That didn’t mean he wasn’t in there—he might be sleeping it off, or ducking loan-shark enforcers or gamblers’ goons looking to shake money out of him. I’d seen him wearing their bruises many times before.
So I tried the drugstore downstairs, where the druggist, the soda jerk and the cashier all knew him, though only the cashier (a pretty brunette) seemed to like him at all. He was a regular customer, particularly at lunchtime, often had sandwiches at the counter, but hadn’t done so today. Hadn’t yesterday or the day before, either.
That cashier was a case in point: women liked the guy. Pete Pine was small but handsome, or anyway handsome enough, with dark curly hair. Whereas his organ-grinder buddy Bardwell had little squinty eyes, Pine had big dark, long-lashed Robert Taylor eyes. When it came to build, he was more Alan Ladd, slight but wiry, and when he wasn’t drinking, he seemed shy, quiet, even gentlemanly.
But after a woman became acquainted with Pete Pine, she was as liable to get punched as kissed.
Which was why I disliked the son of a bitch so much. I just don’t like men who knock women around. Call me old-fashioned.
Even the cockiest cabbie will admit that the odd-angled streets of Greenwich Village confound him; local residents claim to have no trouble navigating, but the rest of New York remains bewildered.
So my next cab deposited me to fend for myself on Eighth Street, near the Village Barn, a tourist trap, and soon I was walking among coffee shops and bookstores and sidewalk art displays, past females in black tights and bearded males in striped shirts, often paired off, though not necessarily with the opposite sex. We had another overcast, cool day, but everybody wore sunglasses anyway. A lot of dogs got walked down here, so you watched your step, and I was happy to be one of the few sidewalk-trodders not wearing sandals. At least it wasn’t monkey shit.
Lyla Lamont lived on one of those cobblestone side streets rife with converted stables and carriage houses. Her building was a three-story brick pile that had been whitewashed, its shutters painted green, ironwork painted black. Similar buildings lined both sides of this narrow street, all overseen by the only gas lamps left in the city.
Lyla was on the second floor. I’d been here a number of times, picking up past-deadline artwork when she was doing her strip Miss Fortune for Starr. The strip had been pretty risqué for family newspapers, sort of a female Zorro, and fairly popular, particularly with adolescent girls still working out their sexuality. There were paper dolls, too, with Miss Fortune and other cuties in their lacy underwear, also popular, particularly with adolescent boys still working out theirs.
La Lamont was fairly tall but not willowy, more curvy, an exotic beauty in a Maria Montez kind of way. I would come to the door, she’d be in a black silk dressing robe, smoking a cigarette like Rita Hayworth in Gilda, with one pale, perfect leg slipped outside the robe like a dare.
She would hand me the art between big slices of cardboard, say, “Don’t scold me,” and shut the door. In other words, she would raise my expectations, then immediately lower them. If you said she was a tease, you’d be off by half a compound word.
What a big, plush woman like this was doing with a squirt like Pine, I couldn’t imagine. But rumor had it she drank hard and smoked reefer and slept with anybody of either sex who struck her fancy. This might have intrigued me if I hadn’t been the guy who had to come around periodically to shake overdue artwork out of her.
The last time I’d opened this green door, up three little steps from the sidewalk, had been two years and a few months ago, right before Maggie fired Miss Fortune’s creator for unreliability. I wondered if Lyla had changed much in that time.
I went in and looked up the narrow flight of wooden stairs to the second-floor landing where, I’ll be damned, there she stood. The first thing I noticed different about her was the lack of a black silk robe.
She was, as the 25-cent paperback writers are wont to say, stark naked.
Stood there pale and white as the flesh of an orchid, her legs endless, her hips flaring, the waist narrow, breasts high and sweeping outward like a threat paid off by her dark erect nipples, a mane of gypsy curls brushing her shoulders, its raven blackness rivaled only by the startling snarl of ebony below her belly button.
