1962-BeautyCanKill

BEAUTY CAN KILL, by Michael McCretton

CHAPTER ONE

Joe, the moon-faced car-jockey, waved cheerily at me as I swung the Jag into the parking lot. It was pouring like a champ, and I squinted through the downpour trying to find a parking place close to the building entrance. Naturally, there wasn’t any. I have an office in the building, but that doesn’t seem to count with the single-minded army of housewives who take over the lot every morning.

Finally, I pulled in between a big Caddy and a Buick, undoubtedly giving the little Jaguar a complex, and cut the engine. The rain dared me to open the door and I ignored it and lit up. The Jag’s small interior became crowded with a Camel fog while I patiently ridiculed a fleeting impulse to make a dash for the building. I don’t mind rain. In fact, I even enjoy it—when it has the decency to wait until I’m in a warm, dry bed somewhere. But at ten o’clock in the morning, in the open, in a downpour, forget it. The black trench coat covering my vulnerable person was made of two-hundred-dollar treated silk; and although it was probably made with the thought in mind that rain might someday touch it, I wasn’t about to test the tailor’s confidence.

I was taking a long, dissatisfied drag on the cigarette and silently cursing the sadistic rain gods when my salvation arrived. The door was jerked open and I looked up to find Joe smiling down at me from beneath an out-sized umbrella.

“’Morning, Mister Winters. Nice day for ducks, huh?”

His heart was in the right place but I questioned his wild-life philosophy. Nobody could like a day like this. But I smiled at him anyway. He was much too happy and his yellow grin was just about the last straw—but who am I to sneer at a gift horse?

“Nutty,” I mumbled and went into the usual contortions of hauling my 200-plus out of the Jaguar’s steely grip.

Sometimes I wonder why I bought the thing in the first place. I guess it was ego. Private-eye-man-about-city and all that sort of thing.

I grabbed Joe and we ran for the building without missing a single puddle, which seemed to be par for what was beginning to look like one of those days.

I left my guardian at the plate-glass entrance with a happy Saint Bernard look on his pie face and pushed my way into the warm lobby. My suit, a favorite Italian friend of mine, was drooping at the cuffs and my shoes felt like they needed baling.

Sloshing to the elevator, I punched the up-button and waited. It could be a long wait. The building in which my office is located, while not being pretentious by any means, is still passably modern. When I moved in it was pretty seedy and sort of senile, but the owners re-groomed it a couple of years ago and it’s in pretty good shape now. All but the elevator. Somebody forgot the elevator. My office is on the seventh, and only because my legs would never forgive me if I did otherwise do I go through a daily skirmish with the thing.

After returning from a possible trip to heaven and back, the red light above the floor indicator came on giving me a baleful stare, and the arthritic doors crept open challenging me to enter. I did and apologetically touched the 7-button.

I could have read a book on the way, but finally the monster threw me out on the seventh floor, where I squished down the hall to my office.

I stopped for a second outside the ribbed-glass panel of the door, like I always do, and patted the bold, black letters that some genius had painted on the ribs:

COLEMAN WINTERS PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS

I know it’s conceit, but I can never look at the lettering without getting a charge. I unlocked the door, blew the sign a kiss, and went on in.

My office is neither large nor small. It’s just kind of cozy. It has a sort of lazy effect without being downright sloppy. There is a reception room of sorts—about as big as a large closet and stuffed with a comfortable couch, two stuffed chairs, and a stack of Playboy magazines. I don’t have a secretary; not that I can’t afford one, but I just don’t dig the potential distractions.

When I’m at the office I’m usually there to work.

The connecting door that leads to my private office is always left open when I’m not closeted with a client, so there is usually no need for a receptionist. Anyway and besides, this way I can see who’s sneaking off with my Playboys.

With my damp trench coat on a hanger and my stingy-brim hanging from a hook on the clothes tree, I felt alive for the first time that morning. I dropped onto the cushion behind the desk. My desk, as one of my more imaginative friends once observed, is as wide as a double bed—a huge and heavy mahogany monster with friendly cigar burns and memorable battle scars picturesquely adorning the stained top. Otherwise, my office is about what you’d expect for the building. There’s a wine colored rug, about medium thick, two modern bucket chairs with wrought-iron chassis (I was stoned when I got talked into them), a couple of skinny lamps standing around for effect, and a bookcase in the corner crowded with impressive titles that have never been touched. My one deviation from the prescribed office-protocol scene is the big, blond Hi-Fi set over against the side wall under the imitation Picasso.

Good progressive jazz is a mania with me, and I keep a rack full of albums within reach all the time. It is mornings like the present one that I fight the elements and fate with a Gerry Mulligan riff or two.

From the depths of the desk chair’s cushions, I pushed the remote button and the set came to life, dropping the bottom record on the turntable. It turned out to be a Dave Brubeck thing with a lot of counterpoint between Brubeck and Paul Desmond, his alto man. Listening to it, I slowly emerged from my weather-beaten shell.

I got up when it ended and went into the bathroom that comes with the office. I hardly ever shave at the apartment, primarily because I’m hardly ever awake before I reach the office, so I keep an electric razor at both ends.

The mirror on the medicine chest above the sink didn’t tell me a thing I didn’t already know, and I stared at it with ten o’clock revulsion. I don’t think I’m ugly, exactly. I mean, my sex life is never actually stifled, but anytime before noon on any given day I’m just not well.

My reflection frowned at me and looked even worse. I’ve got the kind of face that looks it’s best in a nightclub, late at night, under indirect lighting. I’ve got black hair that tends to curl coyly, so I keep it close-cropped in a sort of half-hearted crew cut. My face is a rough extension of the rest of me, which has been big since I was fifteen. I used to play right guard in high school and college, and the more lumps I used to take, the bigger I seemed to get. Anyway, I’m not very pretty, but most times I can scout up some feminine approval somewhere. Bless their near-sighted, little hearts.

I buzzed my way through a fast shave and was improving my sagging sex appeal with a bottle of Old Spice when the phone rang in the office. I jumped back inside, plucked the phone off its cradle, lowered myself into the desk chair’s cushioned embrace, and answered.

“Winters, investigations.” I smiled.

“Mister Winters?”

I allowed that it was.

“Mister Winters, I’m calling for Mister Alistair Neal. I’m sure you’ve heard of him?”

Her voice was scratchy, like soprano sandpaper, and I guessed her age at about sixty; spindly, gray and competent.

“Yes,” I assured her. “Of course I’ve heard of Mister Neal. What can I do for him?”

“This is Miss Trossett, Mister Neal’s private secretary. He asked me to call and request that you come to his office at the Harding Building sometime this morning.”

“Oh?”

That was an articulate reply if I ever heard one.

“Miss—ah—Trossett?”

“Yes?”

“Miss Trossett, I’m sure that whatever Mister Neal desires from me would be better off discussed in person, but I’m afraid it’s impossible for me to come down there to see him. You see, my clients usually come to me. That, if you’ll pardon the pun, is why I have an office.”

I’m nothing if not independent. A headshrinker would probably tell me it’s a petty form of reversed snobbery. But whatever it is, it’s fun.

“I understand that, Mister Winters,” she continued, “and Mister Neal respects your natural dislike of any procedural interruption. But it is very important that he speak with you today, and an overcrowded schedule here makes it impossible for him to come to you. I’m sure you understand and will deviate this one time.”

I let her listen to nothing for a second while I pictured the eight digit figure I’d seen in a recent article stating an approximation of Mr. Alistair Neal’s worth.

“Are you there, Mister Winters?”

I erased the figure and came back to the mouthpiece.

“Yes, Miss Trossett, I’m still here.”

“Well, as I said, this is of personal importance to Mister Neal, and I’m sure you can find the time to come and see him. You have been highly recommended to him, and naturally, he is prepared to compensate you for your time and inconvenience.”

She had successfully twisted my arm. I mean, there are snobs and there are snobs.

“All right, Miss Trossett. I’ll try to dispose of whatever pressing matters I have here and be at the Harding Building by eleven-thirty. Will that be satisfactory?”

The sandpaper smiled, and I pictured a double row of perfect false teeth.

“Yes. That will be fine, Mister Winters. We’ll be expecting you. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye.”

I hung up and grinned at Picasso. Maybe this morning wasn’t entirely ruined after all. Remembering the pressing matter I’d mentioned to Miss Trossett, I pulled the inlaid lever at the left of my knee and my tiny bar slid out from its hiding place in the bottom of the desk.

The promise of a client like Alistair Neal called for something and the something became a double Scotch. I leaned the cushions into a half reclining position and sipped past the ice cubes as I checked the mental filing cabinet I call a mind.

Alistair Neal was the president and major stockholder of Dutchess Cosmetics, one of the biggest cosmetic firms in the country. He had an estate the size of a young continent out on Long Island somewhere and a town house here in the city. Mrs. Neal was the perennial hostess of the gossip columns and they seemed to be knee-deep in society and very comfortably happy according to public report. But it was obvious now, considering the phone call, that there was a cloud in sight somewhere.

The Neal’s had an only son named Bradley, who, if I remembered correctly, was pretty well acquainted with the gossip columns himself. Maybe that was the clinker. Bradley was about my age, in his early thirties, and seemed phenomenally prone to lawsuits. Paternity type suits, especially. I recalled a couple of his publicized court tangles with cosmetic-seeking chorus girls.

Alistair Neal was a boot-strap tycoon who had come up the hard way, earning every penny he made through sweat and determination. Now, in his old age, it was understandable that he might frown upon the antics of a playboy son with nothing on his mind but the shortest route up a twenty-year-old leg.

I sipped the Scotch and felt the pleasant tingle as it trickled down to my stomach. All this wool-gathering was fine, but I still wondered where I came in. Dutchess Cosmetics wouldn’t exactly fall into the category of normal clientele for Cole Winters, private investigator; and while I usually enjoyed a better than average existence, my clients were seldom so financially astronomical.

In my half-prone position, I had swung the chair around to muddle over the phone call with the view from my window, so I had my back to the door. The first hint I had of the presence of someone else in the office came as I was in the middle of a long, preoccupied sip of Scotch.

“Cole Winters, you heel!”

The Scotch finished its journey to my stomach a little faster than expected as I straightened and swung around.

It was Toni Dahl—girl burglar.

“Toni!” I cried, trying to hide the glass as I got up. “What a surprise!”

She stood just inside the door, glaring at me with that pin-up anger of hers. At times like this her five-feet-four inches looked lethal.

“I’ll bet it is!” she snapped. “And don’t bother to hide the glass. At ten o’clock in the morning! Cole!”

She stamped one of her tiny black pumps and looked beautiful. She was wearing a beige trench coat that was belted around her nineteen-inch waist, pulling the material tight and making the fact that she was a girl indisputable. The rain had put stars in her long, midnight curls and she looked positively edible.

I came around the desk and kissed her while she was still stamping.

The pout was still there after the kiss, but her lips look like they are pouting all the time anyway. I guess she was supposed to be mad at me, only her eyes didn’t quite go along with it.

Toni is, by her own admission, my “almost steady”. I’ve known her for over a year, ever since I did some investigating for her father, and I guess it would be correct to say that she’s my girl. She is twenty-two, beautiful, intelligent—and her father’s yearly income reads like the national budget. She is stubborn, willful, possessive and very sweet. And sometimes I’m sure that I love her deeply. If I ever get married I am certain that Toni will be the bride. Otherwise, I am equally certain that I wouldn’t live through the wedding ceremony.

If I ever get married, that is.

I released her, reluctantly, and showed her what I hoped was an engaging smile.

“What are you doing out in the rain, kitten? At this hour of the morning. Staten Island flooded or something?”

Her eyes, which get black and smoky when angry, were beginning to get black and smoky again.

“I came over to see you, louse,” she said, glaring up at me. “But don’t get a fat head over it, because I’m leaving immediately. You can just go right back around that desk and finish getting drunk, you drunk.”

“All right,” I shrugged, “so I had a highball before the noon deadline. A little slug of Scotch and I’m drunk?”

“You promised, Cole!”

Naturally, she was right. The twelve o’clock abstinence deadline I had promised was her idea of how to keep me out of the alcoholic wards, which was ridiculous, of course. Anybody’d think I was a lush or something.

I left her stewing in righteous wrath and went back around the desk as directed. It did seem a little silly to be playing hide-and-seek with a highball. What was I, anyway, a mouse?

I picked up the glass and looked her right in the eye. I tried to make my voice sound firm and independent, but somehow it didn’t come out that way.

“Okay, baby, I’m sorry. The weather’s a drag. I got half drowned coming to the office. I’ve got a headache, and I felt blue, so—”

I gave the glass a forlorn jiggle.

The sparks dimmed a little in her eyes and she sighed, pulling the damp coat in interesting little wrinkles around her pointed breasts.

“What’s the use?” she asked somebody, maybe the Picasso, as she unbuckled the belt around her coat. “How can you trust a cad?”

She shrugged out of the trench coat and put it with mine on the tree in the corner. I should have been a gentleman, I suppose, and helped her with the coat. But after being a heel, louse, drunk, and cad, in that order, I just didn’t think it would fit.

She parked her pretty behind on the corner of the desk and silently stared daggers at the defenseless highball in my fist. She was on a Marjory Morningstar kick this morning, wearing a powder blue cashmere sweater that clung passionately to her high, firm breasts and a dark blue skirt with a pegged bottom that crawled up past her knee as she sat down, giving me a cheesecake view of a slim, rounded, nylon-clad calf.

“Well,” she sighed, removing my hand from her knee, “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Mix me one.”

Actually, I wasn’t even surprised. Toni’s like that. One minute I’m an evil-doing lush, and the next minute she’s doing it with me.

I mixed her a short one and refilled my own. Things were back to normal.

“Skol.” I smiled.

She stuck her tongue out at me and took a tiny sip.

“Busy?” she asked.

I finished a swallow and studied her knee some more.

“Uh-uh. Not right now anyway. Why, something on your mind?”

I thought I was smiling, but I guess it was a leer. She pulled her skirt down over her knee, ending the show.

“Derail your one-track mind, darling. That’s not what I meant. I’m going shopping and I thought we might have lunch together.”

That’s life. It was a nice try.

“Sorry, sweets, I have to see a client.” I told her. “How ’bout dinner?”

“What kind of client?”

“A man client.”

“Hmmm.”

“Honest,” I swore, “Male, rich and urgent. Alistair Neal. His secretary just called.”

Toni’s eyebrows arched upward.

“Alistair Neal! What does he want with you?”

Her tone was degrading but I let it go. “Somebody told him what a fabulous detective I am and he decided to let me guard his gold money belt.”

“Naturally,” she drawled. “Who’s going to guard you? Seriously, Cole, what does he want a detective for?”

I described the phone call for her and admitted that I had no idea what the old man wanted.

“Unless,” I added, “it has something to do with the heir apparent. Although in that case, a lawyer would seem more in order.”

“Bradley, isn’t it?” she mused.

“Yeah. Little, virile Bradley.”

“You should talk.”

Obviously, this trend of thought could get dangerous, so I got up and joined her at the corner of the desk. Her tiny waist fit perfectly inside my hands.

“If you don’t want me virile, kitten,” I said into her hair, “you better change your perfume or something.”

I nibbled on her lower lip, the one that’s always pouting, and she slid her arms around my neck, pressing herself softly against me. “So who’s complaining?” she whispered.

At first her lips were soft against mine; soft and moist and delicious. Then the searching started, like always, and my brain got fogged as we sort of merged. Toni’s got a little moan she uses whenever we clinch like that, and it plays hell with my hormones.

She pulled her lips away just short of the inevitable and snuggled her cheek against mine. Her fingers were little spiders on the short hairs at the back of my neck.

“I’ll forget about shopping if you’ll forget about your client,” she whispered. “Let’s go home.”

I didn’t know whether she meant hers or mine. And actually, who cared? But being the conscientious, greedy, young investigator I am, I raised my head and shook it, sadly. Sometimes I frighten me.

“No good,” I sighed. “Duty calls and all that jazz. I’ve got a date with eighty million dollars in less than an hour and neither wind nor rain nor—”

“Forget it,” she said, stepping back and rearranging what my hands had done to her clothes. “I know when I’m licked. I really do have to go shopping anyway.”

“It figures,” I sneered. “You’d probably never get to buy a thing if it wasn’t for me. What with your nasty mind and all.”

I ducked her left jab and got our coats from the tree. By now, Ahmad Jamal was spinning around the turntable, so I shut him off and we left the office.

Toni decided the Jag could cool it’s wheels for awhile. She drove me downtown in her pink T-bird. I don’t think she ran more than six red lights on the way. Finally, I was deposited in front of the Harding Building.

I kissed her and got out. The rain had settled down to an all-day drizzle and the street looked shiny and slick.

“Dinner?” she asked through the window.

“Right. I’ll pick you up at eight.”

She blew me a kiss and screeched away from the curb, cutting off a big Greyhound bus.

I shook my head and crossed to the big, ornate entrance of the Harding Building.

CHAPTER TWO

I had to run the gamut of three secretaries and a stacked receptionist before I finally got to my old friend, Miss Trossett. Sure enough, she was about sixty; spindly, gray, and competent. Her immaculate, prudish appearance looked very prim and proper. I had a vision of her checking beneath her bed every night—hoping…

“Mister Neal is busy at the moment,” she explained. “As I told you on the phone, he has a very busy schedule this morning and your appointment had to be squeezed in. You did say eleven-thirty?”

I looked at my watch and it told me I was early. I told Miss Trossett I understood perfectly and took a seat. For eighty million dollars I could wait.

At exactly 11:30 Mr. Neal’s door opened and a little man in a homburg came out carrying a briefcase. Miss Trossett buzzed inside and returned to me with a smile, proving I was right about the false teeth, too.

“Mister Neal will see you now,” she announced.

Alistair Neal was waiting for me behind a teakwood desk that made my mahogany job look like an orange crate. The office was a little smaller than a football field with an inch thick, white rug crawling majestically from wall to wall.

“Come in, Mister Winters,” he invited, and I couldn’t help listening for an echo.

Alistair Neal looked like a character out of Dickens. He was as tall as I with a bony, concave thinness that made him seem even taller. His hair was thick and white, neatly combed without a part, and his face had a craggy, wrinkled look about it that suggested a lifetime of worries. His nose was a large, hooked beak beneath a pair of piercing gray eyes.

We shook hands and sat down.

He cleared his throat and balanced a gold pencil between his fingertips.

“I sincerely hope I didn’t inconvenience you by asking you to drop by,” he began.

I smiled my think-nothing-of-it smile.

“Not at all, sir.” I assured him.

“Well, then. I suppose you’re wondering why you are here.”

“I must admit I’m a little curious.” I smiled.

He seemed hesitant about starting the interview.

“You were recommended to me by an old friend who assures me that you have a reputation for discretion.”

That seemed to be as good a place as any to begin so I encouraged him with a nod.

“What I desire from you,” he went on, “is of a strictly confidential nature and I cannot stress that enough before we start. As you probably know, I am worth a great deal of money and whatever I or any member of my family does is highly susceptible to publicity. This is what I hope to avoid.”

“Anything said between a client and myself is considered nobody’s business but ours,” I told him.

“Fine. Now to get on with why I requested this appointment with you.”

He tapped the pencil softly against a manicured fingernail, apparently searching for the right words.

“I’m sure you are aware that I have a son.” He paused. “Bradley is not—shall we say—unacquainted with the newspapers. You have undoubtedly run across his name once or twice. He is my only son. My only offspring, in fact, and although I am not always pleased with his choice of—recreation, he is my son and I’ll do anything I can to keep him out of trouble.”

He stared across the desk at me expecting, I suppose, some appropriate comment on this noble display of paternal compassion.

“Of course,” I managed.

“At the present, my son is involved with a girl named Louise Parks. She works as a stenographer for a realty company here in the city and seems to have completely captivated Bradley’s interest. I am certain that this woman is nothing more than a tramp whose sole interest is money, but I have been unable to convince Bradley of this.”

“You’ve talked to him about her?”

“Yes. But as I said, she seems to have him under a spell of some kind and he will listen to nothing I have to say. I hired a tracer to follow them and he reported seeing Bradley give the girl money on several different occasions. I even offered to buy the girl off, through an intermediary, of course, but she flew into a rage and flatly refused. Naturally, she is holding out for a wedding ring; and I intend to stop that at all costs. She has poisoned my son’s mind to the point where I am very much afraid she will get her wish if we don’t act immediately.”

“I see, and this is where I come in?”

“Yes. I don’t care how you do it, but I want irrevocable evidence that this girl is a mercenary tramp whose sole interest in my son is money. I am convinced that this woman is of the same promiscuous type to whom Bradley usually becomes attached, so it shouldn’t be difficult for you to secure evidence to this effect.”

I played with my stingy-brim under the desk for a minute, thinking.

“Mister Neal,” I said, “I don’t know who recommended me to you, but I’m afraid whoever it was gave you a blurred impression of the type of case I usually take. What you have in mind is, in effect, a simple job of snooping. I had looked forward to working for you, but I’m afraid this is just not my type of assignment.”

Neal studied me for a minute over that 18-carat pencil of his before answering.

“On the contrary,” he said finally. “The party who recommended you made it a point to advise me of everything he knew about you, including your ethics and your fee.”

He pulled out the center drawer of the desk and extracted what looked like a check.

“This is your retainer, Mister Winters,” he said, and handed it across.

It was a check all right—made out to me for the amount of five thousand dollars. My usual fee for assignments much more difficult than the one he was offering was about one fifth that amount.

I sighed and ogled the pretty zeros. Meet Cole Winters; professional snoop.

“Mister Neal,” I said, knowing damn well my martyred expression looked pretty silly, under the circumstances, “paternal solicitude such as yours cannot be denied. You have bought yourself a boy.”

Neal smiled at me for the first time, pleased with his accurate opinion of human nature.

“Very good. If your investigations result in the termination of my son’s liaison with this woman the amount on that check will be doubled.”

I dropped my stingy-brim.

