Too Soon Dead E-Book

Michael Kurland

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 402

Beschreibung

A furtive tipster gives nightclub columnist Alexander Brass an envelope filled with photographs of several powerful people caught in compromising sexual positions. Intrigued, Brass sends a newspaper stringer to follow the mystery man. When the stringer is murdered, Brass and his team resolve to find the killer, running the gauntlet of blackmailing Nazis, accommodating nymphomaniacs and US senators on the way.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Also by Michael Kurland

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Coming Soon from Titan Books

ALSO BY MICHAEL KURLAND

THE ALEXANDER BRASS MYSTERIES

The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes (February 2016)

THE PROFESSOR MORIARTY NOVELS

The Infernal Device

Death By Gaslight

The Great Game

The Empress of India

Who Thinks Evil

Too Soon DeadPrint edition ISBN: 9781783295364E-book edition ISBN: 9781783295371

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

First Titan edition: November 20151 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 © 1997, 2015 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 Jack and Stephanie and Edith and Max and Mary and Madeleine and Morgan and Rusty and Sybil and all who love them

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, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 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

It was about eleven in the morning when I arrived at the New York World building. Mel the elevator boy worked at telling me a complicated joke as he took me up to the sixteenth floor. Something about Mussolini and the Ethiopians. If there was a punch line, he lost it without noticing somewhere between the eleventh and twelfth floors. I chuckled appreciatively as he stopped and pulled the elevator door open. It was the least I could do.

I brushed the last touch of March snow off my gray tweed topcoat and kicked the last trace of March slush off my black wing-tips before I pushed open the door to Brass’s outer office. A fat man I’d never seen before stood in front of the reception desk, shaking his chubby forefinger at Gloria. “Oh, no,” he said in a surprisingly high voice, “I can’t talk to you.” He raised a pair of fleshy pink hands in shock at the suggestion. “Either I get to see Mr. Brass himself or I go peddle my papers somewhere else, little lady. I don’t talk to anyone but Mr. Brass. Personal.”

The fat man could see, but he could not observe. Anyone who would call Gloria Adams “little lady” would call Jack Dempsey “buddy.” The description was technically accurate: Gloria stood about five-two in her stockings, and she was certainly a lady; but the connotative content of the phrase was all wrong. Strangers meeting Gloria for the first time became tongue-tied searching for the proper salutation. “Madam” sprang to mind, and was immediately rejected. “Your Royal Highness” was formal enough, but wide of the mark. Most people, speechless, would merely bow or curtsey, although a few especially perceptive foreigners had been known to kow-tow. Foreigners have a sense of the fitness of these things that we Americans lack.

Gloria was in her late twenties, and cold and blond and beautiful. Looking at Gloria, one knew instinctively that she was possessed of knowledge that the rest of us could merely guess at, and that this knowledge ennobled her and made her immune to human emotion. I thought of her as the Ice Princess, and sometimes dreamed—ah! the things I dreamed. After reading either too much or too little of the works of Dr. Freud, I had decided that the reason I found her so attractive was probably the result of something that happened in my childhood that I didn’t want to know about. But I digress.

I crossed the room and tossed my pearl-gray fedora onto the peg reserved for it, and turned to Gloria, who was smiling a welcoming smile sweetly up at me. The smile that said this is your job. And welcome to it. Then she turned off the smile. “This is Mr. DeWitt,” she told the fat man, indicating me with a slight nod of her head. “Perhaps you could explain it to him. He is Mr. Brass’s personal assistant.” Which was not exactly accurate, but was close enough for New York jazz.

I took my topcoat off and hung it with due care under the hat, while looking our guest over thoughtfully. He used the same time to look me over, and I could only hope that he was getting more enjoyment out of his view than I was out of mine. I saw a man who looked to be around forty, of medium height, overweight in all directions, with a pasty-faced complexion that suggested that sunlight was not his favorite form of illumination. He was not drastically obese, but his fat was the loose sort that looks like it has been laid on with a trowel.

The buttons on his soiled white shirt were pulling away from the buttonholes, and the shirttail had come out around the sides. His belly pushed out the fabric so that it hung over the top of his pants, obscuring the belt. The jacket of his double-breasted blue serge suit may have been his size at one time, perhaps ten years ago when lapels that wide were still in style, but today it would resist strongly being buttoned across his wide front. His hair was long on the right side, and the strands were combed over the balding top in a vain effort at concealment. All in all he was not the sort of man a well-brought-up young girl would bring home to Mother.

