Strange Embrace

by Block, Lawrence

  But Johnny never reached him. Instead, Johnny got the sap across the back of his head and the lights went out. His last thought, before the oncoming blackness made thinking impossible, was that maybe he would get lucky and they would not be there when he woke up.

  He didn’t get lucky.

  He came to, a minute or two later, and they were still there. The smaller one talked again. Johnny had trouble hearing the words.

  “You had to be cute, Lane. You could have had it soft and easy but you had to be a hard boy. Now we give more than our money’s worth. Now it’s gonna be a pleasure to work you over. Maybe we’ll do too good a job and kill you. Stranger things have happened.”

  And then they went to work.

  The big one held him while the other one hit him. Hit him in the chest and in the stomach. Periodically the character hit him in the face, too, purely for variety.

  It stopped hurting after a while. It became a dull, gray, continuous suffering. At long last the man lowered his fists and hefted the sap.

  Johnny could not have ducked the blow if he had wanted to. And by this time he didn’t want to anymore. Unconsciousness would be a blessing. His eyes tried to focus on the sap as it came down, ever so gently, against the side of his head just over his ear.

  And then the electrician came through with a perfect blackout, and the stagehands supplied a swift curtain.

  Chapter Seven

  THE BED WAS COMFORTABLE. Slowly, carefully, Johnny opened his eyes. It was something he didn’t want to do too quickly. You didn’t rush a thing like that. A man could get hurt, opening his eyes too quickly. He got them open at last, blinked, saw Lieutenant Sam Haig, and did the only thing possible under such conditions. He closed his eyes again.

  “Wake up, Johnny.”

  Sadly he opened his eyes again.

  “Took you long enough,” Haig said. “You know what time it is? Two-thirty in the morning. Why is it I always see you at two-thirty in the morning?”

  Johnny did not smile. “Cigarette,” he croaked.

  Haig handed him a cigarette, lit it for him. Johnny’s arm hurt when he moved it. His shoulder ached. And his chest felt as though it were held together by adhesive tape. He touched the chest and found out that indeed it was held together by adhesive tape. How about that?

  He smoked, ignoring the questions Haig was asking, and his mind began to find the old familiar channels again. He was in a hospital, wasting his time lying in a damn bed. A pair of hired heavies had put him there. And Haig wanted answers.

  Hell, so did he, Johnny. “How did I get here?” he demanded suddenly.

  “Quite dramatically,” Haig said. “You’ll be happy to know that. You came in an ambulance with the siren wide open. Must have hit eighty miles an hour on the way. They thought you might have been seriously injured. Silly of them. It would take more than a blackjack to dent that fat head of yours.”

  “Who found me?”

  “A beat cop. That doesn’t mean he has a beard and smokes tea. It means he walks around and kicks drunks out of the way. He went to kick you but he decided you weren’t drunk. He called in for help and they checked you into the hospital at a quarter to twelve. You’ll live, incidentally. No skull fracture, nothing too serious. A couple of ribs or something are sprung, so you’ll have to wear that tape around your handsome torso for a week or so. Who did it, Johnny?”

  Lane sighed. “A couple of bozos hired for the job. A pair of heavies from Hell’s Kitchen earning spending money. Hell, I don’t know who they were.”

  “You better give me the whole story, Johnny.”

  He nodded and his head ached. “Yeah,” he said unhappily. “I guess I better.”

  He gave it to Haig from the beginning and the big cop listened without changing expression. Johnny told about Jan’s first visit, about the threatening phone calls, about Carter Tracy’s phony alibi and earnest explanation. He explained about the meeting, then gave the details about the beating he had taken in the airshaft next to Jan’s apartment building. He left out one scene—the huddle in Jan’s cozy bedroom. That, he told himself, was none of Haig’s business.

  And then he was through talking and Haig was looking at him out of sad eyes and shaking his big head.

  “Something the matter?”

  “I could never be an actor,” Haig said. “Or a producer. Not in a million years. I could never get into the swing of things. I wouldn’t fit.”

  “So? You’re a cop. Isn’t that enough?”