“So,” he continued, unaware that my eyes, though staring at him, were seeing nothing but dollar signs. “I suppose you’ll want a little background. The first thing I want you to do is approach this Parks woman again with another offer of money. I am sure she will refuse as before, but as it would simplify things if she would accept, I think it is worth another try. If she refuses, of course, you will have to revert to the plan I have already outlined.

“Miss Parks is a habitué of a dingy little place down in Greenwich Village, somewhat sagaciously called the Cloistered Id. It’s one of those coffee-house bars that harbor weird assortments of neurotic people. She is there with my son almost nightly, so you can see the depths to which she has already dragged him. I suggest you start there unless you have a better plan.”

I told him I didn’t and thanked him for the information. He gave me a snapshot of Bradley and Louise Parks, and the interview seemed to be over.

It ended like that and I left the office with the big check burning holes in my wallet. I salved my irked ego by buying it a double Scotch in the first tavern I passed.

* * * *

I stopped at the office after lunch, ignoring an assortment of clothing bills that some well-meaning postman had dropped through the mail slot, and called my answering service to check in. The bills could wait until later, especially with Neal’s check in my pocket. But nevertheless, I firmly decided that something had to be done about this clothing habit of mine. I’m addicted to a passion for clothes that while keeping me natty, also keeps me broke. Clothes and Toni Dahl are about the only real penchants I have. Besides money, I mean.

Remembering my dinner date with Toni, I called her apartment and left word with the maid that the dinner was off. It wasn’t the best way to tell her, but Toni can get pretty ferocious about let-downs, and it would be much less hazardous breaking the news by proxy.

I deposited Neal’s check on the way to my apartment and felt smugly solvent as I unlocked my door.

My landlord is a shake-down artist who thinks I’m a millionaire, but my pad is cozy so I don’t complain much about his inflated rent. I’ve got three rooms and a bath, all done in a sort of modern African motif. The ebony masks on the living room walls and the crossed spears and shield in the bedroom have caused more than one overnight guest to hesitate at the foot of the bed, especially if there happens to be an Afro-Cuban beat coming from the Hi-Fi, but it gives the pad an atmosphere—and I dig it. Sue me.

I’ve got a painting over the fake fireplace in the living room that’s sort of weird; but it, too, adds to the decor, I think. It’s a large oil done in darkly garish abandon of a beautiful coffee-skinned Zulu girl, intriguingly naked, doing a fertility dance with a pair of shrunken heads.

I showered and changed into a sport coat and slacks, and built a tall one from the bar stashed behind the potted palms in the corner of the living room. I found an LP by Herbie Mann, and settled back in my favorite chair with a cigarette.

The soothing flute, plus the effects of the hot shower, lulled me nicely, and I let my mind wander to this morning’s chat with Neal.

The assignment seemed simple from where I sat. With luck, I could wind the whole thing up within a week. All it involved was a bit of shadowing on my part and an indiscreet slip or two from the girl. Even the area I had to move in was to my liking. The Cloistered Id was mid-center Greenwich Village, surrounded by espresso houses and jazz cellars. I just might catch one of those good, little-known combos while I made the rounds.

CHAPTER THREE

I parked the Jag in the darkness across from the Cloistered Id and sat for a minute, eyeing the place.

It was a downstairs club; small and intimate, with a lopsided black sign indicating its name. From across the street, I could see it was crowded, but a small place was easy to fill.

I left the Jag and ambled over.

A baritone saxophone moaned at me from the juke box in the rear as I entered. It was beatnik night, with a tangled jumble of goatees and Harpo Marx haircuts everywhere. I got a drink and a blank stare from the redhead behind the bar, and sipped it as I scanned the crowd.

I spotted my lovebirds in a booth at the rear without any trouble. They matched the picture in my pocket. I picked up my drink and squeezed through the crowd toward them.

They were sitting opposite each other, probably playing kneesies under the table, and devouring each other with candid eyes. Their fingers were coyly entwined on the table and they seemed completely oblivious to the clamor around them. Two untouched beers sat at their elbows.

The girl was cute, in the pert, winsome sense of the word and quite different from either the photographer’s effort I was carrying or the mental image I had of her. She was a trifle plump, but sexily so, with a small, heart-shaped face that looked very serene and open, at least at the moment. Her auburn hair was short, unruly, and curly. She was wearing a gray dress with buttons down the front and a Peter Pan collar. She looked alarmingly like the stenographer she was supposed to be.

Bradley Neal looked like anything but the playboy he was supposed to be. As I reached the booth and got a look, it was obvious where his reputed magnetism for the opposite sex lay. In his wallet.

He was about five-feet-eight, skinny, nervous and hungry looking. His face was a study in sallow-cheeked anemia with dull blond hair. Without his father’s money, his sex life would have taken an entirely different turn.

Neither of them looked up until I was hovering over them, and even then it was with obvious reluctance at leaving each other’s eyes.

“Hi.” I smiled. “My name’s Winters. May I sit down? I have a message.”

They studied me for a minute, and I slid in next to the girl while they thought it over.

Neal bristled instantly.

“What the hell is this?” he demanded. “Who are you, Mister?”

“A friend,” I assured him. “A friend of daddy’s.”

“A goddamn spy!” he spat. “Get going before I throw you out!”

She squeezed his hand.

“Brad, please.”

“Please, nothing. The old man sent this creep to snoop on us—and I won’t take it! Are you leaving, Mister, or do I help you?”

“Softly, sweetheart,” I cautioned. “You’re not built for the job. Simmer down and drink your beer before it gets flat.”

His pale blue eyes locked with mine for a second, proving he wasn’t afraid; but he didn’t move to evict me, either.

The girl caressed his fingers soothingly. “He’s right, hon.” She sighed. “There’s no need to make a scene. Let’s hear what he has to say.”

“I don’t want to hear anything,” he snapped. “Everything’s been said already.”

She turned to me. Her eyes were a fascinating green.

“What’s your message?” she asked.

“Well, I—” I smiled at her.

“Shut up and get out of here!” Neal yelled, suddenly coming to life again. He looked accusingly at the girl. “Are you going to listen to this creep?”

I wasn’t going to be too many more creeps. “Brad, if you’ll just—”

“Tell her your story, snoop. I’m leaving!” He left the booth and lunged through the crowd toward the door, without looking back.

“Brad!” she said, but he had already melted into the crowd. She looked at me and I could feel her hurt.

“Satisfied?” she glared.

“Touchy, isn’t he?”

“What did you say your name was?”

“Winters. Cole Winters. Or ‘creep’, if you like.”

“Mister Winters, I have an idea why you’re here, and you’re wasting your time. Mister Neal’s tried this before.”

“I know. But just for the record, who’s kidding whom?”

“Pardon?”

“Your indignation’s frayed at the edges, Miss Parks.”

Two pink spots rose on her cheeks and the green of her eyes deepened.

“If you’ll excuse me, Mister Winters, I’d like to leave now.”

“Okay, okay. You be nice and I’ll be nice. I just want to talk to you. All right?”

She relaxed a little and nodded.

“All right. What do you want to talk about?”

“Mister Neal and his latest offer.”

“Mister Winters, I just told you—”

“I know. You refused. And it’s Cole. Now, why?”

“Why what?”

“Why refuse? He’s offering you a tidy little sum just to forget his son. Would that be so hard to do?”

“Mister Winters—”

“Cole.”

“Mister Neal’s offer’s insulting. Brad and I are in love, and we’re going to be married. Does that answer your question?”

“Sure. Now let’s try it a different way. Neal’s offer is peanuts compared to the bundle you’d get your hands on as Bradley’s wife. Ergo; no deal with the old man.”

She surprised me. Just like that, without warning, two tears appeared at the corners of her eyes and slid down her cheeks. Either she was Academy Award material or I was way off base. I frowned and lifted her chin with my finger. Her eyes were swimming.

“Hey,” I mumbled. “You’re not kidding, are you?”

She lifted her purse and looked up at me. “May I get out, please?”

“Leaving?”

“I’d like to go to the powder room.”

I let her out. She worked her way quickly through the mob to the ladies’ room. As the door marked ‘CHICKS’ closed behind her, my attention was suddenly caught by the most bewitching pair of feminine eyes I’d ever seen. They were twin pools of gray fire and they were staring directly at me.

She was sitting alone at a table against the rear wall, in a quiet air of aloofness. As our eyes met, hers turned cold suddenly and dropped to her Martini. She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Exquisite, with a classic, graceful beauty that seemed ethereal, somehow, and untouchable. Her hair was pure white with the faint, misty tint of born platinum. It was coiffed in a meticulous upsweep that added to the austerity that radiated from everything about her. Her dress was a black, silk sheath, possessively caressing the graceful lines of her body. My mouth felt dry watching her.

She didn’t look at me again, and by the time Louise returned to the table my eyes were riveted to her face.

Louise slid in across from me. It was an effort to return my attention to her. Her trip to the powder room had resettled her emotions, and now she looked quite calm and composed. “Feeling better?” I asked.

She nodded.

“I’m sorry, Mister Winters. I’m afraid my nerves are on edge lately.”

“Forget it. I was a bit gruff. And please call me Cole, Louise.”

She shuddered slightly and smiled at me. “All right, Cole. You seem nicer now, and I suppose you’re just doing your job. What is your job, if I may ask?”

“I’m a private detective. Mister Neal’s a client.”

“I see. And you were hired to bribe me, is that it?”

“Yes. Although I heard you wouldn’t take it.”

“Cole, do you think it’s impossible for me to be in love with Brad?”

“Anything’s possible, I guess. His father sure doesn’t think so.”

“Well, he’s wrong. I love Brad with all my heart, and his money has no bearing on it. I know that sounded silly, especially when you consider his past affairs. Brad’s a weak person, Cole. His life’s been one long succession of temptations and impulses that were too much for him. He’s never known what it’s like to be really in love with someone—until now. He loves me. I’m sure of that, and it’s making a man of him. He’s promised me he’ll change, and I believe him. We’re very much in love, and we don’t care if his father believes it or not.”

“Touching,” I observed. “And I couldn’t be happier for both of you, except that I think you’re omitting something, aren’t you?”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning the money he’s been giving you. The money you don’t care a thing about.”

Her eyes clouded, but she didn’t lower them.

“I’ll admit Brad’s given me money—but it’s not what you think.”

“Okay. Tell me about it.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t.”

“Then you must agree that Mister Neal has a point.”

“Mister Neal can think what he pleases.”

“So be it,” I sighed, knowing that now there was no alternative but to put Neal’s plan into action. The thing for me to do was to leave before she did.

I started to rise, but caught myself.

“By the way, Louise. This has nothing to do with our little discussion, but do you know the girl in the black dress over in the corner?”

She gave me a confused look, then eyed the blonde.

“Oh. You caught me off balance for a minute. That’s Valerie Coe. Know her?”

“No, but I’d like to. Does she come here often?”

“All the time. She’s a writer. I don’t know whether she’s gathering material or just plain slumming, but she’s here almost every night. As you can see, she’s not the coffee house type.”

“True, but I wouldn’t hold that against her. Do you know her personally?”

“Slightly. Brad and I have met her. She’s lovely, isn’t she?”

I got up and smiled at her.

“Well, I’m sorry we couldn’t get together, but if you change your mind I’m in the book.”

She didn’t return the smile.

“I won’t change my mind. So tell Mister Neal.”

She looked very prettily determined.

“Give the heir my love,” I said, and headed for the door. I wanted to take one last peek at Valerie Coe’s crossed legs before I left, but I felt that one more peek might launch a campaign—and I had business on the street.

CHAPTER FOUR

It was a short wait. I’d hardly finished a cigarette when a taxi pulled up across the street and Louise came out and got in. They eased from the curb and I kicked the Jag into life.

Traffic was thin on the rain-swept streets. I had no difficulty keeping the cab in sight as it left the Village and headed uptown. We paced each other through the Bronx for awhile, and about fifteen minutes later I pulled to the curb half a block behind the cab and cut the engine. We were on a quiet residential street.

Louise paid the cabbie and climbed the stairs of an aged, brownstone apartment house. She opened the outside door without a key.

I smiled and waited. A few minutes later a light shone in an upstairs window. I left the Jag.

The downstairs hallway was shrouded in darkness relieved only slightly by a dim ceiling bulb. I lit a match and ran it across the group of mailboxes by the door. The third box had a small white card taped beneath the slot with “Parks” scribbled on it. Number five.

I dropped the match as it burned my fingers, and headed for the stairs. Apartment five was around the corner from the head of the stairway on the second floor and in the right position for the light I had seen from the street. I approached it quietly and listened at the door.

I shrugged and knocked on the door.

It opened immediately and Louise’s pixie face appeared, her mouth falling open in surprise. Her shock at seeing me again so soon stunned her for a second and the door swung open wider while she stared. She had wasted no time changing clothes.

A sheer silk robe hung loosely from her shoulders, open in front, exposing a lacy black slip that abruptly changed my first impression about her being plump. She was just plain built.

Recovering, she clutched the robe together at her breast, not that it did much good, and angrily glared at me.

“What do you want?” she demanded.

I chivalrously brought my eyes back up to her face and grinned.

“Hi, Louise. What’s new?”

“What do you want?” she repeated.

“Do we have to talk out here in the hall?”

“I have nothing more to say to you. Good night.”

The door swung toward me suddenly, but I got a foot inside before it closed. I pushed it back slowly but firmly.

“No!” she yelled. “You can’t!”

I opened it wider pushing her along with it.

“Stop! I’ll call the police!”

I was inside by then and closed the door behind me. Louise brought her hands up to her face and started to weep.

The room was small and cheery. A cozy, little living room filled with used but comfortable-looking furniture. The door to a bedroom off to the right was open and caught my interest at once. A man lay fully clothed on the wide bed, asleep—not Bradley Neal.

I looked at Louise, who still cried softly. Brushing past her, I entered the bedroom and looked down at the sleeping figure.

He was no older than eighteen, with dark, red hair and a sallow, thin face that looked very young and innocent. An old suede jacket hung over a chair next to the bed, and his shoes were toppled over on the floor. Otherwise he was fully dressed.

I studied his face for a minute and something clicked in my head. There was something oddly familiar about the way he was breathing. Then he raised his hand in his sleep and began rubbing his nose and snorting in a manner that triggered the vague memory in my mind.

I unbuttoned his shirt cuff and pushed it up to his armpit. The large vein in the middle of his skinny arm was dead black.

He was a junkie. A very stoned junkie.

I straightened and looked down at his sprawled figure on the wide bed. The picture I got of Louise on this same bed with a hopped-up teenager just wouldn’t focus. But facts, no matter how unreasonable they seem, are nevertheless, facts.

I left the kid to his cokey dreams and returned to Louise. She was sitting on the couch with her face on her knees. I walked over and looked down at her auburn curls.

“Quite a room-mate,” I said. “I guess you know what this means.”

She raised her head and looked at me through swollen eyes. Her face wasn’t cute any more.

“Please go,” she whispered.

I went. What else was there to see?

* * * *

I put the Jag in my small garage and went up to the apartment. It was only ten o’clock, but the chaotic din of the Cloistered Id had battered my nerves and I felt a little beat as I opened the door.

The apartment should have been dark. It wasn’t. The glow from the night-light in the bedroom escaped through the door, making the living room a museum of African shadows.

I closed the door and hesitated. Automatically, my hand plucked the .38 from under my arm and the cold steel felt good in my fist. Suddenly I wasn’t tired any more.

Then I smiled, feeling very foolish as I remembered the only other person besides myself with a key to the joint.

Putting the gun back where it belonged, I crossed to the bedroom doorway and looked in. She was smiling at me from the bed. Her inky hair looked even blacker against the white pillowcase.

“Hi,” she chirped.

“Hi, yourself. Having fun?”

“Uh-uh.” She grinned. “I’m lonesome.”

The covers were modestly pulled up to her neck. And her knees made a saucy rise under the blanket. Her clothes were piled on a chair.

“Me, too,” I told her. “For a drink.”

I left her sputtering and went back to the other room. I lit a couple of lamps and threw my coat on the sofa, heading for the bar. Then I stopped and grinned. The Zulu girl had a towel draped in front of her.

Two highballs were finished and waiting when Toni came out of the bedroom. She’s slipped into one of my pajama tops and looked a little like a French postcard. The sleeves hung way down past her hands, and the top button pulled the material together just below the beginning swell of her breasts. As she came to the bar, the hem which hung loosely to her lush thighs, bounced jauntily, making it plain that the shirt was all she wore.

I handed her a drink.

“What every burglar should wear,” I observed.

She plopped into my favorite chair and drew her legs under her. This bit of action made my hand shake.

“Where were you?” she demanded.

“On a case.”

“You can do better than that.”

“Right. I was with a blonde bubble dancer. With a pin.”

She sipped her drink and wrinkled her nose at me.

“Was it the Neal case?”

I sat down on the arm of the chair and put my nose in her hair. It smelled like springtime.

“Yeah. I think it’s sewed up.”

“So soon?”

I put the drink on the bar and kissed her nose.

“So soon.”

She got up and pushed me down on the seat.

“Come on, give,” she said, climbing on my lap. “What did he want?”

I put my arms around her and she snuggled against my chest.

“It was son Bradley, like we figured.”

“What’s he done now?”

I told her most of the story and ended with the kid on Louise’s bed. “So,” I finished, “there’s nothing to do now but report to the old man tomorrow. Actually, I’m a little disappointed in Louise. I was beginning to like her.”

She sat up and stiffened, or maybe she stiffened and sat up.

“Oh?” she cooed haughtily. “How nice.”

“Easy, tiger,” I warned. “What I meant was she was beginning to seem like a nice kid and I was half-way sold on her story. She’s quite an actress.”

“Is she pretty?”

“A dog,” I lied, and kissed the pout.

Her arms reached for me. I pulled her to me, feeling her breasts crush against my shirt. I unbuttoned the pajama top and pushed it away. The firm mounds felt soft beneath my palms and her nipples stiffened.

“Cole…” she whispered.

I picked her up and carried her to bed. My clothes joined hers on the chair as the light went out.

CHAPTER FIVE

I was running through a crimson jungle with thorny foliage slapping me in the face and tearing at my skin. Toni was about a hundred feet ahead of me, running naked, hand-in-hand with a laughing, teenage junkie. I was sweating from the searing heat of the enormous scarlet sun that hung over the tree tops.

It was blazing at me and making the sweat pour down my cheeks and mix with the blood from the cuts and scratches.

Toni was laughing happily and stopping every once in a while to point hysterically at the black needle-track on the junkie’s arm. My feet felt like lead weights. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t catch up. The deafening clatter of loud bongo drums pounded in my ears, laughing at me in a weird, staccato chuckle; sneering at my awkwardness…

I opened my eyes with a start. It took a minute for relief to grasp me. Nightmares I can do without. Especially when they’re as real as this one had been.

The bongo beat that had probably started the whole thing was coming from the Hi-Fi in the next room. I relaxed and sniffed the odor of perking coffee floating through the doorway.

Toni’s clothes were still with mine on the chair and I smiled as I got a picture of what she must look like standing over the stove without them. I got a pair of shorts from the dresser and went to see.

She was setting the table in the little kitchenette, and this time she was completely swallowed in my bathrobe.

I kissed the back of her neck as she bent over the table.

“’Morning,” I mumbled.

“Go get dressed,” she ordered. “You’re naked.”

I bit her ear and went to take a shower and shave.

By the time I was dressed, she had the coffee and a frying pan full of bacon and eggs waiting.

“M-m-m, you’re pretty.” She smiled as I pulled out the chairs. “All this for Alistair Neal?”

She meant my suit, of course. My looks don’t motivate comments like that. The suit was a new one. A charcoal black masterpiece that brought out my Madison Avenue charm, or so swore my tailor. For the price he hit me with, something should have been brought out.

I kissed my girl a thank you and assured her that Neal had nothing to do with it; it was just for her, and we sat down to breakfast.

After breakfast I called my answering service while Toni stacked the dishes in the sink. I was informed that Louise Parks had called and requested that I call her back at her office as soon as possible. I wrote down the number.

I dialed the number she’d given me and listened while the phone purred at the other end. After three purrs somebody picked it up and a feminine voice told me I was calling the Caldwell Realty Company. I asked for Louise and was told to hold on.

While the operator was getting her I lit my first cigarette of the day and mused over the reason behind the call. Had Louise decided it was time to negotiate? I doubted it. After last night she must realize that Neal had her cold and that if she got any money at all it would be just a token fraction of the previous offer.

Louise’s voice interrupted my smoky ruminations.

“Mister Winters?”

“Right. Good morning, Louise.”

“Oh,” she sighed. “I’m glad I caught you early.”

There was a note of anxiety in her voice. “Have you called Mister Neal yet?” she asked.

“Not yet, but I’m planning to. Why?”

“Please don’t, Cole. I can’t explain over the phone, but please wait until I’ve seen you again.”

“You’re losing me, Louise. What about last night and your punctured playmate?”

“Please, Cole. It—it’s very important to me.”

Her voice was cracking a little. I remembered her act of last night—if it was an act. Maybe she should have been in Hollywood, but I decided to go for it again. A few hours wouldn’t make any difference to Neal.

“Okay, baby,” I told her. “I guess it won’t cost anything to listen. I’ll meet you at six.” I heard a soft sigh of relief.

“Thank you, Cole,” she said. “And you won’t call Bradley’s father until you’ve talked to me?”

“I’ll wait.”

“Then I’ll see you at six. Good-bye.”

I hung the receiver and wondered if I was a jerk.

* * * *

The Cloistered Id was as crowded at 6:00 P.M. as it had been at ten the night before. In fact, it looked like the same faces. I wondered if it was just the regular crowd returning or whether they had ever left at all.

Louise was waiting for me in the same booth. I mauled my way back to her and was surprised to find Bradley sitting beside her. I nodded and slid in opposite them.

“Hello again,” I offered. “You two ever do anything alone?”

Bradley bristled but he kept it in check. “Hello, Mister Winters,” he said. “We have something to tell you.”

“We?” I asked. I looked at Louise. “From your call I gathered this would be solo.”

