Armchair in Hell (Prologue Books) Read online

  I ate and I washed the dishes and I was ready for bed.

  So the phone rang again.

  “Please, God,” I said out loud. “Pretty please. I should like to go to sleep.”

  I went to the living room and picked up the receiver.

  “Jesus breezes,” the voice said.

  “Madeline Howell.”

  “Super-sleuth.”

  “Nuts. You’re busy at your typewriter and you’ve got an item and you’re calling me to check on it.”

  “Nuts. The super-sleuth stinks.”

  Madeline Howell was a lady-winchell on a New York paper. She worked nights and slept days. I’m supposed to work days and sleep nights. It gets mixed up.

  “Jesus breezes,” she said. “I’ve been calling you all night. I have a case for you.”

  “Thanks. Later on. Late in the afternoon. I just got in. I’m going to bed.”

  “It’s very important.”

  “So’s sleeping.”

  “Listen a minute. You’ll be doing me a favor. It’s about a suitcase that was swiped.”

  I yawned. I said, “It’s an epidemic. Or a trend. Or a fellow with a satchel fetish.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “A big Gladstone. With initials. J.J.O’S.”

  Pause. For a nugatory scratch on the head. Then — “What?”

  “A big Gladstone. With initials — ”

  “I’ll be right over,” I said. “Twenty minutes.”

  “You’re a darling. Know where I live?”

  “Sure. The Astor.”

  “No. I moved a couple of months ago. Thirteen Gracie Square. Three-B.”

  “Swell.”

  “Thanks. Awfully.”

  So, I had another large hooker of rye and I got dressed.

  Again.

  2

  I rang a bell in Gracie Square and the door clicked and I walked up red-carpeted steps with ivory banisters and I knocked, gently, on 3-B. She said, “That you, Peter?” and I said, “Me, Peter,” and she opened the door.

  Shoulders and points and small curves (knowingly arrayed)

  nestled in navy blue chiffon with an ambassador sash of white from shoulder diagonally to hip, and a wide white belt. The dress stopped below nyloned knees, and from there on down she was exquisite.

  On top, it wasn’t half bad.

  We smelled alike, with a difference. I smelled slightly of whisky, and she smelled slightly of whisky and slightly of eau de cologne.

  She said, “You’re a big, sweet darling,” and she bowed, a little one, and drew her hand back, sweepingly, behind her hip. I came in and closed the door and she reached up and put her arms around me and she kissed me wet and hard.

  She let go. “Whew,” she said.

  “Whew,” I said.

  “A whit whiskified,” she said.

  “Oh, but nary. Nor you.”

  “Me? Tight, I’d say. I flit from booby trap to boîte, and back. My lifework, and I’ve been making with the lifework all night. With time out to call you.”

  “Me?” I said. “High. I’ve been working all night too.”

  “Tight and high.” She giggled. “Like turtle-neck sweaters. All right, take off your coat and sit down.”

  I took off my hat and coat and put them over one of the grille gates of the step-down living room. Orange sun in slatted spaces put stripes on the walls through the Venetian blinds. I looked at my watch. It was six twenty. I sat down in a sky-blue armchair while she fixed the blinds so that the sun stayed out and light came in. I sat in front of a fake fireplace and I stared into fake flames that flamed because of hidden batches of red Mazda bulbs playing merry-go-round inside a rotating device. Strangely, it was warm and comfortable and restful. Tight and high, and how. And tired.

  She came back and sat down opposite and swished her knees crossed and smiled at me.

  She was a diminutive blonde, slender as a swizzle stick, shaped up right in all the places, with round, clear, large blue eyes and wicked eyebrows and a slow smile that was disarming and disruptive, and corruptive. She had a reputation around the town. She was a killer-diller with the boys, but she bored easily and quickly and she lost interest at the height of the frolic, which made for broken glass in night clubs and overturned tables and tuxedoed heroes and hush-hush and bribes and squelched press releases.

  When she looked at you, like she was looking at me, upward, and she curved her lips at you and her dimples shimmered — when she smiled, as she was smiling now, slowly and carefully, like you were being exposed to X-ray — you were supposed to start thumping inside; and keep thumping.

