Knife at My Back

by Lawrence Lariar

  I reached the inside of The Champagne Room in time to see the windup of the fire. On the stage, the big curtain on the right side was half eaten by the fire. A couple of bellhops were spraying it with the juice from large fire extinguishers. They had opened the big picture windows on the far side of the room and the smoke moved rapidly toward them, slithering up and out into the night. Beyond the rim of the window, the starched and frightened faces of the hotel residents stared and whispered at the tableau from under the trees, looking like a painting out there. But already they were beginning to drift away. Paul Forstenburg stood at the window, advising them that everything was under control, that The Champagne Room would be open for business as usual shortly after ten tonight. And Paul was right. Along the rim of the stage, three workmen were already dragging out a fresh curtain. A swarm of men with mops and pails labored on the floor, cleaning up the mess from the quieted extinguishers. The pall of smoke was almost gone now, and people and faces came into focus.

  Don Trask stood with Margo and Buddy Binns at the left side of the room, near the bar. Margo was unhurt and busying herself with a small jigger of something strong and good for her nerves. Don fluttered and minced around her. Buddy Binns frowned in his surly way, watching the men on the stage and shaking his head and saying something that I could not hear.

  Buddy was watching Lili Zenda. And I didn’t blame him.

  Lili had broken past the guards at. the door to the lobby and stood now at one of the tables near the stage. She leaned over Manny, ministering to him, as fluttery and upset as a mother over her child. She had exploded into semi-hysteria during the last few moments and dabbed at her nose and uttered weak and clucking noises over Manny, who observed her antics with a sick and martyred air. She handled the bandages with a tenderness that revealed her, deep and lasting affection for the little man. The smoke swirled and slid around both of them so that Lili operated in an air of high drama. And when the hotel nurse broke through the gloom, Lili stood back to admire her handiwork, smiling gently as Manny beamed his gratitude at her. But she was too upset by the incident, too far gone emotionally to stand at his side for long. She looked away from her amour, as bothered as a mother over an infant’s accident.

  “Thanks, Lili,” Manny said. “Maybe you’d better go out for some air now.”

  “You all right?”

  “I’m fine. Just fine.”

  “I put some vaseline on his hands,” Lili said to the nurse.

  “You look as though you could use some aromatic spirits of ammonia,” the nurse said, and grabbed her elbow and led her away. “Come with me.”

  Manny watched the two women leave. I stabbed a cigarette into his mouth and lit it for him and he breathed easier.

  “I didn’t know Lili really cared,” he said with a sigh. “Funny how an emergency like this brings out all the corn in a dame.”

  “Lili almost pushed me in here,” I told him. “She was worried about you, Manny. How’d it happen?”

  “Happen?” He rolled his eyes to the ceiling and got up wearily and led me backstage where a large metal drum showed the black scars of recent scorching. “Some crazy bastard put oily rags in this thing, I guess. And some crazier bastard must have flipped a cigarette into it during rehearsal. All of a sudden, it came. The musicians were taking five out in the hall, and I was sitting back here almost falling asleep, when it happens. I’m surrounded by smoke and fire. So I grabbed an old coat and tried to beat out the fire in the can. But it was too far gone. I should have my head examined for trying to play the hero, Steve. But I was all of a sudden very much concerned about the performance tonight. You know, the show must go on and all that kind of crap.”

  “Where was Margo while all this went on?”

  “Down near the bar, of course, talking to one of the musicians the last time I saw her.”

  “And Buddy?”

  “Buddy didn’t come in until the boys came with the fire equipment.”

  The musicians were slowly returning to the room and Manny signaled to the leader and began to reorganize the rehearsal. He moved with crisp efficiency, a little guy with a big head for organization. This was his world, and no little thing like a flash fire could jerk him out of his usual managerial mood. He would get the show under way, on schedule, because Manny Elrich didn’t overplay things in the department of temperament and tantrum. I doffed my mental hat to him for his quick return to sanity. He had the musicians limbering up and the first act in rehearsal while the menials still mopped the floor and adjusted the new curtain.

