One Night Stands and Lost Weekends
She yawned again and her body uncoiled in the chair. The movement drew her breasts into sharp relief against the front of her sweater. This was supposed to be accidental. I knew better.
“Besides,” she said, her voice just slightly husky, “he’s not at all bad in bed.”
I wanted to slap her well-bred face. The lips were slightly parted now, her eyes a little less than half lidded. The operative term, I think, is provocative. She knew damned well what she was doing with the coy posing and the sex talk and all the rest. She had the equipment to carry it off, too. But it was a horrible hour on a horrible Sunday morning, and her fiancé was also my client, and he was sitting in a cell, booked on suspicion of homicide.
So I neither took her to bed nor slapped her face. I let the remark die in the stuffy air and finished my second cup of coffee. There was a rack of pipes on the table next to my chair. I selected a sandblast Barling and stuffed some tobacco into it. I lit it and smoked.
“Ed?”
I looked at her.
“I didn’t mean to sound cheap.”
“Forget it.”
“All right.” A pause. “Ed, you’ll find a way to clear Mark, won’t you?”
“I’ll try.”
“If there’s any way I can help—”
“I’ll let you know.”
She gave me her phone number and address. She was living with her parents.
Then she paused at the door and turned enough to let me look at her lovely young body in profile. “If there’s anything you want,” she said softly, “be sure to let me know.”
It was an ordinary enough line. But I had the feeling that it covered a lot of ground.
At 11:30 I picked up my car at the garage around the corner from my apartment.
The car is a Chevy convertible, an old one that dates from the pre-fin era. I left the top up. The air had an edge to it. I took the East Side Drive downtown and pulled up across the street from Headquarters at noon.
They let me see Mark Donahue. He was wearing the same expensive suit but it didn’t hang right now. It looked as though it had been slept in, which figured. He needed a shave and his eyes had red rims. I didn’t ask him how he had slept. I could tell.
“Hello,” he said.
“Getting along all right?”
“I suppose so.” He swallowed. “They asked me questions most of the night. No rubber hose, though. That’s something.”
“Sure,” I said. “Mind some more questions?”
“Go ahead.”
“When did you start seeing Karen Price?”
“Four, five months ago.”
“When did you stop?”
“About a month ago.”
“Why?”
“Because I was practically married to Lynn.”
“Who knew you were sleeping with Karen?”
“No one I know of.”
“Anybody at the stag last night?”
“I don’t think so.”
More questions. When had she started phoning him? About two weeks ago, maybe a little longer than that. Was she in love with him? He hadn’t thought so, no, and that was why the phone calls were such a shock to him at first. As far as he was concerned, it was just a mutual sex arrangement with no emotional involvement on either side. He took her to shows, bought her presents, gave her occasional small loans with the understanding that they weren’t to be repaid. He wasn’t exactly keeping her and she wasn’t exactly going to bed in return for the money. It was just a convenient arrangement.
Everything, it seemed, was just a convenient arrangement. He and Karen Price had had a convenient shack-up. He and Lynn Farwell were planning a convenient marriage.
But someone had put a bullet in Karen’s pretty chest. People don’t do that because it’s convenient. They usually have more emotional reasons.
More questions. Where did Karen live? He gave me an address in the Village, not too very far from his own apartment. Who were her friends? He knew one, her roommate, Ceil Gorski. Where did she work? He wasn’t too clear.
“My lawyer’s trying to get them to reduce the charge,” he said. “So that I can get out on bail. You think he’ll manage it?”
“He might.”
“I hope so,” he said. His face went serious, then brightened again. “This is a hell of a place to spend a wedding night.” He smiled. “Funny—when I was trying to pick the right hotel, I never thought of a jail.”
FOUR
It was only a few blocks from Mark Donahue’s cell to the building where Karen Price had lived…a great deal further in terms of dollars and cents. She had an apartment in a redbrick five-story building on Sullivan Street, just below Bleecker.
The girl who opened the door was blond, like Lynn Farwell. But her dark roots showed and her eyebrows were dark brown. If her mouth and eyes relaxed she would have been pretty. They didn’t.
“You just better not be another cop,” she said.
“I’m afraid I am. But not city. Private.”
The door started to close. I made like a brush salesman and tucked a foot in it. She glared at me.
“Private cops, I don’t have to see,” she said. “Get the hell out, will you?”
“I just want to talk to you.”
“The feeling isn’t mutual. Look—”
“It won’t take long.”
“You son of a bitch,” she said. But she opened the door and let me inside. We walked through the kitchen to the living room. There was a couch there. She sat on it. I took a chair.
