Bedside Murder

Chapter II

Kim Hale, taut and nervous arrived at the apartment at one minute of six. I opened the door and his smile was an expression of utter relief.

“I was worried,” he said in a low voice. “I never should have let you go off alone like that and—”

“Shhh!” I said.

I hadn’t yet put on my lipstick and, as we walked down the four steps into the living room, Betty appeared in the arch that leads to the kitchen, bedrooms and bath.

“Betty,” I said. “This is Kim Hale. You’ve heard me speak of him. Kim, this is Betty Lafferty.”

I saw the questioning look in his eye as he looked at Betty and greeted her, then complete relaxation. Betty is the size of a pint of cream. Rusty red hair, a pert little face and smiling blue eyes. She’s just a wee shade too plump and she laughs a lot.

I hurried into my bedroom, gave a last look of inspection, touched up the lipstick, scooped up purse, hat and gloves and went back into the living room. I didn’t want to give them too much time together until I had briefed Kim on where and how we had met.

I told Kim and Kim told the cabbie to take us to Lamont’s on Sixty-third. Kim looked wonderfully nice. I decided that I never would tell him that he was the fourth lawyer I had gone to, and that I hadn’t liked the looks of the first three enough to tell them the story.

Ramond recognized me and, smiling, led us to a quiet corner in the cocktail lounge and said that he would call us when the proper table was ready. I told him we wanted to eat at quarter to eight. He glanced at his watch, smiled again, and walked off.

“What do you think of Betty?” I asked.

“Cute as a button! Very nice.”

“Potential murderess?”

“Could be,” he said slowly. “Anyone could be. That’s the trouble with the world. Smiling faces can hide some very savage souls.”

The way he said it, gave me the shivers. And I had had my share of goosebumps during the previous two weeks.

“By the way,” I said. “I met you at a party in Los Angeles in early nineteen forty-four. I was singing out there at a place called Jerry’s, on Wilshire. You were a friend of Stan Haskell.”

“Who’s he?”

It’s a struggle to keep from self pity whenever I remember Stan. He was the one. Maybe he’ll always be the one. It seems that way.

“He’s dead. Killed in the war. And so nobody can check. Were you ever in Los Angeles?”

He smiled. “I was in Los Angeles in nineteen forty-four. I was at Camp Anza waiting to go overseas. And I heard you sing at Jerry’s.”

There was a rough and yet tender note in his voice that made me wonder if maybe I should reappraise the shy young lawyer.

“Who do you want me to meet tonight particularly?” he asked.

“Sonny Rice, of course, the band-leader. And Johnny France, who also sings with the band. We do duets once in a while. Sam Lescott, who owns the joint. Carl Hopper, my agent, if he happens to drop in. Donald Frees, my shadow.”

“Your what?”

“The little man who follows me around. Hopeless love, he says. His folks hold some sort of plastics patents. He’s working up to be a playboy.”

I looked across the room and saw Wallace Wint, the gossip columnist, come in alone and take a table diagonally across from us in the lounge. It gave me an idea. I leaned toward Kim.

“Don’t look now,” I said, “but the disher of dirt is across the way. Wallace Wint. We can get this off to a wonderful start if you want to cooperate. Maybe you’ll be able to read all about us in tomorrow morning’s paper.”

He looked puzzled. “What do I have to do?”

“Don’t be so dull! For one thing, hold my hand across the table and look as if you were in love. I’ll give you the old melting eye. He’ll wonder who you are, after he sees that, and keep an eye on us. Then kiss me.”

He swallowed hard, took my hand and, as I looked softly at him, he said, “Darling, you’re the most beautiful, glamorous lovely thing that ever came along.”

“Hey!” I said.

“Shut up! I’m getting in the mood.”

I risked a glance at Wallace and saw his beady little eyes on us. After a time I moistened my lips and leaned toward Kim, parting them just a little. He leaned across the small table. He was very adequate. He was even deft. It took me a good four seconds after it was over to remember why it had happened. I loosened up on the fingernails that were about to punch holes in his hand.

“Now what?” he asked.

