More significantly, he kept Max on the story. “Find the chief cook and bottle washer and interview her. If you run her down, and she’ll stand for it, we’ll order up an illo.” Parnell would never break down and say something as simple as “nice work,” but the promise of an illustration was worth far more.
Max raced back to the bookstore and left a message for the Midnight Band’s leader, the so-called Mrs. Edwards. That evening he cruised the 19th. The swollen cat population looked as healthy as ever. A three-foot-high garbage mound on 24th Street had attracted several warring tomcats. At the bottom of a stairwell, a gray with a white chest was nursing her mewling brood. A black cat darted under a wagon. An old warlord with a tattered ear sauntered right across the sidewalk. Max couldn’t stop seeing cats, but their enemies were nowhere in sight.
Sergeant Morris hadn’t heard of any slayings that evening either. Schreiber said the Midnight Band was making itself scarce for a reason.
“John Law’s after their skinny necks. They’re scared outta their wool drawers now,” the patrolman speculated. Max wondered if he’d squeezed the story dry.
At the dinner table, Danny was the first to point out Max’s article. “A good piece of work, but don’t tell me you didn’t gild the lily.” In a complicated dance, the corner of Swarms’s mouth rose, as did the lines in his forehead, indicating he wasn’t in the least bit serious.
“I was this close to the woman.” Max touched index finger to thumb.
“Why didn’t you stop her?” Belle asked. She hated to admit her fascination. Wasn’t Max’s tale exacdy the kind of cheap sensationalism her boyfriend Jake always railed against?
Max shot back, “Oh, I did, after I got over the shock of it.” A white lie, but what was he supposed to say?
“I picked up a turn at Tony Pastor’s,” Danny announced, raising his fluffy eyebrows. “Just a fill-in.”
“Oh, that’s marvelous,” Gretta said. “What will you do?”
Max was impressed. In Pastor’s high-class acts, the women covered up and the comics toned down their blue material. It was a big step up for Danny, who usually scrambled in the concert saloons and begged singing waiters to try out his songs.
“The usual, but fresh.”
“Hey, we’ll all catch you. We’ll drag Faye along too,” Max said. Was Danny on a joyride with Faye, or was it more serious? Then he thought of his sister’s smeared eyebrows, her puffy face, the milk stains on her Chinese robe. Maybe he shouldn’t ask any questions.
“Why not? Make a party. We can go to Pete’s over on Irving Place later.”
“Your sister? The one you two are always talking about?” Belle asked.
“Fabulous Faye,” Danny replied. “Another night, we can go see her show.”
A spirit of affection suffused the atmosphere. They all knew that Danny had knocked on a thousand doors and that a turn at Pastor’s was a great break. Swarms had so many strikes against him—his premature baldness, his putty-like face, his slight frame, his poverty—yet his talent made a man forget these deficiencies. As Danny basked in glory, Max flushed, as if the date at Tony Pastor’s were his too. If he felt a twinge of jealousy, and he did, he was only human.
Faye would be a fool to drive Swarms away, especially now. She had already run through an aspiring clog dancer, a dog trainer, and a mind-reader from Flushing who was willing to put her into his act. Every time she jettisoned one of these Lotharios, Max was secretly thrilled, though he made sure to act irritated. Danny Swarms was so perfect for her, though, and for him too. A brother-in-law and a drinking buddy all rolled into one.
His little sister Faye ran like a groove through the center of his brain. She had had scarlet fever when she was five, and he still remembered the heat of her forehead under his palm. Certain she was going to die, he locked himself in a closet and cried with his fist in his mouth. Naphtha fumes had burned his eyes.
An older Faye threw her report card into a storm drain, and he’d had to organize three friends and a crowbar to retrieve it. She liked to pinch and scratch, she came to school with wax teeth in her mouth, and she learned piano at her friend Marsha’s flat. Once Faye’s straightened out…. The phrase had a practical sound to it. He just hadn’t found the right formula.
A flood of angry letters poured into the Herald offices, though not all of them were critical of the Midnight Band. Happy to keep the controversy boiling, The Herald printed these missives and their calls to arms several days running.
