The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes (28 page)

“You don’t think that I think this is a real kidnapping, do you?” Gates asked. “You can’t continue to pretend that this note is real now that I know?”

“What do you know?”

Pearly started to blurt out something, but then he paused and took a deep breath. “Two-Headed Mary, the woman I knew as Philippa, is a confidence trickster,” he began.

“That might be so,” Brass acknowledged.

“And you knew it when I came up here last week.”

“That is so.”

Pearly thrust his chin forward. “So this whole thing is a confidence trick, and you two are in it together!”

“Really? And just what would my part in it be?”

“For one thing you told me not to go to a private detective, that’s what.”

Brass leaned on his desk, his face inches away from Gates’s. “And how did we cleverly plan that you were going to come see me?”

“You know, that piece in the paper—”

“That piece in two hundred and six papers in the United States and Canada? I must have wanted to con you pretty badly. And all that for a cut of ten thousand dollars? What do you suppose my share will be? How many people do you figure are in on this con, Mr. Gates? All of Greater New York, or is it merely Manhattan? Or perhaps just the theater district? They all know Two-Headed Mary’s story, and delight in telling it to passersby. Or so I am told.”

Brass sat back down, and Pearly stared at him for a long time. Or at least he stared in his direction, what he was seeing, I don’t know. “What about the money?” he said finally.

“What money?”

“The ten thousand. What about that?”

“Someone’s attempting to extort money from you. Mary is missing. Possibly she has been kidnapped. If so, the note may be from the kidnapper, or it may be from someone who knows she’s missing and is trying to pull a fast one. But I’m reasonably sure that it’s not from Mary, which is what you obviously suspect.”

“And you’re not involved?”

“My word of honor.”

Gates leaned forward. “Then why did they tell me to deliver the money to you?”

This time the silence was palpable. You could have touched it, molded it, cut it with a knife. I looked at Brass; Brass looked at me. “There’s a certain pattern developing here,” Brass said, “that I’m not sure I like.”

“How’s that?” I asked.

“Crooks using me as a go-between. Once that gets started, no telling where it will end. Winchell seems to enjoy that sort of thing, but I don’t.” He turned to Pearly. “You said ‘they.’ Who are ‘they’?”

“The kidnappers or whatever. They called me at the hotel. Said if I wanted to get my Filly back I should give you the ten thousand dollars in small bills.”

“You keep saying ‘they.’ Was there more than one?”

“Well, there was just one fellow on the phone, but the note says ‘we,’ don’t it?”

“Whoever it is just wants you to think there’s a gang. That last line, ‘we will inform you where to deliver the money,’ that was cribbed from the Lindbergh baby kidnap note.”

Pearly thought that over for a moment. “You think it was the same guy that did that one? But Bruno Hauptmann is in prison.”

“Whoever else it is that sent this note, it’s not the kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby, whoever that really was,” Brass said. “There’s an outside chance the Lindbergh kidnapper really was Hauptmann, but they never proved it. But this isn’t related. I think it’s someone with a strange sense of humor.”

“This whole deal is pretty strange,” Pearly said. “I guess I really never thought it was you, but I ain’t never come across nothing like this before.”

“Tell me about it,” Brass said.

“Tell you what?”

“Everything you can think of that might relate. How you got the note, how they got in touch with you, everything.”

“The message you’re looking at came this morning,” Pearly said. “Stuck in my mailbox in the hotel. No envelope or nothing, just the paper folded up. It was there when I came down for breakfast. I don’t like eating in my room, so I always come down to the dining room for breakfast. Then after breakfast, when I went to my room, the phone rang. A man’s voice said, ‘Have you got the money?’ I said not yet but I can get it real quick, and some stuff about is my Filly all right and can I talk to her and like that. And he said, ‘Get the ten thousand and give it to Alexander Brass. We’ll tell him how to deliver it. Then you’ll get your Filly back.’”

“That’s it?” Brass asked.

“Then he hung up. It was right then that the Winterbotham man came to my room with the report. I tell you, that floored me. I thought the whole thing was a con. Then I thought maybe it was serious. I had all kind of thoughts. Maybe her meeting me and everything was a con from the beginning. Maybe she just married me for my money, you know. People do that. But she had this great apartment and everything. I didn’t know what to think. I still don’t.”

