The Fatal Frails

CHAPTER IV

Johnny stepped from the elevator into the stream of people in the lobby of 222 Maiden Lane with Gloria Philips on his arm, and the redhead's hand tightened on his elbow. “There she is,” the girl murmured. “That's Harry Palmer with her.”

Johnny looked with interest at the tall, regal-looking blonde in a pastel mink stole who swept up to them, trailed by a short, bouncy, aggressive-looking little man in a dark business suit. “So good of you to be able to make it, darling,” the blonde said crisply to Gloria, semi-enveloping her in the phantom embrace with which women meet in public without ever quite making contact. “And how is dear Ernest these days?”

“Dear Ernest is just fine,” the redhead replied. “Mrs. Winters, Mr. Killain. Mr. Palmer, Mr. Killain.” Johnny was conscious that the eyes of both were upon the marks on his face.

Madeleine Winters was a green-eyed ash blonde, Johnny discovered as he pressed the tips of her fingers, which somehow managed to be the only part of her hand available to be shaken. What he could see of her legs beneath the faille suit were excellent. He suspected that her figure was just as good, if a man held no prejudice against the greyhound type.

Harry Palmer's handshake was firm and surprisingly strong. “Glad to meet you, Killain,” he said buoyantly. Confident good humor quirked the corners of his wide mouth. Johnny felt the transfer of a bit of cardboard from the little man's hand to his own. He palmed it as Palmer turned to Madeleine Winters. “Now that I've done the honors, my dear, I'll be running along.”

“Certainly, Harry.” The blonde smiled at him cozily. “And thanks for being so sweet about escorting me.” She addressed herself to Gloria as the little man strode jauntily away. “You won't mind that I've asked Jack Arends to join us for a drink at my place? I feel he can add so much to the gathering.” Madeleine Winters smiled again.

“I don't mind in the least,” Gloria replied. She disengaged her arm from within Johnny's. “I'm going to have to hold you up a moment, though. I've forgotten my little case with my homework. Excuse me, please?” She stepped back onto the elevator as she spoke.

For a second Johnny thought it might have been an arrangement to leave him alone with Madeleine Winters, until he saw that lady's expression as she stared at the elevator's closed door. In the lobby's harsh overhead light, tiny crow's-feet radiated from the eyes but only slightly negated a very good complexion. She was older than the redhead, Johnny thought, but it would take a woman to appraise the difference.

Suddenly conscious of his eyes upon her, Madeleine Winters showed her teeth in what was not quite a smile. “Extraordinary girl, Gloria. Isn't there something in the natural history books with tentacles ending in claws?”

“Not since the Ice Age,” Johnny said.

“A prehistoric background would suit her nicely,” the blonde said acidly. “But I shouldn't prejudice you on your first date.” Johnny again saw the flash of her even white teeth. “You must tell me all about it some time. I adore naughty stories.”

“You don't pull many punches, do you, Mrs. Winters?”

“Madeleine, please.” The green eyes inspected him searchingly. “If I don't, I understand I'm in good company. Max Stitt is not considered an easy man to handle.”

“His foot must've slipped.”

“Why did you go to see-” She broke off as the elevator ejected Gloria, attache case under her arm. “We can always get into that later, can't we?” The blonde smiled at Johnny. The smile evaporated as she turned to the redhead. “You're quite sure you're ready now, darling?”

“Quite sure,” Gloria returned evenly, drawing on white gloves. Johnny followed them through the lobby's revolving doors onto the sidewalk. Brother, he thought to himself, if there's a lamb in this crowd its name is Killain.

Facing away from the women with his arm upraised for a cab, Johnny was able to take his first look at the business card Harry Palmer had pressed into his hand. Beneath the block-lettered name it said Heritage Building, in the upper left hand corner Factoring, in the lower right Financing. Diagonally across its face in a bold, pencil-stabbing scrawl appeared Drop around and see me.

Now here's a money man no one took the trouble to mention, Johnny thought. He slipped the card in a pocket as he opened the taxicab door.

There was only one attempt at conversation during the trip uptown. “I suppose your friend Ernest is busy disentangling Claude's affairs?” Madeleine Winters inquired. “I haven't seen my friend Ernest since that night,” Gloria replied. The balance of the ride was completed in silence. Johnny offered his hand to each as they alighted. He found the double flash of nylon blinding as they scrambled from the low-roofed cab. A uniformed doorman lumbered up belatedly to assist. With what they were able to see all day opening car doors for the ladies, Johnny mused, doormanning should be a fine job for voyeurs.

