Naked and Alone Read online

  “Get dressed,” I told her.

  “What on earth for?” Jordice asked.

  I pulled away from her, gently. “We’re going out, baby. Both of us. For a couple of drinks.”

  “Must you have more liquor?” She went back to the couch again and I went with her. There was a small light burning, the little lamp in the corner. She stretched voluptuously and her tongue skated across her lips. “Darling,” she whispered. “Let’s just relax the way we used to in the old days.”

  “I’m not as strong as I used to be, Jordice.” I held up the dead bottle of Scotch. “And frankly, I’m fed up on waiting for Kay.”

  “But you’ll come back?”

  “Eventually.”

  “Promise me you’ll come back tonight?” Jordice pleaded. “I know how you feel, Johnny. She stood you up and you want to keep her waiting a bit. You want to turn the tables and I don’t blame you. But you’ll come back?”

  “I promise. Now let’s get dressed and beat it out of here before I change my mind.”

  Jordice pushed her way into my arms, but I gave her a playful slap and pulled her to her feet. In sultry silence she slipped into her clothes.

  We walked out of the warm apartment into the deserted lobby. The marble fountain was still spilling water out of a frog’s mouth. The goldfish still swam under the green lilies. Over in the corner, an elevator boy dozed under a potted palm. The front door was shut tight and when I opened it a frozen wind sang through the street. Jordice clung close to me, shivering as we walked. The musical comedy doorman was gone for the night. A cab rolled up to the canopy and a woman stepped out. Jordice held me to her and stopped.

  “It might be Kay, Johnny.”

  The woman had red hair, the color of Kay’s, but her face was not Kay’s. She was somebody’s grandmother, on the way home from a rhumba session at one of the dubs. She gave me a wicked smile, as lovely as a pumpkin on Halloween. I began to yearn even more for a few drinks. Jordice took me to a place called Mamma Natti’s, on a side street twenty minutes away at a slow walk, a little dump that smelled of garlic and doves and the finer Italian delicacies. Jordice knew the place well and we got a table in the corner, complete with a flickering candle, antipasto, minestrone and spaghetti, plus the sharp and twangy tunes from an Italian juke box. It was a little after eleven when we finished.

  “I’ve got to leave you now,” Jordice said. “I’m a working gal, you know.”

  “At this hour?” I asked. “You’re not still dancing?”

  “Only for private enjoyment. I’m a hat check girl, Johnny.”

  “Where can I check my hat with you?”

  She shouted a name through the window of the cab. But the skittering wind picked it up and carried it somewhere south, beyond the range of my ears. I stood there watching the cab snake away uptown. Then I turned on my heel and marched into the wind, heading back to Kay’s place.

  On the uptown side, across the street, a doll on stilt-heeled shoes clicked her way along the pavement. She held her head high against the wind, a small figure with a stiff back. The way she walked reminded me of Kay again. The years slid away and I could see her during the hectic days when she had come to me in her first emergency. She had crossed my orbit like a dazzling star, a beautiful, desperate girl who wanted me to track down her wandering husband. She seemed much too young to be a seasoned married woman then. She had all the bright sparkle and innocence of virginity—until I got her alone in her cozy apartment one night. That changed things for both of us, and I took my time with the manhunt. I knew where her husband was. I had tracked him to a small dive in Miami, where he was bedding down a local queen from a bistro. I let him have fun, because the longer be stayed down there, the more chance I had for getting close to Kay. And she made it worth my while. I delayed locating her husband for three extra weeks. When she finally divorced the little crud, I continued to see her until she left New York for Chicago and disappeared from my life. That was long ago. Tonight, the sound of her voice on the phone had rekindled the spark in me, reminding me of what we had meant to each other. And that was plenty.

  Twenty minutes later I was marching through the lobby of the Coral Apartments again. I was whistling now, one of the old tunes that had made Kay famous.

  But the whistle died in my throat when I pushed open the door to her apartment.

  The living room was empty.

  “Kay?”

