The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes Page 9

  Agnes Silverson, a handsome woman in her late thirties, wrote the “Dagger Dell, Private Eye” series for All-Detective Story magazine and a couple of other pulps under the pen name Charles D. Epp. Stories that were that hard-boiled should have a man’s byline, her editors felt. Not that any of them cared personally, they assured her, but they thought that their readers wanted to picture the writers as cynical, tough he-men with their shirtsleeves rolled up and a cigarette dangling from the corner of their mouth as they punched out the story with two fingers on some old, beat-up portable on the table of their cheap hotel room between slugs of bourbon.

  “And the thing is,” she told us, “I live at the Paris on West Twelfth, which is the cheapest hotel in the city that isn’t a flop. I type with two fingers on an old, beat-up portable. And I am no stranger to either the cigarettes or the bourbon. If I only had a cock, I could be the next Paul Cain.”

  We discussed the State of the Novel and how it had been going steadily downhill since Dickens and Twain. We tried to decide whether Kipling was an important writer. We made disparaging remarks about Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Franz Werfel. We drank coffee.

  Toward the end of the evening I told them about the disappearance of Two-Headed Mary and her penchant for elaborate stories. They were interested: writers are always interested in material they can adapt to their own stories; if it is real, so much the better, it will add that unmistakable air of verisimilitude.

  “She got married just before she disappeared,” I told them. “It wasn’t under her own name, at least I think it wasn’t, but I guess it’s still legal. A rich Texan named—I swear—Pearly Gates. They met at the theater. Waiting for Lefty.”

  “A good play,” Agnes said.

  “I haven’t seen it,” I admitted.

  “You must. It is a play of the people.”

  “The people,” I said.

  SCENE: The Blind Harlequin, a Greenwich Village coffeehouse.

  It looks like all other coffeehouses in the Village; old wooden tables, battered wooden chairs, earnest people speaking intently about this and that.

  TIME: The Present (September 1935)

  The air is thick with cigarette smoke and the honest sweat of the masses. Bill, Agnes, and Morgan are sitting at one of the small tables drinking black coffee, except for Morgan, who has put cream in his, and talking the honest talk of the working class.

  BILL: (pounding on the table with his hard, callused hand) …one hell of a playwright. Not more of this pseudo-intellectual Marxist drivel that passes for proletarian theater, but a clean, sharp glimpse into the soul of the working man. We’ll hear more from him. Odets is his name. Clifton…

  Agnes stares intently across the table, concern for the urban proletariat written on her face, a face wreathed in the smoke of the cheap cigarettes she is chain-smoking.

  AGNES: (correcting Bill, but without animus) Clifford. Clifford Odets.

  BILL: Clifford. Wrote Waiting for Lefty. It’s about hack drivers. Real hack drivers. They sweat, they curse, they bleed. It’s about the cab driver strike last year, sort of.

  AGNES: I saw it a couple of months ago at the Longacre. It’s a hell of a play.

  Impressed by his companions’ earnestness, the fire of Socialist realism burns in Morgan’s eyes.

  MORGAN: So I’ll go see it. If it’s as good as you say it is, I’ll go see it.

  AGNES: You’ll experience it.

  BILL: And this guy playing the lead… Kazan…

  AGNES: Elia Kazan.

  BILL: Yeah. I think he must be a hack driver.

  AGNES: A hell of an actor. One hell of a play. Socially conscious, but good.

  BILL: A hell of a play.

  They stare at each other, their faces mirroring the futility of life.

  I may have exaggerated the scene a little for dramatic emphasis. They went on like that for a while. I was at home and in bed at about one-thirty, with “A hell of a play” ringing in my ears.

  8

  At 9:04 Saturday morning I was on a Long Island Railroad local that pulled in to Quogue right on time at 12:23. The Quogue station was a platform with a small shed surrounded by woods, and no sign of a station master or attendant. A narrow two-lane blacktop road wended up to it from the north and away from it to the south, and there were no houses in sight. The three other people who got off dispersed rapidly, and shortly I was standing alone.

