Dressed to Killed

by Milton Ozaki

  She shattered the silence by asking: "What are you thinking?"

  "I was wondering what kind of cement held you and Eddie Sands together."

  "Figure it out. It's a four-letter word."

  "Not l-o-v-e."

  "Why not?"

  "That blue dress you've got on isn't widow's weeds."

  "I sing for a living. I intended to work later tonight."

  "Why?" I tossed the word at her casually.

  "A girl's got to live."

  "You can live for a long time on the meltings from the ice you've got under your mattress."

  She lifted one eyebrow. "So you found that, too. You're pretty clever."

  "It was a dumb place to hide it. Why don't we talk sense, Miss Evans?"

  "Like what?"

  "Like why Eddie Sands was killed. Like what the big rub was between Sands and Gold. Like how I can get myself out of this mess."

  "That's your principal interest—getting out?"

  "Damned right. I like having skin; I want to keep it."

  "Suppose I make a deal with you, Mr. Forbes—"

  It sounded familiar. "Thank you, but no deals."

  "Why not?"

  "I learn slowly, but I learn. Whenever someone offers me a deal, I get kicked in the teeth."

  She played the throaty laugh, this time lightly and very larghetto. "This wouldn't be that kind of deal." With a sudden movement, she rose from her chair and slid onto the sofa beside me. "I'll tell you the truth," she said softly. "I'm in a spot. We're both in a spot. Why shouldn't we help each other?"

  The stuff she used behind her ears was worth the dough, I decided. "Why not?" I asked.

  "That's what I've been asking myself. We're both in trouble —and there's something about you I like. You're direct, and clever, and very much a man." She gave me a smile along with the last phrase, and I had to admit to myself that maybe I was very much a man; at least, I felt sure that the rustling in my capillaries was more than prickly heat. "I know I can trust you."

  "Like a brother—or a lover?"

  "Both. Or either. All I want is a fair shake. A fair shake and a little understanding. If you knew the whole story, I'm sure you'd trust me and help me, especially if it helped solve your own problems too."

  "I'm listening."

  "Good." She took a deep breath, thereby banishing any shred of doubt I might have had as to whether or not she were a girl, and leaned her shoulder gently against mine. "It's going to be hard for me to explain—after all, I'm a girl and you're a man—but I'll try to make it clear. I came to Chicago four years ago. Mom and Dad didn't want me to leave Radford—that's a town in Virginia—but I'd always wanted to be a singer, the kind that sings with orchestras, and on the radio, places like that, and not just at weddings and on Sunday in church. I didn't have any money, but I did have a lot of ambition, and I thought a big city like Chicago would give me the break I needed."

  She sighed.

  "Well, I took the plunge. I dumped what clothes I had into a suitcase, got on a bus, and came to the big city. I landed here with about twenty bucks in cash and the determination never to ride a bus again. I got a room at the Y.W.C.A., put on my best clothes, and started canvassing the agencies. What a fool I was! They laughed at me. Not one of them wanted to hear me sing. All they did was take one look at me, at the clothes I had on, especially, and kick me out. I went back to the Y, ripped up most of my things—and cried my eyes out."

  "You should have known better," I said.

  "Who was to tell me? But thank God, I was tough. I wasn't going to quit. I decided that the smart thing to do was to get myself in some nightclub or cocktail lounge, where I could not only make dough but could meet the right kind of people."

  "Men," I murmured.

  "Certainly," she agreed. "Men and money. They're what make the world go around, for a woman, anyway. It didn't take me long to find that out. So I got myself a job, waitressing in a joint on Rush Street. I stuck there a year, long enough to find out what made the wheels turn and to get myself a closet full of pretty decent clothes. Then I started hitting the agencies again." She laughed bitterly. "This time, they didn't laugh—but they didn't throw any contracts at me, either. What do you think they wanted to know?"

  "Experience?"

  "No. They all asked me one question: what connections have you got? When I said none, they shrugged and that was that. How does a girl get connections? And what did it have to do with a girl singing, anyhow? I made up my mind to find out, and I did—in a hurry."

