The ice cold nude

chapter one

I always figured blondes, like brunettes, were mostly a sometime thing; while redheads, being invariably skinny, were mostly a no-time thing. One swift glance at this redhead made me realize the sheer stupidity of all generalizations. The tight fit of her demure black silk dress against the arrogant thrust of her high-riding breasts was proof positive. Brother! If she was skinny, I was from outer space yet.

“The name is Boyd,” I confided with an approving grin, “Danny Boyd, from Boyd Enterprises, New York City.” My head turned automatically—a fraction to the left, then a fraction to the right—so she got the full impact of the profile both coming and going. It was the absolute treatment because I figured she deserved it; just one sid^-of the profile alone is mostly more than enough to reduce a healthy bouncing blonde to sobbing tears of frustration.

Somehow it produced no reaction at all from the mag-nificendy built redhead. There was merely a questioning look in her tawny eyes as she returned stare for stare. I guessed she was myopic for sure, and just too damned proud to wear cheaters.

“The glazed eyeballs I take as a compliment,” she said finally in a calm voice. “But take one small step closer to this desk, Boyd, and I’ll scream my head off.”

“Maybe if you put on your glasses for a moment,” I suggested nonchalantly, “you’d realize that sinister blur in

7

front of your straining eyes is the most handsome hunk of virile—”

“My vision is twenty-twenty,” she snapped. “Without straining my eyes at all, I can tell you what I see is one of those square-jawed cartoon characters they frighten children with on'television. For sure, there’s no possible resemblance to anything human.”

“You’re sick?” I said hopefully. “I bet any analyst could find some simple reason for why you don’t like good-looking men. Maybe it’s a hangover from childhood —you being a skinny kid with flaming pigtails, all the boys would run screaming when you came around. But believe me, honey, you’ve changed—now you’re all rounded out and everything.”

A faint smile quirked her lips, and she bent her head quickly to hide it, giving me a bird’s-eye view of her fantastic hair-do, which was a kind of careless rapture in titian.

“You wanted to see Mr. Elmo?” she said in a muffled voice. “He’s been expecting you, Mr. Boyd. You can go right on into his office—the second door to your right.” “Thanks,” I said politely. “I expect to be around here a while and I’d like to offer you the services of the Boyd good neighbor policy for free. We should get together and work on that inferiority complex of yours, honey. How about we make a start tonight, around eight maybe?” “I’m no masochist, Mr. Boyd,” she said sweetly. “If I want to make myself real miserable, I can do it without your help.”

Right then I figured it would be easier to take the second door to my right than try and answer that crack, so I started walking at a fast pace, pretending I never even heard that malicious chuckle of triumph from in back of me.

Mr. Elmo was a little man sitting behind a big desk. He was dressed in a dignified black suit and he wore gold-rimmed glasses that glittered with curiosity as he looked at me.

“I’m Boyd,” I told him cautiously.

“Ah, yes.” His tone of voice made me some kind of personal tragedy. “Sit down, Mr. Boyd. I trust you had a pleasant journey from the East?” He made New York sound like the Casbah.

“It was fine,” I told him, then sat cautiously in what looked like a genuine piece of early Americana. “I never expected to be back in Santo Bahia so soon—it’s only around six months since I was last here.”

“Indeed?”

“I’m curious,” I said truthfully. “I normally work out of my New York office and I wouldn’t call the West Coast my home territory exactly. How come you found me?”

“You were recommended, Mr. Boyd. I had great need for the services of an astute private detective. Lieutenant Schell suggested I contact you.”

“Schell?” I gaped at him.

“Does it surprise you?”

“That’s an understatement.” I remembered the last time I was in Santo Bahia, a skip-trace assignment turned into a multiple murder caper—with Lieutenant Schell holding me personally responsible for most of the corpses.

Elmo gave me a wintry smile. “The Lieutenant said the assignment was impossible in the first place and only a— I quote his words, you understand?—complete nut could have any hope of success. That was when he mentioned your name, Mr. Boyd.”

“It’s real great to know you have friends,” I said bitterly. “So what is this impossible assignment?”

“My jewelry store was robbed a week back,” he said in a precise voice. “We lost a diamond tiara worth one hundred thousand dollars, approximately.”

“Obviously the police haven’t found it,” I said. “How about the insurance company?—they’d have their own men working on it. Why do you need me?”

“A reasonable question, Mr. Boyd.” His gold-rimmed glasses glinted with an outraged sense of propriety. “The insurance company have refused the claim. Unless the tiara is recovered, I shall lose its wholesale cost which is approximately fifty thousand dollars.”

“How was it stolen?”

Elmo leaned back in his chair and shook his head dismally. “A clever plot, Mr. Boyd! It is, I’m afraid, a quite complicated story. Perhaps I should start at the beginning?”

“My time is your time,” I said generously.

“On the basis of a thousand dollars retainer, plus expenses, I imagine it is,” he said coldly. “Well now, in the first place I was approached by a local manufacturer, Poolside Plastics, to cooperate in publicizing a beauty contest they’re running. The tiara was on display in our window, and had been for a couple of weeks, when their publicity manager, a Mr. Machin, brought the three contest finalists to the store. The idea was, of course, that the contest winner would be crowned with the tiara. He wanted to photograph the three finalists, each wearing it in turn, to further the publicity.”

