Strange Embrace (10 page)

“It helps,” Johnny told him.

“Solid. And now you know who did it?”

Johnny nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Now I know.”

“Like on television?”

Johnny nodded again. “You’ve been a help,” he said. “I guess I’ll leave you to your Zen kick now. What’s that position you’re in again?”

“The full lotus posture. Why?”

“Just wondered,” Johnny said. He hesitated, choosing his words carefully. “Look, I’ve got a very square question to ask, if it’s a big bring-down just tell me to disappear. Okay?”

“Try me.”

“Why?” Johnny asked.

“Why what?”

“Why all this? You’re not some kind of nut. Your mind works right. Why sit on the floor and make like a lotus? You believe all this stuff?”

Schwerner wrinkled up his face. “Not exactly,” he admitted. “There’s some sense to it, but I don’t swallow it whole.”

“Then why play games? Why the beard-and-beat routine?”

The boy thought it over carefully. For a moment or two it seemed that he might not answer. Then he spoke.

“It’s like this,” he said. “My old man lives up in Yonkers. He’s got his own insurance agency there. Dull as dishwater but it pays for groceries and keeps oil in the tank, you know?”

“So?”

“So I’m not a talented cat. I can’t act and I can’t paint and I can’t write. No sense fooling myself. I’m no artist. So pretty soon I’ll be selling insurance in Yonkers. I’ll find some chick and get married and buy a house and sell insurance to people who don’t want to buy it. I mean, what the hell, there’s nothing else I’m keyed up to do. So the old man has a good thing going and I’ll go into it.” He shrugged. “And in the meantime I might as well bounce around a little. The papers call me a beatnik. The cops don’t like me. The people around here stare at me like I have gonorrhea or something. I’m not hurting anybody. I stay nice and quiet and don’t get in anybody’s way. I’m just having a little fun. I figure it’s not going to be any big gas selling insurance, and I’ll be selling insurance for a hell of a long time, and after that I’ll be dead. And that will be for an even longer time. So the Zen kick and the beat kick are just something to do first. Make sense?”

“Yeah,” Johnny said. “Yeah, I guess it does. And thanks.”

“I don’t turn on,” Lennie Schwerner said. “I don’t make a nuisance of myself. I don’t even get drunk. I’m not a pervert or anything. I’m not a candidate for Bellevue like most of the cats around here. I’m just enjoying myself.”

“You could do worse.”

“I probably will. I’ll see you again, man. In a few years I’ll sell you an insurance policy. Take it easy.”

Johnny called Haig at Homicide from a drugstore pay phone. The lieutenant’s voice was gruff. “Ready to give up, Johnny? Ready to let me pick up your actor?”

“Yeah, I’m ready.”

“What changed your mind?”

“I found something,” Johnny said. “I talked to that Sondra Barr girl and another neighbor, and I found the motive you were looking for. I know why Elaine was killed.”

“Why?”

“Take it easy,” Johnny said. “I want to go along for the ride. Tracy lives over in the Village anyway, so you can pick me up. It’s on your way, sort of.”

“Where are you?”

“Fifth Street and Avenue B. That’s—”

“I know where it is,” Haig cut in. “It’s not on my way. It’s not on anybody’s way.”

“You want to find out why Tracy killed her?” Johnny said. “Or do you want to play pattycake with him?”

An unhappy sigh came over the phone. “You gotta come along?” the cop asked. “You gotta be a cutie about this? You have a real sense of the dramatic, Lane.”

Johnny did not bother to deny it.

“There are times,” Haig confided, “when I think maybe you’ve got the makings of a first-class son of a bitch.”

“I’ll be waiting on the corner,” Johnny told him. “Don’t take too long.”

And he hung up.

“W
ITH THAT PENTHOUSE OF YOURS
,” Haig was saying, “you could also have a chauffeur. Buy yourself a nice long Lincoln. Or a Caddy, say. Then hire some monkey in uniform to drive you around. That would make my life easier.”

“I don’t need a chauffeur,” Johnny said sweetly. “Not so long as I have you.”

Haig growled. They were sitting in the back of a police car, an unmarked green Plymouth. Haggerty was in the driver’s seat. Another cop whose name Johnny had not managed to catch sat beside Haggerty in front. The two of them were silent.

