Stone Cold Blonde

by Lawrence Lariar

  “And now you,” he said to the Paramount Building.

  “Not to your back, Doughty,” I said. He was deliberately irritating me, showing me his beefy backside, impressing me with the length and breadth of his figure. It was always that way with big men, somehow. I had an ingrown hatred for the whole tribe of them, the monster boys with the monster bodies. He turned my way slowly, but his fixed and phony grin didn’t do anything for my percolating stomach.

  “Pardon me, little man,” Doughty said.

  Worse, and more of it. He wanted me to walk over to him and measure him, perhaps. He wanted me to come a bit closer so that he could level me from his high perch, maybe two feet above my head. He was asking for a show of spleen from me, worrying me with his big black eyes and the foolish grin that did not sit right on his fare. He was a technician, Doughty was, but I welcomed the challenge and smiled back at him. I sat on my desk and tapped a pencil on my desk lamp and just grinned at him until he came over to me and dropped to my level by sitting down.

  Then I said. “You’re slipping, Doughty. You don’t really think I knocked that girl off, not in my own office?”

  “Why not? What do I know about your sex life?”

  I laughed in his face. “What do you want to know?”

  “Let’s keep it clean. Did you ever see this blonde before?”

  “Not before this morning.”

  “How about your girl? The one in the reception room, maybe she knows her?”

  “Liz doesn’t know her either.”

  “What makes you so sure? Has Liz introduced you to all her friends?”

  “Most of them,” I said.

  “And Liz—does she know all of your lady friends?”

  “She doesn’t give a damn about my lady friends.”

  “Sure, sure,” said Doughty. “But suppose she did. Conacher. You little guys get around and also get in. Maybe Liz got a bit jealous, like they show in the movies.”

  “You’ve been seeing the wrong movies.”

  “Maybe Liz invited this friend of yours up here and then stuck a knife into her. It makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s a hot plot,” I laughed. “But it’s strictly for the B picture trade.”

  “I like the plot,” said Doughty. “Who else but a jealous woman would stab another where that one got stabbed?”

  “A jealous man.”

  “Don’t be funny,” said Doughty. “A man now, he’d stab her in the back, the orthodox way, wouldn’t he?”

  “I didn’t know there was a book of etiquette on stabbing.”

  “Stop trying to be clever, Conacher,” Doughty said. “Take you, for instance. Where would you put the knife if you wanted to rub out a woman?”

  “I wouldn’t know. The last woman I stabbed I used a tack and it was smack in the seat of her pants, because I was in the third grade at the time.”

  “Always the comedian,” Doughty said, studying his cigar without emotion. “Tell me a little something about your love life, Mr. Funnyman. You know any other blondes?”

  “You’re not getting anywhere,” I said. “You want a few phone numbers?”

  “I’ll break it down for you,” said Doughty. “You got a little black book?”

  I opened my drawer and pulled out my address book. I tossed it to him, and he caught it easily and studied it for a minute before stuffing it away in his jacket. He got off the desk and returned to the window.

  “Who do you know that might have pulled this one up here in your office?” he asked.

  “Now you’re getting somewhere,” I said. “Nobody—even my best enemies don’t go in for this kind of practical joke.”

  “Then how do you figure it? An accident? You think somebody just picked your office for the ball?”

  “That’s as far as I’ve gotten with it,” I said. “But I’m going to get much further, believe me. I’m going to find the crud who did this and when I get him I’m going to bring him downtown to you in small pieces.”

  “Now that’s a nice sensible attitude,” Doughty said. “How do you figure you’ll find the nasty man?”

  “I’ve found men before.”

  Sam Doughty nodded to his cigar. It was beginning to make some sense to him, in the way that I had made sense to the Police Department on other occasions. Doughty was well aware of my reputation in certain offices close to his Headquarters. Not long ago I had worked with Biberman down there when there was a hue and cry for a maggoty little tailor in Flatbush who had butchered two small girls in Prospect Park and then disappeared in the void that was Brooklyn. Biberman had called me in for that one because I knew Brooklyn and was considered an expert in the missing persons business. I found the tailor for the tin badge boys. I tracked him from Flatbush to Bensonhurst and back again to the Red Hook section where he had found employment in a pants factory. It was a long and intricate chase that took most of my spare time, but the rewards were gratifying. The publicity boosted my stock as a private investigator and I earned the lifelong affection of Biberman, which gave me a good friend in a top seat in the New York Police Department.

  “So you have,” Doughty said. “I got to hand it to you, Conacher, you’re talented.”

  “Gosh,” I said. “Thank you very kindly.”

  “Don’t get your bowels in an uproar again. Stop pushing your personality at me. Maybe I was a bit upset when I walked in here. A character like you with such a combination of talents, sometimes he gets pretty confusing.”

  “You’re oiling me, Doughty.”

  “So I’m oiling you.” He was staring up at a fancy calendar over my desk, a picture of a girl on the beach in a bathing suit of the Bikini type. He squinted at her, smiled at her and addressed his dialogue to her. “I got to admit you get around with your type of talent, Conacher—a talent like that could tie up nicely with knifing one of them.”

