‘Blurred View’
JOHN D. MACDONALD

CRIME: Blackmailer 
PLACE: San Francisco 
YEAR: 1964

BRIEFING: People in all walks of life, from libidinous Cabinet Ministers to adulterous housewives, have been the object of blackmail-some of whom have made headlines, with a great many more who have not. One of England’s most infamous blackmailers was Dr Neill Cream, who practised as a physician in Chicago and London as a cover for his nefarious activities which fed his obsession for sex, crime and murder. As he was about to die on the gallows in November i892, Cream is said to have begun the sentence, ‘I am Jack the...’ just before the rope snapped tight. In America in 1923, the unsolved murder of a pretty young model, Dot King, who was well known to have a number of rich admirers in New York, has long been ascribed to her being involved in a complex blackmail plot.

AUTHOR: John D. MacDonald (1916-87), another crime writer whose early work was published in paperback, has been described by fellow mystery author Richard Condon as ‘the great American storyteller’. Although perhaps best known as the creator of the Fort Lauderdale detective-thief Travis McGee, who makes his living recovering stolen property and outwitting crooked businessmen, the topics of blackmail and corruption have been recurring themes in his work. One of his earliest non-McGee novels, ‘The Only Girl in the Game’ (1960), is a tale of blackmail featuring an innocent young woman trapped into working for a criminal syndicate operating a Las Vegas casino; and corruption is the main theme in ‘Condominium’ (1977), concerning a corporate swindle. MacDonald brought an MBA degree from the Harvard School of Business Administration and a formidable intelligence to the writing of his crime stories and always kept himself up to date on the latest financial scams in case he needed the information for any of his plots. His very first novel, ‘The Brass Cupcake’, published in 1950, was an instant success, selling one and a half million copies, ensuring that his name was ever-present in book stores and that, in time, he was to be the most renowned original paperback crime novelist of his generation. MacDonald’s insight into human psychology-in particular what turns an honest man into a criminal or makes a gentle man a murderer-also earned him numerous awards from crime writers’ associations on both sides of the Atlantic. His regular output of two new titles per year has been much missed by his fans since his death. ‘Blurred View’, originally published in This Week magazine in 1964, is MacDonald at his most ingenious as he recounts what seems like a classic case of blackmail-until the surprise ending is reached...

THE STORY:

