“In the pig’s clavicle,” I said. “I’ve got a date with the queen today.”
“The queen?” She smiled under her teeth. “Are you referring to Miss Christie?”
“A good guess.”
“I have no record of such an appointment,” she said, recovering her usual icy indifference. “I’m afraid—”
“Don’t be afraid, sister. Either I see the queen, or she gets herself another boy. Now you just pick up that gimmick and tell Alice I’m here.”
She slammed the glass door in my face and fiddled with her telephone connections. She spoke briefly to somebody, hung up and motioned me to a chair without a word. Or a smile.
I pulled the glass door open and stuck my head inside the aperture, scowling at her in my schoolboy manner.
“If Ashforth comes out, I’m going to bite your pretty little pink ears off.”
“You’re cute, Mr. Conacher. You can’t scare me.”
There was a discreet cough behind me and I turned around to find Ashforth beaming at me from the far door.
“Mr. Conacher,” he said, eyeing me with obvious relish. “So we meet again?”
“Oh no we don’t,” I said, moving for the exit and slapping my hat on my head.
He minced after me, crossing the room with the agility of an emotional elephant, but fast enough to touch my arm before I reached the door.
“Please,” he said. “I’ve only come to take you to Alice V.”
“Lead on,” I said.
“You might at least be more friendly, Mr. Conacher. It’s been a long time.”
“I didn’t keep a record of it,” I said.
I couldn’t see his face as he marched ahead of me, but I knew he was coloring up because of the rosy tint on the back of his neck. He kept spouting a steady line of chatter.
“Busy. We’ve been so damnably busy here. Busiest damned office I ever saw in all my life. Look at these cubbyholes, Mr. Conacher. A legal brain in each of them. They perspire all day, and all for Alice. Loyalty. My, how that woman commands loyalty. I’ve seen some of these little worms staying on until the wee hours. Just for Alice.” We were moving through a broad hall, through a narrow hall, around several corners and up to an oversized door of some sort of polished wood of a unique quality. The name ALICE V. CHRISTIE was in the dead center of the panel, in simple gilt letters.
“Amazing woman,” Ashforth was saying. He had stopped before the door and now he took a deep breath and knocked twice, gently, as though too much pressure on the wood might collapse the entire building.
There was a throaty “Come” from somewhere inside. Ashforth stepped forward daintily and pushed the door open for me, and I was inside. The door closed silently behind me.
Alice V. sat behind a desk across the room from me, a mile or so away. It was a tremendous desk of the modern variety, sporting a profusion of ledges, ridges, niches and cubbyholes, on which a variety of art objects was displayed. The room itself was done in shades of blue and gray, a scheme that sang of coldness and formality. But the sun lit up the place, through a large window behind Alice.
And the sun lit Alice, too.
She stood up to greet me, and standing, she was just my size, short and straight, but with important structural differences. She had ink-black, hair, a figure that showed promise in the right places, and a face to match, a round and almost girlish head with burning eyes, not black, not brown, but somewhere in the subtle range between the extremes. Her eyes gave her away. They were tired, those eyes. She could have bluffed at being twenty-five if her inner juices had fed those eyes with innocence and youthful bounce. But somehow, sometime long ago, the bright and girlish glow had faded from her optics. There were little wrinkles in the corners, built of the sweat and strain of study. And above the eyes, her brows seemed always ready for frowning, the habitual curve of intelligence; the reflex born of deep and fancy thinking.
She wore a summery blouse—tailored in a masculine fashion, but designed to feature the firm crest of her ample breasts. She was a little dumpy, pleasantly hipped and curved. She must have been a butterball of delight about ten years ago. And even now she radiated a refined fragrance, an odor that had undertones of musk and bit gently into my libido.
She pressed a button somewhere on the panel before her, and reached into a small bar and produced glasses and a good Scotch, holding it up for me and waiting for my nod. She poured herself a jot of Drambuie and pushed a leather cigarette case my way. She had a newspaper on her desk, a tabloid, and it was folded back so that I could see the featured picture of Sam Doughty, snapped by the lens hound this morning.
