by Kane, Henry
The phone rang.
Chambers moved.
The phone kept ringing, then stopped.
Cops? Calling to inform Richard V. Starr? Would they call again, or would they come? Or perhaps it was not cops. Perhaps a friend. Somebody. A woman. Whatever or whoever, he had to get out — fast. Like an undertaker’s assistant, he neatly adjusted the dead man’s apparel, and like a conscientious houseboy he cleaned up debris and set the room in order. He looked at Starr — a perfect suicide. The wound was a gaping hole surrounded by powder burns, the gun was clamped in the guy’s hand, and the nitrate particles would be in his palm. What about the other bullet. The one Starr had aimed at him and missed? Hell, a guy bent on suicide had a nervous hand. The first bullet had gone astray, but the second had done the job. Nothing new about that. Many a suicide, in trembling intensity, had missed with more than one bullet before accomplishing his purpose. And there was even a logical motive because Starr was a powerhouse with connections downtown. He had got a call about Tony Starr. He had reacted in shame that he was the father of this cannibalistic killer. Couldn’t take it. Couldn’t take the onslaught of heinous notoriety that was sure to come. Who can tell of the depths, or the depredations, of sudden emotional reaction?
He wiped with his handkerchief the arms of the mahogany armchair and then, on leaving, wiped the inside doorknob and then the outside doorknob.
Downstairs he got a cab and gave his address and then remembered his shortage of money. When he had arrived at 940 Park, he had paid the driver with a five-dollar bill, and had disconsolately noted that, somehow, it was the last of his money. The fare had been two dollars and seventy-five cents, and he had added seventy-five cents as a tip, and now his sum total of negotiable wealth was a single dollar and a single fifty-cent piece. Jesus, when it goes bad, it goes bad all the way, wouldn’t you know? He sat and stared at the clicking meter and prayed to God it wouldn’t go over a buck and a half.
What a night!
What a lousy night in the life of the private eye!
He had killed a guy in the Waldorf Astoria and had killed a guy in his study on the eighth floor of 940 Park Avenue. He had invested a thousand dollars in Felix Budd, and tonight had expected a fee of sixteen thousand dollars, which would have meant a net return of fifteen thousand dollars, but the return had turned out to be a big fat zero, and here he was in a corner of a cab, thinking in terms of thousands of dollars, but praying that meter would not embarrass him by going up over a dollar and a half.
He lit a cigarette. It tasted rotten and he threw it out the window into the dark night and thrust thoughts of money out of his mind and tried to shut his ears to the ominous clickings of the fucking meter and found a form of consolation in clicking off sexual visions of the svelte out-of-this-veldt Sandi Barton, comely, alluring, enchanting, and tonight contrite, appreciative, waiting in his apartment. Frustration in matters of money does not inhibit sexuality — it does, in fact, compensatorily, enhance sexuality — and he was very sexual about Sandi Barton … and the taxi rolled to a halt at the curb outside his house … and send up a prayer, everybody, in thanks for devout prayer.
The figure on the meter was splendid, upright, uptight, and just under the line — $1.45.
Chambers delivered his dollar and his fifty-cent piece.
“Sorry,” he said. “That’s it. I’m tapped out.”
“Sure, tapped out,” the cabbie said. “Ain’t the first time I got stiffed.”
Chambers opened the door, slid out, and closed the door.
“Hey, big shot,” the cabbie called. “You forgot your change.”
Chambers did not turn. The cabbie threw the nickel at him. Two misses tonight. Starr had missed with a bullet and the cabbie missed with a nickel. It bounced dully on the sidewalk and rolled away.
Chambers rang his bell and Sandi opened the door and the dark night finally got bright. Sweet Jesus, what an absolutely beautiful girl! Exquisite! The terror was out of her eyes — huge, blue, limpid eyes — and she was smiling, dimpling, and no longer wan, up from under, shed of exigency, entirely recovered. Ah, youth. Ah, the resiliency of youth.
