Black Is the Fashion for Dying (20 page)

“I told you it wasn't that.”

“Yeah. You
told
me.” Amusement curled her mouth. “Why didn't you get her name when you were in the hay with her?”

“I wasn't in the hay.”

“Then answer me this, buddy boy.” The lime silk slipped off one shoulder as she bent towards him, her eyes mocking. “How come you know she's got a mole on her left bazoom?”

“I explained that. When she took off her mink coat she was …”

The raspy laughter welled up again. “I'll believe that the day they make Polly Adler a saint.”

“Okay.” He smiled at her wanly. “I've got the hots. So will you call Sid?”

“If you fix up these drinks.” She bent for the phone, caught the top of the lime wrapper just in time. “Funny thing, though.”

“What?”

“Seems to me Josh said you were soft on that girl they pegged for the Garnet job.”

“I am.” He stood up, took the two glasses from the coffee table. “Josh'll explain.”

Her face darkened. “He's got plenty to explain.” She kept on talking as he went towards the kitchen. “That crack in the papers about Miller Place, for instance.” Her voice followed him across the imitation leather dinette. “By now everybody in town's playing twenty questions, including
his
wife and
my
boy friend. And what I want to know …”

The kitchen door cut off what she wanted to know. He put the glasses on the chrome drainboard by the sink, opened the chrome refrigerator and took out the tray of ice cubes. He felt tired and bewildered. He didn't know how Josh was going to explain anything and he didn't much care. Except, possibly, about the blonde. Only chance left, Josh had said. Now the ledgers were gone. He poured vodka and then tonic water into the glasses. He didn't even know how the ledgers fitted into Caresse's death, or what they would have proven. Yet they must have had something to do with it. Otherwise they Wouldn't have been stolen. They were a puzzle.

And so was the naked blonde.

Leaning an elbow on the chrome drainboard, he thought about the theory he had evolved while he listened to Yvonne make her nine telephone calls. It was a pretty wild theory, but it made a sort of cockeyed sense. As much sense as naked blondes generally make in people's living rooms. He took a long drink from his glass and went over the theory step by step. Actually there were only two major steps. The first was an assumption that the blonde had been sent to his house, rather than having arrived there by chance. Sent to lure him from his study and the screenplay of
Tiger in the Night
without arousing suspicion. The no-suspicion part would account for her parking in the driveway, instead of pounding at the door. And the lure part for no clothes under the mink coat

The second step was a little more complicated. It was based on a fact and an assumption. The fact was that somebody had murdered Caresse on the set. The assumption was that the somebody, to execute the murder, had to know exactly what was going to happen on the set. And the only way to know that was for the somebody to look at the script.

He drank from the glass again. He couldn't quite see himself outlining the theory to Captain Walsh or Sergeant Grimsby, but it sounded less wild each time he went over it. The murderer had to see the script. He had to see it in time to make his plans. And the only place to see it was in the study, hot from the typewriter. So he had sent Miss Omaha, little girl body bare under the mink coat, to clear the way.

So Gordon was right. The blonde was the only chance left. Find her, find out who had hired her, and they'd know who the killer was. He picked up the glasses, pushed open the kitchen door with an elbow and went through the dinette into the living room. Yvonne was still seated on the white davenport, the telephone resting between cheek and shoulder.

“I thought you died,” she said.

He put her drink on the table. “What about Sid?”

“They're getting him.”

“Look,” he said, sitting opposite her. “What if we offered him a couple of hundred to find her?”

She laughed. “Sid spends that on coffee before lunch.”

“He must be in the chips.”

“In the chippies be a better way to say it.”

“You mean he …?”

“Yeah.” The scarlet lips twisted wryly. “He's the guy they should have named the Mann Act after.”

Pressing the telephone with her cheek, she reached with one hand for the vodka-and-tonic, with the other held the lime silk wrapper closed. She frowned at the glass, took a tentative sip.

“Wish I knew,” she said.

“Knew what?”

“Why I'm doing this.”

“You're doing it for Josh.”

