Schreiber glared pugnaciously at Brass. “Will we?” He asked. “And just who are you?”
“My name is Alexander Brass, and this is Mr. DeWitt. We’re friends of Miss Lelane.”
“It’s all right, Normy,” Sandra said, appearing in the doorway. “Mr. Brass is right. Let’s not make a fuss about this.”
“If you say so,” Schreiber said, but he clearly was not convinced. He stared about him indecisively for a moment and then made up his mind. “I’ll be downstairs,” he said. “I’ll see you again before you leave.” He tiptoed around the debris and left.
“I think Field Marshal Ponce is in for a hard time,” I opined.
Brass crossed the room and squatted amid the pile of books that had been pulled from the bookcase. “Mary—you don’t mind if I keep calling her Mary, do you?—had quite an eclectic taste in her reading,” he said, picking up some of the books at random and looking at them. “Jane Austen, Dos Passos, Shaw, Cervantes, Mark Twain, Edgar Wallace, Dorothy Sayers, Dawn Powell…” He cleared a space and sat on the floor. He was lost in the world of books, and it would be some time before he emerged. Brass treated books with the same reverence with which he treated women; and if there was anything he held in higher regard than books or women, I had not noticed it in the four years I had worked for him.
I followed Sandra back into the interior of the apartment as she stalked from room to room surveying the damage. There were eight or nine rooms, including a dining room, two bedrooms, a butler’s pantry, and a maid’s room with its own bath off the kitchen. I was gaining more respect for Brooklyn. “Swell digs,” I told Sandra.
She glanced at me. “Not at the moment,” she said.
Sandra went through the rooms slowly, touching this and that, straightening an occasional object, checking some of the things to see if they were broken, and cursing under her breath when one of them, an oversized cup that, for some reason was in her mother’s bedroom, proved to be cracked. None of the rooms had been spared the vandal’s touch, and no object was too small to have been dumped onto the floor.
The door to the other bedroom was closed, and I had a momentary queasy feeling opening it, remembering that the last time I had viewed a ransacked apartment there had been a corpse behind one of the closed doors. But this one was merely a continuation of the established theme, two dressers with drawers pulled out and piled by the bed, and a tangle of sheets, pillowcases, clothing, and cosmetics on the bed. “Your room?” I asked Sandra.
“A long time ago,” she said. She went over to the bed and stared down at the jumble. After a moment she reached down and retrieved a much-worn stuffed animal of indeterminate species, and clutched it to her chest. “Binny,” she said defensively, eyeing me as though she thought I was going to protest at a grown woman clutching a stuffed toy. “It’s my Binny.”
“Your Binny?”
“That’s a good sign,” Sandra said.
“Of course it is,” I agreed. We continued our perusal of the wreckage.
“She was looking for something,” Sandra said as we rounded back to the living room. “But she didn’t find it.”
Brass was still on the floor, leafing through the pile of books. “Something small,” he said. “Whoever did this looked through all the books, and you can’t hide anything large in a book.”
“You could cut out the inside and glue what’s left of the pages together,” I suggested. “I’ve seen that.”
Brass looked pained. “But still,” he said, “some of the books that have been examined are quite slender.”
“Perhaps she merely looked at the shelf behind them,” Sandra suggested.
“No,” Brass said. “Watch.” He got up and stuck some books back on the shelf. “If she, or, I rather suspect, they, were merely vandals or had just wanted to search behind the books”—he brushed the books aside, and they scattered to the floor, several landing facedown and open and one losing its dust jacket.
Brass quickly retrieved the books and gently closed them. “Oh pardon me thou crumpled piece of print,” he said.
“Mr. Brass feels about books the way mother eagles feel about their eggs,” I told Sandra.
“But these books were not scattered,’ Brass said, carefully returning the books in his hand to a shelf, “they are in a pile, where each was dropped after it was gone through.” He demonstrated, leafing through a copy of The Maltese Falcon and dropping it on the pile by his side. “Our vandals were searching for something that could be hidden in a book.”