But beautiful!
She had showered and smelled of the fragrance from the flacon in her handbag. The blonde hair was a shiny mass piled high on her head and she wore no makeup and no clothes except a shirt that belonged to him. The sleeves were folded above her elbows, the tails fluttered aphrodisically, the buttons in front were invitingly unbuttoned. He slid his hands under his shirt, pressed her warm body to him, kissed her and she kissed him, and he tasted the Scotch on her mouth and it reminded him of imperative need. First things first. He released her and went to the bar and poured a Scotch and gulped it and poured another Scotch and gulped it and then he said, “Honey, let’s not even talk. Nothing. Let’s go to bed. Now.”
“For a hundred bucks,” she said.
Jesus, was she recovered!
“Remember me?” he said.
“I love you madly,” she said.
“Who saved your fucking life?”
“You did.”
“Who saved your reputation down there with the cops?”
“You did.”
“Remember what you said?”
“I said I’ll never forget it. And I never will.”
“Jesus, let’s go to bed.”
“Ethics. Principle. A hundred bucks.”
She shrugged out of the shirt and it fell to the floor.
She stood there, tall, proud, unsmiling, serious, beautifully naked.
“For God’s sake,” she said, “give in! I love you, I’m dying for you, I’m out of my goddamn mind for you.”
He shook his head. What do you say?
He said, “No money. Nothing at all. I don’t have a dime on me.”
“I trust you, lover. I’ll take your check.”
What do you do?
Jesus, what do you do?
You write the check, that’s what you do.
He wrote the check and took her to bed.
Sometimes in order to win, you have to lose.
He won. And lost.
And lost. And won.
It was a losing, winning, wonderful night.
If you liked Don’t Call Me Madame check out:
Martinis and Murder
1
I SAW the thing happen and in a cockeyed roundabout way I was mixed up in it, so the policeman had every right in the world to ask questions.
The policeman had a stenographer (male) and instead of asking questions like a policeman, he was snapping them like a smart lawyer, cross-examination style, and when a policeman goes about his business like a smart lawyer, cross-examination style, it just becomes irritating.
It becomes increasingly irritating, like an old corn in new shoes.
So I quit talking.
So he hit me, which made him more like a policeman and less like a lawyer. I moved with his fist and most of it went rapidly past me, but not all of it.
I said, “Cut it out, Louis. I’m not one of your ironheaded, ex-convict exercise boys. Slow down.”
The policeman was Louis Parker, detective lieutenant, homicide, New York City, a nice guy generally, of average height and built like a piano.
He looked faintly remorseful and he sighed and tapped a cigarette out of a pack and lit it.
“All right, Pete, I’m sorry. But you’re beginning to get my goat.”
I kept right on sitting in a very hard chair. The back of my thighs had gone to sleep.
“Talk,” he insisted.
The stenographer, a pale face with a purple nose, squinted at me sidewise and smiled unpleasantly.
“Get this monkey out of here,” I said, “and stop asking me well-rounded, idiotic, for-the-record questions and let me beat it out my own way and maybe we’ll get this business over with. I am not enjoying myself. Not in the least.”
Parker said, “All right, Aldridge,” and the stenographer closed his pad and got up wearily and wen
t out.
“Since when,” I inquired, “do you tote stenographers? That turnip of yours gives me the willies.”
“Talk,” he said, simply.
I told him about how it must have been around ten-thirty, I wasn’t sure, and I was at the Club Nevada and I had a ringside table and I was drinking rum and Coca-Cola and I was paying no attention at all to my partner, Philip Scoffol. I was paying attention to Lolita Blamey singing songs, some clean, some dirty, only when she sang them dirty they didn’t sound dirty, but cute, like when your four-year-old daughter comes up with one of those words she learned while playing house in her girl friend’s back yard.
Isaac, the waiter, touched my shoulder.
“A man wants to see you.”
“The hell with him.”
“He says it’s important.”
