Don't Call Me Madame

by Kane, Henry

  Wrong move. Wrong word. Immediately she was solicitous.

  “What? What is it? What’s the matter, kid?”

  He played it down. “Heartburn. Got a bad heart burn.”

  She laughed. Thickly. “You drink too much.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Pete.”

  “What?”

  “Wanna know something?”

  “What?”

  “I … uh … I forgot why I called you.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Maybe you’ll remember tomorrow.”

  “Oh!”

  “What?”

  “Look, remember you told me to call you if a John of mine happens to ask for a special-type chick?”

  At the moment he didn’t remember. “I did?” he said.

  “Guy called tonight. An Englishman. Recommendation from a great old pal of mine. Johnny Edison. You ever been to the Palisades Club in London?”

  “No.” Christ, how do I get rid of her?

  “Guy wanted a special-type chick. Very specific, this prick. A blonde, he wants. But the blonde has to have long legs. And a big ass. And small knockers. That’s what you wanted me to call you about, didn’t you?”

  He stood rigid as though goddamn petrified.

  Sweat burst from his pores. Vermin of nerves itched at his scalp.

  “Yes,” he said, trying to control his voice.

  “Okay, so I called you. G’bye, sweetie.”

  “Hold it,” he said. “Hold — it!”

  “I’m holding, baby.”

  “What about it? Tell me! Jesus!”

  “Yeah. Natch. I’m sorry. Drunkie. I’m like drunkie, baby.”

  “Tell me, please.”

  “Stephen Stevens at the Waldorf. Suite seventeen-fourteen. I sent him a date for eleven o’clock, and sent him exactly what he wanted, perfect. Sandi Barton. Perfect? You know how Sandi looks naked.”

  He didn’t admit that he didn’t.

  “Right. Thanks. Gotta run.” Hung up.

  Grabbed his jacket and ran.

  The chief security officer at the Waldorf was Moe Kahane, once with the FBI in Washington, then a private eye in New York City (to whom Peter Chambers had thrown a hell of a lot of business), and now chief security officer at the Waldorf. Chambers talked to him rapidly in an isolated corner of the downstairs lobby. “A big one, Moe, the biggest of your career. The ripper that’s been knocking up this town — we got him. He’s upstairs in seventeen-fourteen. Get the pass key, and let’s go.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know! No time now for details.”

  “Just hold your water, kid.”

  Kahane went away. Chambers paced. Kahane came back.

  “Are you flipped out, kid.”

  “Moe, stop fucking around. He’s up there.”

  “The guy that’s up there is an Englishman. Discreet inquiry at the desk. An eighty-dollar-a-day guy. From England.”

  “That’s right. From England.” (Tony Starr was from England.) “Come on, Moe. Move that square ass of yours.”

  “Kid, don’t lower the boom on me. If you’re wrong, it can cost me my job. An eighty-dollar-a-day guy — if you’re wrong, it’s my job.

  “Even if I’m wrong — I’m not wrong.”

  “Don’t fuck me around with riddles, kid.”

  “You can’t be wrong. There’s a cunt up there. A professional cunt.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know!”

  “If it’s a professional cunt up there, I’m protected. Kid, if you’re pulling a freak on me, I’ll put you out of business if it’s the last thing I do. You swear to God there’s a professional hook up there with the eighty-dollar-a-day Englishman?”

  “I swear to God. Jesus, let’s go. Moe, I tell you it’s the biggest of your career.”

  “Kid, if you’re freaking me, I’ll cut your balls out, I swear to Christ.”

  “Moe, I’m not freaking you, I swear to Christ.”

  “Okay, fucker, you talked me into it.”

  “Got the pass key?”

  “Yes.”

  “Gimme.”

  “Why?”

  “You just said it — I talked you into it. It’s my gig — so I’m the front man — you’re the backer-upper. Plus you got a wife and kids. What the hell do I have? Nothing. Gimme the key, square-ass.”

  Upstairs on the seventeenth floor Chambers pushed the key in the lock and turned it. He leaned on a door that opened silently. He preceded Kahane into an empty, silent, thickly-carpeted living room. Nothing. Nobody. He flicked a glance at Kahane, motioned him to follow, and went to the bedroom.