Speculation ran high that the cat killers were in it for the money. One letter writer argued that “a catgut, divided into sixty-one threads by the professional violin string maker, furnishes four E strings at 30 cents each, 15 D strings at 40 cents and seven A strings at 25 cents each, for a total of $8.95. These women are making a very nice dollar.”
A litde girl wrote to say that unless the Midnight Band was put out of business, she and her pussy would move to the country. A Waverly Place resident demanded that the miscreants be brought to justice. Still, Mrs. Warner stirred up more support than Max had expected.
An insomniac wrote, “All honor and glory to Mrs. Warner, the cat killer. Send her down to Clinton Place and receive the blessings of one who cannot sleep at night by reason of the midnight racket made by cats.”
Though he still wasn’t getting a salary, Max claimed his far-corner desk every morning, ostentatiously typing useless notes when he had no serious business to transact. Copy boys raced up and down the narrow aisles, reporters banged away on their upright typewriters, clusters of men waited their turn at Parnell’s throne. Cigar smoke rose, bells rang, voices bellowed. Nowhere else did he feel more at home.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Edwards and Mrs. Warner eluded him. No one seemed to know where they lived. Max inquired at Superintendent Byrnes’s office on Mulberry Street, but the police department’s upper echelons showed litde interest in the case. Finally, after camping out at the police chief’s door, Max was rewarded with word from an assistant. “We’re looking into it, but we got our hands full with the two-legged beasts.”
He spent the weekend roaming the Waverly Place area and the 19th, but there were no fresh Midnight Band outbreaks. Parnell wasn’t giving him any new assignments either, and the story was dying.
His mood grew darker. Of ail things to pin his hopes on! A few madwomen and piles of dead cats. He’d always been prone to sudden shifts in his spirits. Most of the time, he pushed his terrors into a corner of his mind and pretended they didn’t exist. He’d stay on an even keel for weeks at a time, but when the horrors started leaking out, he’d plunge right down a black shaft. Only Faye knew about these panics, and only Faye could talk him out of them. She understood how to take him seriously and make fun of him at the same time, and soon his heebie-jeebies would fade. Only his fear’s ghost would remain, all the more frightening because it lived on, disconnected but eternal.
He treated the cat saga lightly at the boardinghouse table, but interest there had grown intense. Even Mrs. DeVogt had become less dismissive. At least she had stopped referring to him as a typist. Only Gretta failed to show any regard for his tale. In his black humor, he didn’t wonder why. She was a tennis-playing Staten Island beauty. Why should she be interested in him?
By an act of will, he managed to stop gazing at her across the table, engaging anyone else in dinner conversation before addressing her. Following her into the hall, he watched her smooth, graceful walk, the way her dress flared out, her square shoulders. If he looped his arms around that waist and pressed her to him, he would feel the full shape of her breasts, her hips, her thighs. All of his proud resistance melted away.
When she actually touched his wrist, a shock ran right up his arm. She smiled at him with a sympathy she had never shown before. At first he didn’t notice the envelope in her hand. “Martin sent you this note. He’s been reading your stories, and he thinks he can help you.”
“What gave him that idea?”
Laughing, she replied, “I haven’t the sl
ightest idea, but he seems to think you’re quite the character, Mr. Greengrass.” Her tone was mildly skeptical. “I had to remind him that I dine with you regularly.”
He stood there dumbly, looking down at the expensive stationery. Why couldn’t he think of something to say? He was never at a loss for words. “You look beautiful tonight,” he blurted. Too blunt! His cheeks burned.
She seemed to take his remark in stride, though. “Thank you, but I’m really all dragged out from work.”
Why was she working so hard? It dawned on him that her circumstances might not be as comfortable as he had assumed. “Why don’t you take a few days off?”
“Well, there’s too much business at the moment. I can’t exactly walk away from my job.” She must have sensed his surprise, because she went on quietly. “My father passed away a few years ago, so I contribute. To my mother. And my uncle does too. He’s a sea captain. Now, he’s quite a character!”
In one exchange she shattered all of Max’s preconceptions. Why hadn’t he asked her these questions before?
