“He never mentioned your father to me.”
“It figures,” she smiled sadly. “We never knew him, Johnny. He divorced my mother when we were infants. There was no settlement, because of Mother’s pride. She refused to accept any help from him. It was a silly, impractical thing to do, but that was her way. That was why I never saw my father. That was why I never really thought about him until a few months ago. Do you know who he is, Johnny?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“You must have heard of Mark Tyson?”
“The cartoonist?”
“There’s only one Mark Tyson.”
“The King of the Comic Strips,” I said. Mark Tyson was rated highest of the high in the kingdom of comic art. His strip, “Jeff Noble,” ran in hundreds of papers, including many foreign sheets from Dublin to Calcutta. Tyson had built Jeff Noble into an archetype American, the hard-fisted, steel-jawed adventurer who made small boys drool. Jeff Noble fractured the country in the daily papers first. From there he moved easily into radio and the movies. And today? Jeff Noble grinned his corny smile into millions of living rooms by way of a TV series. Jeff Noble invaded the nurseries as a doll, a game and a breakfast-food huckster. He earned millions for the National Comics Syndicate. And for Mark Tyson, of course.
“The King of the Punks,” she said bitterly. “Jake and I never met our father, Johnny.”
“It happens that way sometimes.”
“Mother didn’t want us to see him, ever.”
“Was he a cartoonist when he divorced her?”
“He was just beginning. Just starting his strip,” she said. “It was after he hit it big with Jeff Noble that he ditched her. He owed her plenty. He owed her his career.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“The idea for Jeff Noble was my mother’s.”
“The idea?”
“The whole concept of the strip came from my mother, and I can prove it. I can prove that he owes her a large slice of his personal fortune, Johnny. After she died I was going through her effects one day. I was curious about her early life with him. I found some papers that prove she originated the entire character, rough scripts she wrote for him. There were also some letters.”
“Letters?”
“Several of them,” Sandra said. “When Mark left her to sell the strip in New York, he wrote to say that her idea would soon be sold. He promised her the world. He praised her for her clever mind. And then, instead of coming home to his family, he abandoned her, the louse.”
She got up and drifted to the terrace door. Against the backdrop of black sky, she was a queen out of a dream, long-legged and rigged for pleasure. She stood there, her eyes hot with purpose.
“I’m going to clip Mark Tyson,” she said. “I’m going to make my father pay for all the miserable years my mother suffered.”
“You’ve contacted him?”
“I’ve tried to see him.”
“He knows what you’ve got?”
“I was stupid enough to phone him and tell him,” Sandra said angrily. She came back to me and began to drink again. I took the glass away from her. “That was a week ago,” she went on. “And that’s where Helen Tate enters the picture.”
“She has the papers?”
“She was bringing them to me from Hollywood. I left them with her for safekeeping, Johnny. I was afraid to carry them with me.”
“Did Helen Tate know about your father?”
“Of course she did.”
“Then she also knew she was carrying dynamite,” I said. “Maybe Helen sold you down the river, Sandra.”
“Never. Not Helen.”
“Are you sure? He’d pay through the nose for those papers.”
“Not Helen,” she said stubbornly.
“Not even for big loot?”
“Not for anything,” Sandra said.
But doubt began to eat her. She crossed the room and refilled her glass and drank thirstily. I questioned her about Helen Tate’s background. They were old friends, out of high-school days. On Sandra’s West Coast singing dates in the Los Angeles area, she would always shack up with Helen. And was Helen the greedy type? There would be no need for such avarice, no need for betraying a good friend. Helen was a very successful model, in demand for high-fashion shots. She earned top rates, had more than enough money.
“Some people never get enough,” I said. “Some people see money as dream stuff. They’ll die for it, even murder for it. And when they get it, they sit on it.”
“I know the type,” said Sandra.
“Think. Is there a chance Helen Tate would cross you?”
“There’s always a chance, isn’t there?”
