Then I said, “I’m sorry, Jordice, But you had to know.”
“I should apologize, Johnny. I don’t usually act like this.” She grabbed my hand and held on for comfort. “Tell me the rest. Tell me what happened.”
So I told her. She heard me through to the bitter end, up to the moment when I found the knifer in her room. She was staring at my face now, as if she saw it for the first time. She touched my cheek tenderly.
“You’re pretty well banged up, Johnny. That Serena Harper sounds like a crazy woman.”
“She’s something out of a nut house.”
“Maybe she’s just crazy about you.”
“Not a chance,” I said. “Serena is wacky. Let’s forget about her. Let’s talk about you, baby. You and Kay.”
“I’ve told you all there is to know.”
“Dig a little deeper. Maybe you left out a man or two.”
“Look at me, Johnny.” She lay on her side, facing me now, and her nightgown pulled away where it had been ripped. “A few minutes ago a woman almost murdered me, and you saved my life. I’d do anything for you, Johnny. Anything but lie. Why should I tell you a lie? I’m scared when you harden up and look at me that way. When you don’t trust me.”
She trembled and buried her face in the pillow. I spoke to the hill of coffee-brown hair. I patted it gently. “I’m only asking you to try and remember, Jordice. Any of her boy friends at all. George Dumarette, for instance?”
“I never met him.”
“Hank Foley?”
“Never.”
“Horsh?”
Jordice stirred. She lifted her head and brushed back her hair in a tired way. “Say that name again, Johnny.”
“Horsh.”
“It rings a bell.”
“Answer the ring, baby. Think.”
She sat up and I lit another cigarette for her. She puffed it hungrily, her eyes closed against some fleeting memory, searching it out, trying for a fix on the sound of the name. She got up and threw a robe around her, shivering again, but this time from the internal struggle to place the recollection for me. I gave her some brandy. I marched the room with her.
“Maybe the town of Merrick will help,” I said. “Horsh comes from Merrick.”
“Merrick?” She scowled and stared through the window into the murky courtyard, as though Horsh himself might be hiding out there behind a convenient garbage can. And Horsh came through to her, suddenly. She laughed and turned to me. She grabbed me and said, “I remember now, Johnny. Just before Kay left her apartment last night there was a call. It came from a Mr. Horsh. Kay was discussing something about the funeral of her husband. She—”
I squeezed her hopefully. “Easy, baby. I want one thing at a time. Did Kay say anything about any other man in that conversation?”
“I can’t remember her mentioning a man.”
“Just funeral talk?”
“That was all. The funeral was to take place tomorrow.”
“In Merrick?”
“Kay didn’t say.”
“Think hard,” I whispered. “This is important. What else did Kay say?”
“That was all, Johnny. That was definitely all Kay talked about with Horsh.”
“Get dressed,” I said.
“Please, Johnny. This is practically the middle of the night for me. Where am I going?”
“You’re staying at my hotel room, baby. I don’t want you here by yourself. I don’t want to find your pretty torso sporting a knife between the blossoms. You’re getting out of here. But right now.”
“I love you for your thoughtfulness,” Jordice said. She grabbed me and leaned into me. She kissed me hard, pressing her nakedness against me. “You’re a great big, soft-hearted lump of sentiment under that ugly face, Johnny Amsterdam.”
I patted her tail into the closet and she got dressed. Then I gave her my key and my address.
“Wait here for five minutes, Jordice. Then head for my hotel. The cops have an expert tail on me. He’ll be out there, waiting to follow me. I’ll decoy him away from your front porch so you can leave in peace.”
“When will you be there, Johnny?”
“I don’t know. But I’ll be back sooner or later.”
“Make it sooner?” I’ll be waiting for you.”
