HCC 115 - Borderline (24 page)

“Well, I didn’t have anything else on today. So I came on down. You know how it is…
Say, I got news for you, Ed.”

“About Donahue?”

“Yes. We let him go.”

“He’s clear?”

“No, not clear.” Jerry grunted. “We could have held him but there was no point, Ed.
He’s not clear, not by a mile. But we ran a check on the Price kid and learned she’s
been sleeping with two parties—Democrats and Republicans. Practically everyone at
the stag. So there’s nothing that makes your boy look too much more suspicious than
the others.”

“I found out the same thing this afternoon.”

“Ed, I wasn’t too crazy about letting him get away. Donahue still looks like the killer
from where I sit. He hired you because the girl was giving him trouble. She wasn’t
giving anybody else trouble. He looks like the closest thing to a suspect around.”

“Then why release him?”

I could picture Jerry’s shrug. “Well, there was pressure,” he said. “The guy got himself
an expensive lawyer and the lawyer was getting ready to pull a couple of strings.
That’s not all, of course. Donahue isn’t a criminal type, Ed. He’s not going to run
far. We let him go figuring we won’t have much trouble picking him up again.”

“Maybe you won’t have to.”

“You get anything yet, Ed?”

“Not much,” I said. “Just enough to figure out that everything’s mixed up.”

“I already knew that.”

“Uh-huh. But the more I hunt around, the more loose ends I find. I’m glad you boys
let my client loose. I’m going to see if I can get hold of him.”

“Bye,” Jerry said, clicking off.

I took time to get a pipe going, then dialed Mark Donahue’s number. The phone rang
eight times before I gave up. I decided he must be out on Long Island with Lynn Farwell.
I was halfway through the complicated process of prying a number out of the information
operator when I decided not to bother. Donahue had my number. He could reach me when
he got the chance.

Then I closed my eyes, gritted my teeth and tried to think straight.

It wasn’t easy. So far I had managed one little trick—I had succeeded in convincing
myself that Donahue had not killed the girl. But this wasn’t much cause for celebration.
When you’re working for someone, it’s easy to get yourself to thinking that your client
is on the side of the angels.

First of all, the girl. Karen Price. According to all and sundry, she was something
of a tramp. According to her roommate she didn’t put a price tag on it—but she didn’t
keep it under lock and key, either. She had wound up in bed with most of the heterosexual
ad men on Madison Avenue. Donahue, a member of this clan, had been sleeping with her.

This didn’t mean she was in love with him, or carrying a flaming torch, or singing
blues, or issuing dire threats concerning his upcoming marriage. According to everyone
who knew Karen, there was no reason for her to give a whoop in hell whether he got
married, turned queer, became an astronaut or joined the Foreign Legion.

But Donahue said he had received threatening calls from her. That left two possibilities.
One: Donahue was lying. Two: Donahue was telling the truth.

If he was lying, why in hell had he hired me as a bodyguard? And if he had some other
reason to want the girl dead, he wouldn’t need me along for fun and games. Hell, if
he hadn’t gone through the business of hiring me, no one could have tagged him as
the prime suspect in the shooting. He would just be another person at the bachelor
dinner, another former playmate of Karen’s with no more motive to kill her than anyone
else at the party.

I gave up the brainwork and concentrated on harmless if time-consuming games. I sat
at my desk and drew up a list of the eight men who had been at the dinner. I listed
the four married men, the Don Juan, the incipient divorce and, just for the sake of
completion, Lloyd and Kenneth. I worked on my silly little list for over an hour,
creating mythical motives for each man.

It made an interesting mental exercise, although it didn’t seem to be of much value.

The Alhambra is a Syrian restaurant on West 27th Street, an Arabian oasis in a desert
of Greek night clubs. Off the beaten track, it doesn’t advertise, and the sign announcing
its presence is almost invisible. You have to know the Alhambra is there in order
to find it.

The owner and maitre d’ is a little man whom the customers call Kamil. His name is
Louis, his parents brought him to America before his eyes were open, and one of his
brothers is a full professor at Columbia, but he likes to put on an act. When I brought
Ceil Gorski into the place around 8:30, he smiled hugely at me and bowed halfway to
the floor.

