Suicide Blonde

SUICIDE BLONDE

Three Novellas

Brian Thornton

PRAISE FOR SUICIDE BLONDE

"Brian Thornton’s trio of historical novellas—Suicide Blonde—affirms his status as a star of the genre. A true wordsmith, Thornton paints rich, evocative portraits of early 1960s Las Vegas mobsters, nineteenth-century Pacific Northwest racial strife, and sixteenth-century Venetian maritime adventures. These novellas brim with characters full of life and personality, and the storytelling transports the reader to fascinating—and dangerous—times. Top-drawer stuff." —James W. Ziskin, Anthony and Macavity award-winning author of the Ellie Stone mysteries

"Evoking Dashiell Hammett and Phillip Kerr, Suicide Blonde conjures a world of pulp adventure and hardboiled grit. From the Vegas Strip to the Mediterranean, this trio of historical crime tales surges with period precision and Black Mask-worthy thrills. Thornton delivers." —Sam Wiebe, award-winning author of Invisible Dead and Last of the Independents

"A trio of tales that span the globe and the centuries, each one told with a historian’s eye for detail and a storyteller’s gift for pacing. Suicide Blonde is not to be missed." —Renee Patrick, Anthony and Macavity Award-nominated author of Design For Dying and Script For Scandal

Copyright © 2020 by Brian Thornton

All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Suicide Blonde

Paper Son

Bragadin’s Skin

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Books by the Author

Preview from Badge Heavy by Colin Conway and Frank Zafiro

Preview from Headstone’s Folly by Robert J. Randisi

Preview from The Better of the Bad by J.J. Hensley

For Robyn

SUICIDE BLONDE

I

Eddie jerked his front door open in response to my knock.

Murph! he exclaimed. Thank God!

I took off my hat as I pushed past him and looked around the one-bedroom that my boss rented in Eddie’s name. As soon as I crossed the threshold, I caught the overly sweet day after scent a guy gives off when he’s processing alcohol out of his system. Living in Vegas, it’s a smell you get used to pretty fast.

Eddie’s home bore any number of the hallmarks of bachelorhood: piles of laundry flung carelessly about, ashtrays filled to overflowing, dirty dishes everywhere except in the sink.

My client.

Now he faced me across a span of about four feet, skin more pale than usual, bloodshot eyes popping out of his moon face. The guy I was supposed to have in court at ten o’clock sharp this coming morning had a 3 a.m. shadow that made for a stark contrast with his ashen skin. His green sharkskin suit looked slept in. His breath made me long for a pack of Sen-Sen or even Black Jack. The room was frigid in the way places in the desert get only with air conditioning, yet his skin glistened with perspiration.

I hope I didn’t wake you, Eddie said.

I thought about my warm bed and about Joyce and considered telling him what he had actually interrupted. Instead, I said, I fell asleep in front of the TV with Jack Paar, and you know it.

If he’d had a tail, he’d have tucked it between his legs. Sorry.

Yeah, I said. Then again. Yeah…Well, you wanted me, you got me. What’s this all about?

She’s next door, he said.

Who?

My neighbor. She’s next door. She’s dead.

I whistled low and soft.

You find her?

He picked that moment to show me he actually knew how to keep his trap shut, something that wasn’t always so apparent with Eddie.

I rubbed the back of my neck. You have anything to do with it?

He headed for his kitchen. I need a drink.

I’d been on retainer with the Outfit for a little over four years. And they had kept me busy. I’d represented its interests in front of the Nevada Gaming Commission and at Las Vegas City Council meetings countless times. The fact that Howard Rappaport had tapped me to represent him personally just a year or so previously had initially seemed a testament to my upward mobility within the organization. Then Howard had explained that his real concern was his brother, Eddie.

It took a lot of sweat, but I’d managed to keep Eddie Rappaport out of jail during the entire thirteen months since his younger brother set me the task of cleaning up after him. In that time, I’d run up a mountain of legal fees. Howard had paid them all. I’d settled Eddie’s bar tabs, and I’d paid off hookers, the victims of two separate car crashes, even his bookies. But I hadn’t had any dealings with corpses.

I caught up to Eddie just as he opened one of his cabinets. I slammed it shut. He barely got his hand out of the way.

Did you have anything to do with your neighbor getting dead, Eddie?

He turned around, mouth open, his face a study in long-lost nerve. I dunno. I don’t think so. He looked at his shoes, then said again, I dunno.