“What’s this all about?” I asked, doing my best to sound stern and friendly at the same time, since I wasn’t sure in which direction I would have to lean.

“He wants to see Mr. Brass,” Gloria said.

“I want to see Alexander Brass,” the plump person said half a beat behind her. “I don’t want to see no one else. I don’t want to talk to no one else. And Mr. Brass will want to see me, I bet.”

“If you want to see Mr. Brass,” I told him, “you’re going to have to talk to me. That’s the way it is. Nobody sees Mr. Brass unless they talk to me first. Especially if the nobody is somebody that Mr. Brass doesn’t know. My name is Morgan DeWitt. What’s yours?”

The fat man cocked his right forefinger and pointed it at my nose. “Listen, you,” he said. “No names. I didn’t ask you to throw your moniker at me, did I? I came all the way to see Alexander Brass, ’cause I got something for him. But it’s personal, see. But he wants what I got, you can bet on it. And if he don’t, there are other newsies in town.”

I noticed a fleeting smile pass Gloria’s lips. She was probably thinking how Brass would react to being called a “newsy.”

In any other office, in any other business, the man would have been out on his ear by now. But Alexander Brass had a syndicated column to write every day. “Brass Tacks” paid the salaries of Gloria Adams, his researcher, fact-checker, and general know-it-all; and myself, his right-hand man, general gopher, and do-it-all; as well as that, of Theodore Garrett, Brass’s personal cook, handyman, and bouncer, and assorted other assistants, researchers, interviewers, informants, and supplicants as the need arose. It was the reason the New York World supplied Brass with this fancy suite of offices on the sixteenth floor. It paid the rent on the twelve-room penthouse apartment at 33 Central Park South that Brass called home, and allowed Brass to indulge his taste for old books, expensive booze, and toys of all sorts. The latest being the Packard sedan that I had just picked up at the showroom. Other parts of the world might be depressed, but the offices of Alexander Brass in the New York World building on Tenth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street, Manhattan, were doing fine. And “Brass Tacks” was the reason why. Oh, there were a few other things, like “After Dark,” the weekly column appearing in forty-six cities other than New York that fulfilled its readers’ worst fears—or best fantasies—of what life in Gomorrah was really like; like “Alexander Brass Speaking,” the half-hour radio show that went out on transcription to—at last count—137 stations around the country; like his fees for speaking engagements, which were exorbitant.

But “Brass Tacks” was the heart of it all. Nine hundred and fourteen newspapers in the United States and Canada expected “Brass Tacks” to titillate their readers over breakfast every day but Saturday with cleverly phrased gobbets of fascinating facts concerning the great, the rich, or the merely notorious. And to explain to them in a simple and fascinating way the issues of the day, and tell them what to think about this and that. And fascinating facts of the sort that make news are seldom volunteered by those whom they concern. Instead they come from some of the most unlikely people. Our motto was “You never can tell.” Which was why the desk in the lobby had instructions to let anyone up who looked even reasonably kempt, provided only that they were not foaming at the mouth or waving a sharp-edged object about. Usually they talked to Gloria. She was a good listener. Men had been known to confess to major crimes just to see if they could get her to look impressed. So far no one had, to the best of my knowledge. And I kept track.

On the other hand, there were a lot of nuts in the world, and Brass had his share of enemies. The fat man looked like an unlikely candidate for homicidal maniac of the year, but, like I said, you never can tell.

“Give me a hint,” I told the fat man. “Something I can take inside to tell Mr. Brass. If you’ve got something good, you don’t want to take it anywhere else. Mr. Brass is the best newsy in town.”

The fat man thought it over. “You got an envelope?” he asked.

Gloria opened a drawer in the desk and pulled out a business envelope.

“Nah,” the fat man said. “Bigger.” He made an indefinite-sized box with his hands.

Gloria produced an eight-by-ten manila envelope, one of the kind where the flap ties closed with a string. The fat man took it and turned his back on us for thirty seconds. Then he used the stapler on the desk to staple the flap shut and held the envelope out to me. “Give this to Mr. Brass,” he said. “Tell him to open it private-like. Then he’ll see me. And don’t you open it!”

I examined the envelope. “Well, it’s too skinny to be a bomb,” I said. “And it doesn’t wiggle around, so it’s not a poisonous viper.”

