Microsoft Word - The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance.doc (78 page)

“You come highly recommended, Mr Becker.” A regular  Bryn-Mawr purr, over the sound of Miss Dale’s typing in the  front. The lady kept her back as straight as a ruler and the lamp  on my desk made her out to be pale, not one of those sunbunnies.

Miss Dale stopped typing.

“Glad to hear that.” I made it non-committal, as casual as  my shoes on the desk. It was five o’ clock and already dark, the  middle of winter, and I was behind on the rent.

“Mr Becker?” Miss Dale stood tall and angular in the  doorway. “Will you be  needing anything else?” Her cat-tilted  dark eyes met mine, and she had a sheaf of files in her capable

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hands. If she got a little more meat on her, she’d be a knockout.

If, that is, you could chip through the ice.

Right now she was giving me the chance to  say we were closing and the dame in green could come back another time. I waved a languid hand. “No thanks, Miss Dale. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Very good sir,” Frosty as a Frigidare. Miss Dale spent a  few moments moving around the office, locking the files in the  front cabinet, and the dame in green said nothing until my  secretary left, locking the door behind her and her heels clicktapping down the hall, as efficiently as the rest of her.

The sign outside my office window blinked. We were up overan all-night lunch counter and a news-stand, and the big neon arrow drenched the room with waves of yellow and red after dark once Miss Dale turned the lights off. The couch opposite my desk looked inviting, and it would have looked even more inviting if I hadn’t been looking eviction in the face. I suppose.

“So what do you want me to do, Mrs . . .?” I made it into a

question.

“Kendal. Mrs Arthur Kendall. Mr Becker, I want you to

follow my husband.

It smelled like Chanel and dirt. And even though I was under a pile of blankets, I was lying on something soft and I shot up straight, swallowing a scream. It was the sound a bullet makes when it hits a skull, the explosion that was death.

My fingers were around something soft, but with a harder core. My other hand flashed up, catching Miss Dale’s other

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wrist as she tried to slap me. Silk fluttered  –  she was dressed in  a wrapper, a red kimono with a sun-yellow dragon breathing  orange fire.

She yelped, and I realized I was half-naked, only in a pair of mud-crusted skivvies. Someone had undressed me and put me in a bed made of pink fluff, pillows spilling over the edges. The  Chanel was her, and the dirt? That was me, stinking up a nice dame’s bed.

“Mr Becker,” she said, and it was my imperturbable  secretary  again, the belt of her kimono loosened enough to show  a strap of her-  well, I’m only human, of course I looked. “Mr  Becker, let go of me at
 
once
.”

The nightmare receded. I let go of her wrists. She retreated two steps, bumping her hip against a bedside table loaded with a jar of cold cream and a stack of big leather-bound books that looked straight out of Dr Caligari’s library, as well as a lamp with a frilly pink shade and an economy-sized box of Kleenex.  We stared at each other, and the fine, damp texture of her skin looked better than it ever had.

She rubbed at her right wrist, the one I’d grabbed first. “You

were screaming,” she whispered.

For once, I had no smart come-back thing to say. Of course

I’d been screaming.

Miss Dale drew herself up, tightening her kimono with swift movements. She was barefoot, and her dark hair wasn’t pinned back. It tumbled down her shoulders in a mass of curls, and it looked nice that way. She folded her arms and tried her best glare at me, and if I hadn’t been lounging half-naked in what I suspected was her bed, it might have worked.

“I’m sorry,” It was all I could say.

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“You’d better be. You’re wanted for murder.”

I closed my mouth with a snap and started thinking

furiously.

“You disappeared three days ago, Mr Becker.  The police  tore apart your office. I am sad to report they also took your last  three bottles of scotch. They questioned me rather extensively,  too.”

My throat was dry. The thirst was worse than ever, and that distracting sound was back, the high hard thumping. It was her pulse, and it sounded like water in the desert. It sounded like the chow bell in basic training.

