Dressed to Killed (8 page)

A woman's short, throaty laugh greeted me from the bedroom.

"Wrap a towel around yourself, honey," she said, "and come out slowly. If you get frisky and make me pull this trigger, you won't be a boy any more."

I GRABBED a towel quicker than a shavetail jumping to attention. Then the complete awkwardness and stupidity of the situation struck me and I felt like crawling under the sink and scuttling like a roach.

"Come on," she drawled, "and be sure you do it slow. Strange men make me nervous."

She was a big blonde girl, built hefty and solid, with the fluid curves of a belly-dancer. The dress she wore may have accentuated the curves. It was a pale blue, satiny number, of a cut designed to make men stand on tiptoe, and it started with a pair of lacy cups, then smoothed down around her generous hips and fell in a long thigh-clinging line which didn't end until it touched the toes of gold-meshed slippers. Her face was oval, smooth, pretty, colorful—and expressionless, showing she'd done a good, careful job with stage makeup. Thick blonde hair was piled atop her head in a sleek up-do, the kind favored by entertainers. Her blue eyes were clear and rather friendly, I thought, although marred now by an expression which suggested knowing wariness. It was the third eye which bothered me the most. A blue-black circle, about .38 caliber, which peeked at me from the vicinity of her right hand.

"Imagine my embarrassment," I said.

The tip of her tongue moistened red lips. "A girl can't even step out to a store without getting visitors. Who invited you in?"

"No one. It seemed like a good idea at the time."

"Who are you, anyway?" Her eyes danced across my chest and shoulders, doing a polka from bruise to bruise.

I decided I might as well level with her. "Russell Forbes," I said. "The guy Giselle told you about."

She made a tsk-ing sound with her lips. "Old lover-boy, himself—and hotter than a pistol. Aren't I the lucky girl?" A new note, cooler and more businesslike, came into her voice. "The papers said you were in the clink."

"I didn't like the room they gave me. No Muzak, no maid service, no—"

"You broke out?" Her eyebrows rose admiringly.

I tried to wrap the towel a little tighter about my waist. "That's why I pushed in here. It was handy and I figured you'd be at work. I thought I'd clean up a bit." I nodded toward the clothing on the bed. "I was going to borrow some of your boyfriend's stuff, too. Temporarily, of course, and strictly because of the emergency."

"You've got a hell of a nerve," she commented.

"Necessity, not nerve," I corrected.

"What are those marks on you?" Her eyes flickered over the bruises again.

"Those are the love-bites of a little beauty named Fia Sprite."

"Little punk, you mean," she said, narrowing her eyes slightly. "Who gave the cops that story about her being Eddie Sands' girlfriend?"

"She must have confessed."

"Confessed!" Her nostrils flared and she made an uncomplimentary sound. "Eddie wouldn't have used her to stir paint with."

"You mean she wasn't?"

"It's strictly from dreams, take my word for it."

"Richmond or Gold must have suggested it to her, then," I said thoughtfully. "Anyway, it made a nice story. I wonder—"

"Gold? What's he got to do with this?" she interrupted sharply.

"He's the master mind, as near as I can figure out. He and Richmond engineered the frame."

"You don't say!" Her red lips parted in an expression of rapt interest. "Tell me about it."

"Like this?" I shifted the towel. "How about letting me get decent?"

She did the throaty laugh again. "Okay." She lowered the gun and swung her arm casually, letting the .38 dangle by two fingers. "You can borrow the clothes. Eddie won't need them any more." She turned on a golden heel, giving me a view of additional curves, and strode into the other room.

My skin crawled a little as I slipped into the fancy shorts, but I decided I couldn't afford to be fussy. They looked new. Maybe Sands hadn't even worn them. Keeping a firm hand on the superstitious qualms which kept pricking at me, I put on the trousers and shirt, leaving the collar of the shirt unbuttoned. I went into the living room, carrying the suit jacket on my arm.

She was sitting in a wingback chair, arms relaxed, ankles crossed, very ladylike. The gun was not in evidence.

"Tell me about Gold," she said.

"I'd better tell you about Richmond first."

"Richmond I know. Tell me about Gold."

"They're in this together." I told her about wangling a date with Richmond, the rendezvous in the garage, and the conversation I'd overheard in Richmond's apartment. When I went into details of the episode with Fia Sprite, her eyes began to smolder and her lips curled a little. "The way I figure it," I concluded, "Richmond passed the word to Gold, Gold tipped a pal on the staff of the Journal, this pal wrote the story with one hand and waved to the cops with the other—and I got the rap. You have to give the Sprite babe credit. She put on a good act."

