The Body Lovers

Chapter 5

He lay face down in the half-opened doorway, death so new that it hadn't erased the look of surprise on his face. I nudged the door open, flipped the light switch with the tip of my finger and looked around the room. There was nothing fancy about the Hackard Building or the offices it rented. This one was a minimum setup with a wooden desk, a pair of chairs and a coat rack. A layer of dust was spread evenly over everything, the window was grimy and the floor scuffed and splintered from the countless pieces of equipment that had been moved in and out.

The guy had drawn up a chair close to the door to be able to listen to any activity in the hall outside. Chances were that he had shaken my place down, found nothing and waited for me. If the door had opened from the other side he would have had a clear shot at my back before I could have done anything about it and Pat would have had me in his statistical columns instead of his address book.

I went though his pockets, found sixty-two bucks and some change, a pair of rubber gloves you could buy anywhere and two fairly stiff plastic strips that I slipped into my own pocket. None of his clothes were new. His suit had come from a large chain and looked about a year old, matching everything else. Unless the police had a record on the guy, or could come up with something out of the lab, getting a make on him wasn't going to be easy. He looked to be in his late forties, on the thin side and about five ten or so. His dark hair had receded, but there was no gray showing, so my guess at his age could have been off. I studied his face again, taking in the sharp features and the odd skin coloration. There was a death pallor there but it couldn't obliterate some of the characteristics common to some Europeans or Latin Americans.

One thing was sure, it wasn't a plain contract kill. Those guys specialize in one field and don't bother with any shakedown job to boot. Either there were two involved or this one was on assignment to find out what I knew or make sure I didn't find out any more.

But what the hell had I found out?

I stepped over the body and went back into the corridor. The elevator was still where it had left me and nobody had come to investigate the shots. It wasn't strange. The old building was solidly built and could muffle noise almost completely.

There was still a way to play it. I'd be asking for trouble, but it would keep me from doing too much explaining and it was simple enough to look right. Three of the offices down the hall from mine were occupied by small businesses that could conceivably keep something of value on the premises. In the door of each one, I knocked a hole in the glass panes, reached in and opened the lock, hoping none of them had alarms wired to them. Every room got the same treatment, a little disturbance that would indicate a search and the rubber gloves in the guy's pocket would explain the lack of prints. In the last place there was a gold wrist watch lying on top of a desk and I took it out and dropped it in the dead man's pocket for a clincher.

Then I went back to my own office and called Pat.

By nine-thirty they had bought my story. The guy at the newsstand downstairs had remembered the guy coming in after everybody had left and as he was closing up. Two of the men who rented the other offices said they did a cash business, but never left money in the office overnight, but for someone who didn't know it, they were probably targets for a robbery. The watch in the corpse's pocket made the deal firm. My version was that I had seen the broken windows, checked my own office and started out to see if anyone was still around when he tried to nail me. The manager admitted that a lot of the empty offices were unlocked, so the probability was that the guy had heard the elevator coming up, slipped into one to hide, and when he started out to make a getaway, saw me, panicked and started shooting.

I knew better. He had come prepared to handle a lock with those plastic strips. My door wouldn't give in to that technique so he had broken the window, but they made it easy for him to wait me out in a convenient empty office.

Pat drove me downtown and took my statement there. Before I finished, one of the detectives came in and told him there was no make on the guy yet, but that the gun was a .38 Colt Cobra licensed to a jeweler that had been stolen in a robbery two months before. The lab hadn't come up with any laundry marks on the guy's clothes and the only lead they had was that he had been wearing shoes made and sold in Spain but they were probably as old as his clothes. His prints had been wired to Washington and pictures were telephotoed to Interpol in case he was a foreign national.

Pat took my statement, read it through once and tossed it on his desk. "I almost believe it," he said. "Damn it, I almost believe it."

"You're a spooky slob," I grunted.

"I'm supposed to be, buddy. Right now I'm spooked more than ever. First the Delaney thing, now this."

"At least this one's cut and dry."

"Is it?" he asked softly.

"Nobody's looking for your scalp."

He interlocked his fingers and smiled at me, his eyes cold. "Are they looking for yours, Mike?"

I smiled back at him. "They'll have a hard time getting it."

