You Could Call It Murder Read online

  We waited for them. It would have been easier to take the picture to Helen MacIlhenny for identification, but I couldn’t quite see myself showing pornographic pictures to the Dean of Women. Some men may be able to carry off a play like that. I would have had trouble.

  I reasoned that Alan Marsten would be able to tell me who Linda Jeffers was as well as Mrs. MacIlhenny. And there was more to it than that. Unless I was a good distance from the trail, Marsten knew a lot more than he was telling me. The picture might be a chink in his conversational armor, so to speak. Once I put that single card on the table, he might be willing to come out of his shell.

  At least it was a possibility. But first of all I had to identify the girl. I’d made a big mistake in telling Hanovan of New York Homicide that my little pigeon with the mole on her thigh didn’t have anything to do with Barbara Taft. She was in it up to the top of her pretty head. She and Barbara were part of a bloody set, for that matter—a set of dirty pictures in a straight-laced girl’s closet.

  Which was interesting.

  Things were taking their own sort of shape now, and some of the pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle were starting to wind up on the table. But I still had far too few pieces to put them together and come up with anything vaguely resembling reality. I needed more, and I hoped Alan could give me some of it.

  Right now it looked like blackmail, of course. But it was a blackmail game with six girls caught in the middle, not just one or two. It seemed to have the dimension of a full-scale blackmail ring with a lot of planning back of it and a great deal of potential profits in the effing.

  It looked like a great many things. But I was still up six different trees at once. I couldn’t begin to know who was doing the blackmailing, much less guess who had done the killing.

  I was half finished with a third cigarette by the time Marsten’s lawyer put in an appearance. He called commandingly from the cell and Piersall and I walked there. Piersall opened the door and the lawyer stepped out. He was tall and sandy, his bearing stiffly erect, his eyes sharp.

  I begged his pardon and stepped past him into the cell.

  “And who are you, sir?”

  “I’m Roy Markham,” I said. “I’m going to have a word with your client, counsellor.”

  He didn’t like that at all. He didn’t like the idea of my talking with Alan in private, and I didn’t want him around when I started showing dirty pictures. Alan settled the argument simply enough by telling the fellow to get lost. He didn’t like it one bit, but he got lost.

  Piersall locked us up in the cell again.

  “So that’s your lawyer.”

  “That’s my lawyer,” he said. “He’s not much to look at, is he? But he’s sharp as blue blades. He’s a whip. Nothing but the best for Mr. Marsten’s boy Alan.”

  He was still sitting on the edge of his cot. He was smoking one of the cigarettes I had left with him. He didn’t sound as happy as his words indicated. He looked even worse—there were worried lines in his forehead and around the corners of his mouth, and I could see nothing but tension in his eyes.

  I didn’t waste time. I took the picture with Linda in it from the manilla envelope, glanced at it myself, then passed it to him. I asked him if he knew the girl.

  He didn’t have to answer; his eyes did that for him. There was instant recognition combined with a great amount of shock. His jaw fell and he gaped at me like a goldfish in a bowl.

  “There are more pictures in the envelope,” I said.

  He nodded dully.

  “And you’ve got a few things to tell me,” I went on. “This time you’re going to talk. You know a bloody bit more than you’ve said so far and I want to hear it.”

  He nodded again. “Yeah,” he said. “Solid. Where’d you get these?”

  “What do you care?”

  “Hell,” he said. He looked at the picture, then gave it back to me. “I can talk to you now,” he said. “You got the picture of Barb, huh?”

  “In the envelope.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of. I didn’t want to open up about . . . things . . . unless somebody already knew about the pics. I don’t know. Silly, I guess. I figured if Barb was dead the pictures at least could stay a secret. You know what I’m talking about?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. What do you know, man?”

  I said: “I can guess. Someone took pornographic photographs of six girls, maybe more. Barbara was one of them. She was being blackmailed, being taken for heavy money.”

  “Right so far.”

  “That’s as far as I’ve taken it,” I said. “Now it’s your turn.”

  He dropped his cigarette to the floor of the cell, covered it with a foot and ground it out slowly and deliberately. He looked up at me finally.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “You could start with the girl in the picture. Who is she?”

  “Name’s Jill Lincoln. She was sort of a friend of Barb’s. Part of the same crowd.”

  “Did you know she was being blackmailed?”

  He shook his head. “I only knew about Barb. And I didn’t know all of it. Only what she told me.”

  “Go on.”

  “A couple weeks ago,” he said. “I was with her and she was so nervous I thought she was going to turn green any minute. She kept losing track of the conversation, kept wandering off and getting lost in her own words. I asked her what was the matter, what was bugging her.”

  “And?”

  “She wouldn’t say. She kept saying everything was all right, she was just worried about an exam she had, some jazz like that. I could tell it was something else. She didn’t worry like that about her classes. She just didn’t care that much. So I kept hitting her with questions, telling her she should tell me all about it.”

  He looked away. “We were very close,” he said. “Not that I knew everything on her mind, nothing like that. She had her life and I had mine, you know. We weren’t even going together as a steady thing. But we were close. We could talk to each other. She had something bugging her, she generally would tell me about it.”

