PAPER CAPER, by James Holding

Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, February 1979.

Howard Slack had long since given up any hope of becoming a second Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade. As far as he was concerned, the private detective business was strictly a bummer. After eking out a bare living at it for twenty years, his clients usually petty criminals and their women, his detective work the gathering of unsavory evidence to be used for blackmail or divorce, he had no illusions left.

Nevertheless, when Doris Lasswell walked into his shabby office, he rose from his swivel chair, bowed across his desk toward her and said politely, “Can I help you, Miss?” He was desperate for business.

The girl was maybe fifteen years old, Slack guessed. And she looked not at all like a potential client. More like a typical sloppy high-school kid with her faded blue jeans, dirty T-shirt, thong sandals, long mouse-colored hair, aggressive chin, and uncertain expression. A typical high-school girl except for one thing: she had a black eye—a beauty, just reaching yellow-and-purple maturity. Definitely not a potential client. But since one of the few things Slack had learned for sure during his sleazy career was that appearances are usually deceptive, he continued to smile warmly at her until Doris said. “Are you Mr. Slack?” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder at the chipped lettering of his name on the office door.

“I’m Slack, yes. What can I do for you?”

She hesitated. “I’m not sure you can do anything for me.”

“Neither am I,” Slack said, “until you tell me what your problem is. And whether you can pay me for my help. You have any money?”

She shook her head.

Slack sighed. He sat down in his swivel chair and gestured wearily toward the door. “No freebies here, Miss. I’m sorry.”

She didn’t move.

Slack said, “Do you understand what I’m saying? You got no money, you get no detective. So out. I’m a busy man.”

The girl came to a decision of some sort. She swallowed and said, “I think you’ll be interested in what I can tell you, Mr. Slack. Even if I have no money to pay you with—yet.” She added the last word softly.

Slack felt a small spark of interest begin to glow. “Sit down then. And tell me who you are. And what you think I’ll be so interested in.”

“I’m Doris Lasswell.” She sank bonelessly into the straight chair on the other side of Slack’s desk. “And I think I know something about a local crime. When Slack didn’t respond, she went on. “If you’re a detective, you’re supposed to be interested in crimes.”

“That’s right,” said Slack. “But if you already know about this crime, whatever it is, you don’t need a private detective, kid. Go tell the cops about it, not me. I’ve got a living to make.”

“I don’t want to tell the police.”

“Why not?”

“Because if I told the police they wouldn’t help me with my problem. But if I tell you maybe you will.

“What’s that mean?”

She swallowed again and gazed rather desperately around his cramped, undusted office. Then she said in a small voice, “Maybe I better tell you about my problem first.”

“I can see your problem from here,” Slack said. “Your boyfriend give you that beautiful shiner?”

She ran a finger tenderly over the swollen discolored flesh around her eye. Her lips pulled down. “Not my boyfriend, no. I don’t have one. My father.”

“Your father? Well, well.”

“He’s not—not nice to me. Mr. Slack. Not like he used to be. Not like a father at all, really. He has a few drinks down at Casey’s Tavern, and—and usually ends up doing something like this to me.” She touched her eye again.

“Why?” Slack asked without much interest.

Doris scraped her sandal over the thin place in the rug at her feet. “Well, my mother left us a year ago, and my father was surprised and mad—he still is—and I suppose he tried to take it out on me, you know? Anyway, I’ve got to get away from him. Mr. Slack. As far as I can. I can’t stand living with him anymore, he’s really impossible.” She broke off miserably.

“Never mind,” Slack said. “So you want to get away from your old man because he beats you. I can understand that. Now what’s this crime you’d rather tell me about than the cops?”

“I think it could involve a lot of money,” Doris said slowly, “for someone. A lot of money, Mr. Slack. But if I told the police about it, nobody would get any of the money, do you see? So I thought I’d tell you and maybe—” She let the sentence trail off.

