I pushed him away, gently, then said to the startled, outraged bunch, who were all on their feet now, "I hate to be the turd in the punch bowl, kids. But that stuff is illegal, and I don't want to risk going down for it."
This elicited lots of comment, running mostly to "Oh, Jesus!" and "Do you believe this asshole?"
I said, "I mean, not on a night when there are rumors of a police raid."
The place emptied out faster than that theater when King Kong broke loose.
And then it was just me and Chrome in the wet cellar that posed as a V.I.P. room.
She was laughing and applauding, saying, "Mike! I think maybe you are a cowboy."
Chrome came over and took my hand and led me to a big comfy leather chair near the ruined fun of the coffee table. I sat down and she nestled onto my lap, slipped her arms around my neck, like I was Santa and she had a wish. She was a big woman, and not light, but I didn't mind. Her lips found mine and they were moist and hot. I glanced over at the guard on the other side of the grating door. His back was to us.
"Listen," I said. "I want to talk to you...."
She was nuzzling my ear. "I want to talk to you, too, Mike. We will talk later...."
"Did you know Bill Doolan?"
Her head reared back and the big brown almond eyes locked on to me. "Yes. I did. Not well. So sad that he die. He was very nice."
"How nice?"
"What do you mean, Mike?"
"Nice, like ... this?"
And I put my hands on her breasts and just squeezed gently, like I was checking the freshness of fruit at a market. They were ripe and firm, all right.
"No," she said. She kissed me again, warm, sticky with lipstick, full of promise. Then her tongue was flicking and licking at my ear, darting like a snake's, as she whispered, "He was just a nice old man. He come stand and watch. Never dance. Just watch."
"Some people like to watch...."
"Some do not."
She slipped off my lap and onto the floor where a shag carpet was waiting for her knees and her hand found my zipper and tugged it down. She had me out and in her grasp and her mouth was about to descend when I held her back, the heel of a hand at a shoulder.
"I don't like sex in public places," I said.
"There is no one here but us."
I nodded toward the guard beyond the grating.
She shrugged. "Like I said ... there is no one here, Mike."
"I thought you were Little Tony's girl."
"I'm nobody's girl."
Her head bobbed down, but I pulled her up.
"No," I said. "Not now. Not like this."
Her full lips teased me with a smile. "And here I think they say that you are the wild man."
"Wild, yes. Not kinky."
She rose, sat on the arm of the easy chair, slipped an arm around my shoulder; her other hand still grasped me and gently, gently stroked. "We could go to your place."
"I don't have a place."
"We could go to mine."
"We could. But not tonight. Not now. This place ... your precious 52 ... Chrome, doll, this is not my scene."
The aftermath was expectedly awkward. My fly got zipped, her makeup got unsmeared, and so on. But she gave me her address written in mascara on a Club 52 cocktail napkin.
"Where do you live?" I asked her.
"Rio de Janeiro. Why?"
"This is a Park Avenue address. You staying with somebody?"
"No. I have a Manhattan apartment now. I will be spending much time here. Much time in America. You see, Mike ... you have not escaped me. You will never escape me."
"Is that a promise? In the meantime, where's the nearest exit? I got a feeling after Little Tony hears about this, he may take me off the list."
Chapter 9
BY TEN THE NEXT morning—after an early swim in the Commodore pool, another Bing's workout, and a deli breakfast—I settled in for a day of the kind of detective work that doesn't make it onto the TV shows.
I had to delve into those ancient filing cabinets in that ancient corner building where two old men had shared an office but kept their secrets to themselves. Pete Cummings, on his job in Philly, had left me a tidy desktop and a comfortable swivel chair and an icebox full of Miller. He was my idea of a good host.
But I was glad I'd got limbered up with a swim and a workout, because you have to have good knees to go through every drawer of two five-drawer files. And with an information pack rat like Doolan, those drawers contained plenty of chaff to go through trying to find a few kernels of wheat.
I paid special attention to any clippings that dated within the last year. Doolan put together a fat file of the press he and Alex had got for cleaning up the neighborhood, but I couldn't find anything that wasn't laudatory fluff— RETIRED POLICE OFFICER LEADS NEIGHBORHOOD REFORM. Nothing with specifics about the criminal element he'd helped run out. No other names at all except some of the merchants I'd met when I canvassed the neighborhood.
So I went back and started at the beginning of the newspaper stuff—right around Doolan's retirement twenty years ago. It was a lot of loose, yellowed clippings—two full file drawers—and started with puff pieces about the brave officer stepping down, and included clips on any hood, thief, or rapist that Doolan had put away who'd got out and made the papers again.
At first I thought I'd struck pay dirt, but virtually every series of clippings wound up with the bad guy returned to the slammer. Had Doolan's fine hand worked behind the scenes on any of these arrests? Did that mean a family member of some sorry incarcerated son of a bitch might have settled a grudge with the old warhorse?
But that didn't cut it. Doolan hadn't been chopped down on the street in a drive-by shooting—it was a staged suicide in his own damn apartment. That required a kind of sophistication and access unlikely to be found in the loved ones of some recently re-jugged recidivist.
I made a list of the names anyway, on a yellow pad. It was the kind of thing I could hand over to Pat if everything else was a dead end.
One file drawer seemed to be nothing but crimes from all over the world that had, for whatever reason, piqued Doolan's interest. These went back many years, well before his retirement, some brittle with age, a number from true detective magazines. At times he would underline in pen some nice piece of detective work, sometimes deductive, other times forensic.
I would walk a stack of file folders to Cummings's desk and sit and flip through the contents, and occasionally I'd get distracted by the interesting stories he'd clipped, everything from Jack the Ripper and Lizzie Borden to Kid Twist taking that flying leap out a six-story window at a Coney Island hotel (there'd only been six cops to keep track of him). So it sucker punched me when I found myself holding a crumbling clipping from an old Saga mag headed THE MARK OF BASIL.
There, in details echoing what diamond merchant David Gross had told me, was the tale of the tsar's favorite stonecutter, with blurry photos and hand-drawn re-creations, winding up with the questions, "Whatever happened to the great Basil? And what became of his precious stones? Has a glittering trail of death continued on through the years?"
My hands were trembling. It might have been a coincidence. After all, it wasn't like Doolan worked the Lizzie Borden case. These clippings seemed random, just material that got his juices going enough to honor them with a place in an already fat file folder of nothing special.
But for the first time I had a connection between Bill Doolan and the pebble I'd absentmindedly plucked from a pile of bloody sawdust used to soak up the life that had spilled too soon from young Ginnie Mathes.
It was almost one P.M., so I had a beer and unwrapped the ham and cheese on rye my host had bequeathed me. The "Mark of Basil" clipping stared at me from the desk as I ate and drank, and dared me to make something out of it.