Shock.
The cigarette dropped from her delicate fingers. She exhaled the dregs of her last puff, stiffened and drew back from me. Whatever elements of honesty she stored behind those tricky eyes, whatever authentic emotion stirred in her, would come out now. She began to shake a little. She swallowed hard and lifted her trembling hand to her chin.
“Oh, no,” she whispered. “That couldn’t be.”
“It happened tonight.”
“But why? Who?” She wrung her hands and began to break down. She slumped forward in the chair. I grabbed her and pushed her back. I couldn’t trust her yet. She might slow me down with another of her Katharine Cornell routines.
I said, “Stay alive, Serena. Or I’ll have to slap you awake.”
She lifted her head and looked straight at me. Some of the original anger began to flare. She hardened and tightened under my hand, then shrugged it off and faced me with fresh hostility.
“How well did you know Kay?” I asked.
“She was a new customer. That was all.”
“How new?”
“Just the last month or so.”
“Did you know her socially?”
“Of course not.” She surveyed me with calculating eyes of an angry housewife at the Complaint Department. “But why am I telling you this? Who the hell are you, anyhow?”
“You’re going to learn to love me,” I said. “I’m a detective. And Kay Randall was an old friend of mine.”
“A policeman?” she asked anxiously.
“A private operator, Serena. But some of my best friends are cops.”
“What does that mean?”
“I make deliveries to the police, occasionally.”
“You wouldn’t,” she almost gasped. She grabbed me and held on tight. She was all electric again, a mixture of horror and confusion. Whatever the depths of her madness, she was working hard now to sell me her honesty. She was digging in again to hold me in line. “It would ruin me in business if anything happened. I’ll tell you all you want to know about Kay. I’ll tell you whatever. But you won’t hand me to the police, will you? You mustn’t. I’m terrified of the police. I once asked my analyst about it. It goes far back, somewhere in my childhood, the terror about policemen. Listen, I cross the street when I see one coming. Would you believe that? Can you imagine what they do to me? They …”
On and on. She was opened up and the sound of her voice was a long-playing record in quick tempo. Willy-nilly, the verbal outpouring brought her into clearer focus for me. This dame was strictly fruitcake. Something resembling hysteria clouded her face now and I could do nothing but let her continue her monologue until she ran out of gas and collapsed on the table, her head buried in her arms, her body wracked by live sobs.
“What brought you out here to Freeport?” I asked.
“Norma Meadows.”
“Break it down. Who’s Norma?”
“She works for me. In my shop. She’s having a bunch of people out tonight. I was invited.”
“Why the detour to Mario’s?”
“To get away from you,” she said with a girlish pout. “I spotted you behind me on Southern State Parkway. I didn’t know why you were following me, but I hate being followed.” She shivered dramatically to emphasize her emotion. “So I thought if I stopped here in Mario’s, I could lose you. It almost worked, didn’t it?”
“Almost, but not quite. Where does Norma Meadows live?”
“In Merrick. The next town.” She lifted her head suddenly and her eyes began to dance again. She grabbed my arm and stuck her nails into me. She let the strain show in her face, alternating between the quick and mysterious smile and the worried line of doubt above her eyes. “I’ll prove it to you,” she begged. “Come with me and see for yourself. Come with me now.”
“Why not?” A new smell mingled with the putrid air in Mario’s corroded shack. The smell of lies. I had to know exactly how fruity this doll was. I watched her react to my change of pace. She put her arms up to me and jerked me her way, alive with a fresh burst of enthusiasm about me. I held her off and she pouted and smiled at me, not sure of herself any more. I picked up her handbag, gave it to her and watched her straighten herself in the mirror over the bar. She clipped into the bag, groped for her make-up and paused when she found an item missing.
“You took my address book, cutie.”
“A souvenir,” I said.
She shrugged. Then she finished her varnishing and came my way slowly. “The toughest,” she chuckled. “You certainly are the boy for me.”
“The name is Amsterdam,” I told her. “John Amsterdam. Just in case you want to introduce me to Norma and her friends.”
“You,” she said gaily, “are the boss, Johnny.”
