Time to Murder and Create Read online

Page 20

 

  It was over now. There was really nothing more to do, and all I felt was empty. If Beverly Ethridge ever stood trial, I would probably have to testify, but that wouldnt be for months, if ever, and the prospect of testifying didnt bother me. Id given testimony on enough occasions in the past. There was nothing more to do. Huysendahl was free to become governor or not, depending upon the whims of political bosses and the public at large, and Beverly Ethridge was up against the wall, and Henry Prager was going to be buried in a day or so. The moving finger had written and he had written himself off, and my role in his life was as finished as his life itself. He was another person to light meaningless candles for, that was all.

  I called Anita.

  "Thanks for the money order," she said. "I appreciated it. "

  "Id say theres more where that came from," I said. "Except there isnt. "

  "Are you all right?"

  "Sure. Why?"

  "You sound different. I dont know how exactly, but you sound different. "

  "Its been a long week. "

  There was a pause. Our conversations are usually marked by pauses. Then she said, "The boys were wondering if you wanted to take them to a basketball game. "

  "In Boston?"

  "Pardon me?"

  "The Knicks are out of it. The Celtics destroyed them a couple of nights ago. It was the highlight of my week. "

  "The Nets," she said.

  "Oh. "

  "I think theyre in the finals. Against Utah or something. "

  "Oh. " I can never remember that New York has a second basketball team. I dont know why. Ive taken my sons to the Nassau Coliseum to watch the Nets and I still tend to forget they exist. "When are they playing?"

  "Theres a home game Saturday night. "

  "Whats today?"

  "Are you serious?"

  "Look, Ill get a calendar watch next time I think of it. Whats today?"

  "Thursday. "

  "Tickets will probably be hard to get. "

  "Oh, theyre all sold out. They thought you might know somebody. "

  I thought of Huysendahl. He could probably swing tickets without much trouble. He would also probably have enjoyed meeting my sons. Of course, there were enough other people who could manage to obtain last-minute tickets, and who wouldnt mind doing me a favor.

  I said, "I dont know. Its cutting it kind of close. " But what I was thinking was that I didnt want to see my sons, not in just two days time, and I didnt know why. And I was also wondering if they really wanted me to take them to the game or if they simply wanted to go to it and knew that I would be able to root out a source of tickets.

  I asked if there were any other home games.

  "Thursday. But thats a school night. "

  "Its also a lot more possible than Saturday. "

  "Well, I hate to see them stay out late on a school night. "

  "I could probably get tickets for the Thursday game. "

  "Well-"

  "I couldnt get tickets for Saturday, but I could probably get something for Thursday. Itll be later in the series, a more important game. "

  "Oh, so thats the way you want to do it. If I say no because its a school night, then Im the heavy. "

  "I think Ill hang up. "

  "No, dont do that. All right, Thursday is fine. Youll call if you can get tickets?"

  I said I would.

  IT was odd-I wanted to be drunk but didnt much want a drink. I sat around the room for a while, then walked over to the park and sat on a bench. A couple of kids ambled rather purposefully to a bench nearby. They sat down and lit cigarettes, and then one of them noticed me and nudged his companion, who looked carefully toward me. They got up and walked off, glancing back periodically to make sure I was not following them. I stayed where I was. I guessed that one of them had been about to sell drugs to the other, and that they had looked at me and decided not to conduct the transaction under the eyes of someone who looked like a policeman.

  I dont know how long I sat there. A couple of hours, I suppose. Periodically a panhandler would brace me. Sometimes Id contribute toward the next bottle of sweet wine. Sometimes Id tell the bum to fuck off.

  By the time I left the park and walked over to Ninth Avenue, St. Pauls was closed for the day. The downstairs was opening up, however. It was too late to pray but just the right hour for bingo.

  Armstrongs was open, and it had been a long dry night and day. I told them to forget the coffee.

  THE next forty hours or so were pretty much of a blur. I dont know how long I stayed in Armstrongs or where I went after that. Sometime Friday morning I woke up alone in a hotel room in the Forties, a squalid room in the kind of hotel to which Times Square streetwalkers take their johns. I had no memory of a woman and my money was all still there, so it looked as though I had probably checked in alone. There was a pint bottle of bourbon on the dresser, about two-thirds empty. I killed it and left the hotel and went on drinking, and reality faded in and out, and sometime during that night I must have decided I was done, because I managed to find my way back to my hotel.

  Saturday morning the telephone woke me. It seemed to ring for a long time before I roused myself enough to reach for it. I managed to knock it off the little nightstand and onto the floor, and by the time I managed to pick it up and get it to my ear I was reasonably close to consciousness.

  It was Guzik.

  "Youre hard to find," he said. "I been trying to reach you since yesterday. Didnt you get my messages?"

  "I didnt stop at the desk. "

  "I gotta talk to you. "

  "What about?"

