The scene was built for laughs, because I sat opposite him and watched him gather his resources while I struggled to set my own house in order. He had hit me a staggering blow, enough to fog my eyes and keep me close to him, wheezing and puffing and praying for my muscles to move me before he could make use of that knee again. I crawled away from him, edging toward the bed and beyond the bed to the wall, where the gun was. Then I had it in my hands and the feel of it revived me, especially when I rammed it under Buddy’s nose and let him feel the cool metallic touch of it.
“Jesus,” he groaned. “Get me some water. I’m dying. I can’t catch my breath. Please, Conacher. Please. Please.”
I found my feet and got some water and threw it in his face. Then I refilled the glass and stuck it under his foolish mouth and let him taste it. He sucked at it hungrily, and after a while his eyes cleared and he sagged back against the wall, cracking his head against it as he rolled away from me.
“Now,” I said. “Let’s start it again, Buddy. No more wrestling. It’s too hot. And we haven’t got time for it. I don’t blame you for taking a crack at me. What the hell, you’re in love. You’re doing all this for Margo. But you’re doing it wrong, believe me. I haven’t got the stinking film. And I didn’t kill Grace Lasker and Hugo Repp. I’m trying to do a job, that’s all. And you’re going to help me.”
He began to respond to my unvarnished sincerity.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“What started you my way?”
“I figured you were dirty enough to pull those jobs.”
“And that was all?”
“What else?” he asked sulkily.
“Some person,” I said. “Somebody could have given you a stray thought about me.”
“It was original with me, peeper.”
“So you started after me—just like that?”
“Not quite,” grumbled Buddy. “I happened to see you go into the Rhumba Hut by way of the back window today. I figured you were maybe hiding the reel there. But later, when I investigated, I found that the locker in there was smashed. That stopped me. I couldn’t decide whether you broke the locker—or whether somebody did it before you got there.”
“So you figured you’d check everybody?”
“That’s right. I left you for last. I searched all the other rooms before I came here.”
“And you found nothing in the other rooms?”
“Not a thing,” Buddy said. “That’s why I was so positive I’d locate the reel in here.”
“Whose rooms did you search?”
He rolled them off for me, as serious as a schoolboy giving out with the Emancipation Proclamation. He took great pride in his report, breaking it up into small and intricate segments, complete with his personal reaction to the problems of search and smell. He had lifted the keys he needed from the office, choosing a moment when he could enter it unobserved. He began his trek through the hotel with Paul Forstenburg’s room as his first stop. He found nothing in Paul’s place but the signs of the manager’s disturbance, an upheaval and disorder that seemed to indicate that Paul needed help in the brain department. He skipped Don Trask’s because he had been through it the night before, when he was forced to put the agent to bed. He next visited Lili’s slumber chamber, where he was almost caught when she returned for a cosmetic item she had forgotten. He hid in her closet, however, and gave her room a leisurely search. But he found nothing more unusual than a few half emptied bottles of liquor and a small automatic, which he appropriated for further emergencies. He next visited Jorgenson’s nest and reported the same foul and ugly upset I had witnessed on my visit there. He was forced to wait a while for Darlene, watching her window from under the trees in the garden, until she had transformed herself into the Spanish vixen and was ready to emerge for public appearance. Darlene’s room yielded nothing better than a strong and clinging stench of musk.
“I skipped over to Lasker’s after that,” Buddy continued. “But the old man had nothing of any importance. The same thing in Manny Erlich’s and Archy Funk’s. I didn’t stay very long in Chico’s room. The perfume stink was worse than at Darlene’s, believe it or not. After Chico’s, I came here.”
“You didn’t go into Repp’s?”
“What for? Jorgenson had a man up there. Was it worth the risk?”
“Probably not,” I said. “You did well, Buddy. You’ve saved me a lot of time.”
“You were going to search their rooms?”
“That was my idea.”
“And now?”
“I’m almost home.”
