The Girl with the Frightened Eyes

by Lawrence Lariar

  I took a shower and found myself singing under the spray. Things were moving and moving rapidly since Bull had entered the mix-up.

  I had just finished shaving and dressing when the phone rang. It was a woman, a young voice, soft and yet heavy with purpose. She said, “Jeff Keye? I’ve been trying to get you all day. This is Paula Smith.”

  I sat down on my bed, suddenly, filled with a confusion of excitement and relief. “Paula? Where are you? I’ve been looking all over the city for you.”

  There was a silence. “Where I am is unimportant. I’m on my way out of town now and won’t be back for two months. I’d be glad to see you then.”

  “I could come to you,” I said. “I’d like to talk to you—about Kip.”

  “That would be impossible. I’m going to Hollywood. I’ve got a commission there.”

  “Where can I write you?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll get in touch with you as soon as I’ve settled. You’ve been very sweet, Jeff—I appreciate the trouble I’ve put you to.”

  I said, “Who told you where to reach me?”

  She disregarded my question. “I’ve got to be going now, Jeff. I’ll get in touch with you—I’ll write to you later.”

  When I put down the phone my hands were clammy on the receiver and my collar seemed suddenly too small for my neck. I called Bull and told him about the phone conversation with Paula.

  He said, “That’s interesting, but not unexpected.”

  “Not unexpected?”

  “I’m no superman, Jeff. People who disappear are sometimes filled full of an annoying schizophrenia. It’s hard to understand their motives. Paula is still among the missing, isn’t she? Maybe she wants it that way. Maybe the girl you heard wasn’t Paula Smith. We can’t be sure.”

  “Then who—?”

  “We won’t worry about her. Did you get the date with Lucy?”

  “I’ll see her at nine-thirty.”

  “Good hunting,” he said. “And report to me as soon as you get out of there.”

  I hung up. I stood there, torn between leaving and taking another shower. I could have used another shower.

  CHAPTER 15

  Lucy welcomed me, bedecked in her finest. She was more than tolerable in her silk blouse and tweed skirt. Her face shone with simple glamour, the sort of finish a clever stenographer puts on for her best beau.

  She led me into the living room and a lone light burned near the bay window. The sofa was well padded and comfortable. There was a hush in the house. I made the most of it.

  At ten-thirty she answered a whimpering call from upstairs and left me to attend to Mrs. Crandall. I circled the living room and made a list of the pictures. My tally showed seventeen reproductions, including the Burchfield. There was a large lithograph, hung foolishly in the darkest corner of the room. It was a black and heavy item, overdone and uninteresting, by an artist named Falto. I crossed the threshold and entered the dining room to continue my cataloguing. The predominating motif here was black and white. The room was loaded with etchings, too many to list, too dull to be of any importance.

  The hallway held seven pictures, five of which were standard reproductions, including Wilson Homer’s epic “Gulf Stream.” There was an oblong mirror set on a line with the stair railing, and on either side of this mirror a small etching—a Rembrandt reproduction, but well framed and clear and good in the line.

  Lucy tiptoed downstairs and watched me examine the pictures.

  She said, “Aren’t they simply beautiful?”

  I led her back into the living room and we sat on the couch again. I said, “Honey, art is good for the mind but it does nothing for a man’s stomach. What could you be cooking in the kitchen for a hungry old soldier?”

  She got off my lap and leaned over me. “Waffles?”

  “Wouldn’t they take too long?”

  “They’d be worth it, the way I make ’em.”

  I said, “Make a gallon of coffee and a few hundred waffles and I love you forever.”

  She skipped to the dining room door and then turned to face me. “You take a nap. When you wake up I’ll be back in here with a big bunch of waffles.”

  “Suppose Mrs. Preston walks in and finds a sleeping G.I.?”

  She wrinkled her small nose and tittered. “Mrs. Preston don’t ever get back before one-thirty. She’ll just about be filled up by then.”

  “How about the others?”

  “They’re all out until midnight.”