"Don't con me."

"You have statements from five witnesses besides me that put a common robbery motive behind this, a stolen gun, gloves, a paraffin test that shows he shot at me, the position of the corpse proving concealment, so what more do you want?"

"I could tell you another way things might have been arranged," Pat said. "The only reason I'm not hammering at it is because the manager's statement is the only one that sticks with me...the fact he admitted that occasionally some empty offices are left unlocked. There was one other open one on your floor, but the rest were locked."

"Okay, I was lucky. I was there with a gun. Anybody else would have been written off and you'd have an unsolved one on your hands."

"We're not done with this one yet, you know."

"I hope not I'd like to know who he was myself."

"You'll find out. Think it might tie into something you're on?"

I got up and stretched, then slapped on my hat. "The only thing I'm on is trying to locate Greta Service."

"Maybe I can help you on that." He reached in his desk drawer, took out an envelope and handed it to me. "Authorization to see old Harry. Your conversation will be recorded. Tomorrow you'll probably hear from the D.A. on your court appearance. Don't stay away too long."

"Thanks, chum."

"No trouble. You interest me. I always wonder how far you'll get before you wind up with your ass in a sling."

On some people prison life had a therapeutic effect. Harry Service was one of them. He had slimmed down and his face had lost the hostility it had worn at the trial and he was genuinely glad to see me. There was a momentary surprise, but he knew all the tricks and expected that I did too and anything taken down on tape for analysis later wasn't going to add up any hard points for him.

I said, "See your sister lately?"

"Nope. She sure knows how to worry a guy."

"She's big enough to take care of herself."

"That I wouldn't mind. What bugs me is she wants to take care of me too. I tried to tell her I'd make out...After this stretch I'm going legit, believe me."

"Well," I said, "I wish I could tell you something, but I couldn't locate her. She moved from her last place. One of her friends saw her uptown once, but that was the end of it. I wouldn't sweat it if I were you."

"You ain't me though, Mike. She's all I got for family."

"Maybe you know some of her friends."

He looked at me meaningfully. "Not any more."

"Yeah," I said. "Tell me...what was she like when she visited you last?"

Harry squirmed in his seat and frowned. "Well, she was...well, different."

"How?"

"I don't know how to say it. She wouldn't tell me nothing. She said pretty soon everything was going to be all right because she was going to get a lot of dough. I didn't think about it much because that's what she said right along. This time, though, she wouldn't say how. Like it was a big secret. The part I don't like is that her face was the way she looked as a kid when she done something she shouldn't of."

"Did she mention any of her former...friends?" I asked him.

"That was before the last time," Harry said. "Something was cooking and she didn't say, but I caught on that they all might have part of the action. Funny thing, Greta wasn't one what makes friends fast. The ones she usually took to were kind of oddballs, sort of misplaced types."

"Mixed up?" I suggested.

Harry shook his head. "No, not that. Kind of don't-give-a-damn people. I think that was why she stayed in the Village."

"You're not much help," I said.

"I know," Harry nodded. "Only thing I could put my finger on was when she was here last she opened her pocketbook and I saw a letter in there that was postmarked..." He paused, and wrote with his forefinger on the countertop, Bradbury. "I remembered it because I almost pulled a job there once," he said. "Then, when I mentioned it to her she snapped the pocketbook shut and said it wasn't nothing at all and I knew damn well she was lying."

"You mean out on the Island?"

"That's the place." He ran his tongue over his lips and added as an afterthought, "Something else...that letter was light green, kind of. It was long, like a business would use."

I looked at my watch. The time was almost up. "Okay, kid, I'll see what I can do."

"You'll try real hard, okay, Mike?"

"The best I can."

Harry stood up and looked at me anxiously. "And, Mike...I ain't got no hard feelings about being in here. It's my own fault. I'm just glad I didn't shoot you."

"You're luckier than most, Harry," I told him, but he hadn't heard about last night and didn't get the meaning at all.

