Strange Embrace

by Block, Lawrence

  Johnny had to work to keep the smile off his face. “He didn’t keep the other half, stupid. He sent it to Marlo.”

  Rugger’s mouth opened very wide.

  “So you and Mario got a yard between you,” Johnny went on. “If you put the two halves together. You’re a jerk to fall for an old one like that, Rugger. And a jerk to work for people you don’t know. You get in trouble that way.”

  “I—”

  “Who gave the bill to the kid? Didn’t you think of asking?”

  The muscle man lowered his eyes. “The kid was in and out before I knew what was coming off. I don’t even remember what the kid looked like. The streets are full of kids. They all look the same.”

  “The second phone call. What time did you get it?”

  “Around nine. I don’t know.”

  “And you went right over there?”

  “Yeah. We waited around for Lane. He came out alone and we picked him up.”

  That narrowed it down a little, Johnny thought. It wasn’t a complete blind alley. But that was as much as he was going to get from Rugger. The man did not know who had hired him. He could not tell even though he obviously wanted to.

  “Look,” Rugger was saying. “Look, I got suckered, too. I got stuck on the money end of it. I shouldn’t of taken the job in the first place, all right. I needed the dough so I took it. Lay off, will you?”

  Johnny raised his left hand, dipped into his jacket pocket. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his face with it. He rubbed makeup from the corners of his eyes, from his mouth. He let his face relax. His posture changed from gangster stance to his usual position.

  “Rugger,” he said, his voice normal now. “Don’t you recognize me, Rugger?”

  Rugger blinked. Then recognition came, and shock. The man started to move toward Johnny. Then he remembered that mob man or not, Johnny was still holding a gun in his hand. Rugger stopped in his tracks.

  Johnny shrugged out of the heavy coat. He let it fall and stepped toward Rugger. “Now there’s just two of us,” he said. “Let’s see if you’re worth a hundred dollars or not.”

  He dropped the gun to the floor. And Rugger rushed him, coming fast and hard.

  It did not last long. Rugger was on his own this time and Rugger was soft from too much beer. Johnny ducked the first punch and came up under it, sinking a right to Rugger’s belly. When Rugger folded, Johnny linked both bands behind Rugger’s head and rushed the head down into his own knee. The knee was an effective club. It knocked out two or three of Rugger’s teeth and brought a rush of blood from his flat nose.

  He came up and rushed where angels feared to tread. Johnny ducked another punch, dodged one that would have cracked his jaw if it had landed. Then he moved inside, pivoted and tossed Rugger into a wall. The wall gave way and Rugger went partway through it. He came up cursing but he came up slowly and most of the fight was out of him.

  A left to the jaw finished the job. He went to one knee and stayed there.

  “That was a fight,” Johnny said.

  Rugger was silent.

  “We didn’t have a fight last night,” Johnny told him. “We started off with a fight. We wound up with a beating.”

  Rugger stared.

  “So now you get a beating,” Johnny said, hauling the other to his feet. Johnny held him with his left hand and hit him with the right. Rugger lifted into the air. He sagged and fell on his face.

  “The building’s condemned,” Johnny said. “They have to tear it down anyway. So we’re saving the wrecking crew some time. We’re knocking the walls down for them. You’re the battering ram.”

  He picked Rugger up again. It was like picking up a corpse. He aimed Rugger at a wall and sent him on his way. Rugger took the wall with his shoulder and crashed off in time to get hit in the face once more. He fell down and sat on the floor.

  “Get up,” Johnny said. “C’mon—get up.”

  Rugger got up and Johnny hit him again. They went on that way until Rugger could not get up any more. Then all the fun was gone. Johnny rescued his gun, jammed it into the shoulder holster. He grabbed the coat and put it on, set the short-brimmed hat on his head. Then he prodded Rugger in the ribs until the man’s eyes opened. “You shouldn’t beat up people,” Johnny told him gently. “It’s a rotten way to make a living. Besides, you can get hurt that way.”

