“Go to hell,” I told him. “As a favor, huh? Just for me?”
CHAPTER 14
Clyde Neva’s address turned out to be a six-story warehouse structure on a block taken up almost completely by the sides of large apartment buildings which fronted on other streets. The place had two entrances. One of them was a gigantic sliding-gate affair for trucks. That one was boarded up. The other one was small and newly painted, the color of a stale whisky sour. A neatly polished metal plaque in the center of it said:
Neva Portraits — Loft
The smaller door opened into a narrow stairwell with concrete fire steps and a metal handrail leading upward. There was another plaque just inside which said simply Neva, and still another on the first landing, this time with an arrow pointing upward. Underneath the third plaque someone had scrawled in lipstick: Oh, Clyde, ifl come up all thatway I’ll just never, never come down. The fire doors from the unused warehouse were barred on each landing.
The stairwell was sweltering. There was one final Neva at the top, in case someone hadn’t been paying attention, and a bell that you worked by a chain. Brannigan worked it and we heard it tinkle somewhere inside. I crushed out a cigarette, sweating.
Clyde Neva called out to us as he started to open the door, saying, “But darling, you’re so-ooo early,” and then he got a look at us and said, “But it isn’t you either, is it? I don’t know you, do I? But then that’s always so-ooo exciting! Do come in, do!”
“Can it,” Brannigan said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Can the swish talk, we’re not buying. You Clyde Neva?”
He looked at us, pouting. He had the sort of face that was meant to pout, the kind that would have looked charming in the mirror over a lady’s dressing table while its owner plucked her eyebrows, if its owner had been a her. So it had probably looked sickening when its owner had plucked his. He was wearing rouge, and you could have hitchhiked to Rochester and back in the time he’d spent on his hair. Each tiny blond curl had been twisted into place separately, in a way which made his head look as if someone had doused it with mucilage and then dumped the contents of a bait can over it. He was wearing an orange turtleneck sweater, and the buttermilk-colored things he thought were pants were so tight that he had probably had to put them on with Vaseline.
“I said are you Neva?”
“But naa-tur-a-lly. Surely you didn’t miss the darling signs?”
Brannigan had wanted to know what I felt. I could have told him now. Just tag along, Harry, come meet all the jolly sorts she’d shared her Ju-Jubes with in the past dozen months. I felt an incipient nausea just looking at this one.
We’d gone in. Neva had the fall floor, and most of it was one stadium-size room with windows along the rear and a skylight in the roof. The place might have been the ballroom in a sorority house for unmatriculated screwballs on party night.
Instead of chairs there were pillows scattered everywhere, all of them violet and all about the size of recumbent hippopotami. Most of the wall space was taken up with weird, leering African masks, and there were Chinese lanterns hanging from the ceiling like Yuletide at the Mao Tse Tung’s. A broad platform raised the level of the floor about ten inches in a far corner, and in the middle of the platform, draped in pink, was the largest bed I had ever seen. It would have accommodated the starting five from the Harlem Globetrotters and probably two or three substitutes. They could have practiced in it if they didn’t feel like sleeping. A white picket fence ran around the outside edge of the platform, and in the center of the fence was a little red gate. A lantern hung on the gatepost. A sign said: Neva.
The photographic equipment stood by itself in another corner, near a door marked: Dark Room — For Pictures, Silly. There was another door near that one with a large half moon carved into the paneling.
Neva was reading Brannigan’s shield and being remotely concerned. “But, dears” he was saying, “what can you want with little old me?”
I took a cigarette. I was running out of them.
“Neva, I’ve got some questions and I want some answers,” Brannigan told him. “Straight answers without the phony affectations. Save that for the misfits you think you have to impress. You got some clean young boy who’ll give you an alibi for last night?”
“Have I got — oh, come there, must you be so crude, Mr. Brannigan? And you haven’t even been polite. The least you might do is introduce me to your hand-some friend.”
He looked at me with a sly, simpering sort of grin that was supposed to be clever and quaint and superior all at once. It made his face about as appealing as the back end of a dachshund. I went over to a window and stood there, which was the only thing I could think to do to keep from drop-kicking him through the skylight.
“Neva, I asked you about last night.”
“Well, of course I was with someone, darling. Isn’t everyone?”
Brannigan had meant it about not being on the market for the gay talk. Neva finally got the clue when he found himself being hoisted by the front of the sweater and dumped onto one of the huge purple pillows. He let out a gigglish little squeal, like a goosed hyena.
“You needn’t be so aggressive! Please, my analyst says my psyche is very delicate. I just mustn’t get upset!”
“I bet. And your analyst can lick my old man any day of the week.” Brannigan was towering over him. “I won’t say it a second time, Neva. Anymore of that ‘darling* routine and you’ll do your answering down at headquarters under lights that’ll make that mascara of yours run down into your socks.”
Neva was pouting again. He got to his feet with a gesture like petals opening, then stood there posing with his hands limp in front of him. He nodded grudgingly.
“Who were you with last night?”
“A chap named Anton Quayles. We were developing—”
“Here?”
“—pictures. Here, yes.”
“What time did he leave?”
“About nine o’clock this morning. We were working quite late.”
“He going to admit that?”
“If you’re as offensive with him as you’ve been with me, I’m certain he’ll have no choice.”
“Never mind the editorial comment either. You have any other visitors?”
“Would you?”
“Damn it, Neva—”
“No, no other visitors. We were quite alone.”
“ When’s the last time you saw Catherine Hawes?”
“Catherine—” Neva pursed his lips. His hands were still raised limply, as if he’d just finished an exhausting concerto at an invisible Steinway, but he seemed suddenly conscious of the gesture. He opened his mouth to say something, then thought better of it.
“When, Neva?”
“I — well, it’s been weeks, we—”
Brannigan had him by the sweater again, jerking him forward. Neva squirmed, trying to draw away. He kept running his tongue over his lips, and now his eyes were darting from Brannigan’s to mine and then back. I went over there.
“What about her, Neva?”
“I — they weren’t pornography,” he gasped then. “They were art. Anyhow I didn’t send any of them through the mail so there’s no charge that can be—*