On the way back to the city I picked up a newspaper at a gas stop and flipped through the pages. All the local news was obscured by the latest trouble spot in the world and the statements from the U.N. idiots who fostered the whole mess and were trying to explain their way out of it. Right now they were trying to make the United States the goat again and we were falling for it. I spit out the window in disgust and read the small blurb that detailed the shooting in the Hackard Building. Space was so limited that they didn't bother going into my background again except to mention that I was the one who had discovered the Delaney girl's body. The story simply stated that I had interrupted a burglar and killed him when he tried to shoot his way past me. So far the dead man had not been identified.

Velda and Hy Gardner were having coffee in the office when I got there. They sat on opposite sides of the room making small talk, deliberately avoiding the big thing that was on their minds. The place seemed charged with some unseen force that oozed from both of them.

Hy took the cigar out of his mouth and said, "Well, you did it again."

I tossed my hat on the rack. "Now what?"

Something like a look of relief passed over Velda's face. "You could have let me know where you were."

"What's everybody worried about me for?"

"Mike..." Hy drained his cup and put it on the desk. "Pat's sitting on this latest bit of yours. You think we don't know it? It was a good story, friend, but we all know better."

Velda said, "The D.A. called. You have a court appearance this Monday. He's after your license."

"So what else is new?"

She grinned and poured me a cup of coffee. "Ask Hy."

I looked over at him, "Got something?"

"Something you started. Old Biff down at the morgue got Al Casey back and they pulled about thirty folders Mitch handled when he was poking around in the morgue. They catalogued the photos Mitch handled and it's the damndest conglomeration you ever saw, from polo players to politicians. Right now he thinks you know more than you're telling and they want you to see what Mitch was looking for."

"Biff said he didn't check anything out."

"Hell, Mike, he could have stuck it in his pocket if he had wanted to."

"What for? If he was looking for an I.D. on somebody he would have gotten it right there."

Hy scrutinized my face closely. "Do you know what it was?"

"No," I said simply.

"Then why did somebody try to kill you?"

"I don't know that, either."

For a few seconds Hy was silent, then he nodded and stuck the cigar back in his mouth and stood up. "All right, I'll go for it." He pulled a manila envelope out of his pocket and flipped it on the desk. "The copies of Greta Service's photos you asked for. I passed the rest out. The gang will keep their eyes open."

"Thanks, Hy."

He picked up his coat, headed toward the door and stopped beside me. "Just tell me one thing off the record to satisfy my curiosity. That guy you shot...it didn't happen like you told it, did it?"

I grinned at him and shook my head. "No."

"Damn," he said and walked out.

Velda locked the door behind him and went back to her desk.

"It's pretty deep, isn't it?"

"We're on something. It's not tangible, but it's got somebody worried all to hell." I briefed her on my conversation with Harry Service and the details of the gunfight in the corridor, watching her face furrow with concern.

"I asked around the neighbors where Helen Poston lived. A few of them were able to describe a friend of hers that tallied with Greta. One old biddy turned out to be a people-watcher who drew a lot of her own conclusions, but the main thing she brought out was that Helen Poston was neither happy nor doing too well until after she met Greta. From then on she started turning up in new clothes and staying away from the house on weekends. Greta had a car the woman couldn't identify and on Friday nights they'd leave, Helen with a suitcase, and get back sometime Monday. One night she didn't come back at all and that's when she was found dead."

"That's the first I heard about a car," I said.

"Rented, probably. A kid described it as a black compact with no trim, so we can assume it was an agency vehicle. You want me to check with the garages that handle them?"

"Yeah...and get the mileage records. Did Greta--or whoever it was--show up after the Poston kid died?"

"Apparently not. There was a police investigation and her parents picked up her clothes. Three days later her room was rented to somebody else."

"Anybody else asking around there?"

"Not as far as I could find out. I played it cool enough so nobody would identify me again in case you're worried?"

"I'm worried," I told her. "From now on we'll stay away from the office. You take a room at the Carter-Layland Hotel and get me one adjoining..."

"Oh boy," she grinned.

I faked a swing at her and she faked ducking. I looked at my watch. It was three-thirty. "Let's cut," I said.

Pat had identified the guy who tried to kill me. We sat at one end of the bar in the Blue Ribbon having a sandwich and beer before the supper crowd came in and he let me scan the report that had gotten to his office an hour before.

