HCC 115 - Borderline

by Lawrence Block

  “With the face retouched?”

  She laughed. “He won’t bother. Nobody’s going to look at the face, Ed.”

  “I would.”

  “Would you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And not the body?”

  “That too.”

  She looked at me for a long moment. There was something electric in the air. I could feel the sweet animal heat of her. She was right next to me. I could reach out and touch her, could take her in my arms and press her close. The bedroom wasn’t far away. And she would be good, very good.

  Two drinks later, I got up and walked to the door. She followed me. I stopped at the doorway, started to say something, changed my mind. We said goodnight and I started down the stairs.

  If she had been just any girl—actress, secretary, college girl or waitress—then it would have ended differently. It would have ended in her bedroom, in warmth and hunger and fury. But she was not just any girl. She was a halfway tramp, a little tarnished, a little soiled, a little battered around the edges. And so I could not make that pass at her, could not maneuver from couch to bed.

  I didn’t want to go back to my apartment. It would be lonely there. I drove to a Third Avenue bar where they pour good drinks.

  Somewhere between two and three I left the bar and looked around for the Chevy. By the time I found it I decided to leave it there and take a cab. I had had too little sleep the night before and too much to drink this night, and things were beginning to go a little out of focus. The way I felt, they looked better that way. But I didn’t much feel like bouncing the car off a telephone pole or gunning down some equally stoned pedestrian. I flagged a cab and left the driving to him.

  He had to tell me three times that we were in front of my building before it got through to me. I shook myself awake, paid him, and wended my way into the brownstone and up a flight of stairs.

  Then I blinked a few times.

  There was something on my doormat, something that hadn’t been there when I left.

  It was blonde, well-bred and glassy-eyed. It had an empty wine bottle in one hand and its mouth was smiling lustily. It got to its feet and swayed there, then pitched forward slightly. I caught it and it burrowed its head against my chest.

  “You keep late hours,” it said.

  It was very soft and very warm. It rubbed its hips against me and purred like a kitten. I growled like a randy old tomcat.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” it said. “I’ve been wanting to go to bed. Take me to bed, Ed London.”

  Its name, in case you haven’t guessed, was Lynn Farwell.

  We were a pair of iron filings and my bed was a magnet. I opened the door and we hurried inside. I closed the door and slid the bolt. We moved quickly through the living room and along a hall to the bedroom. Along the way we discarded clothing.

  She left her skirt on my couch, her sweater on one of my leather chairs. Her bra and slip and shoes landed in various spots on the hall floor. In the bedroom she got rid of her stockings and garter belt and panties. She was naked and beautiful and hungry…and there was no time to waste on words.

  Her body welcomed me. Her breasts, firm little cones of happiness, quivered against me. Her thighs enveloped me in the lust-heat of desire. Her face twisted in a blind agony of need.

  We were both pretty well stoned. This didn’t matter. We could never have done better sober. There was a beginning, bittersweet and almost painful. There was a middle, fast and furious, a scherzo movement in a symphony of fire. And there was an ending, gasping, spent, two bodies washed up on a lonely barren beach.

  At the end she used words that girls are not supposed to learn in the schools she had attended. She screamed them out in a frenzy of completion, a song of obscenity offered as a coda.

  And afterward, when the rhythm was gone and only the glow remained, she talked. “I needed that,” she told me. “Needed it badly. But you could tell that, couldn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re good, Ed.” She caressed me. “Very good.”

  “Sure. I win blue ribbons.”

  “Was I good?”

  I told her she was fine.

  “Mmmmm,” she said.

  7

  I rolled out of bed just as the noon whistles started going off all over town. Lynn was gone. I listened to bells from a nearby church ring twelve times; then I showered, shaved and swallowed aspirin. Lynn had left. Living proof of indiscretions makes bad company on the morning after.

