They've always said when anyone asked them about me that I was a born humanitarian: cried when dogs got run over, helped old ladies across the street, and even walked where any sensible angel would fear to tread. All of which is another way of saying I'm a sucker for a hard-luck story. But then again, there was the five thousand dollars, wasn't there? Those kinds of fees and retainers bob up far too seldom.
"I'll be there in a half hour," I said, sighing slightly. It was a lonely haul until Saturday without Melissa Mercer, at that. "Don't open the door for anybody. Think you'll know me?"
"Sure." She sounded exhilarated rather than just plain pleased. "Jellybean said you were a super stud. And I got a great memory for faces. I still know what you look like from that newspaper picture."
"Sure," I said. "A half hour. See you then, Ada Ven."
I hung up the phone, convinced of only two things.
I'd be going out into the night again, over to the Hotel Alamo, the newest and most luxurious holstelry in ever-changing New York, just off Seventh Avenue and Times Square, mainly because of curiosity. Which didn't only kill cats but got very private persons like myself involved in the troubled affairs and mixed-up lives of other persons.
Second, I was unaccountably lonely and depressed. And the chance to play a hand somewhere in the fantastic Gingerbread Man case, which Captain Michael Monks had somehow studiously avoided mentioning to me at all, had triggered all the lack of will power I had left.
And then, of course, there was Miss Ada Ven herself.
The number-one nudie, Jellybean Jackson had called her, with reverence and pride. As if he had a share of some kind in the title.
Strippers, as people and women, had always bugged me since those early days when I found out I was different from girls. I'd known the biggest one that had ever lived, Dolores Ainsley—The Tall Dolores, who had billed herself as The Shapeliest Glamazon In The World until she ran into a running wild forty-five-caliber slug on the steps of the Statue of Liberty. That was about three lifetimes ago, but I'd never forgotten Dolores Ainsley. When a brunette is six feet three without shoes, she isn't exactly nondescript. And Dolores' mind was the most bizarre feature of all. Money had been her God, not sex. I had been prone to lump all strippers into that category ever since. And I'd never met another one who had changed my mind. They used their sex as a weapon, their bodies as tools, all for the making of cash and more cash.
Dodie Rogers out in East Brunswick had had the makings of a great stripper, as young as she was. She'd had the mentality and the physical equipment for it. I really didn't expect Miss Ada Ven to be any different from all the rest. If undressing your body for money isn't some kind of prostitution, then call me blue-nose.
Those were what most of my thoughts were like as I redressed for the street, locked my apartment door, and took the elevator ride down to the lobby. I caught a cab going downtown a few minutes later and was on my way to the Hotel Alamo not fifteen minutes after my talk with Ada Ven. Like all the crazy, colorful names most strippers gave themselves—not to mention the four murdered ones of that week—Heavenly Blue, Cleo Patra, Dimples O'Shaughnessy and Gardena Eden, The Snake Woman—I'd already solved the simple anagram of Ada Ven's name. It had to be a stage name, too. Like all the others.
Ada Ven was Nevada spelled backward.
Whatever the hell that meant.
Or might mean.
The lobby of the Hotel Alamo was like a step onto a movie sound stage. You walked in from the Seventh Avenue side, with all its crowds, dirty-front buildings and garish novelty shops and amusement arcade centers that gave the city a carnival look, and you weren't ready for an interior right out of a futuristic Better Homes And Gardens. Not even the United Nations building over on FDR Drive was a match for the Alamo. The floor of the lobby was a massive Grand Central Station of size and roominess, carpeted a deep and tasteful green, with tall columns of polished marble so gleaming it made the place resemble a tomb for an Egyptian king. There were floor-to-ceiling drapes, in the same exquisite hue of green, which closed out the seamy look of the avenue outside. Contour chairs, potted plants, and enormous mahogany desks with armies of clerks and pretty ladies waited on all sides as if some armada of registrants was going to hurry through the great, revolving doors and fill the five hundred rooms of the hotel. Don't ask me why they called it the Alamo. There wasn't a musket, coonskin cap, or western artifact anywhere in sight. Did I mention the water fountain? So help me, there was one off the center of the lobby, complete with a stone Apollo or some other divine one spouting water from every hair in his granite head. Somebody must have goofed on that one, all right. It didn't make a lick of sense, rhyme, or reason. It just looked good.
