Dark Blonde (2 page)

The rocking foot stopped short. She took one sip of tea, put the cup down almost hard enough to break it, threw me a sour smile, mashed out her cigarette, and reached back for her raincoat. She stood and folded the raincoat over one arm, revealing a tiny smart waist and a bunch of smart little curves lurking under her smart little business suit. “The receipt, if you don’t mind,” she said smartly.

She was a smart little woman. Too smart for me. I was feeling dumber by the second.

“And what sort of services do I make the receipt out for?”

A dumb look was all she fed me.

“What kind of trash does your employer wish to dispose of?”

“I’m sure I have no idea why she’d call a man like you. You’ll have to take that up with her.”

“You are her assistant, aren’t you?”

“Yes, but she didn’t see fit to inform me.”

“Then I take it this wad of lettuce is for something personal, something embarrassing.”

She sniffed and pointed her little nose higher. I wanted to give her a smart little slap.

I went to the secretary desk in the corner and wrote out a receipt, making a carbon for my records. On the bottom I wrote, “retainer for embarrassing personal services to be determined” and signed it.

Standing at the open door I fluttered the receipt just above her eyes, which now held a hint of fire or anger, or maybe sexual tension that hadn’t been there before. I wasn’t sure if the tea or my leg-staring had sparked her imagination.

“What about expenses?” I said. “And do you have a first name?”

“Mrs. Gateswood will discuss that with you. Expenses, not my name, which is Dee. My employer feels an advance retainer will pay you for your time, should you not wish to handle her situation.” A pulse showed at the base of her neck and a tinge of color formed on her cheeks. My intuition said the lady was thinking about my practiced stare, and my suggestion we wait until noon, but then my intuition only batted .300, good only in baseball. Her repression wrestled with my confession. She seemed transfigured looking at my scar with an expression one might have for an exotic snake. I understood how Eve messed up in the Garden.

She took the receipt and turned her eyes up to mine. If she was leaving she wasn’t in a rush. We stood there waiting for the other to say something. Just when I was about to say goodbye, she took a quick step toward me, put one hand on my arm, took her cheaters off with the other hand and pushed her lips up into mine. She had to tiptoe on heels to get there, but I helped her make that last inch. Her cool mouth tasted like a kiss a small child gives you for a long awaited birthday gift. I added tongue to the kiss, again, like an exotic snake might. She pulled back with surprised eyes, feigned, or so it struck me.

There was more than a quota of prick tease in Miss Mathews. My prick rarely minds being teased. The thought struck me she wasn’t blonde.

“You’re not quite as tall as my last lover,” she said, tilting her head and leering at me along her eyes. “He was six three.”

“Lincoln was also six three. I hope your last lover made out better.”

Without those spectacles her eyes were small, intense, deadly
 
—
 
cobra eyes to go with my scar. She pulled away, slid the cheaters back on and was gone. I stood and listened to the purr of her car’s engine receding down the street.

Miss Dee Mathews, all fluff and efficiency, even if she was ignorant as to the reason for her visit. A bit thin, but lovely legs, I’d give her that much. I was certain other qualities would emerge given some time between the sheets, though she’d be a third-round draft choice, at best.

Alfie’s is nearly empty at four o’clock. By six the after work singles crowd throngs the place and by eight the dinner set arrives to slosh down double martinis and gnaw on T-bones that they can’t taste any better than the olives in the martinis.

I parked next to a couple of beat up Pontiacs in the otherwise empty lot, probably employee cars, and picked up a
Sun-Times
from a box at the door. While I waited for the good congressman’s wife I could pick up scuttlebutt on the up-coming election flap by checking Kup’s Chicago column. After my little interview with the ex-beauty queen, Kup might be worth a phone call.

