Anna Halsey was about two hundred and forty pounds of middle-aged putty-faced woman in a black tailor-made suit. Her eyes were shiny black shoe buttons, her cheeks were as soft as suet and about the same color. She was sitting behind a black glass desk that looked like Napoleon’s tomb and she was smoking a cigarette in a black holder that was not quite as long as a rolled umbrella. She said: “I need a man.” —Raymond Chandler, Trouble is My Business
Me, I like ‘em husky. —Mickey Spillane, I, the Jury
ONE
One thing I can’t stand, it’s seeing a woman cry. Hard to believe coming from a guy in my line, I know. But that’s the God’s honest: whether it’s over a drunk husband, a cheating husband, or—as it was in Naomi Connover’s case—a dead husband, I just can’t stand seeing a woman cry.
“The maid found him,” she said between sobs. “He was naked. Th-the police, they said it was a heart attack, th-that Leo was alone, b-but…” She broke down again. I looked at the pens on my desk to keep from looking at her. I told her to take her time. Eventually she got it all out:
Naomi’s husband Leonard’d been found dead over at the Olympus two days back. The circumstances were strange enough the cleaning lady who found him doing her rounds called for the police along with the ambulance. Leonard was nude, for one. And for two, he was alone. It didn’t take a lot of imagination to see it as a sex killing. Or worse yet: a sex suicide. They’ve been known to happen. A married man only rents a room for a handful of reasons—none of which he’s likely to tell the missus about.
The coroner’s take was somewhat less hysterical. Just your run of the gin mill heart attack. Case closed.
Nevermind the fact Leonard’d checked in as “Greg.”
Nevermind the fact a mysterious SOMEONE was reported fleeing the scene.
The cops had parking tickets to write, donuts to eat. If the coroner said it was a heart attack, then that’s what it was.
That wasn’t good enough for Naomi. She’d laid awake the last couple nights, turning it over and over like the loving wife she was until she found me—Harvey Durain, P. I.—in the phonebook.
When Naomi finished the telling up to her knocking on my door, she asked me if I think someone might’ve killed Leo for a payout of some kind. I admitted it was a possibility. An outside one, sure, but it was a possibility. Leonard brought in good money doing something or other at one of the half dozen business firms downtown, a whole hell of a lot better money than I do, at least.
Used to be, twenty-five bucks a day (plus expenses) would cover room, board, and a nasty booze habit. Now it’s barely enough to close out my tab when the barman hollers out last call at the end of the night. I kept all that to myself.
What I told Naomi was that in murders of this kind—if it really was a murder—it was almost always the spouse who stood to gain. Seeing as she was Leonard’s spouse and sole beneficiary, and seeing as she was sitting across from me crying her eyes out, I was hard pressed to come up with any suspects besides stress and maybe a few too many glasses of scotch after work. But Naomi was determined.
“All the same,” she said. “I need to know who was in that room with him. Leo wasn’t the cheating kind, and even if it was a heart attack, something had to cause it.”
I had ideas about that, but I kept them to myself too. But I admired Naomi’s devotion. Most women hear their man’s been found dead in a hotel room, they write him off as an adulterer and start spending their inheritance. Not her. Even in death, she was completely his. Naomi came to me to see justice done. And she would—
—for a reasonable hourly fee, of course.
TWO
The Olympus’ lobby was done up in the Greek-style: all white marble and columns, tangles of vines here and there. Or maybe it was Roman-style. Truth be told, I could never tell the difference much. One pillar looks about the same as another to me, and the only Romans and Greeks I’ve met work at All-Nite diners and pizza joints. Something tells me Vito wouldn’t be the one to give me a crash course in the capital C Classics, besides.
What caught my eye was the fountain. The thing had four tiers like a thousand dollar wedding cake, but it had a statue of a lady draped in a sheet on top instead of a man and wife. Most times, a guy’s got to pay to see something like that, one way or another. A haggard looking cleaning lady stood by with a mop. Management must’ve hired her on for contrast.