  She left me then. When the door to the kitchen had swung closed I got off the couch and headed for the hallway. A small night light burned at the second floor landing. I climbed the stairs quickly and made a tour of the small hallway. There was a sound of steady breathing from the first room to the right. Mrs. Crandall. The room opposite would be Mrs. Preston’s. In most boarding houses the landlady reserves the best exposure for her own use. I tried the knob. The door was locked.

  I set to work on the lock, testing Bull’s key ring. The fifth key unlocked the door.

  The room was fairly large and fairly typical. There was an elegant four poster bed, canopied with the frilly network most antique lovers use to promote the age of their discoveries. I pulled the heavy drapes over the bay window and switched on my flashlight.

  The walls held two large oils, ornately framed and finished in gilt. Over the bed: an oval job, depicting a sleepy nude in the process of dampening her feet in a silver bucket. Opposite the bed: a giant square painting of a farmhouse and a barn, done in the flat, simple planes of the modern landscapers. In the corner: a signature—Verdek.

  This, then, was the picture Mrs. Preston had bought from Boucher. I stood away from it, studying it. I made faces at it and tried to understand the landlady’s love of it. There was a touch of the amateur in the composition and the color could have been better if the artist had used less white and more intelligence. Why would Mrs. Preston fancy an item of this sort? What impulse brought her to the purchase of a picture like this—a soulless creation, dull and uninteresting?

  I removed it from the wall, fascinated by the frame. I set the flashlight on the bed and focused the beam on the picture. I knelt on the floor and examined the back of it. Evidently Mrs. Preston was uncertain about this frame. It was held in place by two brads, loosely stuck in each side. I removed these brads easily and slipped the canvas out of the frame, examining the tacked edges.

  The canvas, too, was lightly tacked to the canvas frame. There was a reason for this, an obvious reason. Verdek’s picture had been tacked over another canvas. I began to remove the tacks.

  I had pulled eight tacks when the flashlight suddenly went out. I dropped the picture in a reflex of terror and as it fell from my hands somebody hit me with a fistful of lead. It was a glancing blow, calculated to quiet me permanently, but it did nothing more than stun me. I fell over on my side and my assailant was quick to follow his advantage. The second blow missed my head and hit my chest. I grabbed for a throat but could find none. I felt the burred fabric of a man’s tweed jacket and heard the deep and throaty grunts of a man’s anger. My first wild swing missed him completely but I caught his jaw with my next and in that split second contact with his face I knew he was mustached.

  He outweighed me. He leaned his weight into me and lashed out at my head. His aim improved and his fist caught my jaw and my head jerked back to hit the wall. He hit me again and I kicked out at him, but the springs were out of my legs.

  He left me then and I heard him curse me. He rolled away and ran out of the room. I heard him going down the stairs, fast. I rubbed my head and shook away a few of the stars and groped around me for the flashlight. I found it, lit it and aimed it around the room, dazedly.

  The picture was gone.

  I stumbled down the stairs and into Lucy.

  She said, “My God! You look terrible. What were you do
ing up there?”

  “Didn’t you see anybody run out of here?”

  She shook her head. “I thought it was you coming down the stairs.”

  “It wasn’t me, sugar. It was a big bad man with a big picture—Mrs. Preston’s latest. I heard him come in and followed him upstairs. He hit me with a small building up there and beat it with the picture.”

  Lucy began to sob in a high key. “This is terrible. Mrs. Preston will blame it all on me.”

  I said, “Not a chance.” I took her back to the kitchen and threw away the waffle batter, disposed of the nut brown waffles and poured the coffee into the sink. We eliminated the cutlery.

  “Get your coat and hat,” I told her. “We’re going out.”

  She got her coat quickly. We walked quickly to Seventh Avenue and entered a bar. I left her there. I bought her a drink and told her to nurse it until she felt that Mrs. Preston had returned home. I said, “You were out all night with me, understand? We left Mrs. Preston’s just after you saw Mrs. Crandall. You’ve got a wonderful alibi, honey—me. Don’t say a word about what happened. I’ll call you tomorrow and find out how you’re doing.”

