False Negative (Hard Case Crime) (20 page)

“After the murder Calvert made a beeline for the Back Bay Wildlife Refuge, which is generally deserted on account of all the mosquitoes and biting bugs. No one was there to see him strip off his duds, put on a new suit and shoes, and leave the old clothes with his watch and wallet on the sand. Nice Bulova watch. Couple days later, the chief of police received a handwritten letter from Calvert apologizing for killing Parsons. His conscience was eating at him so bad, he made up his mind to throw himself in the ocean. By the time the chief had the letter he’d be dead. Still with me?”

“Still,” Jordan said.

“From the refuge Calvert drove to Chesapeake, and checked into the Dunroaming Motel on Route 17 under the name Bill Black, and proceeded to lose most of the six hundred in a rigged poker game. He liked to look on the bright side, though. The bookies, the cops didn’t know he was alive. He didn’t have a care till he sent out for burgers and the papers, and the deliveryman ran out without waitin’ for a tip.”

Jordan glanced again at the copy boy, who was having a second look at the cover girls.

“Ever know a deliveryman not to stick around to have his palm
greased? Gave Calvert the willies, like a black cat cut across his path. It got worse when he looked at the papers. His kisser was splashed over all the front pages above the caption:
Wanted For Murder
. Took the lead right out of his pencil. He called the cops on himself.”

“What gave him away?” Jordan said.

“Was an ivory-billed woodpecker. You didn’t hear about one peckin’ holes in the Back Bay Wildlife Refuge last week? Nobody’s seen an ivorybill in thirty, forty years. The birdwatchers poured in from as far off as Florida. One of them stumbled on Calvert’s clothes so soon after he left them there that the cops had them before his letter reached the chief, even before the postmark was stamped on the envelope. Calvert ain’t explained yet why he’d leave his clothes on the shore and walk into town buck naked to drop his letter in the mailbox, and then walk back to the beach to throw himself in the ocean. The indictment came down this morning. They’re still looking for the bird.”

“Give me five thousand words, and all the photos you can scrape up.”

“Have to do without artwork. I burned all my picture contacts.”

“I need photos,” Jordan said.

“You want the story, or don’t you?”

Jordan said that he did, and hung up. “Orr’s got an early load on,” he said to Mary.

“He’s one of our most productive writers,” she said, “but Mr. Pelfrey wouldn’t accept his calls after the cocktail hour.”

Jordan went back to his desk. “How do you like the magazines?”

The copy boy, Arnold Glass, said, “They’re written by idiots for bigger idiots.”

“Do you also have an opinion about our covers?”

“Not really. I wouldn’t give these girls a tumble.”

“Managing editor pays seventy a week. Associate pays sixty.”

“You’re offering a job? Knowing what I think?”

“Everyone’s too smart for the pulps,” Jordan said, “till they get serious about them. You have an idea about women. The rest you’ll learn. Tell me where you were those eight years.”

Mary went home at five o’clock. Jordan closed the door, and pulled a story from the manuscript pile. It was badly typed. The pages were coffee-stained, and required so much editing that he was rewriting word for word between the lines. The byline read
Sam Orr
. He rolled the paper into his typewriter, and started over on page one.

At eight he called Pixley at the loft. “Do you have connections in Tidewater, Virginia?”

“What do you need?”

“One of the locals knocked off a restaurateur whose wife he was screwing. I need shots of him, the victim, the restaurant, the motel in Chesapeake where he hid out, and a wildlife preserve in Virginia Beach, where the killer staged his suicide.”

“How utterly fascinating! I adore an intriguing mystery,” Pixley said. “Don’t leave out a single detail.”

“Not that intriguing. After the killing, the murderer left his clothes at the preserve, and disappeared himself. His stuff was found before he put his suicide note in the mail, and the cops had him before he caught a deep breath.”

“He had the right idea. He didn’t take it far enough,” Pixley said.

Everyone was an authority on murder. Everyone, from Jordan’s experience, but the practitioners.

“What you should do if you ever find yourself in his situation, you should leave a corpse in your clothes, someone who looks just like you,” Pixley said. “Cops are stupid. Lazy, too. They hate digging deeper into a case than they absolutely have to. You’d get away scot-free.”

