Blondes are Skin Deep

by Louis Trimble

  “And no trace of Johnny besides being at that party?”

  “None,” Chimp said. “It was the second brawl in a week. Johnny was at both. That’s all I know.”

  “He checked out of here?”

  “Four days ago,” Chimp said. “Maybe he’s shacking up.”

  He rose. I didn’t urge him to stay. I got up too and we shook hands. He went out, taking his cigar with him. I looked at my watch and found that it was just short of midnight. Getting the phone book, I put through a call to Considine’s house.

  I got a quick answer. The voice was young and feminine. I asked for Considine. “I’m sorry,” she said. “He isn’t at home. He’s working late.” I thanked her and hung up. The voice had been very nice. I had an idea it was his daughter.

  Time meant very little to me except when there wasn’t enough of it. I had formed the habit of working odd hours and sleeping when I could. So I felt fine as I drove the coupe down to the financial district.

  It took me some time to find Considine’s office. It was on the far edge of the district, bordered by dark, warehouse-lined streets that went on down to the river. It was silent this time of night, an old structure, obviously classy in its earlier days, but running down now like the buildings all around it. There was a light on the top floor.

  No watchman was in sight; the doors weren’t even locked. Probably, I thought, because some of Considine’s clients might prefer to do their business after hours. I took the stairs two at a time.

  There were three stories; the top one had four doors opening onto the hallway. Two were dark and locked—those by the staircase—and the next one had a light behind it. The one still farther down was dark, too. Lettering on the lighted door read, JOSEPH CONSIDINE, BROKER. I rapped. There was no answer, no sound at all. I tried again and rattled the handle. The door swung open; it wasn’t locked.

  I stepped into an outer office. There was a small switchboard, a desk, some easy chairs, a few filing cabinets. It was neither shabby nor pretentious. It was just an office. Habit made me glance at my watch as I went in. It was twelve-thirty.

  Two doors opened from the office, one on either side. The one to the left was dark, that to my right had a light behind it and Mr. Considine in simple black letters on the frosted glass of the door. I rapped there.

  I got no answer and tried that door, too. My impatience was beginning to work. I just let it go. It seemed to me that if a man had lights all over his office he should be awake enough to hear sounds as plain as my heavy pounding. If he wanted to sleep, he should go home to do it.

  This door wasn’t like the other. It wouldn’t yield. I looked at the keyhole. It was a Yale lock. I stood there and glared at it.

  Then I heard a faint clicking, a scuffing sound on a hard surface. It seemed to come from somewhere behind the locked door, only distant.

  I listened again but there was no repetition. Nerves, I thought, but I went to the hall door and looked out anyway. The hallway was dark except for a small night light in the high ceiling. I stepped toward the stairs a little and my foot made a scuffing sound on the rocklike texture of the floor. It was the same kind of sound I had heard before, only much louder.

  I went quickly to the head of the stairs now. I couldn’t hear anything but my own breathing. I thought, “Nerves,” again and turned to go back to the office.

  Nerves, hell. The door nearest the stairs was unlatched. It stood open a good inch. It hadn’t been that way before.

  I stood there, balanced a little on my toes, listening. A few creaks came after a while—the inevitable settling sounds an old building makes at night. That was all.

  Because of the light I had seen from the street below I had left my flashlight in the car. I had only my cigaret lighter and it was of little help when I pushed open the door and stepped into the room.

  Only it wasn’t a room. It was no more than a corridor with another door opening off it to the left and one to the right. I tried the one to the right first and found a lavatory. The one to the left was partially open, just as the door into the hallway had been. I went through it, still burning up my lighter fluid, and the first thing I did was to bark my shin on a chair.

  After that I caromed a hip off the sharp edge of a table, said the hell with it, and hunted for the light switch. It was on the wall by the door.

