The Murderer Vine (6 page)

I took a pad of yellow legal paper and wrote down a list of illegal things I needed, illegal things I needed done. I wrote down several names of illegal people and connected them with pencil lines to my list. I doodled. Crossed out. Reinserted. Crossed out again. I must have changed my mind as many times as Kirby had when she was looking in that window across the street.

Next I wrote down my plot. I wrote it out briefly as if I were a writer writing a screen treatment for a cynical film producer who had a superb sense of film construction. I wrote it as if a very critical film reviewer were to look at it when it became a movie. But there would be a big difference. There was a big difference between a lousy review and winding up dead somewhere on a lonely country road in northern Mississippi. So I picked my cast of characters very carefully. I rewrote my plot. I crossed out scenes and rewrote them. I went over it again and again for obvious flaws. I went over it for the flaws that would develop under stress. There was the big problem. I would have to play a great deal by hunches. There was no way out of it.

When I finished, I realized with a start that four hours had passed since Kirby had left. I was so involved I hadn’t even turned on the lights. My desk picked up the street lights outside when they went on, and I had worked closer to the paper. I laughed. I certainly wanted that half a million more than I had ever wanted anything. I had never worked out a cover story with such intensity. My back and shoulders and fingers were cramped. What I needed was a brief break so that I could give my idea a fresh look.

I jammed the yellow pages into a pocket, locked up, and went downstairs to the nice little ladies’ restaurant on the corner.

I very seldom saw any men there. A few decorators and hair stylists came in from the fashionable salons, but they were discreet enough. I liked it because it was quiet, had a rug on the floor, and no one ever yelled or talked loudly. I liked the soft-spoken Irish heifers who were imported in herds and obviously pastured in some inaccessible meadow where male hands could not come near them. They blushed whenever they took my order. I chewed carefully and swallowed thoughtfully. My mother would have been proud of my table manners if she were still alive. That was another reason why I was going ahead with Parrish: there was no one to take the rap, no one to be interviewed, no one to feel any bitterness. A man responsible only to himself works in a fine atmosphere where few variables exist. It makes serious decisions easy. Well, not easy. But fast.

When I came out into the street, I realized that I had not the faintest idea what I had eaten. Easy, Joe, I said to myself, easy. Take it slow. You get this excited, you’re bound to make a boo-boo.

I went back to the office. I took out the notes. I had been away half an hour. That was enough time to get a good, clear new look at things, wasn’t it? So I reread the notes. I tried to pick them apart. And there was nothing wrong. Nothing. I burned them and then dialed Fairfield 3–1767.

When Parrish answered, I said, “I’m in.”

I heard him sigh.

“I just want to ask one question. Where did they spend the last night?”

“I don’t know. You could ask the Voter Registration people.”

“I could. But if I’m seen anywhere near them, there goes my cover story, blam.”

“I didn’t think of that.”

I thought of it. I thought of it because only a careful old alley cat like me can survive this kind of living.

“I wish I could help, but — wait a minute. I remember something.” He sounded apologetic. “It might not mean anything.”

“Yes?”

“On his last phone call my boy told his mother something about way down in Egypt land with Moses. She says she thought it was some kind of an in-joke, because she heard the other boys laughing at the phrase.”

“ž‘Way down in Egypt land with Moses’ — that right?”

“Yes.”

I filed the information away in the Dunne filing cabinet. The cabinet consists of several billion drawers. It’s my brain, and usually it’s a pretty good information retrieval center, especially when there’s a half-a-million-dollar bone dangling in front of its nose.

After that call I phoned Montreal. Montreal had a hangover but would see me next day.

I had Kirby’s diction money and twelve hours before my plane. The third call I made was willing to spend them with me.

Parrish’s messenger met me at Kennedy with a manila envelope. Once we were airborne, I opened it in the lavatory. As requested, it had fifty one-hundred-dollar bills. Operating expenses. A little typewritten note had been slipped under the big paper clip that was holding them together. It said, “More when you want it.” No signature.

Three minutes after the plane landed, I had Moran on the phone. He was curt, as usual.

“You at the airport?”

“Yes.”

