Knife at My Back

by Lawrence Lariar

  KNIFE AT MY BACK

  A PI Steve Conacher Mystery

  Lawrence Lariar

  CHAPTER 1

  At the top of the hill there was a sharp turn to the right, and after that, the entrance to The Montord, I took the back road, rolling slowly into the parking section near the outlying buildings that nestled on the hillside among the trees. The lot was loaded with wealthy rolling stock, Caddys and Lincolns and an assortment of foreign stuff from Italy and England, so that my jalopy looked like a wandering burn in The Union League Club. I drove my crate slowly, running my eyes over the parked cars, looking for the yellow convertible that belonged to Mrs. H. M. Lasker. It nestled under the bushy shadows near the golf course and I got out and felt the hood and found it still warm.

  Mrs. H. M. Lasker was in The Montord. And that meant that I had to follow her. Now.

  The giant lobby was as lush as anything on Park Avenue, and twice as busy. Hordes of Labor Day weekend guests buzzed and hummed around the reservation desk where Lili Zenda was queen. I edged my way between a cluster of customers and signaled to Lili. She caught my eye and gave me her quick and beautiful smile and winked me back to her cozy office. She kissed me in her theatrical way, as casual as a handshake.

  “Darling,” she said. “Stevie Conacher, who would expect you up here at a time like this?”

  “Can’t a detective take a vacation?”

  “At The Montord?” she asked herself, bubbling over with her usual effervescence, the sort of doll who always laughs up her own quips. “You must be loaded, Steve.”

  “I figured you could get me a cheap bed, Lili.”

  “But of course. You’re serious?”

  “I’m pulling your leg,” I said.

  “You’ve got a gentle touch. I didn’t even feel it.” She had a bottle of Scotch in the top right drawer, and glasses for each of us. She poured two hookers as naturally as though we were sitting in her own nest on Fifty-fourth Street. She pushed one my way, sliding it until it touched my fingers. “We’re full up, Steve. But you know there’s always room for you. Even if it means moving in with me.”

  “Is that an invitation?”

  “Do you need one?” Lili laughed and downed her drink with a masculine proficiency. It was all part of the usual routine she put on exclusively for her intimates, the quick patter out of Broadway, the easy jibes and the open affection that mean very little in theatrical circles. Then the ritual warmth ended, and she was leaning my way and getting serious. “I’m looking at you and thinking you must be up here on business, Stevie. You’ve got that kind of an expression on your face. Is it business?”

  “You guessed it.”

  “You chasing a party?”

  “I’ve caught her, Lili.”

  “Here?”

  “She checked in about fifteen minutes ago. Run out and get me your guest list—a single woman, maybe thirty-five or so, and pretty as hell. You check her in?”

  Lili thought back and relived her last half hour at the desk. She made a face at a fleeting memory and then smiled and nodded. Lili was known throughout the Catskill Mountains for her nimble brain. She had a card index system behind her pink little ears, a knack for remembering everybody who checked in at The Montord, names and faces and also the weight of individual bankrolls. “A woman named V. Lambert,” Lili said, half Closing her eyes and shaking hands with the past. “And you’re absolutely right about her, Steve. She’s one of the prettiest women up here. Came in about twenty minutes ago.”

  “And her room number?”

  “Room 123, across the garden, in The Branton.”

  The Branton, The Tyler, The Elms, The Craddock—these were the names of some of the outbuildings surrounding the main diggings at The Montord Hotel. I knew them well, having visited this lush paradise long years ago when the genius of Lester Schenk moved into the Catskills from New York and began the slow and scientific creation of the great resort. Schenk had begun by buying out a small hotel on the hilltop, a dwelling he immediately converted into a dining hall and theater for his guests to come. After that, Schenk built the outbuildings. And in ten years, there were more than a dozen minor hotels surrounding the main building, all of them used only for sleeping, since the original purchase, the first small hotel, was now a gargantuan amusement palace that featured a restaurant, a night club and a variety of rooms for card playing and other indoor sports. Of all the encircling buildings, The Branton housed the most exclusive guests. The rooms were plush and fancy, richly decorated to suit the temperaments and pocketbooks of the upper-class vacationers who came to The Montord from the high rent districts of the big city. The Branton was off to the north of the garden and far enough removed from the hurly-burly of life at The Montord so that no sounds of revelry ever reached it m the still of the night.