“Excuse yourself and go to the little boy’s room. I’m sure Wallace will join you.”

He left. I sat sipping my drink. Kim came back in a few minutes. He was grinning to himself.

As soon as Wallace Wint left, Kim said, “He came in and asked me if I were John Whitson. I told him no, and he said I looked like John and he asked me if I were an artist too. I told him that I was a lawyer and that my name was Kimberly Hale. Then he said that he noticed I was with you. I said that he was a good noticer. He gave me a very lewd look and asked if it was a serious thing, or if I was just a fancy passing. He told me who he was. I put one hand against his chest and pushed him a little. I said that if he felt like sticking anything in his column, it better be dignified, or I’d personally print a small personal message on his hide. He assured me that he was always dignified and asked me if a date had been set. I told him he should ask you and if you wanted to confirm it, it was okay with me. He asked me if you’d stop singing commercially, and I told him certainly not.”

I gasped. “You didn’t overdo it, did you?”

“I don’t think so. Tomorrow will tell.”

I got him a small corner table not far from the dance floor at the Staccato. The place would have given anyone snow blindness, but I knew that it would fill up later on. I had time to sit and have a drink with Kim. Sam Lescott came over. Sam is a balding man in his late fifties with the energy of a man half his age. His features are somewhat marred from the old days when he did a bit of prize fighting in the ring.

“Sit down, Sam,” I said. “Meet Kim Hale.”

They shook hands. Sam sighed and sat down. He waved a hand at the empty tables.

“Look at the place!” he exclaimed. “Without you, honey, it would look that way all night. Take care of yourself. You’re money in the bank for tired old Sammy.”

I saw Kim’s hand tighten on the tabletop. He asked in an easy tone, “I suppose some of your competition would like to see Laura Lynn booked for a hospital instead of the Staccato?”

“They wouldn’t cry none if she broke a couple legs.”

“Is there anybody in particular, Sam, who’d like to see you have trouble making ends meet?” Kim asked. I kicked him under the table.

Sam gave him an odd expressionless stare. “If you’re asking if I got enemies, sure. All kidding aside, I just talk like this to make Hank feel good. She’s a top star. But there’s other toppers, friend. She gets sick and I get somebody else. In this business you got to give the customers top entertainment.”

Kim smiled easily. “And you certainly know how to do it.”

“I been doing it long enough, Mr. Hale.” Sam stood up. “See you around,” he said and wandered off.

Betty was waiting for me up in the dressing room. With our usual struggle we managed to get the Ryan figure into the silver gown. The top of the dress doesn’t start until it gets way down to here. And I mean way down. Sammy says half the customers come back time after time to see if I’ll ever get the hiccups. The rest of the dress fits in such a way that if I ever get a mosquito bite on one hip, it won’t be possible to zip it up the side.

I sat and smoked and listened to Sonny’s boys ride through the numbers, then the drum roll, the announcement, and I stubbed out the cigarette, went down the stairs and out across the floor, the spot picking me up at the doorway and taking me on out to the mike. Even after all these years, it’s hard to remember not to squint into the glare of it. Some juvenile yowled like a wolf, but I kept my smile on and gave them “Old Fashioned Love” in that voice that Downbeat calls “low down and dirty.”

I gave them a current one, then another oldie and when they clapped long enough, another current one. The spot carried me back to the door, then shifted to Sonny. I threaded my way between the tables and Kim saw me coming. He jumped up and held my chair.

After Sonny finished his special number, the lights came up a little. I could see that Kim was uncomfortable. He wanted to look at me, and yet my show dress was so extreme that he was shy about it. He jingled change, fiddled with his glass and kept tugging at his necktie.

When the break came, I caught Sonny’s eye and motioned him over. Kim stood up and I introduced them. Sonny sat down. He is aging and has been aging since 1901. But he fights bravely against it. The black wavy hair and the teeth are detachable. He is fabulously beaten on the massage table to keep the waistline down. He eats bland foods, doesn’t smoke or drink, gets all the sleep he can and exercises most religiously.

