Too Soon Dead Page 10

  “What kind of bread?” I asked.

  “Kosher rye,” Brass told me. “He also knows more about the technical side of photography than anyone else in the city. Take the pictures to him and tell him I want to know everything there is to know about them. Withhold nothing from him of what we know about the pictures if he asks, but he won’t. He is one of the most essentially uncurious people I have ever known.”

  I stuck the pictures in the inside pocket of my jacket and buttoned the little tab that I never button that closes the pocket.

  “On your way back,” Brass told me, “check in with Inspector Raab and see if there’s anything new and look in on our German friends to see what they’re up to. And, in your copious free time after that, check out any photographic studios within a couple of blocks of that house.”

  “What will I do with one if I find it?”

  “See if our fat friend works there. If you find him, do your best not to alarm him.”

  “You think he works in a photo studio because he had those pictures?” I asked. “That’s a long shot.”

  “It has a good chance of running in the money,” Brass said. “Remember his hands?”

  I pictured the fat man and remembered his hands. “Chubby,” I said. “Ink-stained.”

  “Not ink,” Brass told me. “The stain was heaviest on the little finger and ring finger of his right hand. Just where he’d get it if he was a little careless while developing trays of prints in a darkroom.”

  “Son of a—gun,” I said.

  11

  I took the Sixth Avenue El to Eighth Street, trotted down the stairs, and walked a few blocks south to MacDougal Alley.

  Greenwich Village has been a hangout for those folk that the bourgeoisie are pleased to call “bohemians” for the past fifty or sixty years. A hundred years before that it was the habitation of the city’s free Negroes, another distrusted minority. These days the Village is a mix of aspiring artists, actors, poets, writers, musicians, models, and, in the evenings, tourists. Men and women of all ages, classes, and previous conditions of servitude—who can’t afford to go directly to Paris—come to Greenwich Village from all over the country to carve out for themselves a career in the arts. And the tourists come from all over the country to gawk at their cousins who have settled here and been debauched by their arty brethren.

  The Village, an essentially communal place, welcomes deviants of all flavors, and judges people only on their manners, not their mores; but there’s actually very little debauching. There are, in the little clubs along Bleeker Street that the ordinary tourists never get to see, men who dress like women and men who act like women, women who dress and act like men, and more variations on the theme than most people believe possible. But almost all of them knew what they were before they left Kansas or Texas to find a place that allowed them to be who they were despite what they were.

  Since I arrived in New York I have spent many evenings in the Village, listening to jazz in small, smoky nightclubs or arguing about world affairs or the state of the theater in small, overheated coffeehouses.

  MacDougal Alley is two blocks long and neither intersects nor parallels MacDougal Street, which terminates two blocks away. Located in the heart, or perhaps the liver, of Greenwich Village, MacDougal Alley is a street of mostly two-story houses that was actually once merely an alley, providing the back entrances to the buildings that front the streets on either side. The houses along MacDougal Alley were the carriage houses and stables for those buildings. Now, although not nearly as fine looking as they were when they sheltered horses, they provide inexpensive lodging and studio space for artists and writers.

  Southerland Mitchell had his entire two-story house to himself: the downstairs for living and the upstairs one large and very cluttered studio. When I pushed the doorbell, I could hear a loud clanging noise from somewhere in the back of the house. It must have been two minutes before Mitchell opened the door and peered out suspiciously at me. He was a tall, angular, extremely thin man with unkempt hair, rumpled clothes, and a large head, on which rested a pair of oversized tortoiseshell glasses. “What are you selling?” he asked.

  “Mr. Mitchell? I’m not selling anything—”

  “What religion are you espousing?”

  “No, I’m not doing that either. I’ve come—”

  “Then why are you bothering me?”

  I sighed. “I’m trying to tell you. I’ve come from Alexander Brass. He wants you to do something for him.”

  He stepped aside. “Come in. I’ve very little time and much to do, but that seems to be my usual condition. If Brass has something important—did you say this was important?”

