“That dump? When did you arrive?”
“Yesterday.”
“How long are you staying?”
“Let me ask the questions,” Jordan said. “What do you know about Anita Coburn?”
“The girl they fished out of the ocean? I meant to call.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I was waiting till the police had more than a corpse and a few sordid facts.”
“What have you got?”
“Nothing they don’t.”
“You must have heard something.”
“Heard it from whom?”
“I’m asking the—”
“You listen now. I’m a commercial photographer. Not a newshound. When your boss snaps his fingers do you come up with information the cops don’t have?”
“It’s most of the job,” Jordan said. “Look in your files for photos of Miss Coburn.”
“My files are in my head,” Pixley said. “And, sorry, there’s not a thing there.”
Jordan gave it a bigger laugh than it deserved. Pixley was right. He had no business badgering him. The mild joke was Pixley saying no offense. Not yet.
“She wasn’t a nobody,” Jordan said. “She’d won a raft of beauty contests, and was on the card at the Alcazaba with her uke.”
“Girls like her are a dime a dozen,” Pixley said. “Some, you don’t need a dime.”
Talk about offensive. “Can you get the photos?”
“I don’t see the rush when you don’t have a killer, but I’ll do what I can. By the way, your friend, what’s her name, I haven’t heard from her.”
“Mollie?”
“Not her. The colored girl. Does she still want to sit for me?”
“Cherise doesn’t have regular habits,” Jordan said. “I’ll tell her you’re waiting.”
“Not forever.”
Two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon in a cheap hotel, and Jordan didn’t know what to do with himself. Would it hurt to turn on the TV? He was paying for it, wasn’t he?
A man in a safari suit holding a leopard cub in his lap was talking to a woman with a transparent smile. The cub was full of energy, all claws and teeth, and the woman was keeping her distance. Jordan put his heels up on the mattress a second before a test pattern replaced the picture. He picked up the phone again, asked for long distance.
“I’m sick of murder,” he said. “Talk to me about something else.”
“I’m sick of it, too. Who is this?”
“It’s not a great time for games, Mollie.”
“If you say so. Which murder?”
“This is President 9-9297?”
“You have the right number. The wrong girl.”
A honeyed drawl bolstered a plausible case that he’d been pursuing the wrong roommate.
“I’m Gina.”
“Is Mollie there?”
“Not till Wednesday, or Thursday. She went to Atlantic City. You still haven’t told me about the murder.”
“Leave a message that Adam Jordan called.”
“Why do I know the name?”
“I edit Real Detective. She did some work for me.”
“Say, you wouldn’t be in the market for a fresh face? I’ve been thinking of going into modeling myself. Modeling, or taking up Speedwriting.”
“Let’s discuss it another time,” Jordan said.
“You’re no fun,” Gina said. “Someone who is is bringing Mollie to a party tonight. She couldn’t wait to tell me.”
“Someone?”
“A name I don’t know. First she’s going out to buy new lingerie. Why do you suppose?”
A picture that wouldn’t stop jumping bumped the test pattern. The leopard was gone. The same woman was in a kitchen beating eggs in a bowl.
“Did she say who these everybodies are?”
“How do I know you are who you say you are?”
“You don’t mind talking about her underwear,” Jordan said, “you can tell me who’ll be at the party.”
“I don’t like the way you talk, mister,” Gina said, and hung up.
The woman on TV slid a pan into an oven, and took out a perfect cake. Jordan was thinking that if he wanted to see a fake, he’d tune in the channel with professional wrestlers. He switched off the TV, dialed a local number.
“Greenie, it’s Adam Jordan.”
“How’s it hanging?”
“Comme ci, comme ca.”
Jordan had two distinct images of his reaction, the half-smile the crack deserved, and the hangdog frown that was Greenstein’s walking-around expression.
“You called because you feel bad about the money you owe me?”
“Enlighten me, why don’t you?”
“There’s my fee for helping with the Stolzfus case. And for putting you together with Cherise.”
“You charge for introductions now?”
