The Girls in The High-Heeled Shoes E-Book

Michael Kurland

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 408

Beschreibung

Fine and Dandy chorine Lydia Laurent's strangled, nude body, accompanied by two complete suits of clothing, has been found in Central Park, and now Two-Headed Mary and Billie Trask are missing too. Since the police are as helpless as they always are in 1935, it falls to New York World columnist Alexander Brass and his cheerfully wide-eyed sidekick Morgan DeWitt to dig up the truth.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Also by Michael Kurland

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also Available from Titan Books

Coming Soon from Titan Books

ALSO BY MICHAEL KURLAND

THE ALEXANDER BRASS MYSTERIES

Too Soon Dead

THE PROFESSOR MORIARTY NOVELS

The Infernal Device

Death By Gaslight

The Great Game

The Empress of India

Who Thinks Evil

The Girls in the High-Heeled ShoesPrint edition ISBN: 9781783295388E-book edition ISBN: 9781783295395

Published by Titan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First Titan edition: February 20161 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Copyright © 1998, 2016 by Michael Kurland. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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To Linda……because

I am for Broadway when the moon is low

And magic weaves along the fabled street

For I can search for ghosts of long ago

When time was slow and violins were sweet.

And few there are who note the haunted eyes

That hint of dreams too gossamer to last

And few there are when youth and beauty dies

Who bar the benediction of the past…

Phillip Stack

INTRODUCTION

My father was a reader. He read everything from historical novels to detective stories to encyclopedias, even a few science fiction novels and an occasional racing form. And I grew up reading through his library, Samuel Pepys Diary, The Saint Meets the Tiger, Adventures in Time and Space (the Healy & McComas anthology that turned me on to science fiction—still a great book), The Three Musketeers, and whole shelves of wonderful fiction and essays from the 1930s. When I decided that I wanted to become a writer, at the age of 10, the people I wanted to emulate were Cole Porter, Samuel Hoffenstein (“the Poet Laureate of Brooklyn”), Noel Coward, Dorothy Sayers, Rex Stout, Dashiell Hammett, and especially Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker. (And, I must admit, Mark Twain and Gilbert and Sullivan, but I digress.)

In my imaginings I would have an apartment on Central Park South, right across the way from George, or possibly Ira Gershwin, and spend the days in happy banter with Benchley, Thurber, Parker, and the staff of The New Yorker. In the evenings, if I wasn’t attending the opening of a new Sam and Bella Spewack play, I would sit down at my Underwood Standard and type out deathless prose. If only I had a time machine. And, of course, modern antibiotics.

The Alexander Brass novels are the offspring of my love affair with the 1930s. I have him as a columnist for the New York World, a fine newspaper which, in real life, died in 1931 over an inheritance dispute, and which had a sign over the city editor’s desk: “Never write down to your readers—anybody stupider than you can’t read.”

The title of the second book, The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes, comes from a 1930s era toast my mother taught me:

Here’s to the girls in the high-heeled shoesThat eat our dinners and drink our boozeAnd hug and kiss us until we smotherAnd then go home to sleep with mother!

Perhaps a bit non PC for today, but certainly heartfelt.

In the tales of Alexander Brass I have tried to recreate the feel, the atmosphere, of what it was like to be alive in the 1930s, to be part of a generation that was forced to grow up fast in the middle of a great depression, and who developed that rarest of talents, the ability to laugh at themselves.

MICHAEL KURLAND12 February 2015

1

Two-Headed Mary had been missing for three days before anyone noticed that she wasn’t around. Another day passed before her absence was taken seriously, and Cholly-on-the-Corner was sent to look for her. He checked at her usual pitches in front of some of Broadway’s better theaters, and some that were not so better. He talked to the bartenders at the between-the-acts joints in which she was known to imbibe and the waitresses at Schrafft’s restaurant on Broadway and 44th, where she was known to lunch. He spoke to some Broadway citizens who were known to be acquainted with the lady. He didn’t find her.

Alexander Brass and I were having a late supper at the Knickerbocker Grill on 54th and Sixth and listening to Benny Goodman and his boys make music on the bandstand, which is, after all, Brass’s job, and he is my boss, when Cholly came over to the table to tell us about it. “I am on da glim fer Two-Headed Mary,” he told us, plopping into the empty seat at our table without bothering to ask. “She ain’t been where she’s supposed ta be at fer a nummer a’ days now, an’ some a’ her friends ah startin’ ta worry so’s dey ast me ta put out da woid.”

(That’s kind of close to Cholly’s diction, but I’d need to use the phonetic alphabet to transcribe it accurately, and I don’t know the phonetic alphabet, so’s youse will have to settle for something closer to standard English since de udder gets tiresome quickly.)

Brass took a bite of steak and chewed it thoughtfully. “That’s odd,” he said. “I don’t think Mary has missed more than five matinee days in the past five years. She certainly never missed two in a row. She hasn’t been seen around the Street?”

