Skinflick by Joseph Hansen Page A

his skull. A shiny green moped buzzed around the corner. A girl in a bikini rode it. Flat-chested. Quantities of yellow hair. Dark glasses. Had Jerry Dawson bought her a motorbike? It purred on past.
    No one had slashed the cloth top of the Triumph. It whipped out of the parking lot. It seemed to have only two speeds—motionless and breakneck. As he steered it out Sunset, the speedometer kept jumping from zero to sixty. The street off the Strip where Sylvia Katzman’s sand-color boxes of apartment units climbed the hill rose in sharp bends. The Triumph zipped up them with brisk little shrieks from the new tires. The address was in big wooden cutout numbers that stuck out on tin struts from the stucco. Dave ducked the car under the place and into a tenant’s empty parking slot. The door at the top of inside stairs was locked. He went up the ramp to the sidewalk and climbed for the front doors among plantings. He’d warned her by phone from the expensive cowhide-smelling Jaguar-Triumph agency that he was coming, and she was waiting for him in the lobby in a green-and-yellow striped tank top and yellow shorts, harlequin glasses set with rhinestones, and yellow platform sandals. Her hair was brassy piled-up ringlets. She was five feet tall and twenty pounds overweight. She unlocked the glass door for him.
    “I don’t understand what it’s about,” she said. “Insurance, did you say? A tenant of mine?”
    “Gerald Dawson. I don’t know whether he was a tenant or not. I only know be made out two checks to you in the past eight weeks.”
    “He didn’t live here,” she said. “It was for his daughter. Charleen. She’d married somebody and they split up and her mother wouldn’t have her back and her father felt different about it and he got this place for her. On the quiet, you understand. Is there something wrong or something?”
    “He’s dead,” Dave said. “Is his daughter here?”
    “Oh, dear,” she said. “Oh, that’s too bad. The poor man. He wasn’t even old. What happened?”
    “Somebody broke his neck on a dark street,” Dave said. “Or that’s how it looks.”
    “Listen,” she said, “it happens every day. What do you think I pay for security for around here? I light the front of this place like a—you should excuse the expression—Christmas tree. Do you know what’s down there? On that Sunset Strip? People out of a nightmare, that’s what. I keep that garage lighted. I have a man down there at night in a uniform with a gun. He’d probably shoot himself in the foot if he had to use it, but maybe he’ll scare the muggers and the rapists, you know? What can you do?”
    “What about Dawson’s daughter?” Dave asked.
    “She must be on a trip,” Sylvia Katzman said. “I haven’t seen her for days.”
    “It’s a big place,” Dave said. “You could have missed her. You don’t play concierge, do you?”
    “I play pan,” she said, “three nights a week. If you mean, do I watch the tenants going in and out—no, of course not. Everybody has their own life. They’re entitled to be free. This isn’t Europe, thank God. This isn’t Russia. Where they go and when they come back is their business.”
    “What’s her apartment number?” Dave asked.
    “Thirty-six. On the third level. With a view.”
    “Who came to see her?” Dave asked. “Anybody besides Gerald Dawson? Part of your security system involves tenants having to come down here in person to let their visitors in, right?”
    “Unless they lend their key,” she said. “They’re not supposed to, but who can predict what people will do? Could I see your identification?”
    He let his wallet fall open so she could read his investigator’s license. “She ought to be told her father is dead,” he said. “The funeral is tomorrow. No one else in the family knew she was here.”
    “She won’t go to the funeral,” Sylvia Katzman said. “She won’t even care that he’s dead. Except he won’t be here to pay her rent