“At today’s rental figures that sounds like an expensive operation,” I said.
“We aren’t two-dollar street hookers, Mark,” she said. “The customer buys us for the night, pays at the club before we go anywhere with him.”
“What makes working for Nora better than working for Thompson?” I asked her.
She looked away and I saw a little shudder move her shoulders. “You’d have to see them to believe some of the characters who come into the club to buy a woman,” she said. “Some of them are just too much! If Zach’s in charge you’ve got no choice. A customer picks you and you go with him, like it or not. You don’t go and you’re out on the street. Nora will give you a break. If you say you just can’t take that one she’ll tell the john you’ve been spoken for in advance. Sometimes he’s a repeater. You’ve been out with him once and you wouldn’t go again for all the tea in China. Nora will turn him on to someone else. There are a couple of girls who’ll go with anyone if her cut is big enough. Nora is a woman who just likes sex, but as far as I know she picks her own people. She doesn’t ‘hire out’ the way the rest of us do.”
“Did she ever mention Stan Nelson to you?”
Linda’s eyes widened. “It’s funny you should ask that,” she said. “Because it was only last night that she talked about him. We were in the dressing room before the night trade started to come in—about eight-thirty, I guess. I switched on the radio on my dressing table. Stan Nelson was singing a song—for that cancer telethon he does. ‘Days of Wine and Roses,’ it was. Nora gave me a funny smile. ‘He’s still the very best at what he does,’ she said. It was as if she had some kind of personal feeling for it, not just a music lover. ‘Would you believe that long ago, before Eddie was born, I lived with Stan for two whole years?’ she told me. A big house, she told me, her own car, servants, trips to all the places he had singing dates if she wanted to go, access to movie lots when he was making a film. ‘He was the nicest guy I’ve ever known,’ she told me. I asked her why she let it break up. ‘Because I couldn’t stay out of bed with any other guy who came along when Stan was away working on a film. I have always been on sex the way other people are on hashish,’ she told me. She gave me a funny look. ‘It’s just possible Stan could have been Eddie’s father.’ Well, that jolted me. ‘Well was he or wasn’t he?’ I asked her. ‘I don’t honestly know,’ she said. ‘Zach helped me bring a suit against him for a property settlement. I lost the suit, but I could have won it if I’d been willing to say Stan was Eddie’s father. He was too nice a guy for me to hang that kind of a rap on him.’” Linda looked at me. “Was Stan Nelson Eddie’s father?”
“She told me just what she told you,” I said.
“Did Eddie know Stan might be his father?”
“She said not.”
“But he was up there at the telethon, with Stan’s autograph in his pocket—according to the radio!”
“That we don’t know for sure,” I said. “Did Zach Thompson ever mention Stan to you?”
“Today, on the way to the hospital,” Linda said. “The club isn’t open to the public in the afternoons, but I was there because I had some clothes that needed ironing before tonight. I’d forgotten to leave them for our wardrobe woman and she leaves early on Saturdays. I had my radio on and the news came over about Nora being found by Leonard Martin beaten and unconscious.” She gave me a bitter little smile. “Women in our business don’t usually make the news when they get beat up. It goes with the territory.”
“Customers beat you up?” I asked, mildly shocked.
“Some of them get sexual kicks out of it,” Linda said. “I guess the high mucky-mucks think we deserve whatever we get and it isn’t news. But with Nora it was only hours after her son had been found murdered in the Beaumont, and Stan Nelson’s name had been brought into that. Stan Nelson is news anytime, I guess. But you asked if Zach had mentioned him.”
“And you said ‘just today.’”
“Well, when I heard the news about Nora I dropped everything and started to run out of the club to go to St. Vincent’s. I thought there might be something I could do for Nora. Like I said, I really love that lady. She’d helped me often when I thought I’d come to the end of the line. I almost collided with Zach down in the lounge. He’d just heard the same broadcast I had and he was on his way. He took me with him in a taxi. I have to hand it to Zach. He stands by his people.”