When I managed to wrench myself away from that pretty picture, I noticed there was a desk at back of it. I’ve worked enough jobs to know better than to ask a desk clerk anything. Best case, he lets you slip him a couple bucks to peek at the guest log, where all you’ll learn is the guy you’re after used a fake name (“Greg”—ha!) and paid by the hour. Because of course he did: he’s either running around or running away. Worst case, the pencil neck brings the house dick down on your head and you’re back to where you started, plus or minus a tooth or three.
The man working the desk that night looked like a worst case to me, so I made straight for the elevators. The ancient wino manning the lifts looked at me expectantly out from under his bellboy hat. I said: “Third floor.”
“Yup. That’s where everybody goes these days,” he slurred, punching the button.
I grunted.
“Yup. You, the police, that couple a few nights back…” he trailed off.
“What couple?”
“A man anna woman. I could hardly fit in the elevator with ‘em.”
“A lot of luggage?”
“A lotta gal.”
I thought I misheard. I said: “You told me it was just a man and a woman.”
“I did, an’ it was. But the last time I saw a dame like that,” he hiccuped. “I hadda pay a quarter.”
The elevator dinged. “This is where I get off.”
“Yup,” he smiled.
“Want a tip?”
He stuck out a liverspotted hand.
“Switch to vodka. It doesn’t tell on your breath the way whiskey does.”
I stepped out onto the landing. A sign on the wall told me rooms 301 through 310 were off to my left and Rooms 311 to 320 were off to my right. The overflowing trashcan beneath it told me the cleaning lady hadn’t made it up this far yet. I’d catch her when she did.
You want to learn anything at a hotel, you ask a maid, and you ask her where her boss can’t hear her answer.
In the meantime, I lit up and bummed around the hallways. The Olympus was a nice place—a far cry from the No-Tell Motels you usually expect to find a man and his mistress, drunk elevator operators notwithstanding.
Maybe Naomi’s hunch was right.
Maybe there was some other angle I wasn’t seeing…
Two cigarettes later, I heard a laundry cart squeak out onto the landing and made my way back to where I’d come. The girl pushing it couldn’t have been more than fifteen. Sixteen, tops. Younger than the woman I’d seen down at the fountain by a century or so, anyways. I said: “Excuse me, miss. Mind if I ask you some questions?”
“Is this about the… that man they found?”
I said it was.
“I already told the other policemen everything.”
I didn’t correct her. Instead, I said: “Run it by me again.”
“There’s not much to tell, really. Some guy died in one of the rooms. I wasn’t even the one who found them. That was Jackie—she has all the luck…
“Anyway, I heard people saying it was a heart attack. Then I heard some of the other girls who were on shift the night before Jackie found the body—I mean… that man—saying he’d checked in with a woman, and that maybe she had something to do with it.”
She leaned in, confidentially: “I can show you the room, if you want. It’s just down the hall.”
“Thanks, kid.” She led me to Room 318. “Mind letting me in so I can give it a once over, see if there’s anything the boys missed?”
“I don’t see why not. You are the law, after all.” She pulled a skeleton key from her apron and opened the door. “I really didn’t expect you’d be back at all. Not after Mr. Papadopoulos paid the bill.”
“The bill?”
“You know…”
“No, I don’t know.”
“Maybe I said too much,” she blushed.
“Or not enough.”
“It’s only… Well, it’s happened before. A man brings a lady here he shouldn’t, something happens, and Mr. P pays the bill to the police. You know, to keep them away—to keep things quiet. It’s all just to protect the hotel’s reputation.
“But before, it was small stuff. Grass, that kind of thing. Now, with this, I…”
I said: “It’s all right, kid. I’ll let you know when I’m done here so you can lock up after me. Wouldn’t want you to find your elevator man sleeping off a drunk in here.”
“You’re sure it’s okay?” she said.
“I’m sure.” That seemed to satisfy her. She disappeared down the hall and I was left alone to earn my rate.
I searched the room from top to bottom. I found what I was looking for wedged between the mattress and the bedframe: a matchbook. The flap read THE ATTIC LOUNGE in big block text and had a little black and white drawing of a house with the upstairs light on printed on it. I pocketed it and went to let the cleaning girl know I was finished. She was just coming out of Room 314. She asked: “Did you find anything?”
“Only this,” I said, showing her the matchbook.
“Oh, that’s not far from here.” She gave me directions.
As far as leads went it wasn’t much of one, but it was better than nothing.