  I shouted the name hopefully. We had left the front door off the spring lock when we scrammed for spaghetti and drinks. Now I stared at the knob, feeling suddenly foolish because I’d handled it. For some reason, caution held me in the small hall, listening. Waiting. For what? I heard nothing but the sound of my own confusion. In a distant apartment, somebody was enjoying bop music, but the symphonics were dead to me and I could hear nothing but the dull thud of the rhythm, the bounce and beat of the drums. Or was it my own pulse, hammering in my ear?

  I crossed the living room slowly. I froze.

  Who can explain the mechanics of the mind? The bedroom door was only a usual door, a door painted light blue to match the decor of the room, a smooth door, an unadorned door, a door that meant nothing to me.

  Yet I stared at it and felt my throat tighten and grow dry. My stomach telegraphed a warning to my brain. Without knowing why, I moved to the left and stared down another hall toward the kitchen and through the kitchen toward the rear of the apartment. There was a door back there. Another door that must lead out to the servant’s entrance. Why was my pulse pounding? Was it fear? Fear of what? I couldn’t explain what froze my knees. It became an effort to recross the living room and put my hand on the bedroom doorknob. It became a greater effort to force my fingers to twist the thing.

  I pushed at the door. It was dark inside, but an open window invited a mist of light from the court beyond; I saw the outlines of furniture, slowly, gradually. A bed sat across the room, opposite the door. A night table was on the right side of the bed. A lamp on the table. A picture, only a vague and gloomy patch of shadow on the wall. I snaked my hand along the wall nearest me, groping for the light switch.

  When the light flashed on, I knew what I had feared. It was death.

  Death lay sprawled on the bed. She was on her back, the dress ripped away from her naked breasts. Between them, buried deep, there protruded the ugly blade of a big knife.

  A kitchen knife.

  CHAPTER 3

  Terror still lingered in the room, but it wasn’t mine. It was the terror I imagined in Kay’s eyes when she saw the murderer come at her with that knife. It was the terror she must have felt as the blade ripped into her flesh. It was the terror of her last breath as she knew that life was gushing out of her.

  It was a terror I must see again. I would find the shadow of this horror in the face of the murderer when I got my two hands on his dirty throat.

  Fury paralyzed me. My eyes were hypnotized by the blood that turned Kay’s gown into a grotesque red flower. I forced myself to look down at her face. It was beautiful in death. It was a stab at my memory of her, the recollections of her rare and delicate beauty. And the past rose up to harden my gut, to build the hatred inside me, the angry helplessness that made my throat burn with dryness and my hands sweat with frustration. Death’s smile played around her mouth. Some maniac had cut all the lusty desires, all the quick wit and easy laughter, with one brutal jab of the blade. Grief sucked at my throat. It was an effort to keep quiet in this moment.

  “The dirty bastard,” I said to the walls.

  I walked stiff-legged to the bed, fighting an impulse to pull the knife from her breast. But logic jerked me away from her. I could do nothing for her now. I was a private cop as of that minute, nothing more. There were rules to be followed, routines for this kind of thing. The corpse was an ex-client of mine named Kay Randall and I knew I had to report the crime to Captain McKegnie of Homicide. Now. Befo
re I did another thing. I knew it, but I didn’t do it. I needed time.

  I had to search Kay’s apartment.

  The bedroom window faced into a court. It was nothing more than a huge cement alley that separated this building from the back of another apartment house. A steep ramp with an iron railing ran beneath the window and into the basement door. A murderer could have climbed through the window easily, stabbed Kay, climbed out again and escaped though the cellar. But I didn’t have time to run that idea down. I had time only for the inside stuff at present; the small bits and pieces I might pick up in her apartment.

  I gave the bed a quick once-over. Kay’s body had fallen on the bed. The bright yellow spread was unwrinkled and in perfect order. The pillows still held their shape under the headboard. Nobody had wrestled Kay on this bed. She must have been stabbed while on her feet. On her way from the john? I had to dig my hands into my pockets to keep them away from the knife. The knife was the challenge. I leaned over it, examining without touching. It was a knife of the kitchen variety, the type used for cutting vegetables, long and slender and designed for the quick, sharp slicing of foods. It was of the common sort, brass riveted. It would be difficult to track down this item. You could buy the thing in any one of a thousand hardware stores. I jotted down the trade name—Lucilla Steel—and shoved my notebook away.