“When I need to get away with murder, I’ll call you first,” Jordan said. “Meantime, can you find pictures?”

“There’s no need to get huffy. I’m merely trying to be helpful.”

“Be helpful with the pictures.”

“They won’t be a problem,” Pixley said. “Give me names.”

Someone brushed against the door, rattled the knob trying to get in. Jordan decided it was a murderer. He was looking for something to defend himself with when he heard the cleaning cart roll along the corridor. Aside from the custodians he was alone on the seventeenth floor. He didn’t have to stay late. He was his own boss now. But he had nothing—no one—waiting at home.

There wasn’t a shortage of women in New York. He was put off by the ritual of cutting one out of the herd, and playing the charmer to clear the way to bed. It was easy to get around that. Just snap his fingers and he’d have Cherise to help kill the long nights. But where would he park her in the morning? What better reason had he needed to quit Atlantic City than that he’d taken up with a colored prostitute?

Not exactly a prostitute. Yet their relationship boiled down to one thing. If the situation with women didn’t improve, he’d wire her money for a train ticket. He’d saved her life. She’d practically be doing the same for him. It was just the one thing. Cherise wouldn’t have it any other way.

Alejandro de Costa had been in Hollywood in its golden era thirty years ago. The morning after two Charlie Chaplin shorts were projected onto the whitewashed wall of the church in San Tomas, the Andean village where he was born, he’d left for the United States. It took three years to reach California, where he changed his name from Saul Hernandez, and found work standing in for the movies’ biggest names. In
Son of the Sheik
his broad shoulders filled the screen as Vilma Banky cowered before the chieftain of the desert brigands. Not until the close-ups
did he retire to a camp chair to watch the great Valentino kiss the gorgeous girls who were so tantalizingly near yet out of his reach.

De Costa, at 20, believed he was star material. He was tall and handsome, but thick around the middle, and the camera added ten pounds to what was there. He photographed miserably. Every casting agent told him so. He continued to scrape by posing for the famous screen lovers as he learned the business of making motion pictures. By 1925 he had graduated to best boy, then to assistant director, second unit director, and to uncredited director of a jungle serial. He filmed two westerns under his own name, and a half-million dollar sand-and-sandals extravaganza that was released as Cecil B. DeMille’s, which was okay with de Costa because the same girls he had warmed up for the famous lovers were fighting to have him in their dressing rooms.

As a director and film editor de Costa saved many big-budget productions from ruin. His modest star was rising when talkies came along. Splendorous epics shot through the eye of a visual artist were old hat. Audiences craved sound. They wanted music, and to hear Garbo speak. De Costa had no better understanding of those things than did any of a thousand other faceless names in Hollywood, and so he drifted east. Since 1933 de Costa had been the art director for Turner Publications. He introduced himself to Jordan in his eighteenth floor studio where models were auditioned for
Real Detective
cover shoots.

“Any interesting possibilities for the June books?” he said.

Jordan had shootings, knifings, and several girls strangled, a Brownie raped and then shoved off the roof of a four-story tenement, two college coeds incinerated in a sorority house arson fire, a housewife dead after acid was thrown in her face. An Apache girl, a 16-year-old prostitute, had been dropped down a well. Another hooker’s arms and legs had been sawed off by a client.

“Nothing out of the ordinary,” Jordan said. “Let’s try something new.”

“There’s nothing new in murder.”

De Costa seemed to be mocking him, but it was hard to read the art director’s part-Indian features, an expression that would serve well for a sociopath’s. The Apache girl had been killed by a white man, but readers wouldn’t know that till they read the story. De Costa was a natural for a cover. Jordan would hold the piece, make the suggestion when he knew de Costa better.

“What would you say to a cover that isn’t tied to a story?”

“The readers will object,” de Costa said. “They expect guns and ropes, a look of fear in the victim’s eye.”

“The older ones do, but they’re dying off,” Jordan said. “With sexier girls showing more skin, we’ll make new subscribers.”

“Mrs. Bryer won’t approve the additional expense.”

“I’ll kick in out of my own pocket if it means the magazines hang on longer. How about you?”