“Okay,” Haig said. “I made a special trip across town solely for the pleasure of your company. Now give. You were talking about a motive, remember? Is it for real or are you saving yourself the price of a cab?”

“It’s for real.”

“So let’s have it.”

“Elaine James wasn’t so sweet and innocent,” Johnny said. “She didn’t sleep around but she was no paragon of virtue. Maybe virginity is only womb-deep—”

“Get to the point.”

“I’m getting there,” Johnny said. “Seems she used to shoot off her mouth about coming into a pile of dough without working for it. At first I thought she meant the show—it was a lush part and a big break. But in that case she’d be working for it and consequently the idea didn’t quite figure.”

“So?”

“So I asked one of Elaine’s acquaintances—not Sondra—and it spilled out. Elaine had a line on somebody, someone connected with the show. She knew something, and she figured the blackmail take would be sweet and long.” He smiled. “Now you get three guesses who the blackmail victim might be.”

“Tracy?”

“Has to be. Now he’s got a motive. Now you can pin him down and skin him. You wouldn’t have had much otherwise without digging for it. Sondra’s your star witness—the gal supposed to prove Tracy was with Elaine—well, let’s just say she wouldn’t be much of an asset to the prosecution. She’s sort of an apprentice junkie. I had to keep reminding her what her name was.”

Haig waved a hand. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Tracy’s no professional criminal. He’d crack anyway. We coulda picked him up yesterday and wormed the blackmail bit out of him.”

“You’re welcome,” Johnny said.

“Don’t get me wrong—this helps, and thanks. The more we know in advance the easier it is to get him to tell us the rest. This way we walk in with motive as well as opportunity. A nice package all ready to roll. Of course, what we need is a confession. You know how hard that’ll be? Not hard at all, Johnny. Chances are his conscience has got him climbing up and down every wall in town already. He’s dying to tell somebody but there’s nobody to tell. Well, he can tell us. Maybe a good lawyer can sneak him off with second-degree, but we’ve got him now.”

Johnny lapsed into silence. Whoever the whispering voice on the telephone had been, he could have saved himself the trouble. And he had wasted the dough shelled out for Johnny’s beating—it had not been necessary.

Because you didn’t get too far with a play when the leading man stood trial for the murder of the leading lady. You took yourself a deep breath, and you put the script into an envelope, and you filed away the whole business for future reference. And you tried not to think too much about it in order to keep from crying and kicking your feet like a two-year-old having a temper tantrum.

Such a nice script, too…

“Sort of puts a damper on your play,” Haig said.

Johnny sighed. “I was thinking the same thing.”

“You can’t win ’em all, you know. At least you can tell yourself you’ve been instrumental in solving a murder. That ought to give you some satisfaction.”

“I guess so.” The green Plymouth stopped short for a stoplight and the driver cursed gently. Crosstown traffic was thick. The afternoon rush hour was getting underway and the cars crawled through the streets like fat water beetles swimming valiantly through molasses. After a long time they pulled up in front of a chrome-and-steel monstrosity that looked out of place on Barrow, one of the quieter streets in the western part of Greenwich Village.

Johnny said, “Tracy lives here?”

Haig nodded. “He’s got the penthouse. Not as fancy as yours, I suppose, but what the hell. It’s the penthouse.”

“Sure. And it’s just about Tracy’s speed. The prestige of a Village address coupled with all the ugliness of a housing project.”

“It looks like a steamboat,” Haig conceded. “But it’s where he has a penthouse. Ordinary slobs like me, slobs that don’t have penthouses of our own, we’re easy to impress.”

The building had a slightly broken-down doorman who looked homesick for Park Avenue. Haig flashed his shield and they went on past him. The elevator was self-service, but to get to the penthouse you needed a key. Haggerty got the key from the doorman, turned it in the little button marked PH, and the car went skyward.

“Impressive,” Haig remarked, “You can’t even ride up there without a key. You got a gadget like that at your dump, Johnny? Or aren’t you that fancy?”

“You’ve been there. There’s an operator running the car so you don’t need a key.”

Haig winced. “Suppose you’re a visitor at this place. How do you get up?”

“You tell the doorman,” Johnny explained patiently. “And he calls upstairs and checks you out, and then he uses his key in the elevator. The one you’re holding in your hand.”

