Stone Cold Blonde Read online

  I said “You knocked them, Monk. Your stuff is great again, just the way it was ten years ago. What did it for you, the Pepsi?”

  “Detective,” Monk said. He had a flat and soulless voice, as deadpan as his face. You caught the humor by way of his eyes, a subtle glow that lit them feebly when he was enjoying himself. “I haven’t touched a drop in the last four months, Steve.”

  “On you it looks good, and sounds better. You and Jeff Eames doing a steady double?”

  “We’ve been together for the last year. It was Jeff’s idea to organize the combine, and it pays off well in places like this. It doesn’t draw much from the street trade but we fill the place every night with show folks. And they eat up our act.”

  “How long have you been playing this dive?”

  “This is the fourth week,” Monk said. “We came in here on a one-week deal but we’ve been jamming the place since the very first night. They love us in this part of town. We may be here for a real long stand.”

  “How are the girls?” I asked. “Anything around worth developing?”

  “We’ve got a pretty good dance group and our singer is Bess Leary. There’s only one specialty dancer, a gal named Patty Price.” Monk whistled and tilted his head toward the little wren who was talking to Hands Vincetti. “How do you like them apples?”

  “That one looks ripe for plucking.”

  Monk sucked up a mouthful of fizz water. “Are you in here for pleasure, Steve? Or working on something special tonight?”

  “I’m on a deal, but I’d give it all up to work on her for a while.”

  “Lay off her. That’s Patty Price.”

  “Laying off a doll like that is nothing to dream about. She looks like a special fruit.”

  “She was fruit—but no more. Vincetti owns the tree now.”

  “How well do you know her?”

  Monk smiled at some secret memory that pleased him. “Patty and I have been, well, a bit on the cozy side. I met her when she was just stepping out of the amateur contests, when she needed a lift to get in at The Oasis, on the other side of town. She’s a pretty talented little dancer, so I gave her the lift. It was a pleasure helping her in those days.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “You don’t know the half of it.” Monk sighed. “She was so appreciative. She paid me what she owed me and when she finished her two weeks over at The Oasis, maybe I owed her a little change. She’s a good performer, Steve, one of the best.”

  “She has the hips for it,” I said.

  “Ah, yes. Patty and I made wonderful cadenzas together, but that was in the good old days.”

  “And the good old days—are they gone forever?”

  “She doesn’t play games with anybody but the ape now.”

  “They don’t make a very appetizing couple. He must be paying her plenty.”

  “Vincetti is loaded,” Monk said. “He’s been buying her off for the past two weeks. He’s been taking the play away from a couple of guys I know who thought they had the inside track with her. Vincetti is hot as hell about her and she’s letting him sweat it out. Patty’s a cute wench. She looks like something fresh out of high school, but she’s as hard as my bunions underneath. She gives out a cute routine—but for a price. She’s playing footie with him now.”

  “Only footie?”

  “I suppose so but who am I to keep track of Patty anymore? From what I know of Vincetti, he may be a tough nut outside, but he’s Mr. Hiram Q Sucker as soon as he lays eyes on little Patty.”

  “How much has he invested?”

  “It’s a pretty big deal. He came in last week with a box full of furs for Patty’s lily-white shoulders, all mink and a yard wide. Patty must have let him touch her knees for those skins.”

  “She’s got high-priced knees.”

  “She’ll empty his till before she lets him go any higher on her shanks,” Monk said. “She’ll bleed him white before she asks him up to her flat for more intimate parlor games. Patty knows how. She’s gifted.”

  Across the room, Vincetti was still frozen in the same position. He was leaning over her, while she batted her high voltage orbs at him, giving him the full two hundred volts.

  “Gifted is the word,” I said. “The way she looks at the gorilla, he could be Errol Flynn. Is this a steady diet for her? Is he in here every night?”

  “Vincetti is here as often as Patty shakes her cute can on this stage. That means seven nights a week.”

