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"Don't worry, dollface. Everything's fine. Take me…"
Where can you go, Jack? The lady in green knows your office, and if she thinks you're dead-
"Take me to your house." Only it was more like
hauwsch, like I was a goddamn German deli-owner, and when I ran my tongue along the inside of my teeth everything got interesting. My tongue rasped, and I lost whatever it was Miss Dale would have said because the taste of copper filled my mouth and I suddenly knew what I was thirsty for.
The knowledge might have made me scream if I hadn't gone limp against the seat as if someone had sapped me, because it was warm and the twisting in my gut receded a little bit, and because goddammit, after a man claws his way up out of his own grave and breaks into a diner, he deserves a little rest.
The green dress hugged her curves like the Samaritan freeway hugs the coast, and under the little veil on her hat those eyes were green too. She even had green gloves, and she accepted a light from me with a small nod and raised eyebrows, settling her emerald velvet clutch purse in her lap.
"You come highly recommended, Mr. Becker." A regular Bryn Mawr purr, over the sound of Miss Dale typing in the front. The lady kept her back straight as a ruler and the lamp on my desk made her out to be pale, not one of those sun-bu
Miss Dale stopped typing.
"Glad to hear that." I made it noncommittal, as casual as my shoes on the desk. It was five o'clock and already dark, the middle of winter, and I was behind on the rent.
"Mr. Becker?" Miss Dale stood tall and angular in the doorway. "Will you be needing anything else?" Her cat-tilted dark eyes met mine, and she had a sheaf of files in her capable, narrow hands. If she got a little more meat on her, she'd be a knockout. If, that is, you could chip through the ice.
Right now she was giving me the chance to say we were closing and the dame in green could come back another time. I waved a languid hand. "No thanks, Miss Dale. I'll see you in the morning."
"Very good, sir." Frosty as a Frigidaire. Miss Dale spent a few moments moving around the office, locking the files in the front cabinet, and the dame in green said nothing until my secretary left, locking the door behind her and her heels click-tapping down the hall, as efficiently as the rest of her.
The sign outside my office window blinked. We were up over an all-night lunch counter and newsstand, and the big neon arrow drenched the room with waves of yellow and red after dark once Miss Dale turned the lights off. The couch opposite my desk looked inviting, and it would have looked even more inviting if I hadn't been looking eviction in the face, I suppose.
"So what do you want me to do, Mrs….?" I made it into a question.
"Kendall. Mrs. Arthur Kendall. Mr. Becker, I want you to follow my husband."
It smelled like Chanel and dirt. And even though I was under a pile of blankets, I was lying on something soft and I shot up straight, swallowing a scream. It was the sound a bullet makes when it hits a skull, the explosion that was death.
My fingers were around something soft, but with a harder core. My other hand flashed up, catching Miss Dale's other wrist as she tried to slap me. Silk fluttered-she was dressed in a wrapper, a red kimono with a sun-yellow dragon breathing orange fire.
She yelped, and I realized I was half-naked, only in a pair of mud-crusted skivvies. Someone had undressed me and put me in a bed made of pink fluff, pillows spilling over the edges. The Chanel was her, and the dirt? That was me, stinking up a nice dame's bed.
"Mr. Becker," she said, and it was my imperturbable secretary again, the belt of her kimono loosened enough to show a strap of her-well, I'm only human, of course I looked. "Mr. Becker, let go of me at
once."
The nightmare receded. I let go of her wrists. She retreated two steps, bumping her hip against a bedside table loaded with a jar of cold cream and a stack of big leatherbound books that looked straight out of Dr. Caligari's library, as well as a lamp with a frilly pink shade and an economy-sized box of Kleenex. We stared at each other, and the fine damp texture of her skin looked better than it ever had.
She rubbed at her right wrist, the one I'd grabbed first. "You were screaming," she whispered.
For once, I had no smart-aleck thing to say. Of course I'd been screaming.
Miss Dale drew herself up, tightening her kimono with swift movements. She was barefoot, and her dark hair wasn't pi
"I'm sorry." It was all I could say.
"You'd better be. You're wanted for murder."
I closed my mouth with a snap and started thinking furiously.
"You disappeared three days ago, Mr. Becker. The police tore apart your office. I am sad to report they also took your last three bottles of Scotch. They questioned me rather extensively, too."
My throat was dry. The thirst was worse than ever, and that distracting sound was back, the high hard thumping. It was her pulse, and it sounded like water in the desert. It sounded like the chow bell in basic training.
Her heart going that fast meant she was terrified. But there she stood, high color on her cheeks, arms folded and shoulders back, ready to take me to task once again.
Three days? "Murder?" I husked.
"The murder of Arthur Kendall, Mr. Becker. His widow identified you as the killer." Hung on the bedroom wall behind her was a Photoplay page of Humphrey Bogart in a fedora, leering at the camera like the bum he was. I was begi
"The Kendall job." It was difficult to think through the haze in my head and the sound of her pulse, calming down a little now, thank God.
There was something very wrong with me.
"The Kendall job," she echoed. "Naturally I have an extra copy of the file you prepared. And
naturally I didn't mention it to the police, especially to Lieutenant Grady. I think you are many things, Mr. Becker-a disgraceful drunk and an immoral and unethical investigator, just to mention a few. But a murderer? Not the man who does widow cases for free." She rubbed at her right wrist.
So I'm a sucker for dames with hard stories. So what? "I didn't kill anyone." It was a relief to say it. "You've got the file?"
"Naturally." She dropped her arms. "I would appreciate an explanation, but I'm only your secretary."
"You're a stand-up doll," I managed. "The Kendall job went bad, Miss Dale. I didn't kill him."
Being that practical type, she got right down to brass tacks. "Then who did, Mr. Becker?"
Even though the thirst was getting worse by the second and the sound of her pulse wasn't helping, I knew the answer to that one. "Get me that file, Dale. And while you're at it, can I have some clothes or am I just going to swing around like Tarzan?"
If she'd muttered something unladylike under her breath as she swept from the room I wouldn't have blamed her.
I cleaned the rest of the mud off in her pink-and-yellow bathroom. She had an apartment on the seedier side of Parth Street, but everything was neat and clean and prim as you'd expect from the woman I'd once caught alphabetizing my incoming mail. She even had a suit hanging on the back of the door for me, one of mine. The door didn't shut quite tight, and I could hear her moving around the kitchen, and hear that maddening, delicious, irresistible thumping.
I looked like I'd been dug up that morning. Which, if you think about it, I had. There was an ugly flushed-red mark over my right eye, a divot I could rest my fingertip in. It was tender, and pressing on it made my whole head feel like a pumpkin again. The back of my skull was sore too, seamed and scarred under my short wet hair. There were bruised bags of flesh under my eyes, and my cheeks had sunken in, and I looked yellow as a jaundiced Chinaman.