The Body Lovers (21 page)

“I’m a funny woman, Mike. I’m young-old. I’ve seen too much and done too much in too short a time. What I really want I can never have, but I have sense enough to realize it, so I take what I can get when I can get it, or is that too complicated?”

“I understand.”

“This is Cleo’s last stand here.” She swept her arm around to take in the room. “It’s very little, but it’s a sanctuary of a sort. From here I can see the other part of the world and nobody can touch me. I can stay here forever and ever with all the good parts of me right where I want them, never changing, never turning their backs. Do I sound too philosophical?”

“You can do better.”

The imps in her eyes danced again. “But I don’t want to. I’m alive here, Mike. Now I’m going to make you part of that life. I won’t sell you. I won’t give you away. I’m going to keep you. You’re going to be mine like nobody else ever had you.”

“Cleo ...”

“Or what you want to know won’t be yours.”

I put the drink down. “Your show, kid. Do I loosen my tie?”

“You take off your clothes, Mike.”

 

She painted me that night. It wasn’t what I had expected. The background was a jungle green with little bright blobs of orange that seemed to explode outward from the canvas, distorting the sensation of seeing a flat surface. There was a man in the picture and it was me, but not so much the physical representation as the mental one. It was the id rather than the ego, the twilight person you were only when you had to be. She had seen things and caught them, registering them for all time as we know it and when I saw myself as she did it was the same as looking at the face of an enemy. The short hairs on the back of my neck raised in sudden anger at the confrontation and I knew what Belar Ris had seen just as I had seen him. My .45 was there too, exact in detail almost to seeming three-dimensional, but it was away from my hands as if I didn’t need it.

During the hours she had discarded the sheer nylon, working unfettered, concentrating solely on the portrait. I could study her abstractly, enjoying the loveliness of her body, then in the stillness my mind had drifted to other things and Cleo was only a warm outline of motion, of long smooth sweeps of pink, blossoming mounds that were half hidden behind the easel, then quickly there again. I had time to think in an unreal world where thinking was all there was to do. The extended strands of the web began to join together with the cross sections of odd conjecture, and little by little, piece by piece, the thing that was possible became probable.

She let me have that one brief look, then turned the canvas to face the walL

“You’re mine now,” she said. Her finger touched a switch and the lights faded gradually into nothingness and the two of us were there alone, people again, barely visible, whitish silhouettes against the velvet of night.

Behind the curtains a false dawn marked the beginning of a new day. The spasm outside was over and whether the Village was in the agony of rebirth or the throes of death, I would never know. We had bought the hours at a price. We had spent excesses we had accumulated during that time, and for a little while there was that crazy release that was a climax and an anticlimax that left no time for work or thought any more.

I looked at the day crawling through the skylight. She had pulled back the blinds so that the glass was a huge square of wet gray overhead, wiggling with wormy raindrops that raced to the bottom to form a pool before dripping off the edge of the sill.

I rolled off the couch and reached for my clothes. I could smell the aroma of coffee as I got dressed and called for her twice without getting an answer. I dressed quickly, found an electric percolator bubbling in the kitchen, poured myself a cup hurriedly and swallowed it down.

Then I saw her note.

It was written in charcoal on a sketching pad, just a few lines, but it said enough.

I yanked the paper out from under the pad. It was the same copy Biff had shoved under my nose the other night. The man in the picture was Belar Ris.

The web was pulling tighter, but I still couldn’t see the spider. I put my hat on and went back through the studio. The easel was still in place, but the picture was gone. The place still smelled of her perfume and the nylon thing was lying across the back of the chair.
Pathétique
was still playing, the record never having been rejected.

She had chosen a good piece. Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Opus 74. Tchaikovsky should have stuck around to write another. This one would be even better.

I stopped by the hotel, showered and changed into fresh clothes. No calls had come in and when I phoned Velda’s number there was no answer and no messages. I left word for her to call me as soon as she arrived and dialed Pat. The desk sergeant told me he had left an hour ago and hadn’t reported in yet, but had asked if I had tried to contact him. I thanked him and hung up softly though I felt like slamming the receiver back on the cradle.