Lack of attire be damned, she seemed poised to come down the steps, apparently in a hurry, her dark eyes so wide they were almost popping, and she was one step down when a second figure flew out on to the landing, a male figure, small, compact, wearing a t-shirt and rolled-up jeans and a face contorted with rage.
Pete Pine.
He shoved her hard from behind, like the guy on the cover of that Suspense Crime Stories comic book at the hearing, and she was falling toward me as I hurtled up the stairs. She didn’t tumble, she had the presence of mind to grab onto a banister, which didn’t stop her fall, her hand sliding down the wooden pole just as she began to do a header, but I was up there in time to catch all that long-legged nakedness in my arms.
For a second, my balance went, and I felt myself tipping backward, and we would have rolled down those narrow stairs in a beautiful demonstration of that classic phrase ass over teakettle, but I managed to lean forward and catch myself, hand clutching the banister even as I clutched her.
“Jack,” she said, eye to eye with me. She had a throaty alto that went nicely with the rest of the package.
“Lyla,” I said.
And I eased her out of my arms and she held onto the banister, and I glared up at the wild-eyed Pine, who was breathing hard, like he’d just lifted a piano. The runt had the fearless look of a madman, but I probably looked much the same—he was like a burning building I was running into, to save a baby, only I didn’t want to save this baby. I wanted to throttle it.
I expected him to retreat into Lyla’s apartment, but instead the crazy little bastard leapt at me, and then he was on me, smelling like a tavern at closing time, taking me backward, and I went bumping down on my back, keeping my head up so I didn’t smack it against the wood, with him riding me, traveling maybe a third of those steps before Lyla put herself in our path, stopping us with her thrust-out bottom as she hung onto that banister with both hands.
Somehow my legs found purchase, a foot on one step, the other foot on another, and shoved up into Pine, with as much force as I could muster, sending him onto his back. I glanced at Lyla and for the first time realized she had blood on her mouth and a bruise blossoming beneath one eye.
He’d been beating her.
A nice little lead-up to shoving her lovely ass down the stairs.
He scrambled off, retreating a step or two, and I got to my feet and reached up and grabbed him by the t-shirt and pulled him forward, then thrust him back, so that his head hit the steps hard. I did that maybe four times, until the wildness went out of his eyes and they started rolling around like marbles.
But even half-unconscious, he managed to kick a powerful little leg out and catch me in the stomach, and I let go of him, reflexively. Again he retreated up the steps. Managing not to puke, I scrambled up after him. As I did, I glanced back down the stairwell at Lyla, maybe halfway to the street now, getting out of our way. Too many fists and feet were flying to suit her, and who could blame her? She just held onto the banister with both hands, her back to the wall, her bare breasts heaving.
In that glance, however, I noticed that she was smiling— blood trickling from the corner of her mouth down her cheek, but smiling as two men fought over her in a stairwell. There was something evil about it. Also, something that propelled me upward where I caught the little prick (that’s the missing part of the compound word, by the way) on the landing.
I tackled him and, like a squirming dog, he tried to escape my grasp. A elbow caught me in the side, once, twice, three times, and then he was out of my arms and I was still down there on the wooden platform that was the landing and he was kicking me, in the ribs, in the stomach, not terribly hard because the space was limited and the angle was wrong, but like stings from a persiste
nt insect, the blows took their toll. Finally I caught his foot—he was in tennies—and twisted it and he went down hard on his side.
We got up simultaneously and he began swinging on me, tiny stinging pellets. They were hard little blows, not doing me as much harm as the women he liked to hit, but sharp little smacks, that too, took a toll. He was so close to me that brewery smell engulfed us both. I assumed a traditional fighter’s pose, leading with my left, and jabbed him in the chest three times, bam, bam, bam. When he paused in his punching, to grab a breath and maybe try for my head, my right fist shot in and turned his face into a smear of red, and he looked like a kid who got into the strawberry jam.
He managed to bring a fist up from his waist and slam me in the temple and, laugh if you want, but I saw stars. Maybe not comic-book stars, but I saw the damn things, and I was woozy on my feet and grabbed onto him in a classic boxer’s clinch, to keep my footing.