  The bedroom wasn’t made for mayhem. It was designed purely for mattress sports. Your eye was caught and held by the bed alone, a giant sleeping nest, a pasha’s idea of perfection in bedroom decor. But it was all out of character for Kay, somehow. Kay had always admired the modernists in art and literature and music. She was a Picasso worshiper, a devotee of James Joyce and bop music. She was at home with everything in the avant-garde school of thinking. She adored the abstractionists and the pioneers in new thought, people like John Cage in music and Luke Deveboise in decoration. Deveboise had done her last place, a fantasy in monochromatic tones and rhythms, a suite of rooms that spelled out Kay Randall’s personality. But who had designed this nest? Certainly not Kay Randall. This was a bedroom to reflect the taste of a corny matron, a cheap gal. Then I remembered. Jordice had mentioned “this furnished palace.” It struck me, suddenly, that a man had designed this room to suit his own corroded background. Which man? Which man had staked Kay to this little den of passion?

  I found no sign of a man in the apartment.

  Not a button, not a piece of ripped cloth, not a used razor blade; nor an ash from a cigar, nor the sign of a subscription to any masculine periodical. I went through the fancy dressers, plumbing the drawers for a hint to the missing man’s character. I fumbled and felt for the usual things, the studs, tie pins, rings and baubles a man might leave behind him temporarily. I found nothing but Kay’s extensive wardrobe of dresses and gowns and underthings.

  The bathroom offered even less. It was a blue-tiled affair with a huge black tub, of the square variety. The medicine cabinet was loaded with the usual assortment of womanly cosmetics, a gallery of the best in perfumes and creams. I clicked off the light and wandered back through the hallway into the kitchen.

  It was a tiny room, built strictly for breakfast. The two enameled cabinets on the wall sported an assortment of odd dishes. But even these accoutrements did not spell Kay for me. She would have bought the most modern dishware for her nest. Instead, these cups and saucers were something out of the Spode factory, a variety of filigreed and curlicued items decorated for upper-class tastes.

  The sink was clean. I found an adequate supply of food in the refrigerator, proof that Kay really used her apartment. But the kitchen gave me claustrophobia. The sickness inside me gained power and strength now. It hurt to stand this close to Kay’s recent life. It hurt to remember the times. I had accompanied her into a kitchen like this, in Chicago, to help her prepare a midnight snack. I decided to get the hell out of there.

  Then I found myself holding the bag. Literally.

  It was a bag of groceries on the pine table against the wall. The bag fascinated me and I dug into it. It was loaded with comestibles. I pulled out a box of King Edward cocktail biscuits, a brand imported from a specialty shop in London. I found a can of Roussainville imported French Turtle Soup, and three jars of the best black Russian caviar, the Caspian Sea Brand. There was an added bundle of high-priced canned meats, truffles and hors d’oeuvres, Latouche Brand snails and clams and antipastos. And on the bottom of the bag, a sales slip that read: $18.87. I pocketed the sales slip.

  The slip might mean nothing and everything. I remembered reading a book, not too long ago, a little volume called, You Are What You Eat. It was true. A lot of personality comes through in the type of diet a person favors. And when I knew Kay, hers was strictly a home girl appetite, despite those fancy tastes in the arts. She was a steak addict, a doll who used to broil the best beefsteaks in the world. Had she changed her eating habits in the last five years? Or had she ordered this special load of tidbits for some fussy guest? For me, perhaps? I shook my head at the idea. Kay knew that all I needed was a hamburger and onion to be happy. Provided I had Kay for the first course.

  But the bag of groceries still held me. A detective is fascinated by things like that. Once I tracked down a little leach because I knew he was crazy about sturgeon sandwiches. This character, a crumb named Ned Columbine, had abandoned his young wife and kid for a quick fling at the hotspots of the big city. He raided the family till and skipped out of the home town. I traced him to a rooming house in Forty-Sixth Street in New York, but his trail fogged out after that. Until I checked carefully with one of the local delicatessens!

