DARLENE and CHICO
Rhumba and Samba Lessons
By Appointment Only
A terraced walk skirted the rhumba room, high enough above the window so that I could see inside. A couple eased past the window facing me, the girl moving gracefully as she led her middle-aged Spaniard through the first lessons of the bounce. He was putty in her hands, and twice as awkward. But she smiled at him tenderly, approvingly, letting him enjoy the intimacy of her supple frame. It was Darlene, and she was hard at work.
A row of low hedges skirted the rise on which I stood, giving me a rustic nook from which I could observe the flow of life below me. The entire front of The Montord lay down there spread out in a panoramic view; the main entrance and the five buildings; the pool and the tennis courts; the staff quarters and the dining hall. Against this background of conglomerate architecture, the roving clientele passed before me, some bound for the golf course, others aimed for the small card tables under the trees. To the right the parking lot lay quiet. Two wandering patrolmen ambled through. The sight of these two made me think of Jorgenson.
Jorgenson pushed all the others out of focus for me. I had been watching and thinking before this moment. My mind had been bright with the odd assortment of characters encountered in these past few days. They had occupied the forefront of all my waking mental gymnastics: Manny Erlich and Paul Forstenburg and Darlene and Chico; Archy Funk and Margo Lewis and her petulant suitor, Buddy Binns; Lili Zenda and Don Trask and old Armette. Behind all of them, the tragic figure of Grace Lasker always rose up to dominate my mind. And after her figure had misted and died, I made the detour back to the problem at hand and saw Hugo Repp stagger and fall and clutch at his bloody throat. All of these things, all of the faces and events were gnawing at me with the sharp teeth of urgency. Yet, everything faded when I considered Jorgenson.
Jorgenson tightened me because I hated the punk. His larded image blacked out all decent thinking in me. Nothing burns me more than a crooked cop, and in my book Jorgenson was as dirty as a shallow sewer. A private investigator meets many of them in his career: the petty goniffs who trafficked with the bookies; the sly flatfeet who looked away from crime for a fast buck; the city dicks with perpetually extended palms. But Jorgenson, in all my lexicon of putrescent police, made my stomach heave and my fists tighten. He clung to the outer edge of my consciousness and interrupted my theoretical ramblings. He crept into every waking thought and intruded his maggoty personality. He froze my mind. He gave me fixed ideas, and this sort of ruminating does not make for limpid deduction. Yet the very sight of him brought subtle stiffness to the short hairs on the back of my neck.
The way they were stiffening now.
Because Jorgenson was coming out of the main entrance. He was sniffing the air, his big head aimed into the sky like a tired mastiff. And after he tested the weather, he put his hands in his pants pockets and started across the garden on a diagonal, moving with his usual rambling stride, as casual as a bum on the prowl for cigar butts. He crossed under the trees and skirted the pool, taking a long detour. I wondered vaguely what he would say if he knew that I had him in focus. He seemed off on some sort of aimless stroll, beyond one of the outbuildings and into a small section of grassy meadow a few hundred yards away.
I kept my personal camera on him, feeling smug and good about the whole business of watching him. He did nothing but light a cigar and stare back toward the hotel, puffing slowly and leaning against a tree and pretending that he might be a nature lover. He plucked a tall grass blade and bit at it and threw it away. And through all of this, his head seemed aimed in one direction.
He was watching the rhumba hut.
I lowered my sights and stared down the little hill. Darlene stood near the door, bidding farewell to her last customer, a little man who seemed hell-bent on taking her arm off. She slid away from him with a quick and graceful, turn of her body, and waggled a finger at him and accepted his last few words of raffish innuendo. Then he was headed away, toward the golf course and his next athletic enterprise. Darlene stood silently by, watching him walk away. Her partner got off his lean Spanish tail and said a few words to her and left with the two young thrushes who had been exchanging badinage with him.
Alone now, Darlene paused at her door.
The scene became a long shot pantomime out of a Hitchcock movie. Things began to happen and I felt like God on a hill, looking down at two actors in a personal drama of their own devising. The sun was out again and the day was bright and the birds fluttered and sang around me. Yet the atmosphere had the chilly aura of a well-contrived play. The characters were coming to life down there. They were separated by a long stretch of grass and furze. Jorgenson seemed frozen under the tree, still sucking at his cigar and allowing a thin thread of smoke to curl away from him. Darlene faced him across the empty pasture, her eyes riveted on him and her body motionless and crisply defined under the bright sun. They were frozen in the tableau. Nothing moved. Nothing stirred but the grass, flicked and brushed by a vagrant breeze. Then Jorgenson shifted his body slightly and I saw Darlene adjust herself to watch him as he moved away from the deep shadow under the tree and started back into the woods, slowly, slowly, in the attitude of a man hunting quail eggs.
And then Darlene moved.
She paused to light a cigarette and flick the match away and look around her in every direction, as carefree and purposeless as a casual stroller. She moved off into the pasture, her body a spot of vibrant color against the tall grasses. She was wearing a pair or crimson slacks, a glistening, glaring color topped with a white blouse of the same material. She passed my line of vision midway through the field. I held my breath. What would happen if she saw me now?
