The Cutie (15 page)

“So what is it near?”

“St. Louis,” he said.

“St. Louis? That’s in Missouri.”

“Sure it is. It’s on the Missouri side of the Mississippi River. Just across the river is East St. Louis, Illinois. Belleville is around there somewhere.”

“East St. Louis, eh?”

“That’s the place. They’ll be able to help you down there. I don’t know Belleville from Bellevue.”

So I called East St. Louis. Some years back, the citizens of St. Louis made the mistake of electing a reform administration in their fair city, and all the rough-and-ready boys immediately moved across the river to East St. Louis. They’re still there. And the citizens who did it to them now bitch about what a dull town St. Louis is, not like the wide-open town across the river, and the traffic on the bridges gets heavier every day.

So, as I say, I called East St. Louis, where there are also people I know and where there is also an organization similar in content and motives to the organization I work for. I called a guy who’s named himself Tex, something he could never get away with in New York, and I said, “Tex, I’d like some information on a broad who used to live over in Belleville. That’s near you, isn’t it?”

“Sure,” he said. “About fifteen miles from here, over toward the air base.”

“It’s nice to know it’s really there,” I said. “Here’s the bit: Five, six years ago, a Belleville broad named Mary Komacki married somebody from the air base. I’d like to know who it was she married.”

“How do you spell that name?”

I spelled it for him, and he said, “When I get it, where do I reach you?”

I gave him my phone number and said, “You can call collect, of course.”

“Of course,” he said. “What the hell do you think?”

Nice guy. I thanked him and hung up. That left one name on the list. Ernest Tesselman. I still liked him for the job, and I’d check on him myself.

And now it was time to go visiting. I looked in the telephone directory, and I found out where everybody lived, and I copied all the addresses down in my notebook. Then I went to the bedroom to put on a tie.

While I was there, the doorbell rang, and I figured it almost inevitably had to be Grimes. I wondered who was dead this time, and I walked back through the apartment to the living room.

I figured it was Grimes, but it might be somebody else, so I checked the peephole before opening the door. And it’s a good thing I did. The minute the peephole was open, he fired through it. The bullet took a layer of skin off my thumb knuckle before whizzing by my head and thunking into the opposite wall.

When I hear a shot, I hit the floor. If two years in the Army hadn’t taught me that, nine years with Ed Ganolese had. So I spent a few seconds digging into the rug, until I realized that sound I was listening to was somebody running down the hall toward the elevator.

I scrabbled up to my feet and yanked the door open, just in time to see the elevator door slide shut. I didn’t even get a glimpse of the guy. I ran down the hall and pressed the up button a few times, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. The elevator wouldn’t come back up for me until it had finished taking the cutie all the way downstairs. By the time it came back up, gathered me, and went back down again, he could be halfway across Jersey.

I went back down the hall and pulled my apartment door shut. I’d been planning to go out anyway, so I thought I might as well keep going. And while I was waiting for the elevator, I could spend a few seconds wondering just what the hell the shooting had been all about.

Then the great light dawned. I’d been in the papers, suspected of killing Betty Benson. The guy I was after must have read that, and realized he’d gotten to Betty Benson too late, that I’d already been there, that whatever it was she had known I knew.

The elevator arrived and I stepped in and pushed the button for the main floor. I was going to go see everybody on my list of possible suspects. Somewhere along the line, I would be having a chat with a guy who had just tried to kill me.

I decided to try Johnny Ricardo first, not because he was my chief suspect, but because he was handiest. He had a supper club over on East 59th Street called, oddly enough, Johnny’s Pub. I took a cab, leaving the Mercedes in its garage, since finding a parking space within a dozen blocks of Johnny’s Pub at nine o’clock at night was something only a tourist would try for.

Johnny’s Pub was divided in half. The front half was the bar, and the back half was the restaurant and also the place where the entertainment—folk singers and comics who imitate queers and other comics who imitate Mort Sahl or Orson Bean—was put on twice nightly.

I went on past the bar and into the restaurant-club part. I stood in the entranceway for a minute, in the semidark, looking at the people crowded around the tiny tables, and the maroon drapes hanging all over the place, and the desktop-size stage, empty at the moment, and then a waiter, black and white and funereal, sidled up and offered to show me where the tables were.