She put a manicured nail on the headline.
“You’re getting to be quite a celebrity in town, Mr. Conacher. It isn’t every detective who can make the front page of a tabloid.”
“It was nothing,” I said. “I give my press agent all the credit.”
“An interesting case. Was she pretty?”
“Very.” I swallowed the yen for laughter. “Why is it you women all react to a dead blonde in the same way? Nine out of ten ask the same question. What the hell difference does it make whether she was pretty? The point is she’s dead. Stone cold.”
“And blonde,” added Alice V., folding away the paper and sipping her drink delicately. “It’s good to meet you, Conacher. Ashforth was telling me we used you some time ago, probably before you established yourself as top man in the missing persons business. It’s pleasant to think that we may have been responsible, in some small way, for helping you make headway in your trade. Ashforth turned in an excellent report on you.”
“Well now, that was just peachy of him.”
“Ashforth is a very discerning man,” Alice V. said.
“Is that what you call it?”
“And he’s full of respect for you, Conacher.”
“Let’s forget about Ashforth,” I said.
“What I mean is, he has confidence in you.”
“Bully for him. I, too, have confidence in him. That makes us even.”
“He saved the report on your last job for us,” Alice V. said. She was fiddling with the yellow sheets I had shipped them to close the case. She was gazing at them fondly. “A mighty good job.”
“Oh, stuff it,” I said. “That deal was only a simple skip trace. That’s a long haul from missing persons.”
She leveled a smile at me. “You have a bad, bad temper, Conacher. You mustn’t get so upset. I didn’t mean to antagonize you.”
“Touché,” I said. “But it’s just that I’m a little bit ashamed of some of the stuff out of the dim and distant past. It was corn, Miss Christie.”
“You’re modest, Conacher. After all, I read about you after you worked for us. It was in all the papers, the job you did for Biberman over in Brooklyn. I followed that manhunt and it had all the fascination of a movie thriller. You know your stuff, my lad.”
Now I was her lad. The thin smile never left her mouth—the poor man’s Mona Lisa, complete with legal services. But for a fee.
“How can a busy barrister like you find time for tabloid tales like that Brooklyn rat race?”
“It concerned an ingenious killer, and killers are my bread and butter.”
She wasn’t kidding. She was licking her well-chiseled chops over a homicidal maniac, the sort of brute she defended every other Monday in the law courts. She had an ingenious reputation and was said to make guarantees in certain cases, based on her skill at the bar, plus the sense of hot theatrical and dramatic effects to be used before juries. She had no end of assistants grubbing their legalistic way through the law journals, in research of precedent and procedure. She was a thorough craftsman at her art, and nine out of ten of her masculine competitors at the bench would wilt and groan whenever they faced her. Her artifices were legion. And she had the face and figure to promote lust or sympathy in the eyes
of any twelve good men and true.
“Not even Alice V. Christie could have saved that nut over in Flatbush,” I said. “You didn’t take the case?”
“I never take a case unless I can win it.”
“A good system.”
“A lady in law must have foolproof systems, Conacher. You boys rarely make it easy for our sex.”
“Now you’re generalizing. I can think of times.”
She let it lay where I dropped it. “But you’re good, Conacher. You’re very good. It was a pleasure to watch the way you nailed that killer. A genuine pleasure.”
“I was lucky on the Biberman deal,” I said. “There have been others since then that came off better. The really good stuff never gets into the newspapers, Miss Christie.”
“Tell me about them.”
“I don’t tell stories.”
“Oh, come now, you’re being a bad boy,” she said. She had an eye on my glass, and when I put it down, she filled it immediately and slid her chair over to my corner of the desk. I moved back and away. Not much and not deliberately, but enough to get the range on her. She was doing too well on one small jigger of Drambuie. If her eyes could ignite on so small a dose, I wondered what would happen if she ever really swallowed some liquor. “I’m curious,” she said. “I’ve always been interested in the way you detectives work. I usually labor for the people you chase, you know.”
