The Murderer Vine (2 page)

How do you put a price tag on that?

You know why I tell you all this, Father. How can you repeat it? And the idea of an American in a clerical collar chasing butterflies with a net because that’s his idea of a vacation — well, when I saw you plunging into the swamp next to the landing, you gave me the best laugh I’ve had in months.

Father, that’s Yucateca you’re drinking. The best beer in the Western Hemisphere. It comes out of Mexico, and the best beer in Mexico comes from Yucatán, and the best beer in Yucatán is Yucateca.

I drink it a lot. I sit and put my hands around the cold, sweating glass. Then I rub my hands across my face. It’s the closest I can come to winter in New York. Did you ever drive through Central Park after it had snowed all night? And be the first one? And see how all the branches were bending with the weight of the snow? I miss that. I think about those days. I would rather not.

I used to be on the cops in New York. Detectives. Then I quit and became a private detective. My own outfit. I did pretty good for a few years. Then this thing.

Narcisco once let me go out on one of his boats when I first came here — the
Dolores.
I laid in four cases of Yucateca. We threw the empties overboard and shot at them with Narcisco’s rusty Winchester. My nose turned red in the sun. My skin had salt spray all over it. I felt bone-tired. I slept ten hours in a row. Ten hours! I haven’t slept three hours straight since it happened. Next week I went out again. But there was no flavor in it. So I didn’t do it anymore.

You’re not going to sleep much tonight, Father. It’s too hot. The only air conditioning we get down here comes with the hurricane season. But we’re months away from that. So it’s going to be bad, with the heat and the mosquitoes. And it’ll take you too long to get used to sleeping in a hammock. So have another beer. I’ll start from the beginning. If you don’t mind, I’ll take rum.

It all began in Haskell. You ever been in Haskell? It’s an hour’s train ride northeast of Grand Central Station. The streets are named Powder Flask Road and Deborah Pond’s Pike. Very colonial, no? But they put in those streets about fifteen years ago. All the houses are very rigidly colonial, with those zigzag split-rail fences and a wagon wheel on each side of the driveway. The houses are in the $75,000–$150,000 range. The big TV network people live there, the admen, and maybe a writer or so if he wipes his feet before he crosses their doorsteps.

The way I wound up there, up at Haskell, one day some big shot wholesaler in heroin thought it would be a good idea to move in on all that easy allowance money. So he sent a pusher to hang around the drive-ins where the kids with the hot rods hang out. He hung around the luncheonette near the high school. He had an attaché case with compartments. Speed balls, goof balls, pot, you name it. And heroin.

And it was home free. The fix was in. They had gotten to the state, county, and local law. So when a kid shows up in school looking nervous and jumpy and sleepy, and wearing a pair of dark glasses to protect the enlarged pupils from too much light — one of the effects of pot — the kids’ parents had seen enough movies on their own networks to realize what the score was. And then one of the mothers walks in one evening into her fifteen-year-old daughter’s room to find the kid mainlining horse into her thigh. Horse, that’s heroin.

The parents went to the cops. No good. Dropped for lack of evidence. All right, they’re not stupid. They hire a private detective, some clown from Bridgeport. He managed to dig up some more evidence. It was presented to the D.A.’s office with cries of triumph. Then the file gets stolen from the D.A.’s office. Naturally.

One of the parents was a guy named Harry Gilbert. He was a fifth, maybe sixth assistant vice-president on one of the big TV networks.

When he was wondering what his next step was, he happened to be down the block from my office. He had just taken a client to one of those expensive French restaurants nearby. The client had hailed a cab and then offered Gilbert a lift, but just then he noticed my little sign painted on the second-floor window:
Confidential Security. Discreet Inquiries.
That’s a great word, discreet. It brings in a lot of business.

Gilbert told me about the drug scene in Haskell. He asked me what I could do. I said, “Nothing.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Here I have to give a supposedly intelligent guy a lecture when I have a report to write. So it bugged me a little. I restrained myself.

“If the fix is in, there’s nothing I can do.”

He looked unsatisfied.

I crossed the t’s.

“When I get evidence,” I said, “what do I do with it? I take it to the authorities. They run it up the flagpole and salute it, as you guys say.”

He stared at me.

“The only way we operate,” I went on, “is strictly within the law. The law stinks, that’s your tough luck.”

“Do you have any kids?”

I shook my head.

“Try to imagine you have a fifteen-year-old daughter,” he began. “Your wife meets you at the station and tells you she went into the girl’s room. She found a hypodermic needle.”

I stopped listening; for a while he went on. He was using the most basic emotional appeal — children.

I remembered the old game of blindman’s buff I used to play when I was a kid. I’d be blindfolded, someone would spin me around till I had lost all sense of direction. Then I’d be shoved violently into the center of the room. I never liked the feeling of being handled and directed — then or now.

Once when I was on undercover duty I sat with a dealer in his Park Avenue apartment. I was playing a big buyer from Utica. The doorbell rang. The dealer got up and let in an attractive, well-dressed woman about thirty-five. She gave me a nervous smile. She was sweating and fumbling with her gloves, her pocketbook, patting her hair into place, adjusting her earrings. I recognized the first stages of withdrawal syndrome. He told her I was okay. He took out a deck of heroin and decided to show off. He held it up.

“Wanna see what I trained her to do?” he asked. I didn’t want to see, but I said sure, I’d like to see.

He turned and said, “All right, baby, go into your act.” She sank to her knees. She bent forward and licked his shoes.

After she had left, he said he used to be a shoeshine boy. “I used to polish the shoes of rich people like she is,” he said. When the time came, I took a lot of pleasure in nailing him.

“I don’t need the hard sell,” I told Gilbert.

He flushed. “Yet you tell me there’s nothing you can do.”

“Yep.”

“How about a ride around the block?”

If he was going to enter upon a conspiracy, he didn’t want anyone listening. There was something I could do and both of us knew it. But I couldn’t do it and keep my license. He started the car and began. “I — ”

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.

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.”