Sugar Shannon Read online

  But Keck was lost in my direction. I was sitting on a low stool and he seemed hell bent for taking a personal measurement of my thighs.

  “I like your type,” he told me with a leering laugh. “Did anybody ever tell you that you’re sculptural?”

  “Not lately.”

  “You’d certainly make an interesting subject.”

  “Why?”

  “Bumps—and hollows. You’ve got them where they belong.”

  “Does it show that much?” I said, buttoning the top button of my blouse.

  “I’d like a crack at you in marble,” he said. “You have a pear-shaped rump, Miss—what did you say the name was?”

  “I didn’t say.”

  “Nor did you explain why you are here,” smiled Keck, sliding his eye over Gwen’s hips, a long and studious stare that wound up riveted on the small sketch pad she carried. “Don’t tell me you’re art students, for God’s sake?”

  “I won’t,” said Gwen.

  “Tourists?”

  “Try again.”

  “You came from Serena’s?” His sharp eyes studied me again. “Serena sent you over to buy a piece of my sculpture, is that it?”

  “Not quite,” I said. “We were sent here by George DeBeers.”

  “DeBeers?” Keck dropped the name in between sucking gasps at a large pipe. If he was surprised he covered it well. His hand held the match steady and he continued to work the pipe until rewarded with great gusts of smoke. “I didn’t know George cared,” he said.

  “George doesn’t.”

  “But that’s double-talk. You say he sent you here?”

  “Here, there and everywhere, Mr. Keck. You see, George DeBeers is dead.”

  “No!”

  He dropped the word into the silence and it sent of ripples of honest emotion. Keck was shocked and slowed by the sudden news. He struggled for composure, the sort of man who would never show any deep or important mood to a female. But nothing he could do hid the quick and sweaty rash of moisture on his brow. His perpetual smile was dead now. He was loaded with honest befuddlement.

  “When did it happen?” he asked.

  “Tonight.”

  “But why? Why would anybody murder poor old George?”

  “I didn’t say he was murdered.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “I said he was dead.”

  “Of course.” Keck mopped his classic brow, fighting for a way out of the trap. “But I assumed that George must have been murdered, don’t you see? Why else would he die? George DeBeers was a man of great vitality—and good health, too young for the ritual illnesses that lay men low. From what I know of him he never had a sick day in his life.”

  “Today was his sick day,” I said.

  “Horrible.”

  “The understatement of the month,” Gwen said. She was putting Keck down on her sketch pad and he watched her speculatively, annoyed by her.

  “Why the sketching?” he asked.

  “You’re going to be famous,” I said. “When this hits the public prints.”

  “Why me, for God’s sake?”

  “Serena Armitage tells me you took a whack at George recently in her saloon.”

  “Ridiculous!” His booming voice regained its routine force. “We quarreled, yes. But only because we were both crocked.”

  “Serena says you had to be bounced out of the Grotto. Serena says you were out for his blood the other night.”

  “Serena is a liar.”

  “Serena has no reason to lie.”

  “Menopausal women!” roared Keck. “God save the man who finds himself involved with one of the breed. And did Serena tell you what reason I might have for killing George?”

  “Magda Trent.”

  “What a preposterous idea,” Keck said with his usual confidence. He was no longer sweating out his original worry about Gwen and me. Now he eyed me with an almost merry twinkle, showing me his broad, stallion smile. “You certainly have an insight into my affairs, my dove. How did it happen? How did you know that I have a high regard for Magda Trent? I don’t understand you at all. I can’t quite fathom why you’re so interested in my life and times.”

  “Shall I draw him a picture?” Gwen asked.

  “I’m a reporter, Mr. Keck,” I told him. “But this assignment is a bit offbeat for me.” I waited until he finished relighting his pipe. I allowed him to adjust his massive frame in the chair and listen carefully to my next thought. “I’m going to find out who murdered my friend George DeBeers.”

  “Commendable,” he smiled. “But isn’t that a job for the police?”