  “It’s plenty. And you’re a producer, and a good one. And isn’t that enough for you, Johnny? Because you sure as hell won’t ever make much of a cop out of yourself.”

  “I—”

  Haig did not let him get started. “In the first place, you shoulda called me right off the bat. Soon as the Vernon babe told you about phone calls you shoulda called me.”

  “I didn’t want to send you on a wild-goose chase.”

  “Let me worry about the wild geese, Johnny. That’s just the first place. There’s other places. Look, some bright boy wants to close your show. You think it doesn’t make any sense. Everything makes sense. Say you’ve got a mob man who has something against somebody working for you, wants to see him out of a job. Say some heavy has bet big money the show won’t open, or doesn’t like one of your backers, or anything. You don’t have to know the reason, not yet. All you have to know is that somebody has it in for your show. Right?”

  “That’s as far as I got with it. And—”

  “Hang on,” Sam Haig said. “I got further than that already. This bastard, this heavy, starts using the telephone. He gives the two girls a hard time because he figures they’ll crack easier. He doesn’t hurt anybody, doesn’t push anybody around. He just makes a few phone calls.”

  Johnny nodded.

  “Next the young one, the James girl, gets killed. Not a case of a beating carried too far. Her throat gets cut open so far you can see her tonsils. And you think the caller did the cutting. That doesn’t make any sense, Johnny boy. You don’t follow up a vague threat with murder. They take your Unione Siciliano card away from you for something like that. So somebody else killed the girl. Somebody who didn’t know a thing about any phone calls.”

  Light was beginning to dawn. Johnny’s mouth dropped open. He butted his cigarette and started to sit up.

  “Relax,” Haig told him. “You beginning to get the message? Is it soaking in?”

  “I think so.”

  “Then tell me about it.”

  “Somebody killed Elaine,” Johnny said. “Then our heavy friend heard about it. He decided to take the credit, figured his threats would be a little stronger with that behind him.”

  Haig nodded. “And all without any killing on his part. He figures the murderer isn’t going to run around waving a flag. He can have the glory all to himself and put on plenty of pressure. It’s that simple.”

  Johnny swallowed. Yes, simple. So simple he would never have thought of it. So simple that it had sailed right past him while his mind had been playing around with all the impossibly complex wrinkles.

  He looked at Haig and tried not to resent the slight smile of superiority on the cop’s face. Hell, he thought, Haig had a perfect right to feel superior.

  “So we’re looking for two people,” Haig said. “A caller and a killer. Cute, huh?”

  “Sure.”

  “I can’t help you with the caller, I’m afraid. That one’s going to be tough. But I shouldn’t have too much trouble telling you who the killer is.”

  Johnny stared hard at him. “Give me that again.”

  “The killer,” Haig said. “Hell, you ought to know the answer all by yourself. It’s your falling star, Johnny. The aging actor hot for young stuff. He already admitted he was there, then handed me a phony alibi, then told you he couldn’t find a real one. He went up there, killed her—”

  “With a razor?”

  “So he had a razor. Or the lab was wrong and it was some kind of knife. It doesn�
��t matter. He went up there, killed her, came out and got blind drunk. In the morning he woke up with us pounding on his door. He handed us the first alibi that came into his mind, then saw how far that was going to get him and tried a new one on you. He did it, Johnny. Carter Tracy. Your male lead killed your female lead and it’s going to knock hell out of your show.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  Haig sighed. “Why—too simple?”

  “It just doesn’t make sense.”

  “It makes perfect sense,” Haig said. “He already told you one motive. He may have had a better one. We’ll find out sooner or later. Murder isn’t usually too complicated, Johnny. Nine times out of ten the first suspect is the right one.”

  “That still leaves one shot in ten.”

  “Uh-huh. And this isn’t that one. There’s more, Johnny. I talked to a girl who was fairly friendly with the James babe. Girl by the name of Sondra Barr. One of the pale-lipstick crew from that neighborhood. In fact, Sondra lives in the building just across the street. Seems she looked out the window last night and saw Elaine James walking into her building with a guy. The guy Sondra describes sounds like Carter Tracy.”