“Fry him.” She peered over the glass, blue shadowed eyes appraising him. “What happens we don't find this dull?”

“I don't know.”

“What do you say we do it together?”

“I don't think Josh would approve.”

“Who the hell cares?” she said. “He can go fry—” She broke off, turned to the telephone. “Sid …?”

She listened for a moment. What Sid was saying evidently amused her. She chuckled throatily. “No. No tricks. Not even for a C-note. I'm a kept woman now.” She paused for another moment. “Yeah, a blonde. For a friend. He doesn't know her name, but she comes from Omaha. About twenty. Dresden-doll type, whatever the hell that is. Wears a silver crucifix and …”

She broke off again to listen. “Where? Yeah, I know.” Her eyes narrowed. “A mink coat? That's the one.” She paused a broken second, then spoke quickly. “No, Sid. Don't do that. It's just a fellow … knew her a long time ago. Drop it.”

She replaced the receiver, her face absolutely blank, and rose from the davenport. She went around the glass coffee table, went across the living room towards a hall at the rear. Under the lime silk bare legs and buttocks moved lithely. Puzzled, and at the same time incongruously wondering if she were really naked under the wrapper, Blake stared after her.

“What about the blonde?” he called.

She vanished without answering. He got up and went through the hall and into the bedroom off it. She was standing by a wardrobe with mirrored doors, the wrapper lying at her feet. She had on nylon panties but no brassiere. She plucked a dress from the wardrobe, raised it over her head and let it slide over her brown body.

“What did he tell you?” Blake asked.

She bent, slipped on high-heeled lizard-skin shoes, and then yanked a polo coat from the wardrobe. She threw this over her shoulders, went to a dresser and began to toss lipsticks, compacts and other articles into a handbag that matched the lizard shoes.

“What in God's name are you doing?”

“Getting the hell out of here,” she said.

“But why?”

“You know why.”

“I don't.”

From a cologne bottle labeled
My Sin
she shook liquid on her fingers, patted her neck under each ear. “You know the La Brea tar pits?”

“Out towards Inglewood?”

“Yeah.”

She smeared burnt-orange lipstick on her mouth, mumbled,

“Cops … out there.”

“What for?”

She closed the lizard handbag, slung it over her arm. “Body.” She brushed by him on her way to the door. “Blonde in a mink coat.” Eerily, her voice floated back from the hall. “Nothing on underneath.”

Irene Fabro

Seven … eight
…
nine …

In the mirror she saw her lips shape the numbers in time with the silver sweep of brush through brown hair, saw under the sheer nightgown the nipple of her right breast rotate with each stroke.

Ten … eleven
…
twelve …

If T. J. would tell her, she thought. If only he would tell her. Then she could help. No matter what the danger was. No matter how immediate. Or how terrible. She could find some way of helping.

Thirteen … fourteen … fifteen …

Immediate and terrible. The words made her tremble. And the danger was all T. J.'s, whether Karl was responsible or not. She had felt that in the cellar. She saw Karl's face as it had looked then, half obscured by weird shadows, sardonic, mocking, assured. He had found a way out of the trouble, whatever it was, leaving T. J. alone.

Sixteen … seventeen … eighteen …

She saw T. J.'s face, feeling a sudden surge of tenderness. She felt him in her arms as she had held him that afternoon and again, as she had then, she recalled the rabbit she had been given as a child and how under her stroking hands the soft creature had ceased to struggle and had settled warm and safe against her body. She recalled T. J.'s head, resting where the rabbit had rested, and saw the nipple on her right breast slowly rise.

Nineteen … oh, darling … my darling
…

She put down the silver brush, eyeing the telltale rosebud. Well, why not? If they needed each other? Sooner or later, somehow, someway, the danger would pass. Then would be the time. She rose from the dressing table, in the mirror examined her body, ivory-colored under the silk. She saw the firm breasts, both nipples erect now, and the narrow waist and below it the rounded outcurve of hips with the dark triangle between them. She thought of other eyes, his eyes, seeing her thus, and with the thought came a delicious warmth, a feeling of flowering as though already she—

Padding footsteps in the hall swung her from the mirror. She snatched at the dressing gown on the bench, but before she could do more than pull it against her Karl came into the bedroom. Below his old purple bathrobe, feet and hairy calves were bare. He came past the bed to the dressing room entrance, apparently unaware of her confusion.

