Ричард Деминг - The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK®

My gaze flicked from my own reflection to that of the girl next to me, meeting her eyes in the mirror. To my surprise her lips curled in a slight smile.

“Admiring yourself?” she asked softly.

I turned from her reflection to the girl herself. She was about twenty-five, I guessed, and as sleek and beautiful as a new Cadillac. From her dress and the diamond brooch at her throat I judged she was equally expensive too.

If she was on the make, why had she picked me, I wondered? On the other side of her sat a smoothly handsome man whose perfectly tailored Palm Beach made my shapeless seersucker suit look like a sack. And dotted along the bar were a half dozen other men who were not only better looking than I, but obviously had more money.

Deciding not to look a gift horse in the mouth, I said, “Criticizing myself. I was trying to make up my mind whether to drink myself to death, or just go home and cut my throat.”

The girl moved her eyes sidewise at me. “Come on now. It can’t be that bad.”

Producing a package of cigarettes, I offered her one, but she shook her head.

“Buy you a drink?”

With the same slight smile she had thrown to me in the mirror she indicated the still nearly full highball before her. Running out of conversational subjects, I lapsed into silence.

“We can talk, though,” the girl said. “I’m not a bad listener. Why so down in the mouth? Fight with your wife?”

I shook my head. “I don’t own one. It’s nothing specific. I guess I’m usually down in the mouth.”

“Business troubles?”

I considered. “Maybe you could call it that. Not financial troubles. I’m a cop. Every once in a while I get disgusted with humanity and more disgusted with myself.”

She looked up at me interestedly. “A policeman? I might have guessed that.”

When I raised an eyebrow inquiringly, she said, “You look so strong. And you seem to have that quiet air of authority policemen are supposed to have.”

The girl actually sounded like she admired me, I thought with mild surprise. For a moment I felt a tug of suspicion, but when I studied her guileless face it died away and was replaced by an unaccustomed feeling of expansiveness. I have never been much of a ladies’ man, and it gave me a strangely pleasant feeling to find I could impress a woman as beautiful as this one.

She was no casual barfly, throwing out a line to the first man she encountered in an attempt to make a pickup, I decided. With her looks and her obviously expensive dress, she could get all the men she wanted without cruising the bars. I decided she must be a guest at the hotel, and was merely being friendly.

Noticing her glass was now nearly empty, I asked, “Can I buy you a drink now?”

“All right,” she said agreeably.

Her name was Jacqueline Crosby, she told me over the drink, and she was a dress designer from Chicago. She was in town for two weeks as her company’s representative at the national fashion show. In return I informed her my name was Sam Card and I was a sergeant on the St. Louis morality squad.

By two highballs later we were old friends. Usually alcohol only succeeds in making me more morose, but to my surprise I found that drinking with Jacqueline was making me increasingly cheerful. By eleven o’clock, when she suggested that she had better get to bed because she had to rise early, I was behaving as light-heartedly as though I were my moon-faced partner, Jud Harrison, instead of the morality squad’s eternal sourpuss.

“I live right here at the hotel,” she added. “If you want to take me up to my room, I’ll mix you a nightcap in return for the drinks you bought me.”

Her tone conveyed the barest suggestion of promise that the invitation could mean more than a nightcap. Momentarily it brought my feet back to earth as I again wondered what motive so beautiful a woman could have in scraping acquaintance with a mere cop. Then I decided that questioning motives was probably one of the reasons I had missed many of the pleasures in life, and rose to follow her without a care in the world.

Jacqueline had a suite, not just a room, I discovered when she keyed open her door and I followed her into a large sitting room. She left me there while she went on into the bedroom, and I could hear her phoning down for ice.

Then she called, “Get the door when the boy brings ice, will you, Sam? I want to change into something more comfortable.”

That did it. Up till then my opinion of Jacqueline had been swaying back and forth between regarding her merely as an impersonally friendly female and a woman on the make. But the corny line about getting into something more comfortable crystallized it. I was now suddenly sure that from the moment she sat down on the bar stool next to me, she had intended me to bring her to her suite and make love to her.

With a mixture of mounting anticipation and puzzlement I wondered if after a lifetime of being ignored by women, I had suddenly become irresistible. Walking over to a wall mirror, I studied my lace again, but it didn’t look any more like the answer to a maiden’s prayers than it had in the bar mirror downstairs.

A knock came at the door, I opened it and traded the white-coated boy in the hall a quarter for a bowl of ice. I had barely closed the door behind him when Jacqueline came from the bedroom.

More comfortable, she had said, and she had changed into about as comfortable a garment as you can imagine short of bare skin. She wore a lace negligee so filmy it was all but transparent. And beneath it there was nothing but the pink and white of her flesh. She wore nothing else.

She was even barefoot.

I watched in astonishment as she removed a bottle, siphon and two glasses from a small liquor cabinet and mixed two highballs. If there had been any lingering doubts in my mind as to what she wanted of me, that negligee would have halted them.

But why so lovely a woman would have picked me out of all the men in the Jefferson bar, I could not imagine.

The thought occurred to me that perhaps I was intended to be the victim of a badger game, but I instantly discarded it as inconceivable the girl would be stupid enough to attempt that stunt on a man she knew to be a cop.

When she neared to within two feet of me in order to hand me my drink, and the bright light of the lamp next to me penetrated her thin garment to expose her firm pink-tipped breasts as clearly as though she were naked, I stopped worrying about her motives. Setting down my glass on the mantel without tasting it, I removed hers from her hand, set it next to mine, and took hold of her.

Approximately an hour later I discovered the reason for Jacqueline’s concentrated play for me. We were back in the sitting room by then, and I had dumped the tepid contents of our highball glasses and mixed two fresh drinks. Jacqueline sat on the sofa watching me mix them, her bare feet tucked up under her and the flimsy negligee wrapped around her so tightly it outlined her figure like a coating of cellophane.

When I passed over her drink, she patted the place next to her on the sofa in indication for me to sit down. I shook my head and looked at her without smiling.

“Why?” I asked.

“Why what, Sam?”

“Why everything? Why did you bring me up here? What do you want?”

Her smooth forehead puckered in a frown. “You mean you think there’s an angle?”

“I don’t think I’m irresistible,” I told her. “For thirty-two years women hardly give me a second glance. Then the most beautiful woman I ever saw takes one look at me and goes completely overboard. Forgive my cynicism, but I’m not exactly a dunce. There has to be an angle.”

“Maybe you’re just being modest.”