A Killing in Comics (9 page)

As I walked by, Big Jim’s beady eyes rose above the edge of the newspaper and met my unbeady ones. I nodded. He nodded.

Buddies.

The presence of Big Jim and his putty-faced pal, near and in sight of the bank of elevators, meant their boss was up a tower in his sweetie’s suite. Calabria’s setup with his longtime ex-showgirl mistress had supposedly inspired Donny Harrison’s similar one with Honey Daily.

Coincidentally, Honey Daily accounted for my presence at the Waldorf—I sure wasn’t here for the apples-and-walnut salad, being an iceberg lettuce kind of guy.

Not that Miss Daily had summoned me: this was my idea, and I hadn’t warned her with a phone call. My limited experience on murder cases, during my MP days, told me such an investigation was not aided by making appointments with suspects. Dropping by unannounced may be rude, and it may risk finding nobody home; but the benefits for a detective are considerable, starting with gaining a psychological edge on an individual who hasn’t had time to prepare for your interview.

That said, I didn’t exactly consider Honey Daily a suspect. I didn’t exactly not consider her a suspect, either, but then I also wasn’t planning to interview her . . . exactly.

I felt we’d hit it off interestingly and well at Donny’s birthday party, up to where he dropped dead onto that knife, anyway. And I hoped we could pick up where we left off, now that she was unattached and might need a sympathetic shoulder, said shoulder being attached to the rest of me, should she need any other sympathetic body part.

Soon I’d gone up the elevator and down the hall and up to the door of her suite, and knocked. The door had a small peephole above its gold numerals, and I must have been approved for entry, because as I raised my knuckles to try again, the door swung inward halfway and she filled the available space with herself, decked out in a black dressing gown, her fetchingly mussed-up blonde hair brushing shoulders whose pinkness could not be disguised by filmy black.

“I remember you,” she said, martini in hand, smirky smile on full lips.

Was she just a little drunk? I couldn’t be sure. It wasn’t as though she’d answered my knock in a negligee—the dressing gown was layers of sheer stuff that didn’t obscure her shape but also didn’t put it on display. Still, these were not the usual widow’s weeds; of course, she wasn’t a widow—kept woman’s weeds?

“I was in the neighborhood,” I said. I nodded down the hall. “Returning a lost puppy to a little old lady who lives down next to the ice machine.”

“I like you,” she said. “You’re silly.”

Where had I heard that before? As she bid me enter with a slightly unsteady sweeping gesture, making room for me, I remembered: Tweety Bird to Sylvester the Cat in a cartoon that did not turn out well for the cat.

She shut the door behind us and I was moving into the entry way, footsteps echoing on green marble. I wheeled to look at her; she was slumped against the white door in her black dressing gown, red-nailed hand leaning on the gold doorknob, other hand regally if precipitously holding the martini, making a somber pinup. On either side of her was a white slab of something with a Grecian bust on top. The walls were coral with white wood trim, and at my left was a bronze-framed mirror and a white table with fresh flowers on it, also white. At right was another white door, presumably to a closet.

Her baby blues, bearing a red filigree, found their way to my face. “Are you here to take advantage of me? Or to try and cheer me up?”

I shrugged. “Maybe it’ll cheer you up if I took advantage of you.”

She laughed, a little more than that rated, and it echoed in the space, giving the laughter bottom but not disguising the ragged edge of hysteria up top.

I went over to her and took an elbow and walked her into the living room, almost dragging her over the fluffy white carpet.

The big high-ceilinged area looked strikingly different than it had during Donny’s party, and not just because sixty-some people were no longer wandering around in it. Hotel elves had come in after the cops left to put the world of the suite right again, some furniture having been added back in, and all of it rearranged. The white baby grand was gone, rolled out with the Negro pianist.

Down toward the end of the living room, through open French doors at left, extended a large dining room, and where its long table had been covered with a linen cloth and arrayed with hors d’oeuvres at the party was now bare, sleek dark wood adorned only with a centerpiece of white and pink flowers.

