CHAPTER 17

The odds were fifteen hundred to one. Nothing like this ever happened at my favorite horse haven, the Roosevelt Raceway, where the trotters scoot behind the sulkies; no daily double equaled this gamble for sheer fantasy; no single wager ever can. The detective sits behind his personal parimutuel machine, running down the nags in his own rat race, handicapping his suspects out of the dim and distant charts of experience and perception. The odds in The Montord were fifteen hundred to one because the guests and the staff were in league against me. Around and around my humming brain they raced. But I was cutting them down and weeding them out. Before long, I would narrow the field to the important subjects and scratch the rest. Right now the field was almost in line and there would be no extra starters.

The rain had stopped, as suddenly as it began.

On the edge of the swimming pool the bathers sat around in attitudes of careless relaxation, the younger set geared for the heat of the morning sun in Bikini ensembles, enough to cover their burgeoning charms with a wisp and a wink. The feminine contingent sprawled and squatted in the key positions at either side of the blue-green man-made lagoon. Around and about them roved the masculine water sprites, flexing their muscles and exercising their eyes in the ritual routine of all predatory Punchinellos. Here and there a couple danced quietly to the tune of a distant rhumba, rubbing and rocking in lumpy gestures on the concrete floor. The music was muted and mellow, rolling out of the small shack at the edge of the tennis courts. There was a sign on the roof:

DARLENE and CHICO

Rhumba and Samba Lessons

By Appointment Only

A terraced walk skirted the rhumba room, high enough above the window so that I could see inside. A couple eased past the window facing me, the girl moving gracefully as she led her middle-aged Spaniard through the first lessons of the bounce. He was putty in her hands, and twice as awkward. But she smiled at him tenderly, approvingly, letting him enjoy the intimacy of her supple frame. It was Darlene, and she was hard at work.

A row of low hedges skirted the rise on which I stood, giving me a rustic nook from which I could observe the flow of life below me. The entire front of The Montord lay down there spread out in a panoramic view; the main entrance and the five buildings; the pool and the tennis courts; the staff quarters and the dining hall. Against this background of conglomerate architecture, the roving clientele passed before me, some bound for the golf course, others aimed for the small card tables under the trees. To the right the parking lot lay quiet. Two wandering patrolmen ambled through. The sight of these two made me think of Jorgenson.

Jorgenson pushed all the others out of focus for me. I had been watching and thinking before this moment. My mind had been bright with the odd assortment of characters encountered in these past few days. They had occupied the forefront of all my waking mental gymnastics: Manny Erlich and Paul Forstenburg and Darlene and Chico; Archy Funk and Margo Lewis and her petulant suitor, Buddy Binns; Lili Zenda and Don Trask and old Armette. Behind all of them, the tragic figure of Grace Lasker always rose up to dominate my mind. And after her figure had misted and died, I made the detour back to the problem at hand and saw Hugo Repp stagger and fall and clutch at his bloody throat. All of these things, all of the faces and events were gnawing at me with the sharp teeth of urgency. Yet, everything faded when I considered Jorgenson.

Jorgenson tightened me because I hated the punk. His larded image blacked out all decent thinking in me. Nothing burns me more than a crooked cop, and in my book Jorgenson was as dirty as a shallow sewer. A private investigator meets many of them in his career: the petty goniffs who trafficked with the bookies; the sly flatfeet who looked away from crime for a fast buck; the city dicks with perpetually extended palms. But Jorgenson, in all my lexicon of putrescent police, made my stomach heave and my fists tighten. He clung to the outer edge of my consciousness and interrupted my theoretical ramblings. He crept into every waking thought and intruded his maggoty personality. He froze my mind. He gave me fixed ideas, and this sort of ruminating does not make for limpid deduction. Yet the very sight of him brought subtle stiffness to the short hairs on the back of my neck.

The way they were stiffening now.

Because Jorgenson was coming out of the main entrance. He was sniffing the air, his big head aimed into the sky like a tired mastiff. And after he tested the weather, he put his hands in his pants pockets and started across the garden on a diagonal, moving with his usual rambling stride, as casual as a bum on the prowl for cigar butts. He crossed under the trees and skirted the pool, taking a long detour. I wondered vaguely what he would say if he knew that I had him in focus. He seemed off on some sort of aimless stroll, beyond one of the outbuildings and into a small section of grassy meadow a few hundred yards away.

I kept my personal camera on him, feeling smug and good about the whole business of watching him. He did nothing but light a cigar and stare back toward the hotel, puffing slowly and leaning against a tree and pretending that he might be a nature lover. He plucked a tall grass blade and bit at it and threw it away. And through all of this, his head seemed aimed in one direction.

He was watching the rhumba hut.

I lowered my sights and stared down the little hill. Darlene stood near the door, bidding farewell to her last customer, a little man who seemed hell-bent on taking her arm off. She slid away from him with a quick and graceful, turn of her body, and waggled a finger at him and accepted his last few words of raffish innuendo. Then he was headed away, toward the golf course and his next athletic enterprise. Darlene stood silently by, watching him walk away. Her partner got off his lean Spanish tail and said a few words to her and left with the two young thrushes who had been exchanging badinage with him.

Alone now, Darlene paused at her door.

The scene became a long shot pantomime out of a Hitchcock movie. Things began to happen and I felt like God on a hill, looking down at two actors in a personal drama of their own devising. The sun was out again and the day was bright and the birds fluttered and sang around me. Yet the atmosphere had the chilly aura of a well-contrived play. The characters were coming to life down there. They were separated by a long stretch of grass and furze. Jorgenson seemed frozen under the tree, still sucking at his cigar and allowing a thin thread of smoke to curl away from him. Darlene faced him across the empty pasture, her eyes riveted on him and her body motionless and crisply defined under the bright sun. They were frozen in the tableau. Nothing moved. Nothing stirred but the grass, flicked and brushed by a vagrant breeze. Then Jorgenson shifted his body slightly and I saw Darlene adjust herself to watch him as he moved away from the deep shadow under the tree and started back into the woods, slowly, slowly, in the attitude of a man hunting quail eggs.