  “What gives on the outside?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Monk said. “But I can find out, if it’s important to you, Steve.”

  “I’ll tell you a secret, Monk. In my business we never know what we can get out of a dame like Patty Price. But sometimes it’s fun to try, even if we’re going up a blind alley. I need some stuff on Vincetti—and she might be the girl to hand it to me.”

  “You’ll never get it unless you beat his price,” Monk said. “And you’ll have to pay through the nose to beat him. He’s loaded her up with furs, orchids, and last night even a diamond ring—a real hunk of ice, worth a couple of grand.”

  I laughed out loud. “Maybe the poor nut wants to marry her.”

  “Whatever he wants, he certainly wants it bad. A character like Hands Vincetti doesn’t throw rings around just for the laughs. One of these days Patty will have to face reality. And it isn’t going to be pleasant, because she hates men with hair on their arms.”

  “Maybe you’re idealizing her, Monk,” I suggested. “She might be quite serious about the lug. Lots of times these showgirl characters disappear from the hot spots, and when you find them, they’re living out in the suburbs, in a vine-covered cottage in Jersey or Westchester or Long Island, with husbands snagged from the cloak and suit business, or upper-class gangland boys like Hands Vincetti. It could be that you don’t know her well. Maybe Patty yearns for the domestic life—and it also could be that Hands Vincetti is her idea of a perfect spouse.”

  “Don’t make me laugh,” said Monk, laughing hilariously. “That may go for some of the others, but you don’t know Patty.”

  “When can it be arranged?”

  “Are you serious? You going to buck the gorilla?”

  “Vincetti doesn’t have to know a thing about it, Monk. What would happen if I came back here after closing?”

  “I could arrange it for you. I could introduce you.”

  “I don’t want to keep you here late on my account, after your sweat session with the drums,” I said. “How would it be if I just walked in on her?”

  Monk finished his Pepsi and surveyed me gloomily, shaking his head at me with the sadness of a grave attendant. “It’s like I said, Steve. You just don’t know Patty. Patty isn’t easy to make. She has her own ideas about the social graces. And she operates as formally as a prima donna most of the time. You can’t just walk up to her and date her. It’s a crazy thing, because she breaks all the rules the other way. Around the dressing rooms, she’s a run-of-the-mill chorus girl, and you can find her strolling through the corridors like she figures her frame is God’s gift to the on-looking male. You can make all sorts of passes at her with your eye, but just try to approach her and give her a fast hello. She’ll put the freeze on you and cut you dead. So if you want to meet her, I’d better be around when you stroll in. This joint is open until four, Steve.”

  “Must it be here?” I asked. “Why can’t I talk to her in her flat?”

  “Jesus, but you’ve got confidence, brother. I know at least two dozen guys who would make a long-term project out of getting into Patty’s flat. Do you think she’s going to let you in just because I introduce you? What’ll I tell her? You’ve got to have an angle with her.”

  “Tell her I’m a Hollywood scout. You know the pitch.”

  “You mean you’re looking for the usual? A big contract in pictures? A h
ot deal in exchange for rehearsals on a studio couch?”

  “Why not? She’ll give her all for a chance out on the coast. Tell her I’m looking for a fresh type who can shake her behind in South American style. If she’s a normal chorus girl, that ought to knock her over easily.”

  “It might warm her up,” Monk said, “but it’ll take more than that kind of double-talk to knock her over.”

  Jeff Eames was coming back to the piano and Monk readied himself for the next number. I said goodbye and skirted the other side of the bistro and returned to my seat at Alice V.’s table, She frowned up at me, scolding me with her eyes. There was another fresh drink at the table, awaiting me, as though she had timed my return carefully.

  I wondered whether she had been watching me with Monk Fleming. She must have observed me stand up at the end of our chit-chat a few minutes ago, because the drink was fresh and unwatered. Alice V. was sipping hers and studying me over the edge of her glass, her eyes half closed now, but with little sleep in them. She was on fire with something, an idea that gnawed away at her and wouldn’t let her rest.

