The Body Lovers (16 page)

Hy said, “Does that look like a guy who doesn’t want his picture taken?”

I had to admit that it didn’t.

Biff grinned and said, “Don’t fool yourself, Hy. Charlie Forbes took that shot and he doesn’t work with a Graflex. Ten to one it was a gimmick camera hidden under his shirt.”

I tapped Hy on the shoulder. “See what I mean?”

He handed the paper back. “Okay, Mike. I’ll buy a little piece of it. Well poke around. Now how about the rest of it?”

“The boys on the police beat have big ears.”

“When it concerns you, yeah.”

I gave him the story, on
finding Greta Service without
mentioning all the details, simply that Dulcie McInnes had suggested checking Teddy Gates’ files and I had come up with another address. He knew he wasn’t getting the whole picture, but figured I was protecting a client’s interest and since the job was done as far as Harry was concerned, it ended there.

When I left the building it was pretty late, but for what I wanted to do, the night was just starting.

 

The stable of girls Lorenzo Jones ran was a tired string operating out of run-down hotels and shoddy apartments. They all had minor arrest records, and after each one, simply changed the locality of their activities, picked up a new name and went back into the business. Like most of the girls who were on the tail end of the prostitution racket, they had no choice. Jones ran things with an iron fist and they didn’t dispute his decisions. The operation was pretty well confined to the section catering to the waterfront trade, the quickies and drunks who patronized the dives where he made the contacts for his broads.

None of the first three I found had seen him and they seemed to be wandering around in a vacuum, not knowing whether to hit the streets or wait for Jones to arrange their appointments. Two of them had turned repeat tricks for old customers out of habit and one had solicited a couple of customers on her own because she was broke.

For some reason they were anxious to see Jones show up again, probably because on their own they’d get sluffed off if they tried to hustle, while Jones got the money in advance and the customer took what he was offered whether he liked it or not.

Talking wasn’t part of their makeup. They had taken too many lumps from Jones and their customers over the years and there was no way to lean on them.

But the fourth one wasn’t like that. Her name was Roberta Slade and she was the last one Jones had added to his firm. I found her in a place they called Billy’s Cave sipping a martini and studying herself in the mirror over the back bar.

When I sat down her eyes caught mine in the glass and she said with a voice the gin had thickened just a little bit, “Move to the rear of the bus, mister.”

She turned insolently and I could see that one time she had been a pretty girL The makeup was heavy, her eyes tired, but there was still some sparkle in her hair and a little bit of determination in the set of her mouth. “Do I know you?”

I waved for a beer and pushed some money across the bar. “Nope.”

“Well, I’m taking the day off.” She turned back and twirled the glass in her hand.

“Good for you,” I said.

I finished half the beer and put the glass down. “Shove off,” she said softly.

I took twenty bucks out and laid it down between us. “Will that buy some conversation?”

A little grin split her lips and she glanced at me, her eyebrows raised. “You don’t look like one of those nuts, mister. I’ve given a hundred different versions of my life history embellished with lurid details to guys who get their kicks that way and I can spot them a city block away.”

“I’m not paying for that kind of talk.”

Quickening interest showed in her face. “You a cop? Damn, you look like one, but any more you can’t tell what a cop looks like. The vice squad runs college boys who look like babies; dames you take for schoolteachers turn out to be policewomen. It’s rough.”

“I’m a private cop, if you want to know.”

“Oh boy,” she laughed. “Big deal. Whose poor husband is going to get handed divorce papers for grabbing some outside stuff?” She laughed again and shook her head. “I don’t know names, I’m lousy at remembering faces and all your twenty bucks could buy you would be a lot of crap, so beat it.”

“I want Lorenzo Jones.”

The glass stopped twirling in her fingers. She studied it a moment, drained it and set it on the bar. “Why?” she asked without looking at me.

“I want to give him a friendly punch in the mouth.”

“Somebody already did.”

“Yeah, I know.” I laid my hand palm down on the bar so she could see the cuts across my knuckles. “I want to do it again,” I said.

