“He didn’t have any teeth and his mouth looked like he was eating an apple.”
“Eddie...?”
Venus gave me a grin of sheer pleasure. “You broke his arm. He was still screaming when Lenny dragged him out. He wanted to kill you and was cursing Lenny out because he thought he had already done the job.”
I wanted to grin myself, but my head hurt too much. The ash tray was still there on the floor, a heavy metal job that would have made a pulp of my skull if it hadn’t been for the layers of bandage that softened the blow. The tape was torn and soggy with the blood that seeped through, but as far as I could tell I wasn’t any worse off than before.”
I rolled my head and looked up at her. “Chick, how come our friends left me for dead and didn’t try to knock you off too?”
“Now you’re not thinking, man. In this town you could have died and it would have been self-defense, especially with a witness on hand to tell how you attacked them first.”
“You’d tell a jury that?”
Her mouth made a smile again. “There wouldn’t be much else I could tell, could there? Living is fun. I’d like to live it without Lenny Servo around sometime.”
She was right. I put my head down and closed my eyes. “What’d they want with you?”
“Information. Why I was fooling around with you. They thought I had something to do with it.”
“Oh.”
She ran her fingers across my face, stroking it gently. “Feel pretty bad?”
“Not much worse than usual.”
“Sure?”
“Uh-huh.”
This time both her hands went under my head, lifted it, then laid it down gently on the cushions. She did something to the lamp, turned it so that its brightness diminished until there was nothing but a faint hint of light like that of dawn in the room. For the first time I saw how she looked, not trim and tailored like last night, but smooth and sleek in a clinging black dress that swept to the ground.
She moved languidly, turning on the record player, standing in front of it swaying to the faint but deep rhythm of a chorus of drums. She said, “I know things you might want to know.”
“What things?”
Her feet took two rapid steps and she spun gracefully so that her skirt lifted and swirled around her legs, the white of her thighs flashing momentarily against the black of the dress.
“About Lenny Servo and his Business Group. Do you know how powerful his organization is?”
“I have a good idea. He’s the money man behind the boys, isn’t he?”
The drums went into a single throbbing beat and she stood there with her legs apart, stiff at first, then melting slowly into a gentle undulation. I could see her half-closed eyes watching me, her mouth faintly smiling as her hands went to the buttons at her back.
Each word was timed with the drums, keeping pace to the motion of her body. “It’s more than that, Johnny. It’s a place like this and other places down the street. It’s places like the back rooms of night clubs where men have smokers and girls are hired for the occasion. It’s places where very candid pictures can be taken and casually shown to the right people afterward so they know that a club doesn’t have to be made out of wood or iron.”
She had the dress in her hand and curled it over her arm so that it was a curtain that parted briefly every now and then, a black curtain she stepped through and disappeared behind so fast you thought your eyes were playing a trick.
There was a glistening black wedge around her hips. Another crossing her breasts. Tight. Sensual. It wasn’t easy to speak. I finally said, “What else?”
“Servo was broke when he came to town. Somebody put him on his feet again.”
She smiled, turned her head and made the gesture of covering her eyes coyly. Her hips went back and back, then jerked forward. She did it again, laughed and tightened up so that every muscle in her body seemed to be working at once. “I used to be good, man.”
My mouth felt dry. “Who backed him?”
“Somebody said you must have. Nobody else in town had that kind of money. He couldn’t have gotten it any other way.”
She stopped dancing. She moved and dipped quickly and something fluttered to the floor. When she took up the rhythm again I saw through the curtain and the glistening black was only around her hips this time.
“That makes Lenny the boss... and me the sucker.”
The drums got louder and faster. The curtain whirled and parted too fast, much too fast. “Definitely,” I heard her say. Then, “There may be a pair of suckers. There’s more.”
“Spell it out.”
“I was told he came with a woman. A very possessive woman. She disappeared before he got to be a big shot.”
“Who told you this?”
“Don’t ask me that. There wasn’t any more information and she isn’t important enough to be dragged into anything.”
“Okay, kid,” I said. “You did good enough.”
Venus smiled again, did something too quick for me to follow, but I had a chance to see through the curtain before the music ended in a crazy, strained beat. The black around her waist was gone too. Then she threw the curtain at me. It missed.
It was supposed to cover my face so I wouldn’t have a chance to see her before she snapped the light off, but it missed and there she was, a symphony in black and white, lithe and graceful with sharply rising breasts that swelled with every breath she took, the muscles of her stomach a predatory ripple, quivering and dancing above the luscious taper of her legs.
Then the light was gone and I could only hear her moving toward me in the darkness. “I liked what you did to them, man,” she said.
“I’m glad of that.”
“Now I’ll show you what a real woman’s like. In style, of course.”
I said, “Of course,” and my voice sounded weak like it did the first time I had said it.
She showed me.
Chapter Ten
The Ford was still there, but now it was wedged in between a couple of seedy old cars that bore college stickers on the windshield. It was eight-thirty-two by my watch, but by my head it was time to hole up someplace and die. There were lights on in the house now, every window except one a yellow square and at that one I tossed a half-hearted salute and said good night to my Venus.
Okay, so I’m a jerk sometimes. I get the rest of my brains damn near knocked out all for something in style from Venus. But hell, they give medals to soldiers for the same thing, and I’d take Venus to a medal any time. Besides, she was handy to have around for inside info if I needed it.
I climbed behind the wheel and poked the key into the lock. It made some tricky juggling to get out of the spot, but I made it and started around the corner when I heard the wail of the sirens coming up behind me. Don’t ask why I did it, but my hand hit the light switch and kicked off the lights as I jammed into the curb and made like an all-night parker.
There were three of them. Two were official and the other was a coupe, but they all had sirens dying to a low growl and seemed to spill out cops by the dozens. It was a nicely planned maneuver if you were on the outside looking in. They covered the house in pairs so that there wasn’t a chance of a mouse getting through, then Lindsey and Tucker went up the front steps and rattled the doorknob.
Inside, somebody screamed, a door opened and slammed and a couple of guys started swearing and telling the cops off. Then more screams of indignation. None of the voices belonged to Venus.
I grinned to myself in the darkness.
If Tucker had come to pick up a corpse he was going to be a mighty upset copper. I knew two other guys who were going to be a little upset, too. It was funny as hell to watch because the cops weren’t taking any chance on having a corpse run out on them. Or maybe Lenny Servo wasn’t too sure about being a corpse and hoped I’d be made one if I tried to get out of the trap.