Warren Murphy: Kill Or Cure

When he got to Tomalino’s room, he knocked.

A patrolman answered the door.

‘What do you want?’ asked the patrolman.

‘I want to impress upon you and your charge in the room about talking from a pure heart. I think you will agree with me, after a few moments of explanation, that truth is the most valuable thing we have.’

‘Get out of here. We don’t need religious nuts.’

The door started to close in Remo’s face, but something stopped it. The patrolman opened the door again to get a better slam, but something stopped it again. This time he looked to see what the obstruction was. The religious nut in the black suit with the blackened face and blackened feet was holding only one blackened finger in the way, so the patrolman decided to break that finger by slamming the door with the full force of his body.

The door reverberated against his shoulder and the religious nut pushed it open, and shut it behind himself with one hand. Something dripped red from behind the nut’s back.

The patrolman went for his gun and the hand did indeed reach the holster. Unfortunately, its wrist connection was rather weak at the time, suffering a cracked bone and a severed nerve. The other patrolman, seeing the speed of the hands, flattened his palms upward.

Vincent ‘The Blast’ Tomalino, a short plug of a man with a stub of a face, begged for mercy.

‘No, no.’

‘I haven’t come here to kill you,’ said Remo. ‘I have come here to help you speak from a pure heart. All of you sit down on the bed.’

When they had done so, Remo lectured them as a school teacher—discussing duty, oaths taken for duty, and an oath that would be taken at a trial shortly where Tomalino would be a witness.

‘Purity of heart is most important,’ Remo said. ‘The detective who is not here had gone up to the roof to do a bad thing. A very bad thing. The bad thing lacked purity of heart.’

The three men eyed the growing red puddle behind the religious nut’s back.

‘What was this bad thing? I will tell you. He was going to take a payoff for someone to kill you. So were these two other officers.’

‘The bastards,’ said Tomalino.

‘Judge not lest ye be judged, Mr. Tomalino, for you have been negotiating with your former boss to perhaps not speak with a pure heart.’

‘No, no. I swear. Never.’

‘Do not lie,’ said Remo sweetly. ‘For this is what happens to people who tell untruths and do not act with purity of heart.’

With that, Remo took what he had been holding behind his back, and placed it on Tomalino’s lap.

Tomalino’s jaw dropped and tears filled his eyes as he went into shock. One of the patrolmen vomited. The other gasped.

‘Now, I must ask you to tell an untruth. You will tell no one about this visit, and you two policemen will do your duty, and you, Mr. Tomalino, will speak with a pure heart.’

Three heads couldn’t nod hard enough. The fourth was beyond nodding and, knowing that the lesson was well-learned, Remo left the room and shut the door behind him.

Down the hotel foyer, three doors down, Remo opened a door he knew would be unlocked. He went to a bathtub that he knew would be filled with water and a special cleansing lotion, then washed his hands and face and feet. As he washed, pods of plastic peeled from his cheeks, changing the contour of his face until now he was almost handsome. He dropped the black pants and shirt into the toilet where, touching water, they dissolved. He heard the police sirens fourteen stories below. He flushed the clothes, emptied the bathtub and went to the closet where a once-worn suit, slightly rumpled as if it had spent a day in the office, hung. He threw it on the bed and opened the bureau drawer where there was a set of underwear, his size; socks, his size; wallet with identification and money; and even a handkerchief. He checked to see if it were clean. Who knew to what extent upstairs would go to assure secrecy?

Remo opened the wallet and checked the wax paper seals. If they were broken he was to discard the identification and say—if he were stopped for questioning—that he had lost his wallet, referring all inquiries about him to a firm in Tacorna, Washington. Should this be done there would be a reference from that firm that, indeed, a Remo Van Sluyters worked for the Busby and Berkley Tool and Die.

Remo opened the seals with his thumb. He looked at the driver’s license. He was Remo Horvath and his card said he worked for the fund-raising firm of Jones, Raymond, Winter and Klein.

He checked the closet for his shoes. The ding-dongs upstairs had unloaded well-used cordovans on him again.

As he dressed, he mused over the morning’s headlines.

HERO COP GIVES LIFE TO SAVE INFORMER.

Or

MANIAC AX WIELDER ATTACKS HERO COP.

Or

A BLOODY MISS AT TOMALINO.

He walked out into the foyer which was now a confusion of blue uniforms, many of them with brass insignia on the shoulders.

‘What happened, officer? What happened?’

‘Stay in your room. No one’s leaving the building.’

‘I beg your pardon.’

An officer with a broken wrist limped out of Tomalino’s room. Why a limp, Remo would never understand. Yet injured people, when they knew they were being observed, often limped.

‘We’re holding people for questioning,’ said the higher ranking officer, who looked at the injured patrolman. The patrolman shook his head, which meant to Remo that there was no identification of him as the killer.

But there was a brief interrogation nevertheless. No, Remo had not seen anything or heard anything and what right did the police have questioning him?

‘A witness was almost killed tonight and one officer was,’ the interrogating officer said. ‘Right next to you.’

‘Goodness gracious,’ said Remo and then, turning to anger, he demanded to know what right the police had to keep witnesses in hotels where ordinary citizens stayed hoping to be safe. What was wrong with the jails?

The officer couldn’t wait to end the unproductive questioning.

Remo left the hotel complaining about violence, crime in the streets and safety for the average citizen. He could not walk underneath the Tomalino window, however, for that was cordoned off by police barricades. A large mound was in the barricaded area. It was covered by a sheet.

One precaution Remo did not take. He did not bother to wipe his prints off the objects in the room he used for changing. There was no need. Police couldn’t check out his fingerprints, least of all with the FBI file. Nobody cross-referenced the prints of men who were certifiably dead.

CHAPTER THREE

In answering questions of the Washington press corps, the presidential press secretary appeared serious, yet unworried. Of course, the charges were serious and they would be looked into thoroughly by the Justice Department. No, this was not another Watergate, the press secretary said. He said that with a crisp smile. Any other questions?

‘Yeah,’ replied one reporter, rising. ‘The incumbents in Miami Beach are charging that your government has been attempting to frame them.’

‘That was not a charge nationally,’ said the press secretary.

‘It may well become one. They say they have indications that an organization called the Greater Florida Betterment League was just a front for secret and illegal government investigations, including wiretaps and bugging.’

‘The Justice Department will look into that.’

The reporter would not sit down. ‘This morning, when the local sheriff’s office broke into the League headquarters in Miami Beach, they found records leading to the National Betterment League’s offices in Kansas City, Missouri. That place turns out to be financed by a U.S. government educational grant. This educational grant doesn’t appear to educate many people, but it managed to spend over a million dollars in Miami Beach alone last year. Now what does that mean?’