The Del Rio's interior was a harsh, jarring world of dancing strobe lights, weird dance-hall gleams and glitters, so that an observer would get an impression of constant movement and activity, however senseless and meaningless. Nobody seemed to mind. The shafted darkness was right up everybody's street. You could find a table or a chair, order a drink at the stiffest rates in town, and revel in the naked parade before your eyes. That was the Del Rio in a nutshell. And along with myself, the place must have been filled with every type of male animal known to the field of psychology. I saw baldies and fatties and thinnies, oldies and youngies and silent, furtive men. And loudly talking men. And those sort of characters who sit and stare and do nothing but twitch a little. And those kind of males who breathe hard and let their lower lips get wet and then let out a sigh. Oh, there was a clean-cut American-boy type hither and yon, but what they might really be was anybody's guess.
I didn't come to check on them, though.
I'd come to see Ada Ven. And her act. And her Thing.
And to trap the Gingerbread Man, if and when.
Men have found lots of ways of killing time for an evening's fun. Strip-watching is one of them. It is only when it isn't just a passing thing, when it becomes a night-in, night-out fetish, that it is probably more than meets the eye. Either way, it didn't matter. This was the place where Ada Ven was working. As such, it commanded my attention. And Flatek's and Lasky's. Flatek had wanted to be in on the kill and since he and Lasky had been assigned to Ven in the first place, Monks decreed they could be on the spot. There was hardly any chance of spotting them in the crazy lights, but I knew they were placed advantageously in the room. I didn't bother looking for them. Just knowing they were there was good enough. Three guns were better than one.
The first show started right on schedule at ten o'clock.
What laughingly passed for a band was a hidden tape recorder somewhere that combined all the risque, jazzy old burlesque beats with modern rock-type music. From "Paradise" to "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" is quite an ethnic leap, but the Del Rio managed it for its patrons of the tarts. Ada, of course, would only settle for something like "The Hucklebuck" but that was her hangup. The Del Rio crowd just didn't give a damn as long as all the darling ladies of the show took it off.
Strip had taken a real nosedive since the old days. Come way down.
There was no emcee, no comics, no introductory patter from a cabaret-type man. Not a chance. The overhead was so low it was funny. The tape recorder merely went from song to song, broke for a voice saying, "And now for the delectable darling of forty-eight states, Miss Bonnie Bee. She'll really make things buzz. . . ." And then all the fun started. I don't suppose Miss Bonnie Bee had ever peddled her wares in Alaska or Hawaii, but what the hell? Geography didn't matter, either.
The show was still the thing. It had to be, at those prices.
Bonnie Bee came as Jellybean Jackson had advertised her. And as far as the Del Rio devotees were concerned, that was just fine.
To the lilting, coarse melody of "Put The Blame On Mame," Bonnie Bee tossed, shook, and completely destroyed everything that Women's Lib is fighting for these days. She was big, powerful, utterly enormous in the breasts and rump and when she finally was wearing nothing but the jazzily red spiked shoes, her blonde hair flowing down her broad back, the wolf pack was howling its glee. Nobody looked at her face, either. Rita Hayworth, she wasn't. Jellybean Jackson had called the shot on that, too. But La Bee buzzed mightily. And every heterosexual, homosexual, and plain tourist in the joint responded. The strobes winked and flashed and great swaths and concentrations of packed epidermis paraded on the runway. Bonnie Bee was no artist, sad to say. Just a hunk of female flesh, enthusiastic, free-formed and bursting. She had no kind of act at all. It was strictly ain't-I-built-and-wouldn't-you-like-to-use-me? For a strip joint, it would be a tough act to follow. Everything had been put on the table in plain sight—a feast.
Tremendous buttocks still gyrating, Bonnie Bee bounced offstage and the Del Rio shivered with sound. Gapping, whistling, shouting. The tape recorder ran down, took a few silent beats and then the unseen recorded voice assumed a new sound of importance. "And now, the Del Rio proudly presents . . . in her only exclusive New York appearance . . . the one, the only, the woman they said couldn't be done . . . Ada the greater . . . the number-one nude attraction in the world—ADA VEN!"
The brassy, low and building tempo of "The Hucklebuck" sounded.
The hush that closed over the darkened precincts surrounding the illuminated runway would have been laughable if it wasn't so impressive. So laden with a downright spirituality that it was awesome.
