The Long Night (6 page)

But Ainsley was at home and he was remarkably wide-awake for a quarter after eight in the morning. I never knew stockbrokers were out of bed that early.

He said, “Who threw you out of bed? Know what time it is?”

“I've known what time it's been since before five a.m.,” I said.

“Sounds bad. What kept you awake?”

“A big palooka called Sullivan. You wouldn't know him. He's one-half of a two-man detail belonging to the Homicide Bureau.”

“What did he want with you?”

“The seat of my pants. He's got a yen to stick it in the electric chair.”

“Sounds worse. Let's hope he's out of luck . . . playing around with electricity causes many a nasty accident. Did you say something?”

“Yes,” I said. “The whole town's full of lousy comics. Think I called you this early to listen to vintage jokes from your gag book? I'm in trouble—damn' bad trouble.”

“So I gathered,” Ainsley said. The flippancy went out of his voice. “What's the pitch?”

“I'm suspected of killing a dame.”

“Oh. . . .” Almost without hesitation, he asked, “Did you do it?”

“No.”

“Then what're you worried about? I'll get hold of my lawyer and be right down. Keep your shirt on . . . and your big mouth shut . . .'bye for now.”

I had started to tell him I didn't need a lawyer when the line went dead. Not that it would've made any difference. He'd have paid no attention, anyway. Ainsley's always been the stubborn type. But a nice guy—a very nice guy.

Around Ten O'clock, I was a free man again. Without Ainsley having to put up any bail money. And without any need of the services of his lawyer. But not without a certain amount of argument. On the principle that half a loaf is better than no bread, coppers always prefer to have their hands on a suspect rather than have an empty cell. It looks better for them when the public thinks they've stuck a killer behind bars before his victim has had time to get cold. And no one can teach the average cop anything about playing to the gallery.

When the front office decided they didn't have enough on me to make the pinch stick, they turned me loose with a warning not to leave town. I guess the stomach test they gave Judith had something to do with it. Cooke told me the analysis of the contents showed up with very little alcohol and a lot of chloral hydrate. And they'd found the dregs of the empty rye bottle stiff with the stuff.

The way he gave me the information, I got the idea he had special reasons of his own for telling me. I said, “How much is a lot?”

“Enough to give her hop-dreams within a few minutes of taking it.”

“Don't see how that lets me out.”

“It doesn't. But the amount of rye does.” He pulled at his ear and stared into my eyes like he could see through the back of my head. “She had too much outside and too little inside. D.A.'s office came to the conclusion you must've been the same. Since you wouldn't frame yourself”—he stuck out his lower lip and made baby eyes at me—“we think you landed yourself in a fixed job . . . complete to the tip-off we got that was meant to railroad you up the river.”

“Tell me about the tip-off,” I said.

“At six minutes after three,” Cooke said, “switchboard took a call from someone who just said ‘. . . Police . . .
police . . .' over and over again and didn't give any name or address. It took time to trace the call and then a prowl car was routed to 621 Gifford Street to see what was coming off in the apartment on the fifth floor rented by a Miss Judith Walker.” He grinned crookedly. “What they saw put Sullivan and me to work.”

“Was this someone a man or a woman?”

“The line was bad but the operator thought the voice sounded like a woman. And she left the receiver off. That's how they were able to trace the call.”

“She left it off when she finished talking with me,” I said. “And at six minutes after three, I'm prepared to testify in any court, Judith Walker was in no condition to use a telephone. It was just after three o'clock when I went into the apartment and found her unconscious on the bed.”

Cooke looked at me and I looked at Cooke. He said, “Somebody must hate you pretty bad, Bowman: somebody with a nice twisted mind who wanted to tie you up so you'd never wriggle free: somebody who went the length of murder to put you out of the way. Got any ideas?”