“You thought I might latch onto this money and give you enough of it to get away from your father, is that it?”

“Oh, yes. Doris breathed. “That’s it, Mr. Slack. Exactly. Would you?”

Slack leaned back in his chair. He was impressed despite himself by the girl’s earnestness. Yet there had to be a joker in her story somewhere. For this ugly beat-up teenager couldn’t possibly know any secret information about a lot of loose money, could she?

“I can’t promise anything, Doris,” Slack said carefully, “till I know a little more about the setup.”

Her battered face showed relief. “That means you’ll help me?”

“Maybe. Tell me about the money.

“Well,” she said, “my father and I live in Fernwood Mobile Home Park south of town. Do you know where that is?”

“Sure. Out past the phosphate plant across from an A&P store.”

She nodded. “That’s where my father works, the phosphate plant. Anyway, our next-door neighbor in Fernwood Park is an old retired man named Landry. He has one of those huge double-size trailers that take up two whole lots and have almost as much room in them as a regular house, you know?”

“Never mind about the trailer,” Slack said.

“But that’s where I saw the crime, Mr. Slack. So I have to tell you about it.”

Slack sighed. “Okay, tell me about it.”

“Well, Mr. Landry lives in half of his trailer and uses the other half as a sort of office and laboratory. He was a chemist for a paper company before be retired, and he still likes to fool around with experiments and things, he says. Anyway, he’s been real nice to me the few times I’ve talked to him. He’s only lived there for six months or so.” She paused. “When I do my homework after school, I sit beside a window in our trailer that faces the window in Mr. Landry’s laboratory. His window’s usually closed and has thick curtains inside, but last Thursday it was very hot, and Mr. Landry’s window was open and the curtains inside were apart a little way and I could see in.”

“What did you see?”

“Mr. Landry was in there, running some kind of a machine.”

“A machine?”

“Yes, a paper-cutting machine, I guess, with a little spout on top that kept dripping all the time. Anyway, Mr. Landry was cutting up a long narrow roll of paper with his machine into little pieces about an inch square, or maybe two inches. Then, every once in a while, the machine would gather up a bunch of the little squares and stick them together somehow, like in pads, you know?”

Slack was bored. He said impatiently, “This is a crime? For a retired paper maker to be making his own memo pads?”

Doris nodded vigorously. “Wait. After Mr. Landry finished making up a lot of the little pads, there was one square of paper left over. And Mr. Landry picked it up and held it out in front of him, like he was proposing a toast or something, and then he laughed out loud and said, ‘Here’s to the machine that will make me rich. Time for a little celebration, Landry, don’t you think?’”

Slack looked puzzled. “So he’s doped out some kind of machine. That’s no crime.”

Doris rushed on. “But listen. Do you know what Mr. Landry did to celebrate his new machine?”

Slack shook his head. “What?”

“He ate that little square of paper! He put it in his mouth and chewed it up and swallowed it! I saw him!”

Slack froze.

Gravely, Doris nodded. “I’ve seen it at school,” she offered by way of explanation. “Some of the kids do it.”

Slack drew a deep breath. After a moment he said quietly, “How many other people have you told about this, Doris?”

“Nobody but you.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“Then who sent you to me?”

“Nobody. I just decided for myself, because of what I heard about you.”

“What was that?”

“That you’re crooked. That you falsify reports to clients. That you’re connected with the dope traffic. That you’d sell your own grandmother for money!” Doris looked him in the eye.

Slack frowned. “Where did you hear that?”

“One of my father’s friends is a deputy sheriff. He came to our trailer last night to have supper with my father. While they were drinking beer I was cooking their hamburgers in the kitchen, and I heard my father ask him about who would be a good private detective to hire to try to trace my mother and make her come home.”

“Oh,” said Slack sarcastically. “I get it. This smart-aleck deputy recommended me, I suppose. Because I’m crooked and falsify reports and so on?”

