The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes (12 page)

Raab looked at me doubtfully. “You could hardly get out of the gate in twenty-five hundred words. Hell, I could give you a quick ten thousand words on Manhattan, north of Fifty-seventh Street.” He closed the magazine and tossed it back into the rack. Pushing himself to his feet, he sorrowfully examined the pencil stub he had been chewing and thrust it into his vest pocket. “This isn’t morning,” he groused, “it’s mid-afternoon.”

Inspector Willem Raab is a large, heavy, solid man. At first glance he appears to be somewhere between portly and fat. But the look is deceiving. Raab is, as the mayor put it at a dinner given for the inspector a couple of months ago, “as big as a mountain, as strong as an ox, and as brave and faithful as a bulldog.” And if Mayor LaGuardia says it, it must be so. Raab has been in charge of Homicide North since before I arrived in New York, and during that time it has become clear, and a thing of wonder to those used to Tammany hacks even in the police department, that he is also as smart and capable as he has to be and as apolitical as he is allowed to be. He and Brass are old friends. Even when circumstances cause them to be adversaries, each tries to keep the underlying friendship in mind.

“I guess the boss isn’t here yet,” I said to Raab, “but I’ll find you a more comfortable chair if you like.”

“Of course Brass isn’t here yet,” Raab said. “It’s only a quarter past ten. Couldn’t expect a man to be at his desk working at only a quarter past ten, now, could we?”

“Your sarcasm is wasted on me,” I said. “As long as Mr. Brass pays my salary on time, he can come in whenever he likes.”

Raab pushed himself to his feet. “It don’t matter,” he said. “I can see Brass later. First I need to talk to you; ask you a few questions. Maybe you can help clear up something.”

“Me? No kidding?” I was nonplussed, a condition I’d seldom achieved. I mentally reviewed my recent transgressions, but could think of none that would interest an inspector of detectives. “Let’s go into my—no, we’d better go into Mr. Brass’s office, mine is hardly big enough for me.” I turned and led the way.

The inspector settled himself on the black leather couch, his favorite seat in the office, and leaned back, his arms outstretched flat across the back of the couch. I pulled one of the office chairs over to a respectful distance and sat. Raab eyed me thoughtfully. “Let’s start with this: how well do you know Lydia Laurent?” he asked.

I thought about it for a second, considering several wise answers, and decided that it would be better to play this one straight. “I don’t,” I said. “Not by that name, anyway.”

Inspector Raab leaned even farther back, sliding his legs forward stiff-legged in front of him, and smiled a friendly, reassuring smile. I felt a twinge of apprehension at the back of my neck. In the four years I had known him, Raab had never smiled at me before. “What makes you think she had another name?” he asked.

“I’m just being scrupulous,” I told him. “I have no reason to think anything about this person I don’t know.”

“If the other name was Maureen Yency—would that refresh your memory?”

I shook my head. “As far as I know, I have no memory to refresh.”

The inspector stared at the ceiling. “A young, blond dancer, maybe five-two, hair bobbed, blue eyes, pretty face, well constructed. Ring any bells?”

“Nary a tinkle,” I told him. “Except that, not counting hair or eye color, those are my minimum standards for a date. Unfortunately, girls who look like that usually have minimum standards of their own, so I seldom date. Dating is highly overrated anyway. I’d much rather spend a quiet evening at home darning socks. Why do you ask? Does she say I know her? What has she done? If she’s as good-looking as you say, I might be willing to provide her with an alibi, but of course I’d have to meet her first to judge for myself.”

If that sounds glib, I was talking to fill the time with my words while I considered one of Raab’s words.
Had.
Verb, transitive, past tense.
Had.
Not
has.
The young lady, whoever she was, was not around anymore, and an inspector of homicide was asking me questions about her. And Raab was being carefully casual, not a good sign.

Your average citizen believes that if he has nothing to hide, he should talk freely to the police to aid them in their pursuit of criminals. There is little truth to this belief. To the police, loquacity is not a sign of innocence; they may regard it as nervous chattering to hide the consciousness of guilt. When an investigator does not have a pretty good idea of who committed a crime, you’re just as good a suspect as the next man. And when a detective does have a pretty good idea of who committed the crime, he may be wrong, and the who may be you. There are many innocent men behind bars; the Second Chance Club has already proven this eight times.

