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  Stone Cold Blonde

  A PI Steve Conacher Mystery

  Lawrence Lariar

  CHAPTER 1

  The door was mine. On the frosted glass, in neat Roman letters, was my name: STEVE CONACHER, and in smaller type, Private. But I stood there, as jittery as a bug on a griddle, looking in at my little nest. There was a woman inside.

  She was naked, on the floor.

  And she wasn’t moving!

  She could have been an artist’s model, taking a pose. Or a woman who had fainted on the way to her bath. Or a girl on the beach, giving herself up to the sun in an attitude of casual relaxation. Her arms were spread out, as if she had reached for something before she fell. Her face was turned down and buried under a wealth of yellow hair that swept over her shoulders and stirred in the slight draft from the open window. She had a svelte torso. There was whiteness around her molded hips and, up higher, another pale patch where she once tied a bra. But the rest of her was tanned by the sun and her skin was unmarked by any blemishes. The scene was staged by an idiot, a macabre joke, a mad dream, calculated to bring a gasp to my throat.

  I said, “What the hell kind of a gag is this?”

  She didn’t answer. I knelt at her side and touched her shoulder. One touch was enough. She was cold. She was as stiff and frigid as an iced chicken, set out to thaw in the sun.

  “Liz!” I shouted.

  I heard Liz Abbott’s high heels click through the reception room and into the little hall outside. Then she was in the door way, her hand at her mouth, gawking down at the nude body and mouthing thin squeals of surprise. A piece of stationery dropped from her fingers and floated lazily down to the rug. I crumpled it in my fist and heaved it into the basket.

  “An early morning customer,” I said.

  “Is she—?”

  I nodded. “She’s been napping here for quite some time, Liz. Anybody you know?”

  “I was about to ask you that question.”

  “A good question,” I said. I leaned over the body and lifted the swirl of curls away from her face so that I could examine her profile. She was pretty. She had delicate features of the classic type, painted lips and mascaraed eyes and penciled brows, all of which might have lit up her face when she lived, but gave her now the appearance of a Benda mask, without expression and accented in bold lines and bright colors.

  I said, “I never knew a blonde this pretty.”

  “She was beautiful. How was she killed, Steve?”

  “I’m not turning her over. She was either shot or stabbed—but on the other side. You never saw her before?”

  “Never.”

  “Think. She might have come into the office.”

  “Never,” Liz said again. “I never forget a face, Steve, especially that type.”

  “What type?”

  “Chorus girl, maybe. Hat check girl.”

  “You’ve been seeing too many movies, Liz.”

  Liz was staring down at the blonde, with one hand at her throat and a look in her eyes I had never seen before. She was scared right down to her pretty ankles. She was swallowing hard, as pale as the prelude to an upchuck. I got off my knees and went to her and held her shoulders, shaking her gently.

  “Are you going to be sick, Liz?”

  “I could be persuaded.”

  “Not in here, please. There’s enough debris on the floor.”

  “It’ll pass, Steve.” She rallied a bit when she took her eyes off the floor and tried to think. “It doesn’t make sense. When was she killed?”

  “It must have been after you locked the office. What time was that?”

  “You know me, Steve. I walked out of here at a few minutes after five. Always the little office machine”

  “You locked the door?”

  “I always lock the door.”

  “Somebody picked it,” I said. “Some bastard used our place for a knifing brawl.”

  Her galloping brain must have begun to picture the slaughter, because she got pale again and started for the door.

  “Maybe I’d better get some coffee.”

  “A good idea.”

  “And maybe I’d better call Sam Doughty?”

  “The hell with Sam Doughty for a while. I need time to think.”

  She went out in a hurry, and the silence closed in on me. It was too early in the morning for heavy thought. Through the window, the sun highlighted the big clock on the Paramount Tower. It was ten-fifteen, the usual time for my routine second breakfast and a short session with the sporting pages. Outside, the dull hum of New York traffic rolled and mumbled along the streets. I opened the window wider and let the racket in. It helped. The muffled background, the discord of horns and whistles, all of this was a tonic for me. The sights and sounds of the city always stimulated me.

  The city was my business. The little people who wandered among the canyons were my meat and fish. You don’t become a missing persons specialist without reacting to the pressure of crowds on highways, without finding a challenge in the millions of small windows around and about you. I breathed in the ripe fall air and let it go to work on my inner man. This was a moment for clear thinking, a moment for waking up. And fast. Someone, some small crumb out in those streets had entered my office last night. Someone had picked my personal cave, out of all the thousands of offices in New York City, as a cute spot for knifing a blonde. Someone, somewhere in a hidden nook, was quietly laughing over his beer while I squirmed.

  But who? Who among my select list of enemies would choose my office for such a chore? I crossed them off my mental list, one by one, until there was nothing left for me, no one to suspect. It made me boil up inside. And the challenge lay out there, out the window, among the ten million residents of the big town. I pulled down the black shade and tried to wipe away the challenge. But it stayed with me. It was in the room, on the floor. I turned away from the window, muttering a few choice phrases to the body at my feet.

  I began to search the room.

