One Night Stands; Lost weekends

by Lawrence Block

  No bra. Just thin black panties. She had a fine body, slender waist, trim hips, full breasts with just the slightest trace of age to them. She kept dancing, moving with the music, flinging her breasts at me, grinding her loins at me.

  “Not bad, huh? Not bad for an old broad, huh, Ed? Still lively, huh?”

  I didn’t answer her. I wanted to get up and go away but I couldn’t do that either. I watched while she peeled off the panties and tossed them away. She had trouble with them but she got them off and danced her wicked dance in blissful nudity.

  “Ed,” she said.

  She came at me, threw herself at me. Her flesh, warm with drink, was soft as butter in my arms. She looked into my eyes, her face a study in alcoholic passion mixed in equal parts with torment. She looked at me, and she squirmed against me, and then her eyes closed and she passed out cold.

  There was a double bed in the bedroom. She had to sleep alone in it now. Some men with machine guns had killed the man who used to share it with her. I drew back the top sheet, put her down on the bed. I covered her with the sheet, tucked a pillow under her head.

  Then I got out of there.

  SEVEN

  The ride back to Manhattan was a long one. Every traffic light was red when I got to it.

  I told myself that the picture was refusing to take shape, and then I changed my mind—it was taking shape, all right. It was taking a great many shapes, each conflicting with the other. Nothing made much sense.

  Shirley Klugsman was a widow because her husband had tried to sell evidence to Rhona Blake. A man named Zucker wanted Rhona dead. He also wanted me dead, and three punks in East New York had tried to carry it off for him. And they were dead now.

  I GOT THE CHEVY BACK TO MY GARAGE and walked halfway home before I changed my mind. Then I jumped in a cab.

  Rewards and punishments—Phillip Carr’s phrase. They were at the punishment stage now. They wanted me dead, and they had tried once already that night, and maybe my apartment wasn’t the safest place in the world.

  Besides, Rhona was alone…

  The doorman barely looked at me. I let the elevator whisk me up to her floor, went to her door, and jabbed at the bell. Nothing happened. I remembered our signal, rang once, waited a minute, then started ringing. Nothing happened. I called out to her, told her who it was. And nothing happened.

  She was out, of course. At a show, having a drink, catching a bite to eat. I got halfway to the elevator and my mind filled with another picture, a less pleasant one in which she was lying facedown on the wall-to-wall carpet and bleeding. I went back to her door.

  On television I would have given the door a good hard shoulder, wood would have splintered, and that would have been that. This is fine on television, where they have balsa doors. But every time I hit a door with my shoulder I wind up with a sore shoulder and an unimpaired door. In Manhattan, apartment doors are usually reinforced with steel plates. You just can’t trust television.

  I took out the little gimcrack I use to clean my pipe. It had a penknife blade. I opened it and played with the lock. It opened. I went inside.

  She wasn’t there. So I sat down in the living room to wait for her, first checking the bar to see if there was any cognac. There wasn’t. There was scotch, but cognac is all I drink.

  Hell. This was a special sort of situation. I poured a lot of scotch into a glass and sat down to work on it.

  After half an hour, I was worried. She was in too deep, playing way over her head, and she wasn’t around. The room was beginning to get to me. I kept smelling her perfume and the furniture kept glaring at me.

  Where the hell was she?

  I remembered the afternoon, and the green eyes warming very suddenly, and her body close to mine. Bed, and whispers, and passion, and the happy drowsiness afterwards. And now she was gone. It was the sort of magic trick Jack Blake would have gone wild over. You just make love to this girl, see, and she disappears.

  After ten more minutes of this I was morbid. I started combing the apartment in a cockeyed search for help notes or struggle signs or bullet holes. I got down on hands and knees and peered owlishly under the bed. There was a single slipper there, and a pair of stockings that had run for their lives, and a respectable quantity of dust. I checked out the closet in the bedroom. Her clothes, and not many of them. A suitcase, streamlined and airplane-gray. She had been traveling light. She was Jack Blake’s daughter, coming from Cleveland with a single suitcase and a bellyful of determination, and that wasn’t going to be enough.