  “It is, very,” I assured him.

  “Come this way.” Mitchell led the way past his bedroom, living room, and kitchen to a back stairs leading up to the studio. The room took up the whole floor, but as the building wasn’t very large, neither was the studio. But it was full of so many things that the first impression was of overwhelming space and clutter. The first objects I noticed as I entered were a plaster horse’s head; a three-foot-high model of the Eiffel Tower; a papier-mâché duck the size of a person; five or six doors set into frames, with no walls, going nowhere; and a model of the zeppelin Hindenburg, six feet long, suspended from the ceiling.

  Across the room was a comparatively clear space under a skylight, on which was a wrought-iron bench of a design that looked as ethereal as wrought iron is capable of looking. On the bench, wrapped in some sort of diaphanous gauze, sat a slender, long-legged, dark-haired girl. When she saw that Mitchell had not returned alone, she jumped up and rushed to get her robe from a chair by the window.

  “Molly,” Mitchell said, “this is…” He turned to me. “Who are you?”

  “Morgan DeWitt,” I told him.

  “Morgan DeWitt,” he repeated. “He claims to work for Alexander Brass, but I haven’t asked to see his credentials.”

  Molly crossed the room, her right hand extended, her left holding the robe closed. “Mr. DeWitt,” she said. “I’m Molly Masker.”

  “My pleasure,” I said, taking her hand.

  “Excuse Southy’s rudeness,” she said. “It’s his defense against an onrushing world. He doesn’t mean it.”

  “I do so.” Mitchell pushed aside a box of grapefruit-sized marbles, three light stands, and a giant cardboard cutout of a bottle of cheap domestic wine to reveal a car seat. “Sit down.” he said. “Do you want some tea?”

  “Ah…” I said.

  “We have a variety of excellent teas from far and distant places,” Mitchell said. “Molly thinks that coffee is bad for me, so she is introducing me to the delights of tea. We scour the docks for incoming ships from the Orient and ask for exotic teas. Sometimes we have a hard time convincing them that it is really tea we want, but occasionally we acquire packets of tea seldom seen east of Suez. Or would that be west of Suez? Where exactly is Suez, anyway?”

  “Egypt,” I said.

  “Ah,” Mitchell replied, nodding.

  “He drank, I’d say, twenty cups of coffee a day,” Molly said. “And he’d forget to eat for days at a time. Look at him!”

  “I am naturally slender,” Mitchell said.

  “I’d like some tea,” I said.

  “If I hadn’t come along they could have used him for a course in anatomy without bothering to dissect him,” Molly said. “I’ll make tea. Is Darjeeling okay?” She clattered down the stairs when I assured her that Darjeeling was fine.

  Mitchell looked fondly after her. “She became my model about six months ago,” he said. “And now she is my life.” He transferred his gaze to me. “You wouldn’t believe this, but I used to be a surly and unhappy man.”

  I shook my head sadly to indicate the quality of my disbelief.

  Mitchell smiled to show me how completely he had become the new, nonsurly Mitchell. “What can I do for Alexander Brass?” he asked.

  “I have some photos to show you,” I told him. “Mr. Brass
wants to know everything about them.”

  “What sort of everything?”

  “Everything you can find out about how and where the pictures were taken. He says that you can tell whether or not they are composites, but aside from that I don’t know what information it’s possible to get from a picture.”

  “That depends on the photograph,” he said. “Let me see them.”

  I unbuttoned my inner jacket pocket and handed him the packet of pictures. He leafed through them. “Good lighting for indoors,” he said. “It looks diffuse, but with most of it coming from directly above the subjects. Let’s get a better look.”

  He threaded his way across the room to a table that had a strong light mounted above it and a six-inch magnifying glass on a sort of swivel arrangement to the side. I tried to follow in his footsteps but I had to work my way around a five-foot stuffed panda that miraculously appeared in my path. When I arrived at his side, he had the light on and was peering through the glass at one of the photographs. He spent a couple of minutes on it before progressing to the next one. By the time he was on the fourth photo, Molly was clomping back up the stairs with an oversized China teapot and three white mugs.

