The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes (21 page)

Brass usually indulged in a manicure while he was being tonsured, but I seldom did. It was the sort of thing that a small-town Ohio boy doesn’t learn to do gracefully. I will admit that it would have been worth fifty cents to have Gwen, the manicurist, sit by me and hold my hand for fifteen minutes, but I couldn’t yet bring myself to have her file my nails.

“Victor, of course, did Brass’s hair himself. My barber was a wizened but dexterous old fellow named Marcello, who had been with Victor since before the Great War, and who flung around hot towels with abandon and wielded the straight razor as though he were a musketeer. He had just pulled the hot towel off my face and I was emerging from the heat-shock-induced stupor when a vague figure scraped a stool across the floor and settled down on it next to my chair. My eyes focused on the face that was peering at mine. It looked familiar. It was familiar. “Junior!” I said.

“Got it in one!” Junior Skulley said. “I didn’t know whether you’d recognize me without a drink in my hand.”

“It took a second,” I told him. “You’re entirely out of your setting.” I looked him over. He was wearing a tan sports jacket and gray slacks, and a redder-than-red wide tie. “I didn’t know that tan and gray went together,” I remarked.

He looked down at himself. “They do when the jacket’s cashmere,” he said.

“Silly me,” I said. “Is this a coincidence or enemy action?”

“You mean, what am I doing here? I came looking for you, and the elevator starter in the lobby told me you were probably in here.”

“Well, there’ll be coal in his stocking this Christmas,” I said.

“Now, now, don’t be testy. I told him it was important, and so it is.”

“What is it, are you collecting for the Boozer’s Guild Relief Fund annual picnic already?”

Junior smiled. He was a hard man to insult. “I don’t need your help in supporting any Boozer’s Fund,” he said. “Besides, I’m seriously considering giving up drinking.”

“No!” I said in mock horror. I twisted in my seat to get a better look at him, but Marcello twisted my head back in place so he could attack it with his scissors, and I had to be content with staring at Junior in the mirror over the sink. “What is it, bleeding ulcers? Pink elephants? Sudden bouts of remorse, and you don’t remember what you’re sorry for? Whole evenings wiped from your memory? Or has one of your chorines let you know what she thinks of kissing a man who smells like a distillery?”

He considered seriously, and finally shook his head. “Nah!” he said. “By the time they kiss me, they’re usually too drunk to tell what I smell like.”

“I can believe that,” I said.

He nodded. “It’s just that, ah, well, since it’s been legal, it isn’t as much fun any more.”

“Junior, it’s been legal for about two years now,” I reminded him.

“Really?” He stared at his fingers. “My how time flies when you’re swozzled.”

“So what did you want to see me about?”

He looked puzzled for a few seconds, and then his face brightened. “I need to consult with you. I need your advice.”

“My advice?” I may have heard something more unlikely, but not in recent memory. “What about?”

“Do you remember when we came across each other in the back room of Sardi’s?” he asked, staring intently at me, as though he were asking whether I remembered a precious moment from our childhood together in the old one-room schoolhouse. “It wasn’t so long ago.”

“When you barged in on a private party and made a pest of yourself? Yes, I remember.”

“Yes, well, of course you would. Well, you see, it’s this way. I was at the Kit Kat with a chorine companion—”

I stuck an arm out from under the sheet that covered me from neck to toe and patted Junior on the knee. “My gosh, Junior, you’re reasonably sober! You never could have gotten that last sentence out without stumbling if you were as soused as you usually are. You ought to expand on your triumph! Try ‘conspicuously carousing with a crinoline-clad corpulent chorine companion.’”

“She was not!” he said indignantly.

“Just for the alliteration,” I explained.

I had taken him off the subject, and he spent a moment mentally stumbling around for it. He might be reasonably sober, but the habits of cognition and ratiocination were not strong in him. “Well,” he said, “this girl came into the club and tried to talk my date into going to Sardi’s. She gave her this card—your card—and said you wanted to talk to her.”

I thought that over for a second. “Goddamn! You were out with Lydia Laurent!”

“I was,” he said. “I was indeed.”

“And then she was murdered!”

