The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes Page 8

  “If what happened to her was the result of actions or threats by a second party: abduction, mayhem, concealment, voluntary or involuntary incarceration, then it becomes relevant to discover just which Two-Headed Mary her adversary believed he was acting on. Consider the possibility that one of Two-Headed Mary’s blithely told fantasies resulted in her disappearance,” Brass said.

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “There are many possibilities. Suppose Mary told someone that she was really the daughter of John D. Rockefeller. And suppose that person kidnapped her and is now sending ransom notes to a very puzzled Rockefeller household. Or suppose she professed to know the location of some fabulous treasure, and someone took her at her word and won’t believe her protestations of prevarication.”

  “Suppose she told someone she was Anastasia, the Tsar’s daughter,” Gloria suggested, getting into the spirit of the game, “and she’s been abducted by Bolsheviks.”

  “Suppose she’s been arrested on Tenth Avenue for being drunk and disorderly, and she’s serving two weeks on Rikers Island,” I said.

  Gloria glared at me.

  “Unlikely,” Brass said.

  I tried again. “Suppose the rapture came, and she’s been wafted off to heaven.”

  Brass rested his heaviest gaze on me. “We live in an unfortunate age,” he said.

  I nodded my agreement. “An age of fast cars, fast music, and fast women,” I said, quoting some magazine article I had read.

  “An age of banter,” he said. “An age of forced witticism when people strive to come out with a bon mot when they can’t even find the mot juste.”

  He had me there.

  “You know what banter is, don’t you?” he asked me.

  “Yes, boss,” I said.

  “Banter is what the mouth does when the brain is not in gear. And don’t call me boss.”

  We could have gone on like that for a while, but we were interrupted by an arrival. Suddenly there came a rapping as of someone sharply tapping, tapping on the frosted glass panel in the reception room door. We used to keep it open all day, but we once had a bad experience with unwelcome visitors and now it was kept closed and locked unless someone—Gloria or myself usually—was at the reception desk to look over visitors.

  I scurried out to the door and opened it. The man in the hall was a little taller than my five-foot-ten, wide, rock-solid and craggy, with a carefully clipped, graying mustache and an expensive light brown store-bought suit. I’d say he was in his early fifties. He was standing in a pair of well-shined cowboy boots with scenes from what was probably the battle of the Alamo tooled around the sides, wearing a heavy silver belt buckle engraved with a picture of a cowboy roping a steer, and topped by a ten-gallon Stetson.

  “Howdy,” he said. “You Alexander Brass?”

  “I’m his amanuensis,” I said, stepping aside to let him in. “What can we do for you?”

  “Name’s Gates,” he said. “I’d like to speak to this Mr. Brass. I want to ask him what’s being done to find that Matinee Mary he wrote about.”

  I closed the door behind him. “And what’s your interest?”

  “Did you know her name’s not really Mary?” he asked.

  “Really?” I said.

  “That’s right. Her name’s Phillippa.

  “Phillippa? That’s a new one.”

  “I’m not rightly sure what you mean. Her name’s Phillippa, sure enough. Phillippa Stern, but now it’s Phillippa Gates, and she’s my wife!”

  “You’re right; we didn’t know that,” I agreed.

  7

  Gates took his Stetson off and clutched it in his left hand while extending a firm, callused right hand across the desk. “Howdy, Mr. Brass,” he said. “Gates is my name, Casper W. Gates. I’ve come right up here to see you without hardly pausing to unpack my bags or nothing because my little Filly’s missing, and these here New York policemen that I spoke to don’t seem to give a good goddamn.”

  Brass shook the hand gingerly. “Your little filly?”

  “My Phillippa. Cute as a button and smart as a whip. The sweetest little woman this side of the Rockies. I exclude the other side of the Rockies ’cause I ain’t never been there.” He smiled a slight reminiscent smile. “That’s kind of our private joke.”

  Brass gave me an inquiring glare. “We know her as Mary,” I explained.

  “Ah!” Brass said. He turned back to his guest. “Do continue, Mr. Gates.” Gloria got up and moved into the corner behind Gates so she could take a few unobtrusive notes.

