“Don't bother, Johnny.” She tucked her arm in his. “I'm sure I have a pair of suedes in my bag. I'd just as soon forget about up there.” Her eyes were shadowed as she tried to smile up at him.
“Okay. Let's get that drink.”
He whistled for a cab.
Johnny sat in a big armchair in Gloria Philips' apartment in a pleasantly relaxed glow. The dinner had gone off well, and the after-dinner drinks hadn't hurt anything, either. He sat and awaited the redhead's return from the bedroom into which she'd gone upon their arrival.
His eyes roamed the room, lazily. Gloria Philips' apartment was small but neatly furnished. Gloria Philips herself was small but neatly furnished. It made a hard combination to beat, Johnny felt.
“Keep you waiting long?” she asked huskily from the doorway.
He hadn't heard the door open. “It was worth it,” he said softly. The redhead was wearing something black, fragile, loose, long, clinging and semitransparent. She came directly to him and sat on the arm of his chair. She smiled down at him, the blue-gray eyes bright with liquor and with something else. Johnny pushed back the loose sleeve of the flowing negligee and traced the silken contours of her upper arm with his fingertips.
She bent down over him until her lips rested against one ear. “Did you really move a whorehouse into Silver City?” she murmured.
“I really did.”
She slid down off the arm of the chair into his lap. “Tell me about it.”
He stood up with her dead weight in his arms. “I'll do better than that, kid,” he told her. “I'll show you.”
He carried her to the bedroom and closed the door.
He reached for the switch on the lamp on the night table when he heard her returning to the bed. “No!” she said sharply, sensing his movement, but she was too late. She grabbed for the negligee at the foot of the bed to shield full-fleshed nudity as the light bathed her. Johnny intercepted her arm. Slowly he drew her up and in until she slithered across turn face down. “Will you stop it?” she demanded crossly, and flung a hand behind her.
He removed the hand unhurriedly and rested his eyes upon the smooth white buttocks. He looked again, more closely. With a finger he traced one of a number of misty dark lines faintly visible beneath the satiny surface. “What happened here?” Johnny asked her.
She stirred uneasily on his knees. “I fell on the stairs.” Her voice was muffled.
“The hell you fell on the stairs. I've seen a whipped rump before. Who ploughed your field?”
“Let me back under the covers,” she pleaded. He released her arm, and she crawled back in beside him. The look she gave him was as defiant as her tone. “You can't guess who did it?”
“Stitt?”
“Yes, Stitt, damn him!”
“How long ago?”
She shrugged bare shoulders. “Two months, ten weeks.”
He whistled. “An' you still look like that? What the hell did he use?”
“A riding crop. The doctor said it would be six months before I bleached out completely. I was in bed five days. I couldn't move.”
“I believe it. How'd it happen?”
“I misjudged him,” she said, remembered resentment in her tone. “I had information I thought he'd buy, or trade for. Instead he tied me over the end of a bed and whipped it out of me. I made it harder on myself by thinking that if I kept my nerve and didn't talk he'd get scared and quit. I didn't realize until too late that he was-enjoying himself.”
“Did he have a hold on Arends? He sure as hell didn't sound like a man talkin' to his boss over there.”
“Max always acts like the king of the mountain. You never saw anyone so arrogant.” She leaned up on an elbow to look into his face. “I'm answering a lot of questions, Johnny. I wouldn't want you to forget it when it's my turn.”
“What's with all this mismarked and unmarked symbols I been hearin' about?”
“That was a very minor matter, Johnny, except to Jack Arends.” She slid down beside him again. “Every foreign shipment coming through customs, whether by boat or air, has every individual piece in the shipment marked with the symbol of the importing merchant. For one reason or another a shipment occasionally isn't picked up here by the importer to whom it was consigned, and then, rather than pay round-trip freight charges and wind up with the merchandise still on his own shipping platform, the manufacturer will scramble around to find someone else to take it over. In such cases customs insists that the goods be re-marked with the symbol of the new consignee. It's a tedious, time-consuming and expensive process. Since the manufacturer will make a cash allowance to the new consignee for the expense of the re-marking, if the actual re-marking can be avoided it's cash in the importer's pocket. It's a favorite evasion of the borderline importers and freight forwarders, although not the big ones like Jack. It requires-”
Johnny interrupted. “Hold it just a minute, sugar.” He leaned up over her to reach for the phone on her side of the bed. He dialed the hotel. “Edna? Killain. Tell Vic I'm gonna be late, will you?” He looked down at the auburn hair spread on the pillow and the perfectly formed white neck with the little hollow at the base of the throat. “Make that good an' late. Thanks, Edna.” He hung up, placed a palm flat on the soft swell of Gloria's stomach and jiggled lightly. He grinned as her knees came up involuntarily. “You were sayin' it requires-” he prompted her.
“Oh. Collusion is what it requires. Money changes hands, but if the wrong inspector's assigned there can be hell to pay, like this time. It was serious for Jack, who could have lost his license. He was furious. He accused Max, but Max denied it.”
“But you think it was Max.”
“I think-” She hesitated. “I don't know. In a way it's petty larceny, and, much as I dislike Stitt, he thinks a little bigger than that. It's exactly the type of thing that appealed to Claude, though. He'd rather steal a dollar than find five. I think Claude probably made a deal with someone in Jack's warehouse.”
“Arends called Dechant a thief.” Johnny made it a question.
“Sticks and stones-” Gloria said lightly. “De mortuis nil nisi bonum. Let's say Claude was a devious man.” She reached up and ran a hand over the ridged scars on Johnny's chest. “Who ploughed your field, mister?”
“A guy who wished he hadn't.”
She pulled herself up to a sitting position to look down at him. “I've answered a lot of questions, haven't I, Johnny?”
“Meanin' it's your turn to ask a few? You're distractin' me up there.”
She folded her arms across her firmly nippled, full breasts. “That better?”
“Terrible.” He pulled her down beside him again. “For some reason I seem to be in a hurry, so I'll save you the trouble of askin' the questions. I'll give it to you in two words: August Hegel. Vous comprenez?”
“So you do know,” she said quietly. “Jules insisted there was no way you could.” She looked up at him as he moved over her. “You're getting into-”
“Hush, woman,” Johnny said firmly. He settled his hands in the dimpled hollows of the plump shoulders. “First things first.”
He put out the light.
His cab was back on the west side before Johnny remembered Jules Tremaine. He looked at his watch. One fifteen. “Skip the Duarte,” he ordered the driver. “Take me on up to the Alden. It's around 82nd.”
“I know,” the cabbie grunted, and swung north on Sixth. Across 57th he headed into the park. Johnny rocked from side to side on the back seat with the letter-S curves until they headed west on a sweeping turn, crossed Central Park West and pulled in under a marquee in the upper end of the first block.
Johnny had never seen the Alden before, but, even from the sidewalk, one look at its solid, banklike exterior and subdued lobby told him all he needed to know. An apartment hotel, known in the trade as a “family" hotel, exactly why he'd never been able to understand. Damn few families lived in them. Their one-and-a-half, two, and two-and-a-half room apartments were far more likely to be occupied by professional and theatrical people of a little more stature than their downtown counterparts.