“I charge for everything.”
“You’re not embarrassed?”
“Often I am,” Greenstein said. “But not around you. Think of me as Cherise’s business manager. I hear you and her are hot and heavy.”
“Not that hot,” Jordan said. “I’m looking for a party.”
“First pay up.”
“Do this for me, and you can write your own check.”
“Scout’s honor?”
“We’re not Boy Scouts, Greenie.”
“What kind of party are you in the market for? Another Negro girl, or something a little more exotic?”
“A party,” Jordan said. “Not a woman. A party.”
“You’re looking for a good time, I can move you up in class from Cherise.”
“When did I ever want a good time?” Jordan said. “Where’s tonight’s party?”
“This is Atlantic City. There’s parties all over town.”
“A party like the one where Chuckie Stolzfus picked up Cherise.”
“It wasn’t at a party. You don’t remember what she told you? The other girl fixed them up, the one who was killed.”
“Cherise likes her friends thinking she’s a hooker, because working on her back is a step up from what she does.”
“Depends how you look at it.”
“I look at it like she does,” Jordan said. “I’d like to catch her act. Stolzfus paid it the ultimate compliment.”
“Everything’s an act with her. You’re lucky your heart didn’t give out like his. She must’ve taken something off her fastball.”
“Where are you—you and Beach—sending her tonight?”
“Call her, and ask.”
“I want to surprise her.”
“You’re the one’ll be surprised.”
“Are you going to tell me, or do I drop a nickel for everything I have on you?”
“Hold your horses,” Greenie said. “It so happens there’s a housewarming on the beach. Cherise is working a single. It starts out a single, and then...you get the idea. Twenty Ocean Grove Boulevard in Margate City.”
“Whose place is it?”
“You’ll recognize him when you see him. Figuring no one sees you first, and gives you the boot.”
A haircut was in order, and nicer clothes. Considering his chance of making it through the door, shopping would be a waste of time. A trim, a shave, and hot towels didn’t do much for what the mirror showed. Probably nothing would.
He woke up starved from a nap. Room service was on the line when he put down the phone. Who crashed a fancy shindig on a full belly?
Jordan hopped a Checker at the head of the hack line, and told the driver to go south. Ten minutes from downtown they’d put the bright lights, every light, behind.
Margate City was nothing to see, if he didn’t count a wood elephant sixty-five feet tall and almost as long, first cousin to the Trojan horse. “Lucy” was built in the 1880s, when zoomorphic architecture was the rage, and had been a tavern, a hotel, a post office. Today she stood with nothing to do, a backdrop for tourists’ snapshots, and an embarrassment to the town fathers developing the old blue collar Rivi
era into a modern resort.
Ocean Grove Boulevard was a thin strip of asphalt from the highway to the sea. Shallow pits in the sand looked to Jordan like miners’ claims in a boomtown goldfield. A few foundations had been poured, but much of the new construction would go up on stilts. The Jersey Shore was a hurricane landfall subject to fierce tidal surges. Winter storms carried a wallop as well.
The home closest to the water shined as brazenly as a lighthouse. Limousines competed for parking space with a smattering of out-of-state Jaguars and MGs. Jordan put his hand on the cabbie’s shoulder. “Stop here.”
“It don’t cost no more to the door.”
“Here’s good.”
A stockade fence strung with Japanese lanterns enclosed the yard. Through the chinks Jordan saw a crowd milling under a canvas canopy, the centerpiece a grill staffed by a cook in a toque. He went in as if he owned the place, or was holding the note. He pulled a bottle of Trommer’s from a barrel of ice. A waiter snatched it away, popped off the cap, and returned it to his hand wrapped in a napkin.
A three-piece combo he didn’t care for banged out stale pop hits. Tonight the music didn’t matter. He moved through the crowd betrayed by his shabby clothes, aware of something else that marked him as different. He was a young man at a party for older men. Old and middle-aged men, and much younger women done up as if they’d been asked to the prom by a campus hero with vulgar taste, and had dressed to please him. Jordan watched them cluster around the old men, giddy as Sinatra’s fan club. In the competition for attention they were in agreement with all points of view, hysterical over every joke.
