Time to Murder and Create

He turned up an arrest inSanta Barbara for prostitution, sentence suspended. There was a narcotics bust in Vegas, thrown out for lack of evidence, with a strong implication that some family money had pulled her ass out of the fire. InSan Diego she was working a badger game with a partner who was a known pimp. It went sour one time; she turned state's evidence and picked up another suspension, while her partner pulled one-to-five in Folsom. The only time she served, as far as Spinner had been able to make out, was fifteen days inOceanside for drunk and disorderly.

Then she came back and married Kermit Ethridge, and if she hadn't gotten her picture in the paper at just the wrong time, she'd have been home free.

The Huysendahl material was hard to take. The documentary evidence was nothing special: the names of some prepubescent boys and the dates on which Ted Huysendahl had allegedly had sexual relations with them, a stat of hospital records indicating that Huysendahl had sprung for treatment of internal injuries and lacerations for one Jeffrey Kramer, age eleven. But the pictures did not leave you with the feeling that you were looking at the people's choice for the next governor ofNew YorkState .

There were an even dozen of them, and they portrayed a fairly full repertoire. The worst one showed Huysendahl's partner, a young and slender black boy, with his face contorted in pain while Huysendahl penetrated him anally. The kid was looking straight at the camera in that shot, as in several of the others, and it was certainly possible that the facial expression of agony was nothing but theater, but that possibility wouldn't prevent nine out of ten average citizens from gladly fitting a noose around Huysendahl's neck and hanging him from the nearest lamppost.

Chapter 4

At four thirty that afternoon I was in a reception room on the twenty-second floor of a glass and steel office building onPark Avenue in the high Forties. The receptionist and I had the room to ourselves. She was behind a U-shaped ebony desk. She was a shade lighter than the desk, and she wore her hair in a tight-cropped Afro. I sat on a vinyl couch the same color as the desk. The small white parson's table beside it was sparsely covered with magazines: Architectural Forum, Scientific American, a couple different golf magazines, last week's Sports Illustrated. I didn't think any of them would tell me anything I wanted to know, so I left them where they were and looked at the small oil on the far wall. It was an amateurish seascape with a great many small boats cavorting on a turbulent ocean.

Men leaned over the sides of the boat in the foreground. They seemed to be vomiting, but it was hard to believe the artist had intended it that way.

"Mrs. Prager painted that," the girl said. "His wife?"

"It's interesting."

"All those in his office, she painted them, too. It must be wonderful to have a talent like that."

"It must be."

"And she never had a lesson in her life."

The receptionist found this more remarkable than I did. I wondered when Mrs. Prager had taken up painting. After her children were grown, I supposed.

There were three Prager children: a boy in medical school at theUniversity ofBuffalo , a married daughter inCalifornia , and the youngest, Stacy. They had all left the nest now, and Mrs. Prager lived in a landlocked house inRye and painted stormy seascapes.

"He's off the phone now," the girl said. "I didn't get your name, I'm afraid."

"Matthew Scudder," I said.

She buzzed him to announce my presence. I hadn't expected the name would mean anything to him, and it evidently didn't, because she asked me what my visit was in reference to.

"I'm representing the Michael Litvak project."

If that registered, Prager wasn't letting on. She conveyed his continued puzzlement. "The Hit-and-Run Cooperative," I said. "The Michael Litvak project.

It's a confidential matter, I'm sure he'll want to see me."

I was sure he wouldn't want to see me at all, actually, but she repeated my words and he couldn't really avoid it. "He'll see you now," she said, and nodded her curly little head at a door marked PRIVATE.

His office was spacious, the far wall all glass with a rather impressive view of a city that looks better the higher up you go. The decor was traditional, in sharp contrast to the harsh modern furnishings of the reception room. The walls were paneled in dark wood—individual boards, not the plywood stuff. The carpet was the color of tawny port wine. There were a lot of pictures on the walls, all of them seascapes, all unmistakably the work of Mrs. Henry Prager.