Hard Case Crime: The Murderer Vine

by Rifkin, Shepard

  I asked him to let me think a while. I thought. Something should be done out in Haskell. The cops weren’t doing it. It would get worse and worse. More kids would get hooked. I lit a cigarette. He drove four times around the block and I shushed him twice. The cop on the beat began to get interested, but he saw me and relaxed.

  I could not only get my Private Detective license lifted. I’d also lose my gun license because I would have a poor moral character. And I’d go to jail. But for a good cause. Hurray.

  Because vigilantes are always a good thing — wherever law breaks down or doesn’t exist. But judges don’t take that viewpoint. And they’re right. The trouble with all vigilante groups is simple. They find power exhilarating. After they run out the bums, they look around and realize they never liked the way the guy down the road keeps old tires on his front lawn instead of keeping it mowed neatly like everyone else on the block. And that guy there, he lets his kids grow long hair and he doesn’t go to church. Why not give him a little night visit?

  Gilbert was talking. I listened this time.

  “I want plenty,” I said.

  “We’re prepared for that,” he said. “One thousand.”

  After I looked at him for a few seconds, I said, “Five.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Let me out, please.”

  I got out. I leaned in the window and kept my voice down. “You don’t have to meet my price,” I said. “All you have to do is go to Stillman’s gym and pick yourself a punch-drunk fighter. You give him ten bucks in advance. No more. He’ll drink it up. Then you hope he’ll make it up there in the train and remember to get off at the right place. But the chances are that he’ll get lost somewhere. So he gets up to Haskell, looking like a beached whale and about as unobtrusive. You hope he’ll find the right guy. Then you hope he’ll get to him before the locals start to break it up. Then you hope he’ll keep his trap shut if he winds up in the local jail — where they’ll give him a good going-over because he tried to dump one of their boys. If he gets away after doing the job, you hope he won’t start bragging in some bar somewhere along the Avenue how he made an easy C-note or two. Some bar where word will get to the top that you’re the guy who started the whole thing.”

  Gilbert was looking uncomfortable.

  “And a week or so later,” I went on, “you get in your car and press the starter button and you and the car wind up scattered all over the east end of Fairfield County. See you around.”

  I got five feet away before he called me back.

  “All right. Five.”

  I’m good on the hard sell myself.

  4

  I went back to the office. Kirby was typing. She had an upper-class Southern accent. She was taking diction lessons trying to lose it. I would be sorry when that would happen. She had a fast, eager, faintly amused way of looking at me whenever I talked to her. She probably found working for a private detective exciting. I’m sure she had memorized the various types that came to the office. And me. I’m sure she had memorized me. I would catch her staring at me from time to time. She probably did me for her actor friends.

  I made a phone call.

  Mel answered. He was very sleepy. He was an old contact I used once in a while. Only once in a while. You push your contacts too much and they resent it. Mel knew the drug scene inside out. I didn’t push him. He knew the chemistry of the sedatives, the analgesics, the barbiturates — anything that would give you a high — or cool you — as well as any chemist in the Police Laboratory. He could have made a brilliant career in any field. But he lived in a filthy furnished room in Spanish Harlem. He didn’t want to be further away than two minutes from heroin. He had been a pusher for twenty years. Yet once he had been so naïve, he told me, that he thought heroin was a misspelled bird.

  I asked him who was pushing the stuff in Haskell.

  “Huh?”

  “You just wake up?”

  “Yeah. Mr. Dunne, I been up all night.”

  Up all night. Sell five decks and earn one for yourself. He was a mainliner. Mel had once told me that he didn’t go for the slow glow when the needle went into some general flesh. He mainlined because the feeling of a mainline shot right into a vein is like the greatest orgasm indefinitely prolonged. He almost had me wanting to try it.

  “Who’s working Haskell?” I repeated patiently. “It’s a few miles north of Westport.”

  “You wanna call me back in ten minutes?”

  I hung up. I looked down at the street. I walked out and drank some water. Kirby looked at me out of the corner of her eye. I was nervous and I didn’t know it. I picked up an old copy of Security Magazine and read about the newest locks. For the thousandth time I wondered why someone didn’t invent a fingerprint lock. I opened my desk drawer and threw out all pencils under five inches. The phone rang.