And then Darlene moved.

She paused to light a cigarette and flick the match away and look around her in every direction, as carefree and purposeless as a casual stroller. She moved off into the pasture, her body a spot of vibrant color against the tall grasses. She was wearing a pair or crimson slacks, a glistening, glaring color topped with a white blouse of the same material. She passed my line of vision midway through the field. I held my breath. What would happen if she saw me now?

But Darlene was interested only in the distant stretch of trees and woodlands where Jorgenson had vanished. For a flickering pause she hesitated and turned her graceful body completely around, snaking her eyes back toward the hotel. In the interval, she was close enough for me to see her intimately; the cold, hard glint of her, deep-set eyes; the nervous flick of her fingers on the cigarette; the rise and fall of her full breasts under the white and shimmering silk. And then it was all over and she was under way again, straight ahead and looking neither to the right nor left, but walking faster now, deeper and deeper into the grasses and beyond the grasses into the rim of shrubs and small trees that skirted the field and finally hid her from view.

I got off my butt and started after her, running down the small hill and reaching the edge of the grass before the full force of reason hit me. I stopped.

I stepped backward as quickly as I had come. In the few minutes it took me to reorient myself, any impartial observer might have considered me ripe fruit for a psychiatrist’s couch, or a well-tailored straightjacket in the nearest asylum. But the mind is a fickle taskmaster. I had operated on impulse when I set out to pursue the fleeing Darlene. And my impulse would have led me up the garden path to nothing at all. But now my feet were taking me around the hedge and back to the rhumba hut and my hands were testing the front door and finding it securely locked.

So I did it the hard way. I opened the window facing the tennis courts and offered a silent prayer to Mother Nature for having doused the courts with enough of her tears to make them unplayable this morning. The window was easy and I slipped inside and stood there, alone in a den of rhumba and mamba.

It was a small room, square and sparsely furnished. The floor had a high and waxy shine, rubbed down by the feet of many students. Around the walls sat a few ancient wicker chairs and on the far side of the room a few more chairs of the card table variety. The pine walls were festooned with a variety of Spanish art, calculated to give the place atmosphere and authenticity. A large poster announced a bullfight in Mexico City one day five years ago. Another art piece showed a Spanish muchacha with pearly teeth and a souped-up smile gazing up at a tanned and tempestuous youth who seemed about to chew off a small hunk of her nose. On the wall beside me, some myopic advertising artist had designed a travel poster that suggested a visit to SPAIN—THE LAND OF GAIETY AND ROMANCE! This slice of nausea suggested that the land of Goya and Velasquez still belonged to the people of Spain, where everything was cute and cozy and Franco played pinochle with his peasant friends. On the rear wall somebody had hung a variety of Mexican and Spanish props: a rusty-looking sombrero; a shawl of purplish silk and a few diseased gourds. All in all, the room stank of the vaudeville and video Spain, as authentic and sincere as its two owners.

The wall on which the ornaments hung was a false front, a series of cabinets built of the same pine, but sectioned into cupboards that opened to reveal the source of Darlene’s music. On the undersection of the first closet I found the phonograph, a good machine equipped for records of all speeds. The record cabinet sat on the right of the player arrangement and housed a considerable quantity of native and imported rhumbas, tangos, mambas and sambas. There was a locker on the other side of the cabinet, and here I paused.

It was a normal-sized locker, tall and narrow, of the type used for storing clothes on a golf course, made of gray metal and sporting the usual ventilating slits on the upper third. It would be used by Darlene and her partner to hold their dancing equipment, or a change of costume. Why, then, was it locked? I stared at the thing and tried to cut away the impatient surge of bile that boiled in me. Darlene might be returning at any moment, to meet her next customer. There was no time for deep and studious thought. There was no time for anything but a quick stab at the lock with my penknife.

So I stabbed. I ripped at the metal until the lock began to come loose. Then I delivered a well-aimed kick at the heart of the keyhole and the door caved in and a cloud of dust rose up from under my toe. I had kicked the entire locker loose from its supports. But it was open.

Inside, Darlene had gathered the dregs of her professional wardrobe: two pairs of old dancing slippers, a colorful and flowered blouse, a few faded bandanas and a huge assortment of abandoned cosmetics, all of these things lumped and piled into an incongruously sloppy bundle. The manner of storing the equipment challenged me. This was not Darlene. She would be neat and precise in her every gesture. The mess of junk was out of character. I began to pluck and pick at the pile of stuff, probing and poking as I made my way to the bottom of the locker. My hand snaked down to the lower level of the mess and my fingers worked toward the metallic wall back there. And then I struck paydirt. I felt something that was neither silk nor shoe nor cosmetic. What I was feeling sent the prickling stabs of excitement shimmering up my wrists. Because the touch of it was soft and provocative.

It was money, a bundle of loot secured by rubber bands and neatly stacked into a wad that started the calculating machine to work in my brain. Century notes, all of them. Two hundred? Three hundred?

I didn’t have time to check them. Through the window, Chico was returning to his business office, escorting a fresh and bubbling broad to the rigors of the rhumba. Chico had her by the arm, a matronly dame who was old enough to be his mother and wanted to forget it.

I stuffed the bundle into my pocket and closed the pine door to the locker and went out of there the way I came in.