  I caught a cab, and the driver and I prowled Third Avenue for my car. It was still there. I drove it back to the garage and tucked it away. Then I called Donahue, but hung up before the phone had a chance to ring. Not that I expected to reach him anyway, since calling him on the phone didn’t seem to produce much in the way of concrete results. But I didn’t feel like talking to him just then.

  A few hours ago I had been busy coupling with his bride-to-be. It seemed an unlikely prelude to a conversation.

  Darcy & Bates wasn’t really on Madison Avenue. It was around the corner on 48th Street, a suite of offices on the fourteenth floor of a twenty-two story building. I got out of the elevator and stood before a reception desk.

  “Phil Abeles,” I said.

  “May I ask your name?”

  “Go right ahead.” I smiled. She looked unhappy. “Ed London,” I finally said. She smiled gratefully and pressed one of twenty buttons and spoke softly into a tube.

  “If you’ll have a seat, Mr. London,” she said.

  I didn’t have a seat. I stood instead and loaded up a pipe. I finished lighting it as Abeles emerged from an office and came over to meet me. He motioned for me to follow him. We went into his air-cooled office and he closed the door.

  “What’s up, Ed?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “I want some help.” I drew on the pipe. “I’ll need a private office for an hour or two,” I told him. “And I want to see all of the men who were at Mark Donahue’s bachelor dinner. One at a time.”

  “All of us?” He grinned. “Even Lloyd and Kenneth?”

  “I suppose we can pass them for the time being. Just you and the other five then. Can you arrange it?”

  He nodded with a fair amount of enthusiasm. “You can use this office,” he said. “And everybody’s around today, so you won’t have any trouble on that score. Who do you want to see first?”

  “I might as well start with you, Phil.”

  I talked with him for ten minutes. But I had already pumped him dry the day before. Still, he gave me a little information on some of the others I would be seeing. Before, I had tried to ask him about his own relationship with Karen Price. Although that tack had been fairly effective, it didn’t look like the best way to come up with something concrete. Instead, I asked him about the other men. If I worked on all of them that way, I just might turn up an answer or two.

  Abeles more or less crossed Fred Klein off the suspect list, if nothing else. Klein, whose wife was in Reno, had tentatively made the coulda-dunnit sheet on the chance that Karen was threatening to give his wife information that could boost her alimony, or something of the sort. Abeles knocked the theory to pieces with the information that Klein’s wife had money of her own, that she wasn’t looking for alimony, and that a pair of expensive lawyers had already worked out all the details of the divorce agreement.

  I asked Phil Abeles which of the married men he knew definitely had contact at one time or another with Karen Price. This was the sort of information a man is supposed to keep to himself, but the mores of Madison Avenue tend to foster subtle back-stabbing. Abeles told me he knew for certain that Karen had been intimate with Harold Merriman, and he was almost sure about Joe Conn as well.

  After Abeles left, I knocked the dottel out of my pipe and filled it again. I lit it, and as I shook out the match, I looked up at Harold Merriman.

  A pudgy man with a bald spot and bushy eyebrows, forty or forty-five, somewhat older than the rest of the crew. He sat do
wn across the desk from me and narrowed his eyes. “Phil said you wanted to see me,” he said. “What’s the trouble?”

  “Just routine.” I smiled. “I need a little information. You knew Karen Price before the shooting, didn’t you?”

  “Well, I knew who she was.”

  Sure, I thought. But I let it pass and played him the way I had planned. I asked him who in the office had had anything to do with the dead girl. He hemmed and hawed a little, then told me that Phil Abeles had taken her out for dinner once or twice and that Jack Harris was supposed to have had her along on a business trip to Miami one weekend. Strictly in a secretarial capacity, no doubt.

  “And you?”

  “Oh, no,” Merriman said. “I’d met her, of course, but that was as far as it went.”

  “Really?”

  The hesitation was admission enough. “Listen,” he stammered, “all right, I…saw her a few times. It was nothing serious and it wasn’t very recent. London—”

  I waited.