  "Who'd you ask?"

  "The guy who owned the joint I was working in at the time." Her voice dropped. "What he told me was a shock. Don't get me wrong. I knew about the birds and the bees. After all, I'd come from a country town and I'd been on as many hayrides as anybody. But I didn't know that it could be a cold-blooded, cut-and-dried racket. I didn't know that a girl who wanted to break into a joint as a singer had to rub some manager's hair the right way—meaning the way he wanted it rubbed and when he wanted it rubbed—otherwise he wouldn't okay her to an agency. Or that she had to join a union and have agency representation before he could put her on the payroll. Or that the agency wouldn't touch her without an okay because selling one girl to a joint was peanuts but maybe, if she had a good okay, the agency could sign a whole string of shows to the joint. It's a screwy, complicated set-up, but it makes sense in a hardboiled, dollars-and-cents sort of way. Do you follow me?"

  "Yeah. What'd you do?"

  "What could I do? I was determined to be a singer."

  "So you got in the hair-rubbing business."

  "I'll say I did. I got myself some low-cut dresses, a new hair-do, and practiced showing my teeth in a big, sweet smile—and I started hanging around the Silver Cloud, over on Clark Street. Eddie Sands' place, in case you don't know."

  "I know."

  "Well, once I understood the ropes, it wasn't hard. Eddie had an eye for big girls—and I was big. Also, I hit him at a time when he was getting a lot of trouble from his wife. She was chasing around, raising hell, giving him a hard time generally, and he needed somebody with a big, soft shoulder.

  Well, I gave him a good look at mine, and I made sure it smelled good, too. He tried it a couple times and, first thing I knew, I was in solid. A week later I had a union card, an agency contract, and I was up on the bandstand every night singing tra-la with the rest of the hep cats."

  "How to be a success."

  "Not a success, just a singer. That was a start. All I got was fifty bucks a week as salary, another thirty or forty, if I was lucky, as kickback from drinks I pushed onto customers—and, of course, whatever I could chisel out of Eddie. He wasn't stingy—I'll give him credit for that—but a singer can't wear the same gown every night and most of the money I was making went for clothes. Eddie helped me as much as he could, but his wife was taking him for a ride, like I said, and he was pretty well strapped. That's the way things were when I first ran into Arnold Richmond."

  "That was how long ago?"

  "Something like two years. Anyway, I got to talking to him one night and he mentioned that he might be able to put me next to some nice dresses cheap. Naturally, I was interested. He drove me out to a place on the north side. It was just a crumby house from the outside, but inside there were racks and racks of clothes, men's and women's. Brand-new stuff with the price tags still on. In one of the back rooms, he showed me a pile of gorgeous formals—they were just heaped on a bed—and right away I could see they were high-class numbers, most of them from places like Bonwit Teller, Saks, and places like that. Stolen, of course, but they made me drool. I forget how many I bought, but I got them for half what I'd have had to spend normally. After that, whenever Richmond had anything he thought I could use, he'd let me know."

  "The beginning of a beautiful friendship," I murmured.

  "Not a friendship, exactly, just a sort of mutually profitable arrangement, because I was interested in anything that spelled money and I was curious as to how the
racket worked. By doing favors for him once in a while and by keeping my ears open, I found out that he was a sort of local agent for a big-time racket. Stolen merchandise was being routed into Chicago from all over the country, and he was the contact for a gang of distributors. Clothing was just a part of it. Furs, jewelry, cars, machinery, musical instruments, optical equipment, guns—anything that was movable and could be sold for a good price, they'd handle. The take they were making was fantastic. By the time it was split up, of course, it wasn't anywhere near what the stuff would have sold for originally, but I could see that the guys who were heading the racket were coining money."

  "So you started rubbing Richmond's hair?" I speculated.

  "God, no!" She looked at me as though I'd made an idiotic noise. "I'd graduated from that kind of act. Besides, I'd found out it's possible for a girl to play hard-to-get and to end up wearing diamonds. I'd been giving Eddie the new treatment and it was working swell. That's when I started collecting that ice you found. A kind of insurance, you know."

