“I gave it to you.”
“Friend, I don’t like that coincidence angle. I’ve found you on top of kills before.”
I shrugged and took a sip of the coffee. “I’m not protecting a client, kid. Since noon I was out checking an accident report for Krauss-Tillman on the new Capeheart Building. That’s five blocks north of the spot where I found the kid.”
“I know where it is.”
“So check on me.”
“Hell, if I didn’t know better, I would. Just don’t make this any of your business.”
“Why should I?”
“Because you have a big nose. That’s what you told me at dinner last night. I’ll be damn glad when you marry Velda and she nails your shoes down.”
“Thanks a bunch,” I grinned at him.
He nodded, picked up his coffee and tasted it, not answering. Pat and I had been friends too long. I could read him too well. He could say as much without saying a word as he could in a conversation. The years since we first met had hardly left a trace on him; he still resembled a trim business executive more than he did a cop ... until you got to his eyes. Then you saw that strange quality that was a part of all professional cops, that of having seen trouble and violence so long, fought it step for step, that their expression was like seeing instant history, past, present and future.
I said, “What’s on your mind, Pat?”
And he knew me too. I was the same as he was. Our fields were different, but allied nevertheless. We had been together on too many different occasions and we had stood over too many dead bodies together for him not to get my implication.
“It was that thing she wore,” he told me.
“Oh?”
“Remember that blonde we fished out of the river last month ... a schoolteacher from Nebraska?” “Vaguely. It was in the papers. What about her?” “She wore a gimmicky robe just like that one, only it was black.”
I waited and he looked at me across the coffeecups. “It’s on the books tentatively as a suicide, but our current M.E. has a strange hobby, the study of chemically induced death. He thinks she was poisoned.”
“He thinks? Didn’t he perform an autopsy?”
“Certainly, but she had been in the water a week and there was no positive trace of what he thought could have caused it.”
“Then what shook him?”
“A peculiarity in the gum structure common to death from that cause. He couldn’t pin it down because of time submerged in water polluted from a chemical treatment unit that was located nearby. He wanted to do some exhaustive tests, but the possibility was so remote and the evidence so inconclusive that we had to release the body to the girl’s parents, who later had it cremated.”
“Something else is bugging you,” I reminded him.
He had another pull at the coffee and set the cup down. “If the M.E. was right, there’s another factor involved. The poison he suggested was a slow-acting one that brought death about very gradually and very painfully. It is used by certain savage tribes in South America as a punishment to those members who have committed what they consider to be a serious offense against their taboos.”
“Torture?”
“Exactly.” He hesitated a second, then added, “I got a funny feeling about this. I don’t like your being involved.”
“Come on, Pat, where the hell would I come in? I dumped it in your lap and that’s as far as I go.”
“Good. Keep it like that. You know how the papers handle anything you’re involved in. It’s a field day for them. You always did make good copy.”
“You worrying about the new administration?”
“Brother!” Pat exploded. “The way our hands are tied between politics and the sudden leniency of the courts it’s like trying to walk through a mine field without a detector.”
I threw a buck down on the table and reached for my hat. “Don’t worry about me,” I said. “Let me know how it turns out.”
Pat nodded and said, “Sure.” But there wasn’t any conviction in his voice at all.
The morning was colored a New York gray, damp with river fog that held in suspension the powdered grime and acid grit the city seemed to exhale with its breathing process. It came from deep inside as its belly rumbled with early life, and from the open wounds on its surface where antlike people rebuilt its surface. Everyone seemed oblivious to the noise, never distinguishing between the pain sounds and the pleasure sounds. They simply followed a pattern, their own feet wearing ruts that grew deeper and deeper until there was no way they could get out of the trap they had laid for themselves. Sometimes I wondered just who was the master and who was the parasite. From the window of the office I looked down and all I could see was a sleeping animal covered with ticks he could ignore until one bit too deep, then he would awaken to scratch.