“I didn’t know,” I lied. Alice V. Christie had the biggest and dirtiest list of underworld clients in the city of New York. Everybody in or near the law courts knew her reputation. I knew it. But I didn’t want her to feel good now.
“You don’t look that dumb,” she said sweetly.
“It’s just a pose with me.”
“You can call me Alice.”
“Why?”
“Why not? My people are all good friends of mine. Everybody in this office calls me Alice. I like it.” She smiled at me with an eagerness that made me understand why masculine juries drooled out the decisions in her favor. Words were little helpmates for Alice V. She used them with the skill of a scientist. “You can’t work for me and dislike me. I just won’t have it.”
“Sold.”
“You’re a cynic, Conacher. You buy too easily.”
“I have no sales resistance,” I said. “I like all my customers, Alice. I like you fine.”
“That’s better.”
She was pouring again, but her eyes never left mine for the flick of an instant. Her aim was good and the liquor splashed neatly in the glass and I had the feeling that she had gone through this routine over and over again. She handled it too nicely. The look in her eyes was loaded with something that should have spelled mystery, or glamour, or yearning, but maybe I was sitting too close for an accurate judgment. To me it seemed that this was Act One, Scene One, of her personal production. She had played it with variations, before. It was an interesting drama, something that would probably have its climax in a bedroom Third Act curtain, but I felt ill at ease as her leading man. Her free hand crawled slowly over the desk top and came to rest on my wrist. Her finger tips were iced and they only touched me lightly.
But somebody ruined her scenario. There was a knock on the door, gently. And then another knock.
Alice V. pulled away from me. Her eyes snapped back to their former focus, all business again. She straightened in her chair and scowled at the door and said, “Come!” The word was crisp and curt, carrying the undertones of anger, and she drummed her little fingers on the green blotter impatiently.
It was Ashforth. He stood in the doorway, frozen, probably affected by the timbre of her sharp command. His eyes skittered my way, briefly, and a suggestion of a pout flickered on his face.
“What is it, for God’s sake?” Alice V. snapped. “Don’t stand there like a dummy. Has she arrived?”
“Yes,” said Ashforth. “Mrs. Masterson is waiting in the reception room.”
“You could have phoned the message in. I told you not to disturb me, didn’t I?”
“Yes,” said Ashforth, and he was having trouble with the little muscles around his mouth again. I got up and walked to the window and looked out, not wanting to suffer the impact of his eyes on me.
“Well, get her, get her, get her,” Alice V. said.
“Yes,” said Ashforth. “At once.”
The door clicked shut. Alice V. eased alongside me at the window, close enough so that I could feel the heat of her. She handed me my glass, full again, and swallowed her hooker of Drambuie in one unladylike swig. She began to talk fast now. She gave me the dope on Mrs. Masterson quickly. Mrs. Masterson was a divorce case. Mrs. Masterson was searching for a runaway husband. Alice V. had recommended me to her client as the champ missing persons hound in the city. I would get a good fee for, the job. Mrs. Masterson was loaded with cabbage. And did I understand?
I had no time to answer. There was the same slow double knock on the door, the same brusque command, but when the door opened, something different was added to the broth.
“This is Grace Masterson,” Alice V. said. “Mr. Conacher.”
I nodded to Grace, and when she smiled her teeth were bright white against her tanned face. Her smile was automatic and hesitant, on broad, ripe lips that caught the light from the window and made each movement of her mouth noticeable and important. She only said, “Hello,” but there was enough sound and breath in the word to tell me that her voice was pleasant. Her eyes were pale blue, and against the shine and glisten of her blonde hair their color seemed vague and lost and intangible.
