The Cutie (11 page)

Betty Benson lived on the third floor, and it was a walk-up. I was puffing by the time I got to the third floor, and I remembered I’d only had a few hours’ sleep since yesterday. I stopped at the head of the stairs, to get my wind and my bearings, and looked around. All the doors on this floor were closed, but I saw a peephole open in one of them, so I walked over and peeped back. There was an eye looking out at me. “Miss Benson?” I said.

Her voice was muffled by the door. “What do you want?”

The standard New York greeting. The less a New Yorker has, the more firmly convinced he is that everybody in the world is waiting, just outside his apartment, to take it all away from him.

“I’m a friend of Ernest Tesselman’s,” I said. It wasn’t strictly accurate, but this looked like a good time for name-dropping, and if this was Mavis St. Paul’s friend and former roommate, she should know who Ernest Tesselman was.

Apparently she did, and wasn’t very happy about it, because she said, “Go away.”

“I’d like to talk to you about Mavis,” I said.

“I already talked to the police. Go away.”

“This won’t take long,” I promised.

“Just go away,” she insisted. “I don’t want to talk to anybody.”

“What are you so jumpy about?” I asked her.

“After what happened to Mavis?”

“Don’t be silly. I’m a friend of Ernest Tesselman’s, and I want to talk to you.”

“I’m not going to let you in,” she said.

“I’ll wait out here,” I told her. “You’ll come out sooner or later.”

“I’ll call the police.”

“Ask for Grimes,” I said. “He’s a friend of mine.”

The peephole snapped shut, and I heard her moving around inside. I wondered if she really would call the cops. I wished I didn’t have to have anything to do with this chick. Nervous females make me upset.

After a couple of minutes, the peephole opened again, and the eye came back. She said, “Why don’t you go away?”

“I want to talk to you.”

“Talk from out there.”

“Sure,” I said. “That’s all right with me.” I dug a pencil and notebook out of my inside jacket pocket. “I’d like to know the names of people who knew Mavis. Her friends and her enemies.”

“Who are you?”

“I told you. A friend of Ernest Tesselman’s.”

“What do you want to know about Mavis for?”

“I’m looking for her killer.”

“You mean the dope fiend?”

“No. He didn’t do it.”

“Then who?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Why do you say the dope fiend didn’t kill her?”

“Because I talked to the dope fiend, and he said he didn’t, and everybody knows that dope fiends never lie.”

“You
talked
to him?”

“That’s right.”

“Who
are
you?”

“I told you. A friend of Ernest Tesselman’s.”

“Why are you looking for the killer?”

“Mr. Tesselman asked me to.” Another inaccuracy, but a lot easier and faster than the truth.

“What does he care?”

“He liked Mavis.”

“Hah,” she said. “Ernest Tesselman doesn’t like anybody but himself. And his fishes,” she added, as an afterthought.

“What makes you say that?”

“I just do.”

“Do you suppose I could come inside?” I asked her. “You could make coffee, and we could sit down like civilized people and have a chat about dope fiends and fishes and Ernest Tesselman and Mavis St. Paul and all sorts of interesting things.”

“Don’t make fun,” she said.

“I’m not making fun,” I told her. “I’m very, very serious. I just climbed two long flights of stairs, and I didn’t get much sleep last night, and I feel like sitting down.”

She thought about it for a minute, then said, “Are you armed?”

“Of course not. What do you take me for?”

“Open your coat,” she said.

So I opened my coat and showed her that I didn’t have a shoulder holster. Then I turned around and raised my coat tails so she could see I didn’t have a gun in my hip pocket. I faced her again and said, “Shall I hike up my pant-legs? Maybe I have a knife strapped to my leg.”

“I have to be careful,” she said. “After what happened to Mavis—”

“Certainly. An ounce of caution is worth a pound of plasma.”

The peephole closed again, a chain rattled, and the door swung open. She studied me for a second, holding tight to the doorknob, testing to see whether or not I planned to leap at her, and then she stepped back and to the side. “Come on in, then,” she said.