  “I ain’t seen her since the day after the wedding,” Gates said. “We spent the night at her place and was fixin’ to go on our honeymoon when I had to leave for a few days. I felt awful, but there wasn’t nothing I could do about it. Some real important business came up concerning one of my properties and I had to high-tail it back to Mariposa, which is where I hail from. That’s Mariposa, Texas; a little old town a few dozen miles south of Dallas. My spread, the CeeGee Ranch, is right outside—well, actually it kind of surrounds Mariposa. Filly wanted to come but there weren’t no room for her in my plane—I fly my own plane; a two-seat De Haviland biplane with a four hundred and fifty horsepower Wright-Curtis rotary engine. That bird can sure move like a scared mustang! Anyway, I couldn’t take Filly ’cause of course I had to take Bobby Lee. He’s my co-pilot, radio man, and mechanic. He takes care of the plane. I’ll be getting a bigger bird now that I’ve got my Filly to take with me.” He paused for breath, and then slumped into the chair that I had thrust behind him. “Where is she, Mr. Brass?”

  “Well, Mr. Gates…”

  Gates smiled a tired smile. “Ain’t nobody calls me ‘Mr. Gates’ but my enemies,” he said. “Call me Pearly. Everybody in Texas does, from Jimmy Allred, who at present is the governor of our great state, to the hands at my ranch. Even their young’uns call me Uncle Pearly. I believe a man should be sociable. Even when he’s not in Texas.”

  I grinned. I couldn’t help it. “Pearly Gates?”

  “That’s me,” he agreed. “Just call me Pearly.”

  Brass grimaced. Pearly probably thought it was a smile. “Texas Bonhomie,” he said. “Just one of the things we Easterners love about Texas; that and sagebrush and rattlesnakes.”

  “No kidding?” Pearly asked. “I’m not overly fond of rattlesnakes myself, although I do believe that there are some folks as collect them. Mostly we just shoot them.”

  Brass sighed. “I’d like to help you find your wife. Tell me about her, Mr. Gates. How long have you known Phillippa, where’d you meet; what you know about her family, her habits, her hobbies, her interests; what you two did together; everything you can think of about her.”

  Gates frowned. I thought he was reacting to Brass’s churlish refusal to call him “Pearly,” but that wasn’t it. “Everything I know about my Filly? Sir, there has been a misunderstanding. I have come here to discover what it is that you know, not to disclose the intimate details of my life to a newspaper reporter.”

  Brass leaned back in his chair with his hands behind his head and stared at the Texan. “You misunderstand me, Mr. Gates,” he said mildly. “You have my word that I have no desire to print anything you may tell me here. I am neither a gossip columnist nor a reporter. I am a chronicler of this era we live in, but I can do my job without interfering in people’s private affairs. I will respect the privacy of anything you choose to confide in me.”

  Gates thought this over, trying to decide what, if anything, was the difference between a chronicler and a gossip columnist, but he was too well brought up to ask. Finally he stuck his hand out to be shook. “I do believe you, sir,” he said firmly. “I apologize for doubting you.”

  Brass gingerly took the hand and shook it. “If you want me to help you find your missing spouse,” he went on, “then you must help me. I have talked to several other people who knew Mary—Phillippa—but none of them knew her well enough to predict where she might have gone.”

  “Then you�
�re already looking for her?”

  “That’s so.”

  “I thought… When I landed at Floyd Bennett Field and Jimmy Danton—he’s my broker here in New York City—showed me the clipping of your story, at first I thought it was some kind of joke or hoax or something. Or maybe some kind of publicity stunt, and you’d end up revealing the marriage. ‘New York Society Matron Weds Texas Millionaire.’ Or something. But then Danton said he’d been trying to get ahold of Mrs. Gates since he read the clipping, and she hasn’t been at her apartment or at my suite at the Waldorf. I spoke to a policeman at that little police station a couple of blocks away from the Waldorf and he said there wasn’t anything they could do on account of she is a grown woman and all. And maybe we’d had a fight or something and she left of her own accord. We hadn’t had no fight. Hell, I hadn’t even been around.” He leaned forward and fixed a steely gaze on Brass’s nose. “It couldn’t be that this is some kind of stunt, could it? Because if it is I would suggest that somebody end it mighty quickly before I get riled.”