CHAPTER 7
Serena huddled against the door of the Caddy. She mumbled an address in Merrick and I clicked on the ignition and the Caddy jumped and rolled as though it believed the full page color ads about itself. We skated over the mud of Mario’s parking lot and out through the weedy lot and beyond the narrow lane that led to the main road. Getting away felt good. I couldn’t leave fast enough. I sucked the misty, salted ocean air into my lungs to rid myself of the odor of offal that had somehow come with me from my interval at Mario’s. Only a transfusion would make me feel clean and whole again. I pressed the gimmick that automatically opened the window and tried to exhale the stench of the past hour.
Serena sat quietly contemplating her ten weapons—the hard and brittle ends of her fingertips.
“I scratched you pretty hard,” she said, almost to herself. “You don’t look well enough to go visiting, Johnny. Why don’t we take a raincheck on Norma’s?”
“I’m not paying her a social call, remember? I’m investigating a murder. The murder of Kay Randall.”
She moved toward me. “But I told you, cutie. Norma doesn’t know Kay Randall.”
“What does Norma know?”
“You won’t like her type.”
“I’m not going to make any passes at her,” I said.
Serena laughed suddenly. You’re a real crazy, Johnny. A real, real, crazy.”
Her voice was soft and purring like a reformed tiger. She was using words I hadn’t heard in years, expressions out of F. Scott Fitzgerald, stuff that stemmed from her college reading. The doll had a talent for creating character. She worked herself into a state of mind that came through in the way she wanted it to express herself, building herself into a zany step by step. She had introduced herself to me as a powder room amazon with ice in her veins. After that, she had shifted gears and showed me her passionate facets, the quick and bloody yen for fists and mayhem that seemed to please her no end. And after that? Suddenly she calmed and cooled and dropped her temperamental tizzy to become the little girl with the wild ideas, the college kid on the loose; the debutante with the debauched mind. All this, plus the sadistic sexual drive that made her Miss Unpredictable of 1952, a bundle of exposed nerves and hidden depths.
And now she was watching me slyly. I waited.
She lay her face down on my knee, as gentle as a tired animal. “I’m bushed, cutie,” she breathed. “Let’s not go to Norma’s, Johnny. Please? Pretty please?”
“Stuff it,” I said.
“You’ll be wasting your time.”
“I’ve got plenty to waste.”
“Nobody has too much time,” she cooed, philosophically and with a strange sigh. “Time’s too precious to waste.”
She ran her delicate fingers lightly along my leg.
This dame never gave up. I grabbed a handful of her hair and shoved her back to a sitting position.
“You’re ruining my permanent,” she said quietly.
“And you’re ruining my state of mind,” I said.
She patted her hair into place and puckered her lips. She eyed me with c
uriosity and a fillip of disdain.
“You hurt me, cutie.”
“I thought you liked it,” I said.
“Not in the hair,” she laughed. “I’m proud of my hair. I take good care of it, and when you pull it that way, it’s a different kind of hurt.” She snaked her hand back on my knee. “But the other kind of hurt I like. The way it was at Mario’s, remember?”
“Behave yourself,” I said. “I’ve had enough dames tonight, alive and dead, to last me a lifetime.”
“Not my kind of dame.”
“Where do I turn?” I asked. We were rolling down Sunrise Highway now, approaching the neon lights of Merrick. Serena lit two cigarettes and put one between my lips. She exhaled her words in a puff of smoke.
“The next corner, right.”
“And put your hand back where it belongs.”
We turned into the dimly lit streets of Merrick. Merrick didn’t pretend to be Westchester or Garden City or Great Neck. The estates were measured in feet, fifty by a hundred for the most part. Anyone with a grand down who guaranteed the bank that he could stay alive for twenty years and pay off the mortgage could set himself up here as a junior country squire. I knew some of the swell people in this town, Nat Tucker and Bill Gittleman and Bernie Gurian, the little dentist with the fine hands of a surgeon and the good heart of a priest. They were old pinochle pals of mine, simple souls who would always warm the place they lived in. There were thousands like these in Merrick, and they owned houses ranging in style from California rancheros to the garbled and gabled monstrosities erected to ape the Spanish in feeling and frenzy. It was a town of medium-little folks, suburban Sunday lawnmowers who took the same trains to work and made the same type of moola and fought the same common enemy—crab grass.
