Flashpoint (9 page)

    "I didn't think you were real. I had to make sure."

    She attempted a smile. It was a dim, damped-out effort. The tip of a pink tongue circled her lips. "And now you know?"

    "Now I know. Why do you wear-" I stopped. The childish face across the table from me had gone slack suddenly. The blue eyes bulged, slitted, then bulged again. "What's the matter?"

    A dirty hand was at her slim throat. "Shouldn't- have mixed beer-with grass." Her voice was a whisper. "Know-better."

    "Then why the hell do it if you know better?"

    Her eyes had gone completely out of focus. "What difference-does it make? Goin' be-got to get-home."

    "Where's home?"

    She didn't answer me. The upper part of her body began to bend forward over the table. I forestalled the collapse by sliding out of my side of the booth and moving in beside her. I propped her up and leaned her against the booth's back. "Where do you live, Chryssie?"

    No answer.

    She had no handbag. I glanced around to make sure we weren't attracting attention, then frisked her. My quick-patting hands discovered only that she probably didn't have a stitch on beneath the sari. I tried it again. This time I found a small green purse safety-pinned to a shoulder of the sari under a loose fold.

    I unpinned the purse and examined its contents which I held on my lap. There were three one-dollar bills, an emerald ring that looked genuine, a bronze door key, and a last year's driver's license made out to sixteen-year-old Cornelia Lavan Rouse. The address on the license was 229 East Fiftieth, four blocks away. I put my lips against the girl's ear. "Who's Cornelia Rouse, Chryssie?"

    She stirred, then became semi-comatose again. "Use'- t'-be me," she muttered thickly.

    "Where's your car?"

    "Sold-it. Long-time ago."

    "Don't you have any friends here?"

    "No friends-anywhere."

    I hesitated, but this youngster was prey for the vultures. "Stand up," I ordered.

    She made no move. I stood up myself, lifted her erect, then supported her with an arm around her slender waist. I got her out of the booth and we moved toward the door in a slue-footed shuffle. I kept waiting for someone to challenge our departure, but nothing happened.

    The first four cabs passed us up-not that I blamed them-but the fifth one stopped. Chryssie's address turned out to be a building that could have been anything from a mortuary to a warehouse loft. There was nothing on the first floor but a scruffy-looking lobby. I half lugged the girl up a narrow flight of stairs. I still had the key I'd extracted from her purse. There were four doors opening off a second-floor landing, and I tried the key in each door in turn. I half expected a smash in the mouth from an irate householder, but the whole building was quiet.

    The key opened the third door, and I wrestled Chryssie inside. There were two rooms, tenement rooms, indescribably filthy. Dirty dishes were stacked on every item of furniture, and empty wine bottles lined the walls. In the bedroom the bed looked as though it hadn't been made for a month. I moved aside the curtain on the bedroom's single window and looked down at a narrow alley below with headlights passing through it.

    I dumped Chryssie on the lumpy bed and scouted the bathroom. It had a long, narrow, old-fashioned tub sitting up on four legs. I scoured a couple layers of grime from it, ran hot water, and returned to the bedroom for Chryssie. Surprisingly, in view of the general wasteland atmosphere, there was a telephone in the bedroom.

    I shucked Chryssie out of her bedraggled sari and carried her nude, dead weight to the tub. She stirred at the touch of hot water on her flesh and murmured something unintelligible, but she didn't open her eyes. I left her there to soak while I went back and remade the bed with some semi-clean linen I found in a drawer. I went back to Chryssie and soaped and rinsed her a few times. Her skin that had felt coarse and pebbled gradually became paler and softer.

    While drying her off, I made a discovery. There were dark striations at the base of her lower abdomen. At the ripe old age of seventeen Chryssie had already had a baby. I brought a pillow from the bedroom, folded it over the side of the tub, and laid the girl across it. She sprawled limp as a jellyfish with her childish, bare behind pointing up in the air.

    I washed her hair, twice. She slid forward on the pillow once until her head went under the water, but even that didn't rouse her. I dried her hair and toted her back to the bedroom. She was breathing shallowly but evenly, and her color seemed better.