Her heart going that fast meant she was terrified. But there she stood, high colour on her cheeks, arms folded and shoulders back, ready to take me to task once again.

Three days?
 
“Murder?” I husked.

“The murder of Arthur Kendall, Mr Becker. His widow  identified you as the killer.” Hung on the bedroom wall behind  her was a photoplay page of Humphrey Bogart in a fedora,  leering at the camera like the bum he was. I was beginning to  suspect my practical, Miss Dale had a soft spot for leering bums.

“The Kendall job,” she echoed. “Naturally I have an extra  copy of the file you prepared. And
 
naturally
 
I didn’t mention it  to the police, especially to Lieutenant Grady. I think you are  many things, Mr Becker  –  a disgraceful drunk and an immoral  and unethical investigator, just to mention a few. But a  murderer? Not the man who does widow cases for free.” She

rubbed at her right wrist.

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So I’m a sucker for dames with hard stories. So what?
 
“I didn’t kill anyone.” It was a relief to say it. “You’ve got the file?”

“
Naturally
.” She dropped her arms. “I would appreciate an

explanation, but I’m only your secretary.”

“You’re a stand-up doll,” I managed. “The  Kendall job went

bad, Miss Dale. I didn’t kill him.”

Being the practical type, she got right down to brass tacks.

“Then who did Mr Becker?”

Even though the thirst was getting worse by the second and the sound of her pulse wasn’t helping. I knew the answer to that one. “Get me that file, Dale. And while you’re at it, can I have some clothes, or am I just going to swing around like Tarzan?”

If she’d muttered something unladylike under her breath as

she swept from the room I wouldn’t have blamed her.

I  cleaned the rest of the mud off in her pink-and-yellow bathroom. She had an apartment on the seedier side of Parth  Street, but everything was neat and clean and prim as you’d expect from the woman I’d once caught alphabetizing my incoming mail. She even had a suit hanging on the back of the door for me, one of mine. The door didn’t shut quite tight, and I could hear her moving around in the kitchen, and hear that maddening, delicious, irresistible thumping.

I looked like I’d been dug up that morning. Which, if you think about it, I had.  There was an ugly flushed-red mark over my right ete, a divot I could rest my fingertip in. It was tender and pressing on it made my whole head feel like a pumpkin

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again. The back of my skull was sore too, seamed and scarred under my short, wet hair. There were bruised bags of flesh under  my eyes, and my cheeks had sunken in, and I looked as yellow  as a jaundiced Chinaman.

I peeled away my shirt collar and looked. A faint bruised mark above the collarbone, two holes that looked like a tiny pair of spikes had gone into my throat. The bruise was fever hot and when I touched it, the rolling thunder of a heartbeat roared in my ears so loud I grabbed at Miss Dale’s scrubbed-white sink and had to fight to retain consciousness.

What the hell happened to me?

The last thing I remembered was Letitia Kendall wiping her mouth and the skinny, nervous red-headed guy putting the barrel of a gun to my forehead. Right where that livid mark was, the one with speckles of dark grit in an orbit  around its sunken redness. Then that sound, like an artillery shell inside my skull .

. .

. . . and waking up in a cold, cold grave. Wanting a drink,  but not my usual drink. Not the kind that went down the gullet  like liquid fire and detonated in the belly, wrapping a warm haze  between me and the rest of the world.

You’re insane Jack. You got shot in the head
.

The trouble with that was, I shouldn’t be insane. I should be

dead
.

But I had a pulse too. Just like Miss Dale. Who was starting

to smell less like Chanel and more like . . .

Food.

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A sizzling sound drifted down the hall. I tied the shoes she’d thoughtfully left right outside the bathroom door and saw her front door, and the warm light of the kitchen, a square of yellow sanity. She had her back turned and was fiddling with the stove, and a steak waited on a plate on the drainboard. She poked at the pan with a fork, and I was moving up quietly, just as if I was going to slap her.

Three steps. Two.