“I don’t want to eat,” I told him. “I want to talk to Johnny Ricardo.”

His expression changed without seeming to, and he said, “I’m not sure he’s in. Who’s looking for him?”

“Tell him I’m from Ed Ganolese,” I said, figuring that name would mean more to him than my own. Johnny Ricardo and I, for some strange reason, had never had any dealings together before, though Johnny almost
had
to be linked with Ed Ganolese in one way or another.

“I’ll see if he’s in his office,” said my friend. “If you’d care to wait in the bar—”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll wait here. Save you some steps.”

He shrugged without seeming to shrug, and padded silently away. I hung around, looking at things, and after a while he came back and said, “He’s in. Through the curtain over there and up the stairs. First door on your right.”

“Thanks.”

I followed directions, through the maroon curtain and up the maroon-carpeted stairs and through the maroon-painted first door on the right, and wound up in the office of Johnny Ricardo. After all the maroon outside, this place was practically invisible. It was gray, gray walls and gray carpet, gray filing cabinet and gray desk, gray drapes on the two windows and a gray wastebasket near a gray chair. Even the painting on the wall was done in varying shades of gray.

So was the guy behind the desk. Gray, just like his office and his suit, with a pale and bloodless and heavily lined face, washed-out hair and washed-out eyes, and gray bony hands sticking out of his gray coat sleeves.

The thin lips smiled as he got to his feet. “I’m Johnny Ricardo,” he said, and his voice was gray too, hoarse and high. He stuck a skin-and-bones hand out, and I touched it carefully, trying not to break anything in it, and told him who I was.

He kept smiling. “You’re from Ed Ganolese, you say.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, I hope there isn’t anything I can do for you. You know how it is.” He was still smiling, but his eyes were wary. He motioned at the gray chair beside the desk. “Sit down.”

“Thanks.”

We both sat down, and he said, “What brings you here? It isn’t going to cost me money, I hope.”

I shook my head. “No, this isn’t that kind of call. Nobody has any complaints about you that I know of.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” he said, but his eyes stayed wary, and his bony hands were clenching and unclenching on the arms of his chair.

“What I’m here about,” I said, “is a girl you used to know. Mavis St. Paul. Maybe you remember her?”

“Mavis?” He looked puzzled, but managed to keep smiling anyway. “You meet so many girls in this business,” he said. His eyes moved away from me, and he studied the painting on the wall. “Mavis,” he said again. “Mavis St. Paul. That’s an unusual name.”

“Her stage name,” I said.

“A singer?”

“No, an actress. I’ve heard she wasn’t much as a singer.”

“Mavis, Mavis—oh, my God, yes! Of course, of course,
Mavis!
Why, it’s been three years if it’s been a day!” He was looking at me again, surprised and pleased by the recollection of good old Mavis. “What in the world do you want to know about Mavis?” he asked me.

“Don’t you keep up with the newspapers?”

“In this business?” He spread his hands wide and grinned wryly at me. “Not in this business, my friend. I live strictly non-normal hours, and most of my waking time is spent right here at this desk, or outside auditioning acts, keeping the bartenders’ hands out of the till—I don’t have time for newspapers or television or things like that.”

“Then you don’t know about Mavis?”

“Know what about her?”

I sidestepped that question. It’s a gimmick the cops have tried to pull on me a couple of times. If he already knew the answer, he might forget I hadn’t given it to him, and he just might mention it later in the conversation. So, instead of answering, I asked a question of my own: “How long’s it been since you’ve seen her, do you remember?”

“Mavis? Oh, God, forever. I don’t remember. Three years ago, anyway. She left me to play around with some clown from television. Martin or Morgan or something like that. We were just one of those crazy flings, like the fella says in the song. I knew she wouldn’t be staying for very long, and she knew I wouldn’t want her to stay very long. You know how it is.”

I thought about Ella, and the string of chicks before Ella, and the difference that was Ella, and I said, “Yeah, I know how it is. But you haven’t seen Mavis since she left you for this Morgan character?”

“Morgan, Martin, something like that. Started with an M. Had something to do with television.”