  I headed off in what I fondly hoped was the direction of stores and civilization, or at least a man mowing his lawn, and was rewarded after walking for five minutes with the Lennon General Store—Hardware, Dry Goods & Sundries, with a gas pump around to the side. The woman who ran the place was in the back pumping kerosene out of a fifty-five-gallon drum into a bunch of one-gallon tin cans. “Afternoon. What do you need?” she said as I came into view.

  “I need to find Fenton Road,” I told her.

  “Go left,” she told me, without pausing in her pumping. “In about a mile you’ll reach the Montauk Highway. Cross it and keep going. You’ll be on Quogue Street. Shortly you’ll reach the center of town. Right outside of town, where the road forks, with Quogue Street on the right, you go left, up the hill. That’ll be Hale. The second road to the left is Fenton.”

  “Thanks,” I told her. “I’d like to get a bottle of pop.”

  She paused to wipe her forehead. “Cooler’s by the front door. Leave the nickel on the counter.”

  “Thanks,” I said again. I took a Dr. Brown’s from the cooler, dropped my nickel, and trudged off to the left.

  The town had a strong New England feel, with good-sized Colonial houses, many actually dating back to before the Revolution. Most of them now belonged to the “summer people,” who came with their kids, dogs, and servants on or about Memorial Day and departed en masse on Labor Day, leaving the big houses empty, and the seven hundred or so permanent residents to fend for themselves.

  Four-sixty-four Fenton Road was a two-story Victorian in a row of Victorians, each on a sizable lot with a white picket fence separating it from its neighbors and from the street. When I reached the house there was a station wagon parked in front of it, and a man in gray flannels and a tweed jacket was pounding a FOR SALE sign into the lawn by the front gate. My deduction that the man was a real estate agent was fortified by the words JAMAN & CO. REAL ESTATE on a side panel of the station wagon.

  “For sale, huh?” I said brightly.

  The man gave the post one last whack with his mallet and turned to me and smiled. “That’s right,” he said. “Interested?”

  “Maybe,” I told him. “Who lives here?”

  “Nobody. That’s why it’s for sale.”

  I grinned to show I could take a joke. “Okay,” I said. “Who did live here, why is he moving, and how much does he want for the property?”

  “I’m having it appraised this afternoon,” the agent told me. “The doctor may take a few dollars under the market price to move it quickly.”

  “Why is he moving?” I asked suspiciously. “Well dried up? Termites walking away with the porch?”

  The agent rose in defense of his property and told all. Kindly old—well, middle aged—Dr. Pangell was retiring and moving back home to somewhere in the Midwest. It had been a sudden decision, but with the end of the season all of his patients who could afford to pay for his services had moved back to the city anyway.

  “What sort of doctor is he?” I asked.

  “The usual sort,” he said. “He’s not a horse doctor, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Where could I find him?” I asked. “I’d like to talk to him.”

  The real estate man gave me a look. “Why?”

  “Why not?”

  He stepped a step toward me. “Just to tell you, not that I’m thinking you might, but just to let you know: I have a contract with Dr. Pangell. You can’t get the house any cheaper than what I’ll offer it for, and you can’t do me out of my commission.”

  “I wouldn’t think of it,” I assured him.


  “Well, just to tell you. But you can’t talk to the doctor anyhow. I don’t know where he is. He’s left town already. He’s going to call me when he gets settled.”

  “I see,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “Here’s my card,” he said, pushing the pasteboard into my hand.

  I walked back down to Quogue Street and managed to verify the real estate man’s story in the drugstore. The doctor had, indeed, left town last week, and it was a real shame because now the nearest doctor was twenty miles away, and he was a retired GP from Brooklyn who didn’t like to make house calls.

