02-Murder

by Parnell Hall

  I shrugged. “Not really. Is there any reason why you don’t want to admit that you were in Darryl Jackson’s apartment?”

  “No. Because I wasn’t.”

  “Of course. I was just wondering if you found the book.”

  “The book?”

  “The address book. The book of johns. Or blackmail victims, if you prefer. Darryl Jackson must have had some book like that. But the police don’t have it. So the way I see it, either the murderer took it, or you took it. Unless, of course, the two are one and the same.”

  He stared at me. “Do you realize you’re accusing me of murder?”

  “No, I hadn’t. Thank you for pointing it out to me. But no, I was just exploring the possibilities. You’re sure you don’t know any Darryl Jackson?”

  “Quite sure.”

  “That’s a shame. Still, I might be able to do you a service. Actually, I’ve done you a service already, just keeping the police off your back.”

  The Congressman looked at me narrowly. “I see. And now you want to be paid?”

  “Oh no,” I said. “I’ve barely gotten started. I haven’t even shown you the worth of my work. If I can really do something for you, when I’ve really accomplished something, then we can talk about compensation.”

  “I’m not asking you to do anything for me.”

  “I understand that. But a private detective has to play the game the way he sees it. Sometimes he has to act on his own initiative. And sometimes the things he does benefit certain people. And then, of course, he expects to be paid.”

  The Congressman said nothing. He was sizing me up the way a cat sizes up a mouse. I was glad I wasn’t running for office against him.

  “Well,” I said. “That’s all I came to say.”

  I stood up. So did he.

  “And you won’t tell me where I can reach you?” he said.

  “No.”

  “And you won’t tell me your name?”

  “It would serve no purpose.”

  “I still want to know.”

  I looked at him. “It must be hard,” I said, “to run for office, win, find oneself well fixed in a position of power, and still not be able to get what one wants.”

  24.

  I FELT PRETTY GOOD leaving the Congressman’s office. Of course, it always feels good to do something you didn’t think you wanted to do.

  Yeah, this was more like it. I’d been too passive before. I’d been hanging back, biding my time, waiting for things to happen. Now I was making ’em happen. Stirring things up.

  I wondered what MacAullif would make of the Congressman. It was a pleasant thought. I wondered if Sandy and the Professor had phoned in yet. I was sure they had. One of them would have stood guard on the office while the other ran out to phone.

  I didn’t look for them as I walked out into the street, but I knew they’d be there. Well, I didn’t care. I was getting action. I was feeling good. Now, I thought, while I’m in the mood, who shall I fuck with next?

  The obvious answer was Pamela. Up till now I’d been too soft on her—let her get away with telling me lies—largely because I felt sorry for her. Well, no more of that. It was time to come down on her hard.

  Which presented a problem: Sandy and the Professor. ’cause if there was one thing I was not going to do, it was lead MacAullif to Pamela Berringer.

  So how the hell could I swing it, assuming I could swing it at all? Well, certainly not the way I’d done it the first time. Not passing it off as an accident. If I managed to ditch ’em at all, they’d have to know they’d been ditched.

  I thought along those lines. All right, if they’re gonna know they’ve been ditched, then they have to know I spotted ’em. So the first thing to do was spot ’em.

  I stopped and looked in the window of a store. After a minute or two I turned my head and saw Sandy standing in the doorway of a store down the street. I turned back to the window. After a few seconds, I turned and looked at him again, then turned quickly back. Then I moved away, and walked casually down the street.

  O.K. Now they know I spotted ’em. Now what?

  The problem was I didn’t know. I was playing it by ear. Letting them know I’d spotted them was the easy part. But what did I do now?

  A cab came down the street. On an impulse, I hailed it and got in, something I rarely do, taxi prices being what they are.

  I glanced in the rear window and saw Sandy and the Professor piling into a cab behind.

  The cabbie saw me looking out the window through his rearview mirror. He was a young guy, and looked like an out of work actor, which was something I knew something about.