Irv Kupcinet was the first person Molly introduced me to when I transplanted from Newark. He’d earned the title “Mister Chicago,” and had been writing a column on the town for over twenty years, back since the
Sun-Times
was the plain old
Times
. Whatever drama percolated in the City of Big Shoulders, Kup was in on it, from hoodlums to sports heroes, celebrities to financial wizards. Molly’s late Dad, Joe Bennett, had been fishing buddies with Kup, and although Kup was Jewish, he’d been Molly’s unofficial godfather. Molly adored him. Kup’s daughter and Molly used to do sandbox drills as kids and went to the same schools, Molly a year behind her.

If there was any gossip on anyone, Kup was the man, and thoroughly honest. His column often dropped little scalding ingots into the shorts of local politicians. He had more than enough material to work with. Whatever was worth knowing about the Gateswood’s, Kup would be privy to, including a few things he couldn’t print.

The interior of Alfie’s was dark paneled with high-backed leather booths lining the outside walls. A half wall separated the main bar from the dining hall. A gothic fireplace with a gas log hissed white flames next to a tiny dance floor that might have held three couples tucked into one corner like an afterthought. The long bar looked like a survivor of the Civil War, trimmed with fluted half columns of the same dark wood, backed by a glittering beveled mirror with glass shelves ten feet high holding bottles of booze. A sliding ladder fronted the mirror.

 
One college boy with a bad case of acne polished glassware behind the bar. He didn’t look up as I stepped in. Two aproned anorexic women scurried around the tables in the dining room laying out accoutrements from a rolling cart. I took a booth near the far corner window where I could watch the entrance and the bar. A side door to the back lot was next to one end of the bar. Whichever door Julia came in, I’d be able to study her as she walked across the length of the room, something I was looking forward to.

Pimples stopped polishing and shuffled over. His tunic was already stained with some sort of wine, either that or they only did laundry once a week. He had a thin conceited face with narrow deep-set filmy gray eyes that swam spastically. Slouching, he waited for my order like he didn’t want to be there, and was too good to actually talk to a customer.

A deluxe cut glass decanter of Murphy’s Irish whiskey sat lonely on the top shelf. Murphy’s had been my late father’s favorite poison. I ordered a double shot with a Rheingold suds chaser. While the kid stretched to the top shelf, a woman came out of the restroom and took a seat at the end of the bar near the door. She had long straight hair, dark brown, and body that messed up my concentration. It was poured into a tailored business suit, expensive looking, even if the hemline was a bit shorter than she’d learned in business college.

She crossed her legs provocatively, finessed a matching bag up on the bar, and cooed a word up the backside of the kid hauling down the decanter. Then she opened her purse and took out a gold cigarette case and lit up, her head back and smoke drifting in a puddle over her. She didn’t glance back at me, but what profile I caught had high-cheekbones, a prominent nose, and full lips. The bartender drew my beer and poured two whiskeys. He gave the brunette a tall water with her shot and shuffled over with my drinks on a small tray. The way he slapped the glasses down and his dull expression told me he was filling in until the barmaids came on duty. It was all a bother to the kid.

I sat there sipping Murphy’s and reading Kup’s column about a councilman who’d been caught in a prostitute sting on Michigan Avenue. It was the second time in a month the poor sap had been flash-bulbed with his pants down and with enough cash on him that Kup asked the obvious
 
—
 
was Fred dipping into a city petty cash fund that he’d been appointed to manage? Kup threw in a few other facts about the guy’s new Lincoln, his second home up north, and a painted mystery woman bathed in furs who’d been seen coming and going from his office over the past year. The people’s money: too easy, too slick, too available. But then taxes were too high, rising too fast
 
—
 
no wonder government jobs attracted such sleaze. Go get ‘em Kup.

I finished my Murphy’s and skimmed the front page: three homicides, a kidnapping and a story about a drug-crazed woman selling her baby to an undercover cop for twelve bucks. Inside the front section there were other items about the upcoming election, including one survey that gave Gateswood a commanding eight-point lead that had fallen from an even more commanding fourteen-point lead. Several of the articles quoted his main opposition, Councilman Jake Whipple, who’d been the Teamster’s fair-haired boy since Dave Beck had sponsored him after the war.

