Flashpoint (11 page)

    "Very nice," I understated the case. "Even an old crock like me wouldn't mind combining business and pleasure in this instance."

    "Businesswise, she may be a complete dead end," Erikson answered. "I'll know better when I pull the report. Meantime you go back to the Alhambra and see if Hawk shows again. I'm-"

    "Seeing him the first time reminded me of something," I interrupted him. I tapped my left shoulder. "My gun is buried in the sand near the airstrip where the gambling plane came down, and if I'm going to see Hawk again I want another."

    "That's not unreasonable," Erikson agreed. "Just a minute." He went into the equipment room, came out with a Smith & Wesson.38 that could have been a duplicate of my own, and handed it to me after taking down the registration number. "It's already been sighted in," he said.

    "Not like I'll sight it in when I get a chance," I said, slipping it into the chamois-lined shoulder holster without which I'd have felt undressed.

    Jock McLaren waved to me cheerily as I passed through the outer office. He still had the earphones on.

    I wondered what his reaction would be if it fell to him to transcribe the segment of tape I'd made of the magazine-studio seduction scene.

    

    

    It was the cocktail hour when I reached the Alhambra.

    The place was a blizzard of bright colors as a hundred people, two-thirds of them in native costume, engaged in high-pitched, alcohol-heightened conversations in half a dozen languages.

    All the booths were occupied, and men were standing three-deep at the bar. I eased in at one end. I was in no hurry to be served, since I was going to be there for awhile. There was no sign of Hawk in the swirling smoke eddies in the room, and I resigned myself to waiting it out.

    When I was finally served, I nursed my drink for an hour. The crowd began to thin out. I moved to a vacated booth in a corner of the room where I could see the front entrance. I settled myself with as much patience as I could muster.

    Only scattered customers remained on the bar stools. One was a woman seated directly in front of my booth. Inside of three minutes I knew she was watching me in the back-bar mirror. After years on the run a man develops a sensitivity about such things.

    The woman was an artificial platinum blonde, about thirty, with thin, plucked eyebrows and a lot of makeup. I couldn't remember ever having seen her before. She had on a white blouse and a black skirt of some shiny material. The skirt was so tight it tucked in under her buttocks, delineating each fleshy crease.

    I hadn't looked directly at her, but she picked up her drink and carried it to my table. With no invitation from me she plopped herself down in the booth opposite me. She crossed her legs deliberately, far enough out in the aisle to afford me a look at her thigh-high sliding skirt. She smiled at me, disclosing bad teeth. At close range the heavy facial makeup was intended to hide blemishes. She was braless under the blouse, and she might just as well have had HOOKER branded in the center of her forehead.

    "I'm Teresa, the original whore with the heart of gold," she said. "I saw you with the kid last night. The skinny little blonde. Chryssie."

    "So?"

    "So the kid sat here in a booth all afternoon, cryin' about bein' stood up. She had no bread for Mary Jane or anything else. Rex-" she nodded at the bartender "- was gonna throw her out, but I talked him out of it. Awhile ago a pimp sat down in her booth, an' the two of them went out together."

    "Your pimp, Teresa?"

    "Correct."

    "Would he take her to his place?"

    "To hers. If you decide to do anything about it, it would help to keep my skin together if he thought you walked in on them accidentally."

    She picked up her drink and went back to the bar.

    I was supposed to stay in the Alhambra and watch for Hawk. But there was the thought of Chryssie sitting in a booth, crying because I'd stood her up. I'd known she was broke or next door to it. I wasn't her guardian angel by any means, but I didn't care for the idea that I'd turned a pimp loose on her.

    It would only take a few minutes. I left the Alhambra and walked rapidly to Fiftieth Street. I didn't have a key to Chryssie's apartment, but that wouldn't be a problem. When I reached her landing, I saw a line of light under her apartment door. It was locked when I tried it. I took a thin strip of stiff plastic from my wallet and eased it into the door jamb. I turned my wrist slightly and the lock moved back with a snicking sound.

