“Nothing. The man means nothing to me.”
“He came to visit you last night.”
“Serena brought him. He was her visitor first, is that not so?”
“How about that, Serena?” The scene was building to a terrific dose of nothing at all. Dumarette was lousing me up with his double-talk. He had the ability to turn words his own way, a skill at feinting and dodging that would look well in a drawing room comedy. But not here. And not now, with me on fire with impatience. I lifted Serena off the couch and pulled her to me. I felt like slapping her pretty nose in, but that kind of routine would do me no good at all. She’d just glow and get hot on the muscular treatment. Even now, as she found herself close to me again, the blossoming lust in her eyes warned me that I was off on the wrong foot. I let up the pressure. I said: “Why did you bring Foley here, Serena?”
“I couldn’t stay home,” she said quietly. “I was afraid of the police.”
Dumarette nodded. “Exactly what she told me.”
“Can’t you guess?” Serena wriggled at my side. “He was a really nice dancer, remember? At Norma’s? Maybe I wanted to dance some more with him.”
“Don’t you ever get tired?”
“Try me some time.”
“Now,” I said. “Grab your coat. You and I are going dancing.”
“Wonderful. But why don’t we dance here?”
“I like your place better. It’s full of mirrors and I can watch you from every angle there. Now get your coat and get it fast.”
She wrapped her coat around her torn dress and stepped into her shoes quickly. She skipped across to me and held on tight.
“I love you when you talk tough, cutie. I can hardly wait to do a rhumba with you.”
Dumarette gave us a muffled laugh and a shrug. Then he minced our way to hold the door open and wave us outside.
“I wish you the best of good fortune,” he said with mock sincerity. “The better man has perhaps won.”
“Not yet,” I said. “But soon, perhaps.”
“Perhaps,” said Dumarette.
I left it that way. I slipped through the door and slammed it in his lean face. I could have been wrong but I thought I heard the sound of his laughter in there as we walked away.
And it was a dirty laugh, too.
CHAPTER 15
As soon as we left Dumarette’s I began to notice the change in Serena. Something had happened to wind her up. She was tense and tight and as restless as a fly on a hot pole. We walked fast toward her house, almost at a trot, her high heels setting up a clattering echo down the dark streets. But beyond the haste, beyond her obvious anxiety to get home, something gnawed at her. She said nothing to me as we approached her stone stoop. She fumbled her key. The key dropped to the porch and she cursed it with a wild obscenity she had never used before. She got down on her knees, groping for it. Her hands were shaking in the search. I found the key for her and opened the door.
“I’ll never drink Scotch again as long as I live,” she muttered, mincing ahead of me. But her tremors had nothing to do with drink. She ticked off her anxiety like an over-wound watch. You could almost hear her heart pounding, she was that upset. I reached for the light switch, but she held my hand. Her fingers were as warm as a deep freeze. She said, “Not here, cutie. Let’s go upstairs.”
She ran up the marble stairway and flicked on one small light in the mirrored apartment. She threw off her coat and stood there, shaking and shivering, staring at me unseeingly. In the mirrors around her, she was a dozen quaking dames, a dozen dozen eyes, all of them snaking past me toward one of the walls.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” she said.
She started away from me, but I grabbed her arm and tugged her close. Her eyes snapped fire and fretfulness now, not sex, but the hard, cold fury of a great emergency. She struggled to get away from me.
“Please, cutie,” she said. “I’ve got to go.”
“Where?”
“To the little girl’s room, of course.”
“What for?”
“That’s not a very clever question,” she said. Something had happened to her lips. She tried to smile, but it didn’t quite come off. Her lips were trembling. She was as off balance as a psycho in the last stages of quake and quaver. “When you’ve got to go,” she smiled, “you’ve just got to go.”
