The Hardboiled Mystery Megapack

by John Roeburt

  By the time I got the pitcher down from the glass shelf over the sink in one corner of the room and began plinking ice cubes in it, Jo-Anne had removed the raincoat. The way she was dressed told me she thought it was an occasion, my coming out of jail, and on St. Valentine’s Day at that. Except that Jo-Anne was not my valentine and knew it.

  “Like?” she said, and spun for me to see.

  It was a copper-colored dress looking like a coat of copper paint sprayed on the pale shoulders and ridged over the jutting breasts and tucked against the flat waist and flared on the round hips and sheathed across the long firm thighs. “Like,” I said, uncapping the gin bottle and sloshing half the contents into the pitcher of ice.

  Jo-Anne came over and trickled some vermouth after it and, minus the olives, we were in business. I poured the cocktail glasses full.

  “To how you feel about the first gal you saw since getting out,” said Jo-Anne, raising her glass. “I hope it’s me.”

  “The first I saw real good.”

  “What a chance for Jo-Anne Stedman,” Jo-Anne said. “You wouldn’t kid a girl.”

  “I didn’t invite anyone else, Jo. You.”

  “Jase, listen. I wanted to visit you up there. Three times I started out but changed my mind. I didn’t want to see you like that, in a striped suit or whatever they wear. I didn’t want you to see me through a grill fence so we could only touch fingertips.” She tilted her glass and I watched the smooth throat work as the martini went down. I poured again for both of us and spilled the rest of the gin into the pitcher.

  “Let’s just forget about it,” I said.

  “All of it?”

  “What the hell, Jo. I can try. You know why I invited you here?”

  “Don’t say it.”

  “I—”

  “Please, Jase. Saying it only makes things lousy.”

  “No. I mean it’s different now. I only want to talk.”

  “I’ll bet.” Jo-Anne winked at me. The martini had begun to work on the whites of her eyes. Outside, you could hear the steady cold rain hissing on the roof. I walked to the window and rolled the yellowing shade up far enough to rub a circle of windowpane clear of mist and watch the rain swamping the street lamps four floors below and the red tail-lights of cars crawling north on Eighth Avenue.

  “What are you thinking, Jase?” Jo-Anne’s hands, tangible but almost weightless, were on my neck, the fingertips marching back and forth. She smelled of perfumed soap and martinis. “Are you thinking of Julia?”

  I turned away from the window and bumped against her. “To hell with Julia. To hell with all of them. Julia and her old man and my brother.” I explored in my pocket and found Ken’s check, unfolding it under Jo-Anne’s nose. “To hell with this, too.”

  Maybe I would really have ripped it, but Jo-Anne’s fingers wrapped around my wrists and she said, “My God, Jase. A hundred thousand. Is it good?”

  “Good and dirty,” I said.

  “Is it because he married your girl?”

  “Nope. Because I took his two-year vacation for him. Julia wasn’t in the bargain.”

  “You said to hell with them.” Jo-Anne poured this time and we toasted. “To hell with them.” We drank. Then she reached for me. “Put the check away, Jason Chase.”

  Those first kisses with the crinkling raincoat between us and Jo-Anne’s hair all wet were just to say hello, but now she tilted her head and I could feel her lips parting under mine and her heart pounding against my chest and the long smooth roundness of her trembling a little as she got her hands behind my back and squeezed. I barely managed to pocket the check. Every time I wanted to pull away and tell her it was going to be different now, altogether different, she yanked my head back down over hers. Her lips tasted like martinis and honey and she had always been second fiddle to Julia and now seemed willing to be second fiddle to a torch, and I knew the hundred thousand dollars had nothing to do with it.

  “That’s all right,” Jo-Anne finally said. “That’s delicious. We’ll have to send you to jail more often.”

  “They sent me, all right. They played me for every kind of sucker in the book.”

  “Just let me stick around. You’ll get over it. Please, Jase. Don’t send me away.”

  “Hey. You’re crying.”

