Blackmail Read online

  I pulled it out, unfolded it.

  On it was written 89 Prince—2A.

  Oh, boy.

  That had to be an address on Prince Street.

  Back to Manhattan.

  It was a drag, yeah, but in a way it was almost reassuring. Because, as I said, meeting at the motel just didn’t make any sense. But it turned out the motel wasn’t the final destination. Just another stop in the runaround.

  I wondered what 89 Prince was.

  It had to be the next stop. Not necessarily the last, certainly the next.

  Still, having been told to show up at the motel, I was loath to leave it. And even though I knew he wouldn’t show, I couldn’t help hanging out and waiting for Barry, at least for a while.

  Which was about ten minutes by my dashboard clock. Then I started the motor, pulled out, and headed back to Manhattan.

  As I paid a buck and a quarter upon leaving the Bronx, it occurred to me the tolls on this thing were beginning to add up. I’d had that bridge twice, the Triboro twice at two-fifty a throw. Not to mention the gas. Thank god I’d avoided the parking ticket.

  I took the West Side Highway downtown and got off at Canal Street. That figured. The address I was going to was only blocks from where I’d been with Marlena earlier that afternoon. Oh, well, sometimes it’s necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly. Edward Albee. Zoo Story.

  I wonder if he ever paid blackmail?

  I turned onto Prince Street, located 89, pulled in to the curb and parked. It was an old factory building that had been converted into lofts on a block of such structures.

  The downstairs door was unlocked. I pushed it open and went in. Facing me was a long staircase and a door with a regular lock and a police lock. The door had no number on it, but as I was looking for 2A, this couldn’t possibly be it.

  I went on up the stairs. At the top was a landing with two doors in front of it. One was labeled 2A, the other 2B.

  What could be easier?

  I took a breath, walked up to 2A and knocked.

  I think I would have been surprised if there had been an answer. When there wasn’t, I took it as a matter of course.

  I also began looking for a folded-up piece of paper, the next clue in the treasure hunt. But there was nothing stuck in the cracks of this door.

  I tried the knob, again expecting nothing.

  And it turned and clicked open.

  What?

  Not possible.

  This door had a regular lock and a big police lock, just like the door downstairs. And none of those locks were engaged? It didn’t add up.

  And then suddenly it did.

  The runaround, the treasure hunt, the blackmail, the whole bit.

  That’s when I knew I didn’t want to open that door. Because I knew what was on the other side. Barry would be lying there dead.

  It was too perfect. I mean, here I am, running around, getting involved with this guy Barry. I meet him once, pay him off. End up having the whole business with him on the phone, running around all over the place. Then I’m sent from Queens back to the motel. Where I find the note sending me here. Two long trips back and forth. And what happens in the meantime? Whoever’s pulling this off kills Barry and drops his body at the address he’s left for me to find.

  And there I am.

  Perfect patsy.

  Perfect frame.

  So I didn’t want to open that door.

  But I had to. There was no help for it. Given the situation, it was something I simply had to do.

  So I did. I took a breath, gritted my teeth, turned the knob, and opened the door. Knowing full well that when I looked, Barry would be lying there dead.

  He wasn’t.

  Marlena was.

  10.

  THE THING ABOUT THE LAW of averages is, it never works. Oh, it works in terms of the lottery—you’ll never win that. But in terms of anything practical, the law of averages simply hasn’t got a chance.

  Yeah, I know. I’m babbling. Finding a dead body will do that to you.

  So will the presence of Sergeant Thurman.

  Which is what that whole law-of-averages thing is about. I don’t know how many homicide cops there are in Manhattan, but there’s gotta be a lot. So what were the odds of me coming up with Sergeant Thurman for the third time running? Well, maybe not as long as the odds of Sergeant Thurman solving a case.

  Yeah, I know It’s a horrible cliché. The obtuse, dense, plodding, and unimaginative policeman, who couldn’t do anything if it weren’t for the help of the hotshot P.I. on the case. But don’t blame me for that. In my experience with the police, I’d found it to be the exact opposite—most homicide cops were ten times more equipped, resourceful, and capable than me.

  And then there was Sergeant Thurman. A bull of a man, whose crewcut, broken nose, and guttural speech made him look and sound like a college football coach. One with a team record of 0 and 13.

  Dumb as he was, Sergeant Thurman remembered me. I don’t think he appreciated the mathematical significance of us hooking up for the third time together, and I doubt if his vocabulary included the term déjà vu, but it still penetrated his consciousness that this had happened before.

  At least I gathered that from what he said when he first saw me. He stopped, scowled, and said, “You.”

  A tough P.I. is supposed to joke in the face of adversity. I’m not tough, but I try to pretend. So I didn’t let on that the sight of his face was like a kick in the stomach. I just smiled and said, “Gee, this must be my lucky day.”

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I’m the one who called the cops.”

  “Oh, shit. No.”

  “Yes.”

  “You found the body?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you kill her?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure? You wouldn’t wanna confess now and save me a lot of grief?”

  “Sorry, sergeant. I didn’t do this one.”

  “Any idea who did?”

  “None at all.”

