Strip for Murder (19 page)

“Can't I stay here? After what's happened, this should be safe enough, shouldn't it?”

I considered that and decided Laurel was thinking much more clearly than I was. Of course, I still had all my clothes on—but there I went, being vain and egotistical again. What she'd said was true enough, though, and the more I thought about it, the more sensible it seemed.

Finally I said, “I think you're right. That is, as long as I'm alive you ought to be safe here. As a matter of fact, this would probably be the safest spot for me, too, under the circumstances. It's highly doubtful that anybody will be bothered here now. Not after what's happened and the police being alerted and everything. Whoever we're after will know by now that the cops are up to date on Brown and Fairview. Stay here, then; just stay around other people.”

“You're leaving?”

“I've got to.”

“Will you be back?”

“Yeah, I've got to come back, too. And I'm going to need your help after a while. Tonight. I'm going to get that bullet, but you'll have to help me.”

“Bullet? The one in the cliff?” I nodded and she said, “How in the world are you going to get up there?”

'I told you yesterday. I'm going to float up.” I grinned at her and got to my feet. “I'll tell you about it later. In fact, I'll show you.”

She shook her head, and I left.

It was after eight P.M. when I reached the Afrodite. The doors at the bottom of the steps were closed, but the neon sign was lighted and music blaring inside told me that the club was again open for business. I invaded the joint.

There was a five-piece combo at the rear of the small dance floor, playing the wildest, thumpiest, hottest Afro-Cuban music that had ever banged my eardrums inward. I liked it, but even more I liked the tall gal singing into a mike in the center of the dance floor. She was busty, all right, with a couple of maracas in her hands, and shaking everything like molasses in a Mixmaster. This, from Carlos's description, would be Juanita.

I walked closer to the dance floor, thinking this trip should be much more enjoyable than the last trip here. Then suddenly I reconsidered. At the opposite side of the floor from me, seated at a ringside table, was Babe Le Toot. There were two guys with her: a hood named Garlic and a hood named Young Egg Foo.

Maybe, I thought dismally, this trip isn't even necessary.

Chapter Eighteen

They spotted me at almost the same moment.

Foo leaned over the table and said something to Garlic, then they both leaned back and watched the show. Or pretended to. At least they weren't going to charge across the dance floor at me. Well, I was here, and I meant to stay. At least until I had a chat with Juanita. And maybe with Foo and his pal. The glass wall had been replaced and the birds were all calmed down again. It almost seemed a shame.

The only vacant seat I could see was the one at which a young red-haired guy sat alone, almost squarely in front of me, and directly across the floor from the two hoods and the hoodess. It was ringside, but I'd been spotted anyway, so I walked to the table, leaned down, and said, “OK, if I use that empty chair for a while?”

“Yeah, yeah,” the redhead said. “Yeah. Take it anywhere.”

His eyes were glued to Juanita and he didn't look at me, but it seemed he didn't quite understand. “I mean, right here, at your table.”

“Yeah, yeah. Yow. Wow. Man, lookit that. Yeah.”

At least I had a seat. I ordered a bourbon and water for me and another of the redhead's for him, then focused my attention on Juanita. Focusing on that babe was quite a trick. She was going in and out, and left and right, and up and down—all at once. She was singing, too. Carlos hadn't told me the half of it.

This Juanita was a sex cyclone with long black hair flying around every which way, a dark, full-lipped, sensual face, the lips writhing and twisting as she moaned words in some foreign language. The way she sang, she could have moaned in English and it would have sounded like a foreign language.

The rest of her looked as if approximately five feet ten inches of well-stacked woman had been mashed down into five feet seven inches, the excess bulging out and overflowing in enjoyable places. It was overflowing even more because of her frantic gyrations, in fairly good time to the clunks and whistles and toots from the men playing behind her. There were even some clunks and whistles and toots from the guys in front of her.

