Lawrence Block - Time to Murder and Create

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.