She kissed me again and I walked out, down the long hall and into the glare of the street. I spotted Robley on the corner opposite, making believe he was interested in Italian vegetables. He had one eye on an eggplant and the other on me. He dropped the eggplant when I started away between the pushcarts. I began to run, not fast, but with a loping pace, enough to keep Robley sucking and blowing for air behind me. I led him around the block so that I could catch a squint at the entrance to Jordice’s place. She came out as I made the corner. Robley didn’t even notice her.
Robley was too busy breathing and running to notice anything but me.
I ran a little faster, uptown this time.
CHAPTER 14
Two names skidded around in my mental rink—Serena Harper and George Dumarette. These were the annoying names, the teasing names, the names that had to be set right in my book of facts. They blurred, avoiding the quick cataloguing, the routine filing that most people suffer in the index-card cranium of the private investigator. Where did they fit? How could I understand them? I needed more information about both of them, right now.
Robley drifted behind me as if he were being pulled along by an invisible umbilical cord. He detached himself, though, when I walked up the steps of Serena Harper’s place and pressed her buzzer. No one answered. I crossed the street and looked up at her windows. No glimmer of light showed through the oblong eyes that were her windows.
I skipped into a drugstore and tried Serena’s phone. Nothing. The detective in my dome took over and teased me to call Merrick. I phoned Norma. No answer. Next I looked up George Dumarette and dialed his number. I got the same dose of nothing. I felt as frustrated as a sailor on shore leave with three hot numbers and nothing but silence on the other end of the wires.
I started for Dumarette’s residence, aware that Robley still haunted my backside. For a split second of insanity, I deliberated the idea of backtracking to Robley, shaking his hand and buying him a drink and talking the deal over with him. Sometimes an involvement can louse a man up. Sometimes a detective doesn’t see the forest for the trees. And when that happens, he can make use of a listening ear, a sympathetic stooge, a character to share the strain and sorrow. But it would do me no good to talk to Robley. Robley would louse me up because it was his job to stand and watch and never think beyond the call of duty.
On the street where Dumarette lived, I saw nothing but emptiness and air. I surveyed the block carefully because good police eyes can sink into the bricks and become part of the plaster. But if there was a police dick on the watch outside Dumarette’s, he must have known tricks I had never heard of. I sauntered casually past Dumarette’s front door. Then I shifted into high and sprinted around the corner. I ran fast, knowing that Robley would be puffing and panting behind me. It was time to confuse him a little, to make him stand and scratch his noggin about me while I prowled in comparative peace. I circled the block and ducked into an alley behind Dumarette’s yard I squatted behind a garbage can and watched Robley race by, a handkerchief up to his head and the high blood pressure pulsing in his fat face.
Then I skipped over the back fence into Dumarette’s tiny yard. I entered by way of the cellar door, up into the main hall and out into the lobby. A minute later, Robley appeared across the street, mopping his fevered brow and squinting across and upstairs. The stubborn leach! He would be difficult to lose, despite clever squirmings and cute detours. He would stand out there forever now, waiting for me because he had figured me right and knew it.
I skipped back through the hall and tried my key ring on Dumarette’s doo
r. There was a key to fit it. I walked through a square foyer, decorated in good taste and refinement. Beyond the vestibule there was a mammoth living room, a giant playroom for a bachelor like Dumarette. The entire production was done in black and white, a cozy masterpiece of neat design and dramatic power, arranged so that the room was dominated by a huge white drapery on which a variety of liquor motifs had been done in a smoothly calligraphic line. I crossed the whitish rug and entered his kitchen.
It was a large room, decorated in simple style, simulating a ship’s galley, as cute and tricky as a store display, with small portholes on wooden walls, and lamps out of some ancient boat. The wall cabinets were simple, but rubbed to a high finish, old pine held together by iron hinges. The place smelled of cleanliness and order. I opened the cabinets quickly, anticipating cans of imported delights, French and Italian goodies. Instead, I saw nothing but the usual stuff you find in any American kitchen: cans of soup and sardines and corned-beef hash and vegetables, all of them of the common chain store variety.