I went on in. The living room was long and narrow, painted gray, and was so completely Greenwich Village in style that it looked more like a stage setting than an actual living room. It was one trite, standard bit after another. The piece of gray driftwood on the black, vaguely Japanese coffee table. The modern painting, looking like a broken stained-glass window, centered on one of the long walls. A low bookcase constructed of one-by-twelve boards separated by unmortared bricks. A cheap record player on an obviously secondhand table, with five or six long-playing record albums lying beside it. Three empty Chianti bottles were tastefully suspended from the wall between the two windows, and the windows themselves were covered with red burlap drapes. A couple of Moselle bottles, festooned with candle drippings, sat around on odd tables, and a hook in the middle of the ceiling showed where the mobile had once been hung, when mobiles were in fashion.

Betty Benson didn’t go with the apartment. She suited her name much better than that. Except for the lack of little white stars in her eyes, she looked like a Jon Whitcomb illustration for the
Saturday Evening Post.
She was one of those sweet, sincere, All-American-Girl, Junior-Prom, brainless types, with fluffy brown hair, a smooth and rather blank face, and a good though not spectacular body. She was dressed in a gray sweatshirt and pink pedal-pushers and in five years she would have traded the driftwood and the Chianti bottles for a washer-dryer and a husband, out in some suburban development.

I knew very little about this type of broad, because my work doesn’t normally bring me in contact with them. I’d known some way back in my college days, but they’d bored me then and they bored me now. I didn’t know how to talk to this one to get her into the mood to answer questions.

She closed the door and turned to face me. “If you try anything,” she said, “I can scream. And I left the door unlocked. And the man next door is home, because he works nights.”

“Darn,” I said. “Then I guess I can’t rape-murder you after all.”

I’d forgotten that chicks like this have absolutely no sense of humor. She stood there for a second, trying to figure out what her reaction to that one was supposed to be, and finally gave up on it. “You can sit down anywhere,” she said.

“Thanks.” I avoided the black basket chair and sat on the studio couch.

“You wanted to talk about Mavis,” she said.

“Uh huh. I’d also like some coffee, if you’ve got some handy. I wasn’t kidding about being behind in my sleep.”

“All right. How do you like your coffee?”

“Black,” I said. “One sugar.”

“It’s instant,” she said doubtfully.

“That’s all right,” I told her. “I love instant.” I hate instant.

“So do I,” she said. She smiled. We had found a common ground.

I sat on the zebra-striped studio couch and waited, while she clanked silverware in the kitchenette. A whistling teakettle whistled, more silverware clanked, and she came back, walking carefully, holding two full cups of coffee out at arm’s length.

“Let me help,” I said, getting to my feet. I rescued one of the coffees, and we both sat down, me back on the studio couch, she in the basket chair across the room.

“You’re a friend of Ernest Tesselman’s?” she asked me. It was good to see I’d gotten through to her on that point.

“That’s right,” I said.

“And he sent you to look for whoever killed Mavis?”

“Right again.”

“That seems awfully strange,” she said.

“Why? They were more or less living together, weren’t they? I imagine she was important to him.”

She shook her head as she stirred her coffee. “It just doesn’t seem like him,” she said. “That dirty old man.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because that’s what he is. He came here once, before Mavis went to live with him, and Mavis was out shopping or somewhere. He tried to seduce me. There he was, going with Mavis, and he knew I was Mavis’s best friend, and he tried to seduce me. And he was old enough to be my grandfather.”

“He’s old enough to be Mavis’s grandfather, too,” I said.

“Mavis thought he could help her in her career.”

“Did you think so?”

“He
could
have,” she said. “But I bet he wouldn’t have. Mavis never learned. She kept going off and sleeping with men who promised her the moon, and they were all the same, all nothing but liars. But she never did learn. She was always sure that this was the time, this man was telling the truth.”

“Ernest Tesselman wasn’t the only one, then,” I said. I had the notebook and pencil ready. “Do you know who any of the others were?”

“Well, of course,” she said. “Mavis was my best friend. She always lived here, uh, between men.”

“Cy Something-or-other was first, wasn’t he?”

“Not really,” she said. “Alan Petry was first, but he doesn’t count.”

“Alan Petry?” I copied the name down in the notebook. “Who was he,” I asked, “and why doesn’t he count?”

“Well, it’s been years since they’ve even seen each other,” she said. “And Alan didn’t have any money or prospects or anything like that, so it was never anything really serious between them.”

