Gilded Canary

by Brad Latham

  “PUT IT IN ME!” SHE MOANED.

  “PUT IT IN ME!”

  and she grabbed for him, with both hands, hungrily pulling him inside her, grinding against him, as he thrust back and forth, filling her.

  “More, More!” she begged, and he gave her more.

  She began to quiver, every bit of her shaking, the flow between her legs near-gushing around his plunging tool. Their bodies slid back and forth, rocking in an eternity of hot, throbbing wetness, as the two of them exploded in one giant orgasm. They cried out, then collapsed; then, he rolled over and drew her toward him.

  “If you do plan to kill me,” he told her, “please do it that way.”

  Books by Brad Latham

  The Hook #1: THE GILDED CANARY

  The Hook #2: SIGHT UNSEEN

  Published by

  WARNER BOOKS

  Copyright

  WARNER BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright © 1981 by Warner Books, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Warner Books, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: September 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-56607-0

  Contents

  “PUT IT IN ME!” SHE MOANED. “PUT IT IN ME!”

  Books by Brad Latham

  Copyright

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER

  1

  Muffy Dearborn. Walter Winchell. The names for the night, Bill Lockwood mused, as he strode along Fifth Avenue, a pace or two quicker than the chattering throngs that filled the streets. It was one of those good New York summer evenings, the air warm and soft, myriad car horns sounding in the velvet dark, a snatch of Bing Crosby’s latest record issuing from a DeSoto’s speaker.

  Muffy Dearborn. He turned and headed past the massive concrete fountain on Fifth and 58th, aiming for the Plaza Hotel. Cabs and limousines were drawn up before the storied building, depositing couples and quartets in evening clothes, the women fine-groomed and shining in their jewels and gowns, the men immaculate and easy in their tuxedos, monied assurance radiating from all of them, causing passersby to stare, some enviously.

  All there for Muffy Dearborn’s opening night, Lockwood thought, as he crossed the traffic-choked little street, returning the nod of the doorman as he reached the broad entrance steps. He ascended, pushed through the revolving door, turned right, and moved to the small coatcheck booth a few steps beyond. He handed his hat to the girl, casually scrutinized his black bow tie in the mirror behind her, gave it an almost imperceptible tug, then strode back in the direction of the Persian Room.

  As he entered the doorway of the handsomely decorated nightclub, he paused for a moment and surveyed the scene. The room was jammed, the crowd glittering. No question that Muffy Dearborn had drawn them in, helped perhaps by the Winchell item. Anyone observing Lockwood in turn would have seen a man just a bit under six feet tall, with dark brown hair and gray eyes. He looked right in his tuxedo, but would have turned no heads. His compact frame gave little hint of its hard leanness, and his looks were the kind that did not stand out; the kind that took time to make their impact on people, women especially.

  “Mr. Lockwood.” It was Nicholas, the elegant nightspot’s headwaiter. His face glowed with genuine pleasure. “Good to see you again! It’s always a pleasure,” he added, “to entertain—The Hook.”

  “And good to see you, Nicholas.” Bill Lockwood, known as The Hook, pulled out a packet of cigarettes, and tapped out a Camel. A flick of his black and silver Dunhill lighter, and he drew in on the cigarette. “Quite a crowd tonight.”

  “Yes. Kiki Barstow, Amanda Belson, Tommy DeTrouve —the whole Southampton crowd, and probably half of Newport, too.”

  “Not surprising. Anyone other than the social set?”

  “Well, the critics, of course, columnists, some stars, naturally. Betty Grable, Bruce Cabot….”

  Lockwood waited. Nicholas obviously had more to say.

  “And… well…” he considered his allegiance to his employer and tempered the words he’d been about to utter, “A few from… a different stratum of society.”

  Lockwood nodded, understanding. “A little shady?”

  “Let me put it this way. There’re a few here with whom you, in your line of work, might expect to have… professional dealings.”

  “Thanks, Nicholas,” Lockwood said, impassive. “I’ll keep an eye peeled. My usual table?”

  “Of course. Discreetly placed, but with a full view of everything.”

