She smiled. “I don’t like milk, Mike.”
“You should.”
“I’m all right.”
I went to my small bar, poured myself a drink. “Sure you are. That’s why you’re here. Drink your milk.”
Obediently she took a drink of milk, made a face. She watched me over the top of the glass. “You—drink liquor quite a lot, don’t you, Mike?”
“I do a lot of things quite a lot, lad.”
She was looking me over. “Yes. I guess you do.”
I pulled over a straight chair for her, sat down and sipped my whiskey, studying her. “How would you like to see lover boy again tonight? Say for one last time?”
“Morgan?” Her mouth trembled. “I never want to see him again.”
“You want some money though, don’t you?”
“I—I’ve got to have it.”
“Then get on that phone. Call your lover boy and don’t take no for an answer. If he hangs up on you, call back. Tell him you’ve rented an apartment. This apartment. Tell him he’s right about the things he said to you. Tell him—hell, tell him you’ll call it quits, never bother him again, if he’ll come over here tonight. One last time.”
“Must I?”
I shrugged. “What made you think I was kidding?”
She sat there for a long time, long enough for me to finish the bourbon and get dry. While I was making a fresh one, she put through the call. It wasn’t easy. At the Carmichael house, they tried to give her the runaround. It was easy to see Morgan had put her name on a list, even with the servants.
When she finally got through to Morgan, he was too busy to yak with her. She stared at me in desperation. I just kept looking at her, nothing in my face. She hung on.
She kept talking, whispering, wheedling, promising, dealing. I began to see how she got in this predicament after all. There was more sex in her voice than most women project with their whole bodies. I remembered Naomi Hyers, looking along her nose, and I grinned to myself. If young Carmichael passed up Lupe for Naomi, he deserved what he got. Hell, I could feel a stirring in myself just listening to Lupe.
Finally she glanced up, eyes stricken, but giving me a wan smile. She had heated young Carmichael past his boiling point—he was coming over.
She replaced the receiver and sank back against the couch, spent.
“Fine,” I said. “Now get out of that dress.”
She started to protest. Then her eyes touched mine and she changed her mind.
She gave me a scared smile, nodded. “All right, Mike.”
She slipped out of the dress. I walked to the window to let the breeze touch me. I did not make a point of not looking at her—and she was even lovelier than the boys in the bureau had imagined she would be out of that dress. Her full curves looked swollen, as if they needed to be loved. She was lush and dark and beautiful.
I finally looked away. “Now take off that bra and your pants,” I told her across my shoulder. I stared out at the darkening river. Lights winked, reflected in it. I winked back.
At last she said, ‘All right. I’ve done it.”
I glanced across my shoulder. I caught my breath. “For hell’s sake, kid, I meant leave your slip on.”
She blushed and wriggled into her slip, pulling it down over her head and undulating up into it. I thought how tough it was remembering why she was here at all.
I drew in a deep breath and turned around, trying to keep everything natural and easy. Her slip didn’t help matters. It only seemed to accentuate her desirability.
“Now, when he comes in,” I said, “act as if you’re hot as a rivet. You can’t resist him. No matter what you think about him now, no matter what he says, get him down on that couch.”
She looked miserable and forlorn, as if she wished she had never started this. “I’ll try,” she said.
I laughed at her. “Hell. It’ll be the easiest thing you ever did.”
“I feel so low,” she said, shivering. “So vile.”
“Good. If you feel vile, then Morgan Carmichael has finally dragged you down to his level. So just keep that thought in your mind—that and the way you want your baby to be taken care of.”
We waited forty minutes, during which I kept coaching her; then we heard him at the door. I stepped into the darkened bedroom.
Lupe crossed the apartment in her slip, and I heard castanets. She hesitated. Carmichael rang again, an impatient sound. He was in a hurry to walk into our little trap.