I'd heard such a hush when Casals performed at City Center, when Olivier read the soliloquy from Hamlet, when Margot Fonteyn danced her ballets—that tiny moment of waiting and expectation, before the wound-up nerves and excitement of those events exploded into rafter-rocking applause. But this was none of those people. This was an Ada Ven who was only going to show her body and you would have thought it was the Second Coming.
Ada Ven—a mere nude lady who wasn't going to sing, dance, or play a difficult instrument like a virtuoso or even read from a book of poems. None of those things, which are an art. Divine arts.
With "The Hucklebuck" thumping its suggestive beat, Ada Ven came on stage from the left, and the Del Rio greeted her with hosannas and hallelujahs that all could be freely translated Hot Damn!
In no time at all, I knew why.
For as the shouting and yelling subsided and the act became the thing and the cynosure of all eyes and private lusts, I had the answer.
Something Jellybean Jackson had conveyed to me in a far different interpretation. To Jellybean, Ada Ven was something else.
But her act wasn't.
She had appeared wearing a three-quarter length black leather coat with a pair of high-heeled boots completing her costume. Under the coat were the pasties and the third covering necessary before the grand finale. But between all those appurtenances was one of the most glorious female bodies alive still. And that flaming red hair. With a black leather whip consummating the motif of Red Lady Cruelty. The flagellation theme.
She flicked the whip, flicked her hips, played with the coat, and paraded all around, green eyes fixed on every man in the audience, and the few women too, and began to peel by degrees. What she did with the black whip, shaped in purely Phallic terms, wasn't anybody's guess. It was everybody's certainty. And pretty soon, with the music mounting to a frenzy of repetition and familiarity, the Great Ven got right down to the nubbin. The heart of the matter. She was all heart. And Deepthroat too.
And that was exactly what was the matter with her act. Her art as she liked to call it, as she had tried to tell me. It was a fraud.
She wasn't even a good dancer. She was just a beautifully—no fantastically—shaped woman, with a flare for theatricality. What she could do when she was completely stripped, with only the boots and whip between herself and the audience, was somehow ugly.
Ada Ven was downright lewd, licentious, and vulgar.
Not that anybody minded, except me. Ye olde bleeding heart.
The sight of her, under the naked lights, pushing that leather whip between her splendid thighs and riding over it slowly, with thrusting movements of her hips and abdomen, turned me off. And when she poked it suggestively into her ample navel, and the room rocked with sound and appreciation and she smiled and did it again and again, I was in a world all by myself. There is nothing more sensual to me than what the lady had, what she looked like, how she could look at me, but when she did all the same things for public consumption, it just wasn't the same. Macy's window is not the proper setting for such things.
So Ada rocked on, pushing it, thrusting it, jamming it into the customers' eyes and as each of her globular mammalian wonders swung and played with desire, I was practically yawning.
Her It had become a meaningless, unimportant item. A commodity.
That o
ld Korean expression—"a man keeps his courage, like his love, dark"—and that isn't just a play on words about me and Melissa Mercer; it says it all for me about what Ada Ven was doing. I can never go public when it comes to my own birds and bees. Which is just one of the reasons that strip or ecdysiasm, or whatever the hell they may want to call it, will never be an art to me. It's just advertising the hots and that's it. Art, hooey. Stag movies are art, too.
Sure, they can all be pleasure kicks, vicarious one-night fun and games. But on a strictly cash basis, as a way of life, count me out.
I was all alone in the Del Rio. Like Poe's "A Man of the Crowd."
As the music jarred to a close and Ada Ven sashayed back into the darkness behind the curtain, the place literally exploded. With a rumbling, bursting thunder. A maelstrom of sound and jubilation. And sin.
I slid away from the dark wall where I had positioned myself and threaded my way through the noisy customers toward backstage.
I was still a hired gun. I still had to protect Ada Ven from the Gingerbread Man, with or without the five-thousand dollar retainer.
No matter how I felt about her and the art of striptease.
They should both live so long.
In the darkness, pierced only with those crazy lights, I hadn't seen anyone I knew. Not Flatek or Lasky or Jellybean Jackson. Or the Alexander Pipps who owned the place. Or Rance Rogers or Donn Dunn. The newspaperman on the skids and the Muscle-Beach man. I didn't know the last three, but I think I could have spotted them from Jellybean Jackson's vivid word pictures. He had described them to me, graphically.
I hadn't seen the Gingerbread Man, either.
But he was there, all right. Somewhere in that darkness.
He had to be.
The way Ada Ven stripped for a living, she had to be a marked woman for a maniac who loathed and despised exotic dancers.