“Subsequent to my leaving her,” he said. “I had nothing to do with her death. I know nothing about it. Believe me! I wouldn’t have let anyone hurt that little girl.” He shook his head. “Why under the sun would anybody want to kill such a lovely creature? The ways of man passeth understanding. Or something.”

“What happened that evening? Why didn’t she and Viola come in to join the rest of the group?”

“Is that the other girl’s name? Well, I suggested that we all go on to Sardi’s and have a little supper and she could speak to you. But we didn’t see you there in the front room, so we ordered food and drink and waited for you to arrive. I gave Viola five dollars to sort of thank her for her troubles. You know. Hoping she’d take the hint and go away. And so she did.”

“What a prince,” I said.

He nodded in recognition of his princeliness. “You were already in the back room but I didn’t know that. I didn’t even know there was a back room. I said to Lydia, I said, ‘Well, we’ve looked for him, now let’s finish up and go to my place for a nightcap.’ You understand, old man.”

“Clearly,” I told him.

“Well, our waiter said he thought you were in the back room, so I told Lydia to eat her steak and I’d go look. And I did.”

“And of course you told her we were there with a table full of her friends, and she should join us. Of course you did.” I was annoyed.

“Well, honestly I thought you had quite enough young ladies all to yourself, so I told Lydia that you were nowhere to be found, and she ate her shell steak and we went off into the night. I feel bad about it, but there it is.”

The barber’s chair on the other side of Junior swiveled around. “And just where did you go?” Brass asked, as Victor used his little brush to remove the last of the little clipped hairs from where they might have fallen around Brass’s neck.

Junior did a double-take worthy of Stan Laurel. “It’s the ‘Brass Tacks’ man himself,” he said. “I didn’t see you there.”

“I wasn’t on view,” Brass said. “I was getting a haircut. Where did you and Miss Laurent go when you left Sardi’s?”

“We could take bets,” I said.

“Well, you’d be wrong,” Junior said, sounding insulted. “I took her to her apartment and left her at the door.”

“She must have been very persuasive,” I said.

“Insistent,” he agreed. “But, I thought, there’s always tomorrow.” He paused and shook his head as though clearing some bad thoughts. “But I was wrong, wasn’t I? There was no tomorrow, not for Lydia.”

“What time did you get her home?” Brass asked.

Junior stared at the floor thoughtfully. “I have no idea,” he said after a minute. “I’m lucky I remember what day it was. Another reason I’m going to stop drinking. I’m losing track of the passage of time.”

Victor snapped a towel in Brass’s direction several times, as a gesture of finality, brushed his shirt and turned the chair to face the front. Brass stood and shrugged into his jacket. Victor gave the jacket a couple of cleansing passes with the brush, stood back to survey his work and nodded. “All done,” he said. “Perfecto!”

Brass nodded. “Thank you, Victor. Stick it on my tab.” He turned to Junior Skulley. “So you left her at her door and walked away? She didn’t invite you in? No nightcap?”

Marcello tilted my head down to do a final bit of snipping at some recalcitrant hairs at the back of my neck.

“She would have,” Junior said defensively, “but there was someone there in the apartment.”

My head snapped back up and I almost jumped out of the chair. If Marcello hadn’t been dextrous with the scissors, he would have stabbed me in the neck. “What?”

“Well, you know, I was ready to come in. Just for a drink, you know. But when she opened the door, there was this man inside.”

Brass sat back down on the barber’s chair. “Who?”

“I don’t know. Is this important?”

“It means that you’re no longer the last person to see Lydia Laurent alive.”

“Well of course not,” Junior said. “Whoever killed her was the last person to see her alive.”

“And the police will be glad to discover that it wasn’t you.”

“The police. The police?” Junior took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Good God!” he said.

“Perhaps we should go upstairs to continue this conversation,” Brass suggested.

“I suppose,” Junior Skulley said. “Got any booze upstairs?”

“I thought you were going to give up drinking,” I said.

Junior smiled a weak smile. “Not just yet.”

“Something can be worked out,” Brass said.

