Strange Embrace (17 page)

“Oh,” she said. “I see.”

“Do you?”

“Uh-huh.” She was a kitten now, a sexy kitten with deep smoky eyes and moist lips. It was a role that suited her.

“I see now,” she went on. “Somebody came over because somebody wants to make love. I see it all now.”

He kissed her neck. Her hands rubbed the back of his neck and played with his hair.

“You need a haircut, Johnny.”

“I know.”

“And that’s not all you need, is it? You need more than a haircut. You need me.”

He kissed her again. This time there was no tension at all—none he could detect, at any rate. This time there was passion and a low-burning flame.

Her voice was husky when she spoke. The husky purr of a sexy kitten.

“Come on, Johnny. You know where the bedroom is. Let’s go there. Let’s go from the living room to the loving room, Johnny. Let’s go.”

They walked to the bedroom and he closed the door. She turned to him, kissed him. Then she reached for the light switch. He took her hand.

“Leave it on, Jan.”

“You want to watch?”

“I want to watch.”

I want to watch your face, he thought. I want to see your eyes and your mouth when I feed you the right line. I want to see how good an actress you are, Jan.

She kissed him again. She stepped away, watched while he took off his jacket. He hung it on the knob of the closet door. Then she snuggled close to him and undid his tie.

“You just stand there,” she told him. “I’m going to undress you. I can be a better servant than Ito, Johnny. Just stand there while I take your clothes off.”

She took off the tie, then unbuttoned the shirt. “No bandages,” she said. “Doctor take them off?”

“I took them off.”

“Then I’d better not hug you,” she said. “That’s going to be rough. I like to hug you.”

She finished removing his clothes, placed them neatly on the chair. He kicked off shoes and socks. She stepped back a stride or two and regarded him thoughtfully.

“Lovely,” she said.

He gazed at her, his eyes properly passionate, as she unbelted her wrapper with casual grace, slipped it off and tossed it at the chair. She turned to face him, posed her ivory body for him, smiled at him.

“Do you like the merchandise, Mr. Lane?”

He moistened his lips with his tongue. He swallowed. He nodded.

All the proper gestures, he thought. All the right moves. All perfectly natural, all completely calculated to convey a certain erroneous, not to say erogenous, impression.

She came to him. He took her in his arms and felt her nude body against his. Her breasts pressed against his chest and her mouth kissed his mouth. He found a breast with a hand and held it gently, tenderly.

“Let’s go to bed,” she murmured.

And they went to bed. Only it wasn’t a bed at all, he realized. It looked like a bed, but it was something else entirely, something quite different.

It was a stage.

It began.

It went on.

It ended.

He held her for a moment afterward, held her warmth against him, and he wished that he did not have to do it, that he did not have to pile false tenderness on top of false passion. He felt like a prostitute and he felt like an actor—felt like almost anything save a decent human being.

Then he rolled away from her. The overhead light glared now. He heard the sound of a match striking. Then she was passing him a cigarette. He dragged on it and sucked the smoke into his lungs. He needed it.

Badly.

It had been weird, frightening. Love-making with all the trappings of love present and none of them meaning a thing. There was no desire on his part, no emotional attachment, nothing but the physical manifestation of excitement necessary for the accomplishment of his role.

He had gone through all the motions, all the kissing and stroking and nuzzling and fondling. And then the scene had reached its climax, and so had they.

And it meant less than nothing.

“Johnny—”

The denouement, he thought. The beginning of the end. The conversation afterward.

“Johnny—”

“I needed that,” he murmured.

“Me, too.”

“You’re good, Jan. You’re wonderful.”

“Am I?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You’re good, too.”

He hesitated, but just for the merest shadow of a second. Then, his voice the same level, the same pitch, he read his line.

His eyes were on her face. He watched her eyes, watched her mouth, and he read his line perfectly.

He said: “As good as Elaine?”

The reaction was there. It was small and quick because she was a professional actress, but it was there because the line had taken her completely by surprise. She had been unprepared, totally unprepared. He saw her eyes widen instinctively, saw her mouth go weak. Her muscles tightened involuntarily.

