“I’m John Amsterdam,” I told her. “Remember me now?”
“What are you doing here?”
“That’s the one I was going to ask you, Norma.”
“Jordice and me are good friends. Now get out and leave me alone.”
“I’m in no hurry.” Behind her, in the open cupboard, the row of eatables caught my eye. It was a slow buildup, like a misted picture suddenly coming to life, like clear water after the wind blows the fog away. Jordice had a shelf full of fancy groceries. I stepped past Norma and began to handle the cans and boxes. The brand names set up a clanging in my brain; King Edward cocktail biscuits and Roussainville French turtle soup and Caspian Sea caviar of the black variety. And in the corner, stacked neatly, was the payoff—over a dozen cans of Latouche snails!
I stared at the array before me, letting the shock sink in. Somewhere close at hand now, the last few pieces of the jigsaw were ready to fall in place. I had my mental fingers out groping for them, but they were still somewhere just beyond reach.
I pulled Norma up to me and held her tight. She reacted with a fit of shaking and shivering, filled to the brim with hysteria.
I said: “Your boy friend Foley gets around, Norma. Five will get you fifty, he was playing house with Jordice.”
“The bastard.” Norma went on shivering. “I wouldn’t put it past him.”
“How long have you known him?”
“Too long. Maybe I don’t know him anymore.”
“You giving him up for Jordice to grab?”
“I’m giving him up, period. The bitch can have him now if she wants him that bad.” Her voice sank to a hoarse whisper, out of control. She jerked her head back and scowled up at me, showing me her dirty smile. She cackled and twitched in my hands, as if she saw something hilariously funny somewhere through the wall beyond me. “You saved her neck!” she screeched. “Why did you have to come here and save her, you jerk? I would have finished her!”
“You were the one with the knife?”
“I learn fast,” she gurgled. Then she squirmed away from me and reached into her bag and showed me a gun. She held the automatic straight out at me, her arm stiff and quivering. She pointed it at my right eye and she was close enough to hit the target. “Now leave me out of here before I blow your fool head off, Amsterdam.”
I continued to block the door. “In a minute, Norma. Let’s talk it over. I only wanted a little more information on Foley, that was all.”
“Get away from that door.”
“Information about his eating habits.”
“I’ll count to three, Amsterdam.” She had me pinpointed with the muzzle of the gun. Her eyes were dancing with madness. She would be fruit for a straitjacket unless she picked up a shot of dope soon. “I swear I’ll shoot you unless you leave me out of here.”
“Just a small question, Norma. You know Foley well. What does he eat?”
“One,” she said.
“He’s been abroad a lot. He could be a nut about foreign foods, couldn’t he? Stuff like black caviar?”
“Two,” said Norma,
“Or snails?” I asked.
She opened her mouth to say the next number, but I was moving her way before the word took shape. I slapped the gun hard. It went sailing out of her hand and hit the refrigerator. It took a soft bounce and dropped to the floor. Norma stooped and scrambled for it. She went down on her knees, screaming gutter obscenities.
The gun scooted across the linoleum and under one of the cupboards at the far end of the room. Norma clawed at me in a desperate fury. She knew no Queensbury rules of fighting. She jumped to her feet and kicked out at me blindly. I grabbed her shoe and upset her, sending her howling and cursing as she fell against the big white refrigerator. Her head hit hard enough to break the door. She sagged and drooped with a gurgling moan. Her head rolled forward at a stupid angle. I kneeled over her and tried her eyes. She was out cold. She would be sleeping for some time to come.
I went down the long hall and into the street, slowing down at the door. The end of the line lay somewhere before me, out in the darkness. But across the street, leaning into one of the shadowed doorways, stood Robley. It was no time for a police tail. In the next few hours, if my hunch was right, I might find the crud I was looking for. But I must approach the murderer carefully and without any interference from McKegnie’s department. The last scene would be played against great odds, yet there would be no game at all if the cops barged in.
