02-Murder

by Parnell Hall

  She dove for it.

  “You got no right to touch that.”

  “Uh uh uh.” I said, turning my back to her and jerking away. “You wanna add resisting arrest and assaulting an officer to the charges? You just better keep cool.”

  I swung my back to her, so she couldn’t get at it, and snapped open the purse. I reached my hand in it, and— sleight of hand—pulled out the bag with the half a gram.

  “Well, well, well,” I said. “Lookie what we got here.”

  Her eyes widened so much I thought they’d fall out of their sockets. “Well, of all the—” she said. “That’s not mine. You planted it there.”

  I looked at her. “Hey, that’s an idea. You could be right.”

  She looked at me as if I’d just told her the earth was flat.

  “Huh?”

  “You could be right,” I said. “This coke could be yours, or it could be mine. I’m not sure. Let’s think about it. Now, if it’s yours, you’re busted and we’re going downtown. But if it’s mine, you got nothing to worry about. And neither do I. If it’s mine, it’s mine, and I can do anything I want with it. In fact, I might even give it to you.”

  She was staring at me openmouthed now. “What?”

  “Now, you’re very lucky, ’cause it just happens that I need something. And you’ve got it. I want to know about X, and it just so happens that you know all about him, and you could tell me. And it ain’t gonna hurt you none, ’cause he’ll never know I got it from you.

  “So that’s the situation. Either this coke is yours, in which case we take a ride downtown and you get busted for drugs. Or, this coke is mine, in which case you talk to me a little bit, and then you take this coke home with you and you thank your lucky stars that you happened to meet me, and that when you did you happened to have something to trade.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Always. What we have here is the carrot and the stick.” I held up the bag of coke. “This is the carrot. A half a gram of pure rock, guaranteed to be purer than anything you could ever lay your hands on. It is also the stick, ’cause if you don’t take it, it’s gonna take you, if you know what I mean.”

  She looked at me. “Whaddya wanna know?”

  “X. I wanna know about X.”

  “What about him?”

  “You were one of Darryl Jackson’s girls. Now you’re working for X. The thing is, you went over to X before Darryl Jackson got killed. That means you and X are pretty close.”

  “Yeah. So.”

  “So you must know a lot of things. And you know things that I want to know.”

  “Yeah. Like what?”

  “First of all, what’s his name.”

  She looked at me. “Jesus, you don’t even know that? His name is Herbert Hoover Greene. He hates it. That’s why he likes to be called X.”

  “Give me his home address and his phone number.”

  She did. I wrote it in my notebook.

  “All right,” she said. “What else you wanna know?”

  “The thing I wanna know in particular is the connection. Between X and Darryl Jackson. ’Cause now Darryl Jackson is dead, and X is running all of Darryl Jackson’s girls. So you tell me. What’s the connection between X and Darryl Jackson, and how was he able to take over all his girls just like that.”

  “Oh.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I knew this was gonna be bad. I just didn’t know how bad.”

  “You and X are pretty close, right?”

  She made a face. “Look, let’s get something straight. I hear this all the time from the other girls, but it’s too much hearing it from you. X is nothing to me. He was the lesser of two evils, you know what I mean. X is a big, dumb, mean brute. Frankly, I don’t like him.

  “But Darryl Jackson was a slime. A real slime. Every week or so he’d have one of us up to his place for his own pleasure. And you know what he was into? Pain. Humiliation and pain. What got him off was seeing how low you could go, how much you could endure and still try to please him. And if you couldn’t, you know, if it got too much to endure, and you couldn’t go on, he’d slap you senseless until you did.”

  Her shoulders heaved and she looked at the floor. I could see tears start to come in her eyes.

  Jesus.

  I wondered if Pamela Berringer had gone through all that. She must have, I realized. It was hard to think about.

  She sniffed, looked at me. “So you see how it is. X is a dumb fucking brute. And he’s mean and he’s tough. If someone popped him tomorrow, I wouldn’t shed a tear. But compared to Darryl Jackson, he’s a fucking saint, you know.”