The Ven dressing room had a cracked, peeling, gold-painted star on the door. That was a fair enough preview of what the interior was like. Plain cane chairs, a big mirror with bulbs bordering the frame, and just enough room for a big, black, brass-studded steamer trunk and the lady herself. Even ritzier places than the Del Rio don't do much better for their stars. Ada was in the chair before the mirror, overflowing it, a fine sheen of dew all over her splendid figure. She wore nothing but a thin dressing robe over her nudity as I walked in on her, after she recognized my voice in answer to her who-goes-there? She didn't sound scared at all. The old workhorse fever had obviously demanded all of her mind and energies. She was practically preening herself in front of the mirror. The green eyes, with the yellow glints, were almost happy.
"Geez, you never know how much you miss the old grind until you lose a day. Know what I mean? How was it?"
"You heard them," I said flatly, standing behind her and watching her in the mirror. She was patting herself dry with a handful of tissues from an opened box atop a stack of unopened Kleenex cartons. It must have been like trying to dry up Niagara Falls with a dishrag. "They could have watched you until the cows came home."
"Moooooo," she lowed, chuckling. "Well, they know what they're getting when they see me. How about you, Ed? Did you dig it?"
"I don't count," I said, eyeing the black whip, the boots, and the three-quarter-length leather coat, all of which were propped on one of the cane chairs. "Strippers would starve if they had to depend on me for a customer. But—you were everything you were supposed to be. Looking like you do, you can't miss."
She cranked around in her chair, back to the mirror, one lovely arm hooked over the wooden top. Her green eyes frowned up at me. She had gotten to know me pretty well in a very short time.
"I get it," she said in her full throaty boom. "You didn't like it. It's not your cup of tea. What I do and what I am didn't seem to bother you last night, kiddo. You went after it same as everybody else. Don't be a hypocrite, Ed."
"Fair enough." I smiled down at her which wasn't much of an angle. Even sitting down, she was a giant female. "I enjoyed myself with you. A helluva lot and then some. But that's got nothing to do with the price of the eggs we're talking about right now. Fact is, Ada, we've come down to the end of the line. Where's Jellybean?"
Her frown widened, as if I had gone crazy.
"Out front counting the house. He likes to do that. What the hell is the difference where he is?"
"All the difference in the world," I said, very calmly, "seeing as how he's the Gingerbread Man. I know that, now. What I don't know is when you found out for yourself. I'm gambling that you didn't know until today. Sometime while I was out and left you two alone. Is that right? Level with me, Ada. I'm the best chance you've got."
"You're crazy," she said, slowly, shaking her head. "You really are crazy—when did you dream this up, Ed?"
"I wish it were a dream, Ada. If it was, then five innocent women would still be alive. And none of us would have anything to worry about, would we?" I backed off from the chair, still looking at her.
"Ed, are you off your trolley? Jellybean? The midget? My own little manager? Why he can't open a can of sardines without help."
"No good, Ada. I know better. He happens to be one of the very strongest little guys I've seen. And if you'll stop looking at me as if I've lost my marbles, I'll tell it all to you. But only if you come clean with me. Don't worry, Ada. It's all out in the open now and I've got a forty-five, cops all over the club, and not even Jellybean crazy with a knife is going to get away from us. But I have to know first what you know. I know he told you today—he'd have to."
"Why?" she whispered fiercely, her eyes acting funny, her full mouth pinched. "Why would he have to tell me today?"
"Because," I said, as honestly as I could, "he doesn't want to kill you. The whole business was for you. To promote you, to make you bigger, to make him bigger in your eyes. The poor nut. It was either having a go at you tonight after the show, just like all the others, to take suspicion away from you—or telling you. I figure he told you. He still wants you, Ada. The old way. And he's tired of playing your game. So you either had to be told or be killed. Now, which is it?"
Ada Ven looked away from me, quickly, averting her face. I watched her in the bright glare of the bulbed mirror. Her face was drawn and a little paler. The green eyes were fearful, as if something might suddenly happen in the little dressing room. She took a deep breath and her great breasts Yo-Yoed. She shuddered and patted at her cheeks nervously.
"If I tell you—" it was almost an inaudible whisper—"what do you do then—what about the little guy?"
"You can't make any deal for a man who's murdered five women, Ada. He gets turned in, no matter what. All I'm trying to do now is protect you. If the cops tie you in with his mad scheme, you could go all the way with him to the chair. Or whatever it is that they do do to murder-one characters and their accomplices."
