CHAPTER 6

In Jack’s Case

It is hard, if not impossible, to snub a beautiful woman.

—Sir Winston Churchill

New York City

July 19, 1946

HER NAME WAS Emily Stendall—the pedigreed blonde in pink polkadots who’d waltzed into his office worried about flies and swatters.

She’d gotten Jack’s name from Gertrude Herbert, a fellow cliff-dweller, one of those uptown, high-rise, society dames who hired him as a bodyguard on a fairly regular basis.

“Start at the beginning, Miss Stendall,” Jack suggested from across the dry, brown desktop.

“I’d rather start at the end,” she said primly. “Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’d like you to stop Joey Lubrano from murdering me. If you take my case this minute, I’ll double your per diem plus expenses, and I’ll give you a bonus of one thousand dollars if you’re able to gather enough evidence for his conviction of a capital crime.”

“The crime of?”

“I told you, killing my sister. And planning to kill me.”

Jack picked up his deck of Luckies and gave them a shake. Emily Stendall nodded and he rose from his chair. He shook the pack again, watched her slip one white cylinder out of its nest, place it between her lips. He fired up a match. Soft fingers touched his, pulling the flame close. She inhaled and closed her eyes, savoring the hit.

Jack lit his own and took a long drag. “Okay—” he began, sitting on the edge of his desk.

She exhaled a long, white plume. “You’ll take the job?”

“Not yet,” Jack said. “You started on your end. Now do me a favor and start on mine.”

Emily Stendall’s brown eyes widened. “Your what?”

“From the beginning, honey,” he clarified. “Tell me the story from the beginning.”

“My sister’s name was Sarah. Mrs. Sarah Nolan. Her husband, Melvin, secured a promotion a year ago that had him traveling on business quite a bit.”

“How much is quite a bit?”

Emily shrugged her creamy shoulders. “Two weeks out of every month I’d guess.”

“I’d guess that’s quite a bit.”

“Well, you can see how it started then. Sarah became lonely, and one night she invited him in for a drink. Joey Lubrano, I should say, our building’s elevator operator—”

Our building?”

“We lived in the same building on East Sixty-fifth. She lived on the ninth floor. I live directly above her on the tenth.”

“Go on.”

“After a while, Joey threatened her with blackmail, and—”

“How?”

“He’d taken photos . . .” Emily Stendall paused a moment, bit her lower lip. “Risque photos. You understand?”

“I understand.”

“At the time he’d said they were just for him to remember her. But obviously he’d had other things in mind.”

“Mmm . . . obviously.” Jack’s tone had a bite. Emily Stendall noticed.

“What?” she asked. “You think she was naive?”

“Not naive.” Jack took a long drag. “Stupid.”

“Mr. Shepard, no one calls my sister stupid.”

“She cheated on her husband with a man who blackmailed and then killed her. You call that smart?”

“I call that victimized. Or is that too expensive a word for your vocabulary?”

“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?”

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