She gave her head a determined shake. “Even if he went to the chair, there’d still be Jake Stark and Artie’s other boys. I know what happens to squealers in this racket. You gave me your word nobody but you would know I talked.”
“All right,” I said soothingly. “Don’t get excited. I’m not going to get you in trouble. We’ll go after him some other way.”
She looked relieved. “I’m sorry, Matt, but you can’t ask me to testify in court. I’d be too scared.”
“Okay. We’ll try something else. Maybe Kitty’s apartment-mate knows something she hasn’t told the police.”
Jolly said dubiously, “She wouldn’t be any more likely to tell you than the homicide cops. You’re a cop too.”
“She wouldn’t have to know that. She might talk in front of a friend of yours she thought was in the rackets. She doesn’t know much about you, does she?”
“We’ve only known each other a couple of weeks. I don’t know much about her either. But we’re friendly enough. She’s a pretty nice kid.”
“Then suppose you introduce me as your boy friend?”
Jolly gave me a peculiar look. “You know what kind of boy friends girls in the profession have?”
I must have looked blank, because she smiled in self-mockery. “You think any nice, normal man wants a girl friend who makes her living the way we do? I don’t know a single girl in the business whose boy friend, if she has one, isn’t a kept man. Do you want to pose as a pimp?”
That hadn’t occurred to me when I made the suggestion, though I had enough knowledge about the prostitution racket to know what she said was true. She used the word “pimp” in its narrowest esoteric sense. To the general public “pimp” and “procurer” are synonymous, but the words have entirely separate meanings in the vocabulary of a prostitute. A pimp has no practical function in her profession. He arranges no dates, he doesn’t bail her out when she’s arrested, he offers no protection. He is simply her kept man.
The idea of posing as a pimp didn’t appeal to me much. “Suppose I just be a friend?” I suggested. “Not a boy friend.”
An amused expression grew on her face. “Maybe it would be more convincing if you did pose as my pimp. She’d be more likely to talk in front of you. The girls are in the habit of confiding as freely in pimps as they do in each other.”
I scowled at her. “We’ll keep me just a male friend.”
“All right,” she said agreeably, but she still looked amused. “When do you want to go see her?”
I glanced at my watch. It was just ten o’clock. “You think it’s too late to drop in tonight?”
She looked surprised. “It’s early. We girls all live nocturnal lives and sleep days. I doubt that she’d be out on a date, with Kitty just dead. She’s probably sitting at home alone mooning. We could drop in and pretend it’s a sympathy visit.”
“Then let’s go,” I said. Then I had a thought. “Do you keep a pimp, Jolly?”
She gave her head a scornful shake. “I haven’t sunk that low. I prefer to be lonely.”
CHAPTER 10
Before we left the room, I phoned room 614, but there was no answer. I asked for an outside line and dialed headquarters. I caught Carl Lincoln at the booking desk.
When he came to the phone, he said, “Where the devil you been? I’ve got my first one all booked and am ready to start out again.”
“Something came up,” I said. “You’ll have to carry on alone for the rest of the night.”
There was a moment of silence. Then he said, “She’s that nice?”
“Oh, go soak your head,” I told him. “Have you caught any television newscasts tonight?”
“I’ve been working, not watching TV.”
“Well, that girl we sicked Little Artie on was beaten and strangled to death this afternoon. I’ve got a lead on it, and I’m following it up.”
There was another silence before he said, “Why don’t you turn it over to Homicide? It’s their job.”
“I feel a personal interest, since I sicked Artie on her. Cover for me tonight, and I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“All right,” he said reluctantly. “But be careful how you stick your neck out.”
“I always am,” I told him, and hung up.
Getting my coat and tie from the closet, I put both on. Jolly looked me over with approval.
“You wear pretty good clothes for a cop,” she said. “You could pass for my pimp.”
I said, “As I understand it, one of the functions a pimp performs is periodically beating up his girl. Want me to start acting like your pimp?”
“Maybe we’d better go,” she suggested.
One twenty-five Ormond Place was a four-unit apartment building in a respectable residential district on the edge of the south side. Katherine Desmond and Delores Fermer were listed on a lobby mailbox card as occupying the upper right-hand unit. We climbed the stairs and rang the bell.
The door was opened by a slim, redheaded girl of no more than twenty. She had flawless features and milk-white skin which brought out the deep green color of her eyes and made them glow like polished jade. She wore black lounging pajamas which clung tightly enough to outline a particularly shapely figure; on her feet she had little, pointed, golden slippers. For no reason I could define, I got the instant impression that under ordinary circumstances she would have a vivacious personality, but at the moment her expression was the listless one of fresh grief.
“Oh, hi, Jolly,” she said in a tired voice. She glanced at me with a touch of curiosity. “Come on in.”
We walked into a well-furnished front room and the girl shut the door behind us. A hall off the front room led to a kitchen at the far end of the apartment, and between it and us there were several doors. It seemed to be at least a two-bedroom apartment.
Jolly said, “We only heard about Kitty on the nine-thirty news, Doll. I’m terribly sorry.”
“I appreciate your dropping in,” the redhead said in a sad voice. “It was a terrible thing. You can’t imagine how terrible. She had been so pretty.”