“In my racket,” I said, “you're a failure if you haven't got any enemies. But mine don't go in for finesse. And a lot of finesse has been used in this affair. Furthermore”—I could hear a voice like honey saying “. . .
This isn't anything a doctor can cure
. . .” and I could see shining, jet-black hair and a satin-smooth skin and a red mouth faintly smiling as I went on—“I wouldn't exactly say all the hatred was directed at me. It wasn't love that wrapped a belt round Judith's throat.”

“Talking about love,” Cooke said, “the neighbours say Miss Walker had a boy-friend—indentity unknown. Her, family, if any, haven't yet been traced.”

“Did he pay the rent?”

“She didn't need any sugar daddy. She's been pulling down four hundred a month modelling for Ivor Kovak, the Fifth Avenue fashion mogul.”

“If there's such a thing as re-incarnation,” I said, “I'm going to come back with a streamline chassis and big brown eyes and go to work for Mister Kovak.”

“Keep the belts of your dresses under lock and key if you do,” Cooke said. “And don't call any tin-badge operators
at two in the morning . . . what're you gonna do when you leave here?”

“Get the stink of rye out of my nose,” I said. “And after that, I've an itch to find out what Miss Judith Walker was before she became a corpse.”

“Don't scratch the itch too hard,” Cooke said. He stared at me with no expression in his pink, little-boy face and his eyes were guileless. “There's more than one kind of louse that bites.”

Rain had seeped through a joint in the window frame and a pool of dusty water lay on the inner sill. An occasional drip to spread the damp patch on the carpet below. There was condensation on the glass panes and on the scarred top of my desk. The familiar odour of damp and dust and ancient linoleum flowed out to greet me as I opened the office door. At three o'clock on a wet, grey afternoon in the Fall, my business premises are less inviting than a camel stable.

Me, I don't mind. And clients rarely call on me. When they want me, they send for me. When they want me. I don't advertise and I've got a reputation for being choosy—and expensive. When a guy gets himself into the kind of trouble that only a guy like me can get him out of—he's entitled to pay.

My mail was lying in a scattered heap on the floor. Except for one letter, it was the usual mail: an invitation to a veterans' dinner, a reminder that my subscription to some club or other was still unpaid, an appeal for support for an East Side youth group, two bills endorsed with a request for my early attention. I put them all on my desk and concentrated on the one and only letter with a handwritten address.

Nice neat writing with rounded loops and an easy flow that usually indicates a woman. The envelope smelled pretty, too. It bore a New York postmark and it was dated first collection the day before.

I studied it back and front while I took off my coat, changing it from one hand to the other and wondering why the perfume was familiar. The handwriting wasn't.

Vague recollections flitted through my mind as I sat down and put my feet up on the desk and lit a cigarette. One of my more innocent habits is to delay opening a letter until I've tried to guess the identity of its sender. That's if it's a personal letter . . . and if it smells of
Paris in the Spring
.

Miriam was a distant memory . . . Berenice still burned deep down in my mind like a dark flame . . . and there was Catherine . . . and Juliet . . . and Isabel. . . . To a guy like me, women are the milestones of life. I travel on and leave them behind . . . a different perfume, a different way of looking at a guy, a different voice—but the same hook for the same fish. And the bait never grows stale.

I thought about them all while I relaxed with a pleasant lunch under my belt and stared at the envelope through a lazy streamer of blue cigarette smoke. I felt fine. I'd had a Turkish bath and a friction massage and a good meal. There wasn't much more a guy could ask—at least, not in the middle of the afternoon. And I'd just ducked out from a murder rap, which is something I don't do every day.

Thinking about murder closed the circle and I was back again to a swell-looking chick who'd had her rye doctored with K.O. drops. Good girl or bad girl—she'd deserved a better break than she'd had. She might've got one if I'd called John Law soon's I found her.

You can't feel fine when you go on tripping over a guilt complex. And I felt guilty about Judith. She couldn't have known I was meant to be framed; if she'd anticipated the outcome, she'd have got the hell out of her apartment before somebody got the chance to shut her breath off.

But she'd called me on the phone and she'd led me into a crazy conversation . . . and I might've finished up toasting my fanny in the big house up the river. . . .

