HCC 115 - Borderline

The door started to close. I made like a brush salesman and tucked a foot in it. She glared at me.

  “Private cops, I don’t have to see,” she said. “Get the hell out, will you?”

  “I just want to talk to you.”

  “The feeling isn’t mutual. Look—”

  “It won’t take long.”

  “You son of a bitch,” she said. But she opened the door and let me inside. We walked through the kitchen to the living room. There was a couch there. She sat on it. I took a chair. “Who are you anyway?” she said.

  “My name’s Ed London.”

  “Who you working for?”

  “Mark Donahue.”

  “The one who killed her?”

  “I don’t think he did,” I said. “What I’m trying to find out, Miss Gorski, is who did.”

  She got to her feet and started walking around the room. There was nothing deliberately sexy about her walk. She was hard, though. She lived in a cheap apartment on a bad block. She bleached her hair, and her hairdresser wasn’t the only one who knew for sure. She could have—but didn’t—come across as a slut.

  There was something honest and forthright about her, if not necessarily wholesome. She was a big blonde with a hot body and a hard face. There are worse things than that.

  “What do you want to know, London?”

  “About Karen.”

  “What is there to know? You want a biography? She came from Indiana because she wanted to be a success. A singer, an actress, a model, something. She wasn’t too clear on just what. She tried, she flopped. She woke up one day knowing she wasn’t going to make it. It happens.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “So she could go back to Indiana or she could stay in the city. Only she couldn’t go back to Indiana. You give in to enough men, you drink enough drinks and do enough things, then you can’t go back to Indiana. What’s left?”

  She lit a cigarette. “Karen could have been a whore. But she wasn’t. She never put a price tag on it. She spread it around, sure. Look, she was in New York and she was used to a certain kind of life and a certain kind of people, and she had to manage that life and those people into enough money to stay alive on, and she had one commodity to trade. She had sex. But she wasn’t a whore.” She paused. “There’s a difference.”

  “All right.”

  “Well, dammit, what else do you want to know?”

  “Who was she sleeping with besides Donahue?”

  “She didn’t say and I didn’t ask. And she never kept a diary.”

  “She ever have men up here?”

  “No.”

  “She talk much about Donahue?”

  “No.” She leaned over, stubbed out a cigarette. Her breasts loomed before my face like fruit. But it wasn’t purposeful sexiness. She didn’t play that way.

  “I’ve got to get out of here,” she said. “I don’t feel like talking anymore.”

  “If you could just—”

  “I couldn’t just.” She looked away. “In fifteen minutes I have to be uptown on the West Side. A guy there wants to take some pictures of me naked. He pays for my time, Mr. London. I’m a working girl.”

  “Are you working tonight?”

  “Huh?”

  “I asked if—”

  “I heard you. What’s the pitch?”

  “I’d like to take you out to dinner.”

  “Why?”

  “I’d like to talk to you.”

  “I’m not going to tell you anything I don’t feel like telling you, London.”

  “I know that, Miss Gorski.”

  “And a dinner doesn’t buy my company in bed, either. In case that’s the idea.”

  “It isn’t. I’m not all that hard up, Miss Gorski.”

  She was suddenly smiling. The smile softened her face all over and cut her age a good three years. Before she had been attractive. Now she was genuinely pretty.

  “You give as good as you take.”

  “I try to.”

  “Is eight o’clock too late? I just got done with lunch a little while ago.”

  “Eight’s fine,” I said. “I’ll see you.”

  I left. I walked the half block to my car and sat behind the wheel for a few seconds and thought about two girls I had met that day. Both blondes, one born that way, one self-made. One of them had poise, breeding and money, good diction and flawless bearing—and she added up to a tramp. The other was a tramp, in an amateurish sort of a way, and she talked tough and dropped an occasional final consonant. Yet she was the one who managed to retain a certain degree of dignity. Of the two, Ceil Gorski was more the lady.

