Brett Halliday: Blue Murder

After he finished, Capp needed another drink, a strong one. He was sweating.

Peter told himself that he really had to go. If he waited to find out what happened to the body, it would give him a hold over Capp, but trying to blackmail such a man was no way to stay healthy. Capp put down his glass, gathered up the cans of film and took them to a bedroom. Without moving from his position, Peter could see the foot of a double bed. To make it more firm, Capp had inserted a sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood between the mattress and the springs. Raising this, he slipped the cans in one by one.

He returned to the living room bringing a long plastic bag, the kind used to store clothes. He laid it on the floor, open, and rolled the dead woman into it, then zipped it up. He had a separate, smaller bag for her clothes, shoes and purse. After sealing the bag with tape, he had to rip off the tape and open it again because he had forgotten to put in the gun.

Now, Peter thought, before Capp began loading these packages into his car?

He came to his feet and forced himself to walk slowly away. His spine prickled, all the way down. He had thought he was finished with the woman and her damn dog, but not at all; here they were again.

“Buttons, will you cooperate ?” the woman was saying. “I know you don’t care, but I have a man waiting.”

Peter threw himself to the grass and wriggled quickly to the nearest bush.

It had been an eventful evening, and now, to make it complete, Buttons made his selection. Out of all the trees and shrubbery on the block, he picked the one bush under which Peter happened to be lying. Various disagreeable and degrading things had happened to Peter lately, but nothing had been quite as bad as this. When it was over, the animal wanted to investigate further, but his owner had had enough and dragged him away.

A screen door opened and shut. Capp’s garage was connected to the house by a short covered walkway. Peter kept his head down. A scheme was beginning to form. There might be more money than he had allowed himself to imagine. Capp wouldn’t be taking a chance like this for peanuts. It would be the riskiest thing Peter had ever done, but with a little luck, a little intelligence, why shouldn’t it work? He couldn’t go on losing forever.

The overhead garage door went up with a bang. Peter got ready to run, relaxing again when he understood what was happening. Capp’s car was too long to fit comfortably inside the garage. He backed out to the street, reversed, and came in again backward, stopping halfway. The screen door banged, and banged again. Peter heard a dragging sound. He knew what was taking place without going any closer. The body was being manhandled into the trunk, and this couldn’t have been easy for a man with a bad back.

The trunk hatch slammed. After another trip to the house for the smaller parcel, Capp moved the Cadillac out of the garage, closed the garage door and drove off. Peter started to count to ten. At the count of six he was up and running.

He had a three-year-old Dodge, completely anonymous, with dealer’s plates and a tendency to flood under pressure. This time it started like more reliable cars. He took the looping drive the wrong way, against the traffic if there had been any, and came out of the bend at the end of the island in time to see the Cadillac, ahead, going up the ramp to the causeway, taking the turn toward Miami. Hurrying, Peter followed.

Out in the open on the causeway, Peter passed several cars and dropped into line two spaces behind the Cadillac. There was nothing to worry about now. Capp had no reason to suspect his existence. Peter was new in Miami, with an equal right to space on the highways.

After leaving the causeway, the Cadillac worked south to Eighth Street, where it turned west. They passed through Coral Gables, West Miami. At the Palmetto Expressway interchange, an intricate tangle of concrete flung across the intersection of the Grand and Tamiami canals, Capp performed a quick maneuver, swinging over on an exit ramp to fling his smaller parcel into the water. He circled back and continued west.

They were meeting less traffic, and Peter began to tighten. This was the Tamiami Trail across the Everglades, and by this time it was obvious what Capp intended to do: ditch the body somewhere in the Glades. Peter had never tailed anyone in a car, and he didn’t know the technique.

He fell farther behind, speeding up occasionally to make sure he was in touch. A heavy produce truck roared past, and he let it pull him in its wake. After a time he pulled out to the left so he could see ahead. The Cadillac was gone.

He came about in a tight U. A narrow dirt road leading into the park to the south was the only one the Cadillac could have used. Peter pulled up in front of a ramshackle building, advertising cold drinks and Seminole artifacts, and consulted a road map. The dirt road, not important enough to deserve its own number, came to an abrupt end at what must be a boat-launching area a quarter of a mile away.

A braver or more foolhardy man might have pulled his car out of sight and gone down on foot, to pinpoint the exact spot where Capp dumped his victim, but for Peter this was close enough.

He headed back toward Miami, stopping at the first roadside tavern with a telephone sign.

Michael Shayne, the private detective, waited a moment before getting out of his Buick. He was in the parking lot of a new upper-income condominium in Bal Harbour, at the northernmost end of the Miami Beach strip. He was here to see the Honorable Nick Tucker, who for the last four years had represented the Miami district in Congress.

Shayne had few friends among full-time politicians, and Tucker possessed every quality he disliked about that profession. He was a great practitioner of the head-fake, looking one way and going another. He had learned his sincerity as a TV actor. His political start was a result of a series of commercials for a major automobile company, whose public relations department had been so impressed that they hired him, on a large annual retainer, to tour the country speaking to business conventions and sales meetings.

His basic speech had been worked out by experts and honed to a fine edge in hundreds of appearances before sympathetic groups. Others on this circuit had used patriotism and anti-Communism, or had taken a strong stand in favor of law and order. Tucker’s subject was pornography. He opposed it, of course. He had film clips of the things he was attacking, samples of magazines and books that were being sold in big-city bookstores, under the protection of Supreme Court rulings. This was heady stuff. He became known, campaigned for Congress using his basic speech, and won. Somehow, during his freshman term, he wangled a resolution setting up a House Select Anti-Pornography Committee and became its chairman. He made CBS Evening News twice that first winter.

The important people in his party let him put his name on a few bills and saw to it that he had no trouble raising funds for his reelection campaign. Now he had his eye on the next rung, and he was going for governor. The general feeling among political experts was that he was likely to make it. His main opponent was a former state’s attorney, a competent man with a good record, and the prospect of Tucker’s success didn’t appeal to Shayne. But undoubtedly the state would survive, as it had survived floods and droughts and other natural disasters.

So that was Nick Tucker, and ordinarily Shayne wouldn’t have taken him as a client. His friend Tim Rourke, a longtime reporter on the Miami News, had wanted him to go to the trotters tonight, then on to a party in Fort Lauderdale. But there were angles to this, and Shayne had decided to come here instead, to let Tucker tell him about his problem.