  Tears were in her eyes and on her cheeks. We sat together, on the edge of the bed. I looked down at the floor, at the faded floral pattern, then at her brown suede pumps, her nyloned legs, her copper-paint dress. The rain was still hissing outside, far away like steam. Her hands found nothing to grab on my brush-cut hair, but she clasped them behind my head, leaning forward from the waist. She was warm and had that perfumed-soap smell where her breasts swelled apart.

  “I can be good for you, Jase,” she said. “Really I can.”

  “I won’t send you away,” I told her.

  * * * *

  It was cold in the room when I awoke. Jo-Anne had turned on the bed lamp and I saw her clothing folded neatly across the back of a chair. I couldn’t tell if it was still raining because the shower was going in the bathroom.

  I sat up when the bathroom door opened and Jo-Anne emerged in a pale billowing cloud of steam.

  “Hi,” she said, and smiled. “It’s almost three o’clock.” She was all white curves and shadows in the dim light, with the same long legs I remembered years ago. “I don’t mind,” she said. “You can keep on looking if you want. It’s almost like we’re married if you look. If you stop, you’ll embarrass me.”

  I said nothing and watched her dress, thinking all the time I shouldn’t have taken her like this, not tonight, not loving her here in this room while thinking of Ken and Ken’s wife, Julia, probably in bed together a few blocks to the east on Park Avenue where a man can live well if his brother spends two years in jail for him. But it had always been like that between Jo-Anne and me, not waxing, not waning, but a steady flame which was too bright in some ways and not enough in others. And maybe it would have been better, I thought, if I’d found a woman who wanted money and no questions and no answers and would have been gone out there somewhere in the rain when I woke up.

  “You don’t owe me a thing,” Jo-Anne said. “Nothing at all, Jase. I wanted to just as much as you did, don’t forget that. I never stopped loving you. Will you see me again?”

  “What kind of a heel do you think I am?”

  “That’s what I mean. Owing me something. You can be a heel, if you want.”

  “I want to keep on seeing you, Jo. Whenever I can. Whenever you’re not too busy with that social work of yours.”

  “Social work? Me? Brother, you’ve been away a long time! We’re all climbing on the Kinsey bandwagon, didn’t you know?” She laughed. “Remember Dr. Kincaid up at school?”

  “Tall skinny guy? The one who used to say—I quote—we’re all going to hell via the highway of moral and ethical debauchery?”

  “You’ve got him. Well, he’s working on a book called Twentieth Century Morality, and I’m on the staff. Brother, we out-Kinsey Kinsey!”

  “Meaning what?”

  “If you’re really interested, I can show you. Come on.”

  I grinned at her. “It’s almost three o’clock in the morning.”

  Jo-Anne slipped the copper dress over her head, smoothing it into place with long, graceful motions of her hands. “Zip me,” she said and turned around while I went to work on the back of the dress. “Of course, you’ll have to keep it secret. Promise?”

  “Sounds like one of those gags of yours,” I said unhappily. That had been her big weakness all through school. Jo-Anne was a compulsive practical joker.

  “Correct. I’m the perennial hotfoot gal, remember? Old funny-girl Stedman—and Dr. Kincaid’s so sober and grim about his findings, anyway, I just had to do it.”

  I climbed into my clothing quickly. “You just had to do what?”

  “Borrow Doc Kincaid’s research papers and pretend they were stolen. They’re over at my place right now. Phyll
is is probably sleeping on them, if I know Phyllis.”

  “She’s a joker too?”

  “Phyllis Kirk happens to be my roommate. Nice gal if you like them small and plump, with dimples.”

  “I like them like you,” I said, and stood up to kiss Jo-Anne lightly on the lips. “Now, what did you borrow?”

  “Dr. Kincaid’s questionnaires. They’re in code, of course, but according to Doc, half of New York City could be blackmailed with the information they contain. Could be, too. What kind of kiss was that?”

  We both enjoyed it better on the second try. “Sleepy?”

  “No. But don’t get any ideas. We’ll take the subway over and wake up Phyllis and I’ll show you what I’m doing instead of social work. You like?”

  “Like. But what about Kincaid?”

  “He’s kind of worried,” she admitted.

