The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes (4 page)

“Good God,” she said. “Next time come closer. A girl likes to be worshiped from close-up.” She looked me up and down. “What’s your name?”

“Morgan DeWitt.”

“Well, Morgan DeWitt, now that you’re close-up, I hope you like what you see.”

“Even better,” I said. “Excuse me for a second, I’ll tell Mr. Brass you’re here.”

I tore myself away from the desk and went back to Brass’s office. Brass was leaning back in his chair, his hands laced behind his head, staring at the large Pearson landscape on the far wall with a woods and a river in the foreground and a medieval castle sitting on a hill in the distance. As a fellow writer, I recognized that he was hard at work. “I hate to interrupt you in the throes of creation,” I told him, “but you’ve got company.”

“Have you ever considered,” he asked me without looking away from the painting, “what a pointless and frivolous exercise we conduct daily from this office.”

“No,” I said, “not really.”

“Well, consider,” he said. “If you work on an assembly line making cars, it might be boring, repetitive, manual labor, but when it’s done you have something: a car. You can point to it as it goes down the street and say ‘Peer under that car and you can see the very bolt that I tightened.’ If you write a book, as you keep threatening to do, someone centuries from now could crack it open and read of your ecstasies and sorrows. If you paint an oil painting, good or bad, people a thousand years from now could look at it and recapture some of the emotion that went into creating the canvas.”

“Not if I painted it,” I said.

“But we,” he said, ignoring me, “we who write ephemera in the dailies for the masses, we see our thoughts converted to fish-wrapping or used for paper-training puppies within the week.”

“Sitting in your penthouse all alone among your meaningless possessions, holding back the tears,” I said. “Why it’s enough to make a fellow drive his La Salle, or his Packard, or his Bugatti right into the Hudson River. Say at the City Island Boat Dock, where this fellow has been eyeing that forty-two-foot schooner.”

“Sloop,” Brass said.

“Certainly,” I agreed.

Brass eyed me. “Sarcasm is a dangerous weapon in the hands of those unskilled in its use,” he said mildly. “Why some are even foolish enough to aim it at the man who signs their paycheck.”

“No!” I said. “What a thought!”

He shook his head sadly at my lack of respect. “Who?” he asked.

It took me a second, but I retrieved the answer to the question with the grace and finesse of Gehrig fielding an infield fly. “Sandra Lelane.”

“The actress? What does she want?”

“Shall I ask her?”

He sighed. Forced to engage in conversation with a beautiful woman. “No, bring her in.”

I marveled at the power of a verb as I went out to retrieve Miss Lelane. If Brass had said, “
Send
her in,” I would have had to think of some excuse to come back in with her, but “
bring
her in” made it mandatory. I brought her in.

Brass rose. “Miss Lelane,” he said.

She came forward and extended her hand. “Mr. Brass. You must call me Sandra.”

While they shook hands I pushed a chair up to the desk for Sandra, but she remained standing.

“Thank you,” Brass said. He didn’t add “You may call me Alexander”; he doesn’t like people calling him Alexander. (We won’t even discuss “Alex” or “Al.”) I retreated to a corner of the couch.

“Please do sit down,” Brass said. He sat down himself to encourage her. “What can I do for you?”

She sat and crossed her legs carefully and smoothed out her skirt. “Help me find my mother.”

Brass considered this for a moment. “Where did you lose her?”

She pushed herself halfway to her feet and then thought better of it and sat back down. “I’m sorry,” she said, leaning forward, “but this is not a joke to me!”

Brass moved his arm in a pushing motion. “Sit back,” he said. “I apologize for what must have sounded like a frivolous comment, but your request is not one that I was expecting. Losing one’s mother is indeed serious, but why on earth did you come to me? The police have a missing persons department. If you don’t trust in their perspicacity, I can recommend an excellent private investigation service. I am not a policeman, I am a columnist.”

“I came to you because I can’t go to the police, because I daren’t trust a private detective, and because if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t know my mother was missing. You wrote about her in your column yesterday.”

Brass allowed himself to look surprised. “Your mother? Two-Headed Mary?”

She leaned back. “That’s right,” she said.

“Well!” Brass said.

“I asked about you on the Street,” Sandra said. “I was told that you were a straight joe; that you could keep a secret. Is that right?”

“That’s a large part of my job,” Brass told her. “If my friends and contacts didn’t think they could trust me, they wouldn’t tell me anything.”