But Darlene was interested only in the distant stretch of trees and woodlands where Jorgenson had vanished. For a flickering pause she hesitated and turned her graceful body completely around, snaking her eyes back toward the hotel. In the interval, she was close enough for me to see her intimately; the cold, hard glint of her, deep-set eyes; the nervous flick of her fingers on the cigarette; the rise and fall of her full breasts under the white and shimmering silk. And then it was all over and she was under way again, straight ahead and looking neither to the right nor left, but walking faster now, deeper and deeper into the grasses and beyond the grasses into the rim of shrubs and small trees that skirted the field and finally hid her from view.
I got off my butt and started after her, running down the small hill and reaching the edge of the grass before the full force of reason hit me. I stopped.
I stepped backward as quickly as I had come. In the few minutes it took me to reorient myself, any impartial observer might have considered me ripe fruit for a psychiatrist’s couch, or a well-tailored straightjacket in the nearest asylum. But the mind is a fickle taskmaster. I had operated on impulse when I set out to pursue the fleeing Darlene. And my impulse would have led me up the garden path to nothing at all. But now my feet were taking me around the hedge and back to the rhumba hut and my hands were testing the front door and finding it securely locked.
So I did it the hard way. I opened the window facing the tennis courts and offered a silent prayer to Mother Nature for having doused the courts with enough of her tears to make them unplayable this morning. The window was easy and I slipped inside and stood there, alone in a den of rhumba and mamba.
It was a small room, square and sparsely furnished. The floor had a high and waxy shine, rubbed down by the feet of many students. Around the walls sat a few ancient wicker chairs and on the far side of the room a few more chairs of the card table variety. The pine walls were festooned with a variety of Spanish art, calculated to give the place atmosphere and authenticity. A large poster announced a bullfight in Mexico City one day five years ago. Another art piece showed a Spanish muchacha with pearly teeth and a souped-up smile gazing up at a tanned and tempestuous youth who seemed about to chew off a small hunk of h
er nose. On the wall beside me, some myopic advertising artist had designed a travel poster that suggested a visit to SPAIN—THE LAND OF GAIETY AND ROMANCE! This slice of nausea suggested that the land of Goya and Velasquez still belonged to the people of Spain, where everything was cute and cozy and Franco played pinochle with his peasant friends. On the rear wall somebody had hung a variety of Mexican and Spanish props: a rusty-looking sombrero; a shawl of purplish silk and a few diseased gourds. All in all, the room stank of the vaudeville and video Spain, as authentic and sincere as its two owners.
The wall on which the ornaments hung was a false front, a series of cabinets built of the same pine, but sectioned into cupboards that opened to reveal the source of Darlene’s music. On the undersection of the first closet I found the phonograph, a good machine equipped for records of all speeds. The record cabinet sat on the right of the player arrangement and housed a considerable quantity of native and imported rhumbas, tangos, mambas and sambas. There was a locker on the other side of the cabinet, and here I paused.
It was a normal-sized locker, tall and narrow, of the type used for storing clothes on a golf course, made of gray metal and sporting the usual ventilating slits on the upper third. It would be used by Darlene and her partner to hold their dancing equipment, or a change of costume. Why, then, was it locked? I stared at the thing and tried to cut away the impatient surge of bile that boiled in me. Darlene might be returning at any moment, to meet her next customer. There was no time for deep and studious thought. There was no time for anything but a quick stab at the lock with my penknife.
So I stabbed. I ripped at the metal until the lock began to come loose. Then I delivered a well-aimed kick at the heart of the keyhole and the door caved in and a cloud of dust rose up from under my toe. I had kicked the entire locker loose from its supports. But it was open.
Inside, Darlene had gathered the dregs of her professional wardrobe: two pairs of old dancing slippers, a colorful and flowered blouse, a few faded bandanas and a huge assortment of abandoned cosmetics, all of these things lumped and piled into an incongruously sloppy bundle. The manner of storing the equipment challenged me. This was not Darlene. She would be neat and precise in her every gesture. The mess of junk was out of character. I began to pluck and pick at the pile of stuff, probing and poking as I made my way to the bottom of the locker. My hand snaked down to the lower level of the mess and my fingers worked toward the metallic wall back there. And then I struck paydirt. I felt something that was neither silk nor shoe nor cosmetic. What I was feeling sent the prickling stabs of excitement shimmering up my wrists. Because the touch of it was soft and provocative.
It was money, a bundle of loot secured by rubber bands and neatly stacked into a wad that started the calculating machine to work in my brain. Century notes, all of them. Two hundred? Three hundred?
I didn’t have time to check them. Through the window, Chico was returning to his business office, escorting a fresh and bubbling broad to the rigors of the rhumba. Chico had her by the arm, a matronly dame who was old enough to be his mother and wanted to forget it.
I stuffed the bundle into my pocket and closed the pine door to the locker and went out of there the way I came in.
