Hard Case Crime: The Murderer Vine

by Rifkin, Shepard

I felt very tired and very old. I stood up and looked out the window. There was Kirby with her nose pressed against an expensive window across the street, looking at a five-hundred-dollar dress. She was idly twirling her umbrella.

  “Suppose there turns out to be more than five? Or less?”

  “Deduct or add one hundred thousand, whichever the case might be.”

  “Expenses?”

  “I’ll bear them.”

  “The chances of failure are very high.”

  “Yes.”

  “A guy could get killed down there.”

  “Why do you think you’re getting a hundred thousand apiece?”

  He had something there.

  “I have a Yankee accent. That will ruin it.”

  “You’re an intelligent man, Mr. Dunne. You thrive on opposition.”

  “Sure. But a man can choke on too much of it.”

  “Mr. Dunne, we don’t seem to be getting anywhere.” He took out a card and wrote Fairfield 3–1767. “I’ll give orders that your call will be put through any time you call. How about twenty-four hours to think it over before I start looking elsewhere?”

  “Fair enough,” I said. We shook hands. I watched him walk out. There was a guy who could put me on easy street for the rest of my life. He could set me up very nicely with a numbered Swiss bank account. He could just put it in for me. I wouldn’t even have to fly to Geneva with all that suspicious cash. His people would simply stick it in the bank. All they needed was my signature. He could take that on the back of one of his cards. I could also stick a thumbprint on the back of it. His man would take it to Geneva and a day or so later I would call him and he would just say the name of the bank and the number. Then I would lock up the office with no regrets whatsoever. I would pull down twenty-five thousand a year interest on my new capital. He could help me live somewhere on an island like Bora Bora. I could sip daiquiris and go fishing on the reef and go to parties with wealthy people who might tolerate me and my poverty. Who might just. If I handled it right.

  10

  I called Kirby in. She sat down, crossed her long legs, and muttered a soft curse. A run had started in her stocking. She sighed, flipped open her notebook and said, “Shoot.”

  She closed her eyes. Her eyelids were painted a pale blue. I watched as she ran an index finger over the left one and her thumb over the other. They were the color of an early morning sky in summer.

  “Headache?”

  “Hangover,” she said briefly, with hatred. “It went away this morning but it’s come back to h’ant me.” I felt a strange emotion. It was only much later that I realized that I was experiencing jealousy for the man who had helped her achieve her headache. “Also debts. Debts give me migraine.”

  I opened a drawer and shook out two aspirins from the company bottle. Four months ago I had bought a big bottle with hundreds of tablets. The large economy size. I unscrewed the cap. She wrinkled her nose at the reek of vinegar.

  “They’re no good,” she said.

  “What do you mean, no good?”

  “No good means no good,” she said with asperity.

  Her headache was making her insolent. It didn’t annoy me at all.

  “I grew up with five brothers and two sisters,” she said. “You bought too many and aspirin grows old. You bought a good buy if you would be runnin’ U.S. Steel, but you ain’t. You are runnin’ me an’ all I have is one lil ol’ side-splitter here that needs action.”

  Whenever she was mad, her Southern accent took over completely.

  “With your permission, suh.” She got up and put on her raincoat, went downstairs, and walked into the drugstore at the corner. I watched her emerge a moment later, and instead of walking back promptly to her waiting employer, she dawdled at the window of the expensive dress shop a few doors down. Finally she turned. I could almost hear her sigh of regret at not being able to buy that pale green five-hundred-dollar job. It looked all right, but why anyone should pay that much money for a couple yards of material has always escaped me.

  She came back up, shook out her umbrella, sat down, remembered something, opened her pocketbook, and took out several stamps. She took out a petty cash voucher and began to fill it in. I was thinking hard about Parrish and I suppose when I think hard my face must look like a police court judge’s. She misunderstood it completely. She flushed. “I spent seventy sayints,” she said curtly, “an’ I c’n prove it.”

  I held up my hand quickly. “I believe you,” I said. “For Christ sake, take the chip off your shoulder!”

