The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes (18 page)

“And the case isn’t big enough to give that kind of play. Just one more kid buys it in the big city. Nobody from the
Mirror
gave the super a twenty,” Brass said. “If there wasn’t anything worth shooting, there wasn’t anything worth paying more than a finit for.”

“That was my thought,” Gloria agreed.

“The description sounds like the man that was with the pseudo-Sandra out in Brooklyn,” I volunteered.

“It does, doesn’t it?” Brass agreed. “Was the apartment turned over?”

Gloria shook her head. “No. Neat and clean. Twenty dollars or no twenty dollars, the super insisted on standing in the doorway and watching while the guy looked over the apartment. Wouldn’t let him take anything away.”

“He let you take stuff away,” I said.

She smiled at me and nodded. It was not worth discussing.

“Well,” Brass said, “let’s see what you got.” He upended the paper sack he was holding, dumping its contents in a pile on the desktop.

“That’s what came from the apartment,” Gloria told him. “It was pretty well gone over by the police, the super said. I don’t know what they took away.”

Brass poked at the pile with his finger. There were three or four unpaid bills, a half-dozen envelopes that looked like personal correspondence, a bracelet, a pair of earrings, and a book:
Wine from These Grapes
by Edna St. Vincent Millay. The bracelet was a circle of heavy links of what appeared to be gold with what appeared to be a diamond set atop each link. The earrings were small circles of some green stone. “I hope that whatever the police took away was more inspirational than this batch,” he said. “Are they all the belongings of Miss Laurent?”

Gloria separated the collection into two small piles. She pointed to one pile. “Laurent.” The other. “Trask.” She dumped the other bag onto the Laurent pile: two lipsticks, a compact, a pair of stockings, a tube of Dr. Fogler’s Fine Liniment, a box of aspirin powders, and two photographs: one of an older woman and the other of a young boy and a dog of indeterminate age. “I didn’t see any point in leaving anything in the locker,” she said, “although I doubt if any of this stuff means anything to us.”

Brass took the envelopes, which were in the “Trask” pile, and sat on the couch. “Did you read through these?” he asked Gloria.

“No. I just dropped them in the bag. I’d feel funny reading them. They might be very private.”

“Were they hidden?”

“Not really. They were in the drawer with her underwear, in a sort of net that she used to keep worn hose. It’s the sort of thing girls with roommates do to keep some things private.”

“Um,” Brass said. “The police didn’t find them, but I doubt if they poked too thoroughly through the girl’s worn stockings.”

“The police should hire some female detectives,” Gloria said.

Brass nodded. “That will be a long time coming.” He sorted the envelopes into two piles, by return address: three from a Mrs. Jacob Trask of Hagerstown, Maryland, and three from a Jemmy Brookes of Baltimore, Maryland. “I think our interest in what happened to Lydia Laurent and how she died must override any considerations of personal privacy,” he said. “And it seems likely that whatever happened to Billie Trask is related to what happened to Miss Laurent. We are voyeurs in a good cause.”

“Oh, I know,” Gloria said. “And besides, we’re newspaper men, and we’re paid to be nosy. Other people pay us to be nosy for them.”

“Very nicely said,” Brass told her. “I may use it in a column.” Although Brass felt free to use in his column anything he heard that wasn’t being told him in confidence, he was scrupulous about giving credit. Famous, infamous, or unknown, it didn’t matter. If you said it, your name got attached to it in the column. I had been mentioned three or four times myself. Gloria must have given up counting some time ago.

Brass looked at one of the envelopes with Mrs. Trask’s return address. “Dime store,” he said. “Presumably from the girl’s mother.” He examined one of the other trio, holding it up to the light and rubbing it between his fingers. “Personalized stationery of reasonable quality,” he said. “A return address in Baltimore. And the postmark bears that out.” He sniffed the envelope. “Faint odor of, ah…”

“Jasmine,” Gloria said.

“Very good, thank you. Jasmine. We can assume that ‘Jemmy’ is female. Well, let’s see if we have anything useful.”

Brass read the letters slowly and thoughtfully, starting with the ones from Billie Trask’s mother, and then passed them along to Gloria, who passed them to me. I read them out of a sense of duty. After all, I was a newspaper man, it was my job.

