Blackmail

by Parnell Hall

  Besides, running off to New Jersey with my car was a hell of a persuasive argument.

  I stumbled out of bed, staggered into the kitchen, where Alice had left coffee in the percolator and another note. This one said, Slow down. You’re not working.

  I smiled. Alice’s argument yesterday had been that I had just made fifteen hundred dollars in two days and I could damn well take the day off. Well, I sure as hell wasn’t chasing around the five boroughs signing up accident victims via subway. I poured myself a cup of coffee, dialed Rosenberg and Stone.

  Wendy/Janet was surprised to hear from me. She’d already gotten the message on the answering machine that I wasn’t working today. I hadn’t left one, of course—that was Alice.

  There’s no fighting Alice. I said I was just making sure she got the message and hung up the phone.

  So what the hell was I gonna do today?

  I had no idea, but I figured the decision could wait till I had coffee and read the paper. I sat down at the kitchen table where Alice had left the Times and the Post.

  I wasn’t surprised the Times hadn’t covered the murder of Patricia Connely, but I expected to read all about it in the Post. After all, wasn’t this the sort of thing the tabloid news thrives on—an attractive woman brutally slain? But I couldn’t find a thing.

  I wondered if the cops were sitting on the story. Or at least the blackmail angle, which would have really made it newsworthy. And if they were, I wondered if it had anything to do with the missing five grand.

  Of course, it was none of my business. That was what Richard, MacAullif, and Alice had taken great pains to impress on me. It was out of my hands and there was nothing I could do. Alice’s argument had been particularly strong, and her logic particularly forceful.

  I knew why. Underlying all of Alice’s judgment was a desire to keep me from having to deal with a moronic, brutal cop who hated my guts and who at the very least was apt to maim me and jail me, if not frame me or kill me. Which certainly made sense.

  Or did it?

  After all, Sergeant Thurman’s only beef with me was that I wouldn’t talk. Well, now I’d talked. Not to him, but to A.D.A. Frost. Still, Thurman would be privy to the information. And I was now free to discuss it.

  I wondered if Sergeant Thurman might like to do that.

  19.

  “YOU GOT A LOT OF FUCKIN’ BALLS.”

  I flipped open the front of my suit jacket, pretended to peer down the front of my pants.

  Thurman’s scowl lines deepened. “Listen, asshole,” he said. “You’re probably too dumb to see it, but I got a short fuse on this one. You got about ten seconds to talk or you’re flyin’ out that door on your ear.”

  “That’s a bad line to take,” I said. “If anyone’s got a beef, it’s me.”

  “The hell!”

  “I’m the guy got beat up, spent the night in the drunk tank.” I put up my hand. “And never mind the denials. It’s just you and me talking here. And I’m not wearing a wire. You wanna check?”

  “I don’t give a fuck what you’re wearin’. You can wear a fuckin’ ballet outfit for all I care.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Anyway, now you know why I wouldn’t talk. I had a perfectly good reason.”

  “Oh, sure,” Thurman said. “’Cause you’re guilty of blackmail. Just a nice, honest, upstanding citizen, exercising his constitutional rights. Makes me fucking sick.”

  “I take it you’ve been over my statement?”

  “Good guess.”

  “So whaddya think?”

  “I think it’s a fucking crime you got immunity.”

  “Aside from that.”

  “I think you better get the fuck out of my office.”

  I took a breath. “Look. You were pissed off I wouldn’t answer your questions. Now you’re pissed off that I got immunity. The way things stood, I couldn’t talk till I got it. Now I got it, now we can talk.”

  “Christ, you got a lot of balls. And don’t look in your fuckin’ pants again. What makes you think I got anything to say to you?”

  “You were so hot to ask me questions, I thought I’d give you another chance.”

  “I got your signed statement now. That’s all I need. Unless you were holding something back. Is that what you’re trying to tell me? That you were holding something back?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Then we got nothin’ to talk about.”

  “Except ...”

  “Except what?”