  I went back to the living room. The bedroom closet had been a disappointment from an aesthetic standpoint. You’re supposed to open a closet door and watch a body fall out. That was how they did it on television. And all I got was a suitcase and some clothing.

  There was still a closet in the front hall. I gave the knob a twist, yanked open the door, and stepped ceremoniously aside so that the body wouldn’t hit me when it fell.

  No body fell.

  Instead there was a noise like a shotgun blast at close quarters, and there was a wind like Hurricane Zelda, and I flew up in the air and bounced off one wall into another. Then the lights went out.

  EIGHT

  It was timeless. There was the lifting sensation, the spinning, the impact, the blackness. Then I was on my back on that orange couch and my eyes were open. I saw ash blond hair, a red mouth.

  Rhona.

  She was saying: “Lie still, Ed. Relax, lie still, don’t try to move. My God, I came in and found you. I thought you were dead. The whole hallway was a mess. It looked as though someone fired a cannon in here. Are you all right, Ed?”

  She was leaning over me, stroking my forehead with one soft hand. Her eyes were wide, concerned. Sensation was starting to come back now, with pain leading the procession. My whole body ached. I ran hands over myself to find out what was broken. Surprisingly, everything seemed to be intact. I started to sit up. There was dizziness, and I fell back on the couch and closed my eyes for a minute.

  I must have blacked out again. Then I came back to life and she was lighting a cigarette for me, putting it between my lips. I smoked. I started to sit up, saw the worry in her eyes. I told her I was all right now.

  “What happened, Ed?”

  “A bomb.”

  “Where?”

  “In your closet,” I said. “I opened the door and it went off.”

  “What were you doing in the closet?”

  “Looking for bodies.”

  “Huh?”

  “Forget it.” I closed my eyes, remembering the cute little sidestep I’d executed, a nutty bit of business designed to permit the mythical corpse to fall out of the closet without hitting me. Corny, but damn fortunate. The sidestep had taken me out of the way of the blast. If the full force had gotten me, I’d have found a body, all right.

  My own.

  “Ed—”

  I took a breath. “Rhona, somebody had it set up for you. You were supposed to walk into the apartment and hang your coat in the front closet. They must have rigged it with a wire running to the door handle, something like that. Open the door and you yank the wire and the thing blows.”

  “God.”

  “Uh-huh. When did you leave, Rhona? Why the hell didn’t you stay put?”

  She was chewing on her lower lip and her eyes were focused on the floor. She said: “I got a phone call.”

  “You weren’t supposed to answer the phone.”

  “I know. But it rang and rang and rang…I picked it up.”

  “Who was it?”

  “A man. He didn’t give me his name. He just said he was calling for you.”

  “For me?”

  She nodded. “I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. But he said you were in trouble and couldn’t call yourself, and I thought you were the only person who knew the telephone number here—”

  “Klugsman knew it, didn’t he?”

  “Oh,” she said. “I forgot that, Ed—”

  “When did
he call?”

  “Around midnight.”

  “And you left right away?”

  “That’s right.”

  I put out the cigarette. “Then I missed you by less than half an hour,” I said. “They must have had a man stationed right out front, ready to drop up and install the bomb the minute you left the building. It’s easy enough to get into this place. The doorman is so busy being proper and distant that he doesn’t pay any attention to what’s going on. So the guy came in, set up shop, and left. Then I got here and waited for you.” I looked at her. “Where the hell were you, anyway?”

  “Times Square.”

  “Huh?”

  “I took a taxi to Times Square, Ed. That’s what the man on the phone said I was supposed to do. I went to a place called Hector’s, a big cafeteria. I took a table and waited for you.”

  “For how long?”