She never even turned around.

I reached out, saw  my hand, yellow in the yellow light, shaking as it brushed past Miss Dale’s hip . . . and fastened on the plate with the steak.

She jumped, the fork went clattering, and I retreated to the table. If I hadn’t been so cold I would have been sweating buckets . I dropped down in one of Miss Dale’s two straight-backed, frill-cushioned chairs next to her cheap gold-speckled kitchen table, and I found out why my mouth hadn’t been working properly.

It was because the fangs had grown, and I licked the plate clean of bloody juice before burying my teeth in the raw meat and sucking as if it was mother’s milk.

Dale’s hand clapped over her mouth. She pinched so hard her cheeks blanched white from the pressure of her fingers, and her cat-tilted dark eyes turned as big as the landlord’s on rent day. The pan sizzled, I sucked and sucked, and the two sounds almost managed to drown out the thunder of her pulse again.

Her free hand shot out and jerked the pan from the stove.  The gas flame kept burning, a hissing circle of blue, and Miss  Dale stared at me, holding the pan like she intended to storm the barricades with it.

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I kept sucking. It wasn’t nearly enough, but the thirst retreated.
 
This
 
was what I wanted. When it was as tasteless as

dry paper, I finished licking the plate clean and dropped the wad

of drained meat down.

I looked at Miss Dale. She looked at me. I searched for

something to say. Dames on her salary don’t buy steak every

day. She must’ve thought I’d be hungry.

“I still need a secretary, doll-face.”

Her throat worked as she swallowed. Then she put the pan down on an unlit burner. She peeled her fingers away from her mouth, the bruise still a dark bracelet on her right wrist. It took her two tries before she could get the words out.

“There’s another steak in  the fridge, Jack. It’s . . . raw.”

Winter nights didn’t last forever, and the rain was still coming down. Dale’s wrist was swelling, but she wrapped it in an Ace and told me in no uncertain terms she was fine. She drove the Ford cautiously, the wipers  ticking, just like her pulse.  I spread the file out in my lap and checked for tails  –  we were clean.

Down on Cross Street, she parked where we had a good view of the Blue Room, and I paged through the file. Pictures of  Arthur Kendall, millionaire, who had come back from Europe with a young wife who had begun to suspect him of fooling around.

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If I hadn’t been so interested in the dollars she fanned out on my desktop, I wouldn’t have taken the job. Divorce jobs aren’t my favourites. They end up too sticky.

This one had just gotten stickier. Kendall wasn’t just a millionaire, he was as dirty as they come. I’d been careful, sure, but I’d gotten priceless shots of him canoodling with the heavies in town  – Lefty Schultz, who ran the prostitution racket, Big Buck Beaudry, who provided muscle, Papa Ginette, whose family used to run gin and now ran dope. Big fan of tradition,  Papa Ginette.

I’d thought I was just getting into a dicey situation until I snapped a few shots of Kendall and his wife at a pricey downtown joint where the jazz was hot and the action was hotter. The Blue Room had a waiting list ten years long, but money talks  –  and it was Willie Goldstein’s place. If Goldstein hadn’t owned more than half the cops in town, he’d have been in Big Sing years  ago.

Another late-night appointment, and the dame in green waltzed in my door just as Miss Dale was waltzing out. I spread the shots out and told her Kendall wasn’t cheating. She’d married a dirty son of an unmentionable, but he wasn’t hanging out with the ladies.

Those green eyes narrowed and she picked up the glossy of the crowd inside Goldstein’s. There they were, Kendall and the missus and the red-headed, rat-faced gent who followed Kendall like glue. He wasn’t heavy muscle  –  his name was Shifty Malloy, and he had a dope habit the size of Wrigley Field  –  but he was dapper in a suit and lit Kendall’s cigarettes.

Mrs Kendall set the photo down again, and smiled at me.  She crushed her cigarette out in the ashtray and I glanced dwon at the pictures again. Something very strange occurred to me.