I’d hear this before.
“He couldn’t guess who had done this to Nora or why. But he said something like, ‘Stan Nelson is probably sitting up there in the Beaumont, grinning from ear to ear. You can bet on it that sonofabitch doesn’t wish Nora well.’ I asked him why and he told me that Nora had once tried to sue Stan for half his property out in California. ‘An elephant never forgets,’ he said. ‘Somebody knows and has been trying to put the police wise when Eddie was found, but the pigs won’t lay a finger on Mr. Nice Guy.’”
“That was it?”
She nodded. “I remembered she’d told me Zach had helped her with her suit, and they’d lost it. Zach doesn’t forgive anyone who beats him at anything. I figured if Nora had won her suit Zach would have shared in the proceeds. He wouldn’t forgive that. He eats money for breakfast!”
“How big a cut does he take from you?” I asked her.
She gave me that steady, defiant look again, as if she was daring me to express disapproval. “I’m worth three hundred dollars a night,” she said. “I get half of it and the club gets the other half. Unless it’s a sting.”
“What do you mean ‘sting’?”
She hesitated. “A couple of these apartments I mentioned are equipped with video cameras.”
I couldn’t believe it. “They take pictures of you in the act?”
She nodded. “If the sucker is an important guy in politics, or socially, or some other kind of big wheel who can’t afford scandal, I may be ordered to take him to one of those places—we call them ‘picture palaces.’ Afterwards the poor slob will pay off in big money to keep the wrong people from seeing what he’s been up to.”
“Organized blackmail!” I said.
“I get an extra piece of change if I’m used for one of those setups. I usually feel pretty lousy about it, but it’s a living.”
“Oh, brother!” I said.
“So you think I’m a bum, so say so!” she said.
“I think Thompson is a bum, a Grade A bastard!” I said.
She glanced down at her drink, which she hadn’t touched after the first sip. “We don’t have bear traps out in the street to catch the customers and drag them into the Private Lives Club,” she said. “They come in of their own free will. They expect to buy something and it’s there for them to buy. Believe me, most of them come because they like sex without having to make any commitments. They’d laugh at you if you threatened to tell someone. It’s a sport they like, like golf, or tennis, or playing the horses. A small portion of them come, loaded with guilt, probably cheating on a rich wife. Would you believe a priest or a minister? Those are the suckers who will pay for silence, and Zach doesn’t let them off the hook.”
“I would have thought the amateur competition would take care of them. Where I work you can find a willing amateur in almost no time at all.”
She gave me her hard little smile. “You a connoisseur, Haskell?”
“I’ve been around,” I said.
“Maybe you don’t know how much better we professionals are at what we do than all your amateur men chasers.”
I think she saw from my face that I’d never paid for any lovemaking in my whole checkered career.
“You ought to try sometime,” she said. “You might become a convert.”
I wanted to get away from there. “You mentioned priests and ministers. What about the Reverend Leonard Martin?”
“A cop in lamb’s clothing,” she said. “He wanted so badly to trip up Zach Thompson’s world you could almost see him tasting it. Zach let Nora handle him. She was far too s
mart for the reverend boob. I sometimes wondered if she hadn’t hooked him and put him right over a barrel.”
“The picture palace game?”
“She’d never set anyone up that way. That’s Zach’s game.”
“Not Nora but the reverend obviously got so sweet on her he lost sight of what he was there to do. He got to be so intent on saving her from damnation that he forgot about wrecking Zach Thompson’s business.”
I had to get back to the Beaumont or Chambrun would have my head on the block. I could imagine Eliot Stevens and the rest of the media people yammering at him for news. My job was to protect him from that. I explained to Linda.
“There are going to be cops circulating around your club,” I told her, “asking questions about Nora and Eddie. You haven’t mentioned Eddie but you sounded as if you knew and liked him.”
