The only problem is that their lifetimes tend to shrink. The Spinner became a bad actuarial risk the day he got successful. First aggravation and ulcers, then a dented skull and a long swim.
A blackmailer needs insurance. He has to have some leverage that will convince his victim not to terminate the blackmail by terminating the blackmailer. Somebody-a lawyer, a girlfriend, anyone-sits in the background with whatever evidence has the victim squirming in the first place. If the blackmailer dies, the evidence goes to the cops and the shit hits the fan. Every blackmailer makes a point of letting the victim know about this added element. Sometimes there's no confederate, no envelope to be mailed, because evidence lying around is dangerous to all concerned, so the blackmailer just says that there is and figures the mark won't call his bluff. Sometimes the mark believes him, and sometimes he doesn't.
Spinner Jablon probably told his mark about the magic envelope from the beginning. But in February he had started to sweat. He had decided that somebody was trying to kill him, or was likely to try, so he had put his envelope together. An actual envelope wouldn't keep him alive if the idea of the envelope failed. He'd be just as dead, and he had known it.
But he had been, in the final analysis, a pro. Penny-ante for almost all his life, but professional just the same. And a professional doesn't get mad. He gets even.
He'd had a problem, though, and it became my problem when I cut his envelope open and checked its contents. Because Spinner had known that he would have to get even with somebody.
He just hadn't known who.
THE first thing I looked at was the letter. It was typed, which suggested that at one time or another he had stolen one more typewriter than he could sell, so he'd kept it around. He hadn't used it a hell of a lot. His letter was full of xxxxxx'd-out words and phrases, skips between letters, and enough misspelled words to make it interesting. But it added up to something like this:
Matt:
If you're reading this I'm a dead man. I hope it blows over but no bets on that. I think somebody tried for me yesterday. There was this car just about crawled up the curb coming at me.
What I got going is blackmail. I fell into some information worth good money. Years of scrounging around and I finally stepped right into it.
There is three of them. You'll see how it lays when you open the other envelopes. That is the problem, the three of them, because if I'm dead one of them did it and I don't know which. I got each one on a string and I don't know which one I'm choking.
This Prager, two years ago December his daughter ran down a kid on a tricycle and kept on going on account of she was driving on a suspended license and strung out on speed and grass and I don't know what else. Prager has more money than God and he spread it on everybody and his kid was never picked up. All the information is in the envelope. He was the first one, I overheard some shit in a bar and I fed this one guy drinks and he opened up for me. I'm not taking him for anything he can't afford and he just pays me like you pay rent the first of the month but who knows when a man is going to go crazy and maybe that's what happened. He wants me dead, shit, he could hire it done easy enough.
The Ethridge broad was just dumb luck. I hit on her picture in the newspapers, some society page hype, and I reckonized her from this fuck film I saw some years back. Talk about remembering a face, and who looks at the face, but maybe she was giving head to some dude and it caught in my mind. I read all these schools she went to and I couldn't add it up, so I did some homework, and there was a couple years when she dropped out of sight and went into things a little heavy, and I got pictures and some other shit which you'll see. I been dealing with her and whether her husband knows what's happening or anything else I don't know. She is very hard and could kill a person without turning a hare. You look into her eyes and you know exactly what I mean.
Huysendahl came in third on the string and by this time I'm on the earie as a regular thing because it's all working so nice for me. What I pick up on is his wife is a lezzie. Well this is nothing spectacular Matt as you know. But he's rich as shit and he's thinking about pushing for governor so why not dig a little. The dyke thing is nothing, too many people know it in front, and you spread it around and all that happens is he gets the dyke vote which maybe puts him over the top, so I don't care about that, but why is he still married to this dyke, that's my question. Like is there something kinky about him. So I work my ass to the bone and it turns out there's something there, but getting a handle on it is something else again. He's not a normal queer but his thing is young boys, younger the better. It's a sickness and it is enough to turn your stomach. I got small things, like this kid hospitalized for internal injuries which Huysendahl paid the hospital bills, but I wanted to be able to sink the hook so the pictures were a set up. It don't matter how I set it up but there was other people involved. He must of shit when he saw the pictures. The deal cost me a packet but nobody ever made a better investment.
Matt the thing is if somebody hit me it was one of them, or they hired it out which adds up the same way, and what I want is for you to fuck them good. The one that did it, not the other two which played straight with me, which is why I can't leave this with a lawyer and send it all to the police, because the ones that played straight with me deserve to be off the hook, not to mention if it goes to the wrong cop he just works a shakedown and whoever kills me is home free, except he's still paying out money.