  Chapter Eleven

  JOHNNY TOOK A CAB back to his apartment. That was the best move, he decided. The alternative—hunting for Jackie Marlo on Bleecker Street and handing him the same routine he had handed Rugger—was not entirely without appeal. But in the long run it would be a waste of time, an elaborate game which would only result in his knocking Mario around without getting any additional information. And it could work the other way. If Rugger recovered in time to warn Marlo by telephone, Johnny could get more than he had bargained for. No, the only sensible thing was to go home. There was bourbon there, and coffee, and a comfortable chair. All of which sounded inviting.

  The hack took Eighth Avenue. Johnny gazed out to the right, watching the throngs of people pouring out of the theaters along the side streets leading from Broadway. His eyes took in theater marquees: Up for Grabs—A Sound of Distant Drums—The Lonely. All good shows, and all drawing good audiences. A Touch of Squalor belonged with them, he thought. But it would not be up there, wouldn’t place a few more neon jewels in the hair of that tarnished lady named Broadway. Not for another season. Maybe never.

  He sighed. Hell, the play was a minor casualty when you stopped to think about it reasonably. The major pity was that two fine actors were dead. One of them happened to have been a son of a bitch, and the other happened to have been a blackmailer, but they had been actors, good theater people. They would have been great in Squalor.

  And they were dead.

  He thought back to what he had managed to learn from Lou Rugger. First of all, Johnny now knew one thing about the killer. He was not a professional mobster as Haig had half-guessed. A gangster type would not have hired muscular talent in such a bizarre manner. If you were one of the hard boys and you wanted muscle you went calling and arranged the deal.

  Which meant the killer was an amateur. A clever amateur—it took a little ingenuity to hire a pair of playboys like Rugger and Marlo without letting them know who you were. And letting a single hundred-dollar bill do the work of two was a touch of genius tempered with poetic beauty.

  Admirable.

  What else did he know? Well, Rugger had said that the joker with the whisper made his last call around nine. That was roughly the time that the meeting of the cast had broken up. So the caller had known about it. That wasn’t all—the caller had seen him come out of Jan’s place, had tailed him back to the apartment and then had arranged the deal with Rugger and Marlo. But what did that prove?

  Only the cast had known about the meeting. Only the cast and whoever had been told by somebody in the cast. Johnny had waited until the rest of the cast had left before dropping back to Jan’s. Which meant…

  Which meant he was up the creek.

  Somebody could have been tailing him all along, could have tailed him to the meeting, waited outside, stayed on his tail while he taxied around the block, then placed the call. If so, Johnny was right back where he had started from. Because such a person did not have to know about the meeting in the first place. He just had to follow Johnny.

  He lit another cigarette. The cab stopped in front of his building and he paid off the driver and got out. The doorman looked at him suspiciously, then did a pronounced take and greeted him by name. “Didn’t recognize you at first, Mr. Lane,” he apologized.

  Johnny grinned. The clothes were not exactly his style, he thought. And his nose still had some of the build-up job left on it. No wonder the doorman had missed him the first time around.

  The elevator operator did not notice anything different, or if he did he did not say anything one way or the other. He took Johnny up to his penthouse swiftly and silently, and Johnny
opened the front door.

  He switched on the lights, pretty certain that he had left them on when he had gone out. Which was strange. He thought that Ito might have come home early, then decided that at that particular moment Ito was probably teaching a pretty little girl how to say “Do it again, darling” in English. Of course, Ito could have dropped in again, and could have turned off the lights on the way out. Or maybe he himself had turned them off and his mind was turned inside-out, or then again maybe…

  He could not get rid of the nagging suspicion that he wasn’t alone in the apartment.

  He stopped in front of a mirror to remove the remaining makeup from his face and to unputty his nose. He took off his hat and coat, removed the gun from his shoulder holster. He felt ridiculous—it is remarkably easy to feel silly when you are toting a gun in your own apartment.

