CHAPTER 11

“Relax,” said Katie, “while I type.”

Once inside her little den, the drunkenness seemed to fade from her and she became a brisk and efficient business machine. She threw off her fur cape and jerked the typewriting table to her desk and flipped a sheet of paper into the carriage at once. There was only an instant’s pause before she began her typing. She hesitated only long enough to pull a few crumpled sheets of yellow paper out of her purse and smooth them on the blotter. Her keys began to rattle with a staccato urgency as she transcribed the notes.

“Emergency script?” I asked.

“It’s always an emergency with the old man. He’s pretty damned fussy with what he puts into the stupid comic strip. He expects Hemingway for the price of Katie Steen.”

“You write it on the run?”

“What does that mean?”

“The notes,” I said. “Usually professional writers keep their notes at home. You hauled yours out of your bag.”

“I write everywhere,” she said, dismissing my inquiry with a show of annoyance as she peered down at the machine. “Nobody makes rules in the writing business. Now, if you’ll let me finish this damned thing, I’ll talk all you like. Why don’t you mix yourself a drink, Steve?”

“And one for you?”

“What else?”

So I mixed two drinks. I gave her my back, allowing her time to finish her work. The little room was as snug as something out of House and Garden, artfully decorated to house its lone occupant. Here she could feel apart from Luke Yorke’s monster household. Here, in a small cubicle beyond the servants’ quarters, Katie Steen had privacy and seclusion. A single door led into the main hall outside. Down the long corridor was the reception room and the elevator. In the other direction, only the kitchen. Katie could open her door and march to work in a matter of seconds. Beyond the reception room lay the big studio of the famous cartoonist, his bedroom and his personal den.

A panel buzzer was tacked on the wall where I mixed the drinks. What a character the old man was! He used every modern device to chain his employees to his whims and fancies. There would be other buzzers in other rooms. The penthouse, then, became a commercial trap for all its residents. I wondered vaguely how often Luke called Katie into his inner sanctum. I wondered, too, how the others might react to her trips to the conference room. The stories about Luke Yorke’s perpetual charm for the ladies were based on hard facts. Even now, in his last feeble gasps for life, the old buzzard might use a gal like Katie for intimate reasons.

I watched her in the oval mirror on my wall. Pretty? Katie Steen had the type of beauty that would make the sap boil in an old man’s veins. Her whole body radiated the basic charm of a woman who knew the score, who knew the power of her dynamo eyes, the irresistible appeal of her svelte, well-curved figure. Even now, as I watched her while she worked, she was selling me her personality. She scowled down at the yellow sheets prettily, working to rewrite a line that bothered her. Then, with a sulky sigh, she balled the yellow sheets in her little fist and dropped them into the wastepaper basket.

“Finished,” she said. “Now give me a minute while I powder my nose.”

A minute was all I needed. While she drifted into the john, I plucked the yellow sheets from the basket and stuffed them into my pocket. The little clock on her desk stood at four minutes before midnight. The silence sang now. Kate’s room became a box, a tiny closet of warmth. Beyond the window, the cold wind brayed and panted at the glass, peppering it with occasional finger-tappings of sleet and hail. Out there, the city lay buried in the thin snow of a fresh gale. There would be inches of fresh snow by morning, unless the moon fought through the veil of clouds. The sound of the outdoors became a nasty whine, bitter and shivery, the sound effects of sub-zero weather. I pulled down the blind and tried to shake away the feeling of doom that gnawed at me here.

I was still shivering when Katie came out.

She had changed into an extravaganza geared for low wolf calls, a pajama outfit inspired by Barcelona and the bull rings. Her pantaloons clung tightly to her sleek hips, and a little white cord hung from each side of her middle. The bright canary blouse was tucked in tightly under the broad sash around her waist. The blouse lacked a few important buttons, up high. She was wearing a finely sculptured piece of silver jewelry around her neck, a bauble that dropped deep into the subtle shadows below her neckline. She allowed me enough time to appraise these items. She gave me my head, letting me play tag with my eyes, the way she used to ham it up in the old days. This, then, would be the only way Katie Steen had not changed. This was the old Kate, the animal Kate, the kid with the quick and hungry kisses and the round heels and the perpetual yen for bundling. It would be an effort to keep free of her.

