You Could Call It Murder

by Lawrence Block

  “Barbara’s missing,” I said. “He’s worried about her. He wants to know where she is.”

  “So do I.”

  “You don’t know?”

  He looked at me carefully. “I don’t,” he said. “If I did, I wouldn’t tell you. I wouldn’t tell anybody.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s Barb’s business what she does. She’s a big girl now, man. She can take care of herself.”

  “Maybe she’s in trouble.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Is she?”

  His eyes mocked me. “I told you,” he said. Barb’s a big girl. She can take care of herself. What’s your bit, anyway? You some kind of a cop?”

  “I’m a private investigator.”

  “I’ll be a son of a bitch. The old man’s got private eyes looking for her. Somebody oughta shoot him.”

  He was getting on my nerves. “You take quite an interest in all this, don’t you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Why? Was she paying your bills for you?”

  “Don’t let the clothes fool you,” he snapped. “My old man’s just as loaded as Barb’s. And just as much of a bastard.”

  I wasn’t getting very far. I lighted a cigarette and smoked, waiting for him to say something else. A girl with long black hair and too much lipstick asked me what I wanted to order. I asked for coffee and she brought me a demitasse cup of it. It was black and bitter and it cost me a quarter.

  “What the hell,” he said finally. “I couldn’t tell you anything even if I wanted to. I don’t know where she went.”

  “She left without telling you?”

  He nodded. “I wasn’t surprised. Something’s been bugging her. She’s in trouble, bad trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  He shrugged. “There’s all kinds. Money trouble, man trouble, pregnant trouble, school trouble, sadness trouble. I don’t think it was money—her old man gives her enough bread, even if he doesn’t show her anything else. I don’t think she was pregnant—”

  “Were you sleeping with her?”

  “None of your business,” he said, angry now. “What I do is my business. What Barb does is her business.”

  Wbich could mean anything, I decided. “You love her?”

  His eyes clouded. “Maybe. Big word, love. She’s gone, maybe she’s coming back, maybe she isn’t. I don’t know.”

  I asked him a few more questions and he didn’t have answers for them. He said he didn’t know why she had left or where she might have gone, didn’t know anyone likely to be able or willing to supply any of the answers. I wasn’t sure whether or not he was telling the truth. I had a hunch he knew more than he was ready to tell me, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.

  I finished my cigarette. There were no ashtrays; I dropped the butt to the bare wooden floor and squashed it with my foot. I left the coffee there. The management was welcome to reheat it and collect another quarter for it.

  And I left Grape Leaves.

  It was close to eight. I found a drugstore, changed a pair of dollars for the telephone booth. The pharmacist had heavily lidded eyes and dirty hands. I wondered how many contraceptives he sold to Radbourne students.

  I shut myself up in the phone booth, put a dime in the slot and managed to convince the operator that I wished to call Bedford Hills, New York. I didn’t bother trying to get her to make the call collect as Edgar Taft had suggested. It would have been too much trouble.

  Instead I poured nickels and dimes and quarters into the telephone until the woman was satisfied. After an annoying delay a phone started to ring. Someone picked it up midway through the first ring and barked hello at me.

  I asked for Taft.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Roy Markham,” I said.

  “Markham,” the voice said. “You the private eye that Taft sent to look for his daughter?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You can quit looking.”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Hanovan,” the voice said. “Homicide. We found the girl in the Hudson, Markham. It looks like suicide.”

  I said: “God.”

  “Yeah. It was messy. It’s always messy. She spent a few days floating and they don’t look too beautiful after a few days in the river. They never look beautiful dead.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I guess that’s it,” he said. “But you don’t have to look for her any more.”

  “Can I speak with Mr. Taft?”

  “I don’t know, Markham. He’s pretty broken up. We had a doc come over and give his wife a sedative, put her to sleep for awhile. But Taft—”

  I heard noises in the background. Then Taft’s voice, loud, came over the wire.