  I asked the friendly counter man whether he had any special sturgeon customers. He remembered several, one of whom was a cute doll who came in for the delicacy regularly. I caught her buying the stuff one evening and followed her down the street to a nearby dump. When she opened the door to her little nest, I found Ned Columbine with her. I grabbed him before he had time to munch the sturgeon.

  A buzz from the living room jerked me back to the present. It was a low hum, ominous and vague, yet persistent and annoying.

  I ran inside and found the phone off the hook. Somebody must have used it recently. Somebody must have left it this way and scrammed in a hurry. Who? Who had I disturbed by returning to Kay’s flat? On the right, through the small hall, I saw that a window was half opened. Somebody must have left by way of the fire escape, down into the alley and out. But fast.

  I pulled out a handkerchief and lifted the phone and dialed the operator.

  “Get me Homicide,” I said.

  Then I slammed down the phone before she could buzz me through to the police.

  Homicide had just walked in the front door, followed by a crew of six men.

  CHAPTER 4

  I don’t know who was more surprised, Chris McKegnie or I. He let his big jaw sag and he sucked air like a fish out of water.

  “Amsterdam,” he said, his face clouding up into deep purple patches above the line of his mouth. He was as confused as a man caught in the little girl’s room. “What in hell are you doing here?”

  “Reporting a murder,” I said, giving him my Number 2 smile, the kind I always used when trapped in somebody’s tomato garden. My voice was as clear and sweet as a frog in heat.

  “You’re a little bit late,” McKegnie spat at me. “The murder was phoned in about fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Anybody I know?”

  “Still the gag man,” McKegnie said wearily. He had the quick and surly distemper of all seasoned cops, a permanent scorn for all private investigators, combined with a natural distaste for anything human around him. He crossed the room, pushed me aside and stared down at the telephone as though it might be ready to send him an exclusive message. It was part of his technique to employ silence as a weapon. He was using it now, to irritate me, to keep me on the hook, to let me boil and bounce around a while in the soup of my own nervousness. He signaled
one of the fingerprint men and pointed to the telephone. He watched his man dust it off and get to work on it. The other men on the squad just stood around gaping at him like a pack of trained dogs waiting for their master’s command. I recognized a few of the faces around me, and I didn’t like what I saw. They were as soft and pleasant as a gang of Macedonian bandits.

  I said, “Whoever did this job was smart enough to avoid leaving fingerprints on that phone.”

  “Of course,” McKegnie said wearily. “That includes you, doesn’t it, bright boy?”

  “Of course.”

  “You just dropped in to get out of the wind, I suppose?”

  “Something like that,” I said. “But not quite.”

  “Tell me all about it.”

  “I’m glad you asked. Thought you’d be interested.”

  “And never mind the gags,” McKegnie barked. He had a stiff and sanded voice, all deep tones and guttural grunts. He was almost exactly my size when he stood up straight, the way he was standing now, his heavy hands knotted into fists and his big head close to mine. I caught a whiff of his last cheap cigar around and about his snarling mouth. He tapped me on the chest. One of his men backed him up, eyeing me with the cold disapproval of a truant officer for a juvenile delinquent. McKegnie lifted his lip to show me his gold inlays. He said, “We’ll get further faster if you slow down on the comic routines, Amsterdam. You know what your brand of humor does to me, remember? It makes me want to—”

  “I’ll have to change gag writers,” I said. “But if you’d like some straight dialogue or a good deodorant mouthwash—”

  “Start now,” McKegnie said. “I want all of it. Why you’re here and when you came and the rest of the details, including the slop.”

  He sat down then and lit his cigar and listened to me. He let me talk, allowing me a monologue that included everything but Jordice’s name and the details of our wrestling on the rug. He listened with half-closed eyes, a sour smile playing around the edges of his mouth. He opened his eyes when my narrative led me into Kay’s bedroom to find her dead on the coverlet.