  I thought of walking back to the station, but rejected it in favor of taking a cab to the summer home of my friends Max and Florence Bosworth in Southampton. Max is a doctor specializing in diseases of people who live within a half mile of his Madison Avenue office, and Florence teaches a fourth-grade class at P.S. 6, on East 85th Street. I spent the rest of the weekend lying in the sun, walking along unspoiled sandy beaches, and admiring the somber traces of yellow, red, and orange beginning to color the leaves of the oak, birch, and occasional maple trees in the half-pint forest behind the cottage. Once it occurred to me to ask Max if he knew of Dr. Pangell over in Quogue, but he said no, and that was that. I helped the Bosworths prepare the place for its long winter’s nap and was rewarded for my labors with sets of tennis, home-cooked meals, and a ride back to the city in their aging Pontiac station wagon late Sunday night.

  * * *

  Monday morning dawned bright, clear and cool. Birds were singing and, as I took my usual long-cut through Central Park on my way to the office, the horses on the bridle path were prancing and snorting, glad to be alive. It was the sort of weather to put human troubles in perspective; insignificant and callow placed next to the wonders of nature. Which shows how much the weather knows about it.

  When I arrived at the office, Gloria was at her desk sorting mail, and Inspector Willem Raab of the New York City Police Department sat gingerly in one of the cane-bottom Louis the Whatever chairs against the reception-room wall, chewing on a pencil stub and reading the September American Mercury magazine, which is one of the bits of ephemera we keep in a rack for our guests’ amusement. I tossed my hat over the peg and cocked an inquisitive eyebrow at Gloria. She smiled sweetly back at me. “We have a visitor,” she said.

  “So we do,” I agreed, taking off my overcoat and hanging it carefully on its hanger in the little clothes closet. “Good morning, Inspector. Are you going to enter the essay contest?”

  Raab focused his eyes on me. “What essay contest?”

  “Somewhere near the back of the magazine. Twenty-five hundred words or less on, if I remember correctly, ‘The Present Troubles of the Country.’ H. L. Mencken is one of the judges, and I forget who the others are. Decision of the judges is final. In case of a tie, bribes will be solicited.”

  Raab looked at me doubtfully. “You could hardly get out of the gate in twenty-five hundred words. Hell, I could give you a quick ten thousand words on Manhattan, north of Fifty-seventh Street.” He closed the magazine and tossed it back into the rack. Pushing himself to his feet, he sorrowfully examined the pencil stub he had been chewing and thrust it into his vest pocket. “This isn’t morning,” he groused, “it’s mid-afternoon.”

  Inspector Willem Raab is a large, heavy, solid man. At first glance he appears to be somewhere between portly and fat. But the look is deceiving. Raab is, as the mayor put it at a dinner given for the inspector a couple of months ago, “as big as a mountain, as strong as an ox, and as brave and faithful as a bulldog.” And if Mayor LaGuardia says it, it must be so. Raab has been in charge of Homicide North since before I arrived in New York, and during that time it has become clear, and a thing of wonder to those used to Tammany hacks even in the police department, that he is also as smart and capable as he has to be and as apolitical as he is allowed to be. He and Brass are old friends. Even when circumstances cause them to be adversaries, each tries to keep the underlying friendship in mind.

  “I guess the boss isn’t here yet,” I said to Raab, “but I’ll find you a more comfortable chair if you like.”

  “Of course Brass isn’t here yet,” Raab said. “It’s only a quarter past ten. Couldn’t expect a man to be at his desk working at only a quarter past ten, now, could we?”

  “Your sarcasm is wasted on me,” I said. “As long as Mr. Brass pays my salary on time, he can come in whenever he likes.”

  Raab pushed himself to his feet. “It don’t matter,” he said. “I can see Brass later. First I need to talk to you; ask you a few questions. Maybe you can help clear up something.”

  “Me? No kidding?” I was nonplussed, a condition I’d seldom achieved. I mentally reviewed my recent transgressions, but could think of none that would interest an inspector of detectives. “Let’s go into my—no, we’d better go into Mr. Brass’s office, mine is hardly big enough for me.” I turned and led the way.

  The inspector settled himself on the black leather couch, his favorite seat in the office, and leaned back, his arms outstretched flat across the back of the couch. I pulled one of the office chairs over to a respectful distance and sat. Raab eyed me thoughtfully. “Let’s start with this: how well do you know Lydia Laurent?” he asked.

