The Murderer Vine (29 page)

In them the private eye was always handsome. He was in his early thirties. He always had plenty of good Scotch in this apartment. He never drank anything else. He usually shot people in the belly, but in order for you to think it’s okay, he usually gets beaten up badly first. So a guy who’s been worked over, it’s all right for him to shoot someone in the belly.

Now, a good private eye in real life is never handsome. He would attract too much attention. I’m the ideal private eye. Like I once said, I could very easily fill your gas tank at a service station and you would never think, “My, what’s this movie star doing here?” I never wear shoulder holsters. Private eyes in novels always wear them, they must have some wildly romantic meaning for most authors. I never could stand the pressure of that back strap going across my shoulder blades. It’s simpler and easier to wear the hip holster, and when you’re sitting down with your jacket open, it’s easy to pull your gun fast.

I know it spoils the drape of one’s jacket, but then I’m not a male model.

So the novels amused me for a while. Then I began to get jittery. I threw the unread one away. I did that after I had read three pages and realized I hadn’t the faintest idea of what I had been looking at.

At Princeton Junction I stood up. I couldn’t walk back and forth in the center aisle without attracting annoyed glances. So I stepped out into the vestibule. As the train pulled out for the run to Newark and then New York, I began to pace back and forth. It was only three steps each way, but it did take some of the steam out of my tension. I had never felt this way before. It puzzled me. I didn’t like it.

I smoked and watched the matchstick houses in their neat little rows marching up and down the rolling hills. Last year I had come through here on the train and there had only been woods.

I told myself I wouldn’t ever have to look at those stupid houses anymore. They’d never be building housing projects on my coast. Well, maybe they would, but it wouldn’t be till 4780 a.d. And by then the Caribbean would have a fifty-foot layer of broken beer bottles and old bedsprings on the bottom. And who would care? I had fifteen good years ahead of me doing just what I wanted to do. To hell with 4780.

Suddenly we were racing across the Jersey meadows. The papers were full of a plan to make a jetport out of them, and there were angry letters to the editors for and against. So long, suckers.

The meadows were used as a vast garbage dump. I watched a huge truck lumber backward to the edge of a sewage-filled creek and dump its load. People lived in horrible little shacks made of scrap lumber with flattened five-gallon cans for roofs. They did the same in the Caribbean, but at least it was warm.

Tremendous signboards advertised Broadway plays and musicals. People went to them for amusement in the evenings after doing things they hated all day. That was not the way to live. The correct way was to do something you liked all day, and to hell with going somewhere at night for fun.

Above the ridge that marked the eastern edge of the meadows, I could see the top forty or so floors of the Empire State and Chrysler buildings. There you were, my filthy, rotten, unspeakable, misty and magnificent city. Inside you sat Parrish, my ticket away from you.

I bit my lip, trying to control my tension. I couldn’t understand what was happening. I was pretty sure it wasn’t any delayed reaction about the machine-gunning. Five murderers murdered was simple justice. The hell with them.

So what was it?

I understood as soon as I saw the last billboard, just before the train roared into the tunnel.

The billboard proclaimed the great merits of a musical comedy. It had a famous blonde star, and she was posed against a green background. Her hair had the same spilled-honey color as Kirby’s.

As soon as I looked at the hair I knew I had to take Kirby with me. It would be a hell of a job talking her into it, but there would never be anyone else. I was no private eye in his early thirties who only drank the best Scotch.

I was a private detective in his very early forties who knew what he liked. I was going to make a damn good try for that girl. And I only had a few hours to do it.

I was the first one off as soon as the train stopped moving. I had been standing in the vestibule with my luggage since Rahway.

I grabbed a phone booth. Parrish was out and would not be back till two. I told his secretary to tell him that Mr. Nelson would arrive a little after two.

I phoned Kirby. My heart was going very fast. I leaned my head against the glass door.

I hadn’t felt like that since I asked a girl for a date when I was in high school. I was very shy, very unsure of myself. I finally got up enough nerve to ask her. Her name was Paula Reilly and she had thick ankles and a high-pitched giggle. I asked her if she wanted to go to the movies. She said yes.

