Death Paints the Picture

by Lawrence Lariar

  Death Paints the Picture

  A HOMER BULL & HANK MacANDREWS MYSTERY

  Lawrence Lariar

  CHAPTER 1

  Invitation to a party

  Nobody but me, Hank MacAndrews, would ever have bothered with the Cheruckten Courthouse (and Town Hall).

  I bothered because I had to bother. Homer wanted a sketch of it, and I couldn’t very well disappoint him. Homer is that way—a fiend about detail, atmosphere, and background. Homer is stubborn. I’m stubborn, too. So I do as Homer says. Eighty-five potatoes per week is a tidy sum. It clothes me at Finchley’s, feeds me steak and onions when I crave them, and keeps Mrs. McCrory, my lantern-jawed landlady, at a congenial distance.

  My sketch was not art. Any good high school student could have done as well. The Cheruckten Courthouse was nothing more than a glorified barn, with a small, gagged-up turret of some sort pasted on the roof. In the old days, I assumed, there must have been a reason for ringing the bell in that turret.

  The building itself had been whitewashed long ago, but now the dirty walls almost lost themselves in the deeper grey of the sky beyond, and only the lacy black of branches against the sides gave it contour and solidity. It was strictly a Thomas Benton courthouse. He could have it. I shivered and blew my nose again.

  Somebody tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to face a messenger youth.

  “You Bisteh Bull?” the harelip asked, and held out a telegram.

  “Practically,” I muttered, grabbing for the message.

  He jerked it away with a toothy grin.

  “Collect—two bucks-twenny!”

  “Oh,” said I. “You want Mr. Bull. You’ll find him in the courthouse, probably talking to the blonde at the desk.”

  He edged past me up the wooden steps, and I whipped out my pad and sketched a quick memory blob of his weasel face. It would come in handy someday, when the comic strip lacked a zombie. All our zombies had to be drawn from nature.

  That was Homer’s method. Homer Bull was a demon data fiend. All his material always came straight from life—straight from actual courts. His daily comic strip, “True Stories of Crime,” was built on that premise. “I don’t like a fiction murder,” Homer would say. “I don’t want Sherlock Holmes or Father Brown or the drawing room patter of Hercule Poirot. There can never be anything quite so impossible as simplicity. Let a simple soul do a job of murder, and we’ve got four weeks of smooth flowing comic strip continuity without any effort.”

  Well, the effort was all Homer’s. I did only the cartooning. Homer wrote the stuff, transformed it from dry rot of the courthouse files to the daily drama of the comic strip. And Homer knew how. His syndicate records proved it. “True Stories of Crime” now ran in three hundred papers, with new customers added every week.

  More than once Wilkinson of the Brooklyn police had made use of his talents. But the real build-up for Homer came after the schoolgirl murders on Church Avenue. He broke the case on his own, and the newspapers raved him into sudden fame. Ever on the alert for a pot shot at Dame Fortune, Homer signed with Queen Features Syndicate for a trial of “True Stories of Crime.” The rest is comic strip history.

  The courthouse door opened and out came Homer, wriggling his fat frame into his overcoat. He minced down the steps and faced me in the gloom.

  “The old heckty-peckty,” he sighed, handing me the wire, “Heckty-peckty from the Shtunk.”

  I read the telegram. It was a typical Shtunk Smith masterpiece.

  I AM JUST BACK FROM BINGE STOP FOUND INVITATION TO WEEKEND PARTY GINK NAMED SHIPLEY STOP SHOULD HAVE OPENED THIS ITEM LAST FRIDAY BUT ON ACCOUNT ABOVE BINGE DIDN’T STOP SEE THIS MORNING AFTER PAPER FOR STUFF STOP ALSO SOME MUG CALLING YOU ON PHONE ALL THE TIME FOR YOU PERSONAL STOP BETTER COME BACK QUICK SEE YOU LATER

  SHTUNK

  “A masterpiece of innuendo,” I said.

  Homer grinned. “You finished with your sketches?” I nodded. “Then we’re off, Hank. This Shipley business interests me—and those calls might be from the syndicate, you know.”

  I knew. Homer had promised Queen Features an outline of his next plot. We were a little behind in our schedule.

  The train steamed in, finally, and we hopped aboard.

