The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes (11 page)

Gloria nodded and made a note on her steno pad.

“And you,” he said, wiggling the finger at me, “I have a task for you, too. The only Fenton I can find in any of the local city or county directories is a Fenton Road in Quogue, Long Island. It’s a small town on the Long Island Railroad. Take a trip out there tomorrow and see what sort of establishment it is. Do not alert the natives if you can help it.”

It took me a second to recall the reference. “464 Fenton” was the address, if it was an address, that was on the scrap of paper in Mary’s bindle. “I know Quogue,” I told him. “It’s near Southampton. I have friends in Southampton.”

“Good,” Brass said. “Tomorrow is Saturday. Take the rest of the day off and visit them.”

“I had this Saturday off anyway,” I told him.

“And you still do,” he said. “Most of it.”

Brass swiveled his chair around to stare pensively out at the Hudson River. It was Friday, time to write “After Dark,” his syndicated column for forty-six Sunday papers around the country chronicling Gotham’s nightlife for the envious auslanders, and he was already hard at work. We tiptoed out of the room.

* * *

That evening I took the Eighth Avenue subway down to West Fourth Street, mingling with the hoi and the polloi. Associating with the common folk is what gives a writer that depth of understanding that makes for great prose. As the car rattled back and forth along the tunnel I listened for examples of the wisdom of the proletariat from my fellow passengers. I leaned forward to overhear two young ladies in the seat next to mine, and heard, “So then I decided we needed a chaperone…” I leaned closer to discover when “then” was, but they glared at me until I leaned back. On the platform at West Fourth, an older lady was earnestly telling her friend, “…and then he threw a teakettle at me—which I think is basically a hostile act!” I silently agreed with her and went on my way.

I headed for the Blind Harlequin, a coffeehouse on MacDougal Street in the heart of Greenwich Village; a hangout for local writers of varying degrees of success and fame. I was having dinner with a couple of friends of mine, real fiction writers who sold regularly and did their best not to rub it in. Bill Welsch was somewhere around forty, and was making a decent living writing stories for
Black Mask
and a variety of pulps; mostly hard-boiled detective, with a few war stories thrown in. He had done most of the things he wrote about: flew a Spad in the big war, been an expatriate writer in Paris, a private detective in Chicago, and a few other things that he hadn’t gotten around to writing about yet. He had a clean, lean prose style that looked easy and wasn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

“A good play,” Agnes said.

“I haven’t seen it,” I admitted.

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

“The people,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“For sale, huh?” I said brightly.

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

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

“Nobody. That’s why it’s for sale.”

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

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

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

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

“What sort of doctor is he?” I asked.

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

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

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

“Why not?”

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

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

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

“I see,” I said. “Thanks.”

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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