The Murderer Vine

by Shepard Rifkin

  Yet he was the most unnoticeable little man I ever saw. He was five feet four, with an ordinary face and ordinary hair. He was so completely ordinary that he would make the perfect tail. I mean, he could follow some guy for hours who would be suspicious to start with. The guy would turn around and see Bryan three steps behind him staring at him. He’d pay no attention and look for someone else. Ten minutes later he’d turn around, say in an elevator with only the two of them in it, and Bryan would be six inches behind him. “No,” the guy would mutter to himself. “No. This can’t possibly be following me.”

  But he was the most talented photographer in the world.

  He had a studio and loft combined off Fifth Avenue at 19th Street. It wasn’t a fashionable area, but he didn’t lose any sleep over it. I walked up the creaking, sagging wooden steps three flights to his door.

  Outside two private cops were sitting on kitchen chairs.

  When I approached, one of them said very politely, “May I help you, sir?”

  I was puzzled. “I don’t think so,” I said. “My business is with Mr. Farr.” I started to pass him, but he stood up and blocked me.

  I began to get annoyed. “May I have your name, sir?” he asked. I told him.

  He opened the door and called inside, “A Mr. Dunne to see you, sir.”

  I heard Bryan’s voice yelling, “The international jewel thief! Send him in.” The guard didn’t think that was funny, and I failed to see the point of it myself until I entered.

  The studio always looked to me a mile long. There was a big skylight at the far end. There was nothing in the place except Bryan and a naked girl.

  “Is she that much in demand?” I asked, jerking a thumb toward the two cops.

  “No, but her necklace is,” Bryan said.

  The girl was very slender, with sharp little breasts. She had a cold, remote, untouchable, and very expensive aura. She would only be photographed stepping out of a Rolls, or wearing a cashmere sweater and patting a thoroughbred race horse. With hollow cheeks, high cheekbones, sharp little muzzle, and with her yellow-green eyes that were giving me a polar stare, she looked like a bitch-wolf.

  I tore my gaze away finally from her private goodies and looked at the necklace.

  “It’s got twenty-eight diamonds on it,” Bryan said, “each the size of an almond. It used to belong to ze Grand Duchess Olga of ze Russian imperial family.”

  “She give it to you?”

  “You really think I look like a gigolo?” he asked, flattered.

  “No.”

  “Well, nevertheless, the neck — ”

  “Hurry up, will you, Mr. Farr,” she said. “This goddam necklace weighs a ton, honest.”

  She tugged it up with one aristocratic slender hand while the other set of long exquisite fingers rubbed the back of her neck.

  “Hold on,” he said. “It’ll be over soon.”

  While he was adjusting a muslin sheet under the skylight, he spoke. “It belongs to Will Howell. He just bought it. I’m taking the shot to illustrate the full-page ad he’s going to run in Fortune. It’ll just show Elisa here backing up the necklace and at the bottom it’ll read, spelled out, no figures, seven hundred and fifty thousand. Plus tax. At the upper left-hand corner it’ll say, small, lowercase, Will Howell. And at the lower right hand it’ll say, awful small, Bryan Farr.”

  “You’ve come far, Bryan.”

  Elisa burst out into laughter. “That’s funny!” she cried. “That’s really awfully funny.” I thought she was kidding, but I realized she was serious. She was holding the necklace up in the air and the strain on her shoulder made that perfect little cone stick out all by itself.

  “Throw the necklace out the window,” I said. “The valuable item is underneath it.”

  I walked over and held the necklace up so that I took the weight off her neck. I thought she was kidding a little about the weight but this girl was serious about everything. It was heavy.

  “Hey,” she said to Bryan, twisting around to look up at me, “I like your friend.”

  “All right, Joe. You can help. Hold up the necklace. I got to get this light just right.” He was using natural light plus a purple spot to bring out the highlights in the diamonds. He prowled around, trying the spot at different heights.

