Contents
Cover
Also by Michael Kurland
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also Available from Titan Books
Coming Soon from Titan Books
ALSO BY MICHAEL KURLAND
THE ALEXANDER BRASS MYSTERIES
Too Soon Dead
THE PROFESSOR MORIARTY NOVELS
The Infernal Device
Death By Gaslight
The Great Game
The Empress of India
Who Thinks Evil
The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes
Print edition ISBN: 9781783295388
E-book edition ISBN: 9781783295395
Published by Titan Books
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First Titan edition: February 2016
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 1998, 2016 by Michael Kurland. All rights reserved.
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To Linda…
…because
I am for Broadway when the moon is low
And magic weaves along the fabled street
For I can search for ghosts of long ago
When time was slow and violins were sweet.
And few there are who note the haunted eyes
That hint of dreams too gossamer to last
And few there are when youth and beauty dies
Who bar the benediction of the past…
Phillip Stack
INTRODUCTION
My father was a reader. He read everything from historical novels to detective stories to encyclopedias, even a few science fiction novels and an occasional racing form. And I grew up reading through his library, Samuel Pepys Diary, The Saint Meets the Tiger, Adventures in Time and Space (the Healy & McComas anthology that turned me on to science fiction—still a great book), The Three Musketeers, and whole shelves of wonderful fiction and essays from the 1930s. When I decided that I wanted to become a writer, at the age of 10, the people I wanted to emulate were Cole Porter, Samuel Hoffenstein (“the Poet Laureate of Brooklyn”), Noel Coward, Dorothy Sayers, Rex Stout, Dashiell Hammett, and especially Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker. (And, I must admit, Mark Twain and Gilbert and Sullivan, but I digress.)
In my imaginings I would have an apartment on Central Park South, right across the way from George, or possibly Ira Gershwin, and spend the days in happy banter with Benchley, Thurber, Parker, and the staff of The New Yorker. In the evenings, if I wasn’t attending the opening of a new Sam and Bella Spewack play, I would sit down at my Underwood Standard and type out deathless prose. If only I had a time machine. And, of course, modern antibiotics.
The Alexander Brass novels are the offspring of my love affair with the 1930s. I have him as a columnist for the New York World, a fine newspaper which, in real life, died in 1931 over an inheritance dispute, and which had a sign over the city editor’s desk: “Never write down to your readers—anybody stupider than you can’t read.”
The title of the second book, The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes, comes from a 1930s era toast my mother taught me:
Here’s to the girls in the high-heeled shoes
That eat our dinners and drink our booze
And hug and kiss us until we smother
And then go home to sleep with mother!
Perhaps a bit non PC for today, but certainly heartfelt.
In the tales of Alexander Brass I have tried to recreate the feel, the atmosphere, of what it was like to be alive in the 1930s, to be part of a generation that was forced to grow up fast in the middle of a great depression, and who developed that rarest of talents, the ability to laugh at themselves.
MICHAEL KURLAND
12 February 2015
1
Two-Headed Mary had been missing for three days before anyone noticed that she wasn’t around. Another day passed before her absence was taken seriously, and Cholly-on-the-Corner was sent to look for her. He checked at her usual pitches in front of some of Broadway’s better theaters, and some that were not so better. He talked to the bartenders at the between-the-acts joints in which she was known to imbibe and the waitresses at Schrafft’s restaurant on Broadway and 44th, where she was known to lunch. He spoke to some Broadway citizens who were known to be acquainted with the lady. He didn’t find her.
Alexander Brass and I were having a late supper at the Knickerbocker Grill on 54th and Sixth and listening to Benny Goodman and his boys make music on the bandstand, which is, after all, Brass’s job, and he is my boss, when Cholly came over to the table to tell us about it. “I am on da glim fer Two-Headed Mary,” he told us, plopping into the empty seat at our table without bothering to ask. “She ain’t been where she’s supposed ta be at fer a nummer a’ days now, an’ some a’ her friends ah startin’ ta worry so’s dey ast me ta put out da woid.”
(That’s kind of close to Cholly’s diction, but I’d need to use the phonetic alphabet to transcribe it accurately, and I don’t know the phonetic alphabet, so’s youse will have to settle for something closer to standard English since de udder gets tiresome quickly.)
Brass took a bite of steak and chewed it thoughtfully. “That’s odd,” he said. “I don’t think Mary has missed more than five matinee days in the past five years. She certainly never missed two in a row. She hasn’t been seen around the Street?”
“She ain’t been on the pitch anywhere what anyone’s seen her at it. And she’s kind of hard to miss.”
“And she’s not at home?”
“I don’t know,” Cholly said seriously. “Where does she live?”
