Pardon My Body

by Dale Bogard

  “Well,” I said, “your husband was sixty years old.”

  “Ah, I see—a little confusion of ideas.” The reference to her husband didn’t seem to trouble her. “Yes, Arny was a whole lot older than me. You didn’t know him?”

  “No. I just happened to be present when…”

  I didn’t finish the sentence, but Mrs. Grierson did. “When somebody planted a dagger into him, you mean.”

  I stared straight into her eyes. They betrayed nothing, either way.

  She said, slowly, “I guess you think I’m hard. If you do you’re wrong. It’s just that I didn’t love Arny. He didn’t love me, either. But he liked having me around. We had a lot of fun together one way or another. What he expected from me was a combination of wife, mother and mistress. He wasn’t disappointed. I played it straight with Arny.”

  The butler moved in with the drinks on a trolley-table. I took whisky and sat down on the arm of a big easy chair. Mrs. Grierson got back to the chaise longue and crossed one long leg over the other. They were nice legs as far as I could see.

  I said, “You talk almost as if you weren’t married.”

  She sat there for a moment looking at the cocktail glass she was holding with both hands. Suddenly, she jerked her head up and looked me in the eye.

  “We weren’t,” she said.

  I drank all my whisky and poured myself some more. If there was anything to say I didn’t know what it was.

  Mrs. Louella Grierson did. She went on, “I was born on a farm at Davenport, Iowa. When I was three my old man gave up trying to work for himself and went to work for the Studebaker plant at South Bend, Indiana. He didn’t like that, either, but he stuck it out. We never had a lot of money which was why I made up my mind to latch on to plenty when I grew up.”

  She stopped to drink her whisky. She didn’t pour another one. Instead, she used both hands to smooth herself down. The movement had a suggestion of the sensuous. I went right ahead saying nothing. This was no time to stop the flow of confidences.

  So she picked up where she left off. “I started to dig when I was sixteen. That was how old I was when I joined a chorus line in a travelling show which played five nights in South Bend. By this time Mom had died and I was supposed to stay home looking after the old man. He treated me right but I knew he wouldn’t like the idea so I took the easy way out. I didn’t tell him. I just beat it out of town.” She paused a moment and let her eyelashes give a little flicker. “Man—I learned plenty about life between the ages of sixteen and twenty. But I didn’t make any mistakes—not any that fastened me down, anyway. I kicked my legs in a couple of dozen touring shows—and they’re nice legs, too…”

  She extended the crossed leg and drew her frock upwards. Far enough for me to see three inches above her knee.

  “They’re still all right,” she said without changing expression.

  “Lady,” I said, “I have nothing to say against your legs. They’re very nice legs and I could look at them for a long time if I had a long time.”

  She smoothed her dress down again and went on, “I soon got wise to the fact that I hadn’t any real talent in show business. I could see the end as clear as a traffic light—cheap stage shows, maybe a move into a better chorus line on Broadway; then, as I got older, back to one-night stands in the hick towns and maybe a fate worse than death at the finish.”

  Around this time I figured I was learning plenty about Mrs. Louella Grierson and not a damn thing about Mr. Arnold Grierson, but I didn’t interrupt.

  “Well, I never made Broadway. But I got into a burlesque act—which is a pretty cheap way of getting your pennies. The customers don’t leave you guessing about anything. But that was when I met Arny. Right here in New York. It was all of ten years ago. He blew into the show one night looking as solid as the Empire State Building and as well heeled as the Carnegie Trust. His was the sixth proposition that night and, on an impulse, I said ‘Yes.’ I liked the cut of his suit, the size of his bankroll and the fact that he looked like he was used to eating good.

  “He took me up to his apartment. I thought, ‘Uh-huh, this is where the all-in wrestling starts’—but Arny, he just looked at me and said, ‘It’s all right, baby, you don’t have to play hard to get. If you like to string along with me I can show you a helluva time. If you don’t like the idea, why, just press the bell and I’ll have a waiter show you to the nearest taxi. Okay—how do we go?’

