Blackmail

by Parnell Hall

“Fingers?”

  “Don’t change the subject. Wouldn’t that work?”

  “It might.”

  “And even if it didn’t, wouldn’t that be a good way to get the names of some photographers?”

  I stood up, held up my hand. “Stop. You win. I’m on my way.”

  42.

  RATFACE GAVE ME THE MOST marvelous deadpan when I walked in. I could tell the prospect of making another dollar off me didn’t exactly thrill him. I paid no attention, just headed for the photos in the back. When he saw that, he shook his head and I believe actually rolled his eyes. I can’t say that I blamed him, really. After all, I had taken close to half an hour to spend my first dollar.

  It just wasn’t Ratface’s day—he didn’t even make his buck. ’Cause the guy I was looking for didn’t happen to be in any of the pictures. That was one of those ideas that sounds real good when you hear it, and then turns out to be a total washout.

  The photographer-name-on-the-back-of-the-photograph bit wasn’t so hot either. Believe it or not, not that many photographers seemed eager to claim their work. In all the photographs I looked at—and there must have been hundreds—I found a total of three names.

  A number of the photos had been stamped Harrison Garrison Studio. A smaller number were stamped Art Smith. And a couple of them, so help me, were stamped F-Stop Fitzgerald.

  I took the information home and Alice and I went to work. Unfortunately, none of the three names was listed in the Yellow Pages under Photographers-Passport, Photographers-Portrait, Photographic Color Prints & Transparencies, or Photographic Equipment & Supplies.

  The white pages were a different story. There was no Harrison Garrison, but there were three H. Garrisons listed. There were seven Art Smiths, eight A. Smiths, and four other two-letter combinations, such as A. J. Smith.

  Believe it or not, there were no F-Stop Fitzgeralds.

  Unpromising as it looked, I began calling. Considering it was nine-thirty on a Friday evening, I didn’t do that bad. Two of the three H. Garrisons were home and denied being Harrison Garrison. The third did not answer. Three of the Art Smiths were home and denied being photographers. The wife of a fourth Art Smith was home and denied that her husband was a photographer. Two A. Smiths, A. J. Smith, and A. P. Smith all denied being photographers, though one of them actually admitted to being named Art.

  Fruitless as the phone calls were, I was perfectly happy to make them. Because they were an excellent excuse for not taking the picture down to the police station.

  At any rate, by eleven-thirty that evening, Alice and I had amassed a huge amount of information.

  All of it totally worthless.

  43.

  SATURDAY MORNING WAS GORGEOUS, AND by nine-thirty Alice, Tommie, and I were all in the car tooling up Route 17 to Tuxedo, New York, and the Renaissance Festival, which is something we do almost every year. The festival is a wonderful thing for a New Yorker. People dress up in medieval costumes, and kids run around with swords and shields and bows and arrows, and you keep bumping into actors from the company who are roaming around the grounds playing characters from Robin Hood, and just for one day it’s as if Manhattan didn’t exist and you were back in Merry Olde England, when the times were simpler, purer, and somehow much more grand.

  After all the pressure I’d been under, it was real nice to stop my mind for a while, go with the medieval flow, and not really think about anything.

  Plus, hanging out in the woods all day made it impossible for me to be downtown at the police station.

  By the time we got there, the place was mobbed. We parked in Parking Lot Four, and piled onto a large yellow school bus that took us to the main gate, where we waited in line, purchased tickets, and stepped through the turnstile into the past.

  We whiled the day away with bits and pieces of the Robin Hood legend, sandwiched among other highlights of the festival, such as the Living Chess Board, where actors on a giant chess board actually fight each other after each move, and the mud wrestlers—actors who improvise comedy skits in a mudhole, which, needless to say, involves plenty of slapstick, including splashing in, falling in, and actually eating mud (“And you paid to see it!”).