I tried the huge gleaming refrigerator next. Instead of truffles and snails, I saw only eggs and cold mashed potatoes and a few bottles of milk, surrounded by a variety of other common staples that were as usual as hot dogs at the Polo Grounds. I slammed the refrigerator shut and called it a dirty name. From the look of Dumarette’s larder, he’d probably faint at the sight of a stewed snail.
I was reaching for a cracker in his cupboard when a noise in the hall froze my hand. A key turned in the lock. I closed the kitchen door fast and spread myself against the wall so that I could see through the slit in the door.
Serena and Dumarette entered. Serena knew her way around the dump. She walked to a cabinet on the far wall, took out two glasses and filled them with liquor. She handed one to Dumarette, who already had eased his tall frame into a comfortable chair. He sipped the drink slowly. Serena hovered over him, impatient for him to finish it.
“Drink it down, cutie,” she urged. “Don’t sip.”
“It is not good to gulp one’s liquor,” Dumarette said softly. He had a sure, quiet, rumbling voice, rich with Boyer undertones. “You must learn to relax, cherie.”
“I’m too old to learn new tricks.”
“That is not so. There are always new tricks to learn. When one ceases to try them—” Dumarette shrugged meaningfully.
“Show me, Georgie.” She stared down at him hungrily. He smiled and continued sipping. Some of her drink spilled over on his pants leg.
Dumarette was mildly annoyed. “Now see what you have done, you impatient little girl.” He wiped the stain from his pants and stepped out of her reach. He was a tall job, well over six feet and put together like a swimmer, broad in the shoulders and narrow in the hips. He walked loosely, but he had power under his sports jacket. He strolled out of my line of vision and Serena pursued him. I couldn’t see them now, but I could hear the dialogue clearly. It was like listening to a movie from behind a fat pole.
“Darling, darling,” Serena whispered.
I heard a slap.
Her “darlings” became more breathless.
Another slap.
Her voice lifted and swelled. I heard something tearing.
“A pity, ma cherie,” said George. “Such a pretty dress.”
For a moment Serena stepped into my line of vision. She was a picture of frenzied madness in her flimsy undergarments. I shifted my position, as curious about the end of this scene as a paid customer at a stag movie. She slid into George’s arms, but he pushed her face away from him. His voice had a practised sincerity as he rejected her.
“Oh, no, my little chicken,” he cooed. “I regret exceedingly that I must refuse.”
“Why, George?”
“You know what bothers me, Serena,” He paused dramatically. He turned his eyes away from her. It was a ridiculous tableau. She was a bundle of uninhibited lust, yet Dumarette played it soberly and with great restraint. “I love you too much, my little dove, too much to, share you with another man.”
“It’s a lie. You’re the only one I care about, George.”
“Nonsense. You are telling the small lie.”
“I swear it.”
Dumarette shrugged. “It is said that when an agnostic swears, the oath is meaningless. I am certain that you care for Foley the way you care for me, Serena.”
She grabbed at him and tugged his head around. “That creepy thing? He doesn’t interest me at all, George.”
“I couldn’t bear an unfaithful woman, cherie.”
“I’m not, I’m not, I’m not,” she moaned.
“Then you promise me? No more Foley?”
“I promise anything you say, George.”
I was in no mood to watch the next episode in this pageant. I stepped out of the kitchen.
“Sorry to break up your bout,” I said, and showed Dumarette my gun. “But don’t like to play peeping Tom to this kind of routine. You two should operate in a deep freeze.”
Serena grabbed at me, screaming a fresh burst of obscenities. I slapped her across her pretty jaw. She fell back on the bed. Dumarette eyed me coldly. I had to hand it to the guy. He was as calm and cool as a tall mackerel.
“Who is this man?” he asked Serena.
“Amsterdam,” I said. “The name is Johnny Amsterdam.
“A detective,” Serena said.