  “I asked him what he wanted of me and he said, ‘You’re my sort. I also think you could look good in the right setting. I want you to live with me out on Long Island where I’ve just bought a place.’

  “You wouldn’t be wanting me to marry you?’ I said. That gave him a big laugh. ‘No, I won’t marry you or any other woman,’ he said. ‘But you’ll have a better life than playing in burlesque, living in two-bit rooming-houses and trying not to go to bed with the manager.’”

  She paused again, then said quite simply, “I thought that one over for about thirty-five seconds and said ‘Yes’ again. I’ve lived out here ever since and haven’t been sorry. It was nice having everybody think I was Mrs. Grierson.” A tiny smile crossed her face and was gone.

  I said, “You never saw me before. Why tell me this?”

  “A lot of people are going to know it all pretty damn soon,” she said softly. “It’s easier telling you than seeing the sneers on the faces of some people I know very well indeed.”

  “Are you flat?” I asked brutally.

  “I don’t get his fortune, I guess. He never would make a will, said it gave him the creeps even to think about it. He fixed up an annuity for me, though, so I don’t have to look for any jobs. I’ll be comfortable all right, but not on this scale”—she gestured at the ornate room. “I can have a nice apartment in New York and play around a little if I feel that way. I never did while he was alive. Like I told you, I always played it straight.”

  Her face shadowed over fleetingly. “I guess that’s more than he did this last few months.”

  “Too bad…” I began uncertainly.

  “That’s okay, brother—I didn’t expect it to last forever.” She uncrossed her legs and stared down at her toes. “Only he might have told me. I think he was getting ready to run out on me….”

  “Maybe he was just playing around,” I said.

  “Yeah, maybe that was all there was to it. But I had the idea it was something more than that.” She shrugged. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter now, does it. Nobody gets him. I don’t even know, as a matter of proof, that there was another girl. It was just a hunch—that and noticing little things about him. Men are such goddamn fools. Most of the time when they’re being smart they wouldn’t deceive a kid in the third grade. And now he’s gone—with a knife in his chest.”

  Suddenly, she said in a low, tense voice, “I’d like to have killed the bastard who did that—but he got his the same way, didn’t he?”

  I nodded. I also thought it was time to start talking.

  “Why should anyone wish to kill your husband, Mrs. Grierson?”

  She picked up a cigarette and sat there tapping it on her bloodred nails.

  “He was being blackmailed,” she said.

  I felt myself tensing. “Who was he laying it on the line for?”

  I reached forward and lit her cigarette. She drew on it for a moment. Then: “I don’t know—he never told me a thing.”

  “So you don’t really know that he was in trouble?”

  “I know. He’d been worried for some time. He had also withdrawn heavily from the bank…and once I heard him speaking to someone on the phone…I only caught a few words, but he was promising to do something or other. He heard me coming close up to him and told me to get out. He had never spoken to me like that before. Afterwards, he apologized, but he wouldn’t tell me what was wrong. Then, a week ago, he seemed easier in his mind.”

  I said, “Mrs. Grierson—have you ever been to a place called Falls City?”

  Her eyes opened wide.
“That’s where he lived once,” she answered. “He told me—but I’ve never been there. Why?”

  “Because I think the killer who stabbed your husband came from Falls City,” I told her.

  “Why do you think that, Mr. Bogard?”

  “The man who killed your husband called himself George Clark. In the bedroom where I found him dead was a torn piece of paper carrying an address in Falls City. I’m just playing a hunch about it.”

  “I see,” she said. “It may have something to do with him being blackmailed.”

  “It could be that way, if it was blackmail.”

  “There was something in his past—something he never spoke of. There must have been. Guys aren’t blackmailed for nothing. But I’m sorry—I can’t help you about Falls City.”

  I slid off the chair arm and stood up. “Mrs. Grierson,” I said, “you have helped plenty. If your husband was being blackmailed, that may be the clue to a lot of things….”