  Sandi Barton, whitely nude, lay on her back, gagged and bound, tied to the bed. Above her a tall, dark, naked young man held a gleaming knife. He was unaware of intruders. The thick carpet absorbed all sound of their entrance.

  Harshly Chambers called, “Forget it, Tony!”

  The dark young man wheeled.

  “Drop it, Tony!”

  But the dark young man did not drop it. He came at Chambers and they tangled. Kahane pulled his gun but could not use it for fear of hutting the wrong man, but in his heart he was not worried. The guy with the knife was out of his class. Peter Chambers knew every trick in the trade. A feint, a parry, a grab and twist, and Chambers had the knife in his right hand, shoving the guy away with his left, but the guy came rushing at him, and Chambers’s right hand was outthrust, and the knife went into the guy’s throat, all the way to the hilt, and Chambers released it, and the guy flopped to the floor, a spurting geyser of blood surging up all the way to the ceiling, and splashing down in droplets.

  Kahane knelt to the dead guy.

  Chambers ungagged and unbound the girl on the bed.

  “Oh, Christ,” she cried. “Oh, dear Jesus Christ!”

  “Shut up!”

  She sat on the edge of the bed and wept.

  Kahane stood up, said, “Finished. He’s all gone.”

  Chambers picked up the phone, called homicide, asked for Lieutenant Parker, and was told that Parker was off duty. He hung up and called Parker at home and Parker sleepily answered. “Got our guy,” Chambers said. “Got our ripper. Lois, Peggy, Elizabeth Bristol. Come and get him. Waldorf Astoria, suite seventeen-fourteen. Got it? Right. Get the engines going, square-ass.”

  “He calls everybody square-ass,” Kahane complained to the weeping girl.

  “Get dressed,” Chambers said.

  The girl wept.

  “Tell her,” Chambers said. “She’s divine without her clothes on — but that divine is no way to receive company.”

  “Divine is no way to receive company,” Kahane said, ogling the weeping girl.

  “Get dressed,” Chambers said, “because real right soon we’re gonna have ourselves a hell of a lot of company here.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  THEY were there in ten minutes, and in time grew to be quite a gang, but the first contingent (shortwave-alerted by Parker) was a couple of patrol car minions in wrinkled uniforms. They viewed the body and talked to Kahane. Then they talked to the telephone for an ambulance and for the medical examiner and for the homicide people. The ambulance responded quickly, and the dead man was officially pronounced dead. Then came four homicide detectives and a police photographer and a fingerprint man. The homicide men asked questions but Chambers refused to answer until Detective-lieutenant Louis Parker arrived. The medical examiner put in his appearance and the dead man was again officially pronounced dead. Finally Parker joined the gang — poor Parker with that puffy, jowly, buttery look of a man rudely awakened from deep slumber — and they all went downtown, including the corpse.

  Chambers, Kahane, and Sandi Barton were sequestered alone. Sandi, despite a woebegone expression, was exceedingly beautiful, and Kahane looked at her, and Chambers looked at her, and so they passed the time while waiting, looking at Sandi, and then Parker came and took Chambers to his office.

  Parker was no longer sleepily jowly; he w
as bright and alert and broadly grinning. “Got him! You got him, baby! He’s our guy — fingerprints match a hundred percent. Now lemme hear. I’m busting to hear. Let’s have your tale, Peter.”

  Chambers told him about passing out the word to the various madames of his acquaintance. “Hunch,” he said, “but I played it. You said the guy went along a certain pattern in his taste for chicks. On a hunch I gave the pattern to the madames. Hell, if a guy asked for four different specific characteristics in the whore of his choice — blonde, long legs, small tits, big ass — he figured to be our guy. Anyway, I got this call from this madame — ”

  “Which madame?”

  “A very respectable madame,” Chambers said and took it up from there and completed his tale. “Louie, I gave you the guy and I want no credit. You’re official, you’re with the department, you be the hero. All I want is a couple of tiny favors to smooth out my side.”

  “Like what?”

  “I want to protect my madame and I want to protect Sandi Barton.”

  “Like how?”

