Time to Murder and Create

I had been telling Birnbaum the truth. I had a hunch, and the more I thought about it the more I believed in it, and at the same time I kept wanting to be wrong. So I sat around the station house and read newspapers and drank endless cups of weak coffee and tried not to think about all of the things I couldn't possibly avoid thinking about. Somewhere along the line Birnbaum went home, after he'd briefed another detective named Guzik, and around nine thirty Guzik came over to me and said they had a make from Washington.

He read it off the teletype sheet. "Lundgren, John Michael. Date of birth fourteen March 'forty-three. Place of birth San Bernardino, California. Whole trail of arrests here, Matt. Living off immoral earnings, assault, assault with a deadly weapon, grand theft auto, grand larceny. He did local bits all up and down the West Coast, pulled some hard time in Quentin."

"He pulled a one-to-five in Folsom," I said. "I don't know whether they called it extortion or larceny. That would have been fairly recent."

He looked up at me. "I thought you didn't know him."

"I don't. He was working a badger game. Arrested in San Diego, and his partner turned state's evidence and got off. Sentence suspended."

"That's more detail than I've got here."

I asked him if he had a cigarette. He said he didn't smoke. He turned to ask if anybody had a cigarette, but I told him to forget it. "Get somebody with a steno pad," I said. "There's a lot to tell."

I gave them everything I could think of. How Beverly Ethridge had worked her way in and out of the world of crime. How she had married well and turned herself back into the society type she had been in the first place. How Spinner Jablon had pieced it all together on the strength of a newspaper photo and turned it into a neat little blackmail operation.

"I guess she stalled him for a while," I said. "But it kept being expensive, and he kept pushing for bigger money. Then her old boyfriend Lundgren came east and showed her a way out. Why pay blackmail when it's so much easier to kill the blackmailer? Lundgren was a pro as a criminal but an amateur as a killer. He tried a couple of different methods on Spinner. Tried to get him with a car, then wound up hitting him over the head and putting him in the East River. Then he tried for me with the car."

"And then with the knife."

"That's right."

"How did you get into it?"

I explained, leaving out the names of Spinner's other blackmail victims. They didn't like that much, but there wasn't anything much they could do about it. I told them how I had staked myself out as a target and how Lundgren had taken the bait.

Guzik kept interrupting to tell me I should have given everything to the cops right off, and I kept telling him it was something I had not been willing to do.

"We'd've handled it right, Matt. Jesus, you talk about Lundgren's an amateur, shit, you ran around like an amateur yourself and almost got your ass in the wringer. You wound up going up against a knife with nothing but your hands, and it's dumb luck you're alive this minute. The hell, you ought to know better, you were a cop fifteen years, and you act like you don't know what the department's all about."

"How about the people who didn't kill Spinner? What happens to them if I hand you the whole thing right off the bat?"

"That's their lookout, isn't it? They come into it with dirty hands. They got something to hide, that shouldn't be getting in the way of a murder investigation."

"But there was no investigation. Nobody gave a shit about Spinner."

"Because you were withholding evidence."

I shook my head. "That's horseshit," I said. "I didn't have evidence that anybody killed Spinner. I had evidence that he was blackmailing several people. That was evidence against Spinner, but he was dead, and I didn't think you were particularly anxious to take him out of the morgue and throw him in a cell. The minute I had murder evidence I put it in your hand. Look, we could argue all day. Why don't you put out a pickup order on Beverly Ethridge?"

"And charge her with what?"

"Two counts of conspiracy to murder."

"You've got the blackmail evidence?"

"In a safe place. A safe-deposit box. I can bring it here in an hour."

"I think I'll come along with you and get it."

I looked at him.

"Maybe I want to see just what's in the envelope, Scudder."

It had been Matt up until then. I wondered what kind of a number he wanted to run. Maybe he was just fishing, but he had visions of something or other. Maybe he wanted to take my place in the blackmail dodge, only he'd want real money, not the name of a murderer. Maybe he figured the other pigeons had committed real crimes and he could buy himself a commendation by knocking them off. I didn't know him well enough to guess which motivation would be consistent with the man, but it didn't really make very much difference.

"I don't get it," I said. "I give you a homicide collar on a silver platter and you want to melt down the platter."

"I'm sending a couple boys over to pick up Ethridge. In the meantime, you and me are going to open up a safe-deposit box."

"I could forget where I left the key."

"And I could make your life difficult."

"It's not that much of a cinch as it is. It's just a few blocks from here."

"Still raining," he said. "We'll take a car."

WE drove over to the Manufacturers Hanover branch at Fifty-seventh and Eighth. He left the black-and-white in a bus stop. All that to save a three-block walk, and it wasn't raining all that hard any more. We went inside and went down the stairs to the vault, and I gave my key to the guard and signed the signature card.

