Don't Call Me Madame Page 13

  “You don’t consider that cocky?”

  “I consider that perfectly logical. Don’t you?”

  Starr smiled. “Yes.” He sat forward. “You win.”

  Dismissed. But not yet. Chambers did have another iron in the fire, Goldie’s iron, and this guy, possibly, might be able to help.

  “Mr. Starr.”

  “Yes?”

  “On a little matter of my own. You might be able to pitch me onto a lead.”

  He was a hell of a handsome guy, and he looked pleased. Powerful men liked to show their power (even in small unimportant matters).

  “Be happy to help if I can …”

  “I needed a favor from a hood by name Barry Burnett. A big shot in the hooker department, but turned out to be small apples. He couldn’t do me the favor, he admitted, because, although he appeared to be the big shot, he wasn’t. Lower echelon, actually. But he mentioned a name. Big, big! The top. Vinnie Two.”

  “Vinnie?” Starr frowned. “Two? What is it?”

  “I have no idea at all. Figured, maybe, you did. You’ve been around, Mr. Starr. You know this town like the palm of your hand. You know all kinds of people; all kinds of chitchat can come your way; figured, maybe, shot in the dark, you could put me onto a lead …”

  Starr turned down the corners of his mouth, shook his head. “Never even heard the name.” The dark eyes smiled. “You sure your hookerhood wasn’t telling a tall tale in order to avoid doing the favor?”

  “He impressed me he was telling the truth, but …” Chambers shrugged.

  Starr stood up. Chambers took the cue, and he stood up. Starr smiled. “I’ll keep my ears open. If ever the name crops up, I’ll inform you.”

  “Thank you. I’ll appreciate it. As I said, shot in the dark. Of course I’m not depending on you — ”

  “I’m depending on you,” Starr said earnestly. “Three ghastly murders, and he’s still out there …”

  “We can’t stop him before we get him. Hell, the cops haven’t stopped him either.

  “You stop him, Chambers. Not the cops. You!”

  “I’m cooking on all the burners. I’m working to earn my fee.”

  Then get more burners, and work harder. Anything extra you need … money … anything …”

  “No. I’ll get him, Mr. Starr. I’ll get to him before the cops.”

  “Christ, I hope so. For his sake — the poor crazy bastard — I hope so. After this Bristol thing, he won’t have a prayer. Police, prosecutor, judge, jury — they’ll crucify him. If we can get him, and get him into an institution — it’s his only chance. We’ll get full confessions from him there, but then, in advance, he’ll be an adjudged psychotic. The other way, at a trial … hell, you know how the prosecutor’s psychiatrists can crawl through loopholes to declare the defendant legally sane …” He put an arm over Chambers’s shoulders and took him to the door. “Anything you need from me that might help, don’t hesitate to ask.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  They shook hands and Chambers went out and walked along Park Avenue to 80th Street, turned east to Lexington, entered a drugstore and called Sandi. He was hungry. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast.

  “How about dinner?” he asked her.

  “Love it,” she said.

  “Then a show. I’ll call my spec.”

  “Great,” she said.

  “Then we’ll hit the bars and have some laughs.”

  “Can’t,” she said. “Got an appointment for midnight.”

  “Mark?”

  “No. Business.”

  “Pick you up at seven.”

  “Right you are, lover.”

  He picked her at seven, took her to Broadway Joe’s for steaks, took her to see My Mama’s a Whore in Calcutta off-Broadway, reluctantly released her at eleven-thirty, and hit the bars alone. He talked to affable nighttime customers, talked to old-time friends tending bar (he dropped in Vinnie Two here and there and getting nothing in return), talked to baseball players in Toots Shor’s, and talked to charming hookers in Tootsies Shore-haven but somehow didn’t get hooked. Morosely at four-thirty he came home, sodden and unrequited, went to bed and slept deep into Friday afternoon. He called the office and Miranda told him there was no messages, and then he went to his appointment with Barry Burnett at 42 Waverly Place.

