1954 - Safer Dead (14 page)

‘Do you think I have a nice shape?’ she asked languidly.

‘Sure, and you have a nice appetite to go with it. Don’t you diet or something?’

‘Sometimes,’ she said. The subject didn’t seem to interest her. ‘Shall we have one more?’ and she lifted her empty glass. This went on for half an hour and I was beginning to wonder if I had brought enough money with me when she finally decided it was time to eat. We went into the restaurant.

Two skimpily dressed girls were doing a song and dance routine on a dais near the band as we took our seats. They were good, and so was the band. It was while we were working through the river trout that a party arrived at a table near ours. I could tell they were important by the way the maître d’hôtel brought them down the aisle. He walked backwards and flourished his arms. If he had had a flag he would have waved it.

There were two girls and two men. The girl who led the way caught my attention. She was around twenty-six: small, compact, with a shape under her flame coloured evening gown that made my eyes pop. She was dark, and her glossy black hair was piled up on her perfectly shaped head. Her face was as lovely as a greek sculpture; cold, perhaps a little hard, and very, very haughty. But there was a flame burning within her that made her more than a beautiful woman: it made her alive, desirable, seductive and feminine as Helen of Troy must have been feminine.

She was magnet to men. There wasn’t a man in the restaurant, including the band and the waiters, who didn’t look as if he wanted to be her escort. You could see the expressions on their faces change when they caught sight of her: they were hungry for her; very, very hungry. I caught myself wondering if I looked like that too. I felt maybe I did.

The other girl with her was nothing to look at; pleasant, a little too plump, wealthy of course, but the dark Helen of Troy need never worry about her as a rival.

The two men were the usual rich, well fed, middle-aged guys you can see any day after ten-thirty a.m. controlling large syndicates, banks or chain stores. You could almost hear their ulcers creak as they moved, and their port wine faces told of their fiery tempers.

‘Don’t you know better than to stare?’ Suzy asked crossly.

‘Am I the only one?’ I said and grinned at her. ‘Who is she? Not the one with the big bosom, but the dark, little one.’

Suzy raised her lip scornfully.

‘I can’t imagine why men go for her. I think she’s nothing but a horrible, oversexed animal.’

‘I like animals,’ I said, ‘I once got a medal for saving a dog from drowning. Who is she?’

‘I thought everyone knew her. My goodness! Even if I did have her money, I would know better than to make an exhibition of myself the way she does. Why Piero doesn’t go down on hands and knees when he shows her to her table I can’t imagine. He does everything else.’

I leaned forward and trying, without a lot of success, to keep my voice from shouting, repeated, ‘Who - is - she?’

‘I’m not deaf,’ Suzy said, recoiling. ‘Cornelia Van Blake if you must know.’ She lifted her elegant shoulders. ‘I should have thought even someone from New York would have known that.’

‘Cornelia Van Blake?’

I stared at Suzy, frowning. Where had I heard the name before? In what connection had I heard it?

‘Does she live in Tampa City?’

‘Of course. She has a house on West Summit and an estate of ten acres. In case you don’t know, West Summit is the high tone district of Tampa City. Only millionaires can afford to live there.’

Millionaires.

I felt a sudden creepy sensation crawl up my spine.

Of course! I remembered now. Cornelia Van Blake was the millionairess Joan Nichols had met in Paris. I remembered Janet Shelley’s exact words:
Joan had an amazing talent for making friends with people with money. When she was in Paris she got friendly with Mrs.

Cornelia Van Blake, the millionaire’s wife. Don’t ask me how she did it, but she did. Twice she went to Mrs. Van Blake’s hotel and
had dinner with her.

I looked again at the dark girl who was scanning the menu that the maître d’hôtel was holding for her. She didn’t look the type to me who would fraternize with an unsuccessful showgirl: she didn’t look the type to fraternize with anyone. If she ever sat next to an iceberg I would bet even money the iceberg would be the first to stoke up the fire.

‘Which one of those well fed guys is her husband?’ I asked.

Suzy wriggled impatiently.

‘My dear man, she is a widow. Her husband died last year. Don’t you know anything?’