She didn’t like the idea. She fought to quiet her fears with the liquor. But her keen mind would not let her rest. Nervousness grew in her, the queasy worry loosening her tongue, sending her into an angry monologue about her father. She had learned much about him since her recent arrival in New York. She had asked questions around town, seeking out people who might know him. She summed him up for me in an alcoholic outburst.
And she was right about Mark Tyson. He had a reputation for debauchery in the chic, café society bunch who mattress-hopped and made the scandal columns. Mark Tyson had been involved with Lori Gilliam only last year. Lori was the fickle wren who abandoned her British earl at a penthouse brawl. She left the fiesta with Mark Tyson and when her husband caught up with her he found her naked as a plucked chicken on the white bear rug in the cartoonist’s pad. The news made the sex columns of the tabloids after that. I could still remember Tyson’s face in the slop sheets, his arrogant pan neatly posed in an expression of amused boredom. It was a face to kick. It was a face to spit at.
“My father,” Sandra was saying, “is a heel. I know him well now, out of the dozens of conversations I’ve had with people in his business. He has a dirty name in the cartoon trade. To hell with him, Johnny. Let’s forget him for a while. Sit down, near me. I’m sick and tired of thinking about him, can you understand that? Make love to me, Johnny. Make me forget him, will you? I get angry, much too angry when my mind is on my father. It gives me real headaches, makes me go batty. I sit here and stare out of the damned fool window and cry my silly head off. I don’t want to cry any more, Johnny. Kiss me, will you? Be good to me and I’ll cook you a steak. I’ll—”
But she was already close beside me and her wonderful arms clung to me and she was working to remind me of our past, the keen, cozy days when she leveled me with her lips. I kissed her and she melted into me.
I stayed long enough for the steak and it made a fine interlude in the early morning hours. She cooked the meat the way I liked it, quick-broiled and rubbed with garlic, plus hashed-brown potatoes and perfect coffee. She was a good cook, almost as good in the kitchen as she was in other parts of the house.
But not quite.
CHAPTER 3
10:15 A.M. Saturday
Dave Gross was sitting at his desk when I arrived in our office. It was a bright and shiny day. Behind his bald head, a brace of powderpuff clouds skimmed over the city skyline. A small group of pigeons made love on the window ledge. From far down below came the dull buzz of traffic.
“You look like death warmed over,” Dave said.
“I’m feeling no pain,” I said.
“How about a cup of coffee?”
“I just had four. At Sandra Tyson’s.”
“I see what you mean, Johnny. Maybe what you need is a strong shot of horse, or a couple of Benzedrines?”
“What I need is cooperation,” I said. “Did you start the wheels on the Helen Tate locate?”
“I’ve been on it for over an hour,” Dave said. He consulted a small pad on which he had made numerous notes. On any locate job, Dave moved with scientific precision. He did his spadework by telephone, of course, the normal procedu
re for any skip-trace operation. Dave was a wizard at the telephone. He wasted no calls. He spent some time analyzing the locate before he started down the line of check and double-check.
Many of our clients were big department stores, for whom we traced the deadbeats. Dave Gross had the touch of genius in this area. Every once in a while he would break the world’s record for making a locate on a charge-it-and-run customer. He had a brain for angles. And from the way he was looking at me now, he had already discovered a shortcut to Helen Tate.
“You’ve been eating canaries?” I asked. “Or is that your normal early-Saturday-morning expression?”
“I’ve been lucky, Johnny. You know the Model Exchange? It’s a tremendous outfit, a place where users of photography can go to pick models. A friend of mine, Arthur Giniger, started the idea last year. It’s making a fortune as a clearing house for the girls. Arthur’s promised to check his files for me this morning. He’s on the way to his office to see whether Helen Tate checked in.”
“Anything else?”
“On a Saturday morning, Johnny? Every office in town is closed.”
“And the hotels?”
He smiled at me slyly, pointing to a list on his desk. “I’ve checked all of the places she might choose, you know, the typical tourist traps. No dice. Did you get her picture?”