But the street we skidded into didn’t belong to the well-manicured Merrick conception of rural living. This was the manure pile of the garden community, the compost heap on the outskirts of respectability. This street belonged a thousand miles from here, on a knobby hill in Caldwell’s Tobacco Road.
Serena stopped me before a hulking silhouette of a house, surrounded by huge oaks that seemed to frown down on the oversized shanty it sheltered.
“What does your friend Norma do?” I asked. “Take in wash?”
“Norma’s a freelance seamstress, cutie. She does odd sewing jobs.”
The whole picture swam out of focus for me. It was as if my brain were using the wrong lens when my eyes clicked the shutter and egged me into the scene ahead, too fuzzed to be real. I had pictured Serena’s friend living in nothing less than a mansion. I had projected the Caddy up a carefully tailored driveway, all pebbles and hush-hush, into a three-car garage. Instead, I pulled up behind a Ford coupe, vintage ’38, parked in a narrow and rutted driveway.
Serena apologized before we got out.
“It’s not a palace, Johnny. But please remember that Norma calls it home.”
Home was a mid-Victorian mélange of architectural dry rot that had started decaying at the turn of the century and hadn’t yet stopped. It was as though some evil designer had promised a prize to the house that collapsed first on this block. And Norma’s place was due for the prize money. It squatted about twenty feet back from the road, a dissonant symphony of broken spires, stale gingerbread and gray and lifeless shingling. Yellow light tried to escape from one of the ground floor windows, but a dirty window shade flapped it back into the room. A lawn of clay, festooned with trash and tufts of weeds, sprawled before the house.
“Your friend’s got a green thumb,” I said, “for garbage.”
“Norma isn’t the outdoor type, cutie.”
I switched off the ignition and we stepped out. I walked over to the parked Ford and felt the hood. Warm, with a warmth that spelled recent travel. Serena watched me as if I were performing a great experiment.
“You sure act like a detective, Johnny. What’s with the car hood?”
“It’s been boiling. Is this heap Norma’s?”
“No.”
“Then she’s got company. And company just came.”
“Clever,” said Serena. “You can tell all that from a little feel.”
We waded through the scattered garbage and up the porch steps. From up this close, the place looked even worse. The porch floor bellied under our heels and groaned and grunted like a dying dog. A rusty brass chandelier that had been gay and gaudy in the last century now hung from the wooden ceiling, imprisoned in the webs of a generation of spiders. The socket grasped a disemboweled light bulb, but couldn’t quite hold on. At the glass door we paused, listening to the muted strains of distant music. It came through a few walls, but bounced in a bop rhythm. I lifted my hand for the doorbell.
Serena stopped me. “It’s only a prop, cutie. We just walk in.”
The door protested, screeching its pain at the rust that infected its corroded hinges. We walked into a dark and narrow hall, the shadows deep and the air foul with the smell of a recent clambake. Only the stuff Norma had cooked must have been simmered in a combination of cabbage and decadent lard. A long wooden stairway faded into the gloom upstairs.
“The hell hole of Calcutta,” I said. “Where would Norma be in this stink?”
“It’s a two-family house,” Serena said, “and the family upstairs just loves garbage. Isn’t it just too quaint?”
“Get me out of this hall before I upchuck,” I said.
“Norma lives in here.”
The door to Norma’s apartment lay open a crack. The music filtered through strongly now, a new number with a new band and probably a newer and wilder Krupa on the skins, loud and bumpy. Behind the beat of his drums we heard the low murmur of voices.
We walked in and I held my breath.
I’ll never forget that room if I live to be a Solomon. It was at least thirty feet square and in every square foot, lined up against the dirty peeling walls, there stood couches. Old couches, frayed and frizzled couches in a variety of sizes and shapes, spiffing out their hair and springs. And seated on these archaic relics of a past civilization, a half-dozen couples sprawled in various attitudes of unrest and abandon, pawing at each other as the music blared. Smoke filled the air, a pail of white so thick that it almost strangled me.