  I left him alone because he needed every minute before The Champagne Room opened. There were sounds and stirrings from the group near the bar. Buddy Binns had his mouth open and what came out wasn’t comedy. He was screaming at Don Trask. He didn’t lower his voice when I arrived at their table.

  “Who asked for him?” Buddy shouted, giving me the look he reserved for all peasants. “Who in hell told you to let a stinking detective in on our trouble? Now we’re really loused up.”

  “Something you ate?” I asked Buddy.

  “Buddy loves to lose his temper at times like this,” said Margo. “Have a drink, Steve? I was going to tell you all last night, anyhow. Don was perfectly right to ask your advice. We’re not getting anywhere on our own.”

  “Oh, please, Margo,” said Buddy.

  “Matter of fact, I advised getting a detective a long time ago,” Margo continued, avoiding Buddy as though he might be a small and restless hound at her feet. She leaned my way, letting me feel the curve of her shoulder. “I offered you a drink, Steve.”

  “Scotch,” I said. “But let’s get out of here. This place smells like the bad end of one of Don’s cigars.”

  “Smart boy,” she said, and signaled the waiter to bring my drink out to the lawn. “Go away, Buddy. I want to be alone.”

  Was she drunk? Something about the way she moved alongside me spelled intimacy and abandon. And the way Buddy and Don watched me move off with her brought the short hairs up on the back of my head. They were murdering me with their eyes, both of them. Margo swayed her delectable fanny through the lobby, moving in the slow hip roll of the professional showgirl. The guests were on their way back now, and every masculine eye gave her the full treatment as we passed. She was a symphony of silken sex. And she was telegraphing all of it my way, her strong fingers tight on my elbow as we stepped down the parking lot and crossed to the lawn. The glass in her hand was as steady as a knob on a door.

  And when she lifted it to her bright lips, her hand neither shook nor faltered. Suddenly, out of the shallow pit of recent memory, the sight of her alongside me rang a bell in my mind. Familiar? Why did she come alive to me now? In some subtle way, I felt the full force of her personality at work on me in a fixed pattern, as though I had been here before and could sense the next quick words from her crimsoned lips.

  But I was all wrong, of course.

  Because she said, “You don’t like me, Steve, do you?”

  “Should I?”

  “I want you to.”

  “What’s in it for me?”

  “My peace of mind,” she said sharply. Whatever the liquor was doing to her, she did not try to hide. Her reactions were quick and incisive and uninhibited. There were ideas she wanted to express, and she was telling me that this was the moment for letting her hair down. Into my eyes. “I get feelings about people, Steve. Like you. From the first minute I saw you. I wanted you on my side.”

  “I like, you, too,” I said.

  “Oh, no you don’t. You’re thinking about the story Don told you. You’re figuring what the hell kind of a woman am I, to get caught in bed with a louse like Jeff Carroll. You’re dreaming up the kind of brawl we were at down in Havana, how I got drunk fast and let him push me into bed. Isn’t that right? Am I on the beam?”

  What could I tell her? She began to cry in the middle of her outburst
, long racking sobs that shook her and ripped her. She had her head in her hands and the glass had dropped to the lawn and she was giving me the full routine, complete with heavings and gasps of sorrow that rendered her a lively bundle of injured womanhood.

  She walked away from me, across the lawn slowly, her figure dimmed and distant in the shadows. There was a bench out there, under the big willow. She continued to cry quietly until I sat down near her. Then she put her head on my shoulder and really let go. And in the next quick moment, my mind responded again to her easy intimacy. You look at a woman and react to her in many ways. You smell her personal fragrance and the odor titillates your nostrils and digs deep into your sensibilities. You used to know a girl who wore this same perfume, and the remembered tug at your mental machinery sets up a screaming call to your memory. In a matter of seconds, your mind tells you that you’ve been through this scene before. It is alive again for you. You are reliving a part of your past, despite the fact that it’s all nonsense, despite the fact that such things cannot happen. The brain is an intricate mechanism. Mine was sounding off to her in a way that bothered me. Because she was reminding me of something that had happened last night, only a few yards from this spot.

