Pardon My Body (9 page)

“That's okay, brother—I didn't expect it to last forever.” She uncrossed her legs and stared down at
her toes. “Only he might have told me. I think he was getting ready to run out on me….”

“Maybe he was just playing around,” I said.

“Yeah, maybe that was all there was to it. But I had the idea it was something more than that.” She shrugged. “Anyway, it doesn't matter now, does it. Nobody gets him. I don't even know, as a matter of proof, that there
was
another girl. It was just a hunch—that and noticing little things about him. Men are such goddamn fools. Most of the time when they're being smart they wouldn't deceive a kid in the third grade. And now he's gone—with a knife in his chest.”

Suddenly, she said in a low, tense voice, “I'd like to have killed the bastard who did that—but he got his the same way, didn't he?”

I nodded. I also thought it was time to start talking.

“Why should anyone wish to kill your husband, Mrs. Grierson?”

She picked up a cigarette and sat there tapping it on her bloodred nails.

“He was being blackmailed,” she said.

I felt myself tensing. “Who was he laying it on the line for?”

I reached forward and lit her cigarette. She drew
on it for a moment. Then: “I don't know—he never told me a thing.”

“So you don't really know that he was in trouble?”

“I know. He'd been worried for some time. He had also withdrawn heavily from the bank…and once I heard him speaking to someone on the phone…I only caught a few words, but he was promising to do something or other. He heard me coming close up to him and told me to get out. He had never spoken to me like that before. Afterwards, he apologized, but he wouldn't tell me what was wrong. Then, a week ago, he seemed easier in his mind.”

I said, “Mrs. Grierson—have you ever been to a place called Falls City?”

Her eyes opened wide. “That's where he lived once,” she answered. “He told me—but I've never been there. Why?”

“Because I think the killer who stabbed your husband came from Falls City,” I told her.

“Why do you think that, Mr. Bogard?”

“The man who killed your husband called himself George Clark. In the bedroom where I found him dead was a torn piece of paper carrying an address in Falls City. I'm just playing a hunch about it.”

“I see,” she said. “It may have something to do with him being blackmailed.”

“It could be that way, if it was blackmail.”

“There was something in his past—something he never spoke of. There must have been. Guys aren't blackmailed for nothing. But I'm sorry—I can't help you about Falls City.”

I slid off the chair arm and stood up. “Mrs. Grierson,” I said, “you have helped plenty. If your husband was being blackmailed, that may be the clue to a lot of things….”

She said, softly, “I wish you luck. But you don't have to go yet. Unless you want to.” She moved a little way along the
chaise longue
and patted the place beside her. “Come and sit by me,” she invited.

I sat by her. She moved just a little. Enough so that I could feel the shape of her leg against me. Her chin was smooth and rounded and she let it thrust outwards so that her full lips were pursed. Her eyes had the kind of look that went with it. So I let my left arm go round her and she fell sideways across my knees.

“I told you I might play around a little,” she said, “and I guess you're twenty years younger than most of the men Arny invited to the house.” She circled a long naked arm round my collar and played a few off-beats on the part of the neck where the barber uses electric clippers.

She gave a tiny wriggle on my knees. If I still had
any knees. They felt like gelatine. I leaned over her and kissed her. Just the one kiss. It lasted about five minutes. She kept her lips parted like the girl in the Longmoor Apartments. But she knew a thing or two more. She bit me three times.

Suddenly, she pushed me back. The beautiful white gown was rumpled and by this time I could see both her knees. She slid sideways off me and stood up. She jerked another cigarette out of the silver casket and stood there lighting it. Her left hand trembled fractionally.

Over her shoulder, she said, “I shouldn't have done that. I shouldn't have acted like a bitch.”

“You didn't,” I lied.

She went on, speaking almost to herself, “Only it's been so long…I don't see young men out here. I haven't misbehaved in ten years….”

I didn't tell her that as a matter of legal definition she had been misbehaving all that time. It didn't seem right to tell her that. Not with Arnold Grierson having lately passed on in regrettable circumstances.

She picked up the decanter and spilled out two highballs. She was generous with the measure because the way she went to work on it she might have been drawing a half-pint in an English tavern.

“We both need it,” she said.

I thought so, too.

She pawed the rug with her elegant toe. Then she said in a low voice, “I'm not trying to tell you I can't be had. But not here—not in this house. I think maybe you had better go…Dale.”

I thought that as well.

There didn't seem to be anything left to say so I didn't try to think of anything. I just turned and walked to the door.

That deep musical voice followed me.

“Some day soon…you can try again, Dale,” it said.

I
T WAS ALL OF SEVEN HUNDRED
miles to Falls City and maybe I would have done better to have started out from Grand Central Station, but I hit the road instead. It was a long time since I had let the Buick out on the open highway and I had time to think all the way. I thought plenty, and at the end of it I wasn't much nearer. But I was seven hundred miles nearer the place where every clue in this case seemed to lead. I was moving into the most wide-open city in all the United States with nothing but a four-year-old car and an even older Luger pistol to get me out of trouble if things broke the wrong way.