“You know where the reel is?” he asked, with sudden liveliness, his little black eyes alive again and burning into me. “You mean we’ll get it soon? Jesus, Margo will pay you plenty for it, Conacher.”
“Better get back to The Champagne Room,” I suggested. “You go on in about fifteen minutes. I’ve got a few more little things to wind up. I should have them done by the time you finish your act.”
“A drink,” he said. “I could use a drink, Conacher. I’m as wet as a diaper.”
I gave him a few shots of Scotch and managed a few for myself and watched Buddy Binns adjust himself for the rigors of his performance. He doused himself with cold water and rubbed away the sweat and buttoned his jacket and straightened himself a bit. When we left the room, he was bouncing in his usually energetic stride, alive and full of the nervous excitement all performers experience before making an appearance.
I saw him to the terrace outside the bar and then turned on my heel and headed the other way.
CHAPTER 20
I went on the prowl for Jorgenson.
The night was hot, but my head burned hotter as I started my trek at Repp’s room. Nobody home. No corpse, no cop on duty, no stiff from the hotel staff to hold me back. The room was clean and respectable, Repp’s personal belongings gone. A wandering bellhop saw me in the hall and told me that they had taken the body down to the county morgue, along with all the last worldly goods of the little sex merchant. I skipped back across the garden and entered the office by way of the side door. One of the lesser hotel police sat at a desk and laughing up at me when I asked for Jorgenson.
“He’s been looking for you, too,” the man said.
“Not locally?”
“Oh, he’s around. Outside, probably.”
“Outside where?”
“He didn’t tell me where he was going, peeper.”
“He couldn’t be in The Champagne Room?”
“Jorgenson?” said the peasant policeman, laughing out loud. “Jorgenson don’t go for them fancy shows.”
“Jorgenson is pretty selective,” I said. “A man of good taste and refinement. I’ll bet he has a wife and ten kids somewhere in these hills, all wrapped up in a neat little ivy-covered cottage. Am I right?”
“Wrong. Jorgenson has a wife, that’s all. But he’s not home much. And he don’t live in a cottage. Lives in an apartment.”
I stalked out of there, muttering hot words at Jorgenson, his men, his wife, and all the local constabulary. Is there anything more maggoty man a dirty cop? The thought of the big country dick waiting for me somewhere in the night, the image of his nasty face rose up to challenge me, to drive me stumbling across the garden, not knowing where I ran, really, but headed for the one small corner of The Montord that might hand him to me. But the foolishness of my maneuver caught up with me and brought me to a halt alongside the golf course. It was much too hot for this kind of horseplay. There was another way out of this particular mania, a detour, a road that could bring me to him by a roundabout course.
I mopped my brow and headed back to The Montord. I hesitated in the narrow path skirting the garden, staring back and the gray and ghostly shape of the main building, asking my inner man for another direction now. Around the hills and through the sticky air, a sudden burst of soun
d filled my ears, and I turned to face the direction of its flow, fascinated by the prickling effect of the noise on my fevered spine.
It was laughter that moved me toward the terrace to the bar.
Laughter shook the walls of The Champagne Room and billowed out through the open windows and across the garden and down the valley, an intermittent cacophony of merriment, a surge of uninhibited joy. Buddy Binns was murdering them in there. He would stay with them for almost an hour of continuous clowning, his normal stint for a night club engagement. He would woo them and shake them with his buffoonery, building the laughs with masterful skill, uncorking the yaks so that the room would rock and roll with his humor. I had seen him go through this sort of stand often, in some of the more intimate rooms along the beat on Broadway. Buddy would stay on and on, just as long as they wanted him. And they would want him there for a few dozen encores, if the present level of enjoyment was any clue to what would follow. The grounds of The Montord were as empty as Jones Beach during a blizzard. Even the boys at the front door were gone, to linger near the entrance to The Champagne Room inside. The garden before me held only a few vagrant crickets, singing their lonely songs into the sticky air. It was hot. It was too hot for laughter, too hot for movement.
