Murder for Madame Read online

  “I’ll let you know later—after I get her.”

  “Don’t let it slip your mind,” he chuckled. He called for another cup of coffee and told me a few tales of remembered brothel Berthas, all of them escapists from the oldest profession. He added them all up the same way. They had failed to pull themselves out of the rut and had bounced back into the trade, resigned to their old way of life. For all of them, the world of pay-as-you-love was the sweeter career. It had to do with the state of mind these rabbits achieved after their apprenticeship days. Mary Ray had told me much about the subtle change that came over most of her girls. She had described it as “body abandonment,” the release of the flesh for profit. It was something you could read in a harlot’s eyes. But I had not seen it in Joy Marsh’s.

  “I’ve never had the chore of spotting and nailing a babe,” Slip Keddy was saying. “There was a small deal once, when I worked for Abe Feldman and visited Scranton to track down an ancient widow. But she was fruit for the coffin boys. It’s always the same for me—the masculine leads. One of these days, before I die, do me a favor and send me off to find you something alive, Steve. That will be living.”

  “You can have Mary Ray’s,” I said.

  “Break it down,” Slip said, unmoved by any generosity. “What are you handing me?”

  “There are two gals to fiddle with at Mary’s. Anita and Rose.”

  “I can’t afford to fiddle with Mary’s skirts. They’re too expensive.”

  “You can work that out when you meet them,” I said. “But you’ve got to check a few things for me along the way. Mary was wearing a bracelet when she was slaughtered. It was an expensive piece, and Doughty doesn’t seem at all concerned about it. I want to make the locate on it. Either of them might have slipped back through the alley door while Tiny was up front.”

  “You think one of the girls has it?”

  “It was an expensive bauble.”

  “Maybe Haskell Moore took it when he knifed her.”

  “Doughty would have found it in his studio.”

  “Not if he hocked it,” Slip said.

  “He didn’t have time, unless he met the fence out in the street on his way from Mary’s. He was a busy bee when he ran out of there, but we know his movements and none of them led toward a fence.”

  “He sounds as though he was ripe for it, Steve. From what you tell me of his studio, he wasn’t loaded with loot.”

  “Haskell Moore doesn’t quite add up in this deal,” I said. “He doesn’t make too much sense anymore, somehow. He began to lose my eye from the moment I saw him swaying on that rope up in his studio. From what I’ve heard about him, he wasn’t the ingrown type. He wasn’t fruit for a ride on a rope.”

  “You never know,” Slip said, “until you find out.”

  “I had him pegged, Slip. I added him up as the stinker who slugged me in Mary’s bedroom and then took the little green book out of my hand. It made sense. It still fits if we assume that the chauffeur grabbed the little green book up at Haskell’s studio. Do you follow me?”

  “I’m tripping over you. You want the chauffeur, but bad.”

  “Get him for me.”

  “Where can I reach you?”

  “I’ll reach you,” I said and got up and threw a bill on the table to cover our tab. “Have yourself a few more pints of coffee and when that lazy brain of yours begins to percolate, get off your pratt and move.”

  “I’m practically jet-propelled,” Slip said, not shifting an ounce of his weight in the chair.

  I left him that way, bent over his third cup of coffee, studying the color of it intensely. But I knew he wasn’t thinking of coffee. He had already put his mind to work for me. It was time to turn off my thinking machine.

  I headed for home.

  CHAPTER 11

  I slept fitfully.

  Sometimes the inner gears of the cranium will not be switched off and away from the annoying problems of the day. Sometimes the bed is but an arena for an extended bout with the obsessions and worries of the overactive mind. My body ached with fatigue. My muscles yearned for a release from the piled up tensions that made me squirm and fidget while Morpheus wooed me. I succumbed, finally, but my subconscious slipped only beyond the first gate of the kingdom of rest and quiet. My ears were too sensitive for rest. My ears picked up a gentle noise from somewhere out in my living room.

  It was a sliding sound, indefinable and vague, like the noise of a footfall in a nightmare of footfalls. I opened my eyes and strained to see beyond the bedroom door. The light from the window gave me no help. There was only a remote glow from some wakeful neighbor across the court. I leaned on an elbow and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and cursed myself for the jittery nervousness that pulled me toward the room beyond.

  My knees held me in a standing position and my hands groped for the wall. In this pose, I advanced toward the door. Until something hit me.

  I fell under the blow, back against my bed, awake now, but fighting somebody who was bigger and stronger. There was the sound of his breathing, rough and coarse, and the smell of him around and about me, the odor of dogcart menus, stale food that must have been rich with grease. He hauled me up and belted me, connecting with my stomach with a hot fist. I doubled up and went down under the force of his blow, clawing up at him, but finding nothing under my desperate fingers.

  Then he hit me again, and this time it was a bull’s-eye.

  I fell into darkness. I dropped quickly and permanently.

  And when I awoke it was morning.

  The rain still fell in a nauseating drizzle, out of a gray and misted canopy of clouds. I was on my back, my head on the carpet, my eyes aimed up at the window sill. My stomach stiffened when I moved, still burning from that last quick blow. My head ached vaguely in a spot between the eyes. I crawled into the john and showered, letting the frigid spray sting me awake.

