Brett Halliday: Blue Murder

“Who saw her with Capp?”

“A friend, no one in particular. I need some more Scotch. How about you?”

Shayne finished his cognac and gave him the glass. Tucker went on talking while he made the drinks.

“Gretchen and Frank Capp — an appalling combination. She’s a lovely woman still, and from what I’ve heard about Capp—”

“He’s anything but lovely, but he manages to be seen with good-looking women.”

Tucker made a small face. “Ouch. All right, it’s possible. But there are two things about Gretchen. She’s excruciatingly moral. She’s also totally innocent about the way the world works. She thinks something should be done about crime, for example, preferably by me, as a member of Congress. Why should I concern myself with small pornographers while all these Mafia types are floating around in their Cadillacs? Frankie Capp — anybody who reads Miami newspapers knows the name. Gretchen wouldn’t be with him unless something very peculiar was going on. He was paying toll on the Venetian Causeway. In a black Fleetwood, naturally, the automobile of choice among that particular subspecies. There was no question that the lady in the front seat with him was my dear unstable wife. She was laughing,” he said with extraordinary bitterness. “For me that was the bad part. What joke could that particular couple have in common? I haven’t seen her laugh in months.”

“Have you notified the police?”

“No!” He added, “Fair’s fair. Put yourself in my shoes, Shayne. How would it look if it turned out she went somewhere to walk on the beach for a few days? To tell the truth, at first I was relieved! The shoe had finally dropped. But the next day I couldn’t keep my mind on what I was doing, and I made a few unnecessary mistakes. I thought we had an agreement to cool it till after the convention. I had to wonder what she was up to. There are four people in town I can trust. I mean trust. I told them she’d checked out and to let me know if they heard anything. Late last night — Frankie Capp. Laughing. I haven’t slept since.” He left his chair, looked at the reflection of the room in one of the glass walls and came back.

“I want to try not to be hypocritical. I don’t want her in any serious trouble, and Frankie Capp, by definition, is serious trouble. I also don’t want to lose that nomination! It doesn’t matter which of those reasons you believe. They’re both true. It’s the Capp sighting that worries me the most. It would be greatly to that man’s advantage to see me out of politics, back making TV commercials.”

“To his advantage in what way?”

“You know he’s got quite a bit of capital tied up in blue movies?”

Shayne had thought he was an expert on the subject of Frank Capp, but he hadn’t known that. He looked a question.

Tucker said: “That hard-core outfit in northwest Miami, the Warehouse. They make some of the filthiest films in the country.”

“Where does Capp come in?”

“He’s their Shylock. Short-term unsecured loans at twenty-five percent. You know my Anti-Porno committee. I don’t know if you followed our latest series of hearings…”

“More or less,” Shayne said. “Mostly less.”

Tucker crossed his legs carefully, picking up the skepticism in Shayne’s comment.

“I don’t want to get into that particular argument tonight, if you don’t mind. Does the open display of this kind of material have an effect on the moral climate of the republic? I maintain that it does. There are intelligent people who disagree with me. You may be one of them. Beside the point. The fact is that I’ve been given a mandate by the voters to do what I can to stamp out this traffic and put the traffickers behind bars. The high court of the land doesn’t happen to view the matter in the same light, and until we can succeed in turning some of those five-four decisions around, we’ll have to rely on exposure and good old-fashioned harassment, to skirt the constitutional problem. We’ve had a few successes. We’re pushing these people hard. We’ve cut their outlets in half, so they have a backlog of filth they haven’t been able to run through the sewer because certain district attorneys have been knocking over their theaters for building-code violations, arresting their projectionists for being behind on alimony payments and the like. Prints of their pictures have been seized and burned. Their legal expenses have been heavy — ruinous in a few cases. They’re all short of cash, and they’ve had to go to people like Capp. I don’t know how much he’s put up, what kind of control it gives him. I thought you might want to find out for me.”

“A couple of questions first,” Shayne said. “Do you have any more hearings scheduled?”

“Definitely, right after the convention, and I predict that one of the stars of the new series is going to be Armand Baruch, the Miami genius. He writes, directs, produces, and he’s one of those picturesque people who don’t believe in washing under the arms. He likes to be in the vanguard, one step ahead. He was the first to go into color, the first to show anal penetration, the first to use so-called literate dialogue. I look forward to getting him on the stand and watching him squirm. If we handle it right, I think public opinion will make it difficult for him to continue to operate in this town.”

“And if he has to close, Capp won’t be able to collect what he’s owed.”

“Exactly, which gives him an incentive. There are others on the committee, of course. I merely happen to be chairman. But to be frank, I think I provide the impetus, and if Capp and Baruch could discredit me in some way, the whole investigation would probably peter out in a matter of weeks. You can see what idea jumped into my mind. Gretchen would present herself to them as a weapon to use against me. So I’ve got to find her! I’ve got to stop her! Without publicity. Nickerson tells me you may be the one man in Dade County who can do it.”

“They won’t move without getting in touch with you first, to give you a chance to bid. What does your wife think about your antipornography thing?”

Tucker chose his words carefully. “She thinks my concern about it is… exaggerated. Or put that in the past tense. We haven’t discussed it for a year. It isn’t something I like to joke about. The thing I fear most” — he gestured with his free hand — “and I do mean for her sake as well as mine. I’ve discussed it with her Washington doctor. She’s been having periods of — I don’t know, irresponsibility. A kind of heedlessness. The doctor has been afraid she would move on to more serious drugs, and Capp would have no difficulty supplying them, would he? That would explain her laughter in the front seat of the Cadillac. High on something.”

Less controlled than he had been at the beginning of the conversation, Tucker pressed his fingertips against his temples, an actor’s gesture. “I’ve had some wild ideas. The vote’s going to be so close! If she does some crazy public thing, like walking out on the floor and taking off her dress — or if she turns herself in at a hospital with needle tracks in her arm — or if she stands up in a TV studio and throws something at me — or a drunk scene, a quarrel. The switch of a half-dozen delegates would do it. If my wife can’t stand me, there must be something off-color about me that doesn’t show on the surface. If I can’t run my own marriage, how can the voters trust me to run Florida? That kind of thing.”

“Have you subpoenaed Baruch yet?”

“A few days ago.”

“How much trouble would it be to quash that?”

“I see what you mean. No trouble at all. We’ve announced the hearings, but we could substitute somebody else or take his testimony in executive session, or ask him a few formal questions. Various possibilities. But the Warehouse is a local operation, here in my bailiwick, and I can’t go on pretending it doesn’t exist.”