I don’t think I threw him down the stairs. Not exactly. I held him away from me and I shook him and I’m sure, pretty sure, I didn’t let go of him intending him to fall. Fairly sure.
But fall he did, windmilling his arms, then doing a somersault that looked almost athletic—bouncing off the narrow side walls enough to slow him some—and Lyla made no move to halt his fall or slow it, either. Nor did she scream. Her smile was gone, her expression almost clinical as she watched the little bastard reach bottom, making a sound like a bundle of kindling tossed off a truck. He lay still.
Had I killed him?
Lyla’s eyes flashed up to mine.
Have you killed him?
Self-defense. Chandler would back me up, no problem. Then why was I shaking? And if I’d killed him, had I also taken care of the Dr. Frederick problem? Was the doc’s death avenged? Not that I cared to avenge that particular death.
Then the little cartoonist got to his feet. He didn’t bound up, but he got to them. He stood down there by the wall mailboxes, weaving just a little. Then he seemed to regain himself, and his bloody face sneered up at me and, in a childish display that was damn near amusing, held up his middle finger.
Whether it was for my benefit, or Lyla’s, or both of ours, I couldn’t tell you.
I thought about yelling down to him that the cops wanted to talk to him. That Frederick was dead, murdered, and he was wanted for questioning.
But why warn the bastard? Even if I’d had the breath left in me to do that....
Then he was gone.
Lyla looked up the stairwell at me. She appeared small, but then she was better than halfway down those stairs. “Are you all right, Jack?”
“Never better,” I said, and passed out.
I woke up on a couch in Lyla’s living room. She was sitting beside me using a damp, cool washcloth on my face. She’d taken time to wash the blood off her own face, which was understandable. She looked quite lovely. Her eyes had an Oriental cast and her mouth was full and lush and as red as the blood she was cleaning away.
She was also still very naked. Nude.
I once heard a comic in a Village club say that the difference between men and women was that a nurse would bend down to recover a male accident victim’s severed arm, while the man with his remaining arm would reach out a hand to fondle the nurse’s bottom. Well, “ass” is how that comic, Lenny Bruce, had put it, and his joke came immediately to mind as my eyes fixed themselves upon those thrusting naked breasts, jiggling as her hand worked at soothing my red badges of courage.
“Why don’t you put something on,” I said, remembering the black silk robe.
“I’m in no rush.”
Speaking of rush, all of the blood remaining in me was rushing to one region.
“No, really,” I said. “It’s distracting. There’s things we need to do. And talk about.”
“What kind of things?”
“Put something on.”
“Party pooper.”
She rose. Did I watch her go? The long back tapering to that narrow waist above the dimpled, perfect globes of her bottom. Of course, I didn’t.
I sat up.
This was Lyla’s living room, and while distinctive and distinctively arty, it was not your typical Bohemian wood-and-block-bookcases, mattress-on-the-floor affair. The furniture was Spanish, stuff dating to the twenties and scuffed up some, but ornate and all to a theme, as opposed to the mix-and-match Early Thriftshop look of most Village pads. The walls were white plaster, though the one opposite where I sat had been painted black, with white, Picasso-ish figures stroked onto it, waving their arms, apparently dancing to some cool cat playing a hot instrument. The fireplace, too, had been painted black. Framed, somewhat expressionistic paintings by Lyla of herself, full figure—she was nude in those, too— rode on the walls. A Hi-Fi squatted in the corner, on the floor. A scattering of LP’s ranged from classical to Sinatra.
This nudity bit actually didn’t surprise me. She’d always been nude under that silk robe, when I’d previously come calling. And that she posed for herself in a full-length mirror when she was painting or working on her comics was legendary in the business. Half a dozen cartoonists had told of walking into her working space (sometimes at various downtown comic-book publishers’ offices) to discover her starkers, looking at herself in the mirror, brush of black ink in hand, her drawing board cranked up to accommodate a standing artist.
Legendary perhaps, but not a legend: Miss Fortune was the spitting image of her creator.
She came back in wearing a red beret.