I called Hy’s office and that didn’t answer.

Dulcie’s phone didn’t answer either, then I remembered it was Saturday. Modern technology had given us two days of rest. I got so damn disgusted I went downstairs to the lobby and picked up a copy of the paper and flipped through it without really seeing anything until I came to the center fold.

Somebody had snapped a shot of Belar Ris, Dulcie and me talking, but my back was to the camera and all you could see was Dulcie and Belar Ris and it looked for all the world as if we were enjoying ourselves.

I threw the paper on a chair and was about to go out when the desk clerk stopped me. I wasn’t signed in under my right name, but he knew the room I was in and pointed to a row of phones against the wall. I picked it up and said, “Yeah?”

“Mike?”

“Speaking.”

“Pat. What’s got hold of you?”

“Listen ...”

“You listen. Meet me at the Blue Ribbon about six-thirty. Have you called Hy?”

“He wasn’t in. Why?”

“Because they found Gates,” he said. “Some tramp tripped over the body under a culvert that goes over the Belt Parkway. Gates shoved a .22 pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger, or at least that’s the way it looked. He’s been dead since the day he left according to the M.E.’s estimate on the spot.”

“Where does Hy fit in?”

“Tell him to squash the story until we can move on it.”

“The last time I tried that Mitch got killed.”

“Mike...”

“Okay. I’ll leave word. Just one thing ... did he have any money on him?”

“Damn right, almost nine hundred bucks in cash.”

“He didn’t get very far,” I said.

“What?”

“Nothing. I’ll see you at six-thirty”

 

Pat was late. I sweated him out for an hour, playing with the coffee George had sent up to the table. Outside, the rain blasted down with the furious derision nature can have for humans, laughing at the futile attempts people put up to avoid her.

Pat finally came in whipping the rain from his hat, one of the young lawyers from the District Attorney’s staff behind him. He introduced him quickly as Ed Walker and they sat down opposite me. Walker was looking at me as if I were a specimen in a zoo and I felt like slamming him one.

Pat said, “Reach Hy?”

“I told you I’d leave word. It was the best we can do.”

“Good enough.”

“Why?”

“The county police accepted Gates’ death as suicide. We’re not sure. How’d you tap the money angle?”

I told him what Dulcie had mentioned to me.

“That might figure in.”

“Pat,” I said, “don’t get lost in this. A guy with a grand in his pocket doesn’t knock himself off without a big run first.”

“That’s what I mean,” he told me. “Any coroner’s jury would direct a verdict of suicide the way it was set up. He used his own gun, even the cartridges and the clip had his fingerprints on it and there was a possible motive behind his own death.”

I pushed my coffee away and flipped a butt between my lips. “Get to it.”

“Tell him, Ed.”

Walker opened his briefcase, took out several sheets of paper and referred to them. He looked at Pat, then me, shrugged once and laid them flat on the table. “You guys have the screwiest deal I ever saw.”

“He’s been in this from the beginning.”

“But I haven’t. Damn, my curiosity is worse than a cat’s and someday it’s going to get me the same thing.”

Pat said annoyed, “Come on, Ed.”

Walker nodded and adjusted his notes. “I pushed a few people overseas and got the details of the litigation the Pericon Chemical Company hit the steamship line with concerning the theft of that C-130. During the hassle the Pericon people uncovered the true owners of the shipping line. The majority control belonged to Belar Ris.”

I said, “Oh?” and wondered why it came out so casually.

Pat’s eyes were all over me, picking me apart. “That isn’t the end of it. I have the report from InterpoL Ali Duval has been associated with Belar Ris since the late forties. He started off as an Algerian terrorist fighting the French, was picked up by Ris somewhere along the line and used by him as an enforcer in several of his enterprises. Duval is suspected of having committed nine different murders and an assault on a political personage from Aden. We might be able to get him held on the last charge. Once they get him in their hands they’ll make him talk. It’s a lousy way of doing things, but a threat to turn him over to them might work wonders.”