‘That was his hard luck,’ I said, and making an effort, I dragged my eyes away from Mrs. Cornelia Van Blake and continued to bone my river trout.

I found I wasn’t hungry any more - anyway, not for the trout.

CHAPTER NINE

I

I
t wasn’t until Suzy and I had been dancing for some little time and had broken off to go to the bar for a drink that I brought Mrs. Cornelia Van Blake up again as a subject for conversation. Suzy had discovered I could dance. I haven’t a lot of talent beside concocting a good yarn, but dancing is one of my specialities. Suzy was pretty good herself, and after we had done one circuit of the floor, she unbent enough to say I was good. A second circuit found her unbending even more, and at the end of a particularly dashing tango, she was behaving almost like a human being.

‘Let’s get outside two big highballs,’ I said, ‘then we’ll come back and show them how it really should be done.’

‘Where did you learn to dance like that, Chet?’ she asked, linking her arm through mine.

Chet.

Well, it takes different ways and means to break them down. I wondered under what conditions, if any, Cornelia Van Blake would break down.

‘My dear woman, it’s not something you learn; it’s something you’re born with,’ I said airily.

Suzy giggled.

‘That serves me right. All right, I apologize for being high hat, but the men Hart asks me to take out sometimes are really the limit. You can’t imagine.’

‘Think nothing of it. A girl’s got to keep her dignity if she doesn’t keep anything else.’

She gave me an old-fashioned look.

‘And don’t think because you can dance, there’s anything else to it, because there isn’t.’

I pushed open the bar door.

‘Don’t start screaming for help until you’re being crowded,’ I said. ‘Who said I wanted anything else?’

‘I know an opening gambit when I hear one,’ she returned and climbed up on a stool and flapped her hands at the barman.

‘Two highballs,’ I said, climbing up on the stool beside her. I took a quick look around the crowded bar in the hope of seeing Mrs. Van Blake again, but she wasn’t in the room. ‘I’ve often thought it would be nice to be a millionaire. If I wasn’t naturally lazy, I’d do something about it,’ I said after I had paid three times too much for the highballs. ‘Take that Van Blake girl. How much did you say she was worth?’

‘I didn’t say. No one knows. Her husband is supposed to have left her five million, but everyone thinks there was more than that. He invented some gadget to do with oil drilling, and they say the royalties on that alone are worth thousands a year. She’s lousy with money. Van Blake put the money up for this club. He had a controlling interest in it, but when he died, Cornelia sold out to Royce. He owns and runs it now.’

‘I wonder what he paid her?’ I said, looking around the plush bar.

Suzy shrugged.

‘Plenty. She wouldn’t part with anything for nothing.’

‘You said her husband died last year?’

‘That’s right. He was murdered.’

I nearly dropped my highball.

‘Murdered? How come? How did it happen?’

She stared at me.

‘The papers were full of it. Why don’t you read them if you have such an inquisitive nature?’

‘Never mind my nature. I bet the New York papers weren’t full of it. Anyway, I have better things to do than bother to read newspapers. I listen to the radio and let it go at that. Who murdered him?’

‘A poacher. Van Blake hated poachers. He used to ride over his estate every morning before seven o’clock, believe it or not and if he caught a poacher after his game, he set about him with his riding whip. Well, he did it once too often. He got shot, and served him right.’

‘He sounds like the Feudal type. What happened to the poacher?’

She shrugged. The subject obviously didn’t interest her.

‘I don’t know. He got away. The police never found him.’

She finished her highball and slid off the stool. ‘Come on; let’s dance. I can’t be too late tonight. I’ve got to pose for Hart tomorrow around noon, and I don’t want to look like a corpse.’

‘That, madam, you could never do,’ I said gallantly, and followed her back to the restaurant.

We danced until one o’clock, and then Suzy said she had to go home.

All the time I had been in the club I had kept my eyes open for Hamilton Royce, but I didn’t see anyone who looked remotely like what I imagined he would look like.

As we were leaving the restaurant, I asked, ‘Isn’t Royce on show tonight? I wanted to catch sight of him.’

‘I haven’t seen him. He’s not always on show,’ Suzy said indifferently. She paused in the lobby. ‘Wait for me here. I won’t be long.’

