Murder for Madame Read online

  Tiny left me here. Time was sliding by. Outside, the sporadic hiss and stutter of traffic rolled westward, the noise of the tires muffled through the wall. Somewhere a horn blared impatiently. There was an answering hoot from far off in the invisible distances, and then the silence closed in. It was too early for business here. In another hour or so gentlemen callers would be arriving in respectable groups, to be ushered into this room and from here to another room where they would select their playmates, order their drinks and retire upstairs for further pleasures.

  I sat in one of the great modern chairs, admiring the room, not as a reception hall in a deluxe bordello, but because the place sang of Mary Ray’s personality.

  Mary Ray was unique, a contradiction of all the fact and fiction concerning harlotry. She was wise and good. She carried herself with obvious poise and dignity. Her body was trim and svelte and it would remain that way for years to come, as carefully tended as a ballerina’s. And she had brains. Mary was aware of the history of her profession because she had dipped deep into the lore and legend of prostitution. But she also knew its sociological implications and could argue the value of her trade with such men as Herbert Kincaid and Tom Webster, expounding on the background of harlotry from the Bible to Broadway. She could quote Westermarck and Krama and, in the next breath, Winchell and Lyons. She considered her business a necessary evil in the hurly-burly of life.

  I had been here before, in the recent past, to socialize with Mary. This was her parlor. Here she entertained an intimate group of friends, culled from the lively arts in the midtown area: actors, musicians, comedians, writers, artists, and even an occasional highbrow visitor from the critical world. Mary was well known for her cozy soirees, sessions that always began after midnight, on special nights when her house was closed to business and all her girls away. Mary was a gracious hostess, a woman of infinite charm, who made friends easily and kept them forever.

  I had met her seven years before when she assigned me the chore of locating her husband, the hoofer Sam Hestie, who had abandoned her and fled to Miami. I made the locate on Sam in a little under two months, a feat that astonished Mary and earned me her everlasting friendship. She divorced him immediately and played the field after that. It was her last permanent attachment. Rumor had it that her current flame was Haskell Moore, a painter of some reputation in Greenwich Village.

  I crossed to the far end of the room where a new painting hung in the illuminated niche. It was a giant opus, the figure of a woman painted in shimmering flesh tones, in the style of Renoir. The name Haskell Moore was signed in the lower right-hand corner in bold, sure strokes. The nude lay on a yellow throw, leaning on one elbow and staring out at her audience in an impudent pose. She had an hourglass figure, young and firm and unwrinkled. Something about her eyes held me.

  Was this Mary?

  I was shaking my head at the idea when I heard the scream. I started for the hall, but Tiny was already halfway down the stairs when I arrived. She was still yammering as she almost tripped on the last step and came flying toward me, hanging there, her head upraised and her eyes wet with unfeigned horror, a surge of tears shaking her as she clung to me.

  I said, “What’s the trouble, Tiny?”

  She pointed upstairs, her arm trembling.

  “Mary!” she gasped. “She’s hurt up there!”

  CHAPTER 3

  Mary Ray’s bedroom was a symphony of French color, chosen to create the illusion of quiet charm and elegant living. The place sang of womanhood, from the broad, well-cushioned bed to the dainty furniture, lightly designed on the arms and backs and placed in just-so positions to blend with the décor of the walls. The carpet was wine-colored and soft underfoot. It was a picture book room, a haven of subdued charm, if you could keep your eyes on the furniture and fixtures. But that was impossible. The center of interest lay on the floor, on the carpet.

  The center of interest was Mary Ray.

  Because Mary Ray was obviously dead.

  She lay on her back, near the bed, her arms raised over her long and flowing hair, as though reaching out for an impossible goal. She was wearing a black evening gown, strapless and low cut, but somebody had mutilated the original line above the bodice. Somebody had ripped it away, tearing it as it was pulled, so that it hung on her torso like a rag.

  And under her dress, her right breast was smeared with a crimson stain. I kneeled to feel her pulse, knowing that she was dead before I touched her wrist.

  Tiny was standing in the hallway, her head buried in her hands. She was trembling with a violent grief, a combination of shock and terror and sadness. The sound of her sobbing did things to my reflexes, holding me at Mary’s side in an attitude of mourning. The sight of her ripped at my stomach, reviving the good memories of the past, recalling to me the many facets of her personality—her essential kindness, her goodness, her genuine friendliness. And kneeling there, I felt the sorrow dry my throat. And after that, anger came to take its place.

  I got off my knees and went to Tiny. I grabbed her hands and jerked them away from her face.

  “Who killed her?” I shouted. “Who was the bastard that knifed her?”

  “I don’t know,” Tiny said. Her face clouded with pain. “Please, I don’t know.”

  “Think! Stop your goddam blubbering and think. Now! Because you’re going to have to do it for the dicks.”

  “I don’t know,” she said again.

  “I’ll give you a minute to remember,” I said. “Start remembering what happened during the past few hours.”