  Promptly at four he rang the bell of 12G and there was no answer. He used the key Barry had given him and there was Barry on the floor, dead as a marinated mackerel, half his face shot away. Chambers sighed, took out his handkerchief, wiped the key and left it there, then wiped the doorknobs and left there. He went into a saloon for two quick shots of resuscitation and then into a phone booth where he dialed 911 for the cops.

  Wearily he said, “There’s a dead body in apartment 12G, 42 Waverly Place.”

  He hung up.

  He was sweating.

  Peter Chambers reporting.

  First Dorothy Steel. Now Barry Burnett.

  He was becoming quite the call-boy for 911.

  SEVENTEEN

  ON Saturday at three-thirty Sandi Barton came to Mark Montague on business, career business. He had told her he wanted her for the rest of the weekend and she in turn had told Goldie she would be unavailable until Monday. Business could wait. Career was paramount.

  Mark, in silk boxer shorts and hairy chest, opened the door, took her in and vented admiration. “You are one gorgeous bitcheroo, bitch.”

  “Well, thankee, lord and master.”

  “But gorgeous!”

  Sandi Barton in a white silk suit, white blouse, white shoes, white nylons (she always wore stocking, hip-hugging pantie-hose).

  “Baby, we’re going to work on the play, and we’re going to bivouac. We’re going to picnic at home, dig? I got steaks, I got all kinds of crazy food, got everything. Six o’clock I gotta go out, be back late. You can sleep, rest, eat, do whatever you like. Then when I get back we’re gonna stay in, we’re not gonna move out of here, were gonna fuck around the clock and around and around.”

  He read lines to her from Black Mass at High Noon, and she read lines back at him, and then suddenly he said, “I can’t work with this hard-on. Got to knock my rocks off. A quickie, baby. Nothing for you, strictly for me. A fastie.”

  He took her to the bedroom. She undressed and he slid out of his silk shorts. “On the bed,” he said. “I want you on the edge of the bed with your ass up.”

  Career was career.

  “You’re the lord and master, lord and master.”

  “Knee-chest position, dig?” She giggled. “I think so.”

  He helped her onto the bed and directed her into position: knees up, head down, chest down — as though she were a Moslem prostrate in genuflection to Mecca. But no Moslem in the world, he reflected, ever presented as gorgeous an ass as this one protruding off the edge of the bed — smooth, round, white, the pink labia of the cunt glistened like dew-kissed rose petals. His scimitar quivered.

  “Back scuttle,” he said.

  Her voice was muffled. “Oh, you crazy creative people.”

  His hands held her hips, his toes gripped the floor, his prick stabbed into her open cunt, and he watched himself in all the many mirrors of the bedroom as the scimitar stabbed, with piston-like exactitude, in and out of her receptive receptacle, in and out of the silky, slithery, glabrous, marvelous tight narrow gorge of gorgeous cunt, plunging in and out, all for him, this one strictly selfish all for him, and then he shoved it to the root, all the way in her, virtually lifting her from the bed, and he shot his rocks, blew his lump, hot semen a geyser burning in her recesses, and then she was flat on her belly and he was flat on top of her and he was panting at her ear: “Baby, you are something; Jesus Christ, something else …”

  Chambers arrived at four-twenty-five at Cafe Veda, hoping against hope he would be an interested observer rather than an active participant, but Lieutenant Robert P. Miller quickly dissolved the hope against hope. “She’s up there,” Bobby Miller said. He was fl
anked by a couple of hard-faced narcotics guys.

  “We got to get her out.”

  “How? Without screwing up the operation? We hit at five.”

  “Call,” Chambers said. “You know his number?”

  “Of course.”

  “Call. Ask for her. Say you’re a doctor from Bellevue. Say Peter Chambers got hit by a truck, he’s in Bellevue in bad shape. He’s asking for her; he wants her. Gave you her home phone; gave you Mark Montague’s phone. Okay, Bobby?”

  A foxlike grin up there by the eyes. “Only for you, pal.”

  “I thank you, pal.”

  “Could be it won’t work.”

  “Why not, cop?”

  “He’s her guy. Not you.”

  “You know everything, don’t you?”