In the center of the room, to the booming bounce of the tinny music, a short doll in a Japanese kimono danced with a young jerk. But what she was dancing had no Oriental flavor. She slipped and shook in a sleepy, passive bump and grind, her eyes shut and her face lost in a private coma. All I could see of the man was his black curly hair and the cut of his uniform, the outfit of a ship’s officer. He, too, had his eyes closed. He stood there, swaying along with his partner, grinding out the tune with only the occasional hip shift he needed to move along the floor an inch at a time.
I tapped Serena’s arm. “Who’s the doll in the Japanese rig?”
“That’s Norma. Isn’t she cute?”
“As cute as a nightmare. And the man with her. Who’s he?”
“That’s Hank Foley. Doesn’t he dance fresh?”
“Norma seems to like it that way.”
No one bothered to lift an eye at us as we crossed the short hall and stepped into the room itself. There was a large vase standing on a yellowed marble pedestal. I pushed it over. I don’t like quiet entrances. The damned thing broke with the force of a minor explosion.
Serena took over quickly. Too quickly. She grabbed my hand and pulled me across the rug to Norma and Hank Foley.
“Meet Johnny Amsterdam, folks,” she giggled. “And guess what—Mr. Amsterdam’s a private detective. A real, live private eye, like you read about.”
Norma unwound herself from Hank Foley’s arms and faced me, glassy-eyed and simpering strangely. She came staggering over to me, peering at me through the slits that used to be her eyes before the liquor had begun to eat at them. She was good-looking in the
way that an artfully cosmeticized cadaver is good-looking. Somewhere along the line she must have decided against her face and begun to play God with it. She had plucked out her eyebrows and substituted her own brownish lines, an exaggeration of all the beautiful eyebrows on earth, but much too perfect to be acceptable. Her mouth was smeared in a broad and lush caricature of a passion fruit, thick on the top and much too wide for her naturally wraithlike face. And the schoolgirl complexion was as obvious as a strong skunk in a lady’s boudoir—two round balls of vivid color against a pasty and powdered base. Behind that mask, she could be eighteen or eighty. But when she opened her kisser to talk, you knew she had gone over the bill of middle age some time ago.
“He’s cute,” she gurgled. “Where’d you pick up such a plum, Serena?”
“We met at a murder,” I said.
Nobody laughed.
“I got to excuse myself,” Norma slobbered. “I mean because of the way it looks outside. If I knew Serena was bringing company, I’d of cleaned up my front. You see, I only rent this place, but my landlord, he’s such a pig. If I don’t do it, it won’t never get done.”
“Don’t give it a thought, Norma,” I said. “It’s got that lived-in look.”
She wrinkled her nose at me in thanks. “You’re a doll, Johnny. What does the doll like to snort?”
“I’m not fussy.”
“A real live doll.” Norma staggered over to a plain wooden table and filled a glass with gin, ginger ale, lemon juice and a spoonful of thick and resinous stuff from a small jar. She approached me with an unsteady roil and handed me the mixture. “A Merrick Mouse, we call it, Johnny.”
“Aren’t you sorry you came?” Serena whispered.
“Drink it,” Norma insisted. “Don’t just stand there looking at it, doll.”
The drink was becoming an international incident. A few of the lushes on the couches looked up from their wrestling and stared at my indecision. Hank Foley joined us, swaying gently on his heels as if making up his mind whether to stand or fall on his nose. He took a deep breath as though walking would be the greatest trick in the world and then tight-roped it in my direction. He looked mean as hell but seemed to change his mind about me by the time he crossed the rug. It could have been because I had sipped the glassful of swill his friend Norma gave me. Or it could have been that he simply turned chicken when he caught the impact of my optics. I was in no mood for kid games, and he knew it. He waved his arm in a broad gesture of friendliness and creased his iron jaw in a forced grin and bowed low and with theatrical sincerity.
Naked and Alone Page 6