  Whoever had done the job was neat and prim about it. He must have waited for her behind the door. She probably walked in, after he called her, and she was facing my desk, waiting for him in the darkness. It would be dark in here at five-thirty. The surrounding canyons were deep pits of shadow so late in the day, and if the shade was half drawn on the lone window, she must have wandered inside with her pretty eyes blinking. He must have killed her as she turned to him, one deep thrust. She may have gasped a bit, but there would be no real sound, nothing to disturb anybody who might have been working late on the floor. She would fall almost exactly where she was now, turning slightly, perhaps, because her head was facing the window. Or did he adjust her body that way after he had disrobed her?

  I saw him as a strong man. It would not be easy to undress a corpse. Once, on a police deal over in Westchester, I saw them trying to take the clothes off a young lady who had been killed on the way home from the movies. The attacker had thrown her body into a gully, and the coroner was trying to pull off her dry, undamaged clothes. It took an assistant to complete the job. And this blonde was no lightweight. I saw the murderer struggling over her inert figure, a sweating killer wrestling a macabre bout with a wooden woman, rapidly growing cold and stiff.

  And what had happened after he pulled the clothing off her? Where had he thrown the stuff? I searched the desk top, looking for the tiny items, the possible pins, bits of material, clips, threads or beads, but found nothing. I scanned the rug, the basket, the window ledge. The office was clean.

  Liz came in. “Are you getting anywhere?”

  “The bastard who killed her stripped everyt
hing.”

  “Everything?”

  “I’ve been over the office, Liz. Not even a hairpin around.”

  “She’s not the type for hairpins.”

  I got down on my knees again and pointed to the fourth finger on the blonde’s left hand. “She was wearing a ring on this finger. See the mark? But our murdering friend managed to work it off. He must have used some of our soap to do the job. That ring was on tight.”

  “But why?” Liz asked herself.

  “A dead-end job. A stab at murder without identification.”

  I broke it down for her. “Sam Doughty has these all the time, but not all of them clueless like this. You read about them in the newspapers every once in a while: Unidentified Man Found in Culvert, or, Body Discovered in Park. Sam arrives with his photographers and his medical men and they take pictures and then haul the stiff down to headquarters and begin a systematic breakdown of the clothing and the dentures and the obvious marks of identification. Sometimes they get a clue and track down the origin of the corpse. But lots of times they wind up just where they started, with a body marked ‘Nameless’ on a slab in the morgue. They’re tough to wrap up, Liz, especially this type.”

  “I still don’t understand it,” Liz said. “Why in your office, of all places?”

  “Why not? The character who did the job must have cased our place.”

  “You mean he’s in this building?”

  “I wish I knew.” I sipped the coffee, and it was bitter, as strong as the rising bile of my anger when I thought of the louse who had arranged this deal for me. “It would be easy for him to pick our lock and walk in here just after five. He made a date with her and sat behind my desk and picked his teeth and just waited. After that, it was easy. He knifed her at his leisure, and if she yelled, it couldn’t have carried any further than the Ladies’ Room outside in the corridor.”

  “The elevator boy must have seen her come up.”

  “So what? He probably carried over a dozen blondes last night. Max Erlock is open late, remember? And so is the other booking agency on the tenth floor.”

  My office was located on the ninth floor of The Cronner Building, an ancient rat’s nest on Forty-fifth Street, out of the high rent district, but still kept in a decent state of repair. It housed an assortment of businesses, from lawyers to stamp dealers and employment agencies, no more than sixty or seventy tenants, all of them friendly people who considered themselves part of a large family, a situation brought about because there were only two small elevators—and washrooms on every other floor. My little cave was large enough for two offices, a reception room able to house three thin clients, plus Liz Abbott’s tiny desk. She had decorated it in good taste shortly after she came to work for me, three years ago, and the midget lobby added a note of warmth and charm to a business well known for its lack of soul. There is no glamour in missing persons. My customers walked through a door marked STEVE CONACHER, and nothing more. It was Liz Abbott who interviewed them on the outside, taking down all important data on large blue index cards, which were later passed on to me for approval or rejection. But such visitors were rare. The bulk of my business came from steady customers who used my talents to track down the vagrant dead-beats, the purposefully missing persons who disappeared to avoid the payment of debts. All this was routine, but occasionally my work was spiced by a spirited quest for a missing husband, or a wife who fled her home for sex or seclusion.

  “You’re not going to question the elevator boy?”

  “I’ll leave that chore for Sam Doughty.”

  “Shall I call him now?”

  “You’re rushing me.”

  “Sam’s going to burn a bit.”

  “He’s burned before.”