“You are asking me to pay for beautiful women? It isn’t something I’ve had to do for a long time.” De Costa glanced toward the door, but didn’t rush Jordan to it. “Let me see what is available in the fifty to seventy-five dollar range. Anything less, and we can do as well bringing in shopgirls from Ohrbach’s.”

Outside the studio young women were lined up on a bench smoking furiously. Jordan wasn’t bowled over by their ordinary good looks.

“These are thirty-five dollar girls,” de Costa said.

“Thirty-five an hour seems like a lot.”

“Thirty-five for as long as we need them in front of the camera. And for some, who are ambitious, anything else we may want them for.”

Why be beautiful if the payoff was the cover of
Real Detective
? Jordan wanted to see the seventy-five dollar girls, and what a hundred dollar girl looked like, and girls who earned more. He wanted to know how the price was decided, and if they were
worth the money. Most of all he wanted to know where to meet them.

“I contacted some of the better agencies,” de Costa told him after the weekend. “They weren’t enthusiastic, but the models want their face everywhere.”

A different crowd had taken over the bench. Not the most beautiful girls Jordan had seen in New York (those were concentrated around Washington Square, and in the quaint Greenwich Village streets west of the park); they were all of a type, fine porcelain by way of the Midwest, a breed apart from the earthy downtown women who turned his head.

Katrin, with a stagey European accent, unzipped her portfolio, and spread pictures over de Costa’s desk.

“Fashion shots don’t tell me how you’d photograph menaced by a strangler.” He handed her a dressing robe. “Put this on, if you don’t mind.”

A shower curtain was suspended in front of a photographer’s white backdrop. When Katrin came out of the changing room, de Costa bunched it over her shoulder, exposing her face. “Take off the robe, please. Try to look as if you had just heard someone come in.”

He turned up the lights, and the curtain seemed to melt away. The lush shape behind it caught Jordan by surprise.

The lights went off. “Thank you for coming.”

“What’s wrong with her?” Jordan said.

“Next girl, try looking at her expression,” de Costa said. “Readers want to believe the victims of murder are not very different from their wives, sisters, daughters, and therefore must have done something to deserve their fate. Katrin is like no one they’ve known. The trouble with these models is they are more at home in Tiffany’s than dodging a homicidal maniac.”

He called for another girl, who left her portfolio with him as she hurried to the changing room. Jordan was following her inside when de Costa pulled him back.

“If you want her, I have her number. You can’t go in.”

Jordan shook him off, and opened the door. The girl was in her bra and panties when he coughed into his fist. She whirled around holding her dress against her body, and then she let it down. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I have the same question for you, Mollie.”

“A girl’s got to eat.”

“I don’t think the next Miss America’s coming from the cover of
Real Detective
.”

“That’s a silly dream I’ve given up, and good riddance. I’ve been in New York four weeks, and doing nicely for myself, thank you. And you? You still haven’t told me.”

“I’m the editor.”

“You mean I get to cash in on our friendship—we are friends, aren’t we, Adam, something like that—to land my first cover?”

“I have one vote,” he said. “The other belongs to Mr. de Costa.”

“I can count on yours, though?”

“Wow him, why don’t you, and make it unanimous.”

De Costa was waiting when Jordan stepped outside. “You can’t watch the girls undress. She could have screamed rape, and held us up for a lot of money.”

“My mistake,” Jordan said.

Mollie came out in the robe, and de Costa showed her where to stand. As he draped the curtain over her shoulder, she said, “I have an idea for the shoot.”

De Costa adjusted the curtain, and stepped back. “I’m sure you do.”

“Would it hurt to listen?”

“Don’t move now.”

“I had my hair done for the audition. No one told me I’d be posing in the shower. Can we wet it like I really am taking a shower? It will look more real.”

“Your hair is nice the way it is.”

“No one’s hair looks nice in the shower.”

She made her case to Jordan, who filled a glass from the studio sink, and was sprinkling her when she tilted his wrist over her head. “What do you think?” she said as she smoothed her hair against her scalp.

De Costa grunted. She shrugged the robe off her shoulders as she undid the sash, surprising Jordan as it fell around her feet. De Costa looked hard, but showed no expression while Mollie’s confidence melted, a woman naked in every way.