The Murderer Vine Page 3

  Well, I hadn’t liked my little session one single bit. That was a comforting sign.

  5

  Next morning I was sitting at my desk drinking some terrible coffee from a container. I had drunk too much the night before and I felt lousy. I was looking at the mail. Two pieces of junk mail and the light bill. The phone rang. It was Gilbert. “Thanks for the shipment,” he said.

  I said nothing.

  “Would you like payment?”

  A stupid question.

  “Yes.”

  “How about us having lunch together?”

  “No.”

  I was feeling monosyllabic. There was an unhappy silence. I ran my tongue along the back of my teeth. Everything felt like sandpaper.

  “You don’t want lunch?”

  He wanted to be loved.

  “I don’t eat business lunches.”

  He probably had two-hour business lunches with ulcer appetizers.

  “Would you like payment?”

  “Yes. Now.”

  He came up half an hour later. He gave me a thick manila envelope. “I thought you’d like it in small bills,” he said. “It’s in twenties. I hear from the hospital they spent four hours patching up some guy from out of town who claims he was jumped by three muggers.”

  “Policing remote areas is a problem.”

  “I suppose so. I see you awarded yourself a bonus.”

  I looked at him.

  “He says he was rolled.”

  “Any objection?”

  “Out of curiosity, how much did you get?”

  “Five hundred eighty-five.”

  He looked at me in a funny way and stood up.

  “It takes all kinds, I suppose,” he said. He stared at me as if I was the guy in the sideshow who bit the heads off live chickens. I was just in the mood to be affronted.

  “Now you listen to me,” I said. “You needed a dirty job done. I did it. He didn’t get that five eighty-five being nice to your kids. I hurt him bad in the body and I hurt him bad in the wallet. He won’t be back.”

  “It’s nice to feel virtuous when you rob somebody, isn’t it?”

  Gilbert and I were co-conspirators. It wouldn’t be smart for me to dump him, although the fact that there wouldn’t be any witnesses was tempting.

  I looked at him for a couple of seconds.

  “Honest to God,” I said, “I don’t understand guys like you, I really don’t. You want to sell a window cleaner on your network, you show a car without a windshield to prove how really, really clean your product cleans. You sell a cigarette, so you say your filter traps one point four milligrams more tar, or whatever the hell it is, than your biggest competitor, and all the time you have the laboratory report in front of you telling you that your variation is meaningless in lung cancer incidence. You take some lousy white bread jammed full of chemicals so it looks fresher, and it doesn’t have any butter in it, and the eggs are the worst grade on the market, and it smells like wall plaster, and you say it develops strong muscles umpteen ways, and you wouldn’t permit it in your house because you eat freshly baked Italian bread. I beat up this guy for money, and he deserved it. I did it because he had to be kept away from your kids. I took his money because you might, you just might, talk a little too much, and the big bad people might hear I was responsible, and they might come looking for me. I need that edge the five eighty-five gives me. Now why don’t you get the hell out?”

  He got the hell out.

  6

  Well, that’s the background. One rainy afternoon about a week later a man named Parrish came into my office. He was carrying a big black umbrella. I watched him idly through the open door. I was lying back in my chair with my hands laced behind my neck, trying to figure out whether to go to Antigua or Acapulco, for a vacation. Antigua was cheaper, but I had never been to Acapulco. In those days I thought that was a big problem.

  Parrish looked like a rich guy with a problem. He was a big tanned man, and watching him shake out the umbrella in the hallway, I had him figured for a banker with a nice Bahama tan and a wandering wife who may have been necking with the mate of his chartered fishing boat. He looked as if he wanted me to make sure.

  Or maybe he had dropped a bundle playing cards and he thought he was being cheated. Or maybe he had unknowingly posed for some interesting pictures.

  He came in and stood next to my desk.

  “Yes?” I said.

  He leaned forward and spoke quietly. As you can see, I was wrong on all counts.

  He said, “I want you to kill five people.”

  7

  “You’re in the wrong place, mister.”

  “I understand the fee will be large.”

  All right. You get them from time to time.

  “Sorry, I’m busy.” He didn’t move.

  “If you’ll just leave, please.” Sometimes the nose deep in the documents works. I buried the nose deep in the documents. I looked at the reports I had to write. There weren’t many. Some ladies had been bad and had jumped into other people’s beds for solace or amusement, or revenge, or all three. I kept an eye on him in case he turned violent.

  A chain of bookstores was being shoplifted into bankruptcy by their own employees. A rich young married woman was being blackmailed by a lesbian. None of them were people I would care to have for friends. To be specific, they were disgusting.

  “A lot of money, Mr. Dunne. A lot.” He didn’t look crazy.

  “Does my name mean anything to you?”

  “Nope.”

  He grinned. “Parrish Enterprises.”

  That did. P.E. built dams and bridges all over the world.

