The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes

by Michael Kurland

  “For Mr. Brass?”

  “Of course. That is my life. Am I not Mr. Brass’s good right arm?”

  “I don’t know. Last week you were his nose and ears.” Mrs. Sardi paused to consider. “The large table in the back room is a possibility. The Waiter’s Union Steering Committee, Local Nineteen, was meeting back there, but they were done an hour ago. Most of them have already left. A few of them are still sitting there, drinking white wine and cursing management. They can do that in the kitchen. Give me a minute.” She darted off.

  Ten minutes later we were gathered around the big table in the back room. Florian, our waiter, he of the long face and sad eyes, took the drink orders, and ambled off to get the assorted martinis, gimlets, Rob Roys, champagne cocktails, ambrosias, gin and tonics, and soda waters while the girls studied their menus. When drinks are on their way, can food be far behind? We decided to hold off any meaningful discussion until the drinks were on the table and the food ordered. I did the preliminaries: getting out my little pocket notebook—can’t be a reporter without a pocket notebook—and taking names. They all more or less knew each other; the gypsy community is small and tight.

  Terri, Maxine, and Aud (“it’s short for Audrey”) were joining us from the Royal. Dossie and Vera came from the New Amsterdam; Yvette and Gilly from the Alhambra. From the chorus of At Home Abroad at the Winter Garden came Trixie and Suze. Honey, Jane, and Didi (“but everyone calls me ‘Knees’”) were the crew from Anything Goes at the Alvin. (There, I hold nothing back. I didn’t collect last names.) Their voices ranged from high and giggly to low and sultry. Their ages ranged from nineteen to somewhere around thirty. This is Gloria’s estimation, we didn’t ask and they all looked to be a very healthy nineteen to me. They were all of about the same height—rather shorter in person than they seemed on the stage, I noted—and mostly different shades of blond. Whether natural or suicide, I couldn’t tell. (A suicide blonde, as Joe Miller’s Joke Book would have it, is one that’s dyed by her own hand.) Seeing so much youth and beauty en masse it was kind of hard to tell them apart, although any red-blooded American boy would have been glad to spend a year or two trying.

  Junior Skulley wandered unsteadily into the room behind Florian as he returned with the tray of drinks. Junior’s eyes were red and bleary from booze and lack of sleep, and his hands were pushed deep into the pockets of his dinner jacket, which bore the spoor of a recent dinner. He spotted our collection of chorines and froze like a bird dog. “Heigh-ho, Morgan,” he said when he regained the power of speech. “Where’d you get the bevy of beautiful dolls? You and Brass putting on a show?”

  “This is a private party,” I told him.

  “Of course it is,” he agreed, taking two precarious steps forward. “Ah, the beauteous Miss Adams,” he said, his eyes lighting on Gloria. “I find her enchanting and she finds me funny. But one lives in hope.”

  “Hello, Junior,” Gloria said. “It’s a free country; you have a right to hope.”

  Junior pulled his right hand from his pocket and seemed surprised to find a half-full glass of scotch still firmly in his fist. He sipped at the scotch as he stared soulfully at the girls around the table. Son, heir, and namesake of city contractor Edwin James Skulley Sr., Junior was in his mid-thirties, but looked a boyish fifty. He had no interest in his father’s business; his two vocations were drinking and chorus girls. As these took up most of his time, he had no hobbies.

  “A toast!” he said, advancing to behind my chair as Florian passed out the last of the booze order.

  “One toast, and then go away,” I told him. “This is business.”

  “Of course it is,” he agreed. “Who said it wasn’t?” He extended his glass. “Ladies? A toast to you; visions of beauty all.”

  To a woman they all leaned forward and raised their glasses, except for Yvette, who made a show of turning to face the other way, her glass tabled but her chin raised high. Perhaps she just didn’t like his face.

  “Yvette, my love, you are even more beautiful than I remember,” he said, raising his glass to salute the back of her head. Perhaps she had good reason to dislike his face. He saluted the rest of the table with his glass, from left to right. “As are you all,” he added. “And, to you all, a toast!” He raised the glass.