“She ain’t been on the pitch anywhere what anyone’s seen her at it. And she’s kind of hard to miss.”

“And she’s not at home?”

“I don’t know,” Cholly said seriously. “Where does she live?”

Brass looked at Cholly and Cholly looked at Brass. Cholly is a big man, large in all dimensions; but you wouldn’t call him fat. Not if you were standing anywhere within reach of his ham-sized fists, you wouldn’t. He had been a prizefighter for a while, where he was known as Charles “the Mountain” Finter, and perfected the art of falling down. He fought some of the big names in his day: Dempsey, Tunney, and some others, and mostly he lost; but he quit one day when his head stopped hurting. “Your head’s supposed to hurt when you get hit,” he explained. “When you can’t feel it, it’s time to find another racket.”

“Are you just passing the time,” Brass asked, “or is there something you and yours think I should do about this absence?”

“I thought if you was to mention it in your column—you know, about her being gone—then maybe someone what has seen her might own up to it, her being missing and all.”

We paused for a moment to applaud Mr. Goodman as the last exuberant riffs of “Sing, Sing, Sing” died away and he and his boys left the bandstand for a well-deserved break. Ambrose, our waiter, appeared at the table with a teacup and saucer, and handed it to Cholly, who took a careful sip from the cup and put it down.

“Prohibition’s been over almost two years now, Cholly,” Brass said, grinning. “You don’t have to drink it out of a teacup any more.”

“It is tea, Mr. Brass,” Cholly explained, offering the cup for examination. “I ain’t supposed to drink nothing stronger than tea. I got a ulcer, and sometimes I spits blood.”

Brass sighed. “Drink your tea,” he told Cholly. “I have no objection to putting an item about Mary in my column, but supposing she’s gone off somewhere on private business and she doesn’t want anyone to know about it?”

“Then she should of left word around the Street that she’d be gone,” Cholly said seriously. “She knows she’s got friends on the Street what would worry about her.”

My boss is Alexander Brass, and his syndicated column “Brass Tacks” goes out to a couple of hundred papers around the country and a few in Canada. He instructs his readers on the State of the World and reports on strange things occurring in distant places; but mostly he tells about happenings on the Great White Way and comments on the hijinks of the high and mighty; particularly those high in the hierarchy of the show business or mighty in the related fields of politics or crime. Within the past couple of weeks he has written about President Roosevelt, Dutch Schultz, Mussolini, Fanny Brice, Harpo Marx, the Prince of Wales, Billy Rose, and New York’s latest phenomenon, Special Prosecutor Thomas A. Dewey (whom he referred to as “that dapper crime fighter,” prompting a phone call from one of Dewey’s aides wondering whether that was good or bad).

Brass fiddled thoughtfully with his brandy and water. “Who is it that is so upset at her absence?” he asked.

“Some of the chorines in Dames, Dames, Dames, which is at the Alhambra, put me on to it,” Cholly explained. “You know she helps out the girls when they needs it. When a girl is between shows and hasn’t got the rent or what to eat, she’s good for a five-spot. Or when a girl has serious boyfriend trouble, like black eyes or a fat lip, Mary will call me and I’ll go over and give the boyfriend a reason or two to keep his hands in his pockets.”

“I didn’t know you were so noble, Cholly,” I said. “We ought to do an item on you.”

Cholly swung around. “And maybe not,” he said, holding his thumb an inch from my nose.

I raised my hands in quick surrender. “Sorry,” I said. “It was just an idea. Besides, Mr. Brass does all the deciding around here, I’m just an errand boy.”

“So Two-Headed Mary’s been money-lender to the theatrical community,” Brass mused. “I didn’t know panhandling was so lucrative.”

“Yeah,” Cholly agreed. “Me, too. But that’s what the girls tells me.”

Cholly-on-the-Corner, now probably in his mid-forties, has become a theatrical hanger-on. But he is more than tolerated by those he hangs about; he is valued. It started when he quit professional boxing and became a carny attraction. He gave exhibition bouts, and offered ten dollars to anyone who could stay in the ring two rounds against him. “It could of been one round,” he said, “but I wanted to give the audience their dime’s worth.” Then he got a job as a walk-on in The Fighting Maxwells, to add color to the prizefight scene in the second act. When Simon Wilder, the director, found out that he really had been a fighter, Wilder hired him to show matinee idol Walter Fitzbreen, who played Minton Maxwell, the hero, how to look like he knew what he was doing in the ring. When the show closed, after a six-month run, Cholly was hired by Jack Barrymore to be his personal trainer and keep him sober for a few months until he (Barrymore) went out to Los Angeles to make a movie.