  “Is that Roy Markham? Gimme the phone, damn it. Let me talk to him.”

  Somebody must have given him the phone. He said: “It’s terrible, Roy. God, it’s awful.”

  I didn’t know what to say or whether I was supposed to say anything at all. He didn’t give me time to worry about it. “Get right back to New York,” he said. “Come up here right away. These cops think she killed herself. I don’t believe it, Roy. Barb wouldn’t do a thing like that.”

  “Well—”

  “You get here as soon as you can,” he went on. “Somebody murdered my daughter, Roy. I want that killer. I want you to find him and I want to see him go to the chair. I want to watch him die, Roy.”

  I didn’t say anything. I looked through the phone booth’s glass door. The pharmacist was busy counting pills. A pair of students near the front of the store were leafing through a display of magazines.

  “Roy? You’re coming?”

  I let out my breath and realized that I had been holding it for a long while.

  “I’m coming,” I said. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  Three

  I FOUND a mercenary student with an ancient Packard and bribed a ride to Byington. The buses weren’t running and I can’t say I blamed them. Snow carpetted the roads while wind blew more snow across the road at us. But the old car was tough as nails, built for rough weather and bad roads, and the boy knew how to drive. He got me to Byington in far less time than the bus would have taken, pocketed his bribe with a huge smile, turned the Packard around and aimed it at Cliff’s End once again. Less than twenty minutes passed before the Massachusetts Northern came to take me to Boston. I picked up the Central there and rode it to New York, then got off it and onto another which carried me back up the Hudson Valley as far as Bedford Hills. I called the Taft home from a pay-phone in the station—it was late and no cabs were handy. The policeman who said his name was Hanovan answered and told me he’d send a car around for me. I waited until an unmarked black Ford pulled up and a hand waved at me.

  I went over to the car, got into it. The man behind the wheel was wearing a rumpled gray business suit. His hair was black, his nose broad, his eyes tired. I asked him if Hanovan had sent him.

  “I’m Hanovan,” he said. “So you’re Markham. I was talking to Bill Runyon about you. He said you’re all right.”

  “I worked with him once.”

  “He told me.” He took out a cigarette and lighted one without offering me the pack. I lighted one of my own and drew smoke into my lungs. The car’s motor was running but we were still at the curb. I wondered what we were waiting for.

  “I wanted to talk to you,” he said. “Without Taft listening. That’s why I stayed around his place. There’s nothing to do there but I wanted to talk to you.”

  I said nothing.

  “The kid killed herself,” he said. “No question about it. We fished her out of the Hudson around Pier Eighty-one—that’s the Hudson Day Line slot near Forty-second Street. Death was by drowning—no bumps on the head, no bullet holes, nothing. She took a jump in the drink and drowned.”

  I swallowed. “How long had she been dead?”

  “That’s hard to say, Markham. You leave somebody in t
he water more than two days, you can’t tell too much. The doc says she was in for three days minimum. Maybe as many as five.” He shrugged heroically. “That’s as close as he would make it. Look, let me tell you what we got. The way we figure it, she hit the water from one of the piers between Fifty-ninth Street and Forty-second. Her car turned up in a garage on West Fifty-third between Eighth and Ninth. It’s been there since late Monday night and the guy we talked to didn’t remember anything about who parked it. That fits the time, Markham. It’s Thursday night now. That would be four days in the water, which checks with what the medical examiner guessed.”

  I nodded.

  “We figured she garaged the car and went for a walk. The docks are empty that time of night. She walked out on a pier, took off her clothes—”

  “She was naked when you found her?”

  He nodded emphatically. “Suicides usually work that way. The ones who go for a swim, anyways. They take everything off and fold it up neat and then go and jump.”

  “Did you find her clothes?”

  “Nope. Which is no surprise, if you stop and think about it. You leave something on a pier and you’re not going to find it three days later. She was a rich kid, wore expensive clothes. Somewhere a longshoreman’s got a wife or girlfriend with a pretty new dress.”