Louise put her hand over Neal’s on the table. She looked demure in a gray gabardine suit and ruffled blouse.

“I called Brad after speaking to you this morning and asked him to meet me at noon,” she said. “I told him everything about last night. He’s here because he wants to help.”

“Help?” I asked. “You’re losing me again.”

She looked at Neal and he nodded, squeezing her hand.

“I was upset last night,” she began, coming back to me, “and in no mood to explain anything to you, Cole. The fact that you followed me home and forced your way into my apartment was just enough to unnerve me. I’ve explained everything to Brad.”

“Fine. Now explain it to me.”

“The boy on the bed?”

“What else?”

She took a deep breath and said, “He’s my brother.”

Nobody spoke for a minute. I stared at her. I saw a tear hesitate near her eye, then topple down her cheek. “His name’s Ricky and he’s my only family. He’s been an addict for a year, and I can’t help him.”

She was more tearful now and Bradley put his arm around her. She cuddled and cried against him.

“So you see, Winters,” he said bitterly, “you’re not such a hot-shot shamus after all.”

He made a point. I agreed with him.

Louise withdrew from him and blew her nose on his handkerchief. She composed herself and went on in a shaky undertone:

“Ricky’s sick. I’ve pleaded with him to turn himself in, but he refused. He needs over forty dollars a day to support his habit. If he doesn’t get it he goes through agony. I know. I’ve watched him.” She glanced at Neal and lowered her eyes. “The money I’ve accepted from Brad was all spent on drugs for Ricky. If I hadn’t got it for him he’d have stolen it. When he’s sick he’ll do anything. I know I was wrong to lie and accept money from Brad to give to him, but I had no choice. I tried scaring him, by telling him I’d turn him in if he didn’t do it himself. But that didn’t help either.”

Her voice became a whisper.

“What else could I do?” she murmured. “He’s my brother. My father died when Rick was a baby, and Mother was killed in an accident three years ago. I’m all he’s got left. And if I don’t stand by him, who will?”

She looked at me as if I had the answer. All she saw was sympathy.

I eyed the couple and felt like a heel.

“Winters, I’m going to ask you a favor,” Bradley said. “I know you’re under obligation to my father, but I’m asking you to let this ride a few days.”

“And then what?” I asked.

“By then, maybe Louise and I can talk Rick into taking treatment.”

At that moment the waiter came. I ordered a Scotch to get rid of him. Bradley and Louise declined.

“What do you say?” Bradley asked.

“All right. Agreed. You want help with the kid?”

Louise’s face lit up hopefully.

“Oh, would you?” she asked.

“Why not? I know a couple of guys on the Narco Squad, and maybe I can do something about getting him into Lex after he gives himself up—that’s a place where addicts take the cure.

She reached over and took my hand. “Thanks, Cole. I knew I was right about you.”

I squeezed her hand and smiled at her. “Forget it.”

I looked at my watch.

“It’s about six-thirty. Where’s your brother now?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Brad picked me up at work and we came here. I haven’t been home. Ricky has a walk-up flat here in the Village, but he has a key to my apartment, and he’s liable to be there any time of the day or night.”

“Do you think he’s there now?”

“I don’t know. I called earlier, but there was no answer. I gave him money this morning, so chances are he’s high.”

“He’ll show when he needs a fix. Stall him and call me. I’ll talk to him.”

Neal rose, took Louise’s hand.

“I hate to leave you like this, honey, but there’s someone I’ve got to see, and it won’t wait. You’ll take her home, won’t you, Winters?”

“Yeah, sure,” I mumbled.

“Who do you have to see, Brad?” she asked.

“My father,” he said.

“Brad, no!”

“Yes, honey. I won’t mention your brother, but it’s time Dad and I had a talk.”

Louise subsided reluctantly.

“Thanks for taking her home,” he said. He bent and kissed her on the lips. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

I smiled at Louise when he was gone, trying to melt some of the sadness on her tear-streaked face. She looked very small and vulnerable all of a sudden.

“Alone at last,” I grinned. “Shall I call the waiter or do you want to go home?”

Her lips curled slightly, softening some of the gloom. “I’d better go. I don’t want to miss Ricky if he shows up.”

“Good idea. If you’re ready, let’s go.”

I couldn’t help giving the crowd a fast, thorough once-over on the way out; but Valerie Coe wasn’t there.

* * * *

I stopped at her apartment and left the motor idling. Louise put her hand on my arm and looked up at me with those expressive green eyes. “Thanks again, Cole. For everything.”

“Don’t forget to call me if he shows. The number I gave you is my answering service. They’ll locate me.”

“I’ll call.”

She opened the door and I shifted the Jag. She got out and was about to leave when something I couldn’t see caught her attention and she stopped. Her face was flushed when it appeared again framed in the car window.

“Cole, look!” she said, pointing upward.

I bent down and followed her finger. The shade was drawn in the window of her apartment. A narrow shaft of light escaped through the slit between the shade and the window sill.

“It’s Ricky,” she said.

I killed the motor and climbed out beside her. “Good,” I said, taking her arm and leading her toward the steps. “This makes it easier.”

She stopped at the bottom step. She was trembling. “Cole, you’ll—go easy?”

I nodded and we entered the hallway and climbed the stairs. I tried the door to the apartment while Louise fumbled in her purse for her keys. I didn’t really expect it to be unlocked, but it surprised me by swinging open. I got a quick look inside while she was still hunting in the purse, and it was enough to make me grab her roughly and throw her against the wall. Her purse fell to the floor with a thud.

“Cole, what—”

“Sorry, baby,” I said, feeling the sweat begin to trickle down my side. “You can’t go in there.”

“Can’t go? Cole, what’s wrong?”

Her face turned chalky as she stared at me.

“What’s wrong? Tell me!” she urged.

I grabbed her shoulders and felt the tremor running through her body. “Take it easy. It’s your brother—”

She screamed and broke loose, ripping her jacket, and lunged inside before I could grab her. The force carried her to the middle of the room where she stopped suddenly as if struck by a physical force. Her shriek was loud in the silent room before she crumbled to the floor at her brother’s feet.

I closed the door. The room was a ransacked chaos of toppled furniture. An icy horror crept up my back as I stared at what was left of Ricky Parks.

He was sitting in the middle of the room with his hands and feet tied to the rungs of a kitchen chair. His body was completely naked and covered with caked blood. His head was bent back across the top of the chair with his eyes staring in empty shock at the ceiling. What used to be his mouth was now a gaping crater of blood where someone had used the crimson-stained hammer lying on the rug. His chest was a brutal network of long, shallow cuts criss-crossing a dozen times down to his bloody stomach. I felt my guts turn over as I saw the cause of most of the blood. The killer had appeased a private, sadistic hate for all manhood with the razor-sharp blade.

CHAPTER SIX

Homicide Lieutenant Paul Javitts paced the living room floor. I had known Paul a long time, and I knew that the nervous pacing habit of his only exerted itself when he was seriously moved. The lab boys and the photographer had completed their grisly tasks and departed. Louise was sleeping under a sedative in the bedroom.

Ricky’s body was stretched out under a blanket.

He stopped by me and rubbed his forehead.

“Let’s have it again, Cole!”

I repeated everything for the second time, covering everything from my interview with Alistair Neal to the discovery of the body and my subsequent call to Homicide.

Javitts nodded when I finished, and looked at the mound under the blanket.

“We’ve got a fiend on our hands, Cole. A madman. You got any theories, you better spit ’em out. This is no time to be cute with me.”

“You know me, Paul. Maybe I’ve held out in the past, but this is different.”

“The kid was a user. Anything there?”

“I don’t know. I just found out he was on it. Whoever did it, though, was bent on finding something. He shook this place down like a pro.”

“You figure the kid was tortured for information? A dope stash, maybe?”

“It’s as good as anything. I’m thinking out loud.”

“Cole, did you take a good look at that kid?”

I swallowed the bile that started up again. “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

“He wasn’t tortured for information. That kid was systematically mutilated by a monster. Maybe the killer was looking for something. The looks of the place indicates that, but that boy wasn’t tortured because he would not talk. This was done for kicks!”

He fumbled for cigarettes. We both lit up. “What about the girl? She say anything that might fit in?”

“Uh-uh. Just that he’d do anything to get his fix. He’s got a flat in the Village, by the way.”

“We’ll get the address from the girl and check it out. Tomorrow. The doc said she’d be out till morning.”

I thought about Louise, glad she was spared temporarily by the drugged sleep.

“She’s going to flip when she wakes up,” I said. “Her brother was all she had.”

“There’s a nurse coming. She’ll stay overnight.”

I nodded and got up. “You need me any more?” I asked.

“I guess not. Why, what’s your hurry?”

I looked at the blanket-covered body I’d promised to help. “I made a promise, and I can’t keep it by sitting here talking to you.”

Javitts glanced at the body and nodded. “Okay. But keep in touch, hear?”

“Right.”

I looked in on Louise. She was lost in a deep, peaceful sleep, and her pretty features made her seem very young and unprotected—and wide open to the sadistic whims of somebody’s twisted mind.

* * * *

The noisy crowd of a couple of hours ago was gone, and the Id was quite empty when I got there. It was nine o’clock. There were only three men and a girl at the bar and a few coffee-sipping couples in the back booths listening to a poet lamenting on the jukebox. The little redhead was vacantly pouring a shot for one of the men. I parked myself next to the youth at my end of the bar and waited.

She corked the bottle and put it back on the shelf on the way over to me. She was still hiding behind that blank stare.

“Ballantine’s,” I ordered, when she was in front of me. “Double, on the rocks.”

She blinked her eyes once, which was supposed to mean she understood, I guess, and went back to the middle of the bar. While I waited, I glanced at the kid next to me.

He was in his late teens, twenty at the most, with a long, lanky frame slouched against the bar. His black chino pants were tight and pegged so small at the bottom he must have had zippers inside the little cuffs that hugged his black suede desert boots. The same pattern continued up the rest of his lean body, including a black corduroy shirt and the coal black mop that covered his head, protruding in trained carelessness down over his narrow forehead. His face was wise for his age, and his hooded eyes looked greedy.

The redhead brought my drink.

“Ricky Parks around?” I asked her.

She parted her lips and I caught a glint of gold.

“A dollar twenty,” she chanted.

I gave her a five.

“Keep what’s left. You didn’t answer my question.”

Her eyes didn’t focus as we traded glances. “Crazy,” she said, and gave up the effort. She went back to the middle of the bar with my five.

The kid beside me turned around and rested his elbows on the bar.

“You lookin’ for Ricky?” he asked.

His eyes were still veiled, but he’s seen me give the girl the five and the greed showed behind them.

“That’s right. Know where I can find him?”

“Maybe. Like, what do you want him for?”

“I’ve got a package for him.”

His eyes dropped to my suit and swiftly shook me down. Now I was almost certain about my first guess.

“He ain’t here right now,” he said, bringing his eyes back to mine. “Is this—ah—package important?”

“To him, yeah.”

He chewed his lip for a minute and I could picture the hustling mechanisms whirling in his head.

“Look here, man,” he said, “I’m gonna see him later. You want I should like, deliver it for you?”

I shook my head.

“You know better than that, man.”

“It’s a drop, right?”

I shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Okay. So maybe I can put you on to somebody who knows where he is. What’s it worth?”

I pulled my wallet, put a ten on the bar.

“If you can help,” I said.

His eyes dropped to the bill and remained. Sweat formed on his brow and I knew he was already seeing the two “nickel-bags” of heroin the sawbuck represented.

“He’s got a girl,” he said. “China McCoy.”

“Where’s she live?”

“I don’t know, but she’s always around at night lookin’ to cop. If you hang around she’ll show. Sometimes she plays the other joints on the street.”

“You see Ricky today?”

“He ain’t showed. See China. She’ll know.”

I slid the ten over in front of him.

“Thanks. I’ll keep her in mind.”

He pocketed the ten and sighed. He didn’t look nervous enough to be in real need of the money, but like all junkies it was enough just to be sure where the next jolt was coming from.

“You know Ricky well?” he asked.

“Well enough.”

He chuckled, privately.

“I hope you get paid in advance,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Ricky. He’s a creep. If you’re willing to give me a dime just to get a line on him you must have more than just a couple of bags. And if that’s the bit, Ricky-boy must really be into somethin’ all of a sudden. And that sure don’t sound like the Ricky I know. He’s a small-time hustler with a habit a mile long. He’s got over a year’s run going for him.”

“So?” I asked.

“So I hope you know what you’re doin’, that’s all. If you’re dealing like I think you are, you’re pushing to a jerk. He’s one of those petty creeps, shaking down drinks and bustin’ in windows to get the bread for their smack. You ought to see him in action around these coffee joints. Anybody who leaves change on the bar when he’s around is asking to be taken. And if you got a broad with you, forget it. She better hang on to her pocketbook like it was gold.”

“I take it you and he aren’t exactly buddies.”

“Different class, man. He ain’t nothin’ but a spike-happy zero.” He leaned over against me and dropped his voice, conspiratorially. “But now you ask around about me, Jack. I’m good people. Ask somebody about Charlie Cool. I can get bags worth of credit anywhere. You ask, and then if you’re back around here again maybe we can get together, huh?”

I told him maybe we could and went back to my drink. At least I’d bought a name—a start. The next thing was to find China McCoy.

* * * *

I divided the next four hours between the dozen or so coffee houses and cellar clubs in the area around the Id. I met junkies, queers, hustlers and bearded pseudo-intellectuals, but not China McCoy. Many knew her but no one had seen her that night or knew where she lived. I hated to quit, but the smoky noise of too many crowded cellars had got me. Around one o’clock I finally decided that Ricky’s girl friend had evidently scored for enough dope the previous night to keep her stoned for two days.

I got the Jag and went home.

The aspirins I took later helped to soften the dull thud that the Ballantine’s had put in the back of my head. As I finally fell into bed, after the added inducement of two Nembutals, I was positive that someone had sneaked into the bedroom and traded my mattress for a cloud.

I closed my eyes and was slipping into oblivion when the phone rang. I searched blindly on the night table, grasping for the phone.

“Yeah?” I grumbled, when I finally found it.

“Hi, scrooge. What’s the matter, somebody tear one of your suits or something?” It was Toni. Who else could be happy at two in the morning?

“Hello, idiot,” I sighed. “Did anyone ever tell you that you’re sick?”

“Sure,” she cooed, “my analyst. What are you doing?”

“Trying to sleep. Good-bye.”

“Where’ve you been? I’ve been calling since lunch.”

“Well, don’t call any more. I’m beat.”

She shuddered dramatically on the phone. “Whew! What a grouch. Still love me?”

“Toni, my eyelids feel like they’ve got weights on them. Give me a break, huh?”

“Want me to come over and rub them?”

“No. Hell, no. I told you I’m beat. Okay? I’ll call you tomorrow.”

She sighed. “Okay, chicken. But you’ll be sorry.”

“So I’m sorry. ’Bye.”

“’Bye.”

“Toni?”

“M-m-m?”

“What are you doing up?”

“Huh? Cole, you’re nuts.”

I stretched my legs and it felt wonderful.

“I’m home,” she said. “In fact, I’m in bed, too. Were you worried?”

I smiled lazily. I was falling asleep. “Uh-uh,” I murmured. “Just checking.” Drowsily, I pictured her smile at her end.

“I like that. It means you care. Sure you don’t want me to hop into the Bird and fly over?”

I was fighting a losing battle with the pills. My head felt peacefully dense and I couldn’t have lifted my arms if I’d tried.

“’Night,” I mumbled, closing my eyes.

“’Night, hon. I love you.”

At least, that’s what I think she said. I was too far gone to be sure.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I left my pad around one the next afternoon feeling relaxed. The pills had done wonders. I was a new man.

I stopped at the restaurant down the block, and read the news over three cups of coffee. Javitts had given out a brief statement that appeared on page four between a two-column rape in Brooklyn and a teenage gang war killing in Harlem. It seemed that life was normal that morning.

The spread about Ricky, as I said, was brief and incomplete. It simply stated that a young drug addict had been slain in his sister’s apartment, by a person or persons unknown. There were no pictures, and no mention made of the brutal mutilation. Javitts was playing it close to his chest. I could imagine the frustration that his silence was causing the sensation-seeking boys of the press.

From the restaurant, I went back up the block to get the Jag and headed downtown. I decided to postpone calling in until I’d made what I hoped would be a fruitful visit to an informant I knew in the Village. A very helpful informant sometimes.

Greenwich Village by daylight is quite different from Greenwich Village at night. I passed the Id and glanced at the deserted bar and empty sidewalk out front that had been packed with lounging Bohemians the night before. A stray cat or two were the only evidence of life on the street now. Except for the redhead in the Id. I got a glimpse of her sitting behind the bar. She certainly had weird working hours, if you could call that trance-like automation of hers work. Maybe she was a zombie.

I grinned at the thought and turned at the next block. Two red lights later I turned again and stopped at an unbelievably ancient hotel that, through somebody’s carelessness, had escaped a condemning report. It was three stories, with the top floor bending a little to the left. I was glad my informant had a downstairs room.

The lobby, a cramped, dusty square about the size of a small ice box, was dark. I caught a mixed odor of grease, urine and disinfectant as I walked through it. The little desk clerk’s cage was empty, but I knew where I was going anyway.

I walked down the narrow corridor to the left of the desk and knocked on door “number three”.

An angry set of springs squeaked from inside as somebody moved in bed. I heard a loud, racking cough. It choked to a stop after a minute, and I heard shuffling footsteps.

“Yeah?” a husky, suspicious voice asked. “What d’ya want?”

“It’s Cole Winters, Monk. I want to talk.”

He coughed again and unlocked the door. Monk smiled at me with his one eye blinking. “Hi ya, Mister Winters. Come on in.”

I went past him. He locked the door again. “Don’t pay no attention to the mess,” he sniffed. “I been sort of sick lately and the joint needs cleanin’.”

He shuffled to the bed, the room’s only piece of furniture besides a battered dresser in the corner, and sat down on the dirty sheets.

Monk was about fifty and looked seventy. His small, skinny frame was permanently bent into a crouch from the effects of a cocaine-poisoned system. It made him look like one of those hunch-backed gargoyles in a horror movie. His left eye had been gouged out by somebody’s finger in a long-forgotten street brawl, and the effect was a little fearsome. His nose flared at the bottom in wide, ugly nostrils that were blue veined and raw from his daily cocaine snorting. Monk had been a cocaine user for the last twenty years and could be counted on to pay three to six month visits to the Tombs or Harts Island at least once a year.

His eye stared at me and he grinned.

“Long time no see, Mister Winters. Got somethin’ you want me to do?”

“Yeah. It’s worth half a C-note to me to get some information, Monk.”

His eye watered and he blinked. “Shoot,” he said, rubbing the eye with a knuckle.

“You know a kid named Ricky Parks? Young junkie. Hangs out around the Cloistered Id?”

“You bet. Skinny, red-headed kid. Strung out on horse.”

“That’s him. Did you know he was killed last night?”

He shook his head absently as if I’d asked him if he knew what time it was. Death was much too ordinary to men like Monk for it to hold more than an indifferent interest.

“I ain’t been out of the room in a couple of days,” he said. “Don’t hear much in here.”

I went to the dresser and put a bill on it. “Here’s twenty to get you off your butt, Monk. You get the rest on delivery. Find out who the kid was buying from and if he was in hock to anybody. Also, he had a girl. Her name’s China McCoy. She’s a junkie, too. Get me the dope on her.”

He climbed off the bed and shuffled to the dresser. He put the twenty in his pocket and nodded.

“Right, Mister Winters. I didn’t know the kid too good, but I’ll find out what you want. I’ll get a line on the girl, too. Don’t you worry none. You just leave it to old Monk.”

I would, too. However shabby Monk appeared, he was an investigator’s dream for digging up information in restricted circles. What would take me a week to learn through patient loitering, he could find in a few hours.

“How long will it take?” I asked him.

He sniffed and scratched his head.

“Call me in the morning. I’ll have it.”

“Here?”

“Yeah. There’s a phone in the hall. Get the number on the way out.”

I nodded and unlocked the door. Before I shut it I turned and looked at him. He was back on the bed, nodding to himself.

“Monk,” I said.

His misshapen face came up to blink at me. “Yeah, Mister Winters?”

“Don’t blow the twenty on sugar and forget why I gave it to you. I wouldn’t like that.”

His mouth twisted and he tried to smile. “Don’t you worry, Mister Winters. You know old Monk.”

I closed the door and shook my head. My skin was crawling. I copied down the number from the hall phone and hit the street under the clean sun.

I stopped at a drugstore on Broadway and had coffee. I nursed it until it got cold and still hadn’t become inspired. I got change from the cashier for a phone call I’d been putting off since yesterday.

Miss Trossett’s voice hadn’t changed in the two days since I’d heard it. She plugged me into Neal’s office and his clipped voice sounded in my ear.

“Hello, Mister Winters,” he said.

“Hello, Mister Neal. I’m checking in.”

“Yes?”

“There have been—complications.”

“Indeed. You mean, of course, the death of Miss Parks’ brother.”

I wasn’t the only one who read the papers. “Uh—yes,” I managed, feeling snubbed.

“I heard of it this morning,” he continued. “I’m glad you called, Mister Winters. In fact, I had planned calling you in the event you didn’t.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. You’re to drop the case. Naturally, you may keep the retainer. But, as of now, you’re no longer retained.”

“It’s none of my business,” I said, “but to satisfy a nosy habit of mine, would you mind telling me why?”

He paused and I heard his loud breathing.

“Has Bradley given up the girl?”

He sighed heavily, but when he went on his voice was stronger, “No, he hasn’t. Bradley and I had a discussion about it yesterday. He intends to marry Miss Parks in the near future.”

I swallowed silently and waited.

“I’ve decided to terminate your assignment, Mister Winters, because it’s no longer of any importance. Bradley seems to value the company of dope-addicts and tramps above my desires, so I see no reason to discuss it further. I no longer consider him any concern of mine.”

“There’re one or two questions I’d like to ask your son,” I said. “Questions aside from our agreement. Do you know where he is?”