I showed him the photo of Helen that Sandra had given me after breakfast. It was an eight-by-ten, the usual head shot all professional models carry with them in their sample kits. Helen Tate looked out at you through ebony eyes. She had a fluffed hairdo, of the Italian school, a cut that gave her face a gamin, Lollobrigida look. Her smile, however, made her something special. She had the pixy grin, the little-girl lips; she was the sort of doll who could smile you into bankruptcy and make you enjoy it.
Dave was studying her face, filing it away in his stockpile of important images, when the phone rang. He picked it up and nodded and winked at me. He thanked Arthur Giniger and hung up.
“We’re almost home,” he said. “A girl named Helen Tate checked in at Arthur’s model directory late yesterday afternoon.”
“Her address?”
“The Shorington Arms, an apartment hotel on the East Side.”
“Let’s take a walk, Dave.”
We walked uptown together, along Fifth Avenue where the summertime crop of rustic sightseers gaped and gawked at the elegant shop windows. You could pick them out easily. They were wide-eyed with wonder, their necks craned to see the sights, their inevitable cameras hung from their shoulders. To the discerning eye, the rubes stood out like cactus growing on Fifth Avenue.
They would be easy marks for the shake-down boys of the city. They would be plucked and skinned by a variety of grifters, easy meat for the professional con men. And Helen Tate? Was she sophisticated enough to avoid the snares, to bypass the wandering wolves? Every year great coveys of young quail slip into the big town in search of careers, only to wind up behind the moral eight ball as commercial tosses in the trade of the tart. Every year they come and go, some lucky, others in bad trouble. The pretty gals often fall faster. And Helen Tate was damned pretty.
The Shorington Arms was an ancient trap, asleep and dreaming of its past. The marble lobby sported recent refurbishing, but nothing could hide the cheapness and the gloss. At the desk, a pimply-faced youth bugged his eyes at me when I asked for Helen Tate’s room.
“You want to see Miss Tate?” he lisped.
“You’re catching on, chum.”
“Oh, I see. Well, then. She’s in Room Three-o-seven.” He regarded me with a frozen stare. “Elevator over there on your left,” he added, gulping.
On the third floor, the reason for the desk boy’s horror stalled us before Helen Tate’s room.
There were several cops standing around outside 307.
And along with the cops, Lieutenant McKegnie.
“Johnny Amsterdam,” he said through his fat nose. He stood there flatfooted, his big hands in his pants, waiting for me. “What brings you to this neck of the woods? And you, too, Gross?”
“Client,” I said. Something was going on inside the room. I heard the sound of movement, a few words, a cough. The smell of some kind of medicine. Alcohol? Ether?
“Come again?” McKegnie asked. He shifted his big frame to block the doorway now. One of the cops marched down the hall and took up a post near the window back there. McKegnie barked an order at him, told him to return and park near the fire escape. McKegnie radiated the brisk, impassive authority of the routine police lieutenant of detectives. But McKegnie was no stock city dick. I had seen him in motion many times. I had seen samples of his wit and wisdom. He moved slowly. But he thought fast.
“I’m on a locate for a client,” I said.
“Interesting. Who’s the locate?”
“A girl named Helen Tate.”
“And the client?”
“I can’t tell you my client’s name, McKegnie. You know that.”
“Sure, sure,” he said, his deadpan eyes nibbling at Dave’s tie. He had a habit of staring at inconsequential items while conducting a private quiz. Once, downtown at the Safe and Loft heating room, I had seen McKegnie work over a gunsel under the lights for more than three hours, all the time staring at a gravy spot on the thug’s vest. McKegnie looked up only after the heist artist began to spill his guts. “I know your ethics, Amsterdam,” he said quietly. “Ethics are for doctors and preachers, not detectives. This could be one time when you maybe better forget your ethics.”
“Not a chance, McKegnie,” I said. “Sorry.”
“Even if the Tate girl is a police case?”
“What kind?”
“Assault. Maybe murder.”