Behind me the door opened and the faint, tingling scent of Black Satin idled past on the draft from the hall. I turned around and said, “Hi, kitten.”
Velda gave me that intimate wink that meant nothing had changed and dropped the mail on the desk. She was always a surprise to me. My big girl. My big, beautiful, luscious doll. Crazy titian hair that rolled in a pageboy and styles be damned. Clothes couldn’t hide her because she was too much woman, wide shouldered and breasted firm and high, hollow and uscular in the stomach and flanked with beautiful dancer’s legs that seemed to move to unheard music. She was deadly, too. The tailored suit she wore under the coat hid a hammerless Browning and her wallet had a ticket from the same agency that issued mine.
Pretty, I thought, and I was such a damn slob. We never should have let it go this long. I had tasted her before, felt that wild mouth on my own and fallen into the deep brown of her eyes.
Crazy world, but she was ready to play the game out as long as I had to.
“See the papers?” she asked me.
“Not yet.”
“You did real well. I can’t leave you alone for a minute, can I?”
I picked up the tabloid and shook it out. I was there, all right. Page one. The department had held back the details, but it was a big spread anyway. The inside story gave the account of what had happened in general, me hearing the kid and finding the body, but no mention was made of the way the girl had died. Most of the yarn concerned the kid who had been playing on the site and accidentally came across the corpse when he lifted the sheetrock.
As yet no identification had been made of the woman and no witnesses to the disposal of her body had been located, but my accidentally stumbling on the scene was played up and some of my history rehashed for the public benefit. The writer must have been somebody I bucked once, because the intimation was that it involved me personally. Coincidence was something not acceptable to him. At least, not with my background.
I tossed the paper down and pulled a chair up with my foot. “Here we go again.”
Velda shrugged off her coat and hung it up. I recited the incident all over again and let her digest it. When I finished she said, “Maybe it’ll be good for business.”
“Nuts.”
“Then stop worrying about it.”
“I’m not.”
She turned and smiled, the even white edges of her teeth showing beneath that full, rich mouth. “No?”
“Come on, sugar.”
“Get it out of your system. At least call Pat and find out what it’s about.”
“Dames,” I said, and picked up the phone.
His hello was cool and he didn’t repeat my name, so I knew he had company in the office. He said, “Just a minute,” and I heard him get up, walk to the filing cabinet and slide a drawer open.
“What is it, Mike?”
“Just my curiosity. You get anything on that kill?”
“No I.D. yet. We’re still checking the prints.”
“Any dental work?”
“Hell, she didn’t even have a filling in her mouth. She looked like a showgirl type so she might have a police registration someplace. You talk to any reporters yet?”
“I’ve been ducking them. They’ll probably dig me out here, but there’s nothing I can tell them you don’t know. What’s the matter, you don’t sound happy.”
“Mitch Temple from
The News
spotted the similarity in those flimsy robes that were on the bodies. He got lucky in checking out the labels and beat us to the punch. They were purchased in different spots—those shops that specialize in erotic clothes for dames. No tieup, but enough to hang a story on.”
“So what can he say?”
“Enough to stir up some of these sex-happy nuts we have running loose around here. You know what happens when that kind of stuff hits the papers.”
“Anything I can do?”
“Yeah ... if you know Mitch well enough, tell him to lay off.”
I grinned into the phone. “Well now, this can be a fun afternoon.”
Pat grunted and said, “I suggested you
speak
to him, buddy.”
“Sure, buddy. The point is loud and clear. When do you want my official statement?”
“Right now if you can get the lead out.”
When I hung up I gave Velda the rundown and reached for my hat. She gave me that funny quizzical look and said, “Mike ...”
“Yeah?”
“Did Pat notice the color relationship of those negligees?”
“Like what?”
“Black on a blonde and green on a redhead.”
“He didn’t mention it.”
“They aren’t exactly conservative. They’re show-off things to stimulate the male.”