Doris regarded him out of her good eye. “No, Mr. Slack,” she said. “The deputy told my father any private detective in the yellow pages would be fine except you. Because you’re crooked and falsify.”

Slack held up his hand. “Please.”

“You believe me, don’t you? I thought that if the deputy was right, that you’d do anything for money, you might be willing to help me if I told you about Mr. Landry.”

For a full minute, Slack sat silent. Then he gave Doris a bitter smile. “I’ll check out your story, and if you’re handing it to me straight I’ll try to help you work it out so you’ll have enough bread to split from your old man. But if I do, you’ll have to help me.”

Doris leaned forward eagerly. “Oh, I will!” she said. “I will! Tell me how.”

Slack told her.

* * * *

That was Tuesday. On Friday night, Slack made a long-distance telephone call to New Orleans. “Is Mr. Prince there?” he asked the man who answered the phone. Prince was a former client.

When Prince said hello, Slack said, “Hiya, Hon. This is Howard Slack.”

“Slack? The peeper?”

“Right.”

“What do you want?” It was not a cordial greeting.

“I’d like to ask you a couple of questions, Ron. Okay.?”

“It’s your nickel.”

“LSD,” Slack said. “Is there still a market for it? Or did it go down the tube with the hippies?”

“Are you kidding? Listen, I could sell tapioca pudding at ten bucks an ounce if there was a high in it. Sure there’s still a market for LSD. Especially on the Coast. Why? You got some to sell?”

“Well, I could have,” Slack answered cautiously. “Packaged in individual doses, neat and convenient.”

“What do you mean, packaged?”

“Little squares of paper for each dose, bound into pads of a hundred sheets.”

“Neat, all right.” Prince laughed. “That way, we could distribute it through stationery stores and Woolworth’s if we wanted to. How much of it do you have a line on?”

“I’m not sure yet. But a hell of a lot.”

“And you want to know if I’ll take it off your hands, right?

“Right. And at what price.”

Slack held his breath until Prince replied, “Depends on the quality, quantity, and how greedy you are.”

“The quality’s absolutely first class,” Slack said at once. With Doris Lasswell acting as lookout while Landry was shopping two days before, Slack had let himself into Landry’s trailer with a skeleton key and appropriated one of the pads of paper squares that he had found packed into two large suitcases in Landry’s laboratory closet. Had Landry packed them up that way for shipment or delivery? Slack didn’t know. But he’d tested the stuff himself—eaten one of the squares from his stolen pad—and had been rewarded with a trip so good that he’d never forget it.

Prince was saying, “How do you know the quality’s all that good?”

“I tested it myself, Ron. It’s that good, believe me. Super.”

“Since when are you an acid head?”

“Since never. Except for experiments years ago—and this one test.” He waited. “Ron?”

“Yeah?”

“How much does a dose go for on the street?”

“Since inflation,” Prince said, “about three or four bucks.”

Slack felt a surge of exultation. There were a couple of thousand pads in Landry’s suitcases. With a hundred doses to a pad, at four dollars a dose…

Prince said, “But a buck, a buck and a half, is tops for your cut, Slack. I need something and my distributors need something. We do all the work.”

“Sure,” said Slack, “sure, I understand that.” It was still a lot of money.

“So when do you figure to make delivery?” Prince asked.

“Give me a week, okay.? I’ll bring it to you myself.”

“Okay, peeper.” Prince hung up.

* * * *

On Sunday night, just as it was getting dark, Doris called Slack at his run-down efficiency apartment on the South Side. She said, “Mr. Slack? He’s going to the movies tonight.”

“Landry?”

“Yes. The nine o’clock show at the Orpheum.”

“How do you know?”

“He told me.”

“How come?”

“After dinner tonight, when my father went off to Casey’s, I looked over and saw Mr. Landry sitting in a chair behind his trailer. He has a little terrace back there, you know? And he looked pretty lonesome. So I took him over a piece of the chocolate cake I made yesterday and hung around while he ate it. He told me he was going to the movies later to see some science-fiction thing at the Orpheum.”