She opened the door and Morgan strode in. I studied him through the partly open bedroom door. Even at twenty-six he looked like a spoiled lost kid who had no idea of the score, who had not even bothered to figure out the rules of the game. I failed to see what about him had excited Lupe.
His breath caught when he saw her. His headshake was unconvincing.
He said, “It’s no good, Lupe. I told you. It’s no use. I’m marrying Naomi Hyers. It’s all over. God knows you’re lovely. But—it’s all over, baby. Why don’t you be a nice kid—and forget it?”
All this time, judging by his eyes, he was not forgetting a damned thing.
Lupe breathed raggedly. Her breathing did something to the front of that slip. The castanets started again in my mind. I was pretty sure young Carmichael was hearing them, too, by now. Lupe managed to keep smiling.
“All right, Morgan. That’s exactly why I wanted to see you. I wanted to tell you—you were right.”
“You could have said that over the phone.”
But something had happened to his voice. Lupe moved closer to him and the violins were coming in under the castanets. She was getting to him. It must have been easy—she had done this before. “I wanted you here—” her voice poured down over him like Cuban syrup—”because I had to see you—one more time.”
“Okay then, baby.” Big shot, he was doing her a favor. “That’s the way it’s got to be, then.”
He got her sprawled on the couch almost before I could get my camera set up. He knew what he wanted, and she knew what she was doing. It was in her blood. She was still crazy about him, too, no matter how terribly he had made her hate him.
I had to act fast. I didn’t give them any time together. I had worked up a real dislike for this boy. When my flashbulb went off, Morgan Carmichael sprang up from Lupe as if he had been shot. He moved fast, but not fast enough. I beat him to his clothes.
He was shaking all over. Typically, like a spoiled brat, he turned away from danger. What he needed was someone to blame.
“You damned little Cuban bitch! A blackmail trick won’t buy you a damned thing.”
Lupe jumped up from the couch but before she could speak he backhanded her across the face so hard he knocked her to the floor. He stood over her. His face was wild and frantic—and sick. I threw him his clothes.
“Put ‘em on,” I said thickly. “Then get out of here—fast.”
When he was gone I went to Lupe. She was still on the floor. Her slip was pulled high above her hips. I knelt beside her, pulled it down. She was crying softly into her hands.
“Don’t worry, querida mia.” I kept my voice as low and soft as possible, the way my mother had crooned to me when I was a kid and hurt—hell, a hundred years ago. Lupe needed to be reminded of all the things her mother should have told her—of her baby, and everything she needed for it.
After a while she said, “Oh, how this is going to cost that pudrise. Oh, how it’s going to cost him.”
She sobbed for a moment, then turned and hurled herself against me where I was hunkered beside her. She struck hard against me, throwing her arms around me, thrusting her face against my chest, sobbing. I held her and let her cry it all out, the weeks and months of it when she had wanted to cry and had had no one with whom to share her tears.
I felt not the least ashamed—not even when I realized that being a young girl’s idea of a strong man can be the hardest thing in the world.
14
At three the next afternoon, I began calling
around trying to locate Morgan Carmichael. It came as a mild shock when I found he was at his desk in his father’s offices. He would not talk to me and I had to put pressure on some top Carmichael Corporation officials to wangle an appointment with Morgan for four.
He was faintly puzzled as to why I would want to see him. So I had my picture, but who was I fighting? He even tried to buy me off.
“Anything particular you want to see me about, Ballard?” he kept saying, as if we had not met last night and I were there just to ask him to sponsor me in the Wednesday Squash Club, of which he was a member.
I did not actually say so, but I finally let him nurture the impression I wanted to talk to him about a block of a hundred tickets for the Policemen’s Ball.
I knew he was muddled, trying to think of his way out of this jam as his father might have, but without letting the old man know.
Finally he blurted, “Look, Ballard—I haven’t been exactly idle since I saw you last. I went through my old man’s files, without his knowing. I found this picture of you—I’ll trade it for whatever you got on me last night.” He picked up a glossy print from his desk, held it in his hands.