  “Here’s to the girls in the high-heeled shoes

  Who eat our dinners and drink our booze

  And hug and kiss us until we smother—

  And then go home to sleep with Mother!”

  With that he bowed to the girls. “Thank you all for your attention,” he said. “Perhaps I will see you again sometime. Now I have to get back to… to…” He turned and staggered back out the door, still going “to… to…” like a lost and bewildered toy train.

  As Junior disappeared out the door there was a brief colloquy among the girls regarding his manners, morals, and general desirability as a dinner companion. Three of the girls admitted to having been out with him and, to the accompaniment of assorted giggles and sighs, they dissected him quickly, cruelly, and, as far as I could tell, accurately. He was a drunk, a wastrel, and had a one-track mind; but he was good for a dinner or two as long it was in a public place and a girl didn’t mind getting slightly pawed over. Essentially, the consensus was, poor Junior was harmless. Yvette flushed red at several of the more intimate comments, particularly regarding how a girl would have to be a fool herself to take a fool like Junior seriously, but she maintained a dignified silence.

  As Florian finished taking food orders Gloria stood up and I opened my notebook to a clean page. Gloria pinged on a water glass with her fork in the time-honored way of making noise at a dinner table. “On behalf of Mr. Alexander Brass, I thank you all for coming and sharing what you know about Two-Headed Mary with us,” she said as the chatter died away. “As you must know, she has been missing for over a week. Let me start with the big question: Do any of you think you know where Mary might have gone?”

  They looked at one another.

  “Did you try her apartment?” Gilly asked. “She lives somewhere on the Upper West Side. Maybe around Ninety-second and Riverside.”

  “Did she tell you that?” Gloria asked.

  “I, well, I think so.”

  “I thought she came in every day from Connecticut,” Aud said. “You know, New Haven or Bridgeport or someplace.” They kicked that around for a while, Suze (rhymes with booze) swore that Mary had told her that she had a penthouse apartment in the east 70s, but she couldn’t remember just where. No one mentioned Eastern Parkway, or anywhere else in Brooklyn. Evidently Mary liked to keep her home life well separated from her professional appearances.

  The discussion segued into other aspects of the secret life of Two-Headed Mary. Apparently she really did help the girls out with a five-spot or occasionally even a ten if one of them needed it, and she was a good listener and she gave good advice when asked.

  “She got Billie Trask her job,” Honey added, “after Billie hurt her leg. She talked Welton into giving her a job at the box office.”

  “Yes, yes,” Didi “Knees” said. “But look where that got her.”

  A mixed chorus of “boo,” “hush,” and “shame on you,” sounded from around the table. “Billie didn’t take that money,” Trixie said positively. “I used to room with her before she moved in with Liddy. If Billie had accidentally left this restaurant with this spoon”—she held up the long spoon she was eating her parfait with—“she’d worry about it all night, tossing and turning, and then come back and confess the next morning. Honest she would!”

  Didi frowned. “But I heard her boyfriend made her do it.”

  “And I heard,” Maxine said, leaning forward and whispering in a stage whisper that could be heard in Cincinnati, “that that wasn’t what her boyfriend made her do at all—and it wasn’t because she hurt her leg that’s he had to quit the chorus!”

  “Why Maxine, you little bitch!” Trixie said. “She might have been in trouble—that kind of trouble—or s
he might not, but if she was, it could have happened to more than one of us at this table—and don’t say it couldn’t!”

  “If the girl was pregnant,” Honey asked, “then who took the money?”

  “There is nothing that says that you can’t be pregnant and a thief,” Jane said, “if you’re going to be a thief.”

  “She was no thief!” Trixie insisted.

  I decided that I’d better bring the conversation back to the subject before it got away from us entirely. “So Mary helped her with her problem,” I suggested, “whatever it was?”

  “She liked helping chorus girls,” Maxine offered, “because she had a daughter who was in the chorus.”

  “That’s right,” Didi agreed. “Such a sad story.”

  “Sad?” I asked.

  “The kid died,” Didi explained. “Right after she got offered a principal spot in the Vanities.”