  We were standing just inside the door to the loft. Sergeant Thurman looked past me to where Marlena’s body was lying on the floor. “Who’s the stiff?”

  Marlena’s floppy purse was lying next to the body. I pointed to it.

  “She may have ID in her purse.”

  “You didn’t look?”

  “Of course not. I saw she was dead and called the cops.”

  “From here?”

  “Don’t be silly. From a pay phone on the corner.”

  “This corner?”

  “Actually, I had to walk a few blocks.”

  “You leave the door unlocked?”

  “I didn’t touch a thing. Everything is just as I found it.”

  “So while you were calling the cops, anyone could have come in or out, or even made their escape?”

  I shrugged. “I suppose. You wanna beat me up now, or after you investigate?”

  Sergeant Thurman glared at me, deciding whether or not to punch me in the nose. Instead, he said simply, “Finding you here has not made my day.”

  No kidding. It hadn’t made mine either. It was, in fact, a disaster of epic proportions.

  Fortunately, with the crime scene to contend with, Sergeant Thurman couldn’t spend all his time with me. He bellowed to one of the beat cops and assigned him to take me off in the corner and ride herd over me and make sure I didn’t touch anything.

  Which I had no intention of doing. I read murder mysteries and I’m not entirely stupid. Scattering my fingerprints over the crime scene would not be a particularly swift move. I stood in the corner of the loft and watched the cops go about their business.

  Marlena had apparently been shot in the head. I say apparently in the same way newspapers use the word alleged to refer to some suspect the police have apprehended with the murder weapon in his possession and boasting moronically about how cool he was for doing the victim in
. Marlena was lying in a pool of blood that had come from a wound in the back of her head. A pistol that smelled as if it had recently been discharged lay next to the body. That was the evidence on which I based my opinion that she had been shot. However, considering my accuracy in these matters, I use the word apparently just in case she happened to actually have been poisoned and I was just too dumb to see it.

  As I watched, one of the detectives from the crime-scene unit picked up the supposed murder weapon with the tip of his pen, dropped it in a plastic evidence envelope, and wrote his name on it.

  Sergeant Thurman, perhaps taking his cue from me, bent down and examined the purse lying next to the body. He reached in, pulled out a wallet, snapped it open.

  The detective who had just bagged the gun gave him a funny look. I figured Thurman’s handling of the evidence wasn’t entirely kosher, but the guy didn’t dare call him on it. When Thurman finished with the purse, the detective surrounded it, almost protectively, and began bagging the stuff.

  Other detectives were searching the loft, which was not that big, by the way, it being 2A and there being two lofts per floor. Nor was it that furnished; that is to say, not at all. It was your basic bare loft—high ceiling, exposed pipes, plumbing fixtures at one end. Pretty much empty, with the exception of one corpse.

  The medical examiner arrived about then. A white-haired, bespectacled man who to the best of my knowledge I had never seen before. He conferred briefly with Sergeant Thurman, then bent to examine the body.

  After a few moments he looked up and nodded.

  I don’t know what that meant, but it meant something to Thurman, because he turned his attention back to me. Which wasn’t really that surprising. This being a vacant loft, there wasn’t that much else to concern him.

  Thurman strode over, inserted himself between the cop and me, and jerked his thumb over his shoulder, inviting the cop to scram. The cop gave him a bit of a look in doing so, and it occurred to me Thurman must be deeply admired on the force.

  Left alone with me, Sergeant Thurman jerked his thumb again, this time at the body. “Doctor says she’s just dead.”

  I nodded. “That figures. If he’d said she was alive, I’d have been totally shocked.”

  Thurman scowled. “You know what I mean. Just dead. Like in real recent.”

  I nodded. “Again, I’m not terribly surprised.”

  “Oh?” Thurman said. “What time was it when you found the body?”

  “Approximately ten-forty-five.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Approximately?”

  “I’m not wearing a watch. It was ten-forty-two by the dashboard clock when I parked my car outside. It took a couple of minutes for me to get inside, go upstairs, knock on the door, and get no answer.”

  “Then you tried the door?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  I shrugged. “Force of habit. Because it’s there. I turned it, it opened.”

  “And went in?”

  “No. I could see she was dead from the door. I closed it and ran to call the cops.”

  “You didn’t go in and look for a phone?”

  “No. I don’t think there is one, but if there had been I wouldn’t have used it.”

  “But there wasn’t a phone on the corner and you had to go several blocks?”

  “Not several. Two. One down and one over.”

  “You called the cops by when?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, well, we will. There’ll be a record of the call.”

  “Good.”

  Thurman grunted. He jerked his thumb again. “Cops say they got here ten-fifty-seven.”

  “That sounds about right.”

  “And found you back upstairs here.”

  “Yeah, but outside the door.”

  “But you’d been inside.”

  “No, I’d opened the door. Small difference.”

  “Uh-huh,” Thurman said. If he’d believed me, you wouldn’t have known it. “Anyway,” he said. “The woman on the floor. The dead woman. What’s her name?”

  “You look in her purse?”

  “You know I did. You were watching me.”

  “So?”

  Thurman’s eyes narrowed. “Let’s not have any trouble here. You’re the civilian. I’m the cop. I ask the questions. And the question is, what is the name of the woman on the floor?”