I looked straight at him. “I’m not selling, buying or trading,” I said.
“Do you have any idea what my father can do to you for trying a stunt like blackmail?”
“I know what your father could do to me for spitting on the sidewalk. I just don’t give a damn—he could have told you that. But I haven’t said a thing about blackmail.”
“Well, I’m not going to pay you anything. Not a damned cent—not even for tickets to the Policemen’s Ball.”
He flipped the glossy toward me. It fluttered to the floor at my feet.
I glanced at it, then moved toward him. He stared at me a moment, his eyes wild, and wheeled around, leaping toward the row of buzzers on his desk. He never reached them. I snagged his collar, brought him up and around.
He swung at me once, but half-heartedly, as if he knew better than actually to hit me.
I beat him about the face—then lowered my blows to his midsection, until he sagged to the floor like an empty sack. He lay at my feet, bleeding into the expensive carpeting. One of his eyes looked bad. What the hell? He could afford the best medical care.
He didn’t yell. He knew better.
I stood waiting until he finally stirred slightly on the floor. He had no idea of what else was going to happen to him. I bent over, caught his lapels in both hands, lifted him bodily and shoved him into one of his bright green overstuffed leather chairs.
He talked through the blood in his mouth. He wiped at the crimson stuff with the back of his hand, but it kept coming. He pulled a handkerchief from the breast pocket of his English-tailored jacket, pressed the white linen oblong against his nostrils.
His voice shook. “My father will break you for this. We’ll get you for this. I’m sorry for you. You’re out. You hear me? You’re dead, or you’ll wish you were—”
I caught his tie in my left hand and backhanded him across the face.
“You know what’s dead? That picture you showed me. It’s more than four years old. It shows me with one of Luxtro’s whores. I’ve seen it before— hell, Tom Flynn was going to use it when he tried to break me off the force, send me to jail—but decided against it because it didn’t prove anything. I’ve seen it before. What the hell do you think I am—a brat like you?”
“What do you want?”
“You figure it out, Morgan.”
He tried to writhe free and I backhanded him again. For a moment he couldn’t see anything, Gradually his eyes focused again.
“I begin to get an idea, Mike.”
He whispered, sick in his guts with fear for the first time in his life. He began to get it. Nothing his father could do to me later was going to help him now. He was scared, and for the first time, he couldn’t pay some money and stop being afraid. His father couldn’t help him.
“I’m a police detective, Morgan,” I said. “I don’t blackmail people. Do you understand that, Morgan?”
He was crying suddenly. He began to cry helplessly, unable to stop.
“I didn’t mean it—I was upset. I hardly knew what I was saying.”
“Sure you knew. It just didn’t work. I can see how you thought it might. A man like you, twenty-six, saddling up with a seventeen-year-old chick. I can see how you’d be mighty upset. That’s rape.”
“Oh, hell, Ballard! She begged me to come over.”
I shrugged. “That makes it statutory rape. You got any idea what that can buy you? It can get you a lifetime lease on a jail cell.”
“I’ve got lawyers. My father’s got lawyers.”
“Sure. And you both have money. Would you like to ask your old man how many kids he left on the sidewalk? Or would you like to make good on the kid you made with Lupe?”
He sat there a long time. “My God, Ballard—Mike—what do you want? What do you want me to do?”
I released him, thrusting him back in the chair. I sat on the edge of his desk. “First of all,” I said. “Forget about calling me Mike. Next, don’t say Ballard. Try to get used to Mr. Ballard—we’ll never be friends. Then figure out what it cost your old man to raise you, and double it. You’d want your kid to be at least twice the man you are, wouldn’t you?” I smiled. “He’ll be born about a block from where I was.”
Morgan looked as if he might vomit. “Oh, hell,” he whispered. He drew a deep breath. “It could be anybody’s baby.”