  Kirby started to pick it up. I said sharply, “All right, I’ve got it!” She looked at me surprised. I mumbled that I was sorry. She frowned and hung up.

  “Mr. Dunne?”

  “Yeah. Go ahead.”

  “He hits there about two-thirty every day. He waits around for the high school crowd, you know?”

  “What’s he carry?”

  “Horse and pot. The horse comes straight from the other side, you know? It runs between two twenty-seven and two thirty-four.”

  The higher the melting point of heroin, the better it is. Our friend was selling very good stuff to the rich kids. Another advantage in picking rich parents.

  “Does he like it up there?”

  “Oh, man, you know, he’s only been goin’ there a month, and already he’s selling a load each afternoon, you know?”

  A load is twenty-five decks. A deck is five grains.

  “He charges fifteen bucks a deck, more’n he gets down here. No competition. The fix is in. An’ he gets all that fresh air for free, you know? He figures in a month he’ll be sellin’ a bundle a day.”

  A bundle is three to five loads.

  “How about pot?”

  “Pot is for kids. There’s not enough money in it. You know?”

  I couldn’t stand his habit of saying “you know” after every sentence.

  “Besides, it’s too easy for anyone to pick it up in Mexico and it drives the price down. And it’s got too much bulk. Now, how’s an amateur gonna get hold of horse? Right? You move in and the big boys carry you out in a box.”

  “What’s he look like?”

  “He’s good. He looks like a college kid. He lives on One Hundred and Third Street. He wears a cashmere sweater and dirty white sneakers. He drives a Chevy Impala, New York 3D–6754. Remember, he’s got nasty friends.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Hey, Mr. Dunne, how much? I mean, how much for me?”

  “It’s not a hijack operation, friend.”

  “Yeah, but I asked around. Sumpin happen, they come lookin’ for me with an army.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll keep you clear.”

  “ž‘Don’t worry,’ he says. I worry about everything.”

  So the guy risked something. When I was a cop, I could have sent him up once from seven to ten, but I let him go in exchange for an occasional phone call. In eight years I had phoned him three times. This was the fourth call.

  “You’re still ahead.”

  He started to whine. I shut him up fast. “You could still be in prison right now and you wouldn’t have to deal with me at all if you didn’t want to. You made your choice eight years ago.”

  “Jeeze, you’re some kind of a — ”

  “Yeah. I am. And I’ll tell you how much your opinion of me grieves me. As soon as you hang up, I’m going to eat a big steak with French fries and then I’m going to do some dealing. Then I’m going to go home and sleep. That’s how much it worries me. But I’ll give you fifty. You be at the southeast corner of Eighty-ninth and First Avenue in twenty minutes.” I hung up.

  I told Kirby I’d be out for the afternoon. She kept her eyes on the typewrite
r. She was still angry because I had snapped at her.

  I got my car and drove up to Eighty-ninth and First. It was no area for action for pushers, so it was safe. Mel was standing on the corner nodding and yawning. Pushers should not use the stuff they sell. But then pushers should not do a lot of things. He leaned on the window. I gave him the fifty. He wanted to chat, but I brushed him.

  I took the East River Drive to the end, cut across the north end of the Triboro Bridge into Bruckner Boulevard, and then onto the New England Thruway. I got off at Westport and took a leafy road northward along the Saugatuck River for a few miles. It wound around groves of oaks and willows, past farms and estates and little lakes edged with cattails and tiger lilies. I passed thoroughbred horses up to their hocks in the rich grass. I turned off on a little dirt road and stopped on the crest of a ridge where I could see anyone coming from either direction.

  I changed the plates for a set of phony Connecticut plates that a very good metal worker had made for me earlier in the year.

  Then I drove out again to the main road. Four miles further brought me to Haskell. It had big white houses with lilac bushes in the center of town. The new high school was on the edge of town, and the houses there were planted with magnolias and English yew. I parked near Haskell High and wished I could have gone to a school with a pond in the front of it and big trees scattered over its green lawn. I sat down in the luncheonette and ordered a cup of coffee. It was terrible. I sipped it as slowly as possible. Halfway through, a red Chevrolet Impala parked across the street. NY 3D–6754. The driver got out and walked into the comfort station in the park next to the high school grounds.