  At the end of the afternoon the whole thing culminated in the joust, fought by actors from the Robin Hood pageant. This involved a great deal of choreographed acrobatics, and touched off an argument between Tommie and Alice. Tommie likes watching steroidal wrestlers on TV, and Alice tells him it’s stupid because the fights are fixed. Tommie wanted to know why that was worse than this. And if Alice didn’t think so, he offered her any odds she wanted to name to bet against Robin Hood.

  I kept out of it. I didn’t give a damn. I was in upstate New York rather than the police station, and I just wanted to be left alone.

  Finally the joust was over—guess who won?—and the pageant came to a close. We anticipated well and were in the first group through the gate and onto the school bus. It was already packed, which was good in that it kept us closer to the front, and bad in that we had to stand. But for such a short ride, it seemed a small inconvenience. We stood, waited impatiently for the bus driver to close the door. He finally did, just as one more couple pushed on.

  They were young, and the man was broad and beefy. He was wearing a string T-shirt, under which muscles rippled, and he grabbed the door and held it wedged open while he tried to squeeze his girlfriend on. The driver actually waved him back, but the man said something to him I couldn’t hear and stepped up onto the bus, pushing his girlfriend ahead of him.

  Hell.

  It had been a long if pleasant day, we had an hour-and-a-half to two-hour drive ahead of us, depending on traffic, I was not enjoying standing like a sardine in a crowded bus, and I just wanted to get the hell out of there and get home. But this guy had us immobilized.

  I said nothing, but someone else on the bus said, “Come on, wait for the next one.” But macho man just made a gesture and half pushed, half lifted the woman onto the bus. As he did, she looked up and I saw her face.

  It was her!

  I told myself it couldn’t be true. I was just desperate, that was all. That was what had pushed me over the edge, was making me see what I wanted to see. What I wanted to think. That had to be the answer. It was certainly a lot easier to believe than that the woman who was holding up our bus from leaving the Renaissance Festival in Tuxedo, New York, was none other than the woman Alice and I had been looking all over for, the woman I had just paid Ratface a dollar for a picture of, the woman who was the prime suspect in the murder case I was investigating. I mean, come on, give me a break. If I read that in a book, I’d throw the fucking thing across the room. I mean, you really expect me to buy that?

  I couldn’t help it.

  It was her.

  I grabbed Alice by the arm. “Look!” I whispered, and pointed.

  Alice looked. Then looked back at me and frowned.

  “It’s her!” I whispered.

  Alice didn’t have to ask who her was. Her eyes widened, and she looked again.

  She looked back, smiled.

  “No, it isn’t.”

  44.

  ALL RIGHT, SO I FELT PRETTY stupid. But it was actually mistaking the woman on the bus for the woman in the pictures that put me on the right track. Well, I wouldn’t go as far as all that. But what it did, really, was show me how desperate I was to find an excuse for not turning in the picture. Or rather to find the woman in the picture, rendering the picture itself moot. That was why I was grasping at straws, recognizing people on the shuttle bus at the Renaissance Festival, for god’s sake.

  But what the humiliation actually did was shame me into thinking the thing out all the way home—all right, asshole, you don’t wanna turn in the picture, you got an hour-and-a-half car ride to come up with a good enough reason.

  Only, I have to tell you, I couldn’t really keep my mind on it. Not on that gorgeous fall day in the country. Not after clowns and magicians and jugglers and Robin Hood and Living C
hess Boards and mud eaters and swordsmen and damsels and knights and wenches and all that delicious childhood fantasy make-believe. It rattled around in my head, intoxicated me. The innocent escapism of youth. It took me back to simpler days, when triple homicides were no concern of mine, but fifty bad guys could be dispatched in the normal course of an afternoon without even making me late for dinner.

  Anyway, all those notions fought in my head.

  Play acting.

  Porno acting.

  Legitimate acting.

  I shook my head to clear it. Gotta concentrate. Gotta straighten this out.

  It was coming back over the George Washington Bridge that it finally hit me.

  45.