  The knock on the door answered his question. There were two men standing there, two bulls from Boyer’s squad. They stepped in together.

  “Keck?” one of the asked. “Better take off that robe and come with us. You’ve got a date down at headquarters.”

  CHAPTER 4

  10:51 P.M. Friday

  I phoned Jake Lathrop, my city editor.

  “I want to do the story of George DeBeers’ death,” I told him.

  “What did he die of? A migraine headache?”

  “A knife, Jake. Where no knife should be—between the short ribs.”

  “Any female material? Models? Village whores, perhaps?”

  “It could be.”

  “No broads, no story, Sugar,” said Jake in his normal monotone, as happy as an Arab in a synagogue. He had been holding his fat tail down at a desk job for too long. He saw the world through jaded eyes and only breathed heavily when the big headlines moved circulation up a few notches above The Express, our competitor. “We can run an artist story, sure. But you’ve got to load it up with sex or I won’t print it. Our readers still think Normal Rockwell is greater than Picasso. Can you dig up an orgy or two?”

  “I won’t promise it.”

  “Maybe you’d better go over to Brooklyn and do that Flatbush assignment, Sugar.”

  “Please, Jake? Pretty please? I want the DeBeers job.”

  There was a buzz and a silence at the other end. Then Jake’s voice came through again, but this time, on fire.

  “Sister, you’ve got yourself a job,” he said curtly. “I just found out The Express is sending Horace Gordon downtown for the DeBeers thing. That means you’d better get to the bottom of the cesspool first. I wouldn’t want a stiff like Gordon to beat us to the red headlines, baby.”

  “I’m on my way,” I said.

  The mention of Horace Gordon’s name tickled me. The army of reportorial talent is a friendly bunch, as warm and cozy as a chowder club, a hep group, an intelligent crew of keen-nosed ferrets. I knew most of them through the congenial sessions at various trade meeting around town. But of all the local newsmen, Horace Gordon made my heart beat out of tempo. Horace and I had worked opposite sides of the street on the Carmen Lucco story.

  Carmen was a local Broadway character, a two-bit entrepreneur who hit it big in the hot dog and orangeade business with a string of corner eateries from Brooklyn to Butte. His sudden rise to fame came about by way of a tricky pizza innovation, a twenty-five cent item complete with mushrooms, anchovies and enough pepper to choke a Sicilian. The idea caught New York by the seat of its appetite and Carmen expanded, aided and abetted by a bank account gleaned from the numbers racket. Carmen became a playboy, made the gossip columns by squiring visiting Hollywood starlets to the night clubs and often turning up at unique brawls given by the upper-class social bigwigs. At one of these brouhahas he met Mary Beth Willis, the debutante heir to the Willis Bank fortunes. Mary Beth fell for Carmen’s oily charm, but her mother resented Lucco and whisked her errant daughter off to France for a prolonged holiday. This did nothing to cool Carmen’s pants. He flew to the French Riviera, located his lady love and disappeared with her into limbo. The story became an international guessing game.
Where was Mary Beth Willis? I was assigned to the case when my editor got an anonymous tip that Lucco might be shacking up with his Lolita nymph somewhere in the vicinity of New York City. Horace Gordon entered the hunt for his newspaper and together we fought for the right ending to the story—working to snag the two lovers in their sex nest and thus scoop the world on the revelation. We roamed the eastern seaboard, from Florida to Maine, chasing down phoney leads but keeping the yarn alive by our coverage of innumerable and picturesque leads to the missing heiress. But it was Horace who figured it out. He remembered that Mary Beth had a brother named Gerald Macy Willis. Gerald had abandoned the family bank to labor in the marts of interior decoration, where he consorted with a variety of pale and lovely males and called one of them “sweetheart.” By following Gerald, we soon found ourselves on the hot and sexy dunes of Fire Island, where Gerald ventured each weekend to seek the company of Oscar Maddock, his current flame. And there we found Lucco and Mary Beth, occupying a commodious cabin on the Lucco yacht, anchored in an inlet hard by Fire Island. We surprised them one afternoon when Carmen and his comely little wren splashed in the surf clad only in her navel and matching skin.

