Seduction of the Innocent (21 page)

Yellow-tinged light gently illuminated my bedroom, as I sat up, surprised to find myself in pajamas. I ached in my chest and midsection where Sarola’s two thugs had worked me over, but less than I’d have imagined. After all, I’d only slept, what? Half an hour since I got home? Funny that I neither remembered getting home nor putting on my pajamas, but I knew I had to really shake a leg, even if that hurt a little. I was supposed to pick up Sylvia at her apartment at seven.

I figured I better grab another shower and shave, before my date, and did so. Then, walking from the bathroom into the bedroom with a towel wrapped around me, I found Maggie sitting on the edge of my bed, facing me.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“What are you doing out of bed?” she asked, expressionless.

“Getting ready for my date. I’m supposed to pick Sylvia Winters up at—”

“That was yesterday.”

“Huh?”

“You were supposed to pick her up Friday night at seven.”

“Right.”

“And this is Saturday.”

“What? How long did I sleep? What is it, morning?”

“No. Evening. Night. Don’t worry about Sylvia. She knows.”

“Knows what?”

She stood. “That you took a beating yesterday and are recuperating. Why don’t you put something on besides that towel.”

“...Okay.” I had an uneasy feeling, suddenly, about how I’d got into those pajamas.

“I’ll get you some coffee.”

“Make it Coke.”

“You’ll lose your teeth someday, over that sugary swill.”

“Coke.”

She nodded, and went from the bedroom into the kitchen, the next room down in the boxcar layout of my apartment. I traded the towel for underwear from my dresser, then went to my closet and got my navy gabardine, a trifle heavy for this time of year, but the only suit I owned that had been tailored to hide a shoulder-holstered gun.

And while I may have been disoriented, I knew that, for the time being, I wanted to carry a gun.

But all I had on was the socks and suit pants and t-shirt when Maggie returned with the Coke for me and some coffee for herself.

“I take it you’re not going back to bed,” she observed.

“Well, considering I’ve slept almost twenty-four hours,” I said, “I just may have had enough of a beauty sleep. Let me finish dressing, then let’s talk in the living room.”

We did.

For inhabiting the same building, neither of us visited the other’s apartment often. But when Maggie did drop by, we normally confined her visit to the living room, where we had entertained Starr Syndicate clients and talent fairly often, the modern furnishings and original comic-art wall hangings providing a proper atmosphere.

I could tell she’d been here a while—the latest book she was reading,
Lord Vanity
by Samuel Shellabarger—was split open face down to its place on the coffee table, with multiple coffee cup rings on the glass and a few crumbs from a sandwich or other snack. Her shoes, little red flats, were under the table, and the pillow on the well-padded black leather couch was positioned for napping, the impression of her head providing further evidence.

She’d been babysitting me. I found that touching if a trifle ridiculous, but would make no wisecrack about it. Sentiment embarrassed her. I took a boxy but comfy black-leather chair, mate to the couch, and sipped my Coke. Unlike the bottle that flat-faced guy gave me back at Sarola’s warehouse, this one was nice and cold.

“Bryce found you,” she said. “You were unconscious in the elevator when he called it up to take him down.”

After five o’clock, the elevator was self-service, the attendant gone, the street door locked.

“Don’t tell me which one of you undressed me,” I said. “Either way, I’m not sure I could handle it.”

“You smelled like you’d been bathing in Jim Beam,” she said.

“Good nose,” I said. “That’s what it was.”

“But you didn’t fall off the wagon, did you?”

“No. But how did you know that?”

She sipped her coffee, shrugged a shoulder. “You’d clearly been beaten. Your sport coat was bloody and torn, your nose swollen, your eyes black. They still are, a little.”

“I noticed when I shaved.”

“The front of your clothing had been soaked in booze. Someone tried to pour the stuff into you, didn’t they?”

I swigged Coke. “And here I thought I was the detective in the family.”

“Dr. Carlson felt you’d had some liquor forced on you, but he doubted it would be enough to cause a...relapse to your former condition.”

“You mean, it didn’t make me an instant drunk?”

She shrugged both shoulders this time. “Sometimes one drink can do it.”

“This wasn’t a drink, exactly. It was more like a dose of medicine from a really mean daddy.”