  “A little over an hour, I guess. It was a bore and I was scared stiff and I didn’t know what was going to happen next. Then finally a man came over to me and handed me a note. He was gone almost before I knew what was going on. The note said you wouldn’t be able to meet me but everything was all right and I was supposed to go back to my apartment. I got here just in time to find you.”

  I got up, dragged myself over to the front hall, what was left of it. There was a gaping hole in the wall directly opposite the closet door. If I hadn’t stepped aside, the blast would have made a similar hole in me.

  It was something to think about.

  I dropped to my hands and knees and poked around in the closet. There wasn’t much to look at, just enough to confirm my diagnosis of the blast. It was a simple sort of booby-trap, the kind even a child could put together. A few sticks of dynamite, evidently touched off with a blasting cap. A piece of thin copper wire was attached to the cap and to the doorknob. There was still a trace of the wire around the knob.

  “God, Ed.”

  I got up, put an arm around her. We walked to the kitchen. She put water on for coffee. While it cooked, I gave her a quick run-down on my part of the evening. I left out the call to the Continental agency in Cleveland. She didn’t have to know that I hadn’t trusted her.

  SHE WAS SMOKING TOO MANY CIGARETTES too quickly. She was nervous and it showed. Why not? She had a lot to be nervous about. Half the world was trying to kill her. That sort of thing tends to get on your nerves.

  “It doesn’t add,” I said.

  “What doesn’t?”

  “The whole thing. This morning they didn’t know where to find you, Rhona. Zucker’s lawyer was ready to pay ten thousand bucks just to get hold of you. A few hours later they know where you are and all they want to do is kill us both. They hand out contracts on the two of us. I’m supposed to get shot in East New York and you’re supposed to get blown up in your own apartment.”

  “Maybe they had us followed. Or maybe somebody tipped them off.”

  “Who?” I shrugged. “But there’s more. Why should they play around with a bomb? They could decoy you with a phone call, then drop you with a bullet on the street. Why get so fancy? Why send you on a wild goose chase to Hector’s? That’s the kind of play an amateur might use. A pro would be more direct. And we’re up against professionals.”

  The coffee finished dripping. She poured out a pair of cups. I sweetened mine with a shot of scotch and let it cool a little.

  “Look,” I said. “Let’s suppose they wanted to search the apartment. They still didn’t have to get cute about it. Did you have anything here?”

  “Nothing they would be interested in.”

  “Well, they might not have known that. But they still could have shot you down on the street and then sent a man upstairs. Or they could break in, kill you, then search. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I guess not,” she said.

  We sat there drinking our coffee, tossing it all back and forth and getting nowhere in particular. She started to relax. God knows how. I decided that a card mechanic has to have a sound nervous system, and she was a card mechanic’s daughter. Maybe that’s the sort of thing that passes down a family tree.

  I told her to go to sleep.

  “Is it safe?”

  “Nothing’s safe,” I said. “I don’t think they’ll be around tonight. It’s late and we’re both half-dead. I am, anyway, and you must be.”

  “I’m kind of tired, Ed.”

  “Sure. We’ll get some sleep and see what happens tomorrow. It’s been their play all along now. Maybe I can start something for our side, set some wheels in motion.”

  “I’m scared, Ed.”

  “So am I. But I’m tired enough to sleep. How about you?”

  She shrugged. “I guess I’m all right,” she said. “Uh…you’ll sleep on the couch tonight, won’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Ed,” she said. “Ed, listen, don’t be silly. You’re exhausted and you almost got killed tonight and—”

  “No.”

  “Ed, you’re crazy. Oh, you nut. Ed, Ed, you will sleep on the couch, won’t you?”

  I didn’t—not on the couch…

  SHE FELL ASLEEP RIGHT AWAY. I tossed and turned and listened to her measured breathing, and I wondered how the hell she managed it. I closed my eyes and counted fences jumping sheep, and things like that, and nothing worked. I hadn’t expected it to.

