The Body Lovers Read online

  “Miss Mclnnes.”

  He walked away, his blocky figure the picture of confidence. Dulcie watched him a moment, then turned to me. “It that what you came for? If I thought it was to get in a political argument ... You embarrassed him!” “Did I?”

  Then she let the laugh go, trying to stifle it with a hand. “It was funny. Even when you said that awful word.”

  “So wash my mouth out with soap.”

  “Really, Mike. Now can you tell me why you wanted to meet him?”

  “You wouldn’t understand, kid.”

  “Are you ... satisfied?”

  I took her arm and steered her toward the bar. “Perfectly,” I said. “Someplace in the pattern there’s a place for him.”

  “You’re talking in riddles. Let’s have our drink and you can take me home. I have a big weekend with a new issue of the magazine in front of me and can’t afford any late nights until it’s put to bed.”

  “That’s too bad,” I said.

  Her fingers tightened on my arm. “I know.” She rubbed her head against my shoulder. “There will be other times.”

  I left Dulcie outside her apartment and told the cab driver to take me back to my hotel. Upstairs, I got out of my tux, mixed myself a drink and slouched in a chair with my feet on the window sill, looking out at the night.

  Sometime not too long ago a point had been reached and a bridge crossed. It was too dark to see the outlines of it, but I could feel it and knew it was there. Too long that little thing had been gnawing at the comers of my mind and I tried to sift it out, going over the puzzle piece by piece. One word, one event, could change the entire course of the whole thing. Out there on the streets Pat and his men and the staff of the paper were scouring the city for that one thing too. Somebody had to find it. I finished my drink, made another and was halfway through it when my phone rang. It was my answering service for the office number with the message that I had several calls from the same number and the party gently insisted that they were urgent.

  I dialed the number, heard it ring, then Cleo’s voice said, “Mike Hammer?”

  “Hello, Cleo.”

  “You never came back.”

  “I would have.”

  “You’d better come now,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I know something you’d like to know.” There was a lilt to her voice as if she had been belting a few drinks.

  “Can’t you tell me now?”

  “Nope. I’m going to tell you when you get here.” She laughed gently and put the phone back. I said something under my breath and redialed her number. It rang a dozen times but she wouldn’t answer it. I cradled the receiver, then got up and climbed into my clothes. It was eleven-thirty and one hell of a time to be starting out again.

  There are times when something happens to Greenwich Village. It gives a spasmodic heave as if trying for a rebirth and during its convulsions the people who dwell in her come out to watch the spectacle. It’s hard to tell whether it’s the inanimate old section or the people themselves, but you know that something is happening. Windows that never show light suddenly brighten; figures who have merely been shadows in doorways take life and move. There is an influx from neighboring parts, people being disgorged from taxicabs to be swallowed up again in the maw of the bistros whose mouths are open wide to receive them.

  The peculiar ones with the high falsettos, skin-tight pants and jackets tossed over shoulders capelike display themselves for public viewing, pleased that they are the center of attraction, each one trying for the center of the spotlight. Their counterparts, sensing new prey available, ready themselves, then stalk toward their favorite hunting grounds, masculine in their movements, realizing that sooner or later someone will respond to the bait being cast out, then the slow, teasing struggle would begin, and they, being the more wise, would make the capture.

  A sureness seemed to be the dominant attitude. Everybody seemed so sure of themselves for that one single night. The heavy damp that should have been oppressive worked in reverse, a challenge to stay outside and dare the elements, a reason to go indoors to expend the excessive energy that was suddenly there.

  I got out of the cab on Seventh Avenue and walked through the crowds, watching them pulsate across the streets at the change of the lights, feeling the static charge of their presence. I wasn’t part of them at all and it was as though I were invisible. They had direction of purpose, to be part of the pleasure of the rebirth. I had direction of course only and picked my way to the house where Greta Service had lived and pushed Cleo’s bell.

  The buzzer clicked on the lock and I went inside, let the door shut behind me and went up the stairs to the top floor and stood there in the dark. I didn’t knock. She knew I was there. I waited a minute, then her door opened silently, flooding the landing with a soft rose glow from the lights behind her and she was wearing one of those things you could see through again.

  “Hello, Mike.”

  I walked inside, let her take my hat and coat from me and picked up the drink she had waiting on top of the table. Her project had been finished and her work area was rearranged, her tools and equipment placed to become part of the decorative concept of the room. Through the skylight and the full French windows I could see the outline of New York above the opaque surfaces of buildings around her.

  “Pensive tonight, aren’t you?” She went over and pulled a cord, then another, closing out the view through the windows. It was like pulling the covers over your head in bed.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “No need to be. You’ll loosen up. Even if I make you.”

  “It’s one of those nights,” I told her.

  “I know. You felt it too, didn’t you?”

  I nodded.

  She walked past me, the sheer nylon of the full-length housecoat crackling, the static making it cling to her body like another skin. She switched the record player on and let Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique seep into the room. She turned, swirling the ice in the glass in her hand as the subtle tones began their journey into life. “Fitting music, isn’t it?”

