Falling Angel (4 page)

The drive back to the city provided plenty of time for thinking. I didn’t like the idea that I had hounded an old man to his death. Vague feelings of sorrow and remorse troubled me. It was a bad mistake locking him up with a gun like that. Bad for me because the doc had a lot more to tell.

I tried to fix the scene in my mind like a photo. Dr. Fowler stretched on the bed with a hole in his eye and his brains spread across the counterpane. There was an electric lamp burning on the bedside table next to the Bible. Inside the Bible were bullets. The framed photograph from up on the bureau was locked in the doctor’s cooling grip. His finger rested on the revolver’s trigger.

No matter how many times I went over the scene there was something missing, a piece gone out of the puzzle. But which piece? And where did it fit? I had nothing to go on but my instincts. A nagging hunch that wouldn’t let go. Maybe it was just because I didn’t want to face my own guilt, but I was sure Dr. Albert Fowler’s death was not suicide. It was murder.

SEVEN

Monday morning was fair and cold. What was left of the snowstorm had been hauled off and dumped in the harbor. After a swim at the “Y” across the street from my place in the Chelsea Hotel, I drove uptown, parked the Chevy at the Hippodrome Garage and walked to my office, stopping to buy a copy of yesterday’s
Poughkeepsie New Yorker
from the out-of-town newsstand at the north corner of Times Tower. No mention anywhere of Dr. Albert Fowler.

It was a little after ten when I unlocked the inner-office door. The usual bad news across the street: … NEW IRAQ ATTACK ON SYRIA ALLEGED … GUARD WOUNDED IN BORDER INCURSION BY BAND OF THIRTY … I phoned Herman Winesap’s Wall Street law firm, and the machine-tooled secretary put me straight through without delay.

“And what might I do for you today, Mr. Angel?” the attorney asked, his voice smooth as a well-oiled hinge.

“I tried calling you over the weekend but the maid said you were out at Sag Harbor.”

“I keep a place there where I can relax. No phone. Has something important come up?”

“That information would be for Mr. Cyphre. I couldn’t find him in the phone book either.”

“Your timing is perfect. Mr. Cyphre is sitting across the desk from me this very moment. I’ll put him on.”

There was the muffled sound of someone speaking with his hand over the receiver and then I heard Cyphre’s polished accent purring on the other end. “So good of you to call, sir,” he said. “I’m anxious to know what you found out.”

I told him most of what I’d learned in Poughkeepsie, leaving out the death of Dr. Fowler. When I finished, I heard only heavy breathing on the other end. I waited. Cyphre muttered, “Incredible!” through tightly clenched teeth.

I said: “There are three possibilities: Kelley and the girl wanted Favorite out of the way and took him for a ride, in which case he’s long gone. It could be they were working for someone else with the same result. Or Favorite was faking amnesia and engineered the whole setup himself. In any case, it adds up to a perfect disappearing act.”

“I want you to find him,” Cyphre said. “I don’t care how long it takes or how much it costs, I want that man found.”

“That’s a pretty tall order, Mr. Cyphre. Fifteen years is a long time. Give a guy that kind of lead and the trail is bound to be cold as ice. Your best bet would be the Missing Persons Bureau.”

“No police. This is a private matter. I don’t want it dragged out in the open by involving a lot of nosy civil servants.” Cyphre’s voice was acid with patrician scorn.

“I suggested it because they’ve got the manpower for the job,” I said. “Favorite could be anywhere in the country, or abroad. I’m just one man on my own. I can’t be expected to accomplish the same results as an organization with an international information network.”

The acid in Cyphre’s voice grew more corrosive. “What it boils down to, Mr. Angel, is simply this: Do you want the job or not? If you are not interested, I will engage someone else.”

“Oh, I’m interested all right, Mr. Cyphre, but it wouldn’t be fair to you as my client if I underestimated the difficulty of the project.” Why did Cyphre make me feel like a child?

“Of course. I appreciate your honesty in the matter, as I do the enormity of the undertaking.” Cyphre paused, and I heard the flick of a lighter and the intake of his breath as he set fire to one of his expensive panatelas. He resumed, sounding somewhat mellowed by fine tobacco. “What I want you to do is get started right away. I’ll leave the approach up to you. Do whatever you think best. The key to the whole operation, however, must remain discretion.”

“I can be discreet as a father confessor when I try,” I said.