“The hell with him.”
“Shall I tell him, Mr. Chambers, you’ll see him later? When the show is over.”
“Yes, tell him, please.”
I swung back to Lolita Blamey.
When she finished, and ran off, I said to Scoffol, “I’m simply nuts about that kid.”
Unenthusiastic, he said, “Um.”
Isaac came back and hovered.
Scoffol said, “It could be business, you know.”
I followed Isaac all the way around to the other side of the dance floor where a large party was having fun around four tables shoved together. I recognized Larry White, who owns twenty-three first-class hotels, and I reached over a fat lady’s bare white shoulder and we shook hands. He turned to a man with silver hair and a wonderfully smooth face who said, “Excuse me,” and he and Larry got up and we all went down to the men’s room. Not Isaac.
In the men’s toilet, Larry said, “This is Mr. Blair Curtis. Mr. Peter Chambers.”
Curtis bowed slightly. I bowed slightly. Larry almost bowed slightly.
I said, “I’ve heard of Mr. Curtis.”
Larry said, “I saw you come in, Pete. I mentioned it to Mr. Curtis, who has been inquiring around about private detectives. You’ve been recommended.”
“Thanks.”
Curtis offered, “Larry has been telling me about you. When he mentioned that you were here tonight, well …”
“If you gentlemen will excuse me.” Larry raised his hand and wiggled his fingers and went.
I gave him a card: “Scoffol and Chambers, Investigation, 50 Rockefeller Plaza, New York.” He took it and gave me one of his (as if I needed that): “Curtis Wilde, Inc., Jewelry, Fifth Avenue at Fifty-seventh Street, New York City.”
“Well,” he said, indecisively.
I said, “Uh.”
He looked around and smiled again and shrugged his shoulders. “Can you come to my apartment? In about an hour? I trust it is not an imposition. If you will kindly return my card, I’ll jot down the address and apartment number.”
I gave him the card and my pen. The address was Park Avenue in the eighties. I liked that.
“All right?” he asked.
“Fine.”
We went back upstairs.
Scoffol said, “Well?”
I said, “Business,” and I showed him the card.
Parker stopped picking his nose and squirmed out of the easy chair. “Christ. Pitch. Stop winding up and pitch.”
I loosened my tie and I opened my collar.
“Go on, talk,” he said.
“I left the Nevada about half past eleven. I took the subway and I got out at Eighty-sixth and walked. I figured this address for the corner of Eighty-third, which it is. I’m walking down Park and I’d just crossed Eighty-fourth, when I see this tussle here on Eighty-third. A guy jumps a guy. One of them goes down with a smack. A woman runs out of the building and screams.”
“Checks,” Parker said. “The guy got tapped cold with a padded billy. Flat lump, no blood. But the sidewalk got him good. Two stitches on the forehead over the right eye. So?” I said, “It happened very fast. There’s a cab at the curb, door hanging open, automatic light on inside. The man is on his face on the sidewalk. The woman screams. Then she rushes at the guy that’s still standing, a little guy, and she shoves at him. Hard. This guy loses his footing and goes down. That’s two down. The woman dives for the cab. Sticks half her body in, then pulls it out quick. Yells, ‘You!’”
Parker wrestled out of the easy chair and stood over me.
“Yells, ‘You?’”
“Right. Yells it out loud. I hear it all the way up the block. Seems there’s a party in the cab and she recognizes him. Anyway, she pulls out and tries to run back into the apartment house but the little guy, who is getting up, grabs an ankle and tips her over. A tall guy steps out of the cab and stands over her and shoots twice and lets fly a couple my way. Then he jumps back into the cab and the little guy follows him, and they roll, leaving the woman face up to the sky and the other guy face down on the sidewalk.”
“Checks,” Parker said. “Some of it. We got a couple of witnesses after the yelling and shooting started. And there’s a doorman which finally shows up. What else?”
