The Murderer Vine (30 page)

The tambourine player lifted her pure, thin soprano and sang, “There is an afterlife, where we shall all meet again.”

I didn’t believe a word of it. I still don’t. But if anyone wants to keep that crutch, they can. I wouldn’t ever pull it away from anyone.

I began thinking how to get a passport for Kirby. It would be too risky to try for one in the States. I decided to fly to El Paso with her. We could get tourist cards.

You could pick them up with as much trouble as a bus transfer. In Mexico City I had a contact who would sell us U.S. passports stolen from tourists’ luggage. A little expert doctoring and Kirby would have hers. With that we could get into Nicaragua without any problems.

Boy, I had it all figured out.

I went back and rang her bell. She must have gone the other way. No answer. I went down to the corner drugstore and phoned. No answer. I got the chief operator.

“Yes, sir?”

“MU 6–7184. Is there anything wrong with the line?”

“I’ll check, sir.”

I waited.

She came on again. “No trouble, sir. The line works perfectly.”

I thanked her and hung up. I went back and rang again. No answer. I didn’t expect one, and I pushed a couple bells on the top floor. When the buzzer sounded, I pushed the door open. I walked up two flights. At the end of the hall was a window opening out onto a fire escape. The catch was open. I pushed the window up and stepped onto the fire escape. I moved five feet to my right. There was her window. The catch was open. A square hole had been cut out of the glass. You can do that with a glass cutter and a powerful little rubber suction cup to pull it out backward. The square of glass was lying on the far end of the fire escape.

I wasn’t wearing a gun. For the first time in my life I acted stupidly. Instead of quietly pulling out, running home, getting mine, and coming back, I opened the window as softly as I could. It opened quietly. I picked up a heavy glass ashtray lying on an end table. I could throw it for temporary distraction.

I went into the bedroom. I felt better. There was no disorder. Her dress and shoes and fresh underwear were neatly laid out on the bed. There were two vases in the bedroom, one on the dresser table, and one on the night table. Both were crammed with the yellow roses. They all had opened almost all the way and their fragrance filled the room. A dozen roses lay on the pillow. She had run out of vases.

I walked into the bathroom.

The tub was full. She was lying face down in it.

I pulled her up. She was dead. There were cigarette burns all over her breasts and a wide band of adhesive tape across her mouth. Her hands were tied behind her back with a nylon stocking. There were fingermarks at the back of her neck.

The water was still hot. It must have just happened. It could have taken place while I was listening to the band and giving away money out of happiness. Her pocketbook was on the dresser. There was two hundred and seventy-five bucks in it. It had not been disturbed. The dresser drawers hadn’t been ransacked.

Therefore these people were not there for information or for money. They were professionals who had been told to work fast and get out. They were being so well paid that they bypassed any chance money they might pick up. They knew where I lived. They didn’t go through her pocketbook or drawers looking for a lead because they already knew.

So this was strictly a punitive expedition.

If Parrish could hire a private eye for some vigilante work, why couldn’t someone down there do the same thing? The technique wasn’t patented.

I shoved her money in my pocket. I had very little time. I held her cheek for a second. I let her slip back into the water.

In those private-eye novels I had been reading for the past three days, I knew what the hero would do. He would go home and get a gun. Or if he couldn’t go home, he would get one somewhere. He would bust in and have himself a shoot-out. He would kill them with a few well-placed shots. He would suffer a bullet in the shoulder which would miss the bone. Then there would follow an interview with an angry assistant D.A. The D.A. would warn him to watch his step in the future or he would lose his license. The D.A. would walk out of the hospital room and our hero would lie back and drink some twelve-year-old Bell’s, smuggled to him against orders by his beautiful nurse. Fade-out.

But life was different. What I wanted was a lot of distance between me and the D.A.

I opened the hall door. No one in sight. I walked down the stairs. I met no one.

Good luck to the son of a bitch who would think of prying up my ice-cube trays. It would probably be the super when they finally cleaned out my apartment. What would happen to my phony passport, I didn’t know. Probably the D.A. would keep it as enemy property. Well, the hell with it. I had my contact in Mexico City.

I walked quickly to the street and took a cab to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. I took a bus to Newark. There I phoned Homicide North in New York. I didn’t want the super to find her four, five days later. I just told the detective there was a dead body around, and when he began to ask my name, I hung up.

I took the next train to Philadelphia. About nine-thirty we were going by Princeton Junction. Only a few short hours ago I was standing there in the vestibule going the other way, all charged with excitement and romance. I suddenly remembered that my fingerprints were all over the windowsill, the ashtray, her pocketbook, probably the bathtub rim. The police would check out all her contacts, including her last employer of record. Me.

They would have my fingerprints on file as a registered private detective. By then the Okalusa police would be up there wanting to talk to me, and the Rebs and the Yanks would get together and fry me. They would work out that I had probably killed her to keep her from talking and that I had taken whatever money I might have given her. The four dozen roses I had sent would be considered some very clever work on my part to divert any suspicion she might have about my motives.

I got up and went into the men’s room. I locked the door, sat down and put my head in my hands. I rocked back and forth. I bit my knuckles to keep my head from exploding. I stayed there until some guy kept banging on the door.