  “We should let it steep for a couple of minutes,” she said, clearing a place for the teapot on top of an old iron safe that was standing ajar in the middle of the room. “What have you there?”

  “Photographs of men and women with no clothes on doing what men and women tend to do when they have no clothes on,” Mitchell said without looking up.

  “When I have no clothes on, I tend to strike a pose,” Molly said, promptly striking a pose that would have been very interesting if she had no clothes on.

  Mitchell worked his way through the photos, while Molly poured the tea and passed us each a mug. I picked up a stack of oversized prints from a stuffed yak’s back and looked through them while I was waiting. They were shots of Molly Masker in a variety of unusual locations. In many of them she had no clothes on, and she did indeed look very interesting.

  “What do you think?”

  I almost jumped. Molly had come up behind me without my noticing, and was peering over my shoulder. “Very nice,” I said. “I think you’ve got a lot of nerve, posing nude in Wall Street, and at—is this the Parthenon?”

  She giggled. “Yes,” she said. “And—” She flipped through some of the prints. “This is the Taj Mahal; and this is the Eighty-sixth Street subway platform—downtown; and this is the Empire State Building observation deck.”

  I stared at the photos. “Don’t you ever get arrested?” I asked.

  Southy Mitchell called me back across the room. The photos were spread out across the table like leaves on the strand. “Here’s what I think,” he said.

  I took out my notebook and turned to a blank page and wrote “dirty pictures” across the top.

  “First, they’re not composites. There has been no cutting and pasting of body parts to achieve an unnatural whole. All the shadows are right, and that’s where even the best composite gives itself away. I don’t say nobody could have done it. I could have. But they wouldn’t look just like this; they’d have to be subtly different. These pictures are not composites. Now, what else? They were all taken in the same location, but I guess you’ve noticed that. The lighting comes from above, and not from a point source. I’d guess a fairly good-sized skylight. The camera was, probably, a four-by-five with a fast lens. The depth of field is impressive. It must have been one of the faster films, because there couldn’t have been that much light, but it’s a very fine-grain film. The developing was done by someone who knows his business, and knows what he’s after. Here, look—” He grabbed one of the pictures and held it out to me. “The guy is sort of sitting up, so nothing is in shadow, and the whole picture is clear and of even density.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “Now look at this one. The face was in shadow, so the plate was developed longer to bring it out. See how the rest of the room is slightly overdeveloped?”

  “I see what you mean,” I said.

  “That’s about it,” Mitchell said. “The paper is a fine-grain stock. German. Don’t see much of it over here.”

  “German?”

  “If I wanted to repeat myself,” Mitchell said fiercely. “I would have bought a monkey!”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  Molly wrapped her arms around Mitchell’s neck. “Southy, what on earth does that mean, you would have bought a monkey?”

  “I have no idea,” Mitchell said. “I say what comes into my head. I figure my subconscious knows what it’s doing, and doesn’t need any help from me.”

  “I worry about you,” Molly told him. “If you weren’t a genius, you’d be a nut.”

  “Maybe I’m both,” Mitchell suggested, reaching up and taking her hands in his.

  I felt that I was in the way, or would be shortly, so I gathered up the pictures. “Thank you, Mr. Mitchell,” I said.

  “Call me Southy,” he said, working his right hand free of Molly and thrusting it out. “All my friends do.”

  “You have no friends,” Molly said.

  “Shut up,” he demurred.

  I shook his hand and left his house, waving good-bye to Molly as I headed for the stairs. I walked over to the east side, took the subway up to Seventy-seventh Street and Lexington Avenue, and walked the half block to the 23rd Precinct.