Because she sat herself alongside me. But close.

Katie gulped her drink thirstily. She seemed anxious to hold fast to the mood of The Quill. She left me only long enough to refill our glasses and dim the big lamp near the window. It was all very cute and cozy. It was all in the old Katie Steen tradition, the bold, sure approach to what she wanted—and no holds barred. In the semidarkness, I noticed that she no longer wore the gold-loop earrings.

“Now,” she said, snuggling at my side again. “Now let’s talk.”

“You’re making it pretty tough for conversation.”

“You never used to resent me this close.”

“Maybe it was because I never asked for important dialogue.”

“Important?” she pouted. “At this hour? In sub-zero weather? I thought you craved small talk, Stevie.”

“You thought wrong.” Where was her handbag now? I had seen it when we came in. There was a little French chair near the door to the john. She had thrown her fur wrap on that chair. Was the handbag under it? Or had she taken it into the john? I got off my tail and made a production of refilling my glass. When I passed the French chair, I could see the dull-brown leather of her bag, just a corner of it, under the fur piece.

“God, but you’re restless,” Katie said. “What’s eating you?”

“You, baby.”

“My favorite subject.”

“Let’s talk about it.”

“Don’t make me laugh,” she laughed. “You know me as well as my own mother, Stevie Conacher. Come back here and sit down. I dare you.”

I sat. Her hand snaked over mine, warm and soft and with a pressure I couldn’t make use of in this moment. She was moving her body back against the cushions, eying me slyly. All of a sudden I wanted to laugh, not at Katie, but at the zany continuity of my recent past. The Mike Smith puzzle was lousy with uninhibited passion, enough to make the Kinsey report look like a survey of a Girl Scout battalion. I counted them off in my mind—Gwen and Vicki and Katie Steen—all of them ripe and ready, all of them just a little bit crazy.

And this one would take plenty of self-control from me.

“I want you to be serious, Katie.”

“There you go again. Did you come up here to interview me? Really?”

“Just to talk,” I said, still holding her hand. “To talk about Mike Smith.”

Her hand went tight and hard under mine. She was reacting in a way that I enjoyed. She was tensing in a reflex of shock and surprise, a quick and muscular spasm of upset that telegraphed her uneasiness. Her body, too, seemed to spring to sudden life, no longer relaxed against the cushions, no longer soft and willing and yielding. She pulled hard at my hand but I held her firm.

“Must you?” she said with a shiver. “Good God, Steve, I don’t want to talk about him. You’re bringing back ancient history. I was a good friend of his, remember?”

“That’s why we’ll talk about him.”

“And if I refuse?”

“You can’t,” I said. “Because if you clam up, I’m going to get you a date with a character out in Mineola, the County Homicide dick.”

“You’re out of your mind,” she said, amazed. “You’re mixing me up, Steve. What are you trying to say?”

“Just this—that you were seen out in Freeville.”

She began to laugh, but her heart wasn’t in it. Kate Steen usually laughed low and soft, a husky, sexy warble. But this time it was different. This time a note of panic edged her laughter. It might have been the liquor that threw her off key. It might have been a small element of honest surprise at my quick verbal jabs. But my heart told me differently.

So I hammered away at her.

“You were seen, I tell you,” I said. “You were seen gabbing with Mike. The day before he was murdered. His wife saw you. You and Mike were parked at a place called Coogan’s Beach.”

“She’s a liar, Steve!”

“That’s your story?”

“She’s a double-barreled, conniving liar,” Kate said huskily.

“You’ll tell that to the Nassau dicks?”

“Oh, Lord,” she moaned. “You wouldn’t make me do that, would you? You must believe me, Steve. If I’m made to testify in a terrible case like this, I’m ruined. My career is finished, over, dead and buried. You mustn’t, Steve. You’ve got to believe me.”

