by Brad Latham
Back at their own table, Myra said, “She’s with one of the embassies or cultural attachés here in New York. I can’t remember which one. I met her at a cocktail party with one of those arrogant bastards with a dueling scar.”
“She seems to go for arrogant types,” Lockwood said. “I’m trying to figure out why he was so pushy tonight.”
“Oh, that’s just England’s upper class. They resent Americans on general principle.”
“I wonder.”
For a few minutes Lockwood toyed with his glass, his knife and fork, and the salt and pepper shaker.
“This may sound silly, Myra, but I don’t want to be here with him.”
Myra smiled warmly and took his hand. “Funny—I was just figuring out how to say the same thing, but you were having such a good time dancing.”
“Hey—I have been.”
“Me, too.” She squeezed his hand and smiled coyly. “Back to the hotel?”
He hoped he wasn’t smirking. “Back to the hotel.”
He caught the headwaiter’s eye, and the man glided over.
Lockwood drew a couple of twenty-dollar bills from his jacket and handed them to Morgan, who protested, “You don’t need all that lettuce—”
“See that guy by the band, Dave?” Lockwood said. “Don’t look now. The one with the heavy-set blond?”
Morgan turned as if he were looking for a waiter, and out of the corner of his eye he looked over the dance floor.
“The limey who’s so rude.”
“That’s him. Can you find me somebody to let me know where he goes tonight?”
“For forty dollars I can find an army.”
“Keep something for yourself, Dave. I want to know every spot he hops to tonight, who he sees, and where he beds down for the night.”
“Suppose him and Brunhilda there go in—”
“Exactly,” Lockwood said. “The guy should stick around for a couple hours after he goes in with her to make sure he’s really down for the night.”
“How about Billy French?”
“I don’t know Billy French, but if you say he’s okay, he’s okay, Dave.”
Morgan smiled and took the two twenty-dollar bills. “You’re going to make yourself a new friend tonight.”
“Ask my new friend to call me from the lobby of the Summerfield at 11:00 tomorrow morning,” Lockwood said. “If he’s done a solid job, there’s a Summerfield House breakfast in it for him, too.”
With Myra on his arm, Lockwood steered them back to 47th Street. It was near one-thirty, and even though it was a Saturday night, the rat-a-tat pace of the city’s heart had slowed. Lockwood noticed that the dozen whores they had passed earlier in front of Walgreen’s had thinned down to four.
“What’s up, Bill?” Myra asked. “Why did you want Nigel and Hilda followed?”
“Too chummy with a lady with a German accent for an Englishman.”
“You can’t suspect him!”
“I suspect everyone.”
“Including me?” she asked coyly.
“Including you,” he answered with a smile.
They didn’t say any more till they got back to the hotel.
Lockwood hadn’t bothered to register Myra, and he was relieved to see that Jake was on duty tonight. He tipped his hat to the night clerk as they went to the elevator. The Summerfield didn’t allow hookers, and Noyes might have tried to throw his weight around about Myra, making a scene that Lockwood certainly wasn’t in the mood for.
Upstairs they eyed each other and smiled. Myra looked shy now, and Lockwood hoped he didn’t look like an eager schoolboy. The moment reminded them that for all their easy familiarity, they still didn’t know each other very well.
“Why don’t I slip into something more comfortable?” she said as she headed for the bedroom.
“Why don’t you?” Lockwood agreed. “Nightcap?”
“Whatever you’re having.”
He made two Canadians in a meditative fashion. Lockwood couldn’t figure out what all this was between him and her, just that it was more than what usually went on between him and the other sex. He had even felt it that first night, when he had thought during the evening that this dame was a hard one, and he wasn’t going to ask her out again. This feeling was a little like carrying a baby around, something precious and fragile that he could roll over and easily kill. While part of him wanted to kiss her off, a stronger part couldn’t. That part wanted to keep her here in New York, right here in his hotel room, so that he would know where she was and that she was safe.
“Come in, Bill.”
He sighed and picked up the two drinks and a couple of paper napkins and entered the bedroom. She was in bed, dressed in something lacy with flounces that told him she had on nothing underneath. She smiled, and he wanted to crush her to him.
“Come to bed.”
“How could I want to crush someone who looks so fragile?”
“Don’t.”
“I won’t.”
“I’m nervous, Bill.”
“I’m jumpy, too.”
“I almost didn’t come today.”
“Why not?”
She took her drink and sipped it and put the cold glass on the night table.
“Am I doing the right thing? I shouldn’t have let you sweep me off my feet last week. Here I am rushing off to spend the night in your apartment.” She gave a little shudder.
“By me, you’re doing the right thing.”
“You don’t think I’m fast?”
“I think you’re fast. And I think you’re wonderful.”
“I want you to think well of me, Bill,” she said. She took his tie in her fingers and toyed with it. Lockwood felt himself getting aroused. “And I want to have fun with you. I feel good with you.”
“I feel good with you. It’s like I haven’t really been with a woman before.”
“Really? Is it really like that?”
“I haven’t lied to you yet.”
She gave a mock pout and gave his tie a jerk. “When do you start?”
“I don’t.”