Interpol, through their Paris office, had picked his prints and mug shots out of their files and transferred them to New York immediately. His name had been Orslo Bucher, accredited with Algerian citizenship, an army deserter and minor criminal with three convictions. He had escaped from a prison camp three years ago and been unheard from since. The report said there was no present evidence of him having applied for a passport from any country they serviced.

"Illegal entry," I suggested.

"We get a few hundred every year. There are probably thousands in the country we don't know about. A lot of the traffic comes up through Mexico and the Gulf coastline."

"Why here, Pat?"

He said, "The Washington Bureau thinks it's because they want political sanctuary. They have enemies in other countries. Because of their criminal records they can't come in legally."

"And this one?"

Pat shrugged and took a bite of his sandwich. "Who knows? We traced him to a room in the Bronx he had occupied for a year and a half. He did odd jobs, seemed to have enough money to keep him going, though nothing fancy, and didn't cultivate any friends except for a couple of jokers at the neighborhood bar. He serviced a whore every two weeks or so without any unnecessary conversation. The only thing she remembered was that the last time around he made her change a fifty instead of giving it to her in the assorted bills he usually did."

"New money?" I asked him.

He got the point. "If he had any more, we didn't find it. I'd figure that if you were the target for a contract kill it would go higher than what he was showing and the gun hand would have had a little more class. That's why I'm still letting your story stand, old buddy."

I grinned at him and hoisted the beer. "He was an army type and that pistol he carried wasn't a zip gun."

"Hell, I figured that, but who isn't ex-military any more? And with his background you could expect him to tote a little hardware. It isn't that hard to come by." He paused and put down his sandwich. "Incidentally, we found some burglar tools and some goodies lifted in a previous robbery in his room."

I kept my face straight and nodded. Pat was really scrambling it now. He was throwing the possibility that the guy really had tried to knock off my office for something of monetary value instead of having either Velda or me as a primary target and all I did was add to the picture by phonying the other break-ins.

"And now the case is closed," I said.

Pat washed his last bite down and shoved the glass back. His eyes went over my face and the lines that played with the corners of his mouth weren't a smile. "Is it?" he asked me.

When a few seconds went by, I said, "Don't nudge me, Pat."

"Last night we exhumed a body. It was that of a young girl supposedly killed in a car crash about four months ago. She was burned beyond recognition, but we got a make from a routine inquiry on her dental work a month later. The lab reports said she was loaded to the gills, and that quite literally. Anybody with the alcohol content she had shouldn't have been able to drive at all. However, making exceptions for certain tolerances people show, we had to assume that's what caused it. She was known as a heavy drinker and a wild kid who could really hold the stuff. She was last seen alive in a slop chute in the Village and said she was going on a party somewhere without saying anything more. The ones she was with were well alibied and told us it was nothing new. She took off in her car and what happened wasn't totally unexpected."

"Then what's your angle, Pat?"

"A more detailed autopsy showed injuries not normally sustained in a car crash, even one of that magnitude. Even the heat couldn't account for certain aspects of her condition."

"You're not saying much, kiddo."

"Ever hear of the rack?"

"Come off it, Pat!"

"Nasty thought," he said, "but look at this." He held out a photo and let me look at it. It was a reduced studio picture of a lovely, well-built girl in her middle twenties, swathed in a sheer, Grecian-style dress, posed languidly against an artificial column, a seductive expression in her dark eyes and the trace of a smile creasing her mouth.

"What about her?"

"Registered with the police department as a night-club entertainer. Good appearance, but a lousy voice so she didn't make out. Her agent couldn't sell her except as a hostess in a few joints and said she picked up money from the johns in the places she worked and seemed to do all right. Orphaned at sixteen with a crippled brother in Des Moines who drew a full World War Two disability pension and ran a moderately prosperous market on the side. He sent the money to bury her."

He gave me another long, steady look. "Tie in the others and what do you have?"

"Somebody loves nice bodies," I said.

"There's one other thing."

"So?"

"This one knew Greta Service," Pat said. "They both worked for the same two outfits in the garment district at the same time, modeling identical lines. Phil Silvester photographed them together for their brochure."

"Got a pick-up out on her?"

"In five states." He paused and glanced at me out of the comers of his eyes. "We covered some of your ground but didn't get too much cooperation. How did you make out?"

"No better."

