Brett Halliday: Blue Murder

A chair lay on its back on a white carpet. Shifting his angle, he saw a woman’s foot, wearing a high-heeled shoe. The rest of her body was hidden by a long couch.

Capp walked into view, a short dark man in his early fifties, wearing heavy-rimmed glasses, a hairpiece that had cost him so much money it looked nearly real. Bushy white sideburns framed his face. He had a good tan, and he wore three rings.

He looked down at the woman and lit a cigar, prodded her with his foot and said something. The house was sealed, with double panes in the windows. Peter heard the sound of Capp’s voice, but couldn’t break it into words.

Capp stooped, pulled the woman forward and threw her roughly onto the couch.

Her head rolled. She seemed only partially aware of what was happening. There was blood on her forehead. She was wearing tight yellow slacks and, like the man standing over her, considerable jewelry. Her unconfined breasts moved inside her buttoned sweater. All the lines of her body were good. This was the kind of female convicts like to pretend they have waiting for them outside.

Stooping again, Capp picked up a flat can marked with a green stripe. Peter’s grip on the windowsill tightened. He was glad now that he had found the courage to look. If that was the Domestic Relations negative, what in God’s name was it doing here? Capp wasn’t even supposed to know it existed. He didn’t have the delicate touch to handle something like this.

Inside, the woman on the couch proved to be less stunned than she seemed. As Capp stepped toward her, she managed to get her hands on a whiskey bottle. She swung it at his groin, and it would have done serious damage if the blow had landed. He doubled forward, covering himself, and the bottle smashed his watch. She brought it around again, more of a push than a blow. It chunked against his head, doing little except to disarrange his hairpiece. Throwing the bottle at him, she ran to the sliding glass doors leading to the terrace overlooking the bay. She fumbled with the unfamiliar latch while he recovered. The door started to move, but he caught her before she was through.

Peter heard: “You stinking bitch, what are you trying to work on me here?”

“Frankie, I had this nutty idea. Let me tell you about it, you’ll love it.”

He hit her. His rings plowed two furrows across her cheek. He had the front of her sweater in his other fist. Continuing to slap her, first with the back of his hand, then with the palm, he walked her into a wall.

“Yeah, let’s talk, and talk fast. I want the whole thing, all the whys and the hows.”

“I noticed something funny about the bed, Frankie! I’ve always had this terrible curiosity. Please don’t. When I found all those film cans, this brainstorm hit me! Money, money. Umm. But I wouldn’t do anything behind your back! I’m greedy but I’m not dumb, not that dumb.”

When he let her go she moved to put the couch between them. He rubbed his fingertips together, then settled his hairpiece more securely with both hands.

“You could have deballed me with that bottle, you know that?”

“Jesus, I’m sorry! You had that look in your eye. I thought you were going to massacre me.”

“How do I look now?”

“Not much better!”

He walked past and closed the heavy glass door, after which he drew the drapes so they couldn’t be seen by anyone on a passing boat. She didn’t like this and watched him warily, her eyes skittering to the doors and the dog.

He retrieved his cigar and rotated it until he had it drawing evenly. He motioned her to a chair. She wanted to do something about her face, which was bleeding badly, but he cut the request short with a gesture. Blood dripped onto her sweater.

He disappeared into another room and came back with a glass of whiskey. After studying her for a moment, his face unfriendly, he drank most of it in one long pull.

Now that the door was shut, Peter could hear nothing they were saying. She shook her head emphatically. Capp snapped another question. Peter thought he heard a name. Was it Baruch, the blue-movie man? She answered with a flood of words, sawing the air. Whatever the trouble was, she was taking it seriously.

Capp, his lips working on the cigar, moved back from the couch and stopped, facing Peter’s window. Peter willed himself not to move. The tension was making one eyelid twitch and flutter. Capp was staring straight at the closed blind. The muscles contracted around his eyes, bringing the overhanging brows closely together.

He rolled the cigar between thumb and fingertips, dislodged the ash, and after asking one more question, seemed to reach a decision. His features relaxed into a kind of smile. It had a good effect on the girl, but it didn’t reassure Peter.

Turning, Capp left the room and came back with a washcloth and a large towel. He folded the towel and put it behind her head. Suspicious at first, she was persuaded to put her head back and let him look at her cuts. He sponged off some of the blood, touching her face with surprising gentleness. Then he took out a short-barreled pistol, equipped with a silencer, and shot her in the head.

Peter made an involuntary sound, as though he, not the girl, had been shot, and dropped to both knees. There was some kind of stoppage in his brain. He knew what he had seen, but he couldn’t accept it. It was out of proportion. It didn’t fit with anything else he’d been told. Peter was temperamentally opposed to all forms of excess, of which murder was certainly one. This had begun as a joke, and when he heard the idea first, he had laughed so hard his face ached.

It was a joke no longer. He had witnessed a passionless murder by a man who happened to be an important person in the illegal life of this city, and Peter knew it would be wise to start traveling, wasting no time on good-byes. The hell with the money. If people were going to start murdering people, he wanted to be elsewhere.

And then what he had been worrying about actually happened. He heard a clack of footsteps and a woman’s voice speaking crossly to her dog.

“Now go, Buttons. What makes you so fussy? One tree is as good as another.”

A fruit tree had been espaliered to the wall on either side of the window. Peter remained still, holding the windowsill with both hands, but he was under no illusion that he looked like a fruit tree.

The footsteps halted briefly, then continued, moving in spurts while the dog weighed its decision.

Peter moved his head. For the moment, the patch of sidewalk in front of the house was empty. He came up on one knee again, but before he could push off there was another, more alarming sound.

The glass door onto the terrace was being opened.

He applied his eye again to the strip of unobstructed glass, trying to control his panic. Undoubtedly that gun of Capp’s had other bullets in it. The worst thing he could do was run.

The man inside hesitated at the open door. The murdered woman lay on the bare floor with her face on a folded newspaper. The large German shepherd sniffed her bloody head until Capp ordered him off.

“Not the boat,” Capp said softly, after another moment. “Too goddamn public.”

He slid the door shut and reclosed the drapes. The woman on the sidewalk came back briskly, and from the comments she was making to her dog, it was clear that the animal was still holding off. Waiting for Capp to commit himself, Peter continued to pretend that he was an espaliered tree.

Inside, Capp poured himself another drink and drank it slowly. Returning to the body, he undressed it carefully, making an attempt to keep the blood off his hands. He removed the girl’s rings and stood up painfully, kneading the small of his back.

After that he did an odd thing. He opened the dead woman’s legs and stuffed her jewelry into her vagina. Then he took off his belt and whipped her hard enough to leave marks. Peter, pinned to the window, could see that he wasn’t enjoying this, but was doing it to make the crime seem like a sexual murder.