  “Hey,” he said. “Are you being followed?”

  “Sure looks that way,” I told him. “Can you do anything about it?”

  He shook his head. “Not in this snow, I can’t.”

  Snow. It sounded like a cue. It occurred to me, if I were a detective in a movie, snow would suggest something to me.

  It did.

  “I don’t suppose,” I said, “you could engineer a skid?”

  He turned around and looked at me. “A what?”

  “A skid,” I told him. “A skid in the snow. Slide your cab across the street and stop.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “Not at all. It doesn’t have to be artistic or anything. Just skid to a stop.”

  “Now?”

  “No. I’ll tell you when. Can you do it?”

  “Give it a try.”

  “Be sure you block the whole street.”

  “That much I figured out.”

  We were going down a one-way street, which was good, ’cause it was narrow, and what with the snow and all, there was barely room for two cars to get by. We were coming up on a traffic light. Waiting at the light, was another cab with its light on.

  “O.K.,” I said. “Right behind that cab.”

  The cabbie accelerated slightly, hit the brakes, and fishtailed. He spun out diagonally across the street and came to a stop not twenty feet from the waiting cab.

  I slapped a ten dollar bill in his hand.

  “Don’t be too quick about getting untangled,” I said.

  I opened the door and hopped out. I ran to the corner and hopped in the other cab. The light changed, and we took off.

  Through the rear window I could see Sandy and the Professor standing helplessly in the street and hurling curses at the fishtailed cab.

  25.

  I WANTED TO HAVE as many strings to my bow as possible before I confronted Pamela Berringer, so I decided to engineer a coincidence.

  I knew from casual conversations with the Berringers during the course of the car pool that Ronnie worked for an insurance agency somewhere near the World Trade Center. I wasn’t sure of the name of it—I’m terrible with names—but it seemed to me it was one of the presidents, possibly Monroe or Madison.

  I took the cab to the World Trade Center, got out, and hunted up a pay phone.

  The Madison Insurance Agency had never heard of Ron Berringer, but the Monroe Agency had. Had he been in, I was prepared to be conveniently disconnected before his secretary got him on the phone, but she told me he was out to lunch and was expected back around 2:00. She asked me if I wanted to leave a message, but I told her, no, I’d try back later.

  I hung up the phone and checked my watch. 1:30. Perfect.

  I called information again and got the address of the Monroe Agency. I could have just asked the secretary, but I wanted to get off the phone before she asked me too many questions, seeing as how I didn’t really have any answers.

  The address of the agency was on John Street, not two blocks from where I was. I strolled over leisurely, stopping every now and then to see if anyone was taking any interest in me. No one was. All in all, it just wasn’t Sandy and the Professor’s day.

  I stopped outside the building and took my camera out of my coat pocket. During the summer I carry my camera in my briefcase, but in the winter I just slide it into my coat pocke
t, which is much more convenient. See, a lot of the sign-ups I do are in hospitals, and a lot of hospitals won’t let you walk in with a briefcase or a camera, because a lot of hospitals have restrictions about taking pictures. So all I can take in is just a signup kit and a clipboard. That’s why my Canon Snappy 50 is perfect for my job. It’s small and compact, and slides right into a coat pocket. In the summer, with no overcoat, in order to get into hospitals, I have to wear the damn thing around my neck and tucked under my armpit, but in the winter it’s a breeze.

  I’d forgotten to reload the camera after taking out the roll with the shots of the guy who’d fallen at McDonald’s, which was great for me, since I didn’t really want to take any pictures and I didn’t want Richard giving me any grief about wasting any film.

  I took the camera and started snapping shots of the sidewalk in front of Ronnie Berringer’s office building. It was a good thing these weren’t real Location of Accident pictures: first, because there was no film in the camera, and second, because even if there had been the shots wouldn’t have been any good. There simply wasn’t any defect. There was no snow on the sidewalk, no icy patch that could have caused a poor pedestrian to slip. It had been beautifully cleared. And the sidewalk itself was perfect. The concrete could have been poured yesterday. A small crack in the pavement, sort of like a hairline fracture, was the best I could come up with. I proceeded to shoot it from every conceivable angle.