So I moved toward the terrace near the bar where the big broad sat. She did not hear me approach. She sat at one of the tiny tables, her long fingers encircling a tall glass of something alcoholic. She was staring toward the door to the bar, and the light from in there sharpened her, illuminating her profile into a picture of high tension. Against the wall, her features stood out as clearly as a chalk drawing on a blackboard, with variations. Because chalk drawings do not register emotion. And Darlene was obviously as tight and skittish as a young bride kept waiting at the altar. She seemed lost in a concentrated scrutiny of the framed area through the doorway into the bar. Yet nobody moved in there.
And when I slipped through the hedge and sat quietly beside her, she almost dropped her glass in a reflex of surprise.
“You scared me,” she whispered.
“You scared me, too,” I told her. “Why aren’t you inside, laughing it up for Buddy Binns?”
“He leaves me cold. I like it out here.”
“You’re not waiting for anybody?”
“Waiting?” she asked herself. “Why should I be waiting?”
She looked at me out of tired eyes, the dry and sleepless expression no amount of fancy make-up can hide. Her attempts at projecting the spirit of carefree and youthful exuberance fell flat and sour. There was a thin and silken fuzz of dark hair on her upper lip, obvious now in the sharp light from the bar. And so were the tiny bubbles of sweat on that area. She wiped her face delicately, but nothing she might do could ever wipe away her obvious distress.
I said, “You shouldn’t be waiting. Let’s go, Darlene.”
“Go? Where?” She froze under my hand, her body tight and hard, her whole being steeled against me, not wanting to go with me.
“Come on—I’ll show you my etchings.”
“Don’t be funny, Steve. It’s too hot for games.”
I pulled her out of the seat and felt good when her body trembled under my fingers. She reacted to my muscular blandishments with too much fire. She tugged at my arm and tried to hold me where I stood and we began a quiet little battle out on the terrace. It was corny and weird, the struggle and the protagonists, a semi-Spanish bundle of womanhood against a private detective with one burning idea. She let herself be piloted as far as the last concrete square on the terrace, and there she stood firm and really got tough with me. She clawed into me with her long nails, so that my wrist stung with the bite of them. She shoved her great wealth of torso against me and struggled to worm free of me.
“Why not talk here?” she asked, finally. We were now mincing down the lawn, away from the main house.
“The Rhumba Hut,” I said.
“It’s closed.”
“I like it down there, Darlene. You can show me the fandango.”
“I’m going to scream,” she warned, her body tight again, braced against me, so that she resembled an overgrown kid, on the way to the woodshed for a spanking from Daddy. “I’m going to yell if you keep dragging me around.”
“Open your pretty little mouth,” I warned her, “and I’ll stuff my fist down it!”
We went down the incline to the Rhumba Hut at a zany pace, Darlene’s figure still stiff and tense against my arm, her body slipping and sliding and hopping and halting because of the height of her heels on the dewy grass. She breathed hard and I thought I caught the tremor of a sob shaking her as we neared the base of the little hill. The closeness of the Rhumba Hut worked to freeze her, to ice her, to harden her curves into a bundle of trembling torment, so that she seemed suddenly hysterical as we moved toward the front door of her dancing dormitory. She sat down on the grass. Hard.
“Can’t we talk here?” she pleaded.
“Why not inside the Rhumba Hut?”
“I’d rather not, Steve.”
“Tell me why.”
She took her shoes off. She rubbed at her toes and made soft and sibilant noises, the weak and melting sounds of femininity, the little signs of a softening mood. She was playing me now, working her wiles with me, letting me see that she could be had at bargain rates. She looked up at me and smiled at me and went through the motions of adjusting the low cut of her neckline, fiddling and fussing with her dress in the coy and kittenish manner of an ingénue on the make for a good contract. Her hand came up to mine and she tugged at me timidly. Around us, the night was a great cave of darkness. We faced the hills beyond the edge of the little rise of ground and from this spot The Montord seemed a thousand miles behind us. We were alone in our own pocket of silence.