  It was still too tangled up to make any appreciable sort of sense. There were just too damned many inconsistencies. I couldn’t figure them out.

  Sleep on it, I told myself. Sleep on it, stupid. And, eventually, I did just that.

  The morning wasn’t too bad. She woke up first, and by the time I opened my eyes she was busy frying bacon and eggs in the kitchen. I showered and got dressed and went in for breakfast. There was fresh coffee made and the food was on the table. She even looked pretty in the morning. It seemed impossible, but she did.

  The bacon was crisp, the eggs were fine, the coffee was perfect. I told her so and she beamed. “I had plenty of practice,” she said. “I used to cook for Dad all the time, since my mother died.”

  It was around ten by the time I got out of there. First we had to go over the ground rules. This time, dammit, she would stay in the apartment. This time, dammit, she wouldn’t answer the phone unless it was my signal. Same for the door.

  “Ed—”

  I was at the door. I turned. Her mouth came up to me and her lips brushed mine.

  “Be careful, Ed.”

  Outside, the sun was shining. There was a different doorman on duty. He ignored me—he knew the ground rules there, by George, and the rules said that the doorman took no notice of anyone. They were strictly ornamental.

  I hauled out my wallet, dug out the card I’d gotten a day ago. Just a day? It seemed much longer. I studied the card—Phillip Carr. Attorney at Law. 42 East 37thStreet.

  I walked to the corner to save the doorman the trouble of hailing me a cab, and to save myself the tip I’d have had to give him. I got into a taxi and told the driver to take me to Fifth and 37th.

  It was time to get rolling. Carr and Zucker and the rest of the crooked-card-game set had dealt every hand so far. Rhona and I were just throwing our chips in the center and calling every bet.

  You can do that for just so long. Then it’s time to deal a hand yourself.

  I sat in the backseat and gnawed on a pipestem while the cabby fought his way uptown through mid-morning traffic. Phillip Carr, Attorney at Law. Okay, shyster, I thought. Let’s see what happens.

  NINE

  The cab dropped me in front of Carr’s building about midway between Fifth and Madison on 37th Street. I took an express elevator to the twentieth floor, walked along a chrome-plated hallway to a door with Carr’s name on it. I walked in.

  The secretary’s desk was kidney shaped. The girl behind it wasn’t. Her bright red hair had been painfully spray-netted until it had the general consistency of plastic. Her smile was metallic. Her sweater bulged nicely, giving a hint of flesh that the ha
ir and the smile tried to conceal. I told her I wanted to see Carr.

  “Your name, please?”

  “Ed London,” I said.

  She got up gracefully, wiggled her well-girdled hips on the way through a door marked PRIVATE. The door closed behind her. I picked up a magazine from a table, glanced at it, tossed it back. The door opened and the girl came out again.

  “He’ll see you,” she said.

  “I thought he would.”

  Phillip Carr’s office had framed diplomas on the wall from every college but Leavenworth. He stood up, smiled at me, and stuck out his hand for a handshake. I didn’t take it, and after a few seconds he fetched it back again.

  “Well,” he said. “I’m damn glad to see you, London. You were pretty hostile yesterday. I guess you’ve thought things over.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Cigar?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Well,” he said.

  “I thought it all over. Especially what you said about rewards and punishments.”

  “And?”

  “I’ve got a reward for you.”

  He didn’t get it until I hit him in the face. He’d stood there, hands at his sides, waiting patiently for me to tell him what the reward was, while I curled one hand into a fist, and aimed it at his jaw. It was a nice punch. It picked him up and sent him sailing over his desk, and it dropped him in an untidy pile on the floor.

  He came up cursing. He made a grab for a desk drawer, probably to get a gun. I kicked him away from it. He crouched, snarling like a tiger at bay, and lunged for the button that would summon the secretary. I caught him by the lapels and gave him a little push that turned his lunge into a full-blown charge. He didn’t slow down until he bounced off a wall and collapsed onto the high-pile carpet.