Lawrence Block - Time to Murder and Create

He had to be Prager’s boy. It just had to add up that way. Either he had somehow missed the news that Prager was dead and out of the picture, or he was tied in close to Prager and wanted me dead out of spite. Or he had been hired through an intermediary, somehow, and didn’t know that Prager was a part of it. Something, anything, because otherwise—

I didn’t want to think about the otherwise.

I had been telling Birnbaum the truth. I had a hunch, and the more I thought about it the more I believed in it, and at the same time I kept wanting to be wrong. So I sat around the station house and read newspapers and drank endless cups of weak coffee and tried not to think about all of the things I couldn’t possibly avoid thinking about. Somewhere along the line Birnbaum went home, after he’d briefed another detective named Guzik, and around nine thirty Guzik came over to me and said they had a make from Washington.

He read it off the teletype sheet. “Lundgren, John Michael. Date of birth fourteen March ‘forty-three. Place of birth San Bernardino, California. Whole trail of arrests here, Matt. Living off immoral earnings, assault, assault with a deadly weapon, grand theft auto, grand larceny. He did local bits all up and down the West Coast, pulled some hard time in Quentin.”

“He pulled a one-to-five in Folsom,” I said. “I don’t know whether they called it extortion or larceny. That would have been fairly recent.”

He looked up at me. “I thought you didn’t know him.”

“I don’t. He was working a badger game. Arrested in San Diego, and his partner turned state’s evidence and got off. Sentence suspended.”

“That’s more detail than I’ve got here.”

I asked him if he had a cigarette. He said he didn’t smoke. He turned to ask if anybody had a cigarette, but I told him to forget it. “Get somebody with a steno pad,” I said. “There’s a lot to tell.”

I gave them everything I could think of. How Beverly Ethridge had worked her way in and out of the world of crime. How she had married well and turned herself back into the society type she had been in the first place. How Spinner Jablon had pieced it all together on the strength of a newspaper photo and turned it into a neat little blackmail operation.

“I guess she stalled him for a while,” I said. “But it kept being expensive, and he kept pushing for bigger money. Then her old boyfriend Lundgren came east and showed her a way out. Why pay blackmail when it’s so much easier to kill the blackmailer? Lundgren was a pro as a criminal but an amateur as a killer. He tried a couple of different methods on Spinner. Tried to get him with a car, then wound up hitting him over the head and putting him in the East River. Then he tried for me with the car.”

“And then with the knife.”

“That’s right.”

“How did you get into it?”

I explained, leaving out the names of Spinner’s other blackmail victims. They didn’t like that much, but there wasn’t anything much they could do about it. I told them how I had staked myself out as a target and how Lundgren had taken the bait.

Guzik kept interrupting to tell me I should have given everything to the cops right off, and I kept telling him it was something I had not been willing to do.

“We’d’ve handled it right, Matt. Jesus, you talk about Lundgren’s an amateur, shit, you ran around like an amateur yourself and almost got your ass in the wringer. You wound up going up against a knife with nothing but your hands, and it’s dumb luck you’re alive this minute. The hell, you ought to know better, you were a cop fifteen years, and you act like you don’t know what the department’s all about.”

“How about the people who didn’t kill Spinner? What happens to them if I hand you the whole thing right off the bat?”

“That’s their lookout, isn’t it? They come into it with dirty hands. They got something to hide, that shouldn’t be getting in the way of a murder investigation.”

“But there was no investigation. Nobody gave a shit about Spinner.”

“Because you were withholding evidence.”

I shook my head. “That’s horseshit,” I said. “I didn’t have evidence that anybody killed Spinner. I had evidence that he was blackmailing several people. That was evidence against Spinner, but he was dead, and I didn’t think you were particularly anxious to take him out of the morgue and throw him in a cell. The minute I had murder evidence I put it in your hand. Look, we could argue all day. Why don’t you put out a pickup order on Beverly Ethridge?”

“And charge her with what?”

“Two counts of conspiracy to murder.”

“You’ve got the blackmail evidence?”

“In a safe place. A safe-deposit box. I can bring it here in an hour.”

“I think I’ll come along with you and get it.”

I looked at him.

“Maybe I want to see just what’s in the envelope, Scudder.”

It had been Matt up until then. I wondered what kind of a number he wanted to run. Maybe he was just fishing, but he had visions of something or other. Maybe he wanted to take my place in the blackmail dodge, only he’d want real money, not the name of a murderer. Maybe he figured the other pigeons had committed real crimes and he could buy himself a commendation by knocking them off. I didn’t know him well enough to guess which motivation would be consistent with the man, but it didn’t really make very much difference.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “I give you a homicide collar on a silver platter and you want to melt down the platter.”

“I’m sending a couple boys over to pick up Ethridge. In the meantime, you and me are going to open up a safe-deposit box.”

“I could forget where I left the key.”

“And I could make your life difficult.”

“It’s not that much of a cinch as it is. It’s just a few blocks from here.”

“Still raining,” he said. “We’ll take a car.”

We drove over to the Manufacturers Hanover branch at Fifty-seventh and Eighth. He left the black-and-white in a bus stop. All that to save a three-block walk, and it wasn’t raining all that hard any more. We went inside and went down the stairs to the vault, and I gave my key to the guard and signed the signature card.

“Had the damnedest thing you ever heard of a few months back,” Guzik said. He was friendly now that I was going along with him. “This girl rented a box over at Chemical Bank, and she paid her eight bucks for a year, and she was visiting the box three or four times a day. Always with a guy, always a different guy. So the bank got suspicious and asked us to check it out, and wouldn’t you know, the chick is a pross. Instead of taking a hotel room for ten bucks, she’s picking up her tricks on the street and taking them to the fucking bank, for Christ’s sake. Then she gets her box out and they show her to the little room, and she locks the door and gives the guy a quick blow job in complete privacy, and then she sticks the money in the box and locks it up again. And all it runs her is eight bucks for the year instead of ten bucks a trick, and it’s safer than a hotel because if she gets a crazy he’s not going to try beating her up in the middle of a fucking bank, is he? She can’t get beaten up and she can’t get robbed, and it’s perfect.”

By this time the guard had used his key and mine to get the box from the vault. He handed it to me and led us to a cubicle. We entered together, and Guzik closed and locked the door. The room struck me as rather cramped for sex, but I understand people do it in airplane lavatories, and this was spacious in comparison.

I asked Guzik what had happened to the girl.

“Oh, we told the bank not to press charges, or all it would do was give every streetwalker in the business the same idea. We told them to refund her box-rental fee and tell her they didn’t want her business, so I guess that’s what they did. She probably walked across the street and started doing business with another bank.”