They had to stand close to one another in the narrow, awkward space, but Gretta didn’t draw back. Perhaps she didn’t mind.
“Sorry about your father.”
“Oh, don’t be. It was hard, but time…. He’s the one who taught me to take pictures in the first place. He was a chemist….”
“Ahh. And Martin, what does he do exactly?” On their pub crawl, Mourtone had dodged every question on the subject.
“Oh, he’s in his fathers insurance office. They have him going around collecting weekly premiums to learn the ropes, but he despises it.”
“He has a territory?”
“Yes, from Thompson Street west. Part of it is called Little Africa, I think.”
“A small part, now,” Max said absently.
Max knew the area well. It had the highest tuberculosis rate in the city. In rear tenements where blacks and Italians were living ten to a windowless room, the white lung ran wild. These same people were the most likely to eat tuberculosis tainted meat and drink cholera-infected milk.
“He can’t possibly be selling insurance policies on Thompson Street, can he?” Max asked.
“Maybe not there. But the policies only cost a few cents a week. Some of the people who are a little better off take them, I think. I know he loathes his work.”
He couldn’t summon up much pity for Martin Mourtone, but he said, “It must be very unpleasant for him.”
“Yes, it is. Well, I hope you’ll confide in me if Martin’s information is worthwhile. I couldn’t pry a word out of him.”
“Of course, but we get dozens of leads….”
After she left, he lingered in the hall, breathing her perfume. He liked to think he was no novice when it came to women, but Gretta’s beauty made him go weak in strange places. The backs of his knees, deep in his chest. Now that he knew she needed every dime, she seemed less ethereal, and that excited him even more.
Idly, he ripped open Martin’s envelope. The note said, “It’s a vicious joke, but it might explain things. I can meet you tomorrow at Stephenson’s on Bleecker at about 2. Nobody we know goes there.” No salutation, no signature, just Mourtone’s barely legible scrawl.
Martin was right about Stephenson’s. The dive was a notorious black-and-tan, infamous for fostering relations between white women and any variety of the colored, from American Indians to Mexicans to local Negroes. For a slummer like Mourtone, the forbidden couplings no doubt added to Stephenson’s allure.
Max would have preferred an expensive drink at the new Metropole on Forty-Second. Through its tall windows, you could see every hot bird in town strut past.
You had to be careful about what you drank in a stale-beer dive like Stephenson’s. The management was renowned for its skill with knockout drops. Who cared about the black-and-tan’s clientele? They were perfect marks. Many were seamen off foreign vessels, the rest bootblacks, barbers, coal shovelers, rag men, and members of the lost sisterhood. Naturally, the police levied a small tithe on the establishment. That Stephenson’s had been open twenty-four hours a day for over a dozen years demonstrated its high standing in the community.
Early the next morning, Parnell sent Max out to Williamsburg to cover a story: two hundred steers had dodged the Johnson Avenue slaughterhouse and were stampeding up and down Bedford Avenue. At noon he interviewed Dr. Alphonse M. Wallace, whose arm had swollen to twice its normal size after a Bellevue patient bit him to protest a diagnosis. By the time he knocked out these stories, he was running twenty minutes behind schedule.
It took Max’s eyes a moment to adjust to Stephenson’s shrouded interior. The joint was eerily quiet. He searched the gloomy interior for some sign of Mourtone. The deeper he penetrated, the stronger grew the smell of musty beer and piss. A bartender in a stained apron stood stock-still, a rag in his hand, and the single patron, a black man in work clothes, stared at Max wide-eyed, in apparent shock.
A fluttering gas light revealed a bar framed by a pair of husky, tooled pillars. Behind the bartender, a ragged collection of liquor bottles reflected the faint illumination. Max heard the shuffle of his own feet in the sawdust and the sound of his own shallow breathing. In a chair whose back tilted against the scarred wall, Martin perched, his head flung back. Too far.