The funeral was a wretched affair. I suppose it was done as tastefully as one would expect. But great gaudy swarms of Gloria’s friends from the television industry came up from the Los Angeles area. They were dressed sedately, but still managed to seem like flocks of bright birds, men and women alike, their eyes bright and sharp and questing.
They had been at the inquest too, turning out in numbers which astonished the officials. I had not been surprised. If I learned any one thing from my marriage, it was that those people are incurably gregarious. They had absolutely no appreciation of privacy and decorum. Their ceaseless talk is like the chatter of birds, and largely incomprehensible to the outsider.
After the funeral I settled a few final details before going away. The lawyer had me sign the necessary things. Gloria had managed to squirrel away more than I expected, and she had invested it very shrewdly indeed. My own affairs were in a temporary lull. Bernard, at the gallery, made the usual apology about not being able to move more of my work, and offered his condolences, for the tenth time. I closed the Bay house and flew to the Islands.
Helen’s greeting was sweet and humble and adoring. She is a small, plain woman, quite wealthy, a few years older than I. She was most restful after the contentious flamboyance of Gloria. Her figure is rather good. During the weeks we had together she made several shy hints about marriage, but the unexpected size of Gloria’s estate gave me the courage to think of Helen as a patron rather than a potential wife.
We returned to Los Angeles by ship, in adjoining state-rooms, and parted warmly in that city. She was to return to New York to visit her children and settle some business matters concerning her late husband’s estate, then fly back out to San Francisco to be near me.
I moved back into the Bay house and listed it with a good broker. It is a splendid house, set high over the rocks, but a little too expensive to maintain, and a little too conspicuous for the bachelor life I contemplated. Also, there was a silence about it when I was alone there which made me feel uneasy, and made it difficult for me to work in the big studio which Gloria and I had designed together.
After I had been there alone for five days, a seedy little man arrived in the afternoon. He drove up in a battered little car and came to the door carrying a big manila envelope in his hand.
He was trying to say he had something to show me. He was humble, and nervous, and had a little recurring smile like a sudden grimace. He smelled sweaty. Something about him alarmed me. Reluctantly I led him back through the house to the studio.
He said, ‘Mr Fletcher, I just want to work something out. That’s all. I don’t want you should get the wrong idea about anything. It’s just one of those things. And we can work something out. The thing is, to talk it over.’
I’d had my share of bad dreams about this kind of situation. My voice sounded peculiar to me as I said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
He had put the envelope on a work table. He said, ‘What I do, I’m assistant manager, Thrifty Quick. My brother-in-law, he’s a doctor, got a home right over there across the way. You can’t see it today, it’s too misty. The thing is, I was laid up in April. Dropped a case on my foot, and I stayed over there with my sister. I guess I’m what they call a shutter bug. I’m a real nut on photography. It keeps me broke, I’m telling you.’
‘Mr Walsik, I haven’t the faintest...’
‘What I was fooling with, long-lens stuff on thirty-five millimetre. I was using a Nikon body and a bunch of adaptors, a tripod of course, and I figured it out it came to f22, sixteen hundred millimetres, and I was using Tri-X. I don’t suppose the technical stuff means anything to you, Mr Fletcher.’
‘You don’t mean anything to me, Mr Walsik.’
‘Figuring back, it had to be April tenth. A clear morning and no wind. Wind is bad when you use that much lens. You can’t get sharpness. The thing is, I was just experimenting, so I had to find some sharp-edged object at a distance to focus on, so I picked the edge of that terrace out there. I took some shots at different exposures, and after a while I thought I could see somebody moving around on the terrace. I took some more shots. I made notes on exposure times and so on. You know, you have to keep track or you forget.’
I sat down upon my work stool. This was the monstrous cliché of all murders, I had thought it a device of scenario writers, the accidental little man, the incongruous flaw. With an effort I brought my attention back to what he was saying.
‘...in the paper that she was all alone here, Mr Fletcher, and you proved you were somewhere else. Now I got to apologise for the quality of this print. It’s sixteen by twenty, which is pretty big to push thirty-five millimetre, and there was some haze, and that fast film is grainy, but here you take a look.’
I took the big black-and-white print and studied it. I was at the railing, leaning, arms still extended. He had caught her in free fall toward the rocks, some six feet below my outstretched hands, her fair hair and nylon peignoir rippled upward by the wind of passage. It brought it all back, scooping her up from the drugged and drowsy bed, walking with her slack warm weight, seeing her eyes open and hearing her murmurous question in the instant before I dropped her over the wall. The print was too blurred for me to be recognisable, or Gloria. But it was enough. The unique pattern of the wall was clear. It could no longer be ‘jumped or fell’. And with that picture, they could go back and pry at the rest of it until the whole thing fell apart.
When he took the picture out of my hands I looked up at him. He stepped backward very quickly and said in a shaking voice, ‘I got the negative in a safe place, with a letter explaining it.’
‘What do you want?’ I asked him.
‘Like I said, I just want to work something out, Mr Fletcher. The way I figure if I try to push too hard what I’ll do is spoil everything. What I want is for life to be a little easier. So I could get a little bit better apartment in a handier neighbourhood. And there’s some lenses and camera equipment I want to buy. I won’t be a terrible burden, you understand. But I don’t want to sell you the negatives. I want like a permanent-type thing, the way people get an annuity. I’ve got some bills I want to pay off, so the first bite, believe me, is bigger than the ones I’ll want later on. I was figuring it out. If you can get a thousand for me now, then in three or four months I’ll come back like for five hundred. I don’t see why we can’t work it out this way. I want you to be comfortable with it, so you won’t try to upset anything.’
He was actually pleading with me. And obviously frightened. And I found myself reappraising marriage to Helen. She could more readily afford Mr Walsik. I had no choice, of course. I had to agree.
He told me where to meet him, and when, and I promised to bring along the thousand dollars in tens and twenties. After he had left I had two stiff drinks and began to feel better. In ridding myself of Gloria I had saddled myself with Walsik, but he seemed a good deal easier to manage.
I found him two nights later exactly where he said he would be, in one of the rear booths of a tiresome little neighbourhood bar. I handed him the envelope and he tucked it away. As I got up to leave, two burly chaps grabbed me, snapped steel on my wrist, and bustled me out to an official sedan.
They tell me that I held out for fourteen hours before I finally began to give them those answers as deadly to me as the cyanide will be in the gas chamber.
After it was over, they let me sleep. The next afternoon they brought Walsik to see me. He was not seedy. He was not humble. His voice was not the same. He had that odd febrile, animal glitter so typical of Gloria’s friends in the industry.
‘While you were on the grass-skirt circuit, Frank baby,’ he said, ‘we borrowed your pad. We brought the long lenses. We rigged the safety net. A big crew of willing volunteers, baby, all the kids who loved Gloria. We guessed that’s how you did it. We took maybe fifty stills of Buddy dropping Nina over the wall. How did you like my performance, sweetie? You bought it good. After you bought it, we brought the law into it, to watch you give me money. Sit right there, Frank baby. Sit there and bug yourself with how stupid you were.’
I heard him leave, walking briskly down the corridor, humming a tune. Somebody said something to him. He laughed. A door clanged shut. And I began to go over it all, again and again and again...