Besides, I needed a drink.
THREE
None of it makes any sense. who was leonard with? anyone? i need a lead… i need a refill. nix the heart attack line. this was a kill… what’s this about the elevator man’s twenty-five cent freakshow crack? Non sequitor? red herring? what? what!?—
The voice of a pack-a-day angel saying, “Can I get that glass out of your way, hon?” snapped me out of it.
I looked up and saw HER.
You’d need a wide lens to take her picture and a rail spike to hang it. I’d never seen so much woman. She had to be pushing four, five hundred pounds, and two hundred of them were fighting their way out of her top. She had a mess of blue-black hair pulled back in a bun the way all working girls do to keep it out of her face. And what a face! Like one of those blushing cupids, the kind with the chubby cheeks you want to pinch.
She was the kind of girl who made you wish you had more hands.
I was in the next best thing to love.
Across the lounge, one of the players made his sax yowl like a tomcat.
I said: “Thanks…?” searching for a nametag on the wide expanse of her breasts. My eyes got lost between them.
“Amelia,” she said. “I’ve never seen you in here before.”
“That’s because I’ve never been in here before, Amy. Though knowing you’re here, maybe it might become a habit for me.”
“Maybe I’d like that…?”
“Harvey.”
“Well, maybe I’d like that, Harv.” She took my glass and headed for the bar. The view of her massive ass swaying away from me dulled the pain of our parting.
Just after 2:00 AM I paid my bill and followed that ass out to the street, where the lady it was attached to hailed a cab. I beat feet to my car and nosed into traffic behind her. I kept my distance. I didn’t think she’d be looking for a tail, but I’ve been wrong before.
But I knew I was right on this much: Amy was Leonard’s mistress.
And his killer.
FOUR
I checked the names on the mailbox and found an “A. Masque” living on the second floor. I went up and knocked. SHE answered. In the fifteen minutes it’d taken me to find her place, Amy’d changed out of her uniform into a slip so tight she might as well have been nude. The silky fabric was pulled so tight across her gut I could see the shadow of her bellybutton beneath.
“Harv?”
“You know why I’m here?”
“I’ve got a couple guesses,” she said, leaning forward.
“The first two don’t count. Mind if I come in?”
“I wish you would.”
I took a seat on a couch and watched as she mixed the drinks.
“Triple gin and tonic, right?”
“Good memory,” I said.
“Occupational hazard.” She handed me the drink and took three seats on the couch across from me. It moaned under her weight. I’d never been so jealous of a sofa.
There was a coffee table between us, though you wouldn’t know it for the mugs. We were quiet for a time, just taking each other in. I took a swallow of my G&T, and said: “Did you know a Leonard Connover?”
Her shoulders sagged like a hanged woman’s. “Yes,” she said. “But you knew that, didn’t you?”
I nodded.
“And if you know that, you’ve probably figured the rest.”
I said: “I’d like to hear it from your end.”
The headlights of a passing car on the street below cut through the blinds, briefly giving Amy tiger stripes. She said: “I moved to the city thinking I’d make it as a singer. I tried out a few clubs, a couple of lounges. It didn’t take long for me to realize nobody wanted to see a woman who looked like me up on stage.”
I could think of plenty of places I’d want to see a woman who looked like Amy, but I kept that to myself. She pulled a cigarette from the pack on the coffee table. I reached across and lit it.
“Well, aren’t you a gentleman?” Amy took a long drag and blew a ring at me. I smiled. She said: “I started smoking around then. Luckies are my favorite. They’re what really tore it for me though. Singing, I mean. I didn’t have the figure to begin with, and suddenly I didn’t have the voice either.
“So I took what I could get, and what I could get was waiting tables at the Attic where you found me. When Leo came in one night complaining about his wife, I listened. Naomi was devoted, but that’s all she was. They never did anything, if you catch my meaning.
“Whatever: he was sad, I was sad. We bonded. I didn’t even know he had money until later.”
The bar had been dark enough I could almost believe Amy hadn’t seen the cut of Leo’s suit the night they’d met. Almost. I let her go on talking.
“Not that money mattered any to me. I knew it wasn’t love with us… It was just… It was just his was the first kindness I’d known in a long time.