“Did he say the nine o’clock show? You’re sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. You told me to watch him and let you know when you could—”

“Yes, and you’ve done great, Doris. He won’t get out of the theater until after eleven, which gives us plenty of time. So tonight’s the night. As soon as I fill up with gas, I’ll meet you in the A&P parking lot across from your place. Okay.?”

Her voice was shrill with excitement. “It certainly is okay.! I can hardly wait!”

“About half an hour then,” he said. Then, amused, “You got your trunks all packed to make your getaway from your old man?”

“I’ve had my stuff packed for three days,” Doris replied seriously. “Only it’s not in trunks, just a backpack.” She was silent for a few seconds, then said with fervor before she hung up, “Oh, Mr. Slack, I hope I never see my father again after tonight!”

“You won’t, baby, you won’t,” Slack murmured, staring thoughtfully at the wall. He hadn’t quite decided yet what he’d do about Doris. A teenaged witness with a big mouth wasn’t the safest thing to have running free on your backtrail. But first things first, he thought.

* * * *

The A&P parking area across from Fern wood Mobile Home Park was dark and deserted on Sunday nights. Slack turned off his headlights as he eased into the lot, reversed his car, and pointed it at the exit ramp before he climbed out and acknowledged Doris’s presence. She was seated on the low stone coping that surrounded the lot, her backpack in the shadow at her feet.

She jumped up as he approached her. “Mr. Landry left his house right after I talked to you on the phone,” she told him in a conspiratorial whisper.

“Good,” said Slack. “Now listen, Doris. I’m going into Landry’s to get those suitcases of LSD—it’ll take me two trips they’re so damn heavy, but the whole operation shouldn’t take more than ten or fifteen minutes before we’re on our way to New Orleans. Here.” He handed her his car keys. “Have the car trunk open when I get back with the first load, and put your own stuff in the back seat with my bag. Okay.?”

“Okay. But please hurry!”

Slack crossed the road quietly and disappeared inside the gates of Fernwood Park.

* * * *

Exactly eight minutes later he drove his second-hand Chevrolet out of the A&P lot with two suitcases full of LSD in the trunk and a shivering Doris Lasswell in the passenger seat beside him. “No need to be scared, kid,” he said. “I told you it would be a breeze.”

“I’m not scared,” Doris said. “I’m terribly happy and excited, that’s all. Aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I guess I am at that.” Slack shook his head in disbelief, but his voice held a thread of triumph. “How about us for a couple of operators, Doris? It only takes us a lousy little ten minutes to solve the biggest problems we got. Ten minutes for you to get loose from your old man, ten minutes for me to get rich.” He rolled the word on his tongue in the manner of a man tasting a vintage wine. He drove sedately across town at a speed slightly below the posted limit. The Sunday-night traffic was light. After several miles, he turned onto the interstate highway.

Doris, nestled into her seat, maintained a contented silence for thirty’ miles. Then she murmured, “I’ll never be able to thank you for this, Mr. Slack. I can’t believe it yet. No more beatings, no more sneaky talk about me by the kids at school, no more listening to the awful things my father says about my mother.” She took a deep breath.

“Don’t worry about thanking me,” Slack said. “Those suitcases in the trunk are thanks enough.”

Doris took a comb out of the pocket of her jeans and ran it through her hair. “Is this the way to New Orleans?” she asked in the naive tone of a kid who had never been out of her hometown. And she probably hadn’t, Slack thought. He looked at her in the glow of the dashboard light. Now that her black eye was almost healed, she wasn’t so ugly.

He said, “This is the shortest way and the quickest. And the quickest is what we want right now. By the time old Landry gets home from the movies, we’ll he a hundred miles away.”

“Do you think we’re safe yet?”