  "Tax free, too."

  "You bet." She smiled faintly. "Anyway, what I did—and this is important—I happened to mention Richmond's racket to Eddie one night. He'd known that Richmond was peddling things, of course, but he hadn't caught on to how big it was. Once I explained it to him, he was real interested."

  "I'll bet."

  "Sure. Why not? Everybody's looking for a way to make a quick buck, aren't they?"

  "Even me," I admitted.

  "See, that's what I've been saying, isn't it?" She settled down beside me again and, perhaps unconsciously, her hand stroked my arm. "Well, Eddie started inquiring around, but it didn't do him any good. He found out that Richmond was fronting for somebody else, but he couldn't find out who the big guy was, not without letting Richmond know that he was trying to cut in. Then, sort of accidentally, we got a break. A guy had been coming into the joint pretty regularly, spending a lot of money, and making a play for me. I was giving him the hard-to-get routine, but he acted real hard hit, and one night, when we were having some drinks, he asked me how I'd like to have a television set. I told him I'd been dreaming about one. He took down my address and the next day a truck pulled up and a couple guys carried that in." She waved at the DuMorell console. "All I had to do was initial a piece of paper."

  She laughed softly.

  "No kidding, it kind of floored me. I'd given the guy nothing, not even a hope, really, and here he gives me a thing like that, that's got everything from soup to nuts. When Eddie saw it, he said the guy was a prime sucker. Well, the next time he came in, I thanked him, of course, and then I began to see the light. The guy was warehouse manager for the DuMorell company. I found out he got the set for nix. All he did was make out a phoney order blank, ship it out to me, then fake the inventory at the warehouse so it would look like it was still in stock!"

  I whistled softly. "Pretty neat."

  "That's what I thought—and Eddie agreed, when I told him. To make a long story short, Eddie and I went to work on the guy, I sort of suggesting that I'd go for him in a big way if he had a good bankroll and Eddie sort of showing him how he could get a bankroll without anyone being the wiser. After all, the DuMorell company is a big manufacturer and there were thousands of sets going through their warehouses every day. Eddie didn't need to draw him much of a picture. He knew how to work it; the only thing he didn't know was how to cash in on the set-up. When Eddie got around to explaining it to him, he fell for it but good."

  "So?"

  "So the guy went to work and started pitching these sets to Eddie. They sell for eleven hundred each, and Eddie was to take care of the selling. Whatever they got, they were going to cut up between them." She paused and moistened her red lips breathlessly. "Eddie had two hundred twenty-five of them stashed in a loft somewhere."

  "Two hundred and twenty-five!" I stared at her. "My God, that's more than a quarter-million dollars' worth!"

  "Uh-huh." She snuggled her head against my shoulder. "And guess what—" she whispered, "—now that Eddie's dead, I'm the only one who knows where they are!"

  NINE. Strange Bedfellows

  SHE was warm against me and the pleasant scent of her tantalized my nostrils. "What do you expect me to do?" I asked.

  "See Richmond. Make a deal with him. He can get rid of them for us."

  "Gold's the boss."

  "Then see Gold. He won't turn down a quarter-million dollars' worth of merchandise."

  "You could see him yourself."

  "That's just it, I can't."

  "Why not?"

  "Look at it this way: We've got the stuff. They'll want it, but it takes a man to talk that kind of business, and you're clever. You can make them listen to you."

  "But why me?"

  "You're in a jam, and—well, something about you makes me trust you. I know you wouldn't cheat me or hurt me. I like you. I guess I like you more than any man I've met in a long time." Her lips were suddenly close to mine and the heat of her breath brushed my nose, then two fiery petals touched my mouth and clung moistly, while the age-old message surged through my body, reminding me that I was a boy. "Think about it, darling," she whispered huskily. "It's the chance of a lifetime, for both of us."