CHAPTER 18
Sleep slugged me as soon as I hit my room. I let myself fall into the soft cushion of lazy languor, overcome by the ache of my muscles and the headachy dullness that seemed boxed between my ears. And Morpheus tucked me away until the long shadows fell across the ridge of hills and it was evening again and time to get back to work. There was a good shower in the john down the hall and I let the needle stab me with their icy spray. My eyes still looked like Fred Allen after a television routine, but a shave helped a little, and when I climbed into my clothes I felt spry and human again. It was exactly six-seventeen when I stuffed the wad of money into a window ledge flower pot and walked out of my room, headed for the staff lodgings.
The building was alive with lights. In the gathering dusk, Lili’s window stood out cleanly as I crossed beneath it and paused to observe her.
The window was closed but the Venetian slats were uptilted carelessly, so that any curious prowler might easily see what went on inside. I stood to watch. The work of a detective involves plenty of standing and watching, a chore that can be tiring and dull. But peeping and squinting could never be a bore for any wandering male who had the chance to watch Lili. Lili asked for the watching. Lili had a fancy for exhibitionism, part of the restlessness of her peculiar personality. Show people are prone to minimize the basic wonders of the body. They will undress together in halls and closets with the nonchalance of marmosets. Lili must have considered her body God’s gift to the Peeping Toms of this world. She was busy with her brassiere, twisting and turning this way and that, viewing her ample charms from all manner of angles.
She removed the brassiere and measured her naked torso in the mirror before her. Her nudity fascinated Lili. She half closed her eyes and ran the gamut of narcissistic gestures. When she held up a fresh brassiere to test it against her body, somebody knocked at the door and she turned to yell a welcome.
Manny Erlich walked in. He went to her at once and began to talk quickly. The sound was locked away from me, through the closed window, but Manny’s pantomimic fumblings with his bandaged hands converted the scene into a semi-humorous silent movie. He was hell-bent for soothing her. He was softening her up for something. But Lili gave him no time. She opened her mouth and screamed at him. She pushed him away and stood apart from him, hoarsing invective at him, while the little man only stood there and took it without a murmur.
The argument was one-sided and the cards were stacked in Lili’s corner. She pushed him out of the room and came back into my line of vision and continued to view herself in the mirror. When she held up a silvery gown and began to work her body into it, I left my orchestra seat and cut back to the entrance and walked down the hall to her room.
Lili was still simmering when she opened the door for me. The dress was on, but the zippers were not yet tight and the view of her breasts was something for the front row at a burlesque show. Lili didn’t attempt to cover up, nor did she apologize for her fluttery spirits.
Instead she said, “Zip me up, Stevie?”
I zipped while she applied a quick re-stenciling to her lush lips. “You and Manny still battling, Lili?”
“When did we ever stop?”
“You used to be fruity about each other.”
“Not anymore.” Lili jerked and yanked at the gown until it fell into the exact position she wanted over her anterior charms. Then she squirmed and bounced it down a fraction of an inch so that it revealed the extra shock of delightful flesh. She began to powder her face violently, sending up a small storm of white dust. But through the thin mist of her cosmetic cloud, her eyes were as angry as a marauding lynx. “Manny and I are finished, Steve. Didn’t you know?”
“I guessed. Who’s the lucky girl that gets him?”
“You’d better ask Manny that question.”
“Why Manny? I figure you’re the doll to tell me.”
“I can’t keep track of his whores,” Lili spat. “With some men it’s liquor or smoking, or playing the horses. With Manny, it’s women.”
“I thought he narrowed down the field.”
“Maybe he did.”
“And I figured the answer to his prayers was Darlene.”
She pulled away from the mirror and eyed me with savage intensity. “What are you trying to do, Steve—break me up? Suppose it is Darlene? He can have her. She’s what he deserves—a two-bit bim from Brooklyn.”
“How do you know she’s from Brooklyn?”
“I know all about her.”
“Tell it to me.”
“I didn’t think you cared.” Lili laughed, as sour as the top pickle in a barrel. “Don’t tell me she hooked you, too?”
“I don’t bite her type
of bait,” I said. “But she interests me, Lili. Funny things have been happening up here at The Montord, things that upset me. Like the murder of Grace Lasker—and the way it was all hoked up to make it look as if she drove herself off Indian Cliff. I still think Grace was murdered first, and I’ve been looking around for somebody to slap down, because I liked Grace Lasker. I’ve been knocking myself out ever since I stepped through the front door of this wasp’s nest, Lili. Things have happened too fast to be normal and nice. And when Repp was bumped off, I really got myself a stiff headache. All of which brings me right back to Darlene. I want to know more about her. She may be the key to the whole mess.”
“Don’t make me laugh,” Lili said, with a nasty smile. “That broad just isn’t smart enough for anything better than bed wrestling.”
“You’re selling her short. I happen to know how clever she really is. I’ve seen her in action.”
“You mean in bed?”
“Keep it clean,” I said. “And tell me what you know about her.”
“She’s murder, all right. She can sell rhumba lessons to a convalescent in a wheel chair.”
“That much I know. But who hired her?”
“Can’t you guess?”
“Manny?”
“Who else?”
“How did it happen, Lili? And give it to me straight—it may be important.”
Knife at My Back Page 17