The fourth envelope has your name on it because it is for you. There is 3K in it and that is for you. I don't know if it should be more or what it should be, but there's always the chance you'll just put it in your pocket and shitcan the rest of the stuff, which if it happens I'll be dead and won't know about it. Why I think you'll follow through is something I noticed about you a long time ago, namely that you happen to think there is a difference between murder and other crimes. I am the same. I have done bad things all my life but never killed anybody and never would. I have known people who have killed which I've known for a fact or a rumor and would never get close to them. It is the way I am and I think you are that way too and that is why you might do something, and again if you don't I will not know it.
Your Friend,
Jake "Spinner" Jablon
Wednesday morning I got the envelope out from under the carpet and took another long look at the evidence. I got out my notebook and jotted down a few details. I wasn't going to be able to keep the stuff on hand, because if I made any kind of move I would be making myself visible, and my room would no longer be a clever hiding place.
Spinner had nailed them down tight enough. There was very little hard evidence to prove that Henry Prager's daughter Stacy had left the scene of an accident in which three-year-old Michael Litvak was run down and killed, but in this instance hard evidence wasn't necessary. Spinner had the name of the garage where the Prager car had been repaired, the names of the people in the police department and Westchester D.A.'s office who had been reached, and a few other bits and pieces which would do the job. If you handed the whole package to a good investigative reporter, he wouldn't be able to leave it alone.
The material on Beverly Ethridge was more graphic. The pictures alone might not have been enough. There were a couple of four-by-five color prints and half a dozen clips of film running a few frames each. She was clearly identifiable throughout, and there was no question what she was doing. This by itself might not have been so damaging. A lot of the things people do for a lark in their youth can be written off readily enough after a few years have passed, especially in those social circles where every other closet sports a skeleton.
But the Spinner had done his homework, just as he'd said. He traced Mrs. Ethridge, then Beverly Guildhurst, from the time she left Vassar in her junior year. He turned up an arrest in Santa Barbara for prostitution, sentence suspended. There was a narcotics bust in Vegas, thrown out for lack of evidence, with a strong implication that some family money had pulled her ass out of the fire. In San Diego she was working a badger game with a partner who was a known pimp. It went sour one time; she turned state's evidence and picked up another suspension, while her partner pulled one-to-five in Folsom. The only time she served, as far as Spinner had been able to make out, was fifteen days in Oceanside for drunk and disorderly.
Then she came back and married Kermit Ethridge, and if she hadn't gotten her picture in the paper at just the wrong time, she'd have been home free.
The Huysendahl material was hard to take. The documentary evidence was nothing special: the names of some prepubescent boys and the dates on which Ted Huysendahl had allegedly had sexual relations with them, a stat of hospital records indicating that Huysendahl had sprung for treatment of internal injuries and lacerations for one Jeffrey Kramer, age eleven. But the pictures did not leave you with the feeling that you were looking at the people's choice for the next governor of New York State.
There were an even dozen of them, and they portrayed a fairly full repertoire. The worst one showed Huysendahl's partner, a young and slender black boy, with his face contorted in pain while Huysendahl penetrated him anally. The kid was looking straight at the camera in that shot, as in several of the others, and it was certainly possible that the facial expression of agony was nothing but theater, but that possibility wouldn't prevent nine out of ten average citizens from gladly fitting a noose around Huysendahl's neck and hanging him from the nearest lamppost.
Chapter 4
At four thirty that afternoon I was in a reception room on the twenty-second floor of a glass and steel office building on Park Avenue in the high Forties. The receptionist and I had the room to ourselves. She was behind a U-shaped ebony desk. She was a shade lighter than the desk, and she wore her hair in a tight-cropped Afro. I sat on a vinyl couch the same color as the desk. The small white parson's table beside it was sparsely covered with magazines: Architectural Forum, Scientific American, a couple different golf magazines, last week's Sports Illustrated. I didn't think any of them would tell me anything I wanted to know, so I left them where they were and looked at the small oil on the far wall. It was an amateurish seascape with a great many small boats cavorting on a turbulent ocean. Men leaned over the sides of the boat in the foreground. They seemed to be vomiting, but it was hard to believe the artist had intended it that way.
"Mrs. Prager painted that," the girl said. "His wife?"
"It's interesting."
"All those in his office, she painted them, too. It must be wonderful to have a talent like that."
"It must be."
"And she never had a lesson in her life."
The receptionist found this more remarkable than I did. I wondered when Mrs. Prager had taken up painting. After her children were grown, I supposed. There were three Prager children: a boy in medical school at the University of Buffalo, a married daughter in California, and the youngest, Stacy. They had all left the nest now, and Mrs. Prager lived in a landlocked house in Rye and painted stormy seascapes.
"He's off the phone now," the girl said. "I didn't get your name, I'm afraid."
"Matthew Scudder," I said.
She buzzed him to announce my presence. I hadn't expected the name would mean anything to him, and it evidently didn't, because she asked me what my visit was in reference to.