“I’m sure you can, Mr. Angel. I’m instructing my attorney to make you out a check for five hundred dollars in advance. That will go in the mail today. Should you need anything more for expenses, please contact Mr. Winesap.”

I said that five hundred would certainly take care of things, and we hung up. The urge to crack the office bottle for a self-congratulatory toast was never stronger, but I resisted and lit up a cigar instead. Drinking before lunch was bad luck.

I started by calling Walt Rigler, a reporter I knew over at the
Times
. “What can you tell me about Johnny Favorite?” I asked, after the prerequisite snappy patter.

“Johnny Favorite? You must be kidding. Why don’t you ask me the names of the other guys who sang with Bing Crosby in the A&P Gypsies?”

“Seriously, can you dig anything up on him?”

“I’m sure the morgue has a file. Give me five or ten minutes and I’ll have the stuff ready for you.”

“Thanks, buddy. I knew I could count on you.”

He grunted goodbye and we hung up. I finished my cigar while sorting the morning mail, mostly bills and circulars, and closed up the office. The fire stairs are always quicker than the coffin-sized self-service elevator, but I was in no hurry, so I pushed the button and waited, listening to Ira Kipnis, C.P.A., rattle off figures next door on his adding machine.

The Times Building on 43rd Street was just around the corner. I walked there, feeling prosperous, and took the elevator to the newsroom on the third floor after exchanging frowns with the statue of Adolph Ochs in the marble lobby. I gave Walt’s name to the old man at the reception desk and waited a minute or so until he appeared from the back in shirt sleeves with his necktie loosened, like a reporter in the movies.

We shook hands and he led me into the newsroom where a hundred typewriters filled the cigarette haze with their staccato rhythms.

“This place has been gloomy as hell,” Walt said, “ever since Mike Berger died last month.” He nodded at an empty desk in the front row where a wilted red rose stood in a glass of water on the shrouded typewriter.

I followed him through the clatter of the rewrite bank to his desk in the middle of the room. A fat manila folder sat in the top wire basket of the desk tray. I picked it up and glanced at the yellowed clippings inside. “Okay if I hang onto some of this stuff?” I asked.

“House rules say no.” Walt hooked a forefinger into the collar of the worsted jacket draped over the back of his swivel chair. “I’m going out to lunch. There’s some 8-by-12 envelopes in the bottom drawer. Try not to lose anything and my conscience’ll be clean.”

“Thanks, Walt. If I can ever do you a favor —”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah! For a guy who reads the
Journal-American
you come to the right place for your research.”

I watched him slouch between the rows of desks, trading wisecracks with the other reporters and waving to one of the editors in the bullpen on his way out. Seated at his desk, I had a look through the Johnny Favorite folder.

Most of the old clippings were not from the
Times
, but from other New York dailies and a selection of national magazines. Mainly, they were about Favorite’s appearances with the Spider Simpson band. A few were feature stories, and I read through these with care.

He was an abandoned child. A cop found him in a cardboard box with only his name and “June 2, 1920,” the date of his birth, pinned in a note to his receiving blanket. His first few months were spent at the old Foundling Hospital on East 68th Street. He was raised in an orphanage in the Bronx and was on his own at sixteen, working as a busboy in a series of restaurants. Within a year, he was playing piano and singing in road-houses upstate.

He was “discovered” by Spider Simpson in 1938 and soon was headlining with a fifteen-piece orchestra. He set an attendance record for a week’s engagement at the Paramount Theatre in 1940 that wasn’t equaled until the Sinatra craze of ‘44. In 1941, his records sold over five million copies, and his income was said to be better than $750,000. There were several stories about his injury in Tunisia, one reporting that he was “presumed dead,” and that was the end of it. There was nothing about his hospitalization or return to the States.

I sorted through the rest of the material, making a small pile of the stuff I wanted to keep. Two photos, one a studio glossy of Favorite in a tuxedo, his Vaseline-bright hair pomaded into a frozen black wave. The agent’s name and address were rubber-stamped on the back: WARREN WAGNER, THEATRICAL REPRESENTATIVE, 1619 BROADWAY (THE BRILL BUILDING). WYNDHAM 9-3500.

The other glossy showed the Spider Simpson orchestra in 1940. Johnny stood to one side with his hands folded like a choirboy. The names of all the sidemen were written in beside them on the print.

