Lawrence Block: Time to Murder and Create

Spinner Jablon probably told his mark about the magic envelope from the beginning. But in February he had started to sweat. He had decided that somebody was trying to kill him, or was likely to try, so he had put his envelope together. An actual envelope wouldn’t keep him alive if the idea of the envelope failed. He’d be just as dead, and he had known it.

But he had been, in the final analysis, a pro. Penny-ante for almost all his life, but professional just the same. And a professional doesn’t get mad. He gets even.

He’d had a problem, though, and it became my problem when I cut his envelope open and checked its contents. Because Spinner had known that he would have to get even with somebody.

He just hadn’t known who.

THE first thing I looked at was the letter. It was typed, which suggested that at one time or another he had stolen one more typewriter than he could sell, so he’d kept it around. He hadn’t used it a hell of a lot. His letter was full of xxxxxx’d-out words and phrases, skips between letters, and enough misspelled words to make it interesting. But it added up to something like this:

Matt:

If you’re reading this I’m a dead man. I hope it blows over but no bets on that. I think somebody tried for me yesterday. There was this car just about crawled up the curb coming at me.

What I got going is blackmail. I fell into some information worth good money. Years of scrounging around and I finally stepped right into it.

There is three of them. You’ll see how it lays when you open the other envelopes. That is the problem, the three of them, because if I’m dead one of them did it and I don’t know which. I got each one on a string and I don’t know which one I’m choking.

This Prager, two years ago December his daughter ran down a kid on a tricycle and kept on going on account of she was driving on a suspended license and strung out on speed and grass and I don’t know what else. Prager has more money than God and he spread it on everybody and his kid was never picked up. All the information is in the envelope. He was the first one, I overheard some shit in a bar and I fed this one guy drinks and he opened up for me. I’m not taking him for anything he can’t afford and he just pays me like you pay rent the first of the month but who knows when a man is going to go crazy and maybe that’s what happened. He wants me dead, shit, he could hire it done easy enough.

The Ethridge broad was just dumb luck. I hit on her picture in the newspapers, some society page hype, and I reckonized her from this fuck film I saw some years back. Talk about remembering a face, and who looks at the face, but maybe she was giving head to some dude and it caught in my mind. I read all these schools she went to and I couldn’t add it up, so I did some homework, and there was a couple years when she dropped out of sight and went into things a little heavy, and I got pictures and some other shit which you’ll see. I been dealing with her and whether her husband knows what’s happening or anything else I don’t know. She is very hard and could kill a person without turning a hare. You look into her eyes and you know exactly what I mean.

Huysendahl came in third on the string and by this time I’m on the earie as a regular thing because it’s all working so nice for me. What I pick up on is his wife is a lezzie. Well this is nothing spectacular Matt as you know. But he’s rich as shit and he’s thinking about pushing for governor so why not dig a little. The dyke thing is nothing, too many people know it in front, and you spread it around and all that happens is he gets the dyke vote which maybe puts him over the top, so I don’t care about that, but why is he still married to this dyke, that’s my question. Like is there something kinky about him. So I work my ass to the bone and it turns out there’s something there, but getting a handle on it is something else again. He’s not a normal queer but his thing is young boys, younger the better. It’s a sickness and it is enough to turn your stomach. I got small things, like this kid hospitalized for internal injuries which Huysendahl paid the hospital bills, but I wanted to be able to sink the hook so the pictures were a set up. It don’t matter how I set it up but there was other people involved. He must of shit when he saw the pictures. The deal cost me a packet but nobody ever made a better investment.

Matt the thing is if somebody hit me it was one of them, or they hired it out which adds up the same way, and what I want is for you to fuck them good. The one that did it, not the other two which played straight with me, which is why I can’t leave this with a lawyer and send it all to the police, because the ones that played straight with me deserve to be off the hook, not to mention if it goes to the wrong cop he just works a shakedown and whoever kills me is home free, except he’s still paying out money.

The fourth envelope has your name on it because it is for you. There is 3K in it and that is for you. I don’t know if it should be more or what it should be, but there’s always the chance you’ll just put it in your pocket and shitcan the rest of the stuff, which if it happens I’ll be dead and won’t know about it. Why I think you’ll follow through is something I noticed about you a long time ago, namely that you happen to think there is a difference between murder and other crimes. I am the same. I have done bad things all my life but never killed anybody and never would. I have known people who have killed which I’ve known for a fact or a rumor and would never get close to them. It is the way I am and I think you are that way too and that is why you might do something, and again if you don’t I will not know it.

Your Friend,

Wednesday morning I got the envelope out from under the carpet and took another long look at the evidence. I got out my notebook and jotted down a few details. I wasn’t going to be able to keep the stuff on hand, because if I made any kind of move I would be making myself visible, and my room would no longer be a clever hiding place.

Spinner had nailed them down tight enough. There was very little hard evidence to prove that Henry Prager’s daughter Stacy had left the scene of an accident in which three-year-old Michael Litvak was run down and killed, but in this instance hard evidence wasn’t necessary. Spinner had the name of the garage where the Prager car had been repaired, the names of the people in the police department and Westchester D.A.’s office who had been reached, and a few other bits and pieces which would do the job. If you handed the whole package to a good investigative reporter, he wouldn’t be able to leave it alone.

The material on Beverly Ethridge was more graphic. The pictures alone might not have been enough. There were a couple of four-by-five color prints and half a dozen clips of film running a few frames each. She was clearly identifiable throughout, and there was no question what she was doing. This by itself might not have been so damaging. A lot of the things people do for a lark in their youth can be written off readily enough after a few years have passed, especially in those social circles where every other closet sports a skeleton.

But the Spinner had done his homework, just as he’d said. He traced Mrs. Ethridge, then Beverly Guildhurst, from the time she left Vassar in her junior year. He turned up an arrest in Santa Barbara for prostitution, sentence suspended. There was a narcotics bust in Vegas, thrown out for lack of evidence, with a strong implication that some family money had pulled her ass out of the fire. In San Diego she was working a badger game with a partner who was a known pimp. It went sour one time; she turned state’s evidence and picked up another suspension, while her partner pulled one-to-five in Folsom. The only time she served, as far as Spinner had been able to make out, was fifteen days in Oceanside for drunk and disorderly.