Haig looked thoughtfully at the key, then shrugged and put it into his pocket. The car eased to a stop and the door opened. They stepped out of the elevator and into the foyer of Carter Tracy’s apartment. It was an impressive layout, Johnny had to admit. The furniture was too extreme for his tastes, too modern in design, maybe a little too flashy. But then it had to reflect the tenant’s personality, and in that it succeeded admirably. It was just the sort of place Tracy would pick to live in—an over-thick carpet laid wall-to-wall, glaringly daring arrangements of lamps and sectional couches and tables, all too low to serve other than a decorative function for a human being of normal size. Blinding abstract paintings set the walls on fire. It was fine for Tracy, but Johnny could not see how anybody else could stand living in it.

“Tracy!” Haig’s voice echoed through the apartment. “Police officers, Tracy. We want to talk to you.”

Silence.

“Maybe,” Johnny suggested, “he’s not home.”

Haig turned to Haggerty. “Go down and talk to the doorman,” he said. “Find out if Tracy left the apartment this afternoon. Ask him—”

“Sit down and relax, Haggerty.” Johnny grinned. “It would be easier to call the old coot on the phone, Sam. Not that one—the intercom. Over there on the wall. Here, let me.”

Johnny picked up the intercom phone, jangled the hook a few times and waited until the doorman got around to answering it. “Police,” he said. “Mr. Tracy leave the building since you came on? Uh-huh. Yeah. He have any visitors? Yeah. Thanks.”

He returned the receiver to the hook and turned to Haig. “The doorman’s been on since noon,” he said. “Tracy went out to lunch at one and came back half an hour later. He’s been here since, as far as our boy knows.”

“Visitors?”

“None. Tracy’s here and he’s alone. Why don’t we look for him? That might make sense.”

“Hey, good thinking, Johnny.” The tone was mild but the implication was obvious:
Quit showing off, sonny boy. We like you and you’ve been handy but we know our business. So sit down and behave.

“Sure,” Johnny said. He lowered himself uncomfortably to an uncomfortably low couch and picked up a copy of
Hollywood Reporter
from a low coffee table. He flipped it open and tried to get interested in the not-too-exciting trade gossip of a not-too-exciting trade. If Hollywood would only stop being Hollywood, he thought sadly, they might manage to accomplish something out there.

That train of thought lost him. He turned to the scandal section, a column written by, for and about idiots, and tried to care who was infanticipating and who was headed for Splitsville and what U-I hot property was last seen with what director on the Twentieth lot. He failed. He was reading the latest inside poop—the columnist’s word—on the latest heartthrob of a teenage teaser with the improbable name of Thursday Rivet when he heard Haig’s voice.

“Johnny!”

He stood up quickly. “Aha! You need my special talents. You’ve run into a snag—”

He broke off the sentence when he saw the look on Sam Haig’s face. The big cop was standing in the doorway of what looked like the bedroom. His shoulders were slumped and his face had a haggard look.

Johnny reached him in a hurry.

Johnny went inside.

He took a good look.

He saw a bedroom, the ceiling high, the walls a bright baby blue, the bed huge and built for comfort. He saw cigarette burns on new furniture, the scars of cigarettes forgotten while the bed was being put cheerfully to use. He saw a set of matched and expensive luggage in one corner, a big picture of the room’s tenant on one wall, another glaring abstract on another. He saw two empty liquor bottles and one packet of contraceptives prominently displayed on the dresser.

He also saw a body. The nude body of Carter Tracy. It lay on its back on the bed, lay on the sheet with the bedcovers carelessly kicked down around the foot of the bed. The eyes in its head were open and glassy. Its hands lay palms-up at the sides of its torso.

Its throat had been cut wide open.

There were times when you didn’t want to think about anything in the world. There were times when all you wanted to do was to go home to your own place and open one or two bottles and get very drunk. Not happy drunk, which would be impossible. Not moody drunk, which would be unpleasant. Just drunk, dead drunk, so that when you closed your eyes and passed out you would be so thoroughly stoned that you wouldn’t even dream.

That was about the way Johnny Lane felt.

“I don’t even want to talk about it,” Haig said. “I don’t want to talk about it or think about it or do anything at all about it. Everything was all set up, everything was perfect, we had the motive and the means and the opportunity, we even had the goddamned murderer. We guessed it right, we figured it right, we saw the whole mess clear through. The leading man killed the leading lady and the ball game was over.”

Johnny didn’t say anything.