By then he was hooked, and he spent his days in and about those legitimate theaters from 43rd Street to 56th Street, between Sixth and Tenth Avenues, that are collectively known as “Broadway.” He did odd jobs, subbed for missing workers, chased away overly amorous stage-door johnnies, behaved with the utmost decorum at all times, and was absolutely trustworthy with whatever a producer or house manager or chorine chose to trust him with. He got his nickname because, when he wasn’t in a theater, he hung out at a papaya juice stand on the corner of 54th and Seventh Avenue. There came a time when he was needed at the Belasco Theater regularly, and Eddie Panglitch, the house manager, would turn to someone and say, “Go and get Cholly on the corner and tell him I want him.”

We chatted over a range of subjects while Brass finished his steak, and Cholly his tea. We discussed the attempted assassination of “the Kingfish,” Senator Huey Long, last night in Baton Rouge. Some doctor had accosted the senator in a hallway in the state capitol and put a couple of bullets in his stomach. The doctor had promptly been blown away by three of the Kingfish’s State Police bodyguards. Some people thought it was political; Long’s populist Share the Wealth clubs were rising in membership and popularity, making him a powerful contender for the presidency in the next election. It was an open question as to whether the Republicans or the Democrats were more scared of him. The opinion of the local reporters, a cynical lot, was that he had hopped out of the wrong bed.

“I don’t know why the guy shot him,” Cholly ventured, “but I been reading about how funny it was that he went everywhere with his bodyguard, even into the Senate. But now I guess it ain’t so funny no more.”

We talked about the Max Baer-James J. Braddock title bout at Madison Square Garden a couple of months ago (Braddock won on a decision after fifteen rounds; Baer was gypped, Cholly asserted. Brass, who had had a ringside seat, agreed. I missed that one, but I agreed on general principles: I had met Max Baer and I liked him) and the Joe Louis-Primo Carnera bout two weeks later in the same arena (Louis K.O.’d the ex-champion in the sixth. He might become the next Negro World Champion, according to Cholly, if Braddock, the bum, agrees to fight him. Brass and I had both been at that one. Brass agreed with Cholly. I am no judge of such things, but from what I saw anyone climbing into the ring against Mr. Louis had better have made out his will and said goodbye to his nearest and dearest). The conversation then switched to the decline of the American theater for a little while, until Benny Goodman and his boys were making their way back to the bandstand. Then Cholly-on-the-Corner got up, solemnly shook hands with Brass and me, and departed.

“Well, what are you going to do?” I asked Brass.

“About what?”

“About Two-Headed Mary. Are you going to do a mention about her being gone?”

“Of course,” Brass told me. “‘Philanthropist panhandler missing.’ My readers will eat it up. If she doesn’t reappear soon I can do a paragraph on it once a month for the next year. Then, on the first anniversary of her disappearance, I’ll write a full-column ‘Mysterious Disappearance’ story. Feature writers will add her to the pantheon of perpetual missing persons like Judge Crater and Ambrose Bierce. We can have the whole country out looking for her. Boy scouts in Topeka and volunteer fire departments through Ohio and Indiana will send out search parties to examine deserted quarries and peer down closed mine shafts. I wonder whether anyone has actually ever been found in a deserted quarry or down a closed mine shaft.”

Brass sipped his brandy and contemplated the follies of the human race. “But it will probably amount to very little. The odds are that Mary is just sleeping off a binge in some Bowery hotel or smoking the dream pipe in one of those dives off Mott Street, and she’ll show up in the next few days on her own.”

“Maybe she’s been carried off by Indians like Evangeline, or has ran off with her secret lover like Aimie Semple McPherson or stolen a bunch of money like Billie Trask,” I suggested. “That should be good for some copy.”

“‘Evangeline’ is a poem by Longfellow,” Brass corrected me with the sigh of a long-suffering pedant. “You’re probably thinking of Virginia Dare, who was the first English child born in North America. She vanished with the rest of the settlers on Roanoke Island sometime before 1591.”

“That must be the lady I meant,” I agreed.

Benny Goodman blew a tentative E-flat.

“And the fact that Miss Trask was working in the box office of the Monarch Theater and disappeared at the same time as the box-office receipts doesn’t mean she took them. There are several other explanations for her disappearance and the vanishing money that are not being considered by the authorities, or by my fellow journalists.”

“They might have information you don’t,” I suggested.

“I’m sure they do,” Brass agreed. “They must know the color of the girl’s eyes and hair, her weight, the names of her intimates, and what small town in Indiana, or wherever, she’s from. But they don’t know, and neither do you nor I, whether she has that money.”

This was part of an ongoing discussion between us. We’d been following the case in the papers and speculating on it since the story broke. The consensus was that Trask had taken the money, but Brass has never been a consensus player. “She’s been gone two weeks now,” I said. “My bet is when they catch up with her, she’s got the missing dough in her girdle.”

“I doubt if she wears a girdle,” Brass said. “Remember, she was a dancer in the Lucky Lady company until she hurt her leg.”

“Well, at least I was right about Aimee,” I said.

