The Long Night

by Hartley Howard

  Cooke looked at me and I looked at Cooke. He said, “Somebody must hate you pretty bad, Bowman: somebody with a nice twisted mind who wanted to tie you up so you’d never wriggle free: somebody who went the length of murder to put you out of the way. Got any ideas?”

  “In my racket,” I said, “you’re a failure if you haven’t got any enemies. But mine don’t go in for finesse. And a lot of finesse has been used in this affair. Furthermore”—I could hear a voice like honey saying “. . . This isn’t anything a doctor can cure. . .” and I could see shining, jet-black hair and a satin-smooth skin and a red mouth faintly smiling as I went on—“I wouldn’t exactly say all the hatred was directed at me. It wasn’t love that wrapped a belt round Judith’s throat.”

  “Talking about love,” Cooke said, “the neighbours say Miss Walker had a boy-friend—indentity unknown. Her, family, if any, haven’t yet been traced.”

  “Did he pay the rent?”

  “She didn’t need any sugar daddy. She’s been pulling down four hundred a month modelling for Ivor Kovak, the Fifth Avenue fashion mogul.”

  “If there’s such a thing as re-incarnation,” I said, “I’m going to come back with a streamline chassis and big brown eyes and go to work for Mister Kovak.”

  “Keep the belts of your dresses under lock and key if you do,” Cooke said. “And don’t call any tin-badge operators at two in the morning . . . what’re you gonna do when you leave here?”

  “Get the stink of rye out of my nose,” I said. “And after that, I’ve an itch to find out what Miss Judith Walker was before she became a corpse.”

  “Don’t scratch the itch too hard,” Cooke said. He stared at me with no expression in his pink, little-boy face and his eyes were guileless. “There’s more than one kind of louse that bites.”

  Chapter VI

  Beauty in the Parlour

  Rain had seeped through a joint in the window frame and a pool of dusty water lay on the inner sill. An occasional drip to spread the damp patch on the carpet below. There was condensation on the glass panes and on the scarred top of my desk. The familiar odour of damp and dust and ancient linoleum flowed out to greet me as I opened the office door. At three o’clock on a wet, grey afternoon in the Fall, my business premises are less inviting than a camel stable.

  Me, I don’t mind. And clients rarely call on me. When they want me, they send for me. When they want me. I don’t advertise and I’ve got a reputation for being choosy—and expensive. When a guy gets himself into the kind of trouble that only a guy like me can get him out of—he’s entitled to pay.

  My mail was lying in a scattered heap on the floor. Except for one letter, it was the usual mail: an invitation to a veterans’ dinner, a reminder that my subscription to some club or other was still unpaid, an appeal for support for an East Side youth group, two bills endorsed with a request for my early attention. I put them all on my desk and concentrated on the one and only letter with a handwritten address.

  Nice neat writing with rounded loops and an easy flow that usually indicates a woman. The envelope smelled pretty, too. It bore a New York postmark and it was dated first collection the day before.

  I studied it back and front while I took off my coat, changing it from one hand to the other and wondering why the perfume was familiar. The handwriting wasn’t.

  Vague recollections flitted through my mind as I sat down and put my feet up on the desk and lit a cigarette. One of my more innocent habits is to delay opening a letter until I’ve tried to guess the identity of its sender. That’s if it’s a personal letter . . . and if it smells of Paris in the Spring.

  Miriam was a distant memory . . . Berenice still burned deep down in my mind like a dark flame . . . and there was Catherine . . . and Juliet . . . and Isabel. . . . To a guy like me, women are the milestones of life. I travel on and leave them behind . . . a different perfume, a different way of looking at a guy, a different voice—but the same hook for the same fish. And the bait never grows stale.

  I thought about them all while I relaxed with a pleasant lunch under my belt and stared at the envelope through a lazy streamer of blue cigarette smoke. I felt fine. I’d had a Turkish bath and a friction massage and a good meal. There wasn’t much more a guy could ask—at least, not in the middle of the afternoon. And I’d just ducked out from a murder rap, which is something I don’t do every day.