  Still…

  He checked each room in the apartment with gun drawn. He looked into the kitchen, opened closet doors, and felt increasingly like an idiot as he inspected each empty room. He even looked into Ito’s room, something he never did, and was careful to shut the door when he left. Only his own bedroom remained, and he stood in front of the closed door for several seconds, unable to end the search by opening the damned door.

  You’re a horse’s ass, he told himself angrily. Either you open the silly door or you put the gun away and have a drink.

  He felt like knocking.

  But he did not knock. He shrugged, annoyed as all hell with himself and he turned the knob and gave the door a shove. The room was dark, naturally enough. He reached for the light and switched it on.

  For a moment he felt as though he were a character in somebody’s nightmare, probably his own. He blinked his eyes at the light and stared. His bedcovers were thrown back and there was a girl in his bed.

  She was naked.

  But history was repeating itself only up to a point. No pool of dark blood had flowed from the girl’s neck. No razor had slashed her throat. No killer had killed her. She was, as a matter of fact, very much alive.

  She propped herself up on her elbows and grinned at him. Her hair fell over her shoulders loosely and sexily. Her eyes were disarmingly lustful.

  “A gun yet,” Jan Vernon said. “Come on in, Johnny. Make yourself at home. Take off your shoes and loosen your tie and relax. It’s about time.” She yawned and stretched, magnificently. “About time,” she repeated. “I thought you’d never get here.”

  It was a while before they got around to talking. By the time the initial shock had worn off something altogether different from shock had taken its place. He began by taking off his jacket, and then he removed the rest of his clothing as well.

  Then he got into something more comfortable. Jan.

  Later he told her about the evening. It was good to have someone to talk with, someone you could let it all out to. And she was an excellent listener.

  “You should have stayed with acting,” she told him finally. “That must have been quite a performance. I wish I could have watched you.”

  He laughed. “I don’t know how good I was, really. I wouldn’t have won any awards.”

  “But you pleased the critics, Johnny. And they sound as though they know their business.”

  “They were easily intimidated,” he told her. “One look at me and they were ready to roll over and play dead. I looked like Death walking. They were afraid of me on sight.” He sighed. “Now, it could have been different. I could have come on stage…same way, but before a big man in the rackets, a guy who wouldn’t be scared to look at me. That would have been more of a test.”

  “You still should get an Oscar. For makeup.”

  “You should get one yourself,” he said, “For—”

  “Never mind what for. Did you get anywhere tonight, Johnny? Did you find out anything?”

  “Nothing too helpful,” he admitted. “I found out who beat me up. I got even with him by knocking him around a little.” He shook his head. “Sounds pretty childish, doesn’t it?”

  “Childish or manly.”

  “Which?”

  “Sometimes they’re about the same thing,” she said thoughtfully. “But you aren’t any further than before?”

  “I suppose not.”

  She sighed. “That’s what I tried to tell you,” she said. “That you were wasting your time. Let the police handle it, Johnny. Look how far you stuck your neck out. Suppose the fight with Rugger had gone the other way. He would have killed you.”

  “There wasn’t anything to worry about.”

  She arched her eyebrows. “The hell there wasn’t,” she said. “There was plenty to worry about. You were sticking your neck way out for nothing.”

  “You’re exaggerating, Jan. I’m in greater danger here in bed with you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Only that you’re a little too exuberant,” he told her, grinning. “My ribs hurt. You should be a little more restrained.”

  She laughed easily. “Sorry,” she said. “I get carried away. And it’s your fault anyway. You loosen the bonds of restraint, Johnny. That’s not very nice of you.”

  They slipped into an easy silence. He lit two cigarettes and gave one of them to her. He smoked and watched the smoke trail lazily to the ceiling.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey what?”

  “I was just thinking. How the hell did you get in here tonight?”

  She looked at him.

