Negative of a Nude Page 3

  I nodded.

  “Well, it’s about her that I called you. Er—Eloise, maybe you’d better high-tail it out of here so’s us men-folk can talk.”

  Eloise leaned to peck him on the cheek in a very wifely manner, then turned to go. As she passed me, she smiled and winked. I felt cold chills go through me at that. The door clicked shut behind her.

  “Care for a cigar?”

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  He took a long skinny black cigar from his breast pocket, carefully removed the cellophane, bit off one end of the smoke, spat the end on the floor. Then he looked me square in the eye, pointed the cigar like he was aiming a gun, and fired: “You got some credentials, Mr. Wonder?”

  I took out my wallet, unsnapped the cover leading to my I.D. cards and handed it over to him. My license was on top peering out through a milky plastic window. Mr. Harvey Dutton scrutinized it thoroughly, rolling his cigar about his mouth and masticating it with determination. Finally, satisfied, he thrust the wallet back at me.

  “You do take a fine picture, Mr. Wonder,” he said.

  “Thank you, Mr. Dutton,” I said.

  He frowned at a sudden thought. “What do you think of my Eloise, Mr. Wonder? I mean, do you like her? Do you think she’s a—well, a nice woman?”

  “I just met your wife, Mr. Dutton,” I said, “but I’d say she’s a wonderful woman.” And stacked like nobody’s business I thought to myself.

  He considered this. He took the cigar out of his mouth, stuck the cigar back in his mouth, took a wooden stick match from a shirt pocket, struck it aflame with a fingernail, applied the light to the end of the cigar, and began puffing out clouds of grey smoke.

  “You married, Mr. Wonder?”

  “No,” I admitted, “I’m not.”

  I began to wonder if I had some of his wife’s lipstick on me. I hoped not. I could handle him okay. I wasn’t worried about his size. But I didn’t like a fat fee to slip between my greedy little fingers. Okay, I guess maybe I was worried a little about his size, too. He was a big one. I’m six-feet-one from my bare tootsies to my sandy crewcut, but Harvey Dutton outranked me on size and weight.

  “Suppose,” he said, puffing, “suppose you were married to a sweet little woman like my wife, and some rattlesnake tried to do her dirt? What would you do?”

  I thought: oh-oh. I said, honestly enough, “I’d probably clobber the ape!” It sounded to my suspicious and guilt-laden mind as though he were trying to justify clobbering me.

  He hurled himself from his chair, and I tensed, bracing myself. But it was only Harvey Dutton’s way of getting up. I settled back and took a long, relieved gulp of my drink, while he made pacing marks in the expensive, wall-to-wall carpeting.

  “Right,” he said, finally. “That is absolutely, one-hunnerd percent right, Mr. Wonder.” He stopped pacing and fixed me with a steely glance. “And that’s where you come in.”

  “I was wondering where I would come in,” I said, wryly, but fortunately he took no notice.

  He fell back into a chair and took a few more contemplative puffs. “Eloise used to be a model,” he said. “She wanted to be a fashion model and go on to movies. But when a young girl’s just starting out, you know when she’s young and innocent, they take advantage of her and make her do a lot of posing for pictures.” He waved the trifle aside with his cigar. “You know, cheesecake, and—” he hesitated, then rushed on—“and girlie pictures.”

  I nodded that I was still with him, and he continued: “Some of the pictures aren’t—well, maybe ain’t the kind that you’d want to be seen in.” The steely stare came again. “Get what I mean?”

  I played it cool. “I’m not sure,” I said.

  He catapulted himself from the chair again and paced back and forth like a nervous horse. “I mean, when a girl has a lot of pictures taken—you know, in one costume and out and in another, in bathing suits and shorts and things—well, maybe some pictures are taken that—well, that—” He was floundering so badly it was embarrassing.

  I said, “I get you, Mr. Dutton. This could certainly happen without the girl meaning to, or maybe even knowing about it.” I was working pretty hard for my fee. “Does somebody have some pictures like this of Eloise?”

  He sank into the chair and expelled a great sigh. “Yeah,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “My little prairie flower.”