The mother’s letters dated to before Billie had her accident and left the chorus. They were loving and chatty and full of back-home gossip, with a hint of something deeper. Toward the end of that first letter, Mother Trask wrote:

…Your poppa asked me the other day if I was hearing from you, and of course I told him I was cause I don’t want to lie to your poppa. He kind of grunted, you know what I mean, and that was that. But he never even asked before. Maybe if he asks again I’ll show him some of your letters. Not the one where you say as how you forgive him, although I’m glad of that, but you know he never can admit he’s done anything wrong and never will…

Forgive him for what, I wondered. But then I decided I was glad that I probably would never know.

The letters from Jemmy Brookes of Baltimore, Maryland, placed her as a close friend of Billie Trask. One was possibly interesting, in view of what we knew:

Ma Chere Bil—

C’etait bonne to hear from you enfin. Oui, Doddie told you right, Jule popped the question, and we plan to get hitched just as soon as he can get a job. He doesn’t want me to work after we’re married, so I’ll have to quit the sec pool, which believe you me won’t be much of a hardship. He ses that a man should support his woman, which is kind of Victorian, ses I, but sweet with all of that. But with jobs being the way they are—or, say, the way they aren’t!!—it may be a while. You’ll be my maid of honor on the big day, whenever it may be.

Je do so worry about you all alone in the big city. Although I’m glad that you’re not quite so alone anymore-and I don’t mean votre roommate, although she sounds like a nice girl.

I’d watch out for this one, tho. I know you’re a big girl and can take care of yourself and not do anything you don’t want to do. But he sounds like a big boy whos had a lot more practice with girls like you than you have with guys like him. And like you said, sometimes being with a guy can make you want to do what you dont want to do, at least until it’s done and it’s too late.

I promise to come up to visit some time when I have the bus fare. I’m looking forward to see you on stage, even if it is only in the chorus. After all, Jimmy Cagney started in the chorus, and look at him now—Public Enemy #1. You have a great future ahead of you kiddo.

Love n stuff
Jem

Which shows, I suppose, that it doesn’t pay to predict. Billie was not exactly public enemy number one, but she was spending the present hiding out from the cops, and a good part of her future would probably be spent in a home for naughty women somewhere Upstate. Unless Brass was right and she was innocent. But he just said things like that to provoke a reaction. It’s like the joke that Pinky told me about the man who went into Ratner’s on 2nd Avenue and ordered a bowl of borscht. The waiter tells him, “Don’t have the borscht today, it’s not so good. Have the schav instead.”

“But I don’t want schav,” the man insists, “I want borscht.”

“In good conscience I cannot serve you the borscht today, it just isn’t up to our standard.”

“I don’t care about your standard, I want the borscht!”

“Trust me—”

“You won’t bring me the borscht? Then bring me the manager!”

So the manager comes over and listens to the story. “Ordinarily,” he tells the man, “the customer is always right. But today I happen to know that the borscht is truly not as good as it should be. Have the schav.”

So the man gets up and storms out of the restaurant. The manager turns to the waiter and says, “You think he came in here to eat? No, he just wanted to argue.”

That’s Brass. You may think he came in to eat, but he just wants to argue. What makes it really irritating is his habit of being right.

Brass poked further into the detritus of a girl’s life and took up the bracelet from the Billie Trask pile. He tossed it up and down in his hand a couple of times, and then stared closely at it. “Well!” he said.

Gloria pulled one of the upright wooden chairs closer to the desk and sat down. “You noticed,” she said. “The police probably thought it was costume junk, but it’s not.”

“Not,” Brass agreed. He opened one of the lower drawers to his desk and rummaged about in it until he found a jeweler’s loupe, which he stuck in his eye. “Very good workmanship,” he said, peering at the bracelet. “By the weight I’d say it was gold, and fairly solid, and there’s a jeweler’s mark inside the catch.” He reached over and ran one of the stones along the nearest window pane. It scratched the glass. “Well,” he said again.

“If the earrings are real also,” Gloria said, “you’re looking at at least a thousand dollars.”

“That’s what I would say,” Brass agreed.

“Maybe it was some stage-door Johnny,” I suggested.

“If so her girlfriends should know of it, and presumably so should the police,” Brass said. “But we’ll ask around.”