  I looked at her and tasted my drink. She had built it just right.

  “They don’t know it out there,” she said. “They take time out of their expressionless little existences trying to find something vital here and leave things as they found them. They really go away empty.”

  “What did you have to tell me, Cleo?”

  She smiled, crossed one arm under her breasts, balanced the other on it and sipped her drink. “But you aren’t one of them.”

  “Cleo...”

  She paid no attention to me. She walked up, took the drink I didn’t know I had finished from my hand very slowly and went and made me another. “Do you remember what I told you when you were here?”

  “No.”

  “I said I wanted to paint you.”

  “Look ...”

  “Specially now.” Her eyes viewed me with an odd interest.

  She turned her head from side to side, moved to study me in a different light, then said, “Yes, something has happened to you since the last time. It’s better now. Like it should be. There isn’t any softness at all left.”

  I put the drink down and she shook her head very gently. “It’s something you want to know, Mike, but you’ll have to do what I want you to do first.”

  I said, “I found Greta.”

  “Good,” she said, and smiled again. “It’s more than that now though, isn’t it?”

  “Come on, Cleo. What have you got on your mind?”

  She walked up to me, turned her back and took my hands, wrapping them around her waist. Her hair brushed my face and it smelled faintly of a floral scent. “I work for the Proctor Group too, or have you forgotten? I knew when you went up to see Dulcie McInnes. You should never have said what you did to her Miss Tabor. That old harridan can’t stand dominant males.”

  “I was there,” I admitted.

  She turned in my arms, her body a warm
thing against mine. “And I was jealous.” She smiled, let her arms crawl up my sides, her hands going to my face, then lacing them behind my head. “I saw you first,” she grinned. “Am I teasing well enough?”

  “I’m hurting. Don’t lean on me too hard.”

  “There was some strange speculation about Teddy Gates. Now he’s missing after you paid another visit up there. People are talking, yet nobody really knows anything at all.”

  “Except you.”

  “Except me,” she repeated. “You found Greta Service, but it couldn’t have ended because you’re here now to find out something else.”

  I ran my fingers down the small of her back and felt her body arch under them. “What’s your price, Cleo?”

  “You,” she said. “I’m going to paint you first. I want you permanently inscribed so I can look at you and touch you and talk to you whenever I want and know you’ll never fade away.” She raised herself on her toes and her mouth touched mine lightly. Then she let herself down and pushed away from me, her eyes sad little imps dancing in far off places.

  “I’m a funny woman, Mike. I’m young-old. I’ve seen too much and done too much in too short a time. What I really want I can never have, but I have sense enough to realize it, so I take what I can get when I can get it, or is that too complicated?”

  “I understand.”

  “This is Cleo’s last stand here.” She swept her arm around to take in the room. “It’s very little, but it’s a sanctuary of a sort. From here I can see the other part of the world and nobody can touch me. I can stay here forever and ever with all the good parts of me right where I want them, never changing, never turning their backs. Do I sound too philosophical?”

  “You can do better.”

  The imps in her eyes danced again. “But I don’t want to. I’m alive here, Mike. Now I’m going to make you part of that life. I won’t sell you. I won’t give you away. I’m going to keep you. You’re going to be mine like nobody else ever had you.”

  “Cleo ...”

  “Or what you want to know won’t be yours.”

  I put the drink down. “Your show, kid. Do I loosen my tie?”

  “You take off your clothes, Mike.”

  She painted me that night. It wasn’t what I had expected. The background was a jungle green with little bright blobs of orange that seemed to explode outward from the canvas, distorting the sensation of seeing a flat surface. There was a man in the picture and it was me, but not so much the physical representation as the mental one. It was the id rather than the ego, the twilight person you were only when you had to be. She had seen things and caught them, registering them for all time as we know it and when I saw myself as she did it was the same as looking at the face of an enemy. The short hairs on the back of my neck raised in sudden anger at the confrontation and I knew what Belar Ris had seen just as I had seen him. My .45 was there too, exact in detail almost to seeming three-dimensional, but it was away from my hands as if I didn’t need it.

  During the hours she had discarded the sheer nylon, working unfettered, concentrating solely on the portrait. I could study her abstractly, enjoying the loveliness of her body, then in the stillness my mind had drifted to other things and Cleo was only a warm outline of motion, of long smooth sweeps of pink, blossoming mounds that were half hidden behind the easel, then quickly there again. I had time to think in an unreal world where thinking was all there was to do. The extended strands of the web began to join together with the cross sections of odd conjecture, and little by little, piece by piece, the thing that was possible became probable.

  She let me have that one brief look, then turned the canvas to face the walL

  “You’re mine now,” she said. Her finger touched a switch and the lights faded gradually into nothingness and the two of us were there alone, people again, barely visible, whitish silhouettes against the velvet of night.