  “Blackmail?” I suggested.

  He nodded grimly. “Some polecat got ahold of some pictures and is trying to bleed money from me. I don’t mind that so much, but I’m thinking of Elly.”

  “She knows about these pictures, then, and the blackmail attempt?”

  He nodded. “She got real hysterical about it. Said she’d forgotten about her posing days and didn’t know these were still around. That’s why I called you in. I didn’t want the police in on this; I wanted the whole thing private.”

  “By the way,” I said, “how’d you happen to pick me? The yellow pages?”

  He grinned like a small boy with a secret.

  “Somebody recommended you, Mr. Wonder. Very highly, too.”

  “Who’s my friend?”

  “Can’t tell you that,” he said. “But I can give you a—retainer, I guess you call it, if you can get the person behind this, and the negatives of those pictures.”

  “I’ll get them,” I said, oozing confidence.

  I wondered who my unknown admirer was, but I didn’t want to press the issue. Harvey Dutton had pulled a bulging wallet from his hip pocket and was peeling bills from it. One thing at a time, I thought.

  He was frowning at a stack of bills that would have choked a mustang. “Don’t seem to have much change left,” he said, almost apologetically. “Suppose I give you five hundred as a starter?”

  “It’s a good starter,” I said, reaching for it.

  “And say, forty-five hundred more when you deliver?”

  “Fair enough,” I said, pocketing the four one-hundred dollar bills and two fifties. I was in the steak bracket again, temporarily at least, and it felt good. “First of all, I’d like to see some of those pictures of Eloise, and the envelope and letter asking for money.”

  He looked like he was ready to call the whole thing off. “You got to see the pictures?”

  I shrugged helplessly. “I have to know what I’m looking for.”

  He mulled over that for awhile, his cigar working. Then he let out a sigh and threw himself from the chair. He went to a picture of some stampeding cattle, with the legend “ROUND-UP TIME IN TEXAS” branded on the frame, and swung the picture aside to reveal a safe. He twirled the safe’s dial and clicked the door open. He shoved several things aside—probably diamond trinkets—and took out a small brown envelope. He hesitated, undecided, then walked over and handed it to me.

  “This’s how it came in the mail,” he said.

  It was a plain brown six-by-nine inch Kraft envelope. Across the face of it was typed Harvey Dutton’s name and address. FIRST CLASS MAIL and PLEASE DO NOT FOLD OR BEND were rubber-stamped on front and back. It took twenty cents postage to mail, and the postmark said it had been dispatched from the Hollywood post office just a week ago. I studied these details carefully, trying not to appear anxious to look at the contents.

  “They came about a week ago,” Harvey volunteered. “I was going to tear them up, but instead I put the whole kaboodle in the safe and went around cross as a coyote for a couple days, and then I asked Eloise about them. That’s when she told me about posing.” He motioned to the envelope. “You’d better take a look.”

  I fumbled at the clasp on the envelope and dragged out four pictures along with a corrugated cardboard used to prevent bending, and a three-by-five inch index card with a brief line of typing on it. The index card said: $15,000 FOR THE NEGATIVES.

  I whistled at that. The writer of that brief message was certainly ambitious. “Did you get any more messages?”

  “Not yet,” he said.

  “You will,” I said, but I wo
ndered why he hadn’t already gotten another message.

  I withdrew the pictures from the corrugated cardboard protectors. For the second time I stifled a whistle. It wouldn’t have been polite. The pictures were four five-by-seven glossies of Eloise Dutton on a bed. She was totally nude and smiling directly into the camera lens.

  She hadn’t changed much since the pictures were taken. At least her face hadn’t, and her hairdo was the same; about the rest of her I couldn’t say. As I’d suspected, she had a lulu of a figure and a very nice smile, but the photos were clearly no accident. They were deliberately posed, and not for the sake of art.

  Harvey Dutton was looking grim. “I’ll be frank with you, Mr. Wonder. I’ve got a good bit of money. I’ve had it ever since my father sold his cattle and took to drilling for oil. But I wouldn’t know where this maverick’d stop—or if he’d stop at all. Any money I gave him might be just a first installment.”

