Seduction of the Innocent (Hard Case Crime)

by Collins, Max Allan

  “I take it you’re not going back to bed,” she observed.

  “Well, considering I’ve slept almost twenty-four hours,” I said, “I just may have had enough of a beauty sleep. Let me finish dressing, then let’s talk in the living room.”

  We did.

  For inhabiting the same building, neither of us visited the other’s apartment often. But when Maggie did drop by, we normally confined her visit to the living room, where we had entertained Starr Syndicate clients and talent fairly often, the modern furnishings and original comic-art wall hangings providing a proper atmosphere.

  I could tell she’d been here a while—the latest book she was reading, Lord Vanity by Samuel Shellabarger—was split open face down to its place on the coffee table, with multiple coffee cup rings on the glass and a few crumbs from a sandwich or other snack. Her shoes, little red flats, were under the table, and the pillow on the well-padded black leather couch was positioned for napping, the impression of her head providing further evidence.

  She’d been babysitting me. I found that touching if a trifle ridiculous, but would make no wisecrack about it. Sentiment embarrassed her. I took a boxy but comfy black-leather chair, mate to the couch, and sipped my Coke. Unlike the bottle that flat-faced guy gave me back at Sarola’s warehouse, this one was nice and cold.

  “Bryce found you,” she said. “You were unconscious in the elevator when he called it up to take him down.”

  After five o’clock, the elevator was self-service, the attendant gone, the street door locked.

  “Don’t tell me which one of you undressed me,” I said. “Either way, I’m not sure I could handle it.”

  “You smelled like you’d been bathing in Jim Beam,” she said.

  “Good nose,” I said. “That’s what it was.”

  “But you didn’t fall off the wagon, did you?”

  “No. But how did you know that?”

  She sipped her coffee, shrugged a shoulder. “You’d clearly been beaten. Your sport coat was bloody and torn, your nose swollen, your eyes black. They still are, a little.”

  “I noticed when I shaved.”

  “The front of your clothing had been soaked in booze. Someone tried to pour the stuff into you, didn’t they?”

  I swigged Coke. “And here I thought I was the detective in the family.”

  “Dr. Carlson felt you’d had some liquor forced on you, but he doubted it would be enough to cause a...relapse to your former condition.”

  “You mean, it didn’t make me an instant drunk?”

  She shrugged both shoulders this time. “Sometimes one drink can do it.”

  “This wasn’t a drink, exactly. It was more like a dose of medicine from a really mean daddy.”

  “Are you going to tell me what happened?”

  I did.

  My account upset her enough to cause a rare tightening of the eyes. “Shall we call your friend Captain Chandler?”

  I shook my head. “No. If I killed Sarola, dropping that wall of boxes on him, why bother? If Chandler wants me on a manslaughter beef, let him come up with his own damn evidence.”

  “Is that wise?”

  I grunted a laugh, which hurt just a little. “Maggie, odds are that tough old bastard Sarola is still alive. So if I go to the cops and accuse him and his two goons of beating on me, they’ll just deny it. And add it up any way you like—it still comes out my word against the three of them.”

  She nodded. Her ponytail bobbed. Right then I would have given a thousand bucks for her not to be my father’s widow. Two thousand.

  “Besides,” she said, musing aloud, “it just dredges up all that old history with the major’s dealings with the mob.”

  “Not to mention the various mob factions who are involved in magazine distribution in this town, and our tangential connection to one of them.”

  I meant Frank Calabria, of course.

  “Not to mention that,” she said. “May I make a suggestion?”

  “I’m impressed you asked first. Sure. What?”

  Her eyes were hard and unblinking. “Call your Uncle Frank and tell him what happened. Ask him if he can apply his influence to see that you suffer no repercussions from this Sarola incident.”

  “That’s an excellent suggestion. I might have thought of it myself, when my head cleared, but I appreciate the help.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “A little thick in the tongue and between the ears, but not bad. Did you say Dr. Carlson stopped in?”

  She nodded. “He gave you two shots, one for pain, another a sedative. That’s why you had the nice long nap.”