  She said, softly, “I wish you luck. But you don’t have to go yet. Unless you want to.” She moved a little way along the chaise longue and patted the place beside her. “Come and sit by me,” she invited.

  I sat by her. She moved just a little. Enough so that I could feel the shape of her leg against me. Her chin was smooth and rounded and she let it thrust outwards so that her full lips were pursed. Her eyes had the kind of look that went with it. So I let my left arm go round her and she fell sideways across my knees.

  “I told you I might play around a little,” she said, “and I guess you’re twenty years younger than most of the men Arny invited to the house.” She circled a long naked arm round my collar and played a few off-beats on the part of the neck where the barber uses electric clippers.

  She gave a tiny wriggle on my knees. If I still had any knees. They felt like gelatine. I leaned over her and kissed her. Just the one kiss. It lasted about five minutes. She kept her lips parted like the girl in the Longmoor Apartments. But she knew a thing or two more. She bit me three times.

  Suddenly, she pushed me back. The beautiful white gown was rumpled and by this time I could see both her knees. She slid sideways off me and stood up. She jerked another cigarette out of the silver casket and stood there lighting it. Her left hand trembled fractionally.

  Over her shoulder, she said, “I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have acted like a bitch.”

  “You didn’t,” I lied.

  She went on, speaking almost to herself, “Only it’s been so long…I don’t see young men out here. I haven’t misbehaved in ten years….”

  I didn’t tell her that as a matter of legal definition she had been misbehaving all that time. It didn’t seem right to tell her that. Not with Arnold Grierson having lately passed on in regrettable circumstances.

  She picked up the decanter and spilled out two highballs. She was generous with the measure because the way she went to work on it she might have been drawing a half-pint in an English tavern.

  “We both need it,” she said.

  I thought so, too.

  She pawed the rug with her elegant toe. Then she said in a low voice, “I’m not trying to tell you I can’t be had. But not here—not in this house. I think maybe you had better go…Dale.”

  I thought that as well.

  There didn’t seem to be anything left to say so I didn’t try to think of anything. I just turned and walked to the door.

  That deep musical voice followed me.

  “Some day soon…you can try again, Dale,” it said.

  CHAPTER TEN

  IT WAS ALL OF SEVEN HUNDRED miles to Falls City and maybe I would have done better to have started out from Grand Central Station, but I hit the road instead. It was a long time since I had let the Buick out on the open highway and I had time to think all the way. I thought plenty, and at the end of it I wasn’t much nearer. But I was seven hundred miles nearer the place where every clue in this case seemed to lead. I was moving into the most wide-open city in all the United States with nothing but a four-year-old car and an even older Luger pistol to get me out of trouble if things broke the wrong way.

  A mile outside the limits they have a big red-on-white sign telling you this is Falls City, but they needn’t have bothered because this is where High River Rock shoots twin cascades of foam over a black granite shoulder into a thirty-foot drop.

  This is a nicely laid-out city. The suburban lawns are trim, the houses look as though somebody washed them regularly, and the shopping center has a lively, high-stepping air. I drove slowly down the main stem. Nobody fired any guns and I didn’t hear any police sirens. Maybe the place had sobered up.

  I followed the traffic into Fourteenth Street at the first intersection. It was barely dusk but halfway down the street a beer parlor had a sign flashing on and off. I killed the motor and braked to a standstill outside the swing doors.

  The evening was early, but it wasn’t too early for the customers. Half a dozen guys sat on high stools at the long polished bar and there were twice as many dotted round the little room at green-topped tables. A girl sat by herself at a table near the bar on my right. A girl with red hair and a face that had been beautiful until she was twenty-six—which would be all of a decade ago. She wore sea-green whipcord over a cream silk shirt. She was drinking gin and she didn’t bother me.

  The guy behind the bar was short and fat and had an oiled forelock. He also wore a narrow celluloid collar on a shirt with red horizontal stripes and his false teeth looked like highly-polished china. He asked me the routine question with his eyes, which were the palest blue.

  “Beer—and I’ll take a chaser on the side,” I told him.