Inspector Raab gazed at me thoughtfully and let the shoe drop. “The girl is dead,” he said.

“Ah,” I said, wondering what was in the other shoe—the one with my name on it. “And you want to know where I was on the night of January thirty-fourth, nineteen hundred-aught-twelve?”

Raab sighed. “If you could only tap dance, you could take it on the road.”

I shrugged. “I don’t mean to sound heartless, but a lot of people die every day. A couple of hundred Ethiopians may be being machine-gunned by Mussolini’s Praetorian Guard right now and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Brass stalked into the room and tossed his overcoat on a chair. Since he usually fastidiously hangs it in the closet in the front room, Gloria must have signaled him to hurry on through. It was nice to know she cared.

“Morgan is right, you know,” Brass said. “I hope I’m not interrupting.”

“Good morning,” Raab said. “I was going to get to you.”

Brass went behind his desk and sat down, swiveling left and right to make sure the chair still swiveled, and then leaned back. “We mortals are not provided with an endless supply of sympathy,” he said. “If we tried to feel sorry for every bad or evil thing that happened, even just those we hear about in normal intercourse, we’d be swamped by emotion from moment to moment. Of necessity we must save our sympathy for those we know.”

Raab scowled at my boss. “We are discussing a dead girl,” he said. “Name of Lydia Laurent. Mean anything to you?”

Brass thought for a moment and then shook his head. “Not that I can remember,” he said. “How did she die?”

“You and your apprentice here are so scrupulous with your language it’s hard not to think you have something to hide,” Raab said. “Him with his, ‘not by that name,’ and now you with, ‘not that I can remember.’ Can’t either of you give me a simple yes or no?”

“No,” Brass said.

“Phooey,” Raab said. He took a cigar out of his jacket pocket, turned it over speculatively a few times, and then shoved it back into his pocket and turned to me. “Come on, where do you know the girl from? How long had you been intimate with her? Nobody’s accusing you of anything, we just need to know her background, who she talked to; that sort of stuff.”

“Intimate?” I took a deep breath. “As far as I know, I do not know, and have certainly not been intimate with anyone named Lydia anything,” I told Raab. “I’d like to help, but there you have it.”

“How did this girl die?” Brass asked, “and what makes you think she and DeWitt were, as you say, ‘intimate’?”

“I don’t insist on the ‘intimate,’” Raab said. “But he knew her all right.”

Brass looked at me. “Did you?”

I shook my head. “Like I said, I don’t think so.”

“That ain’t what you said,” Raab said.

“Let’s hear it,” Brass told Raab. “What have you got, and why are you harassing my assistant?”

“Is that higher or lower than an apprentice?” I asked Brass.

“No,” he said.

“This don’t qualify as harassing,” Raab said. “If I want to do any harassing you could tell the difference. Easy.”

“Well then, put your cards on the table,” Brass said. “We’re at an impasse here. You say DeWitt was intimate with this girl and DeWitt says he doesn’t even know her. My bet would be that he doesn’t know her. You want to raise me?”

“We’ll see.” Raab turned to Gloria, who was standing silently in the doorway. “You got something to write on?”

Gloria disappeared for a second and reappeared with a steno pad. “Will this do?”

“Yeah. Give it to DeWitt. You got a pencil?” he asked me.

I fished one out of my pocket. “Sure thing,” I said. “We apprentice assistants always carry writing implements about with us. What’s the game?”

Raab got up and stuffed his hands into his pockets. “I’ll dictate, you write.”

“My shorthand isn’t very good.”

“I’ll speak slowly. You write it out.”

“Ah!” I said. “Stylomancy.”

“Stylo-what?” Raab demanded.

“Handwriting divination. Stylomancy. You’re going to tell me that I’m going to marry a tall blond girl who’s four-foot-nine with dark brown hair and have three children, one of each.”

Raab snorted.

“Not a bad construction, stylomancy,” Brass said. “From ‘stylus.’ Is it yours?”

“I don’t think so,” I told him. “I think I heard it somewhere. Isn’t that the word?”

“There are several words for the analysis of personality or the telling of fortunes by studying handwriting,” Brass told me. “I like
steganomancy
, from a Greek root meaning ‘secret writing.’” He swiveled around to look at Raab. “Did you know you were practicing steganomancy?”