  “Goodbye, Cheruckten,” I bronxed through my chapped lips.

  Homer’s expert nose had already detected the way to the bar. There was a bar, and a black bartender with a hearty laugh and plenty of antidote for Cheruckten weather. We attacked a jug of Bourbon until Homer’s nose turned from light blue to pastel pink and then glowed like a traffic light, complete with highlights.

  “I wonder about the Shtunk,” mused Homer, fingering his glass.

  I gulped another hooker. “You should wonder? For two cents a word you’d find the reason quickly enough, you Hemingway, you.”

  But Homer was lost in thought. “It must be something mighty important. It had better be. I told Shtunk that I wasn’t to be disturbed.”

  He called the bartender. “Got a morning paper, George?”

  George had eight. Seven were from below the Mason and Dixon Line, and the eighth was an old issue of Women’s Wear. The barman explained that we would pick up a New York paper at the next station.

  There was a long silence punctuated by the glug of whiskey pouring.

  “Let me see that wire, Hank?”

  I leaned it against the bottle of Bourbon. Homer studied it intently.

  “He just got back from a binge,” Homer translated. “And he found an invitation to a weekend at Hugo Shipley’s place.” He turned to me. “You know who Shipley is, of course?”

  “I read the tabloids occasionally, chum.”

  “He goes on to say that I should be up at Shipley’s for some reason I’ll find in this morning’s paper. Now what in the world could have happened at Shipley’s that’d interest me?”

  “He’s been known to have fancy peep shows occasionally,” I suggested.

  “Nonsense! Hugo Shipley doesn’t know me well enough for that.”

  It was amazing, sometimes, how flat my quips could fall. Or was it only that Homer didn’t bother to laugh? He looked positively sad, suddenly.

  “You’re not worried?” I asked. “Not worried about Shipley, are you?”

  “Don’t be a fool.” He massaged his eyebrow. “I have an idea that Shipley is up to one of his practical jokes again. I think I know why he wanted me there.”

  I had a pretty good idea, too. But I couldn’t mention it. It was too obvious.

  “I’m pretty sure Hugo’s crowd includes Douglas Trum, Hank,” said Homer. “If Trum is up there this weekend, I can put two and two together and get—” He turned to me for the answer.

  “Grace?”

  “For a cartoonist, you think clearly,” Homer sighed. “Of course little Grace is there. And where Grace is—”

  I filled his glass and kept my trap shut.

  Love is a kick in the pants.

  CHAPTER 2

  Shtunk Smith

  Homer was funny that way—about Grace, I mean. Give him a couple of stiff snorts and wait for that faraway look. Over the river and far away looked Homer. Through the wall and into the next county looked Homer. Homer just looked, but I knew what he was mooing about. When Homer mooed, everybody knew why.

  It was Grace.

  Everybody knew all about Grace, long before Homer met her and married her in the dark days of ’32 when love was a bigger gamble than the stock market. Who can understand the vagaries of women? Who can figure why Grace married Homer or why Homer married Grace, for that matter? Homer was nobo
dy’s fool, even though he was starving to death. He earned his bread with very little butter—in those days. He was a gagman, feeding funny little lines to the horde of cartoonists who decorate the back pages of Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post with their whimsy. And Homer was a good gagman, even though he starved.

  But maybe Grace wasn’t so dumb. She must have known that he wouldn’t wander in the quagmire of professional humor for long. Maybe she knew that Homer’s fertile brain was already plumbing the mysteries of fiction and radio writing, and any other type of storytelling that paid through the nose. For Homer was anxious to forget the willy-nilly life of a gagman.

  Grace married him, anyhow. She married him in spite of his size. She also married him in spite of his looks, his butterball body, his fat legs, his wide behind, his farsightedness and high blood pressure. No, Homer wasn’t a looker.

  Grace was. Grace could be a Petty Girl, Miss Hollywood, Miss Vogue or Miss Libido. She had always been a model, even in the lean days when her checks paid for Homer’s spaghetti at Max’s.

  Hegemund, the patent leather and lace photographer for the bigtime, happened to spot her one day at Sardi’s. Something happened behind Homer’s back, and that was the beginning of the end for Homer. Grace needed Hegemund. And what Grace needed Hegemund for was not Hegemund personally.