  Inspector Raab was not in his office, and the hired help had nothing of interest to tell me. Von Pilath was still being held on suspicion, and none of the detectives on the case had any other suspicions they were willing to share with me. From there I walked over to the Eighty-second Street home of the Verein für Wahrheit und Freiheit, and couldn’t get through the front door. Nobody answered the ring at the Verein apartment, so I rang some bells at random, but nobody buzzed me in or yelled at me. I decided that the bell system was out of order, and was debating throwing pebbles up to the third-story window, if I could find any pebbles to throw, if I could reach the third floor, if I could figure out which window belonged to the Verein, when a window to my left was pushed open with a hearty shove and a heavily muscled young man with close cropped blond hair leaned out. “Yes?” he asked. “What you want?”

  “I would like to speak to someone from the Verein für Wahrheit und Freiheit,” I told him, giving the German pronunciation my best shot.

  “They are not here,” he said. “They are all left.”

  I almost said, “How far left?” but realized that would take me down linguistic paths that I did not wish to travel. “Thank you,” I said instead. “When do you think one of them will be around?”

  “It is hard to say,” he said. “Come back then!” And he slammed down the window.

  I can take a hint.

  It was only about ten after five but I was hungry, so I decided that the next stop was dinner. I went into Bavaria Haus Restaurant on Eighty-sixth Street and was served bratwurst and kraut by a fat man in leather shorts. While I was eating I borrowed a Manhattan phone book and looked up photographic studios. There were six within ten blocks. I jotted the addresses down in my notebook and decided that I could probably handle the strudel for dessert.

  It was a little after six when I left the restaurant. Most of the stores along Eighty-sixth Street seemed to be still open, so I thought I’d try scouting out a few of the photo studios. There were four movie theaters farther along Eighty-sixth Street, so maybe the stores stayed open late to catch the after-theater crowd. “Wasn’t that W.C. Fields just irresistibly funny, dear? Let’s buy a pot to go with the dishes we got at the theater.” Could be.

  The closest photo studio, on Lexington Avenue just off Eighty-sixth, had a window full of wedding pictures that did nothing to encourage thoughts of marriage in passersby. In one the bride was smiling, but the groom looked trapped; in another the groom was grinning, but the bride looked like she was in shock. In several both bride and groom were smiling at the camera as though it were a painful duty.

/>   The door dinged when I opened it to go in, and donged when I closed it behind me. For a while it seemed as though the ding-dong had attracted no one, but then a man pushed aside a curtain leading to a room in back and came up to the counter. He was thin, with a thin face, dressed in a black suit and white shirt with a black bow tie around a high collar of the sort that I thought had gone out of style twenty years ago. “Yes?” the man said.

  “Are you the owner?” I asked.

  “I’m the only,” the man said. “I’m the owner and all the help wrapped into one package. What can I do for you? I should warn you that if you’re selling anything, you’re wasting your time in here.”

  “I’m not selling anything,” I told him. “I’m looking for a photographer that took some pictures of my kid. We want to get some prints made, my wife and I, but I don’t remember the man’s name or address. My wife thinks that his studio was somewhere here in Yorkville.”

  “Look on the back of the picture,” the man said. “The studio’s name and address will be rubber-stamped on the back.” He turned to go back behind the curtain.

  “We lost the pictures,” I told him. “There was a fire. My son died. Five years old. My wife would really like to see if we can find that photographer.”

  That stopped him. He turned around. “I’d like to help you, but what can I do if you don’t know the name or address?”

  “The photographer was heavy,” I told him. “You might almost say fat. He was about this tall—” I indicated the height with my hand “—and balding, with his hair, you know, combed over the bald spot. He wore a double-breasted blue suit that seemed a bit too small for him.”

  “That sounds like Hermann,” the man said. “But he does not do baby pictures. Most decidedly he does not.”

  “My wife talked him into it,” I said. “We met him at a party.”

  “Well,” the man said. “It may be Hermann.”

  “Hermann who?” I asked. “And where is he?”