02-Murder

by Parnell Hall

  Tears were running down her face. She sniffed twice. Looked up at me.

  “O.K.?” I said.

  She sniffed again. “O.K.”

  “Good. Now tell me. How can I get in touch with Jane?”

  I have to hand it to Pamela Berringer. She had a lot of spirit. Because she smiled slightly. It was a thin smile, but it was still a smile.

  “Got a hundred bucks?”

  27.

  IT WAS MODERATELY DECENT for an East Side hotel. Not real class, but not bad, either. The lobby was small, but clean. There appeared to be no dining room or bar. It was the type of hotel that catered to permanent residents. Any out-of-towner asking for a room for the night would have been laughed out of the place.

  I walked up to the desk. The desk clerk put down his newspaper and looked at me.

  “Can I help you?” he said.

  “Room 357,” I said.

  “Your name, sir?”

  “Jones.”

  He picked up the phone and rang the room.

  “A Mr. Jones is here to see you.”

  He listened a moment, and hung up.

  “You may go right up, sir,” he said.

  The clerk was quite deferential, and I didn’t think it was all because of my suit. With a set-up like Darryl Jackson’s, it was a cinch the hotel staff was getting greased with some heavy bucks.

  I took the elevator up to the third floor, went down the hall, and knocked on the door of 357.

  The door was opened by a young blond. She was Pamela’s age, but not in Pamela’s class.

  I recognized her as one of the girls on the tapes. It was kind of weird. Sort of like having a centerfold come to life.

  The thing was, the biographical data of the girls in the centerfolds always said something like, “cheerleader, likes Van Halen, wants to be in motion pictures.” It never said, “single mother, child has Down’s Syndrome.”

  I felt bad about what I was going to do to her, but I really had no choice.

  “Mr. Jones?” she said.

  “Yes. Jane?”

  “Yes. Do come in.”

  I followed her into the room. It was your basic, simply furnished hotel room. It was clean and presentable, but obviously no one lived there.

  The room was dominated by a king-size bed. Behind the head of the bed, screwed into the wall, was a huge mirror. Next to the bed was the door leading into the bathroom.

  I stood there, looking at the bed. Jane came up to me.

  “You said Darryl Jackson gave you my number?” she asked.

  “Yes. A couple of weeks ago. I was gonna call, but something came up.”

  “I see,” she said. “Look, I’d like to get the mercenary part over with so we can be friends.”

  “Suits me,” I said.

  I reached in my pocket and got out the five folded twenties I’d got out of a cash machine on Broadway. The nice thing about using the cash machine was I didn’t have to write it up in the check book as, “$100— hooker.”

  I passed the bills over to her. She took them and stuck them in her purse.

  I pulled open my coat and flashed my I.D. at her, very briefly so she wouldn’t notice that it was just an I.D. and there wasn’t a badge.

  “Ah shit,” she said. “Not again.”

  She didn’t argue or protest. She just slumped down on the bed in weary resignation.

  I looked at her, and I realized her whole life had probably been like that. Just passively doing what she was told. No life. No spunk. I could understand Pamela Berringer not knowing her very well at college. She wasn’t the type of girl other girls would want to know well. Nor was she pretty enough to have interested many of the college boys. But still she had been attractive enough to have made it as a high-priced call girl. It was probably her only accomplishment.

  “You get knocked down often?” I said.

  “No,” she said. “And never in here.”

  “Well, there’s a first time for everything,” I said.

  She shrugged philosophically. “Yeah, I guess so. All right. Where do we go?”

  “We go to the bathroom.”

  She looked at me. “Huh?”

  “Come on,” I told her. “You’re gonna like this.”

  She gave me a funny look, but she came.

  On the wall of the bathroom, right behind where the head of the bed would be, was a large rectangular box jutting out from the wall. It was plastered over and painted up to look like the rest of the bathroom, but there was no structural reason for it that I could see.

  “You know what this is?” I asked her.

  “No,” she said. “I guess it’s some heating pipes, or something.”

  “Could be,” I said. “Come on.”

  I lead her back out of the bathroom.

  “Come here,” I said, and led her over to the bed.

  “Oh, like that, is it?” she said.

  “No. Not like that.”

  The mirror was fastened to the wall with twelve screws. I reached in my pocket, pulled out a screwdriver, and started taking them out.

  Jane stared at me. “What the hell are you doing?” she said.

  “I’m trying hard to resist any obvious puns,” I told her. “Give me a hand, will ya? When I get these out, hold on to the other side of the mirror.”

  They came out easy. In a matter of minutes I was on the last one.

  “O.K.,” I said. “Now hang on, and set it down easy.”

  We lifted the mirror up and laid it down flat on the bed.

  Behind the mirror was a hole in the wall. Behind the hole was the box I had seen fashioned in the bathroom. Inside the box was mounted a video camera.

  I pointed to it. “Smile,” I said to Jane. “You’re on Candid Camera.”

  She goggled at me. “Huh?”

  I groaned. “Oh Christ,” I said. “Don’t spoil my day by being too young to have heard of Allen Funt.”