  The Hook’s eyes once again swept the room as Nicholas led him to his table. The crowd was chattering away, no doubt many of them centering on the same thing; yesterday’s sensational theft of Muffy Dearborn’s jewels—$50,000 worth. A blind item in Winchell’s column in the Daily Mirror had intimated that Muffy had staged the robbery herself, for publicity reasons.

  “What social thrush, it’s rumored, set up her own big rock snatch, just before her opening at a posh local nitery? Trying to substitute headlines for vocal chords, say the Broadway wiseguys.” That was the way New York’s top columnist had put it, and for any habitué of the local nightclub scene, it was obvious he was writing about Muffy Dearborn.

  Muffy Dearborn, young, beautiful heiress to millions. Muffy Dearborn, one in a new line of entertainers; those rich enough to be part of the elite, and as part of the elite to believe so thoroughly in themselves that they felt they were able to do anything they chose. And in this year of 1938, what a lot of her crowd chose was show business. Society singers were all the rage, and Muffy was yet another of them.

  Another, and yet individual in her way, with her cool blond beauty, her slender yet inviting body, and an ability to almost bring it off; her voice was small, but it stayed on pitch and it had charm; she had not much emotional or intellectual depth, but what she did know, she could sing about with some feeling, and it came across. There were a lot of things money couldn’t buy, but it could buy confidence, and once Muffy was on that stage, both she and the audience felt she belonged there… for a little while, at least.

  “Hey! Waiter! I don’t want service tomorrow! I want it tonight!” The voice, polished, but with occasional intonations that came from another world entirely, belonged to Jock Bunche, until recently a beau of Muffy. Bunche’s looks matched his voice. He was well-tailored, full-muscled, with a sleek, smooth face and an eye that told you he was ready for business. But the muscles were just a little too thick, making the fit of the clothes a hair wrong; the handsome visage had just a bit of jowl, and the patent-leather black hair was slicked straight back, in a fashion that had passed its prime. Lockwood knew Bunche was a shadowy figure, drifting between the edge of the society crowd and the fringes of the Mob. He was a man who desperately wanted to fit in and almost did, but not quite. Right now he was again proving it; his voice an abrasive intrusion in the muted elegance of the room.

  Fifty thousand in jewels. Simple stuff, really: a necklace, a pair of earrings, and a bracelet. Fifty thousand for a handful of rocks. And there they’d been one minute, snug in Muffy’s suite on the fourth floor of the hotel. And there they weren’t the next, or at any rate after a two-hour rehearsal with the band and three hours of shopping, there they weren’t.

  Muffy had handled it well; shed a tear or two, called the cops, then her insurance company. Lockwood’s insurance company too, as it happened. The Transatlantic Underwriters company was royally stuck for the whole kaboodle—all $50,000, unless The Hook could s
omehow recover the costly pebbles of carbon. Or at least pin the whole thing on Muffy. Mr. Gray, Lockwood’s thin-blooded superior at Transatlantic, didn’t much care which.

  Bunche and the crowd at his table continued their noisy conversation, interspersed with rude laughter and guttural yelps and roars. Odd for the jilted lover to be turning up at his onetime darling’s opening. The papers a few months back had made it plain that the split had been a public and ugly one.

  A little rush of black whooshed by. Jabber-Jabber Jacoby, Muffy’s press agent, had leapt from a chair to greet an arriving critic, the other critic at the table he’d precipitously left looking just a bit relieved. It was Jabber-Jabber’s job to ingratiate himself with the press. He did that best by scramming, was the general consensus.

  “Ed, Ed, good to see ya, glad you could come. You’re gonna have a great time, a great time!” Jabber-Jabber shot it all out, giving ample proof of the validity of his nickname. However, Lockwood knew that despite his ebullient effusiveness, Jabber-Jabber was a man in a lot of trouble.

  Down the toilet with Winchell. That was the word. Somehow Jabber-Jabber had offended the man who was perhaps the most powerful figure in town, possibly even in the country. What Winchell said went. Fortunes could be made or lost on a dozen or so of his words. Shows could rise or fall depending on his whim. Stars could be made or drop out of sight if Winchell willed it so.