“Yeah, but have you seen her at all since then?”

“Mavis? No, of course not. I don’t know why she ever hooked up with me in the first place. She didn’t want to break into the nightclub circuit. She was an actress, not an entertainer. And she couldn’t sing a note.”

“So I’ve heard. What was she like, anyway? What kind of a girl was she?”

He grinned at me. “Oh, she was a sharp girl,” he said. “She knew what she wanted, that girl did.”

“And what was it she wanted?”

“Money,” he said. “That’s all, just money. And lots of it.”

“Was she really hipped on an acting career?”

“In a funny kind of a way. She figured that when you were an actress, you were famous. And she also figured that when you were famous you were rich. She couldn’t visualize anybody being famous and poor. So she was hipped on it, but it goes right back to the main issue. She wanted cash, and plenty of it. She even put out for her drama teacher, way back when, so she could get her acting lessons free. A real miser, a real money-counter.”

“Kind of grasping, huh?”

“Oh, hell, no. She was sweet about it all. Don’t get me wrong, she wasn’t one of these hard-eyed peroxide bitches, like the tramp I’m going with now. Not a bit of it. She was a real sweet kid, easy to get along with, lots of fun in the rack. You know. But she always kept one eye open for the dollar.”

“How come you talk about her in the past tense?” I asked him. “Did she die or something?”

“Mavis? Not that I know of. She’s around somewhere, maybe still with that television type, whatever the hell his name was, though I doubt it. She’s probably lolling around on somebody’s yacht right this minute, having the time of her life and sneaking a look at her bankbook every couple of minutes. No, I talk about her in the past tense because as far as I’m concerned she is in the past. She’s in my past. Half an hour after you leave here, I’ll talk about you in the past tense. That won’t mean you’re dead.”

“I was just wondering,” I said. Then I tried throwing him a curve, just to see what would happen. “What about Betty Benson?” I asked him.

“Who?” It looked like a legitimate double-take to me, though I’m not exactly an expert on double-takes.

“Betty Benson,” I said.

He grinned some more. “Come on,” he said. “Nobody’s named Betty Benson.”

“This girl was.”

He raised his eyebrows and kept on grinning. “Was?”

That had been a slip. I grinned sheepishly and said, “My past. I got the habit from you. She is. Named Betty Benson, I mean.”

“Am I supposed to know this girl? Mavis, yes. But nobody named Betty Benson.”

“I thought maybe you might have met her. She was—uh,
is
—a friend of Mavis’s.”

He thought about it for a minute, and then shook his head. “I’m afraid not,” he said. “Mavis St. Paul I might forget for a minute. I mean, it’s an unusual name, but what broad around New York doesn’t have an unusual name? And it has been three years. But Betty Benson—if I ever met a chick named Betty Benson, I’d remember it.”

“Yeah, I suppose so,” I said.

“Why all this interest in Mavis, anyway?” he asked me. “She didn’t get herself in trouble with the syndicate, did she?”

Syndicate is a word I don’t use. I don’t know what you think of when you hear the word syndicate, but I think of comic strips and advice-to-the-lovelorn columns and things like that. The people who distribute all that crap to newspapers all over the country are syndicates. The outfit I work for has nothing to do with advice for the lovelorn, except for maybe Archie Freihofer’s department. I work for a company, an outfit, an organization. But not a syndicate.

But I didn’t mention that to Ricardo. Instead, I said, “I’m not exactly sure what’s up. I’m just an errand boy.”

“I hope she isn’t in trouble,” he said.

“I don’t suppose she is. What about her husband?”

He looked blank. “Husband?”

“I was told she’d gotten herself married before she came to New York.”

“Beats me,” he said. “I don’t remember her ever mentioning it.”

“Well,” I said, getting to my feet, “thanks a lot for your time.”

“Not at all,” he said. “Just so it doesn’t cost me money, I’ll cooperate one hundred percent.” He chuckled, a sound that belonged in a mausoleum. “Of course, if it cost me money, I’d only cooperate ninety percent. I need my margin of profit, you know.”

“Yeah,” I said. I started for the door, then stopped and went back to the desk again. “By the way,” I said. “Do you have a gun?”