  I was in a big room. A long table stretched almost the length of it and there were chairs ranged along one side of the table so that they faced across it to a huge blackboard that covered one wall. Behind the chairs were windows but they were tightly curtained.

  This, obviously, was Considine’s set-up for his clients. The blackboard was scribbled with race results, and one large space was devoted to odds on the baseball season. Like Hall, Considine covered every league from the majors down to the local softball leagues.

  There was nothing else in the room. I went its length to a door at the far end. This one was closed but not locked. When it opened I was looking at a small office. I could see only a portion of it from the doorway, enough to know that it was the room I had been unable to get into a few moments before. The lights were on, so I snapped off those in the big room and stepped in.

  The place was in a mess. A fairly strong smell of cordite hung in the air. A desk stood askew with its drawers pulled out and papers scattered all over.

  “A robbery,” I thought first.

  Then I saw otherwise. The room contained a single, large metal filing cabinet. The second drawer from the top was pulled out some distance, making a shelf about four and a half feet from the floor. Considine hung over the shelf, like a man with a bellyache.

  That was one thing he would never have again. There was a hole in his face. He was dead.

  3

  I DIDN’T even think of the police. That was a habit I had never got into.

  The room was small and that, I judged, was the reason for the cordite smell. That and the fact that it hadn’t been too long since Considine had been shot.

  I had a good look at his features. He was half hanging over the drawer, his feet splayed out behind him, a look of incredulity on his face. He had been smiling affably, I supposed, smiling at someone he knew, and the shot had not been expected. There was still the trace of his smile on his face—it was a point worth noting, I thought. No prowler had done this job.

  I went around behind him. The bullet had come out at the back of his head approximately on the level it had entered the front. He had been standing, so had his killer. It was another point.

  It didn’t mean a damned thing.

  He could have been sitting at the desk and been hung on the cabinet simply to give that impression. I made a superficial check for the bullet, but I was in too much of a hurry to hunt thoroughly enough to find it. This was no place to be if the cops should happen to come.

  I had an idea that Hall might have ordered this. But I tossed it aside almost at once. He wouldn’t use Chimp that way. If Considine had been beaten, yes—though Chimp was usually a good judge of just how much a man could stand.

  Besides, Hall would want his money. Killing Considine was no way to get it.

  I looked again at the hole in Considine and it began to register. It was huge. Only a blunderbuss could have made an opening like that. My stomach began to do dips. I tried to shake the idea but it clung.

  The only person I knew who favored a gun old-fashioned enough to make such a hole and to produce such a strong powder smell was Johnny Doane. He was a small man and he had a fondness for large things.

  • • •

  By the time I had the car a safe distance away I was sweating. I had hurried but the time had gone with agonizing slowness. I had laid Considine on the floor to enable me to get at the filing case. It was awkward because I had put on my driving gloves, but already I had left more fingerprints than I cared to think about.

  The filing case and the desk yielded about as much as Considine’s pockets. There was a nice list of Considine’s customers, indicated by
code number instead of names, but I had seen that at Hall’s—he had duplicates. The names meant nothing to me without the master key Hall would have. They were of little interest, anyway: there were no sums that even smelled like a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar deal.

  I did find two items that might have been of importance. There was an old birthday card in Considine’s desk. It had been mailed from New York approximately a year before. There was no return address on it and the signature inside was simply, “Love, Edna.”

  On Considine’s desk was a memo calendar and on the page uppermost was a notation: Send E. flowers. Under it was a telephone number. I copied it. Considine’s pockets had the usual junk a man carries. His wallet was empty except for numerous cards, three one-dollar bills, and a small snapshot. It was of a girl in a bathing suit, in her late teens. She was small and dark with his features made feminine, but with a wide-eyed appearance of innocence no man in Considine’s business or income bracket could possibly have. She was pretty. On the back was a scrawl: Maretta, 18th birthday. Seaside. Which solved it neatly; she was his daughter.

  There was nothing else. A small safe in one corner of the office refused to open. I left it and took off.

