The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes (31 page)

Sandra did a slow pirouette. “It’s perfect!” she breathed. “However did you manage?”

“The previous tenant left all the fixtures and equipment when he jumped out the window,” the Professor said. “We just turned them back on and changed a few nameplates.”

“He couldn’t have jumped very far,” I said. “We’re on the ground floor.”

The Professor smiled a weary smile. “I spoke metaphorically.”

“Let’s get on with it,” Brass said. “No telling when he’ll show up.”

“Right.” The Professor strode to the middle of the floor and clapped his hands. “Ladies and gents,” he said. “Listen up! Here’s the pitch.”

The “office staff” and “customers,” a group of about thirty people, gathered in a cluster around the Professor. He explained to them what we were doing, told them it was for Two-Headed Mary, and that it might be dangerous. He said that he’d pay them the day rate if they stayed, but there’d be no score today, and that if anyone wanted to leave he wouldn’t blame them.

“What about the gent from Omaha?” someone asked.

“He probably won’t be in until tomorrow. If he does come in today, we’ll stall him. Percy can take him to dinner.”

Everyone laughed. I guess every profession has its in jokes.

Nobody left. They all went back to their assumed jobs and took up where they’d left off, and if anyone could tell that the place wasn’t a real, active brokerage office, he was sharper than I.

The Professor’s big office desk was pulled out to an executive location in the main office, and a man with a little printing machine in a suitcase made a desk plaque that said

ANDREW CUTTINGHAM
PRESIDENT

in a thin line, modern script.

We weren’t sure what Welton—if it was Welton—would attempt, except that his aim would be the demise of Uncle Andrew. We made sure the desk was out of view of the window, in case Welton was a marksman. Perhaps he’d come in to talk and bring a poisoned bottle of scotch. Perhaps he’d invite Uncle Andrew outside, where he could strangle him in privacy. Perhaps he’d stalk in and shoot and merely walk out in the confusion—a favorite of Mafia hit men.

We tried to plan for the various possibilities. We couldn’t stop the action too soon; unless the killer actually made an attempt, we would have no proof to give the police. The desk was solid oak and had a well that the Professor could quickly dive into. Several brawny men were positioned nearby; one behind a strategically placed screen. And it would help that there were no real customers; anyone that came in that the crew didn’t recognize was probably an enemy.

Brass and Sandra and I went to hide in a little office in the wall to the side of the Professor’s desk. It was the original director’s office of the defunct firm, and had a one-way glass window. As long as we kept the lights low, we could look out but no one could see in.

* * *

It was two hours before he showed up, and then we almost missed him until it was too late. Perhaps we were so cocky in knowing that it was all a stage setting, that we forgot that other people can play parts. He was dressed like a Western Union delivery boy, with freckles and black horn-rim glasses and a shock of red hair sticking out from under his Western Union cap. He sauntered in and sauntered toward Andrew Cuttingham’s desk, and we thought nothing of it because we did have a phony Western Union boy in the crew. Our Western Union boy was out getting coffee, but we didn’t realize that.

It was Brass who spotted him. “The shoes!” Brass yelled, “Patent leather!” And he was out of his seat and at the door in one dive. I scrambled behind, not sure where I was going or why, as Brass leaped for the desk.

The Western Union boy was pulling a revolver—one of those great big old long-barreled .44s—out of his belt as everything turned to slow motion, and I felt like I was charging through molasses, unable to move fast enough to grab him before he fired.

The Professor was under strict orders to dive under his desk, but he dove across it instead, his hands grabbing for the gun. There was a deafening
boom
, and a spurt of flame, and the Western Union boy was down, with Brass and two other, larger men on him, and the Professor was holding his hand to his chest and looking surprised, and the blood was spurting out from between his fingers.

The Western Union cap was pulled off, and the red wig, and the glasses, and lying there, under a coat of stage makeup and artfully applied freckles, was a quiescent K. Jeffrey Welton.

The Professor sat and said, “Goddamn!” Sandra was at his side, opening his vest, pulling off his bow tie, unbuttoning his shirt.

“You’ll live,” she told him, “you old idiot. But I’d better get a bandage around that.”