  Lili was standing at the window now, looking out into the sunset over the lush landscape.

  “That’s her window over there,” Lili said. “One of the best rooms in the place.”

  “She reserved it?”

  “What else? I don’t hand those fancy joints to the transient trade.”

  “When did she reserve a room?”

  “I’d say about a week ago,” said Lili, arching her trim and penciled eyebrows my way. “What’s the case, Steve? Jealous husband?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t blame him if he’s jealous. She’s quite a dame.”

  “You’re fishing, Lili.”

  “But I’m not catching,” Lili said with a laugh. “Wrong bait?”

  “You’ve got the bait, all right.”

  Bait? Lili was a mantrap, from the top of her carefully dyed red head to the tips of her manicured toes. She had worked her wiles on many a stubborn male in her day. And her day was not yet over, not by a hell of a lot. In the old days, when Lili wandered the dim corners of the theatrical belt, her allure was considered classic. She had come to Broadway fresh from Brooklyn, where her fame as a girl athlete earned her much publicity and quite a few silver cups for her prowess. She was an expert swimmer, and this skill had caught the public imagination when Lili dove and swam at the Aquamaid Show. The sight of her soft and seductive figure drew large crowds of masculine fans who came only to see her stretch and bounce on the diving board. Over the years, Lili had preserved the niceties of her supple frame, so that she still sparkled with the freshness and rosy-cheeked flush of youth. It was this ageless charm that still made the boys pucker up and whistle whenever she strolled by. But Lili was strong and wiry. She could level a man of her own weight with no trouble at all.

  She worked hard to level me with her eyes. “Flatterer,” she said smilingly. “I’ll bet you say that to all the room clerks.”

  “I don’t know any others, Lili.” She handed me the bottle and let me fill her glass again. This was a fresh and startling vice for the ex-diving gal. She downed her hooker with something resembling desperation. And held out the glass for another. I said. “Since when did you turn pro in the liquor department?”

  “Stop being a detective for a change,” she said petulantly.

  “Manny driving you to drink?”

  “The place, not Manny.”

  “You and he still cozy?”

  “Question,” Lili said sadly. “Let’s change the subject, Steve.”

  She moved restlessly now, away from me again, and over to the window, where she began to massage the colorful drapes. She was telling me to mind my own business. It made sense, because I had pricked her where it hurt, reviving an old amour that might have died a thousand deaths during the long gap when Lili and Manny Erlich wandered the alleys of Broad
way. Everybody knew that Manny Erlich brought her up here a few years back, to train her as a hotel reservation damsel. But everybody also knew that Manny took her with him for other reasons. They had rocked the gossip merchants with their romance not too long ago. And now? From the way Lili glowered into the dusk, the ball was over. Manny had pulled the switch and shifted gears up here where the round-heel dolls were a buck a dozen and beds were plentiful and the grass was deep enough if you couldn’t get a room.

  “You’ll be over there.” Lili pointed out the window. “At The Elms. A good room, Stevie.”

  She was obviously finished with small talk. So I took the key and strolled out of there. I went into the bar and said hello to Dave, the bartender. He introduced me to Darlene, the rhumba teacher, and her partner Chico Cortez, a Spanish type I recognized as Charley Ornstein, a swishy, ex-ballet dancer from Bensonhurst, in Brooklyn. These two made a fine living at The Montord, instructing the middle-aged romantics in the fine and rhythmic art of hip shaking and stomach grinding that released them into a phony land of Spanish tunes and bumpy bounces. Darlene had the figure for the chore, and a face full of sultry charm and polished promise. She made contact with the ancient customers, warming them to the contract with gentle and persuasive movements during the “free lesson” period. She lured them to the dotted line and collected the fee and continued to inspire them with the studied sexiness that was her stock in trade. She was cut from the classic mold for all temptresses in the rhumba racket. She had an eye for business and a bosom calculated to snare the boys and keep them dancing until the dough ran out. Her partner worked the same sly routine with the matrons and the young gazelles, But Chico couldn’t have followed through. Chico was boy-crazy.