  “Keep it a secret, will you?” He forced a grin. “Write it off as a symptom of the foolish forties. She was available and I was ready to play around a little. I’d just as soon it didn’t get out. Nobody around here knows, and I’d like to keep it that way.” He hesitated again. “My wife knows. I was so damn ashamed of myself that I told her. But I wouldn’t want the boys in the office to know.”

  I didn’t tell him that they already knew, and that they had passed the information on to me.

  Ray Powell came in grinning. He was a bachelor, and this made a difference. “Hello, London,” he said. “I made it with the girl, if that’s what you want to know.”

  “I heard rumors.”

  “I don’t keep secrets,” he said. He sprawled in the chair across from me and crossed one leg over the other. It was a relief to talk to someone other than a reticent, guilt-ridden adulterer.

  He certainly looked like a Don Juan. He was twenty-eight, tall, dark and handsome, with wavy black hair and piercing brown eyes. A little prettier and he might have passed for a gigolo. But there was a slight hardness about his features that prevented this.

  “You’re working for Mark,” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  He sighed. “Well, I’d like to see him wind up innocent, but from where I sit, it’s hard to see it that way. He’s a funny guy, London. He wants to have his cake and eat it, too. He wanted a marriage and he wanted a playmate. With the girl he was marrying, you wouldn’t think he’d worry about playing around. Ever meet Lynn?”

  “I’ve met her.”

  “Then you know what I mean.”

  I nodded. “Was she one of your conquests?”

  “Lynn?” He laughed easily. “Not that girl. She’s the pure type, London. The one-man woman. Mark found himself a sweet girl there. Why he bothered with Karen is beyond me.”

  I switched the subject to the married men in the office. With Powell, I didn’t try to find out which of them had been intimate with Karen Price, since it seemed fairly obvious they all had. Instead I tried to ascertain which of them could be in trouble as a result of an affair with the girl.

  I learned a few things. Jack Harris was immune to blackmail—his wife knew he cheated on her regularly and had schooled herself to ignore such indiscretions just as long as he returned to her after each rough passage through the turbulent waters of adultery.

  Harold Merriman was sufficiently well-off financially so that he could pay a blackmailer indefinitely rather than quiet her by murder; besides, Merriman had already told me that his wife knew, and I was more or less prepared to believe him.

  Both Abeles and Joe Conn were possibilities. Conn looked best of all. He wasn’t doing very well in advertising but he could hold his job indefinitely—he had married a girl whose family ran one of Darcy & Bates’ major accounts. Conn had no money of his own, and no talent to hold a job if his wife wised up and left him.

  Of course, there was always the question of how valid Ray Powell’s impressions were. Lynn? She’s the pure type. The one-man woman.

  That didn’t sound much like the drunken blonde who had turned up on my doormat the night before.

  Jack Harris revealed nothing new, merely reinforced what I had managed to pick up elsewhere along the line. I talked to him for fifteen minutes or so. He left, and Joe Conn came into the room.

  He wasn’t happy. “They said you wanted to see me,” he muttered. “We’ll have to make it short, London. I’ve got a pile of work this afternoon and my nerves are jumping all over the place as it is.”

  The part about the nerves was something he didn’t have to tell me. He didn’t sit still, just paced back and forth like a lion in a cage before chow time.

  I could play it slow and easy or fast and hard, looking to shock and jar. If he was the one who killed her, his nervousness now gave me an edge. I decided to press it.

  I got up, walked over to Conn. A short stocky man, crew cut, no tie. “When did you start sleeping with Karen?” I snapped.

  He spun around wide-eyed. “You’re crazy!”

  “Don’t play games,” I told him. “The whole office knows you were bedding her.”

  I watched him. His hands curled into fists at his sides. His eyes narrowed and his nostrils flared.

  “What is this, London?”

  “Your wife doesn’t know about Karen, does she?”

