HCC 115 - Borderline (23 page)

“Ed?”

I looked at her.

“I didn’t mean to sound cheap.”

“Forget it.”

“All right.” A pause. “Ed, you’ll find a way to clear Mark, won’t you?”

“I’ll try.”

“If there’s any way I can help—”

“I’ll let you know.”

She gave me her phone number and address. She was living with her parents.

Then she paused at the door and turned enough to let me look at her lovely young body
in profile. “If there’s anything you want,” she said softly, “be sure to let me know.”

It was an ordinary enough line. But I had the feeling that it covered a lot of ground.

At 11:30 I picked up my car at the garage around the corner from my apartment.

The car is a Chevy convertible, an old one that dates from the pre-fin era. I left
the top up. The air had an edge to it. I took the East Side Drive downtown and pulled
up across the street from Headquarters at noon.

They let me see Mark Donahue. He was wearing the same expensive suit but it didn’t
hang right now. It looked as though it had been slept in, which figured. He needed
a shave and his eyes had red rims. I didn’t ask him how he had slept. I could tell.

“Hello,” he said.

“Getting along all right?”

“I suppose so.” He swallowed. “They asked me questions most of the night. No rubber
hose, though. That’s something.”

“Sure,” I said. “Mind some more questions?”

“Go ahead.”

“When did you start seeing Karen Price?”

“Four, five months ago.”

“When did you stop?”

“About a month ago.”

“Why?”

“Because I was practically married to Lynn.”

“Who knew you were sleeping with Karen?”

“No one I know of.”

“Anybody at the stag last night?”

“I don’t think so.”

More questions. When had she started phoning him? About two weeks ago, maybe a little
longer than that. Was she in love with him? He hadn’t thought so, no, and that was
why the phone calls were such a shock to him at first. As far as he was concerned,
it was just a mutual sex arrangement with no emotional involvement on either side.
He took her to shows, bought her presents, gave her occasional small loans with the
understanding that they weren’t to be repaid. He wasn’t exactly keeping her and she
wasn’t exactly going to bed in return for the money. It was just a convenient arrangement.

Everything, it seemed, was just a convenient arrangement. He and Karen Price had had
a convenient shack-up. He and Lynn Farwell were planning a convenient marriage.

But someone had put a bullet in Karen’s pretty chest. People don’t do that because
it’s convenient. They usually have more emotional reasons.

More questions. Where did Karen live? He gave me an address in the Village, not too
very far from his own apartment. Who were her friends? He knew one, her roommate,
Ceil Gorski. Where did she work? He wasn’t too clear.

“My lawyer’s trying to get them to reduce the charge,” he said. “So that I can get
out on bail. You think he’ll manage it?”

“He might.”

“I hope so,” he said. His face went serious, then brightened again. “This is a hell
of a place to spend a wedding night,” he smiled. “Funny—when I was trying to pick
the right hotel, I never thought of a jail.”

It was only a few blocks from Mark Donahue’s cell to the building where Karen Price
had lived…a great deal further in terms of dollars and cents. She had an apartment
in a red-brick five-story building on Sullivan Street, just below Bleecker.

The girl who opened the door was blonde, like Lynn Farwell. But her dark roots showed
and her eyebrows were dark brown. If her mouth and eyes relaxed she would have been
pretty. They didn’t.

“You just better not be another cop,” she said.

“I’m afraid I am. But not city. Private.”

The door started to close. I made like a brush salesman and tucked a foot in it. She
glared at me.

“Private cops, I don’t have to see,” she said. “Get the hell out, will you?”

“I just want to talk to you.”

“The feeling isn’t mutual. Look—”

“It won’t take long.”

“You son of a bitch,” she said. But she opened the door and let me inside. We walked
through the kitchen to the living room. There was a couch there. She sat on it. I
took a chair. “Who are you anyway?” she said.

“My name’s Ed London.”

“Who you working for?”

“Mark Donahue.”

“The one who killed her?”

“I don’t think he did,” I said. “What I’m trying to find out, Miss Gorski, is who
did.”