  It wouldn’t be long before the police discovered the body. And I wondered if Johnny had lost his quick temper to the extent of killing a man. It had never failed, I thought. Wherever Johnny Doane was, there was trouble.

  I parked at the hotel garage and made tracks to my room. One thought was uppermost in my mind: to find Johnny. This was the first time any job for Hall had been quite so hot, had needed the finesse this one looked as if it would need. But right now Kane Hall wasn’t my first consideration. It was Johnny Doane. I was sure I knew the little guy about as well as I did myself, and I just couldn’t see him, unpredictable as he was, blowing a hole in a man.

  If I could find him I could settle that question once and for all—and go to work on the other angles. I worked my brain over, recalling Chimp’s words. The emphasis there had been on Johnny’s intimacy with Considine, and Considine’s daughter. It was a chance, slim, but the only one I had for now.

  The clerk in the lobby paid no attention as I went through, despite the fact that the clock over the desk read two a.m. It was that kind of hotel.

  The Considine place was fancy and fashionable and set some distance from its neighbors. I had to go up a sweeping driveway to get to the house and I parked right by the front door. There was a light on downstairs.

  My ring produced a quick, light footstep. The door came open and I was looking at the original of the picture in Considine’s wallet. Only without the bathing suit. The girl was dressed in a simple outfit of dark pink, but her figure was fully as good as the picture claimed. She was older by a few years, but the look of wide-eyed innocence was still with her. She was small, about Johnny’s size, which was that of a slightly overweight jockey.

  There seemed to be only slight curiosity in her face when she looked at me. I said, “Miss Considine?”

  “Yes?” She was a little reserved, waiting.

  “I’m Nick Mercer,” I said, “a friend of Johnny Doane’s.”

  A quick brightness came to her lovely features, as if she had been waiting to turn it on.

  “Johnny spoke about you,” she said. “Won’t you come in?”

  I went. The house, in spite of its size, had a feeling of warmth, a kind of coziness about it. There was no stark modernity here. But it was a little too ornate for my taste. Too determinedly expensive. I followed the girl into a rather small living room. Not, I thought, the one they used for affairs of state.

  On a coffee table near a divan was an electric percolator, elaborately silvered, with cream and sugar containers to match, and two cups. On the fragile edge of one was a faint smear of lipstick. The other was unused.

  “I was waiting for Dad,” she said. “But perhaps you’ll have coffee with me.’

  I said no, I couldn’t stay long. “I was looking for Johnny,” I said. “It’s important; I came down here to see him.”

  She said, “It must be important.” She laughed, a lovely sound in keeping with the rest of her. “I thought I was the only person who stayed up so late waiting for someone.”

  I said, “You and your father must be close.”

  She gave me an odd look, quick and rather sharp. “Very,” she said.

  I perched on the edge of the divan. She sat down too, at the other end of the coffee table from me. She offered me cigarets from a box. They were my brand. She shook her head when I held the lighter toward her.

  “You must have been one of the persons who called earlier,” she said. “Were you looking for Dad?”

  I said, “Yes. I called. Did someone else?”

  “I remember your voice,” she said. “Somebody else called just before you did.” I thought, if it had been Johnny she would have recognized his voice as well. Unless he had deliberately disguised it. That made no sense.

  She asked, “Did you locate Dad?”

  I said, “I couldn’t raise him.” I stopped again. Damn it, what could I say? Tell this child—she was twenty-one at the most—to warn Johnny? Not without involving myself.

  “Look, if you see Johnny …”

  A line of shadow brushed across her small face, touching the darkness of her eyes. “You sound so—so insistent. Is something wrong?”

  I was ready for that one. “Johnny’s my partner,” I explained. “He came down here nearly a week ago. He hasn’t reported in. I haven’t heard from him at all.”

  She put a finger to her cheek. “I saw Johnny—let me see …” Her smile reached out and touched me. “Yesterday. Of course, it was yesterday.”

