“I’ve done ten years in jail,” Murray went on. “I’m thirty-seven years old now. I have survived so far, and now I’m sticking my neck way out, taking a lot of risks, but I hate to see a nice little girl like you getting pushed around and in trouble.”
He turned from the windshield and looked straight at me. “I’m doing this for you, but you’ve got to do one thing for me. This is no kid’s game we’re in. This is dangerous, serious work tonight. You’ve got to do just what I say every minute, and you’ll be all right. Don’t be afraid, and do exactly as I tell you.”
I think my eyes were as wide as the ocean. “What do you mean, Murray?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you, Xaviera. Whatever you see tonight, you’ll forget. And don’t ever mention my name or tell anybody what happened.”
I looked out the car window at the wet streets and the rain, and I was cold yet perspiring at the same time.
“Murray,” I asked after a while, “why do we have to meet in front of a cemetery in Queens, of all places, which is a very scary place, especially on a gloomy night like this?”
Murray answered me as though I was a dumb child. “Xaviera,” he said, “that’s the idea. What do you think? They’re going to meet you in front of Saks Fifth Avenue, or in front of Maxwell’s Plum? They’ve got to meet us where there will be no witnesses.”
At fifteen after eight Murray stopped in front of the cemetery. There was a highway right next to us with traffic buzzing by. To our right was the monument, and beside it, with an arched roof, a little dead-end alley maybe fifteen feet long.
There was no other car to be seen when we parked. “Murray,” I said, “this is a phony-baloney deal. It’s a quarter after eight, and why aren’t they here?” I wanted to go home in the worst way before something terrible happened.
Murray looked at me fiercely. “Do as I tell you. Get in the back of the car and shut up. And for Christ’s sake, don’t shake like that, like some little bird freezing to death.”
So I took my umbrella, my weapon for the evening, and climbed over the front seat and sat in the back of the car. But nothing happened. We saw cars drive by, and nobody stopped. And the rain kept pouring down, and I was freezing. Murray smoked one cigarette after another, and I saw he was getting more and more nervous. He opened the window, and you could hardly see out.
Then slowly, from nowhere, a car pulled up behind us with its lights on. “Murray, they’re here,” I said. Looking out the back window, I could see that there were two men in the front seat of the car. “Murray, that’s unfair,” I said. “We talked to only one man.”
Murray kept saying, “Don’t worry, don’t worry.” The car pulled up and passed us, and we could see the men looking into our car to see how many of us there were. Then the car kept going and stopped about four car lengths in front of us. The two men lit cigarettes and smoked them. Then a fellow stepped out of the car and came close to us. Under the street light I could see he was dressed in a white rain jacket and blue jeans. He had long blond stringy hair and a three- or four-day-old. beard. He was definitely a punky guy, and looked exactly like the description of the person who put the note under my door. He knocked on the window next to Murray, who cranked it down and said, “Hiya. I’m her uncle.”
The guy said, “Can I talk to you, buddy?”
Murray opened the door on the passenger side, and the messy guy walked around the car. He was talking and babbling to himself and he finally got in. Obviously he was stoned out of his head.
His eyes were sort of rolling around in his head, and he started saying things like, “We don’t mean so badly, but girls like this shouldn’t be around, dragging dirty pictures around to show everybody.”
I got aggravated and shouted, “What do you mean, show them to everybody? Those pictures were stolen out of my apartments”
“Shut up!” Murray said to me, and I shut my mouth. Then he turned to this pothead beside him. “Let’s go outside and talk. Who is the guy up front in the car?”
The doped-up hippie type said, “Yeah, I’m going to go away. We’re willing to settle for four thousand. Let’s settle right now.”
Murray shook his head. “No. I don’t think we should settle it right now. I think we should go outside and not discuss it in front of this lady.”
He gestured to me to open the window just a little so that I could hear what was happening, and in the pouring rain Murray stepped out on his side of the car, and the other guy got out of his door. I don’t think he knew if it was raining or the sun was shining, the way he was babbling.
The minute Murray left the car, the man in the car up front got out, too. He opened an umbrella and walked up to Murray and the doped-up kid. He acted like the leader, and although the light was bad, especially with the umbrella over his head, I could almost swear it was Mac. The same big fat-looking type. The three of them talked for about ten minutes, when all of a sudden two big strong headlights illuminated the scene. A big truck stopped behind us.
When the lights hit us I was more scared than ever, if that is possible. What the hell was happening? Were people trying to kill us, or what? But the truck driver just stepped out of the cab, and for the first time I saw there was a telephone booth there. The driver went to the booth and made a call. It seemed like he was in there for an hour, but in reality it was maybe two minutes.
All the time I wondered what Murray and Mac and the doped-up boy were talking about and what Murray was going to do. Finally the truck driver left the phone booth, and the truck pulled away.
Mac, holding the umbrella down over his head, went back to his car, got in, and closed the door after him. Then I saw Murray gesturing to the blond guy, and I could hear a few words he was saying. “Wait a minute. I’ll get it for you.”
Murray came back to the car and said in a loud voice, “I’m going to give him his goddamned four thousand and get your pictures back.”
Like a little idiot I said, “But, Murray, I don’t have four thousand dollars.”
In a rasping whisper he said, “Shut up.” And he reached in and took out a brown bag that looked like it was stuffed with something. He straightened up and gestured to the blond guy to go and stand inside the covered-over dead-end alley where he could count the money out of the rain and see that it was right.
I watched as Murray walked toward the alley, his back to me. The other guy stood with his face turned toward me, and I could see him through the rain, somewhat blurred. Then I saw Murray reaching into the bag as though to start giving the money to the young guy. Next thing I knew there were three very soft pops, and the young guy collapsed on the ground. Nobody but me could see into the alley, and then Murray walked back to the car at normal speed and shoved something into his pocket. He got into the car and we drove away. I was still sitting in the back seat.
“My God, Murray, what did you do?” I asked.
As usual, he just said, “Don’t worry.”
“But how can I help worrying?” I said. “Murray, you just shot a man, three times. I heard you shoot him with a silencer on your gun. Was that what you had in the bag?” I kept asking questions as we drove back toward New York.
Finally Murray said, “Kid, we don’t take halfway measures with bastards like these. What right do they have to blackmail a hard-working girl like you?”
“But, Murray, you still don’t have the pictures,” I pointed out.
All the way back to New York Murray didn’t say anything except, “Don’t worry, I’ll deliver the pictures tomorrow:” But in my mind I kept seeing this young boy slowly collapse and fall in the alley.
Okay, he was a head, a junkie. But I saw him lying there. It was horrible to me. He was killed to get three lousy pictures back. So I kept insisting, “Murray, please tell me what happened so far.”