  Then he came out and sauntered toward the luncheonette. I had paid and was out on the street before he had set foot on the sidewalk on my side.

  I entered the comfort station. I looked under the radiator. There it was. A plastic bag. One deck. Not much imagination for hiding places. Every pusher’s idea of a good place.

  I walked back.

  The pusher was talking to some kid who looked about seventeen. He was wearing the usual uniform of his group, the khaki pants, the brown loafers, and the button-down Brooks Brothers shirt. He was nervous. He looked at me, but I was reading a newspaper. He turned back and gave my friend a twenty-dollar bill. He listened carefully to the instructions and left. I folded the paper neatly, got up, and walked over to the booth. I was wearing a different jacket and a loud tie and a hat. I never wear hats. Loud ties make people concentrate on that instead of your face. I keep a couple of ties in my glove compartment at all times. A tie and a hat — better disguises than all the false whiskers ever invented.

  I showed him my private detective badge. I put it away after a second. I was counting on the hope that my man didn’t know Connecticut’s detective badges. And if you work on the cool assumption that your man is sure you’re a cop, he’ll frequently believe that the badge is a police badge.

  “Nilsson,” I said. “State police. May I see your identification?”

  He smiled. “Have a seat, Nilsson,” he said. I put on the proper, stiff look that a state trooper would get when called by his last name. I repeated my request very politely, but with some annoyance in my tone. He shrugged. He had nothing on him, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could prove. His attaché case was in his car, and most likely he had a hidden compartment for it that no hick cop would ever find. He pulled out his driver’s license.

  “Montecalvo, Montecalvo,” I said thoughtfully. I gave it back to him.

  “Mr. Montecalvo,” I said, “you don’t seem to have visible means of support.”

  “You can’t book me,” he said. He took out a wallet. It was about an inch thick with green stuff. He was taking it all very calmly. The fix must really be in, but solid. He sighed. He decided that I was looking for a contribution for my own charitable foundation. On my own. Beyond the normal payoff.

  “Look,” he said, “would you like a new hat?”

  The old phrase made me grin. He relaxed.

  “You know how it is,” I said.

  He took his wallet out. I shook my head.

  “Yeah, sure,” he said. “Look,” he said, leaning close. “I could drop a C-note on the floor. I could look out the window. And not see what happens — you know? I couldn’t testify then. Never. Right, Captain?”

  He opened the wallet. The green stuff was tens and twenties.

  “I’m very sorry, sir,” I said regretfully, giving him the sort of polite handling he wasn’t used to in New York. “It’s the Lieutenant who wants to talk to you. I’m only a trooper. And what the Lieutenant wants, he gets.”

  “Yeah. He gets. And gets.”

  He stood up. He was feeling sour. His mind was as transparent as his plastic bags. The local bite, he was thinking, was going to get bigger. He was thinking that it was my job to give him this little speech on how expenses were getting higher and could he get up a little more? He was getting mad. He had been told the fix was in, and here he was, being arrested or being dragged in, it was all the same, and maybe the fix was in, and my lieutenant was getting greedy on his own. So he would make a phone call to the mob’s local lawyer and he’d get out, but that would kill the afternoon.

  I held the door open for him like a well-bred cop on the take. He got in. I had tossed a copy of Law and Order, the police professional magazine, onto the front seat. He picked it up idly. I liked the magazine lying there, it was a nice touch.

  “Mind if I look at it?”

  “It’s a free country.”

  “Ha-ha.”

  When we drove by police headquarters, he jerked his head up.

  “Hey, man, we ain’t stoppin’?”

  “I’m a state trooper,” I reminded him. “We’re going to the state trooper barracks at Redfield.”

  “Redfield! That’s twenty-four miles, for crissakes!”

  “There’s no way I can bring it closer, sir.” State police always say “sir.”

  “You’re new, aincha?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  That explained it. It hadn’t been made clear to me that the fix was in.