  “How long have the papers been—uh—missing?” It was almost like old times. Years before, in college, Jo-Anne had always confided her pranks to me. Someone had to tell her when to call it quits, and in those days I had usually taken the job upon myself.

  “Just three days, Jase. He’s absent-minded and still thinks they’ve just been misplaced and are going to turn up. Actually, it could be good publicity—if he calls the police, I mean. What do you think?”

  “I think you ought to return the papers.”

  “Killjoy!”

  “No, really. If it’s like that Kinsey stuff, it could be dynamite.”

  “It’s a little different—but dynamite, all right. Do you cheat on your income tax, Mr. Jones? When your wife spent a week at the orphanage with the Junior League, you didn’t watch television, did you? Or, Mrs. Jones, when your husband went to that convention in Chicago, did you play canasta every night? Two hundred questions, Jase. Five hundred questionnaires. No wonder Doc is worried.”

  “You’re some scientist,” I said. “You better return them.”

  “Well, maybe. But let me show you anyhow. Unless you want to go back to bed.”

  “Alone?”

  “Definitely alone. I’m a working gal.” Jo-Anne squirmed out of my arms and headed for the door, blushing and smiling.

  “Let’s go take a look at those top-secret papers,” I said. We linked arms and took the elevator to the ground floor and outstared the desk clerk who was burying his nose in the register when we left, to make sure I had registered single so he could snicker away the wee hours of the morning.

  * * * *

  We left the dusty subway smells at 116th Street, trading them for the damp cold of early February and the rain, softer now, dancing like confetti in the glare of the street lamps. Jo-Anne lived in an ancient apartment house midway between Columbia University and the Hudson River.

  As we walked from the subway station, she chattered about the difference between the published Kinsey and the soon-to-be-published Kincaid. Kinsey attempted a nationwide survey but stopped with sex. Kincaid’s study confined itself to New York City but otherwise was far more inclusive: it dug into sex, business ethics, social life, gambling, relations with the government and religion. Kinsey, never dreaming of best-seller fame at the beginning, had written long, essentially dull tomes. Kincaid had come down from his ivory tower and admitted with unpedantic cheer he was as guilty as any statistic in his book, but needed the money and wouldn’t hide from the fame and sure, his Twentieth Century Morality would be sensational. “Just the same, he’s being very conscientious and scientific about the whole thing,” Jo-Anne assured me, as we rode up in the creaking, self-service elevator.

  Maybe the building was old, but the walls of the ninth floor were nicely decorated with framed water-colors and the floor was of cork tile. Indirect lighting suffused everything with a pinkish glow. Because of the hour, I found myself walking on tiptoe. “I hope this Phyllis doesn’t mind my barging in like this,” I said.

  “Stop slinking like that,” Jo-Anne said. “You could stamp your feet and it wouldn’t be heard on this cork. And Phyllis will love you. She thinks it’s time she got married.”

  “At three A.M.?”

  “At any old time of any old day. Here we are.”

  Jo-Anne explored the pocket of her raincoat and emerged with a key which fit the lock of apartment 9-EL “Funny,” she said. “The door isn’t locked.”

  “So?”

  “Phyllis always locks the door.”

  “Always?”

  “I mean, when she’s alone here. She’s kind of a scaredy-cat that way.”

  “Maybe she’s got company,” I said.

  “Well, come on, we’ll see.” She pushed open the door. I followed her into the dark apartment.

  I closed my eyes, then opened them, but still could see nothing in the darkness. “I’ll give us some light,” Jo-Anne said.

  Something rustled in the darkness in front of us. It might have been someone brushing his hand against the wall so he could feel his way toward the door.

  Suddenly I had a feeling—not the kind of feeling you sometimes hear about, a premonition of things about to happen. A feeling, rather, that things had just happened, maybe only a moment or so before our arrival.

  “Phyllis?” Jo-Anne called softly. “Phyl?”

  I heard the click of a light switch. “Darn,” Jo-Anne said. “The bulb must have blown. Phyllis, is that you?” No answer. “Didn’t you hear something, Jase?”

  “Yeah, I heard something.”