  Ronnie Berringer showed up a little before 2:00. I spotted him about half a block away. The first thing I noticed about him was that he was alone, which was good in that it would make it easier for me to talk to him, and bad in that a person choosing to have lunch alone probably had something on his mind.

  The next thing I noticed about him was his coat. It was a dark blue overcoat. Not a gray parka. One in the plus column.

  As he got closer, however, he started scoring in the minus column. He was walking slowly, mechanically, as if not really paying any attention to where he was going, or anything much else, for that matter. I’m admittedly not the best judge of people’s states of mind, but I would have classed his as oblivious.

  I decided to test the theory. I kept changing the angle on my picture taking so as to give him a good view of my face, just to see if he would recognize me.

  He didn’t. In fact, he didn’t even see me. When I maneuvered in front of him he bumped right into me. Even then, he didn’t really see me. He just murmured, “Excuse me,” and would have kept on going if I hadn’t called out, “Ronnie,” and grabbed him by the arm.

  Ronnie Berringer was about twenty-eight, and he still had a boyish look. I remember my wife telling me a story Pamela told her about how when Ronnie first began working for the agency, he tried growing a mustache to make himself look older, then decided it was silly and shaved it off. I always thought it was a good story, because it summed up my impression of Ronnie Berringer: young and indecisive. In spite of that, he was a successful insurance agency executive, and probably earned four or five times what I did. Nonetheless, to me he always looked like a little boy.

  Now he looked like a little boy lost.

  His eyes focused on me, and I could see his mind going. “Who is this? Where do I know him from?” And then belated recognition: “Stanley.”

  “Yeah, hi,” I said.

  We grinned at each other stupidly for a couple of moments. When I realized he wasn’t going to start the conversation, I did.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “I work here,” he said.

  “Here?”

  “Yes.” He pointed to the building.

  “Is that right? I knew you worked somewhere around here, but I didn’t know this was it. No kidding, you work right here?”

  “Yes,” he said. Then I guess it dawned on him since he had a reason for being here, that this was the question he should be asking me. “What are you doing here?”

  I grinned some more. “I’m working here too.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. Right here. Not inside. Right here. See, a guy fell down here and broke his leg, and I’m taking pictures of the crack in the sidewalk he tripped on.”

  Ronnie looked. “What crack?”

  For my money, it was the first genuine, normal response he’d made. His first real grip on reality. And I had to shatter it.

  “Yeah.” I pointed to the hairline fracture. “Right there.”

  He looked, then looked up at me incredulously. “Someone tripped on that?”

  “Absolutely,” I told him. “It may not look like much now, but when I get the right camera angle on it, it’s gonna look like the Grand Canyon.”

  He blinked a couple of times, as if not sure whether to laugh or agree. Then, inspired, he looked at his watch and said, “Hey, I gotta go. Good seeing you.”

  “Yeah. You too.”

  He nodded, waved, and hurried through the door.

  I stuck my camera in my pocket and headed for the subway. It hadn’t been much of a meeting. I hadn’t mentioned Pamela to see how he reacted. I hadn’t even tried any subtle variations of the “where-were-you-between-the-hours-of-etc.-etc.” gambit. But it was still enough to tell me all I needed to know about Ronnie Berringer.

  He was scared shitless.

  26.

  “YOU GOTTA GIVE UP Jane.”

  “What?”

  I was sitting in the restaurant with Pamela Berringer again. I knew one thing for sure. This time I wasn’t talking any moral philosophy and this time I wasn’t taking any shit.