At that, I slit the flap of the envelope. And then I quit day-dreaming. There's something else I don't do every day and that's read a letter from a dead dame.

The notepaper matched the envelope and the handwriting was the same on both.

In a smooth-flowing script that linked the words together, she'd written:

Dear Mr. Bowman
,

Your name has been recommended to me by someone who once employed you in a confidential capacity. I have been given to understand you are to be trusted
.

If you are willing to undertake something that might put you on the wrong foot with an influential person, will you please call the above number on receipt of this letter? I shall be in my apartment until ten o'clock in the morning. Should this not be convenient, you can contact me at Ivor Kovak's of Fifth Avenue, any time between ten-thirty and noon
.

Sincerely yours,
Judith Walker
.

Nice and brief and businesslike. Nothing personal; nothing intimate. Yet she'd wakened me at two a.m. to call me darling. It didn't add up.

Unless. . . . There could be two of them. One to write the letter and the other to talk drink and suicide on the phone. One who wanted to hire me and the other who wanted to frame me. Which of them was the dame in the nylon nightdress?

Cooke had just returned from a late lunch. I asked him.

He said I got some interesting correspondence and would I let him have the letter and the dame occupying a drawer in cold storage was Judith Walker because he'd had her identified.

I said, “Who did the identifying?”

“A frill called Van Buren—Carole Van Buren. She works for Kovak, too. . . . See you got round to my way of thinking. Would you recognise the voice you made a date with last night?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. One drunk canary sings much the same as another. Has this Carole any idea what her friend got herself mixed up in?”

“She says not. Gave me the impression she was telling the truth, too.”

“A copper shouldn't be impressionable. What's she like?”

“White meat. And hair to match. When you call on her, see you keep your mind on your business. And don't forget I want that letter . . . be seeing you.”

Kovak's salon was on the first floor. White marble steps with a pale-green carpet runner curving up from the ground floor level. Greek urns filled with gladioli flanking the foot of the staircase and graceful vases with more flowers at the top. Soft, diffused lighting from hidden sconces. The air was warm and hushed and fragrant like the indoor Garden of Rest at Holtzhacker's Crematorium.

Where the marble steps ended, heavy green satin drapes were drawn across an opening built like a Norman arch. And in an alcove, a polished one-piece door bore a plaque that said:
Reception
, in white letters. With a feeling like I'd come to express my sympathy, I knocked.

Nothing happened. Somewhere far-off I could hear voices muffled by a lot of intervening doors. The intermittent thrum of a sewing machine came and went. Out in Fifth Avenue the tide of traffic flowed by beyond plateglass doors.

I knocked again. The one-piece door opened and a dame with a platinum streak came out.

She said, “Yes . . .?” And she said it with her head on a side and her front teeth showing in a tight little smile and the fingers of one hand clasped in the other.

“If Miss Van Buren is available,” I said, “my name is Bowman.”

“Oh . . .?” Her smile withdrew south of her eyes and made a last-ditch stand around her mouth. “Does Miss Van Buren expect you?”

“No, but she'll see me. Tell her I want to talk about Judith Walker.”

“Oh. . . .” What was left of her smile was now an uneasy grin that accentuated the powder-filled lines at the corners of her lips. After a moment, she said, “I see . . .” And her eyes added up my height and my raincoat and my fedora and got a total of copper.

She had hard eyes with narrow bags under them and she'd used blue eye-shadow to camouflage her wrinkled lids. She also had skinny hands with mandarin nails and thin, bony feet with dark veins showing. Her age was anybody's guess.
From what I've seen of gown stores and joints that stage fashion displays, they take a bustless female in her middle thirties, diet and dehydrate her, remove all resemblance to flesh-and-blood femininity, sheath her in a skin-tight black dress, and train her to say, “Modom,” like she was sucking acid drops.

This dame was sister to all the others. Only this one was a trifle unhappy because she'd worked alongside a model who'd gone and got herself strangled. Just thinking about it deepened the crows' feet around her eyes.