“What are you talking about?” the fat man demanded.

“You’d be surprised. We had a bomb once. I’m still waiting for the poisonous viper.”

I took the envelope in to Brass, who was sitting in his office with his feet up on his giant desk, staring out his window at the Hudson River, which flowed beneath his feet, give or take a few blocks, filling much of the available view. “Good morning, Morgan,” he said without looking around. “It’s a gray day. Did you get the automobile?”

“I did, Mr. Brass,” I told him. “It’s in the garage on Ninth Avenue. You’ll have to arrange with the garage manager to get a permanent parking space.”

“I thought I had two,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “The Cord and the Lagonda are in them.”

“Ah!” Brass said. He swung his feet down off the desk and swiveled around to face me. He was shorter than I by a couple of inches—I’m about five-ten; lighter than I by a few pounds—quite a few, actually; I’m about one-sixty, and built solid without too much extra flesh on me, but Brass has one of those slender bodies that look like they were made to wear tuxedos. He had sported a brush mustache for fifteen years, until the day, two years ago, that Adolf Hitler had been appointed chancellor of Germany; now he was clean-shaven. I had told him that I couldn’t see the resemblance, but he shaved anyway.

“I have been staring at this sheet of paper for the past hour, and I am not inspired,” he said, indicating the Underwood typewriter on his desk, with its sheet of white paper still pristine around the roller.

“You were staring out the window when I came in,” I said. “Inspiration doesn’t write your columns, perspiration does.”

He glared at me, but since I was quoting him—something he had said recently in an interview to a writer’s magazine—he didn’t reply.

“I have something for you,” I told him, extending the large manila envelope toward him. “Wait until I leave the room to open it.”

He eyed the envelope suspiciously. “Why?” he asked.

“I’m not supposed to know what’s in it,” I told him.

Brass shook his head. “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “I have no secrets from you. At least, none that could be contained in this.”

“I agree,” I said. “But the gentleman who handed it to me to give to you insists that you open it in private. Incidently, he won’t give his name.”

“What does he look like?” Brass asked.

I described him while Brass stared thoughtfully at the little ivory Chinese god on one corner of his desk and weighed the envelope in his hands.

“It doesn’t sound promising,” Brass said when I was done. “I would prefer that he were well tailored and well spoken; then he might have something I’d want to see.”

“You want a diplomat bringing state secrets,” I said.

“Of course,” Brass agreed. “Don’t you?”

“I don’t know. A nice, juicy murder might be fun.”

“Not for the victim.”

“There is that,” I agreed.

“Well,” Brass said, “I might as well open this. Stand across the room; that should satisfy the requirements.”

“I’ll even turn my back,” I said. “Let it never be suggested that we journalists are not honorable.”

“Heaven forfend!” Brass agreed, slitting open the envelope as I turned and walked over to face the Pearson landscape on the far wall. I was particularly fond of the castle in the right-hand corner of the picture. I had always wanted to be somewhere where I could look at a real castle.

There was something more than a moment of silence.

“Son of a bitch!” Brass said, sounding at least surprised, and possibly awed.

I turned around. Brass almost never cursed, so whatever was in the envelope was probably worth a view. He had put whatever-it-was on top of the desk and was staring down at it. “Let me guess,” I said. “It’s a nude picture of Marie of Rumania.”

“I’m not sure who the woman is,” Brass said.

“What?”

“Come look at this.”

I crossed around to his side of the desk and looked down. There was a photograph of a man and a woman lying on what appeared to be a large, fluffy rug. To be more precise, the man was on the rug, face up, and the woman was straddling the man. There was no clothing in sight. They both seemed to be enjoying themselves. Perhaps they were playing Find the Pony. The camera had been above them and to one side, so that the man’s face—among other things—was clearly in view. The woman was almost as clearly visible, except that her face was in shadow.

The picture looked pretty much like what it was—a pornographic photograph—and nothing exceptional along that line. The girl was attractive as far as I could tell—and I could tell pretty far—but the man was, if anything, a bit chubby and a bit old for that sort of thing. I couldn’t understand what had provoked Brass’s reaction. I peered closely at the photograph.

I whistled thoughtfully between my teeth as I realized what Brass had noticed. “Son of a bitch!” I said.

2

“Go retrieve the fat gentleman and bring him in here,” Brass ordered. “And stay in here with him when you return—I don’t think a private conversation would be useful.”

