Murder for Madame

by Lawrence Lariar

  I turned away from the horror on the canvas and appraised the room. His art interested me. Artists speak to the intelligent observer through their paintings, sometimes revealing depths of their personality that do not come alive in everyday life. Haskell Moore was a stranger to me, but he was talking to me now, through the monstrosity on his canvas, his last communication to the outer world.

  Along the window, underneath the level of the glass, there was a row of cabinets, made up of unfinished oak. I began on the left and opened the first small closet, revealing a confusion of pads and papers, none of them bearing any creative work. But the next cabinet was loaded with finished paintings. I pulled them out and piled them up on the floor, dozens of them of assorted sizes.

  Haskell Moore had been prolific, if this was a small sample of his recent output. His work had a uniform quality, the same slick finish on each of his daubs, an artificial gloss and glisten that was almost photographic in its effect. Yet, the draftsmanship suggested that he knew much about drawing, for his figures and his backgrounds radiated an effect of truthfulness. He painted women exclusively. He painted them in the nude. And most of the poses suggested the inner workings of his diseased mentality. The colors were garish and brittle and the compositions forced and macabre, so that each of his subjects took on a standard personality. And the personality was lewd.

  Yet the heads were different. His women seemed predestined to a life of scandalous trade, and the faces held me because they were somehow familiar. I recognized Anita and Rose, over and over again, in a variety of insane postures, each of them calculated to make a pervert cackle and groan with delight—exaggerated poses and facial grimaces out of a handbook of harlotry.

  Anita and Rose, over and over again! He had the facility for caricaturing his women, cataloguing them in paint, so that you felt the force of them as you turned away from them in revulsion. I went through them quickly, annoyed by this index to his lecherous soul. I held them and dropped them, one after one.

  Until I reached the one with the ripe blonde hair.

  This was another woman I had seen before. She was a young girl, a trim and delicate creature, asprawl a blood-red couch, stretched out in an attitude suggesting sin. He had painted her in his usual manner, but her face shone out at you so that the rest of her was somehow lost and unimportant. She had an oval face and classic features. She lay on her side, but her fair head was turned in a three-quarter view, uptilted to the right. There was a man in the picture, a lecherous lout, peering out at her from behind a mauve curtain, only his head and shoulders visible in the strange composition. The dramatics of the situation were lost to me. The girl on the couch was not really looking at the guest who came toward her. Her eyes were aimed away from him, although she turned his way. It was as though Haskell Moore had painted the model first and added the extra figure later. But he had never corrected her posture so that she would seem to be observing the man. And the lack of focus added a weird note of unreality to the scene, making the tableau seem forced and brittle.

  I lifted the painting to the lamp at my side. I studied it for a long moment and the face of the model began to come alive for me. I knew this girl. I had seen her recently, in the flesh. My mind backtracked through the recent past, groping for a clue to her identity. And then I was back at Tim Coogan’s, leaning on my elbow and watching the antics of the television characters. And then I knew who she was.

  The girl in the painting was Joy Marsh!

  I stood there in the silence and gave her my eyes, and for an instant she was alongside me again, on the stool at the bar, talking to me, showing me her fear, building the tension in me as I warmed to her. I took the painting to the far side of the room and put it on the table and began to wrap it in an old newspaper. It was small enough to carry easily. I jerked open a drawer in the table, searching for some string and finding none.

  I was starting across the room to Haskell Moore’s desk when the man came out from behind the vestibule wall.

  CHAPTER 17

  There are certain faces that cannot be erased from memory’s index.

  These are the extremes, the characters who are patterned out of a special mold, the people who exist as master types, the very tall and the very short, the very fat and the very thin, the pinheads and the squareheads, the men with lumpy noses and the women with lumpy derrieres. You see them in the movies and on the stage—the Edward G. Robinsons and Humphrey Bogarts, the Marjorie Mains and ZaSu Pittses—and their images register against the soft wall of your intellect and remain fixed and remembered forever. You see them on the streets, sometimes, in the tide of pedestrian traffic. You see them, too in the police line-ups—the Jake Defores and Buggs Genottis. You may have observed one of these characters for only a short interval, but you can never forget the way his maggoty eyes faltered under the lights, or the trick cut on his square cheekbone, the knife slash that went strangely white as he stood there, and the contrast of the whitish skin against the high-blood pressure crimson of his jaw. You would never forget the sound of his name as the police sergeant hoarsed it from out of the protective darkness.

  Sailor Schenk! Sailor Schenk, because of the shape of that scar, a macabre caricature of an anchor, where no anchor should ever be etched.

  “Sailor Schenk,” I said. “It’s a small world.”

  He blinked his eyes at me, showing me his jittery shock and surprise. He had the befuddled stare of a punchy fighter. The scene before him would take time to filter through his optics and register against the dimmed mirror of his brain. He stood flatfooted, his short legs spread, his right hand stiff as it held the automatic aimed at my eyes. He did not move a muscle in his body. But there was a small and twitchy tic working up close to his right eye, above the anchor, on again and off again, in time to the rhythm of his pulse-beat. Recognition crawled slowly into his eyes. And he did not like me, suddenly.

