The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes

by Michael Kurland

  “Do I know her?” Brass asked.

  Gloria shook her head.

  Brass pursed his lips. “I suppose I should have expected it,” he said, “but I keep forgetting the innate perversity of the human race. Doesn’t the item say to get in touch with Welton, not me?”

  “Not explicitly,” I told him.

  “Well, you go downstairs and be explicit,” he told me. “Don’t bring her back up here, you take care of it.”

  “Supposing she has something worth listening to?”

  “Then listen!”

  I shrugged and nodded. He’d teach this woman, whomever she was, not to come annoying him with information.

  Gloria took her hand off the mouthpiece. “Tell Madam Florintina that Monsieur DeWitt will be right down to parlez to her. Okay, thanks.” She hung up. “Third-floor reception,” she told me.

  “Okay.”

  The New York World’s city room is on the third floor, the heart, if not the soul, of the paper. An ornate marble interior staircase goes from the ground floor to the third floor, and anyone can climb it and at least get as far as the reception desk on three. The first three floors are where the newspaper deals with its public in person. Mezzanine: classified ads, lost and found, birth and death announcements, contest winners. Second floor: the advertising department and the circulation department. Third floor: city room, sports department, mail room, and the headquarters of the City Wire Service, the teletype service that distributed local news and fed it to the United Press circuit.

  The woman standing by the information desk at the head of the stairs was not from the world of Broadway. If anyone hired her to dance it would be to feel the floor tremble. She was short and wide, somewhere between forty and seventy years old, and wore a white peasant blouse and copious layers of varicolored skirts. She was bedecked with necklaces made up of large colorful stones and bedizened with gold bracelets and rings. Her handbag was a red and white straw contraption that could have held two small boys and a goat.

  “Madam Florintina?” I asked.

  “That’s me,” she agreed. “Are you DeWitt?”

  “I am,” I said. “You have something for us?”

  She took me by the sleeve and pulled me over to the beat-up leather couch across from the information desk. “I might,” she said plopping onto a cushion and tugging on my sleeve until I sat next to her. “But I’ll need some facts first.”

  “What sort of facts?”

  She reached into her handbag and groped around for a while until she came up with a large notebook, and then went back in for a search for a pencil. When she had both she dropped the handbag to the floor and tucked it between her knees. “Just the usual,” she told me. “Dates of birth for Two-Headed Mary and Jeffrey Welton, time to the nearest hour if possible, and their birthplace, date and time of the girls’ disappearance; that sort of thing.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Well, the exact time the curtain went up on the first night of Lucky Lady, and the time of the robbery would be helpful.”

  I suppressed a sigh. “You’re an astrologer!”

  “We prefer ‘astrologist,’” she said. “I thought the person at the desk told you; I am Madam Florintina.” She reached again into her handbag, fished around for a minute, and came out with a 5-x-8 card; red and black ink on heavy gray stock. She thrust it into my hand.

  The signs of the Zodiac formed a circle around the outer edge of the card. In the center it said “Madam Florintina” over “by appointment” and a phone number. Under that, in small italics, the motto: “The Stars Know All!”

  “Very tasteful,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, “and expensive.” She took it back and stuck it deep into the handbag. “Now”—she opened the notebook on her lap, examined the pencil closely, retrieved a small sharpener from her handbag and touched up the pencil point. “Birth dates.”

  “The police probably have them,” I said.

  “But the police aren’t offering a reward,” she said.

  “Neither are we,” I told her. “The reward is being offered by Mr. Jeffrey Welton and the Lucky Lady company. That’s what it says in the ‘Brass Tacks’ column.”

  “I know,” she said. “But I need to check a few things before I go to speak to Mr. Welton. I thought you people could help me.” She leaned toward me and her puffy dark eyes stared intently into mine. “We could split the reward,” she said. “I’m not greedy.” Her breath smelled of nutmeg.