  She growled an apology. I had forgotten why I had called her in. I just took pleasure in watching the play of moods that swept over her face like clouds across the sun. It amused me and touched me.

  When I said nothing, she thought I had not accepted her words of apology. She explained.

  “Mah diction teacher is mad at me because I haven’t paid the old bag for the last four lessons. An’ I haven’t paid her for reasons you very well know, Mr. Dunne.”

  The well-known reasons were that there were a few clients who had been slow about paying.

  “So who can I get mad at?” she demanded.

  “Me. Try me.”

  “I don’t want to get mad, Mr. Dunne. Because I will lose control and insult you and then you’ll fire me an’ I do find the job interestin’. So I thought I’d solve everything and treat myself to a headache.”

  I liked the way her accent flared up and died down, depending on her mood.

  “How much are the diction lessons?”

  “Six dollars apiece.”

  I had twenty-nine in my wallet. I was going to buy a good drip-dry shirt for eight dollars, then go through my little black book when I got home and see who’d be willing to share my bed after being rendered amiable by a good dinner. I sighed and gave her twenty-four of man’s best friends. I never saw anyone’s eyebrows go up so fast and so high. She stood there and stared at the money.

  “Take it fast before I regret the whole thing,” I said.

  She grabbed it. Good reaction in an emergency. She opened a desk drawer, took out one of my expensive bond envelopes with raised lettering — I’m one for the big front — crossed out the expensive return address, wrote hers in its place — 105 Charles Street — that would be the west side of Greenwich Village. Then she wrote down her teacher’s address, 247 West 56th Street. That would be in that nest of voice teachers, singing coaches, and ballet schools back of Carnegie Hall. She took out one of my stamps from the petty cash box, licked and banged it triumphantly into place. I opened my mouth, but she cut me short as she rolled her fist back and forth over the stamp.

  “Every secretary does that. I just do it in front of your back.”

  The front of my back would be my front.

  “I accept that,” I said.

  There went my shirt, a good meal, and a happy horizontal evening in bed. And she had the effrontery to steal my stamp right in front of me. And that way she defused me.

  I said, “Miss Jamison.”

  “Sir?” she said, tucking the letter in her purse.

  “I’m going to close up for two or three weeks.”

  “Oh, I see. You’re looking for an excuse to fire me?”

  “No, sorry. Business.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll miss me?” I asked dryly.

  “Miss you hell. It’s the ninety bucks I’ll miss.”

  “I’m sorry. But there isn’t enough work to keep you on. Besides, you can collect unemployment insurance.”

  “How? I need twenty-six weeks during the last fiscal year to collect that — I’m an expert on the subject — and I’ve only been here three months.” She spun the ashtray on her desk absentmindedly and sighed. “Your loss will benefit Macy’s. God, I hate selling! Where are you going, if I may ask?”

  I saw no reason not to tell her.

  “Down South.”

  “In Dixie Land where I was born!” She perked up at once. “What part?”

 
; “Mississippi.”

  “Mah favorite cousin’s state. Jackson?”

  “No. A small town.”

  She stopped spinning the ashtray. “You,” she said, “You are going to dig up some information in a small town in Mississippi?”

  Three stresses in one sentence was really pushing it. But when you fire a girl, you have to be patient.

  “Yep.”

  “You are not going to get any. No sirree bob, you are not.”

  I had a feeling she was right.

  “You never know.”

  “I know. I was born and bred in Dixie, remember? You ain’t going to get off home plate.”

  “Ah’ll git me a Southren accent, ma’am.”

  She chortled with amusement. “God, are you corny!”

  “It sounded pretty good to me,” I said, a bit irritated.

  “It don’t signify what it sounds like to you. What signifies is what it sounds lahk to Mississippi ears, and, brother, you better stay home.”

  “I think I can make out.”

  “You have as much chance of persuadin’ anyone down there that you’re a Southerner as daylight has of gettin’ past a rooster.”