  Carlson was known as the Broadway Kildare. Via house (and apartment) calls, he tended to the health problems of actors, actresses, directors, choreographers, and other creative types, and some of his treatments were not strictly by the AMA rule book.

  “I must not have needed hospitalization,” I said. “Was I awake when he examined me?”

  “More or less.”

  Maybe I was starting to remember that....

  “He said you’d be fine,” she said, “but if you have any blood in your urine, give him a shout.”

  “Don’t worry, if I piss blood, I’ll scream. And he’ll hear it. He’s only four blocks from here.”

  She tucked her legs up under her, like a teenage girl at a slumber party. “Are you up for reporting on the rest of your day? Your yesterday, I mean?”

  I said I was, and told her about visiting Charles Bardwell and his monkey at Levinson Publications, and gave her a scaled-down account of my stairwell battle with Bardwell’s other monkey, Pete Pine, including how he’d tried to toss Lyla Lamont down the stairs after beating on her.

  Maggie’s eyes flared. “I swear, we need to insist on a different artist for Crime Fighter.”

  “Well, apparently Lyla’s been drawing it lately. Why not hire her? She’s been making Pine’s deadlines better than she used to her own.”

  Maggie sighed. “Sometimes I think nobody we have under contract is doing their own work,” she said, mildly disgusted. “It’s all ghosts, ghosts, ghosts. Case in point, I spoke to an editor at Frederick’s publisher the other day.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “This was before he died on us. I wanted to make sure there were no contractual obligations to the book publisher before we inked a syndication deal for a column. I was right to tell the late doctor he could use an assistant. His editor said, off-the-record, that Ravage the Lambs was mostly a ghost job.”

  “Why, that old windbag! That phony.”

  “Which reminds me. Your new lady friend, Dr. Winters...?”

  “I don’t know if I like the way you put that...”

  “What are we going to do about her?”

  I had several ideas, but didn’t feel I needed Maggie’s advice in that area.

  As if reading my mind, or maybe just my expression, she said, “What I mean is, we offered her a contract to ghost a column by a dead man.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “Or I should say, a man who is now dead.”

  I had another swig of Coke. “In all the fuss, I hadn’t thought that through. That’s a bum deal for her. What do you say we give her a shot at a column like that, anyway?”

  “Jack, you know very well the point of the column was just to manipulate Dr. Frederick into laying off our comic-book properties....”

  I lifted two palms in surrender. “I know, I know. But it’s still not a bad idea, however we happened to come up with it—an advice column by an actual shrink. How about we let her write us, say, three sample columns, and if we don’t sign her, offer her a nice kill fee for her trouble.”

  She thought about that, then nodded once. “Yes. That’s a good solution. So...getting back to Friday and what your inquiry came up with....”

  I told her about Chandler having the drunken Pine picked up and shipped to Bellevue, as well as my visit to the Entertaining Funnies offices—not just my conversation with Bob P
rice and Hal Feldman, but the encounter with that would-be Brando of the ink brushes, Will Allison.

  “I hate to think that kid had anything to do with Frederick’s murder,” she said.

  “Me, too. But he has the brains and, well, bizarre streak needed to rig up that crazy crime scene. My problem with Pine is that he’s not that imaginative. Not that bright.”

  An eyebrow rose a quarter of an inch over a green eye. “But his bosom buddy Bardwell is bright—a clever, nasty man, our Mr. Bardwell.”

  I snapped my fingers. “That’s right! I never thought of that possibility. They could have been in on it together, one of their drunken frolics turned deadly. Bardwell and his man-monkey, making Dr. Frederick pay for assorted indignities.”

  “I like it,” she said, as if she and I were Price and Feldman brainstorming horror story “springboards.”

  I got to my feet. “Listen, I appreciate what you did here, getting a doc in, looking after me...but I’m fine now. No need for chicken soup.”

  “You’ll stay in? Take it easy?”

  “Are you kidding? I’m twenty-four hours late for my date with that hubba-hubba headshrinker down in the Village.”

