The Consummata

“I don’t,” she admitted.

“But we do know she sometimes dated her clients outside the Mandor’s doors. Dick Best a case in point.”

Bunny nodded, but then contradicted it with a head shake. “If Tango did date Halaquez, she never mentioned it. Nobody asks too many questions around here. And Dick Best is the only one I know of that she dated away from the club.”

I stuck the photo in my pocket and put the handbag back on the shelf. “Think I can beat Gaita out of her room tonight? She can stay here in Tango’s room instead.”

“I’m not crazy about you staying around, Morgan. You’re trouble.”

“You’re telling me? That’s why I want that handy back exit out of her room. Look, I can’t risk a hotel and the cops might spot me on a park bench.”

She sighed, a world-weary one, but then she gave me a little smile that said all was forgiven. Or most, anyway. “All right, Morg, I’ll arrange it.”

“Thanks.”

“Although Gaita may prefer sharing her room with you, to giving it up.”

“She and I can negotiate that. Just make sure she knows I’m coming.”

“Somehow,” Bunny said archly, “I think she’ll know when you’re coming. Morgan...what about Tango? How much heat is this liable to raise here at the Mandor?”

“And here I thought you were concerned about Tango as a friend.”

She whapped me on the arm—sort of a friendly whap, but a whap. “Bastard,” she said.

I grinned at her, shrugged. “My bet is that the cops will call it an attack by a sadist that was interrupted by someone who heard her yell. What happened is obvious enough—somebody tortured her. Whether to get information out of her, or just for the jollies, that’s in the eye of the beholder. It’ll be easy enough to understand why her rescuer would call the cops but get the hell out.”

But I was wrong. The cops didn’t call it anything at all. The next morning there would be no mention of it in the papers, nor any of the guy who had fallen on his knife in the lobby of Bunny’s apartment house.

Right now, of course, I didn’t know that. We went to Bunny’s office to wait for the doctor. We sat on her handsome leather couch, plumped up with big plush pillows, over which loomed that paisley wall hanging.

Her half-lidded eyes regarded me. “You think I’m a cold-hearted bitch, don’t you?”

“Not really,” I said. “I think you’re a decent enough dame. I understand why you don’t want to risk what you’ve got going here. I know you care about your girls.”

Her expression softened. There was real warmth in those dark blue eyes.

When she kissed me, it came as a surprise. Not a bad one, either, but a surprise.

“You know,” she said, “I don’t mind that you’re married. Not at all. A lot of married men do business here.”

“Yeah, you do know I make a policy of not paying?”

“I didn’t say anything about charging you, Morg. Anyway, I kind of owe you one...I did try to have you killed, once or twice.”

I kissed her and it was starting to get somewhere when a knock came at her door, and a muffled voice said, “It’s Doc Wilson, Bunny! You in there?”

I took my tongue out of her mouth and my hand off her right breast and said, “Maybe I should get my busted rib taped up before we take this any farther....”

A thundering rain had driven everybody indoors and was beginning to turn the streets into sluiceways. The cabbie who had picked me up reluctantly let me out a block from where I asked to be dropped, clearly wondering what kind of nut would want to wade through a night like this one in a ramshackle neighborhood slated for rebuilding when the city got tired of looking at it.

Tango may have possessed an exotic queenly beauty, perfect for her to play Cleopatra in the movies, but she sure hadn’t been raised in pretentious surroundings. The house she grew up in was a relic of those days when the boom hit Miami, then collapsed to leave the memory of inflated money behind by way of unpainted siding and sagging verandas. The wind had blown two aged wicker rockers onto their backs on the porch, and kept the torn screen door slamming on its hinges, like the face of the house kept getting slapped. The noise didn’t seem bother anybody, though.

I stepped across the litter of soggy newspaper and leaves plastered to the porch floor, rapped on the door, and waited. I did it again without getting an answer, said the hell with it, and tried the knob. The door swung in limply, half-loose from the frame, and—when I closed it again—sighed with creaking release.

The smell was like a foul fog in the air. Rotted garbage was the base, somewhere a dirty toilet added its bouquet while whiskey and beer fumes gave it that certain tang. The only occupant downstairs was an unshaven, dead-to-the-world guy in his middle fifties who was sprawled out on the couch, like Lizzie Borden’s papa waiting to get the axe.

The sleeper reeked of booze, two empty bottles on the floor beside him, his half-naked belly poking through a split shirt and his pants held together by an old army belt with the zipper wide open. A half-dozen pension check stubs were on the table at one end of the couch—the name typed on them: George L. Prosser.

Tango’s old man.

No great surprise there. Scratch a whore, find a no-good father.

I tried shaking him awake, but it was no good. He didn’t even make sounds of protest or even of reflexive awareness. The bum would be out a pretty long time yet.

I went through the downstairs rooms, kicking my way through the mess, then upstairs to what used to be the bedroom level.

Two rooms were totally empty.

One was as much of a mess as those downstairs. The fourth had been locked, but somebody had broken it open. This one had been neat and clean until somebody had ripped it into little pieces.

So this was Tango’s room—the one she returned home to, once or twice a month.

There hadn’t been much to strip out of the single dresser or the closet. Her clothes were out-of-style teenage things from school days long ago, along with some paint-spattered (though otherwise clean) dungarees and a few sweaters. The stuffing had been pulled out of the antique mohair chair, the mattress torn to shreds, and the flimsy little desk knocked to splinters with the old letters and notepaper it held scattered all over the floor.

Two pictures had been yanked from the wall and their backs removed, one ornamental top knocked off a bedpost to make sure they were solid, and the linoleum rug ripped into hunks to see if anything had been hidden under it.

But at least it gave me an idea of what somebody was looking for. It had to be small and it had to be flat. And it had to be important enough to kill for.

They had looked for it here, whatever it was.

Then they had gone after Tango herself.

So far they hadn’t found it, and she hadn’t given it to them, probably because she had no idea what the hell her torturers were after.

I left everything as it was and went back downstairs. George Prosser was still motionless on the couch, his breath burbling between his lips. He had pissed his pants without knowing since I last saw him, a few minutes ago. Well, it was cold in the house, on this rainy night, so maybe it would keep him warm a while.

Not that hard to figure, why Tango left home.

When I reached the section where the Club Mandor operated, I found the opening to the maze that led to Gaita’s room. I had the route so well sketched out in my mind, I didn’t need a light anymore.

I carefully went up the stairs, slid the door open, stepped inside, and closed it with a flick of my hand.

The only illumination came from the partially opened bathroom door, a pale yellow glow that was enough to barely outline the shapely female figure on the bed.

I felt a twinge of annoyance because as pleasant a bedroom companion as she would make, I really didn’t want Gaita to be here tonight. I was tired, I had thinking to do, and being with me right now was inherently dangerous for her.