  I didn’t thump. I like them more corporeal, larger and less studied.

  However….

  “This business,” she said, “about the suitcase. It was stolen at about eleven o’clock last evening on Seventy-sixth near Park, during the rain. A man was carrying it. He was mugged, rendered unconscious, and robbed. Of the valise.” Her voice was gray velvet in the gloom-glow of candles. That, she had.

  “Mugged, rendered unconscious, and robbed,” I said. “My, my. Just like in the papers.” I pushed a cigarette at her, reached over and lit it and lit my own. Gruffly I said, with the cigarette jumping in my lips, “Man’s name?”

  That was all I wanted out of this interview.

  “I don’t know,” she said. And blithely.

  I blew smoke out of my lungs, wearily. I lost the cigarette in an ash tray. I said, “You claim you want me to handle a case. You claim you’ve been calling me all night. Now you want to play gidjie.”

  “No,” she said. “I really don’t know who the man was.”

  “What was in the bag?”

  “I don’t know that either.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to find the bag.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s not your business.”

  “For how much?”

  “For a thousand dollars.”

  “What else you got for me?”

  “Nothing else.”

  “Now, look,” I said, “angel-face. Do you really think I can find a suitcase in this city of seven million on the facts that you’ve given me? A man got hit on the head on Seventy-sixth Street and lost a bag. Nothing else. Do you?”

  She smiled with her eyes. Unenthusiastically. “I don’t know. I hope so. You’re supposed to be good. Give it a whirl. I pay you a thousand dollars regardless. Now.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  She stood up and went out of the room.

  I sat still and I pondered.

  What the hell was playing here?

  Was this tied in? Of course it was. But Madeline Howell. Not Madeline Howell. I knew Madeline Howell. Madeline Howell was virtue in a black lace nightgown; respectability dented around the edges by big-city wise-guyness — sleeping around, maybe, but essentially moral. Madeline Howell fronting for thieves was as likely as the town banker reaching around his belly to snitch a nickel from the poor box.

  Not good. Shift. New subject.

  What about ethics?

  Would I be working at cross-purposes on behalf of two clients with divergent interests? If I took her money, would I be waving off Viggy? No. According to Viggy I was not supposed to be looking for the bag. Viggy was paying me to try to clear up that mess of murder in his house. So all right. So I had thought about ethics.

  So now I was working for Madeline too. Somewhere, I’d ring Viggy in on it. After all….

  Now, what about her?

  Who in all bad hell ever heard of a detective being paid one thousand dollars to find a bag without any information except that it was a bag and that it was stolen by the unique method of clipping a guy over the head and taking it away.

  All right, again; will somebody, somewhere, please understand how private detective and alcoholic get to sound so similar.

  She came back with a packet of fresh, unbent bills (ten one-hundreds) and she pinched my chee
k, gently, like you’d squeeze an eye dropper, and she slapped the money into my non-protesting hand. “I’ve hired me a detective. May I build you a drink?”

  “No.”

  In a far corner of the room, she opened a tall wood cabinet. “What kind of a drink don’t you want? Scotch or rye?”

  “Rye,” I said automatically, perfunctorily, sourly.

  It was an immense room with a bordello-red carpet and casement windows and yellow drapes and blue easy chairs and a million thingumabobs: like giraffes with their necks entwined on a corner bookcase, and a fragile glass boat on a coffee table, and miniature dolls on shelves in the walls, and little statuettes on mahogany tables, and a sad little dog with his leg poised at a little red hydrant on top of the fireplace.

  “Jesus breezes,” Madeline Howell said. “Move. Come and get it.”

  She put the amber glass of fizz on a wicker coaster on top of the high mahogany liquor cabinet. I sighed with my lips closed, gratingly, and creased the money and put it away.

  Madeline brushed by me and I stopped and watched her arrange herself amongst the pillows on the day bed. She had a lot of leg, narrow at the ankle and curving at the calf, and, with the highball in one hand and the other hand back over her head, her stomach was round and flat and her breasts were high and full, and disconcerting.

