Stone Cold Blonde

by Lawrence Lariar

  “And such information would help you?”

  “It might put the fix on Bryant.”

  “The answer, Herr Conacher, is yes.” He said it flatly and honestly, but with an obvious finality, brought about by his immediate rise from his chair to indicate that our charming tête-á-tête was at an end. “More than that, I would not tell anybody on earth, nor do I wish to be quoted. But, since you seem straightforward and frank, and promise some punishment for the beast, I have given you what you asked for. And now I must go upstairs and see how Lisa is doing. I bid you good night, and good luck.”

  He came to the door with me and bowed me out. I had only a quick interval, a fleeting second, during which I looked up the narrow stairway. There was a dull red light burning up there, on the upstairs landing. But I could have sworn I saw the pale and mask-like face of Lisa, staring down, her eyes riveted on me.

  And then the door closed behind me and I was out on the street again.

  CHAPTER 12

  The sleepy-eyed druggist in the corner store sold me a pack of Chesterfields and did not mind when I held him at the counter, making small talk. It was already close to midnight, but I was in no hurry. Neighborhood stores are always of interest to the lone operator. Neighborhood stores cater to neighborhood people, and drugstores can be mines of undug information, since the family druggist holds the key to many intimate secrets. Of all the merchandise marts, the local pill and powder emporiums are man’s most true and faithful servants. They toil as shopkeepers, from early morning until the world is asleep, ever on the alert for the jangle of the phone, the important prescription or the wandering Willie in search of a pack of butts.

  This store was well situated for me. Over the druggist’s shoulder, through the neon-lit window, I could see down the block, to the lamppost standing not too far away from Paul Simoneck’s shadowed doorway. The street was empty.

  I said, “So you know Paul Simoneck? Nice guy.”

  “Not bad, for a refugee. But he ain’t exactly healthy.”

  “He didn’t look so well tonight.”

  “Another one of his spells? I sell him a lot of kidney stuff.”

  “Well, he’s an old man,” I said. “And he’s got his problems. Take that Lisa broad. I’ll bet she’s no tonic for him.”

  “A dizzy dame.”

  “I’ll bet you sell her a lot of Benzedrine.”

  “I sell her nothing but cigarettes,” the druggist said. “What a bundle of woman. Jesus, I wouldn’t like to be married to a big one like that. A guy would have to own an iron backbone to keep her happy.”

  I laughed out loud at his joke. He enjoyed my laughter. He began to build the gag, the way all amateur comics play up an accident of humor. It was important to keep him laughing, so I joined him in the crescendo of hilarity, until his pale face filled with the blood of his amusement.

  “What does she do for a living?” I asked. “I figured her for a lady wrestler.”

  “You could be right. She could murder a man with her right arm.” A customer came in and he moved away to distill a Coca-Cola. He mopped the fountain quickly and came back with all the laughter gone out of him. “Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola. This is strictly a nickel and dime neighborhood. God, my mother warned me I should take up plumbing. Even plumbing would be better than this. What were we talking about?”

  “Simoneck’s niece. You were saying that she has some kind of a job?”

  “I was?” He began to smile again, remembering his one great joke of the evening. But it faded soon and he sank back into his accustomed groove, his vacant contemplation of nothing at all. “I really don’t know. She’s not around here very much.”

  “I thought she lived with the old man.”

  “Listen,” he whispered, tapping the words out on my jacket, “if she lived with Simoneck for one week, one week I say, you know what would happen? They’d be carrying him out in a box. She’s nuts, you understand? She lost all her marbles, somewhere over in Europe.”

  He continued to talk about her, but my ears were out of touch with him now. I had my lead. There was a chance that she might come out now, a long shot, but well worth the playing. My business is compounded of long and watchful gaps, moments when the eye takes up the sentinel watch while the brain is lost in theory and speculation. The street was almost all asleep now, only a few yellowed windows glimmering in the gray and black background of the night. A lone policeman hove into view and swung out along the pavement, passing through the small circle of light under the street lamp, his head raised, whistling a tune to warm his lonely beat. A man with a lunch bucket followed him through the shadows. From somewhere far uptown, the blare of an impatient horn howled and hooted. A baby wailed a thin and high-pitched whimper, upstairs, through many walls.

