"You have a key?"
She nodded, fished in her little purse, and held out a key in her palm.
I didn't make any move to take it. "Susie, you can hold that for the cops or give it to me. Your choice."
Her hand stayed outstretched. "Why break the door down? Besides, whatever you are, you're not exactly an Establishment type."
"That's a character reference I can appreciate, sugar."
That made her smile a little. I plucked the key from her palm and dropped it in my pocket.
When I paid the bill, and walked her to the door, she stopped me with her hand on my arm. "I feel awfully funny, Mr. Hammer, now that I think back."
"About what?"
"Having balled a dead man."
"He wasn't dead then."
She took her hand away and let it drop at her side. "Yes he was," she said.
Chapter Four
RUSSELL FRAZER'S APARTMENT was everything little Susie had said, and more.
She had apparently never opened the mahogany box with the heavy-duty diamond cufflinks and the Cartier jeweled watch. She had not found the two packets of fifty-dollar bills, or seen the empty wrappers for three others, because they were tucked in back of a bottom bureau drawer otherwise occupied by black silk socks, the kind worn by guys with dough or as the primary costume of some stud in a stag reel.
Frazer hadn't lied to Susie when he said he'd paid cash for everything. His receipts were all filed in one compartment of a black-lacquered wall unit with built-in storage cabinets and shelves for his hi-fi components and enough electronic gadgetry to make NASA turn green.
The living room motif was black and white, from the thick white pile wall-to-wall carpet to the black couch and stacked black cushions and white ones that apparently took the place of chairs for guests. The walls bore black-lacquer-framed black-and-white nude female photos that must have been art because the pubic deltas weren't airbrushed out, and the built-in bar in one corner was mirrored where it wasn't a black-and-white checkerboard design.
With the exception of the white carpet, though, the bedroom was in shades of brown and black, since the center-stage round bed's leopard spread seemed the focal point—a mirror above said Russell Frazer was no spring sybarite. That opinion was confirmed by the lavish bathroom's big sunken tub with its water-jet sprays, perfect for two. Or more.
Oh, it was an expensive, elaborate layout all right, taking one hell of a lot of bread, too heavy for a hundred-plus-a-week ceramics worker to handle; but if you had a good sideline going for you, it could be bought.
That character reference Susie had sketched for me was turning into a full-scale portrait as I shook down the rooms. This was all just one big playhouse and these were a little boy's toys. Russell Frazer probably never had the likes of them before, except in his fantasies or reading Playboy magazine.
But he sure had made up for lost time. There wasn't one sign of anything of solid investment value—just the ephemeral junk of a have-not who'd been given his head in some overpriced, trend-happy department store. The black satin sheets and the brass cigar humidor on the nightstand were the crowning touches.
Except the humidor didn't hold cigars—it was packed with dozens of condoms topped by a dozen fancy French ticklers, so he could do his entertaining in style. Either he had never heard of the Pill or he was understandably paranoid about VD.
One thing he did have: sense enough not to leave anything around that had a name or a number that wasn't his. And if he had a drug stash, I sure didn't find it. I was starting to wonder if I'd been the first guy to look this coop over.
Because I know how to shake a place down, and nothing pertinent turned up. I double-checked to make sure I hadn't missed anything, then finally headed out. The Homicide team could take it from here and put it through their own system of analysis, and maybe those sharp-eyed boys you never see because they live in labs could work out better answers than yours truly.
All I had going for me was a tight feeling across my shoulders and those funny fingers flexing in my mind and tapping out the message that something in this horny bachelor's pad was emitting a bigger smell than even my trained nose could sniff out.
Near the door, a four-shelved niche showcased a set of male-joined-to-female statuettes depicting just about every sex act imaginable. These weren't the kind of knickknacks you found for sale back at that pottery shop. They were arranged in an almost studied progression, lessons in a book to be learned and practiced, each one more acrobatically ambitious than the next.
Apparently Frazer was pretty serious about his Don Juan image. I could picture him hopping out of bed for a quick run to his knickknack rack to review a posture, then scurrying back to correct his technique. I grunted out a laugh.
His collection was pretty complete, plaster figures based on the most famous Hindu temple reliefs, hand-painted with loving care for detail ... and nothing that was new to me at all.
I could have told my pal Russell Frazer that he was missing at least one good arrangement Velda had devised.
Hell, I had muscle cramps for two days after.
It took me three hours of talking to half a dozen merchants and citizens, but I made the connection between Norman Brix and Russell Frazer.
Alex Singer, a retired tailor whose stone front stoop was his bleacher seat on the world, remembered them both and didn't have a good word for either.
He was a small blue-eyed man with thin white hair, looking lost in a dark woolen suit the temperature didn't call for. No doubt he'd perfectly tailored that number for himself some years ago, but age was shrinking him.
"Mr. Hammer, that Frazer was a real nogoodnik. The kind of slimeball that can bring a neighborhood down. The kind of crudder that can give young kids the wrong idea about what is 'cool,' and send them off down the wrong path."
"You make him sound like Fagin."
"I don't mean to say he paid any attention to the younger kids, nothing more than a grin and a nod. But when they saw him usher sexy young women up his front steps, and watched him getting in and out of expensive cars with a driver no less, well ... it gives those kids the wrong kind of ideas."
I didn't point out to the old gent that he seemed to be paying pretty close attention to the dolls parading in and out himself.
"Now older kids?" the geezer was saying. "That's another story. Like that Brix boy. Ever since Frazer moved into the neighborhood, occupying that apartment by himself? It turned into the worst kind of hangout for street punks and these trashy little girls they attract. Sometimes I'd see him go in with about five of these punks, Brix and these other greasy-haired bums, and just one girl ... and she would come out looking tired and frazzled, but counting her money."
"Any specific girl?"
"No. A good half-dozen of them. Skinny with dead eyes, all of 'em."
"There's a little doll named Susie, with a short haircut and long legs, skinny like a model—you see her?"
He nodded. "She'd go in there with him, sometimes. She looked nicer than the others. She wasn't one of those, uh..."
"Gang-bang gals?"
He shivered as if the early fall evening had turned bitterly cold. "Not her. Those parties of his, though ... you could smell the stuff coming out of his windows at night."
"What stuff?"
"Marijuana!"
How much of the old tailor's tale was envy for the younger generation—he probably went 23 skidoo with Charleston fillies and drank hooch in speaks in his day—and how much was righteous indignation, I neither knew nor cared. But the picture of Russell Frazer having dough to throw around, and maybe access to narcotics, kept getting clearer and clearer.