“Gotcha, boss,” I said.

“And don’t call me ‘boss,’” he told my back just as I reached the door. “And for that matter, you would do well to expunge ‘gotcha.’ The next great American novelist will probably not be a vulgarian.”

He was hitting me where it hurt, but I didn’t wince visibly as I closed the door. When, fresh out of Western Reserve College and even fresher in New York, I had applied for the job with Brass, I had told him that my ambition was to be the next great American novelist. The next day, when he called me back, he had simultaneously offered me the job and strongly advised me not to take it. “It can’t do you any good as a writer,” he had said, “and it may destroy your talent and ambition.”

“Jobs are not that easy to come by at the moment, Mr. Brass,” I had told him. “And I’ve never had any strong desire to become a lumberjack, or a coal miner, or a missionary, or any of those other jobs that writers are supposed to get so they can put it on the back of their book jackets. I’ve always thought that to learn writing one should be around writers.”

“This isn’t writing that goes on here,” he had told me, “this is plumbing and mortising with words. This is a literary yard-goods store, not a fashion house.”

“On the contrary, sir,” I had told him. “You have a terse, cleaft style that I’ve always admired.”

“Style!” He had shaken his head. “You start on Monday.”

And so I had. That was in September 1931, about three and a half years ago. I’m still at it. And I still admire Brass’s style. And I still haven’t written the Great American Novel. Oh, I’ve started it a few dozen times. As a matter of fact, I just started it all over again last week. I had about six pages done now.

They call me Percival. I was born in a monastery in Brooklyn Heights. My mother, in an ecstasy of misplaced zeal, had joined the Order of Supplicants of St. Sebastian while she was carrying me, lying about her sex and possibly a few other things. The monks, being an introspective and essentially incurious crew, effected not to notice. Those few who did notice kept silent for reasons of their own.

That’s how this version begins. I can’t decide whether to call it The Supplicant or The Uncivil War or Money Well Spent. Perhaps, as I understand they do with babies in primitive societies, I should refrain from naming it until I’m sure it’s going to live. Maybe I should give it another fifty pages or so.

The fat gentleman was sitting in one of the four cane-bottom chairs in the reception room, shifting his weight impatiently from side to side. The chairs are French, done in the style of Louis XIV, or XV, or whichever Louis was into furniture. They’re copies, but they were copied so long ago that they’re antiques in their own right by now. They were given to Brass by a mobster named Francis “the Chin” Capitello in return for a favor Brass had done the mobster involving Capitello’s daughter Isabella and a trombone player named Sid. Brass had not considered what he did a favor for Capitello, but for the daughter, and he hadn’t wanted a reward, and he didn’t like the chairs much anyway, but there you have it. And if the fat man broke the chair he was sitting on, Francis “the Chin” would never understand it.

“Mr. Brass would like to see you,” I told him.

“I thought maybe he would,” the fat man said, pushing himself to his feet. The chair creaked, but it held. He marched into Brass’s office with all the grace of an indignant goose, and stopped in front of the big desk. He glanced down at the envelope, which was neatly centered on Brass’s desk blotter. “I thought you’d see me,” he said. “Send your errand boy out of here so’s we can talk.”

Brass leaned even farther back in his swivel chair and examined the fat man, who stolidly met his gaze.

“Mr. DeWitt stays,” Brass said. “If you want to talk to me, talk. If not, get out.”

The fat man took a half-step backward and raised his hands in a mock gesture of warding off physical attack. “Sure, sure,” he said. “If you trust him in this kind of business…” He looked around him. “Got a chair?” he asked.

I pushed a solid wooden chair over to the desk, and he plumped himself into it. Pulling a reasonably clean white handkerchief from his breast pocket, he mopped his face. “Let’s get down to business,” he said.

“Start with your name,” Brass told him. “I always like to know to whom I am speaking.”

“Not part of the deal,” the fat man said. “You don’t have to know my moniker for us to conduct business.”

“Just what kind of business is this?” Brass asked. “Why did you give me that picture, and what do you expect me to do about it?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” the fat man replied. “You did recognize the john, of course.”

Brass repositioned the envelope slightly with two fingers. “The man in the photograph has a superficial resemblance to Senator Childers,” he said. “But I don’t know how that resemblance was achieved.”

“Superficial, hell,” the fat man said, sounding annoyed. “It’s him. You know it’s him.”