Sam says that for all practical purposes, Sonny Rice died in 1931, and the current walking corpse is the result of pure will power. From forty feet away, Sonny looks twenty-three. From twenty feet away he looks thirty-two. From six feet away he looks fifty. From three feet away he looks as though he had been taken out of one of those Egyptian mummy boxes and reactivated.

Most women get to see Sonny from forty feet away. His voice is quick, light and gay — with something in it like the voice of a woman who is laughing while clutching a sodden handkerchief and mopping at her eyes.

“How do you like the show?” he asked eagerly.

“Your music is splendid!” Kim said gravely. “Youthful.”

Sonny couldn’t have been more touched. “Youthful,” was, to Sonny, the peak accolade.

“We work hard,” Sonny said joyously.

“Your music brings out the best qualities in Hank’s voice,” Kim said.

He was heaping it on so thick that even Sonny could afford to be generous. Sonny beamed at me.

“Why, I don’t know what we’d do without Hank,” he said. “She’s tops.” He patted my hand. It was like the touch of a dry old lizard.

Donald Frees came in between shows, a few moments before Sonny left our table. As I told Kim, Frees is working up to be a playboy. His bland, moon-like face expresses nothing but fatuous self satisfaction. His pink hands are always faintly wrinkled as though he had just stepped out of a long, hot tub. He is about thirty, I think, but by reason of his weight he has jowls, which make him look older.

At the age of twenty-five, Donald became heir to a life income of at least a hundred thousand a year after taxes. But he doesn’t fit properly into the role of playboy, for he worked for five years after college and got into the habit of it and feels remotely guilty about the whole thing.

He motioned to me to come over to his table and since I resent being summoned like the cigarette girl, I ignored him. Several minutes later he lumbered over, smelling of soap, hair tonic, shaving lotion, a pine and leather scent, shoe polish, deodorant and fine Scotch. Kim stiffened a little and I sensed the instantaneous dislike.

I introduced them and Donald said to me, “Mind if I join you?”

“This is Mr. Hale’s table,” I said primly.

Donald sighed. “Then you join me, Laura.” Donald feels that Laura Lynn is more dignified than Hank Ryan, so he always calls me by my professional name.

“I came with Kim,” I said.

Donald’s little blue eyes inspected Kim again. “May I join your table?” he asked.

Kim looked him up and down carefully, taking his time. He pursed his lips, smiled pleasantly and said, “Get your own dates, fatso.”

It was the first time I had ever seen Donald without his pink complexion. He turned and walked majestically off, his back rigid. Twenty seconds after he paid his check, Sam Lescott came over, a dark look on his face.

“Honey,” he said, “Did you brush moneybags?”

“I did,” Kim said. “He asked if he could join me and I told him no.”

I looked at my watch. “Sam, he’ll be back in twenty minutes. Don’t fret.”

“I hope so, honey. All by himself he’s good for enough, and once in a while he brings in a nice party.” He walked away.

“I don’t care for Mr. Frees,” Kim said.

“Nobody does, Kim. But he’s harmless. He just breathes on me, and his eyes go soft, and then he asks me if I’ll let him buy me a beautiful house in Hawaii or the South of France or Bermuda or somewhere. And he never looks at my face while he’s asking. He always looks where my tie clip would be if I were a man.”

“His kind of money is never harmless, Hank. I’ve learned that with lots of money you can hire people to be unpleasant for you.”

“Why you old cynic, you! And so young, too.”

The rest of the evening was uneventful until, at quarter to one, Roger Blate came in with a small party of sharpies. Roger gave me a look of pure hatred and I knew that it hadn’t been his idea to come to the Staccato. I finished my number and went back to the table. I pointed out Roger to Kim.

“There, my boy,” I said, “is what too many people think of when they think of showbusiness.”

“How so?”

