Kiss Her Goodbye (23 page)

"Yes you do."

I sat forward. "What brought you to that crime scene the other night? Ginnie Mathes is a small kill for such a 'big girl.' And then there's earlier today, this afternoon, over at that flophouse—why does the late Joseph Fidello get on your radar? And don't say because he was the Mathes kid's ex-boyfriend. I want the whole story."

She reached for the beer, chugged some. A little Irish courage for the girl.

Then she said, "Mike, Ginnie was in a dancing class, off Broadway, using the same private tutor as Club 52's star attraction."

"Chrome?"

She nodded. "I talked to the tutor, and I think I did so in a way that raised no suspicions. I'm not as skilled an investigator as you, but I didn't dare use any of our investigative team, and—"

"Skip it. What's the connection?"

"Chrome had been grooming Ginnie to be a backup dancer in her act."

"She doesn't use any backup dancers in her act."

"Well, not her current act, maybe. But Chrome's preparing for this big national tour, and she'd been dangling that opportunity over Ginnie's head, as recently as the day the young woman was killed. Chrome had really been courting her—otherwise Ginnie wouldn't have been on my radar at all. They often had lunch together, after dance class, and Ginnie seemed enthralled to be in the star's company."

I sipped more beer. "If you did your research, which I'm sure you did, then you know Ginnie took out a cabaret entertainer's license a while back. Making it as a performer was apparently a long-held dream."

"Right," Angela said, nodding. "And when I heard the description of the dead girl who was a mugging fatality, it sounded awfully close to Ginnie—not just physically, but down to the clothes I'd seen her wearing earlier ... so I checked it out."

"And we had our first star-crossed meeting."

She smiled. "Boy, did I hate
your
guts."

"I wanted to ram that Japanese sports car of yours up your rear highway."

"Really?"

"Yeah. Or ram something somewhere."

She almost blushed at that. Damn, she was cute.

"But, Mike—now Ginnie's boyfriend has been murdered, and there can be no question about that. Nobody could write Fidello's death off as a mugging. And it's sure not a robbery, considering where he lived."

"No," I confirmed. "That was as cold-blooded as kills get. So how do the pieces fit? You're looking at Tony Tret as a drug kingpin. What does that have to do with Chrome making friends with Ginnie Mathes?"

"Simple." She shrugged. "Chrome works for Anthony. She may even be his main squeeze, if rumor can be believed."

"I say Tony's gay, but go on."

"Whatever the case, this may just be a matter of Chrome enlisting Ginnie for some purpose. An errand of some kind, which might explain what Ginnie was doing on that rough patch of real estate where she died."

Delivering Basil's diamond to somebody. But who? And why?

"Mike, what's on your mind?"

"Just thinking, doll. Just thinking."

"Can you figure why Fidello was murdered?"

My eyebrows hiked. "Possibly he was getting back with Ginnie, and overheard something, and maybe became the kind of loose end that needs cutting off."

"Somebody is killing awfully casually."

"Little Tony comes from that kind of stock."

She put the beer bottle back.

"I have to tinkle," she said.

"As long as you put it so sweetly, you don't even have to leave a quarter on the porcelain."

Angela laughed at that, tipsy enough for my quip to seem funny. She snatched her purse off the nearby nightstand and scampered off. Always a kick to see a big, beautiful woman scamper.

I sat there thinking about a young woman who dreamed of a show biz break and had done a star a favor, maybe delivering a valuable pebble. Her reward had been a quick, nasty death. If Angela was right, Ginnie was doing Tony Tret's bidding, in a roundabout way.

What was Tretriano doing with Basil's diamond in the rough? And assuming Tony was using it as a small-size big payoff, whose palm was he greasing in such a magnanimous fashion?

The toilet had long since flushed and she wasn't back yet.

Then the door opened and she stepped out in the shaft of light, and all she had on was the silk blouse, buttoned up discreetly, but with the tail not quite hiding the dark tip of her pubic triangle. Her legs were long and with a little flesh around the thighs, which was fine with me because I hated these skinny kids. She was tiptoeing, like she was sneaking up on me, though I was right there staring.