  “Boy,” she said, “you don’t know what a relief it is to get that thing off my boobs. They’re sensitive to pressure, you know.”

  “So I hear.”

  She had round little nipples the size and color of ripe raspberries.

  “You like me?”

  “Bryan,” I said, “go to the movies.”

  “Not when she gets seventy-five bucks an hour. Control yourself.”

  “I can tell you’re not a fag,” she said. “This business is just loaded with them. Oh, not Mr. Farr! He said I’m not his style. He said I’m too skinny. He said when I pulled out my permanent back molars to get this great high cheekbone effect, he said, Lisa, you have the brains of a cockroach. He said, Lisa, if brains were beans, he said, you don’t have enough to make a mosquito fart.”

  She giggled.

  I began to reconsider our romance.

  “Yes,” she said, “he really did say that.” She repeated it in case I might have missed it the first time. “Listen,” she said, “I really like you. Even though you’re old, and got some gray hair. Why don’t you ask me for a date?”

  I didn’t want to ask her for a date anymore. But who knows, if I kept her mouth filled with food and liquor she might stop talking.

  “How about tonight?”

  “Great!”

  “Shall I pick you up at eight?”

  “Sure. But you’ll have to bring me home by nine-thirty. I go to bed by ten.”

  “And that’s exactly right, Joe.”

  “Yes,” Lisa said primly. “I sleep ten hours every night. Except Saturday night. Saturday night I can stay up till midnight. You know why?”

  “Because then you turn into a pumpkin?”

  “No, you’re silly! But that’s funny! A pumpkin!”

  There was something appealing about a girl who liked all my jokes. One could get attached to her. I began to rethink my sour attitude.

  “I stay up till midnight on Saturday,” she continued, “because unless I get ten hours a night, it shows around my eyes. They get all baggy. On Saturday night it doesn’t matter so much because on Sunday I go to bed at seven to make up for the time I lost on Saturday. Those three hours extra — ”

  “I get it,” I said kindly.

  “Those three hours extra,” she went on, “they make up for going to bed late on Saturday. You know why I need so much sleep? Because,” she said impressively, “because the camera does not lie.”

  “That’s a very impressive statement,” I said. “Please repeat it so I won’t forget it.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Bryan said.

  She repeated it.

  “I must remember that,” I said.

  “Joe,” Bryan said, “as a matter of fact, why don’t you go and stand in the hallway for a few minutes? I don’t think I can stand this much more.”

  I went out and stood next to the cops. They eyed me and kept their hands near their gun butts. I told them to relax.

  “That’s a very valuable piece in there,” one of them said importantly.

  “I don’t know about that,” I said. “Chemically, she’s only worth about eighty-three cents.”

  He clammed up. I leaned on the dusty banister and smoked. Five minutes later Bryan called us in. The cops put the necklace in a small velvet-lined box. “How do you know that’s not a paste substitute you just put in there?” I asked.

  They went out worried, still with their hands on their butts. I held the door and watched them go down the stairs. They kept looking up at me, and one of them tripped on the bottom step. I closed the door.

  Bryan said, “You made their day. Why pick on a couple jerks doing their duty?”

  “I don’t like nervous guys a
round guns,” I said. “Some poor kid’ll ask them for a match and they’ll each put five slugs in his belly.”

  Bryan was at the window. “Look, look!” he chortled. “They don’t know whether we’ve got the real necklace up here or not, after that crack of yours.”

  I went over and looked down. They were arguing outside the armored truck. We were still grinning when Lisa appeared. “Goodbye, Mr. Farr,” she said. She thrust a piece of paper at me with her phone number on it. She giggled and went out. When the door closed, I crumpled it and tossed it in the wastebasket.

  “You’re better off, believe me,” Bryan said. He reversed the film in his Leica. “All right. When you wouldn’t tell me over the phone, I knew it was serious.”

  “Here’s the situation. I know enough to take flash at night and get those action shots which mean so much to us. You taught me how to get that kind of stuff, how to get it in good focus, suitable for eight-by-ten blowups. But this time it’s going to be a lot more complicated. I need a camera that will take extreme close-ups.”