She pulled him by his tie down to her. Hurriedly, he put his drink on the table and kissed her. She crushed his head to hers, and when they came up for air, she was gasping.
“Promise me you won’t lie to me. I couldn’t stand it. I want to know all about you.”
He grinned and nuzzled her face with his nose. “I won’t lie to you.”
“Get dressed,” she said. “Or undressed, whatever it is you do. Come to bed.”
He took his pajamas to the bathroom, brushed his teeth, and changed. When he came out, the light was off and all he could see was the glow of a cigarette in the dim light. The neon sign from the deli across the street made a faint red glow around the window shade. She’d thrown all the covers back except for the top sheet, and when he came to the bed she pulled him down to her and guided his hands under her night dress.
“God, your hands feel wonderful,” she said.
“Your skin feels wonderful.”
“Oh yes, like that,” she said. “Ummmmm, keep that up!”
“Like this?”
“Yes.”
“And this?”
“Oh yes!”
It wasn’t till an hour and a half later that Lockwood suggested sleep.
“Sure,” she answered and snuggled up next to him. “There’s no more left to me.”
“Not to me either.”
“I’ve never done all this with a man before.”
“It was wonderful.”
“I trust you,” she said. “You can do anything you want to. It’s okay with me.”
“I know. I never knew I had so much. You get me going.”
She rubbed her nose playfully over his neck and up around his ear. “It’s wonderful to get you going. You’re like some great wild stallion.”
Embarrassed, he laughed.
“Oh, I know it’s silly,” she went on. “But that’s how I feel. Sometimes I get so f
ar into it—I did tonight—God, I was some mare and you were my stallion and I was yours and I just gave myself to you the way a mare would to her stallion.” Myra moved her whole length against him, snuggling up. “Does it bother you, my talking like this?”
He grunted and said something about sleep.
She laughed and said, “My exhausted stallion.”
He didn’t answer. Shortly, they both slept.
Chapter 10
“None of these places looks quite—elegant enough,” Lockwood complained, and then tossed the travel folders back across Hilda’s desk.
Hilda smiled her sullen smile, not an expression that relaxed anyone.
“I keep thinking I’ve seen you somewhere before, Mr. Parker,” she said.
“Were you in Paris last fall?” Lockwood asked.
“No.”
“In the Alps—skiing?”
She shook her head. Her eyes shone.
Lockwood frowned. “Perhaps last spring—Costa del Sol?”
Hilda sighed heavily. She could work here at the embassy amid those who moved elegantly through the larger world, but none of it was for her.
“No, I’m afraid my work keeps me at this desk.”
Lockwood gestured towards the travel folders. “And these are the best that Argentina’s got?”
“We have a new resort going up near Mar del Plata,” she said. “Don’t tell the ambassador I said so, but you’re right —Buenos Aires does get dull after a few days.”
In Monday afternoon’s harsh daylight Hilda looked more grim and warrior-faced than she had Saturday night when Lockwood and Myra had bumped into her and Heatherton. The man that Dave had put onto the foreign couple had trailed them to her place in Queens, and then had followed Heatherton back to the Waldorf-Astoria at four in the morning. At breakfast the next day Lockwood had given his new legman, Billy French, another ten-dollar bill and had told him to keep an eye on her for the next day or so. Billy had called in this morning to say that she’d gone to work in the travel section of the Argentine embassy on 63rd between Fifth and Madison. Lockwood had decided to pretend to be a wealthy playboy named Parker and feel her out.
Outside Lockwood waited in the Cord for her to leave the embassy. He felt silly following her up as a lead, but surely something nutty was up—would a hot dog like Heatherton be seeing Hilda only for her favors? Couldn’t he do much better? But maybe the man just had a perverse taste for Viking warriors with hatchet faces.
About a quarter to five, Hilda came out of the embassy and looked about in a half-bewildered fashion and sauntered across the street into a shop called Ernie’s Ice Cream Parlor. Lockwood got out, locked the Cord, and followed her in. He gritted his teeth. This wasn’t going to be a part of this case that he liked.
He walked in, pretended not to be able to easily choose which flavor nickel cone he wanted, and she called to him.
He bought her a soda and offered to run her home in his car. She offered him a drink to cool him off before his drive back to the city. They climbed gritty stairs framed by filthy walls that had been painted dozens of times. Both pretended there was nothing disgusting about the hallway.
“You can see it’s not much,” she said about her apartment. “The Hinkelmanns fell on hard times after the war.”
“Your father?”
“Yes. He went to Argentina, saying there was nothing for him in Germany. There wasn’t much for him in Argentina either.”
“You’ve fixed it up very well.”
“Do you think so?” she said, and for a moment he had the feeling tears might crack the mask of hardness, grim determination, and powder that lay on her face like concrete. “Let me fix you something—perhaps a little Rhine wine with soda? Very refreshing. I have ice.”