  “You better stop and lemme make a phone call, Jack. You’re makin’ a big mistake and you’ll get your ass in a jam.”

  “Sorry, sir. My orders are to bring you in. No stops for anything, the Lieutenant said.” I was getting closer to my abandoned dirt road where I had changed my plates.

  That clinched it. No stops meant we were really going to shake him down for a little extra before we released him. We were going to try and scare him. He looked at me with the contempt I deserved.

  “You’d better go back. I don’t feel like goin’ forty-eight miles round trip, even if you’re a new guy. I got important appointments.”

  I was getting more and more sick of this snotty pusher with his influential friends.

  “I’m sorry, sir. I do what I’m told.”

  He was beginning to steam. I turned onto the dirt road.

  “Now where the hell are you goin’?”

  “Short cut to Redfield, sir. This way it’s only eighteen miles. A bit rough, but we’ll save fifteen minutes.”

  He wasn’t grateful. He took out a little notebook.

  “What’s your shield number?”

  I gave him the last four numbers of his license plate. He looked thoughtful. They had struck some buried recollection, but he couldn’t figure it out. Most people don’t know their own license numbers.

  He wanted my full name. Oh, boy, he was going to go all the way up with his squeal. I told him I was Sigurd Nilsson. He had a lot of trouble with the spelling and he was still repeating the two s’s of my last name when the bouncing of the car down the rutted little road brought his eyes off the page.

  I got out. He stared at me.

  “What — ” he began. I took out my gun and held it on him.

  “Out,” I said.

  “Listen, you — ”

  “Out!”

  I had never hit anyone in my life exc
ept in self-defense, and then only just enough to overcome opposition.

  I had never been one of those cops who take out their fears and tensions beating up some helpless kid.

  But when I thought of the plastic envelope in my pocket, I did get some satisfaction in what I was doing. Not pleasure. Satisfaction. There was a difference. If this was the only way this slow murderer could be blocked, then it had to be done. It took about a minute. Most of it with the barrel. I didn’t want my knuckles damaged. And the barrel is very effective. I carry permanent proof of its efficacy at the bridge of my nose. Some guy shot off his bullets at me but he missed. He had better aim with the barrel.

  When I finished with him, I bent down.

  “Listen to me, boy,” I said. “Listen careful. You hear me?”

  He said nothing. I lifted the gun.

  “I hear ya,” he mumbled. His front teeth were broken and he was spitting blood.

  “You come back again to Haskell, and you don’t get off this easy.”

  “You’re crazy, cop,” he said. So he still thought I was after money.

  I took out the plastic envelope.

  “I don’t want to see this, or you, or your attaché case, or any of your friends. The fix is in. But that isn’t going to do any good. Because we’ll get you on the road or back on One Hundred and Third Street.”

  That little piece of Mel’s information was effective. He didn’t like the fact that I knew his home address.

  “You ain’t no cop.”

  “Pass the word, friend.”

  I pulled out his shirt and wiped the barrel. I took the attaché case. A mile away I found another little road. I pulled in and changed the plates back to New York. I buried the attaché case deep in the leaf-mold. I buried the Connecticut plates and my loud dollar tie under a bush. They’d never be useful anymore. His boss would have a long memory, and I wouldn’t want to make it easy for him. I got into the car and got out just in time. I vomited. That sure was a surprise.

  I got in again and drove slowly down the beautiful, lush summer lanes. I kept thinking about the German occupation of Poland in World War II. The Polish underground set up a secret court to try traitors. A real lawyer was chosen as judge, another one was the prosecuting attorney, and a third was defense attorney. The problem was that the accused never could learn that he was on trial. The defense attorney’s duty was to provide as good reasons as he could that his absent client should not be found guilty. But when the verdict was guilty, an executioner was chosen. He would study his victim’s movements, and then, in an isolated place, he would brace him, say, “I execute you in the name of the Polish Republic,” and then carry out his orders. The interesting thing about this process was that these devoted members of the underground, who had not wanted to kill but accepted it as a duty, found themselves liking it. It was finally decided that a man would only be permitted to kill three times. No more. He had begun to like it.