  I shook my head. “But, outside of your star charts or whatever, which I’m sure will be of immense value once they’re done, you don’t have any useful information.”

  She grinned. The nutmeg, or something, had done a job on her teeth. “I might,” she said. “When a Scorpio gets in trouble, she really gets in trouble. Scorpios go through life leaving a trail of the bridges they’ve burned behind them. It’s not as though I didn’t warn her.”

  “Who?”

  “When do I get the reward?”

  “When you go to Mr. Jeffrey Welton and tell him something useful.”

  “I’d rather speak to Mr. Brass.”

  “Mr. Brass isn’t paying a reward.”

  She closed her notebook. “Maybe he should,” she said. “Can you give me those natal dates?”

  “I don’t have them on me,” I told her.

  “Call someone. If you’re not interested in money, then you can have my story first. Right after I get my money.”

  “You’ll have to tell me what the story is,” I said.

  “Right after I get my money.” She pushed herself to her feet and thrust the notebook back in the handbag. “I told them about the Lindbergh baby, but they wouldn’t listen to me. And now that poor Mr. Hauptmann is on death row. But I don’t want to say anything until I’m sure. I have to do his chart first.”

  “Whose?” I asked.

  “You’re a Leo,” she said. “It’s in your eyes.”

  “Pisces,” I told her.

  “What’s your rising sign?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Well then!” She tucked her bag under her arm and headed for the staircase.

  She was the first. The second was a cadaverous-looking man in an ill-fitting suit who walked as though his shoes were too tight. His name was Quenton Adelsberg, and he hadn’t known he had this power till one day he got hit in the head by a ricochet bullet during the beer baron wars in Yonkers about ten years back. He could sense where missing things—and people—were. All he needed was an article of clothing that had been worn by one of the missing women, preferably an intimate item that had been worn next to the skin.

  And for the rest of the day they came, by telephone, telegram, by letter, and in person; those who thought that they deserved the reward and that Brass should give it to them. One was a psychic who could sense the astral vibrations of the missing ladies, one had a spirit guide who was intimate friends with Two-Headed Mary’s spirit guide, but needed to be coaxed to tell where she was. Some of them had overheard someone suspicious speaking at a bar, or on a trolley car. Some had the locations of the missing women revealed to them in a dream. Brass let me handle all of them. I could not think of an appropriate way to thank him.

  13

  The next morning, a message sitting on my desk requested my presence at the District Attorney’s office. It had been delivered, Gloria told me, by a policeman, but he hadn’t waited around. This I chose to regard as a good sign. If the policeman had orders to wait for me and escort me in, I would not have been comforted. I went downtown around ten-thirty, and was told to talk to an assistant D.A. named Silberman. Then I was kept waiting on a bench in the corridor for two hours and ten minutes. They treated me nicely, and got me a fried egg sandwich on a kaiser and an egg cream while I was waiting, which they let me pay for.

  At quarter to one I was ushered into Silberman’s office. A thin, wiry, totally bald man with a narrow, carefully trimmed black mustache and the look of a man who has heard everything and do
esn’t believe a word of it, he was wearing a double-breasted blue suit with wide lapels that reflected more than the usual amount of light, and an extra-wide dark blue bow tie speckled with little white squares. When I entered he had a napkin tucked under his chin and was just finishing the last bite of a pastrami on rye. He nodded at me and asked me if I wanted the pickle. I said no, thanks. He nodded again and wadded the scraps and waxed-paper wrapping into a ball and tossed them in the trash basket by the side of his desk. He pulled the napkin out of his collar, rolled it carefully, and thrust it into the top left-hand drawer of his desk while looking at me speculatively through his oversized glasses. After a moment he slammed the drawer closed and smiled the smile of the tiger stalking the kid. “Sit down, kid,” he said. “Tell me about it.”

  I dropped into the chair on the far side of his desk. I’d spent the last two hours sitting on a flat, narrow wooden bench, but his chair was no improvement. I think he cut a couple of inches off the legs so he’d be taller than his guests. “About what?”