  “You’re a bad, bad boy,” Alice V. said. “What has that drummer man got that I haven’t got?”

  “Drums.”

  “You like drums?” Ashforth asked. “Now that’s an odd one. People who play drums are supposed to be psychologically unhinged. Drummers are usually mental cases. You take—”

  “Stop with the Freud,” Alice V. said, withering him with her burning eyes. She tugged my arm again and pulled herself closer so that I caught the elegance of her perfumery. “Steve is probably just a music lover. I’m crazy about drummers myself. Got a whole rack of recordings up at my place, all the best of them, Krupa, and the others. How would you like to hear them, detective?”

  “Not tonight,” I said. “Monk Fleming is enough for me.”

  “She really has a charming little place, Conacher,” Ashforth said. “You’d love it.”

  “Are you selling for her?”

  “Don’t pick on Ashy,” Alice V. said.

  Now it was Ashy. Something about these two was beginning to make my skin prickle, like a sudden visit to a deep-freeze. The Scotch had made inroads into my patience and it would not take much for me to blow off at them. Especially Ashforth. It might be better if I got out of there. Fast. If Hands Vincetti got out first.

  Across the room, Vincetti still charmed Patty Price. But now somebody was calling her, from up near the bandstand. She got up in a hurry and shook her cute little can at him and blew him a kiss with her whole hand. He waved at her and started away, toward the bar.

  I said, “I’ll take a raincheck on that terrace of yours, Alice. Goodbye now, Ashy. Keep your chin dry.”

  Ashforth didn’t answer. He was aimed at the bar, making pretty faces at the fat man. I did a slow crawl to the street, watching Hands Vincetti start away toward The DeGraw, moving slowly, his body swaying as he walked, in the stiff and measured pace of the professional wrestler.

  I gave him a half-block lead and followed slowly.

  CHAPTER 11

  Hands Vincetti did not pause at The DeGraw Hotel. He continued across town, as casual as a man out walking his dog. He was an easy man to tail, a moving bright spot of color. He was sporting a plaid topcoat, done in large and flashy squares of a bluish cast. He wore a green felt hat and light, fawn-colored slacks, so that when he drifted into the shadows I could follow him by way of his legs, two animated strips of movement against the duller background.

  He was heading west, across Fifth Avenue at Fifty-Seventh Street, pausing in some of the brighter windows for a glimpse at this and that. He turned uptown at Broadway and drifted through Columbus Circle to the park, where he continued his march in the deeper shadows of the trees that lined Central Park.

  I knew his destination. He was undoubtedly on his way to report to Gus Bryant. Hands had been Bryant’s first lieutenant for the past fifteen years, ever since the lucky day when Bryant found him out on the Coast, wrestling pipe for one of the minor oil companies. Before that, Hands had done some amateur wrestling, but he had discontinued his interest in the sport when he accidentally broke an opponent’s neck in a competition at Mesa Verde. Aside from this mishap (which certain police officials on the West Coast were convinced was an act of deliberate manslaughter) Hands had never been brought to any recorded conviction. The headquarters men were never able to pin any rap, large or small, on the apelike Vincetti, and his distinguished record was considered a feather in the cap of Gus Bryant himself, who was reputed to do all the thinking for at least three other hairy henchmen of Vincetti’s type.

  Hands crossed the street to the deluxe doorway of The Harrington, an old-line apartment hotel that was well known as the residence of Gus Bryant and a few hundred other tenants, all of whom were well salted down with lucre and had moved in years ago. Most of them would never move out until the long black wagon took them to the permanent sod.

  I remained on the park side of the broad avenue, a good half block from the entrance. I smoked four cigarettes before Gus Bryant came out.