I made up my mind in a hurry. Robley didn’t seem at all surprised to see me when I crossed the street and ran up to him.
“Still on the prowl?” I asked.
“A job is a job,” Robley said. He jerked his thumb in the direction of Jordice’s place. “You seem to like that dump, Amsterdam. You got a dame in there?”
“Not quite,” I said. “But you have.”
“Come again?”
“Thought I’d give you a tip, Robley. It’s not in your department, but the doll in there should be picked up anyhow. She’s a dope pusher.”
“The one who went in after you? Baggy-looking dame?”
“That’s Norma. Norma Meadows. Better get in there before she wakes up.”
“She’s asleep?” Robley smiled good-naturedly. He would react in the same deadpan way if I told him his wife was taking care of the Tenth Infantry one company per night. “A sleeping dope pusher?”
“She had a little accident. I’d suggest you take her to the nearest hospital and assign a man to catch her when she wakes up. She’ll spill plenty when she’s conscious.”
“Well, now, I’ll do that little thing.” Robley grinned. “And where are you bound?”
“I’ll wait for you at that coffee dump up on the corner.”
Robley grunted and started across the street. It had been easier than I figured it. I skipped to the left, toward the buzzing artery where the cruising cabs drifted.
I flagged a yellow and told him to go like hell for the Sigbrantsan Line Pier.
I said, “There’s an extra fin in it for you if you make it before I finish this—”
The cab took off so fast that the back of the seat knocked the last word, “cigarette,” right out of me. No doubt about it, cabbies ought to be cops.
CHAPTER 17
On the ragged edge of New York, down below the luxury boat area, I scanned the dirty dock of the SS Morocco Maid. Here, in the slatternly streets that rim the understructure of the Brooklyn Bridge, the tramps of the ocean pull in to unload their cargoes and pick up fresh merchandise for the far corners of the earth. I stood alone, facing the dim and hulking shapes of the dockside, the huge warehouses, the deserted loading stations, and the barricaded doors of the giant piers. The SS Morocco Maid, its great bulk silhouetted against the pasty sky, lolled against its dock like a captured sea monster. It was a middling sized vessel, not too large in the passenger department, but painted fresh and bright to attract a reasonable tourist trade. Only a few trucks rolled in alongside the boat: delivery vans stoking up the Morocco Maid with basic supplies, the odds and ends of meat and fish for the next trip across the ocean. I stepped through the iron gate and approached a uniformed guard.
“Got a pass, bud?” he asked.
I flipped my badge under his nose, but he was unimpressed. He handed it back to me with a sour smile. “Private dicks don’t get the run of the boat,” he said. “Now if that was a police pass, it’d be different.”
“Maybe you can help me anyhow.” I had a bill in my hand and touched it to his palm. He caught the flutter of it and reacted with the international reflex to cash money. He slid it into his pants with a practiced dexterity. “I only want to ask a few questions,” I said. “One or two about a man named Foley.”
“What’s he done?”
“You’ll read about it in tomorrow’s paper. Can I see him?”
&nbs
p; “He left a little while ago, bud.”
My hand produced another bill. “I’ll double that if you have a good memory, my friend. Where did you last see Foley?”
The guard rubbed his jaw speculatively. He was wrapping himself in deep thought. But his memory revived when he saw a fresh fin in my fingers. He fingered the loot and showed me some enthusiasm.
“Foley came down here to check a stiff off the Morocco Maid.”
“Check it off?” I asked. “Off to where?”
“There,” said the guard, and he pointed a dirty finger down the street to a long warehouse only half a block away. “That’s the company warehouse, mister. It’s sort of a pick-up station for special cargo. Foley checked the corpse out to that building. The downstairs part belongs to Atcheson Shipping, but the second floor is the property of the line. We hold cargo up there. Seems to me Foley was headed that way the last time I spotted him.”
“Alone?”
“Little man was with him.”
“Anybody you know?”
“Never saw him before in my life.”