“Pat thinks the last one was a showgirL”
“The other was a schoolteacher though.”
“You’re thinking funny thoughts, girl,” I said.
“Maybe you ought to think about it too,” she told me.
chapter 2
My reception at headquarters wasn’t exactly cordial. I gave a detailed statement to a police stenographer in Pat’s office, but when he got done with the routine interrogation the new assistant D.A. took it from there, trying to sweat out some angle that connected me to the case. Luckily, Pat deliberately checked out my movements and corroborated them ahead of time, getting both of us off the hook, but not without getting the eager-beaver assistant D.A. red in the face. He gave up in disgust and stamped out of the office after telling me to stay in town.
“He must have read that in a book somewhere,” I told Pat.
“Don’t mind him. The front office gets spooked when sensational cases hit the papers in an election year.”
“Don’t kid with me, Pat. It smells like they’re setting you up to be the patsy if something goes sour.”
“You know how they’re shaking up the department. Too many of the good ones already retired out in disgust.”
“Don’t let those political slobs ride you.”
“I’m a paid employee, buddy.”
I grinned at him. “Well, I’m not, and I got a big mouth. Outside a dozen reporters are waiting for me to show and I can do a little sounding off when I get rubbed wrong.”
“Knock it off.”
“Hell, no trouble.”
“Forget it. You get to see Mitch Temple?”
“Not yet.”
“Do that much and you’ll do me a favor. That’s all I ask. The rest we can handle just fine right here.”
“I told you before I’m not in this.”
“Tell it to the boys waiting outside:” He got up and waved to the door. “Let’s go. Your public awaits.”
Pat sweated out the interview with me, watched me stand for pictures and nodded with approval when I parried the questions. For a change I didn’t have to dodge and they knew it was because my story was a straight one. A couple wanted my opinion on the kill, but I shrugged it off. So far it was only Mitch Temple who had tried to tie in the earlier murder with the redhead, so there wasn’t anything from that direction. If there was a tieup, Pat would find it. Right now it was only guesswork.
When they finished with me we went down to the coffee urn and drew a couple of cups. “You did pretty well back there.”
“Nothing to tell them.”
“Thanks for not guessing. Maybe I have something to tell you.”
“Maybe I’d just as soon not know.”
“Yeah,” Pat said sourly. “So far there’s no definite connection with those negligees. If the first one was a suicide, it’s common enough. More than half who do the dutch act go out naked or partially dressed, though damned if I know why.”
“You said
if
, Pat.”
“Our little M.E. friend pursued his hobby further than I thought. Before they carted the corpse off he took tissue samples for further study. He won’t commit himself positively, but he seems satisfied that his diagnosis was correct. As far as he’s concerned, that first dame was poisoned, slowly and painfully.”
“What can you do about it?”
“Nothing. There’s no body to exhume and no way of proving those tissue samples came from the original corpse. Given a few more days and there won’t be any trace of the chemical that was administered. It’s deteriorated.”
“And the other one?”
“A whip that left pretty definite imprints on the flesh. They match specialty items shipped from Australia for a few circus and stage acts.”
“Trace the buyers?”
Pat nodded. “The regulars buy them in dozen lots. Straight people. The trouble is, the import house plants them around in all sorts of places ... even to advertising them in those fetish magazines. We checked their orders and they’ve sold hundreds by mail alone. It would be damn near impossible to trace one back.”
“That leaves her prints.”
“And her pictures. The photo lab did a pretty good job of reconstructing her as she must have looked.” He held out a four-by-five glossy and I scanned it closely. “Faces like that get remembered,” he told me. “She was quite a beauty.”
“Can I keep this?”
“Be my guest. It’ll be in the paper anyway.”
“Good deal. I’ll call you after I see Temple.”
“Think it’ll do any good?”
I let out a short laugh. “I know a few things he wouldn’t want to get around.”