  “Close-ups of what?”

  “Teeth.”

  He stared at me.

  “For dental identification.”

  “That’s not hard. You get a good lens, a tripod, take your exposure correctly, and then — ”

  “You’re assuming good light conditions.”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t assume that. Assume light will be lousy. And no flash.”

  “You don’t want to attract attention?”

  I nodded.

  “Extreme close-up,” he mused. “Depth of field important, especially on teeth. Bad light. You don’t want much, do you?”

  “Can do?”

  “You’ll need a damn good lens. To grab all the available light. You might need a time exposure. You’ll need a good light meter. A fifty millimeter lens, let’s see — ” He began to write down what I would need. “ — and a tripod,” he finished.

  “A tripod?”

  “You might think you have steady hands, but at half or a fifth of a second you’ll wobble that lens like a drunken sailor. And you want a very sharp image which has to be blown up. This isn’t one of your hundredth-of-a-second jobs with flash showing two naked people sitting up in bed, Joe baby. This has got to be real careful and professional. I take it you can’t go back if the first try doesn’t work out.”

  “Not likely.”

  “Take this list and take it to Sam Belliss, down on Chambers Street. Have Sam put the lens into this model Leica box. Just mention my name. It’ll help a lot. He’ll take off twenty percent. The whole deal should run you about three fifty.”

  “Okay. Whatever you say.” He gave me the list.

  “And get yourself a depth-of-field scale and study it.”

  “A what?”

  “You mean you don’t know what a depth-of-field scale is?”

  “Nope.”

  He held his head.

  “Joe. I was supposed to get these prints out to Will Howell by seven tonight. The New Yorker goes to press in two days, and they want to make this issue. I wish I never met you. Take a cab to Sam’s, get that stuff, and shoot back here. I’ll give you a careful lecture. Why, oh, why did the Signal Corps stick me in your unit?”

  15

  The next day I showed all the symptoms of a man going crazy. I got up, shaved, went downstairs, ate breakfast, read the paper, walked around the block three times with my hands in my pockets, went upstairs, drank two cups of coffee, read a month-old magazine, and finally decided to do something intelligent.

  I took out my combat Magnum, police undercover agent special. The last time I had used it was four months ago when a hijack mob stealing bolts of raw silk fired at me. I got one of them in the hip.

  This job was a little beauty. She was .357 caliber. Two-and-a-half-inch barrel, and the stock was checked walnut. It was, as one of my police friends fondly said, “round as little sister’s ass, and the rest of her was sweet as taffy candy.” I decided it was time to scrub little sister.

  Everything looked kosher, but you never know. The hammer was clean and moved nice and easy in its slot. The firing pin tip was hemispherical; if it gets too sharp, it pierces the primer and then the cylinder would freeze up on me when I would wish it wouldn’t. I pulled the trigger. The pin went right through the face of the standing breech. Okay. I took a Q-tip from the medicine chest and cleaned out some un-burned powder grains and assorted pieces of gook — lint, tobacco fragments. They came from under the extractor star — and that’s another thing that could happen — and they might jam the cylinder.

  The ejector rod had loosened up. That could get serious. I mean, if it got worse, it could bend against the forward locking lug and then the cylinder wouldn’t rotate. That means I wouldn’t be able to fire little sister. I tightened it. I began whistling. The timing was all right. The blueing was a little worn off the fore sight, but nothing serious. If I had to use it, I didn’t think I’d be using a fore sight, anyway. I’d probably be pointing it like a nozzle on a hose.

  Okay. There she was, ready to roll. I had taken fifteen minutes to check her out and scrub her for the road. I carefully put her away in the Bucheimer holster. I liked that holster. I could stick the Magnum in it and turn it upside-down and shake it. Little sister would stay inside and wouldn’t come out. It had an adjustable screw tension post that held her snug. It also had a nice hammer shroud that I liked, ever since last time I had to get her in a hurry and I found out that the hammer caught in my jacket lining and ripped it. The holster cost plenty, but it was worth it. I sat and stared fondly at the both of them. And then I said to myself, Stupid. Boy, you are stupid.