“Like what?” I asked, “the deed to the silver mine?”
“Knowing my mom,” Sandra said, “it could be exactly that. The greatest silver mine in all the land, hitherto kept secret and out of production by the big silver interests. But now the Colonel is determined to give the little guy an even break.”
“What colonel?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter. And the stock will be printed on thick, creamy paper. And the company will have an evocative name.”
“Evoking what?” Brass asked.
“Trust,” Sandra said. “Trust and great wealth. Like ‘The Prince of Wales Mine,’ with his portrait on the certificates—after all, he does have an American girlfriend, or ‘The Four Kings and an Ace Mine’—names suggesting that the property was won in a card game are very effective or ‘The Silver Bullion Mine.’”
“What makes you think they didn’t find what they were looking for—whatever it is?” I asked.
“Simple,” Brass answered for Sandra. “Our searchers have torn the whole apartment apart. If they had found whatever they sought, they would have stopped there.”
“Right,” Sandra said.
“Of course,” I agreed.
“But they didn’t get Binny!” Sandra hugged her well-worn stuffed animal with the innocent, all-encompassing pleasure of an eight-year-old.
Brass shelved a few more books and turned to look at Sandra. “Is that a bear?” he asked politely.
“Binny’s a raccoon,” she told him.
“Binny?”
“As in bindle,” she told him, holding up the beast for his examination.
“Ah!” he said. “A bindle. And is it?”
I dropped into a clear spot on the sofa. “A what?” I asked.
“It’s been my mom’s bindle for twenty years,” Sandra said.
“And they went right by it.”
“As they were supposed to,” Brass said. He turned to me and lectured—his favorite sport: “‘Bindle’ is a Carny term for a container holding your most precious possessions. It’s the bag of stuff you grab when your hotel room catches on fire. Hobos use the word for the sack holding all their worldly goods, since they have so few of them. If the sack is tied to the end of a staff, so they can carry it over their shoulder, the staff is called a ‘bindle stiff.’ In the grift a bindle is where you hide your poke, which makes it the repository for your secrets. I’ve always been fascinated by the way in which words take on divergent meanings according to the users’ needs.”
“Me, too,” I said.
“When I was a little kid Mom figured that one of my stuffed animals was a great hiding place. Let’s see if Mom has any secrets worth hiding these days.” Sandra parted the fur over the fuzzy beast’s stomach and unzipped a very thin zipper about four inches long, which had been cleverly concealed by the joint where the right leg joined the body. Reaching in to the body cavity, she removed four bankbooks and a small piece of yellow lined paper folded into quarters. We waited with well-concealed impatience while she examined her find.
She riffled through the bank books one by one and whistled sharply through her teeth. “Either the Orphans of Claustrophobia are doing even better than I thought, or Mom has taken up another hobby,” she said, passing the books to Brass. “There’s something over twenty thousand dollars in these.”
“A healthy nest egg,” Brass agreed. “What’s on the sheet of paper?”
She unfolded it. “It looks like an address.”
“Could it be where she is?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Sandra said.
Brass took the paper and looked at it. “Four-sixty-four Fenton. Does it mean anything to you?”
“No. I don’t even know where that is.”
“It conveys nothing to me either, but since she kept it carefully hidden, it must mean something,” he said, handing it back. “I assume this means that your mother wasn’t planning to stay away, or she would have taken Binny—or his contents—with her.”
Sandra Lelane stuck it and the bankbooks back into the raccoon, zipped it closed, and stuffed it into her oversized handbag. “I hope nothing’s happened to her, damn her!”
Brass took her hands in his and searched her face. “Are you all right?”
“I’ll be okay. It’s just—”
“We’ll find her,” Brass said. “At least we’ll give it a damn good try. This, here, proves nothing except that someone who knew Mary wasn’t home thought she had something she wanted.”
“But whoever it was had a key.”
“I don’t think so. What she had was a lock pick. There were slight scratch marks around the keyhole.”