I’m your lawyer, I said. What you tell me is privileged. If you had something to do with this, or even if you just know something and don’t want to say, now is the time to tell me. Eddie avoided my gaze and busied himself with producing a crumpled pack of Lucky Strikes for answer. I made a point of getting between him and his liquor. Again. Blackout?

His hand shook as he turned on the gas and lit his cigarette off the stove. He blew a plume of smoke, then nodded.

I leaned against his kitchen counter, rubbing the back of my neck. You’re in a real spot.

He held out the pack of Luckies in my direction. I shook my head. He sighed out another cloud of smoke and looked over my shoulder at his cupboard. I know. And me with the court thing coming up. Howard’ll flip. His voice rose at mention of his brother. What am I gonna do?

Don’t start that again, I said. Let me think a moment. I took him by the elbow, led him back into the living room, pointed to his couch, and told him to grow roots there till I decided what to do.

I walked the length of the small room while turning this over and over in my head. When I realized that I had been pacing, I stopped and looked over at Eddie. He sat there and fidgeted, his eyes on me, the forgotten cigarette smoldering between the index and middle fingers of his left hand. I sat in the armchair across from him. How did she die?

I don’t know.

"What do you know?"

You want everything?

No, I said, unable to keep the disgust out of my voice. "I don’t want everything, but I’d probably better have it if I’m gonna decide what to do next."

OK. That seemed to put him more at ease, and he leaned back on the couch.

I came home from the Sands tonight about seven. Dropped a bundle on a pony I heard about over at Santa Anita, so I wasn’t in a very good mood.

I’m sure Howard won’t be either, once you put the touch on him again for walking-around money.

Eddie winced. No doubt.

He remembered his cigarette, took a deep drag from it. Then he stubbed it out and sat there looking down at his expensive Italian shoes.

Go on.

When I walked up my steps, she was standing there, smoking in her doorway in this slinky little nothing and a satin-type robe to boot. We said hello, and she asked me in for a drink.

She did this a lot?

He shook his head. "This is the first time I ever saw her full-on up close. Never more than a ‘hello’ as we passed each other going opposite ways, and even that was more like seeing her out of the corner of my eye."

And she just invited you in out of the blue.

Yeah. Said she could use some company.

So you licked your lips and went right in.

Eddie didn’t say anything to that, just looked longingly past me at the cupboard where he kept his courage.

This woman have a name?

Told me to call her Brenda.

Did she tell you anything else about herself?

He screwed up his face like he was thinking. She told me she was from Georgia. Had this little accent and everything, which is funny.

Why is that funny?

Because when she moved in last month, I saw her around, you know, like I said. To say hello and all that. So I asked the super about her, and he told me he didn’t know much, only that she was fresh off the bus from Minneapolis.

And yet she had a Southern accent.

Yeah, funny, huh?

Hilarious. I decided it would be better to get him up and moving around, so I said, Is she still next door?

Yeah, I did just what you told me to. I ain’t been back in there.

I stood, pulled on a pair of gloves I’d brought from my car, and retrieved my hat. Let’s go take a look.

He didn’t want to go. I couldn’t really say as I blamed him. Didn’t matter what either of us wanted. There was no way I was going to talk to his brother, my boss, without making sure all the angles were covered. Howard paid me to be thorough.

The hallway that bridged the distance between Eddie’s front door and hers was, as with so many Vegas apartment buildings, all roofless exterior, open to the elements. A salmon-colored paint job, badly peeling and already disappearing under the weight of daily foot traffic, had failed to cover the multitude of cracks in the bare concrete floor. A small army of discarded cigarette butts, arrayed haphazardly in a forlorn semicircle around the door across the way from Eddie’s, only served to complete the picture.

Any of these yours? I said.

He shook his head. Nah. Hers.

You sure?

Sure, I’m sure. Take a look. Not my brand. Besides, when you think I seen her comin’ and goin’? She was out here all hours, either lightin’ one up or puttin’ one out.

I squatted down, mindful of my trousers. I didn’t want so much as a pants cuff touching that floor. I picked up the first one within reach.

Pall Mall, I said.

See? That’s a chick brand.

My dad smoked ’em. A memory flashed in my mind of my twelfth summer vacation, spent on a vigil watching my dad coughing his life out in a Portland cancer sanatorium.

Oh. I didn’t even need to look up. I knew by his tone what expression he wore.

I held up the butt in my hand and peered at it, the way a jeweler would peer at a diamond.

You’re sure you didn’t have an introductory smoke together? Light her cigarette as an icebreaker or some other cornball maneuver?

No, man, I told you.

I picked up another butt. Read the label on it.

These are just like the ones dear old Dad smoked, I said. Unfiltered.