“Tell me why,” I said again.
“I hate the stinking place, Steve.”
“Because of the dough you tried to hide there.”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
But she understood. I was beside her on the grass and all the tricks in her feminine kitbag of histrionics couldn’t kill the effect of my simple declarative sentence. Darlene was really running her motor now. She rocked and rolled with anxiety, her whole body atremble. She might explode into hysteria, she might scream and bite, if she went out of control now. I moved in closer and clamped my hands on her wrists and dragged her around so that she could observe my sweating brow.
“Let’s have it, Darlene,” I said. “You and Jorgenson have been playing games, isn’t that right? You grabbed the bundle of bills in Repp’s room after I went out of there. Jorgenson saw you and you worked a deal. Then you hid the loot in your rhumba shack, in the locker, under your stuff. You figured a poke like that was worth the gamble. Twenty-five grand, wasn’t it? Or thirty? You and Jorgenson must have split a gut when you found the dough missing. Jorgenson probably accused you of the theft.”
“You’re out of your mind,” she said nastily.
“I haven’t got time for stalling, Darlene.”
“You’re talking through your nose. You can’t prove a thing.”
“Maybe I can. Maybe I’ve got that bundle of loot.”
“You’d have to show it, darling.”
“Would I?” I asked, pulling her closer to me so that her face almost touched mine, yanking her into position so that the side of her body rubbed my arm. “I’ve got that money, Darlene. The party with Jorgenson is all over. Either you spill for me or I’m going to take you down to the county seat personally, and have you booked for murder—in duplicate.”
“Murder?” Her voice dropped an octave. “You don’t think that I had anything to do with Repp?”
“I don’t think anything. Period. But you can be softened up for a rap, Darlene. And I’m the boy to do it. Because you’re holding me up with your double talk. You’re trying to jerk me around when I’m almost ho
me. Either you talk fast, or we take a ride together, over the hills and down to the jug.”
“Murder?” she asked herself again. Her voice lost all its recent challenge and sagged into a new pattern of hopelessness. Something had snapped inside her and she seemed suddenly alert to her own involvement with Jorgenson, and what it might mean to her. Her body loosened under my fingers and she slipped back into a softer pose. She was beaten and she knew it. “No, not me, Steve. You’ve got to believe me.”
“Whose idea was the Repp thievery?”
“Jorgenson’s. He saw me up there, out in the hall, just after you left Repp’s room. I was down in the ladies’ johnny, at the end of the hall after I left you with him. When I came out, I saw you leaving. I had heard the shot and I was curious, so I hung around, looking in. I was too scared to move, once I saw the body. Then Jorgenson came running up. He saw me and took me inside. He found the money and we made the deal. That was all, Steve. That was the whole business. I hid the money in my locker. Jorgenson promised to cover for me. The way he explained it, we couldn’t get caught. Who could prove that Repp was loaded with money?”
She had herself in control now and was giving it to me straight and clean, out of the deep and disturbing thrust of her inner discomfort. She leaned into me and sold me the yarn, talking fast and talking soft. She continued her salesmanship for quite a while, explaining her great need for money, her efforts to start a school of the rhumba in Flatbush, her great yen for personal fame and fortune.
“It was Jorgenson conned me into it,” she went on. “He threatened to jerk me into the case if I didn’t cooperate. Do you believe me? You’ve got to, Steve. I was forced into the deal with Jorgenson, the louse. But murder? Not little Darlene.”
“You didn’t know Repp?”
“I never saw him before he came up here.”
“You taught him the rhumba?”
“I was beginning to teach him when you walked in.”
“How was he doing?” I asked.
“Doing?” Darlene shrugged away the memory, shivering under the impact of the pressures it built in her. “He was a filthy little character, Steve. He was rich and ripe for a contract, that was all. I thought I’d sell him the routine.”
Knife at My Back Page 19