  So I opened my own box of emotional tinder. I said, “Listen, Margo—maybe I can help you. But you don’t have to knock yourself out to sign me.”

  “You’re a little louse,” she said petulantly. “Don’t you believe a woman’s tears?”

  “I can take you without the tears.”

  “Can’t help myself sometimes,” she said, quieter now, working to wipe away the mist in her eyes. “I should have been an actress, not a singer. But I am upset, Steve. Everything about this place upsets me. I always thought the mountains were a place for rustic pleasures. But this hotel leaves me cold,” She shivered to prove it. She twisted her body on the bench so that the entrance was behind her. “This hotel should have been built on Broadway and Forty-eighth Street, not here. I’ve always dreamed of places like this. When I was a kid, I thought that nothing on earth could compare with a vacation at a spot like The Montord. But now that I’m here, I’ve had enough for the rest of my life. I’m willing to give it back to the Indians.”

  “Better not let Paul Forstenburg hear you say that.”

  “Paul Forstenburg can drop dead for my money,” she said, cracking the whip over him with her tongue. “And that goes double in spades for Manny Erlich and Lili and the rest of his crumby staff. Funny thing, I don’t even like the type of guests they have up here. I used to hear talk about the morality of show people, Steve, but some of the lecherous goats in this place should be holed up in institutions. They strip you down to the raw flesh with their eyes and then rape you in public. I can’t wait to get back to the dirty air of Broadway.”

  “I’m still on your team,” I said.

  “And I’m glad,” she said softly. “Can you tell how frightened I am, Steve? Have I sold you? If the dirty crumb who has that stag reel doesn’t deliver it soon, I’ll be ripe for the nuthouse. It scares me to think what will happen to my future. I must have that film. I must, I must, I must.”

  “And if you don’t get it this weekend?”

  She grabbed at me and gripped me and let me feel the shock of disbelief that shook her body. “Why? Why shouldn’t I get it?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s a possibility.”

  “You mean because of the suicide?”

  “I mean because of the murder, Margo. Grace Lasker was murdered.”

  “The poor woman. She wanted to meet me, Don says.”

  “You didn’t recognize her last night?”

  “I didn’t see her,” Margo said. She stiffened suddenly, alerting herself to the figure approaching us through the shadows, his head down in its perpetual look of doom. “Oh my God,” said Margo. “Here comes the watchdog. Why is it that all professional comics are such tragic drips?”

  I didn’t have time to answer. Buddy Binns stood over us in the next moment, his hands deep in his pants, rocking and rolling on his elevated heels and treating me to an overdose of his petulant sneer.

  “All finished, Mister Private Eye?” he asked. “Or does she have to stay for X-rays?”

  “Very funny,” said Margo. “But why don’t you go into the hotel for a straight man, sweetheart? Steve is only trying to help us.”

  “I can live without it,” Buddy said.

  “I love you, too,” I said.

  “You look like the type.”

  “Jokes, jokes, jokes,” said Margo, standing up to him and letting him feel her anger. “Why don’t you try to cooperate instead of throwing your fat head around, Buddy darling? Or don’t you care about locating that stag reel?”

  “We can find it without this two-bit detective.”

  “I’m ready to bow out,” I said.

  “Bow,” said Buddy, “before you get knocked.”

  “This,” I said, “is something I’ve got to see.”

  “Be my guest,” said Buddy, and raised his fist. I stood smiling at him and Margo moved in to slap his hand down, in the way that Mamma slaps the infant who reaches for the cookie jar.

  “Stop with the acting,” she said, with a whinnying laugh. “You look like something out of a bad television script, Buddy darling. You never did do well as a heavy.”

  “I haven’t really tried,” he growled, his voice off key under the stress and strain of his anger. “You need a good slapping around at a time like this, Margo.”

  “There’s nothing I’d like better,” she said. “If you can find me a man to do the job.”