  I moved away from him, taking Darlene with me. Nobody in a hotel like The Montord would know more about the guest list than this hot and tropical bud.

  “You like the rhumba?” she asked, accepting the free drink with an accustomed ease.

  “You,” I said. “I like you, Darlene. And drop the Spanish accent, will you? I took my rhumba lessons from Dirty Mary, down in Havana. I can bump and heave with the best of them. Why is it that all lady rhumba experts only have one name?”

  “You’re a nasty man,” Darlene said, as sincere as a dog after a bone. “But I like you.”

  I guided her out onto the terrace near the swimming pool, so that I could enjoy her perfumed presence while watching my subject in The Branton. Darlene told me all about the steady guest list, running over her list of dance customers with great pride. She had hooked them all, at the top level where the loot lay. She had no use for the lower-class clientele, of course. I asked questions about the place, letting her build me a picture from her point-of-view. She ran the gamut of wealthy names and finally began to pay off where I needed her.

  “Lasker?” I asked. “You know the name?”

  She showed me the depth of her powers of concentration, dipping into the recent past to ferret among her long list of dance enthusiasts.

  “Not Lasker,” she said finally. “I had a Laskey up here the first two weeks in July. Nice old crumb. He paid off double for dancing with me in his room. A whack, believe me.”

  We laughed about it. Until she saw Manny Erlich, passing through the entrance and headed the other way. She reacted to him as though somebody had suddenly put a large firecracker in her panties. She bounced away from me with a quick excuse and high-tailed it across the lawn. She had a bouncy and energetic walk that promoted all of her obvious charms. She caught Manny and took his arm and waltzed off into the gathering darkness with him. He didn’t seem to mind at all.

  I sipped the good drink slowly, lapsing into a meditative mood while pondering the strange case of Mrs. H. M. Lasker. I was a long way from my tiny mousehole on Forty-fifth Street, pulled into the heckty-peckty of the most popular mountain hotel in the East. And why? All because Mrs. Lasker chose to beat it out of New York and suddenly emerge here as V. Lambert.

  The way they tell it in the movies, in television, or in the fiction factories, you should expect me to be sitting at my desk and resting my brogans on the blotter when the action begins. You have been sold the idea that all good detectives are always squatting in their dusty cubicles, chewing sour cigars and waiting for important customers to waltz in and start them on the long road to stiffs and gun play, crime and punishment. The detective is always big and strong and earnest, a poor man’s Gary Cooper who has only to cough gently to make the big blondes sway and swoon and roll over for mattress gymnastics.

  Forget it. That sort of private investigator is as true to life as an eight-year-old girl wearing an uplift. I am only a shade over five feet tall in my elevator shoes, and my face is neither good nor bad, so that it gives me no great thrill to watch myself in the shaving mirror. You would add me up as either an overweight jockey or a prosperous bellhop, were you to pass me on the street.

  And you would pass me. I work for a living, and my business is skip-tracing, which means that I find people when other people want them. The fees are only adequate and the work is routine. But once in a while something happens to carry me off and away into a pattern of events that raises my blood pressure.

  Like what was happening to me now at The Montord.

  I couldn’t sit for long. I couldn’t rest until I checked her again. So I got off my tail and strolled across the pebbled path to the entrance of The Branton. On the small porch, I could see her window, and through the slitted Venetian blinds, the movement of her figure, because she had her lights on and was walking around in there. It was enough to satisfy me.