  Behind the curtains a false dawn marked the beginning of a new day. The spasm outside was over and whether the Village was in the agony of rebirth or the throes of death, I would never know. We had bought the hours at a price. We had spent excesses we had accumulated during that time, and for a little while there was that crazy release that was a climax and an anticlimax that left no time for work or thought any more.

  I looked at the day crawling through the skylight. She had pulled back the blinds so that the glass was a huge square of wet gray overhead, wiggling with wormy raindrops that raced to the bottom to form a pool before dripping off the edge of the sill.

  I rolled off the couch and reached for my clothes. I could smell the aroma of coffee as I got dressed and called for her twice without getting an answer. I dressed quickly, found an electric percolator bubbling in the kitchen, poured myself a cup hurriedly and swallowed it down.

  Then I saw her note.

  It was written in charcoal on a sketching pad, just a few lines, but it said enough.

  Mike Darling ... the man Sol Renner saw Greta with has his picture in the paper beneath. Thank you for everything, it was lovely. You’ll never leave me now.

  Good-by, Cleo.

  I yanked the paper out from under the pad. It was the same copy Biff had shoved under my nose the other night. The man in the picture was Belar Ris.

  The web was pulling tighter, but I still couldn’t see the spider. I put my hat on and went back through the studio. The easel was still in place, but the picture was gone. The place still smelled of her perfume and the nylon thing was lying across the back of the chair. Pathétique was still playing, the record never having been rejected.

  She had chosen a good piece. Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Opus 74. Tchaikovsky should have stuck around to write another. This one would be even better.

  chapter 11

  I stopped by the hotel, showered and changed into fresh clothes. No calls had come in and when I phoned Velda’s number there was no answer and no messages. I left word for her to call me as soon as she arrived and dialed Pat. The desk sergeant told me he had left an hour ago and hadn’t reported in yet, but had asked if I had tried to contact him. I thanked him and hung up softly though I felt like slamming the receiver back on the cradle.

  I called Hy’s office and that didn’t answer.

  Dulcie’s phone didn’t answer either, then I remembered it was Saturday. Modern technology had given us two days of rest. I got so damn disgusted I went downstairs to the lobby and picked up a copy of the paper and flipped through it without really seeing anything until I came to the center fold.

  Somebody had snapped a shot of Belar Ris, Dulcie and me talking, but my back was to the camera and all you could see was Dulcie and Belar Ris and it looked for all the world as if we were enjoying ourselves.

  I threw the paper on a chair and was about to go out when the desk clerk stopped me. I wasn’t signed in under my right name, but he knew the room I was in and pointed to a row of phones against the wall. I picked it up and said, “Yeah?”

  “Mike?”

  “Speaking.”

  “Pat. What’s got hold of you?”

  “Listen ...”

  “You listen. Meet me at the Blue Ribbon about six-thirty. Have you called Hy?”

  “He wasn’t in. Why?”

  “Because they found Gates,” he said. “Some tramp tripped over the body under a culvert that goes over the Belt Parkway. Gates shoved a .22 pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger, or at least that’s the way it looked. He’s been dead since the day he left according to the M.E.’s estimate on the spot.”

  “Where does Hy fit in?”

  “Tell him to squash the story until we can move on it.”

  “The last time I tried that Mitch got killed.”

  “Mike...”

  “Okay. I’ll leave word. Just one thing ... did he have any money on him?”

  “Damn right, almost nine hundred bucks in cash.”

  “He didn’t get very far,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I’ll see you
at six-thirty”

  Now Gates, I thought. That opens the web again, but just a little bit. The spides was still inside.

  Pat was late. I sweated him out for an hour, playing with the coffee George had sent up to the table. Outside, the rain blasted down with the furious derision nature can have for humans, laughing at the futile attempts people put up to avoid her.

  Pat finally came in whipping the rain from his hat, one of the young lawyers from the District Attorney’s staff behind him. He introduced him quickly as Ed Walker and they sat down opposite me. Walker was looking at me as if I were a specimen in a zoo and I felt like slamming him one.

  Pat said, “Reach Hy?”

  “I told you I’d leave word. It was the best we can do.”

  “Good enough.”

  “Why?”

  “The county police accepted Gates’ death as suicide. We’re not sure. How’d you tap the money angle?”

  I told him what Dulcie had mentioned to me.

  “That might figure in.”

  “Pat,” I said, “don’t get lost in this. A guy with a grand in his pocket doesn’t knock himself off without a big run first.”

  “That’s what I mean,” he told me. “Any coroner’s jury would direct a verdict of suicide the way it was set up. He used his own gun, even the cartridges and the clip had his fingerprints on it and there was a possible motive behind his own death.”

  I pushed my coffee away and flipped a butt between my lips. “Get to it.”

  “Tell him, Ed.”

  Walker opened his briefcase, took out several sheets of paper and referred to them. He looked at Pat, then me, shrugged once and laid them flat on the table. “You guys have the screwiest deal I ever saw.”