At Philadelphia I took a train for El Paso. I bought some shaving equipment at the airport, cleaned myself up somewhat, and strolled over the border with the canvas bag over my shoulder, just like any tourist might who was going to Juarez to see his Mexican lawyer for a divorce.

I flew to Mexico City. After two days my contact man had my new passport ready. Then I took a ship at Puerto Mexico, down on the Gulf Coast, and made my way south down here.

For the first few weeks after I got here, I tried to figure out where I had gone wrong. Was it in hiring that crummy lawyer up in Toronto?

Shouldn’t I have traveled with her after Memphis and spent those three days trying to persuade her to marry me? Then I could have sent her to Mexico City and wound up my affairs down here in New York alone.

Shouldn’t I have come over to her place while I was waiting for Parrish to get the money? I wouldn’t have had a gun, but maybe I could have scared them off when they came through the window.

What I can’t stand is the thought that I didn’t go over because I wanted her to be surrounded by those roses for a few more hours.

So maybe it was the roses that killed her.

And then, if I hadn’t taken Parrish’s offer, I would have just plodded along, a little tail job here, a little industrial spying there, a little pilferage-checking here. And maybe sooner or later I would have noticed what was under my nose and married her.

Well, maybe.

I just discovered something, Father. If you begin drinking pretty early in the morning, you reach a pleasant buzz around ten
A.M.
So by ten, ten-thirty, you begin sort of drifting through the day. It’s like floating out there in the Caribbean, only there’s no sharks or barracuda to take a bite out of your ass.

Did you see that little green parrot just now? Twenty, thirty miles down the coast is the Rio Papagayo — the River of Parrots. It’s “twenty or thirty” because that’s what they say around here when you ask how far. The jungle here — see, I can reach it with a toss of the beer bottle — the jungle is full of those parrots. The full-grown ones are only a bit larger than sparrows. The kids catch them and sell them for about a quarter. The little parrots are affectionate, but I don’t want any. I don’t want to be responsible for anything living.

When I first came, Narcisco told me that some American mercenary on his way to the monthly revolution up at the capital bought one. He taught it to say “son of a bitch!” and then he let it go. That was eight or nine or ten years ago, Narcisco said. Notice the vague numbers.

Well, thousands of parrots picked it up from him and in turn taught it to the baby parrots. And so on. At dusk, Narcisco said, enormous flocks of parrots fly overhead, all of them cursing “sunnamabeetch!” This I had to see.

I persuaded Narcisco to sail down the coast one Sunday to the parrot country. But at dusk nothing came out of the jungle except mosquitoes. And when I asked a couple kids where the parrots were, they said it was another town down the coast.

“Veinte o treinta kilómetros?”

“Sí, sí!”

Well, it’s a little after four. I can tell by the sun. I haven’t worn a wristwatch since I came down here. You don’t need it and besides, the leather band rots off. The metal ones give you a rash.

I’d walk you back, but my legs wouldn’t hold me. Don’t forget your net and your collection bottle.

If you had one big enough, you could pop me in it. You wouldn’t need that cyanide you use. I’m about a hundred and forty proof right now. In a year or so my blood will be straight alcohol. I’ll keep.

You could take me back to the States all nicely mounted. With three pins in the traditional places required by our faith. You could explain to customs that you caught a large and stupid butterfly down on the Mosquito Coast.

Bad joke. I apologize.

I remember Parrish saying, “Don’t spend it all in one place.”

Other funny thing is this. Coming down in the
Santa Rosalia
out of Puerto Mexico, I found a copy of Shakespeare’s
Plays
in the toilet. It was in English and was leather-bound. The leather had all rotted away and no one aboard could read English. So they were tearing out the pages one by one.

I began reading it. They had reached
Othello,
Act Four. Somewhere near the end of Act Five I came across three lines. I forget who was supposed to have said them, but I’ve never forgotten them. They go,

One whose hand,

Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away,

Richer than all his tribe.

Yes, I know you have to go. Be sure to keep your hat on out there. Go with God,
vaya con Díos.
I’ll get Narcisco to give you some friction tape. Use it to tape the lids of your collection boxes. It’ll keep the ants out.

Watch out for the sun. It’s deceptive. It’s too much trouble boiling water all the time, so just drink beer. The launch going upriver is supposed to leave at seven tomorrow morning. If you’ll get there about eight-thirty, you’ll only have to wait twenty minutes or so. They’d never leave without you. They’re afraid you’ll put the evil eye on them. And if you run across any Americans up the river or in the capital, I’d appreciate it if you’d only discuss the insect situation down on the coast.

Nothing else. Nothing.

by
RICHARD ALEAS

Three years ago, detective John Blake solved a mystery that changed his life forever — and left a woman he loved dead. Now Blake is back, to investigate the apparent suicide of Dorothy Louise Burke, a beautiful college student with a double life. The secrets Blake uncovers could blow the lid off New York City’s sex trade... if they don’t kill him first.

Richard Aleas’ first novel, LITTLE GIRL LOST, was among the most celebrated crime novels of the year, nominated for both the Edgar and Shamus Awards.
But nothing in John Blake’s first case could prepare you for the shocking conclusion of his second...

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