Time to Murder and Create (3 page)

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 inSanta 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. InSan 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 inOceanside 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 ofNew YorkState .

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.

At four thirty that afternoon I was in a reception room on the twenty-second floor of a glass and steel office building onPark 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 theUniversity ofBuffalo , a married daughter inCalifornia , and the youngest, Stacy. They had all left the nest now, and Mrs. Prager lived in a landlocked house inRye 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.

"I'm representing the Michael Litvak project."

If that registered, Prager wasn't letting on. She conveyed his continued puzzlement. "The Hit-and-Run Cooperative," I said. "The Michael Litvak project.

It's a confidential matter, I'm sure he'll want to see me."

I was sure he wouldn't want to see me at all, actually, but she repeated my words and he couldn't really avoid it. "He'll see you now," she said, and nodded her curly little head at a door marked PRIVATE.

His office was spacious, the far wall all glass with a rather impressive view of a city that looks better the higher up you go. The decor was traditional, in sharp contrast to the harsh modern furnishings of the reception room. The walls were paneled in dark wood--individual boards, not the plywood stuff. The carpet was the color of tawny port wine. There were a lot of pictures on the walls, all of them seascapes, all unmistakably the work of Mrs. Henry Prager.

I had seen his picture in the papers I'd scanned in the microfilm room at the library. Just head-and-shoulder shots, but they had prepared me for a larger man than the one who now stood up behind the broad leather-topped desk. And the face in the Bachrach photo had beamed with calm assurance. Now it was lined with apprehension pinned in place by caution. I approached the desk, and we stood looking each other over. He seemed to be considering whether or not to offer his hand. He decided against it.

He said, "Your name is Scudder?"

"That's right."

"I'm not sure what you want."

Neither was I. There was a red leather chair with wooden arms near the desk. I pulled it up and sat in it while he was still on his feet. He hesitated a moment, then seated himself. I waited for a few seconds on the off chance that he might have something to say. But he was pretty good at waiting.

I said, "I mentioned a name before. Michael Litvak."

"I don't know the name."

"Then I'll mention another. Jacob Jablon."

"I don't know that name, either."

"Don't you? Mr. Jablon was an associate of mine. We did some business together."

"What kind of business would that be?"

"Oh, a little of this, a little of that. Nothing as successful as your line of work, I'm afraid. You're an architectural consultant?"

"That's correct."

"Large-scale projects. Housing developments, office buildings, that sort of thing."

"That's hardly classified information, Mr. Scudder."

"It must pay well."

He looked at me.

"Actually, the phrase you just used. 'Classified information.' That's what I really wanted to talk to you about."

"Oh?"

"My associate Mr. Jablon had to leave town abruptly."

"I don't see how--"

"He retired," I said. "He was a man who worked hard all his life, Mr. Prager, and he came into a sum of money, you see, and he retired."

"Perhaps you could come to the point."

I took a silver dollar out of my pocket and gave it a spin, but, unlike Spinner, I kept my eyes on Prager's face instead of on the coin. He could have taken that face to any poker game in town and done just fine with it. Assuming he played his cards right.

"You don't see many of these," I said. "I went into a bank a couple of hours ago and tried to buy one.

They just stared at me and then told me to go see a coin dealer. I thought a dollar was a dollar, you know? That's the way it used to be. It seems the silver content alone in these things is worth two or three bucks, and the collector value is even higher. I had to pay seven dollars for this thing, believe it or not."

"Why did you want it?"

"Just for luck. Mr. Jablon has a coin just like this one. Or at least it looked the same to me. I'm not a numismatist. That's a coin expert."

"I know what a numismatist is."

"Well, I only found that out today, while I was finding out that a dollar's not a dollar any more. Mr.

Jablon could have saved me seven bucks if he'd left his dollar with me when he went out of town. But he left me something else that's probably worth a little more than seven dollars. See, he gave me this envelope full of papers and things.

Some of them have your name on them. And your daughter's name, and some other names I mentioned. Michael Litvak, for example, but that's not a name you recognize, is it?"

The dollar had stopped spinning. Spinner had always snatched it up when it started to wobble, but I just let it drop. It landed heads.

"I thought since those papers had your name on them, along with those other names, I thought you might like to own them."

He didn't say anything, and I couldn't think of anything else to say. I picked up the silver dollar and gave it another spin. This time we both watched it. It stayed spinning for quite a while on the leather desk top.

Then it glanced off a photograph in a silver frame, wobbled uncertainly, and landed heads again.

Prager picked up his desk phone and pushed a buzzer. He said, "That's all for today,Shari . Just put the machine on and go ahead home." Then, after a pause:

"No, they can wait, I'll sign them tomorrow. You can head along home now. Fine."

Neither of us spoke until the door of the outer office opened and closed.

Then Prager leaned back in his chair and folded his hands on his shirt front. He was a rather plump man, but there was no spare flesh on his hands. They were slender, with long fingers.

He said, "I gather you want to take up where--what was his name?"

"Jablon."

"Where Jablon took off."

"Something like that."

"I'm not a rich man, Mr. Scudder."

"You're not starving."

"No," he agreed. "I am not starving." He looked past me for a moment, probably at a seascape. He said,

"My daughter Stacy went through a difficult period in her life. In the course of it, she had a very unfortunate accident."

"A little boy died."

"A little boy died. At the risk of sounding callous, I'll point out that that sort of thing happens all the time.

Human beings--children, adults, what does it matter--people are killed accidentally every day."