I let Marcello remove the sheet and dust me off, and told him to put it on Brass’s tab, and we laughed about that, and he put it on my tab, which I would clear up as usual at the end of the month, and then we headed for the elevators. Brass unlocked the door to the office suite and flicked the lights on, and we went through to his office. He turned on the floor lamp by the side of the desk and waved me to the closet, which concealed his bar. I mixed a bourbon and soda for Junior, a Cognac neat for Brass, and a scotch and water for myself. Prohibition has been over for about seven hundred days, but I still get a feeling of doing something illicit and faintly wicked when I pour an alcoholic beverage into a glass. I think that the thrill of it was a large part of why people drank so much, and that the consumption of alcohol is going to go down now that it’s legal again. But I could be wrong. Brass says that the bootleggers and the speaks created a sort of countrywide ritual, and that drinking became a great secret that we all shared, like the mystical rites of a church or fraternal order that had the population of the whole country as members. But he could be wrong.

“Now,” Brass said when we were all settled; Junior and I on the couch and Brass behind his desk, “tell me about this man.”

“I didn’t see him,” Junior said. “I was standing outside when she opened the door and stepped in. I heard this man’s voice saying something like ‘It’s about time’ and ‘Where have you been?’ Like that. And she said, ‘My gosh, what are you doing here?’”

“And you didn’t just barge in to see who it was? Didn’t you feel jealous?”

“I never feel jealous,” Junior said. “It’s a ridiculous emotion, like you have the right to control someone else’s life. I don’t want anyone controlling my life, after all.”

“Very noble,” Brass said.

Junior shrugged. “I don’t have to work at it,” he said. “I just don’t feel jealousy. Maybe that’s no good. Maybe it’s because I don’t really care about anybody. That’s been suggested.”

“So you didn’t even take a peek at whoever was inside the apartment?”

“Well, to tell you the truth I thought it was her father, someone like that. There was something in the voice—it didn’t sound like a lover; it was too bossy.”

“So you just went away?”

“I said ‘Bye, now,’ and turned and walked away. Just so. I don’t mess with fathers.”

“How would you describe the man’s voice?” I asked.

Junior thought about it. “Kind of high, and kind of sharp precise.”

“How long had you been going out with Lydia Laurent?”

“As a matter of fact, just that once, that’s all. Most of the chorus girls only let me go out with them once or twice. I buy them a couple of dinners, and we dance somewhere if they aren’t too tired, and I take them home. Sometimes I take them to my flat, but more often I just take them home. And the third or fourth time I ask them out they pat me on the back and say no, thanks; why don’t you ask Susie over there, or whoever. I’m sort of passed from girl to girl like a cold. They think I’m harmless. They think I’m a joke.”

I didn’t expect such self-knowledge from Junior. “Then why do you do it?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “Why not? I like to go out with beautiful girls. And I can afford it. And sex is overrated anyway, particularly after six or seven drinks.”

There was a pause while we stared into our glasses and thought our private thoughts.

“Why are you telling us about this now?” Brass asked.

Junior looked unhappy and stared at his feet. “I’ve started seeing a girl, Monica, and I think it’s serious. I mean, we’ve only been out maybe half a dozen times, but we talk to each other about—things. Real things. I don’t know how to explain it, but this feels different. She wants me to give up drinking. And she suggested that I tell the police about this business. She thinks it’s important. I don’t want to talk to the police, they make me nervous. So I told her I’d talk to DeWitt here, because he knows about such things and he’s my friend and would tell me what to do.”

“I’m your friend?” I may have sounded surprised.

“Sure,” he said. “Under that, you know, that witty banter that we go back and forth with, we’re pals.”

“And I’m Marie of Roumania,” I told him.

“See!” he said. “Witty banter.”

Brass took a deep breath and restrained whatever comment came to mind. “Is that it?” he asked. “Have you any other information to unburden yourself of?”

“I have emptied myself of my burdens,” Junior told him, “and am feeling light as a feather.”

“Well, you’d better just float over to Homicide North on Seventy-seventh between Lex and Third and ask for Inspector Raab. Tell him I sent you, and tell him your story. He will treat you very gently.”

Junior Skulley looked doubtful. “Must I?” he asked.

“Do you want someone else to tell them that they saw you out with Lydia Laurent on the evening she was killed before you have a chance to? You’ll spend a long time as a guest of the city explaining that one. Even if the homicide boys don’t think you did it, they’ll be afraid that some hotshot reporter will pick up on the story and suggest in print that maybe your father’s influence bought you a free ride.”