“I’m sorry, Mister Winters. I no longer have a son.”

I frowned at the mouthpiece as he hung up.

CHAPTER EIGHT

I walked into the Id, feeling almost like one of the family by now, and recognized a dozen or more faces in the animated crowd around the bar. It was early, but the place was loaded.

I broke through the redhead’s trance, got a Scotch, and took it with me to a booth where Bradley and Louise waited. He had called the answering service that afternoon while I was at Monk’s, and had left word for an imperative meeting at the Id. Now, as I approached the booth, I wondered if this would have any bearing on his father’s revelation to me over the phone.

They sat together, hands entwined on the table, watching my approach. Louise was very pale. The horrible shock of last night had completely erased the normal vitality from her face and left nothing but a wan silence that aged her and rendered her lifeless. I felt an anger, suddenly, at Neal’s thoughtlessness in bringing her here.

I nodded when I reached them and slid into the booth.

“Hello, Louise,” I said considerately.

She raised her eyes and I felt a chill. Her stare was utterly cold and hard.

“Hello, Cole,” she whispered. “I’m glad you came.”

I looked at Neal.

“She insisted on coming,” he said, reading the accusation in my eyes. “I shouldn’t have told her why I called you.”

“Why did you?” I asked him.

“To hire you,” Louise answered, “to find the butcher that killed my brother.”

I looked at her sitting there calmly across the table and found it hard to watch the venom that poisoned her eyes.

“Find him,” she said, “and tell me who he is.”

“I’m hiring you, Winters,” Bradley said. “I’m not as solvent as I was when I saw you yesterday, but I’ll get your fee somehow. Just get that fiend.”

He put his arm around her but she was rigid, her eyes boring into mine.

“Look,” I said eyeing them, “I intend to find him. I want him as much as you do.”

I reached and took her hand. It was cold. “As for a fee, forget it. I promised you I’d help, Louise. I haven’t forgotten it.”

The iciness cracked and her body started to shake with an erratic shudder as she came back from the shock that had gripped her. The cold determination broke suddenly and she clung to Bradley, sobbing into his chest.

It lasted a long time.

When it was over she wiped her eyes and she looked relaxed. She took my hand again and her moist eyes pleaded with me.

“Just find him, Cole. Put him away where he can’t do it to anyone else.”

“I will,” I promised.

We sat in silence while she made repairs to her face. The sight of her deftly dabbing at her nose in the tiny mirror of her compact made me feel much easier about her state of mind. Her coldness had been deadly; it was relieving to see the softness returning to her green eyes.

“Where will you start?” she asked, putting the compact back in her purse. “Can I help at all?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Tell me about Ricky’s friends. Did he have any enemies?”

She winced involuntarily at her brother’s name, but she answered in an even voice, “I never met his friends. They were mostly addicts, I guess. And the only real enemy he had, that I know of, was the needle. He hung around in this neighborhood, so I guess just about everyone knew him.”

“What about his girl friend?”

“Oh! I’d forgotten her!”

She leaned forward, her face coming alive.

“Of course! Her name’s China McCoy. She might know something. Cole, if you find her, maybe—”

“I know. Maybe she’ll have an idea who did it. I tried to find her last night, but she wasn’t around. Do you know where she lives?”

“No. But I’ve seen her here with Rick.”

“Tell me what you know about her.”

She sighed and shook her head.

“Not much, I’m afraid. She’s been going with Ricky for about six months. She’s an addict, too. They lived together for awhile and then split up about a month ago. Ricky said it was because she decided to stop taking drugs. He told me about it one night after he’d taken a shot and was in a talkative mood. He said China tried it “cold turkey”, as he put it, but before the night was over she was begging him for a shot. He couldn’t stand to see her in agony, so he went out and got her one. Shortly after that she moved out; and although they still went together, she never moved back.”

“Did he tell you why she moved?”

“She was set on quitting and couldn’t with him.”

“When did you see her last?”

“In here with Rick a few days ago.”

“Had she quit?”

She shook her head. “I guess moving out didn’t help. Ricky was still sharing with her.”

I nodded. Outside of enforced supervision, nothing probably ever would. Almost every junkie I’d ever met had periodic intentions of kicking his habit, but they almost never did.

“What’s this China like? I asked. “Her name doesn’t help at all.”

Louise smiled slightly. “She’s very pretty. Ricky told me she’s half Irish and half Chinese. She’s very lovely.”

“Were they in love?”

“Ricky was. I’m not sure about her. I guess she loved him as much as she could—beyond drugs.”

I lit a Camel, watching the smoke spiral upward. “Well,” I said, “one thing’s certain. I’ve got to talk to her. Right now she’s the only lead we’ve got.”

I was about to pump Neal a little about the break with his father, but I stopped before I got my mouth open.

From my position, I was facing the bar. Any thought I had of questioning Bradley was forgotten as I watched Valerie Coe glide toward me in slow, graceful strides. She walked like a contented animal.

She was in blue this time. A jersey sheath that hugged each pore of her magnificent body. I watched, transfixed as she neared the table, unable to tear my eyes from the jutting breasts and bold hips that moved lazily beneath the tight material.

She reached the table and stopped. Bradley and I jumped up almost falling over ourselves.

“Louise,” she said, “I’m terribly sorry. I just heard.”

Her voice was low. A soft, musky contralto.

Louise smiled tearfully. “Thank you, Valerie,” she whispered.

I swallowed loudly and Louise glanced up.

“Oh,” she said, “you don’t know Cole, do you? Miss Coe, this is Cole Winters. Cole—Valerie Coe. Cole is a private detective. He’s helping us.”

Valerie smiled brilliantly and I felt my knees quiver.

“How do you do, Mister Winters? I’m glad you’re helping. Please sit down.”

I smiled shyly and moved out of the booth to stand by her.

“Hi,” I managed. “Won’t you join us?”

She seemed hesitant, but then she smiled slightly and moved in, across from Louise. Bradley and I sat again.

I ordered her a drink and when it came I was surprised that Louise touched my arm. “I’m sorry, Cole,” she said. “I’ve got to go home. I can’t stand it in here any longer.”

I smiled and laid my hand over hers.

“I understand. Go on home and get some sleep. I’ll call you about any news.”

She turned to Valerie. “You won’t mind? I hate to be rude, but my head’s splitting.”

Valerie took her hand.

“Of course. I understand,” she smiled. “Please go home and get some rest.”

As they were leaving, I stood up and Louise stared at me for a minute and then fell into my arms, weeping softly. I rubbed the back of her neck, feeling about as useful as yesterday’s scratch sheet.

“Take it easy, baby,” I whispered. “I’ll get him. I promise.”

As soon as they were gone I sat down and turned to Valerie. We stared at each other for a minute without speaking. I don’t know what she was thinking, but if it was anything like what was running through my head we were bound to get along.

“Hi,” I said smiling.

She dimpled beautifully.

“Hi. You really a private-eye?”

“Really. You really a writer?”

Her eyebrows arched quizzically.

“How did you know?” she asked.

“Louise.”

“Oh.”

She sighed and the dimples disappeared. “It’s terrible about her brother. Louise is such a sweet girl.”

“Did you know him?” I asked.

She shrugged gently.

“Not well. Just saw him here and there.”

I sipped my Scotch and said, “Does your being a writer explain why you’re—” I gestured at our surroundings. “Well, you know.”

“Why I come here? Yes. I do feature articles for periodicals and Sunday supplements, but my first love is novel writing. I’m gathering material, as it were, for a book I’m going to write about the Village.”

She faced me, an eagerness brightening her face, lighting it up beautifully. “The Village is so interesting. Don’t you think so? It’s happy and pathetic and brutal and kind all at the same time. I’ve met dope-addicts and pickpockets and just about every type of negative personality there is. I’ve seen men who wish they were women and girls who crave to be men and a few who don’t seem to care which they are. I even met a real private-eye.”

I grinned at her enthusiasm and dropped my eyes to her jutting breasts. “Gender; male,” I said, just to keep the record straight.

She blushed politely, but somehow I knew it was an effort—something expected of her.

“It’s really a world all by itself,” she said, getting back on the Village kick, “an uninhibited, Bohemian jungle. It’s primitive, really. No codes. No conventions. Oh, I just know it’ll make a wonderful book! I’ll let you in on a secret. I’m going to write a great novel. Someday soon everybody’ll know me. My name’ll be linked along with Rand and Ferber. Wait and see.”

Her gray eyes sparkled with dedication, and I found myself nonplussed. Such fanaticism didn’t belong in eyes like hers.

Then the gray softened again and I felt a stir run through my veins. What the hell? She was the loveliest thing I’d ever seen. A little kooky, maybe, about her writing. But the rumblings she’d started in my loins had nothing to do with her mind.

I reached and softly touched a curl.

“Ferber never looked like this,” I said.

I felt her stiffen and she smiled politely and picked up her drink. Me and my witty nothings!

After one sip she put the glass down and pushed it away. “It’s been nice, Mister Winters. But I really have to go. I have a thousand things to do tonight.”

Reluctantly, I sighed and stood up to let her out.

“Can I drop you? Like—home, I mean.”

She rose and stood next to me. Her head came up to my shoulder and I caught a faint aroma of subtle dynamite.

“You’re sweet, but no.” She smiled.

She held out her slim orchid-tipped fingers, forcing me to be formal. Her hand was soft and small in mine.

“Good-bye,” she breathed; and the way her lips played with the word it almost made it sound promising.

“’Bye,” I croaked.

I watched her glide away, following the soft, full roundness of her beneath the molded dress as she walked across the room.

My throat felt hot and dry. I ordered a double Scotch.

CHAPTER NINE

The alarm went off at nine o’clock the next morning, sending horrible clangs into my numb, hung-over brain. I almost fell out of bed shutting the damn thing off. The abrupt silence was almost as bad, with the echoes still ricocheting around in my skull, but I managed to stumble out to the living room bar and guzzle three fast drinks.

I had stayed at the Cloistered Id the night before after Valerie Coe had walked all over any better plans for the evening, then doggedly drunk my way through twenty dollars. To no apparent avail, I might add. At least, I couldn’t remember meeting anyone with any kind of lead on Ricky Parks’ killer.

Of course, I could be wrong. Everything beyond the first eight doubles was pretty hazy. The only thing I was sure of was the condition in which I fell into bed. I was stoned.

I was more than surprised to even be wearing pajamas this morning. Some night. I don’t usually tie one on like that. It must’ve been the after effects of all that platinum ice.

A hot shower didn’t do much for my head, but it slowed my pulse. After two quick Bromo’s and a tall glass of tomato juice I felt almost up to shaving, which I did, then I dressed.

I made a cup of instant coffee, and by ten o’clock I decided it was possible I might live. I dug out Monk’s phone number and dialed it while I lit a cigarette.

It was a long time before he answered. “Yeah?”

“Monk?”

“Yeah. That you, Mister Winters?”

“Right. How’s the habit?”

He mumbled something about warped humor and told me he’d figured it was I calling, and had beat the desk clerk to the phone. It must’ve been some race, since it had taken so long for him to answer.

“What’ve you got for me?” I asked.

He cleared his throat importantly.

“I got a line on the kid,” he began. “He was on smack, all right. Horse. He copped from a runner named Chico that hangs around the joints a lot. The wire says the kid had a long run. Maybe forty or fifty bucks a day. He hustled for nickels and dimes mostly, and sponged off his sister, but I’m told he was gettin’ set for a big one.”

“How’s that?”

“He’s been runnin’ his mouth lately about some big deal he’s into. Talkin’ kilo stuff, you know?”

“You find out what it was?”

“Naw. Just that he told it around he was ready.”

“Who pushes to this Chico, Monk?”

“Manny Zato. He owns the Village scene.”

“I don’t know him. Run him down for me.”

Monk sniffed a couple of times and went on in a hazy voice. Considering the sniffs, I was lucky he was coherent at all.

“Manny’s the big pusher in the Village. There’s others, but he’s the one that counts. He’s got runners all over the scene and gets regular drops mostly, from the natives. The little pushers only cop the tourist trade, you know?

“He runs a tavern on West Fourth that he uses as headquarters, like, but it’s just a front. He don’t make no bread over the bar.”

“What’s the name of the place?”

Monk giggled as if he’d been waiting for that.

“The Brass Monkey. Ain’t that a gas?”

I agreed it was a gas. “About the girl? Anything there?”

“Nothin’. All I got was the name you gave me—China McCoy. Everybody says she’s fine as wine for a junkie broad, but nobody knows where she pads.”

I sighed. Another night’s hunt through Beatnik Land for an Oriental-Mick.

“Okay, Monk. Got anything else?”

“That’s about it. Hope I helped some.”

“You did. Want me to mail the balance?”

“Uh-no. I mean, if it’s no trouble, could you leave it at a bar for me? This ain’t exactly the Waldorf I’m at. Poor mail service.”

“Okay, Monk. Where?”

After a coughing jag, he named a bar two blocks from the Id.

“Okay, Monk.”

I called the answering service. Nothing. I lounged around my pad all morning listening to records.

The late Ricky Parks was no less a puzzle. What had made a petty little hop-head suddenly important enough to be tortured to death? It didn’t figure. That the killer was a maniac was obvious, but beyond the sadistic angle to the murder there was still the fact that he’d been definitely looking for something. Something precious enough to kill for.

A dope stash? Maybe. But where would a punk like Ricky get his hands on that much stuff? And now this new bit about Ricky’s sudden solvency. Or at least, alleged solvency. The whole thing was much too involved for my hung-over brain.

By noon I decided the next sensible step was a friendly visit to the Brass Monkey—and a pusher named Manny Zato.

* * * *

As I drove past the sun-splotched shops and bars along West Fourth Street the neighborhood blinked at me with noontime sluggishness. The sidewalks were half alive for a change with a spattering of shoppers and lunch-hour strollers.

I had delivered Monk’s money to the tavern of his choice, and was now headed to Zato’s bar. As I neared the right block I slowed and glanced at the surroundings. Both sides of the street followed a quiet pattern of rooming houses and beat-up apartment buildings. A couple of grocery stores and a little drugstore glared at me through dirty windows. In the middle of the block, jammed between a couple of faded, yellow fire-traps, was the Brass Monkey.

I parked and cut the engine. The joint was quiet; a long, single-story job shaped like a tall two-by-four. All I could see through the front windows, looking under the name printed in black letters on the glass, was the front end of a bar and a couple of small tables. It looked deserted, but if Monk’s wire had been straight, that’s how Zato wanted it. I hit the street for a closer look.

The front door opened easily without tripping any loud noises or making ominous buzzes like in the movies. I shut it and walked to the bar.

The joint’s interior was just about what the exterior had promised. Besides the bar, there were a few scattered tables and a dart board on the far wall with three rusty darts buried in the bulls eye.

I leaned on the bar and watched two cockroaches play tag by the draft spigots. I waited a reasonable amount of time and then yelled, “Hey! Any service?”

Another minute went by and then the door in the far wall opened, and a greasy, little guy came out. He went behind the bar.

“We’re closed,” he grunted.

His teeth were black, and he had bad breath.

I smiled at him.

“I want to see Manny. He around?”

He got a bar rag from somewhere and blew his nose on it. “I told you we’re closed. I don’t know no Manny.”

I shrugged and turned toward the door. Nothing to do but play it by ear. I took a step and stopped, glancing behind him at the low shelf filled with dusty, unopened wine bottles.

“Too bad you’re closed. I could sure go for a shot of that Scotch.”

I was indicating the shelf with a nod of my chin. The little man looked confused for a second and turned around to check the stock. That shelf probably hadn’t seen a good fifth of Scotch in ages.

As soon as he turned I spun around and made for the back door. I had my hand on the knob before his surprised, “Hey!” blasted out. But by then I had the door open.

The room was small and windowless. An air-conditioner was hooked up to what looked like a vent in one wall, and it hummed softly in the silence. The room was furnished like a doctor’s waiting room, with two comfortable-looking couches and an assortment of chairs and lamps. A little desk sat in the corner supporting the alligator-clad feet of a thin-looking guy with a blond crew-cut.

I closed the door behind me and crew-cut jumped to his feet. He was about six feet, lean and young with a built-in sneer on his narrow lips. He looked about twenty years old—one of those dedicated twenty year olds who usually never make twenty-five. His baby-cord suit looked almost as expensive as the one I was wearing, only it was cut in a flashy wide-shouldered, narrow-waisted sharpness that undermined the material. The kid’s tailor must have hated him.

He made it to the middle of the room in quick, nervous strides and stopped a foot in front of me.

“Cool it, pal,” he rasped. “That’s as far as you go.”

I gave him a friendly grin.

“I want to see Manny.”

The door flew open behind me and halitosis popped his head inside. He looked worried.

“Sorry, Blade,” he whined. “He walked right in.”

The kid threw him a contemptuous look and jerked his head.

“Watch the front, jerk. I’ll handle this.” When we were alone again we matched stares.

“Okay,” he said, after a minute, “what d’ya want?”

“I told you. I want to see Manny.”

“Manny don’t wanna see you. Cut out the way you came.” He paused dramatically. “I could get angry.”

“Really?”

He grinned nastily.

“It’s happened,” he snapped.

I looked behind him at a closed door leading to another room.

“Manny in there?” I asked.

The kid leaned back and rocked a little on the balls of his feet. He shook his head disgustedly.

“What’re you, some kind of clown? You better split, pal, while you still can.”

I watched him rock for a minute and then spit on the toe of one of his alligators.

“Tell Manny he’s got company, sonny. You’re beginning to bother me.”

A look of incredulity came into his pale face as he jumped back, trying to get his shoe out of the way. Obviously, this boy was used to respect.

He stood there watching me and his eyes got hooded. I dug his pupils for the first time. They were dilated like saucers.

“Mister,” he whispered, “you just tore your ass, you know that? Now you gonna understand why they call me Blade.”

His hand became a blur as it went inside the suit jacket and came out thrusting with an eight inch switch-blade already opened.

As soon as his hand had made for the jacket I was moving. I timed it with his arm, sidestepping to the left at the same second the knife came out so that I took the thrust under my right armpit as I brought a knee smashing up to his groin.

He made a soft, high scream and I brought the knee up again—twice. The knife fell and clattered to the floor as he doubled up and retched all over that pretty baby-cord.

I stepped beside him and stiffened out my right hand with the edge rigid. The shock jolted my wrist as I chopped him on the back of the neck and watched him sprawl on his face, out cold.

I straightened my jacket and stepped over him and picked up the knife. The door to the inner room was unlocked and opened without any trouble.

It was an office about twice the size of the room I’d just left, with all the plush fixtures of a Wall Street conference room. A middle-aged, well-dressed man sat behind a tooled leather desk across the room.

He glanced up as the door opened. Mild surprise covered his swarthy features. He seemed the type that never got too surprised.

“Yes?” he asked, as if he was used to people popping in like that.

I closed the door and crossed the room to his desk. I tossed the knife in front of him.

“Jack Armstrong out there says I can see you now. You Manny Zato?”

He regarded the knife for a second and then nodded and stood up. He was taller than he’d looked sitting down. Maybe six-feet-two, and big. He weighed a good two hundred and none of it looked soft. Daily workouts in his own private gym, no doubt. Or maybe he kept in shape by working over delinquent hop-heads.

He was probably in his early forties, but only the gray at the sides of his thick black hair indicated it. His face looked younger. He smiled, showing me at least twenty of his flawlessly-capped teeth.

“I’m Zato. What can I do for you, Mister—”

“Winters. Cole Winters.”

I showed him my button. His smile shrank a little, but it didn’t bother him much.

“A shamus?” he asked. “That’s a new twist. By the way, what did you do with Blade? A name, incidentally, that seems to be badly misplaced.”

I smiled and put away my button.

“He’s taking a nap in his own puke. He needs a different job.”

“He’ll find one,” he said, and I believed him. “Won’t you sit down, Mister Winters?” He waved at one of the big leather chairs close to the desk. “I’m not accustomed to entertaining gentlemen of your profession, but I’ll do my best.”

I sat. Zato sat, leaned back into the desk chair and waited patiently. He was so calm and indifferent I wondered for a minute whether Monk had given me a wrong wire. But I was forgetting my friend, Blade, out in the other room. You just don’t have people cut up if you’re merely operating a bar. They might take their business elsewhere.

“I’m here about the Ricky Parks’ murder,” I said.

“Ricky Parks?” he asked. “And who’s he?”

Fine. What did I expect? That he’d stick out his wrists and confess all at the drop of a name? I moved up to the edge of the cushion.

“Look, Zato, Ricky Parks was chilled last night up in the Bronx. I’ve got a personal grudge against the killer, and that means I’m going to find him. Parks was a gowster with a long habit, and you supplied him his kicks. Now, somebody’s going to get hurt if I don’t get some answers.”

He smiled at me and withdrew his hand from behind the desk. There was a .45 in it.

“Softly, Mister Winters,” he said. “Let’s try to keep this conversation just that, shall we?”

I sighed and settled down.

“Now,” he continued, holding the gun loosely in my direction, “what makes you think I had anything to do with this Ricky Parks? Or with dope, for that matter?”

Our positions seemed to be neatly reversed all of a sudden. I felt like a chess player who’s just realized that the Bishop he so brilliantly captured has just cost him his queen.

“Well now, it’s funny you should ask,” I said, stalling to mentally measure the distance between me and the .45. “I’m beginning to wonder the same thing myself.”

I decided it would be suicide to try it. A rather swift decision, I might add. In fact, to be truthful about the whole thing, I didn’t give it any thought at all.

The holster under my left arm was gimmicked with a spring that would throw the .38 into my hand pretty fast just by pressing my arm against the leather. But not that fast.

“Mister Winters,” he said, “you’re a very witty man, and I’m sure you do impressions, too. But I asked you a question. What brought you to me?”

“Your reputation, Manny. You’ve got hopped-up publicity all over the Village.”

He leaned back and rested the barrel of the gun on the desk. “Exactly what does my publicity say?” he asked.

“That you’re Mister Big on the spike-and-spoon circuit. Ricky Parks copped regularly from one of your runners, and now he’s dead. Such connections make me curious.”