I went into the men’s room and pulled the roller towel from the wall and cut off the part that had been used. Sandra used the clean part to wrap the Professor’s chest. The bullet had grazed the right side of his chest, but hadn’t penetrated, and once he was wrapped and the blood had stopped flowing, the Professor insisted that he was fine. But Brass and Sandra both insisted that he go to the hospital by ambulance just in case, so he acquiesced. Two burly policemen appeared from somewhere and took charge of Welton. Brass stuck the revolver in a paper bag, and suggested that we take it and Welton right Uptown to Inspector Raab, and the cops agreed. Since they were without a squad car, we used the Professor’s large black Lincoln Town Car, which was parked at the curb. Welton was completely silent for most of the ride, but as we pulled in front of the station house he broke out laughing.

“What’s so damn funny?” one of the cops barked, and if he hadn’t I would have, although I don’t think I would have had as effective a bark.

“I was just picturing my brother Edward’s face when he hears about this,” K. Jeffrey said, and then he clammed up again.

Inspector Raab looked surprised for the first time since I’ve known him when we came through the squad room door with a handcuffed Welton in tow. “What’s this?” he asked.

Brass explained, and handed Raab the revolver-filled paper bag.

“Very good, very good,” Raab said. “It’s okay, boys,” he told the two precinct cops, “we’ll take it from here.” They saluted and left, and one of Raab’s detectives escorted K. Jeffrey over to the holding cell.

“Where is Mary?” Brass demanded.

Welton smiled through the bars. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said.

“You might as well tell us where she is,” Raab said, “Make it easy on yourself.”

Welton laughed. “Oh, come on, Inspector,” he said. “What possible interest could I have in making it easy for you? In the fullness of time, I might have a few things to tell you about my brother, Edward, but about myself, nothing.”

Raab growled.

“Foxy will know,” Brass said. “And he might be interested in escaping an accessory to kidnapping and murder rap.”

We left Welton smiling in his cell and headed to the theater. Foxy was behind the ticket window in the lobby. “Well, gentlemen?” he said as we approached. “Mr. Welton is not here yet.”

“And he won’t be,” Raab said, reaching through the bars in the ticket window and grabbing Foxy by the collar, “but we can arrange for you to join him if you like!”

“What the hell—” Foxy reached up and tried to pry Raab’s fingers loose. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Raab let go. “You just stay there,” he said. “We’re coming around.”

We entered the office and loomed over Foxy. When he understood what had happened, he gulped and sat down. “Murder?” he said. “The boss has been killing people? I didn’t know, honest to God!”

“You and your wife searched an apartment in Brooklyn for him,” Brass said. “And you tried to get into a Park Avenue apartment.”

“Sure we did. They were addresses Welton found in Mary’s handbag. So what? We didn’t kill nobody.”

“What the hell did you think was going on?”

“I thought he was manipulating things. K. Jeffrey is always manipulating things. Hell, the whole family is always manipulating things. Like when he got that girl pregnant, he moved her out of the chorus smooth as a greased rabbit.”

“And then?” Brass asked.

“And then she ran off with his money. Serves him right, I told him, for leading the poor girl on when he had no intention of marrying her.”

“You’d better stick to that story,” Brass told him. “What about Two-Headed Mary?”

Foxy stayed belligerently silent.

“Talk!” Raab said. “You’re looking at at least a decade in Sing Sing right now, you want to try for two?”

“Aw come on, Inspector,” Foxy said. “I didn’t do nothing. Whatever Welton did, he didn’t ask for my help.”

“Two-Headed Mary,” Brass repeated.

Foxy considered. “Maybe I did hear some strange noises coming from downstairs,” he said.

“Downstairs?”

“This place has three cellars, one below the other, that I know of. I’ve never been past the first cellar, but there might be something down there.”

Raab took Foxy by the collar and pulled him out into the hall. “Let’s go see!”

Foxy led the way, his patent leather shoes thumping the way down the wooden steps, insisting with each step that he’d never been down this far before, and that he had nothing to do with whatever we found down here, and that he hoped Two-Headed Mary was all right because, personally, he’d always liked the doll.

The first cellar was full of stored costumes and equipment and flats from shows that were long since defunct. The second cellar had a collection of empty booze bottles of various types and sizes that someone had collected during Prohibition, along with rolls of rubber tubing and coils of copper tubing and two big copper kettles.