A mile outside the limits they have a big red-on-white sign telling you this is Falls City, but they needn't have bothered because this is where High River Rock shoots twin cascades of foam over a black granite shoulder into a thirty-foot drop.

This is a nicely laid-out city. The suburban lawns
are trim, the houses look as though somebody washed them regularly, and the shopping center has a lively, high-stepping air. I drove slowly down the main stem. Nobody fired any guns and I didn't hear any police sirens. Maybe the place had sobered up.

I followed the traffic into Fourteenth Street at the first intersection. It was barely dusk but halfway down the street a beer parlor had a sign flashing on and off. I killed the motor and braked to a standstill outside the swing doors.

The evening was early, but it wasn't too early for the customers. Half a dozen guys sat on high stools at the long polished bar and there were twice as many dotted round the little room at green-topped tables. A girl sat by herself at a table near the bar on my right. A girl with red hair and a face that had been beautiful until she was twenty-six—which would be all of a decade ago. She wore sea-green whipcord over a cream silk shirt. She was drinking gin and she didn't bother me.

The guy behind the bar was short and fat and had an oiled forelock. He also wore a narrow celluloid collar on a shirt with red horizontal stripes and his false teeth looked like highly-polished china. He asked me the routine question with his eyes, which were the palest blue.

“Beer—and I'll take a chaser on the side,” I told him.

He slid the drinks across and I took the rye first. It was pretty good rye. I don't know why I downed it so quick, except that I was beer-thirsty.

Everybody had drinks so the barkeep stood opposite me polishing glasses. He did it as though he liked nothing better. It was his life's work and he was solid for it.

I said, “I am looking for someone who remembers a lawyer who used to practise here. His name was Arthur Schultz.”

The barkeep's face showed about as much expression as a peon's at siesta time.

“Yeah,” he said, “should I know him?”

“Not unless you were around twenty-odd years back.”

“I came here twelve years ago from St. Louis, so I wouldn't,” he said. The Missouri accent wasn't heavy.

“Could be you may have heard the name, though,” I said.

“Could be but it ain't,” he said. “Sorry about that.”

“Think nothing of it,” I said.

“Thanks, brother, I won't. Maybe some of the boys'd know if…”

He broke off to set some drinks up for a balding middle-aged man in a faded gabardine suit which had
cost him plenty at one time. I suddenly became aware of somebody at my side. I knew without looking that it was the girl with the red hair.

She said in a low voice, “Like to join me in a drink?”

“I'm sorry,” I started, but she cut me short with a hard little laugh.

“It's all right, mister—this isn't a make the other way round. I heard what you said…” She lowered her voice a shade more—“About looking for someone who knew Arthur Schultz.”

I picked up my drink and moved over to the little side table. A waiter brought another beer and some more gin.

She sat there for a moment in silence. When she looked directly at me I was struck again by the fact that this had once been a beautiful face. It was still attractive, but the tiny telltale lines were starting. The lines that come from living too fast. The eyes were blue and hard.

“The name you spoke,” she said at last. “It's a name from way back…not a nice name.”

“No?”

“What d'you want to find out?”

“I'm just trying to trace what happened to Arthur Schultz from around the time he left here. He went to Chicago, didn't he?”

She nodded. Her gaze travelled round the room. Slowly, as though she wanted to make quite sure who was there. A look came into her eyes and went. It went so fast I hadn't time to catch what it meant. If it meant anything.

“Follow me out,” she said simply. She was on her feet as she said it.

I waited until she was halfway to the swing doors before I followed. I caught the fat barkeep's eye as I went. It had that look. I didn't tell him how wrong he was.

She was standing on the sidewalk waiting. I showed her the car and she got in.

“Where are we going?” I asked it uncertainly. Things seemed to happen fast in Falls City.

“I've got an apartment on North Shore Boulevard,” she answered. “We'll go there. It's all right, there won't be a husband waiting to sock you in the pan.”

“That eases my mind,” I said. “Okay—let's go.”

It was a six-minute drive. North Shore Boulevard was long, tree-fringed and built-up along its entire length. The houses were just a little faded, as though the place had seen rather better days. But you could live in a lot worse places.

I drove two-thirds down the boulevard. Then she said, “Okay—this is it.”

I steered into the side. We got out and walked up three stone steps and passed through a colored glass door into a small square hall. There was a tiny elevator. We rode up to the third floor and walked five yards down a passage. She got a key out of a white plastic handbag and we moved into her apartment. It had walnut lounge furniture and an apple-green carpet going just a little threadbare in patches. A door on the left was slightly open. I could see that you went through there into the bedroom.

I swivelled my eyes back. On the way across I met hers. They carried a little look and her scarlet lips were twisted in a tiny smile. It wasn't the look of invitation. Or speculation. It was the look of a woman who knows all the answers and doesn't give a damn one way or the other.

She peeled off her jacket and dropped her little hat carelessly on a davenport. She stood upright for a minute pressing her red hair against the sides of her head, using the flats of her hands.

When she finished doing this she asked me if I wanted a drink and I said “Yes”. Bourbon was what she had. She opened the icebox and fished out two frozen cubes and let them roll off her hand into the tall amber-colored glasses.