One or two, closing in on thirty, had the tragic aspect of women beautiful by any standard other than their own. Most were young, several too young even for him, but available to the old men. A paradox: The old men were clumsy with the young women, but confident, and the beautiful women were graceful and unsure. Some were tipsy. No one told them to take it slow.
A slap on the back caused him to crunch down on the bottle. He looked sideways at McAvoy, his former boss. “Why are you hanging around with old farts, Ken?”
“Same Jordan,” McAvoy said. “A day late and a dollar short. It’s my place. The farts are my friends.”
Jordan played the tip of his tongue against a tooth he might have chipped.
“How did you hear about the party?”
“Reporter’s luck. Information finds me.”
A man wearing a phi beta kappa key on his vest pulled a Piels from the ice. McAvoy said something in his ear, and he dug deeper for a Trommer’s.
“Heard about it in New York?”
Jordan, shaking his head, sensed that he was breaking McAvoy’s heart.
“That’s Henry Felder, isn’t it? The public works commissioner?”
“Know him?”
“By reputation only,” Jordan said. “He has his hand in more pockets than a tailor.”
“Under more skirts, too. He’s a jurist at every beauty pageant on the shore.” McAvoy confiscated Jordan’s bottle. “Get another, this one’s cracked,” he said. “Want to hear a good one?”
“A gag?” Jordan said. “Since when do you laugh?”
“I’ve been thinking of coming to you for work. A story for your magazine I’d write under an assumed name. Hub Chase, the pride—make that the former pride—of the Yankees, got himself killed last night.” He paused. “You’re not surprised?”
“How’d it happen?”
“He was with a married lady when her husband walked in on them, and Hub got in the way of several bullets.”
“Can’t use it,” Jordan said. “There’s nothing to it.”
“Same Jordan,” McAvoy said. “Too impatient to learn how events pan out. The lady and her husband have one of those marriages where they don’t give a damn who the other one’s sleeping with when they aren’t sleeping with each other. The husband found them in bed together, and went to the living room for a good book till the love-making took a wrong turn. Hub was choking her by the time he went to the lady’s defense. Hub got the upper hand, and was kicking his ribs in when the loyal bride pulled a Derringer, and put three in Hub’s chest. What do you think?”
“I like what I’m hearing. But it needs more.”
McAvoy smiled at a woman—Jordan didn’t catch the face—and went after her. “Enjoy yourself,” he said to Jordan, “only don’t bother the other guests with your opinions about—”
“Jazz?”
“Anything.”
Jordan walked around the property looking at the girls. Who had appointed him homicide investigator? Why wasn’t it his responsibility to lie, flatter, flirt, tell self-aggrandizing stories, find out how far he could get with Miss America?
Politicians, jurists, lawyers, prominent builders and union bosses were McAvoy’s friends, tough negotiators praised in his editorials as custodians of the public trust. None couldn’t be bought, but even Henry Felder did not come cheap. Tonight’s deal-making was out in the open, a grab bag for the City Hall stalwarts.
A redhead backing against Jordan threw her arms around his neck to keep from falling. “You wouldn’t be a judge of beauty?” she said. “I mean beauty judge.”
“Don’t tell my wife.”
She raised a glass, dribbling scotch down her chin. Jordan gave her his napkin. She crumpled it into a ball as she waved like a reed in the wind. “ ’ll be our secret. Wha’s a judge know about beautiful? I can use a friend with connections, but might com-comp-compromise for a big spender. Wha’s your name?”
“Adam Jordan. Yours?”
“Miss 1952 Jersey Tomato.”
“Do you have a first name?”
“ ’S Miss Tomato to you.”
Mollie hadn’t been this tight the night at his place when he’d purportedly, allegedly, reportedly (a good newsman was careful to include qualifiers in a disputed account) taken advantage of her. He doubted Miss Tomato tumbled into a strange bed without asking What’s in it for me? He’d never believed that Mollie didn’t ask herself the same thing.