The lobby was filled to overflowing when I came in.
Bells were sounding at intervals, people sat in the contour chairs, smartly uniformed bellhops were marching back and forth with and without luggage. Evening newspapers were rustling everywhere.
It was the dinner hour or thereabout. A time of much activity.
Even as I walked directly to the bank of elevators set in the curving left wall of the interior, I saw the quiet-faced, soberly dressed young man retreat behind his copy of the Times as I went by him. I recognized him without even trying. A headquarters' plainclothesman named Flatek. One of Monks' nice little boys out of blue. I didn't know him personally, but I knew he knew me. And now I knew that old Mike wasn't sleeping on his job and that Miss Ada Ven must be a very big fish in the exotic-dancer swimming pool, indeed. If she was worth a headquarters' tail to keep an eye on her, Monks obviously figured her as a prime target for the madman. Either that or the Gingerbread Man had made an announcement of some kind in one of his postcards to Centre Street. Ada Ven had some kind of police protection, whether she wanted it that way or not. Unless Flatek was off duty.
I rode a wide, cavernous, red-veloured elevator car upward in an eternity of silence. There was an operator, but he didn't talk and kept his eyes front. I idly wondered if Monks would blow a gasket when Flatek called in and told him I'd been spotted in the Hotel Alamo where Ada Ven was registered. I'd have to worry about that later and he'd have to prove it first. Flatek could be on an entirely different job.
The long, high corridor to Suite C was deserted. The door to the apartment was right at the end of the hall. There was a Judas window slot about face-level in the center of the door. I pressed down on the green-enameled button just to my left. I couldn't hear any noise from within. Not even the sound of the buzzer or chimes or what have you.
I must have waited a full minute before there was any form of response whatsoever. Behind me, the long corridor was like the anteroom of a funeral director's office. Lots of arty lighting and no people.
When my patience was just about tried and I was reaching to push the button again, the Judas window made a clicking noise, I heard a low "Yeah!" and the sea-green door pulled back almost all the way.
Ada Ven stood framed in the doorway of Suite C.
I got a whirlwind, knock-'em-right-in-the-eye preview of flaming red hair, flashing green eyes with yellow glints in each of them, and just about everything else there was to see in Miss Ada Ven. She was a lady for surprises, and no fooling. A big lady.
She also thought she must have been on the runway at Minsky's in Union City or wherever the hell it was she was working these days.
She was naked except for a glittering, sequined pastie capping each moon-sized breast, something like a walnut-sized diamond or rhinestone winked out of her navel and a palm leaf no bigger than my hand, gaudily crimson as if daubed with firehouse-red paint, was all that concealed the maidenhead from the eyes of Mankind.
"Some hunk of woman, huh?" she chuckled throatily, stepping back and waving a long, suntanned arm toward the rest of her suite. "Come on in, the water's fine. I was just doing a few turns to keep in practice—besides, I got nothing to hide from you, Noon, baby."
There wasn't a come-back in me as I entered Suite C. She had gone ahead of me
as soon as the door closed, dancing forward on her toes, arching her back and rippling with really splendid muscular control so that she resembled a great monument of some kind coming to life. The flaming red hair was a flying waterfall of brilliant color, dazzlingly offsetting a skin of sheer tawniness and almost smoky-colored flesh. She was like a white woman who seems more savage than civilized, more untamed than trained. She looked like she'd soar out of sight any second or come bounding off the walls at me, claws out. Vulgar, scratchy strains of music, as though being played on an old gramophone somewhere, filtered from the corners of the suite. "The Hucklebuck." I recognized that the same way I'd recognized the headquarters' man, Flatek, down in the lobby. With surprise and a vague sense of familiarity. An old somehow moth-eaten familiarity.
And even as Ada Ven paraded her bubbling, mountainously mammoth and shapely figure before me, I realized that little Jellybean Jackson hadn't been exaggerating. She was all the woman anybody would ever have to see or maybe want to see. She was a Tall One, in caps.