  Thinking about murder closed the circle and I was back again to a swell-looking chick who’d had her rye doctored with K.O. drops. Good girl or bad girl—she’d deserved a better break than she’d had. She might’ve got one if I’d called John Law soon’s I found her.

  You can’t feel fine when you go on tripping over a guilt complex. And I felt guilty about Judith. She couldn’t have known I was meant to be framed; if she’d anticipated the outcome, she’d have got the hell out of her apartment before somebody got the chance to shut her breath off.

  But she’d called me on the phone and she’d led me into a crazy conversation . . . and I might’ve finished up toasting my fanny in the big house up the river. . . .

  At that, I slit the flap of the envelope. And then I quit day-dreaming. There’s something else I don’t do every day and that’s read a letter from a dead dame.

  The notepaper matched the envelope and the handwriting was the same on both.

  In a smooth-flowing script that linked the words together, she’d written:

  Dear Mr. Bowman,

  Your name has been recommended to me by someone who once employed you in a confidential capacity. I have been given to understand you are to be trusted.

  If you are willing to undertake something that might put you on the wrong foot with an influential person, will you please call the above number on receipt of this letter? I shall be in my apartment until ten o’clock in the morning. Should this not be convenient, you can contact me at Ivor Kovak’s of Fifth Avenue, any time between ten-thirty and noon.

  Sincerely yours,

  Judith Walker.

  Nice and brief and businesslike. Nothing personal; nothing intimate. Yet she’d wakened me at two a.m. to call me darling. It didn’t add up.

  Unless. . . . There could be two of them. One to write the letter and the other to talk drink and suicide on the phone. One who wanted to hire me and the other who wanted to frame me. Which of them was the dame in the nylon nightdress?

  Cooke had just returned from a late lunch. I asked him.

  He said I got some interesting correspondence and would I let him have the letter and the dame occupying a drawer in cold storage was Judith Walker because he’d had her identified.

  I said, “Who did the identifying?”

  “A frill called Van Buren—Carole Van Buren. She works for Kovak, too. . . . See you got round to my way of thinking. Would you recognise the voice you made a date with last night?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. One drunk canary sings much the same as another. Has this Carole any idea what her friend got herself mixed up in?”

  “She says not. Gave me the impression she was telling the truth, too.”

  “A copper shouldn’t be impressionable. What’s she like?”

  “White meat. And hair to match. When you call on her, see you keep your mind on your business. And don’t forget I want that letter . . . be seeing you.”

  Kovak’s salon was on the first floor. White marble steps with a pale-green carpet runner curving up from the ground floor level. Greek urns filled with gladioli flanking the foot of the staircase and graceful vases with more flowers at the top. Soft, diffused lighting from hidden sconces. The air was warm and hushed and fragrant like the indoor Garden of Rest at Holtzhacker’s Crematorium.

  Where the marble steps ended, heavy green satin drapes were drawn across an opening built like a Norman arch. And in an alcove, a polished one-piece door bore a plaque that said: Reception, in white letters. With a feeling like I’d come to express my sympathy, I knocked.

  Nothing happened. Somewhere far-off I c
ould hear voices muffled by a lot of intervening doors. The intermittent thrum of a sewing machine came and went. Out in Fifth Avenue the tide of traffic flowed by beyond plateglass doors.

  I knocked again. The one-piece door opened and a dame with a platinum streak came out.

  She said, “Yes . . .?” And she said it with her head on a side and her front teeth showing in a tight little smile and the fingers of one hand clasped in the other.

  “If Miss Van Buren is available,” I said, “my name is Bowman.”

  “Oh . . .?” Her smile withdrew south of her eyes and made a last-ditch stand around her mouth. “Does Miss Van Buren expect you?”

  “No, but she’ll see me. Tell her I want to talk about Judith Walker.”

  “Oh. . . .” What was left of her smile was now an uneasy grin that accentuated the powder-filled lines at the corners of her lips. After a moment, she said, “I see . . .” And her eyes added up my height and my raincoat and my fedora and got a total of copper.