  “Go on.”

  He shrugged. “So she told me. We were sitting in her car and she flipped open the glove compartment and took out a picture. She handed it to me. It was like the one you showed me. Except with Barb in it. Barb and some cat.”

  “She showed it to you?”

  “Yeah. I almost folded. She didn’t even blush or anything, just handed it to me and said ‘Here—isn’t this cute?’ I asked her where the hell it came from.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She didn’t exactly say,” he told me. “She said somebody was blackmailing her, threatening to send the picture around if she didn’t play ball.”

  I said: “Why should that worry her so much? She’s supposed to have run with a fairly fast crowd. Her parents knew that. I’m sure they didn’t suspect she was a virgin.”

  He looked at me. “Use your head, man. There’s a difference between knowing your daughter sleeps around a little and seeing a picture of it. And the bastard was going to do more than send a print to Barb’s old man. A few prints were going to some school officials. Other prints were going to other people. And then the negative was going to be sold to one of those outfits that sells pictures like that around the country. You know—cut-rate kicks for kiddies. They’d be selling Barb’s picture at every high school in America. Get the picture?”

  I got the picture. It was an ugly one.

  “It meant getting kicked out of school,” Alan Marsten went on. “It meant a rotten reputation for a hell of a long time. It meant trouble in spades. Barb didn’t like the idea.”

  “Did she say when the picture was taken?”

  “She told me a little of it. There was this party—her and some of her friends and a batch of people from out of the college. Some of the dead-end kids around town, I figure. She got stoned, said she thinks there was something in the drinks besides alcohol. After that she didn’t re
member. Maybe she didn’t want to remember. I don’t know.”

  “And she didn’t say who the blackmailer was?”

  “Not a word. She wouldn’t tell me how much he wanted from her, either. I figured if it was such a big bite I could help her out with it. get some extra dough from my old man. But she didn’t want to talk. So we didn’t talk.”

  “And that was all?”

  “That was all.” He fished in his pocket for cigarettes, selected one. It was bent. He straightened it out with his fingers, put it between his lips, scratched a match and lighted it. He took a deep drag of smoke and blew a cloud of it at the ceiling.

  “Then Barb cut out,” he said. “I figured she couldn’t take it any more, wanted to run away some placc and try starting over. Mavbe she figured if she left town she could call the bastard’s bluff, wait him out or something.”

  “Then she died.”

  “Yeah,” he said heavily. “You came up here looking for her, came on to me at Grape Leaves with a hatful of questions. I told you to get lost. I figured the way I said. Then I heard she was dead and a whole lot of things didn’t matter any more.”

  “And now you’re in jail.”

  He laughed. “Solid—I’m in jail. And you’re asking all the questions and I’m coming through with all the answers. You mind a question, man?”

  I told him to go ahead.

  “Where’d you find the pictures?”

  “In Gwen Davison’s closet.”

  His jaw fell again and his eyes bulged. “You kidding?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “She was the blackmailer? And one of the other girls killed her?”

  “Do you think so?”

  “What else, man?”

  I drew a breath. “She didn’t have the negatives,” I said. “Just a set of prints.”

  “Maybe she kept the negatives somewhere safe.”

  “There’s more,” I told him. “I can hardly picture a girl like her engineering something like this. It’s too complex. There are too many sides to it.”

  I didn’t bother adding that whoever had set everything up obviously had connections with New York—hoods to hire, strings to pull. It was none of his business. It was purely a private headache of mine.

  He said: “I guess I don’t get it.”

  “Neither do I. You didn’t kill Gwen, did you?”

  “Why would I?”

  “Maybe you discovered she was in on the blackmail circuit,” I suggested. “You were in love with Barbara. You blamed Gwen for Barbara’s death. So you murdered her with your knife.”

  “You don’t believe that, do you?”

  I didn’t. He’d been too surprised by the picture, too surprised that I’d found it in Gwen’s room. But it was something to toss at him. Whether I believed it myself or not.

  “It keeps coming back to the damn knife,” he said. “You know what happened with that knife? Hell, you won’t believe it.”

  “Try it out.”

  “I gave it to Barb,” he said. “A few days before I left, I gave it to her. She asked to borrow it. God knows what she wanted it for. I didn’t ask. I let her take it.” He managed a grin. “Now, who in hell would believe a story like that?”

  “I might.”

  “Yeah?”

  “But I don’t know if a jury would,” I said.

  After I left him I found a telephone and put in a call to Jill Lincoln’s dormitory. A girl answered the phone almost at once and told me she’d check to determine whether or not Jill was in her room. She checked and determined that she wasn’t. I told her there was no message and put the receiver back on the hook where it belonged.

  Then I went down the street to the tavern. The next step was to get hold of Jill Lincoln, preferably by the throat. I had a good many questions to ask her and she was going to supply the answers if I had to hold her upside down and shake them out of her. But she would keep—I couldn’t find her at the moment, and it was late enough in the day for my stomach to be growling bearishly. Lunch had somehow been left out of the picture that day. Breakfast had been ages ago.

  I was starving.