It seemed every time Whipple opened his mouth in the opening days of the campaign he’d lost another point. Gateswood batted a thousand, sailing Whipple’s faux pas curves into the left field bleachers
 
—
 
left field because Councilman Henry painted himself a progressive reformer, aiming to clean up not only Cook County but Washington D.C. and later the universe. He was an army of George Washington, FDR and Patrick Henry rolled into one. But the union vote had recently swung to Whipple and the gap narrowed. Cook County politics would decide. The two would do battle in a much-hyped television debate, which meant Whipple was an idiot given his past misspeaks, or he knew secrets no one else in Illinois knew.

Since Nixon flopped in those head-to-heads a couple of years ago, it seemed every political underdog wanted to debate on television. Gateswood was a shoo-in, unless he hired Dick Nixon’s makeup man.

The woman at the bar turned on her stool and looked my way. She had a great face but kept hiding parts of it to watch me around her handkerchief. She was too obviously discreet, probably a housewife bored with vacuuming. It was way too early for hookers.

I wasn’t going to get sidetracked with any barfly, no matter how good her legs. I forced myself not to look at her. It took more force by the minute.

It was 4:30 and still no Julia. My time was on her nickel so I figured I’d give it an hour and deduct time gas and drinks from the five hundred. All that noise in the pulps about detectives working for nothing, being crusaders for the innocent was baloney. It was 1962 after all, and things cost more. My bar tab was over five bucks already, and gas was pushing forty cents a gallon. If there was any way to do investigations without a car, I hadn’t heard of it. My ’46 Buick coupe would need tires before long. Even the price of bullets was going up.

A cute little blonde ponytail rushed in the side door and dipped under the bar. When she flitted out she was tying an apron around her waist. She sang a short greeting to the woman at the bar and bounced over to my table. Ponytail was about as tall as a fireplug, but with the curves of a good mountain road.

“Another?” she asked in a perky voice, her blue eyes like a summer sky full of hope. I wondered whether youth is so happy because it’s so ignorant, or whether it’s so ignorant because it’s so happy.

Cars pulled into the lot and several office type couples sauntered in the front entrance looking bushed from pushing paper around all day.

“Why not? I’m still young, although I must look old to a kid like yourself.” I gave her my order and she handed me some tired lines about being as young as you feel, maintaining the positive, accentuating the good things in life, everyday being an adventure. I wanted to stamp “cliché” on her forehead in red ink and swat her on her cute behind. Evidently she hadn’t read the
Sun-Times
. I wondered how her tips worked out with all that sunny hackneyed crap she handed out. Even so, cynics like me root for Pollyannas like her to stay that way, even as we know that life will kick her in the crotch.

I downed the whiskey and felt pretty warm from it. Even the fake fireplace seemed to put off heat. A mug of suds is a good way to help that feeling along, take the edge off, hydrate while dehydrating. I peeked another look at the end of the bar. The woman was even better looking after the second shot. Funny how Murphy’s improves a woman’s appearance.

She was turned fully toward me, watching the customers snag booths along the other wall. Our eyes met and she smiled. I lifted my beer mug. She winked, lifted her Murphy’s and gave me a circle-okay with her thumb and forefinger. Even from across the room, I could see her fingers were long and slim with subdued apricot polish. When she smiled it seemed to bring her face alive. Distractions. Didn’t she realize I was on the job? I guessed not. Was she on the job? Another question that might cost a drink or two to discover. She didn’t look like a working girl, even though the place probably drew them like ants to an overripe peach as the night wore on. Whatever she was, it was high class, out of my league.

Julia was an hour late. I didn’t feel like driving back to my bungalow during rush hour, so I finally thought, why not. I’d buy the lady another and see if she wanted to test her incisors on Alfie’s beef in the dining area.

I carried my beer to the bar and set it down next to her. Before I had the chance to get the pickup line out, she said,

“It’s me, stupid. I’m in a disguise. It’s about time you figured that out.” She lifted one side of that long straight dark hair and showed some honey blonde streaked with ash and lighter gold underneath. My scar felt suddenly cold. I half expected Dad’s voice to emerge from my beer.