  “We know she sleeps with him. Does she sleep with you?”

  “No.”

  “See what I mean?”

  “Let’s give it a try, Bobby.”

  “I’m about to do that, pal.”

  The phone rang and Mark answered.

  “For you,” he said and gave it to her.

  She listened, hung up. She was pale.

  “What’s the matter?” he said.

  “Peter Chambers. Some kind of accident. Hit by a car. That was the hospital. He wants me. I’ve got to get over there.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Sure. But you’ll be back here?”

  “Of course I will.”

  “If I’m not here … you’ve got keys.”

  “They’re at my apartment. I’ll pick them up on my way back.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  She dressed, fixed her hair, fixed her makeup, took the elevator down, ran through the lobby, and outside Peter Chambers grabbed her wrist.

  “What the hell?” she said.

  “Shut up.”

  He pulled her away from the entrance, held on to her wrist, looked at his watch. Five to five.

  “What — the — hell!”

  Bobby and his boys came out of the Veda and entered into 440 East 77th.

  “I’m buying you a drink,” Chambers said.

  “You’re buying me nothing. I demand — ”

  She tried to break from him. His hand was a vise on her wrist.

  She tugged. He tugged. “Honey, let’s not make a scene.”

  “Let me go! You’re hurting me.”

  “I just saved you from a hell of a lot more hurt.”

  The tugging ceased. She looked at him, squinted.

  He said, “The three guys just went in there. Cops. On a visit to your boyfriend.”

  Still squinting. “What for?”

  “To lock him up, that’s what for.” He released her wrist. “I did a ruse to get you out, and got you. Wouldn’t do your career any good, would it, to get yourself arrested with a junk pusher. Either of your careers.”

  “Junk pusher?”

  “Mark Montague.”

  “Man, you’ve blown your mind.”

  “May I buy you a drink, beautiful lady?”

  “I think so.” A wan smile. “I think I’m going to faint.”

  “That wouldn’t be very pretty right out on the street. Wanna faint? Come with me and faint in comfort.”

  She wasn’t going to faint, not his indomitable Sandi Barton. Her color was back, her eyes were clear, her step was firm. He took her across to Cafe Veda and sat her at a window table. She ordered a double Scotch on the rocks, he ordered a double Scotch with water.

  “What the hell?” she said.

  “He pushes junk, but big, and he’s been at it for a long time. Like you — two careers. The playwrighting is the sideline. The main line” — he liked that — ”the main line is peddling dope, the hard stuff.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Take a look out there, luv.”

  A small parade out of 440, Bobby Miller in front. Next came Mark Montague linked by handcuffs to one of Bobby’s boys. And in the rear the other of Bobby’s boys was carrying a valise. They went quickly to a car and drove off.

  “If he’s lucky he’ll do two years, that’s the minimum. Hard lucky, he’ll go away for a full five.”

  “Jesus,” she said.

  “I pulled you out,” he said.

  “There goes Black Mass at High Noon.”

  She drank. He drank. They lit cigarettes.

  She said, “Peter, I appreciate what you did for me.”

  “Show me,” he said.

  They drank, smoked their cigarettes, and then once again she was insouciant Sandi the invincible. “I’ll just have to find me another sponsor,” she said philosophically. “Goodbye to Mark Montague. Fuck him.”

  “Not him. Me.”

  “Get up the hundred, pocket-pincher.”

  “That’s appreciation?”

  “Business is business.”

  “A cunt is a cunt.”

  “Man, I’d love to have you.”

  “Have me.”

  “One hundred.”

  “Shit.”

  “Ethics is ethics. Principle.”

  “Here we go again.”

  “Wanna marry me?”

  “No.”

  “Then you have to pay for your pleasure, mister.”

  “Drink up. We’re done here. We’ll go somewhere and have dinner.”

  “What a lovely relationship. A lovely relationship. Gosh, I’m so glad you weren’t hit by a car or a truck or whatever the man said. I was scared to tears, scared to death. I love you, Peter, I really do.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Drink up.”