Beside the grill he saw a colored waiter in conversation with Beach. Beach, or else his double. Prominent Negroes were kept away from the trough by the power brokers. That Beach was white would make him more unwelcome. He had traversed a line few people crossed, barging the wrong way down a lonely one-way street. Jordan had never heard of anyone allowed to cross back.
It was the wrong time for sociology. Maybe he’d sign up for night classes at NYU, and write his thesis on race relations among the grafters. He hid his face behind the redhead as the man who might be Beach looked his way. The waiter who definitely was Narvin started toward him. Miss Tomato was stuck to his arm as he hurried to the house.
The ground floor was walled in glass on the ocean side, carpeted in tile, furnished in cold modern. A new house on the beach was beyond most newsmen’s dreams. Whose pockets was McAvoy in? No one had ever tried to buy off Jordan with more than a beer. He wondered what he would have done if he’d been told to name his price.
He’d lost the redhead. Without her he felt exposed. Girls swarmed around a trestle table heaped with food, and picnicked on the stairs. He stepped over them to a second-story gallery, and looked down at Beach and Narvin pushing inside.
He rattled a locked door, then tried one that opened. A parchment shade softened the light around a woman crouched in bed. Legs protruding between hers were grizzled above black socks. She glanced indifferently as the door squeaked, and then gave Jordan a smile. Opportunities were lost with a sour first impression.
Jordan backed out. There were voices next door, but footsteps on the stairs sent him quietly inside. The couple in bed could go on with what they were doing. He wouldn’t stay long. If they ever had to run for their lives, he’d be pleased to return the favor.
The man was undressed. The woman sitting up beside him was wearing a broad skirt, and a blouse open to the waist. A bandana was around her head. Jordan didn’t see her face, didn’t want to.
T
he man, on his back, was unaware they weren’t alone. He said, “Let me hear you say it.”
Cherise looked toward Jordan as she had at the bottom of the bay. Saving her from drowning was one thing. His hands were tied now.
“Okay,” she said. “I don’t know nothing about birthing babies.”
The man shook his head. “Make it sound like you’re ashamed to admit it.”
“I don’t sound ashamed?” Cherise said. “Couldn’t we skip this part? Wasting precious time.”
“Not at all,” he said. “It’s good fun. Aren’t you having fun? Say it again.”
Cherise whisked her hand toward the door. Jordan didn’t budge. “Girl gotta do what she gotta do,” she whispered.
“What?” the man said. “I didn’t hear.”
“Ah don’ know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ babies.”
“Come to Rhett, honey.”
Jordan cracked open the door. If anyone was ashamed, it should be him. He backed in again, and swiped at a wall switch.
The man in bed covered his eyes against the light. “Who are you?”
“This room taken,” Cherise said. “Get out or we gonna call to have you thrown out.”
“My mistake,” Jordan said. “I apologize for disturbing you.” He was looking up and down the gallery when he heard Cherise say, “Sorry, Mr. Duchesne, I got to leave.”
“Now?”
“ ’Fraid so.”
“We hardly—we haven’t started. And you’ve been paid.”
“Not by you,” she said. “Lost my concentration.”
“I know what to do to make it come back.” He grabbed her.
“Once it’s gone, it’s gone,” she said. “Let go, please.”
“Who’s this man? What’s he doing here?”
Cherise pushed at Duchesne, who held her tight. “My partner.”
“Partner in what?”
She embraced Duchesne, squeezed his head against her breast. “Show him the camera,” she said to Jordan.
Duchesne shoved her away. He raised a pillow in front of his face.
Cherise buttoned her blouse, adjusted her skirt, slipped into her shoes. “Cost me a considerable piece of change,” she said walking out with Jordan.
“Go back. No one’s keeping you.”
“Heard what I said, I lost my concentration. Don’t want to discuss it. What’re you doing, following me?”
False Negative (Hard Case Crime) Page 21