  “Yesterday,” I repeated. “He checked out of his hotel some time ago. Where is he staying?”

  She made a little shrugging motion. “I didn’t ask. We took a drive and had tea at a place up the river.”

  My God. Doane, the social lion. I said, “Was he—did he seem all right?” Johnny had never failed to show anything that was on his mind.

  “Shouldn’t he?” The smile came again. “I suppose so. I really don’t know him very well.”

  Not very well, I thought, but there was that warmth in her voice.

  This girl’s quietness, her innocence, baffled me. I tried again, “Did he make another date?”

  “I do know him better than to expect that. Johnny just pops up. But I’m sure he’s all right, Mr. Mercer.”

  I bent to crush my cigaret out in an ashtray. There were three butts in it. Three half-smoked cigaret butts that had been more than stubbed out, they had been shredded.

  I had a picture of Johnny Doane sitting where I was, his quick nervous hands plucking a cigaret butt to pieces until the remains were nothing but shredded paper and tobacco.

  There was nothing to tell me that the butts were fresh and yet, I thought, this was hardly the kind of home where the ashtrays would remain unemptied from one day to the next—probably not even from one hour to the next. These would not be Johnny’s tell tale leavings from yesterday’s visit.

  I started for the door. The girl rose and followed me. I said, “Tell Johnny to stop making a fool of himself, will you? Tell him I’m trying to help. He’ll know what I’m talking about.”

  Once more I saw the worry touch her, stronger this time. “If something really is wrong …”

  “Johnny will know,” I said almost too sharply. Inside, my bewilderment was churning itself to anger; I had to get out of there. “Thank you, Miss Considine.”

  She held the door for me. “Good night, Mr. Mercer. Come again when you can stay longer.”

  I said good night, wondering if she was laughing at me. I was still wondering it as I drove off. I made a lot of noise going away; then, two blocks from the estate, I turned and came back near the entrance as silently as possible. I parked a half block down the street, got out, and spent the rest of the night in shadow across from the driveway.

  By first daylight I decided that
Johnny Doane was either not coming out, had left before I arrived, or had another exit. I went back to the hotel to sleep on it.

  That was no good either. Leaving a call for nine, I hit the pillow, went out, and came to with a telephone bleating at me. It was the desk, reminding me. I felt like hell, groggy from a too hard and too short sleep.

  I spent the next hour with coffee and the morning paper. There was no news of the murder at all. If the cops had it, they weren’t releasing anything yet. I put in a call to the Considine residence and got a male voice. I asked for Considine.

  “I’ll take a message,” the man offered.

  I hung up, grinning a little. That had been no butler. The voice was pure cop.

  4

  I WENT to work. Insofar as I could see, my only hope of finding Johnny was through his contact with Considine or someone who knew Considine. Hall might not appreciate the fact that I was spending my time hunting for Johnny, but I salved my conscience with the thought that I was doing so in connection with Considine—and just might turn up a lead for Hall.

  I couldn’t get my mind off the one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Johnny Doane was a good detective and, as far as I knew, an honest man. I was certain he would have followed every lead; within a week he would have turned up something worth reporting to Hall. And yet there was no news at all.

  I didn’t like to think it but Johnny just might have got greedy. The idea of money, lots of money, did strange things to people.

  Since I couldn’t do anything with that idea, I let it lie and went to work. All I had was a telephone number and a note to send flowers to E. The E could be the Edna of the birthday card I had found in Considine’s desk. I called the number.

  A voice answered, “DuMar’s Flowers.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I thought it was Brigg’s laundry.” Hanging up, I checked the phone book and got the address of DuMar’s.

  I went downtown, located DuMar’s Flowers, and went inside. A young man whose voice matched the one that had answered the phone came up to me. He had the deferential air of a man about to show expensive jewelry. He wasn’t going to push anything.