  When my toes stopped curling, I thought about it. In an unscrupulous sort of way, it figured. Richmond or Gold might have erased Sands to protect their own racket. Sands died without telling where he'd stored the stuff. Knowing the location of the loot made this girl Ginny chairman of the board.

  I didn't kid myself about Ginny's motives. I'm no Casanova and it wasn't anything chemical, either. It was something bigger than either of us—dough. Like she said, a guy could talk a better business deal than she could. I was handy. Also, I was in a jam and, if I didn't behave, she could toss me to the cops and get somebody else to front for her. If she thought I fell for her lovey-dovey act, that was okay, too. As she said, it looked like the chance of a lifetime for both of us.

  "Where's the stuff stored?" I asked.

  "In a loft on the west side. I've got the address and the key. When you make the deal, I'll take you there."

  I nodded. "You're sure Sands didn't tell Richmond where it was?"

  "Positive. Why should he?"

  "What's the name of this guy, the warehouse manager?"

  "Bob Libby."

  "Has he been paid off yet?"

  "Eddie took care of him. I don't know how much."

  "We don't have to fool with him?"

  "No. He's been hanging around, trying to buy me, but I'll get rid of him fast now."

  "Maybe he killed Sands. Think so? Maybe Eddie gypped him and—"

  "Could be. The hell with him, though. We've got ourselves to think about. Honey, what do your girlfriends call you? Russell?"

  "Rusty. Red hair, see?"

  "Rusty. I like that. How soon will you try to talk to Richmond?"

  "If I talk to anybody, it'll be the boss-man, Gold."

  "When?"

  "It can't be too soon." I looked at the clock; it indicated 10:15. "I'd better get going."

  "Darling-?"

  "Yeah?"

  "You'll be real careful, won't you?"

  "That's for sure."

  "And you'll come back here tonight, won't you?"

  I grinned. "Guess I'll have to. The cops will be keeping an eye on the hotels. You won't mind if I use your sofa, will you?"

  "Rusty, honey!" She sounded reproachful. "Aren't you forgetting we're partners now? I wouldn't make you sleep on any old sofa...!"

  I laughed and pulled her into my arms. I kissed her in a way calculated to assure her that I was a man she could depend upon to return in good health and in a hurry. When I left, a couple of minutes later, I was the proud possessor of a key to her apartment and I had the .38 in the right-hand pocket of my jacket.

  I walked west to Rush Street, nagged a cab, and had it drop me a half-block from the Crilton Hotel. At a corner newsstand, I bought a copy of the Tribune. The Tribune doesn't favor t
he lurid journalism that the Journal does, so I didn't rate a banner head, but I was right smack on the front page, only a couple columns away from Eisenhower, McCarthy and a blurb for the Republican Party.

  SUSPECTED KILLER

  DUPES POLICE

  Russell Forbes, Implicated

  In Sands' Murder, Escapes;

  Singer Questioned Again.

  I stood beneath a street light and read the story. While being questioned, it seemed, I had strong-armed my way to freedom and eluded pursuit. The police of five states had been alerted. Commissioner O'Connor had requested a written statement of the facts from Captain Matthews, preliminary to deciding whether or not Matthews or Trottmann should be cited for negligence. Fia Sprite had been turned over to the state's attorney's office for additional questioning.

  On an inside page, I found a brief paragraph about Giselle Kent. No blaring headline, just a factual story to the effect that the body of a girl, believed to be that of Giselle Kent, who had been wanted by police for questioning in the Sands' case, had been discovered in an alley behind a dry-cleaning establishment on Cicero Avenue. Superficial examination revealed that she had seen strangled. The coroner's office was seeking to determine whether or not she had been a victim of attack...

  Seeing it in black-and-white, like that, it hit me hard. "Hell," I thought, "a young kid gets murdered in cold blood— and they've got to bring sex into it. To them, it's just another possible sex-crime item, something for the suburban matrons to shake their heads over. Goddamn them."

  Crying wouldn't do any good. My hand pressed hard against the gun in my pocket. Richmond, Gold, or one of Sands' buddies, whoever it was, I'd get him. He'd find out how it felt to grovel and die.