  He said, “I know you, don’t I?”

  “We’re old friends, Sailor.”

  “From where?”

  “We met at Boyle’s, remember? The room with the lights, down at Headquarters. You were doing a single up on the platform the last time I saw you. Something about a loft robbery down on the river. Lieutenant Boyle was sure you had your nose in that one.”

  “Now I got you,” he said. “The private dick.”

  How could he ever forget me? Lieutenant Jeff Boyle was one of my oldest friends on the force, and one of the smartest. He was the top man in Safe and Loft, a razor-brained student of crime, the sort of detective the writers like to put down in fictionalized yarns. Because Boyle could break a man into small and undignified slices simply by engaging him in polite conversation. He had chewed the sizzling fat with Sailor Schenk—and after that, the sailor spent three years at Ossining. And I was there when he trapped the sailor.

  I said, “The same. You just left your summer resort at Ossining, didn’t you? You came out about two months ago, and here you are again, breaking and entering. Don’t you hoods ever learn?”

  “Maybe we don’t.”

  “Better be careful, Sailor. Fider will be up here in a little while. He’d give his left arm to pull you in. Fider’s hungry for a promotion.”

  “The hell with Fider.” He licked his fat lips. “Fider is eating on Madison Avenue. He won’t be back so soon. I been waiting for him to scram out of here. But you? I didn’t figure to find you here, chum.”

  “We art lovers meet in the strangest places.”

  “Yeh. So put down the picture.”

  He said, “pickshoor,” with the slow and sibilant spluttering of the dim-witted boxer. He spoke a half-tone higher than a whisper, as slowly as a kindergarten tyke mouthing the alphabet. But the way he held his gun was strictly adult.

  “I didn’t know you cared for the finer things in life, Sailor.”

  “Put it down,” he said again.

  “Maybe it belongs to me.”
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  “So I want it. Down.”

  “You haven’t even seen it.”

  “I want it because you want it,” he said angrily. “Because I got an idea it shows a dame on her can, looking at a guy about to hop her. Right, smart boy? So put it down nice and I won’t have to slug you.”

  “Not for you, Sailor. Maybe I’d hand it over to the guy who sent you here.”

  “You want your face kicked in?”

  “Not tonight. I just washed it.”

  “Funny stuff,” he said. “So I’m going to bat your brains out on account of I think you’re such a comical guy.”

  He took a step forward and brought up his left hand and grabbed the frame and wrenched it out of my grasp, before I could tighten my hold on it. He was catlike. He was fast when he had to be. He squinted down at the picture, appraising it as though it were a jigsaw puzzle with some of the pieces mixed. He gave it a thorough going over and smiled grimly at his own cleverness, the ingrown grin of a Mongolian monster who has hit a jackpot. He began to chuckle a sandy-throated gurgle.

  There was a skittering second when his entire brain was involved in self-approval. It was a flick of time in the quiet little tableau. But it was enough time for me to move against him. I hit him hard and high, with enough force to smack the picture out of his hand and send it flying upward. But his hand was still attached to the gun. And he brought his arm down in a vicious swipe, aimed at my head. He connected only with the air. I dug into him, along his larded midriff. I hit him with both hands, in the gut, because it doesn’t pay to play Marquis of Queensberry rules with an enraged gorilla. He dropped the gun.

  He was heavy, solid bone and muscle all the way from his head down. He fell under the impact of my assault, but his hands were not playing it meek and mild. He reached for my neck and made it, grabbing and holding until my breath racked hard in my throat and brought the quick and uninhibited tears of anger to my eyes. He was cutting the air away from me, as surely as a valve on a pipe. We were on the floor and I clutched at him desperately, working myself around for a chance at his soft underbelly. I kicked out at him and my knee came up high enough to connect with his navel and hard enough to send him backward, clutching his gut as though it might fall out in his hands. I kicked him again, and then again. He collapsed against the easel and the weight of him sent it falling crazily, the unfinished portrait hitting the floor and bouncing away. He rolled and squirmed, in the direction of the gun, a few feet from the chair near the wrecked easel. I jumped beyond him and skidded on the small rug and cracked my head against the wall as I groped for the little automatic.

  Then it was in my hand. I showed it to the sailor.

  “No more games,” I said. “Or I’ll let you taste it.”

  “You son of a bitch,” said the sailor.

  “Flattery will get you nowhere. Who sent you up here?”

  He muttered another obscenity and just sat there, holding his stomach and contemplating the area around my knees, as surly as a brat after a flailing.

  “Fider will be glad to see you,” I suggested.

  Some small germ of thought began to move behind his oversized ears, eating its way into his inner man and delivering a delayed reaction to the sound of my voice. And the brain telegraphed its message to his eyes. He looked up at me curiously, aware of my purpose and struggling for a way out of his dilemma.

  “Listen,” he pleaded. “You don’t tell Fider and we’ll talk.”

  “Fast,” I said. “Who sent you up here?”

  “Nobody. It was my own idea.”

  “Since when did you ever have ideas like this?”

  “I read about this jerk artist,” said the sailor, trying for some semblance of honesty by a combination of meekness and dumb hopelessness. “I got the idea from the paper this morning. I figured maybe I could grab myself a fast buck up here.”