“Safe? How safe can we get? Landry’ll never figure out who took his LSD, and your father will never figure out that you ran away with the guy who lifted it. It will be at least twenty-four hours before either of us is missed.” He paused, then said abruptly, “Who told you we were going to New Orleans?”

“You did.” She looked at him in surprise. “Don’t you remember? In the parking lot. Aren’t we going to New Orleans?”

“Well, yeah, we are.” Slack cursed himself for his carelessness. “I don’t remember telling you.”

Doris laughed. “I helped you steal Mr. Landry’s LSD, didn’t I? So we’re partners, aren’t we? So why shouldn’t you tell me where we’re going?”

“No reason. I’m just jumpy, I guess.”

“Besides,” said Doris, “we have to go somewhere to get away from my father and Mr. Landry. New Orleans sounds like a neat place to me.”

“Everybody says it’s great,” said Slack more easily. “I’ve never been there myself.”

She turned and looked at him curiously. “Then what made you decide to go there now, Mr. Slack?”

“Business.”

She nodded wisely. “You mean the LSD, don’t you? Somebody in New Orleans is going to buy it from us. Isn’t that what you mean?”

“Shut up, kid, will you, for a while? How about taking a little nap?”

“Okay,” she agreed readily. “I’ll try. But I’m probably too excited to go to sleep.”

She leaned back against the headrest, closed her eyes, and remained quiet for fifteen minutes while Slack drove northward on the interstate at a steady fifty-five miles per hour. Then she stirred and sat up.

“I can’t sleep, Mr. Slack. I’m sorry. I keep thinking how wonderful you are to be doing all this for me. Getting the LSD away from Mr. Landry, taking me with you to New Orleans to try to sell it. Do you know somebody there who’ll buy it?”

“Yeah,” said Slack. He had just about decided what he’d have to do with Doris Lasswell.

“Who is it?”

“Who is what?

“Your connection in New Orleans.”

“I told you to shut up,” Slack said. “You don’t need to know anything about New Orleans: I’ll handle that end of it, don’t worry.”

“I can’t help worrying,” protested Doris. “I want to know who’s going to buy it. We’re partners, so I should know, shouldn’t l? Suppose something happens to you before we get to New Orleans? If I don’t know who were selling to. I couldn’t get any money for it! Then I’d have to go back to my—my father—again.” She was close to tears.

“Nothing’s going to happen to me, for God’s sake!” Slack said, showing his exasperation. That was the moment when he decided definitely that he would have to kill Doris Lass well. “But if it’ll make you feel any better, I’ll tell you. Our buyer is a guy named Ron Prince who runs a nightclub called The Missing Link in New Orleans. Now are you satisfied?”

Doris nodded vigorously. “Ron Prince. The Missing Link nightclub. Ill remember that. And thanks for trusting me, Mr. Slack. How did you happen to know about Mr. Prince if you’ve never been to New Orleans?”

“I helped him get a divorce from his first wife when he lived in Florida,” Slack said shortly. “Anything else you want to know?”

A genial voice from the back seat of the Chevy said, “I think that’s enough, thank you. Something round and hard and hollow and cold was pressed suddenly against the nape of Slack’s neck.

* * * *

Slack’s heart jumped in his chest. A glance at his rearview mirror showed him a dark figure kneeling behind his seat, evidently having arisen from a recumbent position on the floor. “Just drive quietly along to the next exit ramp, please, Mr. Slack. And Doris, my dear—” the voice lost its geniality for a moment and the pressure against Slack’s neck increased—“if I’m forced to shoot Mr. Slack for misbehaving in any way while we’re still in motion, will you please take charge of the steering wheel until we come to a halt?

After a moment, out of a very dry throat, Slack managed to croak, “Who the hell are you?

The man in the back seat laughed. “You might say I’m Doris’s first partner,” he replied. “The one before you, Mr. Slack.”

“I don’t get it.”

“My name’s Landry. That LSD in the trunk of this car is mine. And you have just given Doris and me the one bit of information we needed to find a market for it.”