  She had hard eyes with narrow bags under them and she’d used blue eye-shadow to camouflage her wrinkled lids. She also had skinny hands with mandarin nails and thin, bony feet with dark veins showing. Her age was anybody’s guess. From what I’ve seen of gown stores and joints that stage fashion displays, they take a bustless female in her middle thirties, diet and dehydrate her, remove all resemblance to flesh-and-blood femininity, sheath her in a skin-tight black dress, and train her to say, “Modom,” like she was sucking acid drops.

  This dame was sister to all the others. Only this one was a trifle unhappy because she’d worked alongside a model who’d gone and got herself strangled. Just thinking about it deepened the crows’ feet around her eyes.

  After she’d wet her lips and pushed back her hair, she said, “If you’ll wait here, I’ll tell Miss Van Buren . . . you did say your name was Bowman—didn’t you?”

  It wasn’t a question; it was an exit line. It took her through the green satin drapes and away from me and the unpleasant things I represented. I wondered how much she knew of the life Judith Walker had lived before she’d taken a bath in straight rye.

  And, while I wondered, I took a peek beyond the one-piece door. I didn’t find anything of interest.

  It was just an office. It had a metal desk and a miniature telephone switchboard and one of those stenographer’s stools with a sprung back-rest that makes a dame sit up like she’s asking you to see what big eyes she’s got. The desk had a blotter, a fancy ball-pen stuck in a white plastic sphere, and a cream-coloured telephone. On the other side of the office there was a door marked: Private.

  If I’d had time, I’d have gone snooping through there as well. But I didn’t have time. A voice right behind me said, “Did you want to see me?”

  She was an ash blonde with grey eyes and a full, pouting mouth and peaches-and-cream complexion. I guessed she’d be about twenty-three or twenty-four. None of the bloom had worn off yet. She had the look of one of those misted stills they frame outside movie theatres.

  I liked her voice. It reminded me of cool, sweet cider on a hot summer’s afternoon.

  Against the background of green drapes, she seemed to shine with a light she carried around inside. If it was a trick she’d developed, it was a good trick. It made a guy admire her without getting ideas. That doesn’t often happen to me when I meet up with a wren who’s got her face and figure.

  After I’d stored away a mental picture to comfort me in my old age, I said, “Is there anywhere we can have a private talk, Miss Van Buren? I don’t think you’d want——”

  “Miss Gordon said you wanted to ask me some more questions about—Judith. Can’t you ask them here?” The words had no offence in them. She made them sound almost like an apology. Then she added, “The only place is Mr. Kovak’s office and he’s already been disturbed such a lot this morning that . . . you do understand, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I understand. But I don’t think you do. I’m not a member of the police department.”

  “No . . .?” A tiny, soft V formed between her well-defined brows and her eyes narrowed while she studied me down and up with a suddenly watchful look on her face. In that moment, she was a different person. But her voice was unchanged when she said, “I assumed from what Miss Gordon told me that you’d been sent by that man Cooke.”

  “Your Miss Gordon evidently judges by appearances,” I I said. “Although, as it happens, Cooke knows I intended calling on you. It was he who gave me your name. He said you’d been a friend of Judith Walker.”

  She stared down at her beautiful ankles and feet and smoothed her hands over her very smooth hips. The way she acted she wanted to be sure she was playing it safe before she opened her pretty red mouth.

  When she looked up at me again, she said, “I’m getting a trifle confused, Mr. Bowman. If you aren’t from the police, then why are you here?”

  “To find out if you know any reason why Judith should’ve been murdered.”

  “I don’t know of any reason. I’ve already told the lieutenant that this morning.”

  “So he says. But maybe he asked you the wrong questions.”

  “It wouldn’t have made any difference what he asked me. I’ve no idea why anyone should’ve wanted to do——” grey ghosts peered out at me from far back in her eyes and her hands had become restless “—to do such a terrible thing.”

  “Didn’t Judith ever hint there might be someone who . . .?”

  “Not to me. And Lieutenant Cooke went over all this in great detail when he was here.” She went quite still and her brows puckered again. “Who are you, Mr. Bowman? What was Judith to you, anyway?”