  EIGHTEEN

  MONDAY morning he called Detective-lieutenant Louis Parker of Homicide and set up an appointment for two o’clock. He had material to offer in trade, and his old friend Louie Parker, brusque, blunt, curt, sometimes officious, was nonetheless a wise and sophisticated minion of the law who appreciated the value of trade.

  It was a hot day but Parker’s office was cool with air-conditioning.

  “Hi, Pete.”

  “Hi, Louie.”

  “Long time no see and all that crap.”

  “You’re a busy man. I only come when I have something to offer.”

  “Yeah. That’s what you said on the phone. Something to offer.”

  “In trade.”

  “Yeah, that’s what you said on the phone.”

  Parker lit a gnarled, black, evil-smelling cigar. He was short, thick, squat, built close to the floor, the one cop in all the world for whom Peter Chambers had unmitigated respect. He had a brilliant mind but didn’t use it as a lash, nor did he use his badge as a bludgeon. In his own way he was kind and considerate, even to the criminal-types he apprehended. His job was to bring them in, and he did his job with remarkable consistency. He was honest, incorruptible, fair and square, and if ever in his youth he had had a pedestal under him, he had long ago kicked it away. His reputation was firmly established: he had no need to bolster his security by a big mouth, a rash act, a brash brush-off, or the usual coplike (almost involuntary) sadistic thrust of inured authority.

  He went around a battered desk and sat himself in a squeaking swivel chair Chambers sat in an armchair alongside the desk, a hard, ass-hurting, wooden armchair. He lit a cigarette, and an idea knifed through him like a quick, sudden, fleeting nerve-pain. Why not? Maybe he could kill a couple of birds here.

  “Something else,” he said.

  Dark, deep-set, intelligent eyes blinked at him.

  “Come again?” Parker said.

  “Something else.”

  “You said that.”

  “I mean … not what I came here for. Not our trade-thing. Something I’d like to ask you. May I?”

  “Ask.”

  “Ever hear the name Vinnie Two?”

  The swivel chair squeaked. Parker sat forward.

  “Want to stay hale and healthy?”

  “Always do,” Chambers said.

  “Don’t pop off with that name indiscriminately. Or you’ll wind up on a dark stree
t with a bullet in your head.”

  “Jesus, where the hell have I been?”

  “Come again?” Parker said.

  “Used to think I knew what was going on in this town. Maybe didn’t know the inside, but knew what was going on. But never once in my life, until very recently, heard the name Vinnie Two.”

  “Very few have.”

  “Why?”

  “Fear. The boys have learned that whoever even mentions the name winds up very dead. Who popped Vinnie Two at you?”

  “A big-shot drug addict desperately in need of his drug.”

  “Is he dead?”

  Yes, sirree he is, Chambers thought, but I can’t tell you I know that because that’s part of the thing I came here to trade for.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Jesus, what in hell is this Vinnie Two?”

  “Cosa Nostra,” Parker said blandly. “Maybe you’ve heard of Cosa Nostra?”

  “Occasionally.” Chambers grinned. “Is this Vinnie Two some kind of inside sect in Cosa Nostra?”

  “No sect. A man. An individual.”

  “Can you tell me, Louie?”

  “Why not? Hell, you’re no baby. But keep the nose clean, kid. If you pop this information around we’ll sure as hell pick you up off the dark street with the bullet in the head.”

  “Nose clean,” Chambers assured him.”

  “Ever hear of Richard V. Starr?”

  Well, there’s a weird beginning, Chambers thought.

  “I have,” he said.

  “That’s it,” Parker said. “Vinnie Two equals Richard V. Starr.”

  NINETEEN

  CHAMBERS slid off the wooden armchair but stayed on his feet. Cigarette smoke got tangled in his larynx and he choked, coughed, brimmed bitter tears, and flailed his arms in the air, sucking for breath. Parker, out of the swivel chair, squeezed his left hand at the nape of Chambers’s neck, and pummeled the flat of his right hand at Chambers’s back until the rasping, choking coughing ceased.

  “You all right?”

  “I’m just fine.”

  Parker brought him a towel and Chambers wiped his face.