  “You’ve got a one-track mind,” I said.

  He held up both hands and waved them at the ceiling. “Not that it adds up, mind you, but murder never really adds up. A fit of temper and a handy knife—and phooey! Then what have you got? You’ve got a hot-tempered crime, a crime of passion like they say over in Paris, France. And you got to admit you have the temper for it, Conacher.”

  “I never hit a girl in my life,” I said, “not with my hands, that is.”

  “Of course you didn’t, it’s just that you look like you might. What the hell are you looking so mad about?”

  “You’re no tonic, Doughty.”

  “You mad at me?”

  “I can live without you,” I said. “You bother me.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Doughty said. “You little guys are always bracing yourselves for some sort of a hit in the head. It’s all over your face, as plain as pimples.” He came back to me and sat down again, as slowly as a grandmother at a picnic, dropping his big tail delicately on my desk top. He lifted a finger and poked me gently, over the heart. “Relax, Conacher. You want to learn to take it easy. My boys will find the lug who dropped the blonde in your office.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  “You don’t want to get jumpy about a thing like this.”

  “I’m starting to jump at this end,” I said. “Me and Abe Feldman.”

  “A good man,” Doughty said. “A nice, quiet man.” He got up and jerked his head to hawk into the basket, and wiped his fat lips with a hairy wrist. “But you don’t want to leave town with Abe, now, do you?”

  “I’m not asking you for expense money.”

  “There you go again. Touchy.” He waggled a finger at me. “You leave town and I’ll come after you—but fast.”

  “If you can find me, Doughty.”

  He was standing only a few feet away from me, but his back was to the window and the huge bulk of him was almost silhouetted against the drab line of buildings outside. In
that pose his physical being irritated me again. He stared at me and ran his tongue over his lower lip once, then his mouth hardened into a tight line. I watched his lumpy hands knot into fists. He came over to me and put a big ham on my shoulder. He let me feel the full weight of it before he added the other hand. He slipped both hands down and caught my lapels in his fat fingers. And squeezed.

  “You can play games, Conacher,” he said, “but you play them all right here in town, where I can find you. Is that clear?”

  “I don’t hear well when my pleats are ruffled.”

  He was pulling my jacket up higher, and he was close enough for me to smell the dying fumes of his dead cigar. He had large and dirty pores on his nose and there was a little scar I had never noticed before, running down his jaw from his left ear. I didn’t enjoy the close-up.

  I said, “Let go of my jacket or you’ll find a knee in your gut, Doughty.”

  The tension went out of his hairy hands and he let me go, respectful of the weight of my command. I would have sunk my knee in his groin up to his navel. And he knew it.

  He chuckled and reached for his hat and said, “Jesus, but you got a bad temper, Conacher. A guy like you could get into a lot of trouble with a temper like that. Now you do as I say and we won’t have any trouble downtown.”

  I allowed Doughty the last word and watched him walk out, and when the door closed I spat at it, high and hard, so that the gob hit the spot where his dirty nose would have been.

  It was a pleasure to know that my aim was still good.

  CHAPTER 3

  I finished telling Abe Feldman the story.

  “It’s much too early to check the hotels,” Abe said. “When Liz phoned me, I figured you must be all upset about this thing, so I came up. But I didn’t bother with the hotels, Steve. Not yet, not yet.”

  “You’re right, Abe. If she checked in anywhere, it’d be at least a day or so before they found her among the missing.”

  “Sometimes even a week, depending on the hotel. You know that.”

  Abe was right, of course. Abe was always right. And I never argued with him. You couldn’t argue with Abe Feldman. He had a soft, pleasant face, creased with a perpetual smile, warm and friendly. He spoke quietly and without effort or emotion, with the voice and manner of a sage. He radiated a certain homeliness found only in a special breed among the middle-aged, but he could discuss modern painting or how to manufacture bouillabaisse, if the occasion arose. He wore glasses that masked the hidden sharpness in his blue eyes. He was as faceless as the man on the street. He was a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker, doctor, lawyer or high school teacher. He was everything and nothing, which made him perfect for the line of work he pursued. He was one of the best skip-trace experts in the city of New York. When Abe Feldman followed you on a busy street, he was only a man in a crowd. And Abe usually caught what he followed.

  “Tell me more about the girl,” Abe said quietly.

  “Nothing. She was as nude as a lox.”

  “Jewelry?”

  “She had a ring mark, fourth finger, left hand, married.”

  “That might be important,” Abe said.

  “It would be the payoff,” I said. “If we had the ring. But whoever did the job, did it thoroughly. She was stripped clean—ring, hairpins and everything else that might have given us a lead.”

  “How about her feet?” Abe asked.

  “She had two of them,” I said.

  “I mean the toes, the toenails. I was thinking whether maybe they had some paint on them.”

  “They were unpainted,” I said.

  “That’s too bad,” Abe said. “We might have traced her to a beach somewhere if the nails had been colored up. Some women like to fiddle with their toes when they live near a beach for long periods or even short ones.”