  “Go on.”

  He turned his hands palms-up. “Go where? That does it, Markham. Look, she went and she jumped. Period. She was a moody kid and she wasn’t doing well in school. So she took what looked like an easy out, turned herself into a floater. It happens all the time. It’s not nice, it doesn’t look pretty or smell sweet. But it happens all the time.”

  “Was she pregnant?”

  He shook his head. “We checked, of course. She wasn’t. That’s why a lot of ’em go swimming. Not this one.”

  I dragged on the cigarette and watched him out of the corner of an eye. He seemed perfectly at ease, a rational man explaining a situation in a straightforward manner. I rolled down the side window and dropped my cigarette to the ground. I turned around and looked at him again.

  “Why?”

  He looked back at me. “Why did she kill herself? Hell, I don’t know. She probably—”

  “That’s not what I mean. Why give me such an elaborate build-up? I’m not your superior. You don’t owe me a report or a favor. Why tell me all this?”

  He colored. “I was just trying to help you out.”

  “I’m sure you were. Why?”

  He studied his own cigarette. It had burned almost to his fingertips. “Look,” he said. “This girl—Taft’s daughter—killed herself. I know it. You know it. Even Taft’s wife knows it.”

  “But Taft doesn’t?”

  “You guessed it.” He sighed heavily. “Now ordinarily if a suicide’s old man wants to make noise, I just nod and gentle him and then leave him alone. I don’t sit and hold his hand all night long. The hell, I’m a New York City cop and this is Westchester. Why worry about him?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “This is different, Markham. Taft is rich. He knows a lot of people, throws a lot of weight. I can’t tell him he’s full of crap, can’t brush him off. I have to be nice.”

  “And you want me to tell him she killed herself?”

  “Wrong.” He put out the cigarette. “He wants you to investigate,” he said. “I told him we’d follow it up but he doesn’t have any faith in us, mainly because I already told him how sure I am that it’s suicide all the way. What I want is for you to tell him you’ll work on it, you’re not too sold on the suicide bit yourself. Then you move into the case.”

  “And look for a mythical killer?”

  “I don’t give a damn if you sit on your hands, Markham. I want you to make like you’re working like a Turk. Gradually you can’t find anything. Gradually he wakes up and realizes what I been trying to tell him all along. Gradually he sees it’s suicide. And in the meantime he stays off my back.”

  I didn’t say anthing. He asked me if I got it, and I told him that I got it, all right. I didn’t like it.

  I didn’t enjoy the notion of wasting my time and Edgar Taft’s money just to do the New York police a favor. I didn’t enjoy the “gradual” routine—a gradual let-down of Edgar Taft, a gradual change in tone.

  “You’ll do it, Markham?” I didn’t answer him. “Look at it this way. You’ll be doing the old man a favor. Right now he’s all broken up. He can’t stand believing any daughter of his knocked herself off. It’s a big thing with him. Okay—so you got to let him believe somebody killed her. And he wants action. So you give him what he thinks is action until his mind gets used to the idea of what really happened. It makes things a lot easier for a lot of people, Markham. I’m one of them. I admit it. But it makes it easier for Taft, too.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “You’ll go along with it?”

  “I said I would,” I told him, my voice tired now. “Now why don’t you try shutting your mouth and driving?”

  He looked at me and thought it over. Then he put the car in gear and stepped down heavily on the gas pedal. Neither of us said a word on the way to Taft’s house.

  Edgar Taft was crushed but strong, broken but surprisingly firm. He didn’t rant, didn’t rave, didn’t foam at the mouth. Instead he talked in a painfully placid voice, explaining very earnestly to me that the police were a bunch of fools, that deep down inside he knew Barbara as he knew himself, that she couldn’t kill herself any more than he could.