  ALICE LOOKED UP AT ME in surprise. “Back Stage?”

  It was later that same night. We’d gotten home, put Tommie to bed, and I’d gone out for the New York Times. The Sunday Times comes out Saturday night in the city. I’m not big on buying it then, because the sports section won’t have Saturday’s scores. But tonight I didn’t care. I’d actually gone out for something else.

  “That’s right,” said. “Back Stage.”

  “What for?”

  “I’m going to auditions.”

  Alice looked at me. I’d recently done a part in summer stock, but aside from that, I hadn’t acted in over ten years. Or gone to an audition.

  “Are you kidding?” she said.

  “Not at all.”

  “What’s the gag?”

  “It’s about the picture.”

  “What about it?”

  “I thought it over, and the way I see it, we’ve been going about it all wrong.”

  “Oh?”

  “The dirty magazines, the photographers. F-Stop Fitzgerald, for Christ’s sake. It’s not going to get us anywhere.”

  “Why not?”

  “The picture’s old. You can see that.”

  “Right. Which makes it harder to trace.”

  “That’s the least of it. I’m thinking about Jack Fargo.”

  “What about him?”

  “How scared he was when I mentioned porn.”

  Alice had been sitting on the bed watching TV. Now she flicked it off with the remote control. She cocked her head, gave me a look.

  “Stanley, don’t make me drag this out of you. What’s your idea?”

  “Okay, look,” I said. “Jack Fargo got upset about porn. The original idea was that upset him because he’d once done it but was legit now. His connection to the case would be that he knew the people in the pictures.”

  “Then he turned out to be gay.”

  I waved it away. “Never mind that. That’s a tangent. The point is, porn star then, legit now.

  “The same goes for the people in the pictures. That’s why they’d be vulnerable to blackmail. If they weren’t legit, there’s no point.”

  “Of course.”

  “So the dirty picture has to be the wrong track. I’m wasting my time looking for a porn star. I should be looking for an actress.”

  “Makes sense,” Alice said.

  I jerked my thumb at the Back Stage. “So I’m going to auditions.”

  Alice nodded. “Me too.”

  46.

  WE MADE THE ROUNDS TOGETHER, went to the auditions.

  We didn’t actually audition. Alice isn’t an actress. I used to be an actor, but I hadn’t auditioned in years, I was never any good at It, and there was no reason to thoroughly humiliate myself. Fortunately, it wasn’t necessary. In most cases, we didn’t actually have to be at the audition—just find out where it was and watch the people going in and out. It was only in cases where the audition was being held on, say, the fourteenth floor of some large office building, with three banks of elevators and four entrances, that we really had to go.

  But it didn’t matter. No one ever challenged us. I had some old pictures and resumes in my briefcase, and the worst that ever happened was, a couple of times, I had to hand them out. On both occasions, I managed to duck out before anyone could call on me to audition.

  Making the rounds did not require me suspending my services to Rosenberg and Stone. There simply aren’t that many open auditions in New York. There were never more than two a day, and some days there weren’t any, so I managed to sandwich them in among my cases. I’d show up at the appointed place and time, and Alice would meet me there.

  I needed Alice, of course, because of her memory for faces. As she pointed out, the woman could walk right by me with a different hairstyle and I wouldn’t even know it. I couldn’t argue with that, so I had to let her come along. I was reluctant to do so because it negated the reason I was doing this in the first place. No, not finding the woman. That was the reason I gave for doing this. My real reason, my real motivation, was to hang on to the photo and not give it to the cops. I figured I would need the photo to compare it with the women I saw at the auditions. With Alice along, that was no longer necessary. But Alice didn’t raise the point. It was almost like an unspoken agreement—her not objecting to me keeping the photo, in exchange for my not objecting to her coming to auditions.

  At any rate, that’s how it worked out. Which was fine with me.

  Except we weren’t getting anywhere. As I said, there aren’t that many open casting calls. And the ones we went to were not productive. The first week yielded a big fat zero.

