Sugar Shannon Read online

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “Just talk, Marianne.”

  “About what?”

  “George DeBeers.”

  “The hell you say!” Her voice dropped to a shivery whisper. In the flash of light, her head turned my way but I couldn’t catch the expression on her face. It would be loaded with fear if it matched her voice. “What’s the gimmick? Did that pansy tell you anything? He’s lying. He’s a dirty pig.”

  “Relax, Marianne. Timothy told me that you saw George tonight; that was all. Is it true?”

  “I don’t have to answer your damned fool questions, sister.”

  “Rather talk it over with the police?”

  “What for? Why the police?”

  “Because George was murdered.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  She began to crack after that. I saw her head go down and heard the sudden sound of her husky sobs. She was sober enough to react honestly now. She would probably level with me if I could reach her cleverly.

  “Knifed,” I added and let the word sing in the silence. “Stabbed in the back, Marianne.”

  “Christ, no. Who’d do a thing like that to Georgie?”

  “You, maybe?”

  “Me? Why in hell would I kill him?”

  “Money. He was loaded tonight.”

  “Listen. That’s crazy. Georgie gave me the money.”

  “How much?”

  “About five hundred bucks.”

  “Why would he give you that much?”

  “Service. He liked my service.”

  “No woman on earth is worth five hundred dollars per bounce, Marianne.”

  “He liked me, I tell you.” Once again her voice dropped to the level of whispered sincerity. But she gave up on the idea almost immediately. Something was eating her. Something was moving her to her feet. She went to the window and clutched at the drapes and in the quick light I saw her in the depths of her despair. She was fighting a losing battle with some inner force, some cloying idea that would not let her rest.

  “I want to help you, Marianne. The police won’t buy your story. You rolled him, didn’t you?”

  “Aaah,” she signed. “The poor little jerk. I liked Georgie. He was an all right guy. He talked to me all the time. He used me as an ear, honest he did. Oh, once in a while we’d have fun together. But mostly, he liked to talk to me. So what did I do tonight? I rolled him. But that was all, sister. That’s the God’s honest truth and may I be struck down dead if I’m lying to you.”

  “Talk?” I asked. “What kind of talk?”

  “Trouble talk. He had troubles.”

  “Tell me about them.”

  “Why tell you?”

  “I’m a friend of George’s.”

  “The hell you are.” She was on fire with fresh nervousness now, on her feet and staring out at the night. I caught the strong and sickly smell of alcohol around her, a cloying stench because it was all mixed up with her cheap and personal perfume. She was a caricature of a young and hopeless tart, the most frightened little whore I had seen in many a moon. She whispered her next line into the night air. “Listen, old Georgie had too many friends, didn’t he? Like the stinker who’s been following me ever since I left his studio.”

  “Who was that?”

  “A character I’ve seen around Georgie’s studio.”

  “Not Timothy?”

  “Stuff Timothy,” she said impatiently. “Georgie didn’t go for the flower types.”

  “Then who?”

  “Forget it, for Christ’s sake, forget it. God, I wish I had a drink right this minute. Listen—maybe you’d better come back later, tomorrow morning?”

  “I’ve got to talk to you tonight, Marianne.”

  “I won’t talk,” she said with a show of sharp decision and tightened nerves. “I need time to think. Who the hell figured he’d be killed? Maybe I better get out of town for a while, till this stink dies down. Maybe—”

  “The police wouldn’t like that.”

  “To hell with the dicks. I’m as nervous as a cat on a hot roof. I’m getting out. I’m leaving, I tell you—”

  “You didn’t kill him, Marianne?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then why run? The police will assume—”

  “To hell with the cops. I’m not running from them.”

  “You’re afraid of somebody?”

  “I’ll be healthier out of town, I tell you.”

  “Not for long,” I said. She was close enough for me to hear her breathing. I reached out a hand to her and touched her ample arm. She was trembling. “Relax, Marianne. You’ve got nothing to fear, I tell you.”