“Are you going to tell me what happened?”

I did.

My account upset her enough to cause a rare tightening of the eyes. “Shall we call your friend Captain Chandler?”

I shook my head. “No. If I killed Sarola, dropping that wall of boxes on him, why bother? If Chandler wants me on a manslaughter beef, let him come up with his own damn evidence.”

“Is that wise?”

I grunted a laugh, which hurt just a little. “Maggie, odds are that tough old bastard Sarola is still alive. So if I go to the cops and accuse him and his two goons of beating on me, they’ll just deny it. And add it up any way you like—it still comes out my word against the three of them.”

She nodded. Her ponytail bobbed. Right then I would have given a thousand bucks for her not to be my father’s widow. Two thousand.

“Besides,” she said, musing aloud, “it just dredges up all that old history with the major’s dealings with the mob.”

“Not to mention the various mob factions who are involved in magazine distribution in this town, and our tangential connection to one of them.”

I meant Frank Calabria, of course.

“Not to mention that,” she said. “May I make a suggestion?”

“I’m impressed you asked first. Sure. What?”

Her eyes were hard and unblinking. “Call your Uncle Frank and tell him what happened. Ask him if he can apply his influence to see that you suffer no repercussions from this Sarola incident.”

“That’s an excellent suggestion. I might have thought of it myself, when my head cleared, but I appreciate the help.”

“How
are
you feeling?”

“A little thick in the tongue and between the ears, but not bad. Did you say Dr. Carlson stopped in?”

She nodded. “He gave you two shots, one for pain, another a sedative. That’s why you had the nice long nap.”

Carlson was known as the Broadway Kildare. Via house (and apartment) calls, he tended to the health problems of actors, actresses, directors, choreographers, and other creative types, and some of his treatments were not strictly by the AMA rule book.

“I must not have needed hospitalization,” I said. “Was I awake when he examined me?”

“More or less.”

Maybe I was starting to remember that
....

“He said you’d be fine,” she said, “but if you have any blood in your urine, give him a shout.”

“Don’t worry, if I piss blood, I’ll scream. And he’ll hear it. He’s only four blocks from here.”

She tucked her legs up under her, like a teenage girl at a slumber party. “Are you up for reporting on the rest of your day? Your yesterday, I mean?”

I said I was, and told her about visiting Charles Bardwell and his monkey at Levinson Publications, and gave her a scaled-down account of my stairwell battle with Bardwell’s other monkey, Pete Pine, including how he’d tried to toss Lyla Lamont down the stairs after beating on her.

Maggie’s eyes flared. “I swear, we need to insist on a different artist for
Crime Fighter.”

“Well, apparently Lyla’s been drawing it lately. Why not hire her? She’s been making Pine’s deadlines better than she used to her own.”

Maggie sighed. “Sometimes I think nobody we have under contract is doing their own work,” she said, mildly disgusted. “It’s all ghosts, ghosts, ghosts. Case in point, I spoke to an editor at Frederick’s publisher the other day.”

“Why did you do that?”

“This was before he died on us. I wanted to make sure there were no contractual obligations to the book publisher before we inked a syndication deal for a column. I was right to tell the late doctor he could use an assistant. His editor said, off-the-record, that
Ravage the Lambs
was mostly a ghost job.”

“Why, that old windbag! That phony.”

“Which reminds me. Your new lady friend, Dr. Winters...?”

“I don’t know if I like the way you put that...”

“What are we going to do about her?”

I had several ideas, but didn’t feel I needed Maggie’s advice in that area.

As if reading my mind, or maybe just my expression, she said, “What I mean is, we offered her a contract to ghost a column by a dead man.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Or I should say, a man who is now dead.”

I had another swig of Coke. “In all the fuss, I hadn’t thought that through. That’s a bum deal for her. What do you say we give her a shot at a column like that, anyway?”

“Jack, you know very well the point of the column was just to manipulate Dr. Frederick into laying off our comic-book properties....”

I lifted two palms in surrender. “I know, I know. But it’s still not a bad idea, however we happened to come up with it—an advice column by an actual shrink. How about we let her write us, say, three sample columns, and if we don’t sign her, offer her a nice kill fee for her trouble.”