  “If so, it’s not of my making,” Brass assured him. “As far as I know the woman we know as Mary has been missing for over a week now, and none of her acquaintances have any idea where she went or why.”

  Pearly leaned back in his chair. “She always was a mysterious little lady,” he said, “long as I’ve known her.”

  “And how long is that?” Brass asked.

  Pearly reflected. “About six weeks. That is, about six weeks before I left for the CeeGee last week. We met, I remember, at the Longacre Theater during intermission. I try to see some of this New York theater every time I get to town. These were doing a couple of short plays that Jimmy told me I ought to go see. I don’t know why, they weren’t much good except for one: Waiting for Lefty. About taxicab drivers here in New York City. Full of social consciousness and that there sort of stuff. ’Course I don’t take cabs much, since Bobby Lee drives me just about everywhere in the Duesenberg.”

  “How do you like that,” Gloria said from her corner. “I wouldn’t have thought that Waiting for Lefty was the sort of play that would be good for trade.”

  Pearly twisted around to look at her. “Trade?” he asked.

  Gloria gestured. “Standing outside the theater with her collecting tube,” she explained.

  “Oh, you mean her charity work? No, she wasn’t doing that that evening. Ain’t it wonderful, the volunteer work she does? Anyway, she had just come to see that play. Waiting for Lefty. She just loved it. She understands all about workers’ rights and unions and that stuff. She’s taught me a lot already.”

  “And I have no doubt that she will teach you a good deal more,” Brass commented.

  I suppressed a smile. Gloria had a small coughing fit.

  Pearly shook his head. “I sure hope so,” he said. “But what could it mean, what could have happened, her disappearing like this?”

  “Just how did you meet during that intermission, do you remember?”

  Now that Pearly was convinced that we weren’t going to spread his private affairs all over the front page, he was willing, eager to talk about his missing beloved.

  “Say, it was the strangest thing. I was in the lobby, getting ready to light my cigar, when I turned around and plum banged into her. She almost fell over, and she spilled this glass of orange soda or whatever it is they sell at that stand in the lobby and it got all over her dress.”

  “And?”

  “And she said, ‘Damn!,’ which is kinda what you might expect to hear a lady say under those circumstances.”

  “Granted.”

  “And I said, ‘Sorry about that, little filly.” And she gave me the strangest look and said, ‘How’d you know my name?’”

  “And that was it?”

  “Isn’t that the strangest thing? I just happened to say, ‘little filly,’ like one might, you know, and it turns out to be her name.”

  “Strange,” Brass agreed.

  “Almost like as if fate had stepped in to take a hand,” Pearly said, a sense of the wonder of things in his voice.

  “Almost,” Brass agreed. “And then?”

  “And then we talked and we talked. She told me about how I reminded her of her first husband who was a flier in the American Eagle Squadron in the Great War and died in combat. And I told her how that was very strange because I was a flier in the Great War, in the One-Fifty-Fifth Recon, and I might have met her husband. She told me how her husband had left her all this money and how she decided to use it to do good things, and about the charity work she did, collecting for worthwhile causes. I told her about my ranch in Mariposa and she told me about how she had always loved horses since she was a little girl.” He paused for breath.

  “Ah!” Brass said.

  “But what has any of this to do with her disappearing like that?”

  “We don’t know. But unless she banged her head and has amnesia, whatever happened to her is probably rooted in her past, so discovering her past will aid us in finding her.”

  Pearly considered this. “Did you know that she’s called ‘Two-Headed Mary’ along Broadway?” he asked.

  “I’d heard something like that,” Brass admitted.

  “It’s cause she wears two hats, kinda. One the society lady going to all these plays—she loves to see plays cause she used to do some acting herself—and the other the charity lady collecting for the orphans and suchlike.”

  “That must be it,” Brass agreed. “You spent the night in her apartment?”

  Pearly blushed. Honest. “We was married,” he said defensively.

  “Just where is her apartment?”

  “It’s on the corner of Park Avenue and Eightieth Street. The address is 910 Park Avenue, I think.”