  It was Horace’s keen thinking that made the locate on the love-happy pair. The chase had been merry and full of dead-ends, but with Horace alongside me I was reluctant to end the story. I could have run to hell and back with him gladly, despite the fact that he barely noticed me and thought me only an ambitious girl reporter. Was it his indifference that won me? He could have knocked me into bed by simply pointing a finger toward a mattress.

  Instead, he was as cold and aloof as a dying mackerel.

  Gwen said: “You look like the cat who just ate a gross of canaries.”

  “I feel like that cat.”

  “Something Jake told you?”

  “Something? Everything. Horace Gordon will be fighting us on the DeBeers story.”

  “My aching back,” Gwen sighed. “Think you’ll seduce him on this caper?”

  “I can dream, can’t I?”

  At the precinct, the outside corridors buzzed with the usual activity for this time of night: peroxide whores smirking at the desk sergeant; occasional drunks being dragged into cool cells; the never-ending line of oddball offenders on their way into temporary oblivion.

  And in the corner, as solitary as a monk in a monastery, sat Horace Gordon. He seemed at ease with the world, as usual, his tall figure slouched casually in a pose that gave him a boyish air, his bony knees high, his blue eyes lost in the latest edition of The Star, his opposition paper.

  “Horace,” I said, forcing him to shake hands with me.

  “The brute lover,” added Gwen.

  “Hello to both of you,” said Horace with a stiffening nod. He had the perpetually awkward air of an adolescent, fumbling his hat and blushing slightly. “What brings you here, Sugar?”

  “You.”

  “Me? How strange.”

  “Shall I draw him a diagram?” Gwen asked.

  “Let’s be serious,” said Horace, because he was always intense when on a job. I could have walked through the room dressed in a bikini and it would not move him. He looked at the world through the eyes of a scientist, a reporter who considered his story first and let the anxious dolls fall where they may. He smiled at me sweetly, as full of deep emotion as a clam. “Do you girls mean that you’re covering the DeBeers case?”

  “Not covering it,” Gwen laughed. “Sugar’s hell bent on solving it.”

  “A fantastic idea,” said Horace, allowing me a few ticks of time from his wonderful blue eyes. “And what does our friend Boyer think of your idea, Sugar?”

  “Does it matter to you, darling?”

  “What I mean is—Boyer might resent your probing.”

  “Boyer can resent as he pleases,” I said. “I think there’s meat and fish in the story for our readers. What could be more interesting? An artist stabbed. And the reporter—that’s poor little me—a personal friend of the dead man, dedicated to the task of locating his murderer.”

  “You make it sound very provocative, Sugar.”

  “I can make it more provocative. What don’t you and I have a drink together and discuss my theories?”

  “I’m not thirsty.” He disregarded my obvious pitch with his usual calm. He had a wide-open, boyish face, complete with the honest stare of the Boy Scout down the block. His mind would be already rounding first base in the battle for leads and clues. He had a habit of thinking in a straight line and nothing in silk panties and uplift bra could sidetrack him. Not even Gwen, who found herself pulled off the bench by my impatient hand.

  “You could be wasting your time,” Horace went on lost in the solitary sea of his mind. “I’ve already spoken to the detectives and they have a theory that George DeBeers might have been attacked because of the large amount of money he was carrying tonight. If a man gets violently drunk in a neighborhood like Greenwich Village, he asks for trouble from the many grifters and thugs who haunt its alleys.”

  “J. Edgar Hoover, in the flesh,” said Gwen.

  “Be quiet and let Horace continue,” I cautioned.

  But my second stab at Horace’s inner man never got off the ground. One of the detectives was signaling us. The examination of Jeffrey Keck was about to get under way. I feel into step alongside Horace and followed him into Boyer’s office.