Brass looked at Cholly and Cholly looked at Brass. Cholly is a big man, large in all dimensions; but you wouldn’t call him fat. Not if you were standing anywhere within reach of his ham-sized fists, you wouldn’t. He had been a prizefighter for a while, where he was known as Charles “the Mountain” Finter, and perfected the art of falling down. He fought some of the big names in his day: Dempsey, Tunney, and some others, and mostly he lost; but he quit one day when his head stopped hur
ting. “Your head’s supposed to hurt when you get hit,” he explained. “When you can’t feel it, it’s time to find another racket.”
“Are you just passing the time,” Brass asked, “or is there something you and yours think I should do about this absence?”
“I thought if you was to mention it in your column—you know, about her being gone—then maybe someone what has seen her might own up to it, her being missing and all.”
We paused for a moment to applaud Mr. Goodman as the last exuberant riffs of “Sing, Sing, Sing” died away and he and his boys left the bandstand for a well-deserved break. Ambrose, our waiter, appeared at the table with a teacup and saucer, and handed it to Cholly, who took a careful sip from the cup and put it down.
“Prohibition’s been over almost two years now, Cholly,” Brass said, grinning. “You don’t have to drink it out of a teacup any more.”
“It is tea, Mr. Brass,” Cholly explained, offering the cup for examination. “I ain’t supposed to drink nothing stronger than tea. I got a ulcer, and sometimes I spits blood.”
Brass sighed. “Drink your tea,” he told Cholly. “I have no objection to putting an item about Mary in my column, but supposing she’s gone off somewhere on private business and she doesn’t want anyone to know about it?”
“Then she should of left word around the Street that she’d be gone,” Cholly said seriously. “She knows she’s got friends on the Street what would worry about her.”
My boss is Alexander Brass, and his syndicated column “Brass Tacks” goes out to a couple of hundred papers around the country and a few in Canada. He instructs his readers on the State of the World and reports on strange things occurring in distant places; but mostly he tells about happenings on the Great White Way and comments on the hijinks of the high and mighty; particularly those high in the hierarchy of the show business or mighty in the related fields of politics or crime. Within the past couple of weeks he has written about President Roosevelt, Dutch Schultz, Mussolini, Fanny Brice, Harpo Marx, the Prince of Wales, Billy Rose, and New York’s latest phenomenon, Special Prosecutor Thomas A. Dewey (whom he referred to as “that dapper crime fighter,” prompting a phone call from one of Dewey’s aides wondering whether that was good or bad).
Brass fiddled thoughtfully with his brandy and water. “Who is it that is so upset at her absence?” he asked.
“Some of the chorines in Dames, Dames, Dames, which is at the Alhambra, put me on to it,” Cholly explained. “You know she helps out the girls when they needs it. When a girl is between shows and hasn’t got the rent or what to eat, she’s good for a five-spot. Or when a girl has serious boyfriend trouble, like black eyes or a fat lip, Mary will call me and I’ll go over and give the boyfriend a reason or two to keep his hands in his pockets.”
“I didn’t know you were so noble, Cholly,” I said. “We ought to do an item on you.”
Cholly swung around. “And maybe not,” he said, holding his thumb an inch from my nose.
I raised my hands in quick surrender. “Sorry,” I said. “It was just an idea. Besides, Mr. Brass does all the deciding around here, I’m just an errand boy.”
“So Two-Headed Mary’s been money-lender to the theatrical community,” Brass mused. “I didn’t know panhandling was so lucrative.”
“Yeah,” Cholly agreed. “Me, too. But that’s what the girls tells me.”
Cholly-on-the-Corner, now probably in his mid-forties, has become a theatrical hanger-on. But he is more than tolerated by those he hangs about; he is valued. It started when he quit professional boxing and became a carny attraction. He gave exhibition bouts, and offered ten dollars to anyone who could stay in the ring two rounds against him. “It could of been one round,” he said, “but I wanted to give the audience their dime’s worth.” Then he got a job as a walk-on in The Fighting Maxwells, to add color to the prizefight scene in the second act. When Simon Wilder, the director, found out that he really had been a fighter, Wilder hired him to show matinee idol Walter Fitzbreen, who played Minton Maxwell, the hero, how to look like he knew what he was doing in the ring. When the show closed, after a six-month run, Cholly was hired by Jack Barrymore to be his personal trainer and keep him sober for a few months until he (Barrymore) went out to Los Angeles to make a movie.
By then he was hooked, and he spent his days in and about those legitimate theaters from 43rd Street to 56th Street, between Sixth and Tenth Avenues, that are collectively known as “Broadway.” He did odd jobs, subbed for missing workers, chased away overly amorous stage-door johnnies, behaved with the utmost decorum at all times, and was absolutely trustworthy with whatever a producer or house manager or chorine chose to trust him with. He got his nickname because, when he wasn’t in a theater, he hung out at a papaya juice stand on the corner of 54th and Seventh Avenue. There came a time when he was needed at the Belasco Theater regularly, and Eddie Panglitch, the house manager, would turn to someone and say, “Go and get Cholly on the corner and tell him I want him.”