  “You got a case that doesn’t make sense.”

  “It makes a lot more sense now. I mean, now I got your story. It’s a blackmail. Things happen in a blackmail. Blackmail scheme, something’s apt to go wrong. A lot of times, blackmail leads to murder.”

  “Yes,” I said. I added gently, “But it is not the wicked blackmailer who lies dead, it is the lady.”

  Thurman frowned. “Huh?” he said. “What the fuck was that?”

  That happened to be a line Hercule Poirot said in Agatha Christie’s Evil Under the Sun. But I thought that explanation might be somewhat lost on Sergeant Thurman.

  “Yeah, blackmail leads to murder,” I said. “But isn’t it always the blackmailer who gets killed? Right? The victim kills the blackmailer to shut him up. Or to avoid paying. At least that makes sense. But why would the blackmailer kill the victim?”

  To my surprise, Sergeant Thurman had an answer. “What if he’s double-crossed?”

  “What?”

  “What do you think the guy is, honorable? He’s a blackmailer, so all he’s gonna do is blackmail? No, he’s a schmuck. That’s why he’s doing it in the first place. You do what he says, you pay him off, you make out fine. You cross him, it’s another matter. You piss him off, he does one of two things. He makes good on his threat—smears you with the evidence you were trying to buy. Or he kills you.”

  “Yeah, but ...”

  “But what?”

  “What good does that do?”

  “It sends a nice little message to anyone else the guy may happen to be blackmailing that they’d damn well better pay up.”

  “Yeah. Maybe. But ...”

  “But what?”

  “She didn’t double-cross him. She was paying off.”

  “Oh yeah?” Thurman said. “What about the wad of newspaper you were carrying around instead of bills? It looked to me like she meant to double-cross him just fine.”

  Now that was mighty interesting. First off, it confirmed the fact that Sergeant Thurman knew about the bogus money. Which I could assume, since he was familiar with the rest of my statement. Second off, taken at face value, it would tend to indicate Sergeant Thurman wasn’t the one who had made the switch. But most interesting about Sergeant Thurman’s deduction was that he had made it. Frankly, I wouldn’t have thought him capable of it.

  Not that there weren’t a lot of things wrong with it. Like the fact that it was totally ass-backwards and didn’t add up.

  “There’s a small problem there,” I said.

  “Oh? Like what?”

  “You’re saying the guy kills her for double-crossing him by giving him bogus cash.”

  “Right.”

  “Except I got the bogus cash.”

  “Yeah? So?”

  “So how does he know that? I haven’t given it to him yet. It’s in my pocket in a sealed envelope. It was still there when I found the body. She’s already dead and I’ve still got the envelope and he hasn’t seen it yet, so how does he know?”

  Thurman shrugged. “How should I know? But say he does.”

  I sighed. That was the problem with dealing with Thurman. Logic wasn’t going to get you anywhere.

  “Yeah, but how?” I said. “The whole thing’s gotta make sense. How does any of that make sense?”

  “Who gives a shit?” Thurman said. “When I get the guy, I’ll find out how. But the way I see it, the guy’s got you out there running around with the cash. Meanwhile he and the babe hook up. How, I don’t know, but most likely
she isn’t planning on seeing him, since she thinks you are. So he surprises her. Says, ‘Hey, babe, I think you’re doin’ the dirty on me. You got your boyfriend runnin’ around out there, but just between you and me, I don’t think he’s got shit. So I’ve decided on a little insurance. You’re gonna be with me when he makes the payoff. And if it don’t go smooth as silk, it’s your ass.’ And the broad panics and says, ‘Hey, wait a minute. We can work this out.’ And he wants to know what the hell there is to work out. And she panics because when you show up she’s in deep shit, and to try to head that off and get out of it, she finally confesses to him there ain’t gonna be no cash when you show up. Only it don’t get her out of it, it gets her into it, ’cause when he hears that he blows her fuckin’ head off.

  “Now, how’s about that?”