“A detective who’s going to take both of you downtown,” I added.
“So?” Dumarette smiled. “You have, I presume, a warrant for our arrest?”
“This,” I said, waving the gun at him.
He cocked his head and smiled again. “On what charge, please?”
“Suspicion of murder. Kay Randall’s murder.”
“Oh, that one, alors,” Dumarette sighed. He lit himself a cigarette and pushed it into a long holder. He sucked a few deep drags and showed me his Parisian smile again, this time strictly down the nose. “Perhaps you had better call the police, Amsterdam. It might save us both a trip.”
He went to the phone and dialed. He listened and said: “One moment, please.” Then he handed me the phone and stepped away.
I grabbed it and yapped into it. “Give me McKegnie,” I said. “Tell him Johnny Amsterdam is calling.”
In the short pause, Dumarette returned to the couch and whispered to Serena. She was tight with emotion now, staring at me bug-eyed as I waited for McKegnie to get on. Finally McKegnie’s voice came over the wire. I said: “I’ve got Dumarette for you.”
There was a wry laugh at the other end. “Well, isn’t that just peachy dandy? Give him my regards, shamus.”
“What’s the pitch? Don’t you want him anymore?”
“I’ve had enough of him,” McKegnie roared. “He’s all yours now.”
And he hung up.
Dumarette got off his thin tail and stood again. “I think I should perhaps explain. You see, I have already been to headquarters and I already have talked to the police. They arrested me on the grounds that I molested a man. But it was something unavoidable.”
“Not in my book,” I said. “Because I’m the man you slugged.”
A pained look crossed his face and stayed for a flick of time. But he could never quite kill the smile that edged his lips. “I am sincerely sorry, Amsterdam.”
“Sorry you didn’t kill me?”
“Why would I wish to kill you?”
“You made a pretty good try.”
“Ah, but that is not so,” he cooed. “Put yourself, please, in my place. I go for a small walk late last night. A man follows me. This neighborhood has been full of evil characters of late. Muggers and bad ones like that. I thought that perhaps you might be one of them. So I protect myself. Is this not proper? What would you have done, Amsterdam, I ask you?”
“I would have aimed myself for the nearest cop.”
“So?
But I am not the one for friendship with cops. The police they make me bashful, as you say.”
“You weren’t bashful with Kay Randall.”
“Kay Randall?” He reacted to the name with a show of quick annoyance. His eyes snaked toward Serena, but he found no comfort there. She was busy with her dress now, wriggling into it and attending to the rips around the bodice. Dumarette snuffed out his butt and lingered at the table “I did not really know Miss Randall at all. I met her at a party in Paris. After that, we came home on the same boat together. That was all, my friend. In New York, I saw Kay Randall perhaps three, perhaps four times, for dinner and the theatre. You do not believe me? The police, they believed me.”
“The police,” I said, “sometimes have the big wheels in the fat heads. What’s your connection with a man named Foley?”
“Connection?” Dumarette shrugged. “I have no connection. I met this Foley on the boat, coming over. He was my purser.”
“What do you know about him?”
He slid his eyes at Serena again. He waved his hand at her. “Perhaps that is a question for Serena. If I should ever decide to murder a man, Amsterdam, it would be this Foley I would select, believe me. I am a jealous man.”
“So am I,” I said. “That’s why I want some more on Foley. I’ve had a big yen for Serena since last night.”
She warmed up to me fast after that, slipping across to me and grabbing my arm and holding on. She was as fruity as a queen in a nuthouse, this Serena. The pressure was off her now and she tried to make a fresh play for me, as though nothing had ever happened between her last pitch and this fevered moment. She made a face at Dumarette and dug into me with her nails. I eased her away from me. I set her down on the couch again and returned to Dumarette. He grinned at me with tolerant good humor.
“Serena can perhaps tell you much about Foley,” Dumarette said.
“And you?” I asked. “Can you, too, perhaps?”
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