“Grab a taxi and meet me at the Whore Lodge.”

That’s what it sounded like, anyway.

“The what?”

“L. Apostrophe. H. O. R. L. O. G. E. You wanna know what it means?”

I had spent two years in Paris on the GI Bill after I had graduated alive from Korea. He didn’t have to define
l’horloge
for me.

“No,” I said.

“It’s frog for clock.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“It’s where a lot of good-looking and expensive tail hangs out. The Whore Lodge. See?” He paused for my laugh. When it didn’t come, he added, “What do you mean, ‘Oh, Jesus’?”

Sometimes you’d only get through to Moran after a six-second gap, like on all-night talk programs on radio.

In twenty seconds he made a lousy pun, tells me to take a cab instead of the cheaper airport bus which passed by the restaurant anyway and stopped a block away, makes a lunch date at Montreal’s most expensive restaurant, insults Canada’s largest minority group, gives me a definition I don’t need after I had told him I didn’t need it, and then feels insulted. All in twenty seconds.

“Oh, Jesus, I’ll meet you there,” I said, and hung up. I went out of the booth, disobeyed orders, and got in the airport bus.

Moran had been a lawyer, been disbarred, used some pull, and got a private detective’s license, got too greedy, and had the license lifted. As a result, he got a lot of work. This seeming paradox came about because legitimate private detectives wouldn’t dare touch a lot of things because their license would be lifted. This he didn’t have to worry about any more.

The situation was made to order for Moran. No one liked him, no one trusted him, but he would do dirty things. And he produced. The problem with Moran was that he drank too much. He talked too much. You had to get him at just the right time, for the former, and threaten him gently so that he wouldn’t do the latter.

It was a lot like landing a big sailfish. You had to drop the bait in the right place, just when he was hungry enough to take it, and when he took it, you had to keep enough strain on the line so that he wouldn’t break it in a sudden lunge. You had to pray that he wouldn’t wrap the line several times around a big coral head and have the boat’s momentum rip the rod from your hands.

I always liked the challenge of doing business with him. But I would prefer rolling in an easy swell, say somewhere off Grand Cayman, drinking ice-cold orange juice laced with that gold Martinique rum — I would prefer that to doing business with challenging people like Moran. I was getting too old for the fast stepping required in my business. I put those thoughts aside when I came into L’Horloge.

He was on his second highball. He didn’t waste time on useless formalities like saying hello.

“You’re paying for it, right? I told them you were.”

“Yeah. They know you here.”

“My reputation is lousy, that’s what you mean?”

“Order steak.” I saw he had been looking at things like flounder and London broil.

He forgot the insult while he ate. I wasn’t hungry enough to eat more than a sandwich, and Moran had a strict rule about not talking business while he ate. It was the only attractive ethical part of the whole range of his personality, and I respected it. He ate like he had a contract to keep two rectums working full-time. I watched.

“You eat like a slob,” I said.

“When I get to eat steak, I don’t want to waste time trying to win a merit badge,” he said, unruffled. While he ate, he looked over the women. There were two single girls near us, sitting at the bar with that unmistakable look of expensive call girls on the make in an expensive bar. They had eyes as coldly appraising as a pawnbroker’s scale, and every single male who came in was weighed and assayed for gold content. They had looked us over, decided I was not interested, looked at Moran, but he had started in on the cole slaw the waiter had placed in front of him while he went to give the order to the chef. Moran at the cole slaw was quite a sight. It stuck out at the corners of his mouth, and the dressing dribbled down on his chin.

“For crissakes,” I said, “wipe yourself.”

“Later,” he said, his mouth full of slaw, “later.” The two girls had caught sight of that spectacle, and they had decided against any of that. Moran told me their fee was fifty for an hour, or one hundred and fifty all night. The two together could be rented for seventy-five an hour, or two hundred and twenty-five all night.

“You hungry?”

“Haven’t eaten for two days.”

“Broke?”

“Drinking, drinking. Should eat. That way you avoid the d.t.’s. You know the d.t.’s is a diet deficiency disease?”