Very slowly, her face turned so she was smiling up at me and her eyes had the look of a puppy that had found a friend and was trying his best not to run away. “So I have a champion.”

“Not quite.”

“But you laid him out, didn’t you? Word gets around fast. You were the one who raised all that hell in Virginia’s room, weren’t you?”

“I was on a job.”

Her grin turned into a chuckle and she motioned with a finger for the bartender to fill her glass again. “I wish I could have seen it. That dirty bastard took me apart enough times. He hated my guts, you know that? And do you know why?”

“No.”

“I used to work a hatcheck concession in a joint he hung out in. I wasn’t like this then. He tried his best to make me and I brushed him off. He was a pig. You know how he gets his kicks? He ... well, hell, that’s another story.”

Her drink came and I paid for it. For a few seconds she stirred the olive around with the toothpick absently, then tasted it, her eyes on herself in the back bar mirror. “I almost had it made. I was doing some high-class hustling, then I got a guy who liked me. Nice rich kid. Good education.” She made a sour grimace and said, “Then Jones queered the deal. He got some pictures of me on a date and showed them to the kid. That was the end of that. I went to pieces, but he picked them up fast. He had me worked over a couple of times, picked up by the cops so I had a record, then he moved in and took over when I didn’t have any place to go.” Roberta took a long pull of the martini and added sadly, “I guess this is what I was cut out for anyway.”

“Where’s Jones now?”

“I hope the bastard’s dead.”

“He isn’t.”

She ran the fingers of one hand through her hair, then lightly down the side of her cheek. “The cops are looking for him too.”

“I know.”

“Why?”

“There are a couple of dead girls he might know something about.”

“Not Lorenzo Jones. They can’t make any money for him dead. He’d keep them alive.”

I said, “He’s just a lead. I want him, Roberta.”

“What will you do to him if you find him?”

“Probably kick the crap out of him.”

“Promise?”

I grinned at her. She wasn’t kidding at all. “Promise,” I said.

“Can I watch?”

“My pleasure.”

She picked the drink up, looked at it a moment, then put it down unfinished. The twenty was still there, but she didn’t touch it. “My treat,” she told me.

The rain had slicked the pavement and was coming down in a fine drizzle, throwing a misty halo around the street lights. I wanted to call a cab, but Roberta said no and we walked two blocks without talking. Finally I said, “Where to?”

“My place.” She didn’t look at me.

“Lorenzo there?”

“No, but I am.” She didn’t say anything after that, crossing the avenues in silence, then down another two blocks until we came to the doorway between a pair of stores and she took my arm and nodded. “Here.”

She put a key In the lock and pushed the door open, stepped in and let me follow her. I went up the stairs behind her, waited at the first landing while she opened up again and switched the light on. I had been in a lot of cribs before and they were usually dingy affairs, but she had taken a lot of trouble with this one. It was a three-room apartment, clean, furnished simply, but in good taste.

Roberta saw me take it in with a single sweep of my eyes and caught my initial reaction. “My early upbringing.” She walked to the closet, reached deep into the shelf and came out with a cheap pad stuffed with papers and held together with a rubber band. She handed it to me and said, “He dropped it one night. It’s a tally sheet on us, but you’ll find receipts in there from a few places. We knew he had a place he stayed when he wasn’t in with one of us, but nobody knew where. That is, until I found this one night. You’ll find him there, but let me go find me first.”

I looked at her, wondering what the hell she was talking about, and when she left, sat down and opened the pad. The kids had made plenty for Lorenzo Jones, all right, but I wasn’t interested in his take. What I saw were paid bills from three different small hotels, each covering a period for about three months, and the last was dated only a month ago and if the pattern fit, he’d be there now. Only he wasn’t listed as Lorenzo Jones. His name on the bill head was an imaginative J. Lorenzo, room 614 of the Midway HoteL

Roberta Slade came back then. She wasn’t the same one who had left and I saw what she meant about finding herself. She smelled of the shower and some subtle perfume; the makeup was gone and the outfit she wore was almost sedate. She pulled on a maroon raincoat, stuffed her hair under a silly little hat and smiled gently. “There are times,” she said, “when I hate myself and want to go back to what I think I could have been.”

