False Negative (Hard Case Crime) (7 page)

“They were credited to you.”

“All it means is PixleyPix provided them for the
Press
.”

“Do you have others they haven’t run?”

“Two,” Pixley said. “McAvoy’s saving them for the next break in the investigation.”

“What are they?”

“One’s Mrs. Chase with her husband on their wedding day. Not many people know she was married. I’ve got her in a white
gown with him in his baseball flannels making their vows at home plate. The other is her in a swimsuit.
There’s
something to see.”

“At a beauty contest?”

“On a beach rubbing suntan oil on her legs. She’s not wearing a regular bathing suit,” Pixley said, “but one of those skimpy two-piece jobs from France. A bikini.” He pronounced it
by-kini
. “You can just about see what she had for breakfast.”

“I’d be interested in seeing them.”

“I’ll bet.” Pixley’s laugh was good-natured and lascivious.

“How about a preview?”

“My studio isn’t far from the
Press
. Drop by some time, and I’ll show you what I have.”

“Give me ten minutes,” Jordan said.

In eight he was a block from the Central Pier, looking up at a cast-iron-front building with Doric colonnades flaking in the salt air. He climbed the stairs to a jumpy Latin beat. On the second story, outside an Arthur Murray dance studio, he stopped to listen to the music and watch a conga line snake around the room.

One floor up a burst of light forced his eyes shut. They opened on a kaleidoscope of various shapes and colors, settling on the most interesting of them, a pink ball above an inverted triangle. As the other shapes fell away the ball was defined as the head of a man, the triangle as his torso. He wasn’t a big man, and the large, round head seemed to grow out of his narrow shoulders. The impression was of a baby who had grown in size without changing form, soft features differentiated inconclusively between adult and child, male and female, so the baby had raised a sparse moustache to ease the confusion. Blond hair falling over one eye caused Jordan to think of a Hollywood celebrity, though the name wouldn’t come. Reaching carefully for his hand, afraid of crushing it, he was seized in a leathery grip.

“I’m Pix.”

“Adam Jordan.”

Jordan went ahead inside a loft half the size of a city block, mostly empty space enclosed by white walls, rough wood planking, filthy windows under a stamped tin ceiling. A photographer’s screen was the backdrop for a banana split in a sparkling silver bowl. Beside it was a Hasselblad 2¼-inch camera and flash.

“Don’t let me interrupt.”

“The hard part’s done,” Pix said. “Shooting ice cream’s tricky. You have to construct the perfect sundae, set up the shot, and get the picture before the project turns to slush. This was a commercial job for Paolo’s Boardwalk Creamery. Now for the payoff.”

A corner of the loft was done up like a small apartment with an unmade bed, bookcase, and kitchen area. He rinsed a couple of spoons in a hand basin and brought one back for Jordan.

“No thanks.”

“Sure...?”

Pixley didn’t go more than 120-130 pounds. One thing Jordan knew about him. He didn’t do many shoots of banana splits.

The walls were hung with his best work. No ice cream, but plenty of artsy landscapes Jordan didn’t think were any good, dinghies, terns skimming the waves, and several of the sun coming up over the lighthouse at Barnegat that lacked a shrewd eye. There were portraits of children behaving cutely, and of animals, cats more than dogs, and pretty girls on the boardwalk. No nudes. Jordan looked at the stunted man meticulously blotting whipped cream from a corner of his mouth, and figured if there were any nudes they probably wouldn’t be of pretty girls.

A series of Negro children on fire escapes filled the space around two windows, along with Chinese kids cooling off under a fire hydrant and Jewish boys with ritual fringes and sidelocks. One wall was covered by panoramic views of the beach between the Central and Steel Piers. A nighttime scene of a corpse
leaking blood onto the running board of a big Packard limousine was more to Jordan’s taste.

“Like it?” Pixley asked him.

“It’s a great shot.”

“Unfortunately it isn’t mine.” Pix looked up from the silver bowl. “Weegee’s my idol.”

He faulted Jordan for preferring Weegee’s work, and was fishing for an apology. The apology, Jordan thought, should come from Pix for not taking better pictures. Pix was a sly sentimentalist with the camera. His idol’s noir sensibilities were absent from the walls.