She clung to me, hysterical now, her eyes wet with tears, her face an explosion of honest terror. She buried her head against my chest and sobbed out her woe. Up close, I could feel the pounding of her heart under the thin blouse. She was letting out all the stops, working to bury me under the weight of her personal integrity. But she was working for other purposes, too. Especially her hands. She moved them restlessly behind my neck, rubbing and clutching and clawing into me in an endless pattern of exploration. She would have been easy to manhandle now.

“Forget it,” she whispered, over and over again. “I thought you came up here to be friendly. The way we used to be. In the old days. I don’t want to talk about Mike. Mike frightens me. Make me forget him. You can make me, Steve. You can make me.”

She was sobbing and out of control when she kissed me. She was alive with an ancient routine, the old Katie Steen again, the pulsing, probing, warming, basic girl out of the past. I could feel her tears against my cheek. I could feel her supple body, every part of it on fire with a challenge for me.

It wasn’t easy to break away.

But I had to see her handbag. I had to ease away from her and reach over to the French chair and grab the brown leather bag and flip it open. Quickly. Before she could gauge my purpose and direction.

Then it was open beside me. I pulled out the white envelope and shook it and watched the bills drop out. There were five of them. Five hundred dollars in C notes.

“Arthur must be loaded,” I said.

Katie sat up, frozen again by my sudden move. She stared at the bills petulantly, dabbing the tears from her eyes. She got up and took a cigarette, on fire with suppressed anger, caught in a fresh and overpowering mood of impatience with me.

“Sneaky,” she said. “God, but you’re sneaky, Steve.”

“I see what I see.”

“And what does the great detective deduce?”

“It’s fairly simple,” I said. “Arthur owed you some money. You loaned him five bills some time ago. He paid off tonight.”

“You think that’s funny? You think that’s impossible?”

“I think nothing at all. You want to tell me?”

“You were right the first time,” she said. “It was a loan.”

“You lie like hell, Katie.”

“Why not ask Arthur?”

“Because he’s a bigger liar than you, baby.”

“I don’t like that,” she said sharply. “What’s your theory about the money?”

“I’ve got lots of them. I can see Arthur paying you off for all sorts of merchandise.”

“What are you trying to insinuate?”

“You want me to draw you a diagram?”

“You’re a filthy, lousy slob,” she screamed. “Get the hell out of here.”

“My pleasure.”

I left on that note. I left her burning with a hot flame, following me to the door and butchering me with her eyes. I left her gnawing her pretty lip and making nasty faces at me. I could feel the strength of her hate knifing into my back as I went through the darkened hall toward the reception room. When I reached the edge of the reception room, I heard the soft click of Katie’s door behind me.

Then silence. The entire penthouse was padded with a deep and downy carpeting, even out here where the cheap help lived. Nothing stirred but the ticking of a distant clock, and far beyond the edge of that, the incessant, whirling, sighing whine of the freezing wind. My instincts worked on me as I crept into the reception room. Without knowing why, I let my hand guide me by way of the wall, feeling the sharp edge of the corner as I made the turn. Ahead of me would be the doorway to the personal nest of Arthur and Gwen Denton, I hesitated before entering their den. There was still time for a turnabout, still time to retrace my steps and retreat to the elevator door on the other side of the reception room.

But something held me where I stood, frozen against the wall, staring ahead of me into the dark corridor. A noise? What was it? The sound of muffled voices? A radio, perhaps? Somebody was alive and awake near me, but my ears couldn’t pick up the direction of the sound. In the vague moment of my indecision, I could have sworn that I heard muffled steps from the direction of Luke Yorke’s studio. The idea gave me pause. Should I wake Arthur Denton to question him? To ask him a few things about Katie? But reason came to slow me down.

And something else stopped me.

It was a powerful blow, coming from straight ahead, from somewhere in the black hallway. The shock of impact staggered me and rocked me off balance, down on my knees and sucking for air. Somebody had thrown a building at me. The blackness waved and rolled around my head as I fought to open my eyes.

I never quite made it. Somebody walloped me again.

And this time, the blackness became permanent.