Lila came back with an impish grin.
“You really hurt him, rough boy,” she said slyly. “You punched him low, he says.”
“Not low enough, Lila. What’s burning his blintzes?”
“You mustn’t mind Greg,” Lila said tenderly. “He’s a demon about his job. Nothing on earth matters for him but the department store.”
“How about you?”
“Me?”
“You matter,” I said. “He was eating out of your hand when he walked out.”
“Greg’s an old friend of mine, Stevie.”
“A real close friend?”
“Let’s keep it clean.” She laughed.
“Some of my closest friends are clean,” I said.
Her apartment was something out of House Beautiful, a neatly decorated trap, artfully designed to radiate the taste of its mistress. If Lila was phony, she was good and phony. She had spent a bushel of loot for the trappings in her cozy parlor; the best in furniture and design; the smoothest and slickest woods; the juiciest abstractions against subtly colored walls. It was a place flavored with a special appeal for only certain tastes. It would have been heaven for Chuck Rosen.
While Lila filled some liquor glasses, I studied the room. Chuck would have been at home here. He had worshiped at the shrine of all the leaders in modern painting; Matisse and Picasso and the other strong men in the world of paint and pigment. He had transferred his enthusiasm to me, long ago, when his quick and facile mind explained the background of all things modern so that I could understand his message. Funny? Strange for a detective? The land of fiction is loaded with corn about the working investigator. Yet some of the best detectives have brains. And even the successful middlemen often struggle to improve their mental cupboards.
And that was why I stood flatfooted in the center of Lila Martin’s living room, sucking in the culture on her walls. She had several good reproductions of Paul Klee. She featured Picasso and Braque and Duly. And on a small wall, hung in a neat pattern against a background of corded fabric, were three Baule masks of the purest African design. I could imagine Chuck standing this way. I could imagine Chuck loving Lila for her good taste.
“Like my place?” she asked, amused by my obvious gawking.
“Did you decorate this yourself, Lila?”
“Now you’re being nasty,” she pouted. Her coat was off and she stood near me unsteadily. There was enough liquor in her to hold her in this mood for a while. Up close, her face came into focus for me. She had delicate features, a pixy nose and lips that were full and ripe. Her eyes still held their original glow, only partly screened by the after effects of her alcoholic revelry. She could smother a man if she lifted an eyebrow. She had all the tricks and snares in the book. And the book was wide open for me now. “It took me months to design this room, Stevie.”
“You have flawless taste.”
“Do you honestly mean it?”
She moved across the room, showing me the subtle swing of her hips. The doorway became a frame for her terrific torso. Behind her, I could see that the bedroom was just as modern as the rest of the place.
“I’ll be out soon, after I get into something comfy,” she said. “You’ll find plenty of snacks in the kitchen. It should be easy for you to locate the cupboard, Stevie. You’re the detective.”
She swayed there for a moment, letting me enjoy the contours of her body in profile. She turned, fussing with the fancy buttons on her blouse. The thing opened trickily. The silken sheath dropped off her shoulder.
“Whoops,” she said. In the half light, her full breasts almost broke through the flimsy barrier as the catch came undone. The silk dropped lower, but she caught it skillfully, in the manner of a strip tease queen on a runway. She took her time pulling the blouse back to hide her nudity. She managed to adjust it so that the silk lay lightly across her breasts. Then she began to struggle with another catch, behind her neck.
“Help me, Stevie,” she whispered.
She held my fingers while I struggled with the tiny catch on her pearls. Her nails were sharp against my wrists. She leaned her tail into me and let her hair fall low over my shoulder. From where I stood, the twin peaks of her delectable torso rose and fell in a fresh, hot rhythm. She began to do things with her hips.
“About that coffee,” I said.
“There’s a little whistling kettle in the kitchen.” She giggled. Her eyes challenged me. Her lips teased me with a cloying smile. “Heat the water, Stevie. I’ll be right out to make the Caffé Espresso.”
She didn’t close the door behind her. She walked to the bed and let the blouse and gown fall away from her. It was an effort to walk away from her, but the apartment beckoned me. Her apartment was an investment of $119.25 for me.
Because I had a theory about Lila Martin.
My mind told me that she was a nympho, a sophisticated roundheel, a girl who could spout culture and then fail gracefully—in the direction of the nearest couch.
My mind told me that Chuck Rosen might have gone for this type—lock, stock and bankroll.
But my mind told me, too, that Lila Martin might have murdered Chuck Rosen!
CHAPTER 3
Lila’s kitchen was a neatly decorated trap, big enough to swing a small kitten in. It yelled with the clues to her personality. It shouted her smartness to the casual visitor. She had filled the place with the latest in electrical equipment from toaster to deep-fat-fryer. She had lined the walls with the smartest in frippery, but she kept the important places open for the featured objects of her fancy. On a brick wall hung some of the latest of Picasso’s ceramics. In a key spot she displayed an original Marc Chagall platter. I wondered vaguely where she found the funds to feed her insatiable yen for the best in art.
Her stock of foodstuffs proved her sophistication. She had caviar, truffles, crumpets and trout, plus an assortment of upper-class tongue-ticklers rigged to make a gourmet’s mouth water. She had soups and savories, condiments and cheeses, artichoke hearts and antipastos.