“I like you better this way.”

She knew I meant it. There was an ironic tone in her voice. “It isn’t very profitable.”

“You could give it a try, kid.”

“That depends on you. And Lorenzo Jones. He’s got a long memory.”

“Maybe we can shorten it up a little.”

 

The Midway Hotel rented rooms by the hour or the day, and if you paid in advance no luggage was required. The going rate for accommodations was steeper than the place deserved because the management got its cut for providing its service of keeping its mouth shut and overlooking the preponderance of Smiths in the register.

I signed in as Mr. and Mrs. Thompson from Toledo, Ohio, passed the money over and took the key marked 410. The clerk didn’t even bother to look at my signature or thank me for letting him keep the change of my bill.

There was no bellhop, but this place had an early-model self-service elevator that took us to the fourth floor where we got out. We walked to the room and when I opened the door she gave me an odd look, a wry little smile, shrugged and walked in.

I grinned at her, but there wasn’t any humor there. “No tricks, kid. I can’t go busting in his door up there and he damn well won’t open it for me.”

“Nothing would surprise me any more. I’m sorry.”

I went to the window, forced it up and looked out at the back of the building. Like most, it had an iron fire escape with landings that covered the windows of several rooms at each floor. I shucked my raincoat and threw it to Roberta. “Give me fifteen minutes to get up there, then come pay a visit.”

“You won’t start without me, will you?”

“No... I’ll wait.”

Outside, thunder rumbled across the sky and for a second there was a dull glow over the city. I stepped out to the iron slats and closed the window behind me. The rain waited for that second and came at me like a basket of spitting cats, daring me to go any further.

I swung my legs over the railing and got my feet set, hanging on to the metal bar behind me. The rain pelted my face and I couldn’t be sure of the distance to the other fire escape frame. Then the sky lit up with that dull gray incandescence and I could see it, and while the image was still there, jumped, my fingers clawing for the iron rail.

My hands made it, but my feet slipped, smashing me into the uprights. I hung on, pulled myself up until I found a toehold, then climbed over and stood there to get my breath and see if anybody had heard the racket. There wasn’t any need to worry; the rain kept the windows closed and the thunder drowned out any noise I thought I made. Two flights up where room 614 was, the window was outlined in yellow behind the drawn shade.

I took the .45 out of the sling, cocked it and started up the stairs.

The window was open about four inches from the bottom with the shade pulled below the level of the sill. Inside a radio was playing some tinny music and the smell of cigar smoke seeped out the opening. There was a cough, the creak of bedsprings and somebody twisted the dial of the radio savagely until another station was on. I tried the window. The damn thing was stuck fast.

Behind my back the wind came at me, driving the rain through my clothes, making the shade flop against the sill. I edged to one side, reached out with my fingers, got the shade, pulled it down on the roller and let it go. The thing snapped up under the tension of the spring and flapped wildly around its axis and the guy on the bed jumped up with a curse, startled, a snub-nosed gun in his hand. He took a look at the shade, let out another curse, stuck the gun in his waistband and came to the window, reaching up to pull down the blind.

And saw me standing there with the .45 aimed at his middle through the glass.

“Open it,” I said.

For a moment I thought he was going to try it, but the odds were just too big and he knew it. His face was a pasty white, his hands shook going to the window, and when he forced it up he stood there with the sweat running down his forehead into a crease in his flattened nose and he couldn’t get a sound out of his throat.

I stepped inside, yanked the gun out of his pants and smashed him across the jaw with it. His head snapped back and he stumbled against the bed just as a knock came on the door. I walked over, opened it and let Roberta in. She gave me a hurt look and said, “You promised.”

“It was just a teaser, kid,” I told her. “The main course comes up later.”