    I moved inside quietly. The sickly-sweet odor of marijuana was overpowering. Only the light in the bedroom was on, and I moved toward it stealthily. Chryssie was on the bed, naked, face down and sobbing. There were dark blotches on her alabaster behind. Across the foot of the bed was a scruffy-bearded, lanky, hairy type, also naked. He was sleeping.

    Male clothing was draped over a nearby chair. I went through it and found an eight-inch, bone-handled knife in a sleeve holster. I dropped holster and knife into my pocket and went back to the bed. I drew the.38 from my shoulder holster, took hold of the bearded character's ankle, and jerked him off the bed.

    He landed on the floor with a crash that sat Chryssie bolt upright in the bed, whimpering fearfully. The man on the floor scrambled on his belly toward the chair holding his clothes as unerringly as though he was fitted with radar although bis eyes were still closed. He went slack only when he couldn't find bis knife.

    "Get your ass out of here before I fill it full of slugs," I told him when he opened his eyes. I showed him the.38. He stayed a respectful distance from it while he dressed hurriedly although his eyes stayed mean. Chryssie stared at the tableau with panic-stricken gaze.

    "How about my knife?" the bearded character asked from the doorway.

    "Come and get it," I invited him. "If you're feeling lucky."

    He glared at me, then went out. I had moved to the bedroom doorway to make sure he went. When I returned to the bed, Chryssie was crying again.

    "What happened to your tail?" I asked her.

    "H-he kept kicking m-me to make me do th-things," she sobbed.

    "What the hell do you expect if you keep on acting like a victim?" I growled. Her air of helplessness really irritated me. I went into the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. There must have been twenty-five different bottles of pills inside. I stuffed bottles into all my pockets until I'd made a clean sweep. "Take a shower and get into bed and stay there till you hear me at the door," I told Chryssie when I was back in the bedroom. "Understand?"

    She nodded, still wide eyed.

    I took her key, locked her into the apartment, and went back to the Alhambra.

    

    

    
WHEN
I left the Alhambra that night, I stopped at an all-night restaurant and carried an order of scrambled eggs and a large coffee back to Chryssie's place.

    She started a screaming tantrum at my entrance over the loss of her amphetamines which I'd dumped in a convenient garbage can. I straightened her out with a slap in the face and another on the tail, then pushed the scrambled eggs into her a spoonful at a time. She sat there sulkily afterward, sipping at the hot coffee. "God knows you're probably not worth this attempted salvage job," I told her, "but I'm curious about what's underneath that skinful of poppers."

    "Don't do me any favors," she answered me, but she didn't sound as flippant as usual.

    The next day I spent fifteen hours at the Alhambra, bored to tears. There was no sign of Hawk. I ate food I didn't want in order to counteract booze I didn't want, and my tailbone ached from just sitting on it.

    I kept Chryssie under house arrest at her place. The only time I left the Alhambra was to bring her meals. She didn't want to eat, but I forced her. My association with her hadn't gone unnoticed at the Alhambra. Rex, the bartender, stopped by my booth in the afternoon to ask me how she was. He sounded sympathetic. There was something about Chryssie's little-girlness that evidently got through even to Broadway types.

    Erikson called me at her place that night. "Talia Rhazmet got her job at the UN through the Turkish

    Foreign Office," he told me. "And she spends more money than she makes working as a guide. I'd like to put a man on her, but I'm shorthanded right now, so we've put a tap on her apartment phone instead. So far there's been nothing interesting. What about Hawk?"

    "Not a trace."

    "There's always the chance the Rhazmet girl will lead us to him. Meantime you hang on at the Alhambra. Call me in the morning with the number of the pay phone there in case I need to reach you in a hurry."

    "I don't like being paged in a public place," I complained.

    "I'll ask for Tom Dawson, not Earl Drake."

    "Listen, how long is this going to last? When I let you talk me into coming here from Tucson, I didn't contract to sit in a bar definitely and blot up Jim Beam. The bartender is even trying to get friendly."

    "Just hang on until we can find out if there's a definite connection between the girl and Hawk. Or until he shows up." Erikson was making his tone soothing. "Then you can back out and my men will take over."