I shrugged. “Another crack like that could cost you new bridgework. However, I can have witnesses to swear in court Lupe was a chaperoned, protected, revered and untouched virgin up until the moment she first shacked up with you—and that would be the truth. You see, Morgan, you’re in a bad spot. All you’ve got is money. The kid’s got me.”
He sucked at his bloodied lip for a moment. I let him suck. It was his blood.
“What—if I gave her twenty thousand for her baby?” He said it without much hope.
“One thing,” I said. “You’re beginning to see the point. Your thinking is a lot better.”
He said, “Forty thousand—”
I waited.
“Tax clear, Mr. Ballard. You understand. Invested. A living trust. He—the baby’d always have something.”
I let him sweat himself up to seventy-five thousand, tax clear, then I cut him off, told him to write a check.
“I have lawyers,” he said. “I’ll have them fix up a living trust for the baby.”
“I know some lawyers, too. You just give me the check. I’ll have the trust set up. In your name.”
He wiped his hand across his mouth. “I don’t have that kind of money in my account. It’ll take me a couple of days. I’ll have to get it.”
I shrugged. “You’ll have to get it. That’s up to you. But for right now, write out a check to Lupe Valdez. She can’t deposit it until morning. That’ll give you plenty of time to cover it. And you’ll cover it—or I’ll see you in the state pen for statutory rape.”
He wrote out the check, looked up at me. “There’s just one thing, Ballard. I’m going to have to tell my father about this. You understand? All about it and all about you. And then, God help you, Ballard.”
“I figured you’d do that boy. I’m prepared for it. You see, I found out a long time ago that nothing is ever easy.”
“You’ve never had it tough the way you’re going to.” He blew on the check, held it out to me. “Take it and get out of here.”
“Oh, there’s a little more,” I said.
His face went white. “What now?” He lost some of that arrogance he figured the seventy-five grand entitled him to.
“If I ever have to come up here again, Morgan, I’ll have to be rough. I was easy on you today, because I like you. Hell, I figure you’re just a spoiled kid. Just a twenty-six-year-old mixed-up kid.”
“Why should you have to see me again?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Let’
s just say if anything happens to Valdez, or her baby—if they even die of pneumonia or are killed in an accident—I don’t give a damn if you’re in Europe when it happens, I’ll want you, boy. If they’re hurt, you’ll be hurt, bad. If they die you’ll die, too—but slowly.”
Young Carmichael jumped up wildly. His voice rose, frantic.
“How can I protect that girl? Dammit—how can I guarantee nothing will happen to her?”
I shrugged. “We’ve all got our problems, Morgan. Looks like you’ve named yours.”
I turned and walked across the deep carpeting toward the outer door. Morgan stood frozen a moment, then wheeled and almost ran toward his father’s suite of offices. He was wasting no time, but I had not expected he would.
I looked his secretary over as I went out. She gave me a smile, and tired as I was, I knew what I wanted right now. Lupe Valdez had gotten me all stirred up and what I wanted was a girl—any kind of girl.
15
When I got back to the detective bureau, it was almost five o’clock. There was a note on my desk. It said to call Carolyn Flynn at once. Urgent.
I crushed the slip in my fist, sat down and the swivel sighed dryly under me. I reached out, pulled the phone to me, and dialed her number before I had time to think about it and decide not to. Talking to Carolyn right now was the last thing I wanted.
The phone rang three times before Carolyn said, abruptly, “Mike?”
I laughed. “Hell, no. This is the third assistant secretary of the Junior League. Suppose I’d been the chairman of the Red Cross. Secretary of the Service League. Or Fred Carmichael.”
She wasted no energy on worry. “I knew it was you, Mike. I could tell by the ringing of the phone. Haven’t you ever felt that way?”
“No.”
“I want to see you, Mike. I need to. I know I have no right to lean on you, Mike. But since Tom’s death, I’ve been completely alone—except for you.”
I wondered what Fred Carmichael would have thought of her saying that
“How about eight o’clock?” I said.
Any Woman He Wanted Page 9