  He leaned back in his chair and surveyed me for a minute over the expanse of his empty desktop. “You told Inspector Raab that you didn’t know Lydia Laurent, but that wasn’t exactly true, was it?”

  I leaned back in my chair, but it swayed alarmingly so I dropped its front legs back to the ground. I tried to look contrite. “I suppose I’d better tell you the truth.”

  “Ah!” he said, leaning forward and putting his elbows on the desk. “Yes, I think you’d better.”

  I leaned forward confidentially. “I never met Lydia Laurent,” I told him. “I would not have known her if she walked through the door. What I told Inspector Raab was, and is still, the exact truth. Sorry.”

  “Hmpf,” he said. “And her roommate, Billie Trask?” He pointed a finger at me. “Was it Billie Trask that you had your relationship with?”

  “‘With whom you had your relationship,’” I corrected.

  “What’s that?”

  “Never mind. I never met Miss Trask either,” I told him.

  “Hmpf!” he reiterated.

  Silberman had a one-track mind, and he wasn’t going to be derailed by anything I said. For most of the next two hours he questioned me about my “relationships” with Lydia Laurent and Billie Trask. He had a folder in front of him that he would refer to when he asked the questions, and he would carefully stick it in the center drawer of his desk, which he would lock, the two or three times he was called out of the office. I don’t think there was actually anything in the folder, but I might be wrong.

  His questions attacked the facts of the case and my story—or rather my lack of a story—from a dozen different angles, some of them I thought fairly clever, and each denial only made him more determined to come up with a better means of entrapment with the next set of questions. He understood my position, he explained; I didn’t want to get involved in a murder and grand theft. But now was the time to come clean, before I got myself in any deeper. Which girl’s lover had I been? Didn’t I realize that it was only a matter of time before they located someone who had seen us together? It would be better if I came clean before that happened, and cooperated with the D.A.’s office. Had I discovered that she had another boyfriend, and killed her in a jealous rage (Laurent) or caused her to run off with the boyfriend (Trask)? What had I done with the money (Trask)?

  Why had I undressed the girl when she was dead (Laurent)—was I some kind of pervert, or was I hiding something?

  When he ran out of questions he spent some time glaring at me to show me how unsatisfied he was with my answers, and then had me write out a statement detailing my lack of knowledge of the life or death of Lydia Laurent and the disappearance of her roommate. He warned me about perjury before I signed, and pulled two people in from another office to witness my signature. Then he held it in the air in front of him with the thumb and forefinger of each hand. “This is your last chance,” he said. “I can rip this up now, and you can tell me the truth, or you can take the consequences when we find out that you’re lying. It’s up to you.”

  “I don’t care whether you rip it up or not,” I told him. “My story isn’t going to change, because it’s the simple truth. I stand by my constitutional right as an American to tell the truth.” I know that doesn’t mean anything, I just thought it was time I brought the Constitution into the conversation. Talking about the Constitution always seems to annoy public officials. I had to bite my tongue to keep from telling him about the letters and the jewelry we’d found, just to be able to tell him something, but I didn’t. It was Brass’s information, and besides the police had had first crack at it. Besides that, if it meant anything useful, I didn’t know what it was. And by this time, I didn’t like him very much.

  It was almost three o’clock when I got back to the office. Brass had his feet up on the desk and was reading the book of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poetry that had been among the possessions rescued from Billie Trask’s apartment. He closed the book and listened carefully while I told him of my adventures. When I was done he shook his head. “They’re taking an undue interest in what is, for the District Attorney’s office, a rather usual murder,” he said. “Somebody must be applying pressure. Which means it must be somebody capable of applying pressure; someone with connections in what passes in this city for high places.”

  “So someone is leaning on the D.A., and the D.A. is leaning on me;” I said. “I’m not sure I like being the low man on this particular human pyramid.”