    The bureau drawers yielded nothing but soiled underwear and nightgowns. I finally dumped her into bed naked and pulled the sheet up over her. There was a sofa in the sitting room, and I cleared the debris from it before sponging off the top layer of crud with a wet rag. Then I went back into the bedroom and called Erikson at the office. "I'm staying here tonight," I said, and gave him the phone number.

    "Where is it?"

    I gave him the address.

    "Anything doing?"

    I looked toward Chryssie's slim form huddled under the sheet. "Nothing."

    "Call me no later than noon tomorrow," Erikson said.

    "Fine."

    I stripped to my underwear and stretched out on the couch.

    A fly buzzed around my head, and it was hot in the close apartment, but neither fact kept me awake long.

    It had been a full day.

    

    

    
THE
persistent ringing of a telephone woke me.

    When I forced my eyes open, I couldn't orient myself for a moment. Then the meaning of the cluttered, dirty room came flooding back. The phone kept ringing, and I stumbled to my feet from the couch. Cramped muscles protested as I went into the bedroom.

    Chryssie was sprawled face down on the bed. One knee was drawn up to her chest, the sheet had fallen to the floor, and she looked about twelve years old. The ringing phone was only inches from her ear, but she never moved. "Yes?" I said into the phone. I expected to hear Erikson.

    "I wish to speak to my daughter, Cornelia," a deep masculine voice said.

    "She's-ah-asleep," I said.

    "You're sure she's all right?" There was anxiety in the voice which featured the cultured accents of Philadelphia's Main Line.

    "She's all right." How could a father let a seventeen-year-old daughter live like this, I wondered? And how could a father express no surprise when a man answered his daughter's telephone? "No thanks to you, Mr. Rouse."

    "You know my name?" He sounded surprised. "You don't-ah-sound like the usual-ah-friend of Cornelia's."

    "I expect I don't."

    "I take it from the disapproval in your tone that you imagine a parent exercises control," the cultured voice continued. "It's not true today. My daughter's way of life is not of my choosing. I found that if I weren't to lose her completely, though, I had to close my eyes to a number of things. I've insisted upon a weekly telephone call, however, and when I didn't receive it I called to find out why."

    "What happened to her baby?"

    "You know about that? It was placed for adoption. The father was colored." The telephone line hummed emptily for an instant. "You sound more responsible than the-ah -types with whom I've conversed before when I've called Cornelia. I'd like to give you my phone number so you can reach me in case of an-ah-emergency."

    "Just a minute." I found a pencil stub and piece of paper. "Go ahead." I wrote down the number as he gave it to me. "I'll have her call you tonight, Mr. Rouse."

    "I would appreciate it, sir." He hung up on me. I had a mental image of a director of corporations who couldn't direct a daughter.

    I looked at my watch. It was eleven-thirty, and bright sunlight was streaming in under the partly drawn shade at the window. I covered Chryssie with the sheet I picked up from the floor, then reached down and shook her. "Rise and shine, sis," I said.

    She stared up at me uncomprehendingly when she opened her eyes. Then recognition dawned. Under the sheet I could see her hands exploring herself. "Did we- uh-last night-I mean-what happened?"

    "The biggest night of your life and you don't remember?" I said in pretended outrage.

    "Oh, sure," she replied hastily. "You were great. Just great." The blue eyes weren't as glazed as they had been the night before, but they still weren't clear. "What day is it?"

    "Wednesday."

    "Wednesday," she repeated. "What day of the month?"

    I wondered if she knew what year it was. "The fourteenth."

    "That's good. My check comes tomorrow. I'm out of everything."

    "Like marijuana, methedrine, and heroin?"

    "Not heroin." The soft mouth pouted at me. "If it's any of your business."

    "Listen, this whole bit-this pigpen you're living in- you ought to have your butt whaled."

    "It's been whaled." Her tone was defiant. "It didn't change anything."

    I gave it up. "Shuck yourself out of the sack and we'll go out and have breakfast."

    "I don't want any breakfast."