  Parrish took out a pigskin cigar case and offered me one. I shook my head. “Save it for later,” he said, and put one on the desk. He selected one for himself and cut off the end with a sterling silver cigar cutter. “I rolled my own long enough,” he observed. “I deserve this.” He lit it carefully and waited for me to talk.

  I shoved the reports aside. Crazy he was not.

  He indicated Kirby with his raised eyebrows.

  “She doesn’t kneel at keyholes.”

  “Nevertheless, Mr. Dunne.”

  All right. I got up and opened the door. She wasn’t kneeling at the keyhole. She had just finished typing up a report on some obscene photographs I had commissioned for some correctly suspicious husband. My typing was erratic four-finger, and clients somehow wanted a neat typing job for their report reading. It wouldn’t matter to me whether important material was printed in crayon, but it’s variety that livens up this dull business.

  She was reading a book while she waited for me to hand her another of my slightly blown-up reports. She had put her legs up on the desk. For the first time I noticed how long they were. She was holding the book above eye level, and her head was tilted backward. Her long yellow hair was swinging free. She was smiling at the book and tugging at her earlobe. I suppose that was the first time I noticed her.

  “Miss Jamison.”

  She whipped her legs off the desk and blushed. “Yes, suh.”

  “Go away for a while.”

  It was an order she was used to with some of my clients.

  “It’s rainin’ fierce,” she said, standing up.

  “Buy stamps,” I said. “Stamps are useful. Several six-cent ones. Maybe we should splurge and buy four airmail stamps.”

  As soon as the door closed behind her, Parrish said, “I suggest you phone Harry Gilbert.”

  I phoned Gilbert. I hadn’t spoken to him since the time I had ordered him out of my office a week before.

  He said, “Gilbert here.”

  I never liked that style of answering a phone.

  I content myself with saying, “Dunne.”

  “What can I do for you?” His voice was cautious.

  I was about to tell him but I restrained myself.

  “A Mr. Parrish suggested I phone you.”

  “Yes, yes! He’s a neighbor. Last night I was talking to him, an
d I told him about the way you had fulfilled our contract — ”

  A partner for life, I told myself, that’s what you got. It serves you right, Dunne, for being stupid and greedy.

  “ — and he liked the way you handled it.”

  “How about taking a full-page ad?”

  “You object to a reference?”

  “I kept my part of the agreement. You keep yours, goddam you!”

  I slammed down the receiver.

  Parrish was grinning. “He’ll keep quiet from now on.”

  “Yeah? An advertising man?”

  “May I have the phone?”

  I gave it to him. He dialed and asked for Gilbert. While he was waiting, he said, “Through my firms and the interlocking directorates, I control about five million bucks’ worth of advertising a year. He gets it. He loves it. Harry. This is Parrish. Harry — yes, thanks, I’m seeing him now. Harry, I wonder if you’d do me a little favor.”

  I could hear Gilbert’s minimized electronic voice crawling and wagging its tail and promising anything.

  “Harry, from now on, don’t mention your contract with our friend to anyone. From now on. Not at a party, or when you’re drunk, or even to recommend him to someone who had the same problem. I mean never. You understand. Yes, all right. And to make sure you do, Harry, if I ever hear in any way that you haven’t kept your word, I’ll instruct my lawyers to break my contract with you. So will you do that little thing? As a personal favor to me? You will? Thanks.” He hung up and looked at me.

  “How’s that?”

  I awarded him back his cigar.

  8

  We looked each other over. He was four inches taller than me and twenty pounds heavier. He drew on his cigar.

  “You don’t look anything special,” he observed. He was right.

  I’m five eight, and the bridge of my nose got pushed to one side once.

  I was five pounds overweight, which is what happens when I sit a lot and have nothing much on my mind.

  My hair is black and close-cropped. A few gray hairs are scattered through it. I had a neat part on the right side. I have gray eyes and crow’s-feet at the corners from scrunching them a lot in the sun from fishing a lot in the summertime.

  My hands aren’t too big. I couldn’t even span an octave when my mother made me take piano lessons when I was a kid. My shoulders are wider across than my rear end. I swim once a week in a gym. I do it for the same reason I keep my short-barreled detective special oiled: my body is a tool and I don’t want it breaking down when I might need it very bad. But all in all, nothing special.

  “What did you expect?” I asked.

  “Someone sophisticated yet brutal. And you know what you look like?”

  “Sure. A broken-down professional football player ten years after his last game, working as a used-car salesman.”

  He grinned. “You surprise me with your frankness.”

  “I surprise myself sometimes. But I know exactly what I look like. I have to know. For instance, you’d never take me for a private detective. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “I look like I could be a treasurer of a local in the Teamsters’ Union? I look like the guy who comes up to your place to put in a new phone? Someone grubby, sincere, and honest, like a reliable mechanic?”

  He knocked the ash off his cigar and waited.

  “Suppose you saw me down at Paradise Beach down in the Bahamas. I’ll tell you what. You’d sit in your private beach cabana and think, here’s this guy been saving up for five years, not going anywhere, and now he’s having an all-out vacation with the rich folks and to hell with the cost. And his tie is wrong and so are his shoes, the poor schmuck.”