  My pupils had dilated and now I could vaguely make out Jo-Anne’s form alongside me. Ahead was blackness.

  “I’ll put the light on in the living room,” she said.

  “No. Don’t.” Suddenly I was wary. The unlocked door, the light that wouldn’t work, whoever it was inside the apartment that wouldn’t answer when Jo-Anne called… I reached back of me, meaning to open the hall door and let the pink light enter the apartment.

  “Phyl?” Jo-Anne whispered, her voiced edged thinly with fear. “Answer me, Phyl.” Her hand found mine in the darkness and squeezed it. I turned and yanked at the door but whirled back to face the darkness of the apartment when footsteps thudded directly at me.

  It took about a second to associate the dull thunking sound and the shattering with the pain which blossomed inside my head, reached the surface and exploded there. It took the same second for me to fold at the middle and the knees and sink to the floor. Jo-Anne was beginning to scream but I lost the sound somehow in a dull, distant roaring. Legs pounded over me. The door swung wide, then slammed. It was so dark it made no difference whether I shut my eyes or kept them open.

  I shut them.

  Chapter Two

  There was this whimpering which, I guessed, wouldn’t stop until I could somehow manage to force my eyelids up and stare at something besides their unseen insides. There were sobs which went with the whimpering and said it was worse than just Jason Chase getting hit on the head, much worse. There were the sounds of a faucet running somewhere, the feel of something cold and wet against my forehead.

  I opened my eyes. The light came down the length of a long foyer and there wasn’t much of it, but too much under the circumstances. I blinked away the pain and tried again. This time I saw Jo-Anne squatting on her heels next to me, patting my forehead with a red-and-white washrag. The red was blood.

  My hands found shards of crockery on the floor as I forced myself into a sitting position. It might have been a vase once but it had succumbed to my tough head, “Don’t tell me that was Phyllis,” I said.

  It was a mistake. Jo-Anne dropped the washrag and instead of just whimpering, hysterically sobbed. Finally, she pointed one hand toward where the light was coming from. So I got up, patted her shoulder in a meaningless understanding gesture when I didn’t understand at all, and staggered inside. Then I understood.

  The light was emerging from a floor lamp in the living room. I saw an orange chair and a green one, a table-model TV set, a brown sectional sofa, an L-shaped coffee table and a cabinet which probably contained liquor.

>   I also saw the body of a young woman, almost certainly Phyllis Kirk, lying on the floor this side of the coffee table, where it had fallen after something much harder than the broken vase had crushed the back of her head, spilling blood on the gray twist carpet.

  I walked into the kitchen and lit a match. The door of the fuse box set into the wall stood open. Probing with my fingers by the flickering match light, I found that two of the three fuses had been loosened in their sockets.

  I screwed them down tight, then half-filled a tall glass with cold water from the tap Jo-Anne had left running, then found some rye in the living-room cabinet and filled the glass the rest of the way. I brought the drink to Jo-Anne in the foyer.

  She was still sobbing into her hands and for the first time I saw the angry red welt alongside her ear where whoever had struck me with the vase had probably used his fist. “Drink this,” I said. I got my hand under her chin and tilted her head up. She looked at me and through me and through the wall behind me, but when I said “drink this” again she obediently took the glass in both hands like a little girl, leaning back with it and not pausing until it had been emptied. It went down like water and had about the same effect as water, not even changing the lack of expression in her eyes or the way she was crying again after the glass was empty.

  Finally she said, “I killed her. The Kincaid papers are gone. It’s just like I hit her and killed her.”

  “How do you know they’re gone?”

  “She—she had one page in her hand. The last page—crushed—like she was trying to hold on to them. I thought it was all so funny, Jase. I killed her. Phyllis.” She handed me a crumpled sheet of paper.

  “I’d better call the police,” I said.

  “Call anyone you want. I don’t care.” The crying would stop and the talking would start, then the talking would stop and the crying would commence again. Now she talked. “You can get out of here, Jase,” Jo-Anne said. “You’re an ex-convict. You’ll be under suspicion as soon as they see your record. Just go away and don’t come back. I’ll be all right. I’ll be fine.” And the crying.