  When I came out, the bedlam in my bedroom came through to me.

  Somebody had rifled my room. Somebody had upchucked my bed, pulling the mattress loose from its moorings and dropping it on the other side of the room. My bureau stood open-drawered, the haberdashery scattered and disarrayed on the floor. The night table sat on its side. And my closet, too, had been emptied of my wardrobe which was scattered, willy-nilly, into the bedroom.

  The living room and the kitchen were masterpieces of disorder. The zany prowler had even opened my kitchen cupboards and emptied the pots and pans, the refrigerator and the garbage can.

  I phoned for room service and shaved and slicked myself, nicking myself three times under the chin because of the building anger that surged in me. What idiot prowler would select my dump for a quick heist? What imbecile crook would choose to invade my humble lodgings? The incongruity of the incident maddened me, sending me out of the place in a hurry, so that I might have time for intelligent thought.

  I had a quick breakfast and a slow squint at the phone book, along the page marked Plubnick, where I found the name Averill Plummer listed as an advertising agency in the Biggs Building.

  Averill Plummer had a broad reception room done up in the latest trickeries of modern office decoration, cold and blond and uninviting, including the blonde who sat behind the little desk in the corner. She managed to lift her stony face enough to allow her a view of my head. She managed a weak and phony smile, the sort of welcome you give an insurance peddler. She also managed to shake her head firmly from side to side when I asked for Averill Plummer.

  “Mr. Plummer is all tied up this morning,” she said.

  “Untie him,” I smiled. “I have business for him.”

  “Will you tell it to me, please?”

  “It’s none of yours, lady.”

  “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to phone for an appointment.”

  “Don’t break your heart about me,” I said. “I’ll get by. I’ll also get b
y you. Just pick up that gimmick on your desk and put your ruby lips to it. Tell Mr. Plummer that there’s a nosy little man out here who wants to make small talk with him. Before the police arrive.”

  “The police?” She put down the magazine she was reading and showed me her alarm. “Are you kidding?”

  “That’s it, I’m kidding. I spend all my time visiting advertising men and joking about the police. It’s all a big nasty promotion stunt put on by the Homicide Squad.”

  She got off her stool and moved her lissome frame through the door behind her. She came back in a moment, signaling me to follow her down the corridor. She came to a halt before a big door with a small silver plate in the center: Averill Plummer, Private. She nodded at the door without a smile and walked away. I pushed at it and walked in.

  Averill Plummer was on his feet to greet me. He was behind his desk and leaning on it, so that I could measure the bulk of his broad shoulders and catch the alert glint in his black eyes. He had the youthful air of the sloppy rich sportsman type of executive. He featured tweeds and trimness, an ensemble of fuzzed jacket and solid tie, clipped to his shirt by a dignified ornament out of some upper class shop window. He had a long face, a long and classic nose, and the look he was giving me was long and serious. A smile would have cracked the skin on his tight face.

  He stood there measuring me and reached out a hand for me to shake. I shook it and in the instant of touching his flesh, he began to speak.

  “You said something about the police? A gag, I suppose, to get in to see me?”

  “I’m too busy for gags, Mr. Plummer.”

  “Well, that’s better,” he said. He got up again and fiddled with the Venetian blinds behind his desk. He was closing them against the drizzle, so that the office darkened and he had to light the desk lamp. He came around the desk and rested his butt on the corner. He lit a cigarette without offering me one and tapped it on his hairy wrist and inhaled once. “What about the police?”

  “We’ll get to that later,” I said. “Right now I’m only interested in Joy Marsh.”

  He had been studying the ash on his cigarette when I dropped her name. He jerked his head up at me and then fingered his mouse-tail mustache. It was a practiced gesture to telegraph calm and poise while his mental machinery adjusted itself to the shock of my dialogue.

  “Joy who?” he asked.

  “Marsh. Joy Marsh. A girl who worked for you a little while ago.”

  “Oh, yes. I recall her now.”

  “Recall her some more for me.”

  “And why should I?”

  “Because I’m asking you nicely,” I said.

  “What has all this got to do with the police?”

  “The police are looking for her, too.”

  “And where do you fit, Mr.—?”

  “I’m glad you asked,” I said. “My name is Steve Conacher and I’m a private investigator. A client of mine is interested in Joy Marsh. I get paid for tracking down people. I’m called a skip-tracer, the poor man’s detective. My client is very anxious to know the whereabouts of Joy Marsh. That’s the beginning and the end of it.”

  “The end of it,” he said, getting off his tail and returning to his dignified posture perch, which was the chair behind his desk. He picked up a paper opener and fiddled with it. He said, “I don’t have to waste any more time with you, Conacher.”

  “Fine and dandy. Then you’ll waste your precious time with the city dicks. They’re interested in Joy, too. They’ll be wanting to talk to you about a murder last night. I see you’ve been reading The Tribune this morning. You must have caught the story—it’s on page one.”

  I started for the door, but he called me back before I had my hand on the knob.

  “I don’t see the connection,” he said: “What has Joy Marsh got to do with the murder?”

  “Maybe I’m just wasting your time, Mr. Plummer.”