“That piece you did about Mom. You didn’t blow her grift, and it must have been quite a temptation.”

“It would be a good story,” Brass agreed. “But everyone on Broadway knows she’s called ‘Two-Headed Mary,’ and why, and none of them have told.”

“Contrariwise,” Sandra Lelane told him. “They tell everyone they know. I must have heard it a couple of dozen times, and nobody in the business knows she’s my mom. But who are they going to tell that matters? The marks don’t hear it. But you must have a million readers.”

“Two and a half million,” Brass corrected. He couldn’t help it.

“Well. And most of them marks. I’m not saying they’d ride her out of town on a rail. But they’d come to look. In every audience there’d be someone who knew, and when they came out at intermission and saw her, the whisper would go around, and they’d all look, and no one would bite. Not another dime would go toward war orphan relief.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Brass said.

Sandra leaned back in her chair, the fingers of her right hand drumming steadily on the arm of the chair, and stared at Brass. “So I’m going to tell you a few other things that I’d just as soon didn’t come out,” she said. “And you’ll see why I want your help. And I don’t want something for nothing. I hear a lot around the Street, and I’ll trade you stuff you shouldn’t tell for stuff you can use. Tit for tat. Can we do that, tit for tat?”

“A lot of my business is conducted that way,” Brass allowed, smiling. “But we don’t have to make it a formal arrangement. I will keep your confidences anyway, and if there’s anything you think I might like to know at any time, I would like to hear from you.”

“Okeydokey,” she said. “But I pay my debts. Here’s the pitch.” She shifted in her chair and started drumming with the fingers of her left hand. “Mom and me, we haven’t been what you’d call close for a while now, like maybe ten years. I left home when I was fourteen.”

“What did you do?”

“I came to live in the city. Mom lives out in Brooklyn, would you believe. On Eastern Parkway. I stayed with a friend on the East Side and waited tables and studied voice and dance. I was in the business when I was sixteen, in the back row of the chorus of Ted White’s Scandals.”

“So you were working inside the theaters while your mom was working outside.”

“Yes. You could say that, but she wasn’t at the war orphan stand that much then. Mom and I didn’t have a big blow-out or anything. I guess you could say we had a disagreement in the way each of us wanted to live her life.”

“Your mother didn’t approve of you going into the show business?”

“She was all for it. It was me who didn’t approve of my mother staying in the grift. I refused to take money that had been earned in such an immoral manner, would you believe. I suppose I was a horrible prig at fourteen. Teenagers can be awfully moral.”

“I supposed that’s so,” Brass agreed. “Those who aren’t busy being awfully immoral.”

“If you’ll excuse me,” I said, “bilking nickels and dimes from Broadway theatergoers doesn’t seem to me to be a major crime.” Sandra turned to look at me. “Back then, that was a sideline,” she said. “She grew up on the grift, and by fourteen I wasn’t so innocent myself.” She switched her attention back to Brass. “When I was a kid Mom was one of the Professor’s crew—you know the Professor?—and I was part of the background at a big store con for the first time when I was six or seven. By the time I was eleven, I was a capper. When the Professor didn’t have a big store operating, there were dozens of short cons we would run, just to keep in practice. We did the badger game for a while. You’d be surprised how fast a mark will fork over his poke when he finds out that the jill he took up to his room is only thirteen.”

Brass nodded. “I can well believe that,” he said. He apparently was following all this, but I admit I was lost.

“Mom quit the heavy grifting a few years ago, and became Two-Headed Mary full-time. She’d been doing it as an occasional moneymaker for a long time; she got a kick out of dressing like a Scarsdale matron, and she worked the theaters between the big scores. But now, it was Christmas three years ago, she swore to me that she was done with all the big cons.”

“And you’re afraid that she’s back at it?”

“It’s not that. I’d be furious if she was running a big store or a golden wire, but what I’m afraid is that she isn’t—that she has really disappeared—that something’s happened to her. But I can’t go to the police, or even the private cops, because suppose she has gotten herself involved in some major grift? I can’t blow the gaff on my own mother.”

“Why did she quit?” Brass asked. “Your moral influence?”

Sandra shook her head. “She let it be known around that she was afraid she’d lost her touch. But the truth was she was clearing too much money as Two-Headed Mary.”

A silence followed this assertion. I was about to blurt out something like “Come off it!” or “Who ya kidding?” or “So’s your old man,” when Brass saved me from this social error by doing it for me.