  And Jabber-Jabber, who depended on the crumbs columnists like Winchell would deign to insert in their columns, was dead in the area he needed the most. A press agent without Winchell was like a fungus without damp and dark to flourish in. All of Jacoby’s clients had deserted him, once his blacklisting had become known. No guilt by association for them; with Winchell, you couldn’t afford it. Whether Muffy had hired him out of naïveté or a high-born willfulness, Lockwood did not know, but he believed Jabber-Jabber would do anything to insinuate himself back into Winchell’s graces, even to calling in the item knocking his own client.

  Calling it in was the way to put it, bcause poor Jabber-Jabber had no other tool but his mouth. He was truly an illiterate, a kind of joke in the business for that reason, although effective in his way. At least when he was tight with Winchell. Lockwood would return his scrutiny to Jabber-Jabber.

  For the moment though, his gaze again swept the crowd, locking in on a man with the looks and British-American charm of an older version of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Raff Spencer was about Lockwood’s age, thirty-seven or so. An unofficial fiancé of Muffy Dearborn, or so the scuttlebutt went. Former flyer in the Lafayette Escadrille, athletic-looking, tanned, and handsome, with a trim blond mustache and close-clipped, slightly darker hair. Raff Spencer was one of those men who seemed to live without having to work; no one knew what Spencer did, if indeed he did anything. Suspect number two.

  Putting Spencer on hold, Lockwood again cased the tuxedo-clad and gowned audience. Vernon “Two-Scar” Toomey, the mobster who was a fixture on the nightclub scene was there, as expected, surrounded by his pals and his molls. Gangster-dapper, he looked as if he’d modeled his whole life-style on George Raft’s performance in Scarface. But you didn’t call him his nickname to his face. “Scarface” had dash; “Two-Scar” implied something else; that he was the kind of incompetent who’d make the same dumb mistake twice, and Toomey was aware of it. Viciously aware.

  No one else in the crowd arrested The Hook’s eye, and so he studied the band. The usual bunch of aging men with obvious toupees, under the leadership of Cracks Henderson, Muffy’s personal accompanist. Cracks had gotten the monicker, Lockwood had heard, because often his fingers seemed to be playing in the spaces between the keys, a place, some said, Henderson’s mind occasionally retreated to as well. Although number three on Lock-wood’s mental list, Cracks was an unlikely suspect on the face of things, but he was one of those with access to Muffy. There was said to be a maid, too, undoubtedly backstage with her mistress at this moment. French. Beautiful. Lockwood would have to check with her, too—an appealing thought.

  “And now, ladies and gentlemen—the popular music world’s freshest new sound—the golden voice of Muffy Dearborn!” The announcer cut into Lockwood’s musings, the band sounded an intro, and Muffy ambled her way onstage, pelvis slightly forward, shoulders a bit hunched, as if sauntering into the solarium of her Southampton mansion.

  She went right into a song, a newie, “Jeepers Creepers”, by Johnny Mercer and Harry Warren. If Muffy was disturbed by the robbery, she didn’t show it, although it wasn’t likely she’d ever show much. With all that money as a cushion, what really could faze her?

  How they hypnotize!

  Where’d ya get those eyes?

  The up tune finished, to friendly applause, she reached back a year for a ballad, “That Old Feeling,” and in the quiet the steady roar that had continued to emanate from Jock Bunche’s table became more than obvious. Muffy’s eyes darted in that direction, once, twice, and then Raff Spencer rose, walked over to Bunche and bent over him, saying something in a hushed voice.

  “Says who?” Bunche snarled, and then grabbed Spencer by the tie, at the same time ramming his fist up at Raff’s face. Raff partially slipped the punch, Bunche’s blow landing loudly on his cheekbone. Red immediately flared up in the area, as Raff simultaneously sent a wallop crashing into Bunche’s jaw.

  At once, Bunche’s pals leapt on Raff, sending him, with them atop him, crashing into the next table. There was an immediate ripple effect, as chairs teetered and fell, their occupants thudding into the neighboring table, bodies pitching out at odd angles, slamming into furniture and flesh. Tempers flared, the contagion of battle caught up this section of the room, and the sounds of punches and shouts of rage began to fill the air.