    "It had better be quick, Karl."

    "Okay. Just sit tight for another day or two."

    He hung up on me before I could give him further argument.

    

    

    In the morning, Chryssie was still pouting and complaining, but she looked and sounded better. The deep, dark shadows under her eyes had lessened, and her jittery skittishness had calmed somewhat. She had a habit of parading the apartment in the nude. "I might as well be here with my father," she said resentfully after flaunting herself in front of me once. "I think you're on cocaine or heroin yourself the way you don't turn on to me."

    "I'm saving you for an orgy, Chryssie," I told her.

    But I was beginning to wonder if this girl could ever sound like a seventeen-year-old with a seventeen-year-old's problems.

    She had improved enough physically for me to take her to the Alhambra. I watched her every time she went to the ladies' room, and sure enough, in the middle of the afternoon her eyes began to get the familiar glazed expression. She'd evidently begged a reefer from someone in the John. I took her back to her place and locked her in again. By that time she was floating so high she didn't even know where she was. I went back to the Alhambra and the monotonous vigil.

    The next day she was as low as she'd been high previously. I wasn't going to make the same mistake again, so I left her after force-feeding some cereal into her. She was sleeping when I left her place. I had toyed with the idea of calling her father to come and get her, but in the back of my mind was the thought that he'd probably already done it, perhaps several times. A salvage job becomes less attractive as renewed effort is required.

    I settled in at the Alhambra again after walking there in a light rain. The waitress brought me my Jim Beam on the rocks without my even ordering. I wondered how long I had to keep it up before I developed cirrhosis. Years, probably. I'd never make it. I was tired already of my mouth tasting like a boiled boot every morning. I was thinking less kindly of Erikson's operation every hour.

    And then at 4:10 P.M. Tom Dawson received a phone call at the Alhambra. I almost blew it. I'd been feeling so sorry for myself I'd almost forgotten Erikson's little ploy. "The Rhazmet girl just telephoned someone she called Hawk to meet her uptown in the Picadilly Bar at One-twenty-five West Fifty-seventh," Erikson rapped at me when I got to the phone booth. "Get up there and make sure it's the right guy. Hustle, will you?"

    I hustled.

    I'd have hustled anywhere to bring an end to what was rapidly becoming one of the least rewarding experiences of my life. I don't have the patience to sit in bars and watch the faces in the booths and the faces coming through the front entrance.

    A cab deposited me within a few feet of a marquee with the single word PICADILLY on it. It was an English-style pub with a fake coat-of-arms plaque inside the door. The clientele had some of the chi-chi look that went with the art galleries in the neighborhood. Velvet jackets and wide-flowing ties predominated at the half-filled bar.

    I couldn't see the Turkish girl as I took a booth. I ordered a drink I didn't want, and wondered if I'd just exchanged one shellac emporium for another. I wondered if the girl would show. If she somehow knew her phone had been tapped, she could have pitched Erikson a curve.

    Then she breezed through the Picadilly front entrance, giving the appearance of a high-fashion model, in a smart lightweight suit. I lowered my eyes to my glass as she settled herself across the width of the room from me. She had placed herself where she could also watch the entrance.

    She removed her gloves and placed them in her handbag, fitted a dark-brown cigarette into a jeweled holder, and smiled at the waiter when he lighted the cigarette for her. The waiter came back from the bar with another of the tiny golden liqueurs I had seen previously. Talia Rhazmet sipped at it with an expression of leisured elegance on her beautiful face. She couldn't have appeared more at ease in an embassy drawing room.

    Hawk entered the tavern. His powerful looking body filled the entrance for a second as he scanned the room, looking everywhere except at the girl. Then he went to the end of the bar and ordered a drink. If he gave the girl a signal, I didn't see it, but she picked up her handbag and took out her gloves. I saw a quick flash of white as she also placed what appeared to be an unmarked envelope on the seat beside her with her body shielding it from the room. While not nearly as bulky as the package that had changed hands at the Alhambra, this envelope was thick enough to indicate that it contained more than a check. Or a message.