“It’s quite a story,” Dana explained. “She disappeared in November, except that nobody knew she had disappeared.”
“Not very logical.”
“With her it is. That twenty million is hers. Various forbears dug it out of the Pennsylvania earth. They dug it, cashed it in, and died. I understand that Candy has been sampling life pretty liberally since she was seventeen.” Then Dana laughed and added, “Believe it or not, her name is Clara.”
“Doesn’t fit. Nothing like that could be named Clara.”
“That’s why the columnists changed it. They discovered a childhood nickname and tied it on her. More glamour to it. And easier to remember.”
“She’d be hard to forget,” I said. “In fact, she looks like a young lady who doesn’t want to be forgotten. Who kidnaped her?”
“Nobody knows. She swears even she doesn’t. Anyway, when she vanished, nobody knew it was a kidnaping. She was always pulling stunts like that. She’d go away and neglect to let her friends know. Nobody suspected she’d been kidnaped until she telephoned her lawyers to get together a half million dollars in cash. She insisted that the police and the F. B. I. were to be left out of it. The lawyers paid the money to a man who met them in Central Park near Fifth Avenue. The next day Candy came home. That was a week ago last Friday, the twenty-sixth. It was the day after the worst blizzard New York had in twenty years. The Saturday papers carried the story.”
Dana’s attitude amused me. “What fascinates you so?” I asked. “The twenty million, the kidnaping, or the lady herself?”
“All three. But mostly, the girl. I met her once at some club. She wouldn’t remember. But I was amazed. She’s nice. A little crude, perhaps. A little boisterous . . . but regular.”
I said, “You intrigue me. If I weren’t a rich man myself, I’d make a play.”
Ricardo loomed over us. He was too interested to be unpleasant. He asked, “Isn’t that Candy Livingston?”
Dana said, “Yes.”
He stated that he’d be damned, which was just what I had heard a waiter say. Obviously, Miss Livingston was creating all the excitement she could have desired.
The emcee was announcing Ricardo & Dana. Ricardo went to the other side of the bandstand. Dana stood up and waited. Then they were on the floor, and once again I was in this world and Dana in another. Once again I punished myself by watching her dance. For these few minutes she was always lost to me.
But even the artistry of Ricardo & Dana couldn’t hold the attention of the crowd tonight. It was Candy Livingston. There was only polite applause at the end of the act, not enough to justify an encore. Dana came back to my table. Ricardo was with her. The head waiter joined us, looking excited.
“Mr. Ricardo?” he said. “Miss Dana?”
Ricardo asked him what he wanted.
“It is both of you. Miss Livingston asked whether you will join her table for a drink.”
Ricardo didn’t hesitate. But Dana delighted me by looking disappointed. She said, “Must I?”
The head waiter nodded. “I am sure the management would appreciate it, Miss Dana.”
She glanced at me and made a gesture of unhappiness. She said, “What one must sacrifice for one’s art.”
“Go ahead,” I said. “Later you can tell me how it feels to rub elbows with twenty million dollars. Meanwhile, I’ll sit here and sulk.”
I watched them cross the floor with the head waiter. Ricardo was excited. He would be. I got a screwball hunch. I thought, “Suppose this Livingston female could fall for Ricardo. He’d love twenty million dollars better than his dance act. Then he’d divorce Dana and I could marry her and we’d name our first girl baby Candy.” It was a nice idea, though I couldn’t feel positive sure certain that it would work out that way.
The three men at Candy’s table stood up. They were nice young fellows who didn’t mean a thing. Most likely when the columnists reported on the morrow that Candy Livingston was again on display, they’d forget to mention the names of the three young men . . . and hearts would be broken. The thought made me very sad.
The head waiter was performing the introductions. Candy held out her hand to Dana. She smiled. She had a nice smile. She looked like a girl you might enjoy meeting even if she were only half as rich. Another table was shoved up against theirs and additional chairs were brought. The manager fluttered about the doorway, looking pleased. Then he disappeared, and my guess was that he was telephoning the newspapers. Hot stuff! “The gorgeous Candy Livingston, ex-kidnapee, had herself a time in the Club Caliente last night.”