Apparently this was a reference to what Kitty had looked like when she found her dead, for a tremor shook her body.
Jolly said, “I don’t think you ever met my boy friend, Matt. This is Doll, honey.”
I gave Jolly a murderous look, but she only smiled at me sweetly. She must have had a perverted sense of humor, for she was deliberately creating the impression that I was her pimp, even after I had vetoed the idea. There was nothing I could do about it either, without making Doll suspicious.
Doll said, “How do you do?” and examined me with professional detachment.
Giving her a nod, I muttered something polite.
“Sit down,” Doll invited. “May I get you drinks?”
“Not me,” Jolly said. “I’ve already had my quota for today.”
I didn’t particularly want a drink, but I figured Doll would probably have to go to the kitchen to mix one, and it would afford an opportunity to give Jolly a piece of my mind in private. “I’d like a bourbon and soda,” I said.
I had guessed right. Our hostess headed for the kitchen. But Jolly crossed me up. She followed right along with an offer to help. I made a motion indicating I wanted to speak to her alone, but she only threw me a bright smile and continued after the redhead.
They must have had quite a lot of woman talk in the kitchen, for I smoked two cigarettes while they were mixing two drinks. When they finally returned, Doll was carrying her own and Jolly had mine.
“Here you are, darling,” she said, handing it to me.
I gave her a cold look. “Thanks.”
I seated myself on the sofa and Jolly sat next to me, one knee chummily pressed against mine. Doll took a chair facing both of us.
Doll was looking me over with considerable interest, which led me to the conclusion that I had been the subject of conversation in the kitchen. I was wondering what tapestry of lies Jolly had woven about our relationship when the little minx let me know
.
“I was telling Doll about the Jaguar I just bought you, hon. Don’t you just love it?”
I smiled from the teeth out. “It’s a beaut. But you shouldn’t have done it. All that time on your back, just so I can ride around in style.”
Jolly emitted an indulgent little laugh. “Hasn’t he a wonderful sense of humor, Doll? He says things like that all the time. That’s one of the reasons I love to spoil him.” She turned back to me. “Darling, you really ought to have some new clothes to go with the new car. Why don’t you run down to Al Swartz’s tomorrow and charge a couple of new suits to my account?” Alfred Swartz was the most exclusive and most expensive tailor in town. As a matter of fact the suit I had on had come from there.
Doll looked impressed. I caught Jolly throwing a side glance at her to see how she was taking our conversation, and suddenly realized that indulging her sense of humor was only part of the reason she was passing me off as her kept man. She was also parading me as a possession in order to impress the other girl.
My work has brought me into contact with enough prostitutes to learn something about their peculiar psychological attitudes and their unique social life. Normal women can tell their friends about their husband’s or boy friend’s promotions and show off the gifts they’ve been given. But what can you tell about your pimp when all your friends know he’s living on you? So I suppose some sort of transference takes place, and a call girl’s prestige among her colleagues rests to some extent on how much her pimp costs her. I realized that Jolly was simply showing off her supposed generosity before her friend.
All at once I stopped being mad at her and felt infinitely sorry for her. It was a pretty drab romantic life for a girl to have when the only brag she could make about her prince charming was how much she spent on him.
I decided to let her have her fun, but I also decided to end the subject.
I said to Doll, “Have the cops gotten anywhere at all with Kitty’s murder yet?”
She shook her head and the saddened expression returned to her face.
I was wondering how delicately to work the conversation around to Doll’s theory about the murder, when Jolly steered things in the right direction by asking a blunt question.
“Do you think Artie killed her, Doll?”
The redhead looked upset at the question, but she didn’t look surprised. “I don’t know. It’s occurred to me. Do you think it might have been him?”
“Well, you know he warned everybody about rolling Johns. Of course that was before you came to work for him, but Kitty probably told you about it.”
Doll nodded. “Kitty wanted me to go in on that racket, but I’m hardly even used to going to strange men’s rooms yet. It would terrify me to try stealing money from them. I asked her once what she’d do if she got caught, but she just laughed.”
She was speaking unreservedly, as though I were another call girl instead of a strange man she had just met. Jolly had been right—my introduction as a pimp made me an insider.
Jolly said, “Maybe she did get caught. And Artie heard about it.”
Doll shook her head. “Until last night, she hadn’t rolled anyone since I moved in here eight days ago. I know, because she always told me everything that happened on a date. She did roll a John for five hundred last night, but she didn’t get caught at it. She showed me the money when she came in about two A.M.”
Jolly’s face registered surprise. “Two A.M.? When I phoned her at eleven-thirty this morning, she said she’d just gotten home.”
“I know. I was here when you phoned, and she had. She went out on a second date last night. After she came in, she phoned Artie at the tavern. The place stays open until two-thirty with daylight saving in effect. She told him she was available again. He’d just had a call for a girl, so he gave her the assignment and she went back out.”
“You were here at eleven-thirty this morning?” I said. “When did you leave?”
“I was just leaving then. I stopped at the door when the phone rang, to see if it were for me. Kitty called that it was just Jolly, so I continued on out.”