  “No,” I said. “What is the name of the man on second base.”

  He stared at me. “What?”

  “Exactly.”

  He frowned. “Who is on second base?”

  “No,” I said. “Who is on first base.”

  “What?”

  “No, what is on second base.”

  “I don’t know,” Thurman cried in exasperation.

  I pointed. “Third base.”

  Thurman finally got it. His eyes blazed. “Shut the fuck up!” he growled.

  “He’s the manager,” I muttered.

  Yeah, I know I shouldn’t have done it. It was a murder case, it was serious and all that. But the thing is, when you’re totally fucked, you got nothing left to lose.

  And I was now dorked beyond all recognition. I had been, from the moment Sergeant Thurman asked me her name. It was a question I could not answer, only evade. But sooner or later, even Sergeant Thurman was going to pin me down.

  And he did. By a great effort he managed to restrain himself from hauling off and decking me. Instead, he summoned all his mental capacities and managed to ask the question right.

  “Listen, fuck-up,” he said. “I’m asking you one question, I want a straight answer and I want no shit. Did you ever see the dead woman before?”

  Damn. That was the one question I could not answer. I mean, it was a murder and I wasn’t involved in the murder. I could happily tell him anything he wanted to know about that. And as a citizen it was my right and my duty to do so.

  Except for the blackmail. That’s a crime. A felony. And anyone who participates in it is guilty at the very least of being an accessory. Of aiding and abetting in the commission of a felony.

  Of course, being guilty of that, I had a right not to incriminate myself. In point of fact, it was Sergeant Thurman’s duty to so inform me. Not that I expected him to do so. The point is, I had a constitutional right not to tell him a goddamn thing. And in light of the fact that I’d been paying off blackmail, I was sure that was exactly what Richard would advise me to do.

  I looked at Sergeant Thurman standing there glowering at me, waiting for me to answer. And I have to tell you, I did not expect him to take it well.

  I took a breath. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t tell you that.”

  11.

  HE BEAT THE SHIT OUT of me.

  I’d heard the expression before, but this was my first firsthand experience with it. And I don’t just mean by a police officer. This was the first time I’d been beaten up by anyone in the practice of my profession. Of course, as I say, my profession mainly involves cracks in the sidewalk, and who is apt to get too upset about that? But still.

  At any rate, it was a first. And what a first. Though only an amateur myself, I would have to rate Sergeant Thurman as a pro. He was brutal, thorough, and painful. And, as I was to discover later, he didn’t leave a mark.

  Of course, Sergeant Thurman was probably a few years older than me, which meant he began practicing his chosen profession in the days before Miranda, in the golden days of the third degree and the rubber hose. I’m sure Thurman was a master of the latter. At any rate, he did a perfectly adequate job with his bare fists.

  I can’t say that I really blamed him. Well, I did, but intellectually speaking, you know. First off, I’d asked for it with the Abbott and Costello routine. And then by refusing to answer his questions. That was my right, but still.

  The thing was, I knew Sergeant Thurman’s point of view. I knew that, in his eyes, he wasn’t a bad cop. That he didn’t see anything wrong with using me as a punching bag.
The good guys and the bad guys, that was how Sergeant Thurman saw it. The cops were the good guys, the crooks were the bad guys, and there was no in-between. And if I didn’t want to help the good guys, then I was on the side of the bad guys, and I deserved what I got. And so did anybody else who wanted to help people break the law.

  You think I thought all that as I was getting pummeled? Not hardly. I doped my feelings out later on. At the time, all I did was try ineffectively to cover up.

  When I refused to answer Sergeant Thurman’s question, he turned to one of the cops on the scene and said, “See I’m not disturbed.” Then he grabbed me by the scruff of the neck, yanked me out the door, hustled me down the stairs, and dragged me around to the back alley.

  Had there been an innocent bystander with a video camera in that back alley, we would have made the network news. And I betcha Sergeant Thurman would have made the LAPD look tame.

  I didn’t see the first blow coming. But I sure felt it land. Moments later I was puking my guts out behind a dumpster. Before I was even halfway finished I was straightened up and busted in the gut again.

  After that, I could not clock the punches. But all were to the body, all were hard. There was another punch to the stomach that made me gag and vomit again, and yet another that I think made me pass out. It’s hard to tell when you’re having so much fun. The next thing I remember clearly was sitting in the back of a police car, all alone, staring at the bars in front and wondering if the doors were locked.

  They were.

  Sometime after that, I had no idea how long, Sergeant Thurman came and climbed into the front seat. When he turned around to look at me, I was suddenly glad those bars were there.

  “How’s your memory?” he said.

  “I remember being hit in the stomach.”

  “You wanna remember it again? Just keep makin’ wise answers like that.”

  I did not really want to remember it again. I said nothing.

  “Listen, asshole,” Thurman said. “I got a dead woman here. You know something and I want it. So give.”

  “I want to talk to my lawyer,” I said.

  “Fine,” Thurman said. “Let’s see if he’s in the back alley.”

  “You gonna beat me up again?”

  “Again? Hey, I never laid a hand on you.”