She got to her feet and started walking around the room. There was nothing deliberately
sexy about her walk. She was hard, though. She lived in a cheap apartment on a bad
block. She bleached her hair, and her hairdresser wasn’t the only one who knew for
sure. She could have—but didn’t—come across as a slut.

There was something honest and forthright about her, if not necessarily wholesome.
She was a big blonde with a hot body and a hard face. There are worse things than
that.

“What do you want to know, London?”

“About Karen.”

“What is there to know? You want a biography? She came from Indiana because she wanted
to be a success. A singer, an actress, a model, something. She wasn’t too clear on
just what. She tried, she flopped. She woke up one day knowing she wasn’t going to
make it. It happens.”

I didn’t say anything.

“So she could go back to Indiana or she could stay in the city. Only she couldn’t
go back to Indiana. You give in to enough men, you drink enough drinks and do enough
things, then you can’t go back to Indiana. What’s left?”

She lit a cigarette. “Karen could have been a whore. But she wasn’t. She never put
a price tag on it. She spread it around, sure. Look, she was in New York and she was
used to a certain kind of life and a certain kind of people, and she had to manage
that life and those people into enough money to stay alive on, and she had one commodity
to trade. She had sex. But she wasn’t a whore.” She paused. “There’s a difference.”

“All right.”

“Well, dammit, what else do you want to know?”

“Who was she sleeping with besides Donahue?”

“She didn’t say and I didn’t ask. And she never kept a diary.”

“She ever have men up here?”

“No.”

“She talk much about Donahue?”

“No.” She leaned over, stubbed out a cigarette. Her breasts loomed before my face
like fruit. But it wasn’t purposeful sexiness. She didn’t play that way.

“I’ve got to get out of here,” she said. “I don’t feel like talking anymore.”

“If you could just—”

“I couldn’t just.” She looked away. “In fifteen minutes I have to be uptown on the
West Side. A guy there wants to take some pictures of me naked. He pays for my time,
Mr. London. I’m a working girl.”

“Are you working tonight?”

“Huh?”

“I asked if—”

“I heard you. What’s the pitch?”

“I’d like to take you out to dinner.”

“Why?”

“I’d like to talk to you.”

“I’m not going to tell you anything I don’t feel like telling you, London.”

“I know that, Miss Gorski.”

“And a dinner doesn’t buy my company in bed, either. In case that’s the idea.”

“It isn’t. I’m not all that hard up, Miss Gorski.”

She was suddenly smiling. The smile softened her face all over and cut her age a good
three years. Before she had been attractive. Now she was genuinely pretty.

“You give as good as you take.”

“I try to.”

“Is eight o’clock too late? I just got done with lunch a little while ago.”

“Eight’s fine,” I said. “I’ll see you.”

I left. I walked the half block to my car and sat behind the wheel for a few seconds
and thought about two girls I had met that day. Both blondes, one born that way, one
self-made. One of them had poise, breeding and money, good diction and flawless bearing—and
she added up to a tramp. The other
was
a tramp, in an amateurish sort of a way, and she talked tough and dropped an occasional
final consonant. Yet she was the one who managed to retain a certain degree of dignity.
Of the two, Ceil Gorski was more the lady.

At 3:30 I was up in Westchester County. The sky was bluer, the air fresher and the
houses more costly. I pulled up in front of a $35,000 split-level, walked up a flagstone
path and leaned on a doorbell.

The little boy who answered it had red hair, freckles and a chipped tooth. He was
too cute to be snotty, but this didn’t stop him.

He asked me who I was. I told him to get his father. He asked me why. I told him that
if he didn’t get his father I would twist his arm off. He wasn’t sure whether or not
to believe me, but I was obviously the first person who had ever talked to him this
way. He took off in a hurry and a few seconds later Phil Abeles came to the door.

“Oh, London,” he said. “Hello. Say, what did you tell the kid?”

“Nothing.”

“Your face must have scared him.” Abeles’ eyes darted around. “You want to talk about
what happened last night, I suppose.”

“That’s right.”

“I’d just as soon talk somewhere else,” he said. “Wait a minute, will you?”

I waited while he went to tell his wife that somebody from the office had driven up,
that it was important, and that he’d be back in an hour. He came out and we went to
my car.