  She winced. “Please tell me I didn’t hear you use the expression ‘hubba-hubba.’”

  “Sorry.” I lifted her gently by the arm off the couch. “What I meant to say was, I’m gonna call my woo-woo baby and see if she’s available at short notice.”

  At the sound of the word “woo-woo,” Maggie did something she rarely did, though God knows I tried hard enough on a regular basis to get that out of her: she laughed.

  I walked her to the door and when she was halfway out, she did something else remarkable.

  She touched my cheek.

  “You be careful, Jack.”

  “Don’t worry, Maggie. I’ll take a gun.”

  “Good,” she said, and was gone.

  You might consider it an odd choice of restaurants, almost as if we were returning to the scene of the crime.

  But Sylvia never did get her nice meal at the Waldorf, as promised by the late Dr. Frederick, and I decided to make up for that. Anyway, I had no desire to fight the bearded boys, long-haired girls, and gawking tourists for a table at a Village bistro on a Saturday night.

  Not that I was springing for the Starlight Roof. I could afford that, marginally, but we’d never get in without a reservation.

  The Tony Sarg Oasis was another story, just off the lobby and the hotel’s coziest dining spot. Also, I knew the maître d’, which—along with a three-dollar tip—got us shown immediately to a table for two. We were seated against a curving wall festooned with funny-animal comics characters, in drunken parade—tipsy turtles, pie-eyed primates, tight tigers, lit lions—as drawn by the cartoonist whose name was on the place.

  More cocktail lounge than restaurant, the Oasis offered a limited but tasty menu of sandwiches and Hungarian dishes. A little bandstand of violinists and cellists provided a side dish of Hungarian rhapsodies, a romantic touch in a room largely given to couples, sitting in the cigarette-smoky fog like London lovers on park benches.

  Sylvia had forgone her usual Beat Generation sweater-and-slacks combo for a black linen dress with white polka-dots and a matching jacket. Most women in the Oasis wore hats, but not Sylvia, who put her money on the lovely short hairdo, its platinum scythe blade of hair swinging at the edge of her apple-cheeked face. Her lipstick was closer to red than black tonight, but she still kept her makeup on the light side, a little face powder, some mascara. Those deep dark blue eyes needed no help at all, really.

  “Feels a little ghoulish,” Sylvia said, “coming here.”

  “That’s goulash,” I said.

  We had just ordered. She took my advice and tried the Hungarian specialty of the house.

  I shrugged. “It’s not like we’re taking room service in the doc’s suite. The Oasis is just a nice place that I could get us into, last minute.”

  She was looking past me.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Will you look who’s sitting over there....”

  I glanced across the room. Garson Lehman was alone at a table for two. I didn’t see him at first, because a waiter was clearing his dishes away.

  “You know that guy, Sylvia?”

  Even her smirks were pretty. “Everybody in the Village knows him. He’s always giving a lecture on sex or starting up a new magazine. I think he’s a big phony.”

  “No argument here.”

  “Anyway, I saw him on that Barray Soiree show, with your stepmother.”

  “Oh yeah, that’s right.”

  Our goulash arrived, its wonderful aroma steaming up at us, when suddenly I realized somebody was standing next to our table, hovering, and it wasn’t a waiter.

  “Jack Starr,” Lehman said in that familiar nasal whine, after giving Sylvia a little nod of acknowledgment. “Good evening to you.”

  He was in a gray suit with a floppy black bow tie, his hair again winging right and left, as if he were about to take flight, his mustache twitching with pleasure at seeing me. I had no mustache, but I guarantee you if I had, it wouldn’t have been twitching with delight.

  “Mr. Lehman,” I said. “Surprised to see you here. I figured you more for the White Horse Tavern type, or maybe Chumley’s.”

  “There are evenings when you could find me at either,” he said pleasantly. “But man does not live by bongos and espresso alone.”

  “I guess not,” I said, much more interested in the goulash than this conversation.

  He frowned. “And yet...isn’t it ironic that we should meet on these premises?”

  “Why is that?”