“Her boyfriend?” Gloria asked.

“Which would be a strong indication that the girl is innocent of the theft,” Brass said. “If she has a boyfriend who can give her gewgaws like these, then she presumably could have gotten any small sum of money she needed from him—and we have no indication that she was in need of any large sum of money. And the story that they were in it together is unlikely. The boyfriend wouldn’t connive at stealing box-office receipts worth less than the jewelry he gave her.”

“Unless the jewelry was stolen,” I suggested. “Maybe the boyfriend was a burglar.”

“What a thought,” Brass said. “We’ll have to check the stolen jewelry hot sheet.”

“My kind of job,” Gloria said.

The phone rang at the small switchboard in the outer office—the only place it does ring—and Gloria picked up the receiver on Brass’s desk. “Alexander Brass’s office,” she said. “Who?” she said. “I’ll see,” she said. She put her hand over the mouthpiece. “It’s the desk downstairs,” she told Brass. “There’s a Madam Florintina wants to see you about the reward.”

“Do I know her?” Brass asked.

Gloria shook her head.

Brass pursed his lips. “I suppose I should have expected it,” he said, “but I keep forgetting the innate perversity of the human race. Doesn’t the item say to get in touch with Welton, not me?”

“Not explicitly,” I told him.

“Well, you go downstairs and be explicit,” he told me. “Don’t bring her back up here, you take care of it.”

“Supposing she has something worth listening to?”

“Then listen!”

I shrugged and nodded. He’d teach this woman, whomever she was, not to come annoying him with information.

Gloria took her hand off the mouthpiece. “Tell Madam Florintina that Monsieur DeWitt will be right down to parlez to her. Okay, thanks.” She hung up. “Third-floor reception,” she told me.

“Okay.”

The
New York World’s
city room is on the third floor, the heart, if not the soul, of the paper. An ornate marble interior staircase goes from the ground floor to the third floor, and anyone can climb it and at least get as far as the reception desk on three. The first three floors are where the newspaper deals with its public in person. Mezzanine: classified ads, lost and found, birth and death announcements, contest winners. Second floor: the advertising department and the circulation department. Third floor: city room, sports department, mail room, and the headquarters of the City Wire Service, the teletype service that distributed local news and fed it to the United Press circuit.

The woman standing by the information desk at the head of the stairs was not from the world of Broadway. If anyone hired her to dance it would be to feel the floor tremble. She was short and wide, somewhere between forty and seventy years old, and wore a white peasant blouse and copious layers of varicolored skirts. She was bedecked with necklaces made up of large colorful stones and bedizened with gold bracelets and rings. Her handbag was a red and white straw contraption that could have held two small boys and a goat.

“Madam Florintina?” I asked.

“That’s me,” she agreed. “Are you DeWitt?”

“I am,” I said. “You have something for us?”

She took me by the sleeve and pulled me over to the beat-up leather couch across from the information desk. “I might,” she said plopping onto a cushion and tugging on my sleeve until I sat next to her. “But I’ll need some facts first.”

“What sort of facts?”

She reached into her handbag and groped around for a while until she came up with a large notebook, and then went back in for a search for a pencil. When she had both she dropped the handbag to the floor and tucked it between her knees. “Just the usual,” she told me. “Dates of birth for Two-Headed Mary and Jeffrey Welton, time to the nearest hour if possible, and their birthplace, date and time of the girls’ disappearance; that sort of thing.”

“Is that all?”

“Well, the exact time the curtain went up on the first night of
Lucky Lady
, and the time of the robbery would be helpful.”

I suppressed a sigh. “You’re an astrologer!”

“We prefer ‘astrologist,’” she said. “I thought the person at the desk told you; I am Madam Florintina.” She reached again into her handbag, fished around for a minute, and came out with a 5-x-8 card; red and black ink on heavy gray stock. She thrust it into my hand.

The signs of the Zodiac formed a circle around the outer edge of the card. In the center it said “Madam Florintina” over “by appointment” and a phone number. Under that, in small italics, the motto: “The Stars Know All!”

“Very tasteful,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, “and expensive.” She took it back and stuck it deep into the handbag. “Now”—she opened the notebook on her lap, examined the pencil closely, retrieved a small sharpener from her handbag and touched up the pencil point. “Birth dates.”