They drank, and discovered they had much in common —principally a love of an easy life lived in the most interesting parts of the world, a life lived with money and a penchant for moving on when a place got boring. Lockwood drove her to Manfred’s, an international restaurant he knew in Brooklyn, and there he stuffed her with squab and more Rhine wine. He became a terrific listener, only interrupting the flow from her to him to give her fictitious stories of his life as a playboy in various resorts of the world. It gave the impression, he hoped, that they were swapping intimacies, getting close to each other. He wondered, as he smiled and leaned close to that heavy face, just how much he was being set up by her, and for what.
He’d circled around her work at the embassy, but she was cagey, not giving what she sensed he wanted. Lockwood bought a couple bottles of the Rhine wine, and they drove back to her place.
By the time they returned, it had been dark for several hours. From across the street the lights from the Bijou Theater flickered across the walls of the small living room. It didn’t take long, in the dim light of the apartment—she turned on only one lamp—to have her talking about her work.
“I have a dictator for a boss.”
“Like the Fuehrer?” he said with a smile.
“It’s no joke. Many of us Germans emigrated to Argentina after the war, including my papa.”
Lockwood was surprised. “Your boss is German?”
“He thinks he’s better than us ‘half-breeds.’ My mother was Indian.”
He nodded and smiled. Now he understood. In her life, having a dark mother was what she was trying to beat. She’d just confided her worst secret. She was trying herself out on him. He gave her a deeper smile and felt like a heel.
“Even though he’s an Argentine diplomat, he still thinks of himself as German?”
“Are you kidding? He belongs to the German-American Bund, goes to all their meetings, and I think if he had his way, he’d make Argentina into another district of Germany.”
“And the Argentines let him get away with it?”
She shrugged and took another large slug of wine. “The Germans buy their way into the Argentine diplomatic corps. It gives them freedom of movement.”
Something clicked for Lockwood. He got up and poured her another drink and sat next to her on the sofa.
“I admire Germany tremendously,” he said. “Thank God somebody is going to keep the world from getting overrun by little yellow and brown men, and all the crazy Yids.”
He saw ambivalence ripple across her concrete mask. She was German, and she was dark.
“You don’t look all that political,” she said. “I’m surprised. I thought all you were interested in was skiing and tennis and nightclubs?”
With a burst of easy enthusiasm, Lockwood said, “Those are the important things in life.”
He fixed them another drink then, making hers mostly wine and his mostly soda water. He got her back into a jollier mood by dancing with her. She encouraged him to take off his tie and jacket, and she changed into a loose summer robe. She teased him, and he felt her up in a tentative, gentlemanly way. Shyly, she encouraged him. She’d become a 160-pound tease; Lockwood felt more and more like a mouse or a small fish being tickled along into a hard trap. He wanted to get what he’d come after and get out.
What bothered him as the hours wore on and he had a bit more wine—he was sure he wasn’t drunk—was that she began to look slimmer and more attractive. Her hatchet face evaporated; she looked girlish and as playful as a kitten. Where before her hard flesh looked as if it would fling and pound him like a cement mixer, now she seemed somewhat comfortably firm and solid, someone on whom he could rest for a few hours.
By midnight they were down to a single candle flickering on the mantle, his shirt and pants, and her silk nightie. She was so looped that it wasn’t hard to get her to talk about the men in her life, and she talked about “a certain very aristocratic, and very rich, English gentleman who takes me out.” Lockwood could see she was hoping to make him jealous, and he pretended to be upset by the revelation that she had a lover of high social and financial station.
He discovered that Nigel Heatherton—it had to be him —belonged to the same German-American social
clubs that her boss belonged to, and that the two were close buddies.
Payoff! Just what he’d been looking for. He’d known that Heatherton was no good, and now he had him linked up with the German-American Bund. If Vinnie could come through and they could pinch Heatherton, this case might get solved very quickly.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“Matter?”
“You just went away, my little choufleur,” she said with a pout. “I don’t take the Englishman seriously.”
Lockwood thought he saw a way out of here, and he gave her a smile that he hoped looked phony through all the wine she’d drunk. He looked at his watch and made an expression of dismay.
“I ought to be going,” he said.
“What a pretty watch,” she said in an attempt to distract him. “What kind is it?”
God, she was drunk if she thought that would work. He pulled her hand off his wrist and stood up.
The flesh on her face looked as if it had started to run. She looked frightened and desperate that he might leave.
“You’re not going?” she whimpered. She huddled up as much as possible inside the silvery nightie.
“It’s late,” he said.
“You’re upset by the Englishman,” she said. Her placating smile looked like a grimace. “He is nothing to me. I like you ever so much more. Sit down for a while with me.”
She stretched out her hand, and Lockwood suddenly wanted to crack her one across her jaw, but restrained himself and simply felt guilty over the impulse.
“Give me your phone number,” he said. “I’ll call you. I’ve had all I can handle for one evening.”
“No!” She picked up her glass and slurped the wine down. “You won’t call me, I know it.” She looked at him with one of the ugliest faces he’d ever seen on a woman. “Tell me the truth.”
Lockwood was at a loss what to do in the situation. A few years ago, he might have taken her to bed and left her drunkenly snoring, but he wasn’t that kind of kid anymore. He put his shoes on and heard the clink of glass on glass; she had poured herself more wine. When he left at midnight, she was crying great black creeks of tears down her ruined face.