  “I’m a private detective,” I said. “If your friend hadn’t—died last night, she was going to hire me to do a job of work for her . . . according to a letter she posted last night. Perhaps you’d care to read it, Miss Van Buren?”

  Evidently Miss Van Buren had no objections. With one corner of her lower lip held between her nice white teeth, she took the envelope from me and removed the letter and read it quickly. Then she stared at my middle coat button like she was reading that, too.

  Eventually, she flicked a swift, upward glance at my face and let go of her lip. She said, “This makes things even more bewildering. I wonder what she could’ve wanted you for?”

  “If we knew that, we’d be a lot nearer knowing who killed her,” I said.

  Carole stopped being bewildered and got puzzled instead. When she’d inspected the letter back and front and checked the postmark and given herself time to reconnoitre the trail ahead, she murmured, “I don’t quite know what you mean.”

  “It’s simple enough,” I said. “Judith found out something about somebody and somebody preferred to have it go on being a secret. So somebody stopped Judith talking.”

  “How can you be sure that’s what happened?”

  “It figures. When I went to school, two and two always made four.”

  “But it would have to be something terrible to make——” She was having trouble with her hands again so she put them behind her. Then she walked slowly to the top of the staircase and stood looking down with her back towards me. If Judith had had the same million dollar walk, I wasn’t surprised Kovak had paid her four C’s a month.

  I said, “It all depends. Some men kill to steal the secret of a bigger and better bomb, others to rid themselves of the surplus wife. And there’s a whole lot of urgent motives in between.”

  With a graceful movement she must’ve been perfecting since she left high school, she turned and looked at me. She said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Bowman, but I don’t think I can help you at all. Judith and I were friends of a sort but she didn’t confide in me to any extent. Outside business hours we saw very little of each other.”

  “You don’t know who her other friends were?”

  “Not her men friends. She never talked about the men she went out with.”

  “But she did have a man or two hanging around?”

&nbs
p; “Naturally, Mr. Bowman. She wasn’t exactly a cripple.”

  “Anyone regular?”

  “I couldn’t say. . . .” Carole Van Buren hadn’t perfected lying. To cover up, she added, “As I’ve told you, we hardly met at all outside business hours. Most times when I did see her in one of the nights spots, she was with a mixed party.”

  “And the other times?”

  “Well . . . I never paid much attention.”

  “But you would remember if you’d seen her with the same guy on more than one occasion . . . wouldn’t you?”

  She admired her slim dainty feet with her head on a side and she didn’t answer straight off. Without meeting my eyes, she said, “I suppose so . . . but I can’t say I was ever very much interested. I lead my own life and she led hers. And one man looks much the same as another in a tuxedo.”

  “You’re a lucky girl,” I said. “At least . . . I hope so.”

  “You—hope so?” She wasn’t putting on an act. Now she was puzzled.

  “Yes,” I said. “Judith was right out of luck because she knew a guy who was bad for her. He’ll be bad for you, too, if he gets the idea you might put the finger on him. No matter how many dames he rubs out, they’ll only burn him once. Better think it over.”

  The ghosts in her wide grey eyes began to get a little bit mad. She came back to me and stood very close and stared up into my face. She said, “There’s nothing for me to think over, Mr. Bowman. If I knew the answers to your questions, I’d tell you. But I don’t. And I’m beginning to resent your persistence. Will you please go now?” The cider in her voice was a lot cooler and not nearly so sweet.

  Later is always the same. There are two ways where it doesn’t pay to rush a dame. “It’s your own neck you’re sticking out,” I said. “I hope nobody treats it the same as Judith Walker’s.”

  She smiled the way a woman smiles when she’s all set to put the skids under a guy. She said, “Nobody will, Mr. Bowman. You can’t frighten me. I don’t know why Judith was murdered, but, whatever the motive, I’m sure it isn’t the one you’ve suggested. I’m also sure the police are quite capable of handling the investigation without any assistance from you.” She liked that line. She’d been building up to it from the moment she’d thought she had my measure.