  “Name was Ruby,” Maxine said. “She was hit by a Fifth Avenue bus. Mary didn’t show it much—she was a real trouper—but she was terrible broken up. Wouldn’t ride buses any more.”

  “I thought the kid got TB and died,” Dossie offered, “like Camille.”

  “The kid’s name is Lenore and she’s not dead. She married a drummer and moved to San Francisco,” Terri contributed. “Mary was real mad about it. She said she wouldn’t have minded so much if the guy was a violinist or even a piano player. But drummers aren’t dependable.”

  None of the girls seemed particularly bothered by the constantly changing stories of their benefactor. They ate, drank, and were merry until almost two in the morning, and I filled up sixteen pages of my notebook with what I like to call my shorthand. None of them was sure just when she’d seen Two-Headed Mary last, although we pretty much pinned it down to a couple of days before she disappeared—or at least before her disappearance was noticed. They all agreed that she had not seemed worried or upset, had not behaved noticeably different, and had not indicated that she was going anywhere.

  I went home and hung my suit up, washed my face, and dropped into bed. I slept soundly until about nine, an hour later than usual, and spent an hour at my aging Underwood to begin my new novel. I had decided to let the old one mature, or possibly rot, with the other dozen or so partials I had done over the past couple of years. The new one was to be a historical fantasy in the mode of James Branch Cabell, Talbot Mundy, or Edgar Rice Burroughs—take your pick. Since my imitations of life read like fantasy, I’d see what I could do with the genuine article. My working title was either “The God King” or “Dancing in Babylon,” I hadn’t decided which. At the end of an hour I had a beginning:

  It came to pass that in the sixteenth year of the Stewardship of Khassam the Observant there was born to the merchant Lufar in the city of Bazra the Eternal a boy child, which was named Sindbad.

  Some there are who teach that the measure of a man’s life is taken from his first breath; and all the good or evil, pain or joy, triumph or woe, that shall befall him is already cast in immutable lines upon the tablet of his existence, as the words of a play are written for the actors. If this were so, and if the actor could read his part before the play commenced, which of us would choose to see the curtain rise?

  But this is mere conjecture.

  And conjecture it would remain, at least until tomorrow morning. I pulled the page from my patient Underwood and put it in the manuscript box, covered the machine, shrugged into my jacket and topcoat, donned my hat, and trotted off to the office. After the usual badinage with Gloria, I dropped into the chair in front of my office typewriter, reflected on how life was just one damn typewriter after another, and typed up my notes from last night. I left them on Brass’s desk along with a chit for $37.40 in expenses. Maybe he could find something useful in them.

  I was clipping items of interest from last week’s Variety and Billboard magazines and arranging them artistically by subject for pasting into our scrapbook, when Brass came in at ten-thirty. Don’t be misled, Brass’s interests are broader than showbiz and glamour; we also clip the New York Times and the Daily News and the Wall Street Journal, and save two years’ worth of back copies of the American Mercury, the Nation, the New Republic, Harper’s, the Partisan Review, and random issues of various other magazines that catch Brass’s eye from time to time.

  At 10:45 the intercom buzzed three times, the signal for Gloria and me to go into the inner sanctum.

  Brass was standing behind his desk and glaring at the door as we entered, a sign of annoyance. Legend has it that when he was truly peeved he stood on the desk, but that may be apocryphal; at least I had not seen it in my four years with the firm. He waited as we approached. When we reached the edge of our side of the desk, he sat down and smiled up at us.

  “Thirty-seven dollars and forty cents,” he said, indicating a small pile of money on a corner of the desk.

  “Ah!” I said.

  It had been the final sign of Brass’s trust in me when, after I worked for him for two years, he had given me fifty dollars in expense money to keep in my wallet, to be used to pay for useful information and renewed by chit whenever it was depleted. The trust in question did not involve the money as such, I handled much larger sums for Brass almost from the day of my employment. It was trust in my judgment as to what constituted useful information. Gloria, I believe, kept a hundred, which she seldom needed to use: men told her things just to see if they could make her smile or frown—laugh or cry was out of the question.