  “Charlie Batesem,” I said at her.

  “Boo,” she said.

  “Algernon Hale.”

  “Boo.”

  That was that.

  Nothing.

  She smiled at me and leaned on one elbow and sipped her drink. She giggled and her bosom deepened. “Breezes. Must you go completely detective on me, barking and waving your eyebrows? My goodness, all I want you to do is find a valise that strayed.” She put the glass down on a little table. “Come on over here and relax. It’s important that you find it, and it was important to me that you accept the damn case. Now you’ve got it. Fine. So relax, and then get out of here, and do your detecting during union hours, or something.”

  I turned and reached up for the drink, and I saw the photograph in the thick silver frame, right behind the highball.

  I took the highball out of the way.

  “Who’s the boy friend?”

  I knew who the boy friend was. The boy friend was Dennis Quentin O’Shea, handsome and smiling-eyed and curly-headed.

  “Never saw the man in my life,” she said. “Only the picture.”

  “Never saw the man in her life.”

  I read out loud from the lower right-hand corner: “To Mad, with love, Denny.”

  “Sweet, huh?”

  “But you never saw the man in your life.”

  “Correct,” she said, “and stop it. All I want you to do is to find a valise. Stop snooping around my apartment. Stop asking

  me questions that are none of your business. I said I never saw that man, and I meant it. Could be I keep that face up there to give my guys an inferiority complex when they come a-calling. Script and all. I don’t know the man. Finish. Now come on over here and mind your business.”

  I started coming. I stopped. I stopped and I stared and I loved it. I half closed my eyes and I sipped the drink and I stared at the oil painting that was no longer blob nor indeterminate. I stared at it and sipped my drink and stepped back a few paces and then forward and I opened my eyes and I tilted my head one way and then the other way but I didn’t stop staring — and the most beautiful girl I have ever seen stared back at me, impishily.

  It was a face. No body. A face that came out of the smoky yellow background of the canvas like steam out of a boiling kettle, hot and hissing and forceful and dangerous. A dark, angry face with color spread low in her cheeks and sulky red lips with a silken skin and wide black almond eyes, inscrutable.

  I stared at her and she stared at me.

  I thumped.

  “Look, vulnerable,” Madeline Howell said. “Her name is Mona Crawford. My roommate, or apartment-mate.” She pointed at the round-a-round stairway. “This is a duplex, which was too much for her. She rented the lower half to me. Comes from my home town in Montana. Very beautiful. Not the town. The dame. That’s a self-portrait.”

  “An artist?” I queried.

  “A dancer,” she said.

  I finished the highball. I put the glass down on the coffee table. Noisily. “Nothing makes sense around here. You want me to find a bag, but you don’t know a thing about it and you won’t even tell me why you want it found. I don’t want a drink, so I just finished a rye highball. You sport a picture of a guy who inscribes ‘To Mad, with love’ and you never saw the guy in your life. A girl does a marvelous painting in oil, so she’s not an artist, she’s a dancer. Nothing makes sense.”

  “Jesus breezes,” she wailed. “This makes sense. You have your case and you’ve been paid your fee. Relax. Be human. Come on over here and kiss me. My goodness. It won’t kill you.”

  It didn’t kill me.

  Chapter Seven

  I DOZED in the cab from Gracie Square to Forty-ninth Street and Broadway, a short enough haul — then the driver reached in and tapped me. I paid, with a top-heavy fatigue-careless tip, and the driver said, “Thank you,” which helped wake me up. It was half past nine of a dull morning with timid sunshine diluting a smoke-thick sky.

  I went down two steps into a clean, tile-floored barbershop and I ignored the solicitous empty-chaired barbers. I took off my hat and coat and I sat down in a wire-framed chair and I waited for Tony, Tony with the shoeshine hair.

  He saw me and he threw me a crescent-moon smile from the number-one chair and he waved a razor. I admired his teeth and his hair and his trim, white-dressed figure. I waited some more, and then I got into the number-one chair and I said, “A haircut, please.”