“At least,” Brass agreed. “Let’s hope Two-Headed Mary has a secret lover; I could do something with that. But right now I’m going on to the Stork Club. With luck somebody whose name is known to the common man will be throwing drunken punches at someone even more famous for insulting his wife or girlfriend, or Roosevelt, or the League of Nations, or Gypsy Rose Lee, and I’ll have the opener for a think piece about the vagaries of human conduct. I feel like doing a think piece, it requires so little thought. You go on home, if you like.”

So here it was a hair before one in the morning and my workday was ending. This is not a complaint. I value my job; and not just because in this month of our Lord September 1935, almost six years since the day immortalized in the Variety headline, WALL STREET LAYS AN EGG, an employer still doesn’t have to advertise a job. He just has to go into a dark corner, make sure there is nobody in earshot, and whisper quietly up his sleeve: “I need someone to sweep the floor and lift heavy objects. I can pay ten dollars a week.” Before he can make it to the front door, four hundred people will be lined up outside, politely, quietly, hopefully.

But I not only have a job, I have the job I wanted: amanuensis and legman for Alexander Brass. My name is Morgan DeWitt and I have worked for Brass since the week I arrived in New York four years ago with my suitcase in one hand and my diploma from Western Reserve College in the other, determined to write the Great American Novel before I was thirty. I am still working on the novel. I have five years to go. Wars have been fought and won, dynasties have fallen, obscure army corporals have risen to lead great countries in less than five years; so I still have a chance with the novel. Besides, would it be so bad if I didn’t finish it until I was thirty-five?

Brass has warned me that working for him will ruin my writing style. He has also said that any writer who is conscious of his style as he writes is an inept farceur. I suppose both could be true. But I like my job. The hours are lousy, the working conditions vary from elegant to dangerous, the pay is barely adequate, even for a young single man with an English degree from a small college in Ohio as his only reference, but I have learned more about life—about people—each week I’ve worked for Brass than I would in ten years of doing anything else. I have dealt with gangsters and their molls, politicians and their molls, stars of stage and screen, con men, kept women, kept men, nightclub owners, nightclub singers, nightclub crawlers, doormen and princes, whores and princesses, and have discovered no universal truth, no rulebook for understanding humanity. But I have learned, faster and more directly than I could have elsewhere, that it is presumptuous for any man to assume that he understands any other man well enough to write about him; and ridiculous for any man to assume that he understands any woman.

Brass and I separated at the door; he grabbed a cab to the Stork Club and a night of listening to stars and starlets and would-be stars and their press agents and sycophants whispering boozy secrets in his ear. I raised the collar of my raincoat and pulled my hat down against the cold drizzle and headed for the 57th Street subway entrance. One of the city’s saving graces is that the streetcars, buses, and subways run all night. The other is that, though New Yorkers know that their city is the center of the known universe, they are not at all stuck up about it.

* * *

Twenty minutes later I was home, which is a room in a brownstone rooming house on West 74th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus. I share the house with an ever-changing assortment of actors, actresses, dancers, singers, musicians, playwrights, waiters, waitresses, and other recent arrivals who are going to make it big in this city without a heart, or die trying. Sometimes reality is surprisingly trite. There is also a young lady who reads cards and tells fortunes at various restaurants around town, a retired New York cop who works as a guard at the Museum of Natural History, and a small-time bookie who works out of a cigar store on Broadway and 86th. My next-door neighbor is a retired circus clown named Pinky. An ever-changing slice of life, my rooming house.

There is a shared living room where people of the opposite sex can entertain each other, since propriety and Mrs. Bianchi, the landlady, discourage the mixing of the sexes in any of the upstairs rooms; brief visits with the door open are barely permitted. The room has an upright piano (no playing after 10:00 P.M.), a couple of couches, a few overstuffed chairs, some beat-up wooden chairs, a writing desk, and, at the moment I came into the house, a uniformed patrolman in deep conversation with Maureen, our resident card reader, on a couch in the corner. Since they were holding hands and gazing meaningfully into each other’s eyes, I didn’t think Maureen was in any great danger of getting arrested for fortune-telling, so I tiptoed upstairs and fell into bed.

2

To compensate for the late hours, I usually don’t arrive at the office until between ten and ten-thirty. Brass tries to make it by eleven. Normally after I get up and ablute, I make a small pot of coffee and spend the next hour at the old Underwood on the desk under my window, working at my novel—can’t be a novelist without writing a novel. But this morning I stared at the last page I had done—thirty-two—and decided to put aside the manuscript and let it age. Perhaps it would improve with age. It was a slice-of-life story called “So Breaks a Heart—A Saga of Broadway.” It was about a young man who works for a famous columnist and what he learns about life and women and other things and how he has his heart broken by a girl who loves him but cannot be faithful to any man.

It was autobiographical, but it was sappy and it didn’t read true. I think the reason truth is stranger than fiction is that when it is written as fiction, it is not believable.

