Full Contact

by Robert J. Randisi

  “About Benny?”

  I nodded.

  “Look, Jack, there’s no need for you to stick around. We’re not gonna get in there tonight. Even if they control it we’d still have to wait for it to cool down.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Why don’t you go on home?”

  It was starting to get dark, which only made the flames look that much brighter and hotter.

  “I think I will.”

  “I’ll call you as soon as we find out anything.”

  “Thanks.”

  As I turned to leave, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, “It was good work finding this place, Jack.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “good and late.”

  I stopped a cab on Ninth Avenue and gave him the address of Bogie’s. When I got there I went right to the bar and got a St. Pauli Girl beer. It felt good and soothing on my dry throat.

  “Jesus,” Billy Palmer said from behind me. When I turned he was wrinkling his nose. “Where’s the fire?”

  “Uptown. My big break on this case just went up in smoke.” I got off the stool and said, “I’ll get out of here before your customers start to leave.”

  A few of them were already looking around to see where the smell was coming from.

  “Are you all right?” Billy asked.

  “Oh, yeah. I was just a spectator. I’m fine, all I need is a shower.”

  One of the waitresses came over to him so he patted me on the shoulder and I went through the kitchen to the office.

  In the shower I wondered if the fire could possibly have been a coincidence, but then what difference would that have made? My one big lead was still gone. Papers, movie film, it all would have burned up in a blaze that size. Obviously, that must have been where Cross was storing all his gear, his movies. At least Paula Bishop could rest relatively easy. . . .

  Paula Bishop? Could she have possibly had something to do with setting the fire, or even have set it herself? Had I been followed to that building today?

  I got out of the shower and toweled myself dry. I’d finished my beer before getting under the water, and now I wished I had another one.

  I thought about the possibility of Paula setting that fire, or hiring someone to set it, and I rejected it. I didn’t think she was capable of that, but then that was a hell of a decision to come to about someone I’d only spoken to twice. Still, Eddie had always told me that one of a detective’s most important assets was instinct. If indeed I could lay claim to any “detective’s instincts,” they were telling me that Paula Bishop had nothing to do with that fire. In her apartment, she had not seemed as cold and collected as she had in her office, and setting a fire was not the same as running a business.

  Brown looked the best for this, just as he looked good for everything else. I was back to square one: find Brown.

  The phone rang, but I ignored it and continued dressing, and then the intercom buzzed.

  “For you, Jack,” Billy said. “Hocus.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Hocus, what’s up? Got something already?”

  “We’ve got something, all right,” he said, not sounding very happy about it.

  “Well, what is it?”

  “‘What’ isn’t the question, the question is who.”

  “Who?”

  “We’ve got a body, Jack. Badly burned and unrecognizable, but it’s a man.”

  “Where was he found?” I asked, though I was afraid I already knew the answer.

  “On the fourth floor, front room.”

  “Jesus,” I said, “Brown?”

  “It could be. We’ll know more after an autopsy.”

  “Ah, Christ.”

  “I’ll keep you posted.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” I said, and hung up. Square one? I thought. If the body turned out to be Brown, then I was even worse off than I had thought just moments before.

  What came before square one?

  Thirty-Four

  Hocus called me again early in the morning, waking me up from a restless sleep. I kept dreaming that Benny was waving to me from one of the windows of that burning building, which was ridiculous, because Benny had died in my apartment. I tried to tell Benny that, but he just kept waving to me and calling my name.

  “Hope I didn’t wake you,” Hocus said.

  “I’m glad you did.”

  “We’re going into that building this morning. I thought you might like to be in on it.”

  “When?”

  “An hour.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  When I got there he was waiting for me out front with his partner, Wright, who was rubbing his stomach.

  “I hate fires,” Wright said with a sour look on his face.

  “The fire’s out,” I said.

  “I know, but you never know what you’re going to find.”

  “Anybody else up there?” I asked Hocus.

  “Fire marshals.”

  “What are they looking for?”

  “More evidence to support their declaration that the fire was suspicious.”

  “Aren’t they sure yet?”

  “They’re picky fellows,” Wright said. “They want to find a note from the arsonist confessing.”

  “Ready?” Hocus said.

  “Let’s go.”

  The elevator wasn’t working so we had to walk up four flights of waterlogged steps to get to the fourth floor.

  “This place looks like shit,” Wright said. “We’re not gonna find anything up here.”

  I didn’t say it out loud but I agreed. The floor was ankle deep in black and gray gunk that was simply a combination of everything that had been melted down by the fire. It squished when we stepped in it, and held tight when we tried to walk.

  “You fellas ought to be wearing boots,” one of the two other men in the room called out. Both of them had shields pinned to their jackets, as did Hocus and Wright.

  “We’re not staying long,” Hocus called back.

  “Suit yourselves,” the man said with a shrug, and went back to doing what he was doing, which seemed to be sifting through the gunk. His partner was all the way at the other end of the long room, doing the same.

  “What have you found so far?” Hocus asked.