When we sat down in the upper balcony, I put my left arm on the rim of her seat. For the next fifteen minutes all I was aware of was my agonizing effort to let it touch her shoulders without her being too aware of it. I finally let it touch. She didn’t move away. I was astonished. It was such a precious moment that I didn’t want to ruin it, so I let that arm remain there for three hours without shifting it. It fell asleep. When we stood up, it was still paralyzed, and I helped her into her coat with only one arm. She thought I was stupid and clumsy.

Kirby answered after the fourth ring.

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Wilson?”

“You must be the gentleman who keeps callin’ himself my husband!”

Her voice was delighted. My heart went up like a skyrocket. “Mrs. Wilson, may I have the honor of taking you to dinner this evening?”

“Suh, it will be a pleasure.”

“What time?”

“I’m starvin’ for a good meal. Will six be too early?”

“Nothing will ever be too early.”

I hadn’t meant any note of high seriousness, but it got away from me. She was silent four heartbeats. Then she said, very low, “I have been missin’ you, Joe.”

“Well, Kirby,” I said, “I — I want to — I—”

“Tell me at six, Joe.”

She hung up. I felt like yelling and jumping up and down. Instead I went to my bank and emptied my safe-deposit box. I took home Parrish’s money and my phony passport. My house smelled stale. I opened the windows and pried loose two ice cubes. I made a drink with cheap Scotch, placed the money in the freezer, and covered it with ice-cube trays and two frozen steaks.

I shaved and went downstairs to the flower shop. I picked out four dozen long-stemmed yellow roses at fifteen dollars a dozen. They would have a hard time matching her hair, but they were welcome to try. I asked the delivery boy if he could take them over right away.

“I got two other rush orders, mister. They gotta go out first.”

I gave him a ten-dollar bill.

“Me first?”

“Yessir!”

Money, money. It could do interesting things if properly distributed.

I went out. Seventy bucks. And seldom were seventy smackers spent more happily. I took a cab down to Battery Place.

By now, if money talked, the delivery boy should be ringing Kirby’s bell.

I whistled all the way up in Parrish’s private elevator. I had forgotten that in my left hand I carried the canvas bag and the Kim with its six-inch reel packed with indictment, verdict, death warrant, and execution. Death and joy riding the elevator together. A subject for one of those old medieval prints.

Parrish came out to meet me. “Mr. Nelson, I’m glad to see you. Are you ready to finalize the deal?”

“Yes.”

“Mary,” he said, “take the afternoon off.”

“But, Mr. Parrish, you said you wanted these three letters typed and — ”

“Mary. Afternoon off.”

“Yes, Mr. Parrish.”

When the elevator doors had closed behind her, he said, “There’s no one within seventy-five feet of here. Come in.”

We went into his private office. He reached out and flicked the
off
switch on his private line.

I took the Kim out of the bag and set it up.

“Ready?”

“Yes.”

I punched the
PLAY
key. He listened. He listened the way anyone would listen to something that was costing half a million bucks.

I had forgotten that I had left it on when I slid behind the pilings to try and hide from Vince. The mike had picked up my fast sloshing through the water.

“What’s that?”

I told him.

“Wasn’t that risky?”

I told him I had no choice.

“Yes. I missed something. Can you play it again?” I reversed it. The shrill, wild, Donald Duck screams of the voices as the tape spun backward didn’t make him smile.

I started it again. He turned his back to the tape and stared out across the harbor as it revolved. Then came the
chugchugchugchugchug.
I moved to shut it off. He held up a hand.

“Wait.”

There was silence on the tape. Then came a steady
thump thump thump.

“What’s that?”

I didn’t know myself. I listened carefully. Then I realized it must have been the blood leaking through the cracks in the flooring and dripping directly onto the mike.

I told him.

“Good. Once more.”

I reversed it and played it again.

“I’m satisfied,” he said. He let out a deep breath, stood up, and unlocked a wall safe. I thought he was getting the money, but he had turned around and was holding out his hand for the tape.