  I took a cab to Hank’s place, still bothered by a few birds in my head. Bull gave me a drink and listened to my story.

  He studied my list of Preston pictures carefully. He stuffed the list into his pocket and said, “This artist Verdek is a rag-picker, isn’t he?”

  “I wouldn’t hang him in a backhouse,” I said. “He’s one of the flat plane boys—slug nutty with surfaces.”

  “And you didn’t see any part of the picture under Verdek’s?”

  “Not even a corner of the surface, really.”

  “That’s a shame,” said Bull. “It ties us up for a while. Mrs. Preston doesn’t sound like the type of art buyer who would pay Boucher prices for a ham like Verdek. Your list of her collection more or less sets her up as the middle of the road type of dilettante, the sort of dame who plays safe, buys enough of the recognized masters in both the academic and modern schools. And now we have her buying a Verdek and using it as a cover for another painting. It smells to high heaven of something more than simple art gathering. How about the tacks in the picture under the Verdek? Were they stuck in tight?”

  “I didn’t have much trouble prying them out.”

  “Two sets of tacks?”

  I thought back. “One set of tacks, applied loosely.”

  “That might clear Boucher,” said Bull. “A gallery man would probably pin down the first picture tightly and mount the phony over it so that it could be easily removed.” He paused and shook his head at himself. “I’m arguing like a Bellick. If Boucher did the job he might have tacked it that way, too. After all he’s a gallery man—an exhibitor. He may not know beans about framing a picture.”

  Hank said, “Be yourself, Homer. Boucher must certainly know how to frame a picture. Even I can do it. Two sets of tacks in a good oil painting would be murder on the canvas. No self-respecting gallery man would do it that way.”

  “I bow to MacAndrews,” said Bull. “How about your pugilistic friend, Jeff?”

  I described him, emphasizing the effect of his fists on my head. “He had a mustache, too.”

  Hank said, “It could have been Boucher. He sports a fringe under the nostrils.”

  I said, “Could be. Boucher has a mustache.”

  “We can’t build a man around a mustache,” said Bull. “Some of my best friends have mustaches. But Boucher is all bones and not very wide. You’d outweigh him, Jeff.”

  “Weight isn’t everything. He may be the wiry type.”

  “He didn’t seem to be. I can’t imagine Boucher putting you away. Are you sure the man had a mustache? You might have felt the fringe of his eyebrows.”

  “I felt his nose. I was reaching for a way to get him off me. I wanted to throttle him and at the same time scratch his nasty eyes out. I’ve got a good memory for faces, especially after I’ve rubbed my hand over an upper lip that sprouts fuzz.”

  Hank said, “How about Semple? Couldn’t it have been that type of mustache?”

  “Semple’s mustache is only an excuse,” I reminded him. “It’s really only the shadow of his cute little nose.”

  “I didn’t notice,” said Hank. “But you should know. Didn’t you do a sketch of him before he walked over and tried to act like a movie tough guy?”

  “I did a sketch. That’s why I’m sure it wasn’t Semple.”

  Bull chuckled. “Bad figuring, Jeff. You can’t be sure of what type of mustache your fingers caressed. You were pretty much wrought up at the time you reached for your assailant’s face. You may be mixing a bit of wishful thinking into your conclusions. It might easily have been Semple, from the way you’ve described him to me. He has beef and it was beef that downed you. On the other hand, we’ve got a gallery of mustaches. Mike Sammit, the janitor, has a mustache. It wasn’t Mike, was it?”

  “You insult my good right arm. I’m weak, but I’m not dead. I could handle Sammit with my elbows. Sammit is no match for even a Boy Scout. It wasn’t Sammit.”

  “And Yukon?”

  I put down my drink. “I never gave him a passing thought. Gregory could have done the job, all right. He’s big and he’s heavy and he’s got a right arm like a meat axe. But Gregory is suffering from a bullet wound in his left shoulder. Do you think a man who just finished a fancy faint could rally enough to stage a brawl like I just had?”

  “A man with a purpose might,” said Bull.

  “What purpose?” I asked. “Getting that picture?”