“That was when it was stolen?” I asked.

He nodded. “Two armed guards removed it from the window and brought IT into this office, where Machin and the rest of his people were already waiting. Each girl put on the tiara while the photographer got his pictures, then the guards returned it to the window.

“Two hours later, our Mr. Byers returned to the store— he’d been out selling a few expensive trinkets to a private buyer—and happened to glance at the display window. Fortunately for us, this man has a sharp and expert eye. That one glance was enough to tell Mr. Byers the real tiara had been replaced by a paste imitation.”

“He’s that good?” I asked incredulously.

“Mr. Byers came to us five years back, direct from Van Dieten and Luutens, of Amsterdam,” Elmo said in a hushed voice. “This man is a genius with precious stones, Mr. Boyd!”

“Fine,” I said politely. “But whoever made the switch had to have a paste imitation ready for the occasion. Who actually took the tiara from the window and gave it to the guards?”

“I removed it myself,” he said with frozen dignity. “I am the only person who knows how to operate the photocell rays and the rest of the protective devices that make the display window burglarproof.”

“So the only possible place the switch could have been made was right here in this room?” I said.

“That is the police theory,” he agreed. “I can see no other possible explanation, Mr. Boyd.”

“And the police haven’t gotten anyplace so far?” “Certainly not to my knowledge, at least,” he said stiffly. “As I have already mentioned, the insurance company refused the claim—using some small-print legal trickery—because the tiara was only covered while it was either in our window or in the vault.”

“What did you hire me for, exactly, Mr. Elmo?” I asked him.

“To get my tiara back,” he said testily. “What else?” “That’s all you want?” I prodded. “Not for me to catch the people responsible for its theft?”

His eyes gleamed sharply through the gold-rimmed glasses.

“Ah!” He chuckled thinly. “I see your point. You think it may be possible to make some kind of deal with the thief, or thieves, as the case may be?”

“It’s up to you,” I shrugged. “Are you prepared to cut a loss?”

“Let us put this on a factual, businesslike basis, Mr. Boyd.” He rubbed his hands together briskly. “If you fail, you already have a thousand dollars and your return fare to New York—correct?”

“Sure,” I nodded agreement.

“If you recover the tiara, I am prepared to pay you another five thousand, with no questions asked,” he continued. “If you think it possible to make a deal with the thief under those terms—and still have something left for your own efforts—the decision is yours entirely, Mr. Boyd.”

I looked at him hard for a moment. He wasn’t about to give an inch. “Like Bargain Day at Macy’s, huh?” I muttered sourly. “Thanks a whole heap.”

“I see no reason for you to complain. You can handle this any way you please. Nobody’s forcing you into anything.”

“Yeah—just like nobody holding one hundred thousand bucks worth of rocks is going to hand it over for peanuts, and you know it.” I sighed. “Well, I guess I might as well start with the plastics people.”

“Tamara has a list of names and addresses,” he said. “You can get them on your way out.”

“The redhead?” I felt slighdy shaken. “Did she come to you straight from Van Wotzis and Whoever in Amsterdam, too?”

“She came to us straight from Santo Bahia High, about nine or ten years ago, Mr. Boyd.” A naughty gleam flashed from the gold-rimmed glasses for a brief instant. “But she does have a Russian mother, I understand, who married an American truck driver. Tamara O’Keefe—a living example of American compromise, wouldn’t you say?”

“That’s her whole trouble,” I said darkly. “She doesn’t have one ounce of compromise in her whole delightful body!”

So a couple of minutes later I was outside Elmo’s office, back with the redhead who had ice shifting through her veins, instead of red blood pulsating in eager response to the Boyd profile.

“There’s the list,” she said in a businesslike voice, and handed me a neady typewritten sheet. “Is there anything else you require, Mr. Boyd?—other than the services of an analyst, of course?”

“I’d like your confidential opinion on the whole problem and the people involved in it,” I said casually. “This will naturally take a great deal of time, and is also urgent, Miss O’Keefe. Why don’t we have dinner and discuss it?”

“Why don’t you get lost, Mr. Boyd, and start looking for that tiara?” she asked sweetly.

Once again she’d left me with the nasty alternative of dreaming up some brilliant repartee to top her crack, or else just getting lost. I folded the typewritten list of names carefully, then slid it into my wallet—and reluctantly got lost.

Before I’d gone calling on Elmo Jewelers to say hello to my new client, I’d checked into the hotel that held sad memories of my previous visit. A whole night of frustration with a gorgeous blonde waiting in my room, ready and eager to be transported into the rapture and delights of the intimate world of Danny Boyd—who just kept right on waiting, because I never did make it back to the hotel that night. My fervent hope now was that the pattern wouldn’t repeat itself; if it did, I’d probably walk straight off the hotel roof—or toss myself out a first floor window, anyway.

After checking into the hotel I’d gotten myself a U-drive convertible which stood waiting at the curb outside the jewelers, all bright and gleaming like real devil-may-care. I drove it down to police headquarters and its bright gleaming look vanished along with mine, once we parked right outside.