"She's a floosie." Ginny narrowed her eyes at me. "What do you intend to do?"

"I don't know," I admitted. "I'm a fugitive from the cops and a pain in the tail to Gold. I'd like to keep on being a pain. But now that Giselle's dead—"

"What?" She started as though I'd slid a sliver of ice down her back.

"She's dead," I repeated. "It probably hasn't hit the papers yet. The cops found her in an alley somewhere on the west side."

"Giselle!" She seemed stunned. "How?"

"Strangled. I don't know any details."

She gripped the arms of her chair so hard that her knuckles stood out like rows of ivory buttons. "The poor kid," she whispered. "If I'd only known—!"

"What could you have done?"

It was an idle question, deserving no answer, and it settled through the silence and disintegrated into nothingness. I sat there, trying to resolve the facts into a picture. Sands' clothes in Ginny's apartment meant they'd been more than buddies. She'd been broken up by his death enough not to work that evening, I guessed. And she'd been sizzling on account of the story in the papers about Fia Sprite being Sands' girl. It had probably hurt her pride. But—

It was a large but. I'd dropped Giselle off at her place early in the afternoon, and Giselle must have told her that Sands was no more. Also, according to Giselle, she'd picked up Richmond's check and instructions from Ginny early that morning—and the only time Sands' body could have been cached in the Caddy was while Giselle was upstairs getting said check and instructions. Did Ginny know, even then, that Sands was dead and that she was helping Richmond make a quick shuffle to get rid of the body? If so, why hadn't she gotten rid of Sands' things, just to protect herself in case of official questioning? Keeping his duds around showed negligence, not sentiment, and could have gotten her into a peck of trouble.

She shattered the silence by asking: "What are you thinking?"

"I was wondering what kind of cement held you and Eddie Sands together."

"Figure it out. It's a four-letter word."

"Not l-o-v-e."

"Why not?"

"That blue dress you've got on isn't widow's weeds."

"I sing for a living. I intended to work later tonight."

"Why?" I tossed the word at her casually.

"A girl's got to live."

"You can live for a long time on the meltings from the ice you've got under your mattress."

She lifted one eyebrow. "So you found that, too. You're pretty clever."

"It was a dumb place to hide it. Why don't we talk sense, Miss Evans?"

"Like what?"

"Like why Eddie Sands was killed. Like what the big rub was between Sands and Gold. Like how I can get myself out of this mess."

"That's your principal interest—getting out?"

"Damned right. I like having skin; I want to keep it."

"Suppose I make a deal with you, Mr. Forbes—"

It sounded familiar. "Thank you, but no deals."

"Why not?"

"I learn slowly, but I learn. Whenever someone offers me a deal, I get kicked in the teeth."

She played the throaty laugh, this time lightly and very larghetto. "This wouldn't be that kind of deal." With a sudden movement, she rose from her chair and slid onto the sofa beside me. "I'll tell you the truth," she said softly. "I'm in a spot. We're both in a spot. Why shouldn't we help each other?"

The stuff she used behind her ears was worth the dough, I decided. "Why not?" I asked.

"That's what I've been asking myself. We're both in trouble —and there's something about you I like. You're direct, and clever, and very much a man." She gave me a smile along with the last phrase, and I had to admit to myself that maybe I was very much a man; at least, I felt sure that the rustling in my capillaries was more than prickly heat. "I know I can trust you."

"Like a brother—or a lover?"

"Both. Or either. All I want is a fair shake. A fair shake and a little understanding. If you knew the whole story, I'm sure you'd trust me and help me, especially if it helped solve your own problems too."

"I'm listening."

"Good." She took a deep breath, thereby banishing any shred of doubt I might have had as to whether or not she were a girl, and leaned her shoulder gently against mine. "It's going to be hard for me to explain—after all, I'm a girl and you're a man—but I'll try to make it clear. I came to Chicago four years ago. Mom and Dad didn't want me to leave Radford—that's a town in Virginia—but I'd always wanted to be a singer, the kind that sings with orchestras, and on the radio, places like that, and not just at weddings and on Sunday in church. I didn't have any money, but I did have a lot of ambition, and I thought a big city like Chicago would give me the break I needed."

