Too Soon Dead (6 page)

For the next half hour I reaffirmed my discovery that a breakfast of smoked salmon, which the local intelligentsia calls “lox,” and eggs is, in itself, a sufficient reason to leave Ohio. Over our second cup of coffee I remembered something else. “Tell me about the moxie girl,” I said.

“The—oh, yes.” Brass stared thoughtfully into the sugar bowl. “It must have been five or six years ago. Jack Diamond, who was not called ‘Legs’ to his face by anyone who wanted to see the sun rise, owned the Hotsy Totsy Club on Fifty-fourth Street, off Broadway, and one of the hatcheck girls was Cathy Wild, whose real name was, if I remember correctly, Karen Welikof, and who wanted to be a singer. Jack put the make on Cathy; told her that he could help her singing career, maybe find her a nice rent-paid apartment. And all he wanted was what you think he wanted. He put the proposition to her one night at his usual table in the corner next to the bandstand. And there, right in front of God and everybody, including an assortment of his gangster buddies, she slapped his face. Hard.

“The place froze. Even the waiters, trays in hand, remained motionless. It was like a set piece in a Broadway farce. Jack Diamond slowly rose to his feet and glared at Cathy for an eternity—maybe ten seconds—and then he said, ‘Sister, you’ve got moxie.’ Everyone started to breathe again. Then Jack continued, ‘I got no use for moxie.’ Again everyone froze.”

Brass looked up from the sugar bowl, but he was seeing the showroom of the Hotsy Totsy Club five years ago. “What happened?” I asked.

“The damnedest thing. The girl started to laugh. Not hysterical, but as though someone had just said something funny. And then Jack started to laugh. And then everyone started to laugh. I put it in my column the next day, and Cathy became the moxie girl.”

“I guess she really did have moxie,” I said.

Brass nodded. “I hope she still does,” he said. “She’s going to need it.” He fished a nickel out of his pocket and slapped it on the table. “There’s a pay phone in the corner,” he said. “Call the city room and get Fox’s address.”

I did so and returned. “You’re lucky,” I told Brass. “He lives—lived—in Manhattan. Two-thirty-five East Fifty-fourth. No phone.”

We took a cab uptown. Brass stopped briefly at the Manhattan Bank on way. He banked there, he had once explained to me, because it was founded by Aaron Burr, a true American hero. It was statements like this which made me think that we must have used a different history book in Ohio. It was only eleven-thirty in the morning when we knocked on Cathy Fox’s door. I could have sworn that at least three days had passed since Brass had picked me up, but it had been less than four hours.

The apartment was on the second floor of a well-kept-up brownstone; there was a fairly new carpet runner on the floor of the hallway and the stairs, and the apartment doors had been freshly painted in that color that is known throughout New York City as landlord green.

At first our knocking produced no response. Then, finally, we heard some banging noises from inside, as though someone had dropped something or knocked something over. And then a girl’s voice yelling, “Go away! Can’t you let a girl sleep?” It was a sweet voice, a singer’s voice, even yelling through a door. It sounded like it belonged to the sort of girl I would like to know. Fox was a lucky man. Had been…

Suddenly I wanted to be anywhere in the world except standing outside that freshly painted green door waiting to tell the girl with that voice that she was now what in my hometown would be known as “the Widow Fox.”

Brass knocked again. “Mrs. Fox?” he called. “This is Alexander Brass, from the
World.
I’d like to speak to you for a minute.”

There was a profound silence from inside the apartment. Then all at once we heard the chain being taken off the door, and the door swung open. She was young and blond and slender and beautiful, and her eyes were full of sleep. She wore a sheer nightgown of some sort, over which she had wrapped a man’s terry cloth bathrobe. She stared at both of us, and we said nothing. Then, with no inflection in her voice, as though she were discussing the weather, she said, “It’s Bill. He’s dead, isn’t he?”

Even Brass was startled, something I had seldom seen before. “Has someone been here before us, Mrs. Fox?” he asked.

“Call me Cathy. I’ve been asleep all morning. It’s just—when I heard your voice… Then, he is dead? Not just in the hospital or something?”

“I’m sorry,” Brass said. “He is dead. Murdered. William was. doing a job for me, and he was killed. I am so very sorry.”