“You’re sure you can nail him then?”

“He’ll leave on the
Pinella.”

“Where is he now?”

“Nobody seems to know,” Pat said.

“And Ris?”

“He’s had a tap on his phone for the last twelve hours. We know where he is.” Pat gave me a laconic grin and said, “He called your erstwhile friend Dulcie McInnes at three-fifteen this afternoon and confirmed his appointment to pick her up for some affair they’re having out at the estate in Bradbury this evening. We’re going to cover that place like the lid on a pan tonight and if Duval shows we’ll nail him.”

“What about Ris?”

“Those damn dipples can get away with murder and we can’t do a thing about it.”

“Those what?”

“Dipples,” Pat repeated. “DPL plates. Diplomatic immunity. He’ll get away clear until he’s declared persona non
grata
and tries to re-enter the country.”

And there it was. The guy Mitch Temple chased who could get away with speeding on the Belt Parkway while he got stopped in the cab. The guy who made the contact with Orslo Bucher. The guy in the black official limousine who dropped Ali Duval off. Damn, it was there all the time. The
dipple
car.
Old Greenie had even called it that!

I got up without saying anything and went to the wall phone and dropped in a dime. I gave the operator Velda’s number. The manager of the motel said she hadn’t returned to her room, but if I was to call to tell me that the answer was in Bradbury and she was going inside to get her fifteen dollars back. She’d be at G-14. The guy sounded puzzled.

The phone almost fell from my fingers. I wanted to yell, “No, don’t try it alone”—but nobody would have heard me.

I didn’t bother to pick up my coat George didn’t question me, but just gave me the keys to his car when I asked for them and I went out the front way leaving Pat and Walker still sitting there waiting for me, got the car out of the garage and headed out of the city.

 

Saturday was just another night in Bradbury. Two hours from New York put it another world away in another dimension. I stopped at a gas station on the edge of town, filled the tank and had the attendant point out the direction of the former Gerald Ute estate. In twenty minutes I reached the edge of the area he described to me, a rise in the road that gave a panoramic view of the landscape below.

Here and there in the distance lights winked between the trees, and when I had them located, drove past them. Every so often another car would pass going in the opposite direction, and once one drew abreast of me while the occupant scrutinized my face, then sped ahead and cut off at a side road.

Our people, I was thinking. The whole place was under constant surveillance. They’d keep up a running conversation on their car radios to keep me spotted until they were sure I had left their section. George’s car didn’t have DPL plates. There would be other security if I could get inside their compounds that would be even tighter. How did Velda think she could make it?

I circled the whole region until I came back to the outskirts of the city. There wasn’t one way of telling just where the hell she was! Those buildings were scattered in haphazard fashion behind their towering walls and if I tried them one at a time I could be too late.

But what was it the guy had said on the phone? Velda would be at G-14. She’d expect me to know what that was. She had more sense than to try and hit a target like that by herself. The message wouldn’t be too cryptic. It would be something I should recognize.

It was. It took me long enough to get it. I found a service station that I generally used, went in and got one of their standard road maps of the local area and looked at the grid markings on the side. The point where the vertical G and horizontal 14 intersected was two miles from my present position. I thanked the guy, got behind the wheel and turned around.

There were no lights showing in the building at all, but there was the barest reflection from the chrome trim of the cars that were parked in front of it to tell me it was far from deserted. I had run George’s car into the brush beside the wall, nosing it in far enough so as to be practically invisible from the side road I had turned onto. From the roof I was able to reach the top of the wall and pull myself up. I flattened out, getting my eyes adjusted to the darkness, then swung over and dropped to the ground. Now I was thankful for the rain we had had. The bush I hit crumpled wetly, rather than crackling under the impact. I stood there fighting the urge to run, the .45 in my hand, the hammer back.