  At 3:30 I was up in Westchester County. The sky was bluer, the air fresher and the houses more costly. I pulled up in front of a $35,000 split-level, walked up a flagstone path and leaned on a doorbell.

  The little boy who answered it had red hair, freckles and a chipped tooth. He was too cute to be snotty, but this didn’t stop him.

  He asked me who I was. I told him to get his father. He asked me why. I told him that if he didn’t get his father I would twist his arm off. He wasn’t sure whether or not to believe me, but I was obviously the first person who had ever talked to him this way. He took off in a hurry and a few seconds later Phil Abeles came to the door.

  “Oh, London,” he said. “Hello. Say, what did you tell the kid?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Your face must have scared him.” Abeles’ eyes darted around. “You want to talk about what happened last night, I suppose.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’d just as soon talk somewhere else,” he said. “Wait a minute, will you?”

  I waited while he went to tell his wife that somebody from the office had driven up, that it was important, and that he’d be back in an hour. He came out and we went to my car.

  “There’s a quiet bar two blocks down and three over,” he said, then added: “Let me check something. The way I’ve got it, you’re a private detective working for Mark. Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’d like to help the guy out. I don’t know very much, but there are things I can talk about to you that I’d just as soon not tell the police. Nothing illegal. Just… Well, you can figure it out.”

  I could figure it out. That was the main reason why I had agreed to stay on the case for Donahue. People do not like to talk to the police if they can avoid it.

  If Phil Abeles was going to talk at all about Karen Price, he would prefer me as a listening post to Lieutenant Jerry Gunther.

  “Here’s the place,” he said. I pulled up next to the chosen bar, a log-cabin arrangement.

  Abeles had J & B with water and I ordered a pony of Courvoisier.

  “I told that homicide lieutenant I didn’t know anything about the Price girl,” he said. “That wasn’t true.”

  “Go on.”

  He hesitated, but just a moment. “I didn’t know she had anything going with Donahue,” he said. “Nobody ever thought of Karen in one-man terms. She slept around.”

  “I gathered that.”

  “It’s a funny thing,” he said. “A girl, not exactly a whore but not convent-bred either, can tend to pass around in a certain group of men. Karen was like that. She went for ad men. I think at one time or another she was intimate with half of Madison Avenue.”

  Speaks well of the dead, I thought. “For anyone in particular?” I asked.

  “It’s hard to say. Probably for most of the fellows who were at the dinner last night. For Ray Powell—but that’s nothing new; he’s one of those bachelors who gets to everything in a skirt sooner or later. But for the married ones, too.”

  “For you?”

  “That’s a hell of a question.”’

  “Forget it. You already answered it.”

  He grinned sourly. “Yes—” he lapsed into flippant Madison Avenue talk “—the Price was right.” He sipped his drink, then continued. “Not recently, and not often. Two or three times over
two months ago. You won’t blackmail me now, will you?”

  “I don’t play that way.” I thought a minute. “Would Karen Price have tried a little subtle blackmail?”

  “I don’t think so. She played pretty fair.”

  “Was she the type to fall in love with somebody like Donahue?”

  Abeles scratched his head. “The story I heard,” he said. “Something to the effect that she was calling him, threatening him, trying to head off his marriage.”

  I nodded. “That’s why he hired me.”

  “It doesn’t make much sense.”

  “No?”

  “No. It doesn’t fit in with what I know about Karen. She wasn’t the torch-bearer type. And she was hardly making a steady thing with Mark, either. I may not have known he was sleeping with her, but I knew damn well that a lot of other guys had been making with her lately.”

  “Could she have been shaking him down?”

  He shrugged. “I told you,” he said. “It doesn’t sound like her. But who knows? She might have gotten into financial trouble. It happens. Perhaps she’d try to milk somebody for a little money.” He pursed his lips. “But why should she blackmail Mark, for heaven’s sake? If she blackmailed a bachelor he could always tell her to go to hell. You’d think she would work that on a married man, not a bachelor.”

  “I know.”