Ada Ven closed green eyes.
She didn't stir. Only her lip moved.
She could have been a statue instead of a flesh-and-blood woman.
"You tell me," she murmured. The boom was all gone from her. "And right now. Everything you think, everything you got. On Jellybean. And then I'll tell you what I have to tell, but not before."
"To the bitter end, Ada? Like in the books?"
"That's it, Ed, baby. I deal no other way. Talk now." She opened her eyes and this time she watched me in the mirror. "From the top."
"All right, sweetheart," I agreed, taking out my cigarettes and watching her too and the door. It was closed tight and the little room seemed far removed from customer noise, music and uproar, as if it might have been insulated or soundproof. "But it's not very nice. I've never run up against a Jellybean Jackson before. I don't think the cops have either. How often do you meet a guy who kills five women just to impress another woman? If that isn't crazy, what is?"
"Stop beating your gums." It was a rasp of protest, but it rumbled out of her full bosom like thunder. "Spill it, will you? Don't give me any of your god-damned sermons. I want t
o know."
"You want to know." I shook my head, wanting to curse and scream at her for her blind spots. For all the selfish, greedy stupidity in the world. "Sure. I'll tell you. And when I'm finished all you're really going to say is—poor little guy, he must have been crazy—oh, Ada Ven. You aren't only Nevada spelled backward, you're just about the biggest concentration of mindless beef on the hoof there is."
"We'll call each other names later," she hissed. "Start talking."
I began, never taking my eyes off her.
Or the door.
Which turned out to be two wrong places to pay attention to.
But I didn't know that until later.
When it was too late.
THE WORLD WE LOVE IN
"All right," I said, "we'll take it from the top. Let's start with Heavenly Blue, killed in an alley early in the morning, a couple of blocks from the club where she had finished her last show. She was living in a hotel close to her club and she always walked back there when work was done. Stripper number one. She called herself an exotic dancer, but she was a peeler, just the same. And she died on Monday. And that's the story of Heavenly Blue.
"On Tuesday, we come to stripper number two. Cleo Patra. Found slumped over her dressing-room table between shows at the Kit Kat Club where she worked. Also early morning. Cleo was a little more honest than most of you. She called herself a stripteaser. But she died just like Heavenly Blue. In the buff, a knife wound in her heart, and an 'S' written on her naked belly."
I let a blue smoke ring crawl to the ceiling where it shattered.
Ada Ven stared up at me, unable to look away. I was fascinating her, whatever the reasons were. Her mouth was taut as if she was holding her breath, as if it pained her to breathe.
"Comes Wednesday, and the Gingerbread Man, who starts sending postcards and letters to police headquarters, nails stripper number three. Dimples O'Shaughnessy, who is really a Korean girl, and calls herself a belly dancer, working all the Greek and Turkish spots in town, is found on her hotel bed, a few hours after her last show. Also very early in the morning. Same knife in the left breast. Same letter 'S.' The cops know it was put on with a lousy cheap fingernail polish called Red Rose. And the cops also know the killer is left-handed, due to the angle of the stab wounds, the handwriting on the letters, I guess. No real trick to finding that out. Thursday, we get an instant replay. Stripper number four hits the deck. She calls herself Gardena Eden, The Snake Woman, who happens to be a black woman. But the Gingerbread Man is obviously colorblind. Gardena is found naked and stabbed and written on in a parked sedan, between shows. The car was in the alley behind her club. And mind you now, not once in all these four murders has anyone seen anyone or spotted anybody at all. True it was very early in the morning. But Times Square isn't empty no matter what time it is, so how did Heavenly Blue get killed with no one seeing anybody suspicious? How did Cleo Patra get nailed in her own dressing room in a packed club? With no stagehands or wardrobe ladies or people like that not spotting a single character? And Dimples O. Murdered in a hotel room and again no elevator operators, no guests, no anybody able to report anything unusual or out of the way. Gardena got done in in her car in an alley right behind her club, and again no witnesses. And then on Friday, another stopper. A topper. Satana of Iran, also a belly dancer, but also a real stripper, is killed in her bathtub right in her own apartment on Beekman Place. Again early in the morning, after she came home from her last show. Our five dead girls all had their last show. In the nude, for a mad bastard who stuck a knife in them and left his signature and vanished. The Gingerbread Man is not invisible, but he might as well be. Nobody has ever seen him—"
Kill Her- You'll Like It! Page 10