  Bryant loped for the curb, as spry as a Harvard boy, and dressed for the part. He wore no hat, as usual, so that his crew cut gave him an air of agelessness, a deliberate fraud, for he must have been in his middle thirties. His tailor had spun him a tweed coat, cut along the lines of the upper-crust British fashionable, so that his shoulders drooped in a natural way. He sported his perpetual bow tie and suede shoes. He moved the shoes now, out into the street to hail a cab.

  I grabbed a yellow on the run, no more than a minute behind him. We snaked in and out of traffic, on a long ride, far downtown and to the east side, along Second Avenue and then a left turn to the river. I pulled my cab up and got out as Bryant bounded out of his and held up a finger to tell his cabby to wait. He was entering a brownstone, one of a long string of old houses that had not yet given way to the march of progress in this area.

  I waltzed down the block, spotting the number of the brownstone—357, with a small silver slab on the right side of the door, but too far away for me to make out the letters on it. I retraced my steps to the drugstore, on the far corner. Bryant took his time.

  He came out twelve minutes later, by the clock. He looked up and down the street casually, lit a cigar, puffed it, flipped the match away and entered his cab. I waited until the rear lights blinked red at the traffic signal on First Avenue, and when the cab turned uptown, I started for the brownstone.

  The name on the silver plate was Paul Simoneck, gracefully engraved in a flowing script and festooned with the curlicue decorative flourishes that smacked of Old Country class. Simoneck! It rang a small and distant bell in my brain. It was a name I had heard somewhere before. I repeated the name to my inner man, turning it over in my mind as I pressed the bell in the ball and waited.

  Nobody answered the ring. I stepped out on the small stone porch and looked at the house. There was a thin lace curtain stretched over the old-fashioned bay window. Through the webbing I could see a small section of the living room where a feeble reddish glow showed over a desk. I returned to the hall and rapped on the glass door. I rapped again and then I turned the knob and walked in.

  The living room was something out of middle Europe. The little parlor was a picture of middle-class comfort, out of the styles and customs of the foreign born. There were moss-backed chairs with ornate legs and carved embellishments on the arms and backs. The curtains at the street windows were of the delicate lace found only among the rich abroad, and against the pattern of filigreed handwork there were broad velvet drapes hanging low enough so that you might trip over them. There was an assortment of archaic lamps, some of them Chinese, others porcelain and metal, but only one of these was lit, the little one on the mahogany table.

  It threw just enough light to show me the soles of the man who was lying on the floor, his head pale and waxen save for the fresh flow of blo
od from his mouth.

  I pulled him into the light and sat him up. Now I knew why the name on the plate outside was familiar. The bloody face before me was Paul Simoneck. The little goatee on the receding jaw stamped him forever in my memory as the man who was the world’s leading gem expert. I remembered from years before the newspaper shots of him coming off the boat, when he had left his fatherland for the safer shores of Manhattan. He had fled Vienna just before the Nazis took over his gem business, along with the rest of Austria. At that time his fame was world-wide. He was welcomed by a delegation of diamond merchants, who hailed him as the most talented man in his field.

  But that was a long time ago. Now he was only an old man, a badly hurt old man. I ran to the table at the window and poured some schnapps from the amber decanter and forced a trickle of it down his throat. He spluttered and gurgled but did not open his eyes. I carried him to the couch and put a pillow behind his head and began to wipe some of the blood off his face.

  I was playing young Doctor Kildare when something hit me flat on the top of my head. It knocked my hat off and sent me to my knees, bobbling my head at the rug.

  “Get up!” somebody said. “Quickly!”

  I said, “I’ll get up, but I won’t promise to stand.”

  “Up! Get up!”

  I lifted myself slowly. Somebody had removed the bones from my legs. I grabbed hold of the couch and turned my body and there was a woman standing over me and she had a small automatic in one hand and a heavy book in the other. She held the automatic firmly, pointing it at the ticklish spot where my eyebrows were raised in incredulity.

  Then she slapped me with the book across the face so that I went spinning backward and down again.