  I would have loved to have pointed out a flaw in the reasoning. But on the spot, standing there gawking at Sergeant Thurman, I have to confess, I couldn’t think of a thing.

  Which shouldn’t have been that surprising. I mean, yeah, Thurman was dumb. But even a stupid person has some reason for his opinions. After all, the guy was in charge of the case. He couldn’t have no theory at all. So why should it be such a shock when he did?

  I guess it was just that I didn’t think him capable of any theory more complicated than the private eye found the body, so the private eye must have done it.

  Maybe that was it.

  Maybe I was just shocked to find he suspected someone other than me.

  “So you think this guy Barry might be it?” I said.

  “I’d certainly like to talk to him.” Thurman cocked his head. “It’s a little hard with the description we got to go with.”

  I winced. After I’d given A.D.A. Frost my statement I’d put in an hour with a police sketch artist, trying to come up with a likeness of Barry. The end result resembled him somewhat, but probably no more so than it did Woody Allen, Bo Jackson, or Connie Chung.

  “Maybe so,” I said. “But If you start digging around in her background, you’re bound to come up with him. So whaddya got so far?”

  Sergeant Thurman frowned. “Excuse me?”

  “On the dead woman. Patricia Connely. What have you got on her? Let’s see if it has any connection to this guy Barry.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “No. I know you’re looking for this guy Barry, I thought maybe I could help.”

  “Well, ain’t that sweet. Why you so eager to help me?”

  “I’d like the matter cleared up.”

  “Oh, you would? What, are you related to the commissioner? ’Cause he’d like it cleared up too. Maybe the two’s of you should get together. See what else you can come up with.”

  “Yeah, great,” I said. “So, you wanna see if there’s any way we can connect these two up?”

  Sergeant Thurman cocked his head. “You’re askin’ me if I’d like your help?”

  “No, not really. I—”

  “You’re offering to help me solve this crime?”

  “No, I’m just—”

  “You’re down here in my office with more balls than you find on the average guy, and you’d like me to tell you what I know—and let me be sure I got this right—so that you can tell me what it all means?”

  “Oh, now look.”

  Sergeant Thurman pointed his finger. “Get the fuck out of my office. Get the fuck out of my life. And get the fuck out of this case. You got no business messin’ around in this. I catch you messin’ around in this, you know what it’s gonna make me think? It’s gonna make me think you’re more mixed up In this than I think you are. So maybe I don’t have to find this Barry creep after all. Maybe I got my killer right here.”

  On second thought, maybe Sergeant Thurman really didn’t want to talk to me.

  20.

  THERE’S MORE THAN ONE WAY to skin a cat.

  Now there’s a phrase. Aside from delighting cat lovers everywhere, just what the hell does it mean?

  I know what it’s supposed to mean—that there’s more than one way to do something. But where did skinning cats come into it? “Who the hell ever skinned a cat, and for what reason? It’s not like you were going to make something out of it. I mean, I could see someone getting pissed off at a cat yowling all night, and going out and wringing its neck. But skinning it? That seems a little much.

  Now please don’t write in. This is not an attack on cats, just on our language. And I didn’t make the damn phrase up. It just occurred to me when I bumped into the Sergeant Thurman stone wall. That there was more than one way to skin a cat.

  Which makes about as much sense to me as the cat’s pajamas. But that’s another story. Unless the pajamas were made to dress up a skinned cat.

  Anyway, if Sergeant Thurman wasn’t going to talk, I had to try something else. I just had to figure out what.

  I was on my way down into the subway station when I got my first clue. It came in the form of a New York Post headline staring up at me from a paper in a trash can. The headline was “Guilty!” I’d seen the headline in the Post this morning and that wasn’t it. I wondered who’d been found guilty that was so important the Post had gotten out an extra with a new headline.

  They hadn’t. And when I realized, it explained a lot. It was yesterday’s paper. I hadn’t seen it because I’d been in the drunk tank, which had knocked me twenty-four hours into the future. Which is why the Patricia Connely murder hadn’t been in today’s paper. It was yesterday’s news.