  “Enough to tell us what was stored up here,” the man replied.

  “And what was that?”

  “Film, and a lot of it. There are even remnants of projectors and cameras. Guy must have been using this place as a movie studio, or something.”

  “Or something is more like it,” I said to Hocus in a low voice.

  “Why? What do you know?”

  “I don’t know anything,” I said, then amended the statement. “Well, I don’t know much, just enough to guess that they didn’t do any shooting here, just used it as storage.”

  “And where did they shoot?”

  “All over. They used different places all the time.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I talked to some of the . . . actors in the films.”

  “You wouldn’t want to let me in on who they were, would you?” Hocus asked.

  “You’ve already spoken to them,” I said, “you just didn’t know they were . . . performers.”

  “You mean some of the people we talked to from the institute were . . .”

  “Yup, and Brown.”

  “Brown?”

  “Yeah. He worked for Cross, helping to round up talent, but he wasn’t above stepping in front of the camera himself.”

  “What about Cross and the Saberhagen girl?”

  “I don’t know about Cross,” I said, and then hedged about Melanie. “I’m not sure about the girl.”

  “Well, do you know of any way we could become sure?”

  “Looking at some of these films would have been a way,” I said, indicating the gunk on the floor.

  “Yeah,” he said, dragging his toe through some of it with a morose expression on his face. “What’s this?” he said suddenly, as his foot came int
o contact with something. He bent over and straightened up holding an object that I recognized for what it had once been.

  “It looks like a videotape.”

  One of the fire marshals heard me and called out, “There were plenty of those around, too. That’s where all this melted plastic came from.”

  “Videotape?” Hocus asked.

  “Yeah, you know, videocassette recorder tapes.” Wright said.

  Hocus stared at his partner, who said, “My kid’s got them.”

  “They must have been putting their films on videotape—” I said, and then stopped short as a thought struck me.

  “What’s the matter?” Hocus asked.

  I thought for a moment about not telling him and checking it out myself, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it to him. Besides, it would be a lot easier getting into Cross’s apartment with him than without him.

  “Cross’s apartment,” I said.

  “What about it?”

  “Well, you went through it just like I did,” I said. “Didn’t you notice anything?”

  “Jacoby, if you play guessing games with me I’m gonna leave you lying face down in this shit.”

  “Cross had a video tape machine in his apartment,” I said, holding the burned remnant up in front of his nose. “Who knows, maybe he made a habit of watching his own movies!”

  “Well, what the hell are we waiting for?”

  Wright stayed behind to continue to look around while Hocus and I drove to Cross’s apartment building. The doorman remembered both of us and let us in with a pass key.

  “Just pull the door shut when you leave, officers,” he said. “It will lock by itself.”

  “Thank you,” Hocus said. He gave me a look, but decided to let the implication in the doorman’s remark pass. After all, he himself had allowed the fire chief to believe I was a cop just the night before.

  “All right, where’s this video tape machine?”

  “Over here.”

  I walked over to the set of shelves against the wall and showed him the VCR with its glowing green digital clock. On the shelves surrounding the machine were all of the tapes, neatly labeled.

  “Jesus,” Hocus said, “there must be hundreds. What are we supposed to do, sit and watch them all? And if we find a dirty movie, what’s it gonna tell us?”

  “I don’t know, but if we had gotten to that storage room in time and found reel-to-reel films, you would have screened them, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes, C.B.”

  “I’ll tell you what. Leave me here and I’ll go through them and let you know what I find. Meanwhile, you can work on finding Brown.”

  “That might not be so hard, if that’s him in the morgue,” he said, studying me thoughtfully.

  “Hocus, I’ve been cooperating all along, haven’t I?”

  “After a fashion.”

  “You don’t have time to sit here and watch these tapes, but I do because if that’s Brown in the morgue, I’m at a dead end.”

  He thought it over a moment, then shook his head and said, “I don’t know what you expect to find, but go ahead. Call me at my office if you do find something.”

  “I will. Thanks.”

  “I’ll tell the doorman you’ll be up here for a while.”

  He stopped by the phone to make sure he remembered the number, and then left with a wave, presumably to go back to the scene of the fire for his partner.

  I had seen Billy Palmer operate his machine on a few occasions, and although the buttons on this machine were not in the same place, they bore the same labels. The ones I was concerned with were Play, Fast Forward, Rewind, and Eject.

  I stared at the shelves of tapes and wondered where I should start. They were all labeled, most of them with movie tides, but that didn’t necessarily mean that was what was on the tape. Still, why would Cross mislabel tapes that were in his own apartment?

  No, if Cross was keeping tapes of his own movies for his own private parties, they’d either be blatantly labeled or totally unlabeled. What I needed was a tape labeled “Doris Does Denver” or a tape with a blank label.