  “I’m getting out.” She shrugged me off and stood there for a flickering moment. “I don’t trust that bastard. I don’t trust Lambert—”

  She started for the door, one step in my direction. At that moment the shot rang out, a loud clap of thunder from my right, beyond the kitchen door. I saw Marianne sag and drop to her knees, a mad silhouette against the flickering sign lights. Instinct told me to break and run for the hall door. But I was held at her side, awed by the sight of her great figure reduced to a huddled, hopeless hulk. I started for her, to help her. And in that moment, I challenged the gunman. From some black and distant pocket of silence I heard the small sound of movement behind me. Then there was a whacking thud and my head broke into flames and a piercing, stabbing pain welled up inside my ears. I tried to yell, to scream, to claw my adversary. My hands went out and grabbed at the black air. I fell into a vast, uncharted void, my body all stiff and dead now, my hands powerless to save me from the ebony hole into which I was faffing.

  And then the world died for me.

  CHAPTER 7

  1:03 A.M. Saturday

  “She’s coming to,” said the voice of a distant angel.

  “More water, Gwen,” another voice replied, this one a male angel who smelled strangely of pipe tobacco. “Use my handkerchief and dampen her forehead.”

  Next came the sting of cold water and my eyes blinked open. Above my head, a ceiling fixture of ancient vintage, circled by two aimless moths and a large black fly. The sight dizzied me and I closed my eyes and clung desperately to the strong arm around my waist. It was a nice arm, a solid arm with steel fingers that seemed strangely soft and good. I held on tighter as soon as I brought his head into focus. He was Horace Gordon. And I was in his arms at last.

  “Where am I?” I asked, for want of a cleverer question.

  “She needs a writer, as usual,” Gwen said. “Tell her where she is, Horace.”

  “How do you feel?” Horace asked, always the great lover. “You’ve been whacked on the head, Sugar.”

  “So I hear,” I said. “Tell me more, darling.”

  “I ran into Horace at Serena’s,” Gwen said. “When I told him I had Marianne’s address, he insisted on playing the Boy Scout. Tough neighborhood this, for women, old Horace insisted. We were rounding the corner when we heard the shot. Whoever killed Marianne left by the alley door because we saw nobody on the street. Then we horsed up here, found you and phoned for the marines.”

  “I’d suggest we leave this place before the police arrive,” said Horace, trying to shake loose of my anxious hands.

  “Don’t move me, darling,” I said. “I may have a concussion.”

  “Have it in a nearby saloon,” suggested Gwen, stopping to prod me in a place where she knew I couldn’t endure prodding. “And be quick about it, passion flower, or our friend Boyer will lock us all in one of his barred bedrooms.”

  “We’d better leave by the alley,” said Horace. “The police will approach the place through Mardall Lane.”

  “A regular Peter Gunn,” laughed Gwen.

  We ducked into the alley as the sirens began to scream from somewhere in the
north. A small invisible man with a mighty sledge hammer stood on my shoulder and walloped me behind the ears. But I didn’t mind the headache because Horace still held my hand. He led us at a mild gallop through an area of bleak shadows and sudden turns. We emerged behind a giant warehouse and entered another section, festooned by garbage cans and the odds and ends of personal discard from the high wall of windows. Then came the final spurt, a meandering route through a narrow corridor of beer cans and debris.

  We stepped out at last into a street a few blocks away from Mardall Lane. Behind us, the sirens had ceased to moan. The detectives would be bending over Marianne’s limp figure now, making their professional calculations and coming up with an assortment of theories. I remembered her last few moments on earth, her shivering fright. And the final words she left for me. Lambert!

  “Lambert?” I asked out loud.

  “What did you say?” Horace asked.

  “She said lamp post,” Gwen said. “The poor girl’s in shock, Horace. We’d best rush her to the nearest pub.”

  “Lambert?” Horace asked again, pulling me up short to beam his beautiful eyes at me. He regarded me with quiet curiosity. “A familiar name.”