  “You lie like hell.”

  “I’m leveling, I tell you.”

  “You’re wasting time,” I said. “Fider won’t swallow that routine, Sailor. It doesn’t fit. Because you wouldn’t dream of casing a place like this for what you wanted to grab. You wouldn’t watch the street door until Fider walked out, so that you could run up here for a picture. You would have tried your luck last night, if you were after real loot. But you couldn’t get in here last night. There were two dicks in here all night, or maybe you saw them on the prowl outside. So you waited until the heat was off the place and came back today. But you didn’t come under your own steam. Somebody sent you, and I’m going to find out who it was.”

  He shook his head dismally at the floor. He blubbered a few desperate words to himself and continued to survey the parquet.

  “Get up,” I said.

  He struggled slowly to his feet. Time was ticking away. There was a gathering shroud of darkness filling the air outside, graying the big window. And through the window, a few yellow oblongs of light already gleamed in the buildings across the street. The rain still fell steadily, and there was the monotonous drip-drip-drip from a distant gutter, punctuating the sticky silence and reminding me of the flight of precious moments. In a little while Fider would be back. And I had to be gone before he returned. With the picture.

  I said, “For the last time, Sailor, either you talk, or I slap.”

  “Aw, cut it out,” he said. He had dropped his voice to a whining monotone, but it did nothing more than make me angry and tight with impatience. He took a step forward and made a wide open gesture with his hands. “Listen,” he begged, “I told you it was my own idea. That’s the truth.”

  So I slapped him. I hit him with the flat end of the gun as he was coming toward me, so hard that he went down in a heap, clapping his hands to his head and moaning painfully. I grabbed him by the tie and put the screws to him, twisting hard until his hands dropped away from his bleeding forehead to struggle weakly with my wrists. He bunged his eyes up at me and showed me his tongue, out of control in his face.

  “Get it up, Sailor. Who sent you?”

  “Fanchon,” he mumbled.

  “Eric Fanchon?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Fat?”

  “Not fat.”

  “Lawrence Fanchon? About my age?”

  “That’s the guy,” the sailor said.

  “How did he reach you?”

  “I got the job through Kemper, downtown.”

  “And Fanchon only wanted one picture?”

  “The one you had.”

  “What about Kemper?” I asked.

  “You know Kemper,” he said. “He gets a cut on the deal. I pay him off.”

  It made sense. Kemper was Claude Kemper, a private eye with offices under his hat, an investigator who had made a great name for himself in the department of fine and applied larceny. Lawrence Fanchon would know of his reputation and seek his aid for a job like this. He was an expert liaison man for peculiar enterprises, and dabbled in both ends of the investigation field. He was as dirty as Sailor Schenk’s filthy neck. I made a mental note of him and marked him down in my inventory of future dates. I looked forward to meeting him and spitting in his watery eye.

  From somewhere down in the hall, there was the sound of a flat and heavy tread. It would be Fider—on the way back for an encore in the siesta chair. I picked up the picture of Joy Marsh and jerked a tablecloth off one of the smaller tables on the other side of the room. The sailor watched me dumbly, the slow realization of my purpose clouding his eyes.

  “Where you going?” he asked.

  “Out.”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “In the pig’s eye you are.”

  “Jesus, why not?” he begged. “They’ll send me up again for this.”

  “Step back,” I warned him.

  He started after me, stumbling toward the bedroom door and muttering. “You can’t do this to
me.” He was beginning to annoy me with his antics, working against my conscience, bothering my civic pride. He would be better off under Fider’s heel. He belonged in a small square room with stout bars between his animal intellect and the civilized world, because his brain was tied in knots that nobody would ever untie.

  “You can’t do this to me,” he whined again.

  So I did it to him. I let him have the end of the gun again, but this time I put all my weight behind the blow and aimed it where it would stun him until Fider arrived. And this time he neither twitched nor moaned. He was out. As limp as a bundle of damp wash.

  I ran through Haskell Moore’s bedroom and flipped open the west window and leaped the gap to the neighboring rooftop, a five-foot drop through the rain. There was a fire exit up ahead, only a few steps to the right.

  I slipped inside and ran down through the house and into the street, hugging the picture to my chest.

  CHAPTER 18

  At ten minutes past nine I stood on a plant across the street from Eric Fanchon’s Greenwich Village mansion.

  Standing on a plant does not mean treading on a turnip. The skip-trace expert and the private investigator stand on a plant when there is watchful waiting to be done; when the subject is close at hand, indoors. The watcher must be patient and alert and primed for quick action. The watcher must be on his toes.

  I was on my heels.

  It was still raining. I aimed my eyes at the bleak façade of the house across the way. There was a dim light burning somewhere far inside, beyond the front room. Another small and weakish glow came from the vestibule. But nobody moved inside. The big house seemed empty of all humanity and I wondered whether the little house-boy was somewhere in the fancy cave.

  I crossed the street and rang the bell and waited while the rain made rivulets on the brim of my hat. There was a long pause, and then a white-coated figure came to the door, showed me a grin of recognition and allowed me to enter the vestibule.