He displayed his pretty caps again.

“They could also make you dead!”

Funny man.

“Carve it on my gravestone,” I said. “You’re not going to kill me, Manny. At least, not here. You’re much too careful for that. For one thing, you don’t know how many people know I’m here. People who can add if I turn up in the river somewhere.”

He sighed wearily.

“You’re absolutely right,” he said. “I don’t have the least intention of killing you. Unless you force me, of course. This gun,” he shook the .45 carelessly, “is merely a pacifier. Sort of a monitor, shall we say, to keep our little chat amiable.

“Now. As to your accusations, naturally I deny them. I could just throw you out of here without trying to convince you, but I have a few minutes and you interest me. For the sake of argument, suppose I were this Mister Big you claim I am. If I’m that big, wouldn’t it seem probable that I still wouldn’t know your Ricky Parks? After all, if I employ runners as you say, wouldn’t it seem rather inconceivable to you that I’d personally acquaint myself with an addict I was pushing to? This is all hypothetical, of course, but would that seem logical to you?”

“It would if the kid had something you wanted,” I said. “Or he could’ve welched on a bill and your boys got too rough trying to collect.”

“Mister Winters, have you ever met a junkie who possessed anything anyone else could want? The only thing an addict has is his habit. That’s all.”

“And the non-payment angle?” I asked.

He smiled again.

“Wrong again. If I was pushing to him, and he did welch, I’d simply forget it and cancel our association. Compared to the heat that a murder of one of my customers could possibly bring to me, the loss of a few dollars would seem inconsequential. And besides, if I did run an organization such as you suggest, you can believe me when I assure you that there would never be any credit involved.”

He stood up and moved to the side of the desk, keeping the gun on me.

“I hope I’ve set your mind at ease, Mister Winters. I enjoyed our little get-together, but I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave. I have an appointment shortly.”

I stood up and looked at him. His brown eyes were twinkling.

“I don’t have much choice,” I said. “I can’t buy your answers, but then that doesn’t make a hell of a lot of difference to you anyway.”

“Not a hell of a lot, no.”

The door to the office flew open suddenly and the crew-cut stumbled his way into the room. I was surprised to see him up and moving.

So much for late hours and weak hangovers.

His suit was a mess where his breakfast had landed and he walked bent over with his hand at his crotch like something was hurting him.

He stopped just inside the door and glared at me.

“You sonofabitch, I’ll kill you,” he rasped.

“Straighten up,” I said. “You’ll get round-shouldered.”

“You bastard!” he whispered and started for me.

This kid had a lot of heart. Of course, the .45 in his bosses’ hand might have had something to do with it.

“Hold it, Blade!”

It was Zato. The kid stopped and faced him. “Sit down, Blade. Before you fall down. Mister Winters was just leaving. He crossed to the door and opened it. “Good-bye, Mister Winters. Please don’t come back.”

I walked to the door. “So long, Manny,” I said. “Give my best to Chico.”

It didn’t get a rise out of him, but as I walked past the bartender on my way out I figured it might at least eliminate one slimy bastard from the streets of New York. I could picture the headstone: CHICO—POPULARITY’S PRICE.

I grinned and went out to the Jag.

I called Toni an hour later from the apartment and told her to dress and be ready when I picked her up at eight. She bubbled with enthusiasm until I told her we were making the rounds in beat land. Then she accused me of using her for purely decorative purposes while I worked on the case. I got a yes finally, and she promised to be ready on time.

I hung up hoping the Village would turn something up for me that night. Manny Zato sure hadn’t helped. His arguments made sense on the surface, but there was still the fact that the killer had been searching for something. Was it something Manny wanted? I couldn’t picture the immaculate pusher as a sadistic madman; but his boy Blade had all the makings.

By 2:30 I was taking a nap on my sofa. The hangover had ebbed to a dull throb by now, and I was counting on the sleep to get me in shape for a return performance later that night. Only this time I’d have Toni along to play governess to my bending elbow. I fell asleep and dreamed about smoky-eyed governesses.

CHAPTER TEN

It was warm and the stars blinked from a clear sky. Things seemed right with the world. I had the top down on the Jag, and the warm air felt good on my face. Two shots of Scotch were doing a lazy breast-stroke through my veins and Toni’s warm thigh was pressed cozily against mine as we cruised Broadway.

It was nine o’clock and the apple was coming alive all around us. At mid-town the sidewalks were crowded with thousands of people.

Times Square was a mess, as usual. But tonight I didn’t mind the constant stopping and starting at obstinate traffic lights. It was a kick to roll along slowly and dig the eager faces that jammed the streets.

As I pulled up for the fifth time in a row Toni reached over and squeezed my arm.

“I wish we could park the car and get out,” she sighed. “I’d love to just mingle with the crowds for awhile. How come I have to go for a private dick?”

I grinned at her and blew her a kiss.

“I know, kitten. It’s a drag and I’m sorry, but—”

She sighed again.

“Oh well, maybe I’ll meet a fireman or something, with reasonable working hours.”

“Fat chance. You’d get bored to death.”

She snuggled next to me and showed me the pout.

“It would help, you know, if you weren’t so damned sure of yourself,” she complained. I nibbled her lip as the light changed.

She was beautiful tonight, as always. Her white shantung dress buttoned demurely up to her neck and cupped her upthrust breasts nicely before it flared at her hips in long, wide pleats. She looked about seventeen with her midnight hair hanging loosely to her shoulders where it curled softly like inky foam. I felt like stopping right there just to hold her for awhile. But it wasn’t long before we reached the Village.

The spot I had chosen tonight was about three blocks from the Cloistered Id. Unlike the Id, it featured a small combo. Louise had named it as another of Ricky’s haunts. It was called The Purple Pit. I hoped only that it wasn’t mobbed with limp-wristed party boys as the color indicated.

The closest parking place I could find was a block away. The club was on the corner of the block. It had a long, violet awning supported by four weird-looking poles that made me think of a song I had heard once. Most of the lyrics escaped me but I could remember a sexy, sepia voice crooning, “I dreamed I built a reefer ten feet tall…”

I chuckled and Toni glanced up at me. “Something funny, shamus, or just youthful bubbles on a balmy night?”

“Bubbles,” I smiled, leaning down to brush my lips across her cheek. “You, the night, the music.”

The music was coming from The Purple Pit. It met us halfway there—heavy, funky stuff from a baritone sax that throbbed around our heads like a pulsing mist.

We had to walk down a short flight of stairs to get into the place. Inside, the music was louder and more contained. We stopped in the ante room and I deposited my stingy-brim with the plunging brunette behind the check counter. When she leaned over to stick a check inside the hat brim, the front of her topless blouse fell away from a hell of a lot of woman. But Toni dug the action and I barely had time to get the check, much less do any private ogling.

The club was divided into two crowded rooms; a large, table-strewn main room where a combo improvised on a raised platform at the far end, and a smaller room to the left connected by a brace of opened French doors through which I caught a glimpse of a long, cushioned bar. Both rooms were up to capacity, but the bar was better lighted and had fewer distractions. I guided Toni in there through the open doors. We found seats where we could still watch the bandstand and ordered drinks.

Toni sipped her Crème De Cocoa and wrinkled her nose at me. “Icky, huh?” she said, meaning the club in general. “I wonder if we’ll get thrown out when they find out we’re together?”

I knew what she meant. The joint was plushier than I had expected. But whatever it lacked in local color it more than made up for in off-beat customers. I remembered Valerie Coe’s observation about negative characters and decided that she had just about summed it up in a word.

Gay people were everywhere—male, female, and borderline question marks. The bar was predominately male—or female, depending on how you looked at it, and the club proper seemed to be catering mostly to their distaff counterparts. I didn’t see any men in female rigging. Of course, the light was bad. But I did catch glimpses of a few short haired man-girls in pants and sport shirts. Some of them weren’t bad, either.

From a corner of my eye I saw Toni discreetly rubber-necking, and I grinned. The joint might be icky but she wasn’t missing a thing.

The combo was a seven-piece group of young Negro disciples of that Cool School. They all wore black sunglasses and bored expressions that hardly changed even when they took their individual solos. They looked high, collectively.

The needle element was represented, too. Here and there I spotted hung-up junkies, male and female, nodding quietly to themselves under dark glasses.

I’ll say this much for the scene; it was unique.

“See anybody you know?” Toni asked. She was leaning against me for a better look through the doorway.

“Uh-uh. People like that don’t meet people like me. We run on different currents.”

I let my arm rub against the fullness of her breast and smiled at her.

“Like AC and DC, you know?”

She moved away a little and picked up her drink. “How well I know,” she said. “But if we’re here to look for leads you’d better forget the sneaky feels, lover. They’ll really kick us out. And be shocked, to boot.”

“Tell me more,” I said, going back to my highball. “You seem to be well up on off-brand etiquette.” I grinned at her. “You sure you never—”

Her eyes went smoky and she grabbed for her purse.

“Cole Winters, I’ll—”

I put my hand on the sensitive little thing’s arm.

“Easy, doll. I’m only kidding.”

She still smoldered a little, but she let go of the purse.

“Well, you better be,” she threatened. “If anybody knows the condition of my hormones, you do.”

What do you do with a chick like that? I touched her lips with my finger and got a tiny kiss.

“I think your hormones are the nicest I’ve ever seen—uh, felt—uh, used? Oh, the hell with it. You know what I mean.”

She smiled and things were all right again. “What exactly are you looking for?” she asked a while later. “I mean, someone special or just pot luck?”

I had brought her up to date on the case earlier in her apartment while I waited for her to finish getting ready. She knew about as much as I did. I do that a lot with Toni. She makes me think more clearly.

From a reasonable distance, I mean.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Just sort of ad-libbing, I guess, till somebody gets sick of seeing me around these joints and decides to pull my coat. I’m—”

I stopped abruptly, sounding pretty silly to Toni, I guess, who was watching me and didn’t see Valerie Coe weaving her way toward the bar between the tables.

Watching that woman weave was enough to stop anything abruptly.

She was poured into an ice-green, silk creation that covered her curves like a wet Kleenex and the way her hips moved under the taut material made heads spin all around her, even in this audience.

Toni dug her just before she reached us and her lips compressed into a straight line. I gave her a quick glance and she looked ready to do battle. Intuition or something.

Valerie stopped beside us, smiled, and took a deep breath. The green silk tightened to its limit and quivered. So did I.

“Whew!” she sighed. “Getting through that mob is like running the rapids. Hi, Cole, who’s your friend?”

“Valerie—Toni Dahl. Toni—Valerie Coe. She writes,” I added lamely.

Toni smiled graciously.

“How do you do, Miss Coe? I’ve never met a writer before. It must do wonders for one’s inhibitions. All that sex and stuff.”

I closed my eyes.

“Oh, it does,” Valerie smiled. “Perhaps you’d let me use you sometime. A biography or something.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t want to write about me,” Toni cooed. “I like men.”

“Toni—” I groaned.

Valerie laughed and turned to me.

“It’s all right, Cole. I don’t blame her for getting the wrong impression. This place is infamous.” She smiled at Toni, giving her that tolerant cat-grin that women use with each other. “But you’re wrong, Miss Dahl. I’m only writing a book.”

“How nice,” Toni said.

Her claws were withdrawn—slightly.

“Join us for a drink?” I asked, avoiding Toni’s eyes.

“Thanks, but I can’t. My date’s waiting for me. I saw you from the other room and just stopped over to say hello.”

“Maybe some other time,” I said. “Have fun.”

She exchanged catty good-byes with Toni and left. The rear view of her in that glued silk was criminal.

“Nice girl,” I ventured.

“M-m-m.”

“She writes.”

“You said that.”

“I hardly know her.”

“That’s odd. She’s very beautiful.”

“If you like the type,” I lied.

Her hand slipped over mine on the bar. “Cole?” she whispered.

“Yeah, kitten?”

“She’s not the reason you’re here, is she?” Her voice was so low I could hardly hear her. Her eyes looked hurt.

I palmed her chin and softly kissed her moist lips.

“Does a begger ask for paste when he’s offered pearls?” I whispered.

She smiled and squeezed my hand.

“Remind me to thank you later,” she grinned, “when we’re alone.”

I ordered refills as the combo climbed back up to their heroin cloud and picked up their instruments. They stuck bored grimaces on their faces and went into a takeoff on ‘Satin Doll’, with the baritone blowing a lazy background.

Toni picked up her purse and wiggled off the stool.

“Don’t go away,” she said. “My nose is shiny.”

I looked at it.

“You could have fooled me,” I said.

“Just be good, honey. I’ll be back.”

My eyes followed her and I found myself watching the graceful way the pleats of her dress swayed around her thin calves.

Some day I’ve got to make her Toni Winters, I thought. Some day.

The kid at the piano fell deftly into a thirty-two bar solo just then, and I returned my attention to the bandstand. He was hunched over the keyboard with his left hand digging out complicated chords while his right hand redecorated the melody. ‘Satin Doll’ is frantic when Ellington does it, and he wrote it, but this kid really blew strong. The kid had class.

I felt a hand pluck at my sleeve and I turned around to look up at heaven.

“Crazy, no?” she smiled. “That’s Wilt Phillips. He moves.”

She was about five-feet-three, with more curves than the Jersey turnpike. Her hair was jet black and pulled back from her little, elfin face in a pert pony tail. Her eyes were deep brown and slanted exotically, with a faraway look of humor sparkling from somewhere deep inside. Her sooty eyelashes looked an inch long.

She grinned at me, showing her tiny white baby teeth.

“I’m China McCoy, pops. I hear you’re paging me.”

Automatically, I eyed her slim, full-breasted figure and swallowed. For a junkie, this girl was put together. For anybody, this girl was put together.

I returned her smile and stood up.

“Hi. I’m Cole Winters. You’re not exactly the easiest girl in the world to find.”

She giggled sweetly.

“I’ve been hung up. Can I sit?”

She slid onto Toni’s stool, making my “please do” a little belated.

“Well,” I said, when we were both seated, “can I buy you a drink?”

She shrugged. “I’ll have a glass of milk.”

“Milk?”

“M-m-m. I dig milk.”

I motioned to the bartender and ordered the milk. Now that I had become somewhat accustomed to her upper measurements I studied her face. It was easy to look at. There was just enough of an Oriental cast to her features to make her beauty mysterious, with the added spice of Irish coquettishness to make it warm.

Her big eyes stared coyly at me through a heroin fog.

“So here I am pops. Explain!”

“I was a friend of Ricky’s,” I said.

Her smile died and her eyes clouded. “Ricky?” she whispered.

“Yeah. I’m pursuing his murderer.”

Two tears appeared at the corners of her eyes and clung to her lashes.

“Are you the fuzz, pops?”

I shook my head.

“Uh-uh. Just a friend.”

The tears slid down her cheeks. The Oriental sadness made her suddenly very fragile looking and small.

I touched her chin.

“I need help, China. A lot of help.”

She sniffed and looked up at me.

“He didn’t have a chance. Not a crummy chance. Nobody does on smack. Did you know that? I loved him, pops. I really did. And he loved me, too. We were like—close, you know?”

I nodded, letting her pour it out. She brushed at the tears with the back of her hand.

“We used to lay in bed and rap, you know? All kinds of weird stuff we’d talk about. Like kicking and getting married and having kids. He used to kid me about little slant-eyed redheads running around the house with his hair and my eyes. He was like that. Always kidding and making me laugh. Even when we couldn’t cop and got sick. He’d hold me and talk to me, and it wouldn’t seem so bad.”

She bit her lower lip.

“But he didn’t have a chance, pops. Neither do I. Or anybody else with a spike in their arm. I tried to quit once. Ricky helped me, but it didn’t work out. I was too weak and he loved me too much to let me go through it.”

She sighed softly.

“And now he’s dead and don’t have to worry about copping any more. Maybe he’s lucky.”

“Why don’t you quit?” I asked. “Check in voluntarily and take the cure. You can.”

“It’s no good,” she said. “It’s a drag when you’re sick, but I just can’t picture life without it any more.”

I played with my highball for a minute while she straightened her face.

“What about Ricky? Can you help?”

“You mean do I know who killed him? It could have been anyone. A sick gowster who thought Ricky was straight. A mark who found out Rick had beat him for some cop-money. Who knows? This is the Village, pops. One little life just doesn’t mean much down here.”

I looked up and saw Toni coming along the bar.

“Think!” I said. “If anybody can help, it’s you. Can’t you think of anything?”

Her face tightened with earnestness as she clutched my arm. “Look, Mister Winters, if I knew anything, don’t you think I’d tell you? I loved Ricky. I just don’t know.”

Toni came up and stopped behind us. I waited for the inevitable, but it didn’t come. I got up and introduced them. Toni smiled at me, reading my mind.

“I wasn’t worried,” she said. “In the first place, you wouldn’t have the nerve, and besides, I liked her—even from back there.” She turned to China, who had slipped off the stool and stood beside her. They were almost the same size.

“I’m very sorry about Ricky, China,” she said softly. “But Cole will find whoever did it. He’s not as stupid as he looks. Honest.”

China smiled and then turned soberly to me. “Do you have a pencil?” she asked.

Toni got one out of her purse and gave it to her. She took one of the club’s match books from the bar and scribbled something on the inside of the cover. Putting it in my hand, she stared up at me.

“That’s my phone number,” she said. “Call me if you need me for anything.”

She came up close and touched my arm.

“I want to help, Cole. I’ll scour the Village for you if it’ll help, but please find him. Ricky wasn’t much of a man, I guess, but he was mine and his killer can’t go free.”

She reached up on tiptoes and kissed me on the cheek. I felt a little ashamed, under the circumstances, at the warm sensation I got from the pressure of her full, soft breasts against me.

I made the same promise for the third time in forty-eight hours. The first time to myself, then Louise, and now China.

“I’ll get him,” I said.

She smiled and stepped back, putting her hip mask back on.

“I’ve gotta split,” she grinned. “I’ve got a date with a passionate Lezzie with four nickel-bags, who’s got mad eyes for me.”

She moved from the bar. “’Bye, Toni,” she said. “You’re sweet and I hope you hook him.” Her smile faded as her eyes swung to me. “’Bye, pops. Good luck.”

She left us and worked her way through the crowd, waving hello to almost everyone. Toni and I sat down.

“Quite a girl,” I said.

She nodded her head.

“She’s sweet,” she said. “Do you think she’ll ever quit?”

“Who knows? I doubt it.”

I lapsed into silence, listening to the music and thinking about China and her habit. Suddenly, Toni caught her breath next to me and turned around.

“Oh!” she cried. “I forgot to tell you!”

“Forgot to tell me what?”

“I almost got picked up!”

I grinned at her.

“How’d he make out?”

“Not a him, silly. A her. In the ladies room.”

This time I really grinned.

“Have fun?” I asked.

She glared at me.

“It’s not funny! She scared me half to death. I was standing in front of the mirror combing my hair when suddenly she just came up behind me and—”

“And what?” I prompted.

“Never mind what. But it gave me ideas. Is that terrible?”

“Is it terrible to be human?”

“I’m glad for your attitude. I guess we’re all only human.”

“Right, honey.”

I ordered drinks and we consumed them and a few more while we listened and watched during the next couple of hours. Neither China nor Valerie came back to interrupt the cozy warmth that began to play between us. I decided that as soon as the Ricky Parks puzzle was finished I would make it a point to set aside a special candle-lit evening for us. I owed her a real date.

By midnight we were tiring of staring down passionately inclined characters, and decided to call it a night. At least at The Purple Pit. I had further plans for Toni’s apartment.

We left the bar with a happy grin from the over-tipped bartender and a few sad shrugs from the boys and girls at the bar, and went out to get my hat.

The pectoral wonder was still on duty, smiling her over-developed promises at me, but Toni shot her down with a cocked eyebrow and we left The Purple Pit.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Toni was quiet on the way out. As we buzzed along East Side Drive she snuggled against my shoulder and tucked her legs up under her, contentedly listening to Frank Sinatra purr from the radio. The warm silence between us spoke volumes anyway, and it was nice to just dummy up for a change and think together.

Usually, it bugged me a little to have to go through the involved runaround of taking a ferry and then driving way out on Staten Island just to get her home to the exclusive, upper-stratum project where she had her apartment, but tonight I felt expansive. Besides, it was usually worth it once we got there.

When we reached South Ferry I paid the man in the toll booth and pulled into the loading lane. The ferry wasn’t in so I cut the engine and we waited. The radio was broadcasting an hour’s worth of Sinatra, which made the ten minute wait pleasant enough. And Toni’s soft weight against my shoulder kept me comfortably lulled.

There were a dozen or so cars waiting with us by the time the ferry arrived, and the attendant waved us through the ramp entrance. The GOLD STAR MOTHER was waiting for us in the slip with her gate pulled up. I drove on board, and because we were first in line, were able to park the Jag up front beyond the upper deck where we could keep the radio on without the usual static.

When the ferry finally moved out, I let Sinatra take care of Toni while I did a little wool-gathering.

So far I’d spent over forty-eight hours getting nowhere. I had talked to creeps, junkies, and various forms of homosexuals that supposedly knew him, and still hadn’t made first base. I was beginning to wonder.

There were over eight million people in the city of New York, and as China had so adroitly pointed out, the killer could be any one of them. Louise’s brother wasn’t the nicest of guys in anybody’s book—and when you considered the number of careless barflies and not so careless hustlers he must have beat at one time or another with his boosting prowess at a bar, the list of Ricky-haters could very well be endless.

Manny Zato, if not heading the list, was pretty high on it for my money—in spite of his eloquent denials. But even he needed a motive, and a motive I couldn’t find. If I just knew what Ricky had that made him so important—or even if the killer had found it. I still had qualms about Louise’s safety. Even though she insisted that she couldn’t possibly be in possession of something of her brother’s that was so important, without being aware of it, I still had qualms. I would’ve felt a hell of a lot better had she not refused Javitts’ police protection.

China, I discounted, almost. I believed her when she’d told me she’d been in love with Ricky. And if she seemed a little less than properly bereaved, I reminded myself that a beautiful kid on a daily quest for forty dollars worth of sanity can’t be judged by normal measures.