"Had the damnedest thing you ever heard of a few months back," Guzik said. He was friendly now that I was going along with him. "This girl rented a box over at Chemical Bank, and she paid her eight bucks for a year, and she was visiting the box three or four times a day. Always with a guy, always a different guy. So the bank got suspicious and asked us to check it out, and wouldn't you know, the chick is a pross. Instead of taking a hotel room for ten bucks, she's picking up her tricks on the street and taking them to the fucking bank, for Christ's sake. Then she gets her box out and they show her to the little room, and she locks the door and gives the guy a quick blow job in complete privacy, and then she sticks the money in the box and locks it up again. And all it runs her is eight bucks for the year instead of ten bucks a trick, and it's safer than a hotel because if she gets a crazy he's not going to try beating her up in the middle of a fucking bank, is he? She can't get beaten up and she can't get robbed, and it's perfect."

By this time the guard had used his key and mine to get the box from the vault. He handed it to me and led us to a cubicle. We entered together, and Guzik closed and locked the door. The room struck me as rather cramped for sex, but I understand people do it in airplane lavatories, and this was spacious in comparison.

I asked Guzik what had happened to the girl.

"Oh, we told the bank not to press charges, or all it would do was give every streetwalker in the business the same idea. We told them to refund her box-rental fee and tell her they didn't want her business, so I guess that's what they did. She probably walked across the street and started doing business with another bank."

"But you never got any more complaints."

"No. Maybe she's got a friend at Chase Manhattan." He laughed hard at his own line, then chopped it off abruptly. "Let's see what's in the box, Scudder."

I handed it to him. "Open it yourself," I said.

He did, and I watched his face while he looked through everything. He had some interesting comments on the pictures he saw, and he gave the written material a fairly careful reading. Then he looked up suddenly.

"This is all the stuff on the Ethridge dame."

"Seems that way," I said.

"What about the others?' "

"I guess these safe-deposit vaults aren't as foolproof as they're supposed to be. Somebody must have come in and taken everything else."

"You son of a bitch."

"You've got everything you need, Guzik. No more and no less."

"You took a different box for each one. How many others are there?"

"What difference does it make?"

"You son of a bitch. So we'll walk back and ask the guard how many other boxes you have here, and we'll take a look at all of them."

"If you want. I can save you a little time."

"Oh?"

"Not just three different boxes, Guzik. Three different banks. And don't even think about shaking me for the other keys, or running a check on the banks, or anything else you might have in mind. In fact, it might be a good idea if you stopped calling me a son of a bitch, because I might get unhappy, and I might decide not to cooperate in your investigation. I don't have to cooperate, you know. And if I don't, your case goes down the drain. You can possibly tie Ethridge to Lundgren without me, but you'll have a hell of a time finding anything a D.A. is going to want to take to court."

We looked at each other for a while. A couple of times he started to say something, and a couple of times he figured out that it wasn't a particularly good idea. Finally something changed in his face, and I knew he'd decided to let it go. He had enough, and he had all he was going to get, and his face said he knew it.

"The hell," he said, "it's the cop in me, I want to get to the bottom of things. No offense, I hope."

"None at all," I said. I don't suppose I sounded very convincing.

"They probably hauled Ethridge out of bed by now. I'll get back and see what she's got to say. It should make good listening. Or maybe they didn't haul her out of bed. These pictures, you'd have more fun hauling her into bed than out. Ever get any of that, Scudder?"

"No."

"I wouldn't mind a taste myself. Want to come back to the station house with me?"

I didn't want to go anywhere with him. I didn't want to see Beverly Ethridge.

"I'll pass," I said. "I've got an appointment."

Chapter 17

I spent half an hour under the shower with the spray as hot as I could stand it. It had been a long night, and the only sleep I'd had had been when I dozed off briefly in Birnbaum's chair. I had come close to being killed, and I had killed the man who'd been trying for me. The Marlboro man, John Michael Lundgren. He'd have been thirty-one next month. I would have guessed him at younger than that, twenty-six or so. Of course, I'd never seen him in particularly good light.

It didn't bother me that he was dead. He had been trying to kill me and had seemed pleased at the prospect. He had killed Spinner, and it wasn't unlikely that he'd killed other people before. He might not have been a pro at killing, but it seemed to be something he enjoyed. He certainly liked working with the knife, and the boys who like to use knives usually get a sexual thrill out of their weaponry. Edged weapons are even more phallic that guns.

I wondered if he'd used a knife on Spinner. It wasn't inconceivable. The Medical Examiner's office doesn't catch everything. There was a case a while ago, a then-unidentified floater they fished out of the Hudson, and she was processed and buried without anyone's noticing that there was a bullet in her skull. They found out only because some yoyo severed her head before burial. He wanted the skull for a desk ornament, and ultimately they found the bullet and identified the skull from dental records and found out the woman had been missing from her home in Jersey for a couple of months.