricane season. But we’re months away from that. So it’s going to be bad, with the heat and the mosquitoes. And it’ll take you too long to get used to sleeping in a hammock. So have another beer. I’ll start from the beginning. If you don’t mind, I’ll take rum.

  3

  It all began in Haskell. You ever been in Haskell? It’s an hour’s train ride northeast of Grand Central Station. The streets are named Powder Flask Road and Deborah Pond’s Pike. Very colonial, no? But they put in those streets about fifteen years ago. All the houses are very rigidly colonial, with those zigzag split-rail fences and a wagon wheel on each side of the driveway. The houses are in the $75,000–$150,000 range. The big TV network people live there, the admen, and maybe a writer or so if he wipes his feet before he crosses their doorsteps.

  The way I wound up there, up at Haskell, one day some big shot wholesaler in heroin thought it would be a good idea to move in on all that easy allowance money. So he sent a pusher to hang around the drive-ins where the kids with the hot rods hang out. He hung around the luncheonette near the high school. He had an attaché case with compartments. Speed balls, goof balls, pot, you name it. And heroin.

  And it was home free. The fix was in. They had gotten to the state, county, and local law. So when a kid shows up in school looking nervous and jumpy and sleepy, and wearing a pair of dark glasses to protect the enlarged pupils from too much light — one of the effects of pot — the kids’ parents had seen enough movies on their own networks to realize what the score was. And then one of the mothers walks in one evening into her fifteen-year-old daughter’s room to find the kid mainlining horse into her thigh. Horse, that’s heroin.

  The parents went to the cops. No good. Dropped for lack of evidence. All right, they’re not stupid. They hire a private detective, some clown from Bridgeport. He managed to dig up some more evidence. It was presented to the D.A.’s office with cries of triumph. Then the file gets stolen from the D.A.’s office. Naturally.

  One of the parents was a guy named Harry Gilbert. He was a fifth, maybe sixth assistant vice-president on one of the big TV networks.

  When he was wondering what his next step was, he happened to be down the block from my office. He had just taken a client to one of those expensive French restaurants nearby. The client had hailed a cab and then offered Gilbert a lift, but just then he noticed my little sign painted on the second-floor window: Confidential Security. Discreet Inquiries. That’s a great word, discreet. It brings in a lot of business.

  Gilbert told me about the drug scene in Haskell. He asked me what I could do. I said, “Nothing.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  Here I have to give a supposedly intelligent guy a lecture when I have a report to write. So it bugged me a little. I restrained myself.

  “If the fix is in, there’s nothing I can do.”

  He looked unsatisfied.

  I crossed the t’s.

  “When I get evidence,” I said, “what do I do with it? I take it to the authorities. They run it up the flagpole and salute it, as you guys say.”

  He stared at me.

  “The only way we operate,” I went on, “is strictly within the law. The law stinks, that’s your tough luck.”

  “Do you have any kids?”

  I shook my head.

  “Try to imagine you have a fifteen-year-old daughter,” he began. “Your wife meets you at the station and tells you she went into the girl’s room. She found a hypodermic needle.”

  I stopped listening; for a while he went on. He was using the most basic emotional appeal — children.

  I remembered the old game of blindman’s buff I used to play when I was a kid. I’d be blindfolded, someone would spin me around till I had lost all sense of direction. Then I’d be shoved vi
olently into the center of the room. I never liked the feeling of being handled and directed — then or now.

  Once when I was on undercover duty I sat with a dealer in his Park Avenue apartment. I was playing a big buyer from Utica. The doorbell rang. The dealer got up and let in an attractive, well-dressed woman about thirty-five. She gave me a nervous smile. She was sweating and fumbling with her gloves, her pocketbook, patting her hair into place, adjusting her earrings. I recognized the first stages of withdrawal syndrome. He told her I was okay. He took out a deck of heroin and decided to show off. He held it up.

  “Wanna see what I trained her to do?” he asked. I didn’t want to see, but I said sure, I’d like to see.

  He turned and said, “All right, baby, go into your act.” She sank to her knees. She bent forward and licked his shoes.

  After she had left, he said he used to be a shoeshine boy. “I used to polish the shoes of rich people like she is,” he said. When the time came, I took a lot of pleasure in nailing him.

  “I don’t need the hard sell,” I told Gilbert.

  He flushed. “Yet you tell me there’s nothing you can do.”

  “Yep.”

  “How about a ride around the block?”

  If he was going to enter upon a conspiracy, he didn’t want anyone listening. There was something I could do and both of us knew it. But I couldn’t do it and keep my license. He started the car and began. “I — ”

  I asked him to let me think a while. I thought. Something should be done out in Haskell. The cops weren’t doing it. It would get worse and worse. More kids would get hooked. I lit a cigarette. He drove four times around the block and I shushed him twice. The cop on the beat began to get interested, but he saw me and relaxed.