  I nodded. I was beginning to feel like an asshole for the tack I’d taken with her. For not treating her like a person. But I’d really had no choice.

  “I see,” I said.

  “So there you are. And now you wanna know about X. Fine. I can tell you about X. I got no loyalty to him. I got no loyalty to anybody but me. Maybe if X went down, I could go on my own. Maybe. I got clients’ names and numbers, you know. I got my own apartment, I don’t need this room. Maybe ...”

  She snapped out of it, and her eyes got hard again. She pointed her finger at me. “But the thing is, you didn’t get it from me. Anything I tell you about him, you didn’t get from me. You hear me?”

  “That’s understood.”

  “O.K. Now, you want to know what the relationship was between X and Darryl Jackson, right? How he was able to take over all of Darryl Jackson’s girls?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Just tell me how he did it.”

  She smiled mirthlessly, shook her head, then looked up at me.

  “He killed him, of course.”

  30.

  YOU KNOW, my self-esteem as a private detective has never been particularly high. But I try. I try hard. And in this case, I’d tried particularly hard. I’d protected my client, concealed evidence, played tag with the police, and painstakingly followed a trail of clues, trying to figure out who the murderer was. And through all of it, I’d tried to make sense of it, tried to put it together in my head, tried to do my Sherlock Holmes bit, and deduce what had happened.

  And then I’m talking to some hooker, and she tells me who did it.

  I blinked at her.

  “What did you say?”

  “He killed him, of course. What did you think? They’ve been rivals for years. When I went over to X, that was the last straw. That made it a blood feud. Darryl Jackson would have killed him if he got a chance. X just beat him to the punch.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Are you kidding? He told me he did. He bragged to me. He’s proud of it, you know?”

  I looked at her. “You are gonna have to testify.”

  “Fuck I will,” she said.

  “Look here, you’re talking to me—”

  “Bullshit,” she said. “I’m talking to you to get out of a drug rap. And because—well, if you get him, that’s all right with me. But you said off the record and he would never know. Well, that’s fine. But you put me on the stand and I’ll deny this shit. Drugs or no drugs, I don’t care how many phony counts you throw at me, I’m not talking. He’d kill me. He’d beat the rap. Somehow, some way, he’d beat the rap and he’d kill me. No way I’m doing that.”

  “If I put you on the stand—”

  “If you put me on the stand, I’ll not only deny it—I’ll say I was with him at the time of the murder. I’ll give him an alibi, and I’ll make it stick. You don’t get by in this business without learning how to tell lies. The jury will believe me and X will believe me. And you’ll look like a fool.”

  “He can’t just walk on this. I’m gonna nail him.”

  “Fine. You wanna nail him, you nail him, but leave me out of it.”

  “How am I gonna nail him without you?”

  She looked at me. “Are you kidding? I told you he was dumb. You won’t have any problem. He’ll have made a hundred mistakes.” She snorted. “Hell, he’
s so fucking dumb his fingerprints will probably be on the knife.”

  31.

  SHE FINGERED HIM for me too. I insisted on it. After all, all she’d done for me was solve the case and tell me who did it. I had to get some return for my half a gram.

  Yeah, I gave it to her. If you think that makes me a bad person, all I can say is you’ve probably never been a murder suspect. I’m talking provocation here. That and the ends justifying the means. The cops do it all the time—supply dope to some junkie snitch to get on to something big. Well, to be honest, I don’t know that for a fact. I’m just taking it from movies like “Prince of the City.” But I’d be willing to bet you it’s true.

  And the thing is, we all have our own morality and our own code of ethics. And the way I see it, it would have been worse to have promised it to her, and then scammed her out of it, than to give it to her. In my book, a deal’s a deal, no matter what it is and who it’s with. Oh yeah, I would have no scruples at all about scamming some rich, filthy dope pusher, but to scam some poor, helpless junkie who was helping me out was something else.

