Chapter Three

Somehow the thinking-drinking session at the Elephant lasted longer than I expected or realized. By the time I stumbled to my feet it was almost dark and all the beer in me was brimming my stomach, giving me a heavy full feeling and cooling the cockles of my heart, which the alcohol had briefly warmed.

This type of afternoon is an occupational hazard of a private investigator between jobs.

I decided my car could sit in its downtown garage for the night; I would walk home and restore my vitality. I poked along St. Catherine Street from Peel to Guy, window shopping and pausing to get makings for dinner. Then I started the long climb up Guy and Cote des Neiges to my home, my apartment in the big square building just opposite the beginning of Westmount Boulevard. It was cool, and a little breeze rustled the leaves as I walked. There were trees almost all the way; Montreal is a good city for trees.

When I came into the apartment I locked the door carefully again behind me. I still thought MacArnold might barge back into my ken at any minute to get me tangled up with his mountain body, and that was something to be avoided.

I felt so fine after the long walk that I automatically uncapped a pint of Dow as I walked into the kitchen. The very sight of the beer reminded me I had urgent business to transact in another room. When I got back from the bathroom, I recapped the bottle and got out the Scotch bottle instead. A man’s effluent system can stand just so much.

With the Scotch for inspiration, I settled down to work. I assembled a quart of bulk oysters, a can of cream of mushroom soup, a cupful of bread crumbs and a few appropriate seasonings including sherry. The oysters got cooked on top of the stove in their own juice until they curled at the edges, while the undiluted soup was thickening up a bit more in the double boiler. The bread crumbs I mixed up with a generous dollop of butter. Then everything went into a casserole dish and into the broiler for ten minutes to brown the crumbs and warm up the sherry, and when it came out it smelled so good I just ate it right there in the kitchen, out of the casserole.

I brewed coffee, unwrapped a wedge of Camembert, and carted a tray into my living room. I poured a few liquid gold drops of cognac into a snifter to go with the coffee, and I took my shoes off so I could put my feet up on my chesterfield, and then I relaxed in perfect contentment.

So the door buzzer burped.

I went to the door with my shoes off, my jacket off and my tie under my left ear. Anyone who interrupted me just then could take me as he found me. I opened the door. Then, without even thinking about it, I straightened my tie.

“Elena!” I said joyfully. Then I collected myself and decided if she was chasing, I was running. I carefully put my tie back where it was before and said, but casually, “Don’t you think you’re rushing things a bit?”

“I beg your pardon?” The tall and slim brunette was very distant in her surface coolness. She even retreated one step. For a minute I was afraid I might have to run after her in my stocking feet to bring her in.

“Well, well, come in,” I said. “We were just going to have coffee. You and I. Come in.”

She stepped hesitantly across the threshold and I waite to snap the door shut behind her as soon as she was out of the angle of slam.

“I was looking for a Mr. George Potts,” she said firmly.

“I’m Russell Teed. Remember?”

“And my name,” she said, “is not Elena. It isn’t anything like Elena.”

“Elena is what Paul Hanwood called you, and Elena is good enough for me.”

She eyed me with a mounting degree of suspicion. “What are we playing—anagrams? Hanwood, Schmanwood! Does George Potts live here? If not, which is his apartment?”

“Potts, pans,” I said. “I’ve lived here eight years and the only Potts in the neighborhood are the ones that get thrown at cat-fights after dark.” I got a little impatient. “Come in so I can close the door. We can argue inside.”

She shrugged. She came in from the rather dim corridor, and after I closed the door she followed me through the entry and into the relative brightness of my living room.

She stood rigidly then just beyond the edge of my thick, dark green rug. The rug’s shaggy pile grew up over the toeless tips of her little shoes, and took a bit of height away from the spike heels. She had very sheer, dark stockings like a delicate layer of smoke over her slim legs. She wore a dress of heavy moiré silk cut in striking, almost swashbuckling lines—no doubt an original by somebody. It was dark green, not a matching color to my rug, but not one that fought. That was good because I figured to keep her in the room as long as I could.