“There’s a quiet bar two blocks down and three over,” he said, then added: “Let me
check something. The way I’ve got it, you’re a private detective working for Mark.
Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’d like to help the guy out. I don’t know very much, but there
are things I can talk about to you that I’d just as soon not tell the police. Nothing
illegal. Just… Well, you can figure it out.”

I could figure it out. That was the main reason why I had agreed to stay on the case
for Donahue. People do not like to talk to the police if they can avoid it.

If Phil Abeles was going to talk at all about Karen Price, he would prefer me as a
listening post to Lieutenant Jerry Gunther.

“Here’s the place,” he said. I pulled up next to the chosen bar, a log-cabin arrangement.

Abeles had J & B with water and I ordered a pony of Courvoisier.

“I told that homicide lieutenant I didn’t know anything about the Price girl,” he
said. “That wasn’t true.”

“Go on.”

He hesitated, but just a moment. “I didn’t know she had anything going with Donahue,”
he said. “Nobody ever thought of Karen in one-man terms. She slept around.”

“I gathered that.”

“It’s a funny thing,” he said. “A girl, not exactly a whore but not convent-bred either,
can tend to pass around in a certain group of men. Karen was like that. She went for
ad men. I think at one time or another she was intimate with half of Madison Avenue.”

Speaks well of the dead, I thought. “For anyone in particular?” I asked.

“It’s hard to say. Probably for most of the fellows who were at the dinner last night.
For Ray Powell—but that’s nothing new; he’s one of those bachelors who gets to everything
in a skirt sooner or later. But for the married ones, too.”

“For you?”

“That’s a hell of a question.”’

“Forget it. You already answered it.”

He grinned sourly. “Yes—” he lapsed into flippant Madison Avenue talk “—the Price
was right.” He sipped his drink, then continued. “Not recently, and not often. Two
or three times over two months ago. You won’t blackmail me now, will you?”

“I don’t play that way.” I thought a minute. “Would Karen Price have tried a little
subtle blackmail?”

“I don’t think so. She played pretty fair.”

“Was she the type to fall in love with somebody like Donahue?”

Abeles scratched his head. “The story I heard,” he said. “Something to the effect
that she was calling him, threatening him, trying to head off his marriage.”

I nodded. “That’s why he hired me.”

“It doesn’t make much sense.”

“No?”

“No. It doesn’t fit in with what I know about Karen. She wasn’t the torch-bearer type.
And she was hardly making a steady thing with Mark, either. I may not have known he
was sleeping with her, but I knew damn well that a lot of other guys had been making
with her lately.”

“Could she have been shaking him down?”

He shrugged. “I told you,” he said. “It doesn’t sound like her. But who knows? She
might have gotten into financial trouble. It happens. Perhaps she’d try to milk somebody
for a little money.” He pursed his lips. “But why should she blackmail Mark, for heaven’s
sake? If she blackmailed a bachelor he could always tell her to go to hell. You’d
think she would work that on a married man, not a bachelor.”

“I know.”

He started to laugh then. “But not me,” he said. “Believe me, London. She didn’t blackmail
me and I didn’t kill her.”

I got a list from him of all the men at the dinner. In addition to Donahue and myself,
there had been eight men present, all of them from Darcy & Bates. Four—Abeles, Jack
Harris, Harold Merriman and Joe Conn—were married. One—Ray Powell—was the bachelor
and stud-about-town of the group, almost a compulsive Don Juan, according to Abeles.
Another, Fred Klein, had a wife waiting out a residency requirement in Reno.

The remaining two wouldn’t have much to do with girls like Karen Price. Lloyd Travers
and Kenneth Bream were as queer as rectangular eggs.

I drove Abeles back to his house. Before I let him off he told me again not to waste
time suspecting him.

“One thing you might remember,” I said. “
Somebody
in that room shot Karen Price. Either Mark or one of the eight of you… I don’t think
it was Mark.” I paused. “That means there’s a murderer in your office, Abeles.”

It was late enough in the day to call Lieutenant Gunther. I tried him at home first.
His wife answered, told me he was at the station. I tried him there and caught him.

“Nice hours you work, Jerry.”