We chatted over a range of subjects while Brass finished his steak, and Cholly his tea. We discussed the attempted assassination of “the Kingfish,” Senator Huey Long, last night in Baton Rouge. Some doctor had accosted the senator in a hallway in the state capitol and put a couple of bullets in his stomach. The doctor had promptly been blown away by three of the Kingfish’s State Police bodyguards. Some people thought it was political; Long’s populist Share the Wealth clubs were rising in membership and popularity, making him a powerful contender for the presidency in the next election. It was an open question as to whether the Republicans or the Democrats were more scared of him. The opinion of the local reporters, a cynical lot, was that he had hopped out of the wrong bed.
“I don’t know why the guy shot him,” Cholly ventured, “but I been reading about how funny it was that he went everywhere with his bodyguard, even into the Senate. But now I guess it ain’t so funny no more.”
We talked about the Max Baer-James J. Braddock title bout at Madison Square Garden a couple of months ago (Braddock won on a decision after fifteen rounds; Baer was gypped, Cholly asserted. Brass, who had had a ringside seat, agreed. I missed that one, but I agreed on general principles: I had met Max Baer and I liked him) and the Joe Louis-Primo Carnera bout two weeks later in the same arena (Louis K.O.’d the ex-champion in the sixth. He might become the next Negro World Champion, according to Cholly, if Braddock, the bum, agrees to fight him. Brass and I had both been at that one. Brass agreed with Cholly. I am no judge of such things, but from what I saw anyone climbing into the ring against Mr. Louis had better have made out his will and said goodbye to his nearest and dearest). The conversation then switched to the decline of the American theater for a little while, until Benny Goodman and his boys were making their way back to the bandstand. Then Cholly-on-the-Corner got up, solemnly shook hands with Brass and me, and departed.
“Well, what are you going to do?” I asked Brass.
“About what?”
“About Two-Headed Mary. Are you going to do a mention about her being gone?”
“Of course,” Brass told me. “‘Philanthropist panhandler missing.’ My readers will eat it up. If she doesn’t reappear soon I can do a paragraph on it once a month for the next year. Then, on the first anniversary of her disappearance, I’ll write a full-column ‘Mysterious Disappearance’ story. Feature writers will add her to the pantheon of perpetual missing persons like Judge Crater and Ambrose Bierce. We can have the whole country out looking for her. Boy scouts in Topeka and volunteer fire departments through Ohio and Indiana will send out search parties to examine deserted quarries and peer down closed mine shafts. I wonder whether anyone has actually ever been found in a deserted quarry or down a closed mine shaft.”
Brass sipped his brandy and contemplated the follies of the human race. “But it will probably amount to very little. The odds are that Mary is just sleeping off a binge in some Bowery hotel or smoking the dream pipe in one of those dives off Mott Street, an
d she’ll show up in the next few days on her own.”
“Maybe she’s been carried off by Indians like Evangeline, or has ran off with her secret lover like Aimie Semple McPherson or stolen a bunch of money like Billie Trask,” I suggested. “That should be good for some copy.”
“‘Evangeline’ is a poem by Longfellow,” Brass corrected me with the sigh of a long-suffering pedant. “You’re probably thinking of Virginia Dare, who was the first English child born in North America. She vanished with the rest of the settlers on Roanoke Island sometime before 1591.”
“That must be the lady I meant,” I agreed.
Benny Goodman blew a tentative E-flat.
“And the fact that Miss Trask was working in the box office of the Monarch Theater and disappeared at the same time as the box-office receipts doesn’t mean she took them. There are several other explanations for her disappearance and the vanishing money that are not being considered by the authorities, or by my fellow journalists.”
“They might have information you don’t,” I suggested.
“I’m sure they do,” Brass agreed. “They must know the color of the girl’s eyes and hair, her weight, the names of her intimates, and what small town in Indiana, or wherever, she’s from. But they don’t know, and neither do you nor I, whether she has that money.”
This was part of an ongoing discussion between us. We’d been following the case in the papers and speculating on it since the story broke. The consensus was that Trask had taken the money, but Brass has never been a consensus player. “She’s been gone two weeks now,” I said. “My bet is when they catch up with her, she’s got the missing dough in her girdle.”
“I doubt if she wears a girdle,” Brass said. “Remember, she was a dancer in the Lucky Lady company until she hurt her leg.”
“Well, at least I was right about Aimee,” I said.
“At least,” Brass agreed. “Let’s hope Two-Headed Mary has a secret lover; I could do something with that. But right now I’m going on to the Stork Club. With luck somebody whose name is known to the common man will be throwing drunken punches at someone even more famous for insulting his wife or girlfriend, or Roosevelt, or the League of Nations, or Gypsy Rose Lee, and I’ll have the opener for a think piece about the vagaries of human conduct. I feel like doing a think piece, it requires so little thought. You go on home, if you like.”
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