  He started to laugh then. “But not me,” he said. “Believe me, London. She didn’t blackmail me and I didn’t kill her.”

  I got a list from him of all the men at the dinner. In addition to Donahue and myself, there had been eight men present, all of them from Darcy & Bates. Four—Abeles, Jack Harris, Harold Merriman and Joe Conn—were married. One—Ray Powell—was the bachelor and stud-about-town of the group, almost a compulsive Don Juan, according to Abeles. Another, Fred Klein, had a wife waiting out a residency requirement in Reno.

  The remaining two wouldn’t have much to do with girls like Karen Price. Lloyd Travers and Kenneth Bream were as queer as rectangular eggs.

  I drove Abeles back to his house. Before I let him off he told me again not to waste time suspecting him.

  “One thing you might remember,” I said. “Somebody in that room shot Karen Price. Either Mark or one of the eight of you… I don’t think it was Mark.” I paused. “That means there’s a murderer in your office, Abeles.”

  5

  It was late enough in the day to call Lieutenant Gunther. I tried him at home first. His wife answered, told me he was at the station. I tried him there and caught him.

  “Nice hours you work, Jerry.”

  “Well, I didn’t have anything else on today. So I came on down. You know how it is… Say, I got news for you, Ed.”

  “About Donahue?”

  “Yes. We let him go.”

  “He’s clear?”

  “No, not clear.” Jerry grunted. “We could have held him but there was no point, Ed. He’s not clear, not by a mile. But we ran a check on the Price kid and learned she’s been sleeping with two parties—Democrats and Republicans. Practically everyone at the stag. So there’s nothing that makes your boy look too much more suspicious than the others.”

  “I found out the same thing this afternoon.”

  “Ed, I wasn’t too crazy about letting him get away. Donahue still looks like the killer from where I sit. He hired you because the girl was giving him trouble. She wasn’t giving anybody else trouble. He looks like the closest thing to a suspect around.”

  “Then why release him?”

  I could picture Jerry’s shrug. “Well, there was pressure,” he said. “The guy got himself an expensive lawyer and the lawyer was getting ready to pull a couple of strings. That’s not all, of course. Donahue isn’t a criminal type, Ed. He’s not going to run far. We let him go figuring we won’t have much trouble picking him up again.”

  “Maybe you won’t have to.”

  “You get anything yet, Ed?”

  “Not much,” I said. “Just enough to figure out that everything’s mixed up.”

  “I already knew that.”

  “Uh-huh. But the more I hunt around, the more loose ends I find. I’m glad you boys let my client loose. I’m going to see if I can get hold of him.”

  “Bye,” Jerry said, clicking off.

  I took time to get a pipe going, then dialed Mark Donahue’s number. The phone rang eight times before I gave up. I decided he must be out on Long Island with Lynn Farwell. I was halfway through the complicated process of prying a number out of the information operator when I decided not to bother. Donahue had my number. He could reach me when he got the chance.

  Then I closed my eyes, gritted my teeth and tried to think straight.

  It wasn’t easy. So far I had managed one little trick—I had succeeded in convincing myself that Donahue had not killed the girl. But this wasn’t much cause for celebration. When you’re working for someone, it’s easy to get yourself to thinking that your client is on the side of the angels.

  First of all, the girl. Karen Price. According to all and sundry, she was something of a tramp. According to her roommate she didn’t put a price tag on it—but she didn’t keep it under lock and key, either. She had wound up in bed with most of the heterosexual ad men on Madison Avenue. Donahue, a member of this clan, had been sleeping with her.

  This didn’t mean she was in love with him, or carrying a flaming torch, or singing blues, or issuing dire threats concerning his upcoming marriage. According to everyone who knew Karen, there was no reason for her to give a whoop in hell whether he got married, turned queer, became an astronaut or joined the Foreign Legion.

  But Donahue said he had received threatening calls from her. That left two possibilities. One: Donahue was lying. Two: Donahue was telling the truth.