She was really moving, going all over the place, dragging the mike. The way some things were going, I thought they were going to keep on going, and I even imagined them flying through the air like that cockatoo. She was halfheartedly wearing a net brassiere, so flimsy it must have been made of piano wire to stay up there, a scarlet skirt that was open in front but swept around to touch the floor behind her, and something dark underneath the front of the red skirt. On her behind, which for a moment I thought was going to wind up in front, was a bunch of curving feathers in red and yellow and purple and black and white, all of them a rainbow blur right now. Except for high-heeled black pumps, the rest was Juanita.

She pulled at the red half-skirt, jerked it from her hips, and danced a little longer wearing only the shoes and bra, plus a gray G-string that looked as if it were made from the smoke of one cigarette. Then there was a wail from the band and the music stopped. Juanita stopped too.

All you could hear was the gnashing of teeth. Then applause boomed. Guys stamped their feet and whistled. Boors, I thought; clods. My hands began to hurt and I stopped. The guy at my table was going, “Yeah, wow, yeah,” and I glanced across the room to see what my friends were doing.

They weren't doing anything. They weren't there.

At least, the two guys weren't. Babe sat alone at the table.

Involuntarily I ducked, thinking they would be behind me swinging saps, brass knuckles, tables, anything at my fat head. But nothing happened. Spotting my waiter nearby, I called him over. Had the two men gone someplace else? Yes, they had gone out the front door before Juanita finished her dance. He seemed surprised at that.

I was surprised too, but not for the same reason. I didn't suppose it actually made any difference, though. I was a bit disgruntled with myself for letting them creep out without my knowing it. But I'd never seen Juanita before. And a guy's got to have one or two little vices.

Right about then Juanita bowed and waved and blew kisses at everybody, then walked off stage toward an open door in the far wall. I could see part of a narrow hallway through it. I was just about to get up and follow her when I noticed the band members nudging each other and yakking back and forth. A couple of them looked at Babe Le Toot, who seemed to be in her cups. Or rather, in her highball.

Then the band started to play again. They didn't sneak into it, they hit it loud, wild, and gut-bucket—"St. Louis Blues"—and Babe's head snapped up as though somebody had yanked on her hair. A big, happy, all-gone smile spread over her chops and she leaped to her feet. While a trumpet went
waah-waah
she ankled out to the middle of the floor—and she seemed to have lost none of her technique. She had her blouse half off when the band stopped suddenly.

For a moment I got a kind of queasy feeling, thinking she must have tottered out half plastered and was going to be plenty embarrassed, but it wasn't at all like that. She did seem to sort of come out of a trance, and she looked around dazedly. Then she swung around to the band and laughed, ran to them and threw her arms around a couple of the guys and hugged them. They laughed it up and some of the men in the audience yelled, “You don't need music, Babe!”

I said to the young guy across the table from me, “What was that?”

For once he spoke intelligibly. “Guess you don't hang around here much. They pull that every other night or so when Babe's here. She gets outside a couple, and seems like the hooch plus ‘St. Louie' makes her want to dance. Like she can't help it. They never let her go all the way, and she gets a boot out of it.”

“So, I'd guess, do the customers.”

“Yeah, man. Wish they'd let her go some night. She never has stopped while the music was playing.” He grinned. “I'll be here if it ever happens.”

“I'll bet you will. Thanks for the seat.” I tossed off the last of my bourbon, got up, and walked to the doorway and into the hall. Light streamed into the hall from a doorway a couple of yards to my left, and when I walked over and looked inside, Juanita was sitting in a chair before a dressing table, putting on some more lipstick. She should have put on more than lipstick.

Her back was to me but she could see me in the dressing-table mirror. I said, “Hi,” and she raised her eyes to meet mine in the mirror.

“Who're you?”

“OK if I come inside?”

“I guess. Who are you, anyway?”

I went in and shut the door, took out my wallet and showed her the photostat of my license. “Like to talk to you a little.”

“Another cop,” she said. “Three of them already talked to me.” She swung around on her chair to face me. “Say, you know Carlos Something-or-other? Lieutenant, I think. He was nice.”

She had no accent at all, but she looked Latin, and Carlos was Cuban, besides being a good-looking cat and one hell of a rumba artist. “Sure,” I said. “Carlos Renata. Buddy of mine.”