I even considered Bradley and his old man, but neither of them fit the picture. The sadistic angle was incidental. I’ve seen little old ladies in Bellview who looked like homemade apple pie, but got their kicks by clobbering their neighbors with a hatchet on weekends. So the Neals’ display of social mildness meant nothing. It was strictly the motive again. Why? Neal, Sr wouldn’t gain anything by killing Ricky. He certainly couldn’t expect to keep his son away from what he figured was a shady lady merely by killing the lady’s brother. If he was contemplating murder at all, Louise would have been the logical target, not Ricky.

Bradley, on the other hand, was even more remote. Even though he had found out that Ricky was an addict, I couldn’t picture him committing murder just to eliminate an undesirable brother-in-law.

Some case. I’d already run out of reasonable suspects. But when I brought back to light the big question of the all important something that Ricky must have possessed, it loomed big enough to bring them all jumping back into the picture again. Without knowing what the killer was looking for, I couldn’t eliminate anyone.

The cobwebs in my head were fuzzier than ever when we reached St. George Terminal and docked. I sighed and let it go for the time being as I started the Jag and drove up the ramp to Bay Street.

Staten Island was tucked in sleepy darkness at that hour. I put my arm around Toni and drove with one hand.

“Cold, kitten?” I asked. “Want me to put the top up?”

She stretched under my arm with her eyes closed.

“Uh-uh,” she sighed. “Just get us home, Jeeves.” She rubbed her cheek against the lapel of my jacket and sighed again. “And when we get there, sing to me. Like Frank.”

I pinched her provocatively propped behind lightly and she giggled.

We passed Silver Lake and swung over to Howard Avenue with the road almost to ourselves. Toni lived in a big apartment project way out on Howard that took awhile to reach, so I kicked the Jag up to a steady sixty for the next few miles. The wind whistled through the open top, making it seem like we were flying low.

I glanced at the rear view mirror as we passed Horrmann’s Castle and almost jerked Toni’s head off straightening up.

They were right behind us. Not more than ten feet from my back bumper. Because of the wind I hadn’t heard them come up.

Toni got her legs on the floor and looked up, startled.

“What is it, Cole?”

“I don’t know, honey. Sit tight!”

I didn’t want to frighten her, but I was telling the truth. I didn’t know who was playing tag with us, and I wanted her braced if things got rough.

At first I thought it was just a bunch of playful teenagers nerved up on a six-pack. I eased up on the gas pedal hoping they would figure us for squares and cut out to find braver playmates. The car stayed persistent and eased off with me.

By the time I had slowed to forty, I was beginning to feel the sweat start to trickle down the inside of my shirt. The car was a black Ford coupe, nine or ten years old, with one functioning headlight that stayed glued to our rear-end, ten feet behind us. There were two of them in the front seat. I got a quick look at the driver as the moonlight caught their windshield.

They weren’t teenagers.

We were just starting the long S-curve that would bring us up the hill to the beginning of the projects. A fast glance at the darkness around us made me remember that we were all alone on a very lonely road.

As the needle dropped under the forty mark they made their move, pulling out suddenly to the left and gunning the coupe into a sudden burst of speed. I saw the gun come out the window when they were still a few feet away.

“The floor!” I yelled, and yanked Toni down past my knees. I floored the gas pedal and wrenched the wheel to the left with both hands just as the coupe drew abreast and the pistol flash spat at me from two feet away. The bullet shattered the vent window an inch in front of my face at the same second the Jag piled into them.

I felt the jarring impact of the steering wheel stab my stomach as we tore into their right front fender. The coupe swerved to the left with the Jag riding their right wheel like a sudden growth and crashed through the guard rail bordering the road. There was a loud screech of metal rubbing against metal and the Jag broke free, skidding on two wheels to the right.

We hit a guard rail post solidly with our rear-end and teetered undecidedly for a second before the Jag shuddered and fell back with a jolting drop to all four wheels.

I grabbed Toni by the arm and pulled her with me through the opposite door. We tumbled to the shoulders of the road and fell in a heap on the grass.

I knelt beside her and got her face between my shaking hands, while my heart pumped like a piston.

“Baby, you all right?”

Her eyes were wide with fright. She nodded weakly and clutched at me, but I lowered her softly to the ground and stood up. My stomach felt like it was torn in half but I didn’t take time to look at it.

Crouching low, I moved to the front of the Jag and looked over the hood. The coupe had careened off the guard rail and landed at the bottom of the short decline that hedged the woods at the side of the road. It was about fifty feet away from the Jag, up on its side, with the wheels still spinning.

I waited a minute catching my breath. I was puffing like a quarter-horse. When I could breathe again I pressed against the rig under my arm and felt the cold steel of the .38 drop into my waiting fist.

No one moved in the coupe as I crossed the grass and moved down the decline. I felt the sweat start trickling again. The thought passed through my head that it might be blood but I was too busy to look.

I reached the coupe and stopped. The car was facing away from me, tipped over on its left side with the right door hanging loosely from one hinge. I glanced at the ground around it; the grass was empty. They were still inside; either hurt or dead—or waiting.

I drew clear air into my lungs and moved around to the left.

I had almost reached the squashed roof, moving as quietly as I could, when he showed himself. He raised his head past the broken door and fired at me point-blank.

The bullet went high as I ducked and fell to one knee. I caught a brief glimpse of a beefy face with a bleeding gash over one eye before I fingered the .38 without stopping. I emptied four cylinders at him before the face disappeared under the door.

Gripping the gun in my wet palm, I got to my feet and leaped up to the chassis, falling head first over the exposed door with the .38 cocked.

They were both dead.

The driver was bent into an impossible curve around the steering wheel that curled his spine like a pretzel. My beefy ambusher was lying on top of him with his one remaining eye staring straight up at me. At least two of my slugs had caught him dead center in the face.

I grabbed my aching stomach and got sick all over the windshield. When the retching stopped, I sat there looking down at the mess inside. It wasn’t pretty. Hanging on to the broken door jam, I leaned down into the front seat, keeping my eyes away from that splintered face. When somebody tries to kill me I just naturally like to find out why.

I eased my Spanish friend’s wallet out of his inside pocket without too much trouble and straightened up. Squatting in the moonlight, I went through it. His driver’s license told me that his name was Juan Moreles and that he had a 116th Street address over in Spanish Harlem. Nothing else—no cards, no photos, and no timely little note from whoever had sent him. I don’t know what I had expected, but at least I had a name.

I put the wallet back in his pocket and nodded good-bye to brother Moreles. Our association had been brief but not without a definite intimacy.

About two slugs worth.

I dropped to the ground and started back to the road. I had heard the wail of a siren while I was going through the wallet, and now I could see the blinking red light of a squad car coming up the hill as I climbed the slope to the road. Somebody in the projects must have heard the crash and called them.

Toni fell into my arms when I reached the Jag again, and that’s how we were when the cops arrived. She was shook up but otherwise all right. And other than the pain in my stomach and ribs when I moved too suddenly, I had come through the thing with nothing worse than a dark brown taste in my mouth.

The cops were thorough and courteous. They heard me out, listened to Toni verify it, and went over to check the coupe for themselves. They came back looking a little ill and suggested politely that I show them my button and the thirty-eight. The badge got a cursory glance and the gun got a couple of sniffs before they were satisfied that I might be telling the truth.

Another squad car pulled up from somewhere with an unneeded ambulance behind it, and we went through the whole thing all over again. Reaction was setting in by then. I felt

Toni quivering under my arm and spent an inspired five minutes talking the officer in charge into taking the two of us to her apartment in the squad car. Homicide Lieutenant Javitts’ name sounded fairly impressive as it tumbled off my tongue at every other sentence. The cop finally agreed to take us home.

He dropped us at the apartment building with a warning that we were to be available later in the day for further questioning. I thanked him and half carried Toni up to her apartment.

Within ten minutes I had her undressed and in bed with a double shot of Irish whiskey drowning some of the shock. She insisted that I stay the night with her. I was tempted, thinking of a novel way of breaking up the lingering effects of the shock, but I kissed her instead and declined. I had other things to do.

Her seductive pout belied most of her helplessness, anyway, so I kissed it warily again and stood up before she persuaded me to crawl in beside her. I borrowed the keys to her T-bird and left her lying there with pursed lips and a bottle of booze. It was some picture.

* * * *

It was almost 3:00 A.M. when I got back to Manhattan. I left the ferry and gave the T-bird its head, pushing it around the thin traffic on the drive. I wanted to get to The Purple Pit again before China left, if she hadn’t already.

I had a name. Juan Moreles. I hoped that China had a connection to go with it. It was a long shot, I admitted, but I was fresh out of short ones. Moreles was dead and it had been a swift, violent death from a lethal reaction to the law of kill or be killed. It was going to be different with the bastard who’d sent him.

Him, I’d enjoy.

The Purple Pit had thinned out a little when I got there, but not enough to give the owner any pains in his cash register. The lisping, lavender crowd was still holding up the bar, and, although the combo seemed to have left the scene, the main room was far from empty.

I found a spot at the bar, ordered a drink and looked around. A minute’s worth of casual scanning got me four cow-eyed invitations and a toothy smile or two, but no China. When the drink arrived I paid for it and gulped it down. It warmed my bruised stomach nicely, caressing the tangled nerves on the way down. It isn’t every day I get to shoot it out with a gun-happy Spaniard, and at the moment I was more than happy to pamper my Scotch-inclined guts.

I set the empty glass on the bar and sighed. Much better. I was about to order a quick refill when I saw China. She was over by the exit, about to leave the club on the solicitous arm of a natty, very attentive escort. China seemed as high as before and looked very gay and happy as she laughed at something her escort was whispering to her. I took another look at the guy and almost wished I hadn’t.

It was Manny Zato.

By the time I’d completely digested what my eyes told me had to be true, they were gone. I sat there like an idiot for a minute wondering what to do. What could I do? Run after them and tell China what a disappointment she was?

I shook out a cigarette and jammed it in my mouth. This case had more angles than a skinny chorus-girl. Here was the ex-girl friend of Ricky Parks, happily playing footsie with the number one suspect of said Ricky’s murder.

I lit up and took a long, angry drag, turning around to get my glass filled up. The glass was gone but the bartender was bringing me a fresh one. I looked at him vaguely when he put it in front of me.

“A friend of yours,” he said, smiling. “At the end of the bar.”

I was about to tell him what the friend could do with it when I looked down to the other end of the bar and saw Valerie Coe smiling at me.

Some of the anger melted.

Taking my drink, I moved around the bar to her. Her smile was a little crooked as I sat down. I guessed it had been a wet night for platinum blondes.

“Hi. Where’s the girl friend?”

I grinned at her.

“Home,” I said. “I thought you had a date?”

She shrugged indifferently, but I detected a submerged anger beneath her calm.

“He left. We weren’t compatible. You owe me a drink, Mister.”

“Right,” I said, and had her glass filled. She was drinking double shots with ice. I looked at her blonde perfection next to me and silently wondered what kind of a nut her date had been. Valerie was beautiful even when cold and aloof, but with the lazy, animal-like warmth brought out by the liquor, she was pretty heady stuff to be walking out on. No walk could be that important.

She smiled lazily at me when the drink came, and the sudden bold promise in her eyes quickened my pulse.

“I have a bottle,” she said. “It’s three o’clock in the morning, and I’m bored, and I have a bottle that needs emptying. Interested?”

Her fingers played lightly on my sleeve, burning right through the material.

“A bottle?” I babbled.

She nodded, closing her eyes.

“At my apartment. Like a drink?”

Is the grass green?

I told her I just might, at that. Suddenly, the crash, the killing, China and Zato; the whole, miserable night seemed like a perfect problem for some future date. Like tomorrow. The most humane thing I could think of in the world at that moment was a drink in Valerie Coe’s apartment.

We sipped salude to each other while her eyes brooded at me over the rim of the glass, and I felt the liquor swirl warmly in my guts.

My stomach still hurt but somehow it was no longer important.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Valerie had an apartment among the plush, penthouse clique up in the East 50’s that must have cost somebody a tidy little fortune to lease. As we silently ascended in the cushioned little elevator, I wondered idly if Valerie was the somebody. Not that it made much difference. I was invited up for a drink, not to pay the rent.

She lived on the ninth floor in a four-room apartment that took up half the floor. When we reached the deep-carpeted foyer she dug a little silver key out of her purse, handed it to me, and leaned indolently against the wall while I unlocked her door.

The door opened into a large, rambling living room that made my little living room look like a nursery. Everything was low and modern with abstract paintings and little skinny lamps hanging all over the place. The cream-colored rug was almost knee-deep and felt like a cloud under my feet.

I closed the door and whistled.

“Like it?” she asked.

“Like it,” I said. “Remind me to take up writing sometime.”

She smiled and walked over to one of the sofas. She tossed her purse on the cushions.

“I’ve been lucky,” she said. “You’d be surprised what a good agent can do. Take off your coat and get comfortable, Cole. I’ll do the same while you’re making drinks.”

She indicated a glass bar by the sofa, and disappeared into the bedroom.

I shrugged at the smirking Buddha on the coffee table and removed my coat. If she wanted me comfortable, comfortable I’d be. I vetoed an impulse to take off my shoes too, then walked over to the bar.

She had everything from rye to wine, but I stayed with Ballantine’s and poured us a few hefty fingers apiece. After adding ice and a stingy shot of soda, I looked around some more and discovered a Hi-Fi set in the corner. She had a stack of albums next to the set, mostly show tunes and chamber stuff, and I had the ‘West Side Story’ spinning softly on the turntable by the time she came out of the bedroom.

I stood looking at her as she posed for me in the doorway. I felt my heart start doing things inside my chest.

She wore a black silk blouse and a pair of red toreador pants. The blouse was buttonless and cut to a long, sharp V that ended in the band of the pants. The black silk was stretched tightly over her high, pointed breasts, making it obvious that there was nothing under it but her. My eyes fell to the V like bees drawn to honey. The cut of the opening was wide enough to show the inner curves of her full breasts, and the startling contrast of all that soft whiteness against the black silk made it hard to just stand there and look. She sighed, purposely prolonging it, so the silk got taut for a second, making her nipples stand out in pointed relief.

She’d let her hair down, and it was longer than I had imagined, falling past her shoulders to the blackness of the silk like a soft platinum waterfall of shimmering waves. It framed her beautiful face like spun silver.

Smiling like a cat who’s just cornered a not very elusive mouse, she came toward me in long, easy strides. The tight pants wrinkled at her hips and thighs as she moved. I felt glued to the spot, watching her. The long, slim muscles of her calves tightened smoothly each time her bare feet touched the rug.

“Drinks ready?” she asked, stopping a foot away from me.

I swallowed and nodded.

“Over there,” I pointed.

I followed her to the bar and the pants were even worse from behind. We touched glasses and sipped when we got there.

She sipped—I gulped.

“I like your—records,” I muttered inanely. Suddenly, I was about fifteen years old with glue on my tongue.

“I’m glad,” she whispered. “I want you to like everything tonight, Cole. The music—the drink—everything.”

She put her glass back on the bar and came up close to me with her arms going up to my shoulders and resting there. We weren’t actually touching, but I got pleasantly drunk on the heady scent that engulfed me.

I felt pretty silly standing there like that with a drink in my hand, so I put it beside hers on the bar. When my hands were empty they just naturally went to her slender waist.

She pressed against me, crushing her breasts against my chest as her arms tightened around my neck.

“Kiss me,” she whispered. “Kiss me hard, Cole.”

Her face lifted and I bent my head to meet her. Her lips were soft and full beneath mine as we kissed. She made a low sound in her throat and her lips opened hungrily, her tongue searching.

I pulled her to me, forgetting everything but the soft warmth in my arms. My lips crushed against hers, our bodies meeting fiercely. I tore my mouth away and kissed her throat urgently, my nostrils filled with the smell of her hair.

My hand caressed her shoulder inside the blouse and moved slowly down to the full, ripe softness of her breast.

“Yes!” she whispered. “Yes, Cole, yes!”

I was on fire as I started to lift her into my arms to carry her to the bedroom.

“No,” she panted. “Right here. Please, Cole, hurry!”

We fell to the deep, soft rug and my hands shook as I tore at her clothes. Her low animal moans sent wonderful daggers through my body as first the blouse and then the pants were dropped to the floor beside her.

I stopped for a second, bending over her, to drink in the soft, blonde beauty of her naked body. My eyes slowly caressed each part of her separately, from her heaving, scarlet-tipped breasts to the long, full thighs that twisted in passion beneath me.

“Cole!” she moaned, pulling me down.

* * * *

How long we stayed on the rug, I don’t know. Time, people, the world; nothing was real but the demanding animal in my arms. She was a soft, firm, wild creature of utter abandon who surrendered herself completely to my inflamed emotions.

Some time during the night we switched to the big, soft mattress in the bedroom, but it was impossible to remember when or how. Her appetite was insatiable throughout the long, ecstatic night. The bright rays of the morning sun had crept through the open bedroom window before I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, exhausted.

I woke up with the sun burning my eyes and a dull pain throbbing in my guts. I remained still a few minutes, wallowing in the softness of the bed and feeling weak as a kitten. My fuzzy thoughts drifted lazily back to Valerie and last night, and I grinned wearily at the ceiling.

A woman is a woman is a woman.

Dragging up some strength from somewhere, I rolled laboriously onto my left side and felt a new pain stab my stomach. I cursed and sat up. A note with my name on it was leaning against a hair brush on the dresser. I reached over and brought it back to bed with me.

It was from Valerie, of course. She’d gone out and didn’t know how long she’d be gone. She hoped I’d have a long, blissful sleep and assured me that I deserved it. This, I didn’t have to be told. She closed the note with love and affection and signed it, “Thanks.”

She was welcome.

I made the bathroom and washed some of the muck out of my brain with cold water. My watch told me it was eleven o’clock. A whole new day was starting without me.

I checked Valerie’s medicine cabinet for some Bromo and got a surprise. One whole shelf was devoted to male toilet articles. Shaving cream, brush, blades, lotion and even some male hair tonic. I shut the cabinet door and shrugged. Somebody either lived here with her or made regular visits. Considering last night, it figured. She needed somebody.

I got dressed in the bedroom and sat by the telephone for five minutes before I got the courage to dial Toni’s number. Besides the guilt I was starting to feel about Valerie, I wanted to be sure Toni was really all right after last night.

The phone buzzed twice before it was answered, and Toni’s soft “Hello” tinkled at me. I felt guiltier than ever.

“Hi, kitten. Everything okay?”

“Cole!” she cried. “Where are you? Paul Javitts has been trying to find you all morning.”

“What’s his problem?”

“It’s about last night, I guess. He came over here to see me and I told him what happened, but he wants to see you, too. Are you home?”

“No,” I mumbled, feeling like a heel. “No, I’m—not home. You all right, kitten? I mean, the crash and everything?”

She giggled softly.

“I’m still in bed, lover. I’m fine but it’s an excuse I’m giving my conscience. Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” I said, rubbing my stomach. “Yeah, I’m fine. Look, honey, did Javitts say he had anything for me? About the case, I mean?”

“Uh-uh. He just had me sign a statement about what happened and said he wanted to talk to you but couldn’t find you. Didn’t you go home last night?”

“I guess I didn’t hear him knock,” I muttered. Which was true in a way. “What’s he doing on Staten Island, by the way?”

“We used his name, remember? Are you going to see him?”

“I’m going down now. You sure you’re all right?”

“Fine. When will I see you?”

“I’ll call you. And, kitten?”

“M-m-m?”

“Nothing. ’Bye.”

I hung up before I really goofed. I’d almost said something embarrassing, like how I loved her or something. That’s how guilty I felt.

* * * *

Javitts’ office was downtown at the headquarters on Broome Street. It was crowding noon when I parked and went into the huge gray building.

Javitts was sitting behind his desk when I entered his office, typing out a report with two stiff fingers. I stood in the doorway watching him bull his way over the keys.

“The Police Department run short of stenographers, Paul?” I asked, “or did you chase them all away with those blunt fingers of yours in the wrong places?”

He stopped typing and looked over the carriage at me. The morbid lines in his face were as deep as ever.

“Well, hello, killer,” he said. “Nice of you to stop in.”

I smiled and walked to the desk.

“It’s a funny thing about killings,” he said, when I’d sat across from him, “even killings done in self-defense. The commissioner has a real phobia about getting the whole thing down on paper from the people involved.” He smirked at me, sarcastically. “It’s tiring, I know, especially for a real busy private-eye like yourself, but maybe you could spare us just a minute or two of your time?”

I shrugged. “The cop who took us home this morning said you people would want a statement later today. This is still today, isn’t it?”

He pushed away from the typewriter and leaned back.

“What happened?” he asked. “Toni filled me in on the crash, but what happened after that?”

I told him the whole thing, adding that I didn’t know the two men in the other car.

“We’re running them through the file now,” he said. “We’ll know who they were by this afternoon. You got any ideas?”

I shook my head, lighting a Camel.

“Nothing sure. What’s your big interest, by the way? Staten Island a branch of Manhattan now? Or are you just naturally concerned about my likeable hide.”

“Toni’s maybe, but not yours, Sherlock. You’re too stupid to die.” He lit a cigarette and blew smoke at me. “I figure the hit attempt ties in with the Parks case.”

“Brilliant, Lieutenant. What’s the latest on the Parks thing?”

“Fingerprints negative. The only prints in his sister’s apartment were theirs. Same goes for Rick’s walk-up. Just his prints and one other set. These were on record. Belong to Peggy McCoy. She was busted for possession, but a judge let her go. Miss Parks says she was Ricky’s girl.”

“She was. Anything else?”

“Phony tips. Nothing important. Because of the way he was killed, I checked most of the paroled and discharged buggos. But that’s a blank, too. Nobody’s missing from Creedmore or Islip or any of those joints, and the only possibilities that might figure with a sadistic angle are just names on circulars. A guy from Youngstown, Ohio who tortured a family to death, a Canadian woman who hacked up her husband, and a kid from Chicago wanted for mutilating a woman. They’re all in this area.”