  Hegemund snapped the black and whites for the Fentis Fur Company. The Fentis Fur ads are first page in Vogue, the sort of spot a gal like Grace could use for self-promotion. Pretty soon Grace was the Fentis Fur Girl. But Homer couldn’t see why modeling furs for Fentis should cost a girl time and a half in Hegemund’s apartment. He should have known that Grace really was posing. But Homer didn’t know Hegemund, and that was why Hegemund had his right eye in a black sling for the next three weeks. (Three agency gents at in ringside seats. It was a clean knockout in the first few seconds of round one.)

  Homer didn’t understand it, but the stink in the papers did his wife plenty of good. Nicky English (Nicky’s New York) spilled the black eye saga and made her a mystery woman. The divorce was featured in all the tabloids. People turned around and just stared and stared at poor Grace. Did Grace resent it? Why do women wear hats with feathers on them? Grace was stared at in the Waldorf, The Stork, 21, 31, The Flying Ginch and all the lesser hot spots where experienced starers ply their trade. She made the top flight modelling jobs overnight. She was café society. There was talk of Hollywood, and from then on her photogenic puss popped into print whenever a magazine rolled off the presses.

  And Homer? He didn’t really want to divorce her. That was why he became the Harpo Marx among writers. Homer turned dapper. Homer dropped from 278 to 215. Homer’s heart was broken. He wore it on his sleeve, as the saying goes. He cooed at every passing wench. But he still mooed over Grace.

  The train jerked to a stop. I skipped out and bought a Times before Homer had downed his next hooker.

  We found the item on page five, well screened by corsets and shoes.

  FAMOUS ILLUSTRATOR IS SUICIDE

  AT WEEKEND PARTY IN WOODSTOCK

  Hugo Shipley, noted illustrator, killed himself last night during the last few hours of a weekend party for a group of his friends. The guests had gone to their rooms when the sound of a shot was heard from downstairs. Shipley had locked himself into his studio. Among the guests were Nicky English, famous columnist of The Daily Star; Stanley Nevin, a friend; Bruce Cunningham, of The Darton Sarton, Martin and Dibble Advertising Co.; Douglas Trum, cigarette magnate; Mike Gavano, notorious East Side racketeer; and Grace Lawrence, famous model.

  Shipley had for years held his place among the first rank illustrators in the country, and his earnings had never fallen under the big brackets. He achieved wide notoriety for his fabulous weekend parties, where it was not uncommon for him to have royalty as his guests.

  His career began …

  But Homer had read enough.

  “A jolly little crew,” he muttered. “I can well understand why Shipley invited little Homer there.”

  I kept my mouth shut, because I suspected what might be coming.

  “Oh, well,” he sighed. “I can’t blame her for wanting to become Mrs. Trum number six. Trum’s salty with lucre.”

  I leaned on my elbow and fell asleep.

  Homer smacked me awake in the cab, and pointed through the rear window.

  “We’re being tailed,” he said, chuckling.

  “You’re drunk,” I gurgled. “Who in hell would tail us?”

  “Two apelike gentlemen I spotted in the station. I have an uncanny instinct about that sort of thing. I have an idea they have a mission, sonny.”

  Homer wasn’t fooling. He signaled the cabby to stop about two blocks before his apartment. I caught a glimpse of the other cab, swinging to the curb about three blocks away. Two men hopped out.

  “Come,” said Homer, bracing me at the elbow.

  We jitterbugged down the street, like two stumblebums. Homer jerked me to a standstill before a store window. We pretended to window shop. The two gents on the next block stopped to chat under a lamp post.

  “That’s enough for me,” said Homer, guiding me briskly to the door. He paused for another instant to fumble with his little black book and stare up at the house number. Our two friends ducked into a convenient doorway. We skipped inside and nabbed an elevator.

  Shtunk Smith was waiting.

  “Geez,” said he. “I am happy you have come. I am slowly going nuts, Mr. Bull, Last Friday—”

  “Now,” said Homer, after his stogie was lit, “tell me what’s happened, Shtunk. Don’t stutter—don’t rush. I’d like to know what’s gone on since I left my little ivory tower in your lily white hands.”