When a random stranger—say someone you meet at a party—finds out you’re a writer, even a would-be novelist like myself, one of the first questions is always “Where do you get your ideas?” My friend Bill Welsch, a regular contributor to Black Mask, claims they are mailed to him on postcards from a fellow in New Jersey named Bodo. The truth is that ideas for plots and characters are constantly flung at you by life, and your job is merely to catch them, sort them, and throw back the ones that are undersized. It isn’t the ideas that are the problem, it’s arranging them in a lifelike and realistic manner within the story. The task is one of selection, organization, and staying far enough removed from the material so that it will read like the truth. Truth in fiction is an artfully contrived facade.

I considered the problems of being a writer as I got dressed, and wondered whether The Writer or Writer’s Digest would be interested in an article by one of America’s major unpublished novelists.

I washed, brushed, and dressed in a brown single-breasted suit that said, or at least strongly implied, “man of the world,” and had set me back thirty-five dollars, and was headed downstairs, trench coat over my arm, by quarter to nine. I walked along Central Park West, observing the pigeons, sparrows, squirrels, small children and their nannies, and other fauna, and thinking over the state of the world and trying to decide what sort of book to attempt next. Starting a novel is easy. Taking it to completion is, for me so far, a distant goal. Perhaps I should switch to short stories or squib fillers for newspapers. Who knows—I might write the Great American Squib.

My thoughts moved, mercifully, on to the missing Two-Headed Mary. The lady was a true Broadway character of the sort that Damon Runyon might write about. Telling her tale would present certain problems in delicacy and restraint, but Alexander Brass had solved worse. In his coverage of the Hall-Mills case a decade ago, he had managed to convey what the minister and his choir singer were doing in their time alone together with mostly biblical references, and without getting more than a couple of dozen letters from readers whose sensibilities were offended (but who nonetheless had read every word). Theodore Garrett, Brass’s man-of-all-work, had done a montage of those letters, and it hung in the entrance hall to Brass’s apartment.

Brass had two people working for him in his office on the sixteenth floor of the New York World building on Tenth Avenue and 59th Street. There was Gloria Adams, his researcher and copy editor, who doubled as the receptionist when there was any receiving to be done; and there was me. Gloria, whom I privately think of as the Ice Princess, is blond, five-foot-two, beautiful, and of indeterminate age. She can’t be as young as she looks, and she looks far too young to be as knowledgeable and self-assured as she is. (If Gloria were to read that last sentence she would red-pencil it heavily and write something about “balance” in the margin. But I think it means what I think I want to say, so I think I’ll just leave it alone.)

I got into the office about ten-thirty, nodded hello to Gloria, who was behind her desk in the front room, carefully hung up my tan British trench coat, which gives me that air of elan that I otherwise lack, and tossed my dark brown fedora on the hat tree. Gloria looked over my suit and gave me an approving nod. She thinks that people should always dress as though they are in imminent danger of meeting their maker, and will be judged 20 percent on their good works and 80 percent on their tailor. “Are there any news?” I asked her.

“Not a new,” she responded. “But here’s the mail.” She indicated a wicker basket stuffed with envelopes on one side of her desk. It is part of my job to sort the mail and answer that part of it not destined for other ends. I took the basket and retreated to my little cubbyhole office in the short hall between Gloria’s well-appointed reception room and Brass’s vast sunlit chamber with a view of the Hudson River, which flowed past some three blocks away for Brass’s personal amusement.

Brass came in about an hour later and settled in his office. I brought him the three letters that he had to look at, and placed them carefully on the blotter in front of him. He was staring out the window at the passing scene. A couple of old four-stack destroyers were puffing their way up the Hudson, working their way past two tugs that were pushing a long row of barges the other way. It was very nautical. Inspired, I snapped to attention and saluted. “Good morning, Commodore Brass,” I said. “Ensign DeWitt reporting for instructions.”

“Good morning, Mr. DeWitt.” He turned to look at me. “Go keelhaul the mizzenmast. And don’t annoy me until at least twelve bells.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” I said. I did a smart about-face and went back to my office to begin answering the stack of letters. A little while later I heard the steady clatter of Brass’s Underwood typewriter over the intermittent clacking of my own. It was a sweet sound, the sound that paid my salary as well as that of Gloria and Garrett. It also kept Brass well supplied with those toys that made his life worth living. In addition to the cars—he now had six—he had recently developed an interest in science and scientific instruments. A couple of months ago he had purchased a six-inch reflecting telescope from a pawn shop—Brass was fascinated by pawn shops—and had installed it on the terrace of his Central Park South apartment. Last Tuesday night, he showed Gloria and me the moons of Jupiter with paternal pride. He had some old maps of Manhattan, purchased from a Cortlandt Street dealer, and was tracing the island’s early streams and water-courses to find out what happened to them as the city spread its concrete around and over the original landscape. What, if anything, he intended to do with the water when he found it I don’t know.

About an hour after the typing started, he called me in to pick up the column, triple-spaced just like a real reporter would type it, and bring it to Gloria for copy editing and fact checking. I was expected to read it and comment if I saw anything I didn’t like, but usually he just glared at me or shook his head sadly when I did. Gloria’s opinion he respected, mine he tolerated.