Jordan had an idea that the little man’s personality was a product of the same gene responsible for his grip. His stature and shapelessness were a disguise, but he was too damn peculiar not to be appealing. Watching him put away the banana split like it was steak, Jordan remembered the celebrity whose name had eluded him. Not a movie star—a literary sensation. Truman Capote.

On top of a file cabinet were a jumble of photos which he spread out for Jordan to see. In addition to the three pictures of Suzie Chase that ran in the
Press
were two that were new. Pix had described the wedding scene without mentioning that the man marrying the Chases between the foul lines was an umpire. Hub was a lug with the shoulders of a lumberjack, and a mafia hitman’s five o’clock shadow. A hitman crazy for his bride. The shot of Suzie in her bikini went a long way toward explaining why.

Suzie Chase was the wrong kind of beautiful. Jordan knew that she would never have made it to Miss America, probably gone no higher than a Miss New Jersey runner-up. She wasn’t what the organizers wanted to parade before the public as a queen. She exemplified something that was not regal—was, in fact, the opposite—the blatant objective of any competition among beautiful women that would interest Jordan. If it were
up to him, every contestant would be Suzie Chase. Pix handed him a magnifying glass to examine the picture of the girl in the tiny swimsuit.

“What do you think?”

“You know what I’m thinking,” Jordan said.

“She’s dead, don’t forget.”

“I saw her dead. I’m not thinking about her dead.” Jordan frowned at Pix, who couldn’t suppress a smile. Invited to ogle a murder victim, he’d been set up to play the necrophile.

Pixley looked back as though he’d been misunderstood. “I’m glad you see it my way.”

Jordan didn’t know which way that was.

“What a waste,” Pix said.

Jordan didn’t take the bait. “How’d you get the shot?”

“Stole it—it’s part of the job. I’ve cut head shots out of high school yearbooks, swiped the only photo a seventeen-year-old widow had of her husband killed at Inchon. I could have had more of Mrs. Chase if I wanted to make a pig of myself. Like I told you, these will be returned.”

“Did the roommates talk to you about her?”

“I was there for pictures. I posed the other girls in the kitchen to make them comfortable with me. After that, I had the run of the place.”

“Where are the photos?”

“I threw out the negatives without developing them,” Pix said. “They aren’t pretty girls. Not bright either. Cows—dairy cows. They didn’t know Susannah Chase was married, and accused Rollo of spreading lies. Those kind of girls.”

Jordan wondered what made him an authority on girls.

“Do you know anything about Hub?”

“Rollo’s seen him play. He says he’s a natural hitter with a short, sweet stroke.”

“Before you return the photos of his wife,” Jordan said, “make another set of prints. Girls like her, they don’t—”

“Fall off trees?”

“Get murdered every day.”

“I should hope not.” Pix went back to the banana split. When he finished, Jordan watched him lick the bowl. “What are the chances you’ll get to write the case?”

“It depends on the cops.”

“It isn’t fair a twenty-two-year-old girl is dead for being beautiful,” Pix said. “Is there something—anything you can do to help them find her killer?”

“You’ve got ice cream on your nose,” Jordan said.

“I’ve got one from the Pine Barrens,” Jordan said. “Am I poaching on someone else’s territory?”

“His tough luck if you are,” Pelfrey said. “Shoot.”

“The Barrens are a million acres of wilderness smack in the middle of New Jersey that might as well be West Virginia. The locals have been cut off since colonial times. You’ve heard about the Jukes and Kallikaks the scientists studied for the effects of inbreeding?”

“What have they got to do with murder?” Pelfrey said.

“I’m giving you local color.”

“The hell with color,” Pelfrey said. “Who’s dead?”

“A cranberry grower, name of A.B. Tyler. He lived in a shack his great-grandfather had put up on stilts by his bog. When berries weren’t in season he got by as a trapper and a hunter.

“Tyler was thirty-seven when he married,” Jordan went on. “His bride was fifteen. A.B. was content with his berries and his trap lines. When Mrs. Tyler complained, told him she wanted to step out, he took to clouting her. At least that’s what the lawyer says.”

“You haven’t told me about the killing yet, and I know who did it.”

“I can have the cops scratching their head before they get onto her,” Jordan said.

“Mrs. Tyler anything to look at?”

“I’d go without pictures of the suspect,” Jordan said.

“Strike two.”