“I don’t get it,” she said.

But she was lying. She got it, got it completely. He wished he had been wrong, but he had not been.

“I’ll spell it out,” he said. “You’re a lesbian, Jan. Not a typical one. Not a swaggering type wearing pants and a tie. But then, neither was Elaine.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“Like hell I am. You met Elaine through the play. One of you made a pass at the other. God knows who threw the first pass. It hardly matters. It was what you both wanted, so you went to bed.”

Jan was staring at him and he watched her eyes. Fury had joined the shock. But there was something else present, something that was a combination of fear and calculation. He could almost see the wheels turning within her brain.

“But Elaine had big ideas,” he went on. “Maybe she got a look at your apartment and saw what a hole she was living in by comparison. Maybe she was planning a blackmail pitch from the first. She was a mercenary little minx, according to what I’ve heard from her East Side friends.” Johnny butted his cigarette. “So she set it up,” he went on. “With a tape recorder? Photographs? Whatever she got on you could hurt. All the rumors drifting in from California had helped rather than harmed. The Sex Goddess image was fine—letting the great American public think that little Jan Vernon had a streak of nymphomania under her soft skin, that kind of thing paid off at the box office. But the public wouldn’t come running to watch a dyke play heterosexual love scenes…”

“You just made love to me,” she gasped. “You just made love to me. How can you think anything like that?”

Johnny ignored the supplication in her voice.

“You would have paid, I suppose,” he went on. “But Elaine got too ambitious. A friend of hers told me she was looking for big money. She had ideas about a penthouse apartment and a lush wardrobe. You couldn’t afford that kind of double expense. Besides, your pride must have been hurt. Here you thought you had a lover and it turned out you had a blackmailer. You must have hated her one hell of a lot, Jan. I can’t say I blame you.”

Jan’s eyes now were burning up with hate and the hatred was not for Elaine James. It was for Johnny.

“So you paid her off in spades, Jan. You went up to that rathole of hers and you took her to bed. First you made love to her and then you cut her throat. That was a nice macabre touch. I bet you got a kick out of it.”

“You filthy son of a—”

“Shut up, will you? You left her dead and you came back here and went to work. You were in the clear for the time being but you couldn’t be too sure of getting through a close police investigation. If Elaine James had been killed because she was Elaine James you were in trouble. You decided to make it look as though she had been killed because she was in
A Touch of Squalor.
You got on the phone and called people. You even called me, and I didn’t recognize your voice. The whisper was cute, Jan. You wound up with a voice that could have belonged to a man or a woman. Everybody assumed it was a man. It was natural to do so.”

He took a deep breath. He wished it were over, but there was more he had to get out.

“You told me about the calls you’d received.” Johnny started to dress himself. “That was a pretty touch, too. Nobody else got a phone call before Elaine was killed. Only afterward—because you made them. But you let me think there really had been a caller before. You told me about the calls you got and about the calls Elaine got. And Elaine wasn’t around to deny anything.”

“You’re crazy, Johnny. Absolutely mad.”

“Sure I am. Or I would have seen through this a long time ago. You figured that the killing, of itself, might not be enough to prove that Elaine’s death was a move against the show. So you lined up Rugger and Marlo to hand me a beating. I should have doped that out when I talked to Rugger. He told me the person on the phone whispered to him. I could understand the caller whispering to people in the cast—that meant they could recognize his voice otherwise. But you whispered to Rugger for a different reason. You whispered to him and Marlo to keep them from knowing you were a woman. You called them a second time while I was circling the block like an idiot. That was why you wanted me back after the cast meeting. You wanted to set me up for them.”

“I wanted you to—to make love to me.”

“Sure you did.” He looked at her and wondered how she had missed grabbing up an Oscar during all those years in Hollywood. She was certainly a good enough actress. A peach of an actress—in bed or out of it. A star.

“So we went to bed,” he said. “Then I left you and got my head kicked in by the talent you hired. You thought that beating, plus the murder, would set the stage to leave you in the clear—since it seemed indicated that the killer had it in for the whole show cast, rather than just Elaine.”