  That’s just how I see it. You don’t have to see it that way. But that’s how I feel, and that’s what I did.

  At any rate, she rode uptown with me to a bar on Lenox Avenue in the 140’s where she said X hung out.

  She was right. He was there. She pointed him out to me through the window. She was being real careful not to be seen, and I couldn’t blame her a bit. X was the type of guy for whom the phrase ‘mean motherfucker’ was invented. It wasn’t that he was big—in that department, Darryl Jackson’s next door neighbor had him beat hands down—it was just that he was solid. It was hard to tell where his head ended and his neck began. The man was a bull.

  I put her in the car and drove her back downtown. She actually thanked me, which was quite unnecessary. She had kind of made my day.

  I drove my car back up to the bar and parked outside. It was a moderately respectable bar, not posh, but not grunge either. I sized it up through the window. The first thing I noticed was that X was still there. If he hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have bothered to notice anything else. But having ascertained that fact, I took stock of the establishment. There was one thing I noticed immediately. Though the bar was fairly crowded, there wasn’t a white man in the place.

  I wouldn’t want you to think I was getting any braver. I wasn’t. I was scared to go into that bar. And I was scared of X. But I was scared of MacAullif too. And the thing is, when you got your balls in a vise, it ain’t an act of bravery to try and get ’em out.

  I took a deep breath and walked through the door.

  For a second, I thought I was in a fucking western movie. Everyone stopped talking and looked at me. The bartender even stopped halfway through pouring a drink. I swear, if there’d been a honky-tonk piano, it would have stopped playing. The sheriff had just walked into the saloon.

  The people in the bar had all jumped to the same logical conclusion. They thought I was a cop.

  I was panicked, and I didn’t know what to do. And I reacted the same way I had in the crack house. And that was to go with the rush of adrenaline, and cover the fear by coming off loud and aggressive.

  I pulled open my coat, jerked the brown leather folder with my photo I.D. as a private detective about an inch out of my jacket pocket, and shoved it back in again, and said. “This is not a bust. I’m on stakeout up the street, nothing’s happening, and I’m bored as hell and I want a beer. Anyone here points out I shouldn’t be drinking on duty, I’m considering him drunk and disorderly and he’s going downtown.”

  I thought that was pretty funny, but no one else seemed to. I found out how novice comics must feel working the late night audiences at the free gigs. Talk about a tough house. I didn’t even get a smile.

  I didn’t try any more one-liners. I just walked over to the bar and slid in next to X. He gave me a look, then very deliberately swivelled around and gave me his back.

  The bartender was democratic. He’d serve anybody with money, particularly when that person had the power to raid the joint.

  X was drinking Schaefer, so that’s what I ordered. The bartender brought me a bottle and a glass. I filled the glass, and put the bottle on the bar as close to X’s as I could. There was about the same amount of beer left in each, which was good.

  I chugged my glass of beer, hoping like hell Alice would be sleeping when I came home smelling like a brewery, since I don’t normally drink.

  My glass had about an inch of beer in it. I held it up and looked at it appreciatively. With my other hand I surreptitiously reached under my coat and switched on my beeper.

  Heads turned at the high-pitched “beep, beep, beep.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  I reached under my coat and switched the beeper off. I downed the beer in my glass, set it on the bar, then reached out and grabbed X’s bottle by the tip of the neck. His back was still to me, and I don’t think he noticed the difference. At any rate he didn’t say anything. I got up and headed for the door.

  The bartender tried to stop me. “Hey, you can’t take that out of here,” he said.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll bust myself,” I told him, and kept going. I’m not sure, but I think that time I might have gotten a chuckle.

  I went out the door and hopped in my car. I gunned the motor, pulled out, and sped down Lenox Avenue. About ten blocks south I stopped, opened the car door, and poured the beer out in the street. I took one of my father-in-law’s plastic bags out of the glove compartment, and put the bottle in it. I got out of the car and stashed the bag and the bottle in the trunk.