She stood before me like a good soldier waiting for inspection. But I was standing at attention, too, even if I was still sitting down.

"Am I too forward?" she asked.

"Not forward enough," I said. "That blouse is ruining the view."

She made me crazy, working those buttons one at a time, taking several seconds each that made sweat bead on my forehead despite the cool spring breeze coming in the crack of the window under the closed blinds, which made a metallic rustling.

When she'd shrugged out of the silk blouse, she put her shoulders back and the full breasts jutted proudly, displaying large, round, puffy nipples whose erect tips pointed slightly right and left, as if a practical joke to turn me cockeyed. Her waist was narrow and her stomach firm and well defined without losing its womanliness, and the dark, dark tangle of pubic hair promised a jungle well worth exploring.

"Should we have some fun?" she asked.

"I'm gonna say yes," I said.

"Check my purse. See if anything interests you."

I stood up and she giggled at the tent I'd made, and grabbed it, pulled it down, and let go. "Boiiiing," she said, and laughed.

Maybe not just a little drunk.

I went over and got in her purse and found what she was talking about—handcuffs. Well, she was an officer of the court.

I stood by the bedside and dangled the shiny pair, which caught what little light was in the room. "I don't wear bracelets, honey—I'm a man."

"I can see you're a man. But I'm a woman."

She threw the sheets and blankets back, and crawled up on the bed, pointing a well-rounded, dimpled behind at me with a little teasing tuft sticking out from in between, where heaven met the earth, and she snapped her right wrist to the bedpost at left. Then she lay on her back, spread-eagled, pink peeking through the curly black, and looked over to where I stood getting out of my own clothes, and she said, "You'll never make me talk, officer."

I didn't make her talk, but I did make her holler, and laugh, and even cry a little. She was moist and tight and wild, a prisoner gyrating for freedom that she didn't really crave, and as I was buried in her dark hair with her moaning in sweet pain, I thought,
So like Velda ... so like Velda....

"Velda," I whispered.

Out loud. Not meaning to.

"What did you say?" She stiffened under me. "What did you call me?"

"Old Celtic term of endearment, baby."

"What does it mean?"

"Love of my life."

"You're sweet..." Her hips began to grind under me again. "You're so
sweet....
"

Wasn't I?

She fell asleep almost immediately, despite her cuffed wrist. She was on her side, her back to me with the covers over her, snoring softly, when I slipped out of bed. I left my clothes on the floor, but got into my shorts. I went to her purse to find the handcuff key, though when I started to rustle in there, she stirred and made a protesting sound that made me shrug. If the cuff didn't bother her, it didn't bother me.

We'd turned all the lights off, but I'd been in this room for enough days to easily make my way to the john without any help. I didn't even turn the bathroom light on until I'd sealed myself in.

What a wonderful, smart woman this was. I'd thought Velda was one of a kind, but another had found me, and took me on my own terms, rough edges and all. It seemed a kind of miracle. I wouldn't say I loved her, not yet, but the sex had been great, hot and loving and crazy. The kind of memory you save up for your deathbed, when you can really use it.

I did a few things in the john that don't really move this story forward. What may be relevant is that the lovemaking had been spirited enough to make my side ache like hell, particularly that hot spot under my ribs. The pill bottles were lined up behind the sink like members of the jury.

The pill bottle for pain, which I knew to be a goddamn narcotic, I grabbed and held and sat staring at, like a kid in school with poor reading skills trying to make sense out of Dick, Jane, and Spot. My hand was shaking a little and my side was burning, like some sicko bastard with a red-hot poker was having a horse laugh at my expense, and I heard the door snick open out there.

I got onto my feet without a sound. I put the plastic vial carefully on the counter without a single rattle of pills.

Somebody was out there.

I did not believe it was Angela, up and dressed and slipping out on me. No, she'd been too drunk to accomplish that quietly, and anyway she couldn't reach her purse for the precious little key, not in that handcuff. Not without my help.

Somebody was out there.

I had no weapon. The .45 in the speed rig was on the shelf in the closet. Just across the way, but it might as well have been in New Jersey. I was in my shorts and the closest thing to a weapon in here was a toothbrush.