I hadn’t come for a lecture on food, but it was useless to talk to Moran about business until he had finished stuffing. It might as well be diet as anything else. After he told me all about how he never drank more than three days straight, because then the lack of vitamins would begin to tell on him, he shifted to more interesting matters.

“After the Fair this town is dead. D. E. A. D.”

Moran liked to spell out words.

He pushed the wreckage away and wiped his greasy face on his napkin. “Am I clean enough for you now?” he asked.

“I could go for you myself.”

He made a couple of jokes about faggots while he ate his Peach Melba. I listened patiently. When I went fishing once down in the Carribbean, off Margarita, one of those little islands off the Venezuelan coast, I learned, once and for all, to accept the fact that certain things, like ship sailings, came to take place when they took place. In other words, don’t push things that cannot be pushed. I drifted with Moran’s filthy conversation.

He ate the dessert like a pig. Then he ordered coffee. By his rules coffee was not part of a meal, and business could be discussed over coffee.

“Okay?”

“Yeah, Dunne. Okay. Shoot.”

I shot. When I finished with my list, he grunted.

“That’s a lot you’re after. A lot.”

“Come on, Jack. Quit trying to force the price up.”

He grinned. “Ought not to be too hard. I’ll need some money to break the ice here and there. To get in some record files. Some payoff money. Then I’ll have to scout around for a careful, old-fashioned burglar. They’re not around much anymore. Then I’ll need a good shoplifter. And then the car.”

I listened patiently. I knew all that; those were some of the things I had written out the night before. But I never cut short an expert when he talks about his specialty.

“It’ll run you — let’s see — how’s three thousand strike you?”

“It strikes me as crazy.”

“What do you like?”

“I like two.”

“Two! For what you want? I’m gonna ask some guy to risk a five-to-ten. You gotta pay a guy plenty. In advance. If he gets caught, he won’t squeal. That’s not cheap. And the car? And all those little extras?”

“I don’t want a Lincoln, Jack. I want a five-, six-year-old heap that’s been well maintained. That won’t run over seven hundred. Don’t make it so heartrending.”

“Who’s your cheap client?” he asked, with a sneer.

That was fine. I was glad he asked. Jack was clever. He probably thought that I might get a bit mad and tell him off with my important client. He would file this information away carefully. It might be useful someday.

“My cheap client, Jack, my cheap client comes from Sicily. He lives in New York. He’s going to bring in a couple friends from Sicily he trusts, and they’re coming back over the border and they’re going to live in Montreal. From time to time they’ll drive down to Philadelphia or Baltimore or Charleston to see their friends who might be dropping in with some good cooking from the old country. They’ll — ”

Jack held up both hands. “All right, all right, Joe. That’s enough. I don’t want to know any more.”

Just the hint of the Mafia was enough for Jack. When he was still a lawyer, he arranged some corporation papers for a front for a Mafia man, and they didn’t like a little extra billing he slipped in. It wasn’t worth a hit, but it was worth a swift, efficient beating in an alley.

“So how about three days?”

“Three days. Yeah, three days will do it. Look for me in three days down at your office.”

I gave him fifteen hundred. It was a calculated risk. It was enough for him to go on a splendid bat, but the thought of my client plus the thought of the balance ought to hold him in check and make him mind his manners.

As I was paying the check, I saw him eyeing one of the tastier bits. She eyed him coldly and turned the other way.

“Oh, wait till I get you in bed, baby,” he muttered, just loud enough for me to hear.

“Control it for three days,” I said. “Be a pal for three days.”

“Yeah,” he said, his voice thick with lust. He stopped at her table. He pretended not to notice her. He took out his wallet and counted the fifteen crisp new one-hundred-dollar bills I had just handed him.

“Aren’t they pretty!” he said.

“Very,” I said. Her eyes were like two ice-cold blue marbles. She couldn’t look away.

“Today is Tuesday, Mr. Onassis,” he said. “I’ll meet you here for dinner on Friday. Say at eight. And if you can’t make it, I’d hate to eat alone. I surely would hate it.”

I went along with him. “I don’t think I can make it,” I said.

He pretended to notice her for the first time. “Why, hello there!” he said. Her face arranged itself in a smile. As we left, she wiggled her fingers at us.