"In here, Noon, baby," she boomed out in her lusty regular-fellow way as I prowled down a fairly long corridor toward a wide-open living room. "Take your shoes off if you want to. We gotta lot to talk about, you and me. Here's a dance you should know," she started to croon, blasting in her resonant, throbbing voice. "When the lights are down low . . . do the Hucklebuck . . . do the Hucklebuck. . . ."
I should have turned right around and gotten the hell out of there. Or maybe laughed, told her she was off her G-String, and taken off anyway. She was sounding like the funny farm herself.
I should have—but I didn't.
Which is why I have a story to tell you.
I hadn't only come where angels would be afraid to tread.
I'd come where angels wouldn't dare take their wings off.
Or their clothes, male or female angels.
That is they wouldn't, if they had any sense.
Ada Ven wasn't The Tall Dolores, not by about five inches.
But she was something sufficient unto herself.
She was a redhead, with bells on. A flaming redhead, like Winnie Garrett had been. Red-hot Ada Ven. And maybe the Gingerbread Man was after her, too. Just maybe. It was something I had to find out. With or without paprika.
THE GIRL FROM—
"Turn that silly record off," I said, taking a stand in the middle of a low-ceilinged, dimly lighted, completely draped room that was more boudoir than living room with literally too many chairs, lounges, and endless ottomans and bolsters scattered wherever the eye could see. Everything was a carnal red, from the drapes to the ottomans and bolsters. The rug beneath my heels was a spectacular shag and the whirling, bumping, and grinding Ada Ven, still animating to the invisible record player, was like a long, mile-high statue of the divine female coming to life with the first touch of dawn. "I want you to stop dancing around, stop playing me as if I'd never seen a woman before and you could put some more clothes on, too. How the hell did they ever let you turn this room into such a two-bit dive? The only thing missing is a player piano and sawdust on the floor."
The bad music jarred to a stop as her right leg flicked out in an elegant kick. Then she put her hands on her arched flanks and glared across the room at me. The moon-shaped, mammoth breasts looked as if they would burst. Her great body—and it was great, every tawny inch and pore—was still quivering rhythmically as if "The Hucklebuck" was still staggering on. The long, flaming hair tossed as she jerked her head angrily. The green eyes blazed and her face, which was the very last thing anyone would ever see about her, was set in a grimace of mingled disgust and amazement. We were eye to eye, even though her feet were bare of any kind of footwear, making her six feet at least and also some kind of magician who had turned the music off just by kicking her big toe into the red floor somewhere.
"Get him," she rumbled throatily, the words surging up from those wonderful breasts and slamming me in the face like a blow. "He gets Ada Ven for free and he makes with the complaints! Noon, baby, if you turn out gay, I'll feed Jellybean to my dog!"
I ignored that and shook my head at her. She was still glaring.
"I'm saving us both time, that's all. I came here to talk to you about what you want. And about five thousand bucks. So here I am and what do I find? You acting like it's just another working day, trying your ego out on me for size, and now you don't look one bit itty-bitty scared. So who's kidding who? If you're kidding me, the news I have for you is this: some thirty-nine dames have loved me in my time and been loved back. So convince me I should hang around here and right away, or I'm taking off in a hurry—with or without your approval, skin lady."
She was staring at my mouth, as if trying to decipher the words that were steaming out. Her manner made her seem more pagan than ever. And as wild as the wind. Someone who might have learned it all the tough way. She wasn't a beautiful woman by any standards. But she had a straight nose, a full mouth, good teeth, and lovely eyes. It was just that her incredibly endowed physique made everything else take second place.
"Are you for real, Noon, baby?" She was still watching my mouth like a lip reader. "Thirty-nine broads? I don't even know that many people. Not in all my life—you must be something else."
I grinned, sensing she was making some attempt at humor, but I couldn't be too sure with her. Vulgarity seemed to top everything else in her personality, the same way her build outranked her face.
"Okay. I had that coming. Now put a robe on, will you? I'm only human and I'd like to hear what you have to tell me."