“That’s just what I don’t know, sir,” Brass said. “I don’t know the provenance of that photograph. Perhaps it’s a clever composite. Perhaps it’s merely a chance resemblance. Perhaps it’s an actor made up to look like the senator. I don’t know. Do you?”

“It’s no composite,” the fat man said. “I got the negative—I could tell. A chance resemblance? Hell, it would have to be his twin brother. An actor? What would be the point?”

“What is the point?” Brass asked.

The fat man sat upright in his chair. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I bet I’m going to find out. I have some ideas.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a rubber-band-wrapped packet of photographs, which he tossed on the desk. There were, perhaps, thirty of them. “Take a look at these,” he said.

Brass took them up and shuffled slowly through them, examining each one closely. Three of them he peered at for a long time before going on. “Very, ah, imaginative,” he said finally, looking back up at the fat man. “Why are you showing me these? I won’t pay you anything for them. If you try selling them to anyone else, you might get some money, but you might be buying a lot of trouble.”

The fat man grinned. “I’m not selling you anything,” he said. “I’m making your life more interesting.” He leaned forward and pushed several of the photographs toward Brass with a pudgy forefinger. “A United States senator, a big-shot lawyer, and a judge. All playing bury-the-pickle with girls who are certainly not their wives, whatever else they may be.”

“And the others?” Brass asked. “There are photographs of seven or eight different men here.”

“I haven’t found out yet,” the fat man said. “Judging by the company which they are in, I figure they are important persons. I figure you can look them up for me. I figure you won’t be able to resist doing just that.”

“Is that what you want from me?”

The fat man shook his head. “I want you to hold these pictures for me until I come back for them. Then we can exchange information. You can tell me who these other gents are, and I can tell you where these photos came from. Or then again, I might not. You might say I’m buying insurance.”

Brass leaned back and put his hands together in front of him, fingertip to fingertip. “I see,” he said.

“I thought you would,” the fat man said, “you being such a wise guy.” He leaned forward. “I don’t know enough about those pictures yet, but I intend to find out. I’m leaving them with you as a sort of insurance policy. You can’t use them unless I tell you more about them. Like you said—they might be faked. Although we both know they’re not. So I’ll come back and tell you more about them. Or I won’t. Depending.”

Brass stared into space somewhere over the fat man’s left shoulder. “I don’t like being used,” he said. “It goes against my policy. If I let one punk use me once, there’ll be a line of them outside the door tomorrow.”

The fat man waved his hands in front of him like a first-base umpire trying to decide whether the runner was safe or out. “You offend me,” he said. “I see this as a sporting proposition. In return for temporarily sticking some pictures in your desk drawer for a while, an act which costs you no sweat, and maybe taking a glom through your photo morgue, you get a shot at a story that could be right up there with Fatty Arbuckle.”

“I don’t know what kind of insurance you think I’m giving you. These pictures,” Brass said, poking at the nearest one with his finger, “pictures like these—they can’t be used for anything even if they are real. At least not by me. You do realize that?”

“Of course,” the fat man said. “You being an honorable guy. But you don’t get it yet.” He leaned forward, putting his chubby palms on the desk. “The tale I’m offering you is not these old guys humping the broads, no matter who they are. It’s where they came from. It’s who took the pictures—and why.”

“Who did?” Brass asked. “Didn’t you?”

“Gracious sakes, no,” the fat man said. Honest, that’s what he said. I didn’t expect it either. “Gracious sakes, no.” Perhaps he had been an altar boy.

“Gracious sakes, no. But I think I know who did. At least, I know who knows who did. And that tale may well be worth telling.”

“How did you get the pictures?”

“That would be telling.” He stood up. “I must go now. You will be hearing from me shortly.” He gestured toward the pile of photographs on the desk. “Keep those,” he said. “Don’t show them around. Don’t tell the cops. And don’t try to find out who I am. That could be trouble for both of us, if you go nosing around. Even me nosing around is liable to create some waves, and I got a sensitive nose. Give me time to get some more info. Maybe a couple of days—maybe a couple of weeks. I’ll be in touch.” The fat man headed for the door.

Brass pushed himself up from his chair. “I make no promises,” he said.

“I’ll be in touch,” the fat man repeated over his shoulder.

Brass watched the door close behind the fat man and then picked up the in-house phone and jiggled for the operator. “Give me the city desk, will you?” he asked.