He dragged on the cigarette. “So you see how lost we are. We’re searching for straws. Parks, a small-time hustler with a thousand people with gripes against him, but none big enough to kill him over. How’re you making out?”

“Same. Potatoes and no meat. You run across Manny Zato’s name?”

“Zato? What’s he got to do with it?”

“He was pushing to Parks.”

“So?”

“So it’s better than nothing. Agree?”

“Zato’s a fox, Cole. We’ve had him pegged for a long time, but it’s done us no good. Personally, he stays too clean. He’s not the type to butcher one of his customers for kicks.”

“Not even if the customer had something he wanted? Something important?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. That’s the key I need.”

“Well, keep plugging, boy. If Zato figures in, I’ll be a happy New York cop. Now, about that statement?”

He buzzed for a stenographer, and when she came in with her little machine I rehashed last night’s crash and shooting. It didn’t take long. When it was finished Javitts waved her out to type it up. I’d sign it on the way out.

“Mind if I use your phone?” I asked. “I haven’t checked in yet.”

“Use it. Dial nine for an outside line.”

I called my favorite operator and was told about three morning calls. One from Toni, one from Javitts, and one from Louise Parks. Toni and Paul were taken care of.

“Any message from Miss Parks,” I asked.

“Yes. Here it is. It’s strange. She said to tell you she’s found what the killer wanted, and it proves who killed her brother. She said you’ll have this proof today, and meanwhile she was going to set up the killer for you. She told me to make you understand there was no danger, because she would use the proof as a bargaining agent.”

The operator’s crisp voice paused.

“Sound crazy, Mister Winters? It’s what she said.”

My fingers turned white around the phone. “Yes, thanks. She say anything else?”

“That was all, Mister Winters.”

“Okay. Thanks again.”

Paul saw my expression and stood up.

“Anything wrong?” he asked.

“Louise Parks.” I cursed. “She’s found the key and wants to brace the killer with it.”

I grabbed the phone, digging for my address book. Javitts barked into another phone, ordering a squad car.

I called the realty company. Louise was still on sick leave. I called her apartment. I got eight buzzes and no answer. I then joined Paul at the door.

“The car’s in front,” he said. “Let’s go.”

We made it up to the Bronx in record time, a siren clearing the way. On the way I called myself sixteen kinds of a fool for playing all-night games with Valerie, instead of sitting by a phone.

The squad car screeched to a stop at Louise’s brownstone, and I was on the sidewalk before it had stopped. Paul followed as I ran up the steps and into the hallway, my heart in my throat. I prayed fast and sincerely as we went up the stairs.

Her door was closed but unlocked. I pushed inside without knocking. The living room was quiet and untouched, easing the thudding in my chest, until I looked into the bedroom.

A sick rage grabbed my muscles and I felt like crying out with futility as I crossed the room and looked inside.

We were much too late.

I heard Paul’s sharp intake of breath as we both stared at the carnage on the bed.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

She was on her back, naked, mid-center on the bed, her hands and feet tied spread-eagle to the bedposts. I had to force myself to look at the killer’s work. It was fiendish.

He’d used a razor blade, a knife couldn’t have cut so cleanly and sharp. Her soft, plump body was insanely mutilated from the torn, blood-splattered breasts to the long, jagged slashes on her thighs. The final, life-ending slash had been made at her neck, from which blood puddled over her chest and caked. It had been an ear to ear cut.

Slowly, I took the sheet at the bottom of the bed and covered her body. Then I sat down on the chair next to the bed and stared numbly. One soft, curving calf was still exposed, sticking out from under the sheet. My eyes traced the gentle curve down to the trim ankle where the cord bruised her skin.

I didn’t feel good. I had promised to help her. This had been help?

I watched the still, butchered body of what had been a young, attractive girl a few hours before, and vaguely heard Paul using the phone in the next room.

When he returned to the bedroom he stopped beside me and put a gentle hand on my shoulder.

“It’s not your fault, Cole. Don’t start thinking it is.”

I looked up at him and something in my eyes must have told him to shut up. He went over to the bed and looked under the sheet again.

“What’re you going to do?” I asked.

He turned around, puzzled.

“Huh?”

“What are you going to do?”

“Cole, you know as well as I what we do. Prints, pictures, lab crew, canvass the area for witnesses.”

I got up and joined him at the side of the bed. My hand was steady as it pulled back the sheet. I looked down at her pitiful body for a long time before I covered it.

“Listen,” I said, grabbing Paul’s arm. “You do that, you hear? Make your tests and take your pictures. Do everything in the book, and do it ten times if you have to. But you do it right. Do it like the girl under that sheet was your own daughter!”

I let go of his arm and headed for the door. I had just made another promise. To myself.

“Where’re you going?” Paul asked when I reached the door. I looked at him. I felt like screaming but it came out a whisper.

“To kill me an animal.”

* * * *

I took a cab back to Broome Street and picked up the T-bird. It was early afternoon by then. I hadn’t eaten since the night before, but my guts were too full of hate to be thinking of food. I drove to a bar in the Village and killed two double shots before my hands felt steady enough to handle a phone. Using the public booth at the rear of the bar, I dialed China’s number and waited. It was a long time before she answered.

“Hello?”

“China?” I asked.

“Yes. Who is this?”

“Cole Winters. I’ve got to see you. Can I come up?”

There was a pause and I heard her breathing over the wire. She sounded strange. Like she was out of breath.

“Cole, do me a favor first? It’s terribly important.”

“Shoot”

“I-I’m sick. I need a fix bad. If I call my connection, will you pick it up for me on your way? Please?”

“Will he give it to me?”

“Sure. Please, Cole. I’m too sick to go.”

I agreed. She gave me the address. Told me the street and number of her pad. I had to get the fix at a tobacco shop on Fourth Street.

Picking up China’s dope wasn’t so difficult as I’d imagined. Apparently her phone call had paved the way. I had no trouble at all finding the shop or getting the stuff. Her connection was an old Negro behind the counter in the shop.

A half hour after our phone call I pulled up in front of China’s apartment building. It was a nondescript place in a junk-infested neighborhood by the river.

She lived on the second floor at the end of a long, dark corridor that stretched in front of me in a maze of shadows. When I remembered whose company she’d been in the last time I’d seen her, the hairs tingled a little at the back of my neck. I walked through the shadows.

One short knock got me in. She had been standing on the other side, waiting. The black pony tail bounced crazily as she stepped back and motioned me in.

“Got it?” she asked, looking hungrily at me.

“I got it,” I said.

As she closed the door I looked at her. She was wearing a yellow terrycloth robe that hung to her calves and belted tightly at her waist. Even the robe’s rough material couldn’t hide the provocative curves inside, but it was her face that got my attention.

Unlike the glowing, healthy color of the night before, it was ashen. Her high cheekbones seemed sharp and bony under the hungry intensity of her eyes. She was sick, and shaking like a leaf.

“Please,” she said. “Give it to me!”

I handed her the fix.

“Sit down,” she said. “I’ll be back shortly.”

Abruptly, she ran into the bedroom and closed the door. I was counting on the dope to pull her together without overdoing it. China and I were due for a talk.

I glanced at the room. It was the living room; apparently one of the only two complete rooms comprising the apartment. There was a door on each side of the room. The one she’d gone through and one opposite it, leading to a closet-sized kitchenette. Her bathroom probably adjoined the bedroom. Which figured; she’d need water for the fix.

I looked around the room but it was strictly an accessory to the bedroom. I doubted whether she even used it, much less left anything lying around.

A telephone stood on an end table by the couch and I walked over and picked it up. I dialed Javitts’ office number and waited. It was answered almost immediately by a gruff voice.

“Is Lieutenant Javitts there, Sergeant?”

“Just a moment, sir.”

I worried my lip and waited.

“Javitts here,” he said.

“Paul, this is Cole.”

“Yeah, Cole. You all right?”

“Why? Shouldn’t I be?”

“Well, you stormed out with blood in your eye. I thought—”

“I know it’s early, Paul,” I cut in, “but—anything yet?”

“You must be psychic. We’ve got a warrant out for Bradley Neal. A woman in the apartment house saw him leaving shortly after the M.E. figures the girl was killed.”

I frowned at the receiver. “How’d you get a positive finger so soon?”

“A hunch. You told me he was the girl’s fiancé when the brother was killed. When we checked for possible witnesses I brought his picture with me.”

“Damn,” I said.

“Oh, and I got a make on your last night’s playmates. The driver was a yegg named Cookie Decarlo, a small time strong-arm boy. The guy you shot it out with was Juan Moreles. It looks like you were right about Zato.”

“Why?”

“Moreles was a runner of his. He pushed to the beats in the Village.”

“Does his record show a nickname, Paul?”

“Yeah. They called him Chico.”

“Thanks, Paul. I’ll keep in touch.”

I hung up and stood there. I had been wrong about Chico’s elimination. Apparently his boss had given him one last assignment to square himself.

The cop-scream for Bradley bothered me none. He wasn’t our killer, but it wouldn’t hurt him to stay in stir until I proved who was.

There were no sounds coming from China’s bedroom when I walked to the door and listened. I turned the knob and opened it.

She was sitting on the bed with the left sleeve of the robe pushed up to her armpit. Her robe belt was tied around her upper arm. Her dull eyes looked up at me as she pressed the rubber nipple of the eye-dropper attached to the needle in her vein.

I watched her while she pressed the rubber and released it, over and over again, almost hypnotically. The heroin was already in her system working it’s magic. Now she was cleaning the dropper of all possible dregs of the dope—with her own blood.

Finally, she stopped and pulled the needle. She untied the belt and worked her arm a little before tying it around the robe again. But not before I’d seen the clean, round curve of a bare breast where the robe parted.

“I’m okay, now,” she said, getting up. “Just let me get rid of this stuff, huh?”

I nodded and lit a cigarette while she cleared the bed of her “works”; the eyedropper outfit, a burnt spoon, a piece of cotton, and her cigarette lighter.

After she’d stashed the articles in the bathroom, she came back looking more like last night’s China.

“I’m bent,” she said. “I think I took too much.” She plopped on the bed and the robe parted at her thigh. “What’s new, pops?”

“Louise Parks was murdered this morning.”

“Murdered?” she said. “How awful.”

I watched her face, looking for reaction. Her condition made it hard. She seemed shocked but the dope wouldn’t let it penetrate very deeply.

“I’ve got questions, China. I want answers.”

She moved her leg and the robe parted farther. She wasn’t wearing anything under it. “What kind of questions?” she asked.

“Two men tried to kill Toni and me after we saw you last night. They didn’t make it, but not because they didn’t try. Do you know who sent them, China?”

Her pupils were brown circles of granite. “Who?” she whispered.

“The same guy you left The Purple Pit with this morning. Manny Zato.”

She jumped off the bed and crossed the room in long, nervous strides. Shaking a cigarette from the pack on the dresser, she lit it savagely and turned around. Her pupils sparkled with fire.

“What do you want from me?” she yelled. “So Manny Zato sent somebody to kill you. Look, pops, I’m just a tired junkie minding my own business. Why lean on me?”

“Zato,” I said.

She laughed bitterly.

“What about Zato?”

“Last night looked pretty convincing. You two seemed cozy from practice.”

She strode to the bed and sat.

“So you saw us last night and you think we’re cozy.” She smiled sardonically. “Pops, you need an education. Yes, we were together last night. And do you know where we were going when you saw us? Right here, pops. Right here on this bed. Just like we’ve been doing for the past two weeks. That’s right—since before Ricky was killed.”

I had to stop myself from grabbing her hopped-up, little head and shaking it.

“I think he killed Ricky,” I said.

She watched me and her lips quivered, but she didn’t cry.

“You want to know something, pops? I couldn’t care less!”

I crossed to the bed with the rotten bile of three days of death choking me. I grabbed the front of her robe and backhanded her across the mouth. She fell against the pillows and lay still. A little trickle of blood slid down the corner of her lips.

“You little tramp!” I choked.

She smiled at me. She lay there against the pillows and smiled up at me with pity, like I was a nut or something that just had to be humored.

“It’s okay, pops, hit me. Take it out of my hide if it’ll make you feel better. I know what I am and it looks like you’re just finding out.”

I stepped back and leaned against the wall. Already, I was sorry I’d hit her. She watched me steadily as she moved over to the edge of the bed again.

“I’m an addict, pops. Do you really know what an addict is? An addict will sell his own mother to get a shot. Or anything else that somebody wants to buy.

“I told you I loved Ricky, and I did. But Ricky’s dead and I’m not. Sure I sleep with Manny Zato. And I did it even when Ricky was alive. Manny Zato has more dope at his fingertips than I’ll ever use in two lifetimes. And if he likes what I give him enough to give me what I like—that’s how it’s going to be.”

She rose and began walking up and down in front of me. Her eyes were fierce now, and defiant.

“You think he’s the first?” she yelled. “I can’t remember the first! I’ve got a commodity, pops. A commodity that men dig. I don’t sell it on the street. I’m not a whore. But I use it, man. I use it because it’s all I’ve got to use.” She stopped in front of me and laughed. “What is it, anyway? Some kind of precious gift that only gets delivered with a marriage license like the book says?” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I’ll tell you something, pops. The only thing that’s precious to me is the shiny little .26 I stick in my arm.

“How do you think you were able to cop for me this afternoon? You think that’s kosher, that delivery service I got? Manny Zato, man. That’s why I got it. And that’s why he can crawl in that bed any goddamned time he wants to.”

I looked at her and I didn’t want to hit her any more. The only emotion left in me for China McCoy was a very big pity. I dropped the cigarette in an ashtray on the dresser and walked past her to the door.

“Cole, wait!”

I stopped in the doorway and faced her. She was standing by the bed watching me, fright in her eyes.

“What are you going to do?”

I shrugged. She wouldn’t understand. She was beyond that.

“Get him,” I said. “Get him for Ricky and his sister.”

Her eyes moistened and she started to cry. Not blinking; just crying, with the tears rolling down her cheeks, unheeded.

“Don’t,” she pleaded. “Please, Cole, don’t. I know you. You’ll do it and he’ll be dead and I’ll be sick. Please, Cole. I’m begging you!” It was hard to watch.

“Good-bye, China,” I said.

“No!” she cried. “Wait!”

She was panting now as her hands flew to the belt and jerked it from her waist. The robe fell open, exposing her soft, naked body through the gap.

“Wait,” she said, again. “I’ll be good to you, Cole. I promise. I know things.”

She reached up to her neck and slid the robe off. It dropped to the floor in a heap. Slowly, she strode toward me, placing one tiny foot in front of the other, rubbing her thighs together as she moved.

“Wonderful things,” she whispered. “Stay with me, Cole. Forget Manny.”

I watched her come, running my eyes over the flawless perfection of her body for one last time. Then I turned around and left her there.

I felt dirty, somehow, and very tired.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

She followed me to the outside door of the apartment, crying and pleading, indifferent to her nakedness. I opened the door and went out to the hall without looking back.

She stopped pleading but I could still hear her sobs in the doorway behind me as I walked down the hall. I reached the hall intersection at the end of the dark corridor and was about to descend to the first step of the stairs when she screamed.

It saved my life.

I threw myself to the right, landing with a thud against the corridor wall. The shiny glint of steel flashed quickly to my left in a deadly chop that tore the air an inch from my shoulder.

He’d been waiting for me in the darkness, knowing he’d have me cold as I walked to the shadowy staircase. Had China not screamed it would’ve been easy.

As I twisted sideways I jammed my arm against the shoulder rig as hard as I could, almost dropping the .38 as it literally flew into my hand. My attacker regained his balance and lunged at me head-on with the knife low in his fist as the .38 came out. I didn’t have time for a shot; the action came too fast. I dropped my left shoulder and met his lunge with my right hand, whipping the gun in a desperate, upward arc. It clanged with the knife and I pushed with everything I had. He fell back to the top of the stairs. The dim light from the bulb glowed momentarily on his thin, blond features.

It was Zato’s man, the kid called Blade.

He stood panting for a second at the edge of the top step. The blade glinted with tiny stars at the razor-sharp edge. A fine edge, honed to perfection for death.

Or mutilation.

“Drop it, Blade,” I grated. “Drop it, you bastard, or I’ll wash you right where you stand.”

He didn’t drop it. He made a sound somewhere between a grunt and a moan and hunched his back for another lunge.

At that distance I couldn’t have missed him blindfolded. I squeezed off three shots in succession and watched all three of them tear his chest apart. He dropped the knife and teetered over the top step for a breathless second, a look of unaccountable shame slowly covering his shocked face. Then he fell backward, headfirst, down the stairs.

He landed in a heap on the landing and lay still.

I put the .38 away and turned around. My nerves were screaming inside me. China was standing in the hallway, naked as sin, with her little fists pressed against her lips, in horror. I looked at her and remembered that she’d saved my life.

“Call the police,” I said, as gently as I could. “Ask for Lieutenant Paul Javitts of homicide, and tell him what happened. Tell him I’ll see him later.”

She stood there rigid, her eyes staring at me over her fists.

“Did you hear me, China?”

She nodded, numbly, never taking her eyes from my face.

I left her there and went down the stairs to the landing where Blade was sprawled on his back. His face looked peaceful in the dim light. He might’ve looked asleep had the blood not been on his chest. I stepped over the body and went down the stairs.

It was after three when I got to the office. I had stopped in a diner downtown and forced down a ham sandwich and two cups of black coffee. But the sandwich lay at the bottom of my guts like a wet rock. In the last fifteen hours I’d seen violent death come to four different people, and the juices in my stomach churned too much to go for food.

I rode up in the elevator without even minding its creaking obstinacy. I felt hollow with uselessness. Alistair Neal was waiting for me in the reception room.

He looked up from the lumpy couch when I came in and the pain in his eyes was almost physical. He seemed to have shrunk since the last time I’d seen him.

I closed the door and eyed him coldly.

“Slumming, Mister Neal?” I asked.

He got up and stood with his hands hanging in front of him, playing with his homburg.

“I must talk with you,” he said.

I nodded and unlocked the door to the office.

If he wanted to follow me in, he could. It didn’t make much difference. I was getting tired of the Neals and their unhappy money.

He followed me in and sat down across the desk from me.

“I need your help again, Mister Winters,” he began, nervously plucking at the creases in his pants. This was a different Alistair Neal. “You know that Bradley’s been arrested and charged with murder?”

“I knew the police were looking for him.”

“He gave himself up. He swears he didn’t do it.” He paused and looked damn sincere. “I believe him, Mister Winters.”

I shrugged.

“You’re his father,” I said. “Which reminds me, the last time I talked to you, you didn’t sound very doting. Change of heart, Mister Neal?”

“Bradley’s in trouble. Serious trouble. Our differences of the past have necessarily become trivial compared to this new situation.”

I had to give it to the old man. Even when desperate, he remained his stubborn, articulate self.

“What does Bradley say?” I asked. “Have you talked to him?”

“Yes. I was with him when he surrendered himself. He told me the whole story.”

He pushed himself to the edge of the chair and leaned earnestly toward me.

“The Parks girl called him this morning at his hotel and asked him to come to her apartment. She didn’t suggest any urgency in the request and Bradley stopped for breakfast before going. He got there an hour or so later and found her dead.”

“Why didn’t he call the police?”

“He was frightened. He knew the police were aware of their relationship, and feared they wouldn’t believe his story. He swears the girl was already dead when he got there. Will you help me?”

He was crawling. Alistair Neal, crawling. “What would you like me to do?”

“Find the real killer and clear my son. You name your own price.”

He got out his checkbook and pen and held them expectantly over the desk.

I got up and looked at him.

“Put your money away,” I said. “You think that stuff can do anything, don’t you? Get out of this office before I forget myself and hit an old man.”

He sat there, stunned. He couldn’t get it through his head that his money had goofed.

“You-you won’t help?” he asked. “I’ll give you ten thousand dollars—fifty thousand—whatever you want.”

“Get out of here!”

“Please!” he said. “You’re the only one who can do it. You know the people involved. You must have some idea who killed her. Please, I’m begging you.”

I walked around the desk and stood next to him.

“I do. A very good idea. You can go see your son and tell him not to worry. Because I’ll get the killer. But I’ll be getting him for a kid named Ricky Parks and his butchered sister. Not for you or Bradley or any of your god-damned money.” I controlled the tension building inside me. “Now get out of here.”

He watched me for a minute and then rose and walked to the door. He looked very old. At the door, he stopped and turned.

“Mister Winters, I—” He saw my eyes and shut his mouth. With a quiet, un-Neal-like humbleness, he bowed slightly and left the office. I watched him walk through the reception room and close the outer door behind him. He didn’t look back.

I sighed from my feet on up and went back around the desk. The over-charged drink I mixed on the little desk bar didn’t help much, but it was something to steady my hand with.

I didn’t want any more of Neal or China or Bradley or Javitts or anybody else with a problem. All I wanted was Manny Zato. Before the day was over I was going to find him and make up for an awful lot of grief.

As it turned out, I didn’t have to.

I was rubbing the bottom of the glass against my forehead, feeling the coolness of the ice, when I heard the mail slot push open in the reception room. I looked up. The afternoon mail delivery was dropping to the floor through the slot in the outside door.

I watched the letters, idly, as they fell and scattered a little on the rug. Bills, I thought. Bills and advertisements for the big smart detective.

Then my feet hit the floor and the glass went flying as I remembered Louise’s message to the girl at the answering service: “She said that you will have the proof today…”

I scrambled out of the chair and ran out to the reception room, falling to my knees at the mail. It was the only envelope there without type-printed lettering on it.

My name and address was the only writing on the envelope, and I felt a lump grow big in my throat as I read Louise’s even handwriting. My hands shook as I tore it open.

Two people had been butchered for what I held in my hand.

It was a clipping. Nothing else. No letter or note. Just a newspaper clipping. A little wrinkled and aged, with a faded picture above the heading.

I squatted there reading it and feeling sick to the core of my soul.