I borrowed three other items, clippings that caught my attention because they didn’t feel like part of the package. The first was a photo from
Life
. It was taken at Dickie Wells’s bar. in Harlem and showed Johnny leaning against a baby grand, holding a drink in one hand and singing along with a Negro piano player named Edison “Toots” Sweet. There was a piece from
Downbeat
, dealing with the singer’s superstitions. The story claimed he went out to Coney Island once a week whenever he was in town and had his palm read by a gypsy fortuneteller named Madame Zora.

The last item was a squib in Walter Winchell’s column dated 11/20/42 announcing that Johnny Favorite was breaking off his two-year engagement to Margaret Krusemark, daughter of Ethan Krusemark, the shipping millionaire.

I shuffled all of this stuff together, got a manila envelope out of the bottom drawer, and stuffed it inside. Then, on a hunch, I dug out the glossy of Favorite, and called the number in the Brill Building stamped on the back.

“Warren Wagner Associates,” answered a perky female voice.

I gave her my name and made an appointment to see Mr. Wagner at noon.

“He has a luncheon engagement at twelve-thirty and can only give you a few minutes.”

“I’ll take them,” I said.

EIGHT

“When you’re not on Broadway, everything is Bridgeport.” This blue-ribbon wisecrack was made to George M. Cohan in 1915 by Arthur “Bugs” Baer, whose column in the
Journal-American
I read every day for years. It might have been true in 1915. I can’t say, not having been there. That was the era of Rector’s and Shanley’s and the New York Roof. The Broadway I knew was Bridgeport; a carnie street of shooting galleries and Howard Johnson’s; Pokerino parlors and hot dog stands. Two old dowagers, Times Tower and the Astor Hotel, were all that remained from the golden age “Bugs” Baer remembered.

The Brill Building was on 49th and Broadway. Walking up from 43rd, I tried to remember how the Square looked the night I saw it for the first time. So much had changed. It was New Year’s Eve of ‘43. An entire year of my life had vanished. I was fresh out of an army hospital with a brand-new face and nothing but loose change in my pockets. Someone had lifted my wallet earlier in the evening, taking all I owned: driver’s license, discharge papers, dogtags, the works. Caught up in the vast crowd and surrounded by the electric pyrotechnics of the spectaculars, I felt my past sloughing away like a shed snakeskin. I had no identification, no money, no place to live, and knew only that I was heading downtown.

It took an hour to move from in front of the Palace Theatre to the center of the Square, between the Astor and Bond Clothes, home of the “two-trouser suit.” I stood there at midnight and watched the golden ball drop on top of Times Tower, a landmark I didn’t reach for another hour. That was when I saw the lights in the Crossroads office and played a hunch which led me to Ernie Cavalero and a job I’ve never left.

In those days, a pair of mammoth nude statues, male and female, bookended the block-long waterfall on the roof of Bond Clothes. Today, gigantic twin Pepsi bottles loomed in their place. I wondered if the plaster statues were still there, trapped inside the sheet-metal bottles like caterpillars slumbering within the confines of their chrysalides.

Outside the Brill Building, a tramp in a tattered army greatcoat paced back and forth, muttering, “Scumbag, scumbag” to all who entered. I checked the directory at the end of the narrow T-shaped lobby and located Warren Wagner Associates, surrounded by dozens of song-pluggers, prizefight promoters, and fly-by-night music publishers. The creaking elevator took me to the eighth floor, and I prowled a dim hallway until I found the office. It was in a corner of the building, several rabbit-warren cubicles with interconnecting doors.

The receptionist was knitting when I opened the door. “You Mr. Angel?” she asked, forming her words around a wad of gum.

I said that I was and got a card out of my dummy wallet. It had my name on it but said I was a representative of the Occidental Life and Casualty Corp. A friend with a print shop in the Village made them up for me in a dozen professions. Everything from ambulance chaser to zoologist.

The receptionist pincered the card between fingernails as green and glossy as beetle wings. She had large breasts and slim hips and emphasized them with a pink angora sweater and a tight black skirt. Her hair was on the brassy side of platinum. “Wait here a minute, wouldja please,” she said, smiling and chewing at the same time. “Have a seat or something.”

She sidled past me, tapped once with her knuckle on a door marked PRIVATE, and stepped inside. Across from where she entered stood an identical door equally private. In between, the walls were hung with hundreds of framed photographs, the faded smiles preserved like moths under glass. I looked around and found the same 8-by-10 glossy of Johnny Favorite that I carried in the manila envelope under my arm. It was high on the left-hand wall, flanked by photos of a female ventriloquist and a fat man playing the clarinet.