“Ben? This is Brass. Any legmen loose at the moment?” He stared thoughtfully into space. “Billy Fox? Good. Can I have him for a couple of hours? No—no trouble, just a tailing job. It may be a story, I can’t promise. Thanks. Stick him on the phone.” Brass drummed his fingers on the table. “William? This is Alexander Brass. I want you to tail someone for me. Find out who he is and where he goes. But don’t let him know. Lose him if you have to. Right. Bring whatever you find out up here to me. I can’t promise a story, but I’ll give you a buck-an-hour bonus and I’ll stand you to dinner. Right. He’s headed down in the elevator right now. Fat man in a blue double-breasted. Not very neat. You can’t miss him. Just run down three flights and pick him up in the lobby. Okay. Good luck.”

While Brass was talking I went over to the table and took a look at the pictures, leafing through them one at a time. There was little to attract the connoisseur of smut to them. Were it not for the prominence of some of the practitioners, they were trivial and repetitious examples of the art. The only conclusion I reached was that stout elderly men should not allow themselves to be photographed in compromising positions; they looked ridiculous. One of them was actually young and handsome, and fairly athletic-looking. He seemed to be enjoying himself. Three of the oldsters also looked like they were having fun; the remaining few looked grim, as though it was a difficult job, but somebody had to do it. The girls—and each fellow seemed to be with a different girl—were uniformly young, well built, and happy-looking.

I tossed the pictures back on the desk as Brass got off the phone. “If this is the latest thing in calisthenics,” I said, “it ought to sweep the country.”

“What do you think of our friend?” Brass asked.

I shook my head. “He’s using you for something.”

“So he intimated. But what are his goals, his motivations? What, if anything, does he see in these pictures besides couples coupling? Is he a simple blackmailer? But then, why give me the pictures?”

“I give up,” I said.

Brass handed me the photographs. “Go down to the morgue and see if you can identify these men. I’m pretty sure about two of them, but I’d like it verified.” He tapped the picture of the handsome young man. “In this case,” he said, “I think the identity of the lady is what will interest us.”

“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t think of that.”

“I thought it was obvious,” Brass said.

I grunted and headed for the door.

3

The research department of the New York World, which we experienced newsies called “the morgue,” a huge room punctuated by two rows of pseudo-Greek columns, took up much of the sixth floor. It was the domain of Michael Fredric Schiff, a skinny old man with large ears, a thin, pointed nose and chin, oversized, arthritic knuckle joints, and an encyclopedic knowledge of everything that had happened in the world for the past half century. Schiff guarded his rows of file drawers full of clippings and photographs with the zeal of a mama bear guarding her cubs, and he always seemed to be able to go right to any required bit of information. After thirty years in this country he still spoke with a vaguely middle-European accent. The rumor was that he had been a college professor in his native land, but had been forced to flee when he was caught in the bed of the daughter—or, some said, the wife—of an anti-Semitic government official.

Schiff kept the room cold, probably to discourage loitering, and wore a dark brown wool sweater with a row of tiny buttons, keeping all but the top one buttoned so that just the knot of his tie peeked out. He sat behind his battered oak desk and peered at me as I posed the problem to him.

“Let me see the pictures,” he said, pulling over a swinging-arm desk lamp and snapping it on. “I might be able to save you some time.”

“I’m not sure if I should show them to you,” I said.

“You might as well,” he said. “They’re going to end up in here sooner or later anyway.”

“I doubt that,” I said. “These are—different.”

“Oh,” he said. “Like that. We’ve got those in here too, my boy. Listen, you see that cabinet?” He pointed to a dark corner of the room.

“Which one?”

“Never mind which one. It is sufficient for you to know that it exists: a cabinet full of pictures that would shock a Swiss pimp.”

“Are they particularly unshockable?” I asked him.

“So it is believed where I come from,” he told me. “But if you don’t want me to see your photographs—”

“Here,” I said, passing them over to him.

He examined each one carefully, dragging a magnifying glass out of the top drawer to take a closer look at a couple of them. He said, “Hah!” He said, “Humm.” His expression gave no indication that he thought anything in the pictures the slightest bit unusual. He went over to the bank of filing cabinets near the hall door and began pulling drawers out and leafing through the files, pausing to pull up an occasional picture and compare it with one of those in his hand.

