One Night Stands And Lost Weekends Part 35

"I don't mind, Ed."

I gave her a brief run-down on the way things seemed to shape up at that point.

"Let me try some names on you," I suggested. "Maybe you can tell me whether Karen mentioned them."

"You can try."

I ran through the eight jokers who had been at the stag. A few sounded vaguely familiar to her, but one of them, Ray Powell, turned out to be someone Ceil knew personally.

"A chaser," she said. "A very plush East Side apartment and an appet.i.te for women that never lets up. He used to see Karen now and then, but there couldn't have been anything serious."

"You know him-very well?"

"Yes." She colored suddenly. She was not the sort you expected to blush. "If you mean intimately, no. He asked often enough. I wasn't interested." She lowered her eyes. "I don't sleep around that much," she said. "Karen-well, she came to New York with stars in her eyes, and when the stars dimmed and died, she went a little crazy, I suppose. I wasn't that ambitious and didn't fall as hard. I have some fairly far-out ways of earning a living, Ed, but most nights I sleep alone."

She was one h.e.l.l of a girl. She was hard and soft, a cynic and a romantic at the same time. She hadn't gone to college, hadn't finished high school, but somewhere along the way she had acquired a veneer of sophistication that reflected more concrete knowledge than a diploma.

"Poor, Karen," she said. "Poor Karen."

I didn't say anything. She sat somberly for a moment, then tossed her head so that her bleached blond mane rippled like a wheat field in the wind. "I'm getting morbid as h.e.l.l," she said. "You'd better take me home, Ed."

We climbed three flights of stairs. I stood next to her while she rummaged through her purse. She came up with a key and turned to face me before opening the door. "Ed," she said softly, "if I asked you, would you just come in for a few drinks? Could it be that much of an invitation and no more?"

"Yes."

"I hate to sound like-"

"I understand."

We went inside. She turned on lamps in the living room and we sat on the couch.

She started talking about the modeling session she'd gone through that afternoon. "The money was good," she said, "but I had to work for it. He took three or four rolls of film. Slightly advanced cheese-cake, Ed. Nudes, underwear stuff. He'll print the best pictures and they'll wind up for sale in the dirty little stores on 42nd Street."

"With the face retouched?"

She laughed. "He won't bother. n.o.body's going to look at the face, Ed."

"I would."

"Would you?"

"Yes."

"And not the body?"

"That too."

She looked at me for a long moment. There was something electric in the air. I could feel the sweet animal heat of her. She was right next to me. I could reach out and touch her, could take her in my arms and press her close. The bedroom wasn't far away. And she would be good, very good.

Two drinks later, I got up and walked to the door. She followed me. I stopped at the doorway, started to say something, changed my mind. We said good night and I started down the stairs.

If she had been just any girl-actress, secretary, college girl, or waitress-then it would have ended differently. It would have ended in her bedroom, in warmth and hunger and fury. But she was not just any girl. She was a halfway tramp, a little tarnished, a little soiled, a little battered around the edges. And so I could not make that pa.s.s at her, could not maneuver from couch to bed.

I didn't want to go back to my apartment. It would be lonely there. I drove to a Third Avenue bar where they pour good drinks.

Somewhere between two and three I left the bar and looked around for the Chevy. By the time I found it I decided to leave it there and take a cab. I had had too little sleep the night before and too much to drink this night, and things were beginning to go a little out of focus. The way I felt, they looked better that way. But I didn't much feel like bouncing the car off a telephone pole or gunning down some equally stoned pedestrian. I flagged a cab and left the driving to him.

He had to tell me three times that we were in front of my building before it got through to me. I shook myself awake, paid him, and wended my way into the brownstone and up a flight of stairs.

Then I blinked a few times.

There was something on my doormat, something that hadn't been there when I left.

It was blond, well-bred, and gla.s.sy-eyed. It had an empty wine bottle in one hand and its mouth was smiling l.u.s.tily. It got to its feet and swayed there, then pitched forward slightly. I caught it and it burrowed its head against my chest.

"You keep late hours," it said.

It was very soft and very warm. It rubbed its hips against me and purred like a kitten, I growled like a randy old tomcat.

"I've been waiting for you," it said. "I've been wanting to go to bed. Take me to bed, Ed London."