  Suddenly a wayward haymaker caught Lockwood on the side of the head, and he found himself flung headlong into the middle of the melee, his boxer’s training automatically sending him into action, warding off blows, then pounding his fist into the wide-open stomach of a man about to autopsy him with a broken bottle.

  Cries, the sounds of shattering furniture, plates, and glasses echoed through the room, the women screaming, their men, some of them, scrambling to get out of the way, the rest eagerly leaping into the fray.

  The space near Lockwood cleared for a moment, and he saw that Raff was in trouble. Bunche and three of his cronies were flailing away at their adversary, who, incredibly, was smiling as he gallantly fought back. Lockwood leapt for one of them, spinning him around, and crashed a right into his chest, knocking the wind out of him, a slight cracking sound vibrating out as massed fist met brittle breastbone.

  Lockwood was on Bunche now, Bunche looking startled as The Hook swept him his way, then murderous as he realized what was happening. Bunche swung, and Lockwood ducked, and ducked again as a second punch came. Then quickly, while Bunche was wide open, he stung in two quick jabs that brought the wet to the bigger man’s eyes.

  “You bastard! I’ll kill you!” Jock Bunche shouted, his face red with fury and two glowing welts, all of it proof of Lockwood’s deadly fistic precision.

  The big man swung a roundhouse right that barely caught the top of his elusive opponent’s head, but the force of it was strong enough to knock Lockwood to the floor. Scrambling up, he found himself face to face with Bunche and two of his bent-nosed associates, and back to back with Raff Spencer, who despite the similar odds he was faced with, had lost none of his lively interest in the proceedings. “You’ve got three and I’ve got three,” he shouted to Lockwood exultantly. “Let’s see which one of us makes the shortest work of them!”

  An adversary threw a punch, and Lockwood, lightning-like, grabbed the rocketing arm and pulled, throwing out a foot as he did so. The sap’s own impetus, deftly levered by The Hook, threw him into an unstoppable drive forward, head crashing into the mirrored wall five feet away, his face a crimson mask as he sank, dazed, to the floor.

  Now there were two, and they were at Lockwood mercilessly, raining punches upon him. He du
cked what he could and absorbed the rest, the steel of his body a near match for the thundering impact of their blows. He fought back, feinting, jabbing, trying to keep them off balance, waiting for an opening, and then finding it. A shot into the mark of Bunche’s confederate and all the air gushed out of him, as the vulnerable cavity just below his chest received the full fury of Lockwood’s hurtling left hand. He went down and stayed there.

  Bunche registered a confused mixture of fear and hate as he found himself facing The Hook alone. He locked his hands and swung down heavily, missing the dodging Hook by a good eight inches, his bear-like hands smashing onto a table, pain contorting his face.

  “You bastard!” he cried again, hurling his bull-like body at Lockwood. They slammed to the floor, Lockwood rolling out from under even as they hit, regaining his feet and crouching as Bunche came at him once more. It was like a Ford coupe hurtling toward an onrushing Packard sedan, as Bunche’s impetus brought him closer and closer to the speeding left hook of his opponent. The collision was all one way, blood spurting out of Bunche’s mouth as bone and flesh met his face at devastating velocity. Bunche sailed backward, careening onto and over a table, crashing through a chair, and winding up on the shining hardwood of the dance floor, his now dead-weight body gently sliding, for a moment, on the highly polished surface.

  Satisfied that Bunche would be no more trouble, Lockwood looked back in the direction of Raff Spencer. Cool and unruffled, Raff was down to one opponent, or, more accurately, one-half of one, judging by the condition of the man he was happily pummeling about. No need to worry about him. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a flash of black streaking out of the room.

  “See you later—looks like you’ve got everything under control now,” Lockwood called to Raff, who grinned and then applied a final clout to the dispirited face of his sagging opponent.

  The Hook turned toward the entrance of the club. Bodies were still pitching back and forth, wood splintering, tuxedos ripping, and it was a struggle to break past, avoiding punches, stepping over bodies, shielding a woman or two as violence thundered dangerously near them. A five-footer, his eyes closed, began hammering away at him, his punches moving with machine-gun speed and arriving like duds. Gently, The Hook lifted him up, deposited him on the sidelines, and pressed on.