  “She was near a beach all right,” I said. “She was brown as burned toast. I figure she was lying under the sun for a long stretch, from the shade of tan she sported. She must have been the type who loved showing her shanks to the passing beach wolves, Abe, but you’ll see what I mean when I take you down to the morgue to look at her chassis.”

  “How about her face?”

  “She was beautiful.”

  “We’ll need a few pictures of her,” said Abe. “We’ll have to show her face around, it always helps.”

  Liz came in, smiling like a cat that has just finished a small meal of canaries. She had a tabloid in her hand and she held it up for me.

  “You’re headline news,” she said. “We’re going to need a switchboard out in the hall in another few hours. So far I’ve listed ten calls from a variety of idiots, six of them from crackpots with zany assignments. Then there was a man from the television show who wanted you to appear for an interview, during which you would draw diagrams and also draw conclusions.”

  I threw the tabloid into the basket. “Tell them all to go to hell.”

  “How about this one?” Liz asked. She waved a small yellow sheet of paper in my face. “Another lady client for the great detective. Hold your breath, Steve; this is a big lady client and just your type.”

  “Stop with the guessing games, who is it?”

  “It’s Alice V. Christie.”

  Abe whistled. “Alice V. Christie. That could be big money, Steve. That could be a cash account, a nice fat deposit in the savings bank.”

  I whistled along with him. “Let’s stop making corny jokes. A deal with Alice V. Christie would mean plenty, Abe. She could be an important customer.”

  Liz said, “She wasn’t fooling, Steve, and I’ll tell you why. The last time you worked for her one of her flunkies made the phone call to get you over there. But this time it’s different, this time Alice V. called herself. I told her you were too busy to talk to her, but she left this message: she wants you to come over to her place late this afternoon. She said she’s got a case for you. She also said that it’s urgent and she needs you badly. How does it feel to be a notorious detective?”

  “I’ll let you know when I get finished with her,” I said. “From what I’ve heard about her, I should have a peachy time.”

  Liz lifted an eyebrow at me to tell me what she thought of me and flounced out.

  Abe said, “There goes a nice little girl. It must be difficult for you to leave your office for outside work, eh, Steve?”

  “I don’t mind staying in.”

  “Liz is a good worker, no?”

  “We work well together.”

  “And why not? She seems to have lots of talent.” He chuckled softly. “You did a job for Alice V. Christie before this?”

  “I did a skip trace for her two years ago but I never got past that pansy secretary of hers.”

  “Ashforth?”

  “The same. She called me in on a collection case but she kept her distance on that one all the way. I only saw her once, but that was a fast shot of her back crossing the hall outside of Ashforth’s office. I had to make my reports to Ashforth, and working with him was like getting sick on sweet liquor. Have you ever seen him?”

  “I’ve heard some stories about him.”

  I made a face at my memory of Ashforth. “He’s like something out of a bad dream, that character, as blowzy as my Aunt Bertha, and just as coy. You never quite know whether he’s leveling or getting ready to make a pass at you. The two weeks I worked with him made my ulcers jump.”

  “I know what you mean, but maybe it will be different this time. Maybe Alice V. Christie will see you personally.”

  “She’d better, or I won’t play,” I said. “Not for any price.”

  I was in no hurry to see Alice V. Christie. Abe and I grabbed a fast lunch and then went downtown to look at the blonde. We wangled a few police photos of her from a cooperative clerk and studied them at a convenient bar.

  In repose, her face was more beautiful than
it had seemed against the background of my dirty rug. She had a quiet charm that came through even in the flat and lifeless photography of the police. The picture should have been lewd and evil, because of her nudity and the awful scar between her breasts. But, somehow, the face alone held your eyes. It stirred your imagination. You thought of the man who married her, and where they might have lived, and the friends they had, and their life at home. It could have been a good life. If you forgot the history of this woman, and why she came to a strange office, and the sudden thrust of a sharp blade and her death cries as she sank to the floor. I couldn’t forget. And the sight of her moved me again, and I was angry once more, angrier than I had been when Sam Doughty grabbed me.

  I ordered another hooker of Scotch and turned to Abe.

  “We’ve got to grab the bastard who killed her,” I said. “I’ve got a hunch it all began in my building.”

  “You could be right. Do you want me to stay there?”

  “Why not? Dig around.”

  “I’ll dig.”

  CHAPTER 4

  I took a cab uptown to the Park Avenue establishment of Alice V. Christie, a modern building nestling close to the heart of the upper-class arty section, where galleries line the streets and mink-clothed minxes window-shop for caviar and Cadillacs. You felt the change of atmosphere as the cab rushed uptown. This was the big money area of the big town. The lobby of Alice V. Christie’s building was a symphony of elegant marble cut in simple lines, calculated to arrest the eye and lull the sensibilities of all who trafficked within these lush walls. This was the high-fee zone, the zone of deep and soft carpeting, and dignified discussions, of whispering receptionists and suave executives. Even the elevator boys were garbed investments befitting the State Department, and the machinery that moved me to the thirty-fifth floor performed its mechanical ritual with only a faint sighing of doors, a humming of deep-hidden gears. It was class, all the way up.

  The girl behind the glass in Alice V. Christie’s office remembered me.

  She said, “You wanted to see Mr. Ashforth?”