  She sat down in the little chair near the door, still sobbing quietly into her hands. I crossed the room to the chaise longue and stood over the small French desk near it. The top drawer was open. There were a few papers exposed, bills and letters. There was a wire brassiere and a small jewel box, unopened. I called Tiny over to me.

  I said, “Is this where Mary kept her valuables?”

  Tiny shook her head. “No, she didn’t. She always talked about her bank vault.”

  “That’s better. She had no other hiding places in the house? Nothing tricky, like wall safes?”

  “Nothing that I know about.”

  “What was she wearing tonight, the last time you saw her? Close your eyes and think.”

  Tiny thought, a long and studious moment. “She had her bracelet on.”

  “Important jewelry?”

  “It was her best, her very best. She always told us that it was worth a lot of money. Something she got from an old beau who was nuts about her—I can’t think of his name, but you probably know who I mean… The one she almost married.”

  “A diamond bracelet?”

  “A beautiful thing.”

  “It’s not on her wrist now,” I said. “The bastard who killed her did it for the bracelet. It must have been worth plenty of loot.”

  “Mary once said that she could get fifty grand for it.”

  “Mary never lied,” I said. “Where’s the telephone.”

  “There’s only one phone, downstairs, in the room we call the butler’s pantry.”

  “Get down there now and call the police.”

  She ran out and I returned to the body of Mary Ray, shaking my head at her, trying to fight down the sickness that was building inside me. The sight of her was a torture to me. The horror of the blood-red stain against her pale and elegant skin made me turn away from her, while my subconscious annoyed me with crazy questions.

  I began to search for the skivvy, but the anger didn’t drain out of me. I scampered around the room, looking for everything and anything, my mind alerted with the idea that there must be something important in the room for me. But the carpet was clean.

  I went back to the door and let my imagination play games with me. I struggled to kill the anger now, to think clearly and reasonably. Nothing came but an annoying itch to return to the little French de
sk. So I re-crossed the room and bent to examine the open drawer. I looked but I did not touch.

  Sam Doughty would break my back if he came up here with his homicide boys and found that I had handled anything. The contents of the drawer were in disorder. On the right side, a few filigreed French handkerchiefs were fluffed up and unfolded, as though somebody had run through them quickly. Underneath them I saw traces of bright yellow silk, probably a brassiere or a neckerchief or some other item of feminine apparel. In the middle section there were a few garters, bright red and light blue, festooned with decorative bows. The jewelry box was made of leather and the top was tooled in a masterful design, dotted with small artificial stones, brilliantly colored and shimmering in the light. And on the other side of the jewel box, something caught my eye.

  It was a small book, bound in green leather—not really a book, but a tiny pad, the sort of midget volume most women carry around in their bags for addresses and phone numbers. My hands burned with the yen to finger this tiny volume, to open it up and read a few of the names inside. This would be a collector’s item, a gimmick that might cause lots of people lots of trouble with the police department. I reached gingerly past the jewel box and my fingers closed over it. I was being a bad boy. I was setting myself up for Sam Doughty. But this was something I had to do. The little book could speak to me, it could tell me much about Mary Ray’s life, things that I had to know now.

  Because I had made up my mind to catch the bastard who had butchered her.

  My hand lifted the little green book, and I watched it come my way, as though the hand that clutched it belonged to somebody else. I was bending low over the desk drawer. I was concentrating on lifting the little green book when somebody hit me.

  It was a shattering smack, a flat blow behind the ears that staggered me and shook me and threw me off balance; I fell to the right, but tried to turn as I fell. Then it hit me again, something harder than a fist, something made of metal. The impact caught me as I turned, and my eyes fogged with a gray mist that became suddenly black and filled itself with a thousand whirling spheres of light, a miasma of technicolored dots in which I began to spin on a mad merry-go-round ride. And I began to fall, not to my knees, but through the floor and into the cellar, and beyond the cellar into a pit, a deep black hole that seemed to be bottomless.

  Then a crazy wind sang in my ears and I knew that I was no longer in Mary Ray’s bedroom.

  CHAPTER 4

  A soft and feminine hand was patting me awake. Tiny was massaging my brow with a cold wet rag. Her arm swam into focus first and after that, the sound of a hard, firm voice from somebody above her. I leaned on an elbow and shook some of the cobwebs away and stared down at the big brogans, black and flatfooted, and above the brogans at the dark gray pants. There were three other pairs of legs around me, and all of them belonged to uniformed cops. The man with the big feet was bellowing at me and I recognized the voice of Sam Doughty.

  “Laughing boy again,” he said. “The little man with the big personality.”

  I looked up at him, and in the perspective shot he was out of focus, like a reflection in a trick mirror, all body and no head at all. The back of my neck stung with pinpricks of pain. Tiny was still massaging my brow with the wet rag.

  “Are you feeling any better now?” she asked.

  “You should have left me alone in my personal black hole,” I said. “The sight of Sam Doughty is no tonic for a man with the heaves.”

  “Still the same little comedian?” Sam Doughty said. “You should be in television, Conacher. With your sense of humor you’d knock ’em dead—but only on the ten inch screens, because of your little head.”

