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“On the Record.”

Bert Kindler said, “I hope to God you work around the presses or peddle ads.”

“Reporter. But I do features. Latin American politics. Foreign affairs. Stop looking at me like that. Look, you did me two favors. Both large. So I am going to run to a phone and get the city desk and yell they should stop the presses. Scoop. Gimme rewrite. Here’s my card. Home address.”

“And,” said Scheff, “when they start beating the bushes looking for Francisca Whosis, everybody knows she’s Kelly’s girl. So you can make a very fine deal for an exclusive maybe?”

“I won’t have any idea where she is.”

After a long thoughtful stare, Scheff said, “Let’s buy it, Bert. But if he leaves us with any egg on the face, all we have to do is tell his boss what kind of a piece of news his boy sat on. Let’s go get Crissy-wissy and take her bye-bye.”

Chapter Twenty-three

Barney Scheff had spent four years of his professional life on the Miami Beach force. He had worked the big hotels along Collins, called in by the house detectives and protection agencies to work upon every form of bunco the guile of man and woman has been able to invent.

When Mrs. Harkinson met them at the door and let them in, he knew at once that he was in the presence of class merchandise. He had seen hundreds of them. The ones this good were usually celebrity imports, lined up for a full season by somebody with the scratch to pay the exclusive freight. Ten, twelve years ago that was the way she would be making it. Mink to the floor, glittering at ears, throat and wrist and fingers, swaying on the tall heels with the hair piled high, moving in the clubs and the show bars at the side of some little fat guy with his head tanned dark brown all over from playing poolside gin for high stakes. The small men wore the big young blondes with the same pebble-eyed indifference with which an iron curtain diplomat might treat the aides who follow a pace behind him.

Such women were one of the necessary outward manifestations of that special kind of coarse and curious money which accumulates in the lock boxes of casino owners, union officials, dealers in casino properties, in the raw products of addiction, in oil tankers, night clubs, prize fighters, television properties — in all the more or less legal services and products which, if a man were greedy enough and ruthless enough, could provide a way of channeling off cash without leaving any trace in the official books and records.

So they kept the tall blonde for that season or that place in tow, at the Beach, or Vegas, or Palm Springs, or London, or Acapulco, or Puerto Rico. She sat in the box at the track, a stick of tickets in her fist, squealing the smart money horse home. She leaned forward at ringside, face avid, cawing for blood. And in the night in the hundred and fifty a day suite, under lights turned low, while the cigar end smouldered and stank in the bedstand ashtray, she earned her keep in effortful requested ways. She would not get too drunk, or get quarrelsome, or make demands, or steal through the darkness to thin the pad of bills in the platinum clip, or give any wolf anything but immediate frost, not the smart ones. She would be a fun kid, because it was a smallish world and everybody knew everybody sooner or later. If you got labeled trouble, if you got too cute, the easiest fate would be no phone call from the next friend of a friend, no more first-class jets, no more silk sheets, no more thirty-dollar Chateaubriand for two. Or it could be a cancellation with a little more to remember if the friend of a friend was in one of the tough trades. Barney Scheff remembered taking one in who’d had her teeth uncapped with a pair of pliers. Between faints she was hysterical, yet not crazy enough to tell who’d done it.

Yes, this Harkinson was one of the great broads, years past the peak of it, but hanging in there so well, you had to marvel at what it had to be costing her in time and effort to keep the illusion of youth. Not only the masks and packs, and the oils and skin foods and lotions and the careful measuring of sun to keep that flawless brown gold of the expensive tennis-club tan, but on top of that, the daily measurements of every dimension to the quarter part of an inch, followed by exercises that would exhaust a stevedore. Then, once you had the pretty machine all assembled, you had to imitate the unconscious tricks of youth, no matter how tired the flesh. You had to walk pert, more trimly and quickly, smile saucy, exaggerate all expressions and all gestures, move the head quickly, and run the voice up and down as many notes of the scale as you could handle.

But, baby, the years are written on the backs of your hands, in bulged veins and thickened knucklebones, and written in the horizontal lines across your throat and in the little striated patterns on the slightly puffed flesh under the eyes.

She’d use every possible way to keep the machine going, from pep pills to those long, hearty romps in the sack at regular intervals to keep the girl-making glands humming.

She was obviously ready to go out. She wore a little beige dress in a linen weave, very unadorned, very simple, yet fitted so artfully and elegantly to that brick-house build the price tag almost showed. And elegance in the careful-casual tossle of the sun-streaked hair, sheen of nylons on the very special legs, a couple of expensive ounces of high-heeled sandals, white purse by the door with white gloves on it, and on the table beside the purse, one of those bright little hats they pull on to keep their hair from snapping around when they drive their convertibles.

There was a business with the eyes she did very well indeed, swinging the glance away slowly and then popping it back onto you, like being snapped with a little whip. Broad across the brows, heavy and prominent bones in the cheeks. Nose a little small, upsnubbed over a short upper lip. Lips of equal unusual heaviness in a considerable amount of mouth.

So there she was, one long arm away, all fresh and fragrant and resilient, unable to make any motion without effective and graceful display of a promise of goodies for me and thee, eyes making her cool speculations the way the man-smart ones can’t help doing, while the mouth made the words of another kind of conversation.

If something like this, Barney thought, really vectored in on that sailboat kid, it would be like going after a goldfish by sticking a twelve-gauge into the fish bowl and pulling both triggers.

“Well — if it is something really important,” she said. “I’m waiting for them to bring my car around. It’s been in the garage since Saturday morning. I have an appointment with the hairdresser, and then I was going to go...”

“We’re asking you to do a favor, or maybe more like a citizen’s duty,” Kindler said. “What we’ve got to get is a positive identification on a body.”

She put her fingertips to her throat and made her eyes round and sat on the broad arm of a low chair. It pulled the hem of the short little dress about four inches above her knees.

“My God, who is it?”

“We’re pretty sure he’s a fellow worked for you, Mrs. Harkinson. Staniker. Captain Garry Staniker. We can’t locate any next of kin.”

“Automobile accident?”

“No. What he did, he killed himself. He was holed up in a fleabag over near Coral Gables and he got loaded and sat in the bathtub and cut his wrists. What it looks like, he got depressed over the bad luck on that cruise, and getting burned and being the only one got out of it.”