Inside the canopied entrance the ceiling was twenty feet high, the floor was parqueted, the atmosphere as hushed as a cathedral. The elevator was self-service type with black filigree ironwork adorning it. It rose soundlessly. Key in hand, Madeleine Winters led the way down a thickly carpeted corridor and admitted them to her apartment.

There was no hallway. Johnny stood just inside the door and looked at the rectangular living room filled with bright color. The walls were off-white, the ceiling dull gold. A shaggy white rug covered the floor. A lounge in royal blue ran nearly from wall to wall at the narrow upper end of the room, and a three-quarter sofa bed with a bright gold coverlet angled out from the right-hand wall. A huge bowl of flowers decorated a hi-fi set against the long left wall. Armchairs in azure blue and nile green squatted at the ends of the lounge, with barely enough room for small end tables with thin-stemmed blue lamps on broad brass bases. The blues and greens should have clashed, Johnny felt, but somehow didn't. A teakwood cabinet rested against the wall opposite the hi-fi. Three doors led off the room, including the one behind him.

“Jack should be along in a moment,” Madeleine said, scaling her stole carelessly at the sofa bed. She indicated the cabinet to Johnny. “Would you do the honors? You'll find everything you need except ice. I'll bring it.”

“I'll run inside to the little girls' room,” Gloria said. She pointed with her attache case to the door on the right. “It's still in there, Madeleine?”

“I haven't moved it recently, dear,” the blonde said sweetly, and exited through the door opposite. Johnny winked at Gloria, who shook her head in a half smile before disappearing behind the right-hand door. Johnny caught a quick glimpse of a white four-poster bed on another white rug before the door closed.

He opened the cabinet door and ran his eye approvingly down the line of bottles. He removed Scotch and bourbon, and three highball glasses. As an afterthought he took out two Old-fashioned glasses. They might like their drinks on the rocks.

“What'll it be?” he asked Madeleine as she returned with a small silver ice bucket. At her silence he turned to find her staring at a black fedora and black leather gloves on an end table.

“Jack's already here?” she murmured half to herself, and raised her voice. “Jack? Where are you, Jack?”

For a second Johnny thought the sound in his ears was a wall-reflected echo of her call. When it was repeated he reached the bedroom door in three long strides and jerked it open. The room was enough to snow-blind a man, he thought as he sprinted through it to the door ajar at its end. Walls, ceiling, rug, bedspread, dresser, boudoir table and bench, lamps, Venetian blinds, occasional chairs-all white. Dead white. Behind him he could hear the thud-thud of Madeleine's heels on the rug.

Gloria stood in the bathroom doorway, attache case crookedly under one arm, staring down at her feet. “I thought you'd never hear me,” she got out in a cracked, strained voice as Johnny moved her to one side and looked down at Jack Arends' crumpled, bloated body. The ugly features were blood-streaked, and a black automatic gleamed against glistening tile.

For an instant Johnny felt suspended in time. Was he seeing the same movie twice? So recently he'd looked down upon a body on a bathroom floor with a black automatic lying alongside on white tile. He dropped to one knee as he heard Madeleine Winters' sharply indrawn breath behind him, and, while he felt for a pulse he knew would not be there, his eye caught up with the differences between this death and Dechant's. This was no suicide. There were no powder burns, and Arends had been shot more than once. This time it was murder.

“The door was closed,” Gloria said from above him in a small voice. “I opened it, and there he was.”

Johnny sat with Gloria on the gold sofa bed and listened to Detective Ted Cuneo direct questions at-from the sound of her voice-an increasingly impatient Madeleine Winters. Beside them an anxious-faced Ernest Faulkner tried ineffectually to referee the match, his glasses glinting in the light.

“Why do you suppose Madeleine insisted on callin' Faulkner?” Johnny asked Gloria.

She shrugged prettily. “At a guess, to embarrass me. I've dated him a few times, but I'm afraid he's taken it more seriously than I have.” The blue-gray eyes were guileless.

Detective James Rogers emerged from the bedroom and approached them. The sandy-haired man looked tired. “I guess that does it inside,” he said mildly. He looked at Johnny. “Run through your end of it again for me.”