“Oh. What does that mean?”
Brass shook his head. “Presumably that whoever entered here didn’t have your mother’s keys, but beyond that I have no idea. Incidently, do you have a recent photograph of your mother?”
“There’s probably one in her bedroom,” Sandra said. “Give me a moment.” She disappeared back into the interior of the apartment. A couple of minutes later she was back with an 8 x 10 photograph in stiff cardboard folder with the emblem of the Stork Club embossed on the cover. “This must be a recent one,” she said.
Most of the big nightclubs have house photographers; girls in brief costumes who come around and take your picture while you eat or dance or gaze soulfully into the eyes of your date. It’s a way of proving to the crowd back home that you were a big sport while visiting the big city. It costs five bucks a snap, and we blasé Gothamites usually don’t want to pay the tariff for a picture of us looking soused with a woman who is probably not our wife.
This photograph was a close shot of a man and woman sitting at a table against the wall. The man was wearing a tux, and had his face turned to whisper into the woman’s ear, so I couldn’t really tell what he looked like. The woman had on a low-cut evening gown with puffy shoulders and was very attractive. She might have been as old as forty, but I would have bet on a good five years younger. She was laughing in the photo, presumably at whatever the man had just said. She looked like she had a great laugh. “Is that your mom?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“A very good-looking lady.”
“Yes.”
“She doesn’t look like the same woman I’ve seen outside the theaters.”
“That’s her matron disguise,” Sandra said, handing the photo to Brass. “This is her glamour girl. She has a different look for all occasions, my mother.”
“Who’s the gentleman with her?” Brass asked.
“I have no idea.”
We went back downstairs to find Schreiber by the gilded lectern, engaged in discussing Field Marshal Ponce’s sins with him in a fierce murmur. Ponce’s ears were red and as we approached he suppressed a sniffle.
Brass stopped at the lectern. “A word with Mr. Ponce, if you don’t mind,” he said.
“Why not?” Schreiber said. “I’ve had a few words with him myself.”
Brass turned to Ponce and smiled reassuringly. Ponce didn’t look reassured. “Could you describe the young lady who impersonated Miss Lelane?” Brass asked.
Ponce raised a hand in front of him, palm down, as high as his collar, and squeaked an unintelligible squeak.
“Take a deep breath,” Brass said. “Take two. Then speak.”
Ponce breathed. “Blond, she was,” he said. “Very blond. About this high.” He wiggled the fingers of his extended hand.
Brass estimated. “About five-foot-four.”
“I guess. A red dress, not too long, you know what I mean, and a fur wrap. Like a lady. With a lot of makeup, but, you know, tastefully applied. Like the girls at Leon’s Tip-Toe Inn.”
Sandra snorted. “A blond bimbo with a painted face, and he thinks it’s glamorous.”
Ponce tried to find a place in his shoulder to hide his head.
“Was she alone?” Brass asked.
“There was a gentleman with her.”
“Ponce!” Schreiber uttered. “You didn’t say—”
Ponce shifted uncomfortably. “Well, I forgot, what with everything.”
Brass said, “Describe the man.”
“Short. Very short. Shorter than the lady. Thin. With a nose.” He indicated a nose with his fingers. “Well dressed, in a dark suit and tie and everything.”
“Everything presumably means he was wearing shoes,” Sandra said.
“Black shoes,” Ponce agreed.
Sandra snorted again. “I have to get back to the theater,” she said.
Brass turned to Schneider. “Could you change the locks on the apartment?” he asked. “Don’t clean up inside yet.”
“I’ll do that,” Schreiber agreed.
“Thank you Normy,” Sandra said.
“I hope your mother’s okay,” he said.
“So do I,” she said.
5
We dropped Sandra off and returned to the office; Brass to his great oaken desk to stare out at the Hudson and seek inspiration for his next column, and I to my tiny cubicle with its large but ancient Underwood to resume answering letters, one of the more important and occasionally more interesting parts of my job. Brass believes that all mail from his readers that can be answered should be answered, and that the answers should be concise, honest, courteous, and grammatically correct.
