The Blonde Wore Black by Peter Chambers

Author:Peter Chambers [Chambers, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Traditional
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

NEXT MORNING I GOT UP around nine and paddled around making coffee and coughing over my first cigaret. The paper was full of stuff about Flower’s murder and the shooting of Jake Martello. Jake was described as a financier, and I guess that’s as good a word as any. I got a two word mention as “a friend” who was with him at the time, and that was all the publicity I needed for today. There was a lot of filler about Jake, and the club, and Rose Suffolk, and just about everything else the reporter could dream up. They gave him a column and a half, and all it said was Jake got shot and nobody knew who did it. With Flower they had a better deal. They now knew there was a connection between her death and the Brook-man murder and they gave it plenty of treatment. The only disappointment from the paper’s standpoint was the lack of any real evidence that she didn’t fall naturally. Still, there was a rehash of the Brookman story, and plenty of emphasis on the mysterious connection with both cases of “the well-known entrepreneur Hugo Somerset.”

I chuckled as I read that “entrepreneur” again. A word that covered a multitude of activities, not to say sins. Just the same, it was clear Somerset would be getting his fair share of questions from Randall and the others. Not that I was sorry about that. All the time they spent asking other people questions was time they couldn’t spend darkening my door.

On an impulse I telephoned the hospital, and was told Jake Martello was making slow progress. I asked if they’d dug out the slug, and a frosty female voice advised me to ask his relatives. That I was not proposing to do at that hour of the morning. I didn’t want to be around Charlie and his playmates anymore than was absolutely necessary.

I was very sharp today in my new brown mohair suit and knitted tie. Anybody would take me for a lawyer, or one of those respectable people. An architect maybe, I thought as I admired myself in the mirror by the front door. Of course, architects don’t carry .38 Police Specials under their nice mohair jackets, I reflected glumly as I opened the door. Once again I found myself heading for Conquest Street. This is one of the more interesting streets in our fair city. It starts off close to the business section, with a legitimate theater right on the corner. That’s where it starts, how it starts. After that each succeeding group of buildings slides further and further down the social scale, and every other kind of scale. Half a mile along there are the girlie shows, clip-joints, run-down gym, every kind of entertainment you could put a name to, especially that kind. At nights, Conquest is no place to leave a car, but at that hour of the morning I knew most of the quick-money boys would be getting their hard-earned rest.

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