  "When I see you. Ill be over in ten minutes. "

  I told him to give me half an hour. He said hed meet me in the lobby. I said that would be fine.

  I stood under the shower, first hot, then cold. I took a couple of aspirin and drank a lot of water. I had a hangover, which I had certainly earned, but aside from that I felt reasonably good. The drinking had purged me. I would still carry Henry Pragers death around with me-you cannot entirely shrug off such burdens-but I had managed to drown some of the guilt, and it was no longer as oppressive as it had been.

  I took the clothes Id been wearing, wadded them up, and stuffed them into the closet. Eventually Id decide whether the cleaner could restore them, but for the moment I didnt even want to think about it. I shaved and put on clean clothes and drank two more glasses of tap water. The aspirin had polished off the headache, but I was dehydrated from too many hours of hard drinking, and every cell in my body had an unquenchable thirst.

  I got down to the lobby before he arrived. I checked the desk and found that hed called four times. There were no other messages, and no mail of any importance. I was reading one of the unimportant letters-an insurance company would give me a leather-covered memorandum book absolutely free if I would tell my date of birth-when Guzik came in. He was wearing a well-tailored suit; you had to look carefully to see he was carrying a gun.

  He came over and took a chair next to me. He told me again that I was hard to find. "Wanted to talk to you after I saw Ethridge," he said. "Jesus, shes something, isnt she? She turns the class on and off. One minute you cant believe she was ever a pross, and the next minute you cant believe she was anything else but. "

  "Shes an odd one, all right. "

  "Uh-huh. Shes also getting out sometime today. "

  "She made bail? I thought theyd book her for Murder One. "

  "Not bail. Not booking her for anything, Matt. We got nothing to hold her on. "

  I looked at him. I could feel the muscles in my forearms tightening. I said, "How much did it cost her?"

  "I told you, no bail. We-"

  "What did it cost her to buy out of a murder charge? I always heard you could wash homicide if you had enough cash. Never saw it done, but I heard about it, and-"

  He was almost ready to swing, and I was by God hoping he would do it, because I wanted an excuse to put him through the wall. A t
endon stood out on his neck, and his eyes narrowed to slits. Then he relaxed suddenly, and his face regained its original color.

  He said, "Well, you would have to figure it that way, wouldnt you?"

  "Well?"

  He shook his head. "Nothing to hold her on," he said again. "Thats what I was trying to tell you. "

  "How about Spinner Jablon?"

  "She didnt kill him. "

  "Her bully boy did. Her pimp, whatever the hell he was. Lundgren. "

  "No way. "

  "The hell. "

  "No way," Guzik said. "He was in California. Town called Santa Paula, its halfway between L. A. and Santa Barbara. "

  "He flew here and then flew back. "

  "No way. He was there from a few weeks before we fished Spinner out of the river until a couple of days afterward, and nobodys gonna shake that alibi. He did thirty days in Santa Paula city jail. They tagged him for assault and let him plead to drunk and disorderly. He did the whole thirty days. Just no way on earth that he was in New York when Spinner got it. "

  I stared at him.

  "So maybe she had another boyfriend," he went on. "We figured that was possible. We could try to turn him up, but does it make any sense that way? She wouldnt use one guy to hit Spinner and another to go after you. It doesnt make sense. "

  "What about the assault on me?"

  "What about it?" He shrugged. "Maybe she put him up to it. Maybe she didnt. She swears she didnt. Her story is she called him for advice when you put the screws to her and he flew out to see if he could help. She said she told him not to get rough, that she thought she would be able to buy you off. Thats her story, but what can you expect her to say? Maybe she wanted him to kill you and maybe she didnt, but how can you put enough together to make a case out of it? Lundgren is dead, and nobody else has any information that absolutely implicates her. Theres no evidence to tie her to the attack on you. You can prove she knew Lundgren and you can prove she had a motive for wanting you dead. You cant prove any kind of an accessory or conspiracy charge. You cant come up with anything to get an indictment returned, you cant even get anything that would make anybody in the District Attorneys office take the whole thing seriously. "

  "Theres no way the Santa Paula records are wrong?"

  "No way. Spinner would have had to spend a month in the river, and it didnt happen that way. "

  "No. He was alive within ten days of the time the body was found. I spoke to him on the telephone. I dont get it. She had to have another accomplice. "

  "Maybe. Polygraph says no. "

  "She agreed to take a lie-detector test?"

  "We never asked her to. She demanded it. It gets her completely off the hook as far as Spinner was concerned. Its not quite as clear as far as the attack on you was concerned. The expert who administered the test says theres a little stress involved, that his guess would be she did and didnt know Lundgren was going to try to take you out. Like she suspected it but they hadnt talked about it and shed been able to avoid thinking about it. "

  "Those tests arent always a hundred percent. "