I ordered myself a daiquiri and lighted a cigarette. I took out a pencil and doodled on the tablecloth. It wasn’t beautiful and it wasn’t art. I didn’t know anyone had stopped at my table until a voice came down over my shoulder.
It was a full, husky voice, definitely on the pleasant side, and it said, “Lonely, Big Boy?”
I looked up into the deep blue eyes of Candy Livingston. I clambered to my feet. She said, “I’m Candy Livingston.”
“I’m Kirk Douglas.”
She smiled. “You were included in the invitation. Come along.”
I shook my head. “Thanks just the same, Miss Livingston, but . . .”
“No use.” Her eyes crinkled at the corners. They were nice eyes. “We need another extra man at my table.”
I asked, “Who wished this on you?”
“Miss Warren. She said I fascinated you.”
“She was right.” So Dana was having fun at my expense, was she? I could handle that. “I think you’re terrific,” I said. “But I have my pride. I need to be coaxed.”
“Pretty please.”
I said, “You’ve got yourself another man, Miss Livingston.”
CHAPTER VIII
CANDY LED me to her table and introduced me around. Her three young men popped up out of their seats and announced that they were delighted to meet me. Candy motioned me to a chair next to her. She lifted an eyebrow which was all she had to do to summon a waiter, they were that close.
“Drink?” she asked.
“No, thanks. One more and I’d fall on my face. I haven’t eaten.”
She ordered three menus and gave one to Dana, Ricardo and me. I protested feebly, but she insisted. She said we’d be there a long time and she didn’t like to watch people starving to death.
Dana glanced at me as much as to say, “We’re stuck with it,” and ordered a club sandwich. That sounded like an excellent compromise, so I said I’d take the same. Ricardo followed suit. We all ordered coffee.
Chatter hung over the table like a fog while things happened in the kitchen. When the three club sandwiches appeared, they weren’t sandwiches at all, but productions. Each one looked like a six-course dinner with trimmings. Candy Livingston Specials. The sort of sandwiches you can buy for twenty million dollars.
I was getting a big kick out of this. It was the first time I’d ever been stared at by the mob. Of course I knew that they weren’t staring at me but at Candy . . . but I was sitting next to her, and they couldn’t miss me, either. I was too honest with myself to pretend that it wasn’t fun.
Candy kept a light conversation going while we massacred our sandwiches and drank our coffee. She talked mostly with Dana, and at the same time Ricardo was turning the full force of his Brooklyn-Latin personality on her. I had a hunch that he was thinking precisely what I most wanted him to think; namely, that a ravishing blonde and twenty million dollars were worth a lot of effort.
Candy was cordial enough, but she didn’t appear to be impressed. That surprised me because Ricardo was the sort of man that Candy’s sort of woman would naturally go for. He was big and handsome and not so refined that it hurt. When the waiter had removed the remains of our scanty meal, Candy asked me to dance with her. I said, “Give yourself a thrill, Miss Livingston. Ricardo is the lad who can dance.”
She smiled and said, “I’ll take him on later.” She got up and held out her hand. There wasn’t anything for me t
o do but follow.
We moved out onto the crowded dance floor. We had plenty of room. I tried to be nonchalant, but it wasn’t easy. I felt like something in a zoo.
We got halfway around the floor. I danced just well enough to know that she was really good. She was using some sort of exotic perfume. It was unusual and exciting. I said, “You love being in the spotlight, don’t you?”
She bestowed a lingering look on me. It was supposed to burn, and maybe it did—a little. Then she smiled, and I decided for the second time that it was a nice smile.
As a matter of fact, I was reaching the conclusion that Candy was a nice girl. She was too important and too wealthy to be affected. She was what she was, and you could take or leave her alone.
