Hard Case Crime: The Murderer Vine

by Rifkin, Shepard

  “I’ll survive.”

  She was all set to go. “When do we start?”

  I told her we’d have to wait a couple days more.

  “Why not now?”

  I couldn’t very well tell her I had to buy a machine gun to kill five people with.

  So I said I needed a good tape recorder and a good camera first.

  “And then we’ll drive down?” I nodded. She began chewing her thumbnail. I knew this was a sign of deep concentration. Then she said, “As a new spy, am I permitted to have ideas?”

  I said yes.

  “I think it would be better if I went down first,” she said. “They’d be a little suspicious if we came down together, maybe a little cold. But if I went down alone, I could spread myself over town. I’d rent a furnished apartment, a cheap one, but not too cheap. Then I’d buy new drapes an’ shelf paper. Then I would scrub like mad to get it real clean, lahk mah hubby’s comin’ down an’ I want to get us a real nice snug lil place? I’ll open a charge account at the gas station an’ the grocery store an’ the butcher’s an’ deposit a few hundred dollars in our joint account at the bank. Evvabody in town is goin’ to be real curious about nice Mrs. Wilson, working so hard to make it homelike, an’ she is goin’ to tell ’em all about us, believe you me. They’re goin’ to find out all about the years you spent slavin’ for your M.A. and tendin’ furnace at night an’ waitin’ on table an’ all. An’ I met you an’ it was love at first sight, even though I could have had the hand of the banker’s son an’ had a hundred-an-fifty-thousand-dollar home out by the country club, with a swimmin’ pool an’ all. I’m goin’ — ”

  “Hold it, hold it.” She was getting carried away with the script.

  “Then I’ll tell all the nosy busybodies who keep pokin’ their noses in the door an’ offerin’ to help that mah poor hard-workin’ husband is at McGill, finishin’ up some last-minute term papers, because he’s an instructor in Freshman English, an’ he hates it, he purely hates it. An’ when he gets his Ph.D. thesis all done — an’ that’s why he’s down here with me, on a grant — when it gets done, he’s gonna get hisself a Ph.D. degree an’ then he can be a professor an’ then — he doesn’t know it yet, but I do — I’m gonna make him move to the University of Georgia wheah our lil one” — and here she patted her stomach — “is goin’ to be born an’ raised, among his cousins an’ uncles an’ all his kin.”

  I liked it. I liked it very much.

  “Then when you come down, clear sailing.”

  “All right. You win.”

  “What’s the thesis going to be on?”

  “The Relation of Deep South Rural English to Elizabethan English.”

  “Zowie!”

  “I’ll be getting all my notes ready, and spending our last few pennies buying a good tape recorder.”

  “Shall I take notes myself on our romance?”

  “You’d better. Don’t trip me up with some little anecdote I’ve never heard about. When I finish up marking the papers, I’ll get all my notes together, pick up this good tape recorder which will use up about all our last few dollars, and then I’ll take the bus down because it’s cheaper.”

  “And I’ll meet you at the bus station?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll put on a welcome scene that will get me the Academy Award.”

  “Just practice that Southern accent,” I said. “You keep slipping into Northern speech habits.”

  “I declare! I keep tryin’, but I don’ know, it jus’ keeps slippin’ mah mind.”

  She stood up. I gave her a hundred for expenses on the way down. I gave her five hundred to start a joint account at the local bank. I told her that when she found a place she should write me a note general delivery, Jackson. I’d phone her when I knew what bus I’d be coming to Okalusa in.

  “What’ll I do with the labels for your clothes?”

  “As soon as I get down there, I’ll spend the evening watching you sew them on like a dutiful faculty wife.”

  “I’ll do it if you read to me aloud from Chaucer.”

  I promised. One more thing. It was important.

  “When you get a place,” I said, “make sure it has two bedrooms. Or a living room with a sofa in it.”

  “Sure. But won’t they get curious?”

  “Tell ’em I need one for my office. I work nights and I don’t want to disturb you.”

  “Sure.”