“You’re making Mavis St. Paul sound like the original gold digger,” I said.

“Well, she was,” said Betty Benson. “I mean, she’s dead now, and she was my best friend and all, but still and all the truth is the truth. Mavis was a very sweet person, a wonderful person to get along with, but she was awfully mercenary.”

“So she was never serious about this”—I looked at the name I’d written—“this Alan Petry. Was he serious about her?”

“No, not really. At least, I don’t think so. I never knew him very well. He was just another boy taking acting lessons. He wasn’t too awfully talented, and I guess he realized it, because he dropped out of Paul’s class shortly after I met him. He and Mavis just enjoyed living together, that was all. They had a good time together for a while, and then it was all over.”

“Where is he now, do you have any idea?”

“I think he lives out on Long Island somewhere,” she said. “At least, he did the last I heard. He’s married and has a family now. He gave up acting completely and became a policeman.”

“A cop?” I made a note after Petry’s name.

“He gave up acting right after Mavis left him. He took the examination, whatever examination it is you have to take if you’re going to be a policeman, and passed and got the job. Then he got married—I don’t think I ever met the girl he married—and moved out on Long Island somewhere. I haven’t seen him for years.”

“Then Cy—what is Cy’s last name?”

“Grildquist,” she said.

“That’s it, Grildquist. He came after Petry?”

“Well, no. Mavis went with Paul Devon for a while. The acting teacher.”

“The one she and Petry were taking lessons from.”

“That’s right. I’m in his class, too. That’s where I met Mavis. She and Paul never lived together, but they spent a lot of time together. You know. Mavis didn’t have to pay anything for the classes.”

“Sweet girl,” I said.

“She was.” Betty Benson bridled, as the saying goes. “Nobody is perfect, you know. Not you or me or anybody. Mavis was a
very
sweet girl, but she just happened to be mercenary, that’s all.”

“Okay. I’m not knocking her. Who comes after Paul Devon?”

“Cy Grildquist,” she said.

“At last.” I wrote the name down. “She lived with him, didn’t she?”

“For about six months, and then she came back here. He promised her all kinds of things, but she finally realized he had no intention of making the promises good. So she left him.”

“Hard feelings?”

“She had, for a little while. He didn’t, though. He was ready for another girl by then, anyway.”

“You sound as though you don’t like Mr. Grildquist.”

“I don’t,” she said. “He’s a fat, sloppy old lecher, and you can’t believe a word he says.”

“Mavis had a habit of picking nice boyfriends, didn’t she?”

“She wanted to be rich,” said Betty Benson simply. “So she stayed with rich men.”

“Okay, that makes sense. Who was next on the rich-man parade?”

“You make it sound a lot harsher than it was. Mavis wasn’t a—a prostitute, or anything like that.”

“I know. She was only mercenary.”

“A lot of people are,” she said.

“Granted. Who came after Grildquist?”

“A man named Ricardo. Johnny Ricardo. He owns a nightclub or something.”

“Okay. How long did that one last?”

“Just a few months. Then she came back here to live again, until she met Charles Morgan.”

I scribbled Morgan’s name down, and said, “Who was he?”

“He had something to do with television, I don’t know what. Then Ernest Tesselman was after that, and that’s all.”

“I see.” I looked at the list of names. “Were any of these men married?” I asked her.

“I don’t know,” she said. Then she thought about it for a minute. “Cy Grildquist is married. Or he was then, but I think he’s divorced now. That happened after Mavis broke up with him. Johnny Ricardo—I think he was divorced then, and now he’s married again.”

“What about Paul Devon?”

“No, he isn’t married. He was once, when he was very young, but she died in an accident. He never married again. He was very much in love with her, and all broken up when she died. He had to go away to a sanitarium and everything.”

“When did all this happen?”

“Oh, years ago.”

“How do you know about it?”

“Oh, everybody knows about it. Everybody in his classes, I mean. Whenever he hears her name, his eyes get all misty.”

“I see. What about Charles Morgan? Is he married? Or was he, at the time?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t remember. I’m sure Mavis must have told me—Mavis told me about every-thing—but I don’t remember whether he was married or not. Not that it makes any difference any more.”