The closets and cupboards of milady’s kitchen always challenge the investigator’s eye. Food can be important at certain times, in certain places. Once, not too long ago, a corned beef sandwich broke an important skip-trace locate for me. I trailed a maggoty crud named Samuel Arthur Lanfogel all the way from a cottage in Oceanside, Long Island, to a cheap rooming house on the edge of the big city slums, all because of his yen for delicatessen. Lanfogel had left his wife and two kids, to wander alone among the hoyden citizenry of New York. I tracked him to a neighborhood, but I couldn’t put my finger on his private nest. Then, out of the blue, I remembered his lust for corned beef on good sour rye. I canvassed the local baloney bistros until I found the one that served the best corned beef. And one day, when a blowzy blonde walked in to buy a pound of the stuff, I followed her and grabbed my man. He had been betrayed by his insatiable drooling over the spiced meat.
That was why I fingered Lila Martin’s cupboard with alertness and sobriety. She had dozens of cans, and the inventory took careful study and patience.
Until I found the jars of lox!
Do you know what lox is?
Have you ever sampled this big town delicacy?
If you live in Goose Creek Hollow or Tupperville a word of explanation is due you.
Lox was a funny word to me, too, for a long time. Lox is a custom and a habit to millions of metropolitan dwellers. They seek it out usually on Sunday mornings. From the Bronx to Brooklyn, from the Bowery to the Battery, lox is the favorite snack to a variety of folk. Lox is smoked salmon. You eat it between the crusts of savory onion rolls, or better still, on the lumpy dough of the ancient bagel. You eat it with cream cheese or munch it on toast. But you only eat it in the giant cities. I had sampled it long ago, when I came to New York after a boyhood far out on the clam-flats of Long Island. And when Chuck Rosen joined my office, the spicy
fish became a weekly ritual for me. I ate it on weekends, in his mother’s house in Brooklyn. The sight of the pinkish fish would always remind me of Chuck.
I opened a jar of it and made a few sandwiches and carried the plateful into the living room.
I was munching a sandwich when Lila came out of the bedroom. She wore canary pajamas, an ensemble out of Vogue, but cut much lower than any vogue demanded. The tight blouse did nothing to enclose her firm frame. She was hell-bent on showing me her intentions. Both of them.
“You made yourself right at home.” She smiled. “Good boy.”
“Want a sandwich, Lila?”
“I never eat smoked salmon.” Her little nose wrinkled cutely. “And besides, I’m not hungry, lover. But I could do with a nice cup of coffee.”
She disappeared into the kitchen. I heard her fiddling with the ice trays. I heard the gurgle of the Scotch bottle in there. She was fortifying her alcoholic soirée with more fuel. But she came out, after a while, equipped with a tray and a silver gimmick built to manufacture the rich black Italian brew called Caffé Espresso. She poured two demitasse cups of it, inhaling it and making pleasant faces.
She sat alongside me, watching me finish my sandwich. She had already tired of the coffee. From the way she rubbed up against me, she had tired of everything but the immediate future. I avoided her eyes. I stared hard at the picture of the fish on the opposite wall.
“You like Klee?” she asked sleepily.
“I try to like him,” I said. “He was a great artist. Chuck Rosen used to like him a lot.”
Did she tighten beside me? For a moment it seemed that she would pull away. For a moment, the silence blossomed.
“Poor Chuck,” she said softly. “It’s hard to believe that he’s gone.”
“You knew him well?”
“He came up here often.”
“Is that why you bought the lox?”
She measured me with her half-awake eyes. “You sure are a detective, Stevie. Don’t you ever stop investigating?”
“Chuck Rosen was murdered.”
She turned her head slowly and fixed her black eyes on me. Those eyes! They were mantraps, as soft and purposeful as honeyed words. They were clever eyes, probing eyes, the eyes of a temptress who was asking me to forget my partner and play with her. But I could only think of her in relation to Chuck now. She would have leveled him with those eyes of hers. She could have jerked him into a coma with one cultured session of wrestling. Chuck was a sucker for just her type, the smooth and sexy sirens who radiate Park Avenue charm while promising Third Avenue harlotry. How far had she gotten with Chuck?
“Did you come up here to investigate his murder?” she asked me, pouting. “Don’t you believe I told you all I know about that horrible, horrible cocktail party?”
“Frankly? No.”
“You think I’m a liar?”
“I think you can tell me more.” My annoyance came through my hands. I grabbed her and yanked her body so that she slid around on the couch and faced me. I wanted her to see my purpose now. I needed her personal information about Chuck. All of it. So I squeezed her arms hard and waited for her eyes to meet mine again. “To hell with the party,” I told her. “Chuck Rosen was nuts about you. He wrote me about you. He was serious about you.”
“He never told me, Steve.”
“How often did you see him?”
“Once or twice a week.”
“Up here?”
“After a show, or a late cocktail,” she said. The pressure of my hands on her didn’t bother her at all. She would relish this treatment. She would enjoy being slapped around. She let me feel her knees again, coming my way under the reflex of her drinking. Her voice dropped huskily. She wanted to be closer to me. “Chuck just wasn’t my type, Steve.”