  “You tell me, Lieutenant. The big deal was catching up with the ripper, and you’re going to get some wonderful publicity on that.” They were old friends and Parker was a compassionate human being. If there was a way to do it, he would do it. “The madame put herself in jeopardy to work with me,” Chambers said. “And the girl was an innocent — I mean what you might call an innocent — pawn in the game. In the circumstances — and, man, they did this deal for us — it would be a goddamn shame to show appreciation by crucifying them. Right?”

  Parker looked somber. Then he looked thoughtful. Then he lit a gnarled black cigar. “How well do you know this Kahane?”

  “Very well.”

  “Can you trust him?”

  “Implicitly.”

  “How well do you know this Barton?”

  “A friend. A close friend, and a damn bright girl. She’s an actress. The whoring is a sideline.”

  “Can you trust her?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Could be we can work something out.”

  “Louie Parker, anomaly.”

  Parker grinned. “Don’t curse at me.”

  “A high-echelon cop that’s not a martinet — an anomaly.”

  “Could be I’ll earn some of the credit you’re insisting on bestowing on me.”

  “I’m listening, Lieutenant.”

  “Okay, listen.” Parker chewed the cigar, laid it away. “Our guy, the ripper kook, signed in at the Hotel Shirley, and signed it at that motel on Tenth Avenue. I had photostats made — specimens of the handwriting. Nothing unusual about the handwriting, but, routine, I had copies delivered to most of the motels and hotels in the city, including, of course, the Waldorf. So, if your Kahane plays ball, he’ll get in on the hero bit, and maybe even get a bonus from his bosses.”

  “How?”

  “Like this. Moe Kahane, chief security officer at the Waldorf, looking over the registration cards, got a feeling about the handwriting of Stephen Stevens. Compared it with my specimen, but wasn’t sure.

  “Now Peter Chambers wanders in for a bit of a chat with his friend Kahane at the Waldorf. Kahane expresses his interest in the similarities of handwriting, shows Chambers the registration card and my specimen. Chambers, rather an expert in handwriting, is certain they’re the same, and Chambers is notorious for direct action once he’s convinced direct action is necessary. He talks Kahane into the pass key deal, they go up there — and find what they found.”

  “Jesus, great! Louie, you’re beautiful!”

  “And the girl … she’s a girl, an actress. Gets a call from Stephen Stevens at the Waldorf. Somebody in London gave him the number. He chats with her, talks her into coming over. She finds him to be a very attractive guy. They have a few drinks, and she kind of flips out for him. The rest — the whole sex bit — she tells the truth.

  “Now go in there and tell them. Explain what the hell you like. They’ve each of them got an ax to grind; they’ll be able to deliver straight statements. And that’s all we need from them, their statements — and they’re through. And your statement. And their statements on your statement about how the guy got killed — self-defense. A lot of paper work and then you’re all out of here. Me, I’ll stick around. We’ve got identification on the guy from his wallet. Lives up in the Kips Bay area. I’ll supervise the inspection of his pad myself. But first I want to get through with everything here.” Parker grinned and took up his cigar. “So move your ass, square-ass.”

  Parker released them at two o’clock.

  Kahane was transported to the Waldorf in a prowl car.

  Chambers and Sandi Barton took a cab and Chambers gave the driver his home address and gave Sandi his keys. “You’ll wait for me.”

  “Where you going, Peter?”

  “A little unfinished business. I won’t be long.”

  She shook his hand. “Jesus, that crazy kook with the knife!” And squeezed his hand. “You saved my life, Peter. I’ll never forget it.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  And now a wan little grin. “And down there with the police — you saved my reputation. I won’t forget that either.”

  “Yep, that’s me,” he said.

  Silence now, and they rode in the night, and then the cab stopped outside his apartment house on Central Park South and he said, “You know where the booze is, baby, and you can use it. See you soon.”

  She got out and he said to the driver: “Nine-forty Park Avenue.”