I paused at Gloria’s desk to see if he had included anything about Two-Headed Mary. The opening piece said nice things about Senator Huey Long, who was not expected to live out the day. The piece on Two-Headed Mary was the third item, sandwiched between a favorable mention of Clarence Day’s new book, Life with Father, and a long think piece on how the world was getting ever smaller, what with the S.S. Normandie just crossing the Atlantic in four days, eleven hours and thirty-three minutes, and the China Clipper flying boat going into regular service between San Francisco and Manila. The piece on Mary read:

THE GREAT WHITE WAY is missing one of its lights tonight. We know her as Matinee Mary and, in the casual, uncaring way of New Yorkers, know little more about her except that for much of the past decade this earnest matron in the print dresses and flowered hats has stationed herself outside Broadway’s theaters during intermissions and dunned the matinee audiences for worthy causes. She learned what shows would open the purses and wallets of the audience and which would not, and stood, rain or shine, where she could do the most good. She has a kind heart, and has been known to help a chorus girl in trouble with advice, friendship, and perhaps a folded-up bill slipped into her hand.

But for the past week Matinee Mary has not been standing under the broad, protective awnings of the Broadway theaters, and no one seems to know where she has gone. Mary, the chorines at the Broadhurst and the Belasco miss you. Forty-sixth Street is a little darker without your smile. We hope you’re o.k., Mary, and we want to see you back under the awning of the Majestic or the Alhambra with your collection tube and your sempiternal smile real soon.

“Matinee Mary” was a pretty good invention. Brass couldn’t very well call her Two-Headed Mary in print, not without explaining the name, which wouldn’t have been nice.

“So,” Gloria said, seeing what I was reading, “Two-Headed Mary is missing. Maybe one of the audience members actually read what it says on that collection tube of hers.”

“They might have punched her out,” I said, “but they wouldn’t have kidnapped her.”

“You never can tell,” Gloria said. That being the unofficial motto of the office, I couldn’t argue with her. The joke is that kind, sweet Mary was a con woman. But she gave her marks a fighting chance. If anyone ever stopped to read the legend wrapped around her donation tube they would have known that this was no ordinary charity that Mary was collecting for. “Give,” it said, “GIVE—for the Two-Headed War Orphans of Claustrophobia—Give—GIVE.”

And thus her nickname.

* * *

The column appeared on Wednesday, September 11. By that afternoon we were fielding phone calls from actors, dancers, stage managers, and other people in “the business,” as the showbusiness folk call their occupation, as though it were the only business on the planet worth considering. And a few from those denizens of Broadway whose professions couldn’t be classified, at least not if they wanted to stay out of jail. None of them had any worthwhile information regarding Two-Headed Mary’s whereabouts, but they all wanted us to know that they thought well of her. By the next morning, we had several letters from chorus girls, and one from a chorus boy, detailing how Two-Headed Mary had helped them with money, advice, or a place to stay when they were in need. I gave the letters to Brass with a note clipped to them that read: “St. Mary of the Grift. Maybe we should pass the story on to Damon Runyon.” He walked by my cubical later and glowered at me and muttered “Runyon indeed,” under his breath.

The next day, which would make it Thursday, at noon I was in the outer office discussing with Gloria the sensitive question of the acquisition of office supplies when the slender, well-groomed scion of the aristocracy, K. Jeffrey Welton, appeared in the doorway. He sported a red and blue striped tie and a red carnation boutonniere in the lapel of his gray cashmere suit jacket. His shoes were glossy black patent leather. His was the sort of elegance that makes we mere mortal men identify with toads; and we envy him but we do not like him. Women, I believe, feel differently—although how a woman can like a man who is habitually prettier than she is, I do not understand.

There are those who claim that the United States of America has no aristocracy; they are misguided. The Weltons and the Vanderbilts and the Astors and the Rockefellers and one particular set of Adamses and some Dutch families whose ancestors were burghers in Nieuw Amsterdam, and some others whose families have been here so long that their names no longer reverberate in casual conversation, are the American aristocracy. Some of these families are social, and are high up in the society Four Hundred, some irrepressible souls make up a part of café society, some pay lawyers and other servants large retainers to see that their names do not come before the public at all.

The Weltons made their money manufacturing shoes in Massachusetts. Welton boots covered the feet of both Union and Confederate soldiers during the Civil War, and American, British, and, it has been alleged, German soldiers during the World War. There was a congressional investigation about the latter incident, but it came to naught.

“Ta, all,” K. Jeffrey said in his clipped, slightly nasal, aristocratic voice. He leaned on his walking stick and smiled into the room. “What’s the good word?” Welton’s father still made shoes, but K. Jeffrey had taken his pittance of the family fortune and shifted it from the shoe business to the show business. You can imagine how his family must have felt about that. But whatever they felt about his choice of profession, they couldn’t argue with his success. He had come straight from Yale to Broadway and started in the esoteric field of play production about the same time I came to New York and began working on the Great American Novel. I had never gotten past page sixty in any of my attempts. K. Jeffrey had already produced four plays: one flop, two that just eked out their nut before closing, and a reasonable success. The success, the musical Lucky Lady, was even now in its sixth month at the Monarch Theater.