  He slid the drinks across and I took the rye first. It was pretty good rye. I don’t know why I downed it so quick, except that I was beer-thirsty.

  Everybody had drinks so the barkeep stood opposite me polishing glasses. He did it as though he liked nothing better. It was his life’s work and he was solid for it.

  I said, “I am looking for someone who remembers a lawyer who used to practise here. His name was Arthur Schultz.”

  The barkeep’s face showed about as much expression as a peon’s at siesta time.

  “Yeah,” he said, “should I know him?”

  “Not unless you were around twenty-odd years back.”

  “I came here twelve years ago from St. Louis, so I wouldn’t,” he said. The Missouri accent wasn’t heavy.

  “Could be you may have heard the name, though,” I said.

  “Could be but it ain’t,” he said. “Sorry about that.”

  “Think nothing of it,” I said.

  “Thanks, brother, I won’t. Maybe some of the boys’d know if…”

  He broke off to set some drinks up for a balding middle-aged man in a faded gabardine suit which had cost him plenty at one time. I suddenly became aware of somebody at my side. I knew without looking that it was the girl with the red hair.

  She said in a low voice, “Like to join me in a drink?”

  “I’m sorry,” I started, but she cut me short with a hard little laugh.

  “It’s all right, mister—this isn’t a make the other way round. I heard what you said…” She lowered her voice a shade more—“About looking for someone who knew Arthur Schultz.”

  I picked up my drink and moved over to the little side table. A waiter brought another beer and some more gin.

  She sat there for a moment in silence. When she looked directly at me I was struck again by the fact that this had once been a beautiful face. It was still attractive, but the tiny telltale lines were starting. The lines that come from living too fast. The eyes were blue and hard.

  “The name you spoke,” she said at last. “It’s a name from way back…not a nice name.”

  “No?”

  “What d’you want to find out?”

  “I’m just trying to trace what happened to Arthur Schultz from around the time he left here. He went to Chicago, didn’t he?”

  She nodded. Her g
aze travelled round the room. Slowly, as though she wanted to make quite sure who was there. A look came into her eyes and went. It went so fast I hadn’t time to catch what it meant. If it meant anything.

  “Follow me out,” she said simply. She was on her feet as she said it.

  I waited until she was halfway to the swing doors before I followed. I caught the fat barkeep’s eye as I went. It had that look. I didn’t tell him how wrong he was.

  She was standing on the sidewalk waiting. I showed her the car and she got in.

  “Where are we going?” I asked it uncertainly. Things seemed to happen fast in Falls City.

  “I’ve got an apartment on North Shore Boulevard,” she answered. “We’ll go there. It’s all right, there won’t be a husband waiting to sock you in the pan.”

  “That eases my mind,” I said. “Okay—let’s go.”

  It was a six-minute drive. North Shore Boulevard was long, tree-fringed and built-up along its entire length. The houses were just a little faded, as though the place had seen rather better days. But you could live in a lot worse places.

  I drove two-thirds down the boulevard. Then she said, “Okay—this is it.”

  I steered into the side. We got out and walked up three stone steps and passed through a colored glass door into a small square hall. There was a tiny elevator. We rode up to the third floor and walked five yards down a passage. She got a key out of a white plastic handbag and we moved into her apartment. It had walnut lounge furniture and an apple-green carpet going just a little threadbare in patches. A door on the left was slightly open. I could see that you went through there into the bedroom.

  I swivelled my eyes back. On the way across I met hers. They carried a little look and her scarlet lips were twisted in a tiny smile. It wasn’t the look of invitation. Or speculation. It was the look of a woman who knows all the answers and doesn’t give a damn one way or the other.

  She peeled off her jacket and dropped her little hat carelessly on a davenport. She stood upright for a minute pressing her red hair against the sides of her head, using the flats of her hands.

  When she finished doing this she asked me if I wanted a drink and I said “Yes”. Bourbon was what she had. She opened the icebox and fished out two frozen cubes and let them roll off her hand into the tall amber-colored glasses.