  On the bench, in the shadow of the building, I watched a blue jay engage in a blustering exchange with a robin, screaming and chattering with the verve and fire of two women arguing over a bargain counter. The setting was idyllic. A cool and tickling breeze bent the slim birches on the lawn, where a few of the cash customers sprawled in the late sun, letting the heat blister their bodies while they slammed playing cards on the grass and yelped an occasional “Gin!” The hills beyond were already tinted with the vague and misted purple that preludes a beautiful evening. Around and about the swimming pool, a variety of feminine guests lolled and laughed and showed their fresh young bodies to the admiring males. The hotel crawled with unattached women, girls of all types, city sirens who had come up to the woods to bare their midriffs and make sly but purposeful passes at the surrounding wolves who picked and plucked at random from the flock. A place like this was built for pleasure, not business. So I continued to think about business. I meditated about the turn of fate that had pushed me into my prosaic trade. The only time I had for the dolls was when I caught one like Lili Zenda, an old friend with a broad mind and a body to match. But such occasions were rare, because a skip-trace expert skips as he traces. He runs and rushes after the missing, and pauses only briefly along the way.

  At this moment, in this split second of meditation, I had already pulled my eyes away from Mrs. Lasker’s window and was watching the door to The Branton and the man who approached it. I got off my tail and followed him. He walked inside, a big broad ape, with shoulders built for moving pianos. He had a flattish head and the stride of a small gorilla, rolling and swinging across the small lobby inside, and over to the door numbered 123. He paused to knock, and in the moment of his waiting, I caught the tight cut of his jaw, as sympathetic as a Nazi warden in a concentration camp. Then he was gone, inside her room. I let myself sag into a soft chair in the shadows near the door of the lobby. I waited.

  Time ticked by, and the heat was getting me, so I went outside again and stood on the small porch and watched a moth bang his brains out against a light bulb. It was the dinner hour and people strolled by, aimed for the cocktail ritual in the main building. The sun dropped over the hills and the sky blew up with vivid color, and in the distant grasses the crickets tuned up for their all-night concert. From somewhere in a remote bedroom, the sound of a girl’s laughter
rose, muffled and obscure, like a record player in a deep closet.

  My watch told me that the big man had already spent more than fifteen minutes with Mrs. H. M. Lasker. Who was he? I knew that I’d get his name sooner or later, because wandering strangers never entered the gates of The Montord. Dan Coates, the hotel eye, had a staff of two dozen cops, in full uniform, hired to patrol the grounds and watch the gates, especially on gala weekends. The Montord was situated in the heart of the Catskill hotel belt, the core of the vacationer’s paradise. On nights like this, when the big show went on, The Montord’s guest book would be full and The Champagne Room would play to capacity. Nobody from the outside could crash the big show because The Champagne Room’s twelve hundred seats were reserved for guests only.

  There were plenty of reasons for such giant audiences every weekend. The vacation hotels competed for Broadway stars, but nobody knew the business as well as Manny Erlich, the permanent maestro of The Montord. Manny had featured them all, including the Hollywood greats, the biggest names in vocalizing, the wildest comics, and a variety of sports stars and celebrities who came up to make him happy and eat for free while accepting the appreciative stares of the paying customers.

  The clientele came from the big cities, a mélange of characters in search of high jinks, husbands, golf, swimming, and the casual calisthenics under the trees and the stars. A long time ago a pundit wrote a book about the Catskills and its cohorts, maintaining that the busy vacationers came to this spot to seek rest and quiet after the hectic months in the city. But such orderly motives belonged only to the very old, who squatted under sun umbrellas and played pinochle and gin rummy all the day long. For the rest, a visit to The Montord was as leisurely as a psychopath running from a straitjacket. Tonight would be bedlam, because this was the Labor Day weekend and the show included Margo Lewis, the celebrated thrush who was already the biggest name singer on Broadway and on her way to Hollywood after the fall season. But Margo would be aided and abetted by other stars. The entertainment was always tops at The Montord and that was the reason for the big crowd tonight.