    "Did anyone ask you what you wanted? You're going to have breakfast."

    She smiled, a tiny-ghost smile. "You sound like my father."

    "Whom you neglected to call last night."

    The smile disappeared. "How did you know that? Are you one of the private detectives he's had snooping around here?"

    "Your father called here. He's worried about you."

    "A recent development, if true." She sat up in the bed, then clutched at the sheet as she realized her nudity beneath it. "What's all this to you, anyway?"

    It was a good question. Exactly what was it to me if a girl decided to tune out the world? "Not a damn thing, Chryssie. Meet me at the Alhambra if you decide you want that breakfast."

    She was on her back again with her eyes fixed vacantly on the ceiling when I left the apartment. I listened for the click of the lock when I closed the outside door. I turned toward the stairs to find myself under the scrutiny of a big woman with a broom and mop in one hand. Her expression was noncommittal.

    "Are you the landlady?" I asked as I walked toward her. She nodded. I handed her a twenty-dollar bill. "When the kid leaves today, send someone in and clean up that place. Floor to ceiling. Is she behind with the rent?"

    "The rent check comes to me." The big woman had a whiskey contralto. "Otherwise I'd never get it. Is she bad today?"

    "Probably no worse than usual."

    "If she was mine, I'd take a yard of skin off her tail."

    "We all have our favorite solutions."

    I ran down the stairway to the street. I stopped in a lunchroom for a quick plate of scrambled eggs en route to the Alhambra. I couldn't face a drink on an empty stomach, and once there I'd have to drink something.

    

    

    The first thing I saw when I walked into the Alhambra was Hawk sitting at the bar. For a heartbeat I doubted my own power of recognition, but there was no mistaking that dark, bold, eagle-beaked face. I went to a booth in the farthest corner of the room where I could watch him without turning my head. It wasn't likely he had had as good a view of me on the airplane wing as I had had of him on the ladder, but why risk it?

    I ordered a Jim Beam when the waitress came. Hawk seemed to be chatting idly with the bartender who wasn't the same man I'd asked about him. That was all to the good, too. Instead of the khakis in which I'd seen him dressed in Nevada, the hijacker wore a conservative business suit. He glanced at the front door from time to time, and once he looked at his watch.

    So he was meeting someone. I watched the door, too. An influx of noontime drinkers gradually filled the bar and a number of the booths. I wished that Hawk would leave so I could follow him, corner him, and ask him a question or two about Hazel's money.

    It took me by surprise when he left his bar stool suddenly. I'd seen no indication that he knew anyone who'd entered. He sauntered toward an empty booth, every movement of his stocky figure an exercise in body control.

    He seated himself in a booth halfway down the room. He waited, then took a wrapped package from under his jacket and placed it on the booth seat with his body between it and the open floor space so that bystanders couldn't see it. The package was the right size and shape to contain three or four hundred bank notes, and I thought again about Hazel's money.

    When Hawk stood up and left the booth, I could see the package still on the seat. He walked toward the door with his eyes on the back bar mirror. Then a girl stood up two booths away and moved to Hawk's booth. I watched her pick up the package and put it in her large handbag. Hawk continued on out the door.

    It presented a dilemma. It was Hawk I wanted, or did I?

    Erikson would undoubtedly want to know the girl's tie-in. I decided to stick with her. With luck, now that Hawk had established that he used the Alhambra, I could pick him up there again.

    The girl seemed to be in no hurry. The waitress brought a tiny glass to her booth which contained a golden liqueur. The waitress spoke to her familiarly, so the girl was no stranger. In appearance she was a knockout. She was tall and ivory skinned, slender but by no means thin. Her hair was raven-black and arranged in sophisticated swirls on her small head. A tiny mole or birthmark dotted her right cheek.

    Her dress was an explosion of bright colors in a Gauguin-style print. It was longer than the mini-skirted mode, but two lengthy side slashes permitting a showing of frothy lace underneath gave it a distinctly Oriental look. The stand-up collar of the dress imitated Chinese mandarin. The ensemble did well by her exotic appeal.