  I needed time to think. But Liz was right, of course. Sam Doughty would come in with his boys and call me names for delaying his entrance. It would take him time to cool off, because he was a fiend for order in police business. He had made a name for himself in Homicide, and his reputation included a roaring temperament that was likely to explode in the face of minor obstacles or obvious delays. I had seen him, bloody-fisted, standing over a Yorkville hoodlum who attempted to toy with him after a domestic Nazi street stabbing. I had seen him scream and shout at a murder witness until his victim began to whimper like a small child. Doughty was violent when he had to be. He had the frame for violence, over six feet of towering hulk, and a face that gave him a head start over all opposition. He was an ugly-looking swine, and I didn’t relish facing up to him. Maybe I’m a little shy of the big boys because of my modest size. Maybe my subconscious was playing tricks with me again and warming me up for my bout with Sam Doughty. What the hell—I had nothing to fear from him. I didn’t kill the blonde, after all.

  Liz said, “Why don’t you call Abe Feldman?”

  “I was thinking of it.”

  “You want me to get him?”

  “Why not? But tell him to come up in about two hours. By that time Sam Doughty will be out of here. In the meantime, tell Abe all about the girl inside. Start him checking the hotels for a lead to her. You never know where you’ll find something.”

  “You’re stabbing.”

  “What the hell else can I do? She might have checked in at a hotel.”

  “Don’t get mad,” Liz said. “You frighten me when you look like that, Steve. You look exactly like Jimmy Cagney.”

  “Nuts!” I said, and walked out of there and into my private office, on fire now. Liz was doing it on purpose, of course. She was aware that I do my best thinking when I’m angry, that I blow and bluster the most when I’m on the ball. She had teased me about my size before, but only for utilitarian purposes. Little men have big tempers, built out of hesitant egos. I let myself burn now, at summer temperature, while I sat at my desk listening to the hammering of a small bludgeon deep inside my head, the pounding of my intellect as it groped for a clue. Something. Anything.

  Liz popped her head in. “Do I call Sam Doughty now?”

  “You’ve got a one-track mind,” I said, and threw the latest copy of The New Yorker at her head. “Call him.”

  “Temper,” said Liz.

  CHAPTER 2

  Sam Doughty was finished with the routine business of the police. His photographers had taken their pictures and the fingerprint men had tried for something on the desk, the doorknob and the chairs. The medical examiner was finished with the body, temporarily. He was a little man named Doctor Millett, a new one on the force. He coughed and blew his nose over the figure, shaking his head occasionally as he pondered over his private theories. There was a soft, self-conscious cough from the big cop in the corner of the room, who blushed and gawked at the smooth symmetry of the corpse. She was horribly lifelike now on her back, because the knife wound was visible, high on her chest where no knife should ever be stuck. Sam Doughty batted his hat back on his head and scowled down at her, sucking at his lip and making no comment.

  Doctor Millett reached for his bag, finally. “I think Conacher’s right about her, Lieutenant,” he said. “She’s cold enough to have been killed some time last night, early. I’ll check it downtown, but you can work along with the fact that she was stabbed yesterday evening.”

  “What about the body?” Doughty asked. “Can you tell—?”

  “You mean rape? I doubt it.”

  “But you’re not sure?”

  “She’s not the type,” Doctor Millett said. “I’m only guessing, of course, but she doesn’t impress me as the sort of girl who died fighting for her honor. There would be bruises on her—”

  “Skip it. You don’t know a thing until you look her over downtown. I want a complete check on her, especially the teeth, understand? And quick.”

  Doctor Millett wilted. He scooted out, and Sam looked at me as though I was a bowl of garbage. He said nothing at all while the men took the body away. A detective came in and sat
down on my desk and pulled out a small black book. Then he glanced over at Sam and waited for the nod, and when Sam nodded, the detective began to read, in a flat, dry voice, like a schoolboy on graduation day.

  “The elevator boy is a nut,” he began. “He knows from nothing. Nothing at all. He says the girl might have come up at any time after five, but he wouldn’t have noticed her on account of Max Erlock, upstairs.”

  “Break it down,” Doughty said. “Who is Erlock?”

  “He’s got a two-bit booking agency upstairs. You know the kind—stags and lodge stuff. Max is all the time booking girls up there. He gets plenty of blondes, on account of they’re so popular at the stags. Erlock verified the fact that he had plenty of them up in his dump yesterday afternoon—all afternoon.”

  “Even after five?”

  “That’s what Erlock said. He was booking a chorus line for some kind of fraternal order in Brooklyn, plus about ten girls for a thing called the Bop Friends—out in Merrick, Long Island. Max will be glad to take a trip downtown for a squint at the dead woman, but he insists he probably don’t know her, on account of all the girls he had on his list showed up.”

  “That’s just dandy,” Doughty said. “He’ll come downtown, anyhow. Anything else, Hess?”

  “I went down the hall trying to make a locate on a few people who maybe worked last night up here.”

  “Did you get anything?”

  “I got nothing,” said Hess. “They all went home at five or before.”

  “How about the cleaning women?”

  “They do this floor every other day. They’re due here tonight.”

  “All the breaks,” Doughty said. “How about the street?”

  “There was only one place open, a little beanery up at the corner, but I drew a blank there. It’s too near Sixth Avenue, too many people walking around on the street.”

  “Keep digging, Hess,” Doughty said, and waved the detective out of the room with a big hand. He lit his mutilated cigar again and stood at the window staring out at a mysterious and distant object somewhere beyond the Paramount Building.