  I got back in the car and drove home.

  32.

  AFTER ALL THAT, the next day was pretty routine. At least it started out that way. I got up at 7:00, dug out my car, which took about a half an hour, and got on the road.

  As expected, a whole mess of slip-and-falls had come in from the storm, which kept me pretty busy. Not only that, it was my day to turn in cases to Richard.

  I drove down to the office, left my car in the municipal lot for an hour, I.D.’d my pictures and filled out my time sheets, and then rushed all the stuff down to Richard’s office.

  Naturally, I was looking out for Sandy and the Professor, though I didn’t expect to see ’em. MacAullif would realize their cover had been blown, and if he still wanted me followed, he’d assign other men to the job. I pulled a couple of figure 8’s on my way to the office just to see if anyone was tagging along. No one was. That meant one of two things, both of which were good: either MacAullif had given up on me, or he had taken the Congressman as bait.

  I parked at a meter on 14th Street and went up to the office.

  Wendy and Cheryl still hadn’t forgiven me. In fact, their mutual dislike seemed to have formed a bond between them. They were more like the Bobbsey Twins than ever. They glared at me in unison, and it was a relief to finally get into Richard’s office.

  Richard wasn’t his old self either. He seemed preoccupied while he went over the fact sheets.

  “Sherry Webber, trip-and-fall, defective stair, fine, I’ll take it; Matilda Mae Smith, super in her building, workman’s comp, it’s a washout; Juan Martinez, slip-and-fall in McDonald’s, love to nail ’em, get some pictures some time when they’re mopping the floor; Felix Pagan, hit-and-run, no-fault, I’ll take it ...”

  He was done in record time. He didn’t ask me a single question. He hardly looked at the accident photos, and didn’t even notice I hadn’t taken the pictures of Sherry Webber’s stairs. This was unprecedented. Even more out of character, he gave my paysheets only a cursory glance.

  When he was done, he pushed the work aside, leaned back in his chair, and looked at me.

  “So,” he said. “How’s the case?”

  “The case?”

  “Darryl Jackson? The missing paper?”

  “Oh, that case. I don’t know. It’s got nothing to do with me.”

  “So you said. I understand a Sergea
nt MacAullif called here looking for you.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He just wanted to ask a few more questions. Try to sweat the truth out of me.”

  “Did he?”

  “No, ’cause there’s nothing to sweat.”

  “Really?”

  “Hey,” I said. “I can’t lie to you. You’re my lawyer.”

  Richard nodded. “Just so you remember that.”

  I finally got out of there. It was going to break Richard’s heart if the truth ever got out, but I couldn’t help that. I couldn’t have given him what he wanted anyway. ’Cause I know the way he figured it, it only really would have counted if he could have gotten me off and I was really guilty.

  I got out of there as quickly as I could, and headed out to my first assignment.

  Before I got in the car, I did something I should have done earlier, but I hadn’t had the time to do it. I called Leroy to thank him for bailing me out.

  “No problem. Any time,” Leroy said. “Why don’t you stop by in your travels?”

  “I’m rather booked up today. And I wouldn’t want to lead the police to your door.”

  “It’s as bad as that?”

  “Worse.”

  “You must tell me about it some time.”

  “Yes. Perhaps when we’re sharing the same cell.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Leroy said. “I have no intention of doing time.”

  I said I wished I shared his optimism. I hung up, got in my car, and headed out.

  My first assignment was way out in Hollis, Queens, so I had time to do a little mindless driving and a little thinking. Of course, the big question was what to do next. I had that bottle, and what I should do is take it in to MacAullif and see if the fingerprints on it matched up with the ones on the knife. But I realized that if I did that, I’d shoot my wad. I’d be out in the open with MacAullif. If the prints matched up, I’d be a hero. But if they didn’t match up, or if there were no prints on the bottle at all, I’d be dead. ’Cause I’d have to explain, and there was no way that I could. It was just too big a risk to take, particularly just on the word of a hooker. I had to be sure.