Meanwhile, back in the living room, the two emerald leather chairs that had been here and there at the periphery, and a couch that had lined a wall, were back in what I presumed was their usual arrangement: the pair of chairs side by side and facing the couch across a glass coffee table, next to the marble fireplace and its mirror over the mantel.

I escorted her to that couch, near where a martini glass rested on the glass table, making a wet circle. The air-conditioning was on high, almost uncomfortably so, and my mind automatically and ridiculously looked at the fireplace and wished it were going.

I sat next to her and she nestled against me, grabbing on to my arm like a
Titanic
survivor clinging to a floating chunk of deck chair. The lighting was subdued, with only one of several lamps on, its square shade upheld by a female Balinese dancer on a white table; a male Balinese dancer was doing the same thing with an identical shade on an identical table, but in darkness, past a white door down the wall.

The other day I hadn’t noticed that the modernity of the furnishings and the general decor—the drawn drapes on a big window we faced were light green with a coral geometric pattern—had these faux touches of antiquity. The lamp tables and a couple of spare chairs had an Egyptian feel, and a couple more disembodied white-plaster Greek noggins on pedestals stared at us from this corner or that one.

At the same time, even as my nostrils tingled with her Chanel No. 5, I saw the ghosts of the guests of the birthday party, wandering around and even through the furniture—Donny in his cape and sweat-soaked superhero long johns flying from attendee to attendee, Rod Krane in his gray Brooks Brothers rewarding the room with his presence, Harry Spiegel and Moe Shulman in their wrinkled off-the-rack numbers, Selma Harrison off to one side with her floral tent a stark contrast to Louis Cohn’s maitre d’s tuxedo.

Right over by those drapes—they’d been open onto the city at the party, the Empire State in the background—the table had stretched with Donny’s birthday cake. With the lighting so dim, a discolored patch on the floor was hard to make out, and at first I thought it was my imagination.

I was sitting up.

She said, not quite slurring, “Liquor cart’s in the bedroom. You want something? . . . Oh, but you don’t drink.”

“You have any Coca-Cola?”

“Sure. It’s in the kitchen.” She pointed and her red-nailed forefinger tickled the air. “Over there.”

She indicated the white door between the two white tables with the Balinese dancer lamps.

“I’ll get it myself,” I said, and rose.

I glanced at her, and she was slumped back into an emerald leather cushion, eyes closed, a provocative pile of blonde hair, pink flesh and black taffeta.

But I took a small detour, to see if my imagination was working overtime or if there really was a big fat stain on the plush white carpeting, right where Donny had fallen. I crouched like Sherlock Holmes trying to find a magnifying glass he’d dropped, finding instead that (despite the lack of light) my eyes were doing fine.

An area roughly the size of dead Donny had discolored the carpet, all right, turning it a sort of sick gray, as best I could tell in this lighting. That knife had gone in Donny and held the blood in, the cork in a bottle—there’d been precious little spillage, and the knife had not been removed when the body had been, by the ambulance boys—I remembered that clearly, since it was one more bizarre aspect of that offbeat birthday party.

Then why was the carpet so discolored? And, anyway, blood wouldn’t have made this gray smear. Had the cops noticed this last night? Had Chandler been here today? I rose and glanced over at the couch where Honey appeared asleep.

Shrugging to myself, I went through the white door into a white kitchen—medium-size, but it had probably been crowded when the Waldorf caterers were using it as a staging station. Much of the floor space was taken up by a red-topped Formica table with four red plastic-upholstered chairs, and two walls were cabinets above counter with doors below, another wall was given over to a little more counter and cabinets but mostly double sink and a big refrigerator. And a second door connected to the dining room.

Still, the space was small enough that you’d imagine any guest who ducked in to fiddle with something in the refrigerator would get noticed.

Speaking of the fridge, I checked it to see if any insulin bottle was still in there. It wasn’t—Chandler must have been here today, or his men; the cops last night wouldn’t likely have thought to take the bottle for testing, Donny’s demise still seeming an accident.

The refrigerator didn’t have much of anything in it but a half-gone bottle of milk, some veggies, half a carton of eggs, some cold cuts and bottles of 7-Up and Coke. I took one of the latter, found an opener in a drawer and a glass in a cabinet and poured and thought.