“
Salaam alekhim
,” he said solemnly. “My pleasure, Mist’ London.”

“
Alekhim salaam
,” I intoned, glancing over at Ceil while Louis showed us to a table.

Our waiter brought a bottle of very sweet white wine to go with the entree.

“I was bitchy before. I’m sorry about it.”

“Forget it.”

“Ed—”

I looked at her. She was worth looking at, in a pale green dress which she filled
to perfe ction.

“You want to ask me some questions,” she said, “don’t you?”

“Well—”

“I don’t mind, Ed.”

I gave her a brief rundown on the way things seemed to shape up at that point.

“Let me try some names on you,” I suggested. “Maybe you can tell me whether Karen
mentioned them.”

“You can try.”

I ran through the eight jokers who had been at the stag. A few sounded vaguely familiar
to her, but one of them, Ray Powell, turned out to be someone Ceil knew personally.

“A chaser,” she said. “A very plush East Side apartment and an appetite for women
that never lets up. He used to see Karen now and then, but there couldn’t have been
anything serious.”

“You know him—very well?”

“Yes.” She colored suddenly. She was not the sort you expected to blush. “If you mean
intimately, no. He asked often enough. I wasn’t interested.” She lowered her eyes.
“I don’t sleep around that much,” she said. “Karen—well, she came to New York with
stars in her eyes, and when the stars dimmed and died, she went a little crazy, I
suppose. I wasn’t that ambitious and didn’t fall as hard. I have some fairly far-out
ways of earning a living, Ed, but most nights I sleep alone.”

She was one hell of a girl. She was hard and soft, a cynic and a romantic at the same
time. She hadn’t gone to college, hadn’t finished high school, but somewhere along
the way she had acquired a veneer of sophistication that reflected more concrete knowledge
than a diploma.

“Poor Karen,” she said. “Poor Karen.”

I didn’t say anything. She sat somberly for a moment, then tossed her head so that
her bleached blonde mane rippled like a wheat field in the wind. “I’m getting morbid
as hell,” she said. “You’d better take me home, Ed.”

We climbed three flights of stairs. I stood next to her while she rummaged through
her purse. She came up with a key and turned to face me before opening the door. “Ed,”
she said softly, “if I asked you, would you just come in for a few drinks? Could it
be that much of an invitation and no more?”

“Yes.”

“I hate to sound like—”

“I understand.”

We went inside. She turned on lamps in the living room and we sat on the couch.

She started talking about the modeling session she’d gone through that afternoon.
“The money was good,” she said, “but I had to work for it. He took three or four rolls
of film. Slightly advanced cheesecake, Ed. Nudes, underwear stuff. He’ll print the
best pictures and they’ll wind up for sale in the dirty little stores on 42nd Street.”

“With the face retouched?”

She laughed. “He won’t bother. Nobody’s going to look at the face, Ed.”

“I would.”

“Would you?”

“Yes.”

“And not the body?”

“That too.”

She looked at me for a long moment. There was something electric in the air. I could
feel the sweet animal heat of her. She was right next to me. I could reach out and
touch her, could take her in my arms and press her close. The bedroom wasn’t far away.
And she would be good, very good.

Two drinks later, I got up and walked to the door. She followed me. I stopped at the
doorway, started to say something, changed my mind. We said goodnight and I started
down the stairs.

If she had been just any girl—actress, secretary, college girl or waitress—then it
would have ended differently. It would have ended in her bedroom, in warmth and hunger
and fury. But she was not just any girl. She was a halfway tramp, a little tarnished,
a little soiled, a little battered around the edges. And so I could not make that
pass at her, could not maneuver from couch to bed.

I didn’t want to go back to my apartment. It would be lonely there. I drove to a Third
Avenue bar where they pour good drinks.

Somewhere between two and three I left the bar and looked around for the Chevy. By
the time I found it I decided to leave it there and take a cab. I had had too little
sleep the night before and too much to drink this night, and things were beginning
to go a little out of focus. The way I felt, they looked better that way. But I didn’t
much feel like bouncing the car off a telephone pole or gunning down some equally
stoned pedestrian. I flagged a cab and left the driving to him.