“Mr. Welton,” Gloria said, smiling sweetly up at him as he approached her desk. “Mr. Brass supplies the words, we just work here. What can we do for you?”

“This bloody Mary business,” he said, leaning on the desk and smiling down at Gloria. “Has she turned up yet?”

“Two-Headed Mary?” I asked.

“That’s her,” he agreed. “Very clever calling her ‘Matinee Mary,’” he said judiciously, “but then your boss is a clever man.”

“If she has reappeared we have not been told,” Gloria said. “Would you like to speak to Mr. Brass?”

“Sure thing,” Welton agreed. “If the old man is in, I’d like to chew the fat with him.”

“I’ll see,” I said, rising from the chair I had deposited myself in upon Welton’s entry.

“Are you in?” I asked Brass, who was staring out his window at something in New Jersey. “K. Jeffrey Welton would speak with you.”

“What does he want?” He asked, swiveling around in his chair.

“He didn’t say,” I said. “Just that he wants to chew the fat with the old man. By which, of course, I knew immediately that he meant you. Sir.”

Brass grimaced thoughtfully. “I’ll come out,” he said. “It will be easier to get rid of him.”

Welton was leaning against Gloria’s desk when we emerged, watching her. His pose was artfully casual, but there was something about his look that suggested that Gloria was a piece of cheesecake and he had just realized he was hungry. Gloria, who was used to being a piece of cheesecake in men’s eyes, was smiling up at him with a smile of devastating innocence.

Brass took in the pose at a glance. “Welton,” he said. “There’s a biblical injunction against coveting thy neighbor’s employee.”

“He wants me to star in his next show,” Gloria said, batting her eyelids theatrically. “Little me! Imagine!”

“Get it in writing,” Brass advised. “I’ll have Syd negotiate the deal for you.” Syd Lautman was Brass’s attorney, and a very good and thorough one he was.

K. Jeffrey grinned. “You people don’t let any grass grow under your palms,” he said. “A little friendly proposition between a man and a woman, and all of a sudden it’s a business deal.”

“Predatory, we are,” Brass said. “Ready to take advantage of the innocent Broadway producer. What can I do for you, Welton?”

“Mary,” Welton said. “I understand she hasn’t turned up yet.”

“True,” Brass agreed.

“The girls in my show are worried about her. They suggested I put up a reward for finding her. The idea being if I can do it for someone who’s a thief, I can do it for someone who’s a good Samaritan. And from the stories the girls tell me, Mary is an angel in disguise.”

“A thief?” Brass paused. “Oh, that’s right. Lucky Lady is your show. You mean the Trask girl.”

“That’s right. Billie Trask. Nice kid—I thought. Stole a weekend’s worth of box-office receipts, among other things, and disappeared. I have posted—I guess that’s the word, although I didn’t actually post anything anywhere—a thousand-dollar reward for finding her and my money.”

“Were the receipts that much?” I asked.

“A little less,” he said. “Which means, if they find her with all the money, I won’t quite break even.”

Brass frowned. “Didn’t you have insurance?”

“Sure. It covers the theater rental and utilities for two days. Paying the cast and crew and the investors, I’m on my own.”

“Do you really think she did it?” I asked.

K. Jeffrey thought that over for a moment. “I certainly hope she didn’t,” he said. “As I say, I liked her. But the police think she did it. Apparently she had a secret boyfriend, and they think she ran off with him.”

“Do you want me to put that in my column?” Brass asked. “About the reward for Mary?”

“What do you think?” Welton asked. “Why don’t you wait a few days? Perhaps she’ll return on her own.”

“All right,” Welton agreed. “If you think so. We’ll give her the weekend to show up. Listen, keep me informed, will you?”

“And you,” Brass said. “If you hear anything about either of our two mysteries, let me know.”

Welton nodded. “Turnabout, and all that,” he said. “If it isn’t one thing, it’s another. Well, must be going. Ave atque vale, old amicus.” And with that, and a wave of his hand, he was out the door.

“It shows,” Brass said, “the advantages of a Yale education. One can say goodbye almost entirely in Latin.”

3

Two hours later, Sandra Lelane came to the office. Gloria was off researching something about the Spanish navy for Brass, so I was sitting at the reception desk at the time. Miss Lelane was demurely dressed in a green frock that went well with her shoulder-length light brown hair and soft hazel eyes, and she was wearing what to my untrained eye looked like the minimum of makeup. If I hadn’t recognized her I might have guessed her to have been a shop girl or a princess, and she would have done either very well. I stood up when she walked in. I would have taken off my hat if I were wearing a hat.