  He lit a cigarette, and wondered about his fee. Hell, why not? He had got to the guy before the cops. If Tony Starr wouldn’t have attacked, or would have attacked with less vehemence — he’d have been delivered to daddy, or daddy would have come to pick him up. He had done the job he’d been hired for; unfortunately, he had done it too well. He had killed the poor bastard. But he remembered Harry Epstein’s pronouncements: a dead Tony Starr meant thirty million dollars to a live Richard V. Starr. Wasn’t that worth a measly fee of sixteen thou?

  Maybe.

  But we’re sure going to give it a hell of a try.

  The cab stopped at a curb. “Here we are,” said the driver. “Nine-forty Park.”

  Richard V. Starr, at two in the morning, was not asleep. He looked through the peephole, turned the three locks, and admitted Peter Chambers. He was wearing black silk lounging pajamas, and he turned off the movie on the TV. He said quite casually: “A rather unconventional hour to come to visit.”

  “It’s important.”

  “I assume it is.”

  He led Chambers to the study, sat behind the mahogany desk, and Chambers sat alongside the desk in the mahogany armchair. He knew he had to talk fast. Right now, in all probability, Parker was supervising the inspection of Tony Starr’s pad in Kips Bay. No doubt Parker would come upon information relating to Judge Harry Epstein. Then Parker would work it in one of two ways. He would either go to Epstein in the middle of the night in order to develop the full background on the killer-kook, or he would not disturb the old guy and wait until morning. They had solved their Lois, their Peggy, their Elizabeth Bristol, and could afford to wait to round out minor details. They had their rapacious ripper on a slab in the morgue and could wait until morning for Harry Epstein. But if Parker chose not to wait, then Epstein, naturally and properly, would divulge that Richard V. Starr was the father of Tony Starr, and this lovely apartment at 940 Park would get flooded with cops. If so, by then, Chambers preferred not to be present. He talked fast. He told his story, and burnished his credits. He told of eliciting the cops’ facts from the cops: that they had the killer’s fingerprints and that they had a pattern, a set pattern, of the physical type the killer sought to kill. He told of his hunch and his spreading the word to his madames and then rapidly told the full story to climax.

  “I had him,” he said. “His death was fortuitous, an accident out of control. My purpose was to subdue him. In that case, I’d have called you, Kahane or no Kahane, and yo
u’d have taken it from there. But he was dead. And Kahane was there. I had no alternative. I called the cops.”

  No emotion showed on Starr’s face.

  “You did right.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You could have called me and told me. Why are you here at this time of night?”

  “Business,” Chambers said. “Frankly, I want to be paid while it’s still hot — before you think the better of it. I did my job. I got to him before the cops did. And I’d have gotten you to him before the cops, except, unfortunately …”

  “Yes, you’re entitled to your fee.” Starr opened the middle drawer of the desk for his checkbook.

  Push it, Chambers thought. Make character for future business: show him how good you are. It’s a risk, but, actually, not much of a risk. Hell, I’m no layman on the street and no hoodlum tangled in the underworld: I’m a private eye who figures to pick up from little hints dropped to him. He’s a big shot, a businessman, a brilliant mind. If I win in this challenge of disputation with myself, I’ll have him forever. He’ll be my most valuable client.

  “The madame who helped,” he said, “is Goldie Dorn and I’d like to show her my appreciation. She’s been pushed for payment by Vinnie Two. I think Vinnie Two, in kind, should also show appreciation. I know who Vinnie Two is and I think he should strike her off his list. Don’t you?”

  He lost.

  Starr reached into the drawer and did not produce a checkbook. He produced a gun and used it immediately but used it against a moving target and missed. The bullet bypassed Chambers as he leaped across the desk, a hurtling missile striking Starr and knocking him out of his chair, and they flailed on the floor in embroilment for the trigger of the gun. The son of a bitch was strong, but so was Chambers. He held the hand holding the gun, held the wrist of the other hand, and they rolled, one over the other, all over the floor in a panting, hissing, roiling fandango whose climax had to be death. Now Chambers’s finger was on Starr’s finger on the trigger and the fandango turned into an Indian wrestle, each straining to point the gun at the other, and then Starr’s elbow bent and the muzzle of the gun touched his temple and the explosion splattered his brains on the carpet. He lay flat on his back, the gun still in his hand, and Chambers got up, heaving for breath.