  “Damn you.” He moved toward me. “How much, you bastard? A private detective,” he snickered. “Sure you are. You’re a damn blackmailer, London. How much?”

  “Just how much did Karen ask for?” I said. “Enough to make you kill her?”

  He answered with a left hook that managed to find the point of my chin and send me crashing back against the wall. There was a split second of blackness. Then he was coming at me again, fists ready, and I spun aside, ducked and planted a fist of my own in his gut. He grunted and threw a right at me. I took it on the shoulder and tried his belly again. It was softer this time. He wheezed and folded up. I hit him in the face and just managed to pull the punch at the last minute. It didn’t knock him out—only spilled him on the seat of his tweed pants.

  “You’ve got a good punch, London.”

  “So do you,” I said. My jaw still ached.

  “You ever do any boxing?”

  “No.”

  “I did,” he said. “In the Navy. I still try to keep in shape. If I hadn’t been so angry I’d have taken you.”

  “Maybe.”

  “But I got mad,” he said. “Irish temper, I guess. Are you trying to shake me down?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t honestly think I killed Karen, do you?”

  “Did you?”

  “God, no.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You think I killed her,” he said hollowly. “You must be insane. I’m no killer, London.”

  “Of course. You’re a meek little man.”

  “You mean just now? I lost my temper.”

  “Sure.”

  “Oh, hell,” he said. “I never killed her. You got me mad. I don’t like shakedowns and I don’t like being called a murderer. That’s all, damn you.”

  I called Jerry Gunther from a pay phone in the lobby. “Two things,” I told the lieutenant. “First I think I’ve got a hotter prospect for you than Donahue. A man named Joe Conn, one of the boys at the stag. I tried shaking him up a little and he cracked wide open, tried to beat my brains in. He’s got a good motive, too.”

  “Ed, listen—”

  “That’s the first thing,” I said. “The other is that I’ve been trying to get in touch with my client for the past too-many hours and can’t reach him. Did you have him picked up again?”

  There was a long pause. All at once the air in the phone booth felt much too close. Something was wrong.

  “I saw Donahue half an hour ago,” Jerry said. “I’m afraid he killed that girl, Ed.”

  “He confessed?” I couldn’t believe it.

 
“He confessed…in a way.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  A short sigh. “It happened yesterday,” Jerry said. “I can’t give you the time until we get the medical examiner’s report, but the guess is that it was just after we let him go. He sat down at his typewriter and dashed off a three-line confession. Then he stuck a gun in his mouth and made a mess. The lab boys are still there trying to scrape his brains off the ceiling. Ed?”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t say anything…I didn’t know if you were still on the line. Look, everybody guesses wrong some of the time.”

  “This was more than a guess. I was sure.”

  “Well, listen, I’m on my way to Donahue’s place again. If you want to take a run over there you can have a look for yourself. I don’t know what good it’s going to do—”

  “I’ll meet you there,” I said.

  8

  The lab crew left shortly after we arrived. “Just a formality for the inquest,” Jerry Gunther said. “That’s all.”

  “You’re sure it’s a suicide, then?”

  “Stop dreaming, Ed. What else?”

  What else? All that was left in the world of Mark Donahue was sprawled in a chair at a desk. There was a typewriter in front of him and a gun on the floor beside him. The gun was just where it would have dropped after a suicide shot of that nature. There were no little inconsistencies.

  The suicide note in the typewriter was slightly incoherent. It read: It has to end now. I can’t help what I did but there is no way out anymore. God forgive me and God help me. I am sorry.

  “You can go if you want, Ed. I’ll stick around until they send a truck for the body. But—”

  “Run over the timetable, will you?”

  “From when to when?”

  “From when you released him to when he died.”

  Jerry shrugged. “Why? You can’t read it any way but suicide, can you?”

  “I don’t know. Give me a rundown.”

  “Let’s see,” he said. “You called around five, right?”

  “Around then. Five or five-thirty.”