Its name, in case you haven't guessed, was Lynn Farwell.

We were a pair of iron filings and my bed was a magnet. I opened the door and we hurried inside. I closed the door and slid the bolt. We moved quickly through the living room and along a hall to the bedroom. Along the way we discarded clothing.

She left her skirt on my couch, her sweater on one of my leather chairs. Her bra and slip and shoes landed in various spots on the hall floor. In the bedroom she got rid of her stockings and garter belt and panties. She was naked and beautiful and hungry...and there was no time to waste on words.

Her body welcomed me. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, firm little cones of happiness, quivered against me. Her thighs enveloped me in the l.u.s.t-heat of desire. Her face twisted in a blind agony of need.

We were both pretty well stoned. This didn't matter. We could never have done better sober. There was a beginning, bittersweet and almost painful. There was a middle, fast and furious, a scherzo movement in a symphony of fire. And there was an ending, gasping, spent, two bodies washed up on a lonely barren beach.

At the end she used words that girls are not supposed to learn in the schools she had attended. She screamed them out in a frenzy of completion, a song of obscenity offered as a coda.

And afterward, when the rhythm was gone and only the glow remained, she talked. "I needed that," she told me. "Needed it badly. But you could tell that, couldn't you?"

"Yes."

"You're good, Ed." She caressed me. "Very good."

"Sure. I win blue ribbons."

"Was I good?"

I told her she was fine.

"Mmmmm," she said.

SEVEN.

I rolled out of bed just as the noon whistles started going off all over town. Lynn was gone. I listened to bells from a nearby church ring twelve times; then I showered, shaved, and swallowed aspirin. Lynn had left. Living proof of indiscretions makes bad company on the morning after.

I caught a cab, and the driver and I prowled Third Avenue for my car. It was still there. I drove it back to the garage and tucked it away. Then I called Donahue, but hung up before the phone had a chance to ring. Not that I expected to reach him anyway, since calling him on the phone didn't seem to produce much in the way of concrete results. But I didn't feel like talking to him just then.

A few hours ago I had been busy coupling with his bride-to-be. It seemed an unlikely prelude to a conversation.

Darcy & Bates wasn't really on Madison Avenue. It was around the corner on 48th Street, a suite of offices on the fourteenth floor of a twenty-two-story building. I got out of the elevator and stood before a reception desk.

"Phil Abeles," I said.

"May I ask your name?"

"Go right ahead." I smiled. She looked unhappily snowed. "Ed London," I finally said. She smiled gratefully and pressed one of twenty b.u.t.tons and spoke softly into a tube.

"If you'll have a seat, Mr. London," she said.

I didn't have a seat. I stood instead and loaded up a pipe. I finished lighting it as Abeles emerged from an office and came over to meet me. He motioned for me to follow him. We went into his air-cooled office and he closed the door.

"What's up, Ed?"

"I'm not sure," I said. "I want some help." I drew on the pipe. "I'll need a private office for an hour or two," I told him. "And I want to see all of the men who were at Mark Donahue's bachelor dinner. One at a time."

"All of us?" He grinned. "Even Lloyd and Kenneth?"

"I suppose we can pa.s.s them for the time being. Just you and the other five then. Can you arrange it?"

He nodded with a fair amount of enthusiasm. "You can use this office," he said. "And everybody's around today, so you won't have any trouble on that score. Who do you want to see first?"

"I might as well start with you, Phil."

I talked with him for ten minutes. But I had already pumped him dry the day before. Still, he gave me a little information on some of the others I would be seeing. Before, I had tried to ask him about his own relations.h.i.+p with Karen Price. Although that tack had been fairly effective, it didn't look like the best way to come up with something concrete. Instead, I asked him about the other men. If I worked on all of them that way, I just might turn up an answer or two.

Abeles more or less crossed Fred Klein off the suspect list, if nothing else. Klein, whose wife was in Reno, had tentatively made the coulda-dunnit sheet on the chance that Karen was threatening to give his wife information that could boost her alimony, or something of the sort. Abeles knocked the theory to pieces with the information that Klein's wife had money of her own, that she wasn't looking for alimony, and that a pair of expensive lawyers had already worked out all the details of the divorce agreement.