  Jane was staring at the hole in the wall. “Hey, what is all this?”

  “You don’t know? Well, for your information, this is part of Darryl Jackson’s little blackmail setup. You’ve been starring in his pictures, by the way. If you didn’t know it, that makes you an unwitting accomplice. If you did know it, I guess that makes you a witting accomplice. At any rate, you’re in bad. The question is, do you want to get out?”

  She looked at me. “Huh?”

  “Here’s the thing,” I told her. “The stakes are a little bigger here than you thought they were. Darryl Jackson was a slime and a blackmailer. Now he’s dead. Someone else has taken over his prostitution racket. Frankly, I don’t give a damn about that. What I want to know is whether he’s taken over the blackmail end of it too.”

  She was looking at me, wide-eyed, desperate.

  “I tell you, mister, I didn’t know anything about this. I swear, mister.”

  “All right,” I said. “You probably didn’t. The thing is, now you do. And the question is, do you want to take the rap for it, or do you want to get out?”

  She looked at me. “What are you saying?”

  “I want the blackmail stopped,” I said. “Now if the guy who took over for Darryl Jackson doesn’t know about this setup, I got no problem and you got no problem. If he does, and he’s using it, I’m gonna close him down. Now, you know about it. First, as a show of good faith, you’re not going to tell him about it. Right? Second, you’re going to tell me about him, so I can find out what he knows.”

  “But I don’t know anything about him.”

  “You know his name, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  “X.”

  “X?”

  “Yeah. X.”

  “As in Malcolm X?”

  “As in X.”

  “What’s his real name?”

  “I don’t know. He likes to be called X.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “I don’t know him very well.”

  “But you met him, r
ight?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what’s he look like?”

  “Tough. Kinda scary looking.”

  “Black?”

  She looked at me as if I were an idiot. “Yeah.”

  “How do you get in touch with him?”

  “I don’t. He gets in touch with me.”

  “You don’t know where to reach him?”

  “No.”

  “Can’t you give me any more than that?”

  “I tell you, I don’t know very much about him.”

  “Well, who would?”

  “Linda.”

  “Linda?”

  “Yeah. Linda. She’s his pet.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “’Cause she went over to him before Darryl Jackson got killed.”

  “Oh yeah? How long before?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe a month.”

  “So tell me about Linda.”

  “Whaddya want to know?”

  “Anything at all. What’s her last name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How about a phone number?”

  “I don’t know that either.”

  “So how can I get in touch with Linda?”

  “That shouldn’t be hard. She’ll be working here tonight.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Yeah. Eight till midnight. That’s her shift.”

  “I see,” I said. I thought about that some.

  Jane was looking at me closely. “Does that square things?”

  “It’s a start,” I said. “What else can you tell me about Linda?”

  Jane was eager to cooperate now that she saw a prospect of getting off.

  “I don’t know that much about her,” she said. “But I can tell you this. She’s tough. She won’t sweat a hooking charge. I don’t want shit like this on my record, but it don’t bother her none. No skin off her nose. You tell her you’re gonna haul her downtown, she’ll just laugh in your face.”

  “So what would she sweat?” I asked. “How can I get to her?”

  Jane shook her head. “I don’t know. I told you I don’t know her very well.”

  “You know her well enough to know that she’s tough. You must know something else about her. Anything. Anything at all.”

  Jane thought a bit. “There is one thing,” she said. “I don’t know if it helps you any.”

  “Yeah? What is it?”

  Jane shrugged. “She’s a cokehead.”

  28.

  ROSA WAS STANDING ON THE CORNER of 48th and Broadway. I hadn’t expected to find her there. It was early in the evening by her standards. I just swung by on the way down to her apartment on Avenue B, just on the off-chance, and there she was, large as life.

  Rosa had helped me out during the Albrect affair. She hadn’t wanted to, but I hadn’t given her any choice.

  In a way I’d done her a service, since the guys I’d “persuaded” her to help me nail had killed her boyfriend.

  And in a way I hadn’t, since those same guys happened to be the dealers who supplied her connection.

  You see, Rosa was a cokehead.

  It was 8:00 in the evening. After leaving Jane, I’d gone out, grabbed myself a quick burger, and sat there thinking about what to do next. I didn’t want to go by my home or my office, where Sandy and the Professor might be hanging out waiting to pick me up again. I had to just stay out and keep on the move.

  The one thing I had done was pick up my car. I was a little nervous about doing it. It occurred to me MacAullif might have traced my registration and got the license plate number, and had men staked out there to pick me up too. But I realized this was just paranoia. My car was parked a good three blocks away from my apartment house, and buried under a mound of snow. The license plate wasn’t even visible. Even the sharpest detective on the force couldn’t have found it.

  Still, it made me nervous to do it. I kept glancing around me, looking for shadows the whole time it took me to dig the thing out. I needn’t have bothered. The only person I saw was a black man with a shovel, who offered to dig me out for five bucks. I passed on the offer.