  Boy, the both of us were calm. We had everything under control.

  “Good luck,” I said. I put out my hand and she extended hers. She shook firmly. Then she stood there. I looked at her. She had a quizzical look that I couldn’t figure out. We stared at each other. Then a little smile appeared at the corner of her mouth.

  “Sir, may I make a suggestion?”

  “Of course.”

  “The car.”

  The car. The brilliant thought struck me that she didn’t know where it was. I calmly showed it to her from the window.

  “It’s the one at the hydrant?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he park it there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Naturally.”

  After the door closed, I watched her walk up to the car. There was a green ticket under the windshield wiper. She slid the ticket out, got into the car, started it and, pulling out, moved expertly into the traffic stream. She was caught by a red light at the corner under the window. Just as the light changed, her hand came out, opened, and a shower of green confetti fluttered down. I grinned.

  Mrs. Wilson had style.

  18

  I went home, made some scrambled eggs, ate them absentmindedly, phoned Bryan, asked for Lisa’s number, dialed it, hung up, drank two cans of beer, and watched a terrible movie on TV. Kirby should be sleeping somewhere in central Virginia. I hoped she was staying at a good motel with a good mattress and not in some fleabag she fell into out of sheer exhaustion. I watched the late late show. A better sleeping pill could not be found.

  Next morning I went to the office and checked out my sound-recording equipment. I had possession of several units designed by cynical people.

  I had a miniature tape recorder that would fit inside my inner jacket pocket and record for four hours. The mike was a wristwatch, and the mike wire ran up my arm and into my armpit and out again into the recorder. No good for hot climates where everyone went around in shirt sleeves.

  All right. How about my more sophisticated unit? This job is a transmitter. It fits inside a pack of cigarettes and still leaves half a pack empty. Take out ten cigarettes, no, take them all out. Put the transmitter in, shove it over to the side under the still unbroken top, feed in the ten cigarettes and you’re ready for business. Only what do you do with the ten left over? I know what I’d think if I visited some guy who would leave a half-opened pack of cigarettes on the table with ten cigarettes stuffed into an ashtray. I’d think he was a lousy detective, that’s what I’d think. Leave it lying casually on the table. Only you’re not quite ready. You need a portable FM receiver in the neighborhood. And that’s still not enough if you’re looking for proof worth a half a million bucks. But let’s be calm about it. The receiver has a recording jack. All you do is hook it up to a tape recorder. Great, right?

  The trouble with this setup is that I’d need someone nearby to work the receiver and the recorder. And if there’s one thing I didn’t want, it was Kirby to get a hint of what was going on. If she didn’t know, she couldn’t spill, and if she did know, she wouldn’t be down there in the first place making the whole thing possible.

  So that was out.

  And besides, both units were designed on the assumption that whoever would talk to me would talk freely about the disappearance of the three boys. That theory was lousy.

  I decided the best thing to do was to pick up the best possible portable tape recorder around. From then on I would just have to play it by ear.

  It would have to be able to operate under any condition. It would have to
have a directional mike that would screen out background noises, like cars passing, or dishes being washed. It would have to record for, say, one hour. And it would have to be completely noiseless.

  I still remember what happened when I was using my first recorder years ago. I bought a cheap one to save money. I carried it in an attaché case.

  The guy I was taping was out in the kitchen mixing some drinks. I slid the recorder under the couch where he was sitting, started it going, and had the attaché case back by the door on the hall table without him knowing anything about the operation.

  He was a cheap actor who was blackmailing a married woman. I had struck up an acquaintance with him in a bar, and I had him convinced I was a beginning playwright with some great scripts. I made up some wild plot and he loved it, and he was trying to interest some people in producing it off-Broadway. I had arranged a double date for us, and he was so pleased with the way things were going that he began boasting about his conquests and how this old bag was financing his vacation trip to Mallorca next month because of a little phone call he threatened to make to her husband. I kept feeding him admiring remarks until he had put enough on the tape to lock him away for a nice stretch or to persuade him to go away quietly. He stopped talking for a second and lit a cigarette. That very second was when the tape chose to reach its end. It began to make that slapping sound each time the reel came around. I can still hear it, slap-slap-slap-slap.