“You’re playing games, McKegnie. Spell it out for me.”
“She’s been hurt,” he said to my tie pin. “Bad.”
“When?”
“Last night. The maid walked in at nine this morning, found her half dead, beaten up.”
“Is she in there now?”
McKegnie shook his head at my tie pin. One of his men came out of the room, a fingerprint lad. He uttered a few negative words and McKegnie waved him off. “She’s at Glennon Hospital, in a coma.”
“Did she talk?”
“Not a word.” He shifted his casual eyes to Dave’s belt buckle, studying the craftsmanship, the design or the leather. “The toys on the ambulance said she looked like a concussion case. No telling when she’ll come around. The thug who beat her didn’t find her easy to handle. She’s a well-stacked girl and did her best to fight him off. But he finally put her away under a pillow. He probably tried to smother her. Now why would anybody try to smother a pretty girl like that, Amsterdam?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Naturally. Would you say it was a robbery?”
“I wouldn’t say.”
“I would,” said McKegnie with a sneaky smile. He rocked and rolled on his heels, his hands still planted deep in his pants. “The way I see it, somebody followed her to her room—and not for mattress fun, Amsterdam. She had something the thug wanted. And it was something damned important. But, of course, you wouldn’t know what it was she carried?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Monotonous. You’re a stubborn man.”
“Mind if Dave and I take a look inside?”
“What would you be looking for?” he asked Dave’s tie.
“Browsing,” I said.
McKegnie signaled one of the cops and he led us inside.
“Look,” said McKegnie, “but don’t touch.”
We looked. Somebody had been through Helen Tate’s room with a marauding hand. The small desk near the window had been emptied and overturned, the ink from the inkwell forming a large black blot on the pea-green rug. Alongside the desk blotter, her handbag lay open, its contents spilled willy-nilly
; her cosmetic case, compact and lipstick, a coin purse, a brown leather wallet—opened and disemboweled—and a few bills, were sitting like fallen leaves on the carpet.
“He didn’t take her cash,” Dave said.
“Nor her jewelry,” I added.
A little blue box sat alongside the litter from the desk. There were several items of jewelry near it; a large pendant, a diamond ring and a few silver ornaments done in the modern style and obviously expensive. A string of pearls hung over the box lid. Beyond this debris, her big valise lay under the window. She had probably been in the process of unpacking, because the case was full of clothing, ruffled and roughed up, as though hurried hands had groped beneath the silks. The closet door was open. On the hook, a tweed jacket and a small beret.
Then McKegnie was behind me.
“The bed,” he said quietly. “She fought him off on the bed, Amsterdam, wouldn’t you say?”
“Definitely.” The bed was a masterpiece of disorder, the spread lumped and pulled half off, the two pillows rumpled and thumped. She had ripped and clawed one of the pillow slips, exposing the blue-striped case beneath.
“She must have fallen off,” Dave Gross said.
“Off?” McKegnie turned slowly his way. “How do you figure it, Gross?”
“On the floor, over there. Looks like an earring, doesn’t it, McKegnie?”
“Clever.” McKegnie stooped to pick up the earring, scowling at it for a long moment. “Clever as hell,” he said to Dave’s tie. There was a small flicker of amusement in his eyes, but he buried it before it reached maturity. “Sometimes you private characters can be useful. You take Gross here, he uses his head for thinking. And he’s a real eye, isn’t he, though? He spotted that earring after three of my jerks went over this room. I call that clever, Gross, real smart. Maybe we can do business, the three of us. Maybe we can help each other. What the hell, you want to know when Helen Tate checked in here last night. She checked in at exactly six-fifteen. She came up here a few minutes later and stayed here. The way I see it, the ape who beat her up arrived right away. If there was a struggle, nobody on the floor heard it because there was nobody here at the time. The dinner hour. The gorilla went down by way of the stairs, into the basement and through the alley to the street. The desk clerk saw nobody strange leave the hotel during that period. Now, how would you add all that up, Amsterdam?”
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