"That's much better," she chuckled deeply and clapped her hands together. She plucked a thin, transparent garment of some kind up from one of the nearby ottomans and slipped it on. I could still see through it, but it was somehow a much more sensible arrangement. "Now, in answer to those nasty remarks you just made—I'm booked at the Del Rio for the next three months, so I took a lease on this dump and they let me do it up how I like it. I like red, see. You don't—well, screw you. I like a room I can feel it in. Just like this one. You think "The Hucklebuck" is silly? Then you don't know strip, Noon, baby. It's one of the best beats to peel to there is. Just like maybe "Temptation" and "Night and Day." I busted my horns trying to find a good record of that old number, but all I could get was a beat-up seventy-eight rpm, cut back in '54. Now what else you gotta know before we talk over my other problem?"
"Where's Jellybean?" I smiled, liking her almost on the spot. I like people who stand up for what they get their kicks out of. Especially when they explain it so well. Ada Ven had scored a few points.
"Out walking Frankie," she whispered a little lower, settling down on an ottoman like a Yogi. Staring up at me, she was the wildest creature in anybody's sex fantasies. Maybe I am crazy, at that. She was studying me as much as I was casing her.
"That dog you mentioned?"
"Same one. A French poodle Sinatra gave me out in Vegas. You like dogs, Noon, baby?"
"Call me Ed," I sighed. "Yeah, I like dogs. I also like Scotch whiskey. You got any in this harem or are you in training?"
Grinning and looking as wicked as a female genie with an itch to grant all the masculine wishes in the book, she snapped erect and all her goodies danced. "Back in a jiff—" she grunted and on her way to a darker corner of the dimly lighted room, she kicked that same spot in the thick rug again. "The Hucklebuck" jarred back into life, fitfully and then strongly, lilting and throbbing into what she had called a perfect beat. I waited until she came back and when she saw the expression on my face, she kicked out her foot again. The room was quiet once more as she handed me a tall water-glass brimming with Scotch and ice. She had one, too. She rattled it around in her fingers, her brows knitted. For once, she didn't seem to have sex on her mind. I could see that all of her vulgarity could have been a wall of some kind between herself and the cold, outer world, but it was still far too early to tell.
"Confession is supposed to be good for the soul," I suggested. The Scotch tasted like Chivas Regal whi
ch was another point for her side.
"I got nothing to confess. I believe in what I do. But you tell me something, Ed. You're a good-looking stud. Maybe you're an ace and maybe you're a four-flusher. What makes this Gingerbread nut cut up on strippers? Think maybe he's a religious fanatic or something?"
"Now, hold on." I took another belt of the drink. "Don't jump ahead just yet. You and I still have a deal to settle."
"What settle?" Her painted eyebrows went up and she shook a shapely shoulder at our surroundings. "You're hired. You'll park here tonight and protect me. Maybe we'll have some laughs, maybe we'll hate each other in the morning, but you're my man, baby. I made up my mind as soon as you bawled me out back there. I could use a little pushing around from the right party. I know too many powder puffs."
"Ada," I said as gently as I could. "Dear Ada, dear knock-them-dead Miss Ven—you talk first and I listen. Then we discuss sleeping arrangements. Okay? Till that time, I'm still here on a pass."
"Geezis, you play hard to get, don't you?" Dimpling her face in an artificial smile, she took a healthy swallow of her drink. I tried to keep my eyes off the shimmering mounds and curves barely hidden by the see-through gizmo she was wearing. I hardly know what they call any of those garments any more. It wasn't easy to concentrate on the Ada Ven face. The Ada Ven body kept getting in the way. "Okay, Ed. We'll do it your way. You want to ask me some questions, is that it?"
"Check. Now, sit still and stop wriggling around like a snake."
"That was Gardena Eden's bit. Not mine. She wasn't so hot at it, either. My kid sister could have given her lessons and she's only ten."
"We'll get to that, later. Now, I take it this Del Rio you mentioned is here in town. A burlesque house or some such."
"Sure. You don't make that scene, do you? Right around the corner from the Capitol. Biggest runways outside of Newark—"
Kill Her- You'll Like It! Page 4