Eddie wasn’t really listening by this point. He looked around at nothing and mopped his brow with a soiled linen handkerchief. Likely thinking about the bottle back in his kitchen cabinet. So what? That gonna tell you who killed her? ’Cause like I said, it wasn’t me.

Yeah, only you never did say that.

What?

You never said, ‘It wasn’t me,’ or ‘I didn’t do it,’ or anything like that until just now.

He blinked at me.

I looked back at him steadily.

It wasn’t me, he said deliberately, like he did when giving carefully rehearsed testimony in court. I didn’t do it.

I held his gaze for a moment, letting him think I was gauging whether to believe him. He broke the connection and looked down again, just like I had known he would. The truth was that I had made up my mind about Eddie Rappaport a long time ago, and I was as close to certain as you can be about another human being that he wasn’t the type to go off half-cocked and snuff his neighbor.

You never smoked out here? I asked him again.

No, he insisted loudly. I got a balcony off the other side. I smoke out there if I’m gonna smoke outta doors at all. Desperation edged his voice. Before I could admonish him to pipe down, he straightened up and looked both ways down the empty hall. What the hell does it matter anyhow? he hissed. Then he jerked a thumb in the direction of the dead girl’s apartment. "She’s dead in there!"

It matters, I said as I continued to sift through the detritus of Brenda’s smoking habit, "because we’re going to erase every possible trace of your existence from this apartment. And that includes any potentially stray Lucky Strikes that might have just happened to migrate across the hall from your place. As far as we’re concerned, the fact that someone got croaked right across the hall from someone like, well…you, is just one big coincidence. I held up a freshly crushed cigarette that had been smoked down to its filter. It’s a good thing you don’t smoke Tareytons."

II

Eddie had left the door unlocked, so we just went in. The living room was tastefully appointed: lots of pale, pastel colors favored by people who thought they should decorate their interiors to mirror the desert exteriors.

Where is she?

Bedroom.

The glacial blast coming from the air conditioner had kept the smell down so far. Without it, out there in the Nevada Desert, she’d most likely have been pretty ripe already.

She lay face up, arms crossed and legs stretched out along her bed, clad only in the short robe Eddie had described earlier. Like so many of the women you see in Vegas—including Joyce—she possessed the lithe form and long legs of a dancer. I wondered whether she was a pro. There were people I could ask about that sort of thing once I’d dragged Eddie out of this particular fix.

I couldn’t tell how long the girl had been dead, but rigor had set in. I brushed her long blonde hair away from her swollen face. Her eyes were closed. She had a bluish tinge to her, and her mouth was open. I didn’t see any blood.

I checked the rest of the exposed portions of her body for puncture wounds of any sort. Nothing. An impulse I couldn’t explain made me take another long look at her face.

There was something in that bloated, once-pretty countenance—a familiarity in the forehead, the chin. Almost like I’d seen her before. Of course, in my line of work—and with all of the people cycling in and out of Vegas—I’d felt that way a lot. I didn’t think too much of it.

What I did think about was whether or not Eddie had offed her, or whether he could be made to look right for the part, regardless of his level of actual involvement. After all, whole political careers had been made from nailing guys like Eddie in order to get to guys like Howard, and my client had a very important date coming up with a certain grand jury in just a few hours. The timing seemed more than coincidence, but I didn’t want to jump to conclusions.

Instead, I began to make a close examination of Brenda’s corpse: her robe, her naked body underneath, her hair, her open mouth, beneath her crossed arms, and inside her clenched fists.

Rigor had set in, so prying her arms apart and her fingers open proved difficult. I didn’t know much about rigor mortis, but as stiff as she was, this gal had to have been dead a while longer than Eddie’s story made it sound.

A couple of minutes of grunting and straining got her right hand open. Nothing. I started in on her left. I had her pinkie and ring fingers pried loose when I heard and felt something drop out from between them. It rolled off the bed and landed with a metallic clatter on the linoleum floor, rattling around a bit before coming to a stop.

I picked it up and examined it. A ring. I’d seen it before, too. On Eddie Rappaport’s left pinkie. I began to sweat. My hand shook as I folded the ring into my handkerchief and placed it in my jacket pocket.

I closed the bedroom door and gave the rest of the place the once-over. I didn’t mention what I’d found to Eddie, who followed me around the way a dog does when he knows you’re about to feed him. The bathroom was clean and spartan, lacking the usual feminine touches, except for a solitary bottle of perfume. This Brenda had a fridge full of food, and the kitchen table still had the dinner dishes on it.

Howard would want to know about this. The question was how much