“He would have gone for you, tail over teacups.”
“Maybe he did. But I didn’t see him that way.”
“What way?” I lifted her chin and forced her to look at me. She seemed too far gone with sadness, suddenly. “Chuck was a good-looking boy. Why would you brush him off?”
“He was too serious.”
“He proposed to you?”
“Often.” She sighed. “He was sweet, but I couldn’t see eating breakfast with him for the rest of my life.”
“You tested him for breakfast?”
“Now you’re being nasty,” she said. “Now you’re poking your nose into my bedroom.”
“That’s where my nose belongs.” I grabbed her and swung her around. Once again my nails bit deep into her arms. But she only sighed and smiled at me. So I dug in harder. “What about your maggoty boyfriends at the store?” I asked. “Did they know that Chuck was burning with love for you?”
“I wouldn’t know. Please, you’re hurting my arms, Steve.”
I let her go and she crossed the room and headed for the little wagon with the Scotch on it. She kept rubbing her arms where my fingers had stabbed her. I got off the couch and went to her again. She drank a long swallow of liquor, straight this time. When she put the glass down, her eyes were asking me for anything but more questions. So I grabbed her again. Maybe I had made a mistake getting her drunk this way. Maybe she wouldn’t talk sense any more for me. She had a one-track mind and the track was sharply defined for her. It led across the living room and straight through the bedroom door. She responded to my hands with a soft and yielding posture. She draped herself against me. But the sexy pitch angered me more.
“I’m going to lay it on the line,” I said angrily.
“Lay it, lover boy.” She smiled.
“Somebody pushed Chuck Rosen off the penthouse terrace at Cumber’s store,” I said. “Chuck was put on as an inside investigator. He was on a special assignment for Cumber himself. And he was getting places with his investigation. He wrote me that he was almost home, that he was ready for the big grab at Cumber’s.”
“The big grab?” Lila asked sleepily.
“An arrest. A pinch. An important disclosure.” I watched her carefully as the words rang into her consciousness. But nothing changed for her. She still leaned into me lazily. I pushed her away and she dropped gracefully on the couch. She stared up at me, waiting for my next line. “It’s funny,” I said, “that Chuck fell to his death just as he was ready to report the result of his investigations to Cumber.”
“I didn’t know about his work,” Lila said.
“Maybe you didn’t. Maybe nobody did at that party. But Chuck could have been pushed off the terrace for another reason.”
“What would that be, lover?”
“Jealousy,” I said. “I’ve been working at Cumber’s for only a few days. I’ve been casing the Advertising Department carefully, Lila. There are at least four characters up there who would murder anybody who had the inside track to your mattress.”
“Flatterer.” She smiled. “Who would they be?”
“Greg Wilkinson. Larry Pettigrew. Chester Carpenter. And even Horace Kutner.” She listened warily as I dropped the names. She enjoyed each one of them, accepting them with a nod of the head and a pixy smile. Her affair with Greg Wilkinson was common gossip at the store. She had come into the advertising world as a green and unschooled recruit in the art of writing copy. Yet Greg Wilkinson had hired her and encouraged her. In short order, Lila Martin became the reigning queen of the Copywriting Department. She had little talent, according to the backroom information I had gathered. The man who wrote her stuff was Chester Carpenter. Chester had been copy chief until Lila came along. Chester was now her assistant. He was a milk-and-mush character who worshiped her from a neurotic distance. She must have encouraged his worship in her own sweet way.
“Where did you get your information?” Lila asked impishly.
“It’s my business to get information. You’ve dated every man in the Advertising Department. Especially Greg Wi
lkinson.”
“Really? And where did you get that morsel of research?”
“A little bird,” I said. “A little bird named Vivian Debevoise.”
“That old bag. You believe her?”
“She made sense.”
“Utter nonsense,” laughed Lila, “would be more like it. Vivian’s been eating her heart out ever since I came into the department. She was Greg’s steady girl before I got there.”
“She was his secretary,” I said. “And she still is. If she doesn’t rate in the store setup, Greg Wilkinson wouldn’t keep her on his staff, would he?”
“She’s a pleasant enough biddy, Mister Detective. And she does her work well.” Lila couldn’t wipe away the inner amusement that Vivian Debevoise inspired in her. Vivian was a big and blowzy blonde, enough competition to make any normal girl quaver. But Lila knew the power of her own charms. “Greg will fire her one of these days, however, because of her adolescent jealousy. She seems to imagine she has a claim on the great Gregory. That’s where she makes a big mistake.”
“Greg’s finished with her?”
“Why not ask Vivian?
“I don’t think she’d admit it.”
“Clever boy. You’ve appraised Vivian correctly, of course. She’s been over the hill for a few years now. Vivian’s past thirty, you know.”
“The riper the fruit,” I suggested, “the sweeter the juice.”
“You’ve squeezed the fruit?”
“Vivian’s not that easy. She strikes me as being the one-man type of damsel.”
“One man at a time?”
“She hasn’t given up on Greg Wilkinson yet, has she?”
Kiss and Kill Page 2