We keep a log of what subjects the letters are on and what column they are in response to, if it’s possible to tell. In today’s mail there was a letter from a man named Pruex in Iowa who had read that “they” were going to saw Manhattan Island loose from its moorings, tow it into the harbor, and then tum it around and bring it back so that the Battery would be at the north end of the island and Washington Heights at the south. He claimed to be “apprised and acquainted with the use of the two-man cross-cut saw,” and could supply his own partner, and wanted to know to whom he would have to apply to get a job. He did not say where he had read this information or who “they” were. I wrote him back that Mr. Brass would certainly look into it and that any information concerning the renovation of Manhattan Island would appear in his column, which Pruex should keep reading regularly.
There was also a missive from a gentlemen named Dochsmann, given name at the moment 279894, who was a guest of the state of New York’s resort facility at Sing Sing for the next eight to twenty years. In three neatly typewritten pages, he claimed a complete lack of connection with the actions for which the state had awarded him his rent-free home on the Hudson and asked Brass to look into it. We averaged two or three letters a week much like this, except that most of them were not typewritten but were laboriously printed in pencil on lined paper, and Brass took them seriously. He and five companions, including another journalist, a retired judge, a police inspector, a detective-novel writer, and one of New York’s leading defense attorneys, made up the Second Chance Club, which gave some few people convicted of serious crimes one last shot at proving their innocence. It also gave Brass enough material for four or five columns a year, but he might well have done it anyway.
All the Second Chance letters were looked at by all the members of the club. If four of the six agreed, then the case was looked in to by a private detective or a reporter paid for by the Club. If there was something to it, it came before the group again, and if all six agreed, they took up the case. Of the fourteen cases they had handled so far, six men had been retried and freed, two had been pardoned by the governors of their states, two had been determined by the Club to actually be guilty, on
e had been found guilty at his second trial—although the Club collectively still believed him to be innocent—and three were still pending.
I had a personal letter in the stack, from a young lady named Elizabeth who was now in Switzerland at a very expensive clinic becoming cured of some very personal problems, one of which, according to her father, the senior senator from New Jersey, was me. I didn’t much care for the senator either.
Elizabeth had been gone a couple of months and was probably not coming back, at least not to me, but I was not yet over her or our relationship. When I thought of her, I still felt as though a healthy, energetic mule had just kicked me in the stomach, but luckily I didn’t think of her more than about twice a minute. We had both agreed before she left, even without her father’s prodding, that separation was the wisest course. Unless I had jumped on the next boat to Switzerland, where I don’t speak any of the languages and would be unemployed, separation was unavoidable; but it did feel slightly better to have been consulted. Along about six-thirty, when I was beginning to consider calling it a day and wondering what to do with the evening, Gloria the Ice Princess came to the doorway of the little cubicle I like to call an office. “How would you like to take me out tonight?” she asked. “To the theater?”
“Be still my heart,” I said, making a vague gesture toward the appropriate area of my chest.
She smiled a chill smile. “Mr. Brass wants us to talk to the gypsies in a couple of shows and see if we can get a line on Two-Headed Mary; find out what she’s been doing, who she’s been talking to. He’d like us to see if we can pin down the last time anyone actually spoke with her.”
“Gypsies,” for the benefit of you who are not denizens of the Great White Way, are the boys and girls in the chorus lines of Broadway musicals.
“Are we to be permitted to actually see a show?” I asked.
“Sandra Lelane sent Mr. Brass house seats for tonight’s performance of Fine and Dandy,” Gloria told me. “He can’t go since he and Winchell and Bob Benchley and Dorothy Parker and a couple of dozen other journalists and magazine types are dining with the Honorable Fiorello LaGuardia tonight, and Hizonner might say something notable or quotable, so he has passed them along to us. We are to start our research after the show.”
The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes Page 5