She thought about that, then nodded once. “Yes. That’s a good solution. So...getting back to Friday and what your inquiry came up with....”

I told her about Chandler having the drunken Pine picked up and shipped to Bellevue, as well as my visit to the Entertaining Funnies offices—not just my conversation with Bob Price and Hal Feldman, but the encounter with that would-be Brando of the ink brushes, Will Allison.

“I hate to think that kid had anything to do with Frederick’s murder,” she said.

“Me, too. But he has the brains and, well, bizarre streak needed to rig up that crazy crime scene. My problem with Pine is that he’s not that imaginative. Not that bright.”

An eyebrow rose a quarter of an inch over a green eye. “But his bosom buddy
Bardwell
is bright—a clever, nasty man, our Mr. Bardwell.”

I snapped my fingers. “That’s right! I never thought of that possibility. They could have been in on it together, one of their drunken frolics turned deadly. Bardwell and his man-monkey, making Dr. Frederick pay for assorted indignities.”

“I like it,” she said, as if she and I were Price and Feldman brainstorming horror story “springboards.”

I got to my feet. “Listen, I appreciate what you did here, getting a doc in, looking after me...but I’m fine now. No need for chicken soup.”

“You’ll stay in? Take it easy?”

“Are you kidding? I’m twenty-four hours late for my date with that hubba-hubba headshrinker down in the Village.”

She winced. “Please tell me I didn’t hear you use the expression ‘hubba-hubba.’”

“Sorry.” I lifted her gently by the arm off the couch. “What I meant to say was, I’m gonna call my woo-woo baby and see if she’s available at short notice.”

At the sound of the word “woo-woo,” Maggie did something she rarely did, though God knows I tried hard enough on a regular basis to get that out of her: she laughed.

I walked her to the door and when she was halfway out, she did something else remarkable.

She touched my cheek.

“You be careful, Jack.”

“Don’t worry, Maggie. I’ll take a gun.”

“Good,” she said, and was gone.

You might consider it an odd choice of restaurants, almost as if we were returning to the scene of the crime.

But Sylvia never did get her nice meal at the Waldorf, as promised by the late Dr. Frederick, and I decided to make up for that. Anyway, I had no desire to fight the bearded boys, long-haired girls, and gawking tourists for a table at a Village bistro on a Saturday night.

Not that I was springing for the Starlight Roof. I could afford that, marginally, but we’d never get in without a reservation.

The Tony Sarg Oasis was another story, just off the lobby and the hotel’s coziest dining spot. Also, I knew the maître d’, which—along with a three-dollar tip—got us shown immediately to a table for two. We were seated against a curving wall festooned with funny-animal comics characters, in drunken parade—tipsy turtles, pie-eyed primates, tight tigers, lit lions—as drawn by the cartoonist whose name was on the place.

More cocktail lounge than restaurant, the Oasis offered a limited but tasty menu of sandwiches and Hungarian dishes. A little bandstand of violinists and cellists provided a side dish of Hungarian rhapsodies, a romantic touch in a room largely given to couples, sitting in the cigarette-smoky fog like London lovers on park benches.

Sylvia had forgone her usual Beat Generation sweater-and-slacks combo for a black linen dress with white polka-dots and a matching jacket. Most women in the Oasis wore hats, but not Sylvia, who put her money on the lovely short hairdo, its platinum scythe blade of hair swinging at the edge of her apple-cheeked face. Her lipstick was closer to red than black tonight, but she still kept her makeup on the light side, a little face powder, some mascara. Those deep dark blue eyes needed no help at all, really.

“Feels a little ghoulish,” Sylvia said, “coming here.”

“That’s
goulash
,” I said.

We had just ordered. She took my advice and tried the Hungarian specialty of the house.

I shrugged. “It’s not like we’re taking room service in the doc’s suite. The Oasis is just a nice place that I could get us into, last minute.”

She was looking past me.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Will you look who’s sitting over
there
....”

I glanced across the room. Garson Lehman was alone at a table for two. I didn’t see him at first, because a waiter was clearing his dishes away.

“You know that guy, Sylvia?”

Even her smirks were pretty. “Everybody in the Village knows him. He’s always giving a lecture on sex or starting up a new magazine. I think he’s a big phony.”