  If he was lying, why in hell had he hired me as a bodyguard? And if he had some other reason to want the girl dead, he wouldn’t need me along for fun and games. Hell, if he hadn’t gone through the business of hiring me, no one could have tagged him as the prime suspect in the shooting. He would just be another person at the bachelor dinner, another former playmate of Karen’s with no more motive to kill her than anyone else at the party.

  I gave up the brainwork and concentrated on harmless if time-consuming games. I sat at my desk and drew up a list of the eight men who had been at the dinner. I listed the four married men, the Don Juan, the incipient divorce and, just for the sake of completion, Lloyd and Kenneth. I worked on my silly little list for over an hour, creating mythical motives for each man.

  It made an interesting mental exercise, although it didn’t seem to be of much value.

  6

  The Alhambra is a Syrian restaurant on West 27th Street, an Arabian oasis in a desert of Greek night clubs. Off the beaten track, it doesn’t advertise, and the sign announcing its presence is almost invisible. You have to know the Alhambra is there in order to find it.

  The owner and maitre d’ is a little man whom the customers call Kamil. His name is Louis, his parents brought him to America before his eyes were open, and one of his brothers is a full professor at Columbia, but he likes to put on an act. When I brought Ceil Gorski into the place around 8:30, he smiled hugely at me and bowed halfway to the floor.

  “Salaam alekhim,” he said solemnly. “My pleasure, Mist’ London.”

  “Alekhim salaam,” I intoned, glancing over at Ceil while Louis showed us to a table.

  Our waiter brought a bottle of very sweet white wine to go with the entree.

  “I was bitchy before. I’m sorry about it.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Ed—”

  I looked at her. She was worth looking at, in a pale green dress which she filled to perfe ction.

  “You want to ask me some questions,” she said, “don’t you?”

  “Well—”

  “I don’t mind, Ed.”

  I gave her a brief rundown on the way things seemed to shape up at that point.

  “Let me try some names on you
,” I suggested. “Maybe you can tell me whether Karen mentioned them.”

  “You can try.”

  I ran through the eight jokers who had been at the stag. A few sounded vaguely familiar to her, but one of them, Ray Powell, turned out to be someone Ceil knew personally.

  “A chaser,” she said. “A very plush East Side apartment and an appetite for women that never lets up. He used to see Karen now and then, but there couldn’t have been anything serious.”

  “You know him—very well?”

  “Yes.” She colored suddenly. She was not the sort you expected to blush. “If you mean intimately, no. He asked often enough. I wasn’t interested.” She lowered her eyes. “I don’t sleep around that much,” she said. “Karen—well, she came to New York with stars in her eyes, and when the stars dimmed and died, she went a little crazy, I suppose. I wasn’t that ambitious and didn’t fall as hard. I have some fairly far-out ways of earning a living, Ed, but most nights I sleep alone.”

  She was one hell of a girl. She was hard and soft, a cynic and a romantic at the same time. She hadn’t gone to college, hadn’t finished high school, but somewhere along the way she had acquired a veneer of sophistication that reflected more concrete knowledge than a diploma.

  “Poor Karen,” she said. “Poor Karen.”

  I didn’t say anything. She sat somberly for a moment, then tossed her head so that her bleached blonde mane rippled like a wheat field in the wind. “I’m getting morbid as hell,” she said. “You’d better take me home, Ed.”

  We climbed three flights of stairs. I stood next to her while she rummaged through her purse. She came up with a key and turned to face me before opening the door. “Ed,” she said softly, “if I asked you, would you just come in for a few drinks? Could it be that much of an invitation and no more?”

  “Yes.”

  “I hate to sound like—”

  “I understand.”

  We went inside. She turned on lamps in the living room and we sat on the couch.

  She started talking about the modeling session she’d gone through that afternoon. “The money was good,” she said, “but I had to work for it. He took three or four rolls of film. Slightly advanced cheesecake, Ed. Nudes, underwear stuff. He’ll print the best pictures and they’ll wind up for sale in the dirty little stores on 42nd Street.”