  “I’m sure the D.A. is not limiting his attentions to you,” Brass said. “Don’t let it bother you.”

  “That’s not as reassuring as I’d like it to be,” I said. “Silberman called me ‘kid.’ I don’t like being called ‘kid.’”

  “Ah!” Brass said. “You dislike being pulled off your pedestal.”

  “What pedestal?”

  “Your position as a journalist; sometimes ally and sometimes thorn in the side of the police. Your ability to wander into police stations and hobnob with the officers, to cross police lines, to go backstage at theaters, to interview rooms full of beautiful chorus girls. Your privileged status as a member of the Fourth Estate.”

  “That’s not so,” I said hotly. “I just dislike being treated like a suspect when I didn’t do anything.”

  “Now you know how it feels,” Brass said. “Think of the people who are in prison as we speak, and who, if the truth were known, didn’t do anything.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But I really didn’t do anything!”

  Brass snorted and picked up his book.

  “Poetry,” I said. “I didn’t know you liked poetry.”

  “I am one with Terence,” Brass replied without looking up from the book. “‘U’Humani nil a me alienum puto.’ Nothing human is alien to me.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “This might interest you,” Brass said, flipping over to the title page and showing it to me. There was an inscription, written with a broad-point pen:

  to Billie-O Billie-O Billie my dear—

  One word is too often profaned

  For me to profane it;

  One feeling too falsely disdain’d

  For thee to disdain it…

  It was not signed. “The quote doesn’t sound like Edna St. Vincent Millay,” I said.

  “It’s not, it’s Percy Shelley,” Brass told me. “The boyfriend—we assume it’s the boyfriend—quotes Shelley and gives Millay. What does that tell us about him?”

  “I don’t know,” I confessed.

  “I don’t either,” Brass said, “but let’s keep it in mind. Incidentally, the rest of the poem indicates that the word that is going unsaid, is ‘love.’ Was it, perhaps, a word that she wanted to hear from the boyfriend, but he refused to say?”

  “You got me, boss,” I said.

  Brass sighed a long-suffering sigh. “I’ll make a deal with you,” he said. “Don’t call me ‘boss,’ and I won’t call you ‘kid.’”

  “I’ll try,” I sa
id. After all, he’s the boss.

  Gloria came in from the front office escorting New York World ace crime reporter Alan Shine. A small man with what we will politely call a prematurely receding hairline, Shine covers the police beat, and does it very well. At every Crime of the Century from the Hall-Mills case to the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, major coverage under Shine’s byline has appeared on the front page of the World.

  “Greetings all,” Shine said, tossing his hat onto a corner of Brass’s desk.

  “Hello, Shine,” Brass said. “I thought you’d be in New Orleans talking to the friends and associates of the defunct senator.”

  “Nah.” Shine shook his head. “Nothing in it for me. The paper can get all it wants without sending me.”

  “So you don’t subscribe to the theory that Roosevelt ordered the hit?”

  “I think it was a local job. Word’s going around that this guy the cops killed, Dr. Weiss, didn’t even do the hit, he was set up. It would be a fun one to cover, but I don’t speak the local language. I wouldn’t know who to grease, who to talk nice to, or who to avoid. A fellow, even a newspaper fellow, can get killed in a place like that.”

  I grinned at the idea of Shine being afraid of anything. While he was on the job, he was fearless. I’d seen him accost cops, politicians, and mobsters, and even irate husbands and wives, in the pursuit of a story. “So you chose not to go?” I asked.

  “The big boys upstairs chose not to send me. The World has a deal with the New Orleans Telegraph-Intelligencer for all the news they think fit to send along, so they don’t need me.”

  “Poor lad,” Brass said. “Restricted to the mundane world of New York City murders. So, what can I do for you?”

  “Just a few words for publication, and I’ll be off. I must say it’s convenient, having my subjects right here in the World building. It’s getting rougher and rougher to get across town during the daytime. Lucky so much crime happens at night.”