She sighed.

"Well, I took the plunge. I dumped what clothes I had into a suitcase, got on a bus, and came to the big city. I landed here with about twenty bucks in cash and the determination never to ride a bus again. I got a room at the Y.W.C.A., put on my best clothes, and started canvassing the agencies. What a fool I was! They laughed at me. Not one of them wanted to hear me sing. All they did was take one look at me, at the clothes I had on, especially, and kick me out. I went back to the Y, ripped up most of my things—and cried my eyes out."

"You should have known better," I said.

"Who was to tell me? But thank God, I was tough. I wasn't going to quit. I decided that the smart thing to do was to get myself in some nightclub or cocktail lounge, where I could not only make dough but could meet the right kind of people."

"Men," I murmured.

"Certainly," she agreed. "Men and money. They're what make the world go around, for a woman, anyway. It didn't take me long to find that out. So I got myself a job, waitressing in a joint on Rush Street. I stuck there a year, long enough to find out what made the wheels turn and to get myself a closet full of pretty decent clothes. Then I started hitting the agencies again." She laughed bitterly. "This time, they didn't laugh—but they didn't throw any contracts at me, either. What do you think they wanted to know?"

"Experience?"

"No. They all asked me one question: what connections have you got? When I said none, they shrugged and that was that. How does a girl get connections? And what did it have to do with a girl singing, anyhow? I made up my mind to find out, and I did—in a hurry."

"Who'd you ask?"

"The guy who owned the joint I was working in at the time." Her voice dropped. "What he told me was a shock. Don't get me wrong. I knew about the birds and the bees. After all, I'd come from a country town and I'd been on as many hayrides as anybody. But I didn't know that it could be a cold-blooded, cut-and-dried racket. I didn't know that a girl who wanted to break into a joint as a singer had to rub some manager's hair the right way—meaning the way he wanted it rubbed and when he wanted it rubbed—otherwise he wouldn't okay her to an agency. Or that she had to join a union and have agency representation before he could put her on the payroll. Or that the agency wouldn't touch her without an okay because selling one girl to a joint was peanuts but maybe, if she had a good okay, the agency could sign a whole string of shows to the joint. It's a screwy, complicated set-up, but it makes sense in a hardboiled, dollars-and-cents sort of way. Do you follow me?"

"Yeah. What'd you do?"

"What could I do? I was determined to be a singer."

"So you got in the hair-rubbing business."

"I'll say I did. I got myself some low-cut dresses, a new hair-do, and practiced showing my teeth in a big, sweet smile—and I started hanging around the Silver Cloud, over on Clark Street. Eddie Sands' place, in case you don't know."

"I know."

"Well, once I understood the ropes, it wasn't hard. Eddie had an eye for big girls—and I was big. Also, I hit him at a time when he was getting a lot of trouble from his wife. She was chasing around, raising hell, giving him a hard time generally, and he needed somebody with a big, soft shoulder.

Well, I gave him a good look at mine, and I made sure it smelled good, too. He tried it a couple times and, first thing I knew, I was in solid. A week later I had a union card, an agency contract, and I was up on the bandstand every night singing tra-la with the rest of the hep cats."

"How to be a success."

"Not a success, just a singer. That was a start. All I got was fifty bucks a week as salary, another thirty or forty, if I was lucky, as kickback from drinks I pushed onto customers—and, of course, whatever I could chisel out of Eddie. He wasn't stingy—I'll give him credit for that—but a singer can't wear the same gown every night and most of the money I was making went for clothes. Eddie helped me as much as he could, but his wife was taking him for a ride, like I said, and he was pretty well strapped. That's the way things were when I first ran into Arnold Richmond."

"That was how long ago?"

"Something like two years. Anyway, I got to talking to him one night and he mentioned that he might be able to put me next to some nice dresses cheap. Naturally, I was interested. He drove me out to a place on the north side. It was just a crumby house from the outside, but inside there were racks and racks of clothes, men's and women's. Brand-new stuff with the price tags still on. In one of the back rooms, he showed me a pile of gorgeous formals—they were just heaped on a bed—and right away I could see they were high-class numbers, most of them from places like Bonwit Teller, Saks, and places like that. Stolen, of course, but they made me drool. I forget how many I bought, but I got them for half what I'd have had to spend normally. After that, whenever Richmond had anything he thought I could use, he'd let me know."