“I’ll stegano the pair of you down to the precinct house if you don’t shut up and let me get on with this,” Raab rumbled.

“Sorry,” Brass said.

“Words are his passion,” Gloria told the inspector.

Raab glared at Gloria, shifted his glare over to Brass, and then fixed his gaze on me. “Write this,” he said. “‘My favorite joints in New York are the Stork Club, Sardi’s, and the Copa.’”

I scribbled on the pad. “Is that it?” I asked.

“You got that? Under that print the alphabet,” Raab said.

Brass and Gloria were watching this operation quizzically, but they were not half as puzzled as I. I did as directed and handed the steno pad to Raab. “What now?”

Raab stared at the writing for a moment, comparing it with something in a small manila evidence envelope he was holding concealed in his hand. After a minute he looked at me almost benignly and ripped out the page and stuffed it and the envelope into his vest pocket. “Now I’ll tell you a story,” he said, lowering his bulk back down onto the couch. He pulled the cigar out of his jacket pocket and ran it over and under his fingers like my Uncle Jake used to do with a fifty-cent piece before he made it disappear or turned it into an egg.

“I thought you gave up smoking, Inspector,” Gloria said.

“I’m not smoking,” Raab replied. “I’m holding a cigar. It’s very soothing to hold a cigar. When I get upset, I can chew on it. When I get really upset I can crush it between my fingers.” He studied the cigar for a moment, ran it around his fingers one more time, and then put it back in his pocket.

“An elderly gentleman name of Defevre went to sail his model boat in Central Park Sunday morning. You know the sailboat lake?”

“There’s a rowboat lake,” I said.

“This one is small,” he made a gesture with his hands as though he were holding a basketball. “Maybe a hundred feet across. Around Seventy-fourth Street on the east side of the park. A concrete-lined oval; sort of like a giant bathtub. There’s a club that sails model sailboats there.”

“I know the place,” Gloria said. “There’s this little sort of clubhouse where they store their boats right by the lake. Elegant miniatures of sloops, schooners, even some square-riggers. Most of them are handmade by the club members. I went to watch them sailing when Mr. Brass mentioned the club in a column about three years ago.”

“Why so I did,” Brass agreed.

Raab nodded and plowed on. “Defevre was out there at first light. To catch the morning breeze, he said. He arrived at the park somewhere between five-thirty and five-forty. Sunrise was at five-thirty-eight. Sometime later—he estimates it was around six-fifteen—he doesn’t carry a watch, only a stopwatch to time his boat—his dog, Marat, started barking at something in a nearby clump of bushes. Defevre thought the dog had lost his toy, so he got his boat pole—this sort of long pole with a hook on the end that they use to push the boats around—and poked under the bushes. He pulled out a shoe; a woman’s shoe. The dog kept barking. Defevre pushed his way between the bushes and found a clear space in the middle. The other shoe was there, lying atop a neat pile of clothing. Next to the clothing, supine on the ground, was the naked body of a young woman. Defevre and Marat ran to the nearest park entrance, where Defevre flagged down a passing patrol car. The officers in the car called it in on a police phone box and followed Defevre back into the park. The body was right where he said it would be.”

Inspector Raab took the cigar back out of his jacket pocket and stared at it wistfully for a moment, and then stuck it back. “Now here’s where it gets interesting,” he said.

I shifted uncomfortably. “Where do I come into it?” I asked.

Raab eyed me with the benevolent gaze of a bear eyeing a ham sandwich. “Patience,” he said. “By one of those coincidences by which the Almighty makes it difficult for transgressors, the officers in the patrol car had just questioned and released a member of the army of the unemployed, whom they had seen flat-footing it down the street with a suspicious bundle. The bundle contained what seemed to be a complete set of women’s clothes, from top to bottom, inside to out, and the bum in question was not a woman. The bum, name of, ah”—he paused to consult his notebook—“Lupoff claimed to have found them in a garbage can on Seventy-third Street. But the clothing was fairly new and fairly expensive; not the sort of thing that anyone tosses out these days. Even someone well-off enough to buy new clothes every year has a relation or a charity to pass the old ones on to.”

Raab paused and turned to me. “You want to change your story?” he asked.

“I haven’t told you a story,” I said, giving him my best look of bewildered innocence. Which was surprisingly difficult, considering that I truly was both bewildered and innocent.