I leaned back and hooked my arm over the back of the stiff chair. “I got four bullets into that cab. I’d bet on that. And if they went through, and you’re lucky, you’d better check some hospitals.”
Reluctantly, he turned and went to the door and tiredly called, “Aldridge,” and talked to him briefly and came back.
“Check details,” he said. “Check every miserable crackpot possibility. You wouldn’t venture a little bet, would you, about those hospitals?” He looked at me again. “I’ll want your popgun.”
“For how long?”
“How do I know? For a week, or so. You’ll call up.”
I gave it to him.
“Cab license?” he asked.
“Nope.”
“Of course not. Descriptions?”
“Little guy,” I said, “practically nondescript. Maybe five-six, no hat, about one hundred forty pounds. Big guy, well over six feet, tan camel’s-hair type coat, big white buttons, snap-brim hat. Taxicab, old and yellow.”
“Anything else?”
“That about winds it.” I took out cigarettes. I lit up. Smoke kicked pleasantly at the back of my throat.
“May I ask one, Lieutenant?”
He walked up and down in front of me. He didn’t answer.
I said, “Who was the guy that got lumped?”
He stopped in front of me and looked down at me. “A Mr. Wesley Gorin,” he said. “And the dame, just to be sure you’re entirely up to date, was Mrs. Rochelle Pratt Curtis, in whose duplex apartment you are now throwing ashes on the parlor floor rug. Two bullets in the chest and lots of blood.”
I got up and rubbed numbness out of my rear.
“I’d like to go home now. You haven’t said thanks yet, Louis, for getting her upstairs while she was still breathing and working on her and calling up and standing over and helping with the guy that got lumped.”
“Thanks. What did Curtis want with you?”
“I never had a chance to find out.”
“We ought to ask, huh?”
He opened the door. I looked over his shoulder into a busy room of smoke and noise and movement, except for a long-ridged motionless bulge on a sofa near the far wall, covered with a sheet. Parker talked to a cop and closed the door and then there was a knock and Blair Curtis came in.
Parker said, “Chambers was just going. What was it you wanted him for?”
Curtis put a hand up to his forehead and squeezed at his temples. “No bearing on this at all. An entirely personal matter. I’d rather not discuss it.”
Parker said, “It might have some connection.”
“Please. No. I’m sure.”
Parker jerked his thumb. “Good-by, Chambers. Keep handy. What’s your home address?”
I closed my collar and pulled up my tie. “Central Park South. Or, Fifty-ninth Street near Sixth Avenue. It’s in the phone book.”
I looked at Curtis. His
face was just as wonderfully smooth but his mouth was tight and the whites of his eyes were watery gray.
“Still want me, Mr. Curtis?” I asked.
Quietly he said, “If you please. Will you give me a ring tomorrow?”
I got out of there.
Downstairs, I caught a cab and went over to Scoffol’s hotel on Forty-seventh Street. Room service brought coffee. I outlined the evening. “Will you go down to headquarters tomorrow and get some dope on it?” I asked.
“Certainly.”
Scoffol could do it. Scoffol was ex-copper, retired, with plenty of influence. Scoffol was the solid man of Scoffol and Chambers. Scoffol was the guy that was in the office every morning at nine o’clock, the guy with the contacts, the guy that the insurance companies had a lot of respect for (and paid nice fees for that respect). He was the guy that wrote the pay check for Archie Alexander every Friday afternoon, and for Frank Higgins and Alice Hilliad and Mike Maine. He was the guy Miss Foxworth, our mutual secretary, called “sir.” Not me. I was flash. I was ready money. When I had it. I was the guy with plenty of padding in the shoulders of the special made-to-order suits, with stripes, with a suggestion of peg in the trousers, with jackets that had to be long enough for a guy that measured six feet two. I was the guy that shot crap with the boys and took out the office help, when they were cute. I was the guy for the dames. I was distinctly (ask Miss Foxworth) the tail end of Scoffol and Chambers.
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Copyright © 1969 by Henry Kane
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