That’s it. A red beret. And a red, devilish smile, and of course yards of ghostly pale flesh. She pulled up a velvet-topped Spanish stool and sat before me with her legs wide, hands on her thighs. Pink peeked out of the thicket at me.
“Better, Jack?”
“Oh yeah. Much.”
“I never figured you for a prude.”
“Take a closer look. You’ll see that was never the case.”
“Ah! So I did get a rise out of you.”
“What the hell’s the deal with you and Pete Pine?”
She shrugged, a little chagrined. Utter nudity was no embarrassment, but admitting to a relationship with Pete Pine was worth being ashamed over.
Couldn’t agree more.
“We’ve been seeing each other,” she said, her voice softer, not at all sultry. “Going on two months.”
“Has he been living here?”
She shook her head. “I need my privacy.”
“Yeah, well, I’m kind of on the modest side myself. What’s the attraction?”
“Initially,” she said with another shrug, the breasts coming along for the ride, their tips soft now, “it was a work arrangement. I ghosted several weeks of that comic strip he’s doing for you.”
“Is that right?”
The red lips offered up a sly smile. “Didn’t you notice the improvement in the art?”
“I don’t read that strip. A lot of what we syndicate leaves me cold.”
“That sounds vaguely disloyal.”
“Reading crap like Crime Fighter isn’t what I’m paid for.”
“What are you paid for?”
“Dealing with trouble that talent gets themselves into. You know, like coming around here and half-getting killed in a stairwell fight, and dealing with a completely crazy broad parading around in her birthday suit. Is the kind of trouble I deal with. Is what they pay me for.”
She looked at my lap. “Must be terribly hard work.”
Her smile was impish, which didn’t play that well. I mean, sirens can’t really pull off “imp.”
She was saying, “I got a big charge out of ghosting that stupid strip for the very people who so heartlessly killed Miss Fortune.”
“We didn’t kill it. You did. You missed deadlines, and anyway, we’d lost about a third of the papers, as the costumed hero thing passed its peak. Nothing personal.”
She crossed her legs. It was almost a relief. “So Jack... what trouble brought you around? I don’t work for you anymore, as you�
��ve so graciously pointed out.”
“I was looking for Pete. Bardwell said he might be here. What the hell was going on? The bastard was beating you. Are you all right?”
I’d been so caught up in the punishment I’d taken, I hadn’t thought to ask. I felt about as gentlemanly as Pete Pine.
“I’m kind of used to it,” she said, touching the mouse under her eye. She shrugged again. “Pete’s a nice guy, when he isn’t boozing. And I don’t mind it a little rough. I like a man to be a man. But Pete gets mean, when he’s got a full tank.”
“He’s a psychopath.”
“Maybe a little.” Another bobbling shrug. “I was through with him. That’s what the brouhaha was about, us breaking up. He wanted me to do things I wouldn’t do.”
I tried to conjure what those things might be, but didn’t have that good an imagination.
“So, Jack, I’ll try again. You weren’t just wandering the Village, heard a scuffle, and rode to a damsel’s rescue. You were looking for Pete. Why? Why were you looking for Pete?”
“Dr. Werner Frederick.”
“What about him?”
“Somebody murdered him.”
Her eyes tightened. “I can tell you aren’t joking. What does it have to do with me?”
“Nothing. It only has to do with Pete. He was seen at the Waldorf...that’s where Frederick had his office...”
“I know it is.”
“Pete was seen pounding on Frederick’s door and shouting threats the night before last. Drunk as a skunk.”
“Dr. Frederick was murdered right there? In his suite?”
“Yes.” My brain was finally starting to work again. “Listen, can I use your phone?”
“Sure.”
It was in the kitchenette. I got Chandler at the Tenth Precinct almost immediately. I told him I’d had a knock-down drag-out with Pine, but that it had been about me busting up a brawl with his girlfriend, nothing to do with the case, and that I hadn’t even got into the Frederick situation with the guy before he split.
Seduction of the Innocent (Hard Case Crime) Page 12