  “A batch of damn fools, Roy. They couldn’t find crap in a latrine, not even if you took them and stuck their heads down the holes. I’m giving you full authority and all expenses. I’m telling them to cooperate with you. That’s one nice thing about money, Roy. If I tell them to cooperate with you they’ll let you do any damn thing you want. Roy—”

  There was more. But it was all in the same vein, all stamped from the same mold. What it boiled down to was that he wanted me to find his daughter’s murderer. That was all there was to it. I let him know that it was a tall order, agreed that the police were being far too quick to write the case off as suicide, and told him I’d do what I could. Marianne was different, though.

  She was as well-mannered as ever, as neat and sweet and soft-spoken as she had always been. She was the gracious lady, accepting reality and greeting it with decorum, maintaining her posistion and being what she was supposed to be.

  “Roy,” she said. “I’m . . . I’m very glad to see you, Roy. This is all very hard for me. My daughter committed suicide, Roy. Barb killed herself, jumped into the water and drowned herself. This is hard for me.”

  It was hard but she was handling it nicely. I had always thought of her as a person with internal strength and now she was proving me correct. I took her arm. We found a sofa and sat side-by-side on it. I lighted cigarettes for us both.

  “Poor Edgar,” she said. “He can’t believe it, you know. He’ll scream at imaginary killers forever.”

  “And you?”

  Her eyes clouded. Maybe I’m more realistic,” she said. I ... I was afraid this had happened . . . or would happen . . . from the moment we found out she had left school. I think I got my tenses scrambled in that sentence, Roy.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it. Edgar says Barbara wasn’t the type of girl to commit suicide.”

  “Edgar is wrong.”

  “He is?”

  She nodded. “He’s wrong,” she said again. “He has never understood her, not really.”

  “He says he knows her as he knows himself”

  That brought a smile. A joyless one. “Perhaps he does,” she half whispered. “Or did. Because there’s very little left to know now, is there?”

  “Marianne—”

  “I’m all right, Roy. Really, I’m all right. To get back to what I was saying—Edgar and Barbara were very much alike. She was the same sort of person. Maybe that’s why they fought so much. I used to think so.”

  I looked at her. “He wouldn�
��t choose suicide, Marianne.”

  “You think not?” Her eyes were amazingly firm. “He’s never failed, Roy. He’s never had any reason to kill himself. Barb evidently failed, or thought she did. I suppose it amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?”

  Hanovan drove me back to New York. He turned on the radio and we listened to some sort of teen age craze playing a guitar and groaning horribly. I suppose it served its purpose—at least Hanovan and I were relieved of the necessity of speaking to one another, which was fortunate.

  Actually, I had no reason to dislike him. In a sense he was advising a course of action which was probably the best thing all around for the people involved. Naturally it made his life a great deal simpler, but it also made for a psychological solution to Edgar Taft’s traumas.

  I managed to ignore both Hanovan and the ersatz music until he let me out of the car at Times Square. I was exhausted without being sleepy. I was as hungry as I was tired—the small steak at the tavern in Cliff’s End had been far too small, and far too long ago. I found an all-night restaurant, went in and sat down. A waitress brought me a mushroom omelet with home fries and a cup of black coffee. I ate the omelet and the potatoes and tried not to listen to a juke box which gave forth with the same sort of pseudo music I’d tried not to listen to in Hanovan’s car. I drank the coffee, smoked a cigarette.

  Outside on 42nd Street it was cold. Not so cold as the lumble hamlet of Cliff’s End, but cold enough to make me give up the idea of walking across town to the Commodore. The wind had a snap to it and my breath smoked in the cold air. I stepped to the curb and flagged down a taxi.

  He pulled over. I opened the door, stepped inside. I muttered Commodore at the husky driver and started to close the door. Then all at once somebody was yanking it open again and piling into the cab with me.

  “You’ve got to help me!”

  The somebody was a girl. Her hair was black and short, her eyes large and frightened. She was struggling to catch her breath and it seemed to be a lost cause.