“Sit down.” She pointed to a chair so spindly that I didn't think it would hold me, but it did, and I said, just to soften her up a little more, “Really enjoyed your act, Juanita. First time I've caught it. Not the last, though. You've got a beautiful voice, you know.”

She beamed. She must have heard about that body and dance of hers a thousand times, but this was music to her ears. Actually, her voice stank. But if three cops had already talked to her without learning much of anything, three cops including Carlos, I had to get on her good side somehow. Not that she had a bad side.

She said, “Do you really mean it?”

“What do you think, Juanita?”

“I think you're a pleasant liar.” She was smiling.

I grinned at her “Well, I had to say something.”

“I can't sing for sour apples, and I know it. But it sure sounded good.” She laughed.

“You should worry. Kirsten Flagstad doesn't dance so good, either.”

We yakked like that for a couple of minutes, and got along famously. When I asked her about Yates and the rest of it, she didn't give me any trouble. The outfit she was wearing gave me a little trouble, but I listened closely. There wasn't anything I hadn't got from Carlos or Sam: Yates had been here Saturday night, the night he'd been killed. A little after midnight he'd been called to the phone, left, and that was it. In the club that night had been Babe, Foo, Strikes, and a guy she called Sardine Lambert. It was a new name, at least, so I asked her about it.

“He's another of the bunch that work out at the castle. You know where it is?”

I nodded. “I've been there. As a matter of fact, that's my next stop tonight.”

“Then you've seen that goofy knight they've got out there. Two men dress up and parade around. One of them's Lambert.”

“Which, I suppose, is why they call him Sardine. Another of Norman's boys, huh?”

“Works for him.”

“How about a guy named Bender? Brad Bender.”

Her lips parted and her eyes opened wider, but quickly her features went back to normal. It seemed funny, so I pushed it around gently.

“Seems like I heard his name somewhere. He one of the bunch that hung around here with Foo and Strikes?”

She didn't say anything, so temporarily I shifted the subject. “How about Andon Poupelle? Was he here the night Yates got that call?”

“I don't think so. He's been here a few times. Not lately, though. I didn't know who he was until Carlos described him.”

I went on casually, “About Brad Bender. Didn't Carlos or one of the others ask you about him?”

“No.”

I remembered then that I'd given Bender's name to Sam only yesterday; the police had talked to Juanita a day or two before. “Well, hell,” I said, “you know the guy, don't you?”

“I know him. Why? What's the matter? I ... go out with him quite a bit.”

“Go out with him? When was the last time?”

“Over a month ago. What's all this about? He isn't in any trouble, is he?”

“That's the point. Nobody's heard anything of him for about a month. I understand he used to hang out here, and then, bang, he's not here any more. Word is, maybe he got hurt. Hurt bad. Maybe fatally.”

I was watching her while I spoke and her lips parted again. “Oh, no,” she said quietly. “He said he'd see me again in a month or so.”

“When was this?”

“About that long ago. A month, I mean. Maybe less.”

“You two ... have an understanding or something?”

“No, he's just a nice guy, is all. Can you tell me any more? I mean, is there a chance he ... isn't hurt?”

“There's a chance. You say you saw him about a month ago?”

“Not quite that long. I can find out in a minute. Only I didn't see him, he phoned me from Vegas and said—”

“From where? Las Vegas, Nevada?”

“Yes.”

I got up and lit a cigarette, then sat down again. “Baby, find out when that call was. Find out for sure. And what did he say to you?”

She went to her dressing table and opened a drawer, pulled out a small calendar. “I marked the day he called,” Juanita said, “so I could figure about when I might see him again.” She turned around with the little calendar in her hand and added, “It was sort of funny. He wouldn't tell me why, just said he had to stay out of town for a month or so. I wasn't supposed to mention it to anybody. But if he's hurt...”

She turned back a page on the calendar and ran her finger over the sheet. “Here it is. He phoned me on June 10. I hadn't seen him for over a week then.”

That was about all of the conversation. I stayed a few minutes more, then got up again. “Don't worry too much about Bender, Juanita,” I said. “I think maybe I shook you up for nothing. I think your boyfriend's all right.”