After a couple of minutes Schiff returned to his desk and, taking a thick, stubby fountain pen from his shirt pocket, printed a list of names on a sheet of yellow paper. “I have numbered the pictures in pencil,” he told me, “very small, on the back. Here are the names to go with the pictures; all but two. That is, I have identified all but two of the people, who are, let us call them, the primary subjects of interest in these pictures.” He held up one from the back. “I assume that in this one, while you might like the name of the young man with the large member, what you are primarily interested in is the woman’s name.”

“Mr. Brass assumes the same thing,” I told him.

“Good. It’s on the list. Leave these two pictures with me, and I’ll see what I can do about putting names to them.” He capped the fountain pen. “A notable assemblage. I assume that these photographs were taken for purposes of blackmail. Is that so?”

“I don’t know,” I told him.

Schiff folded the yellow sheet neatly in half and handed it and the pack of photographs to me. He shook his head. “Imagine that it was ingestion instead of fornication that was taboo,” he said. “Then people would have illicit trysts with ham sandwiches, and elderly men would be held up to ridicule for lusting after young, shapely Bartlett pears.”

I put the photographs in my pocket. “And sharply dressed men would accost you on street corners,” I suggested, “offering hamburgers.”

“Just so,” he agreed. “With not too French, french fries.”

* * *

I pulled the morgue file on each name on his list and took the assortment back upstairs to Brass. He was swiveled around in his chair facing the typewriter and staring with murderous intensity at the blank page. It would not be a good time to interrupt him. I left the files and the photos neatly on a corner of his desk and retreated to my own office to ponder the possibilities. There were six names on the list:

Bertram ChildersGerald GarbinEphraim L. Wackersan IIPass HelbineSuzie FrienardStepney Partcher

It was quite an exclusive group of photographer’s models. Bertram Childers, senior senator from New Jersey, was regarded as a long-shot Republican contender for president in the next election. He couldn’t beat Roosevelt—hell, nobody could beat Roosevelt—but if FDR happened to have a heart attack, or was caught in bed with a teenager of either sex, or was proven to have Jewish blood or be a secret agent of the pope—a couple of dozen letters a week came into the paper accusing him of one or both of these high crimes—then Childers had a good shot against anyone else the Democrats could run.

Gerald Garbin, naked playmate number two, was a judge of the New York State Superior Court, and had a reputation for strictness and severity. Felons sentenced by Judge Garbin could expect to spend an extended time away from home.

Ephraim L. Wackersan, Junior, president and son of the founder of Wackersan’s Department Store, our number three, was a stickler for cleanliness and uniformity. His employees were checked every morning for personal hygiene and grooming. Hair on men had to be kept short, and on women, long. No facial hair was permitted.

Number four, Pass Helbine, millionaire philanthropist, was working on his third marriage, but aside from this exercise in sequential polygamy—a minor character flaw in this day and age, when, as Cole Porter puts it, “Anything Goes”—his life was the stuff of which hagiographies are written. The six Helbine Houses, where a down-and-out citizen can get a good meal, a shower, and a place to sleep for a dime, and if he doesn’t have a dime he can wash dishes, are models of philanthropic endeavor.

The woman, Suzie Frienard, was an attractive blonde who had not yet seen her fortieth summer and looked even younger. Were it not for the extreme youth and vitality of her partner, one might have thought she was just one of the girls. From the view of her charms in the photographs, I certainly wouldn’t kick her out of bed. Her husband, Dominic Frienard, was a major contractor in the New York City area. It would be hard to walk more than ten blocks in any direction without walking over or past Frienard-poured concrete.

The last person on the list, Stepney Partcher, was the senior partner of Partcher, Meedle and Coster, a very political law firm. The file had little about him, since the firm employed a public relations expert to keep all of their names out of the papers. What these six people had in common, besides wealth and a presumably inadvertent appearance in smutty photographs, was not revealed in their files.

The staccato sound of Brass pounding the keys of his Underwood wafted its way through the door of my little office. Can sound waft? Well, I guess it can now. We novelists bring life and vigor into language. Can I call myself a novelist when I haven’t been published? Can I call myself a novelist when I haven’t yet finished a novel?

Brass spent a long time every day staring at a blank sheet of paper, but when he actually started typing it usually went pretty fast. When he was done he’d let it sit for an hour or two, and go over it with a blue pencil, and give it to Gloria to make sure it didn’t contradict any obvious facts or natural laws, or anything he’d written previously. Gloria has an eidetic memory, which means that she never forgets anything she sees or hears, as though her other attributes weren’t frightening enough. Then she passes it to me to type a final draft to send down to editorial.

