that were supposed to give it the atmosphere of a beer garden. Off to one side was the poolroom with the balls neatly racked and gathering more dust. He even had a cigarette machine down there. The butts were on the house and all you had to do was yank the lever, so I had a pack of Luckies on Toady too.
There were two other doors that led off the poolroom. One went into the furnace room and I stepped into a goddamned rattrap that nearly took my toes off. The other was a storeroom and I almost backed out of it when the white clothes that shrouded the stockpile of junk took shape. I found the light switch and turned it on. Instead of an overhead going on, a red light blossomed out over a sink on the end of the wall, turning everything a deep crimson.
The place was a darkroom. Or at least it had been. The stuff hadn't been touched since it was stored here. A big professional camera was folded up under wraps with a lot of movie-screen type backdrops and a couple of wrought-iron benches. The processing chemicals and film plates had rotted away on a shelf next to a box that held the gummy remains of tubes of retouching paints. Off in the corner was a screwy machine of some sort that had its seams all carefully dust-proofed with masking tape.
I put the covers back in place and turned the light off. When I closed the door I couldn't help thinking that Toady certainly tried hard to work up a hobby. In a way I couldn't blame him a bit. For friends all that repulsive bastard had was a lot of toys and dust. The louse was rich as sin with nobody to spend his money on.
I left the door open like I found it and climbed in under the wheel of my heap. I sat there feeling a little finger probing at my mind, trying to jar something into it that should already be there and the finger was still probing away when I got back to Manhattan and started down Riverside Drive.
So damn many little things and none of them added up. Some place between a tenement slum that had belonged to Decker and Toady's dismal swamp castle a killer was whistling his way along the street while I sat trying to figure out what a finger nudging my mind meant.
Lord, I was tired. The smoke in the car stung my eyes and I had to open the window to let it out. What I needed was a long, natural sleep without anything at all to think and dream about, but up there in the man-built cliffs of steel and stone was Marsha and she said she'd wait for me. The back of my head started to hurt again and even the thought of maybe sleeping with somebody who had been a movie star didn't make it go away.
But I went up.
And she was still waiting, too.
Marsha said, 'You're late, Mike.'
'I know, I'm sorry.' She picked the hat out of my hand and waited while I peeled off my coat. When she had them stowed in the closet she hooked her arm under mine and took me inside.
There were drinks all set up and waiting beside a bowl that had held ice but was now all water. The tall red candles had been lit, burned down a few inches, then had been blown out.
'I thought you would have been here earlier. For supper perhaps.'
She handed me a cigarette from a long narrow box and followed it with a lighter. When I had my lungs full of smoke I leaned back with my head pillowed against the chair and looked at her close up. She had on a light green dress that swirled up her body, over her shoulder and came down again to a thin leather belt at her waist. The swelling around her eye had gone down and in the soft light of the room the slight purple looked good.
I watched her a second and grinned. 'Now I'm nearly sorry I didn't. You're nice to look at, kitten.'
'Just half?'
'No. All this time. From top to bottom too.'
Her eyes burned softly under long lashes. 'I like it when you say it, Mike. You're used to saying it too, aren't you?'
'Only to beautiful women.'
'And you've seen plenty of them.' The laugh was in her voice now.
I said, 'You've got the wrong slant, kid. Pretty is what you mean. Pretty and beautiful are two different things. Only a few women are pretty, but even one who's not so hot to look at can be beautiful. A lot of guys make mistakes when they turn down a beautiful woman for one who's just pretty.
Her eyebrows went up in the slightest show of surprise, letting the fires of her irises leap into plain view. 'I didn't know you were a philosopher, Mike.'
'There're a lot of things you don't know about me.'
She uncurled from the chair and picked up the glasses from the table. 'Should I?'
'Uh-huh. They're all bad.' I got that look again, the one with the smile around the edges, then she brought in some fresh ice from the kitchen and made a pair of highballs. The one she gave me went down cold and easy, nestling there at the bottom of my stomach with a pleasant, creeping kind of warmth that tiptoed silently throughout my body until it was the nicest thing in the world to just sit there with my eyes half shut and listen to the rain drum against the windows.
Marsha's hand went to the switch on the record payer, flooding the room with the soft tones of the 'Blue Danube.' She filled the glasses again, then drifted to the floor at my feet, laying her head back against my knees. 'Nice?' she asked me.
'Wonderful. I'm right in the mood to enjoy it.'
'You still...'
'That's right. Still.' I closed my eyes all the way for a minute.
'Sometimes I think I'm standing still too. It's never been like this before.'
Her hand found mine and pulled it down to her cheek. I thought I felt her lips brush my fingers, but I wasn't sure. 'Do you have the boy yet?'
'Yeah, he's in good hands. Tomorrow or maybe the next day they'll come for him. He'll be all right.'