  “Well, maybe I’d leave out the word schmuck, but I’ll buy the rest of it.”

  “But there’s one thing that could never enter your mind. That I’d be a private detective.”

  “You know,” he said, “I think we’ll get along. Shall I begin?”

  I nodded.

  9

  “My son is in his third year at Harvard. He was supposed to spend his summer vacation this year with my wife and me on our yacht. Instead, he chose to pass it doing voter registration in the Deep South. I objected. I’ve built roads and bridges down there and I know what those people are like. He made the usual statement denouncing me and my generation. He went off with two pairs of blue jeans, two shirts, and ten bucks.

  “I liked his stubbornness. But I wouldn’t let him see it. I was real pleased that he had his own mind. But I told him he was a stupid kid and I made him promise he would write or phone his mother every night. Collect. He said he would. Good enough. David always kept his promises. I asked him if he needed money. He said he thought he could make it without Pop’s money, just like the other two boys he was going down with. I liked that. I remembered when I was a kid, I picked up a chrysalis and kept it in a jar until the butterfly started to come out. So I broke open the cocoon to make it easier for the butterfly. When it finally came out, I noticed that it flew sort of feebly. And then it died. Then I found out that it’s the struggle the butterfly makes trying to break through the cocoon that makes its wings strong.

  “For three weeks he wrote a card every day. Or he phoned his mother. The Voter Registration people gave him enough money for razor blades and Cokes. For food and lodging they were dependent upon the Negro families where they worked.”

  “I gather he wasn’t alone.”

  “No. He worked with a team. The others were Negroes — I mean blacks. Both were college boys. One was a friend of his from Harvard. The other was from Columbia.”

  “Go on.”

  “Three weeks ago the phone calls stopped. So did the cards.”

  “And the other boys?”

  “I called their families. Same thing. No letters, no calls.” He reached in a pocket. “Here’s his last card.”

  It said: “Dear Mother and Dad: They are very good to us here. They give us the best they have, which usually isn’t much. Tonight we’re going fishing for catfish. They fix it real good, with cornbread. Love, Dave.”

  I turned it over. It was a cheap colored card showing the state capitol building. It was dated August 16, Okalusa.

  “What do the Voter Registration people say?”

  “They contacted the local police.”

  “Well?”

  He looked at me with a cynical smile. “They said they couldn’t be bothered with a couple of beatniks.”

  “All right. You could bring heavy pressure. Did you?”

  “I didn’t waste my time. I told my Atlanta branch office to hire a good local private detective. I figured a local boy would do better there than anyone I could send down.”

  “And?”

  “He checked out all the doctors, private hospitals, police stations. Nothing.”

  I had my doubts as to how carefully a Southern detective agency would check out a delicate problem like this one. I said nothing, but he caught my expression.

  “You don’t think it was any use?”

  “Not much. Did you notify the FBI?”

  “What would you expect of an ex-CPA or lawyer who has to go around with a folded handkerchief in his breast pocket and ask people ‘Have you seen this man?’ž”

  He was right. The FBI won’t share their information with cops, so the local police are reluctant to work with them. And when you add to that the hostility of Southern cops to any Federal outfit trying to enforce Negro voters’ rights — forget it.

  “How do you know five are involved?”

  “I had that Atlanta detective work on it.”

  “What’s the name of the firm?”

  “Georgia Security.”

  Georgia Security was good. If Daniels, who ran Georgia Security, felt he couldn’t give you a good job, or if he felt he couldn’t put a suitable man on the job, he’d refuse the assignment.

  “What did he find out?”

  “He said the local gossip had five men present at the killing
s. The sheriff, a bus driver, and three others who work at part-time jobs — a little trucking, a little fishing, some railroad work, a little farming. Then I went to the Voter Registration people. They have an office in Harlem. They were very sympathetic and said their information, mostly from Negro sources in Milliken County, was that five men were involved. The sheriff, a bus driver, and three others.”

  He looked at his cigar. He took it and turned it slowly in his big hands.

  “I know they’re dead. I don’t know what your political views are and I don’t care. But I think you know what justice is. If it doesn’t exist, then you make it. I want my boy’s body. And I want justice.”

  “You mean revenge.”

  “I don’t make any distinction. Shall we talk business?”

  I nodded.

  “For finding the bodies, twenty-five thousand. For proving who the killers are — proof that will stand up in court — fifty thousand. For the execution of each killer — one hundred thousand.”

  “Wait a minute. You ask for proof that will stand up in court, then you ask for the execution of each one. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “I’m the court.”

  We stared at each other carefully.

  “The money will be deposited to your account anywhere in the world. In cash. In any denomination you want. As soon as you give me proof.”

  I felt very tired and very old. I stood up and looked out the window. There was Kirby with her nose pressed against an expensive window across the street, looking at a five-hundred-dollar dress. She was idly twirling her umbrella.