  “Actress Slain” was the headline on page nine. That stirred memories. I hadn’t known Patricia Connely was an actress, but if so, she was the second one I’d known who’d been murdered. I pushed the thought from my mind, read the story.

  It was sketchy at best. A Patricia Connely had been found shot in a loft in SoHo. There was no evidence of robbery or rape, and the police had no suspects or motive. The article gave her address on East Ninety-first Street and said she was survived by her husband, Bradley. It occurred to me if he actually happened to live at that address, it would be the cat’s meow.

  He did.

  The address turned out to be a high rise between Park and Lex, and when I asked for Mr. Connely, the doorman nodded, picked up the house phone, and buzzed upstairs.

  “And who shall I say is calling?” he asked.

  “Stanley Hastings.”

  He listened a moment, said, “Yes, a Mr. Stanley Hastings to see you.” After another moment he looked at me and said, “And what is this with regard to, sir?”

  “It’s about his wife.”

  The doorman gave me a reproachful look—if I was a plainclothes cop, I should have said so. If not, I shouldn’t be there. However, he relayed the message and got the approval to send me up.

  “Sixteen D,” he said, pointing in the direction of the elevator.

  I went up to the sixteenth floor, located apartment D, and rang the bell.

  I was in for a bit of a shock. The door was opened by a young man with long blond hair. That in itself wasn’t strange. What was strange was the uncanny resemblance. You know how some people get to resemble their dogs? Well, Mr. and Mrs. Connely had gotten to resemble each other. His long blond hair curled under, and his thin, sensitive face made him look very much like his wife.

  “Mr. Connely?” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Stanley Hastings.”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t place the name.”

  “Surely the police must have mentioned me. I’m the man your wife hired.” I paused a moment. “And the one who found her.”

  “Oh,” he said. He looked at me as if seeing me for the first time. “Oh. Of course. Please. Come on in.”

  He ushered me into the living room, asked me to sit down. The room was furnished in what I guess would be described as starkly modern—chrome and leather furniture, Plexiglas coffee table. I looked around for his favorite chair, couldn’t spot it, decided to wait for him to sit. He did, on the couch, and I took a chair opposite.


  “Now,” he said, “you’re not with the police?”

  “No.”

  “No, of course not,” he said. “Forgive me if my thoughts are scattered. It’s all such a shock.”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you?” he said. It wasn’t sarcastic, but it wasn’t a question either. Even rhetorical. Just sort of musing aloud. Then he looked up at me, and his eyes were wide. “I’m trying to understand, that’s the thing. It’s all sort of overwhelming. I’m trying to understand, but it doesn’t seem to make any sense.”

  I caught myself on the brink of saying “I know” again. If he wanted to talk, I should let him talk.

  When I didn’t answer, he looked up at me. “Maybe you can help me,” he said.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. But you were there. You talked to her. This whole wild scheme.” He ran his hand over his head. “I’m saying it badly. See, I’m the husband. The police told me what happened. But maybe they didn’t tell me all, you know? Because I’m the husband. So they try to shade the truth. Make it less awful.” His lip quivered. “Less awful. How could it be worse than she’s dead?”

  I am not good with grieving kin. I’m not sure who I am good with, but a grieving spouse has to be way down on the list. I wished the hell I was somewhere else.

  As if sensing that, he pulled himself together. “I’m sorry. I was trying to tell you how you could help.”

  “Yes?” I said.

  “Like I said, the police may not have told me everything. But you were there, so you know. So you can fill me in.”

  I didn’t like it. I felt like I was finking on my client to her husband. I know she was dead, but even so.

  “Didn’t you know about it?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “Not a damn thing.”

  I took a breath. “Okay,” I said “Tell me what the police told you. I’ll see if they left anything out.”

  I could tell that didn’t suit him. He wanted me talking, not him. I could see him trying to think of a way of insisting. Either he couldn’t come up with one or decided it was easier to give in.