  He said quietly, “What’s that noise?”

  “What noise?” I asked. I never was much of an actor, and I defy anyone to say that sentence convincingly.

  He looked under the couch. It took some doings back and forth before I could leave with the tape. In the meantime I lost the recorder and two side teeth. The porcelain replacements and the bridge set me back five hundred and seventy-five bucks, and all I could collect from the grateful lady was seven hundred and fifty. The recorder was a mess. It had cost one hundred thirty, so I cleared forty-five bucks on the deal. Lesson for the future: when you buy for your profession, buy the best.

  So I went out and bought a four-hundred-forty-dollar Kim.

  It would have another use. I would have to drive around the countryside taping rural speech patterns. A recorder looking as impressive as that one did would tend to persuade people I really was a professional. People are funny. If I were to use a fifty-nine-fifty job, they’d think I was some sort of an amateur.

  I took the Kim to the office and played with it until it knew me and was friendly. I played with it until I could work all the controls with my eyes closed.

  An hour later the phone rang. It was George Foglia.

  “How you doing, George?”

  “Fine, just fine. If you’re not doin’ anythin’, why don’t you drop up for a bite tomorrow?”

  “Sure, glad to.”

  “Wait a minute. I got a place in the country. You know?”

  I didn’t know.

  “Can you make it up there by twelve?”

  “Where is it?”

  “About thirty miles west of Saratoga.”

  That would be about two hundred and ten miles upstate.

  “Why, for crissakes?”

  I could tell George was mad by his silence, but I was mad, too. This waiting was getting on my nerves.

  Finally he said, “I got a new set of golf clubs, that’s why. You been sayin’ how much you wanted to try my new iron. Here’s your chance. You can take a few practice swings. It’ll limber you up.”

  I realized he was right. If George said I should take a few practice swings, he knew what he was talking about.

  “Okay. Give me directions.”

  He gave them. It would be easy. All I had to do was take the New York State Thruway and then cut north. I hung up. The mailman came in with one letter. It was a check in full for the Burger report. The three hundred and fifty dollars made the four-hundred-and-forty-dollar bite for the Kim seem less poisonous. I locked the office. I wasn’t interested in any more business. I walked to Central Park and strolled through till I came out at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street. I looked up at the equestrian statue of General Sherman with the bronze figure of a woman striding before him holding his horse’s bridle. I suddenly remembered Kirby’s remark about the statue after she had been working for me about a month and had taken a sandwich and gone down there for her lunch.

  “Just like a Yankee,” she said, “to ride that horse and let a lady walk.”

  I realized I was looking forward to seeing her again. I went home, took a long bath, went out for dinner, and went to bed early.

  I left at eight the next morning. By noon I was driving past George’s letter box. I made the left turn he had directed me to, and went up the hill on a winding dirt road between two stone walls. By the poor state of the walls I knew that the farmer who had built them was dead long ago. I passed by one abandoned farmhouse, then another. There were several overgrown fields. On the top of the hill was an old farmhouse. But this one was in good condition. George stood waiting for me on the porch.

  “You made good time,” he said. “I saw you turn in at the bottom of the hill.”

  He had lunch all ready. Spaghetti, meat sauce, green salad, wine. He made it all himself and was proud of it. “The wine, the wine, guaglio,” he said, and pointed out the bay window to the small vineyard. “I made it myself. It’s safe to drink it. I took my shoes off first.”

  After lunch he picked up an attaché case and said, “Let’s go for a walk.”

  We stood on the porch. He flung his free hand out in a big semicircle. “I can see for miles from here,” he said. “I own four hundred acres. I got woods an’ little rivers an’ an old quarry. The road you came up, that’s the only way. You come on foot, I stay here with my binoculars, I can see you easy crossin’ the fields.”

  “This where you keep your golf clubs?”