  And then she raised her hand and brought it across his face in a quick flash of muscular movement. The sound of it was a flat and blossoming crack, so loud that it echoed. In the close-up, the flesh on his beefy jaw quivered under the impact. He bit his lip and swallowed and said nothing as she stepped away from us and showed us the smooth rhythm of her buttocks, headed for the entrance to The Montord. He waited until her rounded figure was a blob of indistinct shadow under the trees. And then he spoke.

  “Bitch!” he said to the lawn.

  CHAPTER 11

  Jorgenson sat in the far corner of the lobby. Alongside him, his lean face working in laughter, was Dan Coates, the house dick, showing the world his new white set of uppers. The big rustic cop saw me as I crossed near the door and tried to slide past him.

  “How’s the great detective?” Jorgenson hoarsed. His tongue had been warmed by an overdose of something strong, so that he projected a kind of phony cordiality, as ingratiating as a pimp in an alley. “Still trying to prove something, Conacher?”

  “Nothing you’d understand,” I said.

  “You see, Dan,” said Jorgenson. “This little crumb just don’t take to friendliness.”

  “Hello Steve,” Dan Coates said. He reached under his chair and showed me the corner of the label on the bottle of Scotch. “Maybe this’ll make you feel better?”

  “Not just now, thanks, Dan.”

  “He’s on a red-hot lead, can’t you see?” Jorgenson ducked to the right and grabbed the bottle and downed a long swallow in one quick but casual gesture. He coughed and spluttered when the liquor hit his larynx, doubled over in a paroxysm of laughter and uncontrollable hacking. “Probably tracking it down by way of a lady’s bedroom.”

  “Another comedian,” I said. I wondered whether the larded lunkhead would stay where he sat for the next hour or so. The door to the office lay off to the left and behind him. “Buddy Binns could use you, Jorgenson. He needs a straight man.”

  I didn’t wait for his line. Instead, I slipped past him through the door and on out to the narrow walk along the side of the building, a pebbled alley that led beyond into the dirty end of the establishment where the kitchen and the back of the garage lay. A few feet to the left of the door was a window, low enough for me to enter. I climbed over a
desk and crept to the wall, feeling my way along until I found the tiny compartment in which the records were kept. In the corner a small gooseneck desk lamp gave me a strong light and I closed the door behind me and went to work. I was in the inner office of The Montord.

  The Montord housed over fifteen hundred guests comfortably, and each of the clients was carefully indexed and filed in a giant cabinet. I began my headachey chore, bracing myself for the long pull through the list of customers who had signed in within the last week. My mind rattled and jumped with impatience. I was searching for the proverbial needle in the rustic hayloft, and such a stiff and difficult task would tax every cell of patience in my emotional foundry. Where to start? The cards were stacked tightly and the file challenged me to find a short cut through the endless assortment of names and addresses. I searched only for the needle names—the stimulating names, the names I might recognize as affiliates to the borderland of crime and conniving; the crumbs; the bums; the infamous and the sly.

  Garand, Gillette, Gordon, Grossarde, Gruber, Grundy, Gryllan, Grystede, they ran on and on, teasing me, halting me for a brief pause and a quick squint at each home address, and then on again. Time was a knife at my back, a stabbing, pricking barb in the quiet box where I labored.

  Kaunus, Keates, Keller, Kemmerman, Kester, Kohier, Korch, Krantz, Kraus, Krynder, Kryvelle; the cards blurred and fuzzed before me, an endless white road leading everywhere and nowhere. From some dim and distant area beyond the deep walls, the sound of voices rose in a muffled and meaningless dissonance. I took off my coat and pulled out the next file.

  Martinson, Massern, Masten, Matley, Maylane, Morgen, Morse, Murray, Musselman. When would the bell go off in my brain? Would I know the name when I found it?

  One small corner of my mind played a strange game with me, holding me off in a distant city, on a slow and meandering stroll through a certain neighborhood where the bright boys roamed. Whoever the contact man was, he must come from a certain stratum of society in the big town. He would be familiar with the nether world of show business, the slime and sex rackets, the businesses that cashed in on raw flesh in all manner of methods.