“See anyone hanging around?” I inquired.
She shook her head again. “No, but there was a funny thing. I thought I heard footsteps going down the stairs. It sounded like whoever it was wanted to make as little noise as possible; sort of like he was stepping on tiptoe. At the time I thought it was probably one of the other tenants, but when I got outside no one was in sight. I didn’t think of it when the police were questioning me, but later I got to wondering if that might not have been the killer. I already had the door open when the phone rang, then I waited to see who it was. The killer might have been coming upstairs just then, and turned around and went back down when he heard the door open. He could have ducked under the stairway, where the basement entrance is, and I wouldn’t have seen him as I went out.”
“That sounds possible,” I said.
She sighed. “Poor Kitty. If I hadn’t gone out, maybe it would never have happened.”
“Or maybe you would have gotten it too,” I said.
She gave a little shudder.
Jolly said, “If it was Artie, her so-called protection wasn’t functioning very well.”
“I guess not. And Kitty used to brag that she didn’t have to worry about Artie, because Jake would take care of her if Artie tried to get rough.”
“Jake?” I said.
“Jake Stark. He works for Artie.”
That was interesting. So Jake had initiated the little side racket with the girls right under his employer’s nose. He was the mysterious protector who, for a percentage of the take, was supposed to prevent Artie from taking disciplinary action against any girl who might be caught.
CHAPTER 11
I wondered why Jake Stark would take such a risk when he must have known Little Artie’s reaction would be violent if he ever discovered his right-hand man was deliberately undermining his operation. Then I realized he was in a unique position to get away with it. He would know of any complaints about the girls as soon as Artie received them, because he was constantly with the little man. He was in a position to soothe Artie’s wrath, and even physically restrain him from harming the girls, ostensibly for Artie’s own good. And undoubtedly, he had issued the girls strict instructions never to mention his name to Artie—no matter what happened.
Suddenly another thought occurred to me. Jake had been present when I told Artie about Kitty rolling her out-of-town client. Up to then it was probable that the only information reaching Artie about the rollings had been when Nick Bartkowiak approached him concerning the rumors he had heard. Those must have been vague rumors which didn’t identify by name any of the girls involved, or Artie certainly would have stepped on the actual offenders instead of merely issuing a general warning to all his girls. It was probable that mine was the first definite complaint to reach him about a specific girl.
Jake Stark might have been afraid that Kitty would tell Artie who encouraged her to roll clients. And he might have taken action to shut her up before Artie got to her.
While I was thinking these thoughts, Doll and Jolly were still discussing the murder. But the subject had veered to Doll’s discovery of it and her horrified reaction. There didn’t seem to be any more pertinent information we could get from her. Finishing my drink, I suggested to Jolly that we leave. At the door I said, “Nice to have met you, Doll. Thanks for the drink.”
“Any time,” she said. “Drop in again.”
The words were merely polite, but she looked directly into my face as she spoke and there was a subdued challenge in her eyes. Jolly noticed that the invitation was addressed to me only. But her expression was only amused instead of irked. Probably she would have bridled in feminine resentment if I had actually been her boy friend. But it only tickled her sense of humor to hear Doll wasting the oblique invitation on a cop.
I said vaguely, “Sure, Doll. Maybe I will.”
As we went down the stairs, Jolly thre
w a speculative look back over her shoulder at me.
“Have fun?” I growled.
“Well, it was effective, wasn’t it? She opened right up.”
We reached the lobby and she waited for me to open the door. I said, “Just a minute,” and walked back beneath the stairway.
There was a door to the basement well out of sight of the front door. As Doll had suggested, the killer could easily have ducked out of sight there until she left the building.
When I returned to where Jolly was standing, she still had an amused grin on her face. Pulling open the door, I said, “Maybe you won’t think it’s so funny when you get the bill from Swartz.”
She gave me a quick glance. “I don’t have any account there.”
“I’ll open one for you. I have a witness to your offer to buy me a couple of suits.”
With a shrug she preceded me through the door. I let it swing shut behind me and caught up with her in time to hold open the car door for her.
When I rounded the car and climbed in behind the wheel, she said, “You certainly treat me like a lady.”
“Why shouldn’t I?” I asked. “Where do you live?”
She gave me an uptown address not far from my own flat. I started the car and we drove along in silence for a time.
Finally she said, “Would you really like some clothes from Swartz, Matt?”
I threw her a disgusted look. “For cripes sake, Jolly, don’t try to make a real pimp out of me.”
She grinned at me. “Just trying to get under your skin, darling.”
“You’ve succeeded,” I said shortly.
Her grin faded. “Don’t be mad at me, Matt. Haven’t I been helpful?”
“Yeah,” I had to admit.
“You know, in a way I’m glad you turned out to be a cop. Or at least I’m glad you aren’t a John. We’d be out of business if it weren’t for Johns, but a girl can’t build much respect for a man who has to buy his women.”
There didn’t seem to be any appropriate answer to that, so I just let it ride. When we reached her address, I cut the engine, went around to the curb side and held open the door for her. She sat still until I got it open, obviously enjoying the unfamiliar sensation of being treated like a lady.
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