The trapdoor to the third cellar was hidden under a couple of large boxes piled innocently near the far wall. When we moved the boxes we saw that the door had a bright and shiny new padlock on it. “I ain’t got the key,” Foxy whined. Brass found a length of iron pipe and snapped the hasp. We lifted the trap and clambered down the stairs. There was another door, a steel door this time, with a Yale lock. A spill of light showed from under the door.

“Mary!” Brass yelled. “Mary, are you in there? It’s Alexander Brass!”

“It’s about goddamn time!” Came a muffled soprano bellow from inside.

“Stand aside!” Raab ordered. “I’m going to shoot the locks.”

“Wait a minute,” Brass said. “That’s a steel door. If you just smash the lock it might take a battering ram to open.”

Raab paused. “Well then.”

“Welton wouldn’t want to carry the keys around with him,” Brass said. “I’ll bet they’re around here somewhere.”

We fished around the area for about a minute, getting our hands dirty, but didn’t find a key.

“Don’t hurry or anything,” came the call from the other side of the door.

“We can’t find the key,” Brass called.

“Where’s that son of a bitch Welton?” Mary called.

“He’s under arrest.”

“I’ve never in my life thought that I’d be pleased to hear those words about anyone,” Mary called. “But by God it’s good to hear that!”

Brass kept up his thumping and prodding at the wall, and finally one of the bricks jiggled slightly at his thump. He worked it back and forth until he could pull it out, and he peered into the space. “There’s a cavity, but it’s too dark to see anything,” he said. He reached into the cavity. With a satisfied “Hah!” he pulled his hand out and brandished his find. “A key!” He fit it into the lock and, after a twist, the door swung open on well-oiled hinges.

The room inside was fitted out as a Spartan bedroom, with a bunk bed and beat-up wooden chair and table, an aged tin sink in one corner and a toilet behind a curtain in the other corner. There was also a small bookcase half-full of books and a reading lamp. Two-Headed Mary was standing to the left side of the door with a white terrycloth bathrobe clutched around her. “I warn you, I’m going to kiss everyone in sight when I come out,” she said. “And then I’m going to have a good cry.”

* * *

Two weeks later the excitement had died down, except in the New York papers, which were happily running stories like:

CHORINE REVEALS LOVE TRYST WITH KILLER
PRODUCER

Startling Details of Love Nest Revealed

JEANETTE WINTERS, a dancer in
Fine and Dandy
, the long-running Broadway show starring Sandra Lelane, is the third girl to come forward and reveal that she has had a long-time relationship with producer K. Jeffrey Welton. The attractive, long-legged blonde described for this reporter the secret trysting place that…

We were gathered for breakfast that Monday morning in the Professor’s Park Avenue apartment. The Professor had a bruised rib and had lost a fair amount of blood, but he was healing well, and as long as the wound didn’t get infected, he’d recover with no problems. Mary and her Texan were sitting next to each other on the couch and holding hands, and it was a lovely sight to see.

Gloria had returned from Baltimore with a letter Billie Trask had written to her friend Jemmy that pretty much told the whole story. Men who are plotting evil should remember that most girls have one real close friend from whom they have few secrets. The facts, as related in Billie’s letter, were pretty much what Brass had deduced. She had written it right before going with K. Jeffrey to visit Dr. Pangell and have her “condition” seen to. K. Jeffrey had promised to marry her in six months, but he told her that he couldn’t do it now because his family would cut him off. When the show was running in the black, and he didn’t need his family’s money, they’d tie the knot and do it right. And Jemmy, Billie promised, would be maid of honor.

But Billie had been found a week ago under three feet of earth in Dr. Pangell’s backyard; dead, as far as the post-mortem could tell, from exsanguination—Pangell had punctured something he shouldn’t have, and they couldn’t stop the bleeding.

Two-Headed Mary had been Billie’s other confidant. She had gone to Mary for advice when K. Jeffrey insisted on the abortion. “I told her to have the kid and leave the creep,” Mary told us. “I told her when she got involved with the creep that she was making a mistake, but she didn’t listen. Girls in love don’t listen to good advice; that’s why there are so many little bastards running around.” Mary had taken Pangell’s name so she could look him up and make sure that at least he was a real doctor. “He was real,” she said, “but he wasn’t very good.” She had stuck the scrap of paper with the doctor’s address on it in her special hiding place so she wouldn’t forget it. She didn’t bother writing the name down—she already knew the name.