  “Geez,” Shtunk said again. “It is away beyond me, I am sure. I am admitting that I took a few snifters too much. Friday, it was.”

  “Friday what was?”

  “I am up fairly early on Friday, see? It is eleven in the A.M. I go downstairs, like always, and right away, something is happening. I find a gink poking around in our mailbox, see?”

  Homer leaned forward. “You caught him?”

  “I do not catch him. He is plenty frightened when he perceives me. He runs. I run after him. He runs too fast. I make a resolve to lay off hard liquor.”

  “Did he get the mail?”

  The Shtunk grinned with pride. “He gets nothing but the air. I have stopped him in the nick of time, see? I open the box and carry the mail upstairs. Then I am putting on my thinking cap.”

  “Bravo!” said Homer.

  “I am thinking like this,” said the Shtunk. “I am thinking, what would Mr. Bull do, if he was me? It comes to me in a flash. I decide I will stay home on account of some item in that mailbox is maybe worth a trip to the pen. You follow me?”

  Homer nodded. “So far, so noble.”

  “It is here the trouble starts.” The Shtunk lowered his eyes. “I decide I am hungry, which I am. I phone the delicatessen for some grub. Then I decide that I am also thirsty. Likewise, I phone McKibbon’s Bar for a few bottles of you-know-what. I wait until the food comes. I eat. I have a snifter with my grub, of course.”

  “Of course,” I chirped.

  “Of course,” said Homer.

  The Shtunk fidgeted. “After grub, I do the dishes. I also have a bottle in the kitchen on account of I do not like to massage the dishes. It helps. I come back in the studio and see the mail. I examine it. I see one letter from a bank. I see a postcard from your sister. I see another letter from this Shipley guy. Right then I decide what to do.” He paused to light a cigarette. “I decide it is smart if I am to hide this Shipley letter, on account of because the other two is null and void.”

  “Geez!” I yapped. “All that thinking come out of you, Shtunk?”

  The Shtunk frowned. “You will please button your lip, MacAndrew!” He turned to Homer. “I take th
e Shipley letter and hide it. I do a good job. Then I feel like my conscience is clear. I settle down to finish that bottle of Scotch. I work at that bottle all night, but I win out.”

  “And the next day?” I asked.

  “The next day, in the afternoon, I am up again,” said the Shtunk. “And right here is the first phone call coming in.”

  “That was Saturday afternoon?”

  “That is correct. The phone is waking me up. I yap: ‘Hello?’ Some gent asks me if I am Homer Bull. I say: ‘No. He will be back presently.’ Then I call the delicatessen again, on account of I am hungry. The same business again happens, mostly because I am going nuts from listening to the radio. By ten o’clock I am once more in bed and also the second bottle of Scotch is gone.”

  “It is Sunday afternoon when, you get up?” Homer smiled.

  “It is Sunday night. The phone has done it again. Again some mutt asks for Homer Bull. He is no gent this time. He hangs up on me right away.” The Shtunk reddened. “Here is the spot where I begin to go nuts. I decide that maybe I should read this Shipley letter on account of it might be important. I search high and low. It is gone.”

  “You lost it?” Homer snapped

  The Shtunk was hurt.

  “I do not lose it. I misplace it, see? I have forgot where I slipped it. All Sunday night I search for that damn letter. It is one in the morning when I find it. I have put it in the icebox, with ice cubes. I forget it because I never use the cubes for Scotch, see? I read it. It sounds important. Then I go nuts trying to find your address. This I have really lost. I cannot send you a wire, until I call Queens Features, where I get the name of your dump in Virginia.” He paused. “That is all which happens until this morning in the A.M. Seven o’clock the phone is ringing. I am plenty mad on account of it has woke me up so early. It rings again at eight. Seven times it rings. It is always the same voice which is asking me the same question and then hanging up on me.”

  Homer’s little black book was out. “When was the last call?”

  “I am saving this last phone call for the topper,” grinned the Shtunk. “The last call is happening only twenty minutes ago. It is the same gink, but this time I do not wait for him to talk. I am ready for him, see? Before he can open his yap, I say: ‘Go to hell, you crud!’ I hear the gink begin to curse. I hang up then. I guess that wise apple will not bother you any more, Mr. Bull.”