She was slightly less than impersonal in her dancing. The body that was pressed close against mine was a very nice body, and there was lots of it. I got the idea that I was getting the business. I was supposed to roll over and wave my paws in the air.
People were still staring. I could imagine the conjecture, “Who’s the big guy with the pushed-in face dancing with Candy Livingston?” That would be me. And the flattened nose wasn’t my fault. That was a souvenir from an intercollegiate boxing tournament. The night I forgot to duck. This was another night I wasn’t ducking, either.
One of the young men from Candy’s retinue was moving around the dance floor with Dana. He swung her close to us and my eye met hers. She looked very much amused, and gave me a broad wink. I tightened my arms around Candy’s body, but I was thinking of Dana. Life is like that—sometimes.
Candy looked up at me. She said, “Am I dancing close enough?”
I relaxed my pressure, but she didn’t take advantage of the opportunity. I said, “Sorry!” and she said, “Be yourself, Mister. I like it.”
I tried to cook up a scintillating retort, but I was fresh out of bright comments. I was also very warm. Miss Livingston’s dancing was definitely on the torrid side. It didn’t mean a thing, but it would have burnt a hole in an iceberg.
She said abruptly, “What’s the verdict?”
“Verdict?” I didn’t know what she meant, and probably sounded like a dope.
“Am I what you expected?”
“You’re a very nice person.”
“How cute! How refined! But not enough.”
I said, “I think I’m being taken for a ride. Why trouble yourself?”
She said, “I like you. I’m throwing myself at you. I’d like this to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
I laughed and asked, “Why?”
“You want diagrams?” I’ll never believe you’re that stupid.”
“You’d be surprised,” I said. “Even my mother never thought I was right bright.”
Dana danced near us again. I fancied I detected a faint symptom of displeasure. My ego jumped ten points. For the first time in all the weeks I’d been coming to the Club Caliente, I felt like something more than The-Little-Man-Who-Sits-in-the-Corner.
Candy said a few nice things. At least, I thought they were nice. She said them in a low, husky, intimate voice. The lady was working on me. I started asking myself why.
It wasn’t my manly beauty, because I haven’t any. It wasn’t my sparkling conversation, because I don’t sparkle. I had the odd feeling that this whole thing had been planned by the Junoesque young lady who was breathing down my neck. It was a nice breath and it tickled, but I wasn’t so dumb that I didn’t think it was meant to.
I told myself sternly that an hour of night-club notoriety had gone to my head. “Be yourself, Brother Douglas,” I thought. “You’re just a poor, lonely mug that she’s sorry for.”
Cold logic told me I was wrong. It occurred to me that very recently Miss Livingston had been thrown back into the Cafe Society jungles after paying a half million dollars’ ransom money. I was thinking that someone had deposited one hundred thousand dollars to my credit without so much as a by-your-leave. I was thinking that this was the only person I’d ever met who had a hundred thousand in spare cash kicking around.
The thought was fantastic. I tried shoving it out of my mind, but it wouldn’t shove. It looked like a third*link in the chain of things that had started happening to me after twenty-eight uneventful years.
Why, for instance, should Candy Livingston present me with one hundred thousand dollars? But then why should she make so obvious a play for me? Why had she asked me to dance instead of grabbing the prize package, which was Ricardo. Why . . . well, why anything? Why, for instance, should a strange young lady named Ethel Brower have strolled into my apartment and got strangled?
Candy said, “Why did you shake your head just then?”
I said, “Did I?”
“Yes. You were thinking of something else. What was it?”
“What do men usually think when you dance with them?”
“You weren’t thinking that.”
“I don’t know what I was thinking really. So it couldn’t have been important.”
“Maybe,” she suggested, “you were wondering why I’ve been working on you.”
“Maybe.”
“Try the simple answer. Perhaps I think you’re cute.”
“More likely,” I said, “you enjoy proving that you’re irresistible.”
I stopped dancing, wrapped my fingers around her arm and guided her toward our table. She said, “Hard to get, eh? We’ll see.” She smiled when she said it, but I knew she wasn’t kidding.