I watched her disappear into the Ladies retiring room. Quite a crowd were leaving by now, and the lobby was pretty congested. I backed against the far wall to get out of their way. To my right was a passage, and at the far end, I saw an oak-panelled door. It was a pretty plush looking door, and it aroused my curiosity. Behind such a door the owner of a nightclub as gaudy as the Golden Apple might conceivably dwell. I had come to the club for the express purpose of getting a look at Mr. Hamilton Royce and so far I had been unlucky.

I didn’t hesitate for more than a couple of seconds. I could always say I thought the door led to the gentlemen’s retiring room.

I looked quickly around the lobby. The receptionist was busy totting up the night’s loot. The hat check girl was surrounded by departing members, all clamouring for their hats. Juan, still flashing the knife blades in his eyes, was bowing to a fat, important looking man, obviously a Senator, who was leaving. Three flunkeys were occupied on the steps of the entrance, whistling up cars.

No one was paying me the slightest attention.

I edged to the opening of the corridor, then walked, not too quickly and as nonchalantly as I could, towards the oak paneled door. I turned the door handle and pushed gently. The door swung inwards as silently as a leaf settling on the ground.

I looked into a big, luxuriously furnished room: a man’s room; a man with plenty of money to spend on his comforts, and who hadn’t missed a trick in satisfying those comforts. I didn’t let my eyes roam around the room longer than a split second.

The man and woman struggling silently by the fireplace caught and held my attention.

The woman was Cornelia Van Blake. The man was tall and thin and handsome, with an eyebrow moustache and the beautiful tan of a sun lizard.

He had hold of Cornelia, the way Rudolph Valentino used to get hold of his women in the silent movie days. He held her two wrists in one hand, his right arm was around her waist, and he was bending her back while he tried to clamp his mouth down on hers.

She was struggling to break free, and she must have been stronger than she looked for I could see he was having his work cut out to hold her.

When a man forces his attention on any woman it has always seemed to me that he is presenting himself as a target for violence.

I don’t often use violence as I’m too lazy to make the effort, but during the war, when I was unfortunate to get drafted into the Marines, I was the undisputed lightweight champion of my battalion, only because I found it less exhausting than getting on the wrong side of my battalion commander who was a boxing fanatic.

Without considering the consequences, I took two quick steps into the room.

The tall man let go of Cornelia and faced me, his eyes glittering with fury. To ease his embarrassment, I hung a right hook on the side of his jaw. It was a nice punch, and the results on him were devastating.

He shot backwards, thudded against his desk, swept some costly gewgaws to the floor and slid down on top of them.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t appear sooner,’ I said to Cornelia who was adjusting the top of her topless dress that had slipped a few inches during the infighting.

She didn’t even thank me.

I’ve seen angry women in my time, but never one as angry as she was at this moment. She was as white as a fresh fall of snow and her eyes blazed like red hot embers as they say in Victorian novels.

She looked at me as if I were transparent, then looked at the tall man who was still lying on his back, although he was shaking his head and trying to get life back once more into focus, then she went out of the room, and as she passed me I felt scorched by the white-hot blast of her rage.

I sought relaxation by dipping into the gold cigarette box on the desk. I took a cigarette and lit it. One drag sent a tremor up to my memory. Egyptian Abdulla. I looked at the cigarette to make sure, then I looked at the tall man who was by now dragging himself to his feet. I remembered Bernie’s description of the mysterious Henry Rutland: over six foot, lean, suntanned, eyebrow moustache and a gold link bracelet on one wrist and a gold strap watch on the other.

This guy had a gold bracelet on his left wrist and a gold strap watch on his right. Even without the gold ornaments, the description fitted him like a glove.

But this seemed scarcely the time to step up, shake him by the hand and say, ‘Henry Rutland I presume.’

This seemed to me to be the time to ease myself out of the room, turn my discovery over in my mind at leisure and decide how best to make use of it.

As Royce staggered to his feet, clutching on to the desk for support, I took two steps towards the door, then paused.

The door had opened silently. Standing in the doorway, his swarthy, cruel face hard and set was Juan. In his right hand he held a .38 automatic and it was pointing at me.