Cathy wrapped the bathrobe more tightly around her and stepped back from the door, and we entered the apartment. “He appreciated that, you know,” Cathy said, closing the door and walking ahead of us down the short hallway to the living room.

“What?”

“Being called ‘William.’ Everyone insisted on calling him ‘Billy.’ He thought nobody took him seriously. He was pleased that you called him ‘William,’ but no one else would, so he was willing to settle for ‘Bill.’ We had long talks about it. It seemed so very important.”

Her voice remained quite calm, almost flat, but when she turned around we could see two lines of tears running down her face. “Please sit down,” she said. “Tell me what happened.”

I settled into an ancient, well-worn brown couch that took up much of one wall of the small living room. Brass sat on a straight-back wooden chair under a framed front page of the
New York World
that was hung on the opposite wall. “This is my associate Morgan DeWitt,” he said, waving his hat in my direction. “We don’t exactly know what happened. Yesterday I asked William to follow a man for me. I didn’t know who the man was, which was why I wanted him followed, but I had no reason to think that the request was dangerous. This morning your husband was found dead in an apartment in Yorkville. He had been hit on the head and his throat had been cut. The police have no idea why. Neither do I. He was unconscious when he died, so he didn’t suffer.”

That last line was pure hokum. Brass had no way of knowing whether Fox was conscious or not when he died. But I was not going to correct him.

Cathy looked from one to the other of us. “Whose apartment?” she asked.

“It was rented by some sort of commercial organization,” I told her. “The police are checking on that now.”

“I see,” she said. “Who was he following?”

I left that one for Brass. “A fat man who had some strange photographs,” he said. “I don’t know who he is. That’s why I had Fox following him.”

Cathy didn’t say anything for a long time. She was staring out the window, but I doubt if she knew that. “You were one of his heroes,” she said, turning to look at Brass. “You and Franklin Roosevelt and Babe Ruth and George Gershwin.”

Brass took an envelope from inside his jacket and handed it to Cathy. “I never paid him for all the work he did for me,” he said. “Here, please take this.”

“I thought the newspaper paid him for all that,” she said.

“Not entirely,” Brass said. “I employed him to do some freelance work for me: legwork, writing, that sort of thing. And I owed him some back salary. This is it.”

Cathy weighed the envelope in her hand. “This is very nice of you, but he would have told me,” she said. “Except for that last day. You don’t have to—”

“I do,” Brass said. “I have to. If you need anything—
anything
—call me.”

Cathy put the envelope on the coffee table. “Where do I go to see about his body and… whatever?”

“I’ll take care of that,” Brass told her. “You won’t have to do anything until there are decisions to be made, then I’ll consult with you. Is there anyone out of town who should be notified?”

“Oh my God!” Cathy said, sitting up and putting her fist in her mouth. When she took it out a few seconds later I could see the tooth marks on her knuckles. “His parents,” she said. “I’ll have to call them. How awful for them.”

“They’ll get whoever did this,” Brass said.

Cathy stared at Brass for a minute. “I’ll tell him,” she said. “When they catch his murderer, I’ll go out to his grave, and I’ll be sure to tell him.”

A
chilling rain was falling when we left Cathy Fox’s apartment and, as usual in New York, those who didn’t want to get wet outnumbered the available taxicabs. We tried to flag down an empty cab for a few minutes, and then Brass and I buttoned our overcoats, pulled down our hats, turned up our collars, and started across town on foot. Silently we crossed the avenues together. There was nothing to say.

It was after one o’clock when we arrived at the office. Gloria was eating lunch at her desk: an egg salad on rye with a cup of tea from Danny’s on the corner. She waved a note at Brass as we came in. “You’re wanted,” she said.

“By whom at the moment?” he asked, unbuttoning his coat and hanging it carefully on a wooden hanger, which he then took into the small storeroom, where it could drip harmlessly. I fished up another hanger and did likewise, not to be outdone in neatness by the boss. My hat was a sodden mess, but I put it on a shelf in the firm expectation that it would reblock itself as it dried.

“Mr. Sanders has called four times,” Gloria said. “He wants to see you as soon as you come in.”

“King Winston called himself?” I asked. “Personally?” Winston Sanders was the publisher of the
World
, known as “the King” by those who owed their weekly paychecks to him, and in my five years working for Brass in the
World
building I had seen him only twice, both times in the lobby as he strode toward his private elevator.