I thanked him and moved off down the quiet street. My shoes clicked the pavement and echoed against the line of buildings across the way. Nobody moved here. Somewhere out in the bay, a ferry coughed and was answered by the hoot of a passing tug, the signals mournful as they drifted above the dead silence of the stony street. On the right, the warehouse loomed against the flickering blobs of light in Brooklyn, across the river and far away. I sneaked alongside the dirty walls, moving slowly toward the entrance gate. I saw a car parked in the shadows. A long black job.
It was a hearse. And a man sat sleeping at the wheel. The sound of his snoring rose and fell in the gloom. His head lay on the frame of the window and I caught the familiar pattern of his jaw. It was Horsh, the mortician. The hearse stood with its end inside the loading station, but the cargo had not yet been put aboard the death wagon. The back doors were open and waiting for the body of Paul Graham, Kay’s husband.
I backed carefully inside the loading zone, skipping up the platform and snaking inside the warehouse. Beyond the tiny office and through one rusted door, the stairs were concrete and iron, moving up into the misted darkness.
I climbed at a snail’s pace, so that no sound of my arrival would be telegraphed up through the stairwell and into the great room above me. The place stank of the salty and fetid stenches brought in from the holds of ships: pitch and tar and the barreled corrosion of a thousand thousand ancient foods and greases. It smelled of mystery and adventure and faraway places. But it also smelled of death. Death in crates and death in coffins, and the lurking death that could be waiting for me around the corner from the second rusted door at the head of the landing on the second floor.
My breath echoed against the slimy walls up here. The door stood open, inviting me into the ebony blackness beyond. I stepped through and inside, holding myself against the wall and freezing there. I was alone in a monster cavern of endless blackness. Here the stink was heightened into an overpowering tissue of noxious odor. Here the breath came slowly from me, because each fresh breath meant an added taste of the stinking cave. I held my eyes straight ahead, knowing that nature would help me soon. The time would come when the distances would take shape, when the pattern of darkness would break down into smaller slices of light and shade.
It began to happen when I caught the small thread of light in the immediate foreground of the black mass. Light was filtering through from some window up there. It was a ghostly haze, a soupy glow that defined the blocks and hunks of reality ahead of me; crates and cartons, bales and bundles, a variety of cargo piled willy-nilly against the walls and along the middle of the room. There was a corridor between the bales. I started down the path ahead of me, feeling my way carefully.
And then I was out into an open area, beyond the first great, wall of crates. My eyes adjusted to the darkness now. In the square of emptiness beyond, I could make out the source of the thin and nebulous light. A cracked window faced the berth where the Morocco Maid rolled at her moorings. Some of the dockside illumination was filtering through, transforming the scene before me into something out of an eerie stage set, a pattern of grays and blacks that could have been used to stage Faust. But the immediate area made me hold tight to the bales at my side in a reflex of shock.
Straight ahead, in the center of the emptiness, I saw the one crate I was looking for. It was a long, black box. A coffin.
Tension held me motionless against the bales and bundles, lost in breathless scrutiny, fighting to keep my nerve in the unyielding silence of the room, the inky blackness of the void around me. I stood that way for a long minute. I was about to step forward when I heard the noise behind me. A step? A gentle tread, coming upstairs?
I dropped behind the last bale and kneeled, listening. They were footsteps, all right, and they were coming up the stairs, clearly now, the clack-clack of high heels in a pattern of hurried movement. The steps of a woman, a dame in a big hurry. She made the top of the landing and then paused for a look around. I could feel her eyes beyond me, staring down the corridor of crates. And then she was coming my way, advancing with an animal caution, closer and closer, until she was beside me and I could smell the odor of her personal perfume, a weak and tentative smell against the greater mass of stench around me. Whose perfume? The itch to place the odor almost moved me to my feet, so that I could nose her like a sly dog. But before I could lift my head she moved beyond me. She was entering the big square of gray light. She moved confidently to the coffin.