“Sure. Gloria an' I left her office at five. We met Mrs. Winters in the lobby, talked maybe five minutes an' caught a cab up here. Took us half an hour, maybe.” Johnny glanced at the bedroom door. “He looked fresh enough to have caught it while we were comin' up in the elevator.”

Rogers' smile was mirthless. “It wasn't long.”

Across the room Madeleine Winters' voice rose stridently. “How many times are you going to ask me that? I told you Jack had his own key! Are you investigating his death or my morals? Ernest, can't you make this man stop repeating himself?” Johnny could see the fluttering movements of Faulkner's hands as he tried to talk to the glowering Cuneo.

Gloria tugged at his arm. “Can we leave?”

Johnny looked at Rogers, who nodded after a second's hesitation. Johnny rose to his feet. From the corner of her eye the blonde caught the movement. “You're leaving?” she said sharply, interrupting Cuneo in the middle of a question. “I want to talk to you.”

“Give me a ring sometime,” Johnny said easily.

“Mrs. Winters-” Cuneo began doggedly.

“Oh, shut up!” she told him rudely. The tips of the detective's ears glowed pinkly as she moved away from him to take Johnny by the arm. She drew him aside. “I want to talk to you,” she repeated. “Soon. Can't you come back later?” She smiled, pure mischief in her eyes. “If you've the strength?”

“I think I'd rather tackle it fresh.” Johnny cocked an eye at the bedroom. “That room in there-with your clothes off, doesn't a man need a search party?”

“The sheets are black,” she assured him. “Black silk.” She smiled again. “Well?”

“Not tonight. You call me.”

“I'm shameless enough,” she admitted. She was looking at him curiously. “I thought you might make it a little easier for me, though. Ah, well. C'est la guerre. Have fun.”

Johnny collected the waiting Gloria and led the way out to the elevator. He thought she looked a little wan.

“What did Madeleine want?” she asked him directly.

“A younger man, I guess.” He grinned at the redhead. “She's lucky we were with her, walkin' in on that. Alone, she'd have been makin' her noises at Cuneo downtown. They're well paired.”

“I don't know why it shook me so,” she said wearily. “Why are all these people killing themselves?” Johnny looked at her. “Arends never killed himself.” “He didn't? But he looked just the same-” “As Dechant? With some important differences he looked the same. Arends took four in the head, dead center. A man don't last to pull the trigger on himself four times, where he took them.”

“He was killed? But the police didn't say-” “They never do say, till the M.E.'s report is in, but you can bet me. They know what it was.” The elevator stopped, and the door opened noiselessly. Johnny followed Gloria through the lobby to the street. “Come on. We'll get you a drink. You need it.” He looked at her hands as she changed the position of the attache case under her arm. “Forget your gloves? I'll run back up an-”

“Don't bother, Johnny.” She tucked her arm in his. “I'm sure I have a pair of suedes in my bag. I'd just as soon forget about up there.” Her eyes were shadowed as she tried to smile up at him.

“Okay. Let's get that drink.”

He whistled for a cab.

Johnny sat in a big armchair in Gloria Philips' apartment in a pleasantly relaxed glow. The dinner had gone off well, and the after-dinner drinks hadn't hurt anything, either. He sat and awaited the redhead's return from the bedroom into which she'd gone upon their arrival.

His eyes roamed the room, lazily. Gloria Philips' apartment was small but neatly furnished. Gloria Philips herself was small but neatly furnished. It made a hard combination to beat, Johnny felt.

“Keep you waiting long?” she asked huskily from the doorway.

He hadn't heard the door open. “It was worth it,” he said softly. The redhead was wearing something black, fragile, loose, long, clinging and semitransparent. She came directly to him and sat on the arm of his chair. She smiled down at him, the blue-gray eyes bright with liquor and with something else. Johnny pushed back the loose sleeve of the flowing negligee and traced the silken contours of her upper arm with his fingertips.

She bent down over him until her lips rested against one ear. “Did you really move a whorehouse into Silver City?” she murmured.

“I really did.”

She slid down off the arm of the chair into his lap. “Tell me about it.”

He stood up with her dead weight in his arms. “I'll do better than that, kid,” he told her. “I'll show you.”

He carried her to the bedroom and closed the door.

He reached for the switch on the lamp on the night table when he heard her returning to the bed. “No!” she said sharply, sensing his movement, but she was too late. She grabbed for the negligee at the foot of the bed to shield full-fleshed nudity as the light bathed her. Johnny intercepted her arm. Slowly he drew her up and in until she slithered across turn face down. “Will you stop it?” she demanded crossly, and flung a hand behind her.