  Tony was an enterprising lad. Tony was boss-barber, desultorily. Mostly he was a bookmaker with a thriving trade. He served also as a dispensary for marijuana, but you had to be introduced by a customer. From the smell of him, it occurred to me that the dispensary was beginning to smoke up profits. It is natural, I suppose, for a young fellow to want to discover what all the wild musicians are so crazy about. It is natural, too, to sink a little lower in the barber chair and to try not to worry overly about a pair of scissors chopping around your ears.

  In my best barbershop manner (albeit a little strained), I said, “What’s new with Crying-Towel Reed? I haven’t seen him around.”

  “Cry? He’s in business. Got a poolroom on Twenty-sixth and Seventh.”

  “Well,” I said. “A businessman.”

  “Yeah. You want Kreml?”

  “No. Dry.”

  He finished the haircut. I sighed.

  He patted my hair. “Shave?”

  “Not on your life,” I said and I touched the poor tight skin at my throat, gently.

  “No shave?”

  “No shave,” I said scramblingly. “I get a rash. I’m a tender one. Ha.”

  I showed him teeth and I paid.

  2

  The sign said BILLIARDS and you went up one dark flight of hollow wooden steps with metal nosings. You opened a tin-sheathed door and it slammed heavily behind you, and you were in a large, still, dim room: a converted loft with the street wall supplanted by three immense pivot windows painted light green, top to bottom.

  You shook your head and you blinked your eyes and you waited to get used to it. The lighting was tricky. Frail sun filtered through the green translucence and a slanted veil of thin dust shimmered in front of you. It was cool and it was quiet.

  It was like an aquarium. With pool tables.

  Fourteen pool tables, along the middle, single file. Racks of cues in niches on the side walls and green cloth-topped card tables in the rear. In a corner, a big, squat, wooden icebox for the colas. In front of the green windows, a long rectangle of glass counter with cigarettes and cigars and packaged candies. In front of the counter, facing the door, with the tips of his elbows resting on the counter behind him, with one foot raised and the
heel of the shoe hooked onto a low ledge: Crying-Towel Reed.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi.” His voice was the riffle of an old deck of cards, a slapping whisper.

  Crying-Towel Reed: a very naughty number.

  Small and slender and round-shouldered; with a face that could blend with the blankness of a wall, a sand-colored face and no other color, shaped like an egg with the point on bottom; with short-clipped stand-up hair; with slash-pocket eyes, the grieving kind, brown and murky as a bad cup of coffee; with a small, anemic fish mouth, sad and turned down at the corners, the outer lines parallel to the slash-pocket eyes. Crying-Towel Reed: expensively encased in brown suède shoes and custom-made brown reverse-pleat slacks and a golden wool sport shirt.

  Crying-Towel Reed, a pro: with more recipes for murder than a cookbook has for sauce.

  I reminded him about the Little Guy’s chef: I wanted him in a nice frame of mind.

  “A legend,” he said. “A foible.”

  “Fable,” I said.

  “Fable,” he said. “A guy gives me that Fable up in Narrangansett. I go for him three G’s across, and the glue winds up in the sheisshouse. I am not lucky. Very unlucky. Like if I invested with an undertaker, the customers would stop dying. Good, huh?”

  “How’s about some kelly?” I said.

  “No kelly. I am willing to joust around with you across the green, but not kelly. Chicago. Chicago, a cemetery with lights. Very funny. So I will play you Chicago, if you want some pool, a saw a way, six ways, double for roundhouse.”

  A saw is a sawbuck, a sawbuck is ten dollars, six ways double could be one hundred and twenty dollars and I cannot say I’m a cultivated pocket-pooler. Sighingly I said, “Grab a cue.”

  It is politic, when you are looking for information, to try to lose. At a saw a way, six ways, double for roundhouse, I did not try to lose. I tried to win.

  I lost.

  The first game, I lost a roundhouse. One hundred and twenty bucks. The next game, I had two ways, he had four. Twenty bucks, which was all right. The next game I lost a roundhouse and the next game I lost a roundhouse. The next game, I lost a roundhouse.