  I recognized expert advice and shut up.

  “Best thing would be if y’all were in a wheelchair an’ I was pushin’ it as your ever-lovin’. Tellin’ everyone you had laryngitis and was totally paralyzed besides from tryin’ to argue with me an’ losin’. Evvabody feel sorry for you and poh lil ole faithful Mrs. Dunne and they’d bring me okra gumbo and yams because I has a genuwine flair to make Southern folk open up real soft. But you, Mr. Dunne, they play rough an’ dirty once you get out of the cities an’ bigger towns. They’ll kill you all right and force a pint of whisky down your throat before the sheriff gets there. Or maybe it’ll be the sheriff himself doin’ all that.”

  I bought that.

  “I do not, repeat do not want to work for Macy’s for my bed and board. Ever, ever again. I am now applying to your personnel department, Dixie division, for a job.”

  I was real stupid at times. “Job?” I asked.

  “As camouflage.”

  “Camouflage?”

  “I can rent you,” she said crisply, “a very good, only in slight disrepair, upper middle-class Georgia accent. Guaranteed to make all status-conscious Southern listeners just know great-grandpappy had a plantation along the best bottom lands of the Tombigbee, with one hundred and seventy top field hands, forty-seven house servants, rhododendrons thirty feet high along the piazza, a piano brought over special from England, and we lost a right smart piece of it because he went up North to Saratoga Springs in the hot spell and he lost considerable to them Yankee gamblers, and the War of the Rebellion finished off the rest.”

  “Is that all true?”

  “Well, yes, ’tis. You blue bellies following Sherman broke up our boxwood hedge for firewood and you stabled your horses in our drawing room, and our faithful, honest, and devoted slaves just up and told you where Massa kept his hand-rolled Havana seegars, the smoked hams, and the family silver. And you took it. Boy, did you ever take it!”

  She was getting indignant at the old affront.

  I was shaking my head trying to say no as nicely as I could when there suddenly flashed into my old, dim-witted skull the thought that here were several pieces for my jigsaw puzzle being neatly placed into my hands. Why was I throwing them away? Because she wasn’t a professional? She was fast and clever, and, from the imitation of me I had seen her give once to a delivery boy when she thought I had left for the day, probably a very good actress. The wheelchair bit was purposely ridiculous, and was meant to be, but that and her half-joking offer to serve as camouflage had given me an idea.

  She started to say something, but I held up my hand impatiently. “Hold it a second,” I said. The hazy idea that was beginning to take shape like a vague cloud was quickly getting some sharp outlines.

  Suppose I would have a damn good reason for being down there?

  Suppose this idea accounted for my Northern accent?

  Suppose my reason had nothing to do with voter registration or civil liberties?

  She was placing her books on her desk. When times were slow, she kept a few textbooks on speech in one of the drawers. The top one was titled American Regional Dialects for Performers.

  And my idea suddenly became sharp and clear. I had it. I had something that might work out very well, and with her help I thought I knew just how to pull it off.

  “I think you’ve got yourself a job,” I said.

  “Great! When do I start?”

  “Let’s get a few things straight.”

  “The spy lecture! I’m ready.”

  No, she wasn’t. Not when she called it the spy lecture.

  “You’ve gotten your ideas about this line of work from movies or from TV. Forget it all. This is about the dullest job in the world, and it requires a very good memory at the same time. That’s the hard part. You’re going to fake emotions. You’re going to make friends of people you really hate. And you might have to make friends with someone you like — and then you’ll have to do him dirty. But there’s one consolation — it pays well. And afterwards, it’ll make you the life of the party.”

  “How much?”

  So she hadn’t listened. It would be her headache. But she was in. She wanted to know how much. When I would be all finished with this project — what an innocent word, “project” — she’d be out of a job. And no unemployment insurance. And having to pay rent and take her diction lessons and I suppose her acting lessons as well. I was going to make enough money to be able to afford a generous gesture as a goodbye present for a loyal lieutenant. I calculated: if she were to get Unemployment she’d get the maximum, twenty-six weeks at fifty bucks a week, that would come to fifteen hundred bucks.