  And then a crack of light showed in Simoneck’s doorway.

  And she was out on the street.

  She paused to wrap her raincoat firmly around her great body, and put her hand to her mouth and studied the block, looking both ways, slowly. She pulled up her collar and rammed her hands into her pockets and began to walk, at a goodly clip, toward the west. She hesitated on the corner, running her eyes uptown and down, probably hunting a taxi. She found none and crossed to the opposite corner. I gave her enough room for comfort and left the drugstore.

  It was a bad time of night for playing games. She would see me if I got too close, because of the hour, because of the dead streets, because of the flat and empty area of town through which we moved, across toward Broadway. This was the manufacturing neighborhood, the section of the city where commerce filled the streets during the day. At night only the cats prowled these ugly canyons. She moved, far ahead of me now, in a steady rhythm, her high heels clacking and echoing in the tight silences between the main arteries of traffic. She was headed for Greenwich Village and I closed the distance between us, so that I would not lose her when we reached the lighted area beyond Fifth Avenue.

  She slowed perceptibly as she mingled with the pedestrian ebb and flow. And when she slowed, I felt the first prickle of unease.

  Somebody was following me.

  The nerve-end vibrations of some buried instinct told me so. I heard no sound of him, I saw no sign of him, yet my brain translated the feel of him into dead certainty. Once, long ago, on a wooded slope in France, I had scouted a patrol alone, crossing under the dark trees until I stood in an open clearing. There were two ways through the forest, and one way led over a ridge and past a deserted farm. Across the meadow, from some distant pit, our machine guns spat and hummed, setting up a background of chatter as I circled the farm, half crouched and moving with caution. And suddenly the music of the bullets ceased. And suddenly I knew that he was behind me, off to the left, crawling my way for a shot at me. I was on my belly before the first shot whistled over my head. I fell abruptly, as though some mysterious hand had pushed my body to the earth. And then I squirmed around and faced him, watching the soft silhouette of the slope for a sign of movement. He moved once, to cock his gun. He never moved again. Because I caught him as he stood against, the sky, trapping him out of the reflexes of the mysterious force that sometimes warns a man of his pursuer.

  But this was different. I was moving in a well-lighted area, in the tide of late pedestrians who always haunt the Village pavements until the wee hours. It was difficult to turn and measure him. He walked somewhere behind me, I knew. He had been walking behind me for some time now, through the deserted streets on the way across town. It would have been easy to spot him, if I weren’t following Lisa Simoneck. For a small moment I weighed the value of my purpose. But the figure of Lisa, a half block away, held me to my course.

  She took me on a tour of the Village. She piloted me teasingly through the crooked streets, slowing once to light a cigarette. It began to rain, a chilling drizzle, not hard, but damp enough to wet my face and make me yearn for my topcoat. We were passing along Bleecker
Street now. She turned left and strolled down a darkened side street, lined with an assortment of squat buildings, ancient barns now converted to studios and apartments for the Bohemian gentry. She was home. She ducked into a doorway and I heard the hinges squeal and the sound of the latch clicking in the silence.

  I gave her five minutes, pausing under a sheltering doorway and squinting back at the edge of the lighted street through which we had passed. There was a small restaurant on the corner, a red neon sign a-flicker in the gloomy mist. An old awning hung over the store front and there was a fogged shadow under it, an area of inkish gray, a void that taxed my eyes as I stared. Something moved there. I saw the vague shape of a man, an ordinary man of average height, a man who wore a gray hat and sucked at a cigarette, because a tiny spark of light, a red pin-point, brightened as he dragged. I strained to identify him, hating myself for my speculation. He might have been a passerby, someone who had stepped out of the drizzle for a casual butt. Or, could he be the other one—the man who had followed me from Simoneck’s?