“What are you going to do?” Brass asked.

“Hell, I don’t know. What should I do?”

“I can tell you this,” Brass said. “She married you because she cared about you. It wasn’t a con.”

Pearly looked at him intently. “You sure about that?”

“That’s the way I hear it.” Brass said. “Morgan, you heard the Professor. What do you think?”

“Who’s this Professor?” Pearly asked.

“A man she used to work with,” I told him. “Lives in the same building she does on Park Avenue.”

“Oh,” he said. “Were they—”

“Just business partners, no more,” I said.

“Oh,” he said.

“She told him she loves you,” I said.

“Oh,” he said.

“I guess I should tell you,” Brass said to Pearly. “Her daughter heard from her recently.”

“Daughter?” Pearly repeated.

“Yes. She’s not in prison, she’s never been in prison. She’s an actress currently in a Broadway show, and a damn good one.”

“Oh.” Pearly thought that over for a second. “What did my Filly have to say?”

“It was over the telephone. She sounded like she was being held captive. I think she may be in great danger.”

“So her daughter’s an actress,” Pearly said. “Must be a cute little thing.” He dug into his jacket pocket and came out with two thickly stuffed envelopes held together with rubber bands. “Here,” he said.

“What’s this?”

“It’s ten thousand dollars in small bills.”

Brass took the envelopes and held them in both hands as though he were weighing them. “I should tell you that I’m not sure paying this will do any good.”

“It couldn’t hurt,” Pearly said.

Pearly was now convinced that we were fighting on the side of truth and justice, and he wanted to stay and back us up, “with fists or guns, as the occasion warrants,” but Brass convinced him to go back to the hotel and await developments. After Pearly left, I went back to the cubicle that I call an office and pretended to work, but I was waiting for the phone to ring. Gloria was at her desk, copyediting tomorrow’s column, but I warrant she also was waiting for the phone to ring. Brass pretended to read some of the out-of-town newspapers he had delivered every day, but if you ask me he, too, was waiting for the phone to ring. It did ring several times, but none of the calls was from a strange man telling us where to bring twenty thousand dollars. Once I went into Brass’s office to suggest to him that it might be two separate sets of crooks, and he snorted. “Always glad to amuse you,” I said, and stalked back to my hovel.

About six o’clock he called Gloria and me into his office. There was a pad of lined yellow paper on the desk by his side, and the desk top was littered with sheets of the yellow paper on which he had drawn intricate designs along with clusters of indecipherable words. He had been thinking.

“I’ve been pulled into the middle of this,” he told us. “And I don’t like it. If it wasn’t that, if I’m right, Two-Headed Mary is alive only at the sufferance of a man who has lost all sense of reason and who is going around killing women, I’d turn the whole thing over to Inspector Raab right now. The next move is his, we have to wait for his call, but there are some loose ends we can clear up while we’re waiting.”

“You know what’s behind all this?” I asked.

“I have a good idea of who, and I believe I know some of the why, but not all—not enough. And I don’t yet know what to do about it.”

“Who is it?” I asked.

“That will await events,” Brass told me. “You’ll know soon enough.”

“I don’t even know what I don’t know,” I said. “Two women disappear, two other women are murdered, and three of them know each other, sort of, and the fourth is a fortune-teller.”

“Astrologist,” Brass corrected.

“Yeah, whatever,” I said. “If she could tell the future, how come she didn’t know enough to stay away from whoever killed her?”

Brass shrugged. “If astrology worked,” he said, “we could cut the police department down to four strong men and an astrologer to tell them who to arrest. If the occult forces were reliably available to anyone, the world would wear a different face. But, unfortunately, spiritualism, astrology, palmistry, tarot card reading, and all the other myriad forms of necromancy must be lumped together as, at best, unproven, and their practitioners as nans, poseurs, charlatans, or bunco artists.”

“You must admit,” Gloria said, “that the notion that someone with the Talent-with-a-capital-T can stare at your palm or read your tea leaves and tell your past, present, and future has a certain appeal.”

“True,” Brass admitted. “But if they know not whereof they speak, they can do a deal of harm. Remember when Glendower proclaims ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep,’ Hotspur replies ‘Why so can I, or so can any man; but will they come when you do call for them?’”