  “So what? He said he was there. Did she see him leave?”

  Haig shook his head. “Nope. But that proves he was on hand. And I don’t care whether he already said he was there or not. He’ll change his story half a dozen times before the jury tells him he’s guilty. I’m talking about evidence. Now we can prove he was there.”

  “But you can’t prove he killed her, can you?”

  “We will, Johnny.”

  Johnny lit another cigarette. “I won’t buy it,” he said.

  “But—”

  “Listen to me a minute, Sam. You know crime and you know criminals but you don’t know Tracy. I do. I don’t like him, but I know him. I don’t like him at all. Just the same, I can’t see him as a killer.”

  Haig shrugged.

  “You going to pick him up?”

  “In the morning,” Haig said. “I don’t figure he’ll run very far. He thinks he’s in the clear now, according to what you said before.”

  “That’s what I was getting at. He’ll be around in the morning. He’ll also be around in the afternoon. Why don’t you let it sit on the fire for a few extra hours? Tracy won’t run away. And the longer you wait, the tighter case you’ll have when you do pick him up—if you ever decide to. Good enough?”

  “I don’t know.” Haig shifted his weight from one foot to the other. His eyes narrowed. “Why?”

  “Because I’d rather you didn’t pick him up at all.”

  “We should let him go free so you can put on a show?”

  “I don’t think he did it,” Johnny said. “I think if you wait a while you’ll find that out. But if you nab him in a hurry and release him later a lot of things are shot to hell. His career, for one thing. A Touch of Squalor, for another.”

  “He did it, Johnny. You might as well get used to that. He killed the girl.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  They stared at each other. Johnny watched the play of expression on the cop’s face and saw the wheels turning in his mind. “What the hell,” Haig said finally. “I suppose it won’t hurt to stall till afternoon.”

  “It won’t.”

  “You going to be busy in the meantime?”

  “Probably,” Johnny admitted. “I want to see this friend of Elaine’s. This Sandra.”

  “Sondra,” Haig said elaborately. “With an o. Sondra Barr. It was probably Sandra Barpenschlobber the first time around. What do you want with her?”

  “I want to talk to her. About Elaine.” He shrugged. “I can’t help it, Sam. Maybe I’m too used to plays, where everything dovetails beautifully and the dramatic effect has to be right. Something rings wrong here. Maybe Sondra can tell me something. Hell, I don’t know much of anything about Elaine—who she was, what she was like, any of that. She was a good actress and a pretty girl and a virgin and she’s dead. That’s all I know.”

  “That’s enough to electrocute Tracy.”

  “Maybe there’s more. And I’d like to know about it. Will you hold off on picking up Tracy until three in the afternoon? That’ll give me time to snoop around a little.”

  Haig nodded unhappily. “But you’re wasting your time,” he said. “You’re not a cop, Johnny. You don’t think like a cop.”

  “I’m not trying to be a cop, Sam.”

  “Hell,” Haig said, “I wouldn’t worry too much about it. About not being a cop, I mean. Us cops don’t live in penthouses. Not even with all the graft we take. Go to sleep, Johnny. I’m going to go collect some graft.”

  A moon-faced, dull-eyed doctor tried to give him a hard time in the morning. “You need bed rest,” he kept saying. “The bones need a chance to relax. We can’t be responsible—”

  Johnny explained very carefully that he would sign a quitclaim absolving the hospital of all responsibility, that he could take care of his own damn skeleton, and that nothing was going to keep him in bed. The doctor was clearly unhappy but, just as clearly, there was not a hell of a lot he could do about it. Johnny signed the quitclaim, signed himself out, and caught a cab back to his place.

  He reassured Ito that he was alive, which was no small task. He washed up, changed clothes, then called Jan and gave her a quick rundown on the beating and the conversation with Haig. “So you can stop worrying,” he wound up. “Whoever is trying to send the show up the nearest creek isn’t using razors this year. Somebody else killed Elaine.”

  “And it looks like Carter?”

  “That’s the way it looks to Haig. Not to me.”