  The cigarette sailed through the air in a straight line for the curbing, and the little light went out as the rain engulfed it. The man had moved back and away now, off-stage, to the front of the restaurant, which was around the corner. It was an effort to fight down the urge to move up there and face him. But the prickling tickle of my curiosity died when I thought of Lisa.

  I crossed the street and opened the door that she had opened.

  The hallway was a dark black square of nothing at all but smell and silence. There was a door on the right because the thin light from the street picked up the shape and substance of the doorknob, so that it glimmered weakly in the gloom. I lit a match and examined the black bell dots on the left wall. There were three of them in a line, with letter boxes underneath them. But there were no names under the buttons. Eenie-meenie-minie, but no moe. I pressed eenie, and stood back to wait the door clicker. Nothing. I pressed meenie. Almost immediately the buzzer sounded and the door swung open under my hand and I was in a narrow hall and staring upstairs at a man with a beard.

  “Jake?” he yelled. “Look, kids, it’s good old Jake, home from the wars at last. Come on up, Jake. Come on up, the whole goddam gang is here.”

  A woman came out to join him. She was holding a tall glass and peering down at me through the gloom and singing something in French. Behind them, I caught the sound of a party, slipping into high, a surge of noise after she had opened the door. I started up the stairs, whistling merrily.

  “Jake!” the man with the beard said, and clapped me on the shoulder, leaning all over me, as heavy as a bundle of concrete. “You old son of a bitch,” he said, spewing a damp spray in my ear. “When did you roll in?”

  “Easy,” I told him. “You’re fracturing my shoulder, old horse.”

  “Good old Jake,” he muttered.

  “Who said Jake?” somebody shouted. They were piling out on the landing, surrounding me. “Where the hell is the old bastard?”

  The French cutie pulled me onward. She had me by the hand and was massaging it gently, in the manner of somebody’s mother petting somebody’s child. She nuzzled her cheek up against me and led me into the room. There were about ten of them inside, all of them staring at me, all of them as loaded as bar rags. The French girl stepped back to look at me. She batted her pretty green eyes at me and began to laugh in a high, incredulous giggle.

  “But this ees not Jake, after all,” she yelped.

  “Is so Jake,” the man with the beard said. “Guess I know Jake when I see him. Just Jake’s size.”

  “Is not,” somebody else said, another doll, but not as pretty as the French one. She came close and squinted at me and shook her head. “Is not Jake. But he’s cute, he’s real nice. Give him a drink, Leo. He’s even nicer than Jake.”

  “Tell that bitch you’re Jake,” the bearded man pleaded.

  “No dice,” I said. I took off my hat and scratched my head, playing it the way it would appeal to them. “Jesus! I’m in the wrong flat.”

  “Nonsense, Jake.” Somebody laughed.

  “Why the hell don’t you admit you’re Jake?” big beard asked petulantly. “Am I asking too much?”

  “Give him a drink.” The French wench tittered. “One beeg drink, Leo, and he will be Jake. Correct, mon ami?”

  “One big drink,” I said. “And I will even be Herbert Q. Hoover.”

  Big beard said, “Good old Jake. Always did have a sense of humor.”

  “Ask him if he wants a drink,” somebody said. “Maybe Jake wants a drink.”

  It was a large room, a studio barn with a broad window on the backyard end. There were sackcloth drapes from the ceiling to the floor and a profusion of furniture from every period known to man. There weren’t enough seats to go around and some of the party people were squatting on the floor in various poses of informality. On the street side, a couple squirmed on a wide couch, playing wrestling games. It was catch-as-catch-can between a small well-molded girl and a character in plaid shirt who had long arms and an expert’s reach. They were going through an assortment of sinful emotions, paying no regard to the rest of the people in the room. She squealed and giggled but you couldn’t hear her because the noise rose and fell in a wild cacophony from an uptuned record player in the corner. The loud speaker blatted out the latest in bop, so loud that you couldn’t hear the melody.

