David Alexander - Masters of Noir - Volume 2

She turned the knob and went in. I was right at her heels when she stopped short and I had to clamp my brakes to keep from knocking her over. She was making sick, gurgling noises and trying to backtrack, but I was in the way. Then she turned and buried her face against my shoulder, clinging to me, trembling along the full length of her body. Another time this might have been a pleasant experience.

Not now. Not with this sight.

Now I could see over her shoulder. I saw Mr. Lester Britt, private eye, seated behind his desk, with a letter opener sticking out of his throat at right angles. The blade had failed to seal his wound. His jugular had spurted like a punctured wine gourd, and the whole front of his vest was sticky and viscous with the blood from his emptied veins.

He was a small man with a round face and a balding head. His eyes were glazed and his lips skinned back, leaving his teeth naked to the gums. I knew the kind of private eye he was. His office and everything about him told me. You can buy them for a dollar a dozen, the divorce specialists, the transom peepers, the deadbeat dicks hounding wage slaves who can’t meet the last installment on a set of Grand Rapids furniture worth exactly ten percent of the sale price. Lester Britt, with a license in his pocket and a tin badge that permitted him to park anywhere he liked, providing he paid the fine. He had taken a job and bucked some customers who were too fast for him. A knife or a bullet or a broken skull, this was bound to happen to him sooner or later.

Grace Denney was still shivering in my arms like a woman suffering from malaria. But she hadn’t screamed and I was thankful for that. “All right,” I said close to her ear. “Let’s get out of here.” I almost had to carry her.

I held her hand in the elevator and it was cold as ice. Our first stop was a bar across the street, a small oasis with booths and checkered tableclothes.

“Two double brandies,” I told the waiter.

“I’ll take the same,” she said.

He gave her a double-take, blinking in surprise, then shrugged and shuffled off to fill the order. I told her to wait and went up front to patronize the telephone booth. I made an anonymous call to Headquarters and hung up. I was in no mood to stick around for a long investigation, trying to convince them I didn’t know the answers to any of their questions.

Back at the table, I said, “You all right, Grace?”

She swallowed hugely and nodded.

“Good,” I said. “Now listen to me. I have a hunch. What happened to Britt is probably the result of handling your case. That’s why he got all worked up when you suddenly appeared at his office yesterday. Chances are he learned something he didn’t want you to know. And I think the explanation can be found at the Vandam Nursing Home. I’m going out there.”

She tossed off the second brandy like an aspirin tablet. It settled her nerves and put some of the color back in her cheeks. “Can I go along?” she asked.

“If you’ll stay in the car and let me handle it.”

She nodded quickly. “Of course.”

I paid the check and we took a cab uptown to the garage and I got out the Buick. We drove across the Queensboro Bridge, heading out towards the South Shore. Grace Denney was silent, her eyes remote, sitting prim and straight, with her hands folded stiffly in her lap and the wind whipping back through her lustrous ebony hair.

At this time of the day traffic was light and the parkway unraveled swiftly under our wheels. Overhead, the sky was clear, a canopy of rich cobalt, and presently I spied a few seagulls wheeling against the horizon and I knew we were approaching the sea. I saw directions and turned off the main artery and drove along a very narrow macadam road. Every now and then a flash of blue water reeled past and the crisp tang of salt was in the air.

This was a choice expanse of realty, with entrenched wealth in fifteen room chateaus, looking out on their own private botanical gardens.

“This is it,” Grace said, stirring at my side.

All I saw was a six foot wall into the top of which had been cemented chunks of broken glass. A pole vaulter might scale the barrier, but the average trespasser would most likely try another route.

“Where’s the entrance?” I asked.

“Around the bend.”

I pulled up near a wrought iron gate that hung open between a pair of concrete columns, and debarked. I stuck my head through the window on the other side. “I’ll try not to be long,” I said.

“Be careful,” she said, and took my face between her palms and leaned towards me. It was supposed to be a simple kiss of encouragement. But something happened. Our lips met and the contact triggered a whole set of electrical impulses that went through me like a searing flame.

Call it chemistry, anything you like. Sometimes, rarely, it just happens this way. We were a pair of catalytic agents working on each other. The hunger must have been building up inside her for a long time, like a full head of steam in a boiler. A sob caught at her throat and there was a soft sighing exhalation. Her mouth opened on mine, our breaths intermingled, and her fingernails gouged into my shoulders and for a moment there I thought she was going to haul me right through the closed door into the car. Her body seemed to grow tense and I felt my knees grow wobbly.

And then I remembered Lester Britt, sitting up in his office chair, with that piece of steel sticking in his throat, and I broke her grip. It took a bit of doing, but I managed it.

“Not now,” I said shakily. “There’s work to be done.”

She leaned hack, her breathing erratic and shallow, her eyes smoldering, unwilling to trust her voice.

I took a long breath and touched her lightly on the cheek and walked past the wrought iron gates along a graveled drive. The building broke into view as I came around a bend. It was dark brown, turreted, solid as a fortress, its leaded panes glinting dully in the late afternoon sun. A heavy oaken door was closed and looked impregnable. There was no bell, no knocker, nothing but a pull cord, which I gave a hard tug.

The door opened wide enough to show me a female face as thin as a hatchet and just as sharp. She was a tall, muscular woman, forty or so, in a starched white nurse’s uniform. She was in the wrong profession. The milk of human kindness had long since curdled in her eyes.

“Yes?” Her voice was short and reedy. “What is it?”

“Dr. Vandam, please.”

“The doctor’s busy,” she said unpleasantly and started to close the door in my face.

But I had my foot in the doorway and she looked down at it, surprised. I put some steel into my voice. “Dr. Vandam,” I said. “Don’t make me ask you again. Where is he?”

She gave me a look of cold hostility, turned on her heel, and said abrasively, “This way.”

I followed her through a wide lobby and down an uncarpeted corridor to another oaken door. She knocked on this, opened it, and said, “This person wishes to see you, doctor. He practically forced his way in.”

Dr. Vandam stood up from behind his desk, a bony man with an angular face, aggrieved eyes, and a perpetually worried mouth. This was the expression he presented to the public. What went on behind it, I couldn’t even guess. “Come in, sir,” he said in a deceptively mild voice. “Come in and sit down.” He pulled a chair around so that the light would strike my face. “You mustn’t mind Miss Kirk,” he said. “We’re short-handed and she has to do most of the work.” He peered at me owlishly. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you before. Are you selling something?”

“Not exactly, doctor.” I had ignored the proffered chair. “I came to see one of your patients.”

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Paula Larsen.”