  It wasn’t till the second week that I began recognizing people. Not the people in the pictures—then the job would have been over. I mean actors. See, I used to be a member of the theater community, albeit a while back, so it was only natural after a while I would bump into someone I knew.

  As I say, that didn’t happen till the second week. By then we’d gotten so used to nothing happening, it was a big surprise.

  The first time it happened was at an open call for singers and dancers for chorus work. The talents displayed by the woman in the picture did not necessarily include singing and dancing, but she certainly seemed limber enough, so there was no reason to pass it up. The audition was being held at a vacant theater on West Forty-fourth Street, which meant Alice and I didn’t have to go in. It was a nice day, so we were hanging out on the sidewalk and leaning up against my car, which you cannot park in midtown Manhattan under penalty of death, and which, if we turned our back and walked a mere ten paces from, would have been instantly ticketed, towed, and would wind up costing me over a hundred bucks and the whole afternoon to get back. Which simply would not have done, since I had just driven in from a hot trip-and-fall in Brooklyn and was scheduled that afternoon for a hit-and-run in Queens.

  Anyway, Alice and I were standing there clocking the actresses in and out when I heard a voice say, “Mr. Hastings.”

  I turned around to find an attractive-looking blonde standing there. Flustered as that made me, and poor as I am at faces, I still recognized Jill Jenson, one of the actresses from Love Strikes Out, a showcase production I’d gotten involved in when one of the actors had gotten murdered.

  That was a bit of a complication. I certainly didn’t want any members of the acting community to know why I was there. So I was just on the point of telling her Alice and I were there to audition when I realized she didn’t know me as an actor. She knew me as a detective. In fact, if my memory served me well, she might even know me as a police detective, since I’d certainly given the actors in that production that impression, and I couldn’t recall if I’d ever disillusioned her.

  I was not about to now. So I switched gears in mid-falsehood and came out with a plausible half truth—I was looking for clues in the murder of Jack Fargo, and did she happen to know him?

  She said she didn’t, but she’d ask around. I asked her please not to, because it was a case where I was trying to keep a low profile.

  After that, I kept a much lower profile. Alice and I actually sat in the car, scrunched down, watching the people going in and out.

  And it’s a good thing I did, because not ten minutes after Jill went in, who should show up but the curly-blo
nd-haired roommate of Cliff McFadgen’s girlfriend.

  That caught me up short. I wondered if I only recognized her because I’d just recognized Jill, which put me in the mood to recognize people. Which made me wonder how many of Cliff McFadgen’s girlfriend’s roommates, or maybe even Cliff McFadgen’s girlfriend herself, might have been at any of those other auditions and I hadn’t even noticed?

  At any rate, after that I paid a lot better attention.

  Which is why, two days later, I spotted Bradley Connely before he spotted me.

  It was outside a loft on Prince Street, not two blocks from the loft where I’d found the body of his wife. It was an audition for an off-Broadway show. Alice and I were sitting in the car in front of the building watching the people go in, when I suddenly grabbed her by the arm.

  “That’s him,” I said.

  “That’s who?”

  “The husband. What’s his name.”

  “Bradley Connely?”

  “Right.”

  “You’re terrible with names, you know it?”

  “Yeah, I know it. Keep your head down.”

  “Why? He doesn’t know me.”

  “He knows me.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Shh.”

  “He can’t hear us, for Christ’s sake.”

  While all that was going on, Bradley Connely, paying no attention to us whatever, went up the front steps and inside.

  “So that’s the husband,” Alice said.

  “Yeah? So?”

  “So nothing. It’s just after hearing so much, it’s strange to put a face to these people.”

  “Does he look like you expected?”

  “I don’t know what I expected.”

  “Well, one thing in his favor.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He was alone.”

  He was alone when he came out too. Which, strange as it might seem, counted as a point in his favor. The mystery woman wasn’t with him. Not that it would have mattered if some woman had been with him. But still.