She had the cool face and hot eyes that belonged to Elena Giotto; a slim face with hollowed cheeks and piquant, almost exotic angles to the bone structure. The face framed her eyes and set them off, giving them a depth and expression more like a fine painting than a living room. I had a notion you could look into those eyes and believe her either an angel or a red, sizzling little devil.

I looked at her for a while, and as I looked my face slowly got longer and longer, like a kid’s when you tell him the bananas in the centrepiece are just wax.

The corners of my mouth turned down. “Oh, oh,” I said.

“Well?”

“I take it all back. I apologize. I’ll even try to find George Potts for you.”

“You’re willing to admit you made a mistake? Maybe it wasn’t a line, then,” she guessed. “Or maybe it was, and this is still part of it. Well, I’m in here now.”

I came to with a start. “You sure are. Pardon me. I’ll get you a cup. Sit down.” I started for the kitchen. I looked back over my shoulder. “Maybe you think it’s impossible. I’m inclined to think so myself. How could I meet two brunettes that look as much alike as you and Elena Giotto, in the same day?”

It was a rhetorical question. She didn’t try to answer it. When I came back and poured her coffee she asked, “Who is Elena Giotto?”

“The hell with Elena,” I told her. “Who are you?”

“Call me Lila.”

“Lila who? I told you my last name.”

“I’ve forgotten it.”

“Teed. Russell Teed.”

“Oh. The private detective.”

“A private detective.”

She looked around the room, at the yellow walls and the brown walls and the dark green rug; at the light-yellow brick fireplace and the lemon-background patterned upholstery on the chesterfield suite, and all the built-in brown and yellow shelves around the walls where my books and magazines and records were.

“I’d say you did pretty well for yourself,” she commented.

“As well as I can. I don’t work for charity. Somebody was trying to rouse my demon curiosity this afternoon, to get some free work out of me. I made it very clear to them.”

“Oh?” She sounded quite interested.

“Let’s skip the shop talk. Tell me who you are.”

“I’m the girl who was looking for George Potts, remember? I’m still looking for him.”

“Why bother?”

“It’s business, Mr. Teed. I happen to be a public steno.” She reached into the leather map case she trucked around for a handbag and flourished a dictation notebook. “I got a call to come around and take some letters for Mr. George Potts, this address. His name wasn’t on a mailbox downstairs so I came up to look around, and punched your buzzer to ask directions.”

“No George Potts,” I said. “You could try asking the janitor.”

“He didn’t answer his bell. This is a heck of a note, at this time of day.”

“Do you often go out on night calls?”

“I do.”

“Little dangerous, isn’t it, for a girl as beautiful as you are?”

“Why, Mr. Teed!” she said, with corny coyness.

I noticed she was letting her coffee sit there and get cold. I pulled out a deck of State Express and fed her one and lit hers and mine. I indicated the coffee. “Maybe you’d sooner have a drink. Scotch, rye?”

“Since I’m here, thanks. Scotch. May I come with you and inspect the other parts of this establishment?”

“Sure.”

I led the way out of the living room, into the entry, and along the corridor to the kitchen. She stopped to examine something in the neighborhood of the front door, and then arrived in the kitchen.

I was a little embarrassed by the seven or eight empty beer quarts spaced around the kitchen, and the dinner dishes I hadn’t cleared up yet. I commenced the conversation on other lines. “Funny, my mistaking you for Elena Giotto,” I said. “The face isn’t really much the same. Just the coloring and the black hair. And the figure. Of course, the figure. You both have the same type of figure. Excellent, if I may be so personal. But a little unbelievable.”

“It’s my figure,” she said aroused. “I don’t know anything about this Elena Gee-otto, but I resent it if somebody doesn’t believe in mine. What’s wrong with it?”

I looked her over very carefully. She watched me with a this-had-better-be-good expression.

“The falsies,” I said, “are just plain too large for the rest of the chassis. It’s nice, but it’s unbelievable.”

“The what?” she screamed.