  “Have a seat,” he said.

  I unwound him with a few questions and he spilled his guts for me, running through his experiences with Joy Marsh. He radiated a brand of sincerity that wasn’t difficult to catalogue. He spoke with the level gaze of the typically “sincere” huckster, selling his saga to me by underplaying it. He explained that Joy Marsh had worked out in the reception hall, behind the desk where the fruity blonde now sat. He picked up his intercom phone and checked the date of Joy’s employment and the date of her departure. She had been with him for exactly thirty-six days. She was a good worker. She was prompt and efficient and well suited to a job in an outer office because of her obvious charms.

  He came to the end of his story and leaned across the desk. He said, “But you haven’t answered my question, Conacher. What would Joy Marsh have to do with the murder?”

  “Everything—or nothing,” I said. “Did you know that she was a refugee from a brothel?”

  “No! Not Joy Marsh!”

  Whatever depth of feeling he was trying to bury now lay open and exposed, as sharply defined as a caricatured expression, because he lifted himself out of his chair, suddenly, and showed me the size of his eyeballs.

  “The same,” I said. “You never knew?”

  “She was an attractive girl,” he said. “But I never would have guessed. She didn’t seem the type.”

  “I agree. Who sent her to you?”

  “She answered our ad for a receptionist.”

  “Why did she leave?”

  Plummer shrugged. “She was unhappy here, I suppose. She had a better offer.”

  “From whom?”

  “I don’t know her that well, Conacher. Perhaps one of the girls outside can tell you more about her private life.”

  “Perhaps. You made no passes at her?”

  Something resembling a smile tried for the light of day around the corners of his little mouth. But the thin lips froze before the impulse generated the humor and he stared at me balefully, bawling me out with his furrowed brows. It was an obvious act, calculated to bury the queasy memories that clawed at his inner man. He was giving me the man-to-man routine, allowing me whatever deductions I cared to make about his love life. It wasn’t enough for me. It wasn’t half enough. Impatience gnawed at me and I repressed the urge to get a firm grip on his tailored shirt and squeeze hard. Up near the neck.

  I said, “You didn’t get very far with her; is that it, Plummer?”

  “I didn’t try very hard.”

  “You tried hard enough. She’s an attractive piece. She’s good enough to be sported at the Stork or Twenty-One, from what I’ve seen of the local wrens featured in those bistros. She had what you need in your business, Plummer. How hard did you work on her?”

  “You’re way off,” Plummer said flatly. “I admit I made a few delicate passes at her. But she didn’t care for my treatment.”

  “You took her out?”

  “We were out together once or twice. Twice, to be exact.”

  “How far did you get?”

  “Only to her front door.”

  “Never in?”

  “Not even close.”

  “What held you back?”

  “I guess I wasn’t her type,” Plummer said.

  “That could be. When was the last time you tried?”

  “You’re making it tough for me, Conacher.”

  “I’ll make it easy,” I said. “How long after your last date together did she quit her job here?”

  Plummer colored from the top of his manly brow to the rim of his fashionable collar. He was hit where it hurt. He said, “She quit the next day.”

  “You must have been a peachy date,” I snarled at him. “You must have swept her off her feet.”

  “Oh, cut it out,” Plummer whined. “You know what she looks like, Conacher. You don’t take a girl like Joy out and tie your hands behind your back. She’s a pretty attractive girl. I admit I g
ot a bit liquored up that night and tried to get her to go to bed with me. Matter of fact, I thought she liked me that much.” He shrugged and turned away from me. “But I was wrong, that’s all.”

  “You never saw her again after she quit?”

  “Never.”

  “But you tried?”

  “Well, yes. I tried to phone her once, but she wasn’t in the book. So I drove over to her place. She wasn’t living there anymore.”

  “The old address,” I said. “Give it to me.”

  He flipped a trick file and read off her address—a number on the East Side, in the upper Eighties, a street number in the high rent area.

  I said, “Was she living alone?”

  “I don’t know, Conacher. She never talked about a roommate.”

  “This street address sounds like an apartment house. What kind of a dump was it?”

  “It wasn’t an apartment. It was a rooming house, a remodeled place. It didn’t look expensive, if that’s what you’re after.”

  “That’s what I’m after. I’m also after the more intimate details of your two tries at her. What about your friends? You must have shown her off in a few public places. Did you introduce her to any of your friends?”

  He considered my question carefully. “She met one of my friends, but it couldn’t have meant anything. It was only a casual meeting.”

  “Don’t sell her short,” I said. “Joy Marsh has what it takes to set any man on his ear. Who was your friend?”

  “I can’t have you bothering him,” Plummer said righteously. “This man is important to my business.”

  “I won’t bother him.”

  “He only met her for a minute, Conacher. It was nothing.”

  “It only takes a second to start a fire.”

  “There was no fire. He didn’t seem to care for her.”

  “Stop with the guesses,” I said. “I’ve got a job to do and we’re sitting here playing potsy together. All I want to do is make the locate on Joy Marsh. I’m not going to hurt your friend, whoever he is. We’re going to chew the fat—the way you and I are gassing. That and nothing more.”