“No.”

“No? I’m paying plenty for it.”

“No. You’re paying for proof that the contract was carried out. Was it?”

“Yes.”

“That reel indicts me for multiple murder. So it’s no.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“Erase it right now.”

“All right. Once more, please.”

He leaned back with his eyes closed. I shoved the Kim a little closer to him, turned up the volume some more, and walked to the far end of the office. I didn’t want to look at his face while he was listening to it. It was his memory he was loading. He could have it.

I looked down at the harbor. It was calm and remote. The sky was a deep, clean blue. It was funny. Here was Parrish trying to remember that tape for the rest of his life and here I was trying to forget it. I turned around after a while and watched his face. Then I looked at the slowly spinning reel. When the
thump thump thump
began again, I stopped it, reversed it, and put it on
erase.
In a few minutes I had a clean tape.

I closed the case.

Neither of us spoke for a while. Parrish spoke first. “Wouldn’t life be great,” he said, “if we could all go back again and erase our mistakes as easy as that?”

“But we’d make them again.”

“I suppose so.” He sighed. “I don’t know where I went wrong,” he said. “Should I have knocked my boy unconscious when he wanted to go South? What could I have done with all this knowledge if we were back in June? I couldn’t have done a damn thing.”

“Mr. Parrish,” I said. “I am afraid I have no time for this kind of a discussion.”

“Sorry.” He lifted his phone, switched it on, and dialed a number. “Bring it,” he said, and hung up.

He turned to me. “The money’s not here. Not safe. As soon as I read that AP dispatch from Okalusa, I took the money from the bank. I didn’t want any red tape while you might be waiting. It should be here at five. It’s out at my Connecticut place.”

“I’ll be here at five.”

“Fine.”

I went down and sold the Kim to a secondhand dealer for a good price.

Then I thought of picking up Kirby and going somewhere while I tried to talk her into coming down to the Caribbean with me. But I decided it would be better for her to be marinated in all those roses. Let her take a leisurely bath while she inhaled their message and thought kindly of me. It would help make her mellow, and anything that might help me would be appreciated.

I walked around the waterfront again, taking deep breaths of the salt air. I watched a freighter go out toward the Narrows with its signal flags fluttering. I watched the seagulls dipping and screeching in its wake. I leaned on the railing and watched the ship disappear, swinging to the left. The signal
Pilot aboard
made a tiny red dot which remained visible quite a long time. I realized with a smile I had my back turned on Manhattan all this time.

Five to five. I went back to Parrish. It was all on his desk, in neat little stacks. I counted it and put it into my canvas bag. I zipped it up.

“Don’t spend it all in one place,” he said.

I smiled.

“Well,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Thank you,” I said. We stood waiting for the elevator. There was an awkward silence. We were like two lovers who have ended an affair and for whom there is nothing more to say.

The elevator finally came. I stepped in.

“So long,” I said.

I lifted a hand and the elevator started down. The bag’s strap was cutting into my shoulder. It was a marvelous sensation.

I could hear a drum banging. When I turned the corner, a tuba began going
oompa-pa, oompa-pa.
It was a Salvation Army band, all girls. Under the black bonnets they were smiling. The tuba player wore glasses and was very serious about her instrument. One of the girls was shaking a tambourine.

I went by and rang Kirby’s bell. No answer. In the tub, I bet. I waited five minutes and planned what I should say to her as my opening sentence.

I rang again. No answer. She was probably out doing last-minute shopping. I walked back to the corner. I would be able to see her coming and also listen to the band. I went up to the tambourine player and smiled. She blushed.

I pulled out all my loose change and dropped it into the tambourine. What the hell. They helped out in floods and earthquakes. In an emergency they would give me a blanket and a cup of coffee if I needed it. My donation amounted to a little over two bucks. I wondered if anyone ever sent roses to Salvation Army girls. I looked at my watch. They began another tune. They played with enthusiasm and little subtlety. The girl with the tuba kept looking at me out of the corner of her eye. I looked back and grinned. She turned pink and primly turned a quarter of a circle to her left.