“Who are you anyway?” she said.
“My name’s Ed London.”
“Who you working for?”
“Mark Donahue.”
“The one who killed her?”
“I don’t think he did,” I said. “What I’m trying to find out, Miss Gorski, is who did.”
She got to her feet and started walking around the room. There was nothing deliberately sexy about her walk. She was hard, though. She lived in a cheap apartment on a bad block. She bleached her hair, and her hairdresser wasn’t the only one who knew for sure. She could have—but didn’t—come across as a slut.
There was something honest and forthright about her, if not necessarily wholesome. She was a big blonde with a hot body and a hard face. There are worse things than that.
“What do you want to know, London?”
“About Karen.”
“What is there to know? You want a biography? She came from Indiana because she wanted to be a success. A singer, an actress, a model, something. She wasn’t too clear on just what. She tried, she flopped. She woke up one day knowing she wasn’t going to make it. It happens.”
I didn’t say anything.
“So she could go back to Indiana or she could stay in the city. Only she couldn’t go back to Indiana. You give in to enough men, you drink enough drinks and do enough things, then you can’t go back to Indiana. What’s left?”
She lit a cigarette. “Karen could have been a whore. But she wasn’t. She never put a price tag on it. She spread it around, sure. Look, she was in New York and she was used to a certain kind of life and a certain kind of people, and she had to manage that life and those people into enough money to stay alive on, and she had one commodity to trade. She had sex. But she wasn’t a whore.” She paused. “There’s a difference.”
“All right.”
“Well, dammit, what else do you want to know?”
“Who was she sleeping with besides Donahue?”
“She didn’t say and I didn’t ask. And she never kept a diary.”
“She ever have men up here?”
“No.”
“She talk much about Donahue?”
“No.” She leaned over, stubbed out a cigarette. Her breasts loomed before my face like fruit. But it wasn’t purposeful sexiness. She didn’t play that way.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” she said. “I don’t feel like talking anymore.”
“If you could just—”
“I couldn’t just.” She looked away. “In fifteen minutes I have to be uptown on the West Side. A guy there wants to take some pictures of me naked. He pays for my time, Mr. London. I’m a working girl.”
“Are you working tonight?”
“Huh?”
“I asked if—”
“I heard you. What’s the pitch?”
“I’d like to take you out to dinner.”
“Why?”
“I’d like to talk to you.”
“I’m not going to tell you anything I don’t feel like telling you, London.”
“I know that, Miss Gorski.”
“And a dinner doesn’t buy my company in bed, either. In case that’s the idea.”
“It isn’t. I’m not all that hard up, Miss Gorski.”
She was suddenly smiling. The smile softened her face all over and cut her age a good three years. Before she had been attractive. Now she was genuinely pretty.
“You give as good as you take.”
“I try to.”
“Is eight o’clock too late? I just got done with lunch a little while ago.”
“Eight’s fine,” I said. “I’ll see you.”
I left. I walked the half block to my car and sat behind the wheel for a few seconds and thought about the two girls I had met that day. Both blondes, one born that way, one self-made. One of them had poise, breeding, and money, good diction and flawless bearing—and she added up to a tramp. The other was a tramp, in an amateurish sort of a way, and she talked tough and dropped an occasional final consonant. Yet she was the one who managed to retain a certain degree of dignity. Of the two, Ceil Gorski was more the lady.
At 3:30 I was up in Westchester County. The sky was bluer, the air fresher, and the houses more costly. I pulled up in front of a $35,000 split-level, walked up a flagstone path, and leaned on a doorbell.
The little boy who answered it had red hair, freckles, and a chipped tooth. He was too cute to be snotty, but this didn’t stop him.
He asked me who I was. I told him to get his father. He asked me why. I told him that if he didn’t get his father I would twist his arm off. He wasn’t sure whether or not to believe me, but I was obviously the first person who had ever talked to him this way. He took off in a hurry and a few seconds later Phil Abeles came to the door.
“Oh, London,” he said. “Hello. Say, what did you tell the kid?”
“Nothing.”
“Your face must have scared him.” Abeles’s eyes darted around. “You want to talk about what happened last night, I suppose.”
“That’s right.”
“I’d just as soon talk somewhere else,” he said. “Wait a minute, will you?”
I waited while he went to tell his wife that somebody from the office had driven up, that it was important, and that he’d be back in an hour. He came out and we went to my car.
“There’s a quiet bar two blocks down and three over,” he said, then added: “Let me check something. The way I’ve got it, you’re a private detective working for Mark. Is that right?”