  Because I couldn’t take her with me. Why? Because I had to assume suspicion on their part down there. Sooner or later someone might just take a peek at my luggage. Plenty of people pack handguns down there, but who packs a .38 detective special that would set them back a hundred and twenty bucks? No good. It was the traditional police detective weapon.

  If I wanted to, I could pick up a cheap handgun down there and keep it in my glove compartment like everyone else, but then, why would a nice peaceful Canadian Ph.D. candidate from the ivy-clad walls of McGill go around toting a gun?

  No. A gun like little sister would have to stay home.

  I would eventually need a gun, and I would have to make damn sure no one ever caught sight of it until they had to look at it, but by then it wouldn’t matter. And it would have to be some spectacular arrangement of a weapon. Something really special. In the meantime, I had wasted fifteen minutes polishing and whistling. It would be better for me to get out of the house before I cut my throat. I was getting more and more nervous. It wasn’t like me at all. But then I never had had a chance at half a million before. I guess it was excusable.

  I shaved again without realizing I had already done so. I put on a clean shirt, tied a knot carefully in the tie, and walked west one block and up five to the Metropolitan Museum. I went up the steps three at a time to get rid of some of that energy, arrived at the top without puffing — those once weekly swimming sessions pay off, eh, Dunne? — and went by the usual giggling group of school kids clustered around the big naked statue of some Roman emperor. Their teacher was telling them about the glories of Ancient Rome with her eyes grimly fixed on the emperor’s toes. I grinned and walked through Ancient Greece and looked at a vase with a javelin thrower poised to really give it a good heave.

  Damn it, that made me think of my problem again.

  Suppose I arrived at the critical moment. I knew who my five people were. What would I do, stalk them one by one? Let’s say I pick off the first. Maybe I get away with it. How about the second? Maybe I can pull that off too. But by then everyone else will be alerted. It would be about impossible to get close to them. They’d stay up all night with shotguns. And a man can’t go around all night in a small town and escape observation. No. No good.

  I found myself in front of the Japanese weapon collection. A st
aff member had some people arranged in front of him in a semicircle. I stopped to listen.

  “Never before or since the eleventh century,” he was saying, “has anyone, anywhere, improved upon the steel in the eleventh-century Japanese sword. The man who made it had priestly status. Women were not allowed nearby while he was working on the sword. It was drawn several times, folded over, drawn again, and so forth. A blade was tested by cutting through twenty copper coins arranged in a stack. If the blade became nicked, it was rejected. The samurai were permitted to try out the blade on prisoners condemned to death. The usual stroke entered the body at the left shoulder blade and made its exit at — ”

  So long. The first part was interesting. The details I preferred to skip. I slid around the group and looked in the restaurant by the pool. It looked inviting and not crowded. I took a cup of coffee, found a table next to the water, and listened to the splashing from the bronze figures scattered about the pool.

  I tested out some more ideas. Good names for me and Kirby. Moran would be bringing down two blank Canadian driving licenses, neatly stamped and issued. He knew someone who would remove the real names and data chemically, and Kirby and I would have two nicely worn proofs we really existed.

  “Is this table taken?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “This is a table for four, young man, and you’re sitting all alone. Are you or are you not waiting for your friends?”

  The restaurant had filled up while I was daydreaming.

  “No, ma’am.” I pulled my legs under my chair, brought my elbows close to my body, and dragged the ashtray in front of me. I had been sprawled all over.

  “You had your legs stretched out,” she began, in a piercing whine. She removed her bread pudding and salad with Russian dressing. She banged down her empty tray at my elbow and sat down. She picked up her spoon and added, “All I can say is, some people are very inconsiderate.”