I read it through twice from top to bottom and stared with fascination at the picture. I’d been wrong all along. Javitts and I both had figured the killing backward. The fact that the killer was a sadist wasn’t merely an unfortunate sidelight to the murders as we had assumed. It was the reason for the murders themselves.

Louise’s mutilated body projected itself in stark detail through my mind, and I shuddered. She had seen this same clipping and still had convinced herself that she would be able to stall the killer. I shook my head and said a short prayer for all the naive of the world.

Including myself.

No one could’ve endured what Louise had been exposed to without telling all. The killer had to know that I now had the clipping.

Then the phone rang sharply.

I brought my eyes up slowly from the clipping and stared at it through the open doorway. It rang some more. I felt calm, suddenly, as I straightened up and went back inside. I knew who it was before I picked the phone up.

“Hello,” I said.

Manny Zato’s low, resonant voice smiled at me over the wire.

“Mister Winters,” he said. “I believe your mail as arrived by now?”

“That’s right, Zato. It arrived.”

He sighed pleasantly.

“Fine, fine. The—ah—little present from Miss Parks—you opened it?”

“I opened it.”

His voice lost its smoothness and became hard.

“Hold the line,” he ordered.

I waited, afraid to breathe. The next voice to come over the wire was cracked with fright.

“Cole!” it cried in my ear. “Cole, help me!”

“Toni! Are you all right?”

She broke into sobs that tore straight through my heart.

“Oh, darling,” she sobbed, “they said they’ll kill me if you don’t come. They said they’ll—oh, Cole, it’s horrible!”

“Easy, kitten,” I choked. My fists were clenched so hard they hurt. “I’ll come. Just—be good and don’t do anything to upset them.”

“Please hurry, darling.”

“Right away. Put Zato back on.”

The phone was silent for a second, then Zato’s voice came over the line again.

“Winters?” he said. “You know what happens to your girl friend if you don’t show?”

“I know,” I said. “I’ll be there.”

His voice became smooth again. He was enjoying this.

“Come immediately. Alone and unarmed. And bring the clipping. If you’re not here right away or if I even smell a cop in the neighborhood, your girl gets cut. Understand?”

“I understand. Where are you?”

He laughed in my ear.

“The Brass Monkey. Where else? Start now, shamus. I’ll be waiting for you.”

He hung up.

I dropped the phone and felt my knees go soft. I took off my coat and unhooked the .38, dropping it on the desk. Zato was calling the shots and I was going to follow them to the letter. Toni’s position in this thing scared me silly.

It was the “they” Toni had referred to that frightened me. The second half of the “they” who waited with Zato—the killer.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I parked the T-bird directly in front of The Brass Monkey, making damn sure Zato could see for himself that I was alone. I got out and slammed the door.

Silence pulsed at me from inside the dirty windows of the tavern. Silence and a weird sense of quiet expectancy. I tried the outside door and it opened easily. My heart hammered in my ears as I went inside.

“Close it, shamus.”

It was Zato. He was standing at the far end of the bar with his .45 leveled in my direction.

I closed the door.

“Walk over here nice and slow. I want to hear your heels and toes all the way.”

“Where’s Toni?” I rasped.

“Just walk, shamus.”

I crossed the room, moving the way he ordered, until I was ten feet from the gun.

“Far enough,” he said. “Now get up against the wall. On your toes. You know how.”

I walked to the wall and climbed it, putting my fingers against the surface over my head, with my body at an angle away from it, on tiptoe.

Zato moved up behind me.

“You follow orders nicely,” he said. “A real smart boy.”

His hands shook me down for a weapon and, finding none, went under my coat and got my wallet.

“In here?” he asked, still behind me.

“In there.”

I heard him open the wallet and paw through it. He had me in the same position cops use when shaking down suspects, and I’d be dead before I could possibly spin around from the awkward stance. Not that I would try it. Toni was still inside with the killer.

I felt the wallet drop into the pocket of my coat.

“You’re a good boy, shamus,” he said. “You do what you’re told.”

He stepped back away from me.

“All right. Move off the wall slowly and lead the way. The girl’s waiting for you in my office.”

I came down off my toes and turned slowly. The .45 was pointed at my head. I walked over to the inside door and opened it.

The little room was empty.

“Keep moving,” he ordered.

“This room is unoccupied.”

He chuckled softly behind me. “You put a couple of bullets in the former occupant this afternoon, remember?” He nudged me in the back with the gun. “You’re real rough on my boys, shamus.”

I led the way across the little room to the door of his office. My hand went to the knob and hesitated.

I was afraid of what I might find.

“Open it,” he ordered. “Open the door.”

I opened it.

As the door swung open under my hand my eyes darted across the room to the desk at the left, but no one was there. Zato nudged me again with the gun and I took another step, swinging the door all the way open.

They were to the right of the door, against the far wall. Toni was crouched against the wall, crying softly. Her dress had been torn from her shoulders and hung loosely from her hips as if someone had tried to rip it off her. One shoulder strap on her slip was broken and the torn silk hung down, half exposing her breast. A dark, ugly looking bruise discolored her left cheek, puffing the black, terror-stricken eye that stared helplessly at the door.

I tensed and Zato jabbed me again with the gun.

“Easy does it,” he grunted. “She’s not hurt.”

Toni cried out something unintelligible when she saw me and tore across the room to my waiting arms. I kissed her hair over and over again and held her trembling body.

“It’s all right, kitten,” I whispered. “It’s all right now.”

I stroked her back softly and stared over her shoulder into the cold gray amusement of Valerie Coe’s eyes.

She was sitting in a deep-cushioned armchair with her beautiful legs crossed demurely beneath a yellow silk sheath. Her white hair was upswept and caught at the side by an ebony comb encased with diamonds. She was staring at me; as meticulous and as beautiful as ever.

And just as deadly.

Zato closed the door and covered us.

“Move against the wall,” he ordered.

I kept my arm around Toni’s shoulders and walked her across the room. Valerie smiled at me from the chair.

“Did he bring the clipping?” she asked. She was talking to Zato, but her eyes stayed on me. They looked a little like they had on her rug the night before.

Zato took the clipping out of his pocket and tapped it on the gun barrel.

“Right here,” he said.

“Burn it,” she told him.

He nodded and walked over to his desk, keeping the .45 in line with Toni’s head.

“Don’t get brave, shamus,” he said. “The broad’ll get it first.”

He dropped the clipping into an ashtray on the desk and lit it with his cigarette lighter.

In less than a minute it was reduced to ashes.

Valerie sighed from the chair.

“I should’ve done that a long time ago,” she said. “I don’t know why I kept it so long.” Her eyes sparkled as she smiled up at me. “Memories, I suppose.”

I watched her beautiful, sick face, and shuddered inside. She was like a warped nightmare out of a horror story. ‘Beauty and the Beast’, personified.

The clipping, a one column cut from a Canadian newspaper, had told the story of one Vera Calvet, a hunted escapee from a Canadian hospital for the criminally insane. Vera was the young widow of a prominent Quebec lawyer; widowed by her own hand at the end of an axe. The clipping described Mrs. Calvet as mentally unbalanced, sadistic, and an extremely dangerous psychopath when aroused.

My hand was moist on Toni’s back as I stroked her. Last night in Valerie’s apartment came back like a bad dream.

“You’ll never get away with this,” I said, just mouthing words and trying to stall. She’d already gotten away with it twice. “You kill us and you’ve had it, Valerie.” I pressed my cheek against the softness of Toni’s hair, “or Vera, I mean.”

She shrugged, lazily, letting the low neckline of her dress droop on purpose. Her breasts rose heavily beneath it, deepening the soft, dark valley between them.

“You know better than that, Cole. After all, I’ve had practice. And yes, my name is Vera, as the clipping said. But not Vera Calvet. I’ve been Mrs. Vera Zato for some time now.”

I let that sink in slowly and glanced over at Manny. He didn’t look pleased at all.

“That’s not my fault,” he grunted. “You can believe that, Winters.”

Valerie chuckled softly.

“No, my dear disillusioned husband, it’s not your fault.” She turned to me with a tolerant smile on her moist lips. You see, Cole, Manny would like nothing better than to see me divorced—or dead, for that matter. He just doesn’t love me any more.”

She settled comfortably in the chair, doing things under the silk, and I hoped she was getting ready for a real spiel. I needed all the time I could get.

“When I escaped from the hospital,” she continued, “I met Manny in Montreal and let him talk me into coming back to the States with him. We were married here, after he’d enjoyed a week or two of trial testing, of course, and settled down to marital bliss.” She eyed Zato contemptuously. “Until my manly husband over there got queasy, all of a sudden, about sharing my bed.”

“Some bed,” Manny grunted. “You just don’t know, shamus.”

He was wrong. I knew.

Valerie’s face glowed excitedly as she went on.

“I have certain—tastes—that Manny found disagreeable. Tastes that have to be gratified, Cole. You don’t know. I wanted to show you last night but I couldn’t. Because then you’d know and I didn’t want that.

“I could have killed you, you know. It would have been simple when we were in bed. Your gun was on the chair right next to us.”

I felt Toni stiffen in my arms, but I couldn’t do anything about that. Maybe it was better that she knew, anyway.

“Why didn’t you?” I asked.

“Too many people saw us leaving the Pit together.” She tensed and sat up at the edge of the cushion. “Besides, I wouldn’t have enjoyed killing you with a gun. Do you know how I’d like to kill you, Cole? With a knife. With a very sharp knife, while you’re making love to me.”

She fell back against the cushion and smiled. Her eyes were staring at me with a warped intensity that chilled my blood.

“If Manny’s so eager to see you dead,” I said, trying to change the subject, “what’s stopping him?”

She laughed again.

“He can’t. He can’t do anything but humor his sick wife. Can you, darling?”

Manny didn’t answer. The look on his handsome face spoke for him.

“You see, Manny and I have an agreement. I stay alive and married, with adequate support, of course, and he and his friends stay free. I spent three long months living with him as his wife and I’ve got enough evidence in writing and tapes to send him and all his connections to Sing-Sing for twenty years.

“Why do you think he sent his men to kill you? Manny doesn’t like violence, you know.” She smiled, sardonically at some private memory. “He doesn’t like violence at all. Not in his business or his women. I told him to have you killed. You were much too involved with Louise Parks and her brother. To tell you the truth, Cole, you scared me.”

I scared her.

“Ricky found the clipping?” I asked.

“Yes. The sneaky, little junkie stole my purse one night in the Id. He read the clipping, recognized my picture and tried to blackmail me.” She frowned gravely. “He was very weak and he died too soon. He was high when I killed him. Did you know that? Very easy to handle. I don’t think it even hurt him very much until the end.”

Her breath was coming in pants now, as she stared at the past on the wall.

“He bled much more than his sister. But she screamed more than him, so it was all right. She found the clipping—I don’t know where—I couldn’t find it. She called me this morning and told me. She thought she was sage because she had mailed it to you.”

She looked at me again and giggled.

“Did you guess it was me, Cole?”

I shook my head, watching her.

“Javitts had a circular on you, but we didn’t connect it.”

“I’m not a writer, you know,” she chirped mischieviously. She was jumping around subjects like a nut. Which figured. “I used that as a front, as Manny would say. I had to explain my apartment and car and clothes and things somehow. And I couldn’t let anyone know I was Manny’s wife, could I? The police don’t like Manny very much and they might have checked on me if they knew. Don’t you think I was smart, Cole?”

“Very smart,” I said. “Psychopaths usually are.”

The words came out before I could stop them. Her eyes got wide and she jumped out of the chair, furiously sticking her face up at me. She wasn’t beautiful at all. She was ugly.

“Shut up!” she screamed. “Shut your filthy mouth! I don’t like names. Don’t call me names!” Her breasts were heaving in emotion under the dress.

And then she stopped. She smiled suddenly and looked up at me and down at her breasts. She brought her hands up slowly and cupped them in her palms.

“You like them, don’t you, Cole?” she whispered. “I know you like them. Last night you loved them.”

I kept my eyes away from her hands and looked at her eyes. They were filmed over with passion.

“You—you must have been surprised when I walked back into the Pit this morning,” I croaked.

Her eyes wavered and cleared. My heart was pounding like a trip-hammer. Her kind of affection, I could do without.

“I was,” she said, breathing normally again. Apparently, her hormones had jumped back into their cages again. I stroked Toni’s cheek and sighed. She went back to the chair.

“Manny had just told me you were dead.” She glared over at Zato. “He was too busy with other things to check. Did you see the slut he left with, Cole? A lousy, little junkie tramp. And he left me for her.” Her eyes pinned him coldly. “He was the date I told you about.”

I looked over at Zato.

“And Blade?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“I told him to finish what Chico started. He picked you up at the dope drop and followed you when you copped for China.”

Toni had stopped crying now and was quiet in my arms. She raised her head up to look at me and her eyes looked like twin rivers of ink.

“Was she lying, Cole?” she whispered. “About last night?”

I gazed at her hurt face and marveled at the complete femaleness that made her think of that at a time like this.

“No, kitten,” I said, “she wasn’t lying. But she was only a body. That’s all.”

“Are we going to die, Cole?” she asked.

“I don’t know, honey. I don’t know.”

She lowered her head to my shoulder again and I tightened my arms around her. She was quiet.

“Very touching,” Valerie said, looking at us. “You make a sweet couple. It’s rather poetic that you’ll be dying together.”

She turned to Zato.

“Did you get the letter?” she asked.

Manny looked confused.

“What letter?” he asked.

“Louise sent him a letter with the clipping that’s just as bad.”

“I didn’t know anything about a letter. I only looked for the clipping. It was in his wallet.”

She sighed, disgustedly.

“Then the letter’s probably there, too. Give me the gun and I’ll cover them while you get it.”

Manny looked at her for a second and then at me. He walked over and handed her the gun.

“Break it up and climb the wall,” he said. He started toward us.

I turned Toni around gently and leaned her against the wall. I was expecting anything. Valerie knew as well as I did that there hadn’t been any letter.

Manny had almost reached us when she cleared it up.

“Forget the letter, Manny,” she said, pointing the gun at the back of his head. “There isn’t any.”

He whirled around and stared at her, surprised fury whitening his face.

“Why, you crazy—”

She cocked the .45, stopping him in midsentence. His mouth hung open incredulously.

“Be a good boy, darling.” She smiled. “You know how I detest names.” She waved the gun at Toni and me. “You two stay just as you are,” she said. “I want you over by the desk, Manny.”

Zato tried to smile but it came off weakly.

“Look, baby,” he said. “You don’t want to—”

“The desk, Manny.”

Her voice was brittle and hard. A determined voice.

Zato looked sick as he backed away from us. He stopped when the back of his legs hit the desk, and stood there staring at her with cold eyes.

She had us where her scrambled mind wanted us. It was like a play being enacted on a stage. Toni and I positioned against the wall to her right as supporting actors, and Zato, her co-star, directly across the stage from her.

I wished stupidly that the director would jump in suddenly, stop the whole thing, and tell us all to go home.

Valerie came out of the chair like a lazy cat, stretching herself. Every sensual, studied movement pulled at the tight silk, boldly outlining her lush body.

The gray fire in her eyes burned fiercely as she watched us. Her breathing was audible. She reached for her purse behind her with her free hand. She opened it and reached inside without taking her eyes off us for an instant. When her hand reappeared it was holding a small, snub-nosed revolver. It looked like a thirty-two.

She smiled across the room at Zato, and Ma Barker never looked deadlier than this beautiful psycho standing there with legs stiffly apart, holding a .45 automatic in her right hand and a little revolver in her left.

“Remember this, darling?” she asked, still looking at Zato. “You gave it to me when we were married. You were so thoughtful of your new bride.” She laughed weirdly. “It’s even registered in your name.”

Her eyes swung to me and I felt myself go rigid. The gray had deepened to a hot, hungry willfulness that challenged the world.

“You see, don’t you, Cole?” she said. She was very pleased with herself. “It’s so simple. I’m going to shoot Manny with the big gun,” she wiggled the .45 gaily, “and you and your girl friend with the little one. The police know by now that it was Manny’s men who tried to kill you, and they’ll come here eventually.”

She blinked excitedly and pointed both guns at us like a badman on a television western.

“They’ll find Manny over there by the desk and you and her right there by the wall. What happened will be obvious. Manny kidnapped the girl to get you here, and you shot it out with him. He killed the two of you—and you, Cole darling, killed him. Isn’t it perfect?”

I looked at her careless fingers on the separate triggers and blanched. What did she want, applause?

Manny stirred across the room.

“Baby, this is stupid,” he said. He had regained some of his former aplomb. Not much, but some. “You don’t want to kill me. What for? I can’t hurt you. Not with that hammer you’ve got over my head. Be reasonable and let’s talk this thing over. I’ll help you take care of these two and then we’ll have a long talk, okay?”

He was coaxing her like you would a child. Somebody had probably told him that was how a nut was supposed to be handled.

Valerie didn’t handle.

“It’s no use, darling,” she said. “I’m going to kill you, and you can talk up to the second the bullet tears into your skin, and it still won’t change anything.”

“Val, we—”

“That’s enough! Don’t talk any more, Manny.”

She was rigid with emotion, staring at him. The naked hate and insanity poisoned her white face, marring it with a cruel, ugly lust.

“You’re not a man!” she yelled. “You’re less than a man! Manny Zato; the cool, calm ladies man.” She spat contemptuously on the rug. “You’re just like my first husband. He called me names, too. He said I was sick. He said I was obscene and vile and perverted. Well, he doesn’t say those things any more, Manny. He isn’t able to any more—and you won’t be, either.”

The revolver in her left hand drooped a little as she strained all her attention on the big .45 pointed at Zato’s head. I watched the long, blue barrel and waited. Manny Zato’s death wouldn’t bother my sleep any, but it might just help to avoid Toni’s and mine.

I stared and I waited. And I thanked whatever gimmick it was in Valerie’s twisted mind that leaned her toward a passion and adeptness for knives instead of guns.

Her red lips were drawn tightly now, into a thin slit of hatred. Her eyes smouldered insanely as she approached the point of action.

“Without you, there won’t be anyone left who knows who I really am,” she said. She was almost chanting now, her voice a singsong softness. “I can start again somewhere. Maybe out west or down in Florida. It doesn’t matter.” Her fingers tightened around the blue steel butt. “You’re no good, Manny. You sell dope and you sleep with your customers and you never loved me at all. Not at all, Manny. Or you would’ve made love like I wanted.”

She implored him suddenly, with pleading, hurt eyes.

“I have to do it, Manny. You see that, don’t you? Don’t you see, Manny?”

She squeezed the trigger and sent a .45 slug tearing through his throat.

The loud report filled the office as I leaped for her. The recoil of the .45 jerked her arm straight up for an instant, as I knew it would, pointing the smoking barrel of the gun at the ceiling.

I left my feet and dived straight at her.

A surprised scream came from her throat as she twisted away from me, trying to bring up the revolver. Two hundred pounds of scared manhood got there first.

I piled into her with my arms outstretched, grabbing desperately for the forty-five. My weight knocked her back to the chair, toppling it over. My left hand closed over the .45 as she fell, knocking it from her grasp. I grabbed at her with my right but got a handful of silk instead.

I landed on my chin with the .45 thudding to the rug under me. Rolling, I snatched it up and threw myself to the right, bringing the gun up in line with Valerie.

She was a twisting, writhing jumble of bare thighs, panties, and breasts as she fought to regain her balance and sit up. She was still clutching the revolver in her left hand, trying to straighten up and bring it around.

“Let it go, Valerie!” I yelled. “Drop the gun!”

She hissed murderously, her eyes bugging with insane fury as she struggled.

“I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!” she screamed, scrambling out of the cushions and leveling the gun.

The low report of the .32 was drowned out by the .45 bucking in my hand.

I felt the hot punch of the bullet as it hit my shoulder, staggering me off balance into the wall. I grabbed my arm instinctively. Blood appeared on my fingers.

The office was suddenly silent except for the low sobs coming from across the room where Toni stood watching in horror. The air was filled with the pungent odor of gunpowder. I looked up at Toni from the floor and she cried out and ran to me, falling into my arms.

I kissed her temple softly and let her cry. Looking up at an angle, I looked at Valerie’s sprawled figure in the chair. Slowly, and with a drained feeling of finality, I ran my eyes over her body.

Up past the bent, dimpled knees, the lush relaxed thighs, the brief silk, to the jagged hole between her breasts.

Her head was lying back against the cushions with a peaceful look of serenity erasing the twisted mask that had marred her face a moment before.

Valerie was beautiful again…

* * * *

Toni kneaded the muscles in my back gently, her fingers sending sleepy, little spiders through my whole body. I felt good; real good for the first time in days.

It was 10:00 P.M., over five hours since the fracas in Zato’s office, and I was stretching out on my stomach, beneath the crossed spears in my bedroom. The wound in my shoulder throbbed a little, but the police interne had bandaged up most of the pain. Toni’s fingers were softening what was left of it.

I mumbled a sigh into the pillow and yawned sleepily.

“Did the police release Bradley?” Toni asked, missing a stroke.

I nodded, rubbing my nose into the soft feathers. “Shh. Don’t talk, kitten. It spoils your rhythm.”

Her fingers stroked into a delicious circle again.

“Yeah, they released him. Daddy Warbucks picked him up at the jail.” I yawned, luxuriously. “Maybe they’ll kiss and make up now. I hope so. They deserve each other.”

“What happened to China?”

Another missed stroke.

“She asked Javitts to take her in when he came for Blade. She’s going to try the cure.” I rolled over, favoring my shoulder, stiffly. “Any more loose ends, Miss Dahl?” I asked. “You’re a gabby masseuse.”

She settled back on the bed next to me and smiled.

“I guess not. How’s the shoulder?”

“It’s got a hole in it.” I reached up and with my fingers touched her cheek softly.

“How’s your bruise?”

She grinned impishly.

“Black and blue. I wonder if it’s going to hurt when I kiss.”

I dropped my hand to her waist and pulled her down on top of me.

“Cole!” she cried. “Your shoulder!”

I smothered her words with my lips and she stopped struggling. Her eyes closed and her arms crept up around my neck.

I guess it didn’t hurt very much.