  “Go on, take the money,” Brass directed. “Just remember in the future, if I’m going to entertain a dozen chorus girls, I’d like to be there to enjoy it. Unless, of course, you got something I can use out of the discussion. But I don’t see anything of even passing interest in these notes.”

  I picked up the bills and stuffed them into my wallet. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “You spent thirty-seven dollars of my money, and discovered that Two-Headed Mary is indeed kind to chorus girls, sympathetic to their problems, and willing to help them out when they are in need. Good. But we knew that. You found out that Two-Headed Mary might have been responsible for getting Billie Trask the job from which she either stole or didn’t steal a large sum of money. Someone in the police department would probably like to know that, but it’s nothing I can use.”

  He paused to take a breath. “Further, you’ve found that Mary claims to live in four different places, none of them the right one; has five different daughters, two of them dead, none of them the one we know; has a boyfriend on the police force, a husband in the navy, and a dog which is, at different times, a schnauzer, a dachshund and a St. Bernard.” He riffled through my notes. “And then there’s her past. She told one of your young ladies that she used to be in the chorus herself; Florenz Ziegfeld having personally picked her out for the 1916 Follies when she was just a girl. That was, of course, between or among her careers as a nurse, a high-wire performer, and one of the girl riders in the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show.”

  “She does seem to have a dislike for telling a story the same way twice,” Gloria offered. “Maybe it has something to do with her years involved in the big con. Maybe she likes to keep in practice.”

  Brass shook his head. “When you’re on the grift you’re prepared to lie,” he said, “but you don’t make a fetish of it. It’s too hard remembering what you said to whom. The idea is to make up a believable story and stick to it.”

  “Maybe she’s practicing for the Olympics,” I suggested. “Freestyle prevarication, skeet-shooting, and leaping to conclusions.”

  Brass eyed me speculatively before transferring his gaze to the Pearson landscape on the wall behind me. “This does add an interesting new dimension to the problem of finding out what happened to her,” he said.

  “And then, of course, there’s the sister that she has been visiting—the one her daughter claims doesn’t exist,” I added.

  Gloria and I maintained a discreet silence while Brass pondered further.

 
“I take it back,” Brass said. “This information is possibly useful. It establishes a pattern that we might not have realized. It may be of great importance in finding her, or finding out what happened to her.”

  “A pattern of prevarication,” Gloria said. “Where does that get us?”

  “Before we can find Two-Headed Mary,” Brass explained, “it may be necessary to discover just which Two-Headed Mary has turned up missing.”

  Brass has a knack for saying things like that: they seem to make sense, but when you try to work them around in your mind the sense tends to stay just beyond your grasp. I thought that one over. “I think I get it,” I said, “but didn’t they all go missing at the same time, since they’re all in the same body?”

  “Consider the possibilities,” Brass said. “She may have had to suddenly leave the country, or at least the New York area. She may be hiding out from someone. She may have been kidnapped. She may be using a different persona in the furtherance of some goal or scheme, possibly connected to her having been on the grift. Or she may have been—or appeared to be—so dangerous to someone that she’s been eliminated.”

  “You think she’s been taken for a ride?” I asked.

  “It’s a possibility.”

  “I thought gangsters avoided killing women.”

  “That’s because so few women are threats or business rivals. But I don’t insist that it was gangsters. There is no class of society that is exempt from committing murder.”

  “It might not be anything as serious as you’re thinking,” Gloria offered. “Maybe she just went on vacation without realizing that anyone would miss her.”

  Brass shook his head. “In that case, she would have read my column, or someone would have pointed it out to her, and she would certainly have called her daughter or someone on the Street, or possibly called me directly at the newspaper.”

  I refrained from pointing out that there are cities where “Brass Tacks” is not available, people who choose to read papers that don’t carry “Brass Tacks,” and people who wouldn’t read “Brass Tacks” if it were thrust before their eyes. Brass would not have thought that to be constructive criticism and at the moment, jobs are not that easy to get, even for people with my wit and tact.