"Harry Service wouldn't talk, either."

"Put him in jail," I said.

"Quit trying to be funny, Mike. He mentioned a letter to you without giving the postmark. The tape was clear at that point."

"He didn't say," I told him.

"Withholding evidence isn't a petty matter, chum."

"Evidence of what? All I have is privileged information. I'm working for Harry, remember?"

"Balls." Pat's face grew tight. "I'm not going to play you down, Mike. Right now I want an opinion. Do you think there's any tie-in between these women?"

I waved to Ed to bring me another beer and finished half of it before I answered him. "Look, Pat...we have three kids in allied professions. It's possible they all knew each other. It's a damn tight business so it's likely they ran into each other. Let's assume they did. Two are dead and one is missing."

"You forgot the fourth one."

"For the moment that's pure speculation. Check your statistics and you'll see how many die every hour."

"Think maybe Greta Service is dead?"

"No. A friend of hers saw her alive and not too far from here not long ago."

"Mike, they were show kids, no family ties and not in the big time. Any of them would hustle for a buck."

"And you and I know plenty like that. You're angling for the Jack-the-Ripper bit, aren't you?"

"It's possible. There's a curious part to it. None of those girls were sexually molested prior to their deaths."

"If it's one man he's got a damn good operation going. Just tell me this...and it's your thought...why go so far out for a remote poison to knock off the Poston girl? How would he have access to the stuff if it's that scarce? It doesn't fit the pattern."

"But there's a pattern," Pat insisted.

"Sure, if you look at it like that."

Pat swung around and looked straight at me. "Which brings us straight back to you, friend."

"Now you're sweating me."

"Nope. That'll come later, old pal. Right now I'm just wondering about one thing. That business with Orslo Bucher. Did it happen the way you said it did?"

"Funny, Hy asked me the same thing."

"What did you tell him?"

"Does Macy's tell Gimbel's?"

Pat threw his half of the lunch money on the bar top. "Don't get too deep, Mike. You don't go solo in this world very long. We've played a lot of games together. Let's not quit here. I know how you think, so I'm going along with you for now, but remember that upstairs, people are after your neck. If you fall, I can too, so stay loose."

"I'm so loose I jingle."

"Just one more time. For me. And off the record. The bit with Bucher...did it happen like that?"

I shook my head. "Nope."

"You know what you are, don't you?"

"I've been told often enough," I said.

Orslo Bucher's neighborhood wasn't new to me. It lay in the fringe area adjoining a slum section that was marked for urban renewal when they could figure out where to put the people that were already there. You could feel the depression that hung over the buildings like an emotional smog, see it in the gray wash that dangled from the clotheslines between the buildings and in the restless hostility of the inhabitants. It was a place that existed on the gratuity of the city's Welfare Department, but the bars were filled and the curbs lined with an assortment of misused cars.

Two years ago we had mopped up a bunch who had peddled home-made booze that had killed off fifteen people at a party, and there would still be some around who liked the feel of the cash I had laid out to get a line on the slobs. The police would get a few reluctant facts, a squeeze on their informers might get them a little more, but when they saw the long green and knew I wasn't submitting official reports they'd lay it out for me.

Max Hughes was the night bartender at the Seville, a grungy corner slop chute. He had just come on the shift when I walked in, mopped the bar top down with a dirty rag and gave me the barest glance of recognition. Without being asked, he slid a beer in front of me and changed the twenty I put down.

"Orslo Bucher," I said. I tapped the ten-spot on the counter and watched it disappear under his fingers.

He leaned forward, propping his elbows on the mahogany. "You the one who bumped him?"

I nodded.

"Thought it was you. Hell, he was asking for it."

"Why?"

"Petty crap. He was always pulling something."

"Alone?"

"Strictly," Max said. "Nobody much wanted him around anyway. Kind of a mean one. I tossed him out a couple of times when he was loaded and he looked like he wanted to kill me."

"He make any trouble around here?"

"No...but I'd lay odds he was the one pulled that armed stickup on Annie's liquor store last month. I felt that iron he carried when I heaved him out."

"Who'd know about him, Max?"