  “My brother-in-law,” I said.

  “An interesting character?” Horace asked.

  “A fiend. Kicks small children.”

  “You are a strange girl, Sugar. Does your head ache very badly?”

  “It thumps and thwacks. Hold my hand, darling.”

  “That name Lambert,” he said. “It has a familiar ring. An artistic ring.”

  “A Hungarian painter of the activist school,” said Gwen with as much conviction as she could muster. “He was the leader of the movement from nineteen-seventeen to nineteen-thirty. He died shortly thereafter.”

  “Interesting indeed,” said Horace, allowing me to hang onto his steady elbow. He looked at me with a sidelong, meaningful glance. He had the sort of mind you couldn’t sidetrack into a dead end through feminine wiles. He was a straight-ahead thinker as stubborn as a calculating machine.

  “The name Jacques Lambert persists,” he mused. “Gallery owner, isn’t he?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I lied. “Would you, Gwen?”

  “I know from nothing except I need a drink.”

  “Make it a double,” I said, because I needed a double. “Hold my hand some more, Horace darling.”

  “You shouldn’t have gone there alone. You might have been killed.”

  “Would you have missed me, lover?”

  “Does your head still hurt badly?”

  “It’s my ego that hurts. Hold my hand.”

  “We’d better take you over to Serena’s,” he said. “You need some strong coffee.”

  “That isn’t all she needs,” Gwen said.

  “Isn’t your flat down here in The Village?” I asked.

  “Over near Fifth and Ninth.”

  “That’s closer than Serena’s.”

  “You could use a good spanking.”

  “Is that a proposition?”

  “Perhaps next time you won’t wander into situations without checking them for danger,” Horace said with his usual sincerity. “What on earth impelled you to go there alone?”

  “A good question,” I said. “And what on earth impelled you to show up, Horace? You told me you were going home to bed after the visit to Boyer’s.”

  “I changed my mind, Sugar. I got to thinking about George DeBeers more analytically. It occurred to me that he was an erratic man, a man with practically no close friends. That type of artist is quite possibly endowed with enemies. In a place like The Village it shouldn’t be too difficult to dig them out.”

  “Exactly my opinion,” said Gwen. “I’ve been talking to a few of the denizens since I saw you last, Sugar. Everybody who knew George DeBeers says he was a nut.”

  “A very nice nut,” I said.

  “But a nut,” Gwen insisted. “He was the closet type of painter, the lone wolf, the dedicated genius. I know the type well. These are the creative clinkers who suffer from a Messiah complex. They imagine they’ve been put on earth by a master hand with a master plan. They get foggy-eyed and mystic about their craft. They spend every available minute in the quiet perusal of their navels. They work overtime at the genius bit. But along the way they set themselves up as targets for the more normal art idiots. The routine artists envy them their solitude and gradually the envy builds up to kind of hate. George DeBeers might have been the sweetest character on earth to the people he liked. He might also have been a stiff pain in the butt to the vast army of people he disregarded.”

  “A keen analysis,” said Horace.

  “Who were the people who hated him so?” I asked petulantly.

  “Almost everybody I talked to,” Gwen said. “Including bartenders, waiters, storekeepers and the rank and file of the saloon customers who knew him only casually but seemed to hate him with a burning flame.”

  “Let’s get over to Serena’s,” I said. “I want to meet some of these lice.”

  CHAPTER 8

  2:04 A.M. Saturday

  “That Boyer is a worm,” said Serena Armitage. “Have another drink, folks. On me. I’m out of my mind tonight. There’ll never be another night like this. This Boyer. A real louse, isn’t he?”

  “He’ll grow on you,” said Gwen.

  “I can live without him.”

  “He must have been dropped on his libido by his mother,” Gwen said.