“Then what about Tracy? Why would I do him in, too? You’re being completely ridiculous, Johnny.”

He stuck his legs into his trousers. “I found out that Elaine had someone on the hook for blackmail. Tracy fitted the part. I made the mistake of calling you and telling you about it. And that got you scared. You knew damn well that Tracy wasn’t the blackmail victim, or the killer, either. And you cleverly figured out that once Tracy was cleared, the police would be out hunting for another blackmail victim. And the one they would turn up would be you.” He sighed. “That took care of Tracy. You saw a way to kill two birds with one razor, to coin a phrase. With Tracy out of the way the blackmail angle would be dropped. And there would be a second murder on the string, a second member of the cast of
A Touch of Squalor
who was dead as a lox. It was a perfect deception play. Besides, you couldn’t have liked Tracy too much. He was a seducer, a braggart, a pompous son of a bitch. The way you killed him was a pure poetic justice, come to think of it.”

Her eyes tried to mock him. “Tell me all about it, Johnny. Tell me how I killed him. And why it was so poetic.”

“Sure. You figured it would be a good idea to kill him the same way you killed Elaine. That would make it look like a chain murder, tie it up neater. You went to his apartment, got past the doorman as easily as you slipped by the one in my building that night. You took the elevator to the floor below and walked up a flight of stairs. He let you in and you fell into his arms and covered the poor bastard with kisses. Then you took him to bed.”

Johnny paused to tie his shoes.

“But I don’t suppose he got to make love to you—unless you wanted to be especially rotten about it. You probably cut his throat first. Why make love to a man if you can avoid it? Women were more your cup of tea. You killed him and left him there. You went home and let me find the body. And you were in the clear, or at least you thought you were.” He forced a smile. “Interesting?”

“Fascinating. Tell me more, Johnny.”

He shrugged. “About that night you tried to get me to drop the case,” he said. “I wouldn’t let go of it. So you came up to my building, to my apartment. You even picked the lock to get in. When I got home you were waiting for me. I should have learned enough from Rugger to figure that you were the killer. But I hadn’t. I suppose that saved my life. You must have been all prepared to cut my throat if I seemed to know too much.”

Having knotted his tie, he sat down on the bed, where she still was lying.

“That’s fascinating,” she told him. She stretched out her arms, one hand resting lightly on his thigh, the other draped over the side of the bed. The hand on his thigh began to do things. And he knew why. The last refuge of a woman, the ultimate appeal… He picked up the hand and moved it away. He did not want her to touch him, not now. It had been bad enough before when he was playing the role. Now it was too much to take.

“Let’s get back to that razor,” she went on. “If I remember correctly, I wasn’t wearing too much when I saw you that night. I was nude, as I recall. Wasn’t I?”

“Yeah.”

“And you saw that my hands were empty. I couldn’t have had the razor up a sleeve since I wasn’t wearing any sleeves. Now if I had this razor, Johnny, where the hell was it?”

He shrugged. “Who knows?”

“It must have been somewhere,” she said. “Unless I was just there because I wanted to make love to you. Unless this pipe dream of yours is a load of nonsense.”

“Who the hell cares where it was?” he snapped. “You could have stuck it anywhere. You probably slipped it under the mattress.”

Jan moved quickly. One moment she was lying flat on her back, one hand near his side, the other draped over the edge of the bed. The next second she was on her feet between the bed and the door.

“You were right,” she said. “It was under the mattress. That’s a good place for a razor, don’t you think?”

He stared.

Because the razor wasn’t under the mattress now.

It was in her hand.

J
OHNNY LANE TOOK A LONG LOOK
at the girl and a longer look at the razor. He also took a deep breath. And then he started to get up from the bed.

“Stay where you are, Johnny.”

He did not stay. He stood up and looked at her. She was about ten feet from him—a couple of steps and he could reach her. But she had the razor.

“You’d do better not to kill me,” he told her levelly. “Ito knows where I am. He knows everything I know. Besides, you’d be killing me in your bedroom instead of mine. That would be a little hard to explain.”