She approached the desk and the slight odor of lily of the valley came along with her. “I would like to see Mr. Brass,” she said. Her voice was soft and pleasant, and lower than I remembered.

“You’re Sandra Lelane,” I said.

She smiled and the room got warmer. “You know me,” she said.

“I have seen you,” I said. “In A ll the King’s Horses and in The Good Word. And you were at Ira Gershwin’s birthday party last year. You sat on the piano and sang ‘A Wonderful Party’ and ‘The Half of It Dearie Blues’ and a couple of other of the Gershwins’ stranger songs. I sat in a corner and worshiped you from afar.”

“Good God,” she said. “Next time come closer. A girl likes to be worshiped from close-up.” She looked me up and down. “What’s your name?”

“Morgan DeWitt.”

“Well, Morgan DeWitt, now that you’re close-up, I hope you like what you see.”

“Even better,” I said. “Excuse me for a second, I’ll tell Mr. Brass you’re here.”

I tore myself away from the desk and went back to Brass’s office. Brass was leaning back in his chair, his hands laced behind his head, staring at the large Pearson landscape on the far wall with a woods and a river in the foreground and a medieval castle sitting on a hill in the distance. As a fellow writer, I recognized that he was hard at work. “I hate to interrupt you in the throes of creation,” I told him, “but you’ve got company.”

“Have you ever considered,” he asked me without looking away from the painting, “what a pointless and frivolous exercise we conduct daily from this office.”

“No,” I said, “not really.”

“Well, consider,” he said. “If you work on an assembly line making cars, it might be boring, repetitive, manual labor, but when it’s done you have something: a car. You can point to it as it goes down the street and say ‘Peer under that car and you can see the very bolt that I tightened.’ If you write a book, as you keep threatening to do, someone centuries from now could crack it open and read of your ecstasies and sorrows. If you paint an oil painting, good or bad, people a thousand years from now could look at it and recapture some of the emotion that went into creating the canvas.”

“Not if I painted it,” I said.

“But we,” he said, ignoring me, “we who write ephemera in the dailies for the masses, we see our thoughts converted to fish-wrapping or used for paper-training puppies within the week.”

“Sitting in your penthouse all alone among your meaningless possessions, holding back the tears,” I said. “Why it’s enough to make a fellow drive his La Salle, or his Packard, or his Bugatti right into the Hudson River. Say at the City Island Boat Dock, where this fellow has been eyeing that forty-two-foot schooner.”

“Sloop,” Brass said.

“Certainly,” I agreed.

Brass eyed me. “Sarcasm is a dangerous weapon in the hands of those unskilled in its use,” he said mildly. “Why some are even foolish enough to aim it at the man who signs their paycheck.”

“No!” I said. “What a thought!”

He shook his head sadly at my lack of respect. “Who?” he asked.

It took me a second, but I retrieved the answer to the question with the grace and finesse of Gehrig fielding an infield fly. “Sandra Lelane.”

“The actress? What does she want?”

“Shall I ask her?”

He sighed. Forced to engage in conversation with a beautiful woman. “No, bring her in.”

I marveled at the power of a verb as I went out to retrieve Miss Lelane. If Brass had said, “Send her in,” I would have had to think of some excuse to come back in with her, but “bring her in” made it mandatory. I brought her in.

Brass rose. “Miss Lelane,” he said.

She came forward and extended her hand. “Mr. Brass. You must call me Sandra.”

While they shook hands I pushed a chair up to the desk for Sandra, but she remained standing.

“Thank you,” Brass said. He didn’t add “You may call me Alexander”; he doesn’t like people calling him Alexander. (We won’t even discuss “Alex” or “Al.”) I retreated to a corner of the couch.

“Please do sit down,” Brass said. He sat down himself to encourage her. “What can I do for you?”

She sat and crossed her legs carefully and smoothed out her skirt. “Help me find my mother.”

Brass considered this for a moment. “Where did you lose her?”

She pushed herself halfway to her feet and then thought better of it and sat back down. “I’m sorry,” she said, leaning forward, “but this is not a joke to me!”

Brass moved his arm in a pushing motion. “Sit back,” he said. “I apologize for what must have sounded like a frivolous comment, but your request is not one that I was expecting. Losing one’s mother is indeed serious, but why on earth did you come to me? The police have a missing persons department. If you don’t trust in their perspicacity, I can recommend an excellent private investigation service. I am not a policeman, I am a columnist.”

“I came to you because I can’t go to the police, because I daren’t trust a private detective, and because if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t know my mother was missing. You wrote about her in your column yesterday.”

Brass allowed himself to look surprised. “Your mother? Two-Headed Mary?”

She leaned back. “That’s right,” she said.

“Well!” Brass said.

“I asked about you on the Street,” Sandra said. “I was told that you were a straight joe; that you could keep a secret. Is that right?”

“That’s a large part of my job,” Brass told her. “If my friends and contacts didn’t think they could trust me, they wouldn’t tell me anything.”