Before she could sit down, Ricardo swung into action. Would Miss Livingston honor him? Miss Livingston would. I held out my hand to Dana, who had completed her chore with the nice young man at her left. “It’s got to happen one time,” I said. “This may as well be it.”
We shoved into the crowd. And this time we shoved. People weren’t standing back any more to look at me. They were staring at Candy and Ricardo. Dana and I had to fight for every inch. She said, “What goes on here?”
“Meaning . . . ?”
“You and Candy.”
“Oh, that! You should understand. I’m a big ol’ he-man. Take one look at me and get ants in your dance.”
“I don’t,” stated Dana flatly, “but Miss Livingston does.”
“And did I eat it up! You have no idea how important I felt.”
Dana said thoughtfully, “Let’s be serious. I got the idea that it was you she wanted all the time. She saw you with Ricardo and me, and that made the approach simple. We’re always being invited to join people. That’s why I so often use the exit through the other building. Anyway, she’s been concentrating on you ever since we joined her. Or am I wrong?”
“Shall I be modest or honest?”
“Try honesty. It won’t hurt much.”
“Okay. Admitting that I’m a combination of Adonis, Hercules, and Frank Sinatra, it still came too fast. And she gave me a definite idea that she intended to see me again.”
A troubled frown appeared on Dana’s forehead. “I was thinking it might be that way. The play tonight has been too obvious. It looked planned. At first I thought I was letting jealousy work on me, but then I knew that wasn’t it. I thought of the bank deposit . . . then I realized that was absurd. She didn’t know you then.”
“And I don’t know Ethel Brower even yet.”
Dana said, “There’s something going on I neither understand nor like.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. We’re both letting hunches push us around. Just because two inexplicable things have happened to me, we’ve got no right to tie other things in with them.”
“But you still feel it, don’t you?”
I said, “Look, sweetheart—of course I do. But common sense tells me I’m wrong.”
“I don’t believe you are. I have a feeling that these things are all wrapped up in the same package.”
I saw she was worried and tried to rally her. She said, “I can’t laugh about it, Kirk. And believe me, it isn’t jealousy. Not that I couldn’t be jealous of someone who can offer what she
can. But this is a different feeling. I’m afraid.”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know.”
I said, “What should I do . . . presuming Candy continues to play interested?”
“What could you do?”
“I could tell her—in a nice, polite way, of course—to go peddle her apples somewhere else. Or I could string along and try to find out what’s behind it. You tell me.”
The orchestra finished the set, and started to make way for the rhumba band. Dana and I went back to the table. Miss Livingston said things to the head waiter and a few minutes later two bottles of champagne appeared along with seven hollow-stemmed glasses. I’d have preferred a slice of rare roast beef and a baked potato, but if they forced champagne on me I figured I’d better grin and bear it.
The evening moved along. Candy brushed off Ricardo’s overtures and ignored her trio of escorts. That left Dana with her hands full, and Ricardo more than a trifle bewildered.
Candy concentrated on me. She asked a million questions. She found out everything about me except that I was in love with Dana. That was something I couldn’t very well volunteer, seeing that Dana’s husband was sitting right there at the table. Candy undoubtedly thought that I was in the public domain. She didn’t seem to care who knew that she had found herself a new playtoy.
I tried to live up to her. I didn’t cover myself with glory. My conversation was as bright and gay as the tread of an elephant. I can play cute for just so long, then my line runs out.
At midnight Ricardo and Dana excused themselves and went to dress for the supper show. After-theater guests were commencing to pour in. The head waiters assumed new dignity. Candy got me out on the floor again and put a Q.E.D. on the theorem that two can dance closer than one.
She kept up a continuous chatter during the time the show was on, except when Ricardo & Dana were performing. By the time they rejoined us, I knew several things.
I knew that Candy Livingston wanted me to believe that I was the really big moment in her life.
I knew that she intended to see me again—soon and alone.
Love Has No Alibi Page 6