I asked the desk sergeant for Lieutenant Schell and my feeling of nervous depression strengthened with every step that took me closer to his office. The walls, I noted, were still the same attractive color of old dried blood; Schell was still the same tall, tough character with close-cropped gray hair and hooded dark eyes that didn’t like anything much, least of all Danny Boyd.

“Well, well,” he said, without making any move to lift his frame out of the chair. “If it isn’t Bug-Eyed Boyd, the moron from Manhattan, come to share another cute caper with us West Coast innocents!”

“You’ve been practicing that greeting for days,” I said accusingly, as I eased gently into the converted packing crate which passed for a visitor’s chair.

I lit a cigarette and we wasted maybe ten seconds just glaring at each other. “Okay,” I said finally, “so what’s the gag? What kind of Machiavellian plot is hatching in that evil mind of yours?”

“Are you talking about something?” he asked crisply. “Or maybe just stringing words together to hear how they sound?”

“Mr. Elmo hires me to get back his stolen tiara,” I said, my voice loaded with outright suspicion. “I ask how come he looks in New York for a private eye, and how come he picks on me? Because, he says happily, I come highly recommended by Lieutenant Schell.”

A nasty grin split the Lieutenant’s face, like someone had taken a delicate swing with a straight razor. “I’ll be frank with you, Boyd,” he said, his voice almost amiable. “We aren’t making much progress with the case at all, and naturally Mr. Elmo wants his tiara back. I figured the best thing he could do would be hire himself a smart

private detective—a guy who can work in areas that are barred to the police officer. What he needed, I told him, was a boy with no scruples, morals, or finer feelings. A guy with only one motivation in his whole life—money— and a guy who would do about anything to get it. In short, he needed Danny Boyd!”

“You don’t need to crawl to me with all those heady compliments, Lieutenant,” I growled at him. “A schemer like you needs to have a better reason for voluntarily dragging me back into your life.”

Schell shrugged his broad shoulders easily. “Anybody would think you didn’t trust me or something, Boyd?” “I’d trust you the way I’d trust an ex-wife looking for back alimony with a knife in her hand,” I said truthfully. “There has to be a mickey wrapped up in this someplace.”

“You don’t trust me?” He shook his head sorrowfully. “I’m hurt, Boyd, real hurt.”

“Okay,” I said. “So it’s all sweetness and light. Just how far have you gotten with the case?”

“Not very far at all,” he said ruefully. “Somebody made the switch in Elmo’s office, that’s for sure. The two armed guards are clean—supplied by an agency who only rostered them for the job that same morning—so neither of them had prior knowledge that they would get the Elmo job. It could just as easily have been any of the six guys employed by the agency.”

I pulled the list of names Tamara O’Keefe had given me out of my wallet and studied it. “So that leaves the three contestants, Machin, the publicity manager—and the president of the plastics corporation, a Mr. Rutter and his wife?”

“Right.” Schell nodded. “You can take your pick— we’ve tried and haven’t gotten anyplace.”

“No clues at all?—no suspicion even?”

“Nothing,” he said comfortably. “Maybe you’ll do better. I hope you will, Boyd.”

“Thanks,” I said doubtfully. “All I can do right now is follow your trail around and go see each one of them, I guess.”

“Why don’t you do that?” He smiled encouragingly.

“Take my advice and start with the contestants first. Try Louise Lamont for a start—she’s your kind of girl, Boyd!” “What does that mean?”

“Sexy, flamboyant—and as tough as nails!”

“I just might do that,” I said. “You have any other pearls of wisdom before I depart, Lieutenant?”

“You might get a copy of the evening paper,” he said comfortably. “There should be a nice story about how Elmo’s hired a real hot-shot private eye to recover his tiara.”

“What?” I goggled at him. “You planted a story about me in the paper?”

“Just part of our tourist service,” he said, grinning. “We aim to please.”

“All right, already!” I croaked. “So this is where you give me the mickey straight”

“You know the insurance company has refused Elmo’s claim?” Schell asked in a bland voice.

“He told me,” I said carefully.

“It was too bad,” he went on cheerfully. “Most times the insurance boys are prepared to do an undercover deal with the thief—but I don’t have to tell you that, I guess? It would have been a help in a tough case like this—by staying real close to the insurance investigator, we might have grabbed the thief as he was about to close the deal, don’t you think?”

I closed my eyes and counted up to five but it was no use—Schell’s leering face was still there when I opened my eyes again.

“Now I get it,” I said sourly. “I’m the substitute for the insurance investigator—that’s why you’ve already given me some free publicity. If the thief wants to make a deal to sell the tiara back cheap, he’ll contact me.”

“Right!” The Lieutenant smiled in mock admiration. “You’re the smart one, Boyd, just like I told Elmo! Only remember, we’re going to be right in back of you every minute from now on, and if anyone contacts you and you somehow forget to inform us right away—”

“You don’t need to fill in the detail,” I said miserably. “—I’m going to take the book,” Schell said happily, “and throw it at you—page by goddamned page!”