I set the fizzing glass of Coke on the counter, found a small sharp knife in another drawer, and fished around for longer than I’d have liked in other drawers until I came across recipe cards, each in a little yellow envelope fronted by the beaming, beautiful and utterly sexless mug of that fictional housewife, Betty Crocker.

One of these envelopes I liberated, slipping it in my suitcoat pocket, dropping the knife in the other, finally exiting the kitchen into the dimly lighted living room, leaving the glass of Coke behind.

The slumping Honey looked asleep. Certainly her eyes were closed and she was breathing regular and heavy.

So, I crept back to that suspicious stain and knelt again and cut off a few tufts of discolored carpet, tucking them away inside the Betty Crocker envelope, which went back into one suitcoat pocket, even as the little sharp knife went into the other suitcoat pocket.

Rising from my knee like a rejected suitor, I noted Honey’s continuing sleep state, and went back into the kitchen, returning the knife to its drawer and reemerging with my Coke.

I resumed my position at her side on the couch and her arms found my nearest one and clung again.

“Hey,” I said.

Her eyelids fluttered.

“Hey you,” I said.

The eyelids fluttered some more and opened enough to peer up at me. “I know you,” she said. “You’re that flirt.”

“That’s right. When’s the last time you ate?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Today?”

“I . . . I don’t think so.”

“How many martinis have you had?”

“I . . . I didn’t even get out of bed till four.”

“Four P.M.?”

She nodded and the blonde hair bounced, looking nicely mussed. That was when I realized she didn’t have a smidge of makeup on and still looked as glamorous as an
Esquire
layout.

“You slept all day?” I asked.

“I . . . I had help.”

“What kind of help?”

“Kind in a bottle.”

“Booze?”

She shook her head. “Pills.”

I took her by both shoulders and made her look at me. “You didn’t overdose, did you, you little fool?”

“I didn’t overdose. I’m no fool. Do I still like you?”

“You tell me.”

“I only had three martinis. That’s not so much.”

“Without having eaten? After God knows how many sedatives? You couldn’t be drunker.”

“Sure I could. Your name is Jack, isn’t it?”

I got up and turned on a few more lamps. Not enough to turn the living room into a blazing high noon, but plenty to make her squint in annoyance and yell, “Hey!”

“We’re getting you something to eat.”

She gestured vaguely, presumably toward a phone, though I hadn’t spotted any in the room. “Call down.”

“Not room service, a real meal.” I went over and lifted her bodily off the sofa. “Go put some clothes on. Where’s the bedroom?”

She pointed to another white door, over past the drapes, to the right.

I walked her over there, past the stain and the drapes and more white Egyptian chairs and into a big darkened bedroom, the color scheme blue and white. The only light came from a bathroom whose door stood open, sending a shaft of white across the unmade blue satin bedspread—a double bed, with a matching satin tufted headboard.

“Get dressed,” I said.

She was over against the wall at right by double closet doors next to a dressing table with round mirror and round stuffed stool. Arrayed on a glass-topped table were half the fancy cut-glass bottles of perfume and such like in Manhattan. Feet planted but weaving, she studied me.

“I don’t feel like . . . like getting dressed up.”

I was sitting on the bed, using the white phone on her white nightstand. “I didn’t say get dressed up. You need a reservation a week ahead for the Starlight Roof, even if I could afford it.”

She squinted at me. “Where then? I don’t feel like leaving the hotel.”

“Shut up,” I said. I had the Oasis Lounge on the line. “Table for two in half an hour? . . . Fine . . . Starr.” I hung up. “We’re going down to Tony Sarg’s Oasis. Dress accordingly. A pith helmet maybe.”

That made her laugh. She
was
drunk.

I got up. “I’ll go drink my Coke. If you fall on your keister, try to make a lot of noise, would you? So I can ride to your rescue?”

She stuck out her tongue at me. “I dare you to stay and watch.”

“I can do that, but I’ll have to call down and get a later reservation.”