He had to tell me three times that we were in front of my building before it got through
to me. I shook myself awake, paid him, and wended my way into the brownstone and up
a flight of stairs.

Then I blinked a few times.

There was something on my doormat, something that hadn’t been there when I left.

It was blonde, well-bred and glassy-eyed. It had an empty wine bottle in one hand
and its mouth was smiling lustily. It got to its feet and swayed there, then pitched
forward slightly. I caught it and it burrowed its head against my chest.

“You keep late hours,” it said.

It was very soft and very warm. It rubbed its hips against me and purred like a kitten.
I growled like a randy old tomcat.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” it said. “I’ve been wanting to go to bed. Take me to
bed, Ed London.”

Its name, in case you haven’t guessed, was Lynn Farwell.

We were a pair of iron filings and my bed was a magnet. I opened the door and we hurried
inside. I closed the door and slid the bolt. We moved quickly through the living room
and along a hall to the bedroom. Along the way we discarded clothing.

She left her skirt on my couch, her sweater on one of my leather chairs. Her bra and
slip and shoes landed in various spots on the hall floor. In the bedroom she got rid
of her stockings and garter belt and panties. She was naked and beautiful and hungry…and
there was no time to waste on words.

Her body welcomed me. Her breasts, firm little cones of happiness, quivered against
me. Her thighs enveloped me in the lust-heat of desire. Her face twisted in a blind
agony of need.

We were both pretty well stoned. This didn’t matter. We could never have done better
sober. There was a beginning, bittersweet and almost painful. There was a middle,
fast and furious, a scherzo movement in a symphony of fire. And there was an ending,
gasping, spent, two bodies washed up on a lonely barren beach.

At the end she used words that girls are not supposed to learn in the schools she
had attended. She screamed them out in a frenzy of completion, a song of obscenity
offered as a coda.

And afterward, when the rhythm was gone and only the glow remained, she talked. “I
needed that,” she told me. “Needed it badly. But you could tell that, couldn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“You’re good, Ed.” She caressed me. “Very good.”

“Sure. I win blue ribbons.”

“Was I good?”

I told her she was fine.

“Mmmmm,” she said.

I rolled out of bed just as the noon whistles started going off all over town. Lynn
was gone. I listened to bells from a nearby church ring twelve times; then I showered,
shaved and swallowed aspirin. Lynn had left. Living proof of indiscretions makes bad
company on the morning after.

I caught a cab, and the driver and I prowled Third Avenue for my car. It was still
there. I drove it back to the garage and tucked it away. Then I called Donahue, but
hung up before the phone had a chance to ring. Not that I expected to reach him anyway,
since calling him on the phone didn’t seem to produce much in the way of concrete
results. But I didn’t feel like talking to him just then.

A few hours ago I had been busy coupling with his bride-to-be. It seemed an unlikely
prelude to a conversation.

Darcy & Bates wasn’t really on Madison Avenue. It was around the corner on 48th Street,
a suite of offices on the fourteenth floor of a twenty-two story building. I got out
of the elevator and stood before a reception desk.

“Phil Abeles,” I said.

“May I ask your name?”

“Go right ahead.” I smiled. She looked unhappy. “Ed London,” I finally said. She smiled
gratefully and pressed one of twenty buttons and spoke softly into a tube.

“If you’ll have a seat, Mr. London,” she said.

I didn’t have a seat. I stood instead and loaded up a pipe. I finished lighting it
as Abeles emerged from an office and came over to meet me. He motioned for me to follow
him. We went into his air-cooled office and he closed the door.

“What’s up, Ed?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I want some help.” I drew on the pipe. “I’ll need a private
office for an hour or two,” I told him. “And I want to see all of the men who were
at Mark Donahue’s bachelor dinner. One at a time.”

“All of us?” He grinned. “Even Lloyd and Kenneth?”

“I suppose we can pass them for the time being. Just you and the other five then.
Can you arrange it?”

He nodded with a fair amount of enthusiasm. “You can use this office,” he said. “And
everybody’s around today, so you won’t have any trouble on that score. Who do you
want to see first?”