Seduction of the Innocent by Collins Max Allan

Author:Collins, Max Allan [Hard Case Crime]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Hard Case Crime
ISBN: 9780857687494
Publisher: Hard Case Crime
Published: 2013-02-19T05:00:00+00:00

A quick cab ride down Lexington brought me to the moderately dingy building where Pete Pine had a second-floor apartment above a drugstore. I pounded on Pine’s door but got no response, and—putting my ear close to the paint-peeling wood—could hear nothing beyond.

That didn’t mean he wasn’t in there—he might be sleeping it off, or ducking loan-shark enforcers or gamblers’ goons looking to shake money out of him. I’d seen him wearing their bruises many times before.

So I tried the drugstore downstairs, where the druggist, the soda jerk and the cashier all knew him, though only the cashier (a pretty brunette) seemed to like him at all. He was a regular customer, particularly at lunchtime, often had sandwiches at the counter, but hadn’t done so today. Hadn’t yesterday or the day before, either.

That cashier was a case in point: women liked the guy. Pete Pine was small but handsome, or anyway handsome enough, with dark curly hair. Whereas his organ-grinder buddy Bardwell had little squinty eyes, Pine had big dark, long-lashed Robert Taylor eyes. When it came to build, he was more Alan Ladd, slight but wiry, and when he wasn’t drinking, he seemed shy, quiet, even gentlemanly.

But after a woman became acquainted with Pete Pine, she was as liable to get punched as kissed.

Which was why I disliked the son of a bitch so much. I just don’t like men who knock women around. Call me old-fashioned.

Even the cockiest cabbie will admit that the odd-angled streets of Greenwich Village confound him; local residents claim to have no trouble navigating, but the rest of New York remains bewildered.

So my next cab deposited me to fend for myself on Eighth Street, near the Village Barn, a tourist trap, and soon I was walking among coffee shops and bookstores and sidewalk art displays, past females in black tights and bearded males in striped shirts, often paired off, though not necessarily with the opposite sex. We had another overcast, cool day, but everybody wore sunglasses anyway. A lot of dogs got walked down here, so you watched your step, and I was happy to be one of the few sidewalk-trodders not wearing sandals. At least it wasn’t monkey shit.

Lyla Lamont lived on one of those cobblestone side streets rife with converted stables and carriage houses. Her building was a three-story brick pile that had been whitewashed, its shutters painted green, ironwork painted black. Similar buildings lined both sides of this narrow street, all overseen by the only gas lamps left in the city.

Lyla was on the second floor. I’d been here a number of times, picking up past-deadline artwork when she was doing her strip Miss Fortune for Starr. The strip had been pretty risqué for family newspapers, sort of a female Zorro, and fairly popular, particularly with adolescent girls still working out their sexuality. There were paper dolls, too, with Miss Fortune and other cuties in their lacy underwear, also popular, particularly with adolescent boys still working out theirs.

La Lamont was fairly tall but not willowy, more curvy, an exotic beauty in a Maria Montez kind of way.

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