  I started with the top shelf, looking behind the front row of tapes. For the most part that’s all there was—until I got about halfway down. Behind the tapes on the center shelf were other tapes, laid flat against the back of the bookcase. I pulled out all of the front tapes and found one mystery tape for every five that were labeled. With fifty tapes to a shelf, that left me with ten, all of which I had to screen because the labels were number-coded.

  I pulled an armchair around so I could sit facing the TV and stacked the tapes on the floor next to me. I leaned forward, hit the eject button, inserted the first tape, pushed the cartridge holder down, and pressed Play. I spotted a wireless remote next to the machine, and leaned back with it in my hand.

  The quality of the film was really bad, and the fact that it was in black and white didn’t help any. There were two women in a room in which the only furniture seemed to be a natty double bed.

  The two women were Fallon and Ginger.

  I watched in sort of a stunned paralysis as the girls undressed each other, carrying on a conversation that left no doubt as to what they were planning to do.

  I watched for a few more minutes. As the girls stripped each other naked and fell to the bed in a hot embrace, I found myself becoming aroused. Annoyed at myself, I hit the Fast Forward button. The girls proceeded to consummate their act in comically fast motion, but I didn’t find it the least bit funny. As it turned out, none of the other participants in this film were familiar to me. When it reached the end I didn’t bother to rewind it, I just popped it out and inserted another one.

  I went through the next three tapes without seeing anyone I recognized, and by that time my eyes were starting to ache from fatigue.

  I popped in the fifth tape, but did not start it right away. Instead I went to the kitchen and washed my eyes out with cold water, then opened the refrigerator to see if there was anything to drink. I took one of several bottles of Budweiser and carried it back to the chair with me, and then started the fifth tape.

  This one was a lulu.

  I recognized Brown right off. He was stripped naked, wearing what looked like a black leather G-string, and on his hands he wore black leather gloves. He moved forward and the camera moved ahead of him to the girl on the bed: Fallon.

  To make a long story short, first he kicked the shit out of her, and then he turned her over and took her from behind. All of this I saw while I fast-forwarded the action, which mercifully spared me any sound. The rest of the tape was much the same, with Brown doing the same thing to several different women. Fallon was the only one on the tape that I recognized.

  I went through three more tapes without seeing anyone I knew, and then inserted the ninth tape. This one was in color and had apparently been shut off while still running the last time it was used. The action was in full swing, with two women on a bed going at each other in living color.

  One woman, a slender blond, was on top of the second woman, a taller, darker lady. The camera moved closer to the bed and began to shoot from above, so the bottom woman was now easily recognizable. Although I shouldn’t have been surprised, I was, to find that I was looking at the contorted face of Paula Bishop. Either she was a hell of an actress, or she was thoroughly enjoying what the other woman was doing to her.

  The camera continued to move until it was showing you what Paula saw when she looked down between her widespread legs. I watched as the blond did her work, and I was holding my breath, waiting to get a look at her face, because I had an eerie feeling I knew who it would be.

  The scene seemed to go on and on from that point—which demonstrated the directorial incompetency involved— but finally the blond looked up at her bed partner with a dreamy, faraway look on her face, and just as I knew it would be, it was Melanie Saberhagen.

  As the film went on and the women—or woman and girl—changed positions, all I could think of was that thi
s confirmed beyond a doubt the connection between Alan Cross and Melanie Saberhagen. As the film came to an end, the phone rang, and I answered it.

  “Jacoby, are you still there?” Hocus’s voice asked.

  “No,” I said, “this is a recording.”

  “Have you found out anything?”

  “Yeah, I found a movie with Melanie Saberhagen in it,” I said, and as I said it I started to feel sick to my stomach. I had to admit that I had become sexually excited by some of the things I had seen in some of the earlier films, but as I went from film to film, the excitement had faded and a vague sickness had replaced it. Now, after seeing the things Paula Bishop and Melanie had been doing to each other, the sick feeling was becoming worse.

  “That clinches a connection,” he said, “but it still doesn’t mean they were killed by the same person.”

  “I guess finding Brown is still our only chance.”

  “Ah, yeah, well that’s what I was calling you about.”

  “Brown?”

  “Yeah, we just got confirmation from Dr. Maybe on the body in the fire.”

  “It was Brown?”

  “It sure was. We just hit a stone wall, pal.”

  “Shit.”

  I hung up wondering if I had the stomach to watch the last tape, then decided that I couldn’t very well leave the job nine-tenths done. I inserted the tape, then sat back and started it.

  Right away I noticed something was different about this particular movie. The quality was even worse than the others had been, of the grainy, black and white type you used to see projected on a bedsheet in somebody’s basement.

  It was older than anything else I’d seen, and I wondered why anyone had taken the trouble to transpose an old stag movie onto videotape.

  The answer eventually became clear.

  I watched as a man and a woman grunted and groaned on a small bed, and then noticed that both of them were barely out of their teens. I concentrated on the girl, trying to get a good look at her face while they rolled around on the bed, not doing a whole lot by my modern standards. They spent a lot of time in a simple missionary position, with the man on top, and finally I decided that I didn’t know the girl.