She took my hand briefly and without pressure and passed before me on the way to the other side of Alice V.’s desk. I was able to observe, in the few seconds involved in this movement, that she had enough grace to be a dancer or a singer or a burlesque queen, for the subtle tilt of her hips as she advanced was an educated rhythm that few women can carry off successfully. She slid into the brown leather chair and lazily lit a cigarette. She used a holder, not too long and not too fancy. She handled her smoke with the seasoned gestures of a veteran tobacco fiend. She inhaled hard and let it pour out in a slow cloud, so that you felt that she was enjoying it and not just blowing for effect.
There were other things about her that smacked against the hard wall of my intellect and kept bouncing; her legs and her knees and the costume she wore, stylish and not loud, but tailored in the uptown manner by some specialist in design.
“What Grace has is right up your alley, Conacher,” Alice V. was saying. “We can talk freely, Grace, because whatever Conacher hears in this room will get no further. A detective never divulges his client’s problems. Is that right, Conacher?”
“But of course.”
“Don’t be impatient with me,” Alice V. said. “I wanted Grace to hear you say it because she’s nervous as a cat about this thing. I want her to understand that this sort of thing is routine for me and you, too. Husbands do run off and lose themselves, and wives must find them. Sometimes the hunt is successful, sometimes not. But we’re going to find your husband for you, Grace, because we’ve got the best man in town for the job.”
I said, “Thanks. But you may be building Mrs. Masterson up for a big letdown. Don’t make it sound too easy.”
“Oh, it won’t be easy,” Alice V. said. “It never is easy, even on the simplest cases. A search may take time, Grace. But I have a feeling—call it womanly intuition—that Conacher will come through.”
She was making it sound like button, button, who’s got the button. Jump down to Broadway and start shouting for Mr. Masterson.
“I make no guarantees,” I said.
“Naturally,” Alice V. said. She arose suddenly and stared at her memo pad and pulled at her blouse. “And now, if you two will excuse me, I’m going to take you into the library where you can talk. You’ll forgive me for being abrupt, Grace—but there’s an important cl
ient due in here very shortly.”
I said, “Haven’t you forgotten something?”
“Have I? If I have, Grace will give you the information.”
“Will she?” I stayed put, rubbing two fingers together and holding them up for her to see. “Or do you and I arrange the fee?”
Alice V. laughed with the crisp and meaningless titter of a lady listening to an ugly joke. She was at the library door, on the other side of the room, but her impatience with me was as obvious as a poke in the ribs.
“I have a reputation for being pretty generous, Conacher.”
“I appreciate that, and my hat is off to you. But I’ve always found that a small preliminary skirmish about the loot saves many a hard word after the case is closed.”
“A sensible approach,” Alice V. agreed, returning to the arena of combat, close to her friend. “And Grace is willing to pay you well for your time.”
I nodded Grace’s way and was rewarded by a teasing curl of her lush lips, without any sound effects.
I said, “Namely?”
“What’s your price?”
“It’ll run pretty high these days. You know my business, Alice. It takes a lot of walking and talking on a missing persons deal. New York City is a crowded town, full of quiet corners. It may take a major investment to locate Mr. Masterson.”
“Will fifty a day do it?”
“Plus expenses,” I said. “And a small bonus for the locate.”
“A bonus?” Alice V. asked. “How much?”
“Say a thousand.”
“That’s a hard price to enunciate. Make it five hundred.”
“I don’t bargain. One thousand and I’m your man, ladies.”
“You’re a robber,” Alice V. said easily, “but we’ll use you. Is that price all right with you, Grace?”
Mrs. Masterson only nodded and stood up and put out her cigarette. Alice V. piloted us through the door into a cozy library, ceiling-high with law books. She opened a tiny bar at the corner near the window and revealed an array of bottles and glasses and a tray of ice cubes.
“Make yourselves comfortable,” said Alice V. “If you need anything, just ring for Ashforth and he’ll replenish the bar.”
Stone Cold Blonde Page 3
