Time to Murder and Create

It had been Matt up until then. I wondered what kind of a number he wanted to run. Maybe he was just fishing, but he had visions of something or other. Maybe he wanted to take my place in the blackmail dodge, only he'd want real money, not the name of a murderer. Maybe he figured the other pigeons had committed real crimes and he could buy himself a commendation by knocking them off. I didn't know him well enough to guess which motivation would be consistent with the man, but it didn't really make very much difference.

"I don't get it," I said. "I give you a homicide collar on a silver platter and you want to melt down the platter."

"I'm sending a couple boys over to pick up Ethridge. In the meantime, you and me are going to open up a safe-deposit box."

"I could forget where I left the key."

"And I could make your life difficult."

"It's not that much of a cinch as it is. It's just a few blocks from here."

"Still raining," he said. "We'll take a car."

WE drove over to the Manufacturers Hanover branch at Fifty-seventh and Eighth. He left the black-and-white in a bus stop. All that to save a three-block walk, and it wasn't raining all that hard any more. We went inside and went down the stairs to the vault, and I gave my key to the guard and signed the signature card.

"Had the damnedest thing you ever heard of a few months back," Guzik said. He was friendly now that I was going along with him. "This girl rented a box over at Chemical Bank, and she paid her eight bucks for a year, and she was visiting the box three or four times a day. Always with a guy, always a different guy. So the bank got suspicious and asked us to check it out, and wouldn't you know, the chick is a pross. Instead of taking a hotel room for ten bucks, she's picking up her tricks on the street and taking them to the fucking bank, for Christ's sake. Then she gets her box out and they show her to the little room, and she locks the door and gives the guy a quick blow job in complete privacy, and then she sticks the money in the box and locks it up again. And all it runs her is eight bucks for the year instead of ten bucks a trick, and it's safer than a hotel because if she gets a crazy he's not going to try beating her up in the middle of a fucking bank, is he? She can't get beaten up and she can't get robbed, and it's perfect."

By this time the guard had used his key and mine to get the box from the vault. He handed it to me and led us to a cubicle. We entered together, and Guzik closed and locked the door. The room struck me as rather cramped for sex, but I understand people do it in airplane lavatories, and this was spacious in comparison.

I asked Guzik what had happened to the girl.

"Oh, we told the bank not to press charges, or all it would do was give every streetwalker in the business the same idea. We told them to refund her box-rental fee and tell her they didn't want her business, so I guess that's what they did. She probably walked across the street and started doing business with another bank."

"But you never got any more complaints."

"No. Maybe she's got a friend at Chase Manhattan." He laughed hard at his own line, then chopped it off abruptly. "Let's see what's in the box, Scudder."

I handed it to him. "Open it yourself," I said.

He did, and I watched his face while he looked through everything. He had some interesting comments on the pictures he saw, and he gave the written material a fairly careful reading. Then he looked up suddenly.

"This is all the stuff on the Ethridge dame."

"Seems that way," I said.

"What about the others?' "

"I guess these safe-deposit vaults aren't as foolproof as they're supposed to be. Somebody must have come in and taken everything else."

"You son of a bitch."

"You've got everything you need, Guzik. No more and no less."

"You took a different box for each one. How many others are there?"

"What difference does it make?"

"You son of a bitch. So we'll walk back and ask the guard how many other boxes you have here, and we'll take a look at all of them."

"If you want. I can save you a little time."

"Oh?"

"Not just three different boxes, Guzik. Three different banks. And don't even think about shaking me for the other keys, or running a check on the banks, or anything else you might have in mind. In fact, it might be a good idea if you stopped calling me a son of a bitch, because I might get unhappy, and I might decide not to cooperate in your investigation. I don't have to cooperate, you know.

And if I don't, your case goes down the drain. You can possibly tie Ethridge to Lundgren without me, but you'll have a hell of a time finding anything a D.A. is going to want to take to court."

We looked at each other for a while. A couple of times he started to say something, and a couple of times he figured out that it wasn't a particularly good idea. Finally something changed in his face, and I knew he'd decided to let it go.

He had enough, and he had all he was going to get, and his face said he knew it.