  “I know I locked the door,” he said. “I wasn’t too sure about the lights, but I know damn well I locked the door. Wasn’t it locked when you got here? And how did you get past the doorman?”

  She fluffed her hair. “A beautiful woman has no problem getting past doormen,” she informed him. “I think he thought I was a call girl you had ordered sent up. I smiled at him and went up in the elevator. And the elevator operator never said a word.”

  “He never does. How about the door?”

  She pursed her lips. “Actually,” she said, “I thought you’d be home. I would have told you I was coming except I thought I could surprise you.”

  “You surprised me, all right. But how the hell did you get past the door?”

  “I was getting around to that, Johnny. I rang the bell. Several times. You didn’t answer.”

  “Primarily because I wasn’t here.”

  She ignored the interruption. “I didn’t want to go home,” she said. “And I thought maybe you were drunk or asleep or something and I could get into bed with you and surprise you.”

  “That would have surprised me, all right. It would have surprised the hell out of me.”

  “That’s what I thought. So I opened the door.”

  “But it was locked!”

  “Not very well,” she said, “because I opened it. You ought to lock that door with a key, Johnny. When you just close it, all you have is a spring lock. They’re easy to pick.”

  “You—you picked the lock?”

  She nodded, beaming. “With a nail file,” she said. “All you have to do is sort of pry at it for a while. A nail file works perfectly. A woman can do almost anything with a bobby pin or a nail file or a…”

  Then she blushed.

  “Almost anything,” he said thoughtfully.

  “Johnny—”

  “But not quite everything. For some things you can’t quite get along with a bobby pin or a file. So—”

  “Johnny, stop that!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he told her. “You don’t want me to stop it. Besides, I’ve hardly even started.”

  And he reached for her again.

  When he awoke it was morning and she was gone. The telephone on the bedside table was ringing industriously and unpleasantly. He reached for it, then stopped to glance at a note she had left.

  “You snore,” it read, “but I love you anyway.”

  He grinned, crumpled the note into a ball and tossed it at a wastebasket. The phone was still ringing and there seemed to
be only one way to stop it. He picked it up and said hello into the mouthpiece.

  “Pete Galton,” a voice said. “New York Post—”

  “We don’t want any,” he said.

  “Lane—”

  “The show’s off for this season. No, I don’t know who the killer is. No, I don’t have a statement to make. Yes, damn you, I was sleeping. Goodbye.”

  “All I want to know is—”

  “To be fully informed,” Johnny cooed, “read the New York Times.”

  He put the receiver back long enough to break the connection, then decided to leave it off the hook. He left it off long enough to hear the dial tone change to that annoying squeal which indicates that your phone is off base, then he gave up and cradled it properly. At which point there was a discreet knock on the door.

  “Come in.”

  The door opened. Ito—a wonderful, marvelous Ito—appeared. He was pushing a small breakfast table on rollers. The tray carried a glass of orange juice, a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon, and a huge mug of black coffee.

  “Breakfast in bed,” Ito said. “Sorry I couldn’t cut off that last phone call. I was busy pouring coffee.”

  “There been many other calls?”

  “Just newspapers. I told them the show was off and you had no statement to make.”

  Johnny finished the orange juice and picked up a fork. “You took the words right out of my mouth,” he said. “That’s what I told the gentleman from the Post.”

  Ito left and Johnny went to work on breakfast, which disappeared rapidly. He carried the coffee out to the living room and sat down.

  “How was last night?” he asked.

  Ito spread out his hands. “So-so.”

  “Is it true what they say about Japanese women?”

  “I’d be the last to know,” Ito said. “Is it true what they say about Miss Vernon?”

  Johnny gaped.

  “She was coming out,” Ito explained, “just as I was coming in. Evidently she and I keep equally late hours. Her self-possession was magnificent. She asked me if the weather was still lousy and I assured her that it was, this being New York. Which made her laugh, for some inscrutable reason. Or is inscrutable an adjective to be applied only to Orientals?”