“Let me finish,” Jordan said. “Mrs. Tyler had a young man on the side in Wading River. When she began shirking her matrimonial responsibilities, A.B. slapped her around more than usual. They were all alone in the woods, no cops, nearest neighbors miles away. Mrs. Tyler decided the prudent thing was to kill A.B., and make it look like something else.”

“What something else? An accident?”

“Act of God.”

“Keep religion out of your stories,” Pelfrey said, “unless one of the principals is of the cloth.”

“October’s harvest time,” Jordan said. “The growers flood the bogs to loose the berries from the bushes. Then they rake them up and pack them off to the Ocean Spray co-op. It’s back-breaking work, leaves them bone-tired.

“A.B. came home from the bog one night and threw himself down on the bed. When Mrs. Tyler heard snoring, she cracked his head with a skillet, and looped a clothesline around his throat till he quit breathing. Mrs. Tyler is not a large woman. She couldn’t carry her husband out of the shack to bury him in the woods, couldn’t even move him out of bed. What she did, she built a fire under him, made it look like he’d been smoking in bed. She figured the flames would burn up the cabin, and destroy any evidence of murder, and she’d be in Wading River when news of her husband’s unfortunate death caught up to her.”

Pelfrey said, “But?”

“Did I mention that A.B. had flooded his bog? He must have had a seepage problem, because some of the water ran off into a depression under the shack, and collected there.

“When Mrs. Tyler saw the place going up in smoke, she cleared out without looking back. What she didn’t take into
account,” Jordan said, “was the fire burning through the floor. Cops found the bed in the water under the shack with A.B. toasted on one side, and with rope marks around his neck and his brains out the top of his head. The widow’s staring down a life sentence.”

“Twenty years tops,” Pelfrey said. “New Jersey’s a progressive state. She’s still a kid.”

“Getting around the fact that Mrs. A.B. Tyler is not a handsome woman, what I have in mind is a compelling love triangle story. Are you interested?”

“You’ll need pictures of the cabin, the victim, and some cops,” Pelfrey said. “Don’t bother about the suspect, if she’s the dog you say she is. Describe her as being unconventionally beautiful.”

“I’d be lying.”

“You’d be exercising good judgment. The readers trust that beauty is in the eye of the beholder—namely ours. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have what to fill our books. Ever get to New York, Jordan?”

“When Billie Holiday’s on Fifty-second Street, or Bird—Charlie Parker is.”

“I like your work. Next time you’re in town, come by the office. Lunch on you. Meanwhile, stop wasting time on the phone. I’m dying for copy.”

Jordan called Pix Pixley, told him to get the shots.

In the prison movies that were Morris Wing’s favorites before he went away the gates swung shut with a resounding clang whenever a convict was let out of stir. For sixteen-and-two-thirds years Wing had been waiting for that sound at his back. But after breakfast on his release date he was brought through the administration building to an exit as inauspicious as a crap-house door. What he heard were hinges that needed oil. The warden was not there to remind him to keep his nose clean. Not a single guard shouted
See you soon.

Beyond the shadow of the walls the river ran clear and blue. There was never a time, glimpsing the Hudson through the bars, that Wing hadn’t dreamed of crashing out. How he would make good on his escape was not detailed. He saw himself in the water, swept along in the current. Wing’s dreams were short on specifics until he was in New York with a knife in his pocket.

The old bus was one of the few things on the street that looked the same. The sleek cars without running boards and headlight cowlings were designed for the people in sharp clothes going around with a spring in their step, a far cry from the Great Depression, when Wing was sent up. He was nineteen then. Nearly middle-aged now, he felt old. Little in this new world seemed as it should be, least of all himself. The only thing that hadn’t changed was his hatred for the man who’d ruined his life.

Two cons from Wing’s block sat at window seats and pressed their face against the glass. Wing shut his eyes. He didn’t want to be distracted by new things. The way he figured it, the bus ride was the first leg on a round trip. The new things would
create appetites that would frustrate him when he was on the inside again.

Wing was first off the bus at the terminal near Times Square. The newsstands were crammed with girlie magazines in full color. Flipping through one, he was surprised by how much skin they showed. A redhead with huge jugs was on the cover, and when you unfolded her picture in the center you even got a look at her nipples. Wing replaced the magazine in the rack. Big jugs were something he’d struggled to forget about in prison. No sense in stoking an appetite for them either.