“Cheating on her husband with the elevator man? Her actions do suggest other adjectives, Miss Stendall,” said Jack. “Words that aren’t pretty. The kind of ugly words men use in front of their bartenders—”
Emily Stendall rose. “How dare you!” And in a blur of movement Jack grabbed her quickly approaching hand.
“Let me go!” She yanked at her trapped wrist.
Jack held. “Look, doll, I’m sincerely sorry about your sister’s death, but I’m not about to start my weekend with a red-hot handprint tattooed to my cheek . . . even if it is a beautiful hand.”
Emily Stendall’s firm, full breasts were heaving in fury and indignation.
“Let me go,” she said, her voice finally level.
Jack released her. She rubbed at the red mark circling her right wrist. Her eyes speared him as her glossy pink lips made a little-girl pout.
“A little advice, honey,” said Jack, retrieving the lit cigarette from the green linoleum floor and stabbing it out in the ashtray beside his cracked-leather davenport. “You might be able to lead your Yale men around by the leash with that indignant princess act, but when you’re dealing with rough trade, you’ll need another strategy.”
The little-girl pout loosened to a grim frown. Jack put a second Lucky in his mouth, lit it, then transferred it to hers. She took another hit, long and needy.
“That’s why I want to hire you, Mr. Shepard,” she admitted. “My sister’s involvement with ‘rough trade,’ as you put it, got her killed. Now I need someone like you to—”
“Clean up the mess.”
“Precisely. So will you take the job or not?”
“I have a few more questions. Namely, why haven’t the police picked up Lubrano? I assume you’ve gone to them?”
“Yes, of course, I went to them. They picked him up, too. They questioned him, then they released him. No evidence, they said, and, of course, he denied everything. They searched his apartment but didn’t find any photos. And his alibi that night was supposedly airtight.”
“What was it?”
“He’d entered a dart-throwing contest at a downtown bar. Ten cops were in the bar with him.”
“That’s pretty airtight, honey.”
“But he slipped away to kill Sarah. I know he did. My sister’s death was ruled an accident. They claim she drank martinis on top of sleeping pills then drowned in a bath. But the night she died, Sarah and Lubrano were supposed to meet. He was supposed to be exchanging the photos and their negatives for the payoff. But something obviously went wrong. Maybe my sister became angry and it went badly. Maybe he’d planned all along to murder her and tricked her into drinking a drugged martini so she could never get him into trouble. Whatever happened that night, he took the money and the photos and set her up with an accidental death. That’s why Lubrano wants to kill me now.”
“Because you went to the police?”
“I’m the only one who knew about the affair he had with Sarah. I’m the only one who knew about the blackmail and the photos. He didn’t know it before he killed her, but now he does because I went to the police. He threatened me just the other day, told me to keep my mouth shut from now on or he’d shut it permanently—just like he did my sister’s.”
“When did he say this?”
“Just last night, right there in my building’s elevator. That’s when I knew I was in over my head. I remembered a friend had used your services some months back, so here I am . . .”
Jack nodded. The dame was right. She was in over her head.
“Mr. Shepard, I think Joey Lubrano is going to try to use those photos again, this time to extort money from Sarah’s husband. If it gets out what happened—that Sarah posed for nude photos with her lover—the scandal would socially ruin and devastate not just him but his father. You know who his father is, Mr. Shepard?”
“Sorry, enlighten me.”
“He’s the fundraising director for St. Bernard’s.”
Jack nodded. St. Bernard’s Episcopal Church was a Fifth Avenue institution. Its members included prominent politicians, judges, and financial scions.
“I get it, honey.”
“Do you?”
Jack’s interest piqued as he watched Emily close her long-lashed eyes and take another long pull on the Lucky Strike.
“And your parents . . . they don’t know their little girl smokes, do they?”
Emily opened her big brown eyes and levelly met Jack’s stare. “They don’t know their little girl does a lot of things.”
Jack’s eyebrow rose. “I’ll need more information from you, Miss Stendall, before I can get started.”
“But you’ll take the case?”
“Yeah, honey,” said Jack. “You just hired yourself your own private dick.”
A few minutes later, Jack was escorting Miss Emily Stendall from his warm office to the hot elevator, then to the steamy Manhattan streets.
“Seven million people in this city,” said Jack Shepard, “and every last one is hailing a cab.”
When the tenth hack went by, already hired, Jack muttered, “Nuts to this.” He considered suggesting they each cough up a dime for the subway, but he doubted very much Miss Stendall would agree.
“Mr. Shepard, a lady of class cannot be seen taking the subway,” one of his clients once had told him when they’d been stranded by her driver and no cabs were in sight. And, of course, what Jack understood was the idea of the act itself was not as repugnant as being “seen” committing it.
“Hungry?” Jack asked his client, because he was.
Emily nodded. So he rolled down his sleeves, put on his jacket and fedora, and took her into Little Roma, a cozy Italian joint near his office, ten wooden tables covered by red-and-white checkered tablecloths and wine bottles with candles stuck in the tops. Nothing pricey but no dive, either. Every table was taken. Ceiling fans moved a pleasant breeze through the room and the smell of fresh rolls and garlic stoked their appetites. They shared a bottle of chilled Chianti and ate thinly sliced veal cutlets made into a melt-on-your-tonsils dish he could never pronounce.
When they stepped back onto the street, the hot day had cooled a few degrees with a breeze off the Hudson, and the hour was well past quitting time. Not for everyone though . . .
Ten blocks north, clouds of steam continued to waft from pressing machines in sweltering loft factories. Long into the night, the Garment District would still be making dresses like the polkadot halter number Miss Stendall wore; while ten blocks south, men without faces had forgotten what quitting time even was. Theirs was a world of shuffling feet and bottomless bottles, outstretched palms, sidewalk beds, long steady stares, and in the end, Bellevue.
Jack doubted Miss Stendall had even been down near the Bowery—he couldn’t blame her. For that crowd, the Depression had never ended, and Jack didn’t like to be reminded of those days, either. He’d had his bad luck like everybody. His mother dying young, his father at a loss for what to do. Putting the two girls in a convent orphanage and Jack left to fend for himself.
He’d boxed some, knocked around, then on a lucky break became a cop. And when the war broke out, and the draft began, that’s the time even more bad luck had blown his way—and he thought it best to enlist his way out of it.
Maybe that’s why he liked Manhattan mostly at night. He’d seen it on leave during the war, when an official dim-out had shut down the bright lights of his town, darkening its marquees and skyscrapers, shrouding even the Statue of Liberty in shadow as a precaution against marauding German subs. Wartime New York had become a somber ghost of itself.
Stepping into this postwar evening, Jack happily eye-balled the forest of buildings, all lit up like torches. This was the reason he’d never leave the city. The lights of night transformed a country boy’s night into a working stiff ’s brand-new day, blazing the pathways to movie theaters and restaurants, gin mills and nightclubs, allowing pursuits of pleasure long past the time the suburban rube and farm boy had been forced to put up their feet.