  On the far side of the room a door was open, wide enough so that you could see it was the john. You could also see the girl who sat on the throne, but it wasn’t Lisa. I wondered where the kitchen was.

  I said, “You bet I want a drink. Lead me to it.”

  “You want some special stuff?” the French gal asked. “Gigi will find it for you.”

  She tugged me through the open door, and before I knew it, we were crossing in front of the seated queen who waved to us drunkenly as we passed before her; through another door and into a long and narrow kitchen, as neat as a city garbage dump.

  “American homes, she are stupid,” sang the French bird at my elbow. “Where else have you ever see a water closet made up for a hallway to the kitchen? Ah, strange, strange America!”

  “You don’t like it here?”

  “Mais, oui.” She plucked a few invisible threads from my lapel. “Especially the American man, I am of great admiration.”

  “I’ll take Scotch, lady.”

  “But in Paree ees altogether different,” she sang on. “Have you ever—?”

  “Is there another room in this hole?” I asked.

  “What for you want another room?”

  “A bedroom maybe?”

  She tittered all over me. “So soon, petit chou-fleur?”

  “Why not?”

  “But we have only just met.”

  “Maybe it’s love at first sight,” I said.

  “You Americans, how bold, how sure, especially the little ones like you. What ees it with you?”

  “L’amour,” I lisped in my lousy French. “How about the bedroom?”

  “But there ees none, cheri.”

  “There must be one somewhere around here. Where does Leo play his personal games?”

  “There is only the couch in the studio.”

  “The studio is too busy, lady,” I said. “And I don’t like to perform in public.”

  She giggled some more. “For this, I do not blame you. Even in Paris we do not behave ourselves this way. There are places where for a small sum, one may go and see such things, but never do we do such before other people.”

  I said, “You’re sure there isn’t a small quiet room up here? You’re sure it’s only a three room dump?”

  “I am positive,” she cooed. “I have been here before, often, but if you like, I have a cozy place not far from here. We have but to go uptown on Fifth Avenue to my room.”

  “Not tonight, Josephine.�
�

  I did not have time. We backed out of there, and when we walked through the water closet, the queen was gone. I took the French girl off into a corner and sat there nodding at her and squeezing her hand while she gushed and rambled. Her name was Gigi and she was a Parisian model who had exported herself into the big-time posing industry in New York. She had worked in the French Underground, she told me, and lifted her skirt to show me a scar on her thigh where a German grenade had wounded her. She went into great detail explaining what happened to her when the Nazis brought her in to a Hun doctor for general repairs. She had crossed the ocean after the war and had appeared on several magazine covers, the head only, because her figure was too busty for the boys in the censorship bureau. She was anxious to find out what I did and I told her I was in the picture department of Life magazine. She almost pushed her womanly charms in my face. Around us the party yowled and squealed, with a few new participants arriving to join the melee.

  I said, “Don’t these bums ever go home and go to bed?”

  “You are a sad type,” Gigi said. “Eees it that you do not enjoy the party?”

  “It is that I have the headache,” I said. “The mal de tête.”

  “I have a method for curing such an ailment.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “Do not laugh at Gigi. Let me massage your scalp, cheri.”

  “Not tonight. It won’t work tonight.”

  “With Gigi it always works.”

  “You have customers?”

  “Ask Leo,” she said. “For him I have done it.”

  “The beard? Does he own this dump?”

  “But of course. You have not heard of Leo Bellaman? You have not seen his paintings, perhaps?”

  “Perhaps I have not.”

  She pulled me to my feet, hell-bent for the far side of the room and the easel. They had backed the art equipment into the corner, but there was a big picture on the stand a nicely handled head and shoulders deal, done with a smooth, sure technique. It was Gigi, smiling out at me in full color. She stood back to admire her likeness and I gurgled the expected phrases of approval.