“Is that all?” I pulled her over to the lamp. She began to writhe and squirm in my hands, as slippery as a snake, and twice as wary. She knew what was coming. Her eyes were bunged with the fear of what I was about to do to her. She tried to claw me and I slapped her hand down and jerked her under the glow of the lamp. She muttered a sighing wail as I pulled her arms up and twisted them so that I could get a good look at them. Then I saw what I thought I’d see. Up high on her left arm. Tiny pinpoint blotches.
“You’re hurting me,” she wailed.
“I thought you liked it.”
“Not this kind of hurt,” she whispered.
“Sit still,” I said, holding her on the bed. “Your motor’s running too fast, Serena.”
I held her tight. A new series of tremors shook her frame. The fear was building in her eyes now, deeper pain, a more serious upset. This was a pain she did not enjoy. Her head bobbled and nodded, as though she had just discovered it was too heavy for her body. Her mouth hung open and she seemed hungry for breath. Small animal noises bubbled in her throat.
“Let me go, Johnny. Please. Please, please. I can’t stand it. I just can’t, believe me.”
But I continued to hold her with me, studying the facial contortions as she slipped into high. This was a familiar anguish, something I had seen before, often, in the police lines downtown, and up in the wack wards of the city hospitals. Her head flopped forward and she began to scream, slowly, but with a rising pitch. I yanked her chin up and slapped my hand over her mouth.
I said, “Where do you keep the hypo?”
“Please, please, please,” she blubbered, not hearing me, her whole body strained away from me, aimed at the wall on the other side of the room. “I’ll die if I don’t get it, Johnny.”
“Get it,” I said, and let her go.
She slipped out of my grasp. She raced across the room to the far wall. She pushed at it and the mirrors slid away, exposing a small closet with a dresser in it. She clawed through the top drawer. Then the needle was in her hands and she was turning away from me to jab herself. Her body stiffened and relaxed like that of a tired athlete after a main event. She tossed the needle back in the drawer and came slowly to the bed. She looked happy now, floating in her own private heroin heaven. She let herself slide to the bed gently, and as the drug caressed her body and she lifted her arms over her head and lay there, her eyes closed, her lips smiling peacefully, awaiting the next word from me. She looked up and smiled tentatively. She stretched out her hands to me.
“Come over here, cutie,” she whispered. “Make love to me, Johnny.”
I said, “In the pig’s chops I will,” and I reached for her again and dragged her upright. But she was enjoying it again. She would be relishing every knock I gave her because her crying need for the dope was gone, and in its place her body was ruled by the pleasures she longed to share with me. So it did no good to play it tough. I stood over her instead, letting her feel the weight of my scowl.
I said: “Tell me about Foley.”
“Must we talk, Johnny?”
“Tell me about Foley,” I said again.
“Later.”
“Now. You either gab with me, or I do what I promised, baby. You know what I mean? The police!”
Her face caught the impact of my purpose. “Not that, I’ll tell you whatever I know, Johnny.”
“Begin at the beginning. Who is he?”
“He works on a ship.”
“The name of the ship?”
&n
bsp; “The Ile De France.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
I leaned over her on the bed. I borrowed her hands and let her feel my fingers bite into them. I squeezed. Hard. So hard that her face knotted into a mask of pain, not pleasurable pain, but real hurt, the kind of hurt that might mean I was hell bent on cracking every bone in her pretty little hands. And when she began to moan and groan, I squeezed harder, pulling her around my way and working her arms up into an attitude of prayer. Only she wasn’t praying. She was having her knuckles broken.
“Listen, you little tramp,” I told her. “I’m going to fracture you unless you level with me. I don’t want any more lies. Give it to me straight—the name of Foley’s boat.”
“My hands,” she gasped, her face going gray. “You’ll ruin my hands, Johnny … He works on the Morocco Maid.”
“That’s better, baby. You’re in love with him?”
“Never,” she whispered, rubbing the blood back into her hands. “He’s a real creep. He’s not my type.”
“He was your type last night,” I reminded her. “You went out to Merrick to see him, didn’t you?”
“I had to.”
“For your supply of snow?”