Brass claimed not to be a perfectionist, and he affected a low regard for his own prose, but he regularly achieved the sort of subtle turn of phrase that would sneak up on the reader and whack him on the back of the head when he wasn’t looking. Brass’s description of Senator Burnside as having “delusions of adequacy” got Brass denounced on the Senate floor. I particularly admired his recent description of singer Bessie Elliot as wearing a red silk dress that was “just too tight enough.”

While Brass typed I concentrated on sorting through the mail. The letters fell into about six standard categories as well as “too nutty to deal with” and “the boss better see this one.” It all got answered except a portion of “too nutty to deal with,” which was too nutty to answer. The six standard categories would receive versions of six standard but personalized form letters.

My favorites were the letters from convicted criminals explaining, usually voluminously and in pencil, why they were innocent. Brass was one of the six members of the Second Chance Club, a group that worked to free people wrongly convicted of major crimes. The only problem was that everyone whose freedom had been curtailed by the court thought himself innocent, and wrote to Brass to prove it.

Gloria and I shared the pleasure of typing the replies to the rest of the mail. When the backlog got too big, Brass would get one of the city-desk reporters who needed some extra money—and they all always needed extra money—to help us cut it down. Billy Fox, the reporter who was out following our fat friend, was one of the regulars at the old L.C. Smith typer in the hall.

One time I pointed out to Brass that H.L. Mencken, a fellow newsy who worked for the Baltimore Sun before going off to found his own magazine, was reputed to have an all-purpose reply that he used for his mail: a postcard with a rubber-stamped message that read, “Sir or Madam, you may be right.”

“Mencken does not suffer fools gladly,” Brass had replied. “A habit that makes introspection difficult.”

I’m still not sure how that applies, but now I answer Brass’s fan mail with no further complaints. Which, I suppose, was what he had in mind.

I waited a full five minutes after the typewriter had stopped clacking before I returned to Brass’s office. His column, triple spaced on yellow copy paper, just like he was a real working reporter, was in the wire basket. Brass was staring out the window at one of the day boats making its way up the river toward Albany.

“What’s the column on today?” I asked.

“Nightclubs,” he told me, still staring down at the Hudson River traffic. “The solid citizens of the Midwest never tire of hearing about nightclubs. Set the most innocuous story in a nightclub and it acquires sinful innuendo by proximity.”

For Brass, as for most New Yorkers, the Midwest was an area full of corn and cattle, with an occasional buffalo, where nothing of note ever happened, which began on the other side of the Hudson and continued to the Pacific Ocean. I did not suffer from this character flaw, having parents and a sister in Ohio.

Brass turned to face me. “Fox isn’t back and he hasn’t phoned in,” he said. “It’s almost four o’clock.”

“Perhaps he followed the subject to somewhere in the Midwest,” I suggested, “and the last stagecoach has already left.” Brass stared at me with the expression of someone who has just discovered a new but not very interesting insect in his soup. “Perhaps,” he said.

“So,” I said, hastening to change the subject, “what do you think of our list of distinguished perverts?”

“Perverts?” Brass raised an eyebrow. “They’ve been caught in the act of performing perfectly normal sex acts with reasonably attractive partners of the opposite sex. If there is any perversion involved, it would be with the photographer. Although I suspect he had a commercial motive. The fact that publication of these pictures would cause each of the subjects insupportable embarrassment is a comment on our vestigial Victorian social mores, not on the activities portrayed.”

There was nothing to say to that, so I did so. Brass handed me the pictures. “Wrap these in something and put them in the safe,” he said.

“Schiff still has a few of them,” I said, going over to open the safe. “There are two subjects he couldn’t identify. What about the files?”

“I want to look them over. Tomorrow morning you can return them and see if Mr. Schiff has satisfied our curiosity.”

4

I live on West Seventy-fourth Street between Amsterdam and Columbus avenues. The neighborhood used to be, so I understand, mostly Italian with a smattering of Irish. Now added to the mix are a heavy sprinkling of out-of-work actors and dancers with a soupçon of starving writers, composers, and poets. Of course, “out-of-work” is an unnecessary modifier in this year-of-the-breadline 1935. Actors and dancers have one advantage over the rest of the population: They’re used to being out of work, it’s their usual condition. They call it “between engagements,” but that doesn’t make it any easier to pay the rent.