“The first two times his secretary called, the last two times it was he,” Gloria said.

“Well,” Brass said. “Most intriguing. I guess I’d better go upstairs and see what he wants.” Brass, as he had told Inspector Raab, did not work for the
New York World
, but the World Features Syndicate, of which Sanders was the president, carried both of Brass’s columns.

“While I’m gone I have work for both of you,” Brass said. He turned to Gloria. “You heard what happened?”

“Yes,” Gloria said. “People have been popping in here all morning keeping me up to date.”

“We have just returned from visiting Mrs. Fox,” Brass told her. “You know, it’s odd the way things come around. I once did a column on her.”

“I know,” Gloria said. “Cathy Wild, née Karen Welikof. The moxie girl. She’s singing at a club in the Village called The Stable. Mostly show stuff: Gershwin, Cole Porter, some Noel Coward. She’s supposed to be very good.”

“Yes,” Brass said.

“I see that we’re reserving those pictures for now,” Gloria said.

“That’s so,” Brass agreed. “How did you know?”

“None of my informants knew about them, so I assumed that you hadn’t mentioned them to the police.”

Brass nodded. “You’re worth every penny I’m paying you,” he said.

“Oh,” Gloria said, “considerably more than that.” She took a dainty bite of her sandwich.

Brass removed the list of names of those people whose naked bodies had graced our collection of photographs from an inner pocket, uncreased it carefully, and laid it on Gloria’s desk. “The folders for these people are on my desk,” he said. “Find out where each of them has been for, say, the past two weeks. Make sure to tell whomever you talk to that you’re from the
World
; we’ll see if that provokes any reaction. Divide the names between you as you like. Also, see if Schiff identified those last two names.”

“He did,” Gloria said. “Their folders are on top of the others on your desk. The photographs were quite, ah, instructive.”

“You looked?” Brass asked.

“Of course. I look at everything that comes into this office. It’s my job. I am a newsman, after all.”

“You are,” Brass agreed. “And better than most. I’m glad you’re so unflappable,” he added. “Perhaps I should show you the rest of the photos when I get back. Your feminine eye might see something that our masculine ones overlooked.” She smiled the smile of an ice princess. “I’m sure I will find different areas of interest, she said. “You men are so easily distracted by the sight of naked flesh.”

“Some naked flesh is more distracting than others,” Brass told her. “I look at myself in the mirror in the morning, and it does nothing for me.” With that Brass went off to his meeting.

Gloria and I stared at the list of names. I went into Brass’s office and retrieved the folders, including the two new ones. To the original six names we now added Homer Seinbrenner and Fletcher van Geuip.

Seinbrenner was the boss of B&S Distilleries, a company that did very little distilling, but imported much of the booze that thirsty New Yorkers sloshed about. When a Gothamite obeys Noel Coward’s injunction to put his scotch or rye down and lie down, it is probably a scotch or rye supplied by B&S in the glass. The company had retreated to Canada during Prohibition and restricted itself to selling to rumrunners (or, presumably, scotch or rye runners) and letting them break the law. Or so Seinbrenner claimed.

Van Geuip—pronounced “gee-whip” with a soft
g
—was a writer of books about his own adventurous life. He traveled everywhere there was a track wide enough for a mule to carry him, and when he arrived he shot anything that moved. His books were full of passages like: “Ubo, my native bearer, handed me my elephant gun and I calmly took a bead on the elephant and brought him down. ‘You brave man,
pemba,’
Ubo gushed, the awe showing in his expressive brown eyes.” When I read things like that I can’t help wondering what
pemba
translates to, and what the elephant thought about it.

“How do you want to split the list up?” I asked Gloria.

“I’ll take Suzie Frienard,” she said. “Aside from that, it doesn’t matter; take whom you want.”

“That’s okay with me,” I told her, “but just for my information, why do you want Suzie? Don’t you think I can handle a woman?”

“Do
you
think you can handle a woman?” Gloria enquired sweetly. “But that’s not it. If I call her, it’s an item for the society page. If a man calls her, or asks about her, her husband is liable to think the paper is trying to investigate him, and we’ll get no cooperation.”