  “Mr. Dutton, you have a problem. I’d like to borrow this note. There’s an expert on documents who can tell me just what typewriter did this. And I’d like to take one of the pictures with me. I have a photographer friend who might be able to throw some light on that.”

  “Well, okay,” he said, somewhat reluctantly, “but don’t lose it. One blackmailer is enough.”

  “More than enough,” I agreed. I took the index card and the least offensive picture and put them in my coat pocket next to my heart. Then I returned the other pictures and the cardboard to the envelope and handed them to him. He fastened the clamp securely, locked the envelope in the safe, and returned the cattle picture to its original resting spot on the wall.

  “I’ll need a list of places Eloise posed so I can do some preliminary checking. Also, when she did the posing, and under what names?”

  “She used the name Lois Smith,” he said. He extracted a small piece of paper from his shirt pocket. On it were typed names and addresses of photo studios. “Eloise thought you might want them, so she made out a list.”

  I took the paper from him, glanced at it briefly, and put it in my wallet. “Eloise is a smart girl,” I said, meaning it.

  She would have been smarter, I thought, if she’d taken a job in a laundry instead of posing for pornographic pictures. I didn’t mention that those four prints were probably not the only samples of “art” in existence featuring his wife. They might be being peddled in Tijuana, maybe worse ones. When a photographer gets a model zeroed in, the film flows like water.

  “See what you can do, Mr. Wonder,” he said.

  “I’ll check with you later, Mr. Dutton, and give you a progress report. I’ll probably also need some more—er—small change for operating expenses. I can find my way out okay.” I left him in the study and walked to the front door. I was glad the butler wasn’t around. I got the impression he could get along without me very well, and the feeling was mutual.

  “Well,” somebody said, “so you’re the private detective?” Somebody was a barefoot young girl in bluejeans and a striped sweater that swallowed the top half of her body. She must have been eighteen or nineteen, but she looked younger in her outfit and with her brown hair hanging in long, unsophisticated strands. She was holding a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in one hand.

  “No secret in that,” I said. “Mark Wonder’s my name. And who are you, the upstairs maid?”

  She pouted. “We haven’t got an upstairs maid, though Harvey could certainly afford one. It’s a good thing Harvey has money because Eloise has expensive tastes and besides that she’s seeing a head shrinker and you know how much they cost. By the way, I’m Dody Dutton, Harvey’s sister.”

  “Glad to meet you, Dody Dutton. I thought you’d never tell me who you are.”

  “Eloise tells me I talk too much. Maybe I do sometimes. You know, you’re much different from the way I thought you’d be. I don’t know how, really. Someone taller, I guess, maybe about Harvey’s height, and with a trench coat and a hat and maybe a cigarette drooping from one corner of his mouth. Do you think I talk too much?”

  “Not for a woman,” I said, smiling.

  She grinned back at me. “I’m on my way to the beach for a swim. Come along?”

  “A swim? Now?” I said. “In the ocean?”

  “Sure. The Pacific. We have a heated pool out back, of course, that’s no fun. I like swimming in the moonlight when a breeze’s blowing and the water’s like ice. Doesn’t everybody?”

  “No,” I disillusioned her, “everybody doesn’t. Maybe some other time, though. By the way, whose sports car is that out front?”

  “Mine,” she said. “Why?”

  “Somebody nearly ran me off the road when I was coming up here.”

  “Couldn’t have been me, or I would have done it. I have very good aim with a car.” Her face was perfectly serious, but her eyes sparkled. “You know something,” she said, taking a bite from her sandwich, “I like you, Mark Wonder.”

  “And I like you, too, Dody Dutton,” I said truthfully.

  “Sure you wouldn’t like that swim?”

  “I’d like it some other time.”

  “Okay,” she said, heading for the door. “I’ll beat you down to civilization.”

  “I’ll bet you will,” I said to the empty, open doorway.

  I’d just gotten to the Chevvy when the black sports car, motor revving, flicked on its lights and zoomed away from in front of me, barely missing the gold Cad, accelerated the curved length of the driveway, cornered in a cloud of flying gravel, and disappeared down the road, growling.

