Black Cat Weekly #13

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 1UNEXPECTED VISITOR

I WALKED into my hotel room and the naked woman was sitting there in the only easy chair.

I stood for a moment with both the door and my mouth open. I’d been batting around Charley Frayne’s bar all evening. Ginny had slapped my face, the side with the scar on it, and the old aching had started in my head, so I’d thought I’d get a girl. Out of meanness, understand? One or two had taken a drink on me, but they’d discovered they had boy friends or husbands. So I’d come back to the hotel.

And there, waiting for me, was Eros’ answer. Rubensesque, the way I like them. Long bob over smooth shoulders. Brown eyes, looking kind of crazy. Lips, pouting, a little too red. Then I saw something else, and I closed the door.

There was a little stream, red-colored, running down from under her left breast across her abdomen. Under the breast there was a hole, a little, oozing hole, like you might make by sticking an ice-pick into a hardfrozen block of raspberry sherbet.

I lit a cigarette and wondered why my hand wasn’t shaky. Sometimes my hand got shaky when I tried to tie my shoes. You can’t get blown out of an M-4 tank without your hand getting shaky, the doctors told me.

I began to think about all the little islands in the Pacific which smelled of cordite and corpses. The hospitals that smelled of formaldehyde. Skid Row, with unwashed men. This dead woman, though, smelled of expensive perfume.

I knew I had to do something. I tried to think what. Then I knew. I began to search the room for her clothes. There wasn’t even anything under the bed. She just didn’t have any clothes.

This is the prize package, kid, I thought. This is the brass ring. Ginny slaps you in the puss, and now you get a naked dame sitting here with a hole in her heart.

But first there’d been a lot of other things.

There’d been the war, with my 50-caliber blasting the little men in our path. There’d been the hospital and some guy with chickens on his shoulders tossing me a heartshaped picture of George Washington hung on a purple ribbon because I’d forgot to duck. With that and a nickel, we used to say, you could buy a subway ride. Nowadays you need a dime in addition to the Purple Heart.

There’d been looking for a job after the war and not getting any. There’d been living in furnished rooms and having the old French key put on the door because I couldn’t pay the rent. There’d been the 52-20 Club and some twerp I knocked off his stool at the unemployment office because he sassed me. I’d told him I was a newspaperman and wanted a job. He smirked at me and said I was a big, husky guy, so why didn’t I try bricklaying.

I didn’t go back for any veterans’ unemployment compensation after that, though it had weeks to run. I hit Skid Row.

Some of the nicest guys I ever met outside my own tank battalion, which was blown to Kingdom Come, were on Skid Row. Three of them robbed me of dough that could have been my passport back to respectability, but there were some guys who would split their last buck and their last crock of muscatel with you. You don’t always find the real bohemians wearing berets in Greenwich Village.

The trouble with me was I’d got shellshock, or combat fatigue, to use the Army euphemism, along with the crease in my face, that time the M-4 tank caught a Jap mortar lob head-on. They kept me in a hospital for a long time giving me Sitz baths and lessons in rug-weaving. They must not have cured me entirely. I was still edgy. I was impatient of the stupidity of city editors for not hiring me. I’d been free-lancing just before the war, so couldn’t demand a job by virtue of the GI Bill of Rights.

So I made lushing a profession. At first it was bonded Bourbon. Then it was bar rye, then draft beer at a dime a copy. And finally sweet wine for anywhere from sixty-five cents to a dollar a bottle depending upon the location of the liquor store. I started lurching up and down Dream Street.

By the time the terminal leave pay came along I determined I was going to get new clothes and rent a clean room and start looking for a job again. The terminal leave pay amounted to quite a bundle. I’d been in nearly four years, most of them in the Pacific, where you didn’t get furloughs.

Somebody I don’t remember advised me to deposit the check, and draw out only what I needed for immediate use. But I had “Red Eye” and “Goosey George” and the “Canned Heat Kid” with me. We went to the bank and I took the cash. Then we went to the liquor store and we bought enough musky to float the Queen Elizabeth, and sat in a lot of doorways drinking. I woke up with five bucks in my pocket. They were good guys, all right. They left me five bucks out of several hundred.

I looked everywhere for the three good guys and I drank everywhere I looked. Then I woke. The little green men on my shoulder and I sat down in a lot of doorways.

* * * *

They sent me to another Government hospital and I had the old curriculum of Sitz baths and rug-weaving, plus shock treatments. There was a certain doctor there who helped get me a job with a research bureau. I got paid according to the number of forms I filled out about people’s preferences in olives or brassieres or other articles…

What the devil! Here I was looking at the naked woman with a hole in her heart, and thinking about all this! But I had to think about something, didn’t I? So I went on—to the time I joined a veterans’ organization and met Chet Lassiter. He’d been a captain of MPs and, believe it or not, some MPs were good guys. Chet was a good guy. He knew how to smile, the kind of smile that never mocked at people. Chet found a lot of things funny in life.