“He was a sweet kid,” Linda said. “I never saw him much because Nora wouldn’t let him come to the club. It’s no place for a teenage boy or a younger kid. But some Sundays Nora would invite me to her place for a late afternoon brunch. That’s breakfast time for us after a Saturday night. Eddie would always be there. He was a handsome kid.”
“You couldn’t tell that from what was left of him this morning,” I said, not thinking.
“Oh, my God,” she said, and reached for the Kleenex again. “He read a lot. His room in the apartment was lined with books. More books than I’ve ever read in my whole life. He had a hi-fi system and he was a rock music fan. Nora used to say she was going to have his room sound-proofed because it wasn’t her kind of music. And Eddie was also a baseball nut. He’d watch games on TV, listen to them on radio, and now and then Nora would provide him with cash to go to Yankee Stadium or Shea. In his free time he played stickball down the block till it came out of his ears. Nora is what she is, but even the Reverend Martin would have to hand it to her for the way she raised her kid. He was a learner, headed for college, and a life as different from hers as anything you can imagine. God help her, Nora doesn’t have anything to live for now.”
I didn’t mention that Dr. Morgan had suggested she might not have to face that.
“Do you have any idea at all why anyone would want to shoot the boy?”
“It’s crazy,” Linda said.
I suddenly had the first constructive idea I’d had in some hours. “I talked to one of his stickball friends, nice black kid named Norman,” I said. “He told me Eddie lost the key to his apartment on Friday afternoon. He was going to have to get in by the fire escape. Could he have done that and found Nora involved with some guy who’d want to keep the boy from talking?”
Linda gave me a negative head shake. “No way,” she said. “That apartment was Eddie’s home. Nora would never have been playing games with anyone there. Eddie was free to come and go at any time. She’d never in the world have let him find out about the other side of her life.”
“The Reverend Martin said he’d been there for supper one Sunday.”
“With Eddie sitting across the table from him,” Linda said. “It had to be that way or she wouldn’t have had Martin there.”
So much for positive thinking.
When you’ve been in trouble somewhere away from home, getting back to familiar surroundings has a way of making you feel safe and secure. The Beaumont might seem like a huge and impersonal place to you, glamor, glitter, even a kind of cold efficiency that is a little scary. To me it’s home. It’s also the place where I work. To me it’s like a small town where the faces on the street are friendly and familiar, where there are landmarks everywhere I look, landmarks of past times, warm, funny, perhaps even exciting. I know every byway and side street. I can open any door and find only what I expect to find. I can pick up the phone, dial an extension, and the expected voice will answer. In that town, my town, I would never think to look back over my shoulder for someone who might be stalking me. I could walk in off the street out of a violence-torn city, out of a terror-ridden world, and feel suddenly safe. If I had unsolved problems Papa was only a flight of stairs away, or down the hallway if I was in my own apartment, with the answers to everything. There could even be, I told myself drily, a lollipop for me if I’d been a good boy. Chambrun was as quick to reward as he was to criticize.
That evening, when I got back from the violence in the Village, from the world of prostitutes, and “picture palaces,” and criminal blackmail, devoid of all fundamental decency, the usual magic wasn’t there. When I came out of the basement garage where I left the hotel car and into the lobby I felt, absurdly, that I must have taken a wrong turn. The lobby, the reception room of my “home,” was crowded with strangers. They weren’t the well-fed, well-heeled, well-dressed clientele that usually strolled through on a Saturday night looking for their particular pleasure in dining, or drinking, or being entertained in the Blue Lagoon, or a game of chess or backgammon in the Spartan Bar, or visiting a famous friend in an upstairs suite. These were street people, dressed for no occasion that could be expected here, hungry for something sensational. There were the recognizable members of the press, waiting for the next thing to happen. Tonight this wasn’t a safe home. It had been invaded by bloodthirsty rubberneckers. After all, it wasn’t a safe place. There had been two murders here in the space of a few hours, and a third violence, somehow connected with the first two, blocks away. I saw not only more than the usual number of our own security people on duty, but a half-dozen men circulating through the crowd who had to be cops. Somehow cops don’t wear their business suits like anyone else in the world. They might as well wear their badges pinned to the lapels of their jackets they are so obvious. Maybe it’s the grim way they look at you, as though you must almost certainly be the villain they’re after.