“That was all.” She was unembarrassed by her addiction. “Foley is nothing but a pusher to me.”
“And Dumarette? Is he a pusher, too?”
“How do you mean that?” she laughed.
“Very funny. Tell me more about Foley. Where’d you meet him?”
“At a party, cutie. A dull party.”
“At Kay Randall’s?”
“No. But she was there.”
“How about Kay? Was she a main liner, too?”
Serena giggled. “I never asked her.”
“Who brought Kay to the party? Foley?”
“She didn’t seem to know Foley. Foley came with someone else. I can’t think of her name.”
“Squeeze a little,” I said.
“I’m doing my best,” she pouted. Her hand was snaking my way again. I caught it and put it back where it belonged. Serena shrugged and tried to concentrate. It would be tough for her to make any headway. She had only one thought in her nimble mind. She was thinking of the mattress again, rubbing her palm along the coverlet and letting me enjoy the smooth contour of her legs as she crossed and uncrossed them for me. “It was a funny name,” she said. “I remember I laughed when I heard it. It sounded like a disease. It sounded like jaundice.”
I grabbed her chin and uplifted her pretty face. She was no longer smiling. She was letting me see the deep longing in her eyes. But my brain was alive with the impact of her last line of dialogue. I tightened my grip on her, shaking her up a bit.
I said, “Was it Jordice?”
“That’s the name.”
“Jordice Gray?”
“I didn’t get her last name, cutie. Somebody you know?”
“Somebody I thought I knew!”
I let Serena slide back on the bed. She arranged herself in a pose of intimate friendliness, falling into the position as easily as a model taking a position on the stand. But she didn’t hold the pose for long. She sat up stiffly as she saw me back away.
When I walked to the door, she really got mad.
“You’re not leaving?” she asked. “Not at a time like this?”
“This is the right time, baby.”
I blew her a kiss and ran down the stairs into the street.
CHAPTER 16
My head was buzzing and humming like the roar of a hot motor. I reached the corner and flagged a cab. The pieces in the puzzle were coming together, but the picture they shaped up into disgusted me. The whole gang was something out of a bad dream: Serena bed-hopping with every passing punk; Dumarette setting himself up as the kingpin of the dope racket in town; Foley making passes at the goonish doll called Norma, to be followed by further matches with Serena and Jordice.
Jordice!
The memory of her converted the pattern of my mental picture into an abstraction out of a madman’s studio. Where did she fit? Where would her pretty face end up in the puzzle? I pushed her around in my mind, feeling out the proper place for her. I turned her over and examined her from every angle. But always, the sweet picture of Jordice clouded my imagery, softening me up because of our intimacy, because of the tender mood she inspired in me. I looked forward to the immediate prospect of talking to her, asking her the key questions.
I ran to the elevator and buzzed it. Then somebody was calling my name and I moved back to the desk. It was my friend Slim, the night clerk.
“Don’t you want your key, Mr. Amsterdam?”
“Isn’t there somebody waiting for me in my room?”
“Not lately,” Slim said. “I’ve been on since noon.”
“A doll?” I asked.
“Not today, she isn’t.”
I ran out of the lobby, as mad as a husband with horns. My head cracked up against the wall of lies Jordice had built up for me. The time for small talk was over. I grabbed a cab and told him to take me down to Greenwich Village, waving a bill under his fat nose to encourage more speed. It was good to go places fast now. It was better for my nerves to forget to backtrack into the recent past with Jordice Gray. I wanted no sloppy sentiment to louse me up when I found her and faced her. I would crack her where she least expected it, across her lying mouth. I would slap her around and force her to tell me the truth. All the truth. Especially about a man named Foley.
Her lobby was twice as dark as the inside of a coffin. I groped my way to her door and found the right key on my ring to open it easily. Then I walked in, expecting to meet her in the bedroom, expecting to catch her off guard and speak my piece. But Jordice was not at home.