  “Yukon is in the picture business. What size is his particular lip fringe?”

  “It could be the fringe I touched.”

  Bull sighed. “Have we forgotten any other mustaches? This case reminds me of another man hunt I experienced not too long ago. That time I was hunting for noses. Remember, Hank?”

  “Lumpy noses,” said Hank. “How could I forget?”

  I remembered another mustache possibility. “We’re forgetting the character in the Franklin apartment, Bull.”

  “You didn’t see him that well, did you?”

  “We didn’t see him at all, really. From where we stood we couldn’t know whether he sported whiskers or a beard down to his knees. But he was a big man, and heavy, or am I miscalculating his fleeting silhouette, Hank?”

  Hank nodded sagely. “He had a heavy frame, but I wouldn’t swear to his pan or his facial ornaments.”

  “We can forget him for a while,” said Bull and reached for his coat. “Come along, Jeff, we’re going for a little ride.”

  “Ride? Where?”

  “Over to Mrs. Preston’s. She should be reeling home by this time. I’d like to get a firsthand look at her face when she finds that painting missing.”

  We walked downstairs, opened the hall door and stepped right into the muzzle of a gun.

  It was Semple.

  CHAPTER 16

  Semple said, “Put your hands up, both of you.”

  Bull finished buttoning his coat, slowly. Semple grinned a stupid, wavering grin. His face was blotched with the bruise I had given him at Lecotte’s. He wet his lips with his tongue, blinked his weak eyes.

  I said, “Hello, Semple. You don’t want this man. Let’s keep our fight personal.”

  Semple killed the grin and toughened his brow. He jerked the gun toward the street corner. “Both of you. This guy is Bull, ain’t he?”

  “In the flesh,” said Bull. “That eye looks sick, Semple. Too bad there’s a steak shortage, eh? A little fellow like you should learn to keep his big mouth shut and stay out of range.”

  Semple shifted his weight around and his gun hand trembled. “Shut up! I got a good mind to let you have it, lug.”

  “You’ve got a bad little mind,” I said. “And you’re as yellow as you’re fat.
Put down that gun and I’ll add new color to your rosy cheeks.”

  Semple stepped back. “Keep your hands up and walk over to that car. Try anything smart and I’ll beat your brains out with this rod, see?”

  “Don’t frighten me,” said Bull. “I’m a nervous man. Where are we going?”

  “Get moving.”

  “I’m as nervous as hell, Semple,” I said, enjoying his stock bad man gestures. “You certainly are a frightening character.”

  “Get moving!”

  We moved.

  The car was a Rolls and the driver was a Latin character with a dark face and long hair. The hair on the sides of his face dropped below the lobes of his ears. His teeth were very white in his smile. When we stepped into the spacious interior of the Rolls, the Latin was smiling.

  Semple heaved his weight in after me and kept the automatic on his knee. The chauffeur started the car and it purred into gear. The chauffeur addressed himself to the rearview mirror.

  “Is that the guy, fatso?”

  Semple grunted.

  “You mad at me, too, fatso?”

  Semple said, “Shut up and drive the car.”

  Louis shrugged. We turned up Second Avenue, Louis began to whistle a piece of slow rhumba, and tapping the rhythm on the wheel with his right hand. He stopped whistling to say, “You better maybe put the rod away now, fatso.”

  Semple’s free hand poked a fat finger into Louis’s back, hard. “Cut the smart talk, Louis. One more crack out of you and I throw you out and drive up there myself.”

  Louis threw back his head and laughed. When he stopped laughing he slid his eyes half around, pursed his lips and made a loud, vulgar noise. “Wait’ll we get back, fatso. I can’t wait to see you get your lumps. What’s gonna happen to your puss shouldn’t happen to a dog!”

  Semple sat back slowly. “I’ll get to you later,” he grumbled.

  We crossed town and went up Fifth Avenue at a good speed. There was no traffic and Louis had a way with the traffic lights. When we reached Seventy-Second Street, Louis swung left and eased into the park and under the bridge and through the park to the West Side.