"Like I said...nobody. He was either in his pad, one of the joints or gone. Nobody cared." Max squinted and rubbed his chin. "Funny thing though, once I seen him getting into a big new car over on Lenox Avenue. He got in the back and the car had a chauffeur. I didn't see who he was with, except the guy wore a homburg and seemed to know him. It wasn't the kind of company Bucher usually kept."

"Sure it was him?"

"Positive." He frowned again and tapped the back of my hand with his finger. "Come to think of it, old Greene said he seen the same thing once. I didn't believe him because Greenie's bombed out on booze and can't think straight. He kept telling me it was a dipple car, whatever the hell that is, but he's always got a screwy name for everything."

"Suppose I talk to Greene."

Max grunted and said, "You'll have to go six feet down to do it. He got clipped by a truck two months ago and died in Bellevue."

I was getting nowhere in a hurry. When Max couldn't supply any answers there weren't any to be had. I said, "What about that whore Bucher used?"

"Rosie? Man, that one's on the last time around. She'll bang for a beer or a buck and lucky to get either. The only ones she gets is the bums the other hustlers won't touch. Lucy Digs and Dolly gave Bucher the brush when he tried to warm their pads, that's why he wound up with Rosie, and when them two turn anything down, it got to be pretty sad. Nope, old Bucher wasn't too popular around here. He ain't going to be missed none at all. Not none. If it wasn't for the cops nosing around nobody would have given him a thought."

"Okay, kid, if that's the best you can do."

"Sorry, Mike. That's the way it is. Suppose something turns up?"

I took out a card and wrote the name of the hotel on it. "Call me here if you think it's important." He looked up at me with shrewd eyes. "I'll mail you a check," I said.

Hy was just getting ready to leave his office when I reached him. He had been trying to get me for the past hour and was about to give up. Too many people were around for him to talk, so he told me to meet him at Teddy's place as fast as I could. I walked up a block, grabbed a cab and gave him the address of the restaurant in the lower end of Manhattan.

He was waiting for me in a private section and he wasn't alone. He pointed to a seat and indicated the tall lanky guy next to him. "You know Al Casey?"

"I've seen you around." I held out my hand and he took it "Biff told me about you going over the morgue files. Come up with anything?"

"That's what we wanted to talk to you about," Hy said. "Sit down."

I pulled out a chair and he nodded to Al, "Fill him in."

Al eased back in his chair and had a sip of his coffee. "First, we think we found Mitch Temple's last contact. He was in a woman's clothing shop on Broadway asking about those damn negligees and finally bought one. He had given his name and the office address to the salesgirl and laid down twenty bucks for a twelve-dollar item. The girl left to ring up the sale and when she came back he was gone. Now on Broadway, people don't just leave tips like that, so the girl remembered the incident after a little bit of persuasion. She hadn't mentioned it before because she didn't want the manager to know she had taken any cash on the side. The second thing she remembered was that while she was writing up the sales slip, Mitch kept looking at another customer down further in the store who was poking around a clothes rack and was preoccupied enough so that she had to ask him twice about the address before he gave it to her. She never saw either one again."

"What did Mitch buy?"

"A black nylon shortie outfit. Real sexy, she said. What we figure is, he recognized the other guy and followed him out. The date on the sales slip tallies with the day he first started to go through the morgue files."

"Anybody else recognize the other one?"

"No. There was one new girl who might have waited on him, but apparently he didn't buy anything. If it was the one she thought she remembered, it was just a man who asked if that were all the colors they had in stock. She said that was it and he left. What was peculiar about it...there was a complete color assortment of new stock that had just been put out that morning."

I looked at the two of them and felt my mind fingering out the bits and pieces until there was only one little piece left.

"Complete except for one," I said.

Al Casey shook his head. "Every color. I even checked their stock records."

"Not white," I told him.

Both of them looked at each other and a frown began to form between Al's eyes. "That's right," he said. "There wasn't any white. But how would you know?"

"Mitch Temple told me. That's why he was reaching for that white handkerchief in his pocket. Not for anything else he had." Hy shoved his glasses up on his forehead and stared at me hard. "I don't get it, Mike."

"Velda spotted it first," I told him. "Green for redheads, black for blondes. What color dame would look best in white?"

After a moment Hy said, "A brunette or black-haired doll."

"Like Greta Service," I added.