I looked around for Mike Maggio, the night bell captain, who should be visible but wasn’t. I glanced over at the front desk to see who was on duty there, but Karl Nevers, the clerk who should be in charge, was obscured by a small army of people asking him God knows what. Then I saw three of four reporters headed my way and I made a quick move for the safety of the front office. I picked up the phone and dialed Chambrun’s extension. A woman’s voice that sounded unfamiliar answered.
“Ruysdale?” I asked, knowing that it wasn’t.
“I’m sitting in for Miss Ruysdale, can I help you?” the voice asked, obviously someone from the secretarial pool.
I told her who I was and that I wanted to locate Chambrun.
“I believe he’s up in his penthouse, Mr. Haskell.”
I dialed that extension and got no answer. To hell with this dislocated place, I told myself. I would go up to my rooms, which are just down the hall from Chambrun’s office on the second floor. A drink, a shower, and a change of clothes would make me feel better. Somehow I felt a little gritty after the violence on Jane Street, the wailing Hispanic woman in the emergency room at St. Vincent’s, and the glimpse into the soiled world of Zachary Thompson. Maybe I could scrub off some of the pious double-talk I’d had from the Reverend Leonard Martin.
I stepped out of the office and found myself confronted by Eliot Stevens, my reporter friend from International.
“So?” he said.
I brought him up to date on Nora Sands.
“Is she going to make it?” he asked.
“Not hopeful,” I said. “What the hell are all those creeps doing in the lobby?”
He shrugged. “Stan Nelson has to appear sometime,” he said. “If you’ve heard the late radio or TV, or seen the evening papers, you’ll know your anonymous friend has made him the living star of the show. You won’t let me down when you know something solid?”
“A promise is a promise,” I said. “I haven’t been able to locate Chambrun so I don’t know what’s been cooking here. When I’ve washed off some of the day’s grime and caught up with the Man, I’ll be circulating again.”
I decided to go out the back way and took the service elevator up to the second floor. I walked down the corridor to Chambrun’s office. Th
e girl sitting at Miss Ruysdale’s desk was, I recalled, Betty Somebody-or-other. Chambrun could have told me her last name, where she’d gone to school, and who her boyfriend was! I left a message for him—that I was back, in my rooms, changing for the evening. Then I went back down the corridor to my room, took out my keys, and unlocked the door. It was dark inside and I reached for the light switch.
I never made it. Someone gave me a violent shove from behind, I felt a bomb explode in my head and excruciating pain. A Roman candle went off in front of my eyes. I thought I heard someone shouting. I thought it might be me. Then I was falling, down, down, to the bottom of the earth and into a black abyss.
PART THREE
ONE
OBVIOUSLY I GOT LUCKY in that moment or I wouldn’t be telling this story now.
How much longer it was after that explosion inside my head I had no idea. I was suddenly aware of some unfamiliar odor of disinfectant. I tried opening my eyes and was instantly blinded by an intolerably bright light. I shut my eyes tight then.
“Well, at least there’s still some life in him,” a grouchy male voice said, standing very close to me.
I realized I was lying flat on my back on something that wasn’t a feather bed. I reached out blindly, feeling for something familiar.
“His arms move,” the grouchy voice said. “Now, if the stupid sonofabitch will open his eyes and keep them open he may realize where he is.”
I opened my eyes a slit and kept them open. The light took the shape of a fluorescent tube. A gray head bent over me and I recognized the lined, unsmiling face of Doc Partridge, the Beaumont’s house physician.
“So, I’m not a bad dream,” he said. “You’re in the Beaumont’s First Aid Section. You ought to be dead but you’re not. In case you’re interested, you have a relatively mild concussion.”
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