Slack gritted his teeth. He risked a glance sideways at Doris in the seat beside him. She was smiling.

Landry went on. “Just keep the car at fifty-five, please. I’m afraid Doris deceived you. Mr. Slack. When she discovered that I was manufacturing pads of LSD papers in my trailer, she came to me at once and tried to blackmail me into helping her escape from her father.”

“Before I came to you, Mr. Slack,” said Doris helpfully.

“But Doris caught me in an awkward position,” Landry continued. “Contrary to what she may have told you, I did not retire from my paper company. I was fired. And thus I had but a tiny pension and very little money. True, I had invented an ingenious machine that automatically measures accurate doses of LSD onto paper, cuts the paper into squares, and binds the squares into pads. But I didn’t yet have the foggiest notion of how I was going to market the stuff. If Doris carried out her threat to expose my activities to the police, I would no doubt be charged with conspiracy to manufacture a controlled substance, and perhaps draw a prison term of considerable duration. In which case, I told Doris, she’d probably never get away from her brutal father. When I explained all this to her she understood my dilemma at once and offered to wait until I found a buyer for my product. Indeed, she offered to help me do so if she could. And she has redeemed that promise splendidly, has she not? With your help, of course, Mr. Slack.”

Doris said suddenly, “There’s an exit coming up, Mr. Landry.”

“Excellent,” said Landry. “Take it, Mr. Slack.”

Slack slowed down and edged into the exit lane, fie forced himself to keep his voice level when he said, “Okay, Landry, you and the kid here conned me. I admit it. You’ve got what you want out of me. So what happens now? You don’t think Bon Prince will buy from strangers, do you?”

“Why not? If the merchandise is satisfactory, which it is. We’ll give it a try anyway.”

Slack drove down the exit ramp from the interstate, very conscious of the prodding of the gun in his neck. “Turn east,” Landry directed him, “and pull up the first chance you get.”

When the Chevy drifted to a halt on the shoulder of the narrow country road, Slack took his hands off the steering wheel and kept his foot on the brake. He didn’t try to turn his head against the urgent pressure of the gun. Doris reached over and switched off the motor.

Slack said, “Listen. Landry, you’ve got to face the fact that you’re a rank amateur in the drug business. And it’s a very tough business, believe me. A guy as inexperienced as you are is going to need a professional to help you get anywhere at all.

“A professional like you?”

“Right. For instance, to absorb the production of that machine of yours you’ll need a lot of buyers, not just one. I can put you in touch with plenty of them.”

“Mr. Prince could probably do that too,” Doris ventured.

Slack fought down panic. He ignored Doris and said to Landry, “You and your fancy machine won’t last a month in the trade unless you know the ropes. You’ll be mixed up with the mob, remember. They’ll swallow you in one bite.”

“Yes, I suppose that’s theoretically possible,” Landry agreed. The prospect didn’t seem to worry him. “However, you realize, don’t you, Mr. Slack, that you have now become merely an embarrassment to us? As you say, we’ve already got what we wanted out of you.”

Slack sat very still in his seat. “So what are you going to do with me?”

“What were you going to do with Doris?” Landry’s tone had turned as cold as the wind off a glacier. “There’s your answer, Slack.”

Slack gathered himself for action while Landry went on in an amused way. “You say I’m an amateur, and I guess you have a point, because who but a fumbling amateur would find himself without a gun in a situation like this? Who but an amateur would try to keep a hardened professional like you under control by merely pressing the end of a lead plumbing pipe into his neck?”

A lead pipe? Slack ducked away from it like a striking snake and twisted savagely about in his seat, reaching over the seat-back for Landry. And he might have managed to seize the old man and render him harmless if Doris, at that moment, hadn’t leaned over and wrapped her arms around Slack in a fierce embrace.

Slack’s last thought before Landry’s lead pipe thudded against his temple with crushing force was that Doris Lasswell richly deserved every black eye her father had ever given her.