He removed the hand unhurriedly and rested his eyes upon the smooth white buttocks. He looked again, more closely. With a finger he traced one of a number of misty dark lines faintly visible beneath the satiny surface. “What happened here?” Johnny asked her.

She stirred uneasily on his knees. “I fell on the stairs.” Her voice was muffled.

“The hell you fell on the stairs. I've seen a whipped rump before. Who ploughed your field?”

“Let me back under the covers,” she pleaded. He released her arm, and she crawled back in beside him. The look she gave him was as defiant as her tone. “You can't guess who did it?”

“Stitt?”

“Yes, Stitt, damn him!”

“How long ago?”

She shrugged bare shoulders. “Two months, ten weeks.”

He whistled. “An' you still look like that? What the hell did he use?”

“A riding crop. The doctor said it would be six months before I bleached out completely. I was in bed five days. I couldn't move.”

“I believe it. How'd it happen?”

“I misjudged him,” she said, remembered resentment in her tone. “I had information I thought he'd buy, or trade for. Instead he tied me over the end of a bed and whipped it out of me. I made it harder on myself by thinking that if I kept my nerve and didn't talk he'd get scared and quit. I didn't realize until too late that he was-enjoying himself.”

“Did he have a hold on Arends? He sure as hell didn't sound like a man talkin' to his boss over there.”

“Max always acts like the king of the mountain. You never saw anyone so arrogant.” She leaned up on an elbow to look into his face. “I'm answering a lot of questions, Johnny. I wouldn't want you to forget it when it's my turn.”

“What's with all this mismarked and unmarked symbols I been hearin' about?”

“That was a very minor matter, Johnny, except to Jack Arends.” She slid down beside him again. “Every foreign shipment coming through customs, whether by boat or air, has every individual piece in the shipment marked with the symbol of the importing merchant. For one reason or another a shipment occasionally isn't picked up here by the importer to whom it was consigned, and then, rather than pay round-trip freight charges and wind up with the merchandise still on his own shipping platform, the manufacturer will scramble around to find someone else to take it over. In such cases customs insists that the goods be re-marked with the symbol of the new consignee. It's a tedious, time-consuming and expensive process. Since the manufacturer will make a cash allowance to the new consignee for the expense of the re-marking, if the actual re-marking can be avoided it's cash in the importer's pocket. It's a favorite evasion of the borderline importers and freight forwarders, although not the big ones like Jack. It requires-”

Johnny interrupted. “Hold it just a minute, sugar.” He leaned up over her to reach for the phone on her side of the bed. He dialed the hotel. “Edna? Killain. Tell Vic I'm gonna be late, will you?” He looked down at the auburn hair spread on the pillow and the perfectly formed white neck with the little hollow at the base of the throat. “Make that good an' late. Thanks, Edna.” He hung up, placed a palm flat on the soft swell of Gloria's stomach and jiggled lightly. He grinned as her knees came up involuntarily. “You were sayin' it requires-” he prompted her.

“Oh. Collusion is what it requires. Money changes hands, but if the wrong inspector's assigned there can be hell to pay, like this time. It was serious for Jack, who could have lost his license. He was furious. He accused Max, but Max denied it.”

“But you think it was Max.”

“I think-” She hesitated. “I don't know. In a way it's petty larceny, and, much as I dislike Stitt, he thinks a little bigger than that. It's exactly the type of thing that appealed to Claude, though. He'd rather steal a dollar than find five. I think Claude probably made a deal with someone in Jack's warehouse.”

“Arends called Dechant a thief.” Johnny made it a question.

“Sticks and stones-” Gloria said lightly. “De mortuis nil nisi bonum. Let's say Claude was a devious man.” She reached up and ran a hand over the ridged scars on Johnny's chest. “Who ploughed your field, mister?”

“A guy who wished he hadn't.”

She pulled herself up to a sitting position to look down at him. “I've answered a lot of questions, haven't I, Johnny?”

“Meanin' it's your turn to ask a few? You're distractin' me up there.”

She folded her arms across her firmly nippled, full breasts. “That better?”

“Terrible.” He pulled her down beside him again. “For some reason I seem to be in a hurry, so I'll save you the trouble of askin' the questions. I'll give it to you in two words: August Hegel. Vous comprenez?”