  “I got four hundred acres to hide ’em in,” he said.

  We walked through a little garden planted with plum tomatoes, onions, lettuce, and escarole. He said he would sit on the porch on sunny afternoons when the rabbits were hopping around. “I shoot the goddam bunnies,” he said. His face became all red with anger when he thought what they did to his lettuce. “So the neighbors are used to shots all the time. This is deer country anyway. They all got guns. An’ they know I’m a gun nut, always doin’ my own loadin’, weighin’ it out grain by grain, an’ havin’ a ball shootin’ at targets. I tell ’em I got a nice little insurance business goin’ on in Brooklyn with my paesani, an’ I like to get up here an’ smell the nice air where it’s peaceful.”

  He led the way through a grove of pine trees, then through a meadow which had once been a cornfield. At the far end of the field a little road led to an abandoned limestone quarry. At the far end, against the rock wall, leaned two life-size human cutouts. They were made of half-inch cardboard.

  “There used to be an old movie theater in Vandermill,” he said. “That’s the nearest town. No one went ever since TV got popular, so they turned it into a supermarket. The manager knows I like target shootin’ an’ he said I could have these, they was only pickin’ up dust in the basement. Who do you want, Greta Garbo or Gary Cooper?”

  I picked Gary.

  He put down the attaché case, took off the binoculars from his neck and scanned the hills and the valleys carefully. Satisfied, he opened the case.

  It was filled with foam rubber. Cut in it, to fit the broken-down machine gun, were variously shaped holes. He pulled out the parts and assembled it easily in thirty seconds. Then he took it apart.

  “You try it,” he said.

  It took me ten seconds longer.

  “Once more.”

  This time I did it in twenty-five.

  “Good enough,” he said. He took out a drum from the case and clipped it on. He took out a three-inch-thick cylinder of black plastic, five inches long, and screwed it on the thread at the muzzle end. “The silencer,” he said.

  He showed me where the safety
was. He handed me the gun.

  “How about a practice swing?” he said.

  I walked toward the cardboard cutout I liked, and paused about thirty feet away. I swung it up, pointed it at the neck. I squeezed the trigger. As soon as I felt the faint vibration of the first shot, I began moving the muzzle from side to side, lowering it. The drum took five seconds to empty.

  There was very little recoil. It felt like someone was patting me gently on the forearm. The gun went chug-chug-chug-chug, very quietly, like a man coughing across a room and trying to muffle it out of consideration for others.

  Gary Cooper disintegrated from the top down.

  George showed me how to set it for single-shot action. He clipped on another drum, took it off, had me clip it on, nodded. He was satisfied I knew how to do it. I squeezed off one shot. It made a hole in poor Greta’s stomach three inches in diameter. The gun coughed quietly once and subsided. Bits of cardboard were floating in the air.

  “God,” I said.

  I took it apart and put it in the case. We walked back silently. At the house George gave me a full drum. I put it in the case. He asked me if I wanted another one. I shook my head. I gave him twenty fifty-dollar bills.

  As I got into the car, I said, “That’s a terrible thing.”

  “So don’t buy it.”

  He watched me drive down the road. When I reached his letter box, which was mounted on a cedar post with morning-glory vines blooming all around it, I paused and looked up the hill. He was still standing on the porch. Neither of us waved goodbye.

  19

  I took the bus down to Jackson rather than the plane. I wanted the extra time for Kirby to worm herself into the town, and if I got there too early, I’d only gum up the works.

  So I took one small suitcase, the Kim, and the attaché case down to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. The attaché case had a leather partition in the middle which divided the contents equally. There were two buckles by which it could be attached so that the golf-club side was permanently covered. The empty half had three slots into which I stuck a couple of books on speech, a notebook, and a couple of ballpoint pens. As soon as the bus started down the ramp leading to the Lincoln Tunnel, Mr. Wilson (who had decided he would like to be called Hal rather than Harold) began to catch up on his homework. He also had an excellent reason for keeping the case on his lap at all times rather than placing it in the overhead rack.