  “A pest,” said Serena. “He questioned me and questioned me, until I thought I’d vomit. He wanted a witness that I was taking a nap for a while back in my office. He has a brain like a Mongolian idiot, the fool, the damned fool.” She swallowed another hooker and smacked her lips and sighed. She was broken up, all upset by Boyer’s routine interview. It hurt her to be considered a suspect in George’s murder. Her eyes dimmed and dampened when she thought of him and she sobbed unashamedly. She seemed in a state of mild shock.

  “George was one of the greatest talents in this Godforsaken Village,” she whispered, her eyes softening under the spell of memories. “He was—he was like a son to me.”

  “Who would want to hurt him?” Horace asked.

  “Hurt George?” she asked herself. “Only a madman.”

  “And there are plenty down here,” I said. “Can you think of anyone special, Serena?”

  “Why not?” she asked herself. She fought to adjust her mind to the problem, finishing another hooker of rye before setting sail on the mental seas. “A couple of cruddy characters hated George’s guts. One I already told you about.”

  “Jeffrey Keck?” Horace asked.

  “Right.”

  “Anybody else?”

  “Timothy Cantrell,” she said after a pause. “The nance hated him, too. Couldn’t make time with George, so he hated him.”

  “Anybody else?”

  “You ready for a long laugh? I think Magda Trent hated him too.”

  “But wasn’t Magda his girl?”

  “So what? Does that mean she loved him? Magda Trent was hell bent on leading her man around by the nose. I’ve seen her operate with others before she landed George. She’s been living down here for about three years, you hear? And how many men do you think she’s had hooked by the nostrils since the first day in The Village? Plenty. Maybe a dozen. She was pretty close to Timothy Cantrell before she met Jeff Keck. Can you tie that? A sexy broad like Magda bothering with a pansy? But she bothered, all right. She drove the nance nuts by starting an affair with Jeff Keck. It was her pleasure to play them one against the other, right here in my saloon. It made my flesh crawl to watch that poor lily, Timothy, trying to act the man against the old buck Keck. It was like a comedy act in a French movie, funny, but disgusting as hell. Then, when she had Keck drooling over her, she took up with George. For a while I thou
ght she would change. But I was all wrong. She started her little game again until George finally exploded here the other night. If I hadn’t stopped the brawl, Keck might have killed him.”

  Her monologue slid to a halting finish. Serena was suddenly thoughtful, alive with a depth of feeling that dampened her eyes again and softened her voice. She told us the history of George DeBeers from the moment he walked into her place years ago. She built him as a heroic figure, an artist who painted for his supper, a lad of many virtues, an honest painter who had a soul.

  “Come into my office,” Serena said. “I’ll show you the kind of man George was.”

  Serena’s bistro was shaped like an L with the restaurant and bar along the stem and her office and kitchen at the base. A narrow hall led back to her personal den, a good-sized room with one window looking out the small yard beyond. A reasonably healthy maple flourished against the brick wall out there. A decorative fountain bubbled under a yellow floodlight.

  In the office, the décor was a refreshing shock. The place sang of good taste in the arts. On the wall behind her desk, arranged in interesting display, stood her collection of primitive African sculpture. There were several pieces of Baule origin, high-bracket art merchandise. On the long wall was her personal collection of paintings, hung in haphazard fashion but featuring some rather valuable items: a small Vlaminck landscape, a brilliant pen sketch by Van Gogh and a divine water color by the great Klee. Around and about these treasures hung another collection, a gathering of some of the contemporary greats. In the dead center of the display was a George DeBeers abstract, a tiny gem in his latest style.

  I looked around the room, enjoying the unique quality of its eye-catching décor. It grabbed you and made you stop to think. Rooms are always reflections of their owners. Over the years, during the many interviews from private dwellings to rococo penthouses, it became my habit to listen with a shallow ear while allowing my eyes to sample the owner’s decorative personality. Unimaginative women assume that they can screen their stupid personalities by hiring a skillful decorator to design their nests. But invariably the character of the owner comes through even the most expensive job. A decorator must eventually yield to his client’s whims. And by yielding and compromising, the dry rot personality of the client emerges.