  “I need to talk to Jane. You gotta tell me who she is.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t tell me no, babe. I’m in the driver’s seat now, and I’m crackin’ the whip. I’ve got cops breathing down my neck every minute of the day. If I hadn’t managed to ditch ’em just now, I couldn’t even be talking to you. But I did, and I am, and while I’m on the loose I gotta make some moves, ’cause it may be the last chance I’ll get. So you gotta give me Jane.”

  “No.”

  “If they get me, they get the tape. Don’t you understand?”

  “I know.”

  “How’d Ronnie seem last night? Pretty cool? Pretty loose? Nothing bothering him?”

  She looked at me. Bit her lip.

  “I don’t know if you can take this much longer,” I said. “But I’m telling you I can’t. You’re starting to crack up, so how do you think I feel? I need this settled, and I need it settled fast. Give me Jane.”

  “No.”

  “O.K. Then you tell me. Who took over? Who’s running Darryl Jackson’s girls.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t want to know,” she said fiercely. “Damn it. Don’t you understand? I got out.”

  “And he never called you? Whoever took over?”

  “No. He doesn’t know about me. No one knows about me. And that’s the way I want to keep it.”

  “No one’s called you at all?”

  She hesitated a second. “Yes. Jane called.”

  “And?”

  “I told her to leave me alone. I told her I was out and I wanted to stay out. I read her the riot act. I told her not to tell anyone who I was. I told her if I got a phone call, it would be her neck. And I told her not to call me again.”

  “And more particularly, you told her not to let the guy know who you are. The guy who took over.”

  “Of course.”

  “And did she mention his name?”

  “No.”

  “Then I gotta talk to Jane.”

  “No,” she said. But weaker this time.

  I tried to press my advantage. “There’s no reason for you to protect Jane. She’s the one who got you into this in the first place. She set you up, for Christ’s sake, and—”

  It was a mistake.

  “No!” she said, strong again. “No, she didn’t. It wasn’t that way at all. She did fly to Indiana. And her mother was dying. She did die. All Jane d
id was tell Darryl Jackson she got someone to cover for her, so he’d let her go. And he took it from there. She had no idea what he was going to do. She was sorry as hell that it happened.”

  She stopped, sniffed, looked at me. “It’s all true about Jane. Her mother. The kid. Everything. I can’t give you Jane.”

  I looked at her for a long time. I sighed. “O.K.,” I said. “If that’s the way you want it. But if I don’t come up with something soon, the cops are gonna haul me in and sweat it out of me. I have to tell you, though, I don’t hold up well under interrogations. I might hold out a day, maybe two, but believe me, sooner or later they’re gonna break me. And this much I do know: once you start talking, it’s easy. You tell them everything. And once I start talking the shit is gonna hit the fan. You, Jane, the tape, everything.

  “You’re strong, you can take it. But it’ll probably kill Ronnie. And I just hope it doesn’t filter down to the school. I mean, Joshua’s a bit young for stuff like that, but it’s amazing what kids pick up, and—”

  “Stop it!” she screamed. “Stop it! Goddamn you!”

  Heads turned. I don’t think there was a head that didn’t turn. A waiter poised himself, in case action should be required.

  “All right,” I said. “Easy. Take it easy.”

  She had come half out of her chair. I got her seated back down. She grabbed the napkin, dabbed at her face.

  “I’m sorry,” I said gently. “I know that was very cruel. But it gives you an idea of how desperate I am.”

  She said nothing. Looked down at the table. I was trying to read her expression, but I couldn’t quite catch it until I remembered the first thing I’d thought about her: her school girl look. She was pouting.

  I leaned in to her. “Now listen,” I said. “Jane will never know how I got on to her. She’ll never know I got it from you. I promise you. Your name won’t be mentioned. I’ll keep you out of it. And I swear to god, I’ll keep her out of it, too. I’m not going to hurt her, I promise you.

  “But listen to me. There is more at stake here than some loyalty you feel you owe to some girl you knew vaguely from college, just because she’s happened to have a hard time. You owe something to your husband, and something to your son. And, believe it or not, you owe something to me.”