  Jeffrey Keck perspired freely under the sharp-tongued questions thrown at him by Boyer. The city detective sat behind his desk in an attitude typical of his breed. He sucked at a toothpick and studied Keck with the glaring benevolence of a large cat over a small rodent. Boyer allowed himself the luxury of a pause when we entered. He slid his bedroom eyes my way and winked me into the chair as though I might be a conspirator in a foreign intrigue plot.

  “You’ve been tagged, Keck,” he said.

  “Tagged?”

  “Observed. Seen. Spotted. And do you know where?”

  “I can’t imagine.” Keck licked his lips nervously and the large pipe shook in his hand. His massive body seemed suddenly tight and stiff, like a man who anticipates a sudden stab. He mopped his brow and fought to preserve his usual dignity.

  “Relax, Keck,” said Boyer. “It’s always easier if you tell the truth. Want to change your story? Or do you still insist that you were walking the streets all evening?” Boyer’s voice sharpened and he leaned forward and waved a letter opener at his victim. “Just remember this before you answer. I won’t give you another chance if you lie to me this time.”

  “You’re right,” whispered Keck. “I didn’t tell you the truth.”

  “You visited George DeBeers?”

  Keck nodded. “A little after nine.”

  “That’s better. Because we had you spotted, like I said, Keck. Lady downstairs in the delicatessen said she saw you go up to DeBeers’ place. At exactly eight-oh-five, am I correct?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why did you go up to see him?”

  “Money. I wanted a loan.”

  “A loan?” Boyer scowled. “Did DeBeers ever lend you money before?”

  “Several times.”

  “And you paid him back?”

  “Not always.” Keck squirmed, annoyed by the direction of his inquisition. “But he knew I would return his loans eventually.”

  “You make him sound like your buddy, Keck. That’s hard to take. That’s corny. We happen to know that you and DeBeers didn’t get along well at all. Matter of fact, you took a poke at him over a woman, right?”

  “Rot!” Keck seemed genuinely angry now. In this mood he had the verve and fire of a young buck, a spirit that made you forget his real age. He would be pushing forty and yet he reacted with the fire of an adolescent. “Are you talking about the stupidity in Serena’s pub? Magda Trent? Hell, she’s just a good friend, a fellow sculptor. That’s the long and
the short of it.”

  “Wasn’t she DeBeers’ girl?”

  “You’ll have to ask Magda that question.”

  “A good idea,” said Boyer. He allowed the pause to build, and old police trick. He fiddled with some papers on his desk. He spoke briefly into the intercom. He sat back and sucked the toothpick, allowing Keck to sweat a bit more. “How long did you stay with DeBeers?”

  “A little while. Perhaps fifteen minutes.”

  “He gave you the money?”

  “He did not.”

  “Was he drunk?”

  “Completely. It was impossible to talk with him.”

  “So you left,” Boyer said. “You left him and went back to your studio?”

  “Not immediately. I walked a bit. I strolled through the Village, just meandering.”

  “Meet anybody?”

  “Nobody.”

  “What time did you reach your studio?”

  “It was well after nine.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  “My model was waiting for me when I returned.”

  “You had a date with her at nine?”

  “You can check it with her,” said Keck. “Her name is Gloria Stanton and she lives in the Village.”

  “Thanks,” said Boyer and buzzed for an outside man. He left the room with the detective, obviously on his way to set up a locate on Gloria Stanton. Keck was not at all disturbed by the turn of events. He got out of his chair and discussed Gwen’s sketches. His manner was smooth and controlled again. Horace studied him casually while I studied Horace. In profile, he made my heart thump harder. There was a spot on his chin that I would enjoy fondling, a dimple that made my head spin.

  I reached for his arm.

  “What do you think?” I whispered.

  “It’s a difficult story, Sugar.”

  “I mean about Keck.”

  “He could be a strong suspect. Appears to be a man of violent moods, wouldn’t you say? I can see him becoming very angry when DeBeers refused him the money. Yet, would a man kill with that as a motive? I doubt it.”