“Falsies,” I said apologetically. “After all, you asked me.”

She was trying to make up her mind whether or not to hit me. She decided not to. She’d thought of something better to do.

The dress opened very easily. Buttons down its front weren’t fake; they actually opened up. Maybe she had a petticoat on, but she wasn’t wearing any slip. She threw the unbuttoned dress back off her shoulders and exposed the laciest black brassiere I ever saw. Practically pure lace.

“Well?”

I looked. I enjoyed looking. “Okay, no foam rubber,” I said.

There was a nasty whistling sound just above my left ear that gave me warning I’d been suckered. I had time to move my head about an inch on my shoulders before the sap came down. Instead of landing solidly behind my ear it grazed my head and bounced fairly harmlessly off the back of my shoulder.

A sap, the popular weapon of silent attack, is the same general idea as an old sock filled with sand. Only in the case of a sap you have a little leather pouch, with long thongs for swinging, usually loaded with lead shot. Swung with a good follow-through, it picks up a hell of a lot of momentum before it sinks into a tender part of the skull.

I’d been pouring the drinks while Lila and I talked and I still had my hand wrapped around the bottle. I swung with it, pivoting around and aiming for the spot where the sapper’s head should have been. For a completely blind shot, it wasn’t too bad. I almost got him, but he saw the bottle coming and threw himself right backwards onto the floor. The bottle went over his head an inch high and leaving my hand, hit the wall with a glorious smash. The place immediately began to smell like a lost weekend.

I started to throw myself on the prone crook when I saw the second one. He was coming at me slowly with a gun held very high. He wasn’t going to shoot. He was looking for something to hit, and not a fly on the table either.

The floored thug just lay there with his knees drawn up and his feet pointed toward me, protecting most of his vital areas. He watched me sharply out of a pair of the baggiest eyes this side of the monkey house. He was scrawny, with skin as dark and wrinkled as the leather of a soft, old boot. The mug with the gun was the muscles of the team. He looked about six foot six and his shoulders would touch both sides of the average doorway. He wasn’t too well shaved and his face looked more like the back end of a steel-grey bus than like ordinary flesh. He had large eyes, a peculiar pale brown color, about as full of expression as a parson’s curse.

I had two kitchen chairs and a table, all within reach and not bolted to the floor, to work with. I got one chair by the back and charged the gorilla with it. He stepped back and the only damage I did was to knock his gun out of his hand. As I lunged past the scrawny one, he lashed out and got me with both heels on my right kneecap. That put the leg out of commission and I had to hop. Up until then I’d figured on dodging past them to the hallway and getting my revolver out of the holster in the hall closet; maybe they were afraid to shoot, but I wasn’t.

Now that was out. I pivoted to the right on my one good leg and broke the kitchen chair carefully over the leathery little lug’s sad face. Part of the seat disappeared into his cheek and one of the legs broke so the splintered end tore away a good chunk of his ear. He screamed like a wet baby but didn’t go out. I had to jump on his stomach which was tricky with one bad leg, but I hit the right spot and he went flat as a cheap football after a rough scrimmage.

Muscles was still scrambling in the corner for his gun.

I stole a look over my shoulder to make sure Lila wasn’t creeping up on me. She wasn’t, but she had ideas. She’d found it easier to step out of the dress than to try climbing back into it. I was wrong about the petticoat; all she had on now was the brassiere and a matching pair of black panties that were just as lacy and far more revealing. She was beautifully constructed, but that wasn’t half as important as the fact that she was waiting, poised, with one of the empty beer bottles in her hand. She was getting in position to brain somebody, and I didn’t think for a moment her sympathies were with me.

I picked up the second kitchen chair and let it go at her. I didn’t even watch it land, but took off from my one leg and landed on Muscle’s back. I chopped him twice behind the ear with the edge of my hand and he sagged slightly and shook his head like a spaniel getting water out of its ears.

Just then there was a crunch and a splintering crash, and a big black cloud swelled up behind my eyes and began blacking out the whole scene.

Lila? I thought. Short for Delilah, that was.