  It took me forty-five minutes to do it myself. I had the motor running most of the time, so the trusty Toyota was all fired up and ready to go by the time I was through.

  I pulled out and headed downtown. On the way, I swung by Broadway and 48th, just on the off-chance, and there she was.

  I swung the car into the curb and got out.

  I didn’t know Rosa’s last name. I knew her breasts though, and they were terrific. Now, of course, her figure was bundled up under the winter coat she wore over her working gear.

  I walked up to her and said, “Hi.”

  She turned around with a welcoming smile. “Hi,” she said.

  Then she recognized me, and her face froze. “You.”

  It had only been a few months since I’d seen her last, but she looked older somehow. I guess hooking and drugs will do that to you. Still, she looked pretty good.

  “Yeah,” I said. “How you doing?”

  I hadn’t been quite sure of my reception, and it seemed she wasn’t sure of it either. She was wary of me, and frankly I couldn’t blame her.

  “All right,” she said. “Getting by.”

  “You mad at me?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know. Not really. Maybe a little,” she said.

  “I don’t see why,” I told her. “I did what I promised you. I left your connection in place.”

  “Yeah, but you cut off his source.”

  “I told you I would.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “He was out for two weeks. I had to score on the street. Spent a lot of money on milk sugar and boraxo, you know what I mean?”

  “That was a while ago. I’m sure he’s back in business by now.”

  “Yeah.” she said.

  “His source killed your boyfriend, just in case you’ve forgotten. You really think he shouldn’t have gone down?”

  “I don’t know what I think. I just do what I can and try to get by.”

  “Same as me,” I told her.

  “So, whaddya here for? Whaddya want?”

  “I just wanted to talk to you a little.”

  “Oh yeah? What about?”

  “About how you’re doing. And what you’re doing.”

  “Whaddya mean?”

  “Like tonight, I mean.”

  She stared at me. “You don’t know what I’m doing?”

  “Yeah. I know what you’re doing. I mean, you doing it for the same reason? You getting up money to score?”

  “What do you think?”

  “So how are you doing? How much you got so far?”

  She shrugged. “A hundred bucks.”

  I looked at her. “Hey,” I said. “We’ve been through this before, you know.”

  “All right,” she said. “A hundred and fifty.”

  “And you need two hundred to score?”

  “Yeah.”

  I’d taken the money back from Jane. I reached in my pocket and pulled out two twenties. I fished in my other pocket and pulled out a ten.

  “Looks like you got lucky again.”

  She didn’t take the money. She just looked at it. Then at me.

  “What are you doing?” she said. “You mean you want to—”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not paying for your services. The money’s for you.”

  She looked at me suspiciously. “Why?” she said. “What is it you want this time?”

  I smiled at her. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Try me. Whaddya want?”

  “I want a half a gram.”

  29.

  I MUST SAY, the clerk at the desk raised an eyebrow when I walked in.

  “Room 357,” I told him.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “Your name again, sir?”

  “Jones.

  “Ah, yes. Of course.”

  He picked up the phone, called upstairs, and announced
me.

  “You may go right up, sir,” he said.

  It’s hard to describe the look he gave me as I walked to the elevator. I’ve never known what it was like to have a reputation for a voracious sexual appetite before. Here comes the stud.

  I took the elevator up to the third floor.

  I had a half a gram of coke in my pocket, courtesy of Rosa, of course. I’d driven her over to her connection’s townhouse on East 64th Street, just as I’d done months before in the Albrect case. I’d waited on the corner while she went in. Five minutes later she’d come back and given me a small plastic bag, just like the kind my father-in-law sells. In it was a small, carefully folded piece of paper with the half a gram.

  After that, I’d given her a ride home to her apartment on Avenue B. Bumping into me hadn’t been that bad for her. She was home early after a short working day, though a half a gram lighter than usual.

  After that, I’d called Linda, made the appointment, and hustled back uptown. So, deja vu. Here I was, once again, calling on a call girl.

  Linda was a redhead. She was also a video star. I recognized her at once from the tapes. I didn’t ask for her autograph, though. I just exchanged the usual pleasantries, and walked into the room.

  I wouldn’t want you to get the impression the only thing I know how to do is pull phony busts on hookers. But the thing is, when something works for you, you use it.

  I didn’t waste time with any preliminaries. As soon as we were into the room I whipped out the I.D., and said, “O.K., this is a bust. We’re going downtown.”

  She stared at me, incredulously. “You out of your fucking mind?” she said. “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “I told you. This is a bust. We’re going downtown.”

  She still couldn’t believe it. “What, are you nuts? What, are you green? Jesus Christ. That’s no way to make a bust. No money’s exchanged hands here. I haven’t even asked you for money. You got no case against me.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I told her. “I’ll just say that you did. Nobody’s gonna take your word for it.”

  She looked at me. “Are you shitting me?”

  “Not at all. Come on. It’s a bust, and we’re going downtown.”

  “You’re crazy, man. You’re out of your mind.”

  “Not so’s you’d know it,” I said. I grabbed up her purse from the bed. “Here, let’s see who you are.”