  “I’ll need you for three weeks. How about five hundred a week?”

  “Holy mackerel,” she said softly. “Holy cats.”

  Her eyes fell upon the twenty-four-dollar envelope.

  “I won’t need any diction lessons for a while. Right?”

  “Yes. Improving your diction would ruin your usefulness.”

  “Then here you are, sir,” she said. She tore open the envelope and gave me back the contents. I put it back in my wallet and watched her tear off the stamp and carefully put it back in the petty cash box.

  “Take the afternoon off,” I said.

  “What about the Burger report?”

  “The what?”

  “You know, the guy who embezzled his corporation. They didn’t want anyone to know, so you went out and found him.”

  “Oh, that,” I said. “To hell with Burger.”

  “With pleasure, sir.” She put on her coat and sailed out. I watched her twirl her furled umbrella like a Guards officer in civvies as she crossed Madison Avenue. She marched up to the same expensive window that had been attracting her off and on all day. She turned, walked away firmly, just as firmly stopped, wheeled, returned, turned away again, and then suddenly and decisively plunged into the shop.

  There went a big chunk of that fifteen hundred bucks.

  11

  But I wasn’t sure whether to go ahead. There were a lot of things I would need. A name. A passport. A new driver’s license. Birth certificate. Other things. But I knew people who would help me get them.

  I took a pad of yellow legal paper and wrote down a list of illegal things I needed, illegal things I needed done. I wrote down several names of illegal people and connected them with pencil lines to my list. I doodled. Crossed out. Reinserted. Crossed out again. I must have changed my mind as many times as Kirby had when she was looking in that window across the street.

  Next I wrote down my plot. I wrote it out briefly as if I were a writer writing a screen treatment for a cynical film producer who had a superb sense of film construction. I wrote it as if a very critical film reviewer were to look at it when it became a movie. But there would be a big difference. There was a big diff
erence between a lousy review and winding up dead somewhere on a lonely country road in northern Mississippi. So I picked my cast of characters very carefully. I rewrote my plot. I crossed out scenes and rewrote them. I went over it again and again for obvious flaws. I went over it for the flaws that would develop under stress. There was the big problem. I would have to play a great deal by hunches. There was no way out of it.

  When I finished, I realized with a start that four hours had passed since Kirby had left. I was so involved I hadn’t even turned on the lights. My desk picked up the street lights outside when they went on, and I had worked closer to the paper. I laughed. I certainly wanted that half a million more than I had ever wanted anything. I had never worked out a cover story with such intensity. My back and shoulders and fingers were cramped. What I needed was a brief break so that I could give my idea a fresh look.

  I jammed the yellow pages into a pocket, locked up, and went downstairs to the nice little ladies’ restaurant on the corner.

  I very seldom saw any men there. A few decorators and hair stylists came in from the fashionable salons, but they were discreet enough. I liked it because it was quiet, had a rug on the floor, and no one ever yelled or talked loudly. I liked the soft-spoken Irish heifers who were imported in herds and obviously pastured in some inaccessible meadow where male hands could not come near them. They blushed whenever they took my order. I chewed carefully and swallowed thoughtfully. My mother would have been proud of my table manners if she were still alive. That was another reason why I was going ahead with Parrish: there was no one to take the rap, no one to be interviewed, no one to feel any bitterness. A man responsible only to himself works in a fine atmosphere where few variables exist. It makes serious decisions easy. Well, not easy. But fast.

  When I came out into the street, I realized that I had not the faintest idea what I had eaten. Easy, Joe, I said to myself, easy. Take it slow. You get this excited, you’re bound to make a boo-boo.

  I went back to the office. I took out the notes. I had been away half an hour. That was enough time to get a good, clear new look at things, wasn’t it? So I reread the notes. I tried to pick them apart. And there was nothing wrong. Nothing. I burned them and then dialed Fairfield 3–1767.