“It gets cold out here, Harv. Real cold…”
Silence, then:
“One thing led to another led to a hotel room. A string of hotel rooms, actually. Leo was paranoid Naomi would get suspicious and hire somebody like you to check up on him when he started coming home late. I guess he was right, at that.”
That squared with what I heard and saw at the Olympus too. Leo was smart being careful: a lady like her makes an impression wherever she goes.
“At first everything was normal between us. Nothing I hadn’t done before… Oh, don’t look so shocked! We’re both of age. But then… then Leo asked to be my slave.”
I said: “Your slave?”
“He told me since he knew we could never be husband and wife with Naomi around, he wanted to be mine—completely mine—in the few hours we spent together. I didn’t take to it right away. I’m not naturally cruel. But the foot rubs were nice, and I’ll say there was something about seeing a man like him down on his knees begging to touch me.
“I even used to put these out on him,” she said wistfully, ashing her cigarette into one of the six mugs on the table. There was a pause.
“But things escalated. The night it happened—the night Leo died—he asked me to sit on his face…”
I could picture it clear: those big thighs of hers viced around Leo’s head, his hands kneading her massive ass as she rubbed the humid mound of her sex over his face. She’d have no way of knowing that same face had gone from red, to redder, to purple, to dead under that belly I couldn’t keep my eyes off until it was too late.
It was an accident, plain and simple. I told her so.
“I know that,” she said. “It’s Naomi I’m worried about. I’m sure she doesn’t buy the heart attack line, or else you wouldn’t be here.”
There it was: Leonard’s infidelity had made a widow of one woman and a killer of another. I wished he was still alive so I could kill him myself. Saving one would doom the other, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. Amy must have seen it on my face. A single tear ran down her fat cheek.
I was beside her on the couch before the next one fell.
What happened next looked more like a wrestling match than anything you’d see in a blue movie.
Amy must not’ve known I made it to states back in high school.
We grappled our way to her bedroom.
I pinned her to the mattress.
We did it the natural way.
When we finished, Amy said: “I think I’m cured, Harv” and blew smoke at the ceiling.
“How’s that?”
“Being with Leo—doing all the things he wanted me to do—I was getting a taste for it. The power, the cruelty. But with you… With you it’s like… It’s like being with a man for the first time, again. I just get to be a woman… your woman.”
Laying there in the dark with HER, I knew what I had to do to stop the tears.
FIVE
The morning after, I called Naomi to my office. The bags under her eyes told me she’d gotten about as much sleep as I had, if not half as much fun. I looked into those eyes, and told her more-or-less the same lie Mr. P told the police. If it was good enough to save the Olympus’ reputation, it was good enough to preserve Leonard’s memory.
The bastard.
I said: “I talked to some of Leonard’s friends at the firm. They’d gone out drinking that night, celebrating.” That was a gamble. I didn’t know how well she knew her husband’s buddies, if at all. When she didn’t call me on it, I pushed my luck. “They lost track of him after a few drinks. He lost track of himself too. A couple other witnesses say they saw him walking towards the Olympus later that night. He was alone.”
Naomi nodded. The way she did it told me she still believed me. So far, at least. The next bit would be a harder sell. I went on: “Sometime later, he passed out in front of the hotel. I found the maid who said she’d found him in that room.
“She’d lied.
“The truth is, she found him on the sidewalk as she was coming on shift. She couldn’t stand seeing him like that, so she walked him up to an empty room where he’d be warm. This girl figured he’d recover. He didn’t.
“When he seized, she panicked and ran. She’s the one people saw running out of that room. Naomi, your husband really did die of a heart attack.
“I’m sorry.”
I gave it a minute to sink in. Naomi sat quietly, then said “Damn him” with a fierceness I knew meant she’d bought it. “I always told him he d-drank too much… that it’d kill him…” I was afraid she was on the verge of breaking down again, but she swallowed her tears.
“Thank you,” she said. Naomi pulled an envelope from her purse and slid it to me. “Your fee.” I thanked her and walked her out to her car. I waited until I couldn’t hear the engine to count the dough. I smiled when I hit seventy-five bucks.
I had a date at the Attic Lounge that night, after all.
-- Dawson Alexander Wohler