  I remembered the small steak and decided it was too small. I told the waiter to bring me the biggest sirloin they could find in the kitchen, with the biggest baked Idaho beside it. In the meanwhile, I added, he should try to find me a mug or two of ale. He brought the ale in a hurry and it went down easily.

  Jill Lincoln.

  She was quite a girl, I decided. She had switched her initials around, provided herself with a fresh name, concocted a far-fetched story and made me believe it. She set me up for a rap on the head, then disappeared neatly and left me to chase around the city trying to rescue her.

  But why?

  It made no more sense than anything else. And no less—because nothing at all seemed to make sense. The most alarming single fact about the entire affair was that the more I learned, the less logical everything became. I kept getting more and more pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, and none of them fit with any of the others. It was incredible.

  According to Alan, the blackmail routine was an explanation for Barbara’s suicide. I couldn’t see it that way myself. She had a great deal of money at her disposal and her father was more than generous. She’d drawn over a thousand dollars before she left Radbourne. So the blackmailer, whoever he was, could hardly have had her with her back to the wall.

  So why should she kill herself?

  And, further, why run to New York to do it? That still didn’t add up. If she were going to commit suicide, she still might as well have done it in New Hampshire.

  Which brought it around to murder again. But why would a blackmailer murder a victim? There are simpler ways than that to grow rich. It would be the classic example of killing the goose that lays golden eggs.

  The waiter saved me by bringing my steak. I pushed Barbara and Gwen and Jill from my mind forcibly, picked up knife and fork and attacked a hunk of thick red meat. I had two more ales to wash it down and left the table, finally, feeling several pounds heavier and several degrees more at peace with the world. I used the telephone on the wall in the tavern to try Jill Lincoln again. A different female voice answered this time, but the information was the same. Jill was out. I passed up another opportunity to leave a message, returned to my table and paid my check. I went outside and took a deep breath of cold air.

  What next? I could run around like a headless chicken if I wanted, but I couldn’t see how that would do me much good. Jill was the person I had to see. Until I saw her I was too much in the dark to get anywhere.

  The thought crossed my mind that something could have happened to her, that maybe she was in danger in New York. That seemed unlikely, but in this case everything that was unlikely was as apt to happen as everything else. Or maybe she was still in New York—it seemed as though students could be absent from Radbourne for an incredible length of time before anybody noticed or reported their absence.

  I gave up, got into Barbara’s MG and drove back to Mrs. Lipton’s home for wayward detectives. I would have to assume that Jill was somewhere around, that eventually she would go to her dormitory and I could contact her there. In the meanwhile I could sit in a comfortable room, shave the stubble from my face and otherwise take things easy.

  I found my way back to the old house and parked in front of it. I killed the engine and pocketed the key. I was halfway to the door before I heard my name called in an urgent whisper.

  I turned and saw her.

  “Roy,” she said. “Come here.”

  She was by a clump of bushes at the side of the house. I walked to her, not sure whether I was supposed to chuckle appreciatively or to belt the bloody life out of her.

  “Hello, Jill.”

  “Oh,” she said. “You found out my name.”

  “Uh-huh. I saw your picture.”

  “Roy, I’ve got to talk to you.”

  “That’s the understatement of the century,” I said. “You�
��ve got a great deal of talking to do.”

  “Not here,” she said. “Oh, Christ. It’s not safe here. Look, can we go to your room?”

  “My room?”

  “Upstairs,” she said.

  “That’s crazy. I’m relatively certain Mrs. Lipton would object to my entertaining college girls in my room. And—”

  “Roy.”

  I looked at her. She knew how to fake fear—I remembered her magnificent act in the taxi when we first met. But I couldn’t believe she was faking now. There were beads of perspiration on her upper lip and she had developed a nervous tic under her left eye. Even Actors Studio has trouble teaching one tricks of that order.

  “I took a chance coming here, Roy.”

  “You take a good many chances.”

  “This was a big one. Let’s go to your room. If they see us together they’ll kill me.”

  “If we go to my room, do I get hit over the head again?”

  She bit her lip. “I’m sorry about that. Honest, I’m sorry. I didn’t know that was going to happen. I’m sorry about a lot of things.” She frowned. “Can’t we go to your room?”

  “Oh, hell,” I said. “Sure, we can go to my room. Come on.”

  Eight

  THE SIMPLE course seemed by all odds the best one to pursue. I did not attempt to spirit Jill into Mrs. Lipton’s house via a rear window, or send her scuttling up a ladder, or otherwise get her to my room by stealthy methods. No doubt Grace Lipton was already familiar with such methods, since student boarders rented her rooms. Nonchalance appeared a better gambit. I took Jill by the hand and led her through the doorway, into the house, down the hall, past the living room where Mrs. Lipton sat immersing herself in television, up a flight of stairs and into my room. Nobody questioned us, looked askance at us, or otherwise interfered with us.

  I closed the door, turned the latch. She tossed her coat over a straight-backed chair while I hung mine on a hook in the small closet. Then she sat down on the bed while I stood lighting a cigarette and watching her through the smoke. She stared back at me in silence while I shook out the match and found an ashtray to drop it into. The fear was still present in her eyes.