  He glanced upward, whether to heaven or the 35th floor, I couldn’t tell you. “The loss of my friend and associate, Werner Frederick. Such a tragedy.”

  The last time I’d talked to him, he was letting me know how much bigger an expert he was on Any Damn Subject than his late “friend.”

  “You’ve obviously just been served your supper,” he said, “and I don’t mean to intrude. I’ll call your office tomorrow and we’ll make an appointment.”

  I frowned up at him. “For what?”

  The mustache twitched some more. “Well, perhaps you won’t be involved. It’s more Miss Starr’s bailiwick.”

  “What is?”

  “It’s just that...much as I dislike capitalizing on the misfortune of others...with Dr. Frederick gone, you will need someone else to write that new column for you.”

  Oh for Christ’s sake....

  He nodded to me, the wings of hair bouncing, and started off; then he shot a condescending little glance at Sylvia. “And I can assure you, Mr. Starr, that I would not need any writing assistance.”

  He returned to his table where the waiter brought him the check, which he signed, and I said, “What a pompous jackass.”

  “I guess he didn’t realize,” Sylvia said, having a delicate bite of the steamy goulash, “that without Dr. Frederick, there is no column.”

  I hadn’t gotten into this with her yet, so before taking another bite, I said, “Not necessarily.”

  Her expression was curious and hopeful.

  “We’ll talk about it later,” I said.

  And we did, at my apartment, which was her first visit. She passed the test with flying colors, loving the framed funny-page artwork and the Bauhaus furnishings. I do keep a liquor cart and made her a martini, olive and all. Just because you’re on the wagon, that doesn’t mean you can’t still be a good host. And ply attractive females with alcoholic beverages.

  Now lest you think there was any quid pro quo going on, let me assure you: my telling Dr. Winters about the chance Maggie was offering her, to try out for an advice column of her own, did not have anything to do with us necking on the couch. Nor did it have anything to do with me turning down the lights, leaving only one modest end-table lamp on its dimmest setting, and unzipping the back of her dress, and discovering that she had the most beautiful f
ull breasts in the world. She had worn no bra, and when she shimmied out of the dress, turned out to be free of panties, as well.

  She stood before me like Venus de Milo with arms and said, shyly, “Don’t think ill of me. I’m no loose woman. I just don’t like the lines that underthings make against my clothes.”

  “That’s a perfectly reasonable policy,” I said, as I stared unabashed at the evidence I’d been seeking, and it had nothing to do with a murder case.

  She was, as the saying goes, a real blonde.

  I was sitting on the couch and then she was sitting on me, and her expression as she ground herself exquisitely into me was dreamy and rapturous, lost in herself, just as I was lost in her, but when she finally came, she was looking at me, those dark blue eyes locked onto mine, where they stayed until our breathing had returned to normal.

  After an awkward moment when I had to deal with the pants that were down around my ankles, I walked her into the bedroom, both of us naked now, except for me in my black stag-movie socks.

  Earlier, when we’d first got to my digs, I had taken my coat off and she had realized for the first time that I was armed, that the shoulder-holstered .45 (a gift from the major, a relic of the Great War) (the gun, not the major) (well, either way really) had been with us the whole evening, and this seemed to frighten and excite her. Before I took the shoulder sling off, she touched the gun, caressed it gently, tenderly.

  I forgot to ask her, later, if that might have had any psychological significance.

  So, anyway, we walked naked, hand in hand, into the bedroom. She used the bathroom, then I did, and naked as Lyla Lamont the other day, we climbed into my already-slept-in bed and curled up, spoon-style.

  We talked about this and that, and eventually got around to the event that so linked us: the murder of Dr. Frederick. I told her, much as I’d told Maggie (though the previous telling did not involve naked spooning), about the events of Friday after I’d sent her off in that cab outside the Waldorf.

  Again, I told the tale of Bardwell and his monkey, and gave her chapter and verse about my wild experience in her native Greenwich Village with Pete Pine and Lyla Lamont, from the stairwell battle to the struggle for my innocence. Told her, also, about visiting the Entertaining Funnies offices, and how Will Allison had sought getaway money from his bosses.