As she lifted the lid I crept behind her. I jerked her up and away from that coffin, turning her body with hard hands. She was caught off guard. A muffled cry escaped her lips. It was just a weak and feminine gasp, but in the electric moment of contact, as I clutched her in my arms and felt the lithe yet soft quality of her body, it rang a bell. And when the shimmering light from the broken window caught her face, she came all the way through to me. I saw her smile, her teeth glistening strangely white in the gloom.
“Jordice!”
“Hello, Johnny,” she said. But the smile was gone now.
She was nudging my navel with her automatic.
CHAPTER 18
“Move back,” she said.
“Funeral services are scheduled for tomorrow, Jordice. You come here for a preview of the stiff?”
“Back, lover boy.” The gun was still probing my navel, headed for contact with my spine. She nudged it deeper and there was no humor in her voice. “I like you better on the other side of the box, Johnny.”
I stepped away from her, wondering whether I could tackle her now … lunge for her, upset her and grab that firing iron. But she was thinking too fast for me. Her hand snaked upward, and in the next moment the cavern of gloom came alive with the sudden glare of light from the bulb hanging above her head. Her eyes held me in sharp focus. Her hand raised the little gun into line with my sweating brow. Her lips curled in a brittle imitation of a smile.
“You didn’t expect me to have a gun, did you, Johnny?”
“You’re full of surprises, baby. I didn’t expect to find a hypo in your apartment, either.”
“Oh?” Her eyebrows went up. “Then you know?”
“I would have known sooner if I had a chance to look at your arms. You must be loaded with main line marks. You’ve been at it a long time, haven’t you, Jordice?”
“Long enough to know how to hide the needle marks.”
Her coffee eyes froze on my face.
She was iced coffee, yet from the neck down she looked pure woman. That old charm rose up to confuse me even now. She mocked me with her lovely face, taunted me with that dancer’s torso. She almost made me forget the fact that she held a gun in her dainty fingers and would squeeze the trigger if I crossed her. The sum total of her made me twist with nausea. How could I handle the sick brain that operated her silken body
? How could I catch her off guard?
She read my mind and smiled.
“Don’t try for an out, Johnny. I can hear your brain working but you’re over your head now. You haven’t got the equipment to beat me. You never did have.”
“I’m just puzzled,” I confessed. “Why did you kill Kay?”
“I thought the big strong dick would know all the answers.”
“I’ve got part of it figured. I know when you killed her.”
Her face lighted again with the evil, lovely smile. “Tell me, lover.”
“You headed for her apartment after you left me at the spaghetti joint,” I said. “You took the cab back to Kay’s place and had at least twenty minutes to knife her. It must have been easy to put her away. She let you in and you walked into the kitchen and grabbed the first knife you found. You must have known she’d be back late. That was why you decoyed me to the spaghetti dump. You had it timed perfectly.”
Jordice clapped the gun against her palm in applause.
“Go to the head of the class, detective.”
“But why did you do it? Did Kay take your man away from you?”
“How did you figure that one out?”
“The fancy food,” I said. “The caviar and snails and truffles. I saw the groceries in Kay’s place. Then I spotted the same grub in your flat. You both fed Hank Foley the same fancy fodder.”
She winked at me expressively. “You’re right about Hank Foley’s taste, Johnny. But his taste has nothing to do with food. That food was for me. What makes you think I don’t like to line my belly with the finer things in life? Kay bought it for me. She knew what I liked.”
She laughed her delight at my stupidity. She was giving me the shock treatment now, the lowdown, the obvious. She was working to promote the pride she had in her own stratagems, feeding her ego on my obvious befuddlement. Her cleverness floored me. She had arranged every detail of Kay’s murder with the precision of a sick mind, the queasy cleverness of a psychotic professional at lawbreaking. I shook my head at her in confusion. I wanted her to see my doubt—to believe it. I wanted to let her feed her ego on my hopelessness, so that I might get the chance to level her. I needed time. I needed a postponement of my immediate funeral.
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