Brett Halliday - Blue Murder

“Never, I’m glad to say.”

“O.K., here he is now. Brother-in-law, meet brother-in-law.”

“You may think you can get away with this, Shayne,” Tucker warned him, “but I want to tell you—”

Shayne rode him down. “This is what you hired me for. You didn’t want a routine skip trace. You thought you could handle your wife yourself. A woman, after all. But you needed somebody like me to get the film for you, and keep Capp and Baruch sniping at each other and out of your way. You knew all you had to do was mention Capp’s name and I’d jump at the chance to get him. And that part pleases me. I haven’t liked quite a bit of this, but I have the satisfaction of knowing that Frankie’s finally going to get his first major conviction.”

“You think so,” Capp muttered.

“Why else am I smiling?” Shayne said. “It’s the first case in a couple of years where I won’t collect a fee. Of course my client’s going to resign from Congress and refuse to run for any other office, so I can write my time off as a public service.”

“I’ve done nothing to be ashamed of,” Tucker said.

“That’s part of your problem.”

To Baruch: “Armand, can you freeze on a front shot of this woman? I want both her face and body.”

The titles continued while the camera moved closer and closer to the girl at the mirror. Her eyes were partly closed. The action stopped.

“How’s this? We cut away in a few more frames.”

“All right. This is a professional porno actress named Maureen Neal, and the reason she was brought east for the role is that she looks a bit like Gretchen Tucker. What do you think, Congressman?” he asked Pomeroy. “You knew Gretchen. You’ve seen her with no clothes on. How close does it come?”

Pomeroy, in the aisle in a wheelchair, blinked at the screen. The skin on his face sagged, and his eyelids were fluttering.

“Not really too close.”

“Tim, give the man a drink of whiskey. He’s in pain.”

Rourke passed his half-pint to the congressman. Shayne continued, “They didn’t need identical twins. All Armand wanted was someone with the same style, the same shape of face. Feel free to break in, Armand.”

“We did a good makeup job — changed the hair and so on. In my pictures the face is never too important, anyway.”

“When Tucker first told me about this,” Shayne said, “the implication was that Gretchen appeared in the picture. I realized later that he never actually said so, in so many words. But that was what was supposed to be so shocking — that the wife of a rising congressman had been persuaded to star in one of these things. And that’s the main thing that’s been bothering me. It wouldn’t have hurt him that much. He’s a great performer in a press conference.” He quoted, with some of Tucker’s stage manner: ‘My wife’s been going to shrinks, and I’m afraid she’s been swallowing too many synthetic chemicals. I’ve done my best to protect her and look after her, but these drug purveyors, these pornographers, have got their claws in her. But I won’t be intimidated! I’ll prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law!’ Tim Rourke even thinks a small jam might have helped him. His trouble has always been that he looks too lucky and handsome and successful.”

“A touch of tragedy,” Rourke said. “Give his face a little character.”

“My God!” Tucker exclaimed. “You talk as though what happened to Gretchen doesn’t matter to me!”

“Does it?” Shayne said gently. “She’s dead, and you haven’t given it a thought. You’re fighting to get out of this with your future intact.” He shook his head. “But you won’t make it. She saw to that by hiring Baruch to make this picture. She never intended to do the scenes herself.”

“She tried a couple,” Baruch said casually, “but the right things didn’t happen. And she was a touch overage, you know? The public likes them young, it’s part of the dream.”

Her brother said, “The weird thing to me, you’re talking about her as if she wasn’t crazy. You just don’t know.”

“I’m beginning to get it,” Rourke said suddenly. “What they were blackmailing Tucker with was the story! Not that she appeared in the film but that she wrote it! A play within a play. Like the one in Hamlet, only here it’s a skin-flick. Terrific.”

Shayne said, “Let’s see.”

He signed to Baruch, and the movie resumed.

The blonde actress was playing a girl named Gretel, married to a congressman named Dick, a former actor. Their domestic life was quirky. Dick showed sex movies in his bedroom while he and his handsome wife occupied separate beds.

“According to Gretch that really happened,” Peter said. “All the films the committee confiscated ended up in my brother-in-law’s closet.”

Tucker snapped, “Absurd.”

Late at night, the congressman in the movie went out to meetings of right-wing business men, which ended in a series of homosexual encounters. He was eager to ingratiate himself and did everything he was asked.

As Shayne had been told, the quality of the moviemaking was good. The tone was light and cool, and many of the lines brought snickers from the audience, in spite of the fact that all but one or two had more pressing things on their minds.

The action moved quickly. Gretel’s brother was caught in Texas with marijuana cigarettes in his car. Narcotics cases in that state are handled with notorious severity, and Gretel urged her husband to intervene. The Texas prosecutor wanted to be made a federal judge. The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Bertram Lovejoy (Barnett Pomeroy), could secure that appointment for him. Lovejoy-Pomeroy was willing enough, Dick reported, but he wanted compensation, in the form of sex with Dick’s wife, a lady he had long admired. Reluctantly, Gretel consented. But her husband double-crossed her. Instead of arranging a nol. pros. for his wife’s brother, in the squalid Texas jail, Dick arranged something to help his own career, a Select Committee to investigate the pornographers who made the films he himself liked to watch.

Shayne told Baruch to stop the film there and turn on the lights. Rourke protested, “The last reel’s the topper, Mike.”

“You’ll have a chance to see it later. This is going to run for months.”

Congressman Pomeroy, in his wheelchair, was looking much better. “I may say,” he said to Baruch when he came out of the booth, “that if you make any attempt to exhibit this picture you’ll answer to a suit for libel and slander.”

“I don’t think so,” Shayne said. “You must be a lawyer. If you’d thought you could stop this legally, you wouldn’t have been so quick to get up a quarter of a million to buy it in. I’m going to back off now and try to put it in chronological sequence. I’ll need help as I go along, especially from you, Peter. Remember, the main person I’m interested in is Frankie Capp. I want him. The rest of you make the best deal you can get.”

Capp growled, “I’m O.K., bastard.”

“You’re far from O.K., if Peter decides to testify against you.”

“That I did what?” Capp said, glancing at the youth.

“You must have realized by now that he saw you get rid of Maureen’s body. There’s a dirt road into the Glades. You had a rubber mattress. You floated her out into the stream and dumped her. I saw the wet mattress in your garage.”

“Talk about crazy.”

“Maybe Peter can do better than that,” Shayne said. “I think he saw you shoot her through the head from behind. Let’s have a comment, Peter.”

“I’m thinking, I’m thinking.”

“Take your time. I’ll go back to last night. Armand said something about arranging the slides in sequence so they’d tell a story. Tucker broke up the sequence and rearranged them before he showed them to me. Now they were random shots of people having sex. The original package may have included a voice-over tape—”