Max could only see the lower part of his face, his exposed nostrils, his down-curved mouth, his pointy chin, his young, sharp Adam’s apple. A painting of a schooner hung off-kilter behind Martin’s head. There was something about the way he was balanced back on the chair, and the way the picture tilted in the opposite direction, that gave Max vertigo. Fighting the urge to toss his dinner, he edged closer. The scratched wall looked moist. Max didn’t want to look too closely, but the back part of Mourtone’s head seemed to be missing. Yet the mask of his face was still intact. His lips were half-parted in an ambiguous expression. In death he stared, his eyes without light, at a vague middle distance.
A dented, liver-colored hat had skidded to the far end of the table. An ash-tipped cigar lay dead beside Mourtone’s curled fingers.
“Did you see what happened?” Max’s voice sounded thin, not his own.
“What right’s he got comin’ in here?” the bartender replied. He had a flat plate of a face, small black eyes, and a voluminous mustache spilling down toward a prognathous jaw. Pink at the nostrils, his nose lay flat in the heart of his face.
Clearly terrified, the African remained frozen at the bar. A spattering of white marks on his cheek looked like burns from hot fat.
“You saw what happened?” Max asked again. How could he go home and tell Gretta? He didn’t want to see her face crumple, he didn’t want to know how much she might have loved this lifeless body.
The bartender deflected his question. “He a pal of yours?”
“Acquaintance.” Of course, the police would inform Mourtone’s parents. It wasn’t his responsibility. But Gretta knew he was going to meet Martin. How could he dodge her questions? He would have to find some conventional words and manage to behave in a conventional way. And never reveal that some small part of him was elated that his rival had suddenly ceased to exist.
Then he thought of that night at the Hoffman House, Martin’s glee as he tore apart the stuffy Century, his half-baked plans, his praise for Gretta’s pictures. And now he was nothing but a husk. Acid scalded the back of Max’s throat.
“I got Sodder’s warehouse knockin’ off work in a few minutes, you think those boys’ll wanna have some laughs with that thing around?”
“What about you?” Max addressed the husky, yellow-eyed black man. His overalls, missing the hook on the left strap, were nothing but patches.
“He’s a deaf and dummy, he don’t know shit,” the bartender cut in.
Still as a statue, the Negro didn’t react. Maybe the rag was telling the truth. Max figured the odds at one in ten.
“Did you see who shot him?” Slowly, Max swam through the stifling atmosphere toward the bar. S
tunned, he was still operating like a newsman. He felt like a ghoul, but he could turn Mourtone’s murder into a major item. Martin’s ambiguous note. Its connection to the cat killings. The dead man’s social standing. The father’s flourishing business. As a lurid setting, Stephenson’s would play perfectly. Parnell would love it.
Despite the realization of his good fortune, Max had to fight waves of nausea, swallowing to keep down the bile that threatened to pulse straight up his throat. He hadn’t seen a corpse in a while, and he had asked all the wrong questions about that one.
Stephenson’s bartender swiped his flattened nose with the back of his forearm. “Look, I got no Western Union here, I can’t leave the joint. Why don’t you be a good feller, run over to the station house and bring the au-thor-o-ties.”
Max put both hands on the bar and straightened his shoulders. “Listen, I’m from the Herald. What did you see?”
“Ain’t you my favorite turd? Every minute he’s layin there, I lose business. I don’t talk to no newspapers. Get me Johnny Law.”
When the rag ducked down, Max knew what was coming. By the time he heard the slung shot slap against the bartender’s palm, Max was already backing away. “All right, don’t get so hot. I’m on my way.”
A drizzle muted the afternoon light. A few sticks of wood and canvas protected Stephenson’s doorway. Max caught his breath, making a point of not running. He wouldn’t give the sonofabitch the satisfaction. Instead, he squared his shoulders and fixed his hat. Police headquarters was located on Mulberry, blocks south of Houston, but Max didn’t trust any of the local buttons. He was better off going straight to the top.
A detective would understand that Mourtone came from a well-connected family and that the department had to jump to. Then Max could follow the police back to Stephenson’s to get a look at the bartender’s face when he was forced to talk. Even if the cops barred him from the interrogation, he could quote the investigator and insert his own observations as well. He could play up Martin’s note in the lead, tying the insurance agent’s homicide to the wave of cat killings.
The Midnight Band of Mercy Page 6