“What kind of money are we talking about? Exactly how much does Mary clear in the average week?” he asked.

“Her name’s not Mary, you know,” Sandra said. “Her name is Amber—Amber Bain. My real name is Lucille Bain, would you believe.”

“So.” Brass leaned back in his chair. “What is Amber’s kick on this two-shoes off-the-wall flim-flam?”

Sandra’s eyes widened with approval. “You know the lingo pretty good,” she said. “You ever been on the game?”

Brass grinned. “Bad boys led me astray in my youth,” he said. “But I swear, Your Honor, that I’ll never do it again.”

“Would somebody like to tell me what you two are talking about?” I asked.

She turned to me. “Get your boss to tell you,” she said. “He shows signs of having led a very interesting life.”

“It gets more interesting with every passing day,” I said.

“I’m not dead yet,” Brass said, looking annoyed. “Back this conversation up a little and tell me what kind of money we’re talking about here.”

“I’d say Mom averaged a hundred and fifty to two hundred a week,” Sandra said.

My jaw didn’t actually drop with astonishment, but I’m sure that it wanted to. “I’d say I’m in the wrong business,” I said. “Where can I get myself one of those collecting cans?”

Sandra turned around and considered me seriously. “Well, you’re dressed well enough, and you look sincere enough, but I don’t think you’d do that well. You could probably clear twenty or thirty a week, though, and a citizen can live pretty good on that.”

“It’s nice to know I have something to fall back on,” I said. “How does your mother do so well?”

“I don’t know for sure. I think it’s the sincerity pitch. She looks like a society matron who doesn’t need the money, so if she’s willing to give up her afternoon bridge game and come downtown to stand out there collecting, it must be a worthy cause. So most people give her at least a dime, many give her a quarter, and some plutocrats have been known to stuff dollar bills into the collection tube. The people who go to the Broadway theaters are the people who still have jobs. Figure a hundred to two hundred people coming out at each intermission, and if she times it right, she can hit three or four intermissions a day, since they don’t all let out at the same time. Then she can hit another two or three as the theaters let out after the show, although she doesn’t do as well then; the people are in a hurry to go elsewhere.”

“So she can clear, maybe, thirty bucks a day,” Brass said. “You’re right, that’s a hundred and fifty a week, easy.”

“That’s my mom!” Sandra said. “Brave little woman out there, helping the orphans.”

“Everybody is scamming somebody on Broadway,” Brass said. “That’s part of the romance that is this city; just ask Damon Runyon.”

“Mom takes a wider view,” Sandra said. “She says that everyone in the world is trying to con you or fight you, and that what separates us from the barbarians is that we’ve mostly taken up conning instead of fighting.” She stood up. “I have to get to my matinee. Will you help me?”

“What is it that you’d like me to do?” Brass asked.

“I’ve been trying to call Mom’s apartment for the past two days, and I keep getting a busy signal. The operator says the phone’s off the hook. I’m worried. Come with me to Mom’s apartment after the matinee. Maybe we can find some hint about where she’s gone. I’d go by myself, but in case something, you know, has happened to her, I’d rather not be alone. And there’s no one else I can ask.”

“I’ll go that far,” Brass agreed. “I’ll pick you up after the performance and we’ll head over. Brooklyn, you say?”

“We can take the subway,” Sandra suggested. “I go everywhere by subway.”

“I don’t,” Brass said. “I have a perfectly good car. We’ll use it.”

“Whatever you say,” she agreed. “I’ll see you then.”

She departed, leaving behind her an odor of lily of the valley and a puzzled Morgan DeWitt. “Will you explain that conversation to me?” I asked Brass, “and don’t say, ‘What conversation?’”

Brass gazed at me mildly. “Of course,” he said. “Let’s see now: a ‘big store’ is a con game invented at the end of the last century by the Gondorf brothers. It involves setting up an establishment, appropriate to the con, that looks so real and uses so many people that the sucker—excuse me, the ‘mark’—can’t even begin to think that the whole thing is a phony put-on just for his benefit. If the gang is trying to peddle paper-that is sell phony stock certificates—then the ‘big store’ will be a stockbroker’s office, complete with ticker tapes, a tote board, ringing telephones, brokers, clerks, customers, messengers, and a security guard or two. If the con is a ‘golden wire,’ which is a sort of race-track scam, then the store will be a bookmaker’s parlor, with the races being called on a loudspeaker, racing results being written on great big blackboards, customers eagerly betting, and so on.”