“Roger Blate was my agent. I was getting a hundred and seventy-five a week and I’d made one recording and I was just beginning to catch on. Roger came to me all excited and told me that he had a new spot for me at a hundred dollars more a week, singing with Jerry Jerome and his band. I took the job and Jerome’s business manager thought I was pretty nice. One night he got tight and told me that Blate had asked Jerry Jerome for five hundred a week for my services, which would have given Blate fifty a week as his commission. But then, after the price was decided on, Blate told Jerome he could have me for two seventy-five, provided he’d kick back a hundred cash each week to Blate. Of course Jerome agreed, as it saved him a hundred and a quarter a week, and Blate was happy because it meant he made one hundred twenty-seven fifty a week off me instead of only fifty. And little Hank was the babe in the woods.”

“What did you do?” Kim asked. “Sue him?”

“Are you crazy? Some of the little boys on my street in Brooklyn grew up to be on the rough side. They like to help a gal from the old neighborhood. One of them went to see Blate and Blate nicely canceled our contract. The doctors took eight stitches on the inside of Blate’s mouth. Then I hooked up with Carl Hopper, who is straight.”

Most rats look like anything but what they are. Not Roger Blate. He has a flat face, like some kind of a snake. I knew that he had Johnny France, who also sings with the band, all hooked up with an airtight agreement. It wasn’t my style to warn Johnny. Let him find out for himself. It isn’t comfortable to be hated the way Roger Blate hated me.

I finished the last turn a few minutes after two and went from the floor up to the dressing room. Betty never stays, of course, to help after the evening’s over. I wouldn’t want her to stay. Usually she leaves the small light on the dressing table on.

I opened the door and frowned because the dressing table light was off. I started through the darkness and suddenly stopped. Had it not been for the three close calls, I would have walked to the dressing table and reached blithely for the lamp switch.

A draft caught the door and banged it shut and I stopped breathing and began to tremble. The expanse of tanned skin exposed by the dress suddenly turned into a rodeo for goose bumps. I was a little girl again, standing in the dark — and afraid.

The room was so dreadfully dark that I felt as though someone had their hand over my eyes. I backed cautiously to the door, found the latch and opened it, backing out into the hall.

Bud Mitch, trumpet, just coming by, grinned at me. “Got mice in there?”

“Lend me some matches, Bud,” I said.

He handed me a packet of matches and went whistling down the hall. The open door let a little light into the room. I walked cautiously across the floor to the dressing table, lit a match and looked. The bulb from the lamp was on the top of the table. One of those screw-in plugs had been put in where the bulb had been. A six-inch length of insulated wire protruded from the plug. It was bent down and at the end, the insulation was peeled off the two naked wires and they were right where my hand would have touched them as I reached for the switch.

It was then that the moisture soaked through my thin slippers. Somebody had spilled water on the floor. Perfect! Hank walks into her room, stands in the puddle and electrocutes herself.

The match singed my fingers and I dropped it. It hissed faintly when it struck the water on the floor. I lit another match, pulled the wall plug out. When the lamp was dead I unscrewed the thing out of the bulb socket and replaced the bulb. It was only after I had thoroughly smeared it up that I thought of fingerprints. And me the daughter of Joe Ryan!

I shut the door, unzipped my dress, and took my first really deep breath of the evening. I slipped out of the thin sandals, dried my damp feet and hurried into street clothes. I put the socket arrangement in my purse, wondering whether the shock would actually have been sufficient to kill me.

I was able to get out of the place quickly because I have the sort of coloring that in a club the size of the Staccato doesn’t demand showgal makeup. My thick black eyebrows and lashes came that way, making what I think is an interesting contrast with the silver hair. I looked in the mirror as I was ready to leave. Hank was okay, except for a haunted look in the gray eyes and a certain tightness around the lips. I practiced a smile, clicked out the light and left.

I had told Kim to wait five minutes after my number, then pay the check and go around to the side door. He was standing in the shadows waiting for me.

As I walked toward him, smiling, he said, “Fatso seems to be awaiting his princess.”

I remembered then that Donald Frees hadn’t returned to the club. Sam, my boss, had probably noticed it also and would have a few barbed words to say the next day.

“Where is he?”

“His big fat black car awaits at the end of this charming alley. He’s practicing having money by being parked by a hydrant. What is my line?”

“Polite, but firm,” I said.

He nodded. “Polite but firm it is.”

We walked down the narrow alley.