Chet introduced me to Charley Frayne’s place. He also introduced me to Ginny, who did a little drinking there to drown her sorrows. She’d spent a lot of money on dancing lessons and she could dance. But she worked in Vince Parada’s Triangle Club and all Vince wanted her to do was strip for the customers. One look at Ginny and you knew why.

Ginny could be as stiff as an old-fashioned, whalebone corset, or as soft and pliable as an oil-bathed baby if she wanted to. I guess I was in love with Ginny. I guess Ginny didn’t hate me too much, either. She’d been my girl for several months now. But that afternoon she’d slapped me—on the left cheek, where the flesh is dented in a little zigzag pattern. I’m sensitive about that scar, although I have been told it makes me appear romantic.

It had been a silly quarrel. I’d said that now I had a regular job —it was with Chet Lassiter who had opened a private detective agency after the war—that we could get married and she could quit what she was doing. She’d said, well, we could get married all right, but she’d better keep on at the Triangle until our incomes were more stabilized. I’d said I didn’t want a wife who showed everything—or almost everything, anyway—to Parada’s drooling customers, even under a blue light, and if she wanted her own income, why didn’t she get a job just dancing?

She slapped my face. It was her sore point, and I’d hit it on purpose. I’d got to my feet, very dignified, and walked out on Ginny. And then, I’d tried to get myself a dame at Frayne’s, but I hadn’t got one. Certainly I hadn’t got this dame in the chair. I never did go for dames who had holes in their hearts.

Chet had become my only friend outside of a few of the so-called bums on the Bowery that I didn’t see any more. Chet offered me the job, providing I’d take a token salary at first, plus a bonus for every case I worked on. For a long time there hadn’t been any cases, then a couple of days before, when I’d come into the office, Chet said:

“A client left a two-hundred-dollar retainer. I’m turning the job over to you.”

“What’s the set-up?” I asked.

“The client’s name is Little,” Chet replied. “Malcolm Little. Owns an estate in Westchester. He’s around sixty, probably. He’s got a wife. Quite a dish. He thinks she’s cheating, believes she’ll meet a man in Room Six-seventeen of the Sheridan Towers Hotel at five o’clock on the afternoon of the twenty-first. I’ve already reserved Room Six-sixteen for the twentieth under the name of George Spelvin. That will give you a day to orient yourself.”

I almost laughed at the alias he’d chosen. George Spelvin is the name they use on theater programs when an actor doubles in brass.

Chet favored me with his winning smile. “I told the clerk over the phone I wanted that particular room because I admired the view from the window. You check in and get the layout of the place. We don’t know anything about the man who will check into Six-seventeen the next day. Leave the door open on safety chain about a foot. Keep the lights off. Pull the blind down. Sit where you can get yourself a mental picture of any man who goes into Six-seventeen. I’ve got a picture of the dame.”

He took a photograph of a chesty female out of an envelope. She was a dame you wouldn’t be likely to forget.

He grinned the wide grin. “An old man’s darling,” he said.

I checked into the hotel, picking up George Spelvin’s reservation. A bellhop took me up and commented upon the fact that I wore the Purple Heart. As soon as he was gone I tested the door chain. I could see Room 617 all right through the twelve-inch crack.

I had told the bellhop I was expecting a friend to check in who would want to be near me, and asked him about Room 617. He told me the room had been occupied for several days by a J. K. Provost and that the gentleman had signified no intention of checking out. The guy had probably just taken the love nest a few days in advance. Anyway the next day was the important one—Terry Bob Rooke’s first case. I had to forget the spat I’d had with Ginny, when I’d gone to Frayne’s to see her that afternoon.

I went to Frayne’s and had some dinner on the expense account, and when I came back to my room I’d found the naked woman.

I got the manila envelope, from a dresser drawer, took a photograph out of it.

There wasn’t any doubt about it.

The naked woman sitting in the easy chair with a hole in her heart was Mrs. Malcolm Little, the dame I was supposed to tail!

I had to get out of there. I collected my belongings, stuffed them, with the photograph, into the pockets of my suit and trench coat. I hung the coat over my arm. I didn’t want anybody coming into the room right after I’d left. They might be surprised to find it still occupied.

Before I even reached the elevator, I realized that I was some private eye, all right. I hadn’t wiped my fingerprints off of anything. But somebody else’s fingerprints must be in that room, too, and if I wiped them off I would be destroying the only evidence that could prove my own innocence.

It took courage to take me through that lobby with my clothes stuffed in my pockets and draped over my arm, and the little men with the hammers and anvils were playing an overture to madness inside my head. Finally, though, I was out in the brawling neon night of Broadway. I called Chet Lassiter’s hotel. I told Chet I had to see him right away. Chet said he had a little pigeon coming up, and couldn’t what I had to see him about wait. I said it couldn’t. He said, okay, come on up, but not to stay long.

When I got to his room he said to make it short. So I made it short.