That room out there was dark. Pitch black. If I was someone's intended target, an intruder could easily take the slumbering Angela for me. The blinds were shut, I knew, no city light to speak of seeping in. Just enough to make out the vaguest shape, like that of a sleeper, primed to be an unwitting victim.

The only weapon I had going for me was surprise.

Leaving the bathroom light on, I opened the door, stepped into the shaft of brightness, and yelled, "
Hey!
"

He was big, stupid big for the role he'd taken on, wearing the white shirt and black bow tie and black trousers of a room-service waiter. The sudden light had him squinting, and his whole face seemed to be clenched, his hair dark and curly with muttonchops, his nose a blobby thing, his chipmunk cheeks acned and pockmarked.

And he was at the foot of the bed with his fist raised high, a long, wide, gleaming Bowie-knife blade reflecting the bathroom light back at me.

This registered in a fraction of a second, and in the next fraction I was on him. He had two inches on me, but I was able to grip his wrist with both hands and stop its downward swing. We did an awkward, grunting dance for a few seconds, and Angela had woken up at some point, because she said "Mike!" softly and then, rattling the handcuff against the brass bedpost, trying vainly to escape, shrieked, "
Miiike!
"

He was strong. Cords in his neck were standing out and veins made a nasty bas-relief on his forehead as he forced his knife-in-hand down, taking my gripped hands with him, edging that wide, pointed blade toward my throat even as his arm sent one forearm after another into me, making that hot spot under my ribs issue lightning bolts of pain all through my torso.

I let the knife inch its way toward me, then pulled back, and with all my strength, brought the blade down, all right, in his hands and mine, but swung it around into his midsection. Deep—the sound like a boot stepping in thick wet mud. His eyes bulged in fear and agony as we did the final steps of our dance, face-to-face, almost nose-to-nose, his mouth moving silently, maybe in a prayer, and I grinned as his hand fell away and my two hands gripped the handle of the knife whose blade was already all the way in and jerked it upward on a terrible path and then made a circular sideways motion, taking the blade on a grim ride.

Then I stepped away.

And grinned at him some more as he looked at me, astonished, then down at the red spreading across his white shirt and the knife pitching to the floor as a flap of flesh opened and he caught the tumble of bloody slimy intestines in his fingers, though some of the scarlet-smeared snakes slithered from his grasp, and I would swear he fainted before he fell to the carpet to die.

That was when I realized Angela was screaming.

I crawled up on the bed where she was still jerking that cuff and said, "It's all right, baby. He can't hurt you. He's dead."

Only her horrified eyes weren't on the corpse, but on me.

I had Angela uncuffed, and she had padded into the bathroom, taking her clothes with her, when the phone rang. It was the front desk, complaining about noise, which was quick, because the guy had only been dead a couple of minutes. I told the desk man to tell any on-duty manager that there had been an assault on a guest, me, and that the hotel doctor should come up, and the police should be called immediately.

I hung up, got the switchboard, and gave the girl Pat Chambers's home number.

"I need you to get over here," I told him.

"Over where?" he said sleepily. "Jesus, Mike. I'm at home. I have a life, you know."

"Is there a woman in bed with you?"

"No."

"Then I'd argue the point about you having a life. There's a dead body on my hotel room floor. I've already had the desk call for the cops. But I figure you'll want to be in on this."

"Mike ... Mike. Did you make him dead?"

"I didn't shoot him."

"You didn't?"

"He had a knife."

A long pause.

Then he said "Mike" again, almost sorrowfully, and hung up.

I went to the bathroom door and knocked. "Are you all right, honey?"

"...Yes."

"I've called the police. A doctor'll be up soon to check on our friend."

"He's dead! He
has
to be dead!"

"Yeah, he's dead, all right, but there are procedures. Hell, I'm telling
you?
Listen, if uh ... if you want to slip out before anybody gets here...."

"No. No, I'll stay."

"Fine. Do you want the doc to check you over?"

"No. No."

The doctor came up, a sixty-ish gent, looked the dead intruder over, and got to his feet, a ghastly white. "This is a first at the Commodore," he said.