“Something for you to sign.”

Still holding the dressing gown close, she sat on the bench. He put down a typewritten sheet of paper.

“What is it?” she asked.

“A power of attorney.” He laid a fountain pen on the sheet of paper. “So I can vote your stock.”

“But, Karl, I told you …”

“Trouble,” he said sharply, bending so he could see her face in the mirror. “At the stockholders' meeting.” Where flesh and ribs should be within the sagging V of the purple robe was tangled black hair. “I need your support.”

“I'll support you. So will Papa.”

“Papa will support Papa.”

“But I don't see …” she began, and suddenly she did see. “
Tiger in the Night?
”

“Two million dollars shot to hell.”

“You'll have to pass the dividend?”

“Yes.” He grimaced, showing tobacco-yellowed teeth. “And the stockholders'll want a scapegoat. Somebody they can disembowel with their votes.” He leaned against her, drew the typewritten sheet closer. “Either Benjy or me.”

She stared at the paper, not really seeing it. His breath was warm on her neck, his body warm on her bare shoulder.

“Do you want it to be me, Irene?”

“No. But I don't want it to be Papa, either.” She felt her flesh crawl under the coarse chest hair. “And it's really his stock.”

“He gave it to you, didn't he?”

“Yes.”

He eyed her hypnotically. “And you're my wife, aren't you?”

Now in the mirror, within the V of purple cloth, she could see the three-inch pelt of vertical fur that divided his belly. She held the dressing gown closer, feeling revulsion and a sort of terror. He was naked under the bathrobe.

“Well, aren't you?” he asked.

She saw herself nod.

“Then sign.”

It took all her courage to shake her head. “I can't,” she said. “Not until I talk to Papa.”

She braced herself for the outburst, for lashing words, for a blow, but nothing happened. He straightened, regarding her thoughtfully, as though he had half expected her answer.

“Too bad,” he said slowly. “For you. But mostly for T. J.”

“What do you mean?”

“You like T. J., don't you?”

She swung around, stared up at him. “What has he to do with this?”

“I thought you'd guessed.” His beady eyes were mocking. “At the office, and then in the cellar …?”

“I guessed there was trouble.”

“Caresse trouble.”

Chill fear enveloped her. “T. J. and Caresse?”

“He told me this afternoon,” he said, reaching for the fountain pen. “Just before you came into the office.”

“Are you trying to say he killed …?”

He nodded. “And I was trying to help him.” He fitted the cap on the pen. “But now I can't. Not if I'm to save myself.”

“But why?” she cried. “Why would he kill her?”

“Blackmail.”

“Caresse was … blackmailing T. J.?”

“For years. That's why I kept her under contract.” He scowled at the pen, then thrust it in his bathrobe pocket. “To keep her quiet for T. J.'s sake.”

“But he barely knew her.”

“That's right.”

“Then how could she blackmail him?”

He eyed her sardonically. “Ever seen the phrase ‘morals offense' in the
Times,
Irene?”

“A
child?”

“Children,” he said matter-of-factly. “Two offenses. Back in New York.” He took the typewritten sheet from the dressing table. “Somehow Caresse got hold of the documents.” He folded the sheet. “That's what we were burning.”

“But T. J. loves children!”

“Just a little too much, apparently.”

She knew he was lying. He had to be lying. Wildly, she cried, “I don't believe you!” She looked up past the hairy chest to the watchful, heavy-lidded eyes. “I know T. J. He'd never do … things like that. And he'd never kill.”

“He had to,” he said. “After dear Papa made me drop Caresse's option. Either kill or go under.”

“I don't believe you.”

“You already said that.”