  “Women drivers,” I muttered.

  I opened the car door and even got in before I noticed. Someone was in the front seat, waiting for me.

  Chapter Four

  I WAS SURPRISED to see anyone there, but I was even more surprised to see who it was.

  “Mrs. Dutton,” I said.

  “I’m happy to see you have 20-20 vision, Mr. Wonder,” Eloise said. “I’m sure good eyesight is an asset to a private eye.”

  My 20-20 was fine, and her low-cut dress was giving it another workout. I remembered her husband was in the house, within shooting distance.

  “Did you want to see me about something?” I asked her.

  “I wanted to talk to you,” she said. “Did Harvey show you the pictures?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you like them?”

  “They were over exposed.”

  She laughed at that. “They were supposed to be.”

  “You don’t seem very disturbed about them.”

  “Harvey has money. Let him pay to get them back.”

  “You’re trying to do me out of a job, I see.”

  “Not at all. But I thought that as long as you were going to be around, we might as well be friendly, get to know each other better.” She edged over on the seat until her leg was touching mine. “I could be very nice to you, Mark,” she said. “I could be very nice.”

  “I’m sure you could. Tell me, Mrs. Dutton—”

  “Eloise,” she insisted.

  “Eloise. When were the pictures taken?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Five years ago, maybe. Maybe more.”

  “In a studio?”

  “I guess so. I don’t remember where it was.”

  “Strange you don’t remember something like that,” I said. “You must have had a lot of pictures taken.”

  She murmured something noncommittal, but she hadn’t really been listening to what I was saying. I’m not sure I’d been listening, either, because she was very close and leaning toward me. It was a calculated lean, and the result was quite effective. She was wearing a delicate scent of perfume. “Mrs. Dutton,” I said. “Eloise—”

  What can you do in the front seat of a car? You can retreat just so far. I stopped backing up, and she flowed over me, her eyes half closed, her fingers digging into the back of my neck. She thrust herself squirming against me, working her lips on mine, nibbling. Her hands were all over me, searching, caressing.

&nb
sp; I grabbed her arms, held her away.

  “Are you crazy? Right here in front of your house?”

  “Start driving,” she said, breathing heavily. “There’s a place up the hill we can park. I’ll show you.”

  I reached across her and opened the door. “Sorry, Mrs. Dutton. I’m not your type!”

  She stared at me, unbelieving. Then her hand shot up and struck me full across the face. She stormed from the car and stamped back to the house. I caught a movement at one of the windows, and I looked in time to see Harvey Dutton retreating from the drawn draperies.

  I started the motor on the Chevvy, anxious to be out of there. The road on the way down was dark and twisting. Treacherous, but not as treacherous as a woman. Harvey Dutton had a problem, all right. A problem worse than a set of pornographic pictures of his wife. The problem was his wife.

  Sunset Boulevard took me through Hollywood to Western Avenue, where I turned right and went south. The Club Nocturne was darkened when I got there, but instinct guided me to the bar.

  On the floor a girl was doing a dance bathed in blue-colored lights and little more. It wasn’t Cherry; it was a bored-looking blonde, but I forced myself to look anyway. I wedged myself between two filled stools at the bar, ordered my usual Scotch and water, and watched what the floor was showing, which was plenty. It’s the duty of a private detective to observe all suspicious movements, and the blonde in the blue spotlight certainly had a lot of them.

  “Well, Wonderboy,” a gruff voice said beside me, “what brings you into my parlor, business or pleasure?”

  I recognized the voice without looking, but I looked anyway. “A little of both, Jake,” I said.

  Jake Richey seemed about the same as I’d known him two years earlier. The same round face with a cigar stuck in it, the hairline back just a fraction of an inch more, his beefy form encased in an immaculate pinstripe.

  “What business would you have here?” he wanted to know.

  “Nothing that would concern you, Jake. Just thought I’d get a little background material. I heard you had an up and coming stripper named Cherry Collins. Thought I’d take a look.”