  I thought about it for a second, considering several wise answers, and decided that it would be better to play this one straight. “I don’t,” I said. “Not by that name, anyway.”

  Inspector Raab leaned even farther back, sliding his legs forward stiff-legged in front of him, and smiled a friendly, reassuring smile. I felt a twinge of apprehension at the back of my neck. In the four years I had known him, Raab had never smiled at me before. “What makes you think she had another name?” he asked.

  “I’m just being scrupulous,” I told him. “I have no reason to think anything about this person I don’t know.”

  “If the other name was Maureen Yency—would that refresh your memory?”

  I shook my head. “As far as I know, I have no memory to refresh.”

  The inspector stared at the ceiling. “A young, blond dancer, maybe five-two, hair bobbed, blue eyes, pretty face, well constructed. Ring any bells?”

  “Nary a tinkle,” I told him. “Except that, not counting hair or eye color, those are my minimum standards for a date. Unfortunately, girls who look like that usually have minimum standards of their own, so I seldom date. Dating is highly overrated anyway. I’d much rather spend a quiet evening at home darning socks. Why do you ask? Does she say I know her? What has she done? If she’s as good-looking as you say, I might be willing to provide her with an alibi, but of course I’d have to meet her first to judge for myself.”

  If that sounds glib, I was talking to fill the time with my words while I considered one of Raab’s words. Had. Verb, transitive, past tense. Had. Not has. The young lady, whoever she was, was not around anymore, and an inspector of homicide was asking me questions about her. And Raab was being carefully casual, not a good sign.

  Your average citizen believes that if he has nothing to hide, he should talk freely to the police to aid them in their pursuit of criminals. There is little truth to this belief. To the police, loquacity is not a sign of innocence; they may regard it as nervous chattering to hide the consciousness of guilt. When an investigator does not have a pretty good idea of who committed a crime, you’re just as good a suspect as the next man. And when a detective does have a pretty good idea of who committed the crime, he may be wrong, and the who may be you. There are many innocent men behind bars; the Second Chance Club has already proven this eight times.

  Inspector Raab gazed at me thoughtfully and let the shoe drop. “The girl is dead,” he said.

  “Ah,” I said, wondering what was in the other shoe—the one with my name on it. “And you want to know where I was on the night of January thirty-fourth, nineteen hundred-aught-twelve?”

  Raab sighed. “If you could only tap dance, you could take it on the road.”

  I shrugg
ed. “I don’t mean to sound heartless, but a lot of people die every day. A couple of hundred Ethiopians may be being machine-gunned by Mussolini’s Praetorian Guard right now and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  Brass stalked into the room and tossed his overcoat on a chair. Since he usually fastidiously hangs it in the closet in the front room, Gloria must have signaled him to hurry on through. It was nice to know she cared.

  “Morgan is right, you know,” Brass said. “I hope I’m not interrupting.”

  “Good morning,” Raab said. “I was going to get to you.”

  Brass went behind his desk and sat down, swiveling left and right to make sure the chair still swiveled, and then leaned back. “We mortals are not provided with an endless supply of sympathy,” he said. “If we tried to feel sorry for every bad or evil thing that happened, even just those we hear about in normal intercourse, we’d be swamped by emotion from moment to moment. Of necessity we must save our sympathy for those we know.”

  Raab scowled at my boss. “We are discussing a dead girl,” he said. “Name of Lydia Laurent. Mean anything to you?”

  Brass thought for a moment and then shook his head. “Not that I can remember,” he said. “How did she die?”

  “You and your apprentice here are so scrupulous with your language it’s hard not to think you have something to hide,” Raab said. “Him with his, ‘not by that name,’ and now you with, ‘not that I can remember.’ Can’t either of you give me a simple yes or no?”

  “No,” Brass said.

  “Phooey,” Raab said. He took a cigar out of his jacket pocket, turned it over speculatively a few times, and then shoved it back into his pocket and turned to me. “Come on, where do you know the girl from? How long had you been intimate with her? Nobody’s accusing you of anything, we just need to know her background, who she talked to; that sort of stuff.”