Gloria nodded.
“Henry the Fourth.”

“Will they come when you call them? That’s the question people forget to ask,” I said.

“People believe what they need to believe,” Brass said. “There’ll always be someone out there pitching an easy way to solve all your problems, and a growing crowd of people to listen to the pitch.”

The phone rang. I won’t say that Brass leaped to answer it, but it was picked up well before the first ring had ceased. “Brass,” he said.

“What?” he said.

“Right now?” he asked.

“Oh, all right, come on over,” he said. He hung up.

“Company?” I asked brightly.

“Inspector Raab,” he said. “He wants to compare notes. He’ll be here in fifteen minutes. Why he thinks I have any notes worthy of comparison, I don’t know. Let me get you two started while I decide what to tell him.” Brass turned to Gloria. “I have a trip in mind for you.”

“That’s why I love this job,” Gloria said. “To what strange and exotic port of call are you sending me?”

“Baltimore,” Brass told her.

“My dreams are answered!”

“You’re going to talk to Jemmy Brookes.”

“The letter writer.”

“That’s right. Tell her you’re a sob sister for the
World
and you’re doing a story on Billie Trask, and you’re interviewing people back home who know her. You want to know what kind of a girl Billie is, and whether Jemmy thinks she could have stolen the money. Of course she won’t think so. See if you can get a look at the letters Billie wrote her. Find out all you can about the boyfriend.”

“Right,” Gloria said.

“Can you go this evening?”

“I’ll go home and pack a bag.”

Brass swiveled his chair to look at me. “Your journey is shorter.” He pulled his yellow pad over and wrote “Lane & Vulpone” on it, ripped the bit with the writing off, and handed it to me. “Go see Schiff in the morgue and see if he has anything on them or their act. I want a picture if possible. Also see if Schiff has a file on Dr. Pangell, recently of Quogue, Long Island, and check the bunco files for the past history of Madam Florintina.” The morgue Brass referred to was the
New York World
’s research department, a vast file room taking up most of the sixth floor, repository of carefully indexed dead stories.

“Okay,” I said. “If I draw a blank on Lane and Vulpone, you want me to try theatrical agents?”

“Good idea,” Brass told me.

I went down to the sixth floor and explained my needs to Michael Fredric Schiff, the man who, along with his banks of file cabinets, was the memory of the
New York World.
Schiff disappeared among his files for about fifteen minutes and came back with a photograph and a folder.

The photograph was an 8-x-10 glossy of Foxy Vulpone and a tall, brassy blond. They were posed side by side in mid-step of what seemed to be a shuffle off to the right. He wore top hat and tails, and was holding a cane in both hands. She wore not much of anything, decorated with feathers, and black net stockings and very high-heeled shoes, and had her hands over her head to express the sheer excitement of being alive. In the white margin under the picture it said LANE & VULPONE. On the back were two rubber stamps:

LIBERTY MANAGEMENT
SUITE 1010—810 BROADWAY
CHICKERING 4-6793

and

OPTRA PHOTO STUDIOS
SERVING THE PROFESSION
SINCE 1914
268 TENTH AVENUE—PE6-3926

“Very pretty,” I said.

“I have nothing on the doctor,” Schiff said. “At least, not under that name.” In Schiff’s world, people were constantly changing names, just to thwart his filing system. Schiff had a grudge against marriage, because the woman disappeared behind her husband’s last name.

“Madam Florintina?” I asked.

“The story on her murder hasn’t been filed yet,” he said. “There’s only one item.” He opened the folder. The clipping was dated Monday, July 9, 1928. The headline was
STARS RUSH TO DEFENSE OF FAVORITE FORTUNE-TELLER
. The text explained that Madam Florintina had been arrested on Saturday in her apartment on East fifty-fifth Street for bunco fortune-telling, and by Sunday morning she’d been bailed out by Ruth Etting, Eddie Cantor, and much of the cast of the
Ziegfeld Follies
who had shown up en masse at the jail. “I am not a fortune-teller, I am an astrologist,” Madam avowed. “Fortune-tellers foretell the future; I give advice based on what the stars tell me.” And the stars told the police to let Madam go. “I don’t really go for this astrology stuff,” Eddie Cantor explained, “but I don’t see why she should be locked up for it.”