I studied the face again, closer this time. The photo was more than a simple snapshot. The clarity was unusual and the posture too professional for an amateur job. And there was that thing about her mouth and the provocative slant to her eyes.
Not everybody was riding my back. Van Reeves in the records section and I had had too many contacts for him to pull out the stops and hedge on things like this. One time he had been caught in a trap too and knew what it was like. He was glad to hear from me and told me so.
I said, “Favor, Van.”
“Listening.”
“A girl was fished out of the river last night. Redhead named Mildred Swiss.”
“Yeah, I saw it.”
“Any request on her I.D. come through your department?”
“Not yet. Should it?”
“Eventually. They probably sent her prints directly to Washington, but see if she was listed as a cabaret performer in the city. She looks the type.”
“Will do. Can you hold on?”
“Sure.”
Van didn’t take long. He came back, picked up the phone and I could hear him rustling sheets of paper in his hand. “Got it, Regan. She’s a naturalized citizen of Polish origin with an unpronounceable last name. Last address is in the Fifties, but it won’t do you any good because they tore all that section down for a new hotel and she never renewed. Parents deceased, no listed relatives.”
“Who sponsored her into the country?”
“Parents. Home in Linden, New Jersey, where they died. Looks like they got here during the war and sent for her later. I’ll have to pass this on.”
“Anything in the other files?”
“No criminal record in this city. Something may turn up somewhere else. What are you thinking of?”
“She’s a type, Van.”
“Hunch or you know?”
“Just one of those things. Thanks.”
“No trouble. Glad you put me on it. Call anytime.”
“It’s nice to know you still have friends,” I said.
“Nuts. You’d be surprised. Now you’ll have more than ever.”
“Sure,” I told him sarcastically and hung up.
After so many years you begin to read the signs. You can see things in expressions and make the nuances of oblique fact channel themselves into paths nobody else would ever notice. It was part of being a cop and a part that nothing but experience and a tiny, ingrained feeling could give you.
Mildred Swiss looked like a type and her background had the little hooks you could hang certain probabilities on. She had steered me into a murder rap and now that it had come unglued, she was dead. Lucky coincidences just don’t come that often. The laws of chance are too strange, too varied.
I grinned and sucked my breath through my teeth, knowing that someplace out there in the crosshatch pattern of the city somebody was sitting and waiting, guts churning with anxiety because I was loose and I’d be looking. He’d be playing a big game and the stakes were absolute.
There was no coming back from the dead.
That was the absolute.
She occupied a suite of offices that took up a corner of the fourth floor of the new Galton-Mead building on Madison Avenue, an exclusive address catering only to the finest tenants or those prepared to pay an exorbitant rental.
Each door bore the gold-lettered name, Sturvesent Agency, a respected firm that handled some of the highest fashion models in the business and worked with nothing but the leading magazines in the field. Six leading movie stars and a few dozen big TV names had come from the Sturvesent list
So did a lot of others who never gained national prominence.
The Sturvesent Agency was a supplier of the fanciest call girls in town too.
A long time ago Madaline Stumper had started in a small way. Luck and diligent enterprise had gotten her to the top, but that curious quirk of nature that drew her into being a madam at nineteen had kept her in the sex business from then on, working at an executive level among the biggest business in the world, with friends in high places and an income that didn’t show in the tax forms.
It was a cute operation. In this crazy world some said it merely filled a demand that would always be there, catered to accepted organizational procedures and was as much a part of business as the clients who requested the services of her stable.
One thing about Miss Mad. She ran both ends with identical and remarkable efficiency. She had never taken a fall, and although she had been questioned on several occasions, a battery of high-priced lawyers quashed the whole thing and had her loose in a matter of minutes. All the department ever got were a few leaks, a word here and there that was too second hand to process and an idea of what she was up to. No disgruntled customers ever registered a complaint and no amount of undercover work ever pointed a condemning finger her way.
I walked in to where the silver blonde was sitting behind a polished mahogany desk, a full-bodied woman in her early thirties with eyes that could pick you clean in seconds and tabulate before you crossed the thick nylon rug from the door.
Her smile was friendly, but there was a frigidity in her eyes that said she could smell gun oil on me and see the hole in my wallet where the badge used to be pinned. She said, “Yes?” Nothing more. It was enough.
“Tell Miss Mad I’d like to see her. Pat Regan.”
Her eyebrows went up slowly, querulously, an unspoken challenge.
“We’re old friends,” I told her.
In a way we were. We had graduated from high school together and twice back in the neighborhood I had pulled a guy off her back who had been trying to make her the hard way and twice I had wound up bloody and sore.
Whatever was in my voice made a lie out of my grin. The receptionist wet her lips with the tip of her tongue and she didn’t push the matter. She spun the dial of her phone, held the husher mouthpiece up close so I couldn’t catch the conversation, then put it back and said, “Her secretary will be right out.”
“Thanks,” I nodded.
For five minutes I had time to watch the traffic. They came and went through the many doors, tall, emaciated women with necks that reminded me of what Mr. Guillotine thought of when he mechanized the chopping block. They all looked hungry, their cheekbones prominent, dresses and coats nipped in around hourglass waists, hair piled in the latest fashion and all flat chested as hell. Only a couple wore wedding rings and it was easy to see why. In bed it would be like having a few loose pipes aboard.
But not all of them were like that. Two happy, well-fed types came bouncing in, deliberately displaying a lot of flesh money-tailored in the kind of clothes that would turn any man inside out, pushed through the gate and went into one of the offices.
Before they came out the pert kid in the green dress tapped my arm and said, “This way, Mr. Regan.”
We went through a long corridor behind the other rooms, then turned and she opened a door. I thanked her, stepped inside and looked across the room at the stunning sight of the woman I used to fight over and said, “Hello, Mad.”
She was a composite of all the world’s beauties until you reached her eyes, then you saw in the great depths of those almost-black orbs that matched the silky sheen of her hair the vast depths of a cavern that held an unknown life of their own.
Only for a second did they seem to fill up with what should have been there in the first place, then whatever it was receded a little... there, but not showing all the way. Her mouth was a flower that blossomed red, accented by the white of even teeth, and one corner had a tiny grin to it. “Regan. Well, well.”