  “Is it? That’s interesting,” Brass said.

  “It’s a right nice place, full of all this antique furniture. Very pretty, but it makes me a mite uncomfortable. A lot of it ain’t all that solid-looking. I told Filly as how it makes me afraid that I’ll break something just by looking at it too hard. I go for Bauhaus modern myself.”

  “Have you been up there since you got back?”

  “Not yet. I ain’t been anywhere yet but the hotel, the police station, and here. But I called on the telephone, and she’s not there.”

  “Maybe she has a reason not to pick up the phone.”

  “The phone goes through a central switchboard, and the operator lady told me she ain’t been in for some days.”

  “Ah!” Brass said.

  The conversation went on for another twenty minutes or so, and we learned that Two-Headed Mary, or “Filly,” if you prefer, had a liking for opera, for long walks through Central Park early in the morning, for rides on the Staten Island Ferry, for Marx Brothers movies, and for Italian food.

  Brass promised to keep looking for Mary and to keep Pearly informed if we discovered anything. Pearly, in turn, promised the same. Pearly asked if Brass could recommend a good private detective, and Brass said he could, but that Pearly should wait a few days before taking any such action. After that, Pearly left.

  “Why,” I asked Brass, after escorting Pearly to the elevator, “did you discourage him from hiring a shamus?”

  Brass eyed me. “Shamus? You’ve been reading detective novels,” he said. “I didn’t think it would be a good idea for Mr. Gates to hire a private detective right now because if the detective was any good he would soon discover the truth about Two-Headed Mary, which is not what Mr. Gates needs to hear at the moment.” He turned to Gloria and raised an instructional finger. “Send a telegram to one of our contacts in Texas,” he told her. “Consult a map and figure out which one is closest to Mariposa. Get some background on Mr. ‘Pearly’ Gates.”

  Gloria nodded and made a note on her steno pad.

  “And you,” he said, wiggling the finger at me, “I have a task for you, too. The only Fenton I can find in any of the local city or county directories is a Fenton Road in Quogue, Long Island. It’s a small town on th
e Long Island Railroad. Take a trip out there tomorrow and see what sort of establishment it is. Do not alert the natives if you can help it.”

  It took me a second to recall the reference. “464 Fenton” was the address, if it was an address, that was on the scrap of paper in Mary’s bindle. “I know Quogue,” I told him. “It’s near Southampton. I have friends in Southampton.”

  “Good,” Brass said. “Tomorrow is Saturday. Take the rest of the day off and visit them.”

  “I had this Saturday off anyway,” I told him.

  “And you still do,” he said. “Most of it.”

  Brass swiveled his chair around to stare pensively out at the Hudson River. It was Friday, time to write “After Dark,” his syndicated column for forty-six Sunday papers around the country chronicling Gotham’s nightlife for the envious auslanders, and he was already hard at work. We tiptoed out of the room.

  * * *

  That evening I took the Eighth Avenue subway down to West Fourth Street, mingling with the hoi and the polloi. Associating with the common folk is what gives a writer that depth of understanding that makes for great prose. As the car rattled back and forth along the tunnel I listened for examples of the wisdom of the proletariat from my fellow passengers. I leaned forward to overhear two young ladies in the seat next to mine, and heard, “So then I decided we needed a chaperone…” I leaned closer to discover when “then” was, but they glared at me until I leaned back. On the platform at West Fourth, an older lady was earnestly telling her friend, “…and then he threw a teakettle at me—which I think is basically a hostile act!” I silently agreed with her and went on my way.

  I headed for the Blind Harlequin, a coffeehouse on MacDougal Street in the heart of Greenwich Village; a hangout for local writers of varying degrees of success and fame. I was having dinner with a couple of friends of mine, real fiction writers who sold regularly and did their best not to rub it in. Bill Welsch was somewhere around forty, and was making a decent living writing stories for Black Mask and a variety of pulps; mostly hard-boiled detective, with a few war stories thrown in. He had done most of the things he wrote about: flew a Spad in the big war, been an expatriate writer in Paris, a private detective in Chicago, and a few other things that he hadn’t gotten around to writing about yet. He had a clean, lean prose style that looked easy and wasn’t.