Brett Halliday: Blue Murder

Gretchen Tucker, an elegant thin-nosed blonde wearing glasses, very short shorts and a thin sleeveless top, turned out the projection-room lights, and the screening began.

This was a rough cut of scenes shot over the weekend, and the transition between shots was sometimes jarring. They were working against a deadline, attempting to shoot and assemble a four-reel feature in fourteen days. There were only two of them in the room, Gretchen and Armand Baruch, the director and producer, a heavily bearded young man wearing a striped Pakistani robe and sandals. He had extremely dark skin and an intentness when he was working that gave him the look of a mullah who had spent too much time alone in the desert.

He was murmuring instructions to himself into a tape recorder as he watched the action, a medium shot of an attractive blond girl approaching a closed office door. She smoothed her eyebrows and tucked in her blouse more securely, accentuating her breasts. She started to knock, changed her mind and walked in.

Gretchen was playing idly with the hair at the nape of Baruch’s neck. “The suspense is terrific. What’s going to happen now?”

“Suspense is our big problem,” Baruch said gloomily. “Every fool in the audience knows what’s going to happen. The only question is with how many people.”

On the screen, a short pompous-looking man behind a big desk looked up, annoyed. He was smoking a cigarette with an anticancer mouthpiece, and he was obviously very busy. It was also obvious that this was one visitor he was glad to be interrupted by.

“A pleasant surprise,” he said. “I wasn’t sure you knew the way.”

“I was shopping,” she said shyly. “I know this is a little unconventional, but I wanted to tell you that I saw you last night on Johnny Carson, and I thought you were super.”

“I’m glad to hear that. Relieved. I thought I muffed a few questions.”

“Oh, no! You made the rest of them look like jerks. So smooth. So — well—” defiantly — “sexy! And I’ve been having second thoughts about — you know. I shouldn’t have laughed. Will you forgive me ?”

“My dear, you’re lovely. Of course I forgive you.”

She was playing with the buttons of her blouse. “And will you let me make it up to you?”

“Here? Now?” He loosened his neck inside his collar. “That would be… interesting.”

“May I confess something? I have this thing for fat people. I love those little folds and creases. I’ve been trying to get over it, and that’s why I laughed when—”

He stood up. “If you like fatties, this is your lucky day.”

“Groovy,” she said bravely.

“I thought I repelled you.”

“Definitely not!”

He switched on his intercom and told his secretary not to disturb him. Old hands in the audience would know, of course, that presently the secretary would forget his instructions and bring in something for him to sign. And after a certain amount of hemming and hawing, she would be asked to join them.

“He really is… rather large, isn’t he?” Gretchen murmured.

“That’s how he gets jobs.”

The fat little man continued to smoke, his cigarette cocked at a jaunty angle. His lovely visitor closed with him, and the camera moved in. She was still wearing her glasses, and her face was nearly hidden by her mass of fair hair. All that showed clearly in the shot were her mouth and tongue.

In spite of a few recent successes, Baruch still ran a marginal operation, cobbling his pictures together with promises and ingenuity and very little cash. The projection room was considered to be air-conditioned, but the equipment functioned only sporadically and never really well. The nudity on the screen was contagious. Gretchen took off her top and used it to wipe the sweat from her arms and shoulders.

“When my dear husband sees this,” she said, “he’s going to hit the ceiling and go right on through.”

“We hope so, don’t we? That’s it for now. Get the lights.”

When the lights came on he talked into the tape recorder for another moment while she watched, smiling.

“You’re a sort of genius, you know that, Armand? You do it so gaily. It’s the way sex ought to be and so seldom is.”

He was pleased. “That’s my aim, to put back the romance. But I can’t move too fast, because I’m not sure the market is ready for it. Come on, we’ve got another scene to shoot.”

Peter Fisher, feeling like a kid playing hide-and-seek, crept under a bush that was heavy with some kind of white flowers, giving off a powerful cloying fragrance. All he’d been told to do was watch the house. But when the uproar started inside, he thought it would be a sound idea to sneak across the yard and find out what was going on.

As soon as he stepped onto private property, he began regretting the decision. He was on one of the pill-shaped islands straddling the Venetian Causeway between Miami and Miami Beach. It was a quiet neighborhood, a quiet night. No cars had gone by for some time. But what if one of these quiet neighbors took it into his head to walk his dog? And saw a furtive figure, with heavily muscled shoulders, creeping across the grass, obviously about to commit some felonious act? People in houses with eight bedrooms and three baths kept on cordial terms with the local fuzz, giving them whiskey at Christmas and writing handsome checks to the Police Athletic League. Peter had been out of jail for less than three weeks, and his hair had hardly grown out enough to take a part. He had promised to stay straight, and his parole officer would be very disappointed to hear of this backsliding.

He listened carefully, hearing nothing but the banging of his own pulse. He left the semisecurity of the bush and ran in a half crouch across the open lawn.

He felt less conspicuous among the low shrubs screening the cinder-block foundation. Several windows were lighted. He looked into an empty kitchen. A dog was barking angrily inside the house, causing the sensitive skin at the back of Peter’s skull to wrinkle. Somebody yelled at the dog and the barking stopped.

Peter was trying to talk himself into moving to the next window. The blind there had jammed before it was all the way down, and a thin strip of light showed at the bottom. Should he or shouldn’t he? The truth was, he didn’t give a damn about his parole officer, who was hopelessly square. You couldn’t allow these grubby bureaucrats to organize your life. There was a nice bit of money involved, in the low six figures, as the saying went, and he thought he saw a way of picking off most of this for himself. Admittedly, it couldn’t be done without a little coarseness and brutality, and was he capable of it? He couldn’t be sure until the time came.

It would be dangerous, of course — dangerous as all hell. The man he had followed here, Frankie Capp, believed in violent solutions to even the simplest problems — that was his reputation. If he caught a peeper, he wouldn’t bother the police with it; he would handle it himself, using something lethal like both barrels of a 20-gauge shotgun. Peter’s lifetime policy, in jail and out, had been to ignore the Capps, to assume that sooner or later, like the dinosaur and the passenger pigeon, they would die out. Common sense told him to return quietly to his car and face the fact that he was unlikely ever to have any more money in his pocket than he had now, fifty or sixty lousy bucks.

But when he heard a faint scream, like the cry of a bird, he stepped into the moonlight without any further debate. Going to the lighted window, he went down on one knee and peered in.