“So you do know,” she said quietly. “Jules insisted there was no way you could.” She looked up at him as he moved over her. “You're getting into-”

“Hush, woman,” Johnny said firmly. He settled his hands in the dimpled hollows of the plump shoulders. “First things first.”

He put out the light.

His cab was back on the west side before Johnny remembered Jules Tremaine. He looked at his watch. One fifteen. “Skip the Duarte,” he ordered the driver. “Take me on up to the Alden. It's around 82nd.”

“I know,” the cabbie grunted, and swung north on Sixth. Across 57th he headed into the park. Johnny rocked from side to side on the back seat with the letter-S curves until they headed west on a sweeping turn, crossed Central Park West and pulled in under a marquee in the upper end of the first block.

Johnny had never seen the Alden before, but, even from the sidewalk, one look at its solid, banklike exterior and subdued lobby told him all he needed to know. An apartment hotel, known in the trade as a “family" hotel, exactly why he'd never been able to understand. Damn few families lived in them. Their one-and-a-half, two, and two-and-a-half room apartments were far more likely to be occupied by professional and theatrical people of a little more stature than their downtown counterparts.

“Jules Tremaine,” Johnny said into the house phone in the almost spartan lobby. “Killain,” he announced to the voice in his ear. “I'm downstairs.”

“Come on up. Four-oh-seven.”

The handsome Frenchman was standing in an open doorway when Johnny stepped off the elevator into the fourth-floor corridor. Silently he led the way inside. “Nice digs,” Johnny said after a look around. Nothing was new, but everything was comfortable. His glance rested longest on a large short-wave radio with a table to itself.

Tremaine nodded indifferently. “They want to get in to paint, but I can't stand the smell. I told them to wait till I had to be out of town.” His manner appeared neither friendly nor unfriendly. He was waiting, as though for a cue to determine the course of the conversation.

“All you people seem to be doin' pretty well,” Johnny suggested.

“All us people?”

“I went over to the blonde's, like you said. She don't look anywhere near close to the bread line.”

Tremaine pulled out his cigarettes and offered Johnny the pack. His dark eyes were inscrutable. “Anything of interest come up?”

“Is a dead body of interest?” The extended arm went rigid. “Whose?” “Jack Arends.”

For a count of five the Frenchman seemed nearly to hold his breath. “Killed?”

“Dead,” Johnny confirmed. “In the blonde's bathroom. Bathrooms are gettin' to be downright unlucky these days. Someone didn't like him four times in the head with a black automatic that looked like the twin of Dechant's.” Jules Tremaine shoved his cigarettes back in his pocket and lighted a match before be realized he hadn't taken one from the pack. “I met a guy named Harry Palmer tonight,” Johnny added.

“He financed deals for Claude.” The big-shouldered man said it absently, his mind obviously elsewhere. “I used to work for him myself.”

“Yeah? Where?”

“Europe. Bird-dogging business prospects.” Tremaine finally got a cigarette going. “What are the police doing?”

“Givin' your blonde acquaintance a fit about who had keys to her apartment. Arends was inside when we got there.”

“We?”

“We,” Johnny repeated, and let it go at that. “How would you assay this boy Faulkner?”

“Not too highly. He has-” Jules Tremaine bit off whatever he had been about to say. His steady regard of Johnny was emotionlessly thorough. “At the moment I'm more interested in how I assay you. Just where do you fit into the picture?”

“That didn't seem to bother you too much on the phone when you invited me to come over an' talk.”

“I've changed my mind about the talk. Jack Arends wasn't dead then.”

“I've got an alibi for that,” Johnny said lightly.

Unexpectedly the Frenchman flushed. “Meaning I haven't?”

“I don't give a damn whether you do or not.” Johnny stared at a stubbornly protruding lower lip. “Do you want to talk or don't you?” He threw up his hands at the sullen silence. “I don't get it. This was your idea, remember? Who muzzled you? Why?” His eyes probed at Tremaine's wooden expression. “Last chance,” he warned. “This is countdown. Three. Two. One. Zero.” He turned and walked to the door. There wasn't a sound from behind him.

In the corridor he wondered fleetingly whether Gloria could have called the Frenchman and told him that Johnny actually had knowledge of August Hegel. But then wouldn't she have told him about Arends?

He had to walk three blocks before he could flag down a cab to get him back to the Duarte.