I started on the prowl, beginning in her clothes closets and going carefully through her wardrobe. She had a goodly assortment of dresses, shoes and incidental toggery, all of the stuff of upper-class design. Her lingerie, in the small chest of drawers, came from the same type of store. She spent money lavishly on her stuff. Too lavishly for a doll who checked hats in a night club. I opened a beat-up little desk in the hall. It was crowded with stuff and nonsense. It was jam-packed with waste paper and old correspondence. I didn’t bother to read her mail, though. I couldn’t, because of something else that I found under the debris. I picked it up and examined it. I muttered a foul word at it, as if by calling it a filthy name, I could make it slink away into the night.
But, of course, a hypodermic needle couldn’t animate itself.
I dived back into the drawer. I waded through every scrap of paper in the desk. I checked and double-checked the contents, hoping for a small crumb, a lead to the one man I wanted. But Jordice kept no secrets of her transactions. Whoever fed her the dope must have collected his loot on the line, in person and on a regular schedule that would eliminate any and all paper work. Down deep in the desk, buried under a further assortment of odds and ends, I found something that held my eye. It was a photograph album, one of the smaller volumes used to keep ordinary snapshots of the post card variety. I thumbed through the pages.
There were shots of Jordice as a young squab, dressed in amateur theatrical costumes, tights and dancing shoes, poised on one toe in an attitude borrowed from the ballet. She must have been fresh out of high school when the shot was taken. But she was round enough and stacked enough to get places in theatricals even then. I skipped down the pages, passing through a quick pattern of her life in show business, from the first engagement (a corny pose outside a hick nightclub) to several shots taken on Broadway. Throughout all of these, her photogenic puss beamed out at me, smiling her charming grin, making my heart bounce with a mixture of memory and mayhem. It was an effort to go through that book of pictures. I was ready to throw it back into the drawer. Then I hit the loose snapshots, maybe two dozen of them, slapp
ed into the back of the little collection, willy-nilly. I thumbed them slowly, and when I was almost finished I saw one shot that stiffened my short hairs and made me call her a dirty name.
It was a picture of Jordice and Foley, taken recently. The crud had his arm around her and was laughing it up for the camera. The gag was something out of a lunatic’s humor file. Foley held her arm up in a gesture of casual grace. But he had a hypo in his free hand, all set to jab her. And Jordice smiled at him gaily, the same sweet curve of her lips that I admired, yet insane and almost evil in this picture. It was a dirty bit of pornography, dirty as if they were readying themselves for a stag reel. I stuffed the picture away.
There were things to do now.
I phoned the SS Morocco Maid. I told them I was looking for an old friend of mine—Hank Foley. The voice at the other end informed me that Mr. Foley was working. When could I see him? Right away, because the Morocco Maid was unloading special cargo in half an hour, and Mr. Foley would be in charge. I hung up. I started for the door.
The knob turned before I touched it.
Somebody was on the way in, slowly and carefully. I ducked back into the hall near the bedroom. The apartment door opened tentatively and a figure stuck its head through, like a frightened mouse, wary of a marauding cat. I caught a glimpse of the black curly hair and frumpy hat, perched at a foolish angle over the right eye. Then the light clicked on and I saw who it was—Norma, the painted bim from Merrick.
Norma moved with a purpose. She crossed the living room as though she had been here many times before. She entered the kitchen and reached up to one of the cupboards. Her frenzy mounted as she began to fumble and grope in the food department, taking down cartons of cans in a wild search. She muttered and mumbled to herself, a zany soliloquy, a whispered monologue that seemed to go well with her hysterical search. I thought I heard her whimper and sob as I stepped quietly in behind her.
She almost fainted when I tapped her on the shoulder.
“You won’t find the dope in there,” I said.
“Who the hell are you?” Her eyes were lit with a strange and vague light. She didn’t recognize me at all. She had a can of something in her hand and before I could stop her she threw it at me. She put everything she had into the pitch, but she was off her form. I ducked easily and stepped in and grabbed her.
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