  I got up off the floor, leaning against the chaise longue to steady myself. I sat down and lit a cigarette, closing my eyes again until most of the dizziness poured out of my head.

  Doughty said, “Who’s the dead woman, Conacher?”

  “Her name is Mary Ray.”

  “I don’t know the name. Am I supposed to? You say it like it was maybe important.”

  “I didn’t say she was. You probably caught her act when she was down in the burlesque hot spots.”

  “Jesus, yes!” Doughty’s enthusiasm came through suddenly. “That’s the Mary Ray we been looking for. This is a first class house for the Vice Squad.”

  “Now you’ve found it,” I said.

  “Mary Ray,” he said again. “This’ll be a feather for me. Imagine me running into the nest that the vice boys been knocking their heads off to find all this time. Wait’ll I tell them I got it for them. You know something, Conacher? We’ve been trying to find this place for maybe three years.”

  “What for? The rates are too high for you city dicks.”

  “She was clever,” said Doughty. “She had this place well screened. A guy like you could have done a great public service by reporting her.”

  “She was a good friend of mine, Doughty.”

  “Naturally. You got all kinds of friends in all kinds of places. So you came up here tonight to pay her a social call, is that it?”

  “On the nose, Doughty.”

  “So you found her stiff on the rug, and then somebody walked in and pinned your ears back. Right?”

  “You’re a great brain,” I said.

  “Who slugged you?”

  “A fancy question. Why do you guys always ask the easy ones first?”

  He walked away from me. Tiny was standing at the window, fingering the draperies and staring out at the flat rooftops across the street. She was going to hell in a hack, her pretty face working nervously, her face stained with tears where the mascara had run down over her once rosy cheeks. She held a handkerchief to her nose and blew once or twice, gently.

  Doughty tapped her on the shoulder and she lumped a bit, as though somebody had put a few thousand volts to her.

  “Take it easy,” Doughty said. “Come over here and sit down and make yourself comfortable and tell me all about it from the beginning.”

  Tiny took the chair at the end of the room so that she faced away from the bed. She began the slow process of mangling the handkerchief in her hands.

  She said, “I don’t know anything about this. I don’t know anything at all.”

  “Of course you don’t,” said Doughty. “Relax. Nobody wants you to rush. Take a deep breath and let your hair down a little. How long you been working in this dump?”

  “About three months.”

  “Where did you come from?”

  “Brooklyn.”

  “You worked in another house in Brooklyn, is that it?”

  “Oh, no,” Tiny sobbed. “This is the first time for me. I used to check hats over at the Palms. That’s a night club in downtown Brooklyn.”

  “I know the dump,” Doughty said. “A real creep joint. So you got fed up with checking fedoras and somebody made you an offer. So you packed up and came uptown for the bigtime dough. Right? Who was your contact?”

  “I have a friend who used to work here. She was down at the Palms one night and she told me about Mary Ray, about how Mary needed a new girl on the door. My friend thought I could fill the bill, so I came up here and met Mary and she gave me the job.”

  “On the door?” Doughty asked. “What the hell were you—a receptionist?”

  “That’s right. I would answer the phone and they would tell me who was coming and then I would stand at the door. When they came, I’d show them in. That’s all I did here.”

  “A real refined job,” Doughty sneered. “Receptionist in a cat house. So you answered all the telephone calls? Where did they come from?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where did they come from?” Doughty yelled. He was standing over her, arms akimbo, glaring down at her balefully, putting the pressure on. There were two round, red splotches of anger on his jaws, high blood pressure areas that made him a frig
htening spectacle. “Jesus! I hate the sight of a cheap tart putting on a show. I want the truth out of you and I want it now, or I’ll take you downtown and sweat twenty pounds off you under the lights!”

  I said, “Take it easy, Doughty. It could be that she’s leveling.”

  “Shut your fancy little trap!” Doughty said. “I’ll get to you later.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  “I’m telling you the truth,” Tiny said. She was sobbing hysterically. “You can check my story, if you like. They’ll tell you all about me down at the Palms. They’ll tell you just when I quit and how I worked there.”

  “Oh, sure, sure,” Doughty said, as friendly as a terrier over a rat. “I suppose they’ll also tell me that you were a virgin, and you came up here to earn a lot of dough for your poor sick old mother. Dames like you give me a swift pain in the butt, especially when you put on the schoolgirl act. We’ll check you, all right. We’ll find out all about you. You’ll have an interview with a man from the Vice Squad one of these days, a personal friend of mine, who likes to play cute games with skirts like you.”

  He paused to relight the stub of his cigar, letting the silence build around her, and watching her squirm. It was a business habit of Doughty’s, a trick he used when he had somebody on the griddle and needed time for deep and penetrating thought. He went to the window and blew gusts of smoke at it. He took off his hat and wiped the sweatband with his handkerchief. He toyed with the brim, adjusted it, and put it back on his head. The cigar went out and he lit it again, returning to Tiny so that he could glower at her through the fresh smoke.