  “Be careful,” she told him. “Very careful. I’ll be worrying about you. And Johnny…”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re hurt,” she said. “Floating ribs. I won’t be able to hug you. We won’t be able to…uh—”

  “We’ll find a way,” he said. He hung up. It was time to go hunting for Sondra Barr.

  Chapter Eight

  SONDRA, UNFORTUNATELY, DID NOT ANSWER Johnny’s ring. But a neighbor, of whom Johnny presumed to make inquiries, proved quite cooperative.

  “Sonny doesn’t hang around her pad much,” said the neighbor. “You might fall over to the Gila Monster. She makes the scene there kind of regular.”

  “How do I recognize her?”

  “She’ll probably be turned on,” the neighbor said. He was a young man with a beard that covered most of his face, which was probably just as well. “She’s always turned on. So am I, but I’m on a Zen kick. You know—meditation. I turn on to visions of hallucinatory reality.”

  “That’s nice,” Johnny told him. “What does Sondra use?”

  “Anything. Tea, meskie, hash, juice—she’s not particular. So that’s how you can recognize her. Which won’t help much.”

  “No?”

  “No. Because everybody is turned on at the Gila Monster. It’s that type of scene.”

  It was that type of scene. When Johnny walked in, he found himself in a low-ceilinged basement that should have been left as a basement, or condemned, or something. The dark, scarred door opened inward. One sealed-up window. Tables and chairs, no two alike, that could once have been furniture on the Mayflower, or maybe on the Ark.

  And people. Young men with beards who looked like Actor’s Studio types on the skids—torn sweaters, uncut hair, unshaved faces—sprawled over chairs, their eyes shut and their mouths hanging open like caverns. Girls wearing dungarees and sweatshirts and looking most unappetizing, with white lipstick and too much eye shadow. One of the girls had to be Sondra Barr. And, after he had managed to convince the lantern-jawed waiter that he was not a policeman, he learned which one she was. She sat, glassy-eyed and inert, at a small table at the rear. She was alone. He joined her, spoke her name. She looked up at him and her violet eyes were unfocused, blank, opaque.

  “My name’s Lane,” he told her. “Johnny Lane. I want to talk to you.”

&
nbsp; She did not answer him.

  “About a friend of yours, Sondra. Elaine James.”

  The eyes were still unfocused but the girl came halfway to life. “Elaine’s dead,” she informed him. “Good girl, Elaine. But dead.”

  Sondra stared sadly at him. Then, strangely, she began to laugh. The laughter sent chills up his spine. It was sickly dry laughter like the rattle of bones in a dusty graveyard.

  “Tell me about her, Sondra.”

  “The fuzz came around,” she said. “Big bad fuzz with a crooked nose. Showed me a badge and asked me questions. So I told him I saw Elaine with a guy. Fell up to her pad, oh, maybe ten o’clock. Maybe later. Maybe earlier.”

  He could not help smiling. This, he thought, was Haig’s proof. Sondra would be magnificent on the witness stand. She would not even be sure of her own name. A defense attorney would have a barrel of fun with her.

  “That’s not what I mean,” he said. “About Elaine. What kind of a girl was she?”

  “Solid. Good to know. What else?”

  “Who were her friends?”

  Sondra Barr waved a hand that took in the whole room. “Everybody,” she said, “and nobody. She was hard to reach. She belonged and she didn’t. Like floating.”

  Like floating? He wondered what cloud Sondra was floating on. “What was she interested in?” he asked. “What was her kick?”

  “Ordinary-type kick. She didn’t dig getting high. She had this theater bit going for her. She had it almost made before that cat carved her. A bad scene, huh?”

  He grunted vaguely.

  “And sex,” Sondra went on. “That was a kick of hers. Sex is an ordinary-type kick, right, Jack?”

  “I thought she was a virgin, Sondra.”

  The laughter was back again, high and dry and brittle. Then it stopped all at once. “I’m hip,” the girl said. “Elaine was a virgin. I forgot for a minute.”

  “Then—”

  “She thought about sex a lot,” the girl said. “She had this mystic attitude, you dig? That’s all.”