We sat in two easy chairs drawn up on either side
of the electric heater she had installed in the center of a wide fireplace.

I thought somebody should be saying something and it might as well be me. So I said, “Who are you?”

She appeared to think for a moment, as though the question needed reflection. Then she answered, “It doesn't matter, honey—but the name is Lena Martin. I knew Arthur Schultz more than twenty years back, when I was a kid of sixteen just out of high school. I was running around with a pretty fast crowd of high steppers. Most of them were other kids in their teens and early twenties, but there were one or two older guys who liked to tag on, and one of them was Arthur Schultz. He was in his early thirties and if he had a wife he never mentioned it. I don't think he had. He struck me as the lone wolf kind, always on the make—but he liked having his fun, at that. He liked teenage virgins best.” She paused a moment and gave another of those little crooked smiles. “If there were any virgins in that gang. I wouldn't know, but I can guess as well as the next. He had the edge on most of the boys on account of he had that grown-up style and his pants pockets were full of dough, so he got most of the dates he wanted.

“He drove a big Packard. Most of the time the gang
holed-up at the Falls Lake Country Club but around three in the morning we generally went to parties in private houses. He took me home one time….”

She stopped again. This time to drink some more bourbon. When she set the glass down she said, “I'll say this for Schultz—he was one fast worker. After ten minutes' driving he stalled the car and it took him about twenty seconds to rip the frock off my back. But that was all he ever got out of me. I didn't like Arthur Schultz and I wasn't going to be pawed by a guy old enough to be my daddy.”

I said, “What did you do?” Though I didn't care what she did.

“I hit him across the face with my handbag and got out and walked.” She gave me a hard look. “But you don't care about all that, do you?”

I told her I didn't care.

“Okay,” she said, “that was just background stuff, anyway. What is it you want to know—and why?”

I answered shortly, “A Wall Street businessman was stabbed to death a few nights ago in a Connecticut inn. He used the name of Grierson, but his description tallies with that of a man named Schultz who came from Falls City but later operated a lawyer's business in Chicago. Maybe they're differ
ent people, maybe not. I'm trying to find out. I'm not a private eye and I don't represent anybody except myself. I was at the inn when Grierson was killed and because of that several people seem to think it would be an idea to rub me out, too. Will that do?”

She nodded. “I guess so. You've got involved in whatever it is and you want to find out what makes Sammy run?”

I told her she was right to figure it that way. She picked up the story again. “You're probably guessing right, brother. Arthur Schultz was running a legal business in Chicago at the time I knew him. But he came from Falls City and used to spend most weekends here.”

“His business was supposed to be on the level—or, at least, to keep one jump ahead of the sheriff. Check?”

She shrugged. “Maybe most of it was. But there were some queer tales…”

“Such as what?”

“Such as using at least one of his legal connections to lift a lot of dough by some smart private blackmailing.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“There was nothing to be sure about. But a lot of people talked. Schultz was supposed to be putting the
squeeze on an old guy named Tennemaker who had been a district court judge and was believed to be financially involved in the syndicate houses on North Riverside Avenue. Nobody was supposed to know this, but once or twice Schultz got high and bragged a little. There was an awful shindig about it one time with a guy named Berson he brought over for a weekend from Chicago…”

I looked up sharply. “Was this man Berson in it with Schultz?”

“It looked that way. He was a young guy—maybe twenty-two or three and as sharp as they come. He had some kind of business interests in Chicago, but he seemed pretty damn close to Schultz. Close enough to be worried when Schultz started blowing his top.” She wrinkled her brows reflectively. “This guy's name was Leo Berson and although he was as hard as steel filings he had a funny sort of feminine way with him. He…”

Something clicked into place in my mind. “What sort of a way?” I asked gently.

“He was always just a little too well-dressed and some of the girls who went around with him said he carried a compact. He kept his nails like a woman, too, and always smelled of scent….”

I felt myself drawing in my breath. I said, “Can you remember what he looked like?”

She stood up. “I can do better than that. I've got some old snapshot pictures. Come over here.”

I followed her across the room to a small bureau-bookcase. She let the flap down and rummaged about in a drawer. Her hand came out with a bulky, faded envelope. She slid a collection of old prints onto the bureau desk like a deck of cards.

Neither of us spoke. I was just conscious of the faint warmth of her body and the perfume of her red hair. It was very quiet. The sudden noise of a car on the street below sounded curiously far away.

She shuffled the cuts. About two-thirds of the way through the pack she stopped and pulled one out. I bent forward to get a better look. I went on looking for maybe half a minute, though there was no need. I got a funny constricted feeling in the pit of my stomach. I don't know why, except that I was staring down at a twenty-odd-year-old photograph of Mr. Lucius Canting….

I heard Lena Martin saying, “There was some trouble—Schultz took it on the lam with a wad of dough and Berson was mad. I don't know…”

Her voice snapped off like the thumbing of a
light switch. Now there wasn't a sound in the little room. Then there was. I just heard it. But I didn't hear it fast enough.

It was a sound I ought to have known. A sound which cuts through the air like a swish because that's what it is.

A swishing sound…