I asked Phil Abeles which of the married men he knew definitely had contact at one time or another with Karen Price. This was the sort of information a man is supposed to keep to himself, but the mores of Madison Avenue tend to foster subtle backstabbing. Abeles told me he knew for certain that Karen had been intimate with Harold Merriman, and he was almost sure about Joe Conn as well.

After Abeles left, I knocked the dottle out of my pipe and filled it again. I lit it, and as I shook out the match, I looked up at Harold Merriman.

A pudgy man with a bald spot and bushy eyebrows, forty or forty-five, somewhat older than the rest of the crew. He sat down across the desk from me and narrowed his eyes. "Phil said you wanted to see me," he said. "What's the trouble?"

"Just routine." I smiled. "I need a little information. You knew Karen Price before the shooting, didn't you?"

"Well, I knew who she was."

Sure, I thought. But I let it pa.s.s and played him the way I had planned. I asked him who in the office had had anything to do with the dead girl. He hemmed and hawed a little, then told me that Phil Abeles had taken her out for dinner once or twice and that Jack Harris was supposed to have had her along on a business trip to Miami one weekend. Strictly in a secretarial capacity, no doubt.

"And you?"

"Oh, no," Merriman said. "I'd met her, of course, but that was as far as it went."

"Really?"

The hesitation was admission enough. "L-listen," he stammered, "all right, I...saw her a few times. It was nothing serious and it wasn't very recent. London-"

I waited.

"Keep it a secret, will you?" He forced a grin. "Write it off as a symptom of the foolish forties. She was available and I was ready to play around a little. I'd just as soon it didn't get out. n.o.body around here knows, and I'd like to keep it that way." He hesitated again. "My wife knows. I was so d.a.m.n ashamed of myself that I told her. But I wouldn't want the boys in the office to know."

I didn't tell him that they already knew, and that they had pa.s.sed the information on to me.

Ray Powell came in grinning. He was a bachelor, and this made a difference. "h.e.l.lo, London," he said. "I made it with the girl, if that's what you want to know."

"I heard rumors."

"I don't keep secrets," he said. He sprawled in the chair across from me and crossed one leg over the other. It was a relief to talk to someone other than a reticent, guilt-ridden adulterer.

He certainly looked like a Don Juan. He was twenty-eight, tall, dark, and handsome, with wavy black hair and piercing brown eyes. A little prettier and he might have pa.s.sed for a gigolo. But there was a slight hardness about his features that prevented this.

"You're working for Mark," he said.

"That's right."

He sighed. "Well, I'd like to see him wind up innocent, but from where I sit, it's hard to see it that way. He's a funny guy, London. He wants to have his cake and eat it, too. He wanted a marriage and he wanted a playmate. With the girl he was marrying, you wouldn't think he'd worry about playing around. Ever meet Lynn?"

"I've met her."

"Then you know what I mean."

I nodded. "Was she one of your conquests?"

"Lynn?" He laughed easily. "Not that girl. She's the pure type, London. The one-man woman. Mark found himself a sweet girl there. Why he bothered with Karen is beyond me."

I switched the subject to the married men in the office. With Powell, I didn't try to find out which of them had been intimate with Karen Price, since it seemed fairly obvious they all had. Instead I tried to ascertain which of them could be in trouble as a result of an affair with the girl.

I learned a few things. Jack Harris was immune to blackmail-his wife knew he cheated on her regularly and had schooled herself to ignore such indiscretions just as long as he returned to her after each rough pa.s.sage through the turbulent waters of adultery.

Harold Merriman was sufficiently well-off financially so that he could pay a blackmailer indefinitely rather than quiet her by murder; besides, Merriman had already told me that his wife knew, and I was more or less prepared to believe him.

Both Abeles and Joe Conn were possibilities. Conn looked best of all. He wasn't doing very well in advertising but he could hold his job indefinitely-he had married a girl whose family ran one of Darcy & Bates